Vanessa Van Edwards Vanessa Van Edwards. For someone that’s just clicked on this conversation now and they’re wondering why they should stay and listen to what we’re going to talk about, what would you say to them?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Very highly successful people speak a hidden language, and that is the language of cues. If you don’t know how to read the cues people are sending to you, if you don’t know how to control the cues you’re sending to others, you are missing a crucial element of success.

STEVE BARTLETT:

How do you… quantify that in a way that I know that it’s true. Are there studies or stats that reinforce what you’ve just said?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

82% of our impressions of people are based on warmth and competence. That means that if we can control our warmth cues and our competence cues, we know we are taking care of 82% of our impression. And that is critical to being more memorable, to being more confident, to having clearer communication.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And taking that a bit further, what areas of my life will that impact? So if I’m warm and I’m competent, which you’re telling me are things that I can control, what are the downstream consequences of that?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So I think my mission is to tackle a big lie. And that is that smart people will translate their book smarts into people smarts. But actually, no matter how smart you are, if you do not know how to communicate with people, you can’t connect with people, you can’t have good relationships, you can’t have supportive friendships, you get looped into difficult people or toxic people, you have trouble getting raises or promotions. When you are able to control your communication, it helps you not be overlooked, not be misunderstood, and that affects your friendships, your partner, your career, and also helps you feel more confident walking into a room.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And what is your research based on? Are you a researcher? Have you done sort of first party research yourself? Where were you drawing from?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So I’m a recovering awkward person. So I used to believe that you were either born with charisma or you weren’t, that charisma was genetic. And in 2002, I discovered a study that changed my life, which said that charisma can be learned. This is when I started to tackle, to figure out, OK, if charisma can be learned, how do we learn it? How can we learn blueprints for conversation? How can we learn frameworks for how we connect and how we socialize? That’s when I started doing my own research. So I’m a behavioral researcher and a best-selling author on communication. And I specialize in helping very brilliant, very smart, awkward folks not be overlooked.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 And give me some sort of depth as to the amount of research and the quantity of research that you’ve done, how many people you’ve studied, how many hours of footage, et cetera.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yep. So I developed my first framework about 12 years ago, and we’ve helped 400,000 students learn that framework, master it, and conquer awkwardness or feel more confident. Some of those folks had very professional goals like getting raised or promotion. Other folks were so socially anxious and so awkward they couldn’t make friends. Other people were looking for their soulmate or their partner. And so 400,000 students have told me that this framework works.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Nobody teaches us this stuff, do they? Mm-mm.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Or actually, extroverts tend to teach it. So I read the quintessential How to Win Friends and Influence People back in the day, and that’s a wonderful book, but it’s a book written by an extrovert. If you are not naturally extroverted, I am not naturally extroverted, I’m more ambiverted, it is very hard to learn how to communicate if you don’t naturally gravitate towards people. I was like, there has to be a way to teach introverts and ambiverts to be able to feel confident without having to fake it till you make it. Without having to pretend to be extroverted or outgoing to be taken seriously or to be charismatic. What’s an ambivert? So ambiverts get energy from the right people in the right places. So for example, in this interview, I love one-on-one conversations. I feel myself. But if we were to go to a loud bar or a nightclub, I would completely shut down and want to be alone. Ambiverts can dial up extroversion to hit their goals. So if they know they have to be friendly and meet people for an interview or a position, they can do it. But they need lots of recharge time. The reason why it’s important to know if you’re an ambivert is because you should know What are the people and places that drain you? There are certain people when you open your calendar and you look at it and you’re like, oh, I have to be with that person. That is someone that drains you. They do not bring out your extroversion or your natural love of people. There are also certain people who you feel you could talk to for hours. They give you social energy. They charge your social battery. So the very first thing I have students do is sit and make a list. Who are the people who give you energy, who charge you up? Who are the people who take from you? Those are people that we want to put boundaries around, we want to say no to, we want to limit as much as possible, and then also the places. Where do you thrive? Is it conferences, one-on-one business, or is it friends socializing parties? Knowing those places helps you optimize your social battery.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And when you say cues, which you said at the start of this conversation, people think of just body language. Is that the sort of full extent of areas that you focus on?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes. So cues come into four different channels. There is body language, that’s facial expressions, gestures, posture. But there’s also vocal. So vocal cues are the tone of our voice, our pace, our volume, our cadence. There’s also the words we use, obviously, verbal cues. The types of words that I’m choosing to use are signaling my warmth and competence to you. And the last, the smallest channel is our ornaments. The colors we wear, the jewelry we wear, the way we wear our hair, the way we wear your facial hair, those are also signaling different things or cuing people to feel a certain way about you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And what about what we say? Because I know you’re writing a book about, I don’t know if I can leak this, but here we go. You’re writing a book about conversation, so what we say.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So I did not realize how powerful our words are. And here’s a study that really changed the way I think about this. Very simple study. They brought people into the lab, and they split them up into two different groups. In one group, they said, today, you’re going to play the community game. And they played kind of a prisoner’s dilemma type of game. The second group, they came into the same room, the same researcher, and they said, good morning. Today, you’re going to play the Wall Street game. The trick was the games were exactly the same. There was no difference between the two games. What they found was everyone who was told they were playing the Wall Street game shared an average of one third of their profits. Everyone who was told they were playing the community game shared an average of two-thirds of their profits. This means that that one word, community game, community, made people think and feel more about community. It made them act more collaboratively. This means that the words we’re using in our emails, our subjects, our texts, our LinkedIn profile headlines, are cuing people for how they should treat us. One really simple way to think about this is your calendar. I send out calendar invites multiple times a week to clients, to friends. When we have meeting, one-on-one, call, video, interview, I am being cued for nothing. Those words are so overused, they’re sterile. If you add cues that prime people to feel or think a certain way, you’re actually setting them up for success. So 2025 wins, collaborative session, strategy meeting, goal meeting, goal overview, teamwork collab session. Those words are actually cuing that person’s brain every single time they open their calendar, that when we read a word like collaborate, we are literally more likely to be collaborative. So the words that we use, even one single word can actually change the way people think.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s funny because our entire lives are people. Like the difference between me being a president, prime minister, superb salesperson, exceptional entrepreneur is probably just my understanding of other people and how I show up in my words and my cues. And so when you think about it like that, this could be for many people, the most important subject for them to improve upon.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I would even go further and say, if you don’t have people skills, you cannot succeed. You cannot succeed in life, you cannot succeed in love, you cannot succeed in business. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, you need people to have success. So this is, I think, the most fundamental skill that people can invest in.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And how many people did you say you’ve taught people skills to?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

400,000 students.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And is there a particular case study that stands out to you as being the most extreme in terms of He’s studying the fact that someone can go from zero to a wonderful place.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, and it’s my very brilliant but stoic students. So I’ve noticed, especially over the last 10 years, because I’ve been doing this for about 17 years, in the last 10 years especially, my most extreme students are the students who are very, very smart, very talented and good at what they do, but they don’t know what cues to send, and so they completely shut down. They try to become stoic, unreadable. They try to have no facial expressions. They literally try to poker face all the time. And as they try to make connections, meet a partner, make friends, people don’t like them, people don’t trust them, they can’t get by into their ideas. And those are the students where I see the biggest transformation. They don’t realize that muting, muting your cues is a danger zone cue. If you try to be stoic and unreadable, people literally cannot get a read on you. And so my biggest transformations have happened when I can say, you don’t need to hide your true feelings. It’s about amplifying them with the right cues. There’s a famous example of this, Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring. So I don’t know if you ever watched Shark Tank. So in this episode, for those who haven’t seen it, Jamie Siminoff entered the tank and he pitched a billion dollar idea. Literally a billion dollar idea, because it went on to raise funding from Shaq and Richard Branson. But in the tank, he pitches the idea, and he gets so much pushback and so much negotiation, and he walks out of the tank without a deal. In fact, the Sharks did not like him. What happened? He had the billion dollar idea, but he did not know how to share it. This is the biggest transformation I see, is people who have brilliant ideas. They’re good people, they’re hardworking people, and they cannot get buy-in. They cannot make friends, they cannot find partners.

STEVE BARTLETT:

How do they feel? So if you had to say words that make them feel seen right now, how are they feeling as they’re listening to this?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Overwhelmed, getting into interaction, just social overthinking, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to feel. Underestimated, like people don’t see you or the real potential that you have. A lack of confidence and fear. Afraid that if you are your true self or you try any of the things we’re talking about, people won’t like you. And I want to teach you that you can be yourself and you can be liked and you can find your people. And that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to like you, but it means if you signal the right things, cues tell others how to treat you. If you signal the right cues, you will find your people.

STEVE BARTLETT:

One of the things that I was sort of inferring from what you said is the importance of understanding your resting bitch face. That’s like the term we use in the UK, resting bitch face, which is like when you’re just listening or doing nothing. Like how does your face look? And you’re telling me that’s really, really important.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

It’s real. So I call it resting bothered face. I probably shouldn’t use that word. Resting bothered face. RBF, same thing. Okay, this is a real phenomenon, which is that all of us have different faces at rest. Now I want you to look at my face for a second. My face at rest, I’m going to rest it for a second. My mouth angles down and sort of an upside down U, so it looks like this. You see how these are going down?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

 Are you laughing at my you?

SPEAKER_04:

A little bit.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay. So at rest, I look a little sad.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That is just my mouth at rest. Yours goes pretty straight across.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I just, I just.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

You have a lot of hood. That’s what that’s called. I have a lot of hood. A lot of hood. Yes. This is hood. Yes. Yes. So that probably makes you, do people think you’re angry or tired? Both. Both. Okay. People never call me angry, they call me sad. You need to look in the mirror and figure out what is the default of your face. If your mouth angles down into a frown, people are going to think you’re sad. You’re going to have to be counteracting that with your cues. If you have a lot of hood above your eyes or you have these two vertical lines that appear between your eyebrows, you actually don’t have them, but if some people at rest even have those two lines, people are going to think you’re angry or frustrated. If you have down eyes, so I don’t know if you noticed, but my, I have cat, I’ve added cat makeup to my eye. Ah, yes. Yes, that actually makes me look less sad. Because also my eyes slope a little bit down at the end, which makes me look sad.

SPEAKER_05:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So people often are like, are you okay? Are you tired? I’m like, no, that’s just my face. So, I have ways that I counteract it. One, I get to use makeup, which is a great thing. But second, I know that I need to make my face a little bit more up, right? So when I am interacting with someone, when I’m on video, when I’m in an interview, I typically rest my face in an upward position. I’ve activated these muscles, so don’t I look happier?

STEVE BARTLETT:

 You do, but have you got to consciously tell yourself to do that, or do you just always remember?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

No, I have to consciously tell myself to do that. Now, I only need to do that with people with a first impression or when I’m trying to make a good impression. My team knows that I’m not sad, right? Like, my team, they see me all the time. They see me without makeup. They know that I’m not sad. They know that’s just my face. So here’s what’s critical. One, you should know what is your resting default. Are you looking sad, angry, or afraid? Oh, afraid I didn’t do. So if you have, you actually have some, I’m so sorry. Oh, you’re joking. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. You have these lines.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I just heard someone laugh in the back. One of my team just laughed in the back.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So you have them just right here, these light lines here. So when we’re afraid, we go, and we raise our eyebrows up and our, you can’t see it because I have Botox in my forehead, but if you, yeah, there you go, there you go, that’s for, now open your eyes and go, that’s afraid. So the more you have those lines and the whites of your eyes appear, like have you ever seen someone kind of walk around like a deer in the headlights? They make you feel anxious. Like if I were to do my entire interview a little bit wide-eyed, you would not only feel anxious, but you wouldn’t believe what I was saying. So you all should see if you have this default lined or if the whites of your eyes show. Look at your profile pictures. In your profile pictures, here are the three biggest mistakes people make. One, they’re showing fewer eyes.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So people, you’re signaling, accidentally, anxiety. So try to make sure you’re not showing the upper whites. Second mistake people do is they make a contempt micro-expression, so. That’s a one-sided mouth raise. So just do a one-sided mouth raise for me. Does it make you kind of feel like, better?

SPEAKER_08:

Don’t do it for too long.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So if you do it at home, there’s a facial feedback hypothesis. When you make these faces, it actually triggers the emotion. Just like when you have the emotion, it triggers the face. There’s a loop that happens. So if people make the contempt expression, one-sided mouth raise, Not only do they look scornful, kind of disdained, they actually begin to feel better then and scornful. So do not do an asymmetrical smile in your profile picture. You are accidentally signaling negativity. The third biggest mistake you will make is they do an inauthentic smile in their picture. The only true indicator of happiness is when these cheek muscles are activated. Anyone can fake smile. This is what mine looks like. But you’ve seen people do it, right?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah, I do it.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, and people know. I would rather you not.

STEVE BARTLETT:

No, because I just don’t have a good smile.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

What?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Look.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

What am I going to say? No, it’s horrible?

STEVE BARTLETT:

That’s not your real smile. I literally have to do this when I take photos. That’s my smile. I can’t do the teeth thing. What am I going to do?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Well, you can smile without your teeth as long as it hits your upper cheek muscles. So just try this for me. Put your hand or your finger in between your mouth like this. And smile as high as you can go. Oh, that’s better. That reaches all the way up into your eyes. Do you see?

SPEAKER_04:

Oh, that’s not…

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That looks so much better. If you can activate these muscles in your profile picture, you don’t have to walk around like that, but if you can activate, not the fear, not the fear, just here, just here. If you can activate these muscles in your profile picture, it shows authentic happiness or don’t smile at all. I hate the advice. Just smile more. Fake smiles do not work. Dr. Barbara Wild studied this. She took pictures of people thinking of something they were authentically happy about, took a picture of them smiling, then she told them to fake smile and took a picture of them. On the surface, you really couldn’t tell the difference between the two smiles. They looked very similar. But she had participants take mood tests. Then look at one picture or the other, group A, group B. People who saw the positive picture had an improved mood. They caught the happiness from the photo. People who looked at the fake smile had no mood change. This means I would rather you have no smile at all or be neutral than fake smile. But if you can smile in your picture, it is so great for authentic happiness.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It sounds like it might be quite exhausting for some people, because I think some people, although they’re happy, they feel good, they’re nice people, they do have that resting bothered face, I think you called it. And there’s other people that I know that just kind of walk through life with this like resting smile. Like we can all think of that person that’s just like always happy. And then there’s these other people who are like objectively happy too, but they just have that resting bothered face. So it feels like life is going to be more exhausting for those people.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

You know, I think it’s about choosing your heart, right? It is hard, it is exhausting for me to show up to a meeting when I’m in a good mood and have someone be like, are you sad and tired? Are you okay? I’m like, I’m fine. I find that exhausting. Is it also a little exhausting to make sure that in my first impression, I’m being a little bit more up with my face, open eyes wide and open mouth? A little less exhausting than that. So I think you have to choose what are the cues you’re going to purposefully add. There are 97 cues. I’ve narrowed down 97 that I think are the most important. You get to make your own recipe. You don’t have to do all the cues. If smiling is not your thing, smiling is not essential for being charismatic. When we talk about being charismatic, it’s about being warm and competent. And you have 97 cues to choose from to make that warmth and competence recipe. And so you don’t have to be a bubbly extrovert to be charismatic. You can be a quiet, powerful introvert. You can be a compassionate, empathetic healer. Those look different. And so I think it’s less exhausting to find your recipe and to use those cues a lot. There’s certain cues in my book that I teach that I don’t use. They just don’t feel natural to me. But there are other cues where I’m like,

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Has anyone ever done any really compelling studies on this idea of resting bitch face or resting bothered face, as you call it?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

There is research on resting bothered face, and there are certain people who, when people see pictures of their face at rest, they assume a mood change. In other words, when there are certain people at rest, where you look at them, they look neutral. But there are a certain percent of the population, when you look at them, they look angry, sad, or afraid. So it’s real. It’s a real phenomenon.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And there’s certain people you look at and they look happy and make you happy.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Very few people have happy resting face, though.

STEVE BARTLETT:

You either look neutral or bothered. So you said you were a recovering awkward person. Yes. Take me into what you were like.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Oh goodness.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And what do you mean when you say awkward person?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I really wanted to go it alone. I was really overwhelmed by people and interactions. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like I missed a memo that everyone got on conversation. I always felt like I was saying the wrong things. I had all these awkward silences. And then what would happen is I would try to overcompensate by sharing a ridiculous story or talking too much or completely shutting down. And I kind of like wavered between completely shutting down and being overwhelmed and talking too much and saying too much and just verbal vomiting all over everyone. And so I shut down. And in college, especially, I just felt so left out. I just felt so lonely. And I don’t know if anyone watching is feeling lonely, I thought it was all my fault. I was like, I missed the memo. I don’t know how to have conversations. I don’t even know how to have friends. That’s what it felt like, that I desperately wanted to make connections, but I had no idea how to level up a new person to a friendship. I had no idea how that path happened. I had no idea how to have a conversation with someone, share something real, and then have a real interaction back. And so it was really lonely and overwhelming.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 And what was the catalyst for you to go on this journey?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I was in college and there was a group paper assigned. And you had like five people and everyone had to do five pages. And I went to the professor and I said, I will write double the amount of pages if I can work by myself. And he was like, Vanessa, the point of the paper is not the paper. It’s working with the people. And I was like, and I started to cry in his office. I was like that student. I was like, I, I don’t know how. And he was like, Vanessa, you’re very good at science. You’re very good at breaking things down. What if you studied for people like you study for chemistry? That was like an aha moment for me. He said, why don’t you study good conversation? Why don’t you study the popular kids? Why don’t you look at what are they doing in conversation that’s working? Study it like it’s a science. Hence, my brand was called Science of People. That’s when I realized, OK, it didn’t come naturally to me, but maybe there’s research. on actual things I can do with my body, things I can do, I can say verbally, questions that work that will help me learn this the other way, turning soft skills into hard skills. That’s when I started creating my first conversational blueprints. That’s when I started creating my conversation formula, and it started to work. I started to try out these kind of tiny experiments, and I actually started to feel like myself, make more friends. It was tools. I had to use tools to be able to connect because it just did not come naturally to me.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Was it fixed from day one?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

No.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So it was a journey?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

It was a real journey, yeah.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I think that’s important because often people think, you know, read the book, get the tips and tricks and you’re changed and you’re fixed. You talk about, I think, later in your life where you went to a dinner party and your husband was there with you and you went home and told him that you thought everyone was angry at you.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah.

STEVE BARTLETT:

When was that?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That was probably maybe four or five years later. So I started mostly with conversation. That was sort of my first tool I needed. Questions I wanted to ask, first impressions, and how to close a conversation very practically. I also realized about five years later, I married my college sweetheart. So I’ve been with my husband for a long time. And he said to me, you always think everyone’s angry at you. I was like, isn’t everyone angry at me? And I realized there are certain people who misinterpret neutral facial expressions as negative. I have this problem. So I will see a neutral expression on someone and assume they are angry or afraid or stressed or don’t like me. And that was creating this really bad loop because when you think someone doesn’t like you, you shut down and become more unlikable. There was a study I discovered right around this time. This is done by Dr. Van Sloan. He wanted to know what makes popular kids popular. Very clever study. He studied thousands of high school students across a variety of high schools looking for patterns. Why is it that some kids across these grades and ages are really popular? He had all the kids ranked across all these schools. He had them looked at traits, and then he guessed what made the popular kids popular. Were they more athletic? Were they more attractive? Were they funnier? Were they smarter? What was it? Can you guess what it was?

STEVE BARTLETT:

So I’m just basing this on the kids that were popular in my school. They were funnier, they were self-deprecating to some degree, they were remotely good at some sports maybe. They were funny, happy, I don’t know.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so he found that the most popular kids, the one single variable that was held true across all the different students, was the most popular kids had the longest list of people they liked. So when he asked, one of the questions of the survey was, who do you like? They had the longest lists. And when he looked at their day-to-day, they had micro moments of liking. They would go down the hallway and be like, hey, Chan. Hey, Chelsea. Hey, Sarah. They liked so many people, and that, in turn, made them more likable. This showed me that being likable is in our control. Being likable means you have to be first liker. If you set out to like more people, you become more likable. And that was a really big shift for me because for so long, I thought it was all about me. It’s a very selfish way to be, right? I was like, I better be impressive. I better be funny. But actually, what makes us likable is just liking as many people as possible.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I was laughing as you were speaking because I was just playing out all the different sort of personas of people listening right now. Yeah. And I just had this one persona of a person sat at home who just like slumped over because they realized they hate everybody. Like, when you said that, they’re just like, fuck, I hate everybody.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Look, I get it. I get it. I get it. And I also think that if you hate everyone, if that’s you, let me try to convince you for a second. It could be because you’re asking the wrong questions. I think I fell into that camp. I don’t need people. I don’t like people. I was very much in that camp for the first couple of years. Why? Because I had terrible interactions and terrible conversations. It was awkward. Of course I didn’t like people. But I was also asking the wrong questions and I was telling the wrong stories. I was trying to be impressive. The best way to be impressive, to be likable, is to help people impress you. is to make them feel so liked that they begin to like you back. It’s aggressively liking. So that means that when you’re with someone, you should be constantly giving them verbal and nonverbal assurances of how much you want to like them. Watch them change. Watch your relationships transform. So I make it a policy of aggressively liking people. So I have three magic phrases for likability. Can I teach them to you?

SPEAKER_05:

Please.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so I want you to use these as many times as you can. Three magic phrases for likeability. One, I was just thinking of you. Okay, so here’s how you use this authentically, right? You think of a lot of people in your life all the time. If you are thinking of someone and you can text them, text them, I was just thinking of you, how are you? I was just thinking of you, how’d that project go? I was just thinking of you, it has been a while since we talked. Or, and better, you see a movie, you see a documentary, you see a matcha latte, you see a mug, you see a ceramic candle, and you’re like, oh, this made me think of you. So my text messages, my conversations are full of actual moments where I was triggered to think of that person, actually, that this thing made me think of you. Or I was just thinking of you, I wanted to ask you about. If you don’t think of someone, they’re not a person you need to have in your life.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay, so that’s number one. That’s number one. I want to pause on number one because I’ve got some sort of questions to ask here. Yes. It sounds exhausting. It sounds like it’s going to cost me a lot of time that I don’t necessarily have. And this is just my like my surface level reaction was, oh God, another job. You know what I mean? If I’ve got to set aside an hour to text everyone I know and go, I was just thinking of you, it’s going to be exhausting. I’ve got like six friends and I’ve got my partner and I’ve got my family and my team. It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Then just them. And also, it doesn’t take an hour when you’re like, oh, stainless steel mug. This made me think of you. Like, you’re only doing it when it’s actually naturally occurring to you. I don’t want you to sit at your desk and be like, I’m due for some I was just thinking of yous. No, this happens in the wild. You’re watching a documentary. You’re at a restaurant. You’re on the bus. You’re like, oh, that reminds me of this person. Quick text. That is less work than missing an old friend and not knowing what to say. It is less work to see something in real life or have a thought of like, I wonder how Sarah is? And reaching out to them then, I miss Sarah, but I’m not going to reach out to her. It’s also less work when you see someone and you haven’t seen them in a while or they’re a friend of a friend or they’re that casual co-worker relationship and you’re like, what do I say? I think it’s a lot of work to go up to that person and be like, How was your weekend? I think that’s a lot of work. I think boring small talk’s a lot of work. If you actually thought of them to say, you know, I know you love dolphins. I saw this dolphin documentary on Netflix. Have you seen it? I was just thinking of you, made me think of you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I want another concern. So if I… If I start firing out these WhatsApp messages telling people when I’m thinking of them, it’s just going to be, it’s going to be opening up loads of conversations that I then have to deal with. Do you know what I mean? Like, it’s going to be like, Hey, I was just thinking of you. And then they reply, they go, Oh, how, how are you? And I go, I’m good. Thanks. And then they go, I go, how are you? They go, I’m good. Thanks. And then, do you know what I mean?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I don’t believe in asking, how are you? That’s a whole nother thing. This is a good test. If you are worried that they’re going to start a conversation that’s going to bore you and feel like work, they’re not a close friend.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So don’t text them. Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

It’s a very good test. If there’s someone where you’re like, oh, I don’t really want to hear how they are.

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah. Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

This is for the people who you want to level up with. There are three levels of intimacy. People who you kind of know, you know their personal, you know their general traits, where they work, where they live, what they do, that’s it. You don’t want to go any deeper with them. Level two people are people where they know your personal concerns. You know their goals, their motivations, their personality traits, their worries. Those are people you want to invest in. And there’s a last level, which is the most deep level, which is called self-narrative, which is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. If you categorize your relationships, another activity I love for my students to do is make those three levels on a piece of paper. Write down the 20 people you can think of, the top 20 people you spend the most time with, where they fall.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So we have acquaintances, we have- Acquaintances who just kind of know where you’re from, what do you do, the basics.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And by the way, some of the people who you’re close with, you might not be deep with.

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah, true.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Right? Level two, personal concerns. Could they tell you what is your, Stephen’s, biggest goal right now?

STEVE BARTLETT:

 OK, and then the middle layer I didn’t understand.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That’s the middle layer. That’s the middle layer. So it’s general traits, personal concerns, self-narrative.

STEVE BARTLETT:

What’s self-narrative?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So this is what my next book is about. I’m doing research on it right now. Self-narrative is the story you tell yourself about yourself.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So is this a group of people?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

It’s the levels of intimacy you are with someone. So would your partner know the story you tell yourself about yourself? I’ll give you an example. 100% she would. I think so. So I think that there are basically three main types of narratives and you should know what these are for the closest people in your life. Maybe only two or three and you should also know what it is for yourself. The best one is a hero narrative. This is I’ve worked really hard. I’ve had some challenges and mistakes, but I’ve overcome with hard work and smarts, and now I am where I am. Every version of their story, their career, their life, their relationships is that same narrative over and over again. Then there’s what I think is called the healer narrative. Again, I’m doing research on this for my next book. The healer narrative, their story is all about helping others. They typically are in careers of service, of helping others, physical therapists, nurses, healthcare. Their story is, how can I be more helpful? They tend to have a problem, though, if you’re in a relationship with a healer, is they always put other people’s needs before them, themselves.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Do they have some kind of historic trauma?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

They can. And a lot of the times they were put in a position of caretaking too early. Like they were told that you are of value if you can caretake. You’re of value if you put your needs last. So they tend to be people pleasers. They tend to say yes to everything. You have to be careful if you work with a healer because they’re great to work with. They help, help, help, but they say yes to too much. So a healer is the middle one. The last one is victim narrative. Victim narrative, no matter what, personal, professional, love life, taxes, they have the same narrative. I experienced challenges and mistakes and I didn’t overcome. No matter how hard I work, no matter how smart I am, the world is against me. So a question I ask people to begin to uncover their self-narratives. Do you feel lucky? Do you feel lucky?

SPEAKER_07:

I feel very lucky.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I also feel very lucky. People who have a resounding yes to I feel lucky are more likely heroes or healers. People who say I don’t feel lucky, I feel very unlucky, are typically victims. Dr. Richard Wiseman did a study. He asked people to perceive their own luck. How lucky do you feel? Then he gave them a challenge. He gave them a newspaper. And he said, I want you to count the amount of images in this newspaper. They sat with the newspaper and they counted all the images, but there was a trick. There’s always a trick in these studies. On the second page of the newspaper, in big print, it said, stop counting. There are 42 images in this newspaper. Almost all of the people who perceived themselves as lucky saw the ad, closed the paper, and gave it back, so there are 42 images. Almost none of the unlucky people did. The unlucky people missed the ad and kept counting, spent a lot of time, and made more mistakes. This means that if you think of yourself as lucky, you literally see more opportunities. If you think of yourself as unlucky, you miss them.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Is it possible to change how you see yourself?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I do believe in a growth mindset, so I do believe that if this is resonating with you and you’re like, uh-oh, I feel unlucky. I might have this victim self-narrative. I do believe it’s possible to change your perception of yourself, and that’s starting with small moments of heroism. I think that changing your people skills, saying, I don’t like people, and saying, I’m going to find a way to like people. Saying, I’m bad at conversation, I’m going to find a way to be good at conversation. To say I’m an awkward person, no, I’m a recovering awkward person. If we can begin to take those tiny experiments and change them one by one, we begin to have small moments of heroism, and that’s how we change our self-narrative.

STEVE BARTLETT:

As an employer I think about this a lot, these sort of verbal and non-verbal cues. I actually had an interview some time ago and I think I came out of the interview and I think objectively the person might have been qualified but there was something about their energy or cues or something that signaled something else to me that they were an unhappy person or they were tired or they didn’t really want to be here or something like that. Are there any studies that confirm that our hidden communication is driving our success in the working environment?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes. So this study blew my mind. It’s 58,000 working hours over 11 different companies. So a huge amount of data. They wanted to know if low performers infect the people around them and if high performers infect the people around them. What they found was if you sit within 25 feet of a high performer, your own performance improves by 15%. Here’s the kicker. If you sit within 25 feet of a low performer, your own performance decreases by 30%. This means that our negative emotions are more contagious, that if you’re around people who are low performers, whatever that means to you, who have negative cues, who are feeling anxious or tired or low confident, you could catch those cues and that affects your own performance. This is why it is incredibly critical to invest in the five people who you spend the most time with. You want to make sure those five people are the cues you want to catch. Do you like the cues they’re sending? Do they give you the right motivation, feelings? Do they make you feel liked? Do they make you a better version of yourself? There’s just one more chemical aspect of this which we have to do more research on. This is a very gross study, but it’s one of my favorites. It’s a little gross. You ready? Okay. So they brought people into their lab. They split them up into two different groups. And they made the first group wear a sweatsuit where they catch their sweat and run on the treadmill. So they sweat a lot on the treadmill. The second group, they wore sweatsuits and they took them skydiving for the first time. Both groups sweat a lot. Treadmill sweat and skydiving sweat. They took these sweat samples and they had unsuspecting participants go into fMRI machines and scan their brains. And they gave them both sweat samples to smell. These poor people didn’t know what they were smelling. They went, Everyone who smelled the skydiving sweat had an activation in their own amygdala, their own fear response triggered. In other words, when they smelled fear sweat, they didn’t know why, they began to feel afraid. Everyone who smelled the treadmill sweat had no change at all. This means that, yes, we can talk about facial expressions and body language and vocal cues and words, but there’s also something chemically happening with the people around us that we can literally smell fear and we catch it. And that is also why it’s really important to follow our gut. Oh, dear.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Well, I was going to say, well, then we’re all screwed, aren’t we? We can’t do anything because there’s, if we’re giving off these chemicals which are impacting those around us, it doesn’t matter if I smile and do the whole like, er.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

No, because I think intention is the backdoor into confidence. It’s very hard to fake confidence. I don’t believe in fake it till you make it, I don’t really. But if I say, I have a conversational tool for you that’s gonna make your conversations better, you become less nervous, you become more excited, you ask a better question, they give you a really good answer, you feel super charismatic, they feel really liked, you feel really likable, ooh, we have a good little cycle. So I think that intention, going in with really purposeful cues, helps you feel more confident and triggers these beautiful cycles.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 The cycle, is this the cycle you’re talking about?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

The cue cycle.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I’ll put it on the screen and in the description for anyone that wants to see it. But when I saw this, the reason I printed this off is because it really hit close to home. Because I’m someone that meets a lot of people and when I meet people, on the very rare occasion, something about someone will just kind of throw my energy and it throws my energy to the point that I realise I’m then acting a little bit in terms of my interaction with them. And it’s almost like I can’t control it, like something about the person has unnerved me or just made it, and it’s nothing that I could consciously tell you, like say it was the way they shook my hand, just something about them throws me into this different state. And when I saw this, I almost figured out why, because the first step in this cue, you explain it, I mean it’s your cue cycle.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, okay, so we often mistakenly think that we send a signal to someone else, they send a signal back to us, and that’s it. What we don’t realize is there’s a cycle happening within us, which is that if you send me a negative cue, I internalize it, and that changes the cues I’m sending back to you. Here’s a very simple experiment that showed this. They put a participant in a room, and they had an actor in the room flash them a social rejection cue that could be, an eye roll, a scoff, a distancing and blocking behavior. So the participants in the room and this person across from them, they don’t know it was an actor, sends them a social rejection cue. What they found was the moment that participant saw the social rejection cue, their own pupils dilated and their field of vision increased. This means that somebody saw, uh-oh, that person doesn’t like me, and their body reacted to fight or flight. Does anyone else feel this way about me? Are there any escape routes for me? And that then changed what cues they sent back to that person. They were more anxious. They were more nervous. If you walk into a room with someone and you’re feeling bad, you probably caught a cue. Here’s the good news. You can stop the cue cycle from being negative. There’s also positive cues, right? We can catch positive cues. That can be good for us. But we can stop the negative cycle if we label the cue we see. Dr. Matthew Lieberman at UCLA studied this very clearly. He put people in fMRI machines, and he flashed them a fear microexpression, the one that you showed us earlier, with your eyes really wide. When people saw the fear microexpression, they caught the fear. They began to feel afraid, and their amygdala lit up. But when he taught them, say, fear, or think, fear, he taught them the micro-expression, it stopped activating their amygdala. Meaning, if you know how to read the 97 Qs, and you see contempt, or social rejection, or a mouth shrug, or a lip purse, all not great Qs, you can in your head say, lip purse, I’m good, or clocked, noted. That intel is actually empowering. So that backdoor into confidence is also, you can label it, name it, tame it, and you’re in control of it. That is a much better way to interact and also can help you like people, for all my people who don’t like people.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay, so in those moments I should, in my head, just say what I’m… Clocked.

SPEAKER_02:

Label it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Clocked.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that’s what I say to myself. Or like, red flag. Or noted.

STEVE BARTLETT:

You’re particularly famous for a TED Talk that you did. Yeah. Which did very, very well. It was called You Are Contagious. And it really opened my eyes to the importance of hand gestures. Which I didn’t really think were that important before, but it’s funny because going through this election cycle, and obviously Trump has now been elected as the next president of the United States, he is someone in particular that uses a lot of hand gestures. And in your TED Talk, you make the case that hand gestures matter.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Oh, so much. I think the hands are the windows into the soul. I think what we underestimate is the power of our gestures. Love it, just love it. Just those jazz hands, just those jazz hands. So here’s, I’m gonna do a little experiment with you. So I’m gonna put my hands on my lap. I’ve been very careful to leave my hands on the table for the entire interview. That’s on purpose. Now, something funny happens in your brain when you can’t see my hands. And the longer my hands are underneath the table, the more your amygdala will begin to fire. And the more distracted you become with, where are her hands? Why are her hands under the table? And then when I bring my hands back out again, your brain goes, And that is because hands show intention, and this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. So if we go back to caveman days, if we were approached by a stranger caveman and they went, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, we saw they weren’t carrying a rock or a spear, and they were probably a friend. In fact, when we go, so nice to meet you, we can see someone’s hand, we know that they’re literally not gonna harm us. So our brain still keeps this mechanism that if we’re on video and we can’t see someone’s hand, or they walk into an office with their hands in their pockets or behind their back, we feel a little bit uneasy. So there’s two things for this. First, is the moment someone first sees you, you want to be friend, friend, friend. Good to see you. Oh, so nice to meet you. What put your hand up for people that can’t see you? The moment I walk into a room, hey, nice to see you. Even before I handshake, even an old friend, I’ll be like, oh my gosh, so good to see you. On Zoom. Morning.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 For people that can’t see, she’s basically putting her hand in the air.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Which is like a little wave, a little wave. We love a palm. As humans, we love seeing someone’s palm. There’s something about it that makes us feel like, ah, they’re literally open-palmed. So that’s the first. In the first few seconds of someone seeing you, in person, on video, try to flash your palm. Very, very simply. Second, we understand competence in two ways. Very highly competent people know their content so well, they can speak to you on two tracks. They can speak to you verbally, but they also can speak to you with their hands. This is why we loved picture books as kids. And so when someone is speaking, we’re listening to their words. But second, we’re looking, are their hands outlining their words? So for example, all the best TED Talks start the same way. And this is what got me my TED Talk, is we studied all the TED Talks from 2010, looking for patterns. And my team and I coded every TED Talk we can find, looking for differences between the most viral TED Talks and the least viral TED Talks. We found the most viral TED speakers used an average of 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes, whereas the least popular TED talkers used an average of 271 gestures, so not quite half. Meaning, if someone walks on stage, here’s a really good TED talk, they all start this way, you ready? Today, I wanna talk to you about a big idea. We’re gonna share three different things that are gonna change your life. So for people listening, I was outlining with my hands along with my words. If I were to get on stage and say, today I have a really big idea. It’s huge. And hold up my hands in a really small way. Your brain is 12.5 times more likely to believe my gesture over my words. And so what we can do as speakers, as very highly charismatic speakers, is think about how can I outline, very basically, not modern dance, what I’m saying or how can I emphasize things with my gestures. If something is big, show me. Is a beach ball big? Is it What is this big? Donkey big? Is this a donkey? I don’t even know. A goat? A goat? This is a goat big. If you have something that’s really small and no big deal, doing this actually helps you think that it’s not a big deal. I’m making a little kind of dismissive gesture with my hand. This also works with emphasizing points you want people to remember. If you have three ideas, tell someone you have three ideas. It is very hard to lie with our gestures. For example, you want to do a little experiment with me? Sure. Okay, I want you to say five, but hold up the number three. Five. Hard, right? Yeah. So it’s really hard.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I have to think about them separately.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, it’s really hard. Our brain is not meant to lie with gesture, which is why humans pay so close attention to gestures. Because we’re looking to see, are they congruent? It is so hard to be incongruent with gestures. Liars typically use less gestures. So we’re also drawn to people who are using gestures, who are congruent with their gestures, because it makes us feel like, oh, they know their stuff and they’re being honest.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So it made me reflect, how do we establish causation here in terms of these hand gestures? Could it be the case that the more confident TED speakers are doing more gestures because they’re less nervous. So is it about nerves? And the less confident, more nervous TED speakers are doing less gestures just because they’re self-soothing a lot and they’re kind of closing off their body. Is confidence the thing here? Is it nerves?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I don’t think so. I think it’s about engagement. So I think most TED speakers, I watch these TED Talks, they’re all good. All of them are good, and some of them are experts in their field. The difference is, do I want to watch their good? It is hard for me as a viewer to pay attention for 18 minutes with someone who didn’t use enough gestures. It was like physically hard for my brain to pay attention. I think those speakers, whether good or not, had over-rehearsed and rehearsed out their hand gestures, or were holding a podium, or were holding a clicker too hard. So I actually think that It’s less to do with the speaker’s nerves or confidence, and it’s more to do with are they going to let themselves use their hands to explain their points, and that becomes more engaging.

STEVE BARTLETT:

One of the things I’ve noticed on this podcast is people who are using their hands are more expressive. And if they’re more expressive, there’s likely to be more sort of intonations in their voice. And if there’s more intonations, it’s more engaging. And if it’s more engaging, then it’s more attentive for the algorithm. And if it’s more attentive for the algorithm, it’s suggested more. If it’s suggested more, there’s more views. Yes, yes, yes. So I would like to tell my guests, all the past and particularly future guests, that if you have more expression in what you’re saying and more intonations in your voice, then our show will grow.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, let’s talk about two things here. One is we did a test on my YouTube channel and found that if we used a thumbnail of me doing any hand gesture, it didn’t even matter what it was. It could be this, it could be this. Any hand gesture, that got more clicks. People even in a thumbnail like to see the hand gesture even more than my crazy facial expressions. We tried both. So yes, we are—because if you see a thumbnail of me, you know, holding up two, you’re like, well, what two things is she talking about? What is it? So we like it. It shows competence. And the second thing is that vocal variety is an incredibly important aspect of charisma. We’re talking about gestures, but there is a feedback loop here. If I were going to sit on my hands for this interview, you would notice my facial expression would get less charismatic, my vocal tone would be less charismatic. It’s really hard to be charismatic without movement. Vocal variety is a critical aspect of both warmth and competence. That is because when we hear someone who’s able to, for example, give us the TED Talk voice. So I’m going to give you the TED Talk voice. You ready? This point is going to change the way that we think about the world. And if we don’t analyze this point, we will be in huge trouble. Like that is a voice that is telling you, ooh, this is important. You also hear that really good speakers will use like a numbers voice. So a numbers voice sounds like this. Did you know that 43% of humans all believe in the same thing?

None:

43%.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And if you’re telling a story, it changes again. So a story tone would go like this. You’re never going to believe what happened to me. So last week, I’m walking down the street and I saw this guy. It’s a totally different vocal variety. That is a gift to your listener that makes you more engaging because they’re able to clock, oh, we’re doing a number now. We have a story now. Oh, this is an important point. I better write it down. Really good TED speakers are outlining their talk for you in many different ways, and that’s the best speakers I see on stage.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s so interesting because in this podcast, we had quite a long conversation a couple of months ago about arms on the chair, the chair that you’re in now. And it was just this observation we had when we first flew out here to New York. The chairs that we ordered were pretty similar to this, but they just happened to have arms on them. And what I noticed was that guests would lean and it would take out their arms. So it took out their arms and they became less expressive and the conversations were less interesting. So we’ve removed the arms again.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so let’s talk about this just very briefly. I actually do recommend chairs with arms, not in this setup, because look at the difference. So actually, right before this interview, you asked me to scoot my chair in, right? Your amazing team asked me to scoot my chair in. Thank you for that, because it makes it so that I want to put my hands up. If I were to be sitting farther back, I’m just going to lean back for a second, I would be tempted to put my hands in my lap.

SPEAKER_04:

Yes.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So the critical piece of this is you’re having me scoot up to the table. It would be really hard if I had arms, because then I would want to go like this, and it would make me look like a duck.

SPEAKER_04:

 Yes.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Right. So you want to use a chair with arms to be broader. It actually does broaden your arms out unless you’re really close to the table and you can put your hands on the table. But it’s amazing how the physical environment can change how we are perceived and how we move.

STEVE BARTLETT:

But even we’re very intentional about the sort of mirroring of our body language and just making sure that we’re head on because this conversation is entirely different if we’re side on.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Very much.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s not going to be the same.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Very much.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And there’s not going to be the same level of intimacy. Yes. We also thought a lot about how big the table was. This is quite a big table.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

What’s the distance?

STEVE BARTLETT:

I’m going to say it’s about just shy of two meters.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Wait, can you hold your arm up? Okay, so this is perfect distance. The perfect distance between two people having a good conversation is that we could shake hands if we wanted to. And that is because there are four different proxemic zones. So the fancy word for space is proxemics. I don’t know if you have that beautiful graphic. I printed out this. Oh, yes, that’s it. Yes. So there are four different space zones, and these are really good to know if you’re trying to set yourself up for success. The public zone is about 5 to 8 feet away. I don’t know, not feet, but 5 to 8 feet away. Then you have the social zone, which is where we like to socialize with people. That is, depending on who you ask, 3 to 5 feet away. Then there’s the personal zone. That’s our favorite zone. That is about arm’s distance apart, right? So we could shake hands if we wanted to. That’s where our best conversations happen. And then there’s the intimate zone. big mistake people make is they place their video camera too close to their face, which means they’re accidentally signaling intimacy cues with their colleagues and their co-workers. Have you ever been on a Zoom with someone where their face is the entire camera? Yeah, I was on one earlier on. And you’re like, please back up. And that is because your brain is going too close, even though they’re across the camera. So what I would really recommend, measure the distance between your nose and your camera. It should be one arm length. So it should be the tip of your nose to the tip of your fingers or a foot and a half to three feet away. That is the ideal zone for having good conversation over Zoom.

STEVE BARTLETT:

That’s really interesting as well because I was thinking about the conversation I had actually on the way here in the car with a colleague of mine and they had called me on FaceTime. Now the thing with FaceTime is it’s going to be close. It’s going to be close. And it did feel a little bit intimate. It does. Because they called me on FaceTime. Yes. Obviously, if I was on my laptop, they would call me on Zoom or something else, and there would be a meter.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, so I think that that’s why we can sometimes, at least introverts, feel like, don’t FaceTime me, it’s way too personal. It’s because there’s a setup there that it’s actually accidentally tricking you into being in the intimate zone with someone. This is also why loud bars and nightclubs work so well for facilitating romantic relationships. What happens in a loud bar or a loud nightclub is you can’t hear someone. So you go, what? And then you get a little bit closer, and all of a sudden, you’re accidentally standing in someone’s intimate zone, which then that cue cycle begins to kick in where you’re like, well, if I’m standing within a foot and a half from this person, maybe I should feel intimate with them, which then makes you lean more, makes you want to touch more. That is why people go to bars and nightclubs to facilitate these romantic relationships. It’s accidentally going into the intimate zone.

STEVE BARTLETT:

When I was younger, I’ve said this a few times on the podcast before, but it feels very relevant. My brother, my older brother Jason, he ordered this book called The Game by Neil Strauss. And he ordered it to university, but he accidentally put the wrong address in, so it came to home. This sounds like an elaborate story for me, like buying a pick-up artist book. But it came to home, and I read the book, and it was my first time understanding that body language was, A, important, but even something you could learn. And when I say body language, I mean everything. And it’s interesting because now after reading your work, I actually think maybe what I should have been aiming at was how to be more charismatic. And you talk about these five science-based habits for being more charismatic. I guess the first question is what is charisma? And then what are these five science-based habits that can make me more charismatic as a person? Like, how do I know if I’m charismatic?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

You are charismatic, but you lean higher on competence. So let’s break it down, okay? So this is not my work. This is the work of Dr. Susan Fisk. This is an instrumental study. It’s been repeated many times back in 2002 that found that to be charismatic, you have to be both highly warm and highly competent. or more importantly, you have to signal high warmth and high competence. And this makes up 82% of impressions of people. Warmth, trust, likability, friendliness, competence, power, reliability, capability. So very highly charismatic people, you meet them, you see them, and they are signaling, you can trust me, you like me, and boy, am I reliable and competent at the very same time. So when I say you are charismatic, but you lean very high in competence, which means that people can see you as cold or stoic if you’re not showing enough warmth cues. Have you been told that? Intimidating?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Indirectly. People are too scared to say it to me and I’m joking. But no, I do get that. I do. I do. I think I have like some degree of self-awareness as to how I come across. And I think how you described it is exactly how I come across.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And that’s not a bad thing, right? Like you get to pick your own recipe. Like I lean a little higher on the warm side. I’m also female. There are differences between men and women. So typically, not always, men default to higher incompetence. Women are defaulted to higher in warmth, typically not always. This isn’t a bad thing, but you should know that if you are trying to come across as warmer on your team, you’re trying to inspire more collaboration, you’re trying to make more friends, you want to dial up your warmth cues. If you’re someone who’s interrupted a lot, not taken seriously, people forget meeting you, you need to dial up competence. This is like a thermostat. You can dial up warmth cues and dial up competence cues and this changes the way people treat you. So I have five power cues for competence and I have five warm cues for warmth.

STEVE BARTLETT:

We’re gonna go through all of those. I saw this wonderful graph which kind of explains it, which I’ll put on the screen for anyone that’s watching. And this was really, really interesting. There’s a danger zone. The danger zone, I’m guessing, is when you’re low warmth and low competence. That’s it.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Those are those folks that are stoic. If you don’t send enough warmth cues, if you don’t send enough competence cues, people cannot trust you. They have trouble working with you. They have trouble talking to you. This is the curse of very smart people. Very smart people think, my ideas will stand alone. My book smarts are great. I don’t need to communicate these cues. My ideas are enough. That’s what happened to Jamie Siminoff in the tank. He did not show enough warmth or competence cues. He relied solely on his ideas and his numbers, and he could not get a deal. So people who want to be taken seriously, you have to show warmth and competence. The other problem with highly competent folks, and you lean higher in competence, this is for you too, which is directly from the research, too much competence without enough warmth leaves people feeling suspicious. So no matter how competent you are, no matter how good your ideas are, if you are not showcasing that with warmth, people are skeptical of you. And this is what happens with a lot of my students is they’re like, people don’t trust me. They don’t believe my ideas. They’re skeptical. I get pushback or their, I do sales trainings. They can’t close. You’ll push back on their numbers. And that is because some part of them is saying, I hear your competence, but you’re not giving me enough warmth.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Can you be too warm?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

You can be absolutely too warm. You can be too warm and too competent. Too warm, you know what that looks like? That’s too warm.

SPEAKER_05:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay? Too warm is… So, we’ll talk about the five warmth cues. Too much of any cue is dangerous, right? So, too much nodding, too much laughing, too much vocalizations. Those are all too warm and they make us think this person is a bimbo or a ditz or not competent. That’s what happens. We have too much warmth that takes away from our competence.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Where should we start?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Let’s start with the power cues.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay, the power cues. So this is competence?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, power cues. Let me get some more power cues. Okay, so we talked about the importance of hand gestures. There is a very good, competent hand gesture, which everyone should know if you want to be perceived as higher in competence. It’s called the steeple.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Oh, this.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Oh, yes. It’s on the cover of my book if you want to see it. Yes, this is when your hands look like a little steeple. They’re kind of relaxed and open. It’s a triangle for anyone that can’t see. Kind of like a triangle. Yeah, a triangle. It’s a power pose for the hands. Why? If you are doing this pose, you’re showing I’m not hiding anything from you. You can still see my palms, but I am very Relaxed and poised, enough so that I’m keeping my hands together. Now be careful, don’t drum. This is evil fingers. This is Mr. Burns, for those of you who know, right? So it’s a nice, still steeple. They raided hand gestures in a study and they found that this was the single The highest rated hand gesture that leaders made was when they made this gesture. Now, personally, I don’t use this a lot in my interpersonal interactions because it doesn’t feel super natural to me. It’s funny because we took one picture for my cover photos, and every single picture of me for my cover photos, I was smiling. And my wonderful photographer, Maggie Kirkland, said, Vanessa, can we just do one of you serious? I was like, but I’m not serious. She’s like, just one. Just do your most powerful power cue. And this is the only picture And that was the one that we chose for it. So it’s just funny because it’s a very high competence cue. So you can try the steeple, just be careful not to do evil fingers with it. That’s a high competence cue.

STEVE BARTLETT:

That picture of you on the front, what is that signaling?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So it’s a perfect balance, right? So one, I have the steeple cue, competence gesture. Two, I’m angled towards you. My body is angled towards you, which is a warmth cue that’s fronting. My toes are angled towards you, which is warmth. I also have a smoldering eye contact look, which is high competence, which we can talk about. And I have an up face, right? I’m not in my resting, bothered face. So that’s a slight warmth cue.

STEVE BARTLETT:

That is actually how it makes me feel. There’s an element of power, but it’s not an intimidating level of power.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Because I balanced it with that warmth.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah, it’s like a welcoming element of power.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Well, yay. Woo, we did it. Now I’ve got to do it with the next one. Okay, steeple. Okay, steeple, yeah. Second, this is a weird one. The most important measurement on your entire body is the distance between your earlobe and your shoulder. This distance right here. Watch. If I were to do this in the interview the entire time, I would have a very small distance between my earlobe and my shoulder. I would look anxious. I would also have a really hard time giving you vocal power. You would have a hard—do you trust me?

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Now you look nervous.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Right. I look nervous. There’s a direct correlation between confidence and anxiety and the distance between our shoulder and our earlobe. And very quickly, we’re trying to just assess someone in the first few seconds of seeing them. We’re trying to assess how confident are you? Can I catch it? We don’t like people who are anxious. We don’t want to talk to someone like this because we don’t want to catch that anxiety, but we do want to talk to someone who has the max distance between their earlobes and their shoulder. So when you’re in a first impression, also in your profile pictures, I want a relaxed distance, shoulders down, earlobes out, which is another reason why I like that this is how your table is set up, because it pushes my shoulders down, so I have a max distance. That makes me look more confident, but it also makes me feel more confident. There’s a look here, so when you do the steeple, and then you roll your shoulders down and back, you will begin to feel more confident. Don’t you feel that?

STEVE BARTLETT:

What if you like raise your head though? Because if I’m trying to get my ears away from my shoulders, I might go like this.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Actually, they’re the same distance. So you want to actually keep your chin level. And if you can help it, you don’t want to actually look down your nose at someone. It’s quite a scornful judgmental. Exactly. So you just noticed it even when I did it. So it’s not this, it’s just this. So maximizing this difference. Third one, I love eye contact. We all know good eye contact is important, but here’s what you might not know about good eye contact. Eye contact is a power move when you look at someone at the end of your sentence. So we’re very used to if someone’s thinking about something and they’re processing something in their head and I’m telling you that there are 465 gestures in a TED Talk, that is the most important way that I want to showcase something to you. We like it when someone is actually accessing different memories or areas of their brain, but then when I end my sentence looking right at you, you’re like, So highly competent people make eye contact specifically at the end of their sentences, to drill a point, and ideally when the other person is saying something important.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay, interesting. I just did it then. I do that when I’m doing interviews because I kind of like look off into the distance to think a little bit and then I come back to ask.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

The worst advice I hear people give, body language experts give, make more eye contact. Make 100% eye contact. It’s awkward. Actually, in Western culture, as they’ve studied this, the ideal amount of eye contact is between 60 and 70% of the conversation. If you make over 70% eye contact, it’s actually considered a territorial gesture. So if I were to be making 100% eye contact with you, it’d feel very invasive, very awkward. We like it when someone is processing or gathering information from around. Like if I’m processing something or I’m thinking about something or I’m accessing, all that matters is at the end of my point, I’m looking right at you. And that feels so much more powerful.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Okay, so that’s number three.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, that’s number three. Yeah. Fourth one, one of my favorites. It’s called a lower lid flex. Lower lid flex is one of the least utilized, but one of my favorite cues. So biologically speaking, when we are trying to see something far away, we harden our lower lids. I’m trying to read the titles on your bookshelf. I harden my lower lids. That is because when our eye is trying to see far, it squints to block out the light. So you’ll see more details in my face when you harden your lower lid at me. So harden your lower lid. If you look at people’s sexiest men alive, almost every man in that magazine is, It’s Zoolander, right? Blue Steel is actually just a lower lid flex. That is because when someone is trying to really focus on something and really understand something, their lower lid is flexed as you’re doing right now. And boy, oh boy, do we like it when someone is lower lid flexing at us. Because it means you are really trying to understand and see me. So a lower lid flex is a great power cue to use in moderation, right? Nothing too much. That when someone is saying something on a date or in a meeting or a colleague is saying something really important and you want to show them, I am really listening. that lower lid flex shows them, I am super focused and intense on you. That is why women find men who do the lower lid flex very sexy, because they feel like, ooh, he’s really focusing on me. Now, there’s a little side note to the lower lid flex. Lower lid flex is not, it’s inherently in itself a positive cue. It’s a cue of focus, right? If you are in a presentation or a meeting and you say something and someone suddenly lid flexes at you, you might’ve just said something there like, really? So for me, this was a game changing moment as I was giving a presentation to a bunch of executives. And I said something about oxytocin, which is the hormone of love and cuddle and connection. And he goes, I saw him lower lid flex at me.

STEVE BARTLETT:

But he’s also turned his head there.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I don’t know if he, I don’t remember if he turned his head, but all I noticed is that distinctly he went from mm-hmm, mm-hmm to.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Ah, yes.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And I went, does that make sense? Any questions? So if you see a lower lid flex, your best choice is to try to gather more information. That makes sense? All good? Any questions for me? How we feel about this? So I said, any questions for me? And he goes, and I looked right at him. I said, any questions for me? He said, you know, I think they gave my wife oxytocin in labor. Is that the same thing? And it’s true that they give a form of oxytocin to induce women in labor. That’s how strong oxytocin is. In high doses, it will put women into labor. It’s a form that’s called pitocin. I said, you’re absolutely right. In medical settings, they can give synthetic forms of oxytocin to push women into labor. That was a moment for me because, one, as I realized, I was able to stop the skepticism and the confusion right there. before we moved on to anything else. And now when I teach oxytocin, I say, in social settings, oxytocin means this. Because in medical settings, it means something different. So noticing that lower lid flex is incredibly important for you to understand where you might have a hint of skepticism or a hint of confusion. If you’re in a sales meeting or a presentation, you want to make sure you have addressed whatever that person is flexing about before you move on.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Super interesting and that example you give there as well, had you not investigated that lower lid flex, you might have also thought something you said was wrong and lost your confidence and that can spiral into, you know, closing off and becoming a worse presenter.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

This is why I thought people hated me and I hated people. So for my folks that are listening who are like, I hate people and I get it. I was misreading cues as skeptical or negative of me when it could have been neutral or curiosity or trying to understand something better. If you can give these a try, it will help you more deeply understand people, which might help you like them more. Ready for the fifth one?

SPEAKER_05:

I’m ready for the fifth.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, the fifth one. This is a vocal cue. So we talked a lot about body language cues, but vocal cues are incredibly important. Vocal cues. Tell someone how you are feeling about them and how you feel about yourself. One of the biggest ones is an accidental question inflection. A question inflection is when we go up at the end of our sentence. So it sounds like we’re asking a question, even if we’re actually using a statement. The brain—research has actually looked at what the brain does when it hears an accidental question inflection. If we are listening to someone and we hear them accidentally use the question inflection, our brain goes from listening to scrutinizing. Why? Our brain wonders, why did you ask me that? Liars typically accidentally use the question inflection. If I say to my daughter, did you take the cookie from the cookie jar? And she goes, no. Oh, yeah. Liars are asking, do you believe this? So we have noticed, we did a massive experiment in our lab where we had people play two truths and a lie with us. So share two truths about themselves and a lie. And we found overwhelmingly one of the biggest patterns, there was a couple of different patterns, but one of the biggest ones was that liars asked their lie statement. So it would sound like this. Here, you can play with me and I’ll add the question inflection to one. I love dogs, I live in Austin, Texas, and I love cilantro.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Oh, yeah. You don’t like cilantro?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

No. It’s like a crime against humanity. Why do people put cilantro on anything? So we notice people ask the lie because they were asking, do you believe this? So our brain is very adept at this. If we hear the accidental question inflection used, we go, wait a minute, is someone lying to me? The biggest mistake that salespeople make is they get to their entire pitch and they ask their number. So it sounds like this. Hi, we’d love to do business with you. We’d love to have your project and the cost of this service is $5,000. If you ask your number, you are begging people to negotiate with you. If you are asking for a raise or you are asking for a certain salary and you ask it, you are signaling to the other person, I don’t really believe this number and you shouldn’t either. So the power cue, number five power cue, is using the downward inflection. Highly competent people, they do not mistakenly use the question inflection. They actually go down at the end of their sentences. President Obama was very good at—is very good at slinging down his words, which makes you want to listen. So it sounds like this. I’m going to say nothing so you can hear it. The problem in this country is that we don’t take seriously enough the issues of our people. And if we don’t take those issues seriously, we will be in grave trouble. So he tends to go down at the end of his sentences. He also has a lot of space in the bottom of his mouth. That makes us—gives us him more resonance, but it also makes us think, oh, he really believes his word, because it’s the opposite of question inflection. If you have a boundary, if you’re setting a limit, if you’re telling someone something really important about you, say it. Don’t ask it. That is the biggest thing you can do to get people to take you seriously.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Interesting.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And don’t ask your name. Most often I hear people ask their own name and it destroys their vocal charisma. So that would be, my name is Vanessa Van Edwards. Not my name is Vanessa Van Edwards. Your perceptions of my confidence in those two introductions are radically different. There’s a study that looked at this, and they looked at the vocal statements of surgeons. They had surgeons come into their lab and record 10-second voice tone clips, the clips that are most important when they’re meeting patients, their name, their specialty, and where they worked, something like this. Hi, my name is Dr. Edwards. I specialize in oncology, and I work at Children’s Presbyterian Hospital. They took these clips and they warbled the words. So you could hear the volume, the pace, the cadence, but not the actual words being said. So it sounded like this. I worked very hard on practicing that, by the way. That’s amazing. Because it has to sound like me, but nothing. They took these clips and they had people rate these surgeons on warmth and competence. The two things that we know are most important for charisma. The doctors who had the lowest ratings of warmth and competence had the highest rate of malpractice lawsuits. In other words, we don’t sue doctors based on their skills. We sue doctors based on our perception of their skills, and that happens within the first few seconds of hearing them. So if you give the question inflection on your name, on your specialty, on what you do, people begin to doubt you. So the bad doctors sound like this. Hi, my name is Dr. Edwards. I specialize in oncology, and I work at Children’s Presbyterian Hospital. those doctors got rated as low in both warmth and competence because their brains were going, why are they asking? Are they not sure? I’m not sure either.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So it’s really signaling conviction in who you are, what you’re about and what you do. Interesting.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So practice your name, your price.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Hello, my name is Stephen. No, that was up. That was a little off. Hi, my name is Stephen.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That’s it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay. Yeah. Okay. I literally asked that like a question, didn’t I, the first one? I was like, hello, my name is Stephen. I was actually asking, I was trying to ask you if it was a good pronunciation. That’s so funny. That was the upward inflection.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And didn’t it feel different?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Totally different. The second one was me. So the first one was like seeking validation.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And you use a lot of downward inflection, except when you’re asking questions, which we like.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Right. That’s why you lean higher in competence is you use already a lot of downward inflection.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s so interesting, because as you were speaking, something came to mind, which I was reading about in your work, which is you’re really good at what you do. You’re very good as a guest on a podcast and just as a professional generally. And as I was thinking this, I was saying to myself, I’m sure she knows, and I’m sure she can tell from my face that I think she’s good. But it’s funny because in your work you say that we’re actually, we over assume people can read us. So like when I was thinking, oh, she’s so good. And in your work, it says like, it says that I was doing it, I was assuming you knew how I felt about you. But in your work, you also make the case that I’ve actually, I should say it.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, yes. There’s an effect where we think that people know how we feel. Specifically, it’s called signal amplification bias. It’s a name for this study, which is that we think our signals are obvious, that if we like someone or if we’re having a good time, we think, oh, they for sure know it. They don’t. Oh, the three magic phrases, we never finish them. That’s why you say, I was just thinking of you. That’s a way of assuring someone, I do think of you, only if it’s true. The second one is, you’re always so, So if you’re with someone and you’re impressed by them or they’re interesting or they’re funny, saying, oh, you always make me laugh. You’re always so interesting. You’re always so great to interview. You’re always so great at interviews. Giving them a label that is a positive label is the best gift you can give someone because it’s fighting that signal amplification bias. And the last one is, last time we talked, you mentioned.

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

We are so honored when we get brain space that you remembered and you’re going to bring it up. And you specifically bring up something that they lit up with. Something they were like, oh, it was great. It was exciting. It was wonderful. Those are my three magic phrases. And it’s because they are fighting that signal application bias. I have no idea if you like this interview. I have no idea if you like my work. I have no idea. And the more that you can broadcast those symbols, those signals, the more people actually like you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So what advice would you give me then as an interview I guess I’m an interview host of the show. What is, because people come here, sometimes they’re nervous, you know, we have people come in there, they, some people come in there nervous a little bit. And I always try, I always want to make them feel comfortable. But I, you know, as you said, I probably don’t rank that high on warmth. So it doesn’t come that natural to me. I’m not the kind of person that comes out and is like, hiya! Welcome! And like, hey.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

 And that would be off-brand for you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah, and it wouldn’t be authentic.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

No, no, it would be off-brand for you. Right, it’s too much. Okay, so five warmth cues. So for those of you who are listening, the five power cues I just shared, those are if you think you are really high in warmth, but you worry that people don’t take you seriously, you’re worried that people ignore you, you get interrupted in meetings. I want you to use those five power cues if that’s you. Now I’m going to teach you five warmth cues. If you have ever been told you’re intimidating, Hard to talk to. Cold. If you often feel like people are holding back or not opening up to you, I want you to use these five warmth cues. This is dialing up your thermostat. Okay, these are for you too. First, we love a triple nod. Research has found that if we do a slow triple nod, the other person speaks 67% longer. So as an interview, this is a great cue. Watch. So here’s my triple nod is, mm, mm, mm. We love it. It’s like a nonverbal dot, dot, dot. It’s like, tell me more. Tell me more. Now, be careful. Don’t bobblehead. So you don’t want to do it too much. Right. That’s too high and warm. And second, you don’t want to do it too fast. Too fast of a triple nod is impatience.

SPEAKER_05:

It means shut up.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah. So if you want someone to rap, if you want someone to rap a question, yeah, that, that.

SPEAKER_07:

That’s it.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Right? So here’s for everyone watching, here’s good. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Here’s please hurry up. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s shut the fuck up. Yeah. I’ve seen that before. And it works. It’s a really nice way of saying, please rap. Please end. So I love a warm triple nod, but you have to be careful with it. Okay, so that’s cue number one. Second. A head tilt. So universally, if we’re trying to hear something, we tilt our head up and we expose our ear, right? As if we’re saying, what was that? Like dogs do this when they’re like, you know, and they expose their ear. Humans also do this across cultures because it’s kind of a way that we’re like, oh, I’m listening to this. Research has found that if you deliver bad news with a head tilt, you are more likable. So people take the news better if you deliver bad news with a slight head tilt, because it literally makes you look more warm. It literally makes you look like you’re listening. Now, I only want you to do this when you’re actually listening, but a head tilt is also a way that you can slightly add warmth to your conversation or to your interview or to your date. Okay, so we’re gonna go back to that. So we don’t want to go too far. That looks weird. It looks a little weird, but not too much. And I also like to teach a head tilt to my highly warm folks who are bobbleheaders. So if anyone, if you’re like, oh, I do this a lot. I’m a bobbleheader. I’m a recovering bobbleheader because I like to—people like me, right? So I’ll nod too much. If you are a bobbleheader, you can train yourself to replace it with the head tilt because it’s physically impossible to head tilt while you nod. So if you’re a bobbleheader, just head tilt.

STEVE BARTLETT:

There’s something about the head tilt which signals they care and they’re empathetic. I don’t know what it is about someone’s head tilt. Because if someone was firing me and they were doing it like this, I feel like they don’t care. There’s something griefless. But if they do it like this, it’s like… They really care about me. That’s so crazy.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Just such a small… That one little thing. You know that you mentioned the book, The Game.

SPEAKER_05:

Yes.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I know a lot about that world. And there’s a funny trick they teach, which I’ll teach you. It’s not part of my warmth cues, but I’m gonna teach it to you because I think it’s interesting. Don’t let anyone use this on you, okay?

STEVE BARTLETT:

And nobody at home use this on anyone else?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Don’t use this on anyone else. So there’s this thing that NLP people will do, or pickup artists will do, where they move their hand like this, and the other person will begin to nod. Because typically when we do this with our hand, the other person starts to nod, which makes you think, I agree, I agree, I agree.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 What are you doing for anyone that is watching?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I’m moving my hand up and down in a nodding yes motion. And so what I’ve noticed very manipulative people will do is they’ll be doing this, they speak like, don’t you understand what I’m saying? Do you get this? And then the person will start to nod. And I’ve seen audiences, entire audiences will start nodding. And then you think to yourself, well, I’m nodding, so I must agree with this person. It’s a secret way to get someone to secretly agree with you. So just be careful and make sure no one uses that on you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And you’re doing it in a bit of a circular motion. Right.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Circular motion.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s not straight up and down. You’re just kind of like, for anyone that can’t see, she’s… Like we’re rolling something forward.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And then you’re like, I want to… It’s really hard to not nod your head when someone’s doing this, which then makes you feel like you agree with them.

STEVE BARTLETT:

That’s so crazy. It’s like you’ve got like a string on my head.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

A string in your head. It’s very weird. So don’t let anyone do that to you. And don’t use it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Don’t use it on anyone.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I don’t teach it in my books because it’s like I’m worried that people… It’s too powerful. It’s too powerful. Okay, triple nod, head tilt. One and two. Okay. Third, we already talked about this one. Authentic smile. Right? A smile that reaches all the way up into your eyes. Highly warm people typically do do that authentic smile more. Now, I don’t like a fake smile, so I only want you to do it when you’re authentic. What’s wrong with that?

STEVE BARTLETT:

That was my authentic smile. You laughed. This is why I don’t smile. This is why people think I’m intimidating, because people laugh at my smile. Look.

SPEAKER_05:

That’s good.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That was better. That was better.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I can tell you’re lying, Mrs. Body Language. I can tell you’re lying.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That was better. That was better than the first one.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Better than the first one? That doesn’t mean it’s good. I’m looking for good.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Anyway, number four is… That’s authentic smiles number three. Authentic smiles number three. Number four. We love a lean. Ooh, we love a lean. When in the proxemic zones, right, we’re in those four zones, if someone’s leaning into you, it shows they’re literally trying to cross from that zone very, very subtly. And so you’ll notice very highly charismatic people who you want to be friends with, they’ll be like, tell me more. Tell me everything. and they lean in really close to you, and that makes you also feel closer. So if you want to be seen as higher in warmth, you can do this as a speaker. So you can lean in as you bold an important point. Like when I make an important point for you, I lean into it. I’m like, listen to this. This is good. But if I’m listening to you and you say something good, I’ll be like, what? Really? So you can do it as a speaker and as a listener, and it immediately adds more warmth.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s funny, okay, this might be a little bit of a tangent, but it just came to mind as you were speaking. There are, like, the odd person in my life who I’ve known for many, many years, but whenever I’m around them, it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier, my body is just off. And, like, I just don’t know what it is. Like, I’m thinking of one particular person, by shant name, where I could be in a room full of people, and I’m relaxed, I’m calm, whatever. And this person who I’ve known for many, many years, the minute they arrived in the room, I wouldn’t be able to be the same person, and I don’t know what it is. I’d suddenly start overthinking my body language, and I’d start thinking, how’s my legs, and what’s my body, and I’d start covering, blocking a little bit. What is that trying to tell me? Do I need to cut this person out of my life? Is there words unspoken? What is it?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I would say it means do more research. I think that gut feelings are incredibly important because, you know, the best cue reading machine we have is our subconscious. Our subconscious or unconscious is picking up on lots of cues that we can’t consciously know. We can’t consciously know that we’re smelling adrenaline, but we are smelling it. So I think that’s a very important thing to pay attention to. It doesn’t mean you should cut them out, but I think it’s time to do more research. Are they truly happy for you? Are they truly rooting for you? Are they secretly angry or jealous?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Maybe I’m doing it to them.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

It’s possible that you’re in a loop with them, right? Like you’re expecting that bad thing and that expectation becomes reality. Like they’ve studied this, that the Pygmalion effect is real. If you expect not to like someone, you send off more unlikable cues. They feel unliked and so they don’t like you either. And so it could be that you’re in a loop with this person that maybe you make them feel the same way.

STEVE BARTLETT:

What do I have to do then next time I see them? Because I want to dial up, I don’t know, some warmth with this person or something or break that cycle.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, if I were you, they’re important to you?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah, they’re important to me.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so I would recommend asking questions that will level you up with them to level two. So my guess is you might be stuck in level one with them because you’re obviously uncomfortable with them. Research shows that the more commonalities we have someone, the more that we understand them, the more compassion we have with them, the more that we like someone. So I wonder if we could level up your relationship with them so you get to know them better, which means you’ll like them more. And if you make it through these six or seven questions and you still don’t like them, then maybe they’re not your person.

SPEAKER_05:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

 Okay, can I give you some questions for them?

SPEAKER_05:

Please. Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Please. So here are my favorite, I call these level one, level two, level three questions. In the framework that I’m researching right now, it’s not done yet, I have four questions for each level and I’m working through these questions. But here are the questions that I think are the shortcut to connection.

SPEAKER_07:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That if you ask these questions with your partner, your friend, your colleagues, you’re going to level up with them. Okay, first. Are you working on anything exciting recently? So stop asking, what do you do? Stop asking, how are you? Stop asking, how’s it going? That’s why you hate people. If you’re asking those questions, of course you’re gonna hate people. Those are the most boring questions anyone’s ever asked. Can I give you a challenge?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

A challenge. Here’s one challenge from this podcast. Stop asking, what do you do? For 30 days, I want you to go on a what do you do diet. Asking what do you do is telling the person’s brain, stay on autopilot. Damn, I lost that last night. No, no more. We’re on a diet.

SPEAKER_05:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Also asking someone what do you do is asking what are you worth? And if someone’s not defined by what they do, it’s actually a rude question.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Do you know what? You’re so right. It’s so funny you say this because yesterday I went to this thing in New York, right? And I was introducing myself to some people and there was one particular person who I went over to and we’re having a conversation and halfway through the conversation I went, So what do you do?” And do you know what they replied? They went, this. And I just, I went home thinking about it, like I was like, I was like, of course, we’re fucking at one. What I’ve done there is I’ve just belittled what we’re doing right now, as if it couldn’t possibly have been what they do. And I just—honestly, I got in bed last night thinking about it. I thought, God, I don’t— Do you know what it was? I think I was so impressed by them that I was a bit awkward. Yeah. And then that just came out mid-sentence.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

What did you do? Yeah. Okay, so we’re going on a diet. Everyone for the next 30 days, we’re going on a diet. No more, what do you do? You’re going to replace it with working on anything exciting these days or working on anything exciting recently. This is permission connection. You ask someone that question, you are giving them permission. If they want to tell you about what they do, oh, they will. If they are not defined by what they do, they’ll tell you something better. And that also gives you really good nuggets for the next time you see them when you can say, hey, how was that thing you were working on that was really exciting going? So start with working on anything exciting these days, working on anything exciting right now. Second, what’s your biggest goal right now? So if you can, especially as we go into the new year, in the new year, right, being part of the year, I love, I ask this question in December, January, and February. I ask everyone, what’s your biggest goal right now? What’s your big goal for 2025? When you ask this question, you’re going to get one of two responses. One, someone shuts you down. I don’t believe in goals. Not my person. Not my person. I’m a growth-minded person. If someone says that, I’m like, cool, peace. We’re not going to get along very well because I have a lot of goals. Or they’re going to be like, oh, And they’re going to tell you all about goals. That’s also a great thing you can follow up on because then when you see them a month later or a week later or a year later you can be like, hey, how did that go?

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s a great interview question. I was just thinking that. I should ask people that in the interview. Because you’re right. Someone that can’t articulate some kind of goal is probably not my kind of person. Those kind of people that go, actually those kind of people don’t listen to this podcast anyway. They just leave hate comments and fuck up.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, exactly. So like it’s a very, I call those allergy questions.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Interesting.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

It’s a way to see, are we going to have an allergic reaction to each other? It creates an allergy. Like I know there’s a type of person, it susses them out really quickly and that’s not my kind of person. Okay, so working on anything exciting, what’s your goal right now? And then this is harder. This is a self-narrative question. Do we want to go deeper for a self-narrative question?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Of course we want to go deeper.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So if we’re getting into self-narrative and you’re trying to figure out yourself or someone else’s narrative, you want to ask the question. It sounds innocuous, but it’s not. What book, movie, or TV character is most like you and why? It’s kind of a silly, like, dinner party question that sort of sounds casual, but the answer to this question is so incredibly important. And here’s an example. How someone relates to characters, their values or personality, is how they see themselves. And people’s answers will shock you. I’ll give you one example. I was friends with someone for six years. One of my closest friends saw them all the time. Weekends. We went on outings together. We went on weekend trips together. I thought I knew her so well. I was like, I know her. I asked her this question, and I hypothesize, this is all my research for my next book, I was like, I hypothesize she’s a mom of three, super funny, super savvy. I was like, she’s gonna pick a great TV mom character that’s super savvy and funny. Asked her. She thinks about it for maybe one second and goes, Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games. I was like, the one who’s fighting for her life? She’s like, yeah, that’s how I feel every day. And we, for the first time in six years, had a conversation about how she feels about her day that was totally different than anything I had ever known, that she feels scared and lonely, and that she is fighting for survival. And it was the first time that I truly connected with her. I cannot tell you how many times the answer to this question has changed for people in my life, and I’m like careful which examples to use because I’m worried that they’re gonna be watching, but has changed my relationship with people in my life based on how they see themselves. Not how I see them, but how they see themselves.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s really interesting because there’s so many people listening right now that are now doing that. And they’re discovering, maybe for the first time, even how they see themselves. Because it’s funny, because when you said that, obviously I did it in my head. And I was like, fuck.

SPEAKER_07:

 Well, now I want to know what it is.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Have you told me after? No, I’ll tell you now. I was thinking, it’s funny because the first person I thought of was Will Smith because people say I look like him sometimes, right? Yes. And you have to correct someone.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

If someone says who they look like, you say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you look like values, personality.

STEVE BARTLETT:

But then when I thought about TV characters, I actually thought about Will Smith in the pursuit of happiness. And if you think about his journey, he was broke. And he was fighting really hard to get out of that situation. And he got out of that situation. So it goes back to the personality type you described at the beginning where like, you think you’re a hero of your own journey, like, well, you’ve overcome something.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And do you feel you’ve found it? Found the… Found it? Happiness? Are you at the end of the movie?

STEVE BARTLETT:

I’m at the end of the movie. I don’t know if you can ever get to the end of the movie. That’s why I’m struggling with that question. Because there’s…

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

 Like, I think I found it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And I’ve always… I don’t know.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Like, not the end of your movie. It’s not the end of your life movie. But like, in that example, we could have a long discussion about like, what is… Have you made it?

STEVE BARTLETT:

So the reason why I think I’m hesitating is because I think to myself, if I say I’ve made it or if I’m at the end of the movie, then I’m like, it kind of robs me of the future in a weird way. In my head, it’s like robbing me of like doing anything else with my future. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_04:

If you feel like you’re at the end of the movie, I’m like, oh my god.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, no, that’s true. You’re never at the end of the movie. But like, if you feel that you’ve made it, it means you have freedom to pursue things and do work for meaning as opposed to hitting it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah, of course. Yeah, like I used to work in call centers at night time selling hotel rooms and car insurance and artificial grass. And now I get to sit here and have conversations with people like you and like people tune in and stuff. It’s like, if I don’t realize at this moment how much, how much privilege I have, I think I’d be, I’d be pretty fucked up. So yeah, I do feel like disproportionate, like unbelievably fortunate in a way that I actually don’t think I can understand. I think maybe I dreamed of this, but to be here feels, feels suspicious. Yeah, that’s a strange word that came to mind. It feels suspicious because it, I don’t know, you just think, you just think sometimes you think. Are you worried? It’s maybe it is worried, but it’s also just like, But surely not. Like, it’s so interesting, because I had the dream of like being successful in business, but I didn’t have a dream of or ever imagine that my life would be like this, where like people know who you are. I never had that dream. Never imagined it being possible. That was other people. For sure.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And so also, I, that’s a very accurate Like, that’s how I think of Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happiness, a little bit. It’s like, you never really see him truly happy in that movie.

STEVE BARTLETT:

No, he’s always just, yeah, running.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Like, that’s something that I, that’s why I ask, like, did you get it? You know, you pursued it, you’re here.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Of course, I’m still chasing after something, aren’t I? That’s what I think. I don’t know what I’m chasing after.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I wonder what you’re chasing after. I don’t know.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I actually don’t know.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

But I think that you’re interviewing for something. Like, when I watch your interviews, which are amazing, I’m like, he’s trying to find the answer to something. What is it?

STEVE BARTLETT:

always like with every person is a different thing. And actually, most of the answers I’m looking for my own answers. And my general belief is that if I check, like authentically go in search of my own answers, which requires some level of like, being open and willing to be open, even though there’s a lot of people watching, then there’ll be lots of other people out there that are struggling with the same things or searching for the same answers as well. Yes. This is interesting. I do ask myself a lot, what am I, like, what’s the point? Like, what am I, like, what am I? But is it not, this is a bit of a tangent obviously, is it not the case that we should all be searching forever? Like we should all be in pursuit of something forever.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I do love a quest, and I love pursuing, and I think humans are built to pursue things. But I also think, I hope, and I’m not here yet, I’m getting there, that there’s a point in our life where we can stop the grind. I think I’m grinding a little bit in my career. I don’t know if you feel like that. Like I’ve made it. I feel like I’ve made it. I’m luckier than I ever, I can’t believe I get paid to do what I do, but I’m still pursuing, pursuing. I hope there’s a point in my life where I can just be sharing wisdom. where I’m not pursuing anything, it’s not a number or a list or a, it’s just like all I’m doing is sharing wisdom and giving out public education. Like, I think that I’m hopeful that there is a stage of our life where it’s just that.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s number five on the one.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Oh my gosh.

STEVE BARTLETT:

We did lean, which was number four. Number five is… Actually I have to pause and lean because I wanted to ask you about something I read in a book about peacocking.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So I read in this pick-up artist book that I read when I was 18 and some of the videos that I watched thereafter and some of the other books that I read thereafter and some of the other videos I watched thereafter. about this concept of peacocking where you can, if you’re like on a date or you’re interested in a girl or a guy in a bar, if you lean in too much, you’re signaling low value and like over interest. And ever since I learned that, I’ve seen it everywhere. And I’ve seen it in my friends. Me and my friends went to like Marbella or somewhere, I can’t remember. It was many, many years ago. And there was this beautiful girl there. And we were all pursuing her. Yes, like that, like a Labrador. And I was saying to my boys, there’s actually a photo of it on my phone, as me, Dom, and my friend Ash sat there, and we’re looking over at some of our other friends, and we’re saying, they’re peacocking, they got no chance. And that’s how the story transpired. And then when this beautiful girl came over to my other friend, he was aware of this peacocking thing, he kept his neck back, he kept his chest back, all these kinds of things. He didn’t lean in, even though it was loud. Closed. Closed.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

OK. Here’s why. Too much of a lean is a bad thing. It’s called a bow. Right? If you lean too far over, you get very quickly into bowing or submissive behavior. We don’t like people who are submissive to us. We want equals. And so you’re absolutely right. What triggers in the brain if you’re leaning too much is literally, I am subservient to you. And that makes someone who does not want to be or in an unequal relationship feel very uneasy. So that is why too much of a lean, always with these nonverbal accusers, too much of a good thing. You lean too much, it’s considered a bow. You also don’t want to lean the entire time because then you look like a hunchback, right?

STEVE BARTLETT:

I’m lowering my value by leaning in too much.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And it’s distracting. Like, I want to lean in as a bold or a highlight. If I were to be reading a book and highlight the entire page, the highlight means nothing. If you lean in when someone’s like, Really? And then I lean back, then it’s powerful. Every single one of these cues we are using as a bold or an emphasis or a highlight. Just enough of a good thing.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay, not too much leaning. Just use it as a party trick. No, no, I mean, just use it like as a highlighter.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

As a highlighter. You’re highlighting. Yes, yes, yes.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Number five.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, five. Nonverbal bridge. So this is a concept that I learned on the road. So I saw this in action in a lot of our experiments. did a big speed networking experiment in our lab where we had 500 speed networkers try out different conversation starters. We recorded them, we coded their conversations, and we looked for patterns of good and bad conversations. And we found there were certain questions that worked better than others, and there were certain questions that did terribly. And one thing we found is that when people rated a conversation on a five scale, like five amazing best conversations I had, we’re going to connect on LinkedIn, I think I like them, the best ones, they used a lot of nonverbal bridges. Nonverbal bridges are when someone is trying to bridge the distance between you. So that could be a lean. Lean is one of them. But it also could be a reach out. We noticed that in the good conversations, people were trying to physically close the distance between them with hand gestures, with leans, with nods, with foot movement, with drinks. And when they were close enough, they would often do very light touches on the arms, on the shoulder. So have you seen this like on a really good date? Have you ever been in a restaurant? Like my husband, I like to play this game where we look and we try to guess if a couple is very like new couple, old couple, how they’re doing. In a very good date, they are looking for as many opportunities to touch as they possibly can. That’s nonverbal bridge. Even if I were to be like, oh, let me tell you something, like that slight reach out, tap of the knuckles, tap of the arm. That’s a quick saying, I’m going to reach into your intimate zone, but I’m not going into your intimate zone. And really good relationships, really warm people, they are bridging all the time. They walk by you, they touch your shoulder, they say, how’s it going? Hey, I was thinking about you. They’re constantly doing these very small bridges and that might not be actual physical touch, it could even be the look of a touch. Like one thing that I teach my students who are uncomfortable with touch is you can even touch without touching. That sounds really weird, but like put your arm closer to me so I can demo it for you. So let’s pretend that we’re at dinner. I could be like, oh my gosh, really?

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Okay, so you didn’t touch me.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I didn’t touch, but it did the same thing.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Not quite oxytocin. No, but it kind of did. Yeah, but kind of, you’re like, oh, I get it.

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

She’s trying to close the intimacy of the distance. So nonverbal bridges, trying to reach out, reach into someone’s face very briefly and come back, trying to lean into someone’s face very briefly. This is why giving people things or serving people is such a warm thing. You hand someone a drink, like you come to my office, I offer you hot chocolate, I offer you tacos, I want to break the social scripts, I want to give you something different, and I’m looking for reasons to serve you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

You give people tacos at your office.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah. I’m in Austin, Texas. You would like it. You would like it. If you were hungry, you’d be like, give me that taco. Give me that taco.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I don’t know if that’s office food, but each to their own. So hugging and stuff like that, you know, there’s this thing that people talk a lot about, which is awkward hugging. And sometimes you hug someone and you just feel like, oh God, they didn’t like that. I didn’t like that. That was bad for both of us.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, horrible. Can we address the hug issue? Please. Okay. You need to signal what kind of greeting you want from the moment someone first sees you. You can stop awkward greetings from happening with simple nonverbal cues. Here’s what they are. You want a handshake? So good to see you. I want you to be doing this from 10 feet away. So good to see you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Oh, come in with it.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, you’re literally signaling to someone, so good to see you, right? This immediately signals their brain, don’t try to give me an awkward hug. Don’t side hug me. Don’t hug me. We’re handshaking. It is a very clear way to be like, it’s called blading. So we angle our body a little bit forward and we put one hand out. You know I’m coming in for a handshake. If you want a hug and you’re a hugger, it’s so good to see you. It’s so good to see you.

SPEAKER_04:

 Okay, arms out.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Arms out, and that’s also going to prevent the awkward side hug. The worst thing you can do is like this.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Which is a kind of butt.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

One arm up. People are like, do I shake it? Do I side hug? Are we going to hug? Are we going to high five? Are we going to fist bump? If you want a fist bump, you’re coming in with a fist bump.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Should I be a hugger? Because I don’t, it always, it’s context dependent.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I do not like hugging people when I first meet them. I was pitching a TV show about recovering awkward people. I had a very big network, and I walk into the pitch room, and at that point, I was a hugger, or I was, I thought I should hug, because that was one of the things in LA. LA people are huggers and cheek kissers a lot. And so I was like, I walk in and I say, oh, it’s so nice to meet you. I’m a hugger. Oh, yeah. And the exec goes, I’m not.

None:

Oh.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Just cringe.

SPEAKER_05:

Oh, God.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Just, I died inside. I died inside. And you know what? That pitch went terribly. Do I have a TV show called Recovering Awkward Person? No, I don’t. That’s because I think I hugged him. And I went forward with it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Too much warmth. Too much warmth. Not enough competence.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And so I will never do that again. So now I never, ever say I’m a hugger, and I always offer my hand. Now, if someone says to me, oh, but I’m a hugger, and they wave my hand away, no problem.

STEVE BARTLETT:

No problem. That’s interesting. If we take that back to the charisma framework of warmth and competence, it is signaling a little bit too much. A lot of warmth.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

It’s a lot of warmth. And I know a lot about a person when they tell me, I’m a hugger.

SPEAKER_05:

What do you know?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

High warmth, probably a people pleaser, over eager, really want to connect, probably feel lonely, a little bit afraid, and I want to make them feel as liked as possible.

STEVE BARTLETT:

That’s a lot just from that one sentence.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I’ve hugged a lot of people. Also, you know, I have amazing students. You know, we have millions of views on our YouTube channel and they feel like they know me. And so if they want to hug me, I’m totally okay with it. Because I’ve been in their bed, I’ve been in their living room, I’ve been in their kitchen TV, I’ve been on their phone. I’ve shared my stories with them and I understand why they want to hug me because we feel like friends. And that actually is a compliment.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And you like it?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I do like it. Like when a student says, oh my gosh, I love you. I love Captivate. I’m like, come here.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It feels like a friend. So on the hugging point then as well, is there a great way to hug someone? I mean, yeah. How is that?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Have you been told you’re a good hugger?

STEVE BARTLETT:

I’ve tried to work on it. So I think I am now. I actually have been told I am. But it’s part of the reason why is because I’ve learned a lot from doing this podcast and someone told me don’t tap on the back. Don’t tap on the back.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And they told me to like… We don’t like being tapped on the head. We don’t like being tapped on the back. It’s a submissive cue, right? It’s like you’ll notice on power players and politics will sometimes demean someone by going, hey, bud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely don’t hug. So you’re going to want to approach equally. You don’t want any kind of asymmetry in your hug, right? So that’s why you want to approach someone like this, like no asymmetry, none of this, straight on. So this is hard. If you are taller than the person, you typically want to go up, but you want to avoid like the, who’s going up, right? So the taller person should always try to go up and you want to like literally angle up. The lower person is going to angle down and you’re going to try to go torso to torso.

SPEAKER_05:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And I like a two-second hug. By the way, there is research on the length of handshakes. I haven’t seen research on the length of hugs. But a handshake should be between one and three pumps, or one and three seconds. So, for example, we’re shaking at one, two, three. That’s good. And typically, they found that if we do a three-second shake, it’s with a new person. So our first shake was about three seconds, because we didn’t know each other. But if I were to see you again, like, oh, it’s so good to see you. Okay, you do okay, so typically if you already know someone you’re just like doing a quick reading It’s a one second and if you don’t know someone it’s a three second.

SPEAKER_05:

What if I

SPEAKER_04:

Your face, as I got to four seconds, you were like offended. You’re like, not my person. You were like, you like cussed me out with your eyes.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, I was like, horrible! That’s how I feel. I was giving my arm back. You also want to make sure that when you’re doing a handshake, you’re offering thumb up. Thumb up is really important. You’ll notice that certain political power players will hear if, yeah, so they’ll flip you.

SPEAKER_05:

 Oh, Donald Trump.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes. And he really pulls. And he’ll pull you. He’ll pull you off. I’ve never shaken hands with him, so I don’t know, but I’ve watched many, many a video, and he’ll shake your hand, turn you up. This is a very vulnerable place to be. We don’t like it as humans to have these arteries up. So he’ll flip, so he’ll flip, and he’ll pull you off there.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It doesn’t feel good, does it? But what does that signal? Does that signal competence and strength?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

No, I don’t think it’s either. I actually think it’s a danger zone.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Because it’s purposely, I don’t, none of the cues I teach are manipulative in that way. Like that is purposely trying to get someone off balance, like to give them disequilibrium. I like relationships to be equal. That’s why I want you to offer thumb up. I also don’t want you to open, you know, offer your hand like, you know, up where you’re saying I’m going to be submissive to you. We don’t like that. Right. So thumb up.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I think, I can’t remember where I learned it, but I learned that if you cup, then it’s signaling warmth. So I was going to cup earlier on, but I was holding some stuff. I remember thinking I’ll walk out there and I’ll cup. Why didn’t I get my cup? Because I was holding all your books. It is warm. I was holding your books. I was like, I can’t. Imagine if I tried to cup with your books. It would be so strange.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

No, so cupping is really warm. It’s double the warmth. It’s double the oxytocin. It’s like a hand hug. So it’s super high and warm. It’s also called the politician’s handshake. So you only want to do it if you are truly and genuinely trying to show warmth. Otherwise, it can come across as forced. I also, speaking of like weird signals, I’ve heard this about men, that men to men have two different kinds of nods. Tell me if you think this is true. So if you walk down the hallway and you see a man you know, you go, hey, nod up. If you see a man you don’t know, you go, morning. and you’re not down.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Oh, that’s interesting.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And supposedly it’s because a person you know you’re willing to expose this part of your neck, but if you don’t know someone, you want to keep your chin down, but you’re still acknowledging them. Is that true?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Well, do you know what’s funny? The way that I think about it is if I see a black guy out and about, pretty much anywhere, and they know me, whatever, they’ll typically do that. There’s something about, I don’t know if I’m just making this up, but there’s something about, like being part of, I can see them from across the room, have no idea who they are, and it’s like a, me and you.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And I trust you. It’s a way of being like, I’m willing to expose this, I trust you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Oh, okay. So interesting. Interesting.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So I’ve noticed that women don’t do that.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay, so, oh yes, not down is stranger. I see you.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Morning.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So interesting. Got noted. So interesting. So, so interesting. I’m a CEO. I do speaking on stage. You speak on stage as well. You’re very, very good at it. Is there anything that I should know if I’m a leader in a business or I’m a public speaker that I should be thinking most about when I’m up on stage to signal, I don’t know, whatever I want to signal to get whatever I want?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes. Purposeful movement. A big mistake I see CEOs make on stage is they either don’t have purposeful movements, they pace the stage back and forth, or they’re stuck in one point and they don’t move from that point and it makes them look very stiff. I believe you should block your speeches, just very subtly. So for example, I always, when I deliver, I start in the middle of the stage, always, always. So when I’m being introduced, right, your first few seconds on stage is the most important for your entire talk. So as you’re being introduced, you walk on stage, pick a point and walk purposely to it. Don’t meander onto stage. You’re walking right to the middle of the stage or the left of the stage, however you pick, and you’re delivering your first opening line, opening story in that middle point. That’s where I like it. And that intention walking on stage is going to make you look so much more confident and not disorganized or ambiguous. Then, if you can, this is for the advanced speaker and this is you, I think. You want to help your audience with your stage movement. So in my presentations, when I’m sharing science or fact or research, I’m on the left-hand side of the stage. When I’m moving to personal story, gifs, anecdotes, or a funny video, I’m on the right side of the stage. That is a way I’m helping my audience organize and categorize my talks. I’ve also noticed in the audience there are highly warm people and there are highly competent people. I’ve noticed if I train them that way, I’m doing a 60-minute keynote, they begin to subconsciously recognize it. My highly competent folks perk right up. When I get to the left side of the stage, oh, this is for me. And my highly warm folks are like, ha, my turn. And it really helps them know when to pay the most attention. So you should think about for your talks, you also can do this chronologically. Some of my students are like TED speakers and they’re telling more of a chronological story as opposed to like making points. I will often teach them to start, like we like to, you know, in Western cultures we read from left to right. I like them to actually start on the left-hand side of the stage or the audience’s left. Because the beginning of their story starts here. And they share their childhood. There’s a picture of their childhood on the slide. And they slowly begin to move over to the middle when the middle part of their journey happens. And they finally get to their arc, their knowledge, their aha moment. They’re finally, they’ve made it over to the far side of the stage, the far right side of the stage.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And in terms of what I’m saying, we talked a little bit about the actual content of what I’m saying, because this applies not just to when I’m on stage, but also to emails and WhatsApps. And I think most of our communication these days is on a screen. So if I’m trying to be a master of structuring a sentence on a screen to set people up for success, what have I got to be thinking about?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

What emotion do you want your person to feel when they see your name in their inbox, on stage, in LinkedIn? That is the emotion that you want to label yourself. So for example, in your talks, like for example, in my talks, I am trying to acknowledge the pain of awkwardness. I don’t want people to feel like they are unseen. So when I say you’re overlooked, you’re misunderstood, you’re underestimated, you feel awkward and out of control and anxious and overwhelmed, I hear you. You’re not alone. I’ve been there. And then the solution to that feeling, the where it gets better, is confidence and presence and memorability. And the mechanism is blueprints and formula and hard skills. That helps me gift to the audience a solution emotion. So for you, I would say, what are the pain points you want your audience to resonate with so they feel heard by you, seen by you, understood by you? What’s the goal emotion that you want to give them from your talk, from your podcast, from the email that they’re subscribing to? And then what’s your mechanism? What’s your way that you do that?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Imperfection. So imperfection. I was watching a video of yours, I think from 10 years ago, where you sat with two lovely people talking about charisma. And one of the things you said earlier in the video is that I think it was like TV shopping or something like that where like a lady made a mistake. She spilled a milkshake or something. Yes. And she did more sales because she spilled a milkshake.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, that’s it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Explain this to me.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes. Another study by Dr. Richard Wiseman who wanted to know, do you have to be perfect? which for many years, I wanted to be perfect. And then I realized, oh, there is no such thing as perfect, and I don’t want to be that way. Very simple. He had a model selling a blender in a mall. And in one version, she had the perfect pitch. And I’ll take your strawberries and your bananas and just hit the button and here you have perfect smoothies. And the second one, he had same smoothie, same pitch, same verbal, but she spills the smoothie on the table as she’s pouring it. People bought more of the blender when she spilled the smoothie. Now, does this mean I want you to purposely spill your smoothies? No. I did have a piece of kale in my teeth earlier, and I really considered coming in with it just to see what would happen. I didn’t. I did. I did think about it, but I didn’t do it. But I do think there’s like, stop trying to be perfect. Own your authentic vulnerabilities. Don’t purposely smell a smoothie. Don’t purposely smell your coffee. By the way, that experiment was repeated with coffee and job interviews. If I remember correctly, they had an audio clip, and hirers were rating job candidates on performance. And in one of the audio clips, they had him spill his coffee. Oh, whoops, oops, oops, oops. Sorry about that. I spilled my coffee. Let’s cut that. And then go back to the interview. And they rated that candidate as a better candidate, even though he spilled his coffee. Why? It’s called the other shoe effect. We know that every—no one’s perfect. We know this. It’s impossible. And so when we’re interacting with someone, even on a commercial, even interview, we’re like, what’s wrong with you? What is your imperfection? And it kind of distracts us. This research, The Other Shoe Effect, found the longer the interview goes on without something dropped, like without the other shoe to drop, the more the interviewer is like, Hmm, what’s going on here? And the more they’ll try to ask questions to try to find it. You are better off in an interview or on a date dropping your shoe. So sharing whatever that vulnerability or imperfection is closer to the start of the interview or the date, because it helps other person A, get to know you better, but also not be so worried that they’re not seeing your true imperfection. Captivate, when I first wrote it, my intro was really, really boring. And my publisher, I love her, Nikki, my editor, wrote back and she’s like, Vanessa, your intro doesn’t sound like you. It sounds like you’re trying to be something you’re not. And she was right. I was trying to sound like an academic researcher. I’m not an academic researcher. I’m a behavior researcher. I’m a pop scientist. I’m a recovering awkward person. She’s like, start with that. So the opening line of Captivate is, hi, I’m Vanessa. I’m a recovering awkward person. That is why that book hit the bestseller list. I dropped the shoe. Yes, I teach charisma. Yes, I teach body language. I am still in recovery. I am still constantly worried that people hate me. I have a small and wonderful group of friends. But otherwise, people make me still nervous. I know how to deal with it. I know how to make conversation. But I want you to know there’s still awkwardness here. No matter how many of these you learn, you’re probably still going to face awkwardness and overwhelm, but at least it will be a little bit easier. So I think it’s really important that we plan to share our inner perfections and not try to hide it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Personal branding is a big thing now because we have social media, we have LinkedIn, it’s a big part of what gets you a job and gets you opportunities and gets you speaking appointments and book deals etc. So everybody is, well most people are playing the game of personal branding to some degree. So as you were saying about being perfect and showing imperfections, again it feels like there’s a there’s like a Is gradient the right word? It’s like a spectrum. That’s a nice word. For sure. You can go too far with imperfection.

SPEAKER_07:

Oh, yeah.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Me and my friends call this deficiency promotion.

SPEAKER_07:

What?

STEVE BARTLETT:

And then on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got ideas promotion, which is like when you’re all about like, look how smart I am and these are my ideas. And deficiency promotion is look how traumatized, broken, sick, ill I am. And you build a whole brand around that. And you can like, you know, so You’re probably still going to get speaking appointments either side because, you know, they’re going to want people to speak about this stuff, but also this stuff. But I think you have to be quite intentional about how you show up on this spectrum.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Well, first of all, what’s true? The very first question is like, don’t purposely spill the smoothie.

STEVE BARTLETT:

But you know what’s interesting is when you build a brand, it becomes self-reinforcing. So I see people on both sides of the spectrum. Maybe they started in the middle and then they got likes and followers.

SPEAKER_04:

And they had to get toxic.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Like, what else is wrong with you? That’s why we love you.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

You’re so broken. Totally. I think that there are people who are locked into being broken and being messy and people don’t want to see them triumph. However, I think it is important to show people if you are very broken and in a bad point and a bad stage in your life, like, show it and then show them how you’re a hero out of it. That can inspire other heroes.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I agree. But is there such a thing as spending too long in either camp? Do you know what I mean? Because we like a little bit of, oh, you had a bad day, great, but you have a bad life.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Different strokes for different folks. I think there are people who would stay over there forever.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah, but if you’re there for 10 years where you’re just every day you’re showing up like another shit day for me for 10 years.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I think they would still get likes. I think they would. They would. Of course they would. I mean, it would be miserable for you as a person, but if that’s your brand, that’s your brand.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I guess you said the most important thing, which is like, who are you?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah, like if that’s the truth, if you’re having a decade of

STEVE BARTLETT:

 then be honest.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

You’ve got a decade of it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s interesting with social media that I think social media started in a place where it was, you know, the margarita on the beach, and that was in such high supply that something else became in greater supply, which was being a bit more honest and open.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Stretch marks on the beach.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Yeah, exactly. Stretch marks on the beach.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That’s exactly what happened. And those are people who’ve gone viral from those kind of posts. I do want to say something about personal branding. I think about it a little bit differently. So in the very last section of cues, I talk about visual cues. We have to remember that the cues in our brand, the colors we wear, what’s behind you in your background, the props you’re holding in your picture, what’s behind you in your videos, they’re triggering neural networks. So for example, they’ve researched this, if I say free associate to fire truck, you might say red. engine, dog, and you might start to associate different words. There are really common neural networks. So what you want to think about is what neural networks are you triggering in your personal brand? For example, I like you to create strong neural networks. All of my single students, my students who are dating, I say your profile picture should be triggering all kinds of neural networks that you like. So if you love skiing, you should be on a slope holding skis because for some people that will trigger a fierce fear neural network, right? Like I’m not a skier. I see skis. I’m like cold, scared, alone or like knees hurting. Like that’s what I think when I see skis. I would not be a good partner for them. But someone else is going to be like adventure, family, fun, vacations. That’s your person. Every picture on your profile should be creating allergies and attractors. should be activating neural networks for your person. You want them to have similar neural networks to you. My husband and I, I think, if you were to show us both pictures of the same things, we would have very similar neural networks for different vacations, different props, different foods, different activities. And that’s because we have similar ways of thinking. We are very different, but we activate the same similar neural networks for pain and pleasure.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay. I had a conversation with a really good friend of mine about this. Okay. They are looking for a partner and they are approaching their 40s and they were asking me about their Instagram and the first thing I noticed about their Instagram is I would say 80% of pictures they’re holding a cocktail or a drink of alcohol. Now, as I looked at the Instagram, I go, oh, party girl. I don’t think like settle down and let’s have a family.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Absolutely. Does she want to have a family? Yes. Okay. Wrong pictures. Okay. She is activating the wrong neural networks for men. She’s dating men.

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

She’s dating the wrong, men are going to look at that and be like, party girl, fun, out, not the mother of my children. So those are creating allergies for the ideal man.

SPEAKER_05:

So what does she need to change?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

She needs, okay, so what kind of husband and father does she want? Does she want an outdoor lover?

STEVE BARTLETT:

A good one that can, she said to me, I want a good one that can help me with some of these overheads. Overheads? Bills. She doesn’t want him to pay all the bills. She just wants some help with the fucking bills.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so a hard worker. She earns a lot of money. Okay, so that’s pictures of her, you know, working hard at a conference. What kind of way does she spend her weekend? She’s hiking, or she’s biking, or she’s running across the Brooklyn Bridge, or she’s running a marathon, or she loves dogs, or she loves cats, or she’s eating big waffles and pancakes. Like, she should be taking pictures of what she wants to do with her partner so that they look at that and they’re like, I want to join her for that. And you also want to, create allergies. You don’t want to appeal to everyone because you’re going to go on bad dates.

STEVE BARTLETT:

The other thing I know about this person is something you said about earlier. It’s just that their body language, as I think about it, is just so, it’s like trying to take up less space, is the only way I can describe it.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Contracted. Exactly like that. Right, so when we talk about distance between, like, so earlobe and shoulder, distance number one. Second distance that’s important, between your arm and your torso. In a good conversation, we have distance that’s fluctuating a lot. Like, right, I’m talking, my arms are going out, you’re seeing distance between my torso and my arm. People who are very anxious,

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Yeah, like in, like just like a pencil.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Or like Penguin, I call it Penguin, where they like don’t ever release their arms from their torso and they’re very contracted. They have very minimal hand gestures and they’ll often clutch something to their chest. Now, if I were to give the entire interview like this, you would think, oh man, she is nervous or she’s, you know, afraid or she’s anxious because I don’t have that space. The moment I release that space, it makes me look more confident. That’s the other distance you can play with. Hand gestures really help with that. Hand gestures help with space, with vocal variety, with comprehension. That’s why I like them so much.

STEVE BARTLETT:

So if I’m trying to get her a husband, I’d like to. We’ve been friends for a long time, almost a decade, and I have sat in the passenger seat of her life and tried to be a supportive friend in any way. But if I tried to give her advice in terms of cues and body language and sentences on how to get a partner, where do we start?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

OK, so one, let’s get her some pictures that are going to attract the right person and create allergies for the wrong person.

SPEAKER_07:

OK.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Two, her main profile pictures should be showing warm and competent body language. Yeah. Authentic smile. Maybe a head tilt. Maybe you have a hand gesture. Maybe that’s too much warmth. I want to see a lot of space between your earlobe and your shoulder. Make sure it’s a symmetrical smile. Make sure we’re not contempt. Make sure we’re not accidentally fear smiling. So the profile picture is number one most important. Yes. Okay. It’s a lot, but okay. It’s going to be hard. We’ve got to find her husband.

SPEAKER_04:

We haven’t got much time either.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

We’ve got to find her husband. The interpersonal body language is really hard as a friend to correct on someone. May I ask you, does she use vocal fry? What’s that?

SPEAKER_00:

Does she ever talk like this where it’s kind of like a frying pan where she’s not using her full voice? Typically, people who use contracted small body language often have that kind of a vocal power. And so they go into a pattern like this and then like, oh, like, I mean, I just like watered the plants this weekend and like,

STEVE BARTLETT:

Ooh. Also, the end of this sentence goes up. Right.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So that’s the first thing I would actually try to help her with, is making sure that she does not accidentally use vocal fry. It’s usually an accident. Here’s the fastest way to get rid of vocal fry. If you are using it, you hear yourself using it, or someone else is using it, just speak louder. Vocal fry happens from a lack of breath. What actually is happening is you’re speaking and your vocal cords are rattling. It’s a terrible noise, but that’s my vocal cords rattling together. And the moment that I speak louder, it goes away. So oftentimes when we’re lacking confidence or we have tight body, we have less breath and we create vocal fry. So just ask her to speak up a little bit. It’s hard to get someone to stand more broadly because if they’re uncomfortable with it, they don’t like it. So what I would recommend is she should do activity dates. When you’re at dinner with someone or at brunch or a coffee at a bar, you’re like this, so what do you do? And you’re like, it’s shriveled and you’re like clutching your drink and you’re in your patterns, you’re in those patterns. Go on hikes, go play pickleball, go learn pickleball, go play ping pong. Like do something physical because then it’s much easier to be broad.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Interesting. Okay. That makes a lot of sense, actually. Yeah, because you’re going to, if it’s in a context you’re super familiar with, the old patterns are going to be triggered.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, and I’ve tried to get people to stand more broadly just by telling them, and it helps, the awareness helps, but it’s much easier when you’re actually in a context that helps you be that way.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I read a study from your work that said, in a study to see how men and women look at body language differently, they put people in an MRI machine and had them try and read body language from just pictures alone. What happened? What did they find out?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So I believe women activated 14 to 16 areas of their brain activated while trying to read those body language pictures. And men, I believe it was half of that. In other words, when women were looking at pictures of body language, lots of connections were happening. They were making predictions. They were thinking about personality. They were thinking about emotions. They were looking at their clothes. They were looking at their facial structure. Women were taking in a much broader picture of the body language, whereas men were, I think, much more cue-focused. Ah, broad shoulders, feet apart, hands visible. Neither of these are right or wrong. Actually, in fact, men can sometimes be easier to teach. Like my students are 50-50 men and women, but sometimes men can, they can focus in on the cue that I’m trying to teach them. They can understand it. They can comprehend it. Got it. It’s decoded. Women tend to create a whole narrative. So I play games sometimes with my students where I say, okay, tell me about someone. He has a Mohawk. And men will often say, I don’t want them to hear the women first. Men will often be like, he has a Mohawk. He’s a man. He’s not bald. Women will be like, okay, he’s a bad boy, and he probably has earrings, and I bet you he drives a motorcycle, and I bet he’d be really fun on a date, but probably a drinker, and he’ll just go.

SPEAKER_05:

Interesting.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So this is, it’s good and bad, right? Like, that also can hinder women, and by the way, I’m making big generalizations on this. This is not the generalization part we have to make sure we’re careful on. Women tend to globalize. Like, they’ll see a cue and be like, oh, that means he’s bad or that means he’s dangerous. I’m never—he’s toxic. I’m never going to talk to him again. Yeah. Whereas men will sometimes, you know, oh, it’s probably just a bad day or I’ll give her or him a second chance. So we just have to be a little bit aware of our own lenses, we’ll say.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Is there anything else that I should say to my friend in order to help them? Because sometimes I wonder, you know, there’s tips, tricks, tactics, they can lean, they can do this, whatever. But is there something deeper that is easier? Do you know why I say this? That book, The Game, I went off to university, I lasted for one lecture. But while I was there, I met this guy called Joe, my friend, I won’t say his second name because people will identify him, but I met my friend Joe. And I said to Joe, listen, my friend, I said this book, The Game, really useful, taught me a lot about like, you know, interpersonal dynamics, you should read it. Gave the book to him, he read it, we went out to the club that day, he fucked it up. Like he went out there, he started negging people and insulting people. And I just thought, God, you know, you just can’t teach it. That’s what I thought. I thought there’s so many. And actually, when I reflect on the people in my life, this guy called Dan, I’ll say his name, Dan Capon. Dan Capon in school, was always just so good with the opposite sex. He was just always, he’s one of those people, he’s charismatic, he was funny, he’s like that cocky funny. Just a natural. No one taught him that. And so I look at my friend Joe, I look at my friend Dan, I go, it doesn’t matter if you read the book, because I’m not saying your book, your book’s amazing. Everyone needs to go read your book. No, they really do. It’s a great book. But I’m saying, is there something deeper within us? Like for my friend that has the shriveled posture?

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Is it just like tactics and tips?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I think anyone can learn it.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I really truly believe that. I have seen the most awkward, uncomfortable people totally shut down, slowly transform or completely transform. And remember, they don’t… Who is your uncharismatic friend? What was the fake first name he used?

STEVE BARTLETT:

He’s not uncharismatic. He just… I just gave him the book and he just like… Who is it? Joe? Joe. Okay.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Joe doesn’t need to have a complete transformation to find his soulmate. Joe does not need to have a complete transformation to have friends. You’re his friend. So even if he has a couple of tactics, like stop asking, what do you do? It’s boring. Like start making eye contact, especially the end of sentences for 60, 70% of the time. Oh, people suddenly feel listened to. Hey, ask better questions to your friends. You’ll get to know them better. Those tactics will get him friendships, hopefully a girlfriend, hopefully a job. So I think that everyone can make small or big changes. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s unteachable.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Do you think there’s a relationship between these tactics and tips and your actual confidence, i.e. does it become like a self-reinforcing?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, so much so. Like, that is the only way I found confidence. The only way that I was able to conquer my awkwardness and actually begin to go out and try to make friends and be less lonely. I mean, I was so lonely. was that I was like, OK, I have a goal. I’m going to ask someone, what have you been doing that’s been exciting recently? I’m going to ask that question. That gave me just enough confidence to get out the door and to get to that party. And then when I got a good answer, someone’s like, oh, yeah, you know, I am working on something exciting. I was like, oh. And then they felt excited, I felt excited. And so like that one tool gave me enough confidence to go out. So these tools give you confidence to try something new and to break your pattern. If you feel stuck, and this is for anyone, if you feel stuck, then you have to try something different. If you keep doing the same thing, you’re going to keep getting the same thing. So that means you have to ask different kinds of questions. You have to use different kind of body language cues. And if you’re willing to try just something different, something will change for you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 Are these cues, this body language, more important for one gender typically than the other?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Not that I’ve seen. The research has not found that. Good for both.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And what’s, in terms of attraction, is what is do you think the most important thing? Is it competent? Is it strong? Is it?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so this is not this is research. So I believe it was Monica Moore who did this research. She found that the people who got approached the most at clubs, the people who got approached the most, were just had the biggest signal of availability. So they weren’t the most attractive men and women. She did this for both men and women. They were not the most attractive men and women. In fact, the most attractive women in the room, if they had closed body language, closed off body language, they were not approached, they did not get dates, they did not get out their number. It was the men and women who signaled, I’m available.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 How do you signal when I’m available?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so this is really important for dating in the sense of wanting to be approached. Dating one-to-one is a little bit different, right? You don’t need to signal this if you’re one-to-one. But if you’re in a big room or you’re speed networking, one is open body, no blocking. I never want anything in front of your torso. I don’t want this. So I don’t want arms crossed. I don’t want cup in front of you. I don’t want you clutching your computer or your iPad or your phone. I want you to make sure that your torso is open and angled out towards the room. I like croissant feet. You know, parallel feet are like what we’re doing right now. In a dating situation, I want you to have croissant feet, which is your feet are angled toward the biggest part of the room, saying, I’m open. Come and approach me. That signals to both men and women, oh, maybe that person is literally physically open to someone coming in and breaking this conversation. It also means small, darting glances to everyone around the room.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Everyone. Everyone you want to approach you. Oh, everyone you want to approach you? Yeah. How many times does someone got to do a glance to get someone to come over?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So Monica Moore actually studied this. I believe it took eight glances to get someone to approach. Don’t quote me on that. It was way higher than I thought. Like I was like two, maybe three. I think it was something insane like eight. Could you imagine being in a bar and looking at someone? eight times, that’s how many times it took to get that person to come over. And these are quick glances, not like, you know, it’s a side glance, it’s a side glance and a smile. It’s a flip of the hair and a look over, right? Those are the kind of glances that we’re talking about. And it takes eight sometimes. So croissant feet, open body, quick, short glances. I would also try one of my secret tricks for daters is generally gesturing in their direction. So like, let’s see, like, there’s a hot guy right over there that I can see. I’ve been married for 18 years, just to be clear. Okay. Yeah. If you want… You okay? He dropped something. He’s cold and hot.

SPEAKER_04:

He’s cold and hot. He’s freaking out.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so there’s a hot guy right over there that I want to see. And I’m talking to you. I might make some quick glances over, but I also might, like, when I’m gesturing, I’m sort of gesturing towards them. So I’m on their line of gesturing. So, like, if I’m gesturing out, I’m making a gesture for them to literally come over. Like, I’m, like, gesturing, and then I’m, like, I want them to, like, literally come over. I’m sort of gesturing, but I’m talking, but I’m open gesturing.

SPEAKER_07:

Ah, interesting.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

It works. It works. If they are attracted to you at all, they will come over. If they don’t come over, they’re probably not attracted to you. Try someone else.

STEVE BARTLETT:

What about men? How do men signal in this?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Same, same. So like a man can do the same thing. Now, women are less likely to approach men in a crowded environment. Culturally, that’s not as accepted. So it’s going to be harder for a man to get a woman to come over. But it does work very well for men to warm a woman up that she is about to be approached with those things. quick glances, open gestures, croissant feet towards her. That way when you do approach, she knows that your attention has been on her. And look at her responses to your gestures and your glances. If she meets your glance, great. If she turns away from you, turns her feet away from you, she’s not probably very receptive to your approach. So it’s a good way to kind of test the waters before you actually approach.

STEVE BARTLETT:

It’s difficult in this day and age, isn’t it, to know if you can roll up on someone because there’s a lot of like, you know. Too cool for school. That’s what I see. And also there’s like a big culture now of inappropriate advances.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yes, but I’m going to be optimistic and say, look, I’m not single, so I know that’s different. But I think people are lonely. And I think people so want to meet their person. So if you are actually in person and you are interested in someone, it is such a gift to go up to someone and be like, hey, I like you. I saw you across the room.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Do you know, I think I said this on one or two podcasts before, but I didn’t really get an answer from anybody. I had this kid at this event that I spoke at.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

STEVE BARTLETT:

And he was in the front row. It really moved me because it made me realize that there’s so many people out there, especially in the world we live in now in 2024, 2025 or whatever, who want friends. You just said loneliness, right? They want to make a friend. And it’s so weird, this kid stood up, bless him, in this talk I was doing, and he put his hands up in the air, and there’s a thousand people around him. It was this talk I did in Canary Wharf in London, which is like, it’s like New York of London. It’s like really, really busy. They’re all wearing suits, these kids, because they work in the city. And he stood up and he went, my question is, how do I make friends? And you can imagine the guts it takes to say that in front of a room of a thousand people your age.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Amazing.

STEVE BARTLETT:

You went, how do I make friends?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

What did you say? Do you have any friends?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Do I have any friends? I have a couple. But it’s funny because what I actually said, it took me off guard. But what I ended up saying was, what you just did is how you make friends. You know what I’m saying? So like that willingness to be vulnerable in that way. Because I said, I know what’s going to happen after I finish on stage here and walk off. People are going to come up to you.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah. Yeah, okay, so I have a framework for how to make friends as adults. I think it’s really important. I think it’s somehow unacceptable in our society to approach friendship like dating, but that’s how we should think about it, is meeting two or three amazing people is so important for your health, for your happiness, for your success. It is so important to date your friends. Like that is incredibly important. One of my best friends is Cody Sanchez because she is incredibly inspiring, incredibly smart, incredibly funny. But I dated a lot of people in Austin, a lot of girls in Austin to find her. I know she did too. It was my bachelorette for friends era where I was looking for girlfriends and we just like hit it off and we’ve been able to grow our businesses together. So one is you should change your mindset. Finding friends is like dating. You are looking for your friend’s soulmate. And then you should approach those friends just like you would a potential partner. You want someone with similar values. You want someone who activates the same neural networks as you. They like the same activities. And you want someone who you test it out. You would never move in with a friend or maybe move in with someone who just started dating. Same thing with a friend. You don’t want to get too close too fast. So I highly recommend go on friendship dates and you want them to be different every time. Take them to places that you love and try to make them a little bit allergic. So for example, there’s a place, oh, this is gonna sound crazy, but it works. So there’s a place in Austin called Casa De Luz, if anyone’s been there in Austin, and it’s a vegan hippie spot. It’s been there forever. And you go in and it’s one meal, you can’t customize it, and they plop it down on your tray and you eat it like a cafeteria food. And I love it. And I love taking really high-maintenance women there, just to see what they’re gonna do. Because the women who are like, can I please get a man, a man, not a, I’m like, we’re not going to be friends. We cannot be friends.

STEVE BARTLETT:

You don’t like those people?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Nope.

STEVE BARTLETT:

That modified them.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That’s why I left LA. I mean, you can modify a little bit, but like, there’s a way that you kind of do it. And here you can’t, you literally cannot modify. And so it’s interesting to see how people deal with that circumstance. And I found my best closest friends are like, cool, let’s go with it. Like that’s a way that I see very into their personality. That’s like a very weird story. People are going to be like, she’s so weird. No wonder she doesn’t have any friends. True. I don’t have a lot of friends, but the friends I have, I love. We go to Casa de Luz all the time. So you should think about activities or places with your friends where you’re going to be able to test out a value or something that you really appreciate in friends.

STEVE BARTLETT:

What if you don’t have friends? I’m thinking about this kid, like, and especially if you’re a man, because men just struggle more. It actually feels awkward sometimes when… I make dates for my husband.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I have to make dates, friend dates for my husband as well. I totally get it. I see it. Activities. So, like, where’s the place you like to hang out? What’s the thing that you do? Is it, you know, axe throwing? Is it going to soccer games? Is it crazy mileage runs? Is it hiking group? Is it pickleball? Like, find the activity you love and then just slowly, just like we’re talking about dating, slowly hit them up. Working on anything exciting these days? What’s your big goal for 2025? Like, those are the questions. The reason I have these questions is they’re dating questions, but they’re also friendship questions. If you live in that activity for long enough, you’ll find your people.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 What are you seeing in terms of interpersonal relationship shifts in the sort of 15 years has it been since you’ve been working?

None:

18.

STEVE BARTLETT:

18 years. You must have seen societal level shifts in our interpersonal skills, our friendships, etc. What are you seeing?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

AirPods are killing friendship. AirPods are going to ruin our interpersonal interactions. And here’s the difference I’ve seen, the biggest difference in the last 18 years. 18 years ago, you could maybe wear a Walkman around campus, or around the city, or on a subway, but really your ears were open. And so what would happen is you’d get on the subway, or you’d walk across campus, or you’d walk down the hallway, and someone would be like, hey Steven, how’s it going? You know, pretty good, crazy week. Oh, really? What’s she working on? Like, it was so much easier to have those tiny micro moments of connection. That Van Sloan study was done before AirPods, and I wonder if he were to redo it now, what would happen?

STEVE BARTLETT:

Which one was that?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

The one where he found the most likable kids had the longest list of people they liked. And in this study, the most likable kids, when he observed them, they were walking down the hallway, saying hello, chatting next to someone for five seconds in a locker, saying after class and sort of talking, sitting with a lunch table, leaning over someone, asking about that. So much micro-connection, very small conversations. Our friendships don’t often happen in these big, deep conversations. They happen in these micro-moments. AirPods destroy it. And I see this especially with younger folks because they always have their AirPods in when they’re commuting, when they’re walking, when they’re jogging, when they’re at the gym. I don’t know about—when I was single for five seconds when I was like, you know, 17, the gym was like the place. At the gym, no one really was listening to anything at the gym. At least I can remember, like, the rare person would have their Walkman in, but everyone was AirPod free. And so there was a lot of micro moments of connection happening. It was so much easier to talk to people. Now, if someone’s working out with their out-there AirPods, they’re insane. I’m like, what are they doing? They should go home. It’s weird. It’s weird. Or they’re with a friend working out together, and that’s intimidating. So I’m worried about this because we need weak ties. Weak ties are, in the research, these very casual connections of someone you see at the gym once a week, and you kind of know them. Oh, yeah, you know, Stephen, nice to see you. You recognize their face. If you were to see them at a restaurant later in the week, you’d be like, hey, don’t you go to that gym? Oh, yeah, yeah, we do. So what are you doing this weekend? Like those weak ties are incredibly important for our happiness. That’s how we build big friends. That’s how we can find a soulmate. That’s how we can make good business contacts. And I’m seeing less and less of that because of AirPods and because of hybrid work. So we’re just not in the office that much. So we’re having less of those little micro moments in a hallway or that five minutes before a meeting starts. The five minutes before a meeting start is really critical to your career success. How you talk to your boss, the small talk you make, are you asking boring questions, it’s telling your colleagues and your boss a lot about who you are, and it’s proven likable people make more money. Likable people get more promotions. Likable people have more friends and more friends at work. And so when we have less moments to show how likable we are, it’s really hard to get those things.

STEVE BARTLETT:

At my company, Flight Studio, which is part of my bigger company, Flight Group, we’re constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences, whether that’s a new show, a product, or a project. It’s why I launched the conversation cards. I’ve relied on Shopify before, who’s a sponsor of today’s podcast, and I’ll be using them again for the next big launch, which we’ll hear about soon. And I use them because of how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you, no matter where you are in the world. With Shopify, the usual pain points of launching products online disappear completely. No matter the size of your business, Shopify has everything you need to make your business go to the next level and better connect with your customers all over the world. To say thank you to all of you for listening to my show, we’re giving you a trial, which is just $1 a month. You can sign up by going to shopify.com slash Bartlett. That’s shopify.com slash Bartlett, or find the link in the description below. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably going to want to listen to this. It’s a message from one of our sponsors on this podcast, which is LinkedIn. If you’ve listened to me on this podcast for a while now, you’ll know that I’ve been on a bit of an evolution as a business owner and entrepreneur. And one of those evolutions that has become clearer and clearer as I’ve matured is that the single most important thing in building a business, in building a company, is hiring. The definition of the word company is actually group of people and that is the first responsibility and job that any entrepreneur has and should focus on, but surprisingly most don’t. About 80% of my team have been hired from LinkedIn. And I think there’s very few platforms, if any, in the world that could give you that diversity of candidate with that much information and data on their profiles. It usually costs money, but for the entrepreneurs that are listening to me, I’ve got you a free job ad post for your company on LinkedIn. Just go to linkedin.com slash DOAC to post your free job ad today. That’s linkedin.com slash DOAC. Terms and conditions apply. What about lying? This is one of the most, um, things people are most interested in is how to, everyone wants to spot a liar. It’s funny because like the rest of our conversation, one could infer that as how to like be a liar. I’m joking, I’m just saying. But it is, it’s like how to show up in a certain way to get success in a certain context, whether it’s dating or work or whatever. But then we want to figure out if someone’s playing us. Is there any, is it possible to spot a liar?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Most people can only spot a lie with 54% accuracy. They’ve actually studied the average person is very bad. But you better off tossing a coin. 54% accuracy. We are very bad at spotting liars. And this is important to know about yourself is we should not overestimate our ability to spot lies. We are usually not good at it. So it is very important to give someone the benefit of the doubt because you don’t know. It’s very hard to spot. It is possible there are certain statistical cues to deceit. There are cues that over and over again research find liars typically do, but not always. Like there’s no Pinocchio’s nose. There’s no one cue that means someone is lying. But there are a couple cues that come up over and over again. One we already talked about, the question inflection. It’s very suspicious if someone is speaking and all of a sudden they ask a question. If they’re not actually asking a question, right? Like if all of a sudden you hear a question inflection using a statement or a number or a boundary or a timeline, that’s when I’m like, let’s double click on that for a second and talk about that budget. So you mentioned the number was 500,000. Where does that number come from? Let’s talk about more. I want to hear if I’m going to hear it again.

SPEAKER_05:

Interesting.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

So that’s a double click for me. That’s like, let’s make sure that I heard that right. Let’s make sure that you feel confident about it. Where does that come from? So that’s just a little red flag that says dive deeper. Nothing is a sign of lying. It’s just a sign that you should dig deeper. So question inflection. A volume drop is another vocal cue of deception. So when we’re anxious or nervous, we will lose volume and we lose breath. So if you hear someone who’s speaking, I hear this a lot in sales calls, so someone will I always know what part of a sales presentation makes my entrepreneurs the most nervous, because they lose volume during that part of their presentation. So it sounds like this. So let’s move on to our team. So our founding partners are me, myself, Joe, Jimmy, and we all met at NYU. And we’re going to now talk about, like I’m obvious, I’m making it obvious for you, but if you’re listening for it, you’ll hear where someone is like, they literally lost fuel. They literally lost breath. So a sudden drop in volume is a very interesting cue to like double click, like What just happened there? How do you feel about your co-founder? How long have you known each other? Anything we should know about that? How’s the relationship? How do you fight? How do you communicate? Right? Like that’s when I would, that’s where I would aim most of my investor questions if I was hearing that volume drop on that specific area. The other, that’s focal. Nonverbal. So nonverbal, what you’re looking for is incongruencies where the verbal does not match the body. The biggest and most obvious one is when someone says yes, but shakes their head no, or says no, but shakes their head yes. So I might say to my daughter, did you clean your room? Yeah, I did. She’s shaking her head no. In Western culture, so there’s a cultural exception to this one, India, Bulgaria, and Pakistan. They nod a little bit differently. The research actually shows that. But in countries outside of India, Bulgaria, and Pakistan, when we agree with someone, say yes, or telling the truth, we typically agree with ourselves and shake our heads yes. When we don’t agree or don’t like something, we’ll often shake our heads no. We can sometimes also do this in disbelief, like, wow, I cannot believe that just happened. So I’m always looking for incongruent nods. This happens a lot if you ask someone, do you like the new girl? Yeah, you know, she’s, um, great. Right? You see that.

SPEAKER_05:

100%, yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

All the time. And people, they don’t realize they’re doing it, but they’re shaking their head, no, they do not like that person. You’ll also see this with mismatched facial expressions. And the biggest one for liars, the research finds, is disgust. So disgust is an expression that people make without even realizing it, and this is across cultures. When we don’t like something or when we smell something bad, we crinkle our nose up and we flash the upper whites of our teeth and we go, ugh, that. So you’ll notice that liars typically feel dirty when they lie. So oftentimes they’ll show disgust with themselves for lying. So you’ll ask someone, so what do you think of the proposal? Yeah, it’s really good. And they might even sniff.

SPEAKER_05:

Really?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05:

What’s a sniff? What does it signal?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Oh, it’s a disgust activator. Like when we are disgusted, our nasal cavities want to close because we want to take in less of it. And so even though it’s not about food, it’s about a preference. Liars will often show a little bit of disgust when they are lying because they are look a little bit disgusted with themselves. And so you’ll see this activation here. By the way, no one does that naturally. This is a very unnatural way to hold my face, but we do it and we feel disgusted. The nasal cavities, when we nasal dilate, or nasal wings dilate, that’s what it’s called, like these nasal wings dilate and we begin to scrunch them up, it’s like we don’t like what we’re seeing, smelling, hearing. So what I will do is I will share a proposal to someone, I will talk about something, and I watch for any disgust. So I’ll say, you know, here’s the plan for 2025. Here’s what we’re going to do. And if I see a, I know that that team member or that person is like, not that into it. And that’s why I double click. Any questions? How do you feel, Steven? Do you like this idea? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

No. Horrible. You look like you’re about to throw up, by the way.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I heard you say that the most toxic relationships are the ambivalent relationships. The word ambivalent means… What does it mean?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so ambivalent is actually not toxic. So toxic is like, we know it’s bad, we don’t want it, we’re creating boundaries around it. Ambivalent means we’re not sure. Ambivalent relationships are the relationships in your life that are the most damaging. They’re the relationships where you wonder, does she like me? Do I like her? Ugh, I wish she would cancel this dinner we have. Am I tired after that? I’m dreading it. Do I have to go? Gosh, I wish I was home. Those are ambivalent relationships where you’re not sure. And they are so energetically draining. Because a toxic person, you know they’re toxic. You’re like, I don’t like that person. They’re not serving me. I’m not going out to dinner. I’m going home. No thanks. Not going to text you. Not going to tell you I’m thinking about you. Or an ambivalent person, you’re like, I should check in with that person. I really should go to this dinner. Oh, it’s been five months since I’ve gone to dinner. Oh man, do I even know what they’re up to these days? Do I even care? And then most importantly, do they like me? Do they support me? That’s why I asked about that friend that you were unsure about. I was like, are they jealous? Do they have a problem with you? Because you might be picking up on they are ambivalent towards you, and you’re picking up on that. There’s a research study that was done with police officers, and they wanted to know what makes for a thriving workplace. So they asked police officers to rank the people in their precinct, and they found that the police officers who had the most ambivalent ties were more unhappy in their job, had less work-life balance, had more workplace stress, more than the people who had toxic relationships. In other words, the police officers who said, all 10 of those people are toxic were happier at work than the police officers who said, I don’t know if I like that person and that person. I don’t know if that person likes me. I don’t know if I want to go out to lunch with that person again. I kind of would rather be alone because it is so mentally draining to have ambivalent relationships. So it’s really important if you’re making that list of people, going back to the very beginning, you know, the people you’re really close, not very close with, kind of close with, really close with. If you’re not sure, put them at the bottom. And in the next 30 days, try to ask them the questions that we shared. Working on anything exciting? What’s your biggest goal right now? And see if you like their answers. It’s important to either move them up or move them out. Don’t let them be ambivalent.

STEVE BARTLETT:

One of the things that is highly searched on Google, I was looking at Google to figure out what the most searched questions are. There’s some tools that I use to figure out what people want to know. And one of them was just, funnily, how do I start a conversation?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

That’s what my next book is about, so I’m happy to hear that. Okay, one is don’t overthink your opener. Starting a conversation is like, hey, I’m Vanessa. Like literally your opener can just be that. My sister, my youngest sister, she was like the best advice I ever gave her ever. And I was like, what is it? She was like, you just told me to say hello to people. And that is it. Your opener is just, hey, I’m Vanessa. Hey, nice to meet you. So don’t overthink the opener because that opener, your body is actually doing a lot of things. Your brain and body are like competence, warmth, facial expressions, voice tone. If you’re like, what’s your biggest goal in life? It’s way too much. And so one is your opener should actually be basic. So the other person’s brain is like, gives them a chance to like safe. Okay, friend, we’re friend. Hey, how are you doing? Right? I did my friend Q, I held up my hand. So don’t overthink your opener. Hey, nice to meet you. Hey, I’m Vanessa. Your first question is where things get more interesting, okay? So if you don’t know their name, you want to say like, oh, what’s your name? Great, I’m Vanessa. Then you have a choice. And I like to take the better route. You can say, so what do you do? But I really don’t like that path. It’s autopilot. So what I like to do instead is ask a version of the excitement question. Do anything fun and exciting this past weekend? If it’s a Monday. So Mondays, I always ask, you do anything fun this past weekend? Fridays, I always ask, have any exciting plans coming up this weekend? And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I don’t talk to anyone.

STEVE BARTLETT:

What is the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about? For the person sat at home, the typical question, the most prolific question. that you get.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

And he did something very interesting at the Democratic National Convention back in, I believe, 1944. He knew he was not a good public speaker, which also is very rare for a U.S. president to become president without being a good public speaker. He knew he could not cut it on stage with the very charismatic people, and he was behind. In the polls, he was not the preferred candidate. So he was like, I’m not going to compete on stage. I’m not going to try to outspeak them. I’m not going to try to go work the floor and shake hands. It’s not my way. What I am going to do is try to find a way to do what I’m best at, which is one-on-one conversations where I can win people over with an argument. So in the Democratic National Convention, it was really hot. It was in Chicago in the middle of summer. He rented the one air-conditioned room in the bottom, in the basement of the convention center, and one by one, his team would invite person by person down into that air-conditioned room, and he would tell them his story. He would tell them his points, and vote by vote, and as the votes were being tallied, he would win over every single person that went to that room. One, it was air-conditioned, so they wanted to stay there as long as possible. Two, he would hear, what are your concerns? Why do you not want to vote for me? And then he would explain to them why they should vote for him. And vote by vote, he ended up winning the National Convention without having to speak on stage barely at all. I share this because stop competing on stages where you can’t be your best. Start creating rooms where you can. Think about what are your social strengths. You have one. What is it? Is it storytelling? Is it being funny? Is it listening? Is it being empathetic? Is it being a decoder? Is it being persuasive? What is your social strength? Create spaces and rooms where you can exercise that strength because no one wants you to pretend to be an extrovert or pretend to be something you’re good at that you’re not. It’s much better to do what you’re actually good at and attract the right people.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 And your social strength might not be in person.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Might not be. And that’s okay. Like, there are some people who are great at texting. There are some people who are great at sending voice notes. There are some people who make their friends by broadcasting and then picking out a couple people. That’s how you met your girlfriend. Is you broadcasted. She resonated with something that you said. And you gave her the way to find you. She did. And then you met. So maybe it’s broadcasting. I think we have to think outside the box. It’s not only in person. There’s so many ways you can have social strengths.

STEVE BARTLETT:

I’ve heard it all now. I get it. I believe it. I’m into it. What is step one? I’m going to buy your books. There’s two of them here. So I’m going to buy both of these books. Both of them will be linked below. What else can I do to start on my journey of becoming, you were a recovering awkward person, you were awkward before, now you’re not. What’s step one?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, step number one is begin to break autopilot. So make a commitment for the next 30 days, you are not going to trigger autopilot in your conversation. No more, what do you do? No more, how are you? No more, where are you from? No more, right? Ask better questions. What’s your biggest goal? Working on anything exciting. You’re disgusting me.

STEVE BARTLETT:

 No, I’m thinking, I’m just, I was going to tell you you look good.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Okay, so that’s challenge number one. Challenge number two, find out where you fall in the warmth and competence scale. Are you highly warmed? Do you need to dial up competence to be taken more seriously? Are you highly competent? Do you need to dial up warmth to be seen as more likable and friendly and trustworthy? Do that email audit. So take the quiz, then do the email audit. And then if you can, here’s the bonus challenge. Send the charisma quiz to someone who knows you well, someone at work, maybe a partner. Ask them to take it as you. and screenshot their results. Sometimes how we perceive our warmth and competence is not how others perceive our warmth and competence. So if you take it and you say, I’m perfect, I’m a five of five, but they take it and they see you as really high on the warmth scale, that is going to be critical feedback for you.

STEVE BARTLETT:

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they’re going to be leaving it for. And the question that’s been left for you.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

I always love these.

STEVE BARTLETT:

When in your life did you try to outrun your pain and what was the consequence? When in your life did you turn and face your pain and what was the consequence?

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

There was a really weird moment in my career where everything was taking off. I had a lot of years of a lot of hard struggle. And being a writer, I had a published book, traditionally published book, that completely failed. 2011, we won’t name it. Put it out there, thought my world would change, and it did terribly. I got terrible reviews, it didn’t sell, and I was literally told, you’ll never write a book again. And I was just devastated, devastated. And my husband was like, you’ve got to keep writing. You’re a writer. You’ve got to keep writing. And so I went back to it. I started Signs of People. That was officially when I started the actual website, Signs of People. Kept writing. And then it started taking off. I had videos that went viral. We started having millions of visitors on the website. And I wanted to prove myself very badly. And I wanted to erase that painful memory. And so when I got approached to write Captivate, I was like, no. I can’t write books. I’m a YouTuber and a blogger, but I can’t write books. And she was like, this will be a different kind of book. This will be a book about really what you want to say to people, not the book you think you should write. And I was like, no. I was like, I cannot do it. It’s too painful. I will not survive if that fails. I will not survive if that fails. And it took Nikki months of telling me, this will be different. This will be a different kind of book. You can write the real book that you really want to write. And so I said yes, I started writing it. And that was when I think I, I don’t know how to end the question was, but decided it would be worth the pain. If that failed, it would be worth the pain of at least saying that I tried. That was a very hard choice. Thank goodness it did not fail. He did really well. And I’m eternally grateful for that. When anyone buys a copy, I’m like one click further from that failure. Horrible failure.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Vanessa, thank you. Thank you so much. What you write about and what you educate people on is a subject that’s probably more important now than ever. And I say that because of the sort of macro climate of society where we’re more lonely than ever, we’re struggling with connection. It’s not coming naturally to us as it once probably did, or at least more natural than it does now. and so many the it’s crazy i’ve only been a podcaster really i think for about four years like i think i started in 2017 but really it’s been four years since i’ve been uploading and it’s crazy just in that time alone how many more of the questions i’m getting are about all the things you write about they’re about like how to make a friend and how to show up in a certain way and all these kinds of things so what the work you’re doing is so unbelievably important there’s so much more that needs to be done as well but the contribution you’ve had to the 400,000 people that you’ve taught and the millions of people that have bought these books and consumed your videos and everything is a really, really important one. So thank you. It’s so funny because even me, like people see me on camera and stuff, but I learned so much, so much from your work, so much, so much. So many things as well that I think a lot about and, you know, things you can take or leave. You’ve got to say like, who do I want to be? And like, who am I? you know truly to then apply these things because there’s no point like I just have no interest in building a facade or anything but there’s things about me which I go fucking oh I didn’t even know I was doing that you know.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Yeah and like what kind of friend do I want to be? What kind of partner do I want to be? What kind of way do I want to be in conversation? Like you get to choose.

STEVE BARTLETT:

Thank you Vanessa.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

Thanks for having me.

John, there are clues in your early context that suggest you might have walked the path that you’ve walked in your life, but there’s also clues that suggest you absolutely would never have done what you’ve done. Yeah. So taking me back to that early context, what do I need to know about that environment, the influences of that environment, to understand how you ended up where you are today?

JOHN ALLEN

I think it all starts with, you know, the family I was born into were like very successful academic people. So I was born in a town called Quincy, Massachusetts. It’s just south of Boston, Mass. And, you know, my mother, father, and two sisters are like brilliant minds in like the academic sense of the word, just like brilliant. You know, my sister, one of my sisters has gone on to win two Pulitzer Prizes. My dad’s won a Pulitzer Prize. And this is not even flex, but to give you a sense of the people in my life. My other sister has a PhD, and she worked out of a Harvard lab. My mom is a professional writer. And then there’s me. When I was growing up, I could have done well in school, you know, but I didn’t want to. It was sort of like my form of rebellion was being a bad student willfully. And I would like go out and party with my friends and just was like, trying to be sort of like a bad kid in a way. And also like the town I grew up in was sort of a, it was not a place where academics really thrived. It’s like a really working class. hard and tough place. I mean, Quincy’s becoming much, much nicer, but it was a little bit of a tough place. And I sort of wanted to be, like, an edgy, like, tough guy. And so I’d, like, get into street fights and get my ass kicked. And, like, I’d, like, stay out drinking with my friends. But what it did is it set me up for, like, colossal failure by the time I got to college. I got into college because my mom, the professional writer, wrote my college essay, and my grades were horrible in high school. In fact, so bad that when I sent off my application, the school got in touch with me, and they were like, hey, your grades are not really what we’re looking for. But boy, that essay was so beautiful. We’re going to give you a chance. And so I get into college. I go to the University of Massachusetts out in Western Mass. It’s where a lot of kids where I was growing up, that’s where they went to school. It’s a big party school. And I just immediately bombed. First semester, I got a 1.016 GPA, which it should have been like a zero. I basically didn’t go to class. I was involved in this riot. So at some point, our football team, which was a team that no one cared about, even the people who went to the school, we didn’t care about it. No offense to the Minutemen. They’re very good now, but at the time in 2006, they weren’t. They made it to like this conference game or something. This is like not big time D1. This is like D1 AA. It’s like very high level football, but not going to be on TV or anything. And the college, the student body, again, they don’t really care about the football team. But for some reason, when they lost this game, it just like instilled this need to riot on campus. And it was like, concentrated in this one area of campus where I happen to live. And I like went out there and I was like breaking windows and being this horrible kid, and the security cameras everywhere recording you and it got to the point where at the end of the semester, there was like this witch hunt to to find the people that had been involved in this riot. And there was like, the website had posted, the college police website had posted all these images of just faces of people in the crowd that were a part of it. And anybody could anonymously name people if they saw them. And it was like, everybody got expelled. And I found pictures of me. And I just got my grades back, 1.016. And at the same time, I’d been telling my brilliant parents Yeah, I’m doing great in school. Things are going really well, getting good grades. And I had to tell them, actually, it’s the opposite. And I’m probably going to get expelled if I don’t withdraw. So my dad comes out to the school. And he sits down with the dean, who also says, John has all these violations of living in the dorm, like noise complaints and being a jerk. We’re going to kick him out of the dorms. Even if he stays at the school, he has to live off campus. And my mom and dad are like, you’re coming home. We’re done with this like you’re an adult and you can either like live at home and go to school or get a job But like you’re gonna be an adult And so I come home. 

STEVEN BARTLETT

At what age? I was 18.

JOHN ALLEN

18. So I come home, and I was living in my mom’s basement in Quincy. And I remember the first couple of weeks I was home, I actually felt mad at my parents. Like, how dare they make me withdraw from the school, even though there’s all this information that it’s completely my fault. But I had like an epiphany when I was literally in my mom’s basement when I sort of realized like, oh, this is my fault. Like I have created like a habit pattern and a way of thinking that’s put me in my mom’s basement with no direction. Like I’ve been gifted all these opportunities that I’ve squandered. And something sort of changed in my head where it was like, I don’t want to be a screw up. I don’t want to be that. I’m looking at my family members as being so successful. And I just was like, I can’t be that. I’m suddenly becoming self-aware that that’s the path I’m on. I’m going to be the guy that floundered everything and didn’t amount to anything. And so I just made it simple. I was like, I’m just going to go to a local school, get good grades, and graduate from college. That’s going to be my focus for now. And I did that. I went to a local school. I got my grades up. I actually transferred back to the school that I withdrew from to finish out my couple of years in college. But it was like a drug, like having a goal that I was working towards, like doing something that was worth my time and like studying. I was like struggling with school, but I worked so hard. I was in the library all the time. Like feeling, like getting to feel what it feels like to be working towards a goal and achieving it was like really addictive for me. And so by the time I was like in my last year in college, I actually ironically had no clue what I would do post-college. It was sort of like, Well, the goal was just to graduate college. I don’t really have a clue what’s next. And I thought about briefly becoming a lawyer or something, because I was studying philosophy and English, because I like those two subjects, and they sort of fit the mold. But I had always sort of had this calling to serve in the military, because some friends of mine in high school went off to serve in the military in 2006, like they went to Iraq and Afghanistan. But I wanted to do something really hard in the military because I needed like a big goal, you know, and it like graduating college was this goal that I had achieved. And I was like, I want to do something hard in the military. And that’s when I got turned on to the SEAL teams. And the cool thing about the Navy SEAL teams is virtually anybody can apply to be a SEAL. You know, you have to like have the right physical fitness, you have to be a citizen. There’s a few things, but basically anybody can try out. But it’s only those who survive the training that become SEALs. And it’s a really small percentage of people. And it just really was the thing that was like, wait a minute, if I do that, if I go through like this baptism of going through this rigorous training, I’ll become a guy that will no longer be viewed as like the screw up in high school who sort of got it together with college. I’ll be able to reinvent myself. I’ll be able to serve in the military, which is something I felt the calling to do. it’s a career that I can kind of progress into. And it’s a big frickin challenge that’s going to require a whole bunch of training and prep before I get to go. And so I kind of just shifted my goal from graduate college to become a Navy SEAL. And everything fell in line. And then naturally, after that, I became a YouTuber, which is an even longer story. But basically, I Yeah, became a SEAL. And then I got hurt, medically retired. And then I basically posted something online that went viral. And I love telling stories, as you can see from this long intro. And I just kept telling stories. And now I’m here. So but it started with like, setting a goal and achieving it. And it’s which sounds so basic, but I think a lot of people go through life just sort of doing stuff because they were told to or they just sort of fell into it. I found like setting a goal that’s really consciously something you care about for whatever reason and working hard to achieve it. It like organizes your whole life. And so my life starting with coming home from college and being in the basement has been a series of set a goal and shoot for that goal. And that’s all that matters.

STEVEN BARTLETT

 It’s interesting, because even before that, there was something that seemed to happen to you in that basement, which I consider to be the starting place, which is awareness.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT

This, like, self-awareness. And with that self-awareness came responsibility. You said, actually, I need to stop blaming my mum and dad. Yeah. I have a role to play in this. Yeah. And that’s really, really hard for a lot of people. I think for everybody to be truly aware of how you might be contributing to the circumstances of your own life.

JOHN ALLEN

 It’s a harsh truth when you realise it’s your fault, or a big part of it is your fault, but that’s what self-awareness is, like taking responsibility for the good and the bad.

STEVEN BARTLETT

And what’s your relationship been like with responsibility, and what’s your view on the importance of that broadly?

JOHN ALLEN

I would say that when I was, you know, pre-basement moment, I was definitely in the mindset of playing the victim. And if something bad happened, it was somebody else’s fault and not taking responsibility for anything. I was the guy that would come home from school and I’d tell my mom, like, you wouldn’t believe that we had a test today. Joey got a 50. I got a 65 but Joey got a 50. It’s like you’re sort of like, that’s the way you approach it versus like I failed the test. But when I sort of decided I would graduate college and organize my life around that and then become a SEAL, I realized that it’s not enough to simply just say I’m going to do this thing. Like you need to own like the entire process and like, for example, in In SEAL training, there were a couple moments where like I myself failed miserably, catastrophically at like tests and opportunities to be a leader. And I just like squandered it in a way. So the way SEAL training works is it’s very reputational. Like as you go along in training, you know, it’s like, the closer you get to graduation, the closer you get to being a real SEAL. And so your instructors Those are active duty SEALs and they’re no longer viewing you towards the end of training as being just some like a candidate. Now it’s like you could be my teammate. There’s not too many of us. And so it changes from you aren’t going to make it to you better do a good job because I might need your help down the line. And I remember in the final part of training, there’s this confidence exercise where they basically expose your class to tear gas, which is something that’s pretty standard in the military. And the only thing they say is like, this is a like, it’s all about mentality here. It’s a confidence booster. It’s going to suck. It’s going to make you want to feel like you’re dying from this gas. And it’s like a long exposure. And they set you up in this, like, square. You’re all just standing there kneeling shoulder to shoulder, if you will, out in this open field on San Clemente Island in California. And all the instructors have their gas masks on. And they have these pool sticks, like, that you would swap, like, trash out of a pool. But at the end, they have the CS grenade canisters. And they’re like, all right. They put their masks on. They fire off these CS grenades. This big white smoke comes out. And they hold out the pole. And you get covered in CS gas. And all you have to do It’s not run. Just stay here and take it. That’s the whole point. And I ran. It was like a fight or flight instinct completely. It was like before I – and it was instant. It wasn’t like, oh, this is really bad. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? It was like instantaneously I ran. I had to get tackled by one of the instructors because I was just out. I wasn’t even thinking. It was like – and nobody else ran. This is the end of training. And so afterwards, it’s like I was brought into the amphitheater. There’s this little theater where they would teach us classes about ordinance and whatever. And they were like, Alan, stand up. And all my peers know I did this. All the instructors know I did this. And he just goes, the main instructor, he’s like, Alan, you’re a fucking pussy. Sit down. He goes, you’re a fucking pussy, and I never want to serve with you, and neither should your classmates. Sit down. And that was it. And I had to, from that point on, for the rest of training, wear these like, it’s almost like a bikini over my shorts. And it was like the worst moment ever, because I’ve made it so far into training. But I knew, and also, by the way, at this point, we weren’t even home. I wasn’t able to go home, see my wife. We’re out at this island for a month. You work seven days a week. You are in training until you’re done. And the only choice was like, Own the fact that you did that. Don’t make excuses for it. Let this show people my actual strength, which seems funny because I did the thing I’m not supposed to do. But instead of running from it, literally, own it. Take responsibility for what you did and show people that, you know what, I’m prepared to show up for work every day wearing these fucking trunks and be looked at as a lesser than to demonstrate that I’m not.

STEVEN BARTLETT

There’s something really important in that. That’s really, really also critical to business, but just really critical to anyone that’s a professional or in a relationship, which is if you make a mistake, you get the second opportunity, which is how you respond to the mistake you made. And in fact, so many times in business, you know, when I was running a marketing business, we’d have clients and we might drop the ball in some way, but we can actually make the relationship stronger than it was before the mistake by how we responded. So making a quick phone call, apologizing, taking responsibility,

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah, I mean, I think that there definitely were some people that did carry that sort of like stigma into the teams, because right after we finished this, we kind of went into the sealed teams. But I do think that there was definitely some people that, and I’m not even tooting my own horn, I really think this happened, that as a result of that moment knew they could like trust that I was prepared to sort of like, I’m going to take responsibility for me, I’m going to do what I’m supposed to do and be the best team that I can be. Even at my lowest, you’re still going to get the best version of me. And that doesn’t mean I think I’m better than anybody else. It just means I’m an adult. And I think that’s a big part of being an adult is responsibility is ultimately owning those mistakes. And sometimes your mistakes are painful and public and awful. And that’s the most important time to own them. And like you said, like, that’s your opportunity in some ways, not just to rectify the mistake, but to become a stronger, better version of yourself. And I think that my mistake in college was a series of mistakes my first semester of screwing it up and getting sent back home. but it was only when I recognized that it was my fault and I had to own that, that I was able to graduate college and try to become a Navy SEAL. And then in the process, like have the CS grenade happen, but in some ways that made me a better SEAL, you know? So I think that like in failure comes the best opportunity for success, which is something that I certainly didn’t coin, but it’s the truth.

STEVEN BARTLETT

What is the Navy SEALs? Because, you know, around the world, I think people are aware of the term Navy SEALs, but we don’t actually know fully what it is.

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah, so every branch of, I think, basically every military in the world, this is a broad generalization, but it’s usually the case that virtually every branch of every military has some form of specialized unit that carries out special operations. It’s the stuff that, you know, the Call of Duty video games and modern warfare, those are based on like the idea of specialized combat units that that go out and do these kind of difficult and high-stakes missions. And so in the US, you have the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, and the Air Force, and each of them have their respective special operations divisions. You have Marine special operations and Marines. You have the PJs, the pararescue jumpers, and the Air Force. There’s multiple. But of all the special operations units in America, of all the different branches, you could make the case that the most, and I’m getting some flack from people that disagree with me, the most, let’s just say well known and potentially most skilled, and I say that carefully, because of course, there are other groups like the Green Berets who are incredible at certain things. But the most skilled at multiple disciplines is very likely the Navy SEAL teams. And it’s because the acronym SEAL stands for Sea, Air, Land, so SE and AL. The idea is, even though it’s under the Navy, which is sort of like maritime and water, the reality is that the SEAL teams are a special operations group that can insert into virtually any any environment, sea, air, or land. They can also use multiple insertion platforms, whether it’s diving, jumping, going in on land. It’s like a highly versatile special operations group, whereas a lot of the other special operations groups, not just in the United States, but internationally, are kind of specialized in certain geographies, like you have mountain warfare specialists, you have like the Dutch have this incredible diving unit. But the SEALs are like, we do everything. And they also sort of came into prominence, they started in the 60s under JFK, they really came into prominence post 9-11, because they were being sent out into the Middle East, which is, you know, it’s a landlocked place. But this Navy Special Operations Unit was being very successful carrying out, you know, kinetic operations all across the Middle East. So it’s like a very famous jack-of-all-trades special operations group that, especially after the bin Laden raid as well, that sort of made them celebrities. But even before that, they were very well known as like the jack-of-all-trades special operations group.

STEVEN BARTLETT

And how long is training? How long does it take to get through training and pass the other end?

JOHN ALLEN

Broadly speaking, I would say it takes about two years. But realistically, it takes a little bit longer. There’s two ways to become a SEAL. You either go in as an enlisted person. So there’s the enlisted component of the military, which is somebody basically without a college degree who just raises their hand and just serves. That’s the grunts of the world. Those are the enlisted community. And then you have the officer side, which is somebody who, at a minimum, needs to have a college degree to apply. You go to officer school. And in the SEAL teams, there’s a tiny, tiny number of officer SEALs and a massive number of enlisted SEALs. But there are two very different pathways into training. If you go the officer route, it’s practically like a political appointment just to get an opportunity. It’s so, so difficult to even get a chance to try out what you get. And it’s because there’s just a handful of spots available. That’s really all it was. So you have all these people on the enlisted side who actually have college degrees and could easily become an officer in the military who, let’s say, have other opportunities that they could pursue with their college degree, but they want to be a SEAL. And so you have this big number of people that are electing to go be enlisted to try out to be SEALs. And that’s important because it makes the enlisted side super competitive. You have these professional athletes, and you have Olympians, and you have the best college athletes, and you have MMA fighters and wrestlers, and then the random people like me who have no resume. And you all just show up for the class in San Diego that technically is six months long, but there’s before you’ve been joined the Navy, you need to basically compete for a spot to even have a chance to try out. And there’s a whole application process before you’ve joined the Navy that can take years. And then let’s say you get your chance as an enlisted person. They’re like, OK, you’re going to get a chance to go. Well, first, you’ve got to go to boot camp. That’s two months in Chicago. And technically, you can fail out of it. But really, you won’t. It’s sort of like a suck it up and get through it. But then at the end of boot camp, at least when I went through, you go to this other school, which is like a prep school. It’s another two months in Chicago. Mind you, you haven’t even started training yet. This is like potentially a year of pre-Navy. And now you’re four months into like you’re in the Navy, but you’re not really in SEAL training yet. You go to this prep school where you like learn how to swim and run. You already know how to do these things. But professional coaches work with you. The Navy invests a lot of money in getting you really strengthened up and mentally strengthened. Because following the prep school, you go to San Diego, where you go through what’s regarded as like the hardest part of SEAL training, which is it’s called BUDS, B-U-D-S. And it stands for Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL School. And it’s basically, imagine whatever you think of as boot camp, like military boot camp, make it not two months long, but six months long, because most boot camps are about two, and make it like 1000 times more difficult. It’s really the same concepts. It’s like intense, grueling, physical, emotional and mental torture for six months. And that’s the part where everybody fails out and drops out. That’s like the, if you made a movie about SEAL training, you’d really only focus on the six months of BUDS training. In fact, you’d only focus on the first two months because that’s the most physically challenging. And then once you finish that, you go to advanced training, which you’re still not a SEAL yet. It’s another six months of like learning how to actually do the job. So BUDS is like, can you handle it? advanced training or SEAL qualification training is, I’m going to teach you how to shoot a gun with surgical precision, I’m going to teach you how to jump out of a plane, I’m going to teach you how to like use this technology, because you need to know how to do the job. So learn the job. And then after that, you’ll go to like, or we did anyways, I don’t know if they do this now, you go to like a language school for a month, or you’ll go to like a medical school or some sort of school to give you additional qualifications. And then you go to your team. And so all told, you have about two years from I want to be a Navy SEAL to I am now a Navy SEAL. Two years is usually the mark.

STEVEN BARTLETT

And what’s the similarities that you notice between the people that made it and didn’t?

JOHN ALLEN

The thing that stands out, honestly, and this is what is pretty universally true, although there’s some outliers. is the folks who show up to Bud’s, the candidates who show up to Bud’s that have like an incredible resume. There was a guy that showed up to training who literally played for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He’s like six foot five, looks just like a God. And he’s so humble. Like he’s this big, strong, professional baseball player who I actually have a memory specifically of playing with his character in a video game. And like there’s other people who are like professional football players and all that. And he washed out so quick. And a lot of the other guys with big resumes, like the sports and big accomplishments, they typically wash out really, really quickly. And it’s not because they lack the physical to do it. They don’t. They definitely don’t. And this is generalizing because this is not true of everybody, but let’s take the guy who played for the Diamondbacks. So this person. is used to being, generally speaking, the very best person at what they do their whole lives. And it’s not because there’s anything wrong with them. It’s just sort of a truth. That’s how you became a professional baseball player. That’s how it works. In Buds, your instructors don’t fucking care about who you were. And it’s like a point they make. They don’t care at all about what you’ve done before. In fact, if they even suspect that you think you’re special because you have some bullet point on your resume, like playing for the Diamondbacks, they will torture you and see if you really got it. They will single you out. and specifically make you feel terrible and tell your class to like, look at this guy, he can’t even do push-ups. You play for the Diamondbacks, you can’t even do push-ups, even though the guy’s doing push-ups just fine. But he’s like, look, that doesn’t even count. That doesn’t count. Do another one. Get in the water. Do this. Do that. It’s a mind game. But the guys like me, who I went to Bud’s, and I’m like, I literally am a joke compared to the people that are here. I wasn’t in great shape relative to my peers. I’m certainly not a professional athlete. The only thing on my resume is, well, I nearly flunked out of college, but then managed to graduate college. That is the extent of my resume. I played a little baseball in high school. And so for me, I have very little to lose. Like, either I’ll make it, and that’ll be amazing, and I’ll get to do the thing I want to do, or I won’t, and people will say, that’s about right. The folks that go in that have the resumes on some level, they expect to be really good, even if they’re humble, and everybody in their personal lives also expects them to make it through. Because who wouldn’t? He played for the Diamondbacks. Expectation. It’s brutal. And the course is too long to simply gut your way through it. The level of physical discomfort that you experience in Buds is so unbelievably high. that it’s not you got to want to be here. That’s the way they say it. You got to want to be here if you want to make it through. It’s you need to have something to hold on to in your brain that overrides the discomfort. And it can’t be, oh, I need to make everybody else happy. I need to live up to expectations. Maybe that’s strong enough for you. For most people, it’s not. Like, when you are at, like, your absolute lowest, like, what do you hold on to? And for people like me, it was like, I have to prove myself to myself. I want to prove to myself that I can do this hard thing. Like, it was not even about serving in the military. It was accomplishing this goal, because I’ve set my mind to it. And I want to believe that I’m the guy that can set goals that are hard and achieve them. And so in my worst moments, I would go to that place where I’m like, this is worth it to me. But for other guys, it’s not. And so at the end, when you graduate, you look around, and it’s like a ragtag group of like, short sort of weird looking guys that don’t in any way embody like what you would think of as like, I mean, some guys do. Some guys are unbelievable studs. But it’s like a ragtag group of guys that just didn’t quit. And a lot of it is because they had some sort of chip on their shoulder that internally drove them and it allowed them to persevere when things got so bad because things get so bad in butts.

STEVEN BARTLETT

If I were to meet the guy in his mother’s basement and then meet the guy who qualified from the SEALs training, in terms of their mentality, like their psychology, how would they be different? What is it that, what evidence does the guy that graduated from SEAL training have that the other guy doesn’t have? What is that? What’s the difference?

JOHN ALLEN

I mean, not just to like shamelessly cycle back to this idea of responsibility, but I’m going to do that. Before, when I first got to the basement, I’ve just arrived, I was really not even able to see what a mess I had made of my life. It wasn’t like I knew I had screwed up and was blaming other people. It was more like my default setting was this is somebody else’s fault. Somebody did this to me. I actively remember being furious with my mom and dad for making me withdraw from college when I literally was about to get expelled. I had a terrible GPA. I couldn’t afford to live in the dorms. I had shown no, there was no evidence to suggest I would succeed in college. It wasn’t until I was like home in the basement and the sort of like living in my mom’s basement with no direction that I, it just sort of naturally happened. I was like, wait a minute, it’s you. It’s not them, it’s you. And it seems so obvious now, but it took falling to the bottom. And also, by the way, kudos to my mom because she’s a single mom. She didn’t give an F. She was not like, don’t worry, you’ll figure it out. She was like, no, you’re going to get a job. or you’re going to move out or whatever. And you’re also going to pay rent while you’re here. And that’s it. This is your fault. And at first, I’m mad. But it’s sort of like it became this arduous thing I had to overcome. So it was like no self-awareness, none, and genuinely blaming the world for my problems to probably, if anything, an extreme on the other side, where if you haven’t already noticed, I’m talking about the CS gas thing that I mentioned to you earlier. That’s something that if that happened to other people, I don’t know if they’d talk about it on such a public platform, especially just in the SEAL community. Like reputation is such a big thing that even talking about things that other people know about, but that cast you in sort of a bad light reputationally, I think people would stay away from saying that. But for me, I view it as a strength. to highlight not only the things that I’m good at, but the things that I’ve made a mess of and screwed up because it shows other people that I’m secure. So it’s like ultra self-aware and secure in my image, the opposite as the basement kid. And it took basically falling to the bottom, being home, no new opportunities in front of me. Other people are off at college succeeding and here I am in my mom’s basement for it to sink in that like, if you want to fix this, you have to start with saying it’s my fault and then do something about it.

STEVEN BARTLETT

And it worked. This idea of rock bottom. It’s so interesting, and it sounds pretty tragic that sometimes people do need to go to the bottom on their own. Yeah. To realize that, as the quote says, the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of making a change.

JOHN ALLEN

I’ve never heard that. That’s actually a great quote.

STEVEN BARTLETT

I was like 18 years old, and I was just dropped out of university. And I saw someone on YouTube say, change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change. And this kind of speaks to why some people sometimes, when you listen to their stories, it wasn’t until they hit the basement that they were able to look themselves in the mirror and then take actions in the right direction but also sometimes when you try and help someone and you prop them up like if your mother had gone listen uh here’s some money and you know here’s some uh you don’t have to pay rent right she would be propping you up a little bit enabling yeah yeah i’m trying to think about the kid that’s listening to this right now that can relate yeah or the person in their life, they might be in a job or whatever that can relate to knowing that there’s something not quite right in their life. Maybe they’re at a point where they can start to look themselves in the mirror and take responsibility. But do they have to go to rock bottom to start to change their life?

JOHN ALLEN

Well, I think that part of the reason, or I should say this is more of a general statement that kind of answers this. I, in a way, was fortunate because when I hit rock bottom, I am a person that does not have what is called paralysis by analysis. I’m sort of an impulsive person, for better or worse. And so for me, it’s like once I hit that rock bottom, it wasn’t hard for me to sort of quickly find a good North Star, which the first one was college. I’m going to do college, right? And then when I was nearing the end of college, by this point, I’ve sort of righted the ship at this point, but I wanted a new goal. It was like, oh, SEAL training. That checks some boxes. It’s like, I want to serve. Check. Like, it’s a super hard goal. Check. I’ll have to work for it. Like, it offers me a chance at reinvention and rebirth. Check. OK, good. Like, I jumped to that. That’s what I do. I think there are plenty of people, and this is my guess, I don’t know if it’s true, who maybe have already hit rock bottom and they want to make a change. They know it’s their fault or whatever situation that they know they’ve contributed to it. But they don’t know what to do next. And there’s so many choices. Think about it. If you’re at rock bottom, in some ways, you have every choice in the world to make. And I think that one of the things that I certainly preach when I talk about this at all, which I guess in situations like this, is you don’t need a perfect idea. You just need something that checks enough boxes for you to be worth doing. So for me, it was like, OK, I’m in my mom’s basement. I’ve done this to myself. I am the reason I’m not at school. I’m the reason that my parents are embarrassed about their son. It’s my fault. What do I need to do? OK, well, I should graduate school because that demonstrates that what happened at UMass is fixable. I can graduate school. I can do it. I’m not dumb. I can do that. OK, fine. Got to go to school. That was it. It’s like, it checks a box. So do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT

I think it was Draco Willick that said to me, his friend had called him and was going through a difficult time in his life. Divorce, lost his wife, lost his job, et cetera. And Draco said something words to the effect of, when you’re lost, in like a military context, whatever, you need to start moving. It doesn’t necessarily matter which direction you move in, but you need to start moving in a direction. And that was, I was thinking about that, as you said about this idea of like paralysis by analysis, people, they might be at rock bottom, but they just don’t know what to do. So they just sat in the same situation. Certainty in that context is sometimes better for people than the uncertainty of what happens if I

JOHN ALLEN

What if it’s the wrong decision or something? Yeah, I mean, and also you got to figure it’s sort of like a self-perpetuating problem too, where if you, let’s say you’ve hit rock bottom, even if you don’t know it, and you’re like, oh, I want to fix my life. I want to do something with my life, let’s say, the kind of generic rock bottom. Well, let’s say you get paralysis by analysis, and you’re not able to sort of like pick a path, and you go nowhere. That only reinforces the idea that you screwed up again. But you haven’t. There’s just too many choices, and you’re allowing too many factors to be at play here. Jocko, however he said it, is dead on. And there’s another way that’s talked about in the military, which is an 80% solution now is oftentimes better than a 100% solution tomorrow. And it’s all about speed over certainty. In the military, it applies a lot of times. But that’s the way I think people should generally, not always, but generally look at their lives if they haven’t quite built anything yet, whether they’re at rock bottom or just starting out. They’re young people. Or whatever age you’re at, if you feel like you need to make a change, like you said, the pain of staying the same is greater than making a change. If you’re at that point, you kind of know it. Think about what matters to you, whatever it is. I like to equate it to when you’re in the shower by yourself and you’re just having unfiltered, true thoughts. Ask yourself, what do you really care about? Honest to God. Forget what society says you should care about. Let’s say you really just want to be famous, and that’s the actual core. And you don’t even know why, but that’s what you want. Well, guess what? Listen to that part of you. It’s not vain. It’s a thing that matters to you. Similarly, if you’re like, I want to be just rich. Great. If that’s a real motivation for you, like at your core, in the shower, it’s just you. If that’s really what drives you, great. Those are boxes that must be checked for something to be worth doing. So it’s like have your shower thoughts and be real with yourself. Like what do you really actually care about? Not what society says, not what you want your family, none of that stuff. For me, honestly, the reason the SEAL thing really paid—I wanted to do it, ultimately, is I wanted people to say, that’s John Allen, the Navy SEAL. Because to me, it was like I had been the black sheep in my family because of me. I had discovered this. But it’s like, oh, his sisters have done this. Oh, his dad’s done this. His mom’s done this. And then there’s John. I wanted something that sort of overrode the mediocrity and failure. And I felt like, what better thing? What more honorable thing? And also, I wanted to serve. That’s another check. It’s a big goal. That’s difficult. That’s a check. But ultimately, it was like, I want people to know that I became a Navy SEAL. That mattered to me. And you know what? It flies in the face of what Navy SEAL instructors tell you, which is, you shouldn’t do this because you want to be a Navy SEAL. You should do it because you want to serve the country. And that’s true. And what else are you going to tell your students? But if you really want to be real about it, you’ve got to find your real motivation. And that box must be checked.

STEVEN BARTLETT

Must be checked. Yeah. So I pause on the must be checked because once you become the Navy SEAL. And everyone’s saying, that’s John Allen, the Navy SEAL. Does your motivation disappear or does it become something else? I think it’s really honest, but also quite unorthodox advice to say, listen, if you’re in the shower and you’re going, I just want to be rich so I can prove those people wrong, I want to be famous, prove these people wrong. It’s unorthodox advice to say to follow that. But I have to say, I just completely agree. I agree because, Sometimes you have to have a hypothesis fail you or some kind of idea fail you for you to scratch the itch And that’s why I was focusing on the side of ticking the box. Yeah, it’s gonna stay there. Yes I don’t know if you can go to therapy or do ayahuasca or something to get rid of that thing But for me until you pursue it and have it fail you or succeed. Yeah, it’s gonna stay there.

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah, I mean that ultimately exactly what you said If that box goes unchecked, you might in your life eventually convince yourself that you never needed to check that box. But at some point, at some point in your life, when it becomes too late or you’re about to die, you’re on your deathbed, you will have regret. And I can actually speak to a specific instance in my life, which I had checked a box by this point, but I had one that I hadn’t checked. I was in Afghanistan in 2014. And we were in this alleyway and a grenade came over the wall and it detonated next to a whole bunch of us. And I nearly bled to death. And I have this moment where I can’t pull the tourniquets off of my kit that are rubber banded to my chest for quick access to stop the bleeding. But I was so weak and like losing my vision. We’re in the middle of this gunfight. I couldn’t get them off. And I realized as I’m sitting in this alleyway in the middle of this like horrible place in Afghanistan, like the town was very kinetic and dangerous. And I’m waiting to either be shot by the enemy, who we know is on the other side of the wall that could be coming around, or I’m going to bleed to death, or there are RPGs being fired blindly in our direction. It’s like, I’m about to die, 100%. I’m actively bleeding out, or I’m going to be shot. And all that was running through my head, there was a couple of thoughts. There was one that was kind of funny now, which was, I was like, hmm, I wonder if my obituary will say, Jonathan Allen killed in action, or, John Allen killed in action. So that was going through my head. But I also, in addition to that, I had this really acute sadness that I hadn’t started a family yet. I didn’t have kids. I was married. We’ve been married for several years. And my wife and I, we’d sort of talked about having kids before that deployment. But we were like, oh, we’ll have time. And I’m sitting there in this alley bleeding to death or expecting to be shot to death. I’m at the end of my life. And it was like, holy shit, I wish I had a child. Yes, that’s horrible for the kid. They lost their dad. But like, that was a box for me. I wanted a family. What was the first thing I did when I survived this and got home? We started a family. You know, so it’s like, that’s sort of an extreme example. But I do really believe that a lot of people have boxes that are going to go unchecked. But to your point also, Just try to do it and fail. And believe it or not, you actually checked the box.

STEVEN BARTLETT

Yeah, that’s true. That’s actually really, really true. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so interesting that, because I’ve never actually heard someone give that kind of advice before. What people say is, like, find your why, and they often are quite judgmental about what’s motivating you. Sure. So the only, like, accepted motivation is something like, I want to serve my country, or I want to change the world.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT

But actually, most of us are either, like, driven or dragged, as I say, which could be, yeah, like, driven is, OK, you’re very conscious of what’s driving you, and you’re in control. But then being dragged is the insecurity. It’s the shame. It’s the, you know, my siblings are better than me, and I want to say fuck you to my parents, whatever it might be. Very, very, very interesting. It’s also even more interesting that you ended up where you are today. So you get medically discharged from the military after the Afghanistan.

JOHN ALLEN

It was not immediately after, but basically between that and some mental issues I was having, I was pushed to see a psychologist. This is like years after. So 2014, that injury happens. I survive, obviously. And I ended up getting surgery to sort of like my shoulder was banged up and I got fixed up enough to deploy again. But I was just not fit to serve. Physically, I was really struggling to keep up. I had some issues with my shoulders and my knees. I’ve shrapnel in my leg. But ultimately, I was recommended to a psych in the military because they’re like, dude, you are not like a sane person. Things are not going well for you. Like, close friends of mine just sort of said, I don’t think this is working out. I was very angry. I had like, now I can say it. It’s like I had very stereotypical or whatever you want to call it, PTSD. Like, I had not dealt with the near death experience in Afghanistan and sort of how that went. And so I ended up going for a medical retirement, which was driven in part by the physical injuries, but also by like, mentally, I wasn’t there. So I get medically retired in at the end of 2017. And, you know, it’s, I never really had a plan. You know, it’s like, I knew I was gonna get medically retired, which just means like, you’re gonna get out and there’s gonna be like this amount of money you get paid as a retirement, but it’s not really enough to live on realistically, you’re gonna have to have a job. And, you know, I basically, I got out at the end of 2017. And I went on LinkedIn, and I’m like, I guess that’s where you get jobs, because that’s what I think people do. And I was like on LinkedIn, and I wound up randomly connecting with this guy named Jordan Selleck, who is he was living in New York at the time. He’s this former investment banker, who had just so happened at the time that I was on LinkedIn doing this like kind of weird job search. that his best friend was a transitioning fighter pilot. Like he was leaving the military, going to the private sector, was struggling with the transition, which is very common in the military, making that jump to the civilian world. And Jordan, who’s like this very entrepreneurial guy, he was trying to prove to his friend, his friend’s name was Austin, that like, you must be alone. Like, you’re so successful being a fighter pilot, like, you’re gonna find a job. And he was like, he was doing this exercise where he was reaching out to like, random veterans on LinkedIn and being like, hey, what are you doing, like, with your transition to the civilian world to prove to Austin that like, you’re basically complaining and you can go find a job. But he found, like, one, nobody really got back to him because they didn’t know who he was. But I got back to him and I’m like, actually, you know what, I just got medically retired. I have no idea what I’m going to do. I got kids. I’m stressed. I don’t know. Didn’t know this guy. And so Jordan quickly went from trying to prove a point to his friend. He was like, oh. Well, hey, why don’t you come to New York and I’ll just introduce you to some people in my network. And out of that was born this charity that Jordan and I actually started called Elite Meet. It’s still around today. It’s like a networking event. It’s a series of networking events for transitioning military veterans and private sector hiring managers to meet and get jobs. So I did that for a little while. Ironically, my job became running a charity that helped other vets get jobs. But Jordan instilled in me, he was a big believer in Gary Vaynerchuk’s style of social media, the sort of like bombard the internet with content and be like all in on content. And Jordan, he even had a similar sort of, he was similar to Gary V. And I found it like really fascinating, the idea of social media and content creation, because when I was in the military, I didn’t even have or I might have had a YouTube account, but I certainly didn’t post on it, didn’t have social media. But I, with Jordan, we began using social media content to drive donations for this charity we’re running together. But at some point, I wanted to do more, like with social media. I was doing storytelling, but narrative storytelling, like written out stories about military stuff to try to generate donations. And I was like, yeah, I want to do something for myself with social media, like build a brand for myself. And I committed a cardinal sin, one that I was very aware of. So this is self-awareness, but doing it anyways. In the SEAL teams, and really I think in special operations generally, despite what you see in terms of books written and like movies made about SEALs, and you can Google SEALs, there’s like 78 examples of SEALs that are publicly talking about being Navy SEALs. There is like this code of conduct amongst the active duty community that you don’t talk about being a SEAL. That’s not what – you can say you’re a SEAL. No one’s telling you, you literally have to lie about it. But being a SEAL is not something that’s yours. Being a SEAL is you were allowed to enter a community of people that were fighting for a common goal together, struggling, bleeding, dying together. The strength of the brand of SEAL, the SEAL brand, is built literally on people dying. And so you can’t then leave the military and say, hey, look at me. I was a Navy SEAL, because that’s for personal gain. You can’t do that. It’s sort of a gray area. I get it. I began posting about being, I was the quintessential, look at this guy, Mr. Navy SEAL. At first, it wasn’t that way. It wasn’t like one day I was like, guess what, guys?

SPEAKER_00:

I’m a Navy SEAL.

JOHN ALLEN

But it began as like, oh, I’m going to just like have my own accounts and sort of tell stories about my experience as a SEAL to push people towards elite meat. But then quickly, as these began to succeed, not really, but kind of, they got like 1,000 likes here or there. I was like, wow, that’s pretty cool. And I like began leaning a little more and more until finally I was like full send, like the guy that you’re not supposed to be. This is like in 2018, 2019. And dude, I got disowned by the Navy SEAL community. I mean like hard. Give me specifics when you say discerned. I could pull up DMs from Instagram. Oh, DMs. No, so at first did not catch a whole lot of public. At first, I think I was doing it and people sort of were like, well, he’s doing this charity, Elite Meat, that’s helping SEALs, that’s helping vets. But gradually, as I sort of drifted farther and farther away from that into just like John the Navy SEAL, mind you, I’m not giving up anything sensitive. It isn’t like I’m talking about stuff that’s like, problematic. It’s really just doing some of this, bumping my chest. I began receiving just some of the most painful messages I’ve ever gotten in my life. It’s different than getting hate. As Mr. Pollen on the internet, I certainly get hate from time to time, but it’s different because they don’t know me. It’s like they see somebody on the internet doing something they don’t agree with or like, and so they speak their opinion. I’m sure you’re familiar, but it’s not personal. It might feel personal at first, but you get used to it. This was actual SEALs who I knew, who wanted me to know exactly who was sending this message, like writing me messages to be like, hey, I used to think of you this way. And now I think of you this way with like detailed explanations and talking about how at the team, like we all talk about how much you fucking suck, basically. And like, I lived in Virginia Beach at the time, which is where the SEAL team, I was SEAL team two, that’s where I was at. And so it’s a big town, but it’s where a huge concentration of SEALs were. And during this time, I would go out to the grocery store, and I would see people that I know. These are not, oh, I think that guy could be a SEAL. It’s like, oh, no, I served with him. I know exactly who that is. And they’d mean mug me and my family at the grocery store or the gym. Because remember, this is not a normal group of people. a group of highly trained killers of like operators, people that like go to war. They’re not afraid of conflict. And I have done something that in many ways is like tarnished their brand, not their brand, that’s not how they look at it, tarnished the brotherhood. It’s like I’m being selfish. And I was revived, they hated me. I got, I got Regularly, two to three messages, email, Instagram, wherever. I get phone calls, voice messages of people leaving me just the most deep-cutting, personal, like, this is how I know you, and this is what’s being said about you, and this is how I feel about you. It was horrible. But luckily, I had already had the experience in my life, the CS gas thing, the coming home from college thing, of fairly quickly realizing that no matter how I justify this, no matter how I justify why I drifted into this arena, Ultimately, I knew what was going on. I knew the line. And I knew when I crossed the line of being, no matter what the public thinks about SEAL content that you see on the internet, I knew amongst the huge majority of people that will never be public about their service, the active duty guys and the retired guys, I had crossed the line for them. And I was not dumb. I would have been just as upset if I was them still active looking at a guy like me. But instead of like, getting mad at anybody or looking for retribution or trying to justify it. I deleted it all at some point. I remember there was a night I’m like sitting on my couch and I got a message from somebody that I would have said was one of my very close friends and it just said, you suck. That’s all it said. But that sounds stupid. But this is somebody who’s on team six. This is somebody who is I specifically trained with, and was like very close with, like his wife and my wife were close. And like, I know what the context of this message is. It’s way more than you suck. It’s, we’re not the same anymore. Like you’re different, and I look down on you. And I was like, I can’t do this. There’s no amount of success that I could possibly achieve doing the Navy SEAL content stuff that would be worth what I’m going through right now. And so instead of being like, I’m going to just act like that didn’t happen. I just removed all the content save for a couple of very small specific things. And I hadn’t lost the itch for making content, but it was like, I can’t do anything with regards to being a SEAL, because that’s not worth it to me. And I don’t want to do it, I felt wrong. And after trying things that never worked, like sketch comedy, and like following trends at one point, I was my lowest, my lowest moment, my worst one, was I, there was a trend on TikTok briefly, where people would tell like sort of weirdly traumatic stories, not traumatic, but like intense stories. But with Auto-Tune, they’d use the feature in TikTok that was Auto-Tune and they’d like sort of sing it as Auto-Tune, but it would be like about the time they got like mugged. And so it’s like it’s the contrast is so extreme. It’s sort of interesting. I did something like that, and I made it. And I was like, I cannot post this. This is like the worst thing I’ve ever made. But nothing worked. And I remember thinking like, OK, I don’t have a clue what I could do that would be interesting. And actually, I remember I had these two documents in my computer. This is again, post deleting everything. I’m like trying to make it on social media with something different. I had this one document that was like ideas for content that were not SEAL related, that were like totally divorced from that. The sketch comedy, the auto tune, whatever it was. And I literally had exhausted all of them. But I had this other document that for I don’t even know why I had separated this topic, but it was all I wrote on it was Dyatlov Pass. So personally, I am interested in the strange, dark and mysterious, the tagline that’s become the Mr. Bolland thing. Basically unsolved mysteries, but not like don’t think true crime necessarily think like world level mysteries like What’s out there? Is there life out there? Why is this portion of Antarctica blacked out on Google Earth? The deep, scintillating stuff that no one really has an answer to. I’ve always been drawn to that stuff. And there’s a really famous mystery called the Dyatlov Pass. And it’s about these hikers in the 50s, these nine really experienced hikers who are going for their what’s called their level three mountaineering test, which sounds sort of like run of the mill. But in fact, in Soviet Russia in the 1950s, this was like master mountaineer. Nobody had level three. This is like the top. If you did this, you’re like the best climbers in the country, if not potentially the world. This is a big deal. And the way you pass your level three is you and the people taking it with you. There was nine of them. You have to map out this route through this really rugged part of whatever mountain you’re going to use. They use the Ural mountains, so big snow swept, like huge icy mountains. And you map out this course that like checks the boxes of difficulty. And you’re effectively timed. You have to start on a particular day and time. And they have people set up along the way, the scheduled checkpoints, if you will. And so they brought cameras with them, this group. This is, again, 1952, I think it was. And so there’s these young nine hikers who were so excited to do this test. No one’s stressed. They’re so pumped. There’s a couple of couples in there. They set off on this journey. And I think they reached the first checkpoint. I forget what it is, but they didn’t make it to whatever second checkpoint or whatever it was. And there was a protocol for the people who were sponsoring this test that were part of the checkpoints that knew this. They knew what was going on, where if they missed a checkpoint, there’s this big search that goes out to make sure they’re OK, even though there’s some expectation that they might not make a checkpoint by a day because it’s a difficult test. But the protocol is like really extreme. As soon as they go missing, it’s like the army gets involved, and they go and follow the route to find the hikers. So they missed the checkpoint, this protocol is enacted. And not only are there pictures that we will get from the hikers, but there was cameras that came with the search crew. They follow the trail that they’re supposed to be on. This is again, there’s no trees. It’s just like the tundra. It’s like ice and snow and mountains. And they come across this mountain off in the distance and they see on the windswept side of the mountain, basically halfway up, are these tents that are just these like canvas tents. They barely see them, but they’re situated right in the middle of the slope. which is strategically one of the worst places you can place these tents. So immediately, they’re thinking, one, it has to be the hikers, because who else is out here right now? But two, why in the world would these incredibly talented hikers or mountaineers, why would they ever pitch their tent there? This is the most hazardous part. The wind can whip you off. You either go to the top and over, or you stay to the bottom. Let’s say you’ve begun hiking up that mountain. You get halfway, and you’re like, oh, I can’t make it. You better go back down and make your camp down there. So they see these tents. They’re in the wrong spot. They go up to the tents, and the hikers aren’t there. They’re not in there. There’s pictures of this too. The tents inside had stacks of clothing neatly folded and placed in the corners, like as if they hadn’t, they left their clothes behind. And the tents themselves were cut open, like with a knife, but somehow they deduced that they had been cut open, but from the inside. So presumably one or multiple of the mountaineers chose to cut open these tents in like negative 50 degree weather. And then there were all these prints in the snow that led down the mountain. And some of the prints were bare feet. Some had one shoe and one bare foot. And it’s all nine of the hikers. They spotted these prints. And they follow the prints down the hill or the mountains of big space. And they find this little crops of trees. There’s only a few areas in the Ural Mountains in this part of the Ural Mountains that have trees. There’s this little group of trees, and when they get to the trees, they find three of the hikers, and they’re all deceased. And there’s one who’s basically almost naked, wrapped up on the ground. There’s pictures of this. There’s one who I believe was draped over one of the branches up in one of the trees, and then another one that was also on the ground as well. And there’s these deep scratch marks in the tree, like gouges on the tree as if some animal had been scratching at this tree. And all three of these hikers are deceased and it looks like exposure, but they’re not really wearing the right clothing or they’re missing pieces of clothing, but they’re all deceased. There’s more footprints that lead away from those three about a mile kind of back in the direction the search party had come from. And there’s this big snow drift that created sort of like a snow cave underneath it. And the footprints lead into the snow cave where the other six hikers were. And they’re all deceased as well. Except in there, the hikers had seemingly exchanged clothing. And they know this because the women were wearing men’s clothing and vice versa. Some of their clothes had traced levels of radiation. And some of them had parts of their face removed, it looked like. lips, nose, ears. It almost looked like surgical precision removal. They’re all deceased. And one of the injuries, there was a person in there who their chest had basically been caved in. And it was deduced that the impact it would have taken, there was no lacerations, just their chest was caved in. The impact would have been equivalent to like a speeding car smashing into you at full speed. But there’s no sign of anything that could have done this damage. And so they’re all deceased. And so the Soviet government, they launch an investigation. And during this investigation, they discover that there was a huge military exercise, a Russian military exercise taking place in the Ural Mountains, who had no idea about these hikers. They have no clue that the level three mountaineering test is going on. It’s not even on their radar. And they’re 15, 20 miles away. And one of their senior commanders, on the same night that it’s believed the hikers all died and whatever happened to them happened, he began noticing all these strange lights in the sky over the Ural Mountains going up and down and moving all around to the point where he actually thought it was another country, a foreign country. Are they invading us? And he literally thought it was like an invasion of Russia. And he sent out messages to say, hey, what’s happening over there? Having no idea that he was pointing to the one spot where these hikers were. So during this investigation, they discover that families are clamoring for information about their lost loved ones. Nobody has any idea what’s going on. And suddenly, the Soviet government says, oh, we’re going to shut this investigation down. All we know is that the nine hikers who died died from an unknown, unnatural force, sealed. And to date, even though there was actually a re-investigation done in 2020, it’s remained like one of the great unsolved mysteries, in part because it’s got this like, oh, the Russian government sealed it and there’s more information. What do they mean, unknown, unnatural force? But there’s pictures of the tent, of the bodies, of all this stuff. I always thought that was a fascinating story. And I love stories like that. And I was at this water park in Pennsylvania with my family, indoor water park. And at this point, I’ve exhausted the one list, you know, nothing’s worked on social media. And this new thing TikTok had sort of begun to happen. I didn’t really know what it was. But I was like, maybe I’ll try posting on there, you know, because it’s a new platform, maybe that’ll work. And I was like, but I bet I want to try something else, you know, because these haven’t these ideas haven’t worked. And so, like, in my hotel room, I tell my wife and three kids, like, go down the water park, I’ll meet you down there in a minute. And I just pull out the phone and I do a 60 second rendition of that. And I was like, hey, you know, at the end of this, you’re going to Google, you’re going to Google two words. And I tell this brief story about this, this crazy mystery. And I’m like, that’s called the Dyatlov Pass mystery. That’s the name of the pass they were in when they were found. And I post this video to my account that has no followers. It’s like the Mr. Ballin account. There’s a story behind that, but it’s a nothing account. Post it and really no expectation that this is going to amount to anything. I leave my phone in the room, because I’m going down to the water park. I can’t waterproof my phone. I’ll be with my kids. And when I came back up a few hours later, and I picked up my phone, I couldn’t even get it to turn on. Like it was like, oh, is the power dead? And I finally get it on and it’s just like notifications like mad from this video. There’s over 5 million views on this video. Mind you, everything I’ve ever posted collectively has maybe been like 100,000 views. So this is like massive virality, but it was utterly divorced from SEAL stuff. This is like pure, I think this is fascinating and I love telling stories. And that wasn’t like, oh, boy, here’s a business opportunity. It was more like, oh, my God, this is so cool. I’m going to tell more stories like that, because this is what I like. And I just began making story after story that sort of fell in line with that. And it happened to fall at literally the start of the pandemic. So it’s like suddenly, everybody is not only on their phones, but they’re on TikTok. And everybody on TikTok is like mostly kids dancing and also me telling stories with a flannel and backwards hat. And so the account just blew up like mad. I transitioned to YouTube and I’ve just been telling stories ever since.

STEVEN BARTLETT

 So first and foremost, I have to ask, what do you think happened to those hikers?

JOHN ALLEN

Man, I don’t know. I don’t know. So they reopened the investigation, like I said, in 2020. I don’t claim this to be true, but I think it might have been in part because of the virality of that video. Suddenly, there’s this newfound interest of people Googling that the outlaw passed. And they concluded that there was an ice slab that broke off and killed them. But it’s like, how does that account for, like, the clothes being exchanged, the potential radioactive nature of their clothes, like what the military guy saw with the lights? There’s too many things that don’t get explained. It is true that, like, when you become hypothermic, when you become truly hypothermic and you’re nearing, like, the end, basically, you’re about to die from exposure, It’s you become warm to the point where you’re hot and actually take your clothes off. Yeah, that’s a well-documented thing. So you could say, OK, so they pitched a terrible place on the mountain. They’re being exposed to the elements. They’re basically freezing. Maybe as skilled as they were, they weren’t really prepared for the weather. And so they became hypothermic. And let’s say maybe an avalanche or an ice slab did come down. And maybe they got hit by the ice slab. And now they’re hypothermic. They’re taking their clothes off. But it’s like, OK. What are all the marks on the tree? Why are their clothes radioactive? What did the government mean when they said an unknown unnatural forest back in the 1950s? What were the lights seen by the military guy? There’s too many unanswered questions. So I admittedly am a huge skeptic. And if anything, creating this content has only made me more skeptical because there’s so much stuff that gets put out that’s not true. And it’s just totally made up. But this remains one of those stories that just sort of makes you wonder, Is it possible there’s stuff out there that we don’t necessarily understand, like supernatural forces or extraterrestrials? I’d say this is a story that certainly opens the possibility. But I also would be perfectly fine to hear that actually turns out, here’s all the things that happen that makes that completely reasonable. Maybe there was a leak of some kind that leaked out radiation or who knows what. So I’m open to it. But I think it’s one of the few cases that seems like could make a case for paranormal.

STEVEN BARTLETT

 And my next question is, as you reflect on the journey of your life, from the basement to the Seals, to then producing the Seals content, getting disowned from your Seals brotherhood because of that, then stumbling across this TikTok thing, then YouTube and everything else that’s happened, when you look back and go, like, how can I give anybody advice on how to stumble into their thing based on the actions, the intentional actions that I took that brought me here?

JOHN ALLEN

So one of the things that my wife and I often find ourselves saying is like, wow, like, we the timing on things is just amazing. We were so lucky with timing. And I’ll give you a couple examples. So when I was getting medically retired from the military, there was a time where I actually was going to be pushed out, like actually cut from the military. And it was going to be like a year earlier than when I actually did. And so it was like, hey, you’re gonna get medically retired, and it’s happening tomorrow. And I didn’t have a job lined up. I didn’t have anything lined up. And that’s actually when I began reaching out and I met Jordan. And it was like really quickly, we came up with this elite meat thing. But then after the elite meat thing, I actually had some legs. And we’re getting donations in. We’re putting these cool events on. And I have this feeble little salary coming in from it plus my retirement. I’m like, OK, I can keep things afloat for a little while until I figure out the next thing. Right as that happened, so out of necessity, I found a way to make an income within a month of needing to have an income. The Navy says, actually, we’re going to extend your contract for an extra, I think it was eight months or something. And so suddenly, I had the opportunity with Jordan and EliteMeat, but also got eight more months or 10 months, six. I forget what it was. It was less than a year, but it was a lot more time in the Navy. But I really didn’t have to do much in the Navy. I was already on the medical discharge way. I had to go to work and be there a couple hours a week. It was not hard. But it meant I got paid through the Navy. And so it allowed me really to not worry about pulling money from EliteMeat and pulling a salary. I can just grow EliteMeat with Jordan. and get paid by the Navy. It’s like the Navy is incubating EliteMeat. But EliteMeat wouldn’t have existed if I didn’t have that, oh, my god, I’m getting out in a month. I have to do something about it. And so it feels like, oh, the timing’s so perfect. Like, I started EliteMeat with Jordan, and then I was granted this extra time with the Navy. It fostered this company. It incubated this company. But no, I’ve sort of always looked at my life as being like, man, there’s just such amazing timing on things. Like, I just feel like we’re so blessed with the timing, like the TikTok thing. Like, I just so happen to be making this video when suddenly everybody’s on TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic. Yeah, that’s insane timing for sure. And I’m not denying that that’s a timing thing. But also, I’m somebody that is perfectly willing to take a chance and do something. I don’t get stuck on, is this a good idea or not? It’s like, I’m just going to try this thing. And it’s the people that are sort of willing to quickly check a box and do this thing that will be in a position to where timing can benefit you. If you’re constantly like, oh, I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking things are going to pass you by. And so I forget what the question was, but essentially, The advice I would give is like, really, it’s sort of what Jaco said. It’s this idea of like, you just got to start moving because it’s amazing what doors begin to open up for you if you’re already on the move. If you’re stationary, they don’t open.

STEVEN BARTLETT

It’s interesting, because as you were talking about timing, I was thinking, that’s not what I think the answer is. I was thinking that timing is one of those things you see in hindsight and go, gosh, wasn’t that perfect timing? But for it to be perfect timing, you need to be the kind of guy who’s willing to send their kids down to the pool with your wife and make a TikTok video on a platform you know very little about, doing something you’ve never done before. And it’s actually in that moment that I think that’s your moment of brilliance. That’s when your life pivots. because genuinely 99.9% of people would not be making a video on a platform they don’t know much about, on a subject that they’ve never made a video about before. And your story is like riddled with those moments where, like even responding to the guy on LinkedIn, you said most people didn’t reply. But I responded and then you went and met him in New York or something. So in hindsight, yes, it looks like timing, but actually it’s that you were in moments where you were lost, you got moving, you did something, you had a bias towards action, and failure is feedback. Feedback is knowledge, knowledge is power. So it’s interesting because when you’re talking about like your bias of just like do something, aim at something, what it appears is happening there is even if the thing fails, like some of the things you tried failed, at least you’re getting feedback. And then the feedback’s informing what you do next. Like you said, I did the seals thing on LinkedIn. You learned some stuff about social media there. Okay, it didn’t work out how you wished, but you took that into the next test. And that’s really, I think, when I looked at your story, the defining thing is these just a willingness to, in fact, I’d be honest, a willingness to embarrass yourself and be bad at something.

JOHN ALLEN

You know, it’s funny you say that, because I literally have sort of a mantra that I’ve developed that I can’t claim is something I came up with, but I definitely find myself living by it now. And that is, it’s do things that scare you. You know, quantify that or qualify that. So actually, Will Smith, the actor, has this great thing he does. He goes on Oprah, I think it was Oprah, or some talk show, and he talks about his experience skydiving. And it’s this unbelievable monologue, this impromptu monologue he gives. But he basically is like, you know, my family was like, yeah, or my buddies were, we’re going skydiving tomorrow. And it was like, oh, yeah, that would be so crazy. We’ll go skydiving tomorrow. But he’s like, we’re not going to really do that. And then it’s like the next morning we get up and he’s like, yeah, let’s go get breakfast, guys. Like, no, no, we’re gonna go skydiving. Like, let’s go, let’s go skydiving. And he’s like, wait, we’re really doing that? And they’re like, yeah. And he’s like, oh, my God, I don’t want to go skydiving. I thought we were just like saying it last night. And he winds up, you know, going with his buddies to the actual, you know, airfield. And they’re like signing the paperwork. And he’s like, guys, are we really doing this? I don’t want to do this. Come on, it’s not so bad. And so before long, he’s in the plane, up in the air, attached to the instructor. And he’s like, they open the door up, and they’re like, all right, it’s your turn. And he’s like, I’m sitting on the edge, and I’m having this full-blown crisis. I don’t want to jump. I’m terrified of jumping. And the instructor’s like, all right, Will, we’re going to go on three. One, jumps.

None:

Really?

JOHN ALLEN

And he was like, the second I left the plane, the fear was gone. And it was just this exhilarating experience of soaring through the air, of skydiving. And he was like, when I landed, he’s like, I suddenly understood that there’s always been this aspect in my life that I’ve sort of seen in other ways in my life. The best things in life, this is Will Smith, not me, the best things in life are on the other side of fear. And so what I’ve taken that as, you know, like becoming a Navy SEAL, for example, when I decided to do it, like, there’s a huge amount of fear and not so much fear of failure, it’s like, it’s fear of like, not stacking up. Like, when I got there, like, I was so intimidated by the people around me. But I knew if I could just, like, not let the fear overwhelm me, that the reward on the back end would be so high, you know? Or even take, you know, I just did a live, we did a live tour with 15 shows. I actually am terrified of public speaking. I’ve had instances in my life where I have frozen up publicly giving a speech and literally had to put the microphone down and leave. I’ve had that experience and I’m volunteering to do a tour with thousands of people. But it’s the way I look at it is like the things that you don’t want to do, you’ll be indifferent to. The things that you do want to do, you’ll typically have a if it’s a if it’s a big enough thing, the best things in life, so to speak, you will have some element of a fear response to it. Now, of course, If you’re scared to go down in the basement because you hear an intruder breaking in, listen to yourself. Don’t go down in the basement. When it comes to goal setting, kind of going back to that idea of shower thoughts, right? Everybody has something that they just really want to do. And it’s not even necessarily motivated by one particular thing. Maybe it’s some action they want to take. Maybe it’s talking to a friend that they’ve blown off for 10 years, or it’s public speaking, or whatever it is. But they know, even if they don’t admit to it, deep down they know fear is the thing keeping them from doing it. It’s fear of embarrassment. It’s fear of failure. It’s a fear of all the things that make us human. It’s the very select number of people in this life that are still able to say, I’m going to still do that thing that scares the fuck out of me, that have the best and most fulfilling lives. Not always, but they often do. And that’s why we look at Will Smith, for example. That dude, very likely, just because I’m referencing him, he’s probably had to do things that were so uncomfortable in his life. To be an actor at his level is like, hey, perform in front of everybody right now. and don’t screw it up. You know, it’s like pressure and performance. It’s like, that dude has faced fears his whole life. Yeah, he’s using skydiving as an example, but his life is very likely a product of a guy who faces fears. But it’s the fear knowing that if I do this, there’s something big on the other side. And so I preach to my children, and I try to live this idea of do things that scare you. And literally, the live tour that we just did was it. I was having like an existential crisis before we began. But the second I took the stage, it was like, oh, this is great, so.

STEVEN BARTLETT

It goes back to what you were saying about when Will jumped out of the plane. Yeah. All the fear was there before he jumped. Oh, yes. And just like you walking out on that stage, the fear, you’re tormented before. Oh, yes. I always find before significantly harder in every way. Oh, yeah. Before everything that I’ve got in my life is the worst part. Once you get into it, you’re confronting reality, which isn’t always as bad.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT

But before is horrible. And also when you were talking, I was thinking, You know, it’s really either way you’re making a decision in those moments. Like when you were thinking about your life tour, the decision is, do I accept the unchecked box or do I accept this mental torment that I’m going to inflict upon myself?

JOHN ALLEN

That’s very true.

STEVEN BARTLETT

And I think, yeah, when they talk to people in their deathbeds and stuff, the worst thing is the unchecked box. It’s gotta be. Not that I walked out and put the mic down and walked off.

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah, I look back at the fact that I was in San Francisco at a dinner where I literally froze and put the mic down and walked off. I looked at that as a catalyst for why I was so scared to do public speaking this time. And it ultimately pushed me to do it. I don’t regret San Francisco. I’m glad it happened. but only because I faced it later on. I would be so embarrassed and I would harbor like my pain forever if I never tried again. But yeah, it’s like the, you don’t regret the failure, you regret not trying.

STEVEN BARTLETT

How do people misunderstand you? Because they, like you, they see you on a screen. Sure. And they consume a certain type of content you make. They probably don’t know the full context of your life. But how do you think people have misunderstood you?

JOHN ALLEN

Oh, good question. I would say, and this is not even to try to curry favor with my former SEAL brethren, but I think that even when I was posting, and this is really just specifically to the people that really disown me, who still very likely do. You know, my intention when I was posting the the seal stuff before Mr. Ball and thing happened, it was never like, I’m so great. It was more like, I want to do something with my life. And this feels like an opportunity. And I know it’s sort of like, questionable, but when you’re no longer in that insulated team room, when you’re in the wolf pack, so to speak, it’s easy to view the rest of your life as being, oh, it’ll, I become a seal, I can do anything I want. But like, when you’re cast out, or when you leave, and you’re by yourself, and you get to like, figure out your new life, it’s it’s really difficult to imagine how you’re going to do that without leveraging, you know, the biggest thing you’ve ever done. And so I think that the one definite specific thing is I never made that content, because I literally believed I’m the special guy. And like, everybody better look at me as like Mr. Navy SEAL. I was very aware of the fact that I was a junior SEAL relative to the other people that had served and like my experience was minimal compared to others. So I think that some people think that I actually somehow believe that I’m like I’m a superhero and I didn’t then and I don’t now. I’d say now sort of the Mr. Ball inside of things, there’s like a practical thing, which is The as the sort of Mr. Bolland thing has grown to where it is now to where it’s a it’s a pretty recognizable thing in the genre of the strange, dark and mysterious. It’s been really, really challenging for me personally to balance my, my life with my wife and my three kids who I adore, and sort of like, you know, responsibilities with content. I mean, we have a recording schedule, we have things that I sort of have pledged to do. And as you know, with content creation, there’s not really an end, you just sort of keep doing it. I think that by no means am I saying like, oh, this job is so hard, people better sympathize with me, hardly, like I understand the privilege. But at the same time, like I started making content and it was like an outpouring of content constantly. I was making five videos a week sometimes that are like 25 minutes each by myself, like shooting it, editing it, everything. It was like, it would take me about 26 hours or so per video over seven days. So it’s like, I really wasn’t sleeping. I became like a raging alcoholic. I became like horribly overweight because it was like everything got pushed aside to make videos. And then as I realized that doing content at that fervorous rate was really taking a toll on my physical health, my mental health, and definitely my relationship with my wife and kids, I began to sort of make an exchange. It was like, I’m going to do less content for more time with my family. And loads of people got that. It isn’t like the masses were like, dude, you’re a jerk. But I think what’s happened now, and it’s sort of a product of success, is we’ve reached a point, not just me, but like, we have a team that’s pretty sizable, we have an amazing studio, we have publishing division, we have this, we have that, like, we’ve reached a point where I think people view me as like this corporate guy out to get money. When in reality, like, you were talking before the show, like, you’re like, it’s weird. People say you’re so successful when I don’t even know what I’m doing. Like, I’m still very much the guy that randomly made a video that went viral on TikTok. And so one of the harder things for me has been as the audience grows, which I’m happy for, it’s like, you really have to understand that there are people that don’t like me anymore. have taken an issue with me. And it’s always this idea that like, I’m somehow like this money grubbing, like corporate guy that is only in it to make money. When in reality, like, as you’ve probably seen with this interview, dude, my default is I love telling stories. I love this genre, always have. And like, I also I kind of like being my own boss to a degree. So it’s like it checks a lot of boxes for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT

Do you ever worry that you’ve got your priorities wrong? And when I say that, I really mean, because when you’re a content creator, like we both are, like you say, it’s constant, it’s constant, it’s constant, it’s constant. And there’s no light at the end of the tunnel in terms of, there’s not like you get off this train at some point. If you get off, you fail effectively. So how do you think, because if I said to you, you’re going to be doing this forever, like you’re going to be doing what you do now for the next 30 years,

JOHN ALLEN

You know, I think that I’ve actually probably reached a point in my life as a content creator where maybe I haven’t come to it exactly the way you’ve just laid it out, but it’s I’m definitely not currently in this for money. If anything, I’m in it for, I get a lot of enjoyment out of literally telling stories. I mentioned to you pre-show that doing the live tour was so much fun because I got to actually interact with these people that show up as numbers on my YouTube videos, but they’re real people. And it’s like, it was so much fun, like fulfilling for me. I literally told Nick, my CEO and my manager, Like, before the tour started, like, I would have paid to do the tour. And now, especially, I would have paid money to have that experience, to put those shows on. But yeah, like, looking ahead, it’s like I’ve sort of reached a point, which is, like, I was never really in this for fame or money, or I definitely was in it for, like, the idea of being successful, no doubt. I want to be successful. And things come with that, that are in the money and fame and all that. I ultimately just, I’m a guy that just like tries new stuff. I’ve done lots of new things. I sort of reinvented myself several times over. But I do really well when I just sort of have a new goal. And I thrive in that environment. And like for me, like when the Mr. Ballin thing started, it was not how much money can we make or how successful or how big of a business can we make? It was like, can I make another video that people like? Can I keep doing that? And that became the goal. Can I repeat interest in the videos?

STEVEN BARTLETT

Could you see yourself ever stopping?

JOHN ALLEN

Yes and no, for sure. Because I think that I’m also capable of saying, and now I’m good. I’m going to go do this completely new thing with my family and ride off into the sunset.

STEVEN BARTLETT

You think you’re capable of that, Saynor?

JOHN ALLEN

I do, actually.

STEVEN BARTLETT

How many subscribers have you got total? It’s like, I mean, your main channel’s got almost, what, 10 million?

JOHN ALLEN

It’s about 10. I think that if you, I think we’ve done the math and we looked at all areas, all platforms, including podcasts, it’s probably somewhere around 20 to 25 million.

STEVEN BARTLETT

 say 20, 25 million subscribers, you would be okay with just walking away and saying, could you see that reality in the future?

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT

Is there anything that it would take for you to get there? Is it like, would you need, is there anything, any catalyst you think?

JOHN ALLEN

You know, actually it’s funny you bring this up because I’ve sort of mentioned the live tour a couple of times. If I had to be honest about my, deeply internalized, unchecked box from the time I became an adult. Well, from the time I joined the military, it was, I always just had this interest in giving a big public talk for no other reason than to simply conquer that moment. My dad is an incredible speaker. He’s done some pretty big talks. And I’ve seen him speak and he’s so good. And I’ve always known that I’m a good speaker. I can tell stories. This is something well before Mr. Pollan. But I viewed it as something that was so terrifying that I would never actually do it. I was the guy that had that thought and was like, I’ll live with an unchecked box. And I would tell myself it’s because I don’t really have the content to deliver a talk. I have the ability, but no content. And that was my excuse. But then the Mr. Ballin thing sort of takes off. And suddenly, it’s like, oh, you have the audience. You have the content. You have all this stuff. It is now a decision. Are you going to do it or not? And I, over the last couple of years, have really mentally tortured myself to work myself up to be like, I’m not only going to do the live stuff, but I’m going to do a whole tour. And I told you before the show that I wanted limited production value. A part of that was because I wanted it to be me with a spotlight on me with a microphone to make it as intense as it could possibly be. Because I felt like if I didn’t start there, I’d be worried I didn’t fulfill the thing I’ve always wanted to do, which is like be the guy with the mic and captivate people. And so I did that. I feel like I genuinely accomplished this thing that I really didn’t think I would ever actually do because fear was too much. I wasn’t able to get to get past it. But as a result, coming back from that tour, and this is going to sound so like egotistical, but it’s like we come back from tour, and we have this the graphic novel released, New York Times bestselling graphic novel, like it’s beautiful. I’m so proud of that book. You know, the tour was like, statistically, financially, whatever you want to call it, huge success. You know, the YouTube channel, the podcast, everything’s going great. But I suddenly had no more genuinely deep-seated, unchecked boxes. I don’t. The only thing I have is like… a real desire to be a good dad, but it hasn’t, there’s not a specific way to quantify that. But by doing the live thing, which was so in the back of my mind, now that it’s been checked, I could do 50 more live tours and it would never be the same as the first one. Like I could right now visit, hey, there’s 70,000 people out there, go tell a story impromptu. I could do that right now and it wouldn’t be, it’d be stressful as hell, but I’d do it. I don’t have, and this is again not meant to be egotistical, I don’t have a goal anymore. I have now reached a point where the only other thing that I wanted to do was pitch for the Boston Red Sox. And I think that ship has sailed. That’d be the one thing I’m not able to do. But I don’t really have the big audacious goal. I’m sure I’ll find one. I’m looking for one. But I’ve sort of reached a point where I adore the storytelling aspect of storytelling. I just do. I’m doing it right now. But I also adore my family and my kids. And I want to have a full life there. And by the way, I definitely have a good balance right now. But to your point, could I do this for 30 more years? The answer is no. I could do this for a time and I’ll put all of my energy into it. And when people hear my fans, when I say like, I genuinely care about what you think, I’m in the comments, I read Reddit, I read painful things on Reddit, I read all this stuff. It’s because I genuinely care because this was never about building a business. That’s a product of the thing that I love to do. It’s a product of telling stories and loving to do that. But yeah, I don’t have the deep unchecked box. I hope to find one, but right now it’s like, I feel like I’m just sort of doing stuff and I need to find the thing and I don’t have it. I’m so fortunate, so blessed and I love my life. I love that, but I don’t have, I’ve done the box checking and I don’t know what’s next.

STEVEN BARTLETT

Everybody needs an unchecked box, don’t they?

JOHN ALLEN

I feel like you do. It keeps you moving, keeps you like thinking about that. It’s purpose and meaning, isn’t it?

STEVEN BARTLETT

It’s like a…

JOHN ALLEN

there was that horrible disaster with the little submarine that imploded. Horrible thing. And I was reading about it and like the people that… that go on these deep sea excursions are typically like billionaires. It’s people that literally have every resource known to man. You can do basically anything you want within reason. And it’s like, they can’t figure out what to do now. Because everything, like to us, if it’s like, hey, do you want to go buy $100 million yacht today? Like, we can’t do that. Like, I can’t go buy $100 million. Maybe you can. I can buy $100 million yacht. But it’s like, imagine being it’s very difficult to do this. I’m sure billionaires could tell us. If you could buy anything, it’s like suddenly everything loses its value, at least the things you can buy. It’s only valuable to us because we can’t have it. It’s like, I can get this nice of a car, but I know I can’t get a McLaren. But that’s what makes this one special, because I can’t afford this one. But it’s like the billionaires, it’s like, oh, well, all I can do is like adrenaline now because it’s money doesn’t put up. So it’s I’ve sort of reached a point, not billionaire status even close, but it’s like. It’s hard to figure out what I even want to do besides knowing wife and kids is like a really big thing for me. It stems literally from nearly dying in Afghanistan, like really cherishing the fact that I have a family. But it’s like I also cherish what I have here with Ballin Studios. I just I’m waiting for the next big sort of unchecked box to appear.

STEVEN BARTLETT

What’s your journey like been with your own mental health? Because you talked about PTSD. You talked about becoming a bit of an alcoholic as well at one point. What’s that journey been like? What’s that sort of overlaid across your story?

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah, I’ve really struggled with my mental health. In particular, kind of like in the, from military service was a big part of it. When I was medically retired, so 2014, I get hurt in Afghanistan. I really didn’t, I thought I dealt with it because you have to go see a therapist and stuff. Post deployments, you go speak to somebody. But I sort of was just sort of playing the game to get through it because I just wanted to deploy again and be a part of the team again. It wasn’t until later on that I actually deployed a second time and I went to South America. And I remember not giving much thought to the deployment before I got there. I remember thinking like, compared to going to Afghanistan, we’re going to South America to like, sit in like a nice house, literally in a beautiful part of South America and like train Peruvian military forces. Like it’s not a combat deployment. This is like, you’re deploying and you’re living there, but you’re just sort of like a teacher. That’s the gist. And that’s an amazing thing to do, but it’s definitely not combat. But as a result, I really didn’t like mentally prepare myself for what it would be like to be in Peru. And if you don’t know this, like Peru is a totally Spanish speaking country. It’s very, at least where we were, there was very little English, like very, very little. And so I remember I had to go late to Peru. So my team had gone, the group of us that was deploying there, they went early to Peru. And I went like a week later. And it meant that I had to fly in to the airport in Peru by myself. And I had to like navigate the airport and I speak a little Spanish, like barely conversational. And I didn’t take it seriously at all. They gave a Spanish course as I blew it off. And I remember I got to Peru, and it was like, oh, my God. As soon as I landed and I look around, and no one speaks English. I’m trying to figure out where to go. Everything’s in Spanish. I can’t find my ride. My ride, by the way, is a local who speaks Spanish, doesn’t know what I look like. And my bag got stuck, and they were trying to figure out what was in my bag, but I don’t speak their language. It was so stressful. And then I finally get in the vehicle to get brought to our hotel. our house we were at, but to get there, it required driving through like a true like slum, like a very, very unsafe place. And I remember thinking like, I am in a totally foreign country. I’m so far from my family and I’m going to be here for six months, which is not long by, you know, deployment standards, but that’s a long time to be away. And it was like, I didn’t put any thought into this. I can’t believe I’m going to be here. It like I had suddenly, I feel like I was in Afghanistan again a little bit. I struggled so, so bad on that deployment with just being sane. Like I was so miserable there. There was like, to the point where I was borderline having delusions. I was so depressed. I can’t even describe it. I had this recurring dream where I’d be lying on my bed. And it’s also, it’s always moist in Peru. Like it’s, everything’s wet. Like no matter what, like your sheets are wet, your clothes are wet. It’s like a very humid environment. And I’m laying in my bed. I don’t have a fan. It’s humid in this crappy little room. And outside, I just hear the chaos of the Peruvian streets. And I would fall asleep. And I’d have this dream that I was in Russia standing on the corner of this embassy or some federal building. And somebody would come out of a car and grab me and hijack me and take me hostage. But it was over and over again. I had this dream to the point where I began to believe I was losing my mind. that like, how can I have the same dream? I’d like wake up in a panic. I missed my wife so terribly. She was pregnant with our first child. It was awful. It was like the worst time of my life. And it’s hard to even even now to put it into words. It was just like I had bordering on like a mental collapse. And it was in part because I just didn’t appreciate the fact that like, you’re going to another part of the world where everything is different. And I also sort of began to confront, I guess, my demons from the deployment to Afghanistan. There was just some things that I, that we did, that I did that were not necessarily wrong or like illegal at all, but just like it’s war and war is like this horrible thing and seeing it up close, man, it’s just, it’s rough, you know? And at the time you’re so conditioned. to not only see war and be okay with it, but to practically revel in it. Because how else do you get young men to keep going to war and keep fighting and dying? You need men and women. But it was like I, yeah, it was it was like I had like a breakdown, like a mental sort of questioning why am I in the military, you know, questioning who I was. And so I ended up getting medically retired, and it was not really from Peru at all. It was more like I was so unhappy. I came back from Peru, and I just detested the fact that I was in the military. I didn’t feel like it was the place for me. I also was physically injured. I was dealing with the injuries. And I ended up getting medically retired, but it was my choice if I wanted to continue to see a therapist after I got out. And at first, I didn’t. At first, when I got out, when I got medically retired, I just was like, whatever, I’m done, I’m on my own. But I was so angry all the time. Like, just everything made me mad. I was so like, on edge, not even like jumpy, but just I was just like, So high-strung and it got to the point where like nobody wanted to be around me like my kids didn’t wanna be around me my wife didn’t want to be around me and Ultimately, they were like, I think you need to see somebody and I was like, you know what? I think I do too like I feel like I’m a mess and it was through therapy that I this is like 2018 or so that I realized I had some very deep-seated issues with myself with my service with just stuff I saw and did and And it was only when I began to sort of openly talk about those things that I actually began to sort of forgive myself and begin to feel content. Like, what’s the word? Content again. You know, it’s not about like, therapy is not meant to make you forget stuff. It’s to give you perspective that you didn’t have. And I just, I think I had fallen into a cycle of like, just detesting who I was. Why? I think that it was like, ultimately, if I were to boil it down to its simplest part, it’s like, I wanted to be a Navy SEAL, in part because I just wanted to go through the training. I wanted to serve in the military, but I didn’t really think that hard about that. It was mostly like, I want to serve because it’s an honorable thing, and I know people that have done it, and that’s something that means something to me. But it was really the draw to be a SEAL that was the challenge that I saw. That’s the thing. It’s going to take years to do it. It’s like this really hard thing. It was like the idea of even contemplating what life would be like as a SEAL felt like even cart before the horse. It’s like, who do you think you are thinking about what it’s going to be like to be a SEAL? Like, if you ever get there, you’ll figure it out. And this is actually a, I think it’s a relatively common phenomenon that the people that become SEALs, it’s almost surprising. Like, you become a SEAL, and you’re like, wait a minute. Now I’m going to be a Navy SEAL, which sounds goofy. But it’s years to get to that point. And all the way up until the end, to a degree, you can not make it. You can fail out. And so you finally become a SEAL, and you realize the reality of the job. And I say this not because I have deep exposure to this, but because it’s just true, which is in this job, people die. and you kill people. Like, that’s kind of the gist of the job. There’s way more to it than that. But it’s like, that’s the job, guys. Like, why do you think they make video games and movies about it? And I think that there’s a mental conditioning to being able to do that job that comes from training. And frankly, it’s a remarkable thing that they’re able to create this system that creates really capable warfighters, because that’s how you protect your country. That’s how you go out and do what you got to do. But when you come out of that, when you sort of – what’s the word? It’s almost like when you – it’s like you enter this matrix of thinking when you go through training and you become like willing and able to fight wars, basically. But when you begin to fracture and you begin to sort of realize that you want to do something else with your life, you have to like kind of come to terms with what you have been doing and the way you’ve been thinking about it. You begin to view who you were as a SEAL as a person you don’t, for me, only. I was not proud of the person I had become. I had sort of really leaned into being as aggressive and as like, you know, like alpha as I possibly could be, not with my teammates, but just in doing the job that I had sort of drifted down a path that I wasn’t very proud of. And I think that realizing that this wasn’t a fit for me, like being in the SEALs, even though I got medically retired, I think I realized it wasn’t a fit for me and I would have gotten out whether or not I was medically retired. It was really difficult to cope with that loss of identity.

STEVEN BARTLETT

You still have those demons.

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah. But I go to therapy for them and shout out to Vinnie Shorman, who actually is he’s based in the UK. He’s my therapist. He’s awesome. We haven’t really delved too deeply into the military stuff. But yeah, I think that it’s, it’s something that will always be with me. I certainly when I think about having served, I’m very proud and I’m proud to have I’m a veteran now and the people I worked with were incredible. Even the people that hate me now, like, it doesn’t mean I think any less of them. There are incredible people in the military. I think that I just sort of, it wasn’t a fit for me. It was like, I thought the military was, but it was the SEAL thing that drew me in. And in many ways, this is gonna sound weird, but I was sort of lucky enough to get to deploy to Afghanistan and actually have a combat deployment. Because many people, what happens is they go to like a war fighting unit, like a special operations unit, and then they never see combat. And it’s not because they made any decision. It’s just the way it goes. And those people, it’s sort of like they have this unchecked box, but it’s not their decision. And so in a way, I was given this gift, and it sounds horrible to say it that way, but I don’t know how else to say it, of getting to sort of do the job in real life. But there are sort of like, and anybody who’s listening that’s done multiple deployments, like, look at this guy. Like, I don’t claim to have like, oh, I’ve done 87 deployments. And this is my experience. It’s just from like, I had one combat tour, one. But it was enough to show me that that isn’t what I was cut out to do. But I still did those things, and I still was that person. And now, as a civilian, sort of reconciling that I’m such a different person now, in a good way. I’ve taken all the best qualities I possibly could, and I’ve poured them into this person. I’m trying to be a good husband and a good dad, and I’m trying to do all the right things. But it’s like I have this part of me that it’s just crazy to me that I was ever a Navy SEAL. It’s crazy.

STEVEN BARTLETT

Everybody has their demons to some degree, whether it’s, you know, it’s a spectrum of how strong those demons can be and how much control they can have over your decisions. What have you learned about dealing with demons that might be of any, because you’ve been to therapy, a lot of people haven’t, a lot of people maybe even haven’t arrived at the awareness that they need to go yet. What have you learned about dealing with demons that might be useful to anybody listening?

JOHN ALLEN

that you can’t talk yourself out of them. A demon to me is something that If you begin to have those thoughts, and you feel them creeping in, and you tell yourself, stop thinking about it. I don’t want to. I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to think about that. If you have those thoughts in your life, that even just the slightest beginning of a thought about that thing starts to creep into your head, and your reaction to it is, not now. I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this right now. It’s all happening in your head. If that’s something that you deal with, That’s a demon. It’s something that is like the uncontrollable thought that comes into your head. It usually happens at the same time of the day or same thing that triggers it. And if your reaction to it is, oh my god, I can’t think about this thing, like that is a demon in your life. And you are not going to be able, at least in my opinion, long term, to simply convince yourself that that’s not a demon. It is a demon. It doesn’t matter if it’s rational or not. For me, I have several that sort of creep into my life. But the only way I have found to sort of cope with them is to sort of not embrace them, because that’s not what you do, is to talk about them with someone who it’s cathartic to talk about it with a therapist. But it’s even more cathartic to almost hear yourself talking about it. Like, you actually have for me specifically, like I have things that I’ve said in therapy that I can’t believe I’m saying out loud that are so like personal and intimate, and so tied to like deep insecurities and pains in my life, but it’s only in that environment with like a third party who’s neutral in a private setting. that these things just come to the surface and I’m saying these things. And the beautiful thing about having a great therapist is their whole gig is they’re listening and interpreting and providing perspective. They’re not trying to like tell you, oh, that’s not a thing. It’s like, well, have you thought about it this way?

STEVEN BARTLETT

One of the things that I think about all the time, because my life is quite hectic and busy, is how to manage my energy load. And as a podcaster, you kind of have to manage your energy in such a way that you can have these articulate conversations with experts on subjects you don’t understand. And this is why Perfect 10 has become so important in my life, because previously, when it came to energy products, I had to make a trade-off that I wasn’t happy with. Typically, if I wanted the energy, I had to deal with high sugar, I had to deal with jitters and crashes that come along with a lot of the mainstream energy products. And I also just had to tolerate the fact that if I want energy, I have to put up with a lot of artificial ingredients, which my body didn’t like. And that’s why I invested in Perfect Ted and why they’re one of the sponsors of this podcast. It has changed not just my life, but my entire team’s life. And for me, it’s drastically improved my cognitive performance, but also my physical performance. So if you haven’t tried Perfect Ted yet, you must have been living under a rock. Now is the time. You can find Perfect Ted at Tesco and Waitrose or online where you can enjoy 40% off with code DIARY40 at checkout. Head to perfectted.com. Quick one. I want to tell you about a new health product slash gadget that’s had a big impact on my life but also my partner’s life. They are a sponsor of this podcast and me and my partner are both quite obsessed with it now. It is the Bonn Charge Infrared Sauna Blanket. Have you ever heard of an infrared sauna blanket before? Infrared sauna blankets are designed to give you the exact same benefits of infrared saunas that you find at gyms and spas and health clubs, but they’re portable. You can use them at home, you can use them when you travel and anywhere in between. It heats the body directly rather than the air around you. And for me, when I use the Boncharge Infrared Sauna Blanket before I sleep, my sleep scores go up. I’m better recovered the next day when I go to the gym because it helps with circulation and stiffness and muscle soreness. But also, infrared is associated with really improving your skin. They are a sponsor of this podcast and because of that, they’ve offered all of you listeners a 25% discount when you try Boncharge’s Infrared Sauna Blankets today. To get that discount, use the code DIARY at checkout and you’ll also get free shipping and a year-long warranty. Head to bondcharge.com slash diary and get started on your infrared sauna journey today. Your father, you mentioned earlier that you were raised by a single mother in the basement at least. How has your father been a sort of key figure in the man that you are? And we talk about demons and the demons that you have.

JOHN ALLEN

So, you know, it’s funny, my dad and I recently have sort of had a resurgence. He and I sort of had, I guess you could call it a falling out. I was very close with my dad growing up. My parents split when I was 13. And even though I was living with my mom and sisters, my dad was a very active part of my life. It isn’t like I didn’t see him again. But we had a good relationship, me and my dad. And then when I left for the Navy, it came after I had found a way to graduate college. And I was talking about law school a little bit. And I think my dad, he was like, that’s great. My son, he turned it around. He’s got this career in mind that seems like a really strong idea. And I sort of sprung it on him and my mom and my sisters that I’m like, actually, no, when I graduate college, I’m going to enlist in the Navy and try to be a Navy SEAL. I hadn’t really talked about it with them at all. I mean, I’m exaggerating, but it was a very quick turnaround. And I didn’t want to talk to them about it, because I knew they’d say, one, why will you make it through? And two, why are you doing this? And so when I began talking about it, like right at the end of my college career, like literally I’m getting ready to enlist, my dad, I think he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the idea that I really was going to do this for reasons that make sense to me now that didn’t at the time. It’s his son. If you’re successful, that’s not good. You’re going to be a Navy SEAL like going to war. If you’re not successful and you wash out of training, you’re stuck in the Navy in the sense that you don’t get to pick another job. You kind of become needs of the Navy and you have to go do like these crappy jobs for like four years. Nobody likes being stuck if they don’t have what’s called a rate secure job. So it’s like he’s viewing it as both outcomes sort of come with big negatives. But the way it came out to me was he doesn’t believe in me. He doesn’t believe I can be a Navy SEAL. Like he thinks I’m not going to make it. I’m sure that was not what he intended, but that’s the way I interpreted it. And it marked like a departure in our relationship in 2010. I left for boot camp. And while he and I absolutely maintained some level of contact from 2010 until quite literally like a few months ago, I barely spoke to my dad by choice. I had a lot of ill will towards him. I always just sort of felt like He doesn’t believe in me. He also, he got remarried and he has, and he’s, you know, he got remarried as a family. It just, I had a lot of resentment towards him that some was founded, much of it was not. And it sort of became something that it never was, which is I had it in my head that my dad doesn’t believe in me. That really was the thought. And it actually helped propel me to, at times there were, there were days in SEAL training where I would literally think to myself, If I don’t make it, I can’t even fathom what it would be like to face my dad who, in my head at the time, I’m like, he’d be like, told you so. Like the idea of that made my skin crawl, you know? So in many ways, my relationship with my dad, it had become sort of negative for many years, but it sort of maintained a pretty healthy chip on my shoulder that pushed me to sort of prove him wrong in a sense. But with self-awareness recently, like very recently through therapy with my boy Vinny Shorman, and through some sort of the world lining up, he and I sort of reconnected. And we actually had some frank discussions about that. And it turns out that no, my dad just literally was worried about his son and felt like I didn’t like him or love him. And we sort of drifted and life happens. I had my life, he had his life, but we’ve reconnected now and I’m happy for it.

STEVEN BARTLETT

There’s a lot of men that aren’t at the place yet where they, they’ll speak openly about their demons and how they’re feeling and their emotions and stuff. Especially, I mean, people that have been in combat and that scene is big, tough guys, right? What would you say to those men that maybe, because we all feel things. Most of us don’t have the tools to know how to talk about it. We don’t have the environment. Maybe we don’t have friends or outlets where we can talk about it. And a lot of men don’t feel like they can, even I was one of those men that, probably until about the last I’d say two years, I would never tell my partner if I was having a bad day. If I was feeling bad, if I was anxious in any way, if I was struggling with something, I would always try and shield everyone from it. Like I thought as a man my job was to just take it, take everything, absorb, hold. But what I came to learn is that it is coming out. Yeah. But in with unintended consequences and in unexpected ways, it’s coming out somewhere, maybe in my mood, um, maybe in my health, maybe in my habits, um, maybe in my search for quick fixes of dopamine, it’s going to come out. So I ran the experiment one day of just like sitting my partner down and saying, look, I’m not, I haven’t been honest with you. This is how I feel. And this is what’s happened. That’s what I’m going through. And it was such a, important pivotal experiment in my life. You know what I mean? Yeah, I do. So I’m just wondering what journey you’ve been on with opening up.

JOHN ALLEN

I think that taking men specifically as an example. You sort of have these socially acceptable things that can be demons for you that maybe we don’t talk about them. But if you did, no one’s really going to bat an eye. It turns out I hate my job. And it turns out I don’t love my partner. These are bad things. But they’re things that if you brought them up, no one’s going to question your manhood. They’re not going to question things that society views as really important. It’s the stuff that is super personal to you that’s like, could be potentially embarrassing. Those are the things that are your real demons. I’m not saying those other things aren’t demons. They are, they are. But if you can’t talk about those things, they will dog you your whole life. They really will. And so I think it’s not about you need to go sign up for therapy and go talk to a therapist. But I do think that, like you mentioned it yourself, you have to be able to sort of like unburden yourself. And part of that is simply talking about it. Like I had one, and this is not really a demon, but to give people a sense who are watching this of like how comfortable I am being forward about things that I struggle with. Oddly enough, one of the reasons that I was also drawn to the military, believe it or not, was I struggle mightily to urinate in front of other people, just publicly going to the bathroom in front of other people. It’s not like it’s destroying my life, but it’s uncomfortable. Like, it’s easier for me if I’m alone, right? I knew this about myself at a young age. Don’t have a reason for it. But I knew when I was in high school or in college, I would go to a bathroom that was private because that was easier for me. And as I got older, I was like, that’s not really that normal that this is happening to me. And so part of the reason I was interested in the Navy is they drug test you, and they do it really publicly. And it was like, in order to deal with this, I have to go into an organization that literally will force me to have to urinate in front of other people. But like for me, it’s sort of like facing these things that are hyper personal, like inability to pee in front of other people, which I’ve overcome. But you have to be willing to sort of identify those things. And in my case, I talked to my wife about it before I joined the Navy. And she’s like, OK. I talked to my therapist about it recently as well. But it’s sort of like, that’s a really specific personal thing that if I brought that up in a casual conversation, I’m sure there are people that could actually relate to it. But most people would be like, that’s a little uncomfortable that you brought that up. But everybody’s got stuff that falls into that category. Maybe not specifically, but everybody’s got weird insecurities, and they’ve got things that drive their decisions that would be, to them, deeply embarrassing to bring up. that is the reason you have to bring them up because they will dog you and they will always be there until you deal with them. And for me, it’s been helpful and cathartic to state them out loud and then do something about them.

STEVEN BARTLETT

The other thing I’ve noticed is that when I don’t state them, especially in the context of a relationship, is you live misunderstood.

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah, that’s true.

STEVEN BARTLETT

So like, let’s play out the scenario that you struggle to urinate in front of other people. Your wife might always start to wonder, why you don’t want to go to certain places or when you’re in those places, you’re acting strange. She’ll misunderstand that as maybe he’s X, Y, and Z. And then you’re dealing with a problem. You’re dealing with another set of problems. He’s like, he’s cheating on me. No, no, no. Actually, it was just, we didn’t have an environment, a safe space where we could talk about the actual issue. So I’ve created like five other issues. And I have that in my life where I’m like, Like if I just told the truth, it’s a shame that sometimes I have to get to the like bust up moment, turn around and say, you’ve got this totally wrong. And the reason why you’ve got this totally wrong is because I didn’t tell you the truth. And it’s led you off down a path, which is really unfortunate and it’s caused us more hurt than me just being honest with you. But it’s, I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I think… Like many of the things you’ve described in your story, first you have to just take one step in that direction. I’m not saying like pull your partner in and like offload or offload to a therapist today. It’s just, you have to run the experiment to build the evidence and have it compound and go, actually, this is a better life than secrecy. Keeping everything to yourself. When I interview people, there’s always questions I know that they get asked all the time. And I’m like, do I ask him the question that I know he probably gets asked all the time? But you’re so good at telling stories. You really, really are great at telling stories. So there’s really two questions I wanted to end with. I guess we’ve got a couple of minutes, but the first question is, to be a great storyteller, and we’re all telling stories whether we know it or not, is there any principles that you’ve come to learn that you could give me to tell better stories?

JOHN ALLEN

Yeah, so I would say, obviously, the medium by which you’re telling the story matters. But if we’re talking about literally speaking a story, telling a story, and assuming you have people listening to that story right in front of you, which is the medium by which many of us tell stories, telling our friends, telling our family members. To tell a really good story, it has less to do with the content of the story, and more to do with the delivery of that story. When I told you the Dyatlov Pass story, I was fully committed to telling you that story. I didn’t care if you thought it was interesting or not. I thought it was interesting enough that I was going to give you my hand gestures. I’m going to make sure I harp on the details that I find really interesting. But it’s like a level of commitment to telling that story. Like that’s the key. It’s commit to be like you have to be in the story. And like, for example, when I’m when I did the live tour, like that’s the purest form of you’re either going to be awkward up there and like get through it, or you’re going to fucking own the story, be in the stories and tell it to those people right there. And they’re going to hear what I want to tell them. So it’s like the delivery, it’s not just practice and get your words right, hardly. Dude, I don’t even use a script when I tell stories. I look at the story, I learn the story, I internalize the story, and then I inhabit the story. And when I tell you the story, it should almost feel like I was there. Like that is the level of commitment you need. And I would say also like with regards to general storytelling, it really is true that it has less to do with like finessing the language so it’s perfect or getting your script exactly right. It’s like, I would say when it comes to most stories, you need to make sure there’s some sort of payoff at the end of the story, which is sort of like storytelling 101. But if you look at the way newspapers structure stories, for those maybe don’t read the newspaper or generally here, here’s how it goes. This thing happened. And now I’m going to tell you the details of what that thing is and how it happened, right? That’s not good storytelling. That’s great for getting information across. But all too often, if you look on YouTube or if you look at other people who tell mysteries, for example, sometimes in their header, it’ll be like, crazy, golden skeleton found in cave in Russia. And actually, that’s pretty compelling. Maybe I’d read that. But it’s like, Suzanne murdered in London. And then you click on it to find out what happened. But it’s like, you don’t want your audience to already, in certain cases, you don’t necessarily want your audience to know where the story is going. They might have a very strong inclination that Suzanne’s going to get killed at the end of the story, or there’s going to be a gold skeleton found in Russia. But being a storyteller, your job is to keep people invested and to build tension and to get them ready for the payoff at the end. Any story can have a twist at the end. It depends on how you tell it. It isn’t like some stories have payoffs and some don’t. Absolutely not. You can use point of view. You can inhabit aspects of the story that give different lenses into the story. Own the story when you tell it and ensure that there’s some type of payoff at the end, whatever it is. Like when I told you that the outlaw past story, like ultimately the goal is to get you to see that, wow, all these conflicting things, there’s pictures of this and that. But the Russian government said an unknown, unnatural force is responsible and then closed the case. The whole point of that is to say all these crazy things that are objective, they objectively happen, that we have data, we have pictures, we have all these things. I’ve demonstrated that to you. And clearly something’s wrong and they sealed the case and no one could look into it. The whole point is to make you think, what is going on over there? But if I had said, guess what? There’s this case that’s sealed and no one will look into it. Here’s what happened. It’s the same story, but I’ve opened with the reveal. You got to do it the other way. So pay off at the end and own the storytelling aspect of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT

I’ll go and tell people to check it out on your channel, but is there a particular story on your channel that is, this was the cliche question, that is your favorite? Oh man. It’s like asking your favorite kids, right?

JOHN ALLEN

I would say the story that I’m the most proud of, in terms of just how difficult it was to piece it together, is The Headless Valley. And it’s actually in our graphic novel as well. It isn’t that it’s literally the best story, but it’s a story that is a composite of a whole bunch of anecdotes over about 100 years. I know we don’t have enough time. there’s this place in Canada called the Northwest Territories. And so it’s a part of Canada that’s already very remote, and it’s just wilderness and forests. And there’s this section called the Northwest Territories, which is even more remote. It’s as big as Germany, but Germany has like 50 million residents, and this has like 50,000 people there. So it’s like no one lives there. And within the Northwest Territories, there’s this valley, this like river that cuts through this beautiful valley called the Nahanni Valley, which has been now dubbed the Headless Valley. Because over the course of 100 years, all these people who have gone into this valley have turned up headless. They’ve been but like in the most bizarre ways. And you and also you can’t really get into this valley. It’s very difficult to do. You can’t fly there. You can’t hike there. You have to either take a boat upstream and literally carry a boat up a couple waterfalls and then continue going upstream. Or there is an overland hike, but it’s like 70 miles of treacherous terrain. It’s really hard to get there. It’s totally remote. And the only other people that ever lived there were the Nahanni tribe. And they, one day, somebody was actually there on a hunting expedition. They noticed that the Nahanni tribe, which made up like hundreds of people, they were camped out along this river, they disappeared overnight. And literally nobody knows what happened to them. all their equipment, all their housing, it was left. They just vanished. No one knows what happened to them. And there’s rumors of like white creatures wandering the woods. But I took like seven or eight anecdotes chronologically and pieced them all together and created what, in my opinion, is the most comprehensive narrative of what could be happening in the Headless Valley. And I’m very proud of the way it was written and put together. And it’s the first story in the graphic novel as well.

STEVEN BARTLETT

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is, what do you see as the most desirable future for the new media podcast world?

JOHN ALLEN

I would say that what I love about the podcast space that I hope continues is that it is not corporate in the sense that it’s totally like anybody can start a podcast. We’re seeing so many podcasts, but it’s like, Podcasts rise based on the merit of those shows versus like there’s not a lot of corporate pushing behind podcasts. It’s sort of like the corporations show up and take the podcasts or try to license podcasts that have already sort of made their place, but they don’t have a lot of influence over who or what they do. So it’s like it’s this great meritocracy of content where the podcasts are growing and succeeding based largely on merit and skill. And they’re covering all these topics that are like so far reaching. So it’s like it just feels sort of authentic. I know there are plenty of corporate podcasts out there, too. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I hope that podcasting continues to be this sort of like, how in the world are like, the Joe Rogan podcast and like, you know, whatever the random podcast you want to name, like these like titans of industry, but it’s like, it’s so random, but it’s like, it’s like this beautiful product of just like human, like authenticity and willingness to talk about stuff. I love it. I think that it’s a very authentic place that has not been corporatized yet. Amen.

STEVEN BARTLETT

John, thank you so much for everything that you do. Thank you. It’s really, really incredible. It’s really incredible. You run a phenomenal media company, which I don’t think people truly understand.

JOHN ALLEN

Nick Witters does.

STEVEN BARTLETT

You and Nick run a phenomenal media company, which I think, I don’t know if people understand the scale and size of that media company, but it’s truly impressive. And you have this awesome graphic novel.

JOHN ALLEN

Yes, in the graphic novel. It’s a New York Times bestseller. It’s an anthology of nine stories. It’s beautiful. And we intend to continue making more of them. So definitely check out the graphic novel. It makes a great holiday gift.

STEVEN BARTLETT

It is absolutely gorgeous. The illustrations are phenomenal. We’re very proud of it. Thank you so much for all that you do. I’m someone that is absolutely enthralled by all these stories. I love mysteries, I love unsolved mysteries, and I love true crime. And as we were saying before we got recording, me and my partner, when she lets me listen to these things in bed and it helps me sleep, and your channel is by far and away the best at that. because you’re such a gifted storyteller. And as you’ve been speaking to me today, I’ve been thinking, ah, that’s fair. I’ve been trying to piece together what makes you so brilliant as a storyteller, but I guess it’s a long journey, a family influence, and generally, you know, the experience that you’ve had. So thank you for what you do. Thank you for your time today as well. And it’s been an honor to learn about your story of reinvention, but also to hear some of these stories, which by the way, I need to go and figure out this fucking, what’s it called? Diavlon Pass?

JOHN ALLEN

The Dyatlov Pass.

STEVEN BARTLETT

The Dyatlov Pass.

JOHN ALLEN

Pretty well, thank you. And it’s an honor to be on your show, really. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Martha Beck, within all your work, what is it that you’re aiming to do? And I guess most importantly, equally importantly, who are you aiming to do it for?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I could give you the normal answer, which goes down easily with most people, or I could give you the truth, which sounds really weird.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ll take the truth.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I was hoping you would say that. So in all my work, and this means from the time I was little, I remember being dreadfully anxious about not having done enough toward it. On the night before my birthday one year, I was lying there thinking, I am supposed—there’s something I’m supposed to help with on the earth, and I have not done enough, and I’ve got to get moving here. And the next day I turned four. So ever since I was little, my whole intent has been based on this feeling that I was meant to help with a shift that would happen in the world during my lifetime, and I did not know what it was. So I would ask myself, what is it? I would spend hours thinking, what is it? And the only thing I got as an answer was this bit of poetry from T.S. Eliot. And it goes, I said to my soul, be still and wait without love, for it would be love of the wrong thing. And wait without hope, for it would be hope of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the love and the hope and the faith are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing. All right. As I got older and studied more, I began to think What I am meant to help with is a shift in the way human beings perceive and think. And that is why I couldn’t know what it was, because to explain to someone a fundamental shift in the way they think would have to be processed through the way they’re thinking now, and so it would be fundamentally misunderstood. Now I’m old and I don’t care what people think of me, so I just say this right out loud. It was a deep secret in my heart for decades. And now I just say, I think there is going to be a shift in the way in human consciousness. And I think it is going to change the way humans relate to the planet, relate to each other, relate to themselves. And I could be wrong, but I don’t care. I’m going to keep trying for it till the day I die.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And what is that shift in human consciousness that you’re predicting?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Wait, without thought, but actually, no, I actually have a theory now. My undergraduate degree was in East Asian studies. I lived in Asia and studied Chinese and Japanese. And they have a concept in Asia that is not well known in modern Western culture. And that is the concept of awakening. And it’s awakening out of the dream of thought. Which is, I mean, the whole thing is now like half of our listeners are at this point probably thinking, Stephen has brought a lunatic to the program. I will not listen to this episode. But I’m promising you, it gets really cool if you focus on it. Because when you awaken, and it’s a shift in the way, a fundamental perception. This is also very strong in India, Tibet, and the other Buddhist countries. It’s a shift where you leave the aspects of your thinking that cause you internal suffering. You cease to suffer after you awaken. I think that’s actually an epigenetic shift that is inherent in the brain of every individual. and that many individuals throughout history have gone through it. The great teachers, I think Nelson Mandela went through it in prison at Robben Island. So all over the world, in different cultures, in different parts of the world, throughout history, individuals have described this experience with very, very consistent terminology. You awaken, you realize that the life you’ve been living is real, but only in the way a dream is real. and that the reality of the awakened state is much more real, and in that state, there’s no fear, there’s no suffering, there is infinite compassion, there is the desire to serve, there is love for all beings, not just every human, but every being there is, and there is a kind of fundamental peace and bliss, the bliss of being, they call it in Sanskrit, Satchitananda. the bliss of being becomes your everyday state. I think if a critical number of people experience that at the same time, we could just fix the problems humans have been causing for the last few thousand years.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How could you persuade anybody that that state of being is even possible?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, I have a few tricks. There’s no persuading. I can show you a few things if you want that I tend to do when I’m coaching people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So let’s get on to that then. Who are you in terms of your qualifications?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I am a person who has experienced intense psychological and physical suffering for decades. Absolute wreck of a human being. Physically, by the time I was 30, I had been bedridden for 10 years with autoimmune diseases. I had depression and anxiety in massive amounts from the time I was very small. And then I actually had an experience during a surgery, which was like a near-death experience, where I felt like I saw this light, and I felt connected to it. More than connected to it, I felt radically shifted. And I came out of that surgery and changed I stopped telling a single lie with any aspect of my speech, behavior. I would not lie after that. So in the next year, it was a very exciting year, I walked away from my family religion, which was very, very important in my home community. So that meant I lost my family of origin, my community of origin. Every friend I’d had before the age of 17 when I left for college, I realized I was gay, so that was the end of my marriage. I had to leave my home. I had to leave my, I left academia. basically threw everything into the bonfire. And I would not recommend this to anyone listening out there. Don’t do it. I did this so you would not have to. I can tell you there are easier ways. But through it all, through everything I’ve studied with my mind and through everything I’ve experienced with my body and my heart, I’m not saying I awakened. but I feel I know what awakening is. And for that reason, I feel very safe in the world and very joyful. All I can say is, this is in you. I may be able to help you find it, but I don’t need to create it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Who have you worked with on a one-on-one basis? What are the different types of individuals that have asked for your help and support?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I mean, I’ve worked with homeless heroin addicts on the streets of Phoenix because I truly believe that the experience I had in surgery with this light, this absolute homecoming and peace, I actually gravitated to addicts, even though I’ve never been addicted to substance, because when they say they can’t live without that first heroin hit, that’s how I felt after coming out of that experience, that light. I was like, I cannot live without that. And so I would tell the heroin addicts, I believe you’re meant to have that feeling you long for so much, but I also think you get to keep your teeth. There’s another way. So I’ve worked with people like that. I’ve had billionaires as clients. I have counseled people in prison because I’m a sociologist. And if I say something works for humanity, it has to work across cultures and in all situations, poverty, wealth, captivity, freedom, any situation, it has to work before I’ll say, I’ll put my stamp on it and say, yeah, I think that works.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And who, when you talk about, you know, helping billionaires, what do they come to you seeking? Do they just express symptoms or something?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

You know what? Almost everyone has the same major problem, and it’s not what you would think. They want to know their purpose. They want to know why the hell they’re even here. Humans are the only animals, so far as we know, that live on a day-to-day basis with the consciousness of our mortality. We are going to die, so why are we even here? What am I doing here? And it’s the same whether you’re talking to someone on the street or someone with a billion dollars. That desperation to know why we’re here. And I think it comes out of a culture that has fundamentally pulled us away from our inherent knowledge of what we’re meant to be and put us in a place where we are obsessed with productivity and consumption and production of material wealth. and has actually cut us off from our own sense of meaning. And that’s actually in the brain that you get stuck in a part of the left hemisphere that is obsessed with grabbing things and owning things and controlling things. And it’s always afraid. It’s always grasping. And it refuses to believe that anything but itself exists. But on the other side of the brain, there is the self that connects with meaning, purpose, relationship, connection. And living in a state of nature as everyone did until a few hundred years ago, almost everyone, we would wake up, a human would wake up hearing wind and birdsong and other people’s voices. They would rise and go to bed according to the sunlight and the temperature. They had intimate relationships with animals and with plants and with the earth itself. All of our biology evolved to be in that situation. And one anthropologist called it the weird societies. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. We have a fundamentally different way of living. We get up surrounded by artificial light, we push ourselves all day to do things that we would never have done 300 years ago. Spreadsheets. Sitting next to people we barely know who are assigned to be there because we have similar tasks, which is a system based on factory labor, which is horrible for people. Not to solve real problems that matter to you, but to catch on to something that an adult already knows who’s going to punish you or shame you, depending on whether you get the right answer or the wrong answer. It’s a bizarre, very left hemisphere dominated society. So Ian McGilchrist, my favorite philosopher and neurologist or psychiatrist, says the whole culture functions like someone with a severe right hemisphere stroke. We live in a bizarre, crazy culture, and we do not know why we’re here because we don’t have access to our sense of meaning.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I just wanted to ask you, you know, of all the things you could have written about at this exact moment in time, you chose to write a book about anxiety. It’s called Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. Why did you choose that subject, and specifically this word anxiety, above everything else you could have written about?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

So after I wrote The Way of Integrity, where I say, look, if you—integrity to me means that you are whole and—that’s what the word means. It means intact. It doesn’t mean, like, morally. It just means structurally. If all your meaning-making systems are in order, are telling the same story—body, heart, spirit, mind—if those are all in agreement, there is a kind of grounding in reality. And in that reality, what happens when you get into that reality is you begin to awaken. You begin to experience spontaneously the things that Eastern sages have described about the cessation of suffering. So I was, you know, I’d been studying toward this for years and I thought, this is the last self-help book I’m ever going to write. I really believe this is it.” So people read the book, and then they would come to me and they’d say, I have put my whole life in integrity, but I’m so scared all the time. I am so afraid. So I started looking into it and realized that anxiety is skyrocketing all over the world. It is by far the most common mental health challenge that people face. Something like 284 million people, last I checked, were clinically diagnosable with anxiety disorder. During the pandemic year, 2020, anxiety went up all over the world by a full 25%. And here’s the thing about anxiety. It’s like one of those tire rippers that you drive across and you can’t drive back because the way the brain is structured, when you get into anxiety, it just keeps going up and up and getting worse and worse and worse. And then when you get a lot of people who are experiencing this intense anxiety and they can’t get out of it, they create a culture that reflects anxiety and fosters anxiety without really meaning to, but that becomes, if you’re stuck in this very mechanistic grasping way of being, anxiety is inevitable and actually lauded. So I was amazed to find that Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, says in his quarterly reports, and loves to say in many settings, that he tells all of the thousands of Amazon employees who work under him, he wants them all to wake up terrified every morning. And that’s the word he uses, terrified. And to stay terrified all day because that makes them productive. But most of these people are just getting by financially. He wants them to be afraid all the time so that he and the stockholders can get more stuff. and they already have so much stuff, you know? Like 1% of the world’s people own something like 95, no, 50% of the total wealth of the world is owned by the top 1%. It’s insane. And so we’re saying, yes, get up, be terrified, as long as you’re productive. And you know what? When you get really productive, and you earn a lot of stuff and that’s still your only way of being, you still wake up terrified every morning and you stay anxious all day long. Fear, see, fear is like being shot from a cannon. If a bear came in here, we would both go, whoa, and we’d get very clear instructions from our biology. to either fight, flee, freeze, hide under the table, I would feed you to the bear, probably. You could totally take that bear.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m not going to risk it. I’d be out of here.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No, you would win. Anyway, it would eat me and then you would win. And then our fear, if we were like other animals, would subside. That’s normal fear. Anxiety, instead of being like shot from a cannon, it’s like being haunted. Something bad happens, or we hear about something bad happening. And we get that jolt of fear, but instead of acting and then relaxing, we turn it into a verbal story. So a group of psychologists, I think in the 90s, decided to try to figure out why humans, of all animals, are the only ones who commit suicide on a regular basis. And what they found out, the answer is language. We humans have the capacity to use language to create an abstract vision of the future that is more horrifying than the prospect of our own death. We choose death over the story of fear that we carry in our minds. And the spiral happens because there’s a jolt of fear, then a story about the fear. And then there’s a story about how we have to control the world so that we won’t be in danger anymore. And we have to control our loved ones so they won’t be in danger. And we have to control—we just have to control. But we, honest to God, really can’t control very much. So then we get even more scared. And that feeds back into these primitive brain structures that say, fear! and then it creates a bigger story and more control efforts and it goes up and up and up and it doesn’t go down because that part of the brain has a very peculiar, I don’t know how this evolved, it has this tendency to truly believe that nothing but itself exists.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So you’re going to have to explain the brain to me in the context you’re describing it for me to understand some of these points. Tell me what I need to know about the brain. I’m going to draw a little picture of it on my iPad here, so I can stay with you.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

All right, so you’ve got your brain, and it’s symmetrical, right? Yeah. Two mirror image, and there’s something in the middle called the corpus callosum that connects it. And I’m about to vastly oversimplify, and I’m not a neuroscientist, so neurologists, I beg you to forgive me. I know that the whole brain is working almost all the time, and that left-right simplifications about the hemispheres of the brain are oversimplifications. Nevertheless, there are very dramatic differences between what happens, and so I’m going to talk to those. So on the left side, you have this thing called the anxiety spiral, where there’s a little tiny part of your brain called the amygdala, and it’s very primitive. Every animal with a spine has one of these, or something very close to it. And its job is to make you safe by being alarmed when you see unfamiliar things. It feeds information to layers of the brain that are also ancient, but not as old. And these, on the left hemisphere, make you immediately start thinking of ways to control a situation. And then when it gets to the outermost layer of the left hemisphere, which handles things like time and language, it starts to tell a story defending the feelings it’s having. So that’s what the left hemisphere does in this one little compartment. On the right side, you also have an amygdala. You actually have two of all these structures. On the right side, the amygdala also goes, ah, something unfamiliar, a little burst of, ah. Then, in the right side, it creates curiosity instead of aversion. Have you ever rubber-necked at an accident?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Is that when you’re like, what’s… Yeah, everybody slows down and you’re like, what happened?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

And I always think, oh, I should look away. I’m being voyeuristic, but I still really want to look. And the reason is that we evolved a tendency to move away from frightening things to stay safe, but toward them, insofar as we can figure out what happened and avoid that happening to us. So curiosity is intense around things we fear. That’s why the average American child, by the time they’re ready for college, has witnessed on TV or online 16,000—or is it 60,000—murders. We’re terrified of murder, so we’re obsessed with it. You do not have mystery stories written about robbery. It’s murder. Okay, so the right side of the amygdala goes curious, and then it starts to connect things. How can I figure this out? That’s like that other thing, so this is what must have happened. It’s a detective, and it starts to put together its own version of what happened. Doesn’t use language. But it uses very vivid images and sensory details. And it can connect things in ways that are highly original and inventive. So you immediately start to get creative. What I found in the wonderful books I read about anxiety, they always talked about how to get your anxiety to calm down. But for me, that wasn’t enough as an individual or just as a theoretician. Because that just gets you to the, you flatten your anxiety. But if you go into the right hemisphere of your brain and start to get creative, something really magical happens. Just as anxiety shuts off creativity, creativity can shut down anxiety. It’s like these two parts of the brain toggle. And if you go to any traditional culture, you will find the wise people, the elders, the medicine people of that culture talking about the oneness of all things. It’s not a new concept. What I realized is that if I deliberately chose to push my brain toward creativity and get the right side moving, my anxiety shut down. And then I started testing it on clients and on groups of people online. I’d design these experiments because I was trained as a sociologist. And consistently, I found that this is the way to get rid of this horrific scourge that is ruining so many people’s lives. And what I always hear is people say, well, there are real problems. We really should be afraid. My answer to that is if you were in a horrible car accident, God forbid, and you had many injuries, would you want the surgeons working on you to be in a state of panic or calm creativity? The only way we’re going to fix the problems we’ve made with our fear-based behavior, the only way to solve problems this big is to access the incredible capacity of human creativity. I believe we can do that as individuals and as a species.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So how would I go about switching into this right hemisphere? If I’m feeling anxious, what would you recommend that I do?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s so easy. It’s so amazingly easy. Now, your brain naturally goes toward anxiety because of something called the negativity bias. And I always think of it as 15 puppies and a cobra. If I gave you a box and it had 15 puppies and a cobra in it, what would catch your attention? the snake, and that’s because in evolutionary terms, paying attention to the snake is a good idea. But we have such a strong negativity bias in our culture, and we have very little to pull us back into communion with oneness. We don’t have nature around us anymore. So we have to do that. We can trick our brains into doing that. And if you want to play a little with this. Sure. Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Tell me what to do.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

First, I want you to think of something that makes you feel a bit anxious. Maybe not panicky, but anxious. Something you’re willing to, like, tell us what it is.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. Something that makes me feel a little bit anxious.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This is an interesting one. Sounds like a strange thing to say, but when my partner is not happy, and I know she’s not happy, but she’s not telling me why, and I’m around her, and I can tell from her vibe, her face, she’s not happy about something, and I have no idea what it is.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Okay, I think there will be many people out there who know what this feels like. You are describing a tiny domestic nightmare that many of us feel. So think about that. Think about what that feels like and just notice what it does to your body and to your emotions. what’s happening in your body if you’re in that situation with your partner.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

My breath is short. Yeah. Right. I just feel tense and I become quite impatient because I just need the answer to alleviate the anxiety. Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 So you’ve gone to a fight-or-flight nervous system, arousal state, okay, uh-uh, something’s wrong.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m very focused, yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, I’m very focused and I’m very, like, I’m anxious but I’m also a little bit snappish because I’m fleeing on one side, I need to get out of this situation. But I’m fighting on the other side, like, tell me what’s wrong. So you’ve got a full fight or flight thing happening. So you can get into that by imagining the situation. Now I want you to imagine something else very vividly. And it would probably help if you close your eyes. Have you ever eaten an orange?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

All right. So imagine that you are holding an orange. It’s a nice, ripe, heavy, delicious orange at the peak of its ripeness. I can tell you’ve already smelled it. So you can smell the citrus. You just take a bite of it to break the seal of the peeling and just feel that little spray of citric acid that It pops up when you bite the peel and then the bitterness of the rind. And then as you bite and the juice gets in your mouth, it’s sweet, it’s a little bit tangy. You can feel the filaments of the skin and the stringiness of the insides. And you can pull it back, you pull back the peel. You can feel it under your fingernails. You can smell it. Just put the broken part to your mouth and like squeeze the orange and let some juice get into your mouth and taste it completely and then swallow it. and then enjoy the sensation of tasting, feeling, hearing even this experience. Okay, how’s your anxiety?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 My anxiety went away.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s gone.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Because I asked you to use sensory imagination. And that’s handled by the right hemisphere. It’s not in the left. So instead of verbal imagination, which can create horror stories, you were in a sensory experience. And what I don’t think people realize is that we’re always imagining what’s going to happen to us in the next few days, weeks, months, years. But we’re imagining it based on what we think is real, which is all the horror stories we’re hearing about. Oh, you know, I need to mind my health. I need to—there will be accidents. There will be, you know, my loved ones will die. We have all these stories that haven’t happened yet. They may. They’re not lies. But that’s in the mind as we make our choices. I need to get more money, that whole thing. When you imagine forward with your senses in a way that brings relaxation, how’s your body when you’re in the orange thing? You said it was tense when you were in anxiety. What happens to your physical body when you’re completely connected to the experience of this imaginary orange?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 relaxes, your body relaxes.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, you start breathing more deeply, you stop producing all the cortisol, the glucocorticoids, the adrenaline that you had in the fight-flight state, and now you’re starting to produce serotonin and dopamine and what they call the tend and befriend hormones. So you’re, say you could hold that energy and your partner’s still tense and running around but you’re staying in this relaxed state, can you then, instead of being afraid of her, start to be curious about what’s going on? Instead of saying, tell me what’s going on. It’s more like, wow, she’s really tense. I wonder what that’s about. And you could even ask her, honey, I don’t want to step on your toes here, but the vibe I’m getting is that you’re not okay. Like, can I help you? So it’s a very, very different thing to approach conflict. One of the people I wrote about in this book is Chris Voss, one of the FBI’s top hostage negotiators. And when he’s dealing with a violent, psychopathic terrorist who has people as hostages he’s ready to kill, Chris Voss says, this is how you deal with him. Gently, with a soft voice, curious about his experience and empathetic about it. And you’re just thinking, What? This is not in the movies. But the human amygdala is a frightened animal most of the time. And we all know that if you run at a frightened animal and say, tell me what you want, it doesn’t get less frightened. So what you just did was move your nervous system into a state where you can be a field of peace for someone else who’s anxious.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Do you have to do the orange thing the whole time to get into that state?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No, no, no. There are many tricks. Do you want to do some more? Sure, let’s do more. All right, here’s one of my favorites. And I got this from a brilliant artist and professor at Harvard, William Ryman, who I was lucky enough to be his teaching assistant for a few years. And this is one of the things that he used to do to get the students to shut down the left side of their brain. Well, not shut it down, but to use the right side of the brain as well. Because the left side of the brain can’t draw very well, I have to tell you this. So all I want you to do is put your stylus there over toward the right. center of your field, and write your first name the way you usually sign it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah. All right. The way I usually sign it or write it?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

The way you usually sign it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So the way I usually sign it is a bit more complicated.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Ooh, that’s beautiful. Okay, so now put your stylus just to the left of the signature, and now replicate the signature, but this time write it in mirror writing backwards. Take as much time as you need.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Gosh, this is so difficult.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Just breathe.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Wait, I’ve got it wrong already.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Can I rub it out? Absolutely, you have as many tries as you need. Notice how the rhythm of your hand goes when you’re signing moving right and try to see if you can find that rhythm going the opposite direction.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I might need pen and paper.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Using pencil and paper because they’re tactile is actually, you’re going to have easier access to it because you’re going to have more access to the right side of your brain.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This is so difficult. Why is my signature so complicated?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

You’re doing brilliantly. You did it!

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Terrible.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yay! No, not terrible. Now, the torture is not over, Steven.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s terrible. It’s beautiful. You said you wouldn’t lie.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I just meant your first name anyway. Now, while you were doing that, you might have felt intense frustration and a sense of, huh. But when you’re anxious about it, you actually can’t do it. You have to become engrossed with it in order to do it. Because your brain is creating new neuron synapses that have never existed before. You’ve never done this before. So you are fundamentally changing your brain, teaching it a skill it has never had. And this is what children are going through when they learn to write for the first time. But what you just did was connect to parts of the brain that are in the right side. So this is why we used to make these poor students do this. Because once they could, we had another book we worked with called Drawing is Forgetting the Name of What You See. As long as you call it a cup, you can’t draw it. You draw your image of a cup. But when you forget to call it anything, it just becomes a shape. Like your signature had to just become a shape. And shapes are on the right hemisphere. So what you just did was, it’s like power lifting. You forced your brain to create synapses that were brand new, that were taking you into a state of learning, deep learning. similar to what happens to children if you let them run around in nature. So there was a study done at NASA in the 60s to identify creative geniuses. And they found that 2% of the adults they sought out, like college graduates, were creative geniuses. After a while, a few years, they decided to try giving it to four and five-year-olds. 98% of them were creative geniuses. And I think that probably the other 2% were just having a bad day. What happens between the moment you’re four years old, a full-on creative genius learning new things the way you just did, day in, day out, and adulthood where your genius has mainly gone dark? It’s because you stop trying things that are brand new like that. You’re put in the factory line in school and taught to learn in a completely different way that’s based on shame and fear and artificial skills that don’t mean much to you. Right and wrong answers. Yeah. Everything’s right or wrong. Everything’s very judgmental in nature. Nothing’s judgmental. One of the things I’ve done with groups of clients is take them into a forest, and with the help of another coach who’s a great woodsman, we give them the tools to make fire with sticks and rocks, but they have to work as a team. And then we say, make fire, but you can’t talk about it, because language is in the left hemisphere. And sometimes they’re out there for four hours. And the whole time it’s like, ah, what are we doing? They try all these different things. And then I’ve never had a group that didn’t do it. They figure it out. And you end up with a little flame in your hands. And you feed it a few bits of dried moss or whatever. And you blow into it. And it starts to smoke. And then smoke heavily. And then suddenly it just bursts into flame. And there’s this feeling, there’s this Promethean feeling, oh my God, we can do anything. And the fact that that’s how we’re built to learn and there’s joy in it, there’s a kind of, it’s an achievement. But nature’s not saying, wrong, right, you get an F, you get an A, you get higher levels. No, you get fire or you don’t get fire, no judgment.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what does this mean for me on a day-to-day basis? If I understand the power of this, does this mean that I should draw my name a lot? Or is there something that we could all be doing to alleviate our anxiety and to get us into the right hemisphere of our brain?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, to me, there’s a three-step process, and there are three sections in the book. The first one, I use it with the acronym CAT. Calm, art and transcendence. This is how it works. The first third of the book is just how to calm your brain. It’s been taught to be anxious. It is biologically pre-programmed to be anxious. So to calm it down, most people will say, they’ll come in and tell me, I want to fight my anxiety. I want to end it. I want to bring it down. I want it gone. Because they think it’s a broken machine, but it’s not a broken machine. It’s a frightened animal. And if you came in and I said to you, OK, I want to end you. I want to bring you down. I’m going to fight you till you’re gone. Would you be less afraid or more afraid? So they’re attacking the part of themself that’s anxious, and it makes it more anxious. And that’s what we’re taught to do, end it, force it to calm down with chemicals. One of the most ghastly things that ever happened in psychiatry was that they used to literally take people who had inexorable anxiety and literally put a screwdriver through the eye socket and up into the brain and just mix it around That’s how mechanistic we are about our own minds, we can fix it with a screwdriver. That’s a very left hemisphere way to think. And it’s literally attacking ourselves. But we’re all born with the intrinsic knowledge of how to calm a frightened animal. So if you found a terrified puppy on your stoop one morning and you decided to try to help it, you would instinctively know how to do that. What would you do?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 I would approach it slowly or not approach it at all and I would get down and I’d be very gentle and say hello and I’d ask it to come to me.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

And if it didn’t you’d give it space, you’d give it time, you’d sit there with it. And just the way your energy just changed now, you’d get down, you’d begin to smile in a very sweet way, and I could feel the tolerance and the gentleness and the space that you would give this creature. We’ve got to learn to be gentle to ourselves. We are taught to be violent to ourselves. Biohack that. Make yourself eat this and do that. And instead, if we could just go to the anxious part. Like, say you’re with your partner and she’s acting weird and you’re feeling anxious. Generally, what we do is we try to control the situation. What can I do? Can I make her happy? I’ll bring her flowers. I’ll do whatever, right? Have an argument. Instead of trying to control her, the best approach is go inside, find the part of yourself that’s afraid. So if you’re in that situation and she’s nervous and you just start to observe your own anxiety, like, OK, what does that feel like? Who is that in there? Who’s the anxious part of me? And just notice, I mean, try it right now if you don’t mind. She’s upset. She’s tense. She’s not telling you the problem. Notice the anxiety. Where is it in your body exactly?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s like here in my chest.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Okay, in your chest. So allow that and say to it, I’m going to give you space. I’m here. I’m going to be here with you. I know she’s scaring you, but I’ve got you. It’s okay. She’s not going to hurt us. I can go in the other room with you if you need and sit with it and say, let me know, what are you feeling? Tell me everything. You get to feel exactly the way you feel. And I’m here to listen to anything you want to tell me and I will not hurt you. And I will not try to stifle you or make you go away. So how does that change anything?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, for some reason it just, the volume went down. It’s just like the volume went down. And it made me wonder if, because just by you saying that, it made me wonder if in those moments I should be writing it out.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

That can be really helpful. There’s a psychologist named James Pennebaker who found that if he just had students—he just did this experiment once as a graduate student—he had students write for 15 minutes about something that was upsetting to them. And many of them came out of the experiment in tears. It really upset them for an hour or two. He had other students just write what they did last summer or whatever. So there was this brief period where the ones who had stirred up some turmoil felt unsettled. But they, in the weeks and even the years subsequent to that experiment, they had fewer doctor’s visits, they had less anxiety, they had better relationships, they had better everything. So he, for his whole career, just did these writing exercises where he would have people just express themselves, not to show anyone, not even to reread, just to express. The parts of us that are frightened need to be heard. The parts of society that are hurting need to be hurt. I’m astonished by the Truth and Reconciliation Councils held in South Africa after Nelson Mandela became president. These people who had been through absolute atrocities, and they were just heard. They were allowed to tell their stories to the people who had hurt them and other people who were on their side. And the telling of it, avoided what everyone thought would be a bloodbath. And it, of course, didn’t fix all the problems. But it unburdened, to a large extent, people who had been through things that I can’t even imagine. So yes, write it. Write it down. So she’s in the other room. She’s acting weird. Something might come up about, like, how old is that anxious part? Maybe it’s young. Maybe it’s not.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You said something at the start, you said that anxiety is like driving over a metal spike in those police chases, that’s what I was thinking about, like the police chases where they throw out the metal spikes and the car drives over. Why did you use that analogy? What are you saying there about the nature of anxiety?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

That’s what it’s like if you get stuck in what’s called the anxiety spiral in the brain, the anxiety cycle, some people call it. So what you have to do in that situation is, to extend the metaphor, get out of the car, disarm the mechanism, get that mechanism out of the way, you know, the tire ripping thing, and then you can back out. But the stopping and getting out, that’s the calming step of anxiety and that’s what you’re doing here. As weird as it sounds, when you write your name backwards and you come into a state of physiological calm, you are getting rid of the tire rippers. You’re building pathways that go into the calmer parts of the brain. So the same thing when you were imagining eating an orange, you’re calming yourself and it allows you to reverse. It allows you to leave finally. But our culture tends to not allow you to leave. It’s always telling you horror stories. So then once you get really calm and you’ve taken care of that part of yourself, I said the acronym is CAT. Once you get to calm, then very paradoxically, it blew me away when I realized this, then you need art. And I don’t mean drawing, I mean making things. Making things in three dimensions, making events happen, making a podcast. Like, what was the fire in you that made you make things? And how did it feel when you were in the making?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

In the making, it usually feels great. Like in the process of making. Actually, me and my partner went and did, last weekend, we went and made some art. And I was like stressed and stuff. And so when we went and did this art, I’d like never painted in my life. So we went to this like random loft and there was this guy there and he had these massive two pieces of cardboard and like loads of spray cans and paint and stuff and we just painted for maybe three hours or something. And I was totally lost in it. I mean that’s the way people describe it. They describe it as being lost in it, right?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah. And do you know that if people have been through a trauma and they’re allowed to draw about it, even if they can’t draw, you know, professionally, they have an 80% lower chance of developing PTSD. There’s something about creating stuff and it could be a company or it could be a spray paint on a cardboard. My partner started making bead bracelets a while ago. She’s very busy, she doesn’t have time for this, but it makes her so And we were talking about how if you go into a tomb in Egypt from 5,000 years ago, what are you going to find? Among other things, beaded bracelets. If you go to the Amazon rainforest and contact an uncontacted tribe, what might you find? Beaded bracelets. People are making beaded bracelets all the time, and they serve no function. They are precious, pointless things,” she said, that we make. And all cultures make—we make music. I mean, I think about the cultures in Jamaica, one of the worst slavery colonies in the history of the world. It was just—it made what was happening on the mainland look gentle by comparison. And out of that, you get these incredible art forms—reggae, dance—I mean, like in the middle of being crushed, having literally everything taken from them. People were still making art. This is a part of the human spirit that is just, it’s indomitable, and our culture pushes it to the fringes. Okay, Steven, you can do that on a weekend, that’s nice, but did you really make any money? You know?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Get a real job. Yeah. How does this link, again, back to the brain? So if I’m creating, I’m making some art, I was doing that spray paint thing with the paint and the… I’ll show you a picture of it after I actually think about it.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Cool, I want to see it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But how is that helping me to calm my anxiety?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s because of the way the structures on the left side, they’re obsessed with grasping material objects, acquiring, controlling other people, always thinking about fear. And There does seem to be this toggle effect that anxiety and creativity just can’t work at the same time. So the moment you begin to create, like when you said, I could write this, that’s expressive writing, that’s artistic writing. And all of a sudden, the toggle switches off in anxiety and on in creativity. So I believe that there’s another spiral on the right side of the brain, but instead of spiraling tightly into fear, it spirals outward. And ultimately, you get to the final thing. There’s calming, there’s artistry, and then there’s transcendence, or awakening. When you’re there, sometimes we call it flow. Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who named it flow, really looked into this. And it’s a state of creating and performing at a level so difficult we almost can’t do it. Exactly the way you were writing your name. And you can have what’s called the rage to master where you’re just like, I can’t. But when you get it, and I’m sure you’ve had this with many things you’ve created in your life, it’s like flying, it’s heaven. And there’s a time in the process of creating where the sense of self falls away and the sense of control isn’t necessary and what you feel Is creation itself sort of moving with you and through you? And it’s blissful. And I believe that is the state in which we are meant to spend almost all our time. And I think that would transform our consciousness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This is a related but slightly unrelated topic, but there’s a lot of people and certain demographics suffering in different ways at the moment. There’s like a conversation I hear a lot about men suffering with meaning and purpose and those things. And I hear this other conversation about young women suffering and depression and anxiety being on the rise there. When you think about those two groups, so like men and young women, what is it that you think is the causal factor of their suffering? Because their suffering is similar and different.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah. Well, it’s conditioned by the way the brain works. It works very differently in pubescent girls than it does in, say, adult men. Young adult men, their brains work very differently from elders. That’s why in traditional societies, the young man would be herded together. And sometimes, for example, in some cultures, their faces would be obscured. They would leave their name behind. They would leave all the possessions they had or burn them. And they would be taken into the wilderness by the elders. And the elders would proceed to scare the living daylights out of them, making strange noises in the brush, putting them through a kind of trial. And the result of this is it kind of disintegrates the ego. And you still see it in, like, if you see movies about the Army and how the tough but hard of gold sergeant breaks down the young soldier’s egos so that they finally say, OK, I am not the center of the universe. I need my brothers to exist. I bow down in the face of nature, which is greater than I am. And then the elders say, all right, now you’re ready to be a man. Go back to the village and tell people your new name, which you get to choose. Young girls at puberty go through the opposite experience in many cultures. They are isolated in places away from all humans. Because the primary psychological task, according to some theories, of males is that they’re born sort of differentiated and very individual. And they need to learn to integrate with other people to be whole. Females tend to be born, or people identified as female, are born very integrated. And the task of female maturation is to individuate. So young girls who haven’t, they’re just at the stage where they need to find out who they are as an individual. And instead, they’re very integrated with networks of people who are psychologically attacking each other. in ways that are extremely harmful to their psyche at that stage. In a traditional culture, they might be put in, say, a hut that was dark and given food every day. But you’re in there by yourself until you learn, I’m OK. I can actually go inside myself and find the truth of who I am. On the other hand, the boys are out there going, ah, I can give up thinking I am all that. and I can kneel in reverence at the oneness of it all. And then they come back together and they’ve got a lot in common at that point.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Because the men now realize they need people and the women now realize that they have an independence.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Exactly. And so each can understand the other better. I mean the wisdom of these cultural traditions is incredible and we just don’t have it. We don’t have it. The internet in particular spins out the individuation of young men makes them feel like, you know—they do have bands of brothers, but it’s like, we’re under attack, man, and I really—I’m going to try to—I have to achieve. I’m going to try it this way, and I’m going to try it that way, and there’s a lot of battle games and stuff. But none of the humility that comes from the elders. And these young girls are just caught in whirlwinds of social toxicity when they might be taught to meditate. And we can still do all those things. We can still access those things.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You talked about suicidal ideation earlier on being unique to humans. When we think about suicidal ideation, it’s particularly prominent in young men. I think in the UK, the stat is still the case that the single biggest killer of young men is themselves under the age of 45. Wow. So why is that? We talked about meaning and purpose and stuff earlier. Why are young men killing themselves at alarming rates?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Because It is easier in the mind to take arms against a sea of troubles. Like it’s Hamlet’s speech. You know, why should I stay alive in a world where everyone dies? And we’re all assaulted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He’s just watched his father die. And he’s like, why would I keep going? I could just kill myself. Because men are taught combat as a way of control. If you’re afraid, every movie will tell you, get a gun. Like The Matrix, where the guy learns he can control everything with his mind. Everything he’s controlling with his mind. So what does he do? He says, we’re gonna need a lot of guns. You can control the universe with your mind. You don’t need guns, right? But there’s just this obsession with weaponry, and that’s kind of in the DNA. But when you get people in a spiral of fear, it becomes, intense and military. All the genocides committed throughout history have relied on really toxic leaders accessing vulnerable young men and militarizing them against other people, which is really easy. And if they’re on their own, isolated, and there are no elders taking them in groups doing things, they turn that on themselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what is the solution then for young men?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I would say, look to our ancestors, you know. Let’s take young men. The coach, Michael Trotta, that I used to go with to make fire in the woods, he originally worked with, and probably still does work with, groups of young men. He was a disciple of I think it was the Odawa tribe of indigenous Americans. And he always wore this shirt that said, listen to grandfather. And he would take these confused, hurting young men out. And he would put them through the trials that they would have had in a traditional society. And they would have to learn to make fire together. And they would have to learn to feed each other what they could find and use their skills in hunting, building, all of that for the community. And I just watched him heal boy after boy after boy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And that’s not that hard to do. Why is it healing for them, doing that, using their skills, hunting, surviving? Because it’s what we evolved to do.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Like the lives we’re giving people now, the lives most of us are living, are so alienating. It’s such an abnormal. This here is not normal. Right? This is not a forest or a beach or a desert. This is all man-made. It’s full of right angles, which don’t even very rarely exist in nature, only in crystals.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

For people that aren’t watching video, she’s pointing at the studio.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, I’m pointing at the studio, which is lovely, by the way. Absolutely state of the art. If you talk about human evolution and the incredible, sophisticated nervous systems we have, they evolved intimately for a totally different environment. And this is scary.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what do we do about it? Because, you know, the more I listen to you, I think maybe I should run away. Like, maybe I should. I have the funds to run away. I could go forever. And I do wonder, I could probably be happier, maybe. Maybe I’d start creating though. And then I, this is what I said, I did a set up sort of my podcast recently. I said, if I ran away, then I’d start creating and then. You know, I might start a podcast on the beach in Bali and then… You would.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

You would create stuff. You can’t help yourself. And that’s why you are obviously, like, physically healthy. You seem incredibly balanced and wise. Like, you’ve been making stuff. So you’re very much like you’re… Sorry to use California language, but your energy is very calm, but also very exuberant.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Your story, is um it’s heartbreaking in many ways but it’s it’s so evidently shaped the person that sits in front of me today because you’re at a very young age which you’ve not we’ve not really spoken about much you were part of the mormon religion oh yes i was take me into that before 10 years old how that experience before the age of 10 has shaped the person you are

DR. MARTHA BECK:

So I was born not just into a Mormon family, but a Mormon community where everyone shared the same beliefs. You didn’t call people Mr. and Mrs. It was brother and sister. Brother Smith, Sister Smith. And I was told from very young, I mean you’re indoctrinated. At 18 months you start religious training and they tell you things like, You know, if men live well and they’re part of the Mormon Church, then when they die, they get their own planet and all the women they want. And it’s like, all right, like you’re three years old. What do you know, right? And Jesus is going to come over the mountains, and all the graves are going to fly open, and all the bodies, the literal bodies of all the dead people are going to rise up out and go join Jesus. which is why we don’t cremate bodies. We bury them because they’re going to come back to life. And I would have nightmares of Jesus coming over the mountains, the graves flying open, all the people around me are rising up, and I would run. As a little kid, this happened over and over again, this dream where I was trying to jump high enough to go with the people who were being saved, and I couldn’t do it. I just kept coming back down. So I lived in absolute terror all the time. And I also didn’t know what was real, because none of it, nothing felt real. So that was, it’s very disconcerting, but because I’d never had any other experience, I just thought, well, this is life. So that was rough.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And at 28 years old, you realized that you’d been sexually assaulted as a child.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, I think I had hints of it. Actually, friends told me that I had told them about it in high school, and I don’t remember telling them. So I had pretty much repressed it. My father was a very, very renowned scholarly defender of Mormonism. His job was to take the claims of the doctrine and validate them you know, academically. But in order to do that, I talked to many people who, many of, he had five people working with him to help him translate various documents of different languages. And they said he would just make things up and put them as footnotes in different languages so no one was likely to check them. And it was called Lying for the Lord. Which is so weird. I mean, it means you have a God who’s fundamentally interested in helping people be like God by lying. So yeah, I was twisted in knots when I was little. And then I think it twisted my father into knots as well. And I do have memories and a lot of physical scarring from sexual abuse that sort of blew up into my consciousness right after I had the light experience that came to me in surgery. And it actually told me during the surgery, you’re about to go through something very, very difficult, but I’ve always been with you and I’ll always be with you. Never forget that. And that’s why I decided not to lie anymore. And that’s why when I started having these memories, it didn’t matter because Because connection with that light and never forgetting it was the realest, maybe the only absolutely true thing that had ever happened to me. And I was not leaving again.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Abuse at the hands of your father.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yes. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And you remembered that at 28 years old.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You recalled it at 28 years old.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, it sort of exploded into my mind. They’re called intrusive flashbacks. I’d had a lot of symptoms of PTSD my whole life without knowing it. But my oldest child got to be the age I was when the abuse started occurring, five years old. And she looked just like me at that age. Every time I look at her, I would just have these incredibly violent It’s not like a memory. It’s like it’s happening. It’s like You’re completely overwhelmed by it For a period of time and it was it was extraordinarily hard. I’m not gonna lie It was bad and I called my mother and she said well, yes, that’s what happened. I was like, oh What? You agree with me?” And she said, why shouldn’t I? I know him better than you. And I said, okay, so like, what do I do? She said, well, obviously, you have to protect the church.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 You called your mother to tell her you’d been sexually abused, and you realized, and she said, yes, she knows.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, she called me and said, what’s going on? Why are you not visiting us? And I said, all right. I had taken a vow not to lie, so I told her the truth, expecting her to go into a rage or something. And she said, well, yeah, that’s how it is.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

She said, well, yeah, that’s how it is?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, I believe you. That sounds right. That tracks.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How did it track? What did she know?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

She said, I know him better than you do. And I said, I don’t remember. This was 30 years ago. But I said, he’s really, he’s not an honest man. And she said, no, he’s not honest. And then she said, you better come and make him a cake, which is It’s weird, frankly, to say, yes, I believe you were raped by your father at the age of five. And by the way, the surgery I was in when I had the light experience was surgery to correct some of the scar tissue left by the abuse. It had ripped internally, and I was bleeding internally. And they just found all this scar tissue, where it probably shouldn’t have been. And so for a mother to say, oh yeah, I completely believe that’s true, and what I think you should do about it is to make your perpetrator a cake, kind of sums up the way I was raised. And I just, I tried. I made the cake. I went down, I served the cake, and then I just couldn’t go back. I just couldn’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Did you confront him?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I did, yeah. I confronted him at first, and then years later, 10 years later or so when he was 90, 91, I was born when he was 52. I wanted to meet with him after I’d forgiven him to tell him that I’d forgiven him so that he would not have to carry that because he was a very, very miserable, strange, disassociated human being, like really, really weird. He was brilliant, but very, very broken. And I think he had to choose between his entire sense of reality and his religion, and he chose the religion. And he chose the job of talking other people into believing the religion. And I think it just completely broke him. And that plus he was in World War II and saw a lot of action there. And it was, I forgive him, you know. By the way, anyone listening to this, you do not have to forgive your perpetrator. Find a way to be in your own truth, in your own integrity. You will heal. You will be happier. Then you will notice that there is no more anything to forgive. You’re done.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Did he acknowledge that he had done it?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No. It’s very strange about it, though. He didn’t say, I never did that. He said, oh, but that was the evil one, meaning the devil. And that was my family’s story, was that I’d been sexually assaulted by the devil as a child. And that’s why I had scars and so on. And so he said, yeah, that was the evil one, I think meaning the devil, but maybe he meant part of him that was evil. He never really talked to me my whole life. We never had like conversations. He would switch languages. He would literally physically run away from me. It was very, very strange. Yeah, it wasn’t a normal childhood or adulthood.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And after that phone call with your mother where you confronted her about it and she said, that sounds about right, I read that she then denied it after that.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh, she totally retracted it, yeah. I mean, she had to live with him and she couldn’t very well, like, agree with me in his presence. So when I asked her, I met with both of them in my therapist’s office, and I said, why did you tell me that you agreed with me and that it made sense to you? And she said, oh, I just assumed you were joking, which was like, nah, that, no.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So… Did she ever admit that she had said that?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No, she never did. I never saw her again. And, but actually I have to say, if I had to, as a child, if I had to choose one of my parents to be around, it would have been my father because my mother was just a big ball of misery and rage. And I never once remember feeling safe around her.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

She, I had the distinct impression she hated me. Really? Yeah, because Mormons believe that children choose to be born to specific parents. And so, and she had had five children and one stillbirth, and her body was over it, and she was done, and she was sick and depressed and miserable. And then she had three more children. I was seventh of the eight surviving children. And the last four of us, she was really angry that we had forced ourselves upon her. She did not want us. And she was angry because we had been born.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And she was depressed, right? I was reading through your story about how she spent a lot of time in bed, upset, crying.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, like all the time. I had a weird privilege of watching her funeral on, what do they call it, closed circuit TV during the pandemic or just after. One of my sisters had gotten back in touch with me after 30 years of no contact. It was the strangest thing, because I was going to go do something that day, and then I thought, no, I’ve got to go lie down in bed, which I don’t do. And then I’ve got to watch TV, which I never do during the day. And then I got a text from my sister saying, our mom’s funeral is on TV right now. at this link. So I sat there and I watched it, and it was quite validating. One of my brothers got up and started out by saying, if you came here expecting to hear stories of motherly love, you are at the wrong funeral. Yeah, and my siblings said things like, it’s not so much that she was depressed, it was kind of like depression is who she was. I feel tremendous sadness for my mother, tremendous compassion and empathy. To the point, I mean, heartbroken about the life she lived and the lives that many other women live, sort of in crazy systems, feeling they have no power. It just destroyed me to feel how much pain she was in. But yeah, she didn’t like me.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Did you ever figure out why your parents were the way that they were outside of the influence of the religion? Was there anything that happened to them?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh yeah, tons of things. They were, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, I think was a complete psychopath. She was pro-Nazi in World War II. What? Who does that? She was Swedish and she just thought that was the right thing to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Was there a suspicion that your dad was abused?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh, he was definitely abused by his mother.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

He was sexually abused by his mother?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yes, yes. And that was known. My mother had told me this before. Yeah, she would do horrible things. She would put, she would wound him and put bee venom on his genitals and be very sexual toward him. I mean, it was a mess. It was horrible.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The things that happened to you at that age, they left their fingerprints on you as you went through your teen years.

SPEAKER_04:

Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I was listening to an interview you did where you were describing being I think 17, 18 years old and you were thinking about ending your own life?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh, constantly.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Constantly?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah. Like, it was a daily struggle not to.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Through what period of your life?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I would say about 16, well, it started right around 13, but by the time I was 16, it was pretty constant. 17, 18, 19, it was all I could do to not commit suicide. And then, It kind of went to a level of, like, I can hang on during my 20s. But I think I was 32 the day I realized, it was the first day I remembered that I hadn’t wanted to kill myself. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why? Why do you think that was so present in your life, those thoughts?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Because I was in tremendous amounts of physical and psychological pain.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And are the two linked?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

They were for me. Yeah, they were very much. Psychogenic pain, you know, the body mind interface is not, there’s not much separation. And for me, one of the things I talked about in the way of integrity is that when we lie, our bodies get very weak. So like I could do a simple little hokey test with you where I could, oh, you want to do it? Okay. So stick your arm out and hold it up. Don’t let me push it down. Okay. Now, I want you to do that while lying, and the lie I’d like you to say is, I love to vomit.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. I love to vomit.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Say it holding your arm up.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Say it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I love to vomit. Why? That’s so weird.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Now say, I love fresh air.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I love fresh, I love fresh air.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I’m trying my very hard. Say it again.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I love fresh air.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 Now say I love to vomit.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I love to vomit. Why is that? That’s so strange.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

This is why polygraph machines work on everybody with psychopaths.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Just for people that couldn’t see that because they were listening, when… I don’t know if I’ve just been like messed with in some way, but when I said I love to vomit, she could push my hand down. But when I said I love fresh air, she couldn’t push my hand down. And she was trying both times, she was pushing hard both times. And I would think that I’d be able to resist both forces. But when I said I love to vomit, it was like, the only way I can describe it was, I wasn’t actually connected to my strength. Yeah, exactly. It was like I was inside my head so I couldn’t also at the same time think about you, you’re about to push me. Right. It was like there was two different systems.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yes, because the body lives in reality. The body is honest. Only the mind and only the verbal mind can lie to us and tell us things that we can believe even though they’re not true. So, I love to vomit is a statement that says it’s okay for me to feel horrible. But a smaller version of this is I often speak to groups, and often they’re in like hotel ballrooms or in auditoriums. And I’ll stop right in the middle of the speech and say, apropos of nothing, is everyone comfortable? And they’ll say, yes. No, really, truly, is everyone? Are you genuinely comfortable? Are you really comfortable? And they say, yes, go on with your speech. And then I say, so how many of you, if you were sitting at home alone, if you were at home alone right now, how many of you would be in exactly the position you’re in at this moment? And nobody raises a hand. And then I say, why not? And they have to sit and think for a long time before someone finally says, I’m not completely comfortable this way. And I would say, well, that’s OK, because humans can tolerate a lot of suffering. And this is mild. What concerns me and should concern you is that 30 seconds ago, you swore to me in broad daylight that you were absolutely comfortable, while you knew you weren’t. Your body knew you weren’t comfortable, and your mind was doing this little trick where it goes very quickly through this, okay, in order to listen to speeches, we sit in uncomfortable positions, and that’s okay because it’s worth the benefit we get out of it. So given that, I am tolerably comfortable. But all you think is, I’m comfortable. when you’re not comfortable. So people come to me and they’re in jobs where they’re not comfortable, in relationships where they’re like sometimes in intense suffering, in religions where they’re not comfortable, in all kinds of places. And they think they’re comfortable, but they’re getting sick. They’re getting physically sick or they’re getting addicted to a substance because they’re trying to numb the discomfort they won’t acknowledge. And so pretty much all I do is help people get in touch with a really, really benevolent friend called suffering. When you know what makes you suffer, you’re getting accurate information from your entire neurological system about what’s working for you and what isn’t and what would be better, what would be more comfortable, just a little bit. And if you keep correcting, I call them one degree turns, I would be a little more comfortable doing this. So I did it like run off a cliff method. Don’t do it my way. Do the one degree turns. If you’re in an airplane and it turns one degree north every half hour, over 10,000 miles, you won’t even notice you’re turning, but you’ll be in a completely different place. And that’s just noticing. Oh, this isn’t very comfortable for me. I would rather do this. You know, my girlfriend is anxious. I could break my back trying to figure out what’s going on and getting her enough presents to make her happy. Or I could go in the other room, sit down, be gentle with myself, maybe do a little writing about how I feel. That would be a little more comfortable.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 It almost feels like we’ve been trained not to listen to how we feel.

None:

100%.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

100%. As Sir Ken Robinson says, you know, we’re trained to think of our bodies as mechanisms that take our heads to meetings. You know, that the meetings are all important and our heads are all important and all of the rest of our evolution is meaningless to us. That’s a very left hemisphere dominated way of thinking. And that’s why Ian McGilchrist says we live like people with right hemisphere strokes. We’re not even in our bodies. I think maybe you are more than most people. The way you talk about it and the way you’ve made decisions really, it speaks to me of a person who finds what’s right for him. Very, with a lot of integrity.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, well, I think, I think, yeah, one of the things I, the reason I say that is because I’ve been saying on stage and I wanted to see if you thought it was true, this idea, because people ask me all the time, they ask me about meaning and purpose and what decision they should make and should they quit their job or quit the relationship. And my response for the last, I’d say, 12 months has just been to try and impress upon them that they were born with this thing inside them, which is how you feel. and you’ve learned not to listen to it because your mother’s opinion of which university you go to has like superseded it and Instagram has. But I know it’s there because I know like evolutionarily you wouldn’t be here if your body didn’t have signals to tell you to run, to tell you to be scared, to tell you to move away from this person. So I know it’s there but you just probably tuned it out.

SPEAKER_03:

 Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And I say that to people and I’ve almost never asked them if that resonated with them, but I’ve just been saying it for a while. So I don’t even know if it’s like true, but it’s just how I experience life. I suspect it does. Because my decision, like the reason why I’m sat here now is because of just, I quit a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_04:

 Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So like, and I quit, people go, you’re so young. It’s like, actually, it’s not that I made great decisions. It’s just, I think the skill of quitting was one that just came naturally to me. So like, I don’t like being at school. I stopped going. I don’t like university. I left after the first lecture. I started a business, did it for two years, quit that business out of the blue, start another business, did that one for six, seven years, quit that one out of the blue. I love it. And, um, it’s, it was all like, I didn’t need to have a place to go to. I didn’t need to have like a better option. It was just, this doesn’t feel good.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 I love that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But that’s kind of running off the cliff.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, it is a bit. And the thing is, the costs are high and the rewards are high. If you go gradually, you’re going to get a smaller amount of gain by the year. If you run off a cliff, you can have a really rough ride, but you might come out with a lot of positives. And your skill of quitting, it reminds me If people come to me, I try to give them all the value in one session. Like, hear this and go away. All right, take notes. If you don’t really want to do something, and you don’t really have to do something, don’t do it. Now, give me my money and go. Because that’s the whole thing. If you don’t want to do something and you don’t have to do it, don’t do it. And that’s a really quick way to find out what you do want.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What if you don’t want to do it, but there’s something telling you that you have to? So it could be like a horrible work meeting or that event you’ve been invited to with that person, which you don’t particularly like anyway, that baby shower you don’t want to go to.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

So you have to get more and more attentive to what’s going on inside. And I think some form of meditation, whether it’s expressive writing or painting or just sitting still, is very helpful at noticing these fine details. And I’m kind of joking when I say if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it, don’t do it. But ultimately, that’s true. And the way you decide, there are things that you don’t want to do, but you actually do have to do them. Not because people want you to, but because you have to do them. And the way I experienced that, I like to describe it with something the Buddha used to say a lot. And that was, wherever you find a body of water, You can know if it’s the sea because the sea always tastes of salt. And wherever you find enlightenment, awakening, your own truth, your path, you can always recognize it no matter what form it takes because enlightenment always tastes of freedom. He did not say happiness. He did not say benefit. He did not say, you know, mania, true love. He said freedom. And when you know, like, I did not want to meet with my parents, for example, in my therapist’s office. I was terrified of both of them and of the whole community. My therapist could have been run out of business in the town we lived in. But if I had not done it, I would not have been as free. So I had to do it. But that’s a really different I have to do it than my mother really, really would be happier if I became a doctor.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Freedom.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is freedom in that definition of the word?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

When I asked you what your body felt when you started paying attention to it and you said it relaxed. It’s a sense of, I also mentioned flow, which is the sense of being completely almost the sense of self-disappearing and being in complete harmony with something that is moving through the world. My undergraduate degree is in Chinese and so I know I found out about Taoism earlier in my life and it’s not really a religion the way we would think of it. It’s the sense that there is an energy that flows through nature and that if you don’t fight it you will You will live the life you were meant to live. And the sense of letting go of everything else, except letting that thing work with you and through you, that to me is freedom.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

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DR. MARTHA BECK:

I just went back for the first time in years. I had a gig in Boston, so I went back to Cambridge, which is next to it, and I went with my wife, something that couldn’t have happened when I was 17. I had the sense of tapping my younger self on the shoulder and saying, I am from your future, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is possible for you to live in a state of almost continuous joy and that you can get there without dying. You can get there. In fact, your job in this world is to find a way to live in a state of continuous joy without dying.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And if she turned to you and said, Dr. Martha Beck, what is step one? What would you say to her?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I would say, sit down with yourself and find a part of you that can say to your suffering, which is huge, I love you. It’ll be okay. I’m right here. And that’s something, I call it kind internal self-talk. And the acronym is KIST. And I didn’t tell anyone about it for decades because it’s so corny sounding. But that one thing in Tibetan Buddhism, they might call it the basis of loving kindness. For years sometimes, the monks who are trained there and the nuns will sit in meditation for days and days and do nothing but offer kindness to themselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Themselves?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, it has to start that way. So you sit with your miserable self and you say, I would sit with her and I would say, may you be well, may you be happy. May you be free from suffering. May you feel safe and protected. May you live with ease. And as I offer her those wishes, I become the part of myself that is real. Because the suffering is part of the dream world. And the reality is infinitely loving. and intelligent beyond, so far beyond our silly monkey minds. And we can align ourselves with that. And it’s like a lifeline that I could throw my younger self. Sometimes I wonder if I did.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The suffering is part of the dream world.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 When you say that, are you referring to the anxiety spiral and those kinds of things?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh yeah, but also the whole thing about we’re all going to die and everything’s awful and what point is there to it anyway? You know, suffering is certain and death is certain. Why don’t we just get off the bus now? That kind of thing. That’s the dream. Everybody who’s had the awakening experience, Dante said it, Shakespeare said it, they’re like, we are such stuff as dreams are made of. Dante, in the last part of the Divine Comedy, which I believe is his description of his own enlightenment, He looks back at the earth once he’s learned to love himself, and he calls it the little threshing floor that so incites our savagery. It’s nothing compared—now he’s with the source of love in paradise. And he describes it as a rose unfolding and unfolding and producing light, and in Asia It’s a lotus, same thing, a many-petaled flower that keeps opening and opening. Very similar imagery. And that’s, I kind of feel that way. When you mentioned the part of me that used to be so unhappy, it’s like, oh yeah. Yeah, she thought that was real. But I haven’t, and it is real, the way a video game is real. It’s something that I believe our consciousness projects, this life of misery and even materiality. Matter is not—consciousness is not made by matter. Matter is made by consciousness, and consciousness is primary. And nobody has the vaguest clue what consciousness actually is, but we have it, so it must exist. And that was what Descartes said. He actually—we say—he said, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. He actually said, I don’t know anything. But I doubt everything, and the fact that I doubt means that I’m thinking, so I must exist. He said, dubito cogito ergo sum. I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. So when you get to this place where you’re willing to let your mind go wide open, not closed around, oh, there’s an afterlife where we sit on clouds, and no, I have no idea what happens when we die. But my mind is open. And the minds we are taught to have by this culture are closed like fists, whether it’s around a religion or a sort of atheistic science. Because real science has to be open to the mystery. People experience it. You can’t just rule that out. So, yeah, I think that what we’re experiencing is a real projection of consciousness, but I think consciousness is something much vaster and more infinite and enduring than matter.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

One of the things you talked about was when you saw the light during that surgery. Like, when people hear you say you saw a light during surgery, people think, well, you’re on morphine or something.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Were you on morphine?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I don’t remember exactly which anesthesia they used, but I asked. So I’m in surgery. They’re operating on me. I look around. I sit up, and then I think, why am I sitting up? I’m having surgery. I look down. There’s my body. They’re operating on it. I was like, this is weird. So I lay back down, and there were bright surgical lights. And the light that appeared between them was just small at first. like a golf ball. And it was, they tell us we only see a trillionth of the available light spectrum. We only see a trillionth of the colors that we could that exist. And I think I could see trillions more colors than I’d ever seen before. And it was It was absolutely mesmerizing. You could not, you would never want to look away from it. And then it got bigger, in my case, and it touched my body and this feeling of absolute exquisite joy just coursed through me. And it was the realest thing I’d ever seen, so much realer than the body that was being operated on. And it was laughing with joy, and I was laughing with joy. And I started to cry because I was, it was pure relief, pure happiness. And the surgeons noticed tears coming out of my eyes, and they thought I could feel the surgery and that the anesthesia wasn’t strong enough. So they were like, oh my god, oh my god, she’s feeling this. And the anesthesiologist was freaked out. And then I really didn’t notice the rest because I was busy with other things. But the moment I woke up, I was like, bring me the anesthesiologist, please. Actually, I couldn’t stop crying for hours because I loved everyone so much. And I was just like, everybody that was there, there was a janitor. I was like, I love you so much. So they brought me the anesthesiologist, and he seemed terrified, which I didn’t understand. Now I do. He was afraid that he’d done something wrong. So I said, what did you give me? What are the side effects? What happens to people under this surgery? What goes on? And he said, just tell me what happened. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, I was going to give you more medication. And then a voice said, don’t do that. She’s crying because she’s happy. And he said, I just listened to it, and I don’t know why. And he was like, did I do the right thing? And so I told him a little bit. It was still, I never thought I’d tell anyone this story. I have ended up telling it over and over. And the memory of it never fades at all. It’s not like a typical memory. And he said, do you know how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of giving people anesthesia? I said, how many? And he said, once. And then he gave me a kiss on the forehead and went away. So I don’t think it was a drug effect.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why truth emerged from that? Because you say, from what I’ve understood, that you vowed not to lie.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah. In any way. Like, not with my actions, not with even my facial expressions. And the reason was I had heard the truth will set you free. I had studied so many wisdom traditions, looking everywhere for a reason not to commit suicide. I mean, I had really looked. I knew a lot of religious texts, philosophical texts. I had done my homework. And over and over and over and over it said, the truth will set you free. I was like, in Mormonism they said the truth is what we’ve written down here and it was bogus and phony and I was like, no. But the light was far more true than anything else I’d ever experienced. It was far more real. So I was like, okay, if truth takes me there, and it told me, not verbally, but it said, look, you’ve been thinking that you could kill yourself and feel better. And I am telling you that you are meant to learn to feel this way, the way you feel with me now. when you’re alive, always. So go and do that. And what I really did was I made, it wasn’t even a choice. It was a, ooh, it was an absolute obsession. I would not live in such a way that I was not conscious of the presence of that light. And that meant every time I lied, you felt how weak you got when you just said something that wasn’t true. I felt it withdraw. Or myself, you can’t withdraw from it. It’s everywhere, I believe. But I felt myself less conscious of it. And I was like, okay, that’s not gonna work. So I decided what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna say what’s real, do what’s real. If a thought comes in that feels like it’s pulling me away from that light, I will question that thought. It can’t be real. It doesn’t set me free. Bring me into that. I’m going to just investigate everything until I find what feels truest to me. Knowing, by the way, that, as one of my favorite Indian sages says, the only true statement the mind can make is, I do not know. Because we could be dreaming all this. We could be fed misinformation. We could be deep fake. I don’t know anything. I mean, with this little monkey brain. I don’t know. But in Asia, they have this concept of don’t know mind, where the mind is wide open and not clenched around anything. And then you can experience a sort of, it’s the humility of surrendering your primacy, the primacy of human intelligence, to something so much bigger. And still being human and having that be a good thing, but just not mistaking it for godhood.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Hmm. As part of you stepping in, when you step into your truth, so the body knows, from what you said, the body lives in a better state, a less anxious state, I imagine.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You know what it is? When people think about stepping into their truth, the reason they probably don’t is because there’s consequence to that, or at least there’s a short-term apparent consequence. I might lose my job. When people think of truth, they think of speaking your mind. In the modern world, you speak your mind, you might lose everything.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

You ask yourself, is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary? So you don’t say every little thing that crosses your mind, and you don’t do it in ways that are unkind. But yes, you may feel that, you know, I felt I had to formally leave Mormonism, which to my entire community of childhood and young adulthood was the sin worse than murder. I was going to outer darkness. I used to walk down the street once I’d done this, and people would physically turn their backs. Friends, right? But I had to. So that was a place where, yes, there was a huge consequence, and there will be. I sort of position it as your true nature versus culture, and by culture I mean anything from a couple’s culture, to a family culture, to a religious, to an ethnic, national, whatever. If you serve your true nature, there will come a time when you become counter-cultural. You do something that is not what your parents approved of, or it’s not what your religion taught.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How do you know what your true nature is? Is there such an exercise one can go through to figure it out?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 Yeah, the absence of all suffering, psychological suffering.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, so the absence of all psychological suffering is my true nature. Yeah. So is my psychological suffering caused by being not in my true nature?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, it’s caused by innocently believing lies you were taught by one of two forces. Socialization or trauma? Trauma tells you, oh my God, everything’s dangerous all the time, and it gets lodged in the brain. And socialization says things like, you’re not good enough, you should try harder, that was a bad choice, you’ve got to please your mother, all kinds of things. We all have them. And if you want to please your mother and you have that, it’s great. If your true nature and your culture go together, there’s no conflict. Like, I loved school. My true nature fit that culture. But then my oldest child, who’s brilliant, it did not fit that child’s culture. And yet I forced my kid to go through school. And we’ve talked about a lot since. I wish I hadn’t done that. I was young. I had my kids young. And I forced my child to conform with a culture that went against her true nature. And it caused a lot of suffering. Do you suffer? Oh, still, yeah, I was really, really kind of, I was deeply sad after the last American election. Deeply sad, but never afraid anymore. Not anxious. And even, you know, the grieving process, when you lose someone, you’re gonna grieve deeply. And that’s a sequence of, you know, denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, there’s kind of They put them in a list, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross put them in a list of things you experience when you lose someone or you’re going to die. It’s actually more like being in a cement mixer. It just all happens at once. But I actually wouldn’t count that as suffering. It is a process. A Peruvian shaman once told me, compassion is the evolution of consciousness in the healing of trauma, and the healing of trauma is the grieving process. So if you’re grieving, I would sit with you and I would bring you, you know, warm drinks and put a blanket around you and I would cry with you and feel with you and love you. But that’s not the same to me as psychological suffering, which is that anguished feeling of, I just don’t want to be here. This is bad.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 As part of you stepping into your truth, you realised that the relationship you were in with your husband at the time was not the relationship you wanted.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

No. He was gay and trying so hard not to be gay. And he was Mormon, so it was very convenient for me because I was in love with him, very much in love. And I think he really, really loved me, too. I know he did. We got married when I was 20. We were delivered by the same obstetrician. Like, we had a very similar life path. And then we both went to Harvard, which was very unusual for people from our hometown. So we had so much in common and we were best friends and loved each other deeply. And he was trying desperately not to be gay. I wasn’t conscious of being gay because I wasn’t conscious of anything much. I was so disassociated because of sexual abuse that I just didn’t know where I stood. He just made me feel safe. And I loved that. But then when we started questioning Mormonism and the sexual abuse came up and everything, I was just—and even before that, it was really obvious that I said—when I was pregnant with my son, I started having psychic experiences. I’m sorry, they just happened. I had to allow them. getting my doctorate at Harvard, and now I was having psychic flashes. What do you do with that? You either throw it away, which means throwing away the evidence, the data, or you blow your mind open. And one of the things that happened was I started to be able to see what was happening with people I loved when I wasn’t there, just in flashes, but very verifiable, I could call them and do it. And when that would happen, my husband was traveling a lot. I just knew he was gay and I knew that’s what was right for him and that his joy was part of homosexuality. And he was still quite religious and wanted to be a good boy the way he’d been taught to be. And so I think he went through a lot of anguish. I know he did. We talked about it. And it wasn’t until we both left the church that I said, you know, I’m gay, you’re gay, why don’t we just be gay? And so he started dating men and I fell in love with a woman and I’m still with her. And eight years ago, As I said, you go into countercultural things when you follow your truth. Another woman who was visiting us at the place where we were living, the three of us started hanging out and we could not stop hanging out with each other and it’s very weird for three people to all fall in love with each other. But that’s what happened eight years ago and it was so It’s a good thing we were living out in the forest, because the cultural pressures against that are huge. But we were living in a national forest. There were no people around. And it was just like, well, OK, then. This feels awesome. And eight, nine years later, it still feels awesome.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

There really is something to that. There really is something to this idea that when you follow your truth, you’ll live a counter-cultural life. Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Do you know how embarrassing it is for me to sit and tell people, not only am I gay, but I have two partners.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I don’t think it’s embarrassing. I’ve got friends that, I’ve got a good friend of mine that is married, but also in love with another couple. So they’re like a four and they like raise the kids together and stuff. Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing it’s, it’s, this sounds so strange to say, but for me, to me, it’s actually quite inspiring because it must take a lot of something to accept that people are going to be judgmental and to do it anyway. So I’m like, oh God, I wish I had the, like, if that’s how I felt, would I be the type of person that would be strong enough to follow that feeling? If that’s like how I felt, or would I just bat the feeling away? I actually think I’d bat the feeling away and I don’t like that about myself because of consequence. And the consequence for me would be, in my head, it would be quite grave.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

 Yeah, because you’re a public figure.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, so it’s going to be written about everywhere and people are going to tweet me all day saying, oh, Steve’s dating five people or whatever.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Oh, when this happened, when I realized, when the three of us realized we were actually, for several weeks we were like, this is normal, right? It’s very normal for three people to sit very close together on the same couch and talk for hours. And then finally I was like, oh my God, I’m in love with both of you. And they were like, yeah, we’re all in love with both of each other. And I said, it’s fine for you two. I’m on an integrity cleanse and I have to tell the truth all the time to a lot of people. But it was like being hit by a train, the joy that came with that. I remember Karen, my original partner, who’d been with me for like 22 years at the time, she came to me and she sat me down and she said, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Rowan.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Who’s this other lady?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, this writer from Australia who had come to do some work in the US. And she was staying with us for a while, but not with us, with some other people on a neighboring property. And Karen said, yeah, we’ve been hanging out and I just, I’m having very, very strong feelings. It’s kind of like a fire hose of love, and I don’t know if it’s like maybe spiritual. And I remember just smiling at her the way you do with your friends when they are in love and going, you’re in love with her. And I looked inside myself for Any fear, any anger, any jealousy, nothing. It was like an explosion of pure joy, just joy beyond joy beyond joy. And I was like, this is amazing. Does she feel the same way about you? Bring her. Tell her to come here. Let’s all get to know each other. This is awesome. And I’ll move into the guest room, and you guys can have the master bedroom. And there will be more love in this house. And that’s just how it felt. And that’s how it’s felt to me ever since. And that’s my alternative to feeling suicidal. Ro calls it feeling good by looking weird.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And is that, it’s been how many years now? Four years, did you say? Eight. Eight years, wow. Is it difficult?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s like now I just think about how do couples do it and it’s like a two-legged stool. How would that even work? Like you need the balance of three. Like if somebody gets in an argument, who’s the referee? And like how do you even do that with two people? So it very quickly, it felt so natural. You have to communicate a lot and there is, one of the things is none of us is capable of lying. We just, we’re out of practice. I don’t think either of them ever had a tendency to lie to themselves or anyone else. So you’re always telling each other the truth and there’s not, there’s a weird kind of harmony among people who are forming community with total authenticity and openness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

We talked earlier on about meaning and purpose. You said the billionaires when they come to you, but really anyone that comes to you is all trying to figure out their path in life, their meaning, their purpose. It’s a big, big question. What are the lies we’re sold about finding our purpose? Because I have a lot of kids in my DMs that DM me and say, Steve, I can’t find my passion or I can’t find my purpose or I can’t, and I never really know what to say to them.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I think one thing I wrote in one of my books a long time ago was that I realized this when I was pregnant with my son and I realized he would have Down syndrome and be intellectually delayed. And I thought, what is the meaning of his life? What is the purpose of his life? And then somehow I realized because of my love for him, that the meaning of life is not what happens to people. The meaning of life, your purpose in life, is what happens between people. So it’s in the meeting. You have a home in South Africa, so you know about Ubuntu, yeah?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I bought the house this year, so I’ve been working a lot, and it’s only really at the end of the year that I get to go there, so I don’t really know South Africa well yet.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Well, the concept of Ubuntu, I think, is dominant throughout a lot of Africa. And there’s no English translation. And it is completely the opposite of our cultural individualism. And the meaning of Ubuntu is basically, I am me because we are us. I am fundamentally different because I know you. and you matter to me. And I used to be confused in South Africa because I knew there were a lot of AIDS orphans, and I never saw them on the streets or anything. And then I realized that Ubuntu is a real practical thing there, and that the children who are left are absorbed into community by people who may have nothing except Ubuntu. And Ubuntu, There’s a Chinese proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So we’ve been going really fast in this culture, fast toward our own destruction. Because I am because we are is the closest thing you can say to it. But conceptually, it means the space between us. So that’s another thing you can do, an exercise you can do to get into your right hemisphere. So we’re looking at each other. But if you look, without moving your eyes, look at the distance between us. Look at the openness between us. Do you feel how it changes your gaze? Yeah. How it changes your heartbeat? This is how people like Carl Jung, the psychologist, had a dear friend who was a Pueblo Indian, and he said, what do you really think of us Anglos? And he said, we think you’re insane. And he said, why? And this guy’s name was Chief Mountain Lake. He said, you’re always staring at things, and yet you never see each other. You never see what’s between you. and our eyes are soft and yours are hard. And when you and I just did that, my whole body went into a state of, it’s like the light, you know? It’s like that light is more, I’m more conscious of it when I’m looking at the space between us and I feel you. I don’t just see you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I felt like my heart rate dropped.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, so did mine.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That’s kind of how I just felt really calm. Yeah. And I was thinking about, I was trying to look at the space in between. Yeah.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

So I’m trying right now to start building communities of Ubuntu. I started one online just to foster people’s creativity and help them move into this state of being. And it’s called Wilder because when we were wilder, that’s how we looked at each other. That’s how your dog and your cat look at you. That’s why we love being with them because they look at us and they look at the space between us and their eyes are soft. And if there’s a fly that goes by, they’ll get sharp. And that’s the hunting instinct. But then when they’re looking at something they love, they’re looking at the whole space and feeling each other.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So if someone sends me a DM and says, I can’t find my purpose in life, what do you suggest I respond?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I’d say, first of all, sit down and offer love to the part of you that’s in so much stress because you can’t find your purpose. That’s a horrible feeling. You know your purpose, but you can’t find it because it’s being drowned out by what you’ve been taught. And that hurts. And I’m really sorry because I know that pain. Go and sit down or find a friend, find someone trustworthy, find community, and tell them what Mary Oliver says, tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. And she talks about the wild geese announcing your place in the family of things. When you can communicate your despair and feel heard and feel connected, And what happens between people will fill in the gaps in your knowledge and you’ll realize, ah, my purpose is where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. And I can feel that when I love. And love is not like goopy-gippy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s my deep gladness.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, that’s from Fred Boettner, who was a theologian, German theologian. He said, your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. So what you just described, a young person reaching out to you and saying, what is my purpose, and you are asking yourself, what do I say? So you’re looking at the relationship between this young person and you, and you are in Ubuntu. You’re looking at the space between you, and your deep gladness is to heal the scars and wounds in this person you’ve never met, but who is deeply hungry for something the culture is not giving him or her or them. that’s your deep gladness and their deep hunger. And you’ve been serving that really well, like so much better than most people I’ve met in my life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And by deep gladness, how I interpreted that was the thing that makes me happy or the thing that makes me feel good?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Yeah, that’s kind of, People could take that a number of different ways. This is deep gladness. It’s something you feel in your viscera. It’s something, it’s like the most, here’s another way to get into it. Imagine a time when you were with a creature you loved, and it’s probably easier if it was an animal than if it was a person. If it was a person, it has to be a baby. So somebody who couldn’t talk. My son can’t really talk so I get this with him a lot. And remember a time when you relaxed completely into the presence of this other being and the cat was purring on your chest or the dog had his head on your lap and there was no pressure to do anything. You’re being human. with this other being in a space that you have created that we’ve all created with our consciousness for the joy of its beauty and its darkness and its light and there’s just Psalm 46, Eckhart Tolle says, it says the name of God like six different ways. Be still and know that I am God. Be is a name for God. Stillness is a name for God. Know is a name for God. I am is a name for God. And God is a name for God. And when you When you feel all of that as what you fundamentally are, and it’s connecting with another person, the gladness doesn’t even touch it. No word can touch it. But it’s two aspects of a consciousness that thought they were separate joining hands and meeting each other again. And the reunion is overwhelmingly Beautiful. Relief. Joy. Gladness. Light. All of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How has the internet messed this all up?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

It’s messed it up and it’s made it possible. It’s messed it up horribly by feeding on our culture’s obsession with those left hemisphere, what bleeds leads, right? We have that negativity bias. And what people want to do is monetize their position on the internet. And the best way to monetize your position is to get the lion’s share of attention. And whatever gets the lion’s share of attention is a cobra versus a puppy. There’s a psychological and monetary pressure always pushing the internet to frighten us more, or to make us more angry at each other, to divide and polarize us. It’s like this left hemisphere weapon that has just gone berserk. And so like in America, there are these pockets of such extremely polarized political belief systems that all have their own information sets, and I don’t know what the hell’s true, but they all believe absolutely the way the left hemisphere believes. There’s no open mind. On the other hand, You know, when the brain wakes up, when it has the awakening experience, the fruit ripens and ripens and then it falls. Okay, so that, I think, may be this epigenetic switch going on in the brain and it flashes to the whole brain and changes everything. And I like to think of fractals, the different units of nature that tend to reproduce at larger sizes. Like a twig is like a branch is like the trunk of a tree. So our brains may be like us. Our neocortex is very thin. It’s just this thin surface of cells around the surface of the brain. Very, very interactive. And we are kind of like that. We’re running around the surface of a sphere being very, very interactive and teaching each other ideas. And if just one person awakens, you know, Buddha was awake. Jesus was awake. And Buddha never tried to save anybody but himself. You know? But other minds caught that configuration. They switched on. And because we have the internet, What used to take a whole national government to do, to communicate with everyone in the world, could happen from, like, a poor kid in Malawi who suddenly awakened and was able to put that into a message. Or, you know, Malala Yousaf. Like, everyone knows what this 15-year-old girl went through. Even though the information would have been suppressed by the Taliban if they could have done it, but they can’t do it anymore. So one awakened person now has the potential to touch the lives of literally everyone virtually for free.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you interact with the internet much?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I do. And I know that I am shaping an algorithm that is totally unrealistic because my world online is primarily otters. Otters. I loves me an otter. But, like, it’s all the examples of love and joy that occur between people. And then I look at the headlines and I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, when I first went to Africa, I’d heard, it’s the dark continent, everything is bad. Ebola, war, the Congo, all these terrible things, the heart of darkness. And then I went there and realized that for every horrible thing that legitimately does happen in that place, there are maybe a thousand acts of completely selfless love. I would walk around, every time I go there, I look at the people who have been colonized, you know, the original people, and I think, I’m white, If I were you, I’d be really mad at me. Like, why? And yet I was there. My wife had a little girl a few years ago. She’s a bit younger than I am. And she got sick in the airport in Johannesburg, really sick. And she was barfing everywhere. And we were just pushing the stroller from one tourist store. We’d get a bunch of t-shirts, and she’d throw up on that. And we’d put her in another one and throw the first one away. And people came running to us from the different stores. And they were from, you know, there are 11 different national languages there. There were people from different tribal legacies. And instead of running away from a vomiting child, they ran toward us with everything they could find to help. Someone lit a fire and sterilized a spoon. Someone ran down the airport to the only pharmacy to get the right medication and ran back with it. People were holding the vomit-stained clothes. I mean, these are people we had never met. And this was the place I’d been afraid of because I had let myself believe the stories that polarized me and said, oh, that’s a dark, scary place. Every place is dark and scary. And everywhere there are human beings, there is the capacity for Ubuntu. And what there is to love, the part of us that loves is infinitely more powerful than the part of us that doesn’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Amen. What is the most important thing in your new book, Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, that we haven’t talked about yet?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I would say it’s, I wish I could, I don’t know how to get it, how to say this clearly enough, and I’ve said it here, But what is the most important thing that anyone listening to this, you specifically right now, wherever you are, and I just mentioned Mary Oliver’s The Wild Geese, one of the things she says, no matter who you are, no matter how lonely, no, whoever you are, no matter how lonely, The world offers itself to your imagination. And you are part of the family of things. So whoever hears this, you specifically, in your essence, you are safe. No matter what it looks like, you are fundamentally going to be okay. I promise.

SPEAKER_04:

That’s it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Dr. Martha Beck, we have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they’re leaving the question for. Okay. And the question that has been left for you is… This is a tricky one. And you can interpret this however you wish.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What do you think separates a great story from just a good story? Easy.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

In a good story, bad things happen to good people. In a great story, bad things happen to heroes. Because there’s always conflict and there’s always suffering. And that can be just like, oh, that was awful. But the great stories, the ones we keep telling, are the ones where the person who would be a victim becomes a creator who says, I’m not going to stay in fear. I’m going to make something from this. And they stand up and they go out on an adventure. and what looks like it could have been a tragedy becomes an adventure. That’s what Shakespeare did at the end of his life. I was taught at Harvard that he wrote the four great tragedies where everything ends in horror and annihilation. That was his high point. And then he started writing these romances which are so stupid because they have like magic and forgiveness and happy endings. And I was actually told he did that because he was senile. He was 50, you know? The tragedies are amazing stories, and the romances, those are the great ones as far as I’m concerned, because that’s where the tragedy becomes an adventure that ends well.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

A good story is when bad things happen to good people, but a great story is when bad things happen to heroes.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

Heroes. Because it’s what the good people do with that. Do they suffer it, or do they make it the material of invention? Do they let it be a weight of lead, or do they perform an alchemy that turns it into gold? And all the great stories that last forever are the ones about alchemy, where suffering turns to something wonderful.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is this a choice that we have?

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I do believe it is, not always. Like if you’re a little kid or if you’re a young person out there, if you’re a working mom or someone in poverty or someone who’s just had a terminal diagnosis, of course you’re going to feel, you’re not just going to want to jump up and do something heroic. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be gentle to yourself. And if you’re gentle for just a while, you’re going to start to say, instead of, what am I going to do about this? You’re going to say, what can I make from this? And that shifts you into the mode of the creative. And as you start to make something of your situation, you become part of the creation. And that’s when you wake up from your nightmare. And to me, that’s the best ending of any story.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You clearly have a great story. Oh, thank you. So do you. Because you are clearly someone that is a good person that bad things happen to. Now you’re a person where bad things have happened to someone that me and many others consider to be a hero. because of all the wonderful things that you’ve done. It’s interesting because I thought I understood the subject matter of anxiety. And I think I was of the mind that it’s something you attack, you throw things at. Much of society says the key to curing anxiety is just you throw pills at it or something else. but you’ve given me a whole new perspective on what it is and also how to navigate in a world that’s increasingly more anxious. And I’m sure you’ve done that for many other people. In a way that’s really, really honest, really rooted in science and really accessible. I hope so. Thank you so much. That’s genuinely the words that I mean. I’m not lying to you. Thank you. I highly recommend anybody who’s resonated with any of this conversation, please go and get this book. It’s fantastic. It has these wonderful areas where you can engage with the book and there’s some sections that you can write in. But it’s just a wonderful book. And I think it’s a wonderful book for anybody that’s struggling. And I say struggling or suffering in all your forms. That’s trying to understand what that means. how to channel it into your own hero’s journey of sorts. So, Dr. Martha Beck, thank you so much. It’s been such an honor and privilege to meet you and I hope we have more conversations in the future.

DR. MARTHA BECK:

I hope so. The honor is all mine. Thank you so much.

What do I need to know about you and your earliest years to understand the life that you went on, that journey you went on, and the person you came to be?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, I grew up here in Los Angeles, not far from where we are, in a neighborhood called Baldwin Hills, and then we moved to another neighborhood. I had a very nice childhood, very middle class family. My father was a salesman his whole life, worked for the same company for 40 years, just sold chemical supplies. And, you know, my parents kind of left me alone a lot. I was basically, my sister almost kind of raised me in a way. And, you know, I had a very nice childhood, kind of left alone, sort of an introvert. Books kind of shaped me. I became an avid reader in early age, knew I wanted to be a writer, got heavily into drugs, I’m afraid, in high school, because that was the time where I went to school and in college. Had some great experiences. I look very fondly back even on my drug experiences, even though they got kind of depressing after a while. but it kind of shaped me in some ways. And, you know, that was me growing up, you know, and I had an attitude or a lens in which I looked at people from a distance. Like I was always sort of obsessed with, people wore masks the way I looked at it. Even when I looked at my parents and their friends and I said, what is really going on behind the masks that they wear and all the social niceties going on? What is behind? What is really the human animal like? And so these are kind of the themes that were a big part of me growing up.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

From what I read, you had a lot of different jobs in a lot of different industries up until the point when you wrote the first of your many books called The 48 Laws of Power back in 1998. And I was looking at all of these different jobs you’d had, and they all seemed to be completely different from one another. So then trying to understand how you arrived at a moment where you then wrote a book on the topic and subject matter of power, Having not been, you know, a psychology graduate or seemingly worked in any industry related to like human psychology seemed to be really peculiar to me.

ROBERT GREENE:

Yeah, and also I never really had a lot of power up until that point, so it wasn’t like I knew everything about being a leader or anything. You know, a lot of things that happen in life are kind of by coincidence or serendipitous. You don’t necessarily plan on it, which is sort of, when you look back on it, you can see a kind of an odd plan going on, like a destiny or fate. But in the moment, I didn’t feel that. I had all of these different jobs, as you mentioned, some of them completely unrelated. You know, I worked in construction. I had a construction job. I worked in a detective agency. I was a tour guide. I helped write an encyclopedia. I taught English in Spain, you know, on and on and on and on and on. But I was searching. I wanted to be a writer and a writer needs experiences. I just was hungry for weird experiences. You know, I never really stuck at any one job. And by the time you’re 37, 38, you know, my parents are starting to worry about me. I’m starting to worry about me. I’m getting a little bit depressed, even have moments where suicidal thoughts are floating in my brain. Like, I’m very ambitious. I know I could do something well, but it’s never come together. And so here’s the serendipity part. I’m in Italy for a job, one of my 80 different jobs, and I meet a man who’s a book packager there on this particular job we’re on. And he’s a Dutchman. I’m not going to imitate him, but he asked me if I had any ideas for a book. And suddenly all of the painful experiences in my life working in Hollywood, all the assholes I’ve worked for, all these weird politicking, all the manipulative games, all the crap that I had seen, it just came like almost vomiting out of me. And I said, you know, Here we are 20s. This was 1990 20th century back then here. We are in the late 20th century and People don’t dress like they did in the days of Machiavelli, right? They don’t wear wigs and stuff, but it’s the same damn thing It’s the same bloody battles going on the same manipulations the same kind of you know people don’t reveal who they are and And it’s a timeless game of power, just the same as Louis XIV or Cesare Borgia, or the people, the CEOs in the late 20th century. It’s this timeless thing. And as I’m telling him this, his eyes are lighting. He’s like, wow, this could really be a book. And he said, look, Robert, I’ll pay you to live while you write half the book and then we’ll sell it. And as I told you before, I was desperate. It was my get rich or die trying moment. I went back to Los Angeles. I borrowed money from my parents because I was that poor. And I wrote a treatment and he loved it. And the rest is history. That’s sort of my long winded answer to your question.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That’s so interesting. It’s crazy how in life things can just take such a turn out of nothing. And you never know what that thing is going to be. And I mean, you say the rest is history there. Give me an idea of the success of that book, The 48 Laws of Power, because I mean, I’ve seen it everywhere for as long as I’ve been looking at books. So what’s the, give me some, quantify the global success of that book.

ROBERT GREENE:

Quantify? Yeah. Well, here in the U.S., it’s sold quite a bit over 2 million copies, which is great. The weird thing is it’s selling now more than it ever has sold before. In other words, the percentage of books that we’re selling here in 2023 is greater than any period before. So it’s accelerating, which is insane, you know, and even my English publisher is having the same, telling me the same stuff. So, it’s kind of accumulated. It started off a little bit slowly. I mean, we got press, but it became this kind of cult thing. I’ve had very little publicity in mainstream media, which was big back then. It’s not big anymore, thank God. It was word of mouth. It’s like, if you heard about this book, it’s kind of dark, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It got on a few television shows. There was this show, a reality show with boxers, I think it was called The Contender, in which the finalist held up a copy of the book and said, this book helped me get to where I am now. And it sold like crazy. It got into the hip hop stream. Jay-Z was the first person I ever saw quoting the book in print in a Playboy interview. And then, you know, 50 Cent and all that, and Drake and all these people, that really kind of set it into the stratosphere. So it’s slowly become a bigger and bigger thing. And I had no idea, you know, I thought it was a weird book and it could be successful, but I had no idea the journey I was about to begin. It’s weird.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

journey of writing this book, have your feelings towards the book evolved or changed over time? Because society moves on, you move on as an individual, as a human, you learn new things, you mature, and then the book is kind of held in time.

ROBERT GREENE:

Not really. My philosophy in life is never look back, regret nothing. It’s there, I did it. It came in a particular moment in my life and in the zeitgeist and things have changed a little bit. But it was a very serious effort to try and get at something timeless. Now, yes, there’s a dark side to it, and maybe I’ve moved on from that. And honestly, when I wrote my fourth book, Mastery, I was a little bit concerned that young people were thinking that the whole game of life is about politics and manipulation. So I wrote a book to kind of counter that. But I think the book is true and it’s held up. I think if I look at business, what’s going on in the business world, I kind of got, I think I hit it on the nail about what goes on in the dynamics and the power game. You know, I wrote a book on human nature and the idea is we were formed hundreds of thousands of years ago in particular circumstances, our brains are wired a certain way. Yes, we’re very sophisticated. Yes, we have the internet. Yes, I’m here being interviewed by you on a podcast. It’s pretty insane, but we haven’t fundamentally changed the same raw emotions of envy, of aggression, of, of, you know, worrying about our status, about having to disguise ourselves and appear like we’re saintly and loving, that we don’t have a shadow, which we all have. None of that has changed. So, yeah, I wouldn’t write that book now because I’m at a different place in life and I understand that, but I’m not ashamed of it in any way. I stand by it and I think I hit at something real.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is, in your definition, what is power? You know, I was really compelled when you’re talking about the evolutionary roots of power, but like, at its essence, what is power?

ROBERT GREENE:

It’s not what you think it is. It’s not, you know, Vladimir Putin or presidents or Biden or all these political figures and these big games. Power is a feeling. It’s an essence. It’s an emotion. It’s a human need and desire. And really what power is, is a sense of understanding yourself and being able to control yourself. So the way I look at it, I like to look at it not through the lens of great power politics, but as an average everyday human being here in the United States or in England. The feeling that you have with your children, with your spouse, with your colleagues, the people who work for you, the sense that you have no control, that you can’t influence them with your ideas, that you can’t get them to maybe soften some of their ugly behavior if they have that, that you can’t get them interested in helping you with a project or whatever, is the most miserable feeling a human being can have. Malcolm X had a quote that I love, which is, absolute power corrupts, but absolute powerless corrupts even more. I’m butchering it, but that was the gist of it. The feeling of powerlessness is actually more corrupting than the feeling of having a lot of power. It turns people into being passive-aggressive, into playing all kinds of weird games, negative games to get power. You want to feel that you have a degree of control over events in your life, over people, over your future. And that, to me, is what power is, right? And so some of that involves these games that I mentioned in there, and some of it goes beyond the 48 laws of power, which I’ve tried to indicate in my other books. But it’s the sense that I’m not helpless in this world. I remember when I first entered the work world, As a very naive college graduate with all these ideals and things I’d read, because I studied literature and languages, going, man, this is weird. People are playing all these kind of games. I’m in over my head. I made mistakes. I got fired. for being too brash for outshine the master. It was painful, right? And so learning, you don’t have to use the loss of power. I don’t advocate crushing your enemy totally. I hope I don’t have any enemies ever that I need to crush ever. You just need to know these things so that when you enter the work world, you’re not naive, you’re not stupid. You don’t make the same kind of mistakes that I made. You spare yourself the pain. You understand the most fundamental thing about human nature. People have egos. Even your boss has an ego. You think he or she doesn’t because they’re powerful. They’re even more insecure than other people. You need to be aware of these things so that you don’t inadvertently make them feel insecure and suffer the consequences. So that’s, I don’t know, that’s sort of my idea of power that I was trying to describe there.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The way you describe it is more of a sort of intrinsic force perception of yourself. When people think of power, they think of having control over others or their influence over others. But you’ve kind of made it more of a internal force.

ROBERT GREENE:

Yeah, well, if you can’t control yourself, then you’re in a lot of trouble in this world, right? Because when you just naturally are yourself doing things, you’re going to offend people. You learn early on we’re social animals. I have to tailor my behavior, you know? If you go on babbling about all about how you feel and think etc and you just say what’s the first thing on your mind, you’re going to end up having a very short career. You’re going to be saying things that are going to offend people. You’re going to be making a fool of yourself. You’re going to be saying things that you end up regretting, right? You have no self-control. And if you see somebody who has no self-control, it makes you look like you’re not powerful. If you can’t control yourself, how can you control anything in your environment? How can you be a leader, right? So you have to learn certain things about your nature, about who you are, and not just be anybody. You have to kind of tailor your appearances as well. Because for good or for bad, I’m a believer in looking at the human animal without shame and embarrassment, just as we are, right? And appearances matter. It’s the animal part of our nature. We judge people by how they appear, how they dress, their tone of voice, their body language, et cetera, et cetera. It would be, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t judge people by appearances. We would just judge them by what’s inside of them. Yes, I agree with that. But that we’re not ideal. We’re not descended from angels. We’re descended from primates. So you have to understand that appearances matter. And this is part of the game. And so you have to control your appearances a little bit. You have to tailor it. You have to be a bit of actor in this world, on and on and on. You know, these are things that people don’t like to admit about ourselves. We like to think that we’re much more idealistic, that these things really don’t matter in the end. And I wish it were that way, but it’s not. And so I’m a bit more of a realist when it comes to things like that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But yeah. As you were talking about this need to keep up appearances to some degree in order to survive and to fit into the tribes that we form in our lives. It made me think about how many guests I’ve had on this podcast who work in maybe the entertainment industry or other industries, you know, they’re famous or whatever, and they report that keeping up appearances had a really detrimental impact on their happiness and their fulfillment in life because in some cases they, you know, it meant that they were doing a job as a presenter and had to always be happy when inside they didn’t feel that and maybe the contrast of reality and and perception caused them a lot of harm or they’ve built a life around things that they’re not interested in. I think you touched on some of that in mastery. That’s the question I have, which is keeping up appearances and the impact that that has on your happiness. Are you wearing a mask and happiness? What’s the relationship?

ROBERT GREENE:

I talk about it in the 48 Laws of Power where you have to play this game in life. To me, it’s a form of wisdom. which is it’s a wisdom that used to exist like in the 18th century. I read a book that had a big impact on me many years ago called The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett in which he described like cafe life in London in the 18th century or France. And he was saying back then, when you entered the public arena or your cafe, you knew you were an actor. You left the house, you put on the mask, and you had fun. You knew it was like fun. It was play. When you’re a child, you like playing games. You like putting on costumes. You like playing your parents or some character you saw on TV. It’s part of human nature. We like to play these games. We’re role players. We’re actors. And he was saying in the 18th century, that was just a given in life, that when you entered the public realm, you knew you were an actor. And then when you went home to your wife, your family, or your husband, or wherever, you drop the mask, you breathe a deep sigh of relief, go, now I can be who I am, right? And it wasn’t a problem. It didn’t create neuroses. It didn’t create this like, What’s wrong with me? I don’t know who I am anymore. So people now, the problem now is we don’t have distance from that social realm. And so we think that if we’re acting, that’s who we are. But it’s not. It’s just that’s part of being a social animal is playing a role. You know, I did a book with 50 Cent and he kind of exemplifies a lot of that. He plays a role in life. You know, when I met him, I thought, uh-oh. I was kind of intimidated. I was a little bit afraid. You know, the thug. This is a guy, when I met him, he was, you know, just a few years away from being shot and all this stuff. And I met him, and he was the nicest person in the world. He was almost kind of sweet. He’d hate it if I said that word, but he was sweet, right? He was very down to earth. He was very calm, et cetera. He’s playing a role when he goes out and he plays that person. He knows it. He knows it’s like, he doesn’t take it seriously, you know? He had this big beef with Kanye West back when I was doing the book with him. And then I met the two of them in Vegas when they were there for the awards. They were like the best of friends. They were joking. It was just a game they were playing, right? So what I tell people is, we all are actors. Humans are born actors. We learn at a very early age to play that kind of game. It’s kind of fun sometimes to do that, you know? Enjoy that part of life, but don’t get it confused with who you are in your essence. That’s sort of the dance you’re playing between those two things. I understand what you’re saying, and a lot of it has to do, as you said, related to mastery, where people end up in a career that doesn’t suit them. And I think I understand what you’re getting at when I look at presenters or people in the news and they have to smile and be so cheerful. Man, what a drag. I’d hate to be like that. That is so false. Don’t you want to take a shower after being so cheerful and chatty and all that shit? You know, yeah, I understand that. But if that’s the profession you chose and you love it, then maybe you don’t feel that way. I couldn’t do it personally. But, you know, I think it’s OK to think of yourself as an actor. I don’t think there’s anything wrong about that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The second very curious law in your book that I uncovered was law number two. I’m talking about the 48 laws of power here where it says never trust friends too much, learn how to use enemies. Do you trust your friends?

ROBERT GREENE:

Okay, well, everything in the book is context. So when you take things out of context, it’s a little harder to understand. And what I’m trying to say in that, I’m talking about in the work world, when you’re out in the social realm. And one of the worst things that people do is you have a job, and I’ve been guilty of it myself, even after I wrote the damn book. You’re out in the work world and you need to hire somebody, you need to find a colleague, you need to find a partner or an employee. Your mind naturally gravitates towards a friend, right? Because they know you, you trust them, you have a relationship, you know, and you feel comfortable with them. And it’s a terrible mistake. So many of the worst things have happened in history are because of that very problem. Because friends, there’s all these emotions involved between people, right? And those emotions confuse the issue. So what I’m talking about in that law is when you need to get results, you need to think, when you have a job or something, you have to think in practical terms, not in terms of emotions, not in terms of friendship, et cetera, et cetera. So you want to keep your work world separate. It’s not everything about life is having to be friends and having nice things and everybody like you. Sometimes what matters is getting results done. And sometimes the best person to work with isn’t your friend because they don’t have all this other stuff that we’re talking about. In fact, a very powerful move is if there’s an enemy out there, somebody who you never got along with, If you approach them and say, let’s bury the hatchet. I have a job and I’d really like you to work with me. I know you’re really smart. The turnaround of emotions is a very powerful thing where they’re going, wow, yeah, sure, that’s great. I never expected that. And they’re highly motivated to now prove that they’re worthy of your change of mind. So, it’s not about not trusting your friends in the realm of friendship in personal relationships. It’s about being aware that the work world is different from the realm of personal relationships.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The other point I found really curious was point three about concealing your intentions. And I find this curious because I’ve never really known where to land on this when people ask me for advice on the subject matter about how much of your hand should you show, whether it’s in business or life or whatever. There’s a group of people that think you should always just keep everything you’re doing and your intentions totally secret. Because then people might copy you or they’ll attack you or whatever and then there’s another school of thought that says When you’re building something when you’re doing something when you have a mission you need to share it with as many people as possible because that will Galvanize people to to come along with the journey with you and they’ll want to support you and help you so when I read Point number three about concealing your intentions. I wanted to ask you about what what you think about that which side you land on

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, everything depends on circumstances. So the laws are never meant to apply to every situation, right? So when it’s with your own team, and you’re trying to inspire them, and you’re trying to give them a vision, you’re trying to get them on your side, yeah, you share your vision with them. You shared, this is where the group is going. This is where I want things to be in three years. Let’s all get together. We’re trying to do something very positive for the world. OK, here’s my plan. But then there are circumstances where revealing everything about what you’re planning to do is actually very counterproductive. So the business world, in the 21st century is extremely competitive. It’s getting worse and worse by the day as more and more people now are entering the power arena. And I think it’s a great thing where it used to be just a realm where only older white men had power. And now it’s the doors have opened to everyone. The level of competition is that much more intense, particularly now even with the internet. You have rivals out there. You have competitors out there. Even as we talk right now, maybe you’re not thinking about them, but they are. They’re going to steal your ideas. They’re looking to take your business away from you, et cetera, et cetera. Just be aware of that phenomenon. And just always saying what you’re planning on doing isn’t always the wisest thing to do. Sometimes, if you’re in a tricky situation, putting people off the scent and giving them a red herring and saying, I’m planning to do this when in fact you’re planning to do that. It’s a very powerful technique. It’s deception, but all’s fair in love and war and business, I’m afraid. So, you know, there are moments where you don’t want to lay all your cards out on the table, right? You want to either create a little bit of mystery so that people don’t know what you’re going to do next and they’re wondering what you’re going to do next. And as they’re wondering what you’re going to do next, they’re kind of on their heels a little bit. What’s the next thing that Stephen is planning? I don’t really know. Wow. You know, it’s a very powerful approach. There are other times and other experiences and moments in life where you do want to reveal what you’re planning to do because there’s a purpose behind it. I’m just saying, be aware. Don’t just act in this world, be aware, have a strategic mindset. Sometimes concealing is what you need to do, sometimes not concealing is what you need to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s funny, when we have this conversation about power and the darkness and the shadows that people have in them, I think a lot of people listening And probably it seems that way because I’m the one asking the questions, as if I’m questioning society that I’m not part of. They might think they don’t play these games, right? So that’s the question I have is like, have you ever encountered anybody? Do you believe there’s anybody out there that doesn’t play power games, manipulation, have shadows, have darkness in them?

ROBERT GREENE:

No, I don’t. So in my war book, I read the biography of Mahatma Gandhi. were the saintliest figures in history, right? And I realized that Mahatma Gandhi was actually a brilliant strategist. And I’m not saying his use of non-violence and civil disobedience didn’t come from the heart. He didn’t mean it. He wasn’t actually, he didn’t actually believe in the peaceful method. He did. He was very sincere. But he was very strategic about it. And he planned a campaign, several campaigns like the Salt March in the 20s, where he knew, for instance, that the English public was very liberal minded. They had this ideal of themselves as being this very, they weren’t colonialists, they weren’t imperialists, they were doing the best for the world. And he deliberately had these marches where he knew that they would be reading in their newspaper and seeing photographs of Indian people being beaten up by Englishmen and their Indian officers on the streets of wherever. It would have a terrible impact on the public, he thought, in terms of strategy. OK, so there’s Gandhi. Then there’s Martin Luther King, who is somebody I wrote about a lot in The Laws of Human Nature, another great icon whom I admire, who actually was inspired by Gandhi and had campaigns of civil disobedience. And there was a campaign, I believe it was in Montgomery or Selma, I can’t remember which one, where he was getting fed up. They weren’t getting very far in the civil rights movement. They were reaching a stalemate, and he was getting very frustrated. And an advisor came to him and said, look, we’re going to have this massive march, and I can get a lot of elementary school and junior high school students to be on this march, because they believe in you and they’re very fervent. And I think it would be great. And his advisors go, God, you can’t do that. You can’t have put 13-year-olds at risk. And Martin Luther King thought about it very deeply. He said, no, we’re going to go ahead and do it. Because damn it, I want the American public sitting in there all fat and watching their televisions to see these brutal, you know, Bull Connor, the police chief then. I want to see these children being water hosed and beaten. And it’s going to have an incredible impact. He was being strategic. And his advisors were shocked. by it, but it ended up proving to be one of the most pivotal important moments in the civil rights movement. So here you have Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And Martin Luther King was a flawed individual, as we know, right? He had a private life that wasn’t exactly the same as his public life. I don’t judge him for that because he was a brilliant man and I admire him. I love him deeply. Reading his biography made me even admire him even more, seeing that he had a human flawed side to him. But these are icons that we set up and they reveal what I’m talking about in human nature. You can’t escape it. Yeah, maybe there was some saint born in some century that I’ve never heard of that maybe got pretty far away from everything I’ve talked about. But, you know, we all have this idea, like in the laws of human nature, I write about irrationality, envy, aggression, or narcissism. Narcissism is a good one. Oh, they’re a narcissist. I’m not a narcissist. I’m not self-absorbed. But they are. Yeah, yeah. I don’t have any of those traits. Well, damn it. Every single human being has self-absorption traits. We can’t help it. We naturally think of ourselves first. Yes, there are people who are much deeper narcissists in life, no doubt. And there are toxic narcissists. But we all have a touch of it. I want you to be a little more humble in this world and not be so arrogant and not think that you are somehow exempt from having a dark side, that somehow you were born with a halo over your head, that you were born different, you don’t have human nature, that you’re a saintly person, you’re much better, Get rid of your moral superiority, because I find that deeply offensive. We are all cut from the same cloth. We all have the same flaws. And when you look at yourself, and when I wrote The Laws of Human Nature, I’m going, damn it, Robert. You have a dark side. You’re a narcissist. You know, I had to come to terms with my irrationality, my grandiosity, my aggressive instincts. But it’s the only way to change yourself is to be aware that you have these issues. I have the narcissistic tendencies, now I see it. All right, now when they pop up, I can control it better. I can say, damn, Robert, you’re being too self-absorbed. You think more about the other person. But if you go around in life thinking, I don’t have any of these problems, I’m not a narcissist, you’re never going to have the awareness to stop the fact that you are actually one.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

being a narcissist, is that objectively a good or a bad thing? Because when you when you was, obviously, I know, people are having a bad thing as a narcissist cause a lot of harm. And that’s very true. But in the context of the human animal, and why the human animal develops certain attributes and qualities to, you know, maybe further its survival or its ability to stay within the social pact. Is it just a consequence of being a human to have these like shadow traits and to be coercive and manipulative? Is it good or is it bad? Or is it neither? It’s neither.

ROBERT GREENE:

Neither. Because it just is, right? So with narcissism, for instance, there’s a reason why we’re narcissists. So I explain in the book, it’s not my own theory, it comes from some great psychologists like Kohout, the origins of narcissism, right? So when you’re have to leave you, when your parents have to kind of not abandon you, but have to not give you as much attention as you used to have, and you’re three years old or four years old, you don’t remember it, but it was very painful. Like, oh, they don’t love me as much. What’s wrong with me, right? You know, I have to get that love and attention, not just naturally, I have to do things to earn it, et cetera, et cetera. And what happens with a lot of people in that situation when you’re a child is, I have to develop my own, I have to be my own mother or father. I have to find a way of loving myself. When something bad happens, I have to retreat inward and go, I’m really not so bad at all. I’m actually a decent person. I like my own tastes. I like the clothes that I wear, et cetera, et cetera. You’re developing the shreds of self-esteem, right? And people who never developed that because they were abused or they were abandoned, or even if they were suffocated, Never develop that self-esteem. And so what happens in life is whenever, if you don’t develop that and you get older and people attack you and yell at you or criticize you, you can’t retreat inward to that self-esteem, that love you have. The only thing you know is to get angry, to call it narcissistic rage, and to yell at people and say, God, get away from me. You’re evil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? And then the other problems evolve where the only way I don’t have that inner self-esteem, the only way I can get people to love me is by being incredibly dramatic and overly dramatic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and always making myself the center of attention. That’s what creates a deep narcissist. That’s their only way of getting the love that they need. So children, we all need that degree of self-esteem, that anchor in our life. So narcissism, self-love is not a bad thing. But what happens is as you get older, if you go too deep into it, it becomes a problem. And so what I say is you need to take that self-love that has a good function and turn it outward as much as you can and turn it into empathy and love and consideration for other people. That’s your task as you get older in life. That’s how I approach all of these flaws. You can’t run away from them. You can’t run away from your shadow, your dark side. You can make it work for you, you can make it positive and productive and healthy. You can become a healthy narcissist, which is a name that I use in the book. You can use your dark side for positive purposes. Let’s say you have a lot of anger inside, and I had a lot of anger when I was younger. I was a very angry young man, right? Channel that into some kind of cause. I have a lot of causes that I believe in very deeply. And when I was younger, I was like that. Channel that energy into something productive and helpful and put it into something that goes to something that helps society. That’s using your dark side for positive purposes. Because the dark side of human nature has a lot of creativity, has a lot of energy. An artist has to have a dark side. You use your dark side because all those dark emotions, all the people that shat on you in your life, they inspire you. They create your best work. Don’t run away from your shadow. Don’t run away from your narcissism. Use it in a healthy way.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

and acknowledge it. I think that’s the hardest thing for people to do. Yeah. So few people, I think, including myself, like, have really fully understood what their shadow in the dark side is. I mean, doing this podcast has really helped me because I learned things from other people vicariously. And then I look at reflect on myself or keeping a diary has helped me to understand that. that first step in someone having the self-awareness to understand their dark side. I mean, there’s even a lot of people who confronting their dark side would be so, it feels like it would be so impactful on their self-esteem in a negative sense that they spend their life putting up a wall to never go there. I mean, there’s some people who you even mentioned something to them and they would- Triggers. Triggers them. Yeah. You know, we can all think of those people. We can all think of those people. The really interesting thing there is the role that your early years play on your relationship with power. Because when I think about some of the nicest, I don’t know if this is just a general stereotype or a narrow observation I’ve had, but some of the nicest people I’ve met in terms of, you know, being the opposite of whatever a toxic narcissist is, seem to have really comfortable, loving, secure, safe, early experiences. Is that broadly true in your view?

ROBERT GREENE:

It’s a generalization, but there is some truth to it. I mean, There’s things called attachment theories, where psychologists have looked at the kind of attachment you had to your parents and they categorize it in four different ways. And there’s the ideal, the best one, where you have this incredibly loving mother and father, and they’re giving you unconditional love, but they know also how to give you your independence, etc. It’s not terribly common. I don’t know what the percentage would be. Then there’s levels and levels and as you get to the fourth level it’s like the abandonment one where or abusive and abandonment where you basically leave the child alone. You don’t give it any attention, any love and it’s very crippling, right? But the thing is children are much stronger than we think they are. They’re very resilient. They’re very resourceful. They’re going to find their love. They’re going to find a way to compensate for it in some way. And what’s something very interesting when I was doing seduction in some of my other books, and I look at people who were like very charismatic, like a Malcolm X, like a Marilyn Monroe. I could go on and on and on. These are people that came from very, very bad families, right? They had no love. Marilyn Monroe was an orphan, essentially, raised in an orphanage. Her whole life was, I got to get people to love me. I need love so desperately. And her way of doing it? was to literally make love with the camera. Nobody ever done that before. You could sense that she needed it and it was so powerful that you sensed it, that she drew it to herself. Great charismatic individuals. John F. Kennedy is someone who had a lot of charisma. He came from a very bad childhood, right? His father was very mean to him, etc. Some children, in the worst circumstances, it ends up bringing the best out of them. They have to find their way in life. And some people who have everything don’t go very far because they don’t know how to find things for themselves. So life is weird. Some people who have great childhoods do well. Some people who have great childhoods are spoiled and never learn how to get things on their own. And some people who have the shittiest childhoods learn how to be resourceful and get what they need on their own.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You mentioned seduction there, the art of seduction. Why did you write a book about the topic of seduction?

ROBERT GREENE:

Seduction is a high form of power because you make people feel pleasure. You make them feel excited or interested in you. And then their resistance to your ideas slowly lowers, and you have the ability to influence them and to move them in the direction that you want. If you yell at them, like we were talking about your child, and you tell them, do this, do that, they’re resented, and for good reason. But if you’re subtler, if you’re more seductive in your approach, if you’re more indirect, people will do what you want or go in your direction without ever even realizing it. So it was a sub-theme in the 48 Laws of Power. And so I was sort of interested in the psychology of that and why some people are good at it and some people are awkward about it. So when I finished the 48 Laws of Power, I thought this would be a natural segue, the next book.

SPEAKER_01:

 What are the qualities of a great seducer?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, I like to distinguish between cold seducers and warm seducers. A cold seducer is something you don’t want to be. That’s the typical image that we might have of a male seducer, but even of a female seducer, like the great courtesans that set up with her just after money, or the men are just after sex. That’s not my ideal. My ideal is is kind of a back and forth quality where it’s not domination. It’s sort of like a game that you’re playing. It’s like a mating game. It’s like a courtship ritual where both people are kind of seducing each other. And so what makes for a great seducer is very simple. I can summarize it very simply. You are outer directed. So when you meet somebody for the first time or you’re on a date or whatever it is, You’re not having that internal monologue going, does she like me or does he like me? Am I dressed well? Am I saying stupid things? What can I do to impress them? No, you turn it off and you’re outer directed and you’re listening to them and you’re entering their spirit and you’re hearing them say things that give you idea of what they’re missing in life, of what they want, of what their needs are, of what makes them an individual. you’re absorbing it, you’re entering into their spirit, and then you can reflect it back to them. You can give them gifts, you can take them to places that show that you’re attentive to them. Because if you look at how we are in our day-to-day life, Normally, people never pay us attention. They’re always so self-absorbed. They’re never thinking about us. The times where you get the sense that people are actually interested in who you are as an individual is pretty rare. If you give that feeling to someone, it’s incredibly powerful because we all want to be validated. We all want to be recognized. So the seducer is not someone who’s all worried about him or herself and thinking. They’re involved in the other person. They’re absorbed like a sponge inside their psychology, inside their world.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

A lot of this is very applicable to romance and dating, etc, etc. It feels for whatever reason, not necessarily something I’ve read much about in your work, but it feels like dating and romance and relationships have become much more complicated in the modern world. It’s become much more difficult to seduce somebody. What are the attributes of someone then that is not good at seducing?

ROBERT GREENE:

Anti-seducer has many qualities. I have a whole chapter on the anti-seducer. I try and define it. There are several of them. I don’t have them all memorized, but one quality that’s very anti-seductive is preaching and moralizing. It’s like telling people, oh, that’s wrong what you just said, or your politics are ugly, or you’re not really good at this or something or other. Having a moral superiority, a sense of sanctimonious, sanctimony in a realm which should be about pleasure, where should be that kind of equality, that kind of back and forth dynamic, where you’re asserting your moral superiority, is deeply, deeply anti-seductive, the element of preaching to people. Not being generous, and I mean not just with money, money is important, but not just being generous with your spirit, right? You want to be open, you want to give as much as you can to the other person of yourself, of your time, of your money, of your energy, et cetera. So being all kind of crimped and I don’t want to give, I don’t want to spend money, I want to take you to the cheap place to eat, I don’t want to give you much time, is very, very anti-seductive.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you were talking a second ago about the person who goes on the date and they’re thinking about themselves and what they, you know, what their hair looks like or whatever else, that spoke to an insecure person. Is insecurity a seductive quality or is it a anti-seductive quality?

ROBERT GREENE:

It is anti-seductive. Now there is a part of weakness that is seductive. So I would say vulnerability is seductive but insecurity is anti-seductive and there’s a big difference. Why does vulnerability draw people to you? Because the sense, so if I can define seduction in simple terms, most of the time we are closed to the influence of other people, particularly now we have these walls up. Because life is harsh, people are coming at us with their advertisements, with their pleas, with their wanting money, with this and the other, and we’ve all learned to be very defensive, right? And seduction is an openness, is the opposite of that. And you felt it when you were a child towards your parents, you felt very vulnerable and open. And there was an element of your parents and how they treated you that was very much like a seduction, right? So seduction is about being open to the other person to the extent where you can even fall in love, you can fall under their spell. And the sense of letting go of your ego, letting go of your defensiveness, and letting another person enter your world is being seduced. It requires vulnerability. If you meet, the typical scenario is of a man who’s not vulnerable at all. He’s so powerful and in control and everything has no vulnerabilities. It’s frightening. you know, for a woman, it could be very frightening. Like this, he’s so strong, he’s so invulnerable, that there’s something wrong about it. You know, maybe he’s a serial killer. Maybe he’s got skeletons in his closet. Something isn’t right about that. What seduces you about a puppy, about a child, about an animal, is their vulnerability. It makes you want to hug them. It makes you want to help them, right? The sense which if you came upon a, a tiger that’s there and they don’t need that, well, that’s not seductive. I mean, on your screen it is, but if they’re there in your living room, that’s not seductive. But that puppy is, right? Vulnerability, the sense that somebody needs protection or help, brings out qualities in us that we don’t normally have that I think allow for seduction. So that is being vulnerable. That is, I can be influenced by that other person. I am open to their spirit, right? That’s being vulnerable. The word vulnerable, I hate to sound like a professor, so excuse me, seduction, comes from the root of it means a wound, vulnus. So you have a wound inside of you and you need healing. And the other person naturally wants to help you, right? But being insecure means I’m so self-absorbed, I’m so worried about myself, that I can’t get out of it. And we’ve all had that experience. When you meet somebody and you can sense, you can smell their insecurity in them, I’m not judging them because we all have insecurities, it makes you feel insecure. It makes you feel a little bit awkward. Whereas if you meet someone who’s not like that, who’s confident, etc, it brings out that quality in you. So if you’re on a date and there’s someone who’s, you smell that kind of insecurity, it makes you awkward and insecure. It creates a kind of a problem. So that would be the difference between the two.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

There’s going to be a lot of people listening to this that are single. and ready to mingle. What advice would you give them in terms of being great at dating? You’ve talked about the importance of vulnerability there and how that kind of forms connection between humans in a very innate way. What else is great dating advice for the single people out there?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, the thing is, OK, there are several things. So first of all, we live in a culture where people think you shouldn’t have to put effort into something like love and romance. You should just be who you are, man. I don’t have to put on a role. I don’t have to play a game. That’s manipulative, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, I’m sorry. Love and romance is something that is almost biological. If you look at animals and mating rituals, they’re incredibly elaborate. Seduction is a mating ritual. And so the worst thing you can feel is that this person isn’t putting any effort into something. Let’s just say it’s from the woman’s point of view. This man, he just shows up wearing jeans and his usual sloppy outfit. He doesn’t comb his hair, etc, etc, etc. He takes me to the pub for dinner on our first date. You know, he’s not thinking about me. He’s not willing to put any effort into it. If he’s not willing to put any effort into it, what’s it going to be like three months down the line when he completely takes me for granted, which is what happens in a relationship? Am I not important enough? Right? Whereas the ability to have a little bit of effort, to think of it as kind of theater and drama and that there’s nothing evil about it. So I’m going to dress nicely. I’m going to, I just have to be fancy, just that I’m going to, you know, I’m going to put some effort into how I look. I’m going to take her to a place that isn’t, you know, I’m not talking about candlelights and roses and that kind of crap. Doesn’t that, you can be creative. It can be somewhere that’s scuzzy, that’s on the wrong side of town, but it’s different and it’s appealing and you put some thought into it. There’s a reason you’re taking her there, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I have a friend who went on a date and she came back from the date and was complaining because the person that she went on that first date with was using a, took her to a spot where he had an available valid discount code for like two to one. And talk about anti-seduction. There you go. Why is that anti-seductive? In that case, one might say that male is being, you know, economically savvy, financially savvy.

ROBERT GREENE:

You know, if you’re not able to let go of your of your kind of tightness when it comes to a woman, something’s wrong with you, man. Just let go. Spend some extra money. Spend the extra 10 quid that you might need to spend on taking you to someplace different. but it signals a kind of cheapness. And it’s not about money, it’s about a cheapness in your spirit, right? She’s not worth, you know, letting go. Okay, maybe you don’t have that much, but my God, you have enough. It’s not going to, like, if you’re that poor, then, you know, okay, maybe. But probably not. You can afford it. Show that it means something to you. Seduction is a language. It’s not a language of words. It’s a language of gestures that we’re paying attention to. We’re paying attention to people’s body language. We’re paying attention to their actions, to the things that they never say. So when you signal that Discounts are so important to you that even on the first date you have to have a discount. You’re signaling that it’s not, there’s something tight about you in your nature and it’s not very pleasant.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

From doing this podcast and speaking about topics like love and sex and dating and dating apps even, one of the comments I saw quite frequently was from young men who are struggling to seduce a woman, or vice versa. Specifically young men that, you know, and then I read some stats, I think Scott Galloway came on the podcast and talked about how going to butcher these numbers, but a staggering amount of men haven’t had sex in the young men haven’t had sex in the last 12 months. And then when I looked at the comment section specifically on YouTube, I saw I kind of saw that energy reflected where it looked like young men in particular were struggling to seduce a mate, a partner in the modern world. Is that real in your view? Is there something that has changed in society? Has that always been the case? Is there anything we can do if we’re a young man that’s struggling in the modern world because of the internet and computers and this and dating apps?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, a lot of it is, I’m afraid to say, is internet porn. where you get the idea that sex is something that should be very easy and quick, and that women should have that kind of body and physique, etc., etc., and that becomes your norm, etc., that can be very damaging. But the idea that things must come easy and quick is very prevalent. And to win over someone like, let’s say you’re a man and it’s a woman who might be reluctant to have sex for good reason or reluctant to have a relationship. requires some effort. It requires some thinking. You can’t just hack it, or you can’t just swipe and get it. You can have your internet sex, but you’re not going to get that in real life. It doesn’t work that way. It takes time. It takes patience. And you’re going to have to work it, and you’re going to be rejected. Being with people is a skill. Being a social animal, although there’s a part that comes naturally, if you spend all of your time here, you’re losing that skill of how to respond to people’s body language. You know, half of the thing is you’re sitting in a bar opposite, let’s say it’s a woman, And how she crosses her legs, how she sips her drink, how she looks at you, how she touches her hair, she’s signaling things. It’s a language, it’s a beautiful language, right? You have to learn it and you’re not going to learn it here because you can’t. You have to be in person, it has to be skin to skin. You have to get a feel for what other people are thinking and feeling. And we’re actually really, really good at that. Humans have, that’s what makes us human. It’s called mirror neurons. I can sense what’s going on in your mind. I can read your body language. You have to get out in the world and you have to put yourself physically out there and try and try and try and have rejection. And I know it sounds awful, but it is a skill in a way, where you’re learning how to understand and deal with people and understand who they are and get inside their spirit. It takes time and effort and patience. So for young men, You have to realize that, right? If you think everything has to be easy and quick, it’s never going to work for you. And I talk about the actor, the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, who is perhaps numerically the greatest male seducer ever, because it’s estimated that he had seduced close to 3,000 women, and he died when he was 50. And if I did the math one day, I’d go, How can that possibly be? And I tried to research what was his secret, and it was hard to find out. Finally, I found a book written by a woman whom he had seduced, another actress, and she said he was so relaxed and so comfortable. It was like being, it was like an animal type thing. And then when I would sit with him, it was almost as if I had drunk two martinis just sitting next to him. His comfort and his security and his confidence, his relaxed attitude, it just made me drunk. So feeling relaxed, feeling confident and not defensive and comfortable with yourself is a very powerful, seductive quality. I mean, there are many of them, but that’s one that I would point out.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Have you ever figured out what builds confidence? Earlier on you were talking about how children need to experience things firsthand. You can’t just tell them. You can’t just tell someone, for example, to be confident. Preaching doesn’t seem to work. What is it, in your view, that that does build that true, you also can’t fake confidence. I remember, I’d say we talked about rejection a second ago, I was rejected by pretty much every girl that I was pursuing between the ages of 16 and I’d say 22. Really? Yeah. Like, and I, do you know what it was? I was faking confidence. It all changed when I was actually had a sense of security in myself. But in the period where I was like faking confidence, I was pretending I was confident. Um, it was like they could, they just could read past it. That’s almost how I look back on the situation. So I came to learn that you can’t fake confidence. You can’t pretend to be it because there’s so many sort of micro expressions that That look, that end up reading more like insecurity than confidence. But what is real confidence and how does one build it in your view?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, you’ve kind of answered your own question there in a way. So, you know, fake confidence is like bravado, right? And you’re putting on an act. And particularly women who’ve had to deal with this for millennia, they can smell it, they can sense it. It’s not in your words, it’s the body language, et cetera, et cetera. Real confidence comes from actual actions, from your actual things you’ve accomplished, right? So when you’re 22, 21, it’s hard to have that confidence because what is it based on? Maybe it’s based, OK, maybe you’re really good looking if you happen to have that good fortune and you can feel confident about that and you don’t have to try so hard. All right. Maybe that might work. Or maybe you’re really good at sports or maybe you’re a really good dancer or you’re a really great singer. But it’s based on something real. You have a skill. You have something that separates you. You have something that you can do that you can accomplish. Because when you’re 21, it’s hard to have those. You know, I look back on myself when I was that age, I had nothing. No wonder I got rejected, you know? So it comes from what you do in life, okay? The finest sense of confidence is actually creating things and having success and meeting goals and achieving things and having a record of that. And maybe what goes with that is having some money, but it’s not necessarily because you don’t have to have a lot of money. And you don’t have to be good-looking to seduce. That’s a myth that I try to explode in the art of seduction. Some of the greatest seducers, male and female, were not good-looking at all. It’s about psychology and it’s about how you carry yourself. But the confidence comes from actually what you can do, not how you feel or what you say. Well, it is how you feel, but the feeling is based on things that you actually can do, skills that you have that separates you, that make you feel really confident, you know?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So- Body language. Yeah, I find it fascinating that, you know, there’s quotes and things that say 80% of our communication is nonverbal, et cetera, et cetera. Body language is so interesting to me because again, I think that’s one of the things that it’s just impossibly hard to fake. I was reading, you know, a couple of books on, there was a phase when I was, I don’t know, 20, probably just after being rejected all the time, when I was maybe 22 where I started reading books from pickup artists. And they would obsess on the topic of body language. And one of the things they’d say is, and I was explaining this to my girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, that when a man is lower confidence and when he’s desperate, he does this thing called pecking in a nightclub where he’ll like lean in and like shout in your ear. And when he’s higher confidence, he kind of leans out and he’ll wait for you to lean in. Small things like that, subtleties like that, that intuitively we’re reading and understanding and communicating and etc. But someone that doesn’t have the confidence probably isn’t even aware that they do. So when I reflect on my rejection phase, I think, gosh, my body language must have been exuding desperation and low status and low value, low self-esteem. What’s your thoughts on body language?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, in my last book, Human Nature, I wrote a whole chapter on it. I quoted the figure 95%, but who knows what it really is. The thing is that we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years before language existed, right? And our earliest ancestors depended on the group for their survival and getting along. And their powers came from observing other people and their body language. You could read it. So it’s a skill that’s wired into us, wired into our brains. It’s a very unique skill that we humans have. It’s just that you don’t learn that. When you’re a child, when you’re two years old, you have it because your life depends on it. You have to see if your mother is loving you or your father is kind to you. Because if not, you could be abandoned. Your life depends on it. You’re great at reading that. And children are incredibly adept at picking up body language. So if someone is fake, if someone’s an imposter, they hate being around children because children see through you, you know, like radar, right? Because they’re so attuned to it. You had that skill when you were very young, but you lost it because you became so oriented with words and you became so self-absorbed that you’re not paying attention. But it’s extremely important, right? So the whole body is involved in it. So you’ve got to first stop thinking about people’s words so much. Because the one thing about words, unfortunately, is people can lie. They can say whatever they want. They can say, I love your screenplay. That was fantastic. You were great in that movie. I thought you were great, et cetera, et cetera. They can say anything to please, to flatter, to cajole you. But body language, man, it doesn’t lie, right? So I talk in that book about the eyes and the fake smile. The fake smile is something you see every single day, but you’re not paying attention. It’s kind of tight, right? But a real smile, the whole face gets animated, and there’s a little crinkly thing here as your face lights up and your eyes light up. It’s hard to even put into words, but it’s there, you can see it. It’s real, it’s not faked. Knowing the difference between a fake and a real smile is really important in seduction, in business, or whatever. To know if someone is like, yeah, I like that idea. No, they don’t really. They’re saying that to please you. They actually hate your idea. You master that language, you can start deciphering all this bullshit people are giving you. The face, you can disguise it a little bit. Actors know that. But you know what you can’t fake? It’s your voice. If you’re nervous, not even the finest actors in the world can fake that. Your voice betrays so many things about you. It betrays your weakness, it betrays your lack of confidence, or it betrays the other quality, et cetera, right? So pay really attention to the tone of people’s voices, to how fast they talk. People who talk fast are very nervous. Someone who’s talked, I know I’m probably talking a little too fast here, sorry. My mind races, so I do that. Normally I don’t talk so fast. But, you know, you talk slowly, you have a certain tone, you have a certain intonation that kind of reveals confidence, okay? Body language, posture. You were talking about pecking, right? When you go and look at a meeting of people in a business meeting, you’ll see all the employees kind of leaning forward, nervous. and you’ll see the boss kind of leaning back, arms like this, you know, I’m the powerful one, you come to me, I’m the leader, I’m the top dog or she, it’s a woman. I don’t need to be like this, I’m like this. Body language reveals a lot about leadership qualities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, if you go, you’re at a party, and you come up to someone that you’re meeting for the first time, and they’re talking to you, and you notice that their feet are angling away from you, that means that they’re not really interested, they’re looking for any moment to try and walk away and escape. They’re not really into you. Whereas their feet are facing you, they’re engaged, they want to talk to you, right? This is a whole art you can learn. You can sit there and you can read it. And I talk about, I give the story in Laws of Human Nature of a man named Milton Erickson, the founder of NLP and hypnotherapy, probably one of the most brilliant psychologists who ever lived. When Milton Erickson was 19 years old or so, he had polio. He nearly died. His entire body was paralyzed. The only thing he could move, the only muscle he could move were his eyeballs. Now imagine that. He was a young man with a very active mind. He can’t talk, he can’t do anything. All he can do is move his eyeballs a little bit. He was so bored. Can you imagine how bored you’d be like that? You can’t read, you can’t do anything. People would come in to visit him. All they could do was look at them and study them. He became the greatest reader of body language ever in the history of mankind. People said he almost had ESP. He could read everything about who they were. Just by looking, because he ended up recovering, he became a psychologist. because his life depended on developing this skill. He was going to just die from sheer boredom if he didn’t learn how to read body language. He mastered that language much like somebody could master French. And it’s an incredibly powerful language that I can’t emphasize enough.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You know, we can go about learning the language of body language, and I’m sure that will help, but it’s such a complex, like, there’s like a thousand things with my body language at all times, like how I’m speaking, my eyeballs, where I’m looking, my posture, my arms, like, am I crossing my arms? Am I crossing my legs? All of these things. So the challenge of mastering all of that feels a little bit overwhelming. Am I right in assuming the easiest The easier challenge to master is in fact just like my sense of self.

ROBERT GREENE:

Very well put. If you feel confident, if you feel secure, if you’re not all inward and insecure and worried about yourself, it will naturally radiate through your gestures. You don’t have to sit there and pay attention to your fingers, your arm, your ears, your eyes. It’s just there, it’s natural. So yeah, that is the solution. So the two parts of the game, it’s your own body language. Be aware that people are judging you for that. And you can’t, as you say, be monitoring everything or you’ll drive yourself crazy and you’ll look very weird. So the best solution is to feel these certain things that are going to radiate and to not give the fake smile, but when you really happy to just show it and show your emotion that way. And the other side, which is more, I think, really important, is learning other people’s body language. And that can come from study and is much more a logical thing than constantly thinking about everything that you do.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Your next book that I have here, Mastery. Why did you write a book called Mastery?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, to be honest with you, the idea for it was around the year 2010-2009. I was getting a little worried that people who were reading my books, particularly young men reading Power Instruction, they were thinking, That’s all I need in life, man. I just need to be a manipulator. I just need to play political games. That’s what success is all about. And I was worried that if you don’t understand how to make something, what’s going to be the future of mankind? Are bridges just going to fall down? Are hotels going to collapse? People don’t know how to make things anymore. We don’t know how to use our hands anymore. Right? So being able to be good with people is extremely important as a social animal. But perhaps higher up in the hierarchy is being able to do things, to be able to have great skill, and to be able to create something, and know how to master a subject, and to build something that can last. That’s really important. And I’m feeling like because young people, this is back in 2010, imagine now, Have this idea that everything comes quick and easy because you can click, click, click and things come to you. That everything in life should be that way. That we’re becoming alienated from the human brain and how the human brain operates. Because the human brain requires time. If you know how the human brain operates, we have what are called neural pathways. And every time you repeat something, a neural pathway is created and strengthened and strengthened and strengthened. It’s why we get addicted to things, but it’s also why we develop skill. So if I’m sitting there shooting free throws day in and day out and day up, my brain is wiring it, it’s learning it, it’s learning that motor skill, that hand-mind thing, and it’s getting better and better and better at it. It takes time, it takes repetition to build those pathways. And I explain in Mastery that you reach the proverbial 10,000 hours, which some people dispute nowadays, so it’s just a number, it’s not a fact. You’ve spent so long learning something, that there’s so many pathways. It’s like this amazing inner landscape with all these connections going on in your brain. And now you can be creative. Now you can come up with things that nobody’s ever thought of. You can play chess on a higher level. You can be Pele on soccer or Lionel Messi making passes that no one had ever seen before because you’re not having to think, right? You don’t have to think anymore. Your body just does what it wants. Imagine 20,000 hours, which is possible, which people sometimes attain in certain fields. You’re almost like a genius. You’re almost like superhuman, right? If you’re someone who’s so locked into the internet, to getting things instantly, you can’t get past 100 hours, let alone 10,000. You’re never going to develop skill, and you’re going to find life really, really difficult for you. So I wrote the book because I was actually deeply worried that we were losing a part of how the human brain operates, something elemental part of our wisdom.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The interesting through line between that and the subject matter we’ve discussed in Power and Seduction is that by learning to master something you build that sense of self-esteem and confidence that we’re looking for to be good at the former topics mentioned. On the topic of mastery, the first chapter in this book and really the first question a lot of people ask is this question about finding your passion. And I’ve always had a difficult relationship with this question because it sometimes assumes that there’s one of them and that you have to go in search of it somewhere. In the first chapter of your book, you talk about discovering your life task. Why is it important? Is it the same thing? Is finding your passion and finding your life task the same thing?

ROBERT GREENE:

No, I just recorded this yesterday on my own podcast. I went on a rant about how it’s not about passion. It’s not about finding your passion. I actually don’t like that word passion. It kind of makes me cringe. Because if you think about it, passion, to succeed at anything requires time and effort and boredom and tedium. So let’s just say a simple example. You’re learning to play the piano. When you first sit down at the piano, You have to play these really insipid tunes. It’s so boring. You have to learn, you know, what they call it, finger exercises and scales. On any instrument, you have to learn scales, etc. It’s tedious, man. If you think it’s got to be passion, forget it. You’re never going to get far. The thrill comes after a year of playing the piano, and you get better at it. Better and better and now starts coming fun than 10 years. It’s more fun than 20 years. It’s fantastic You know, I’m not I’m not trying to name-drop here. But the other night I had dinner with Stevie Wonder and It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. He’s absolutely, I wish I’d interviewed him for my book. Speaking of genius, you know, and he’s blind obviously, everybody knows, but I was watching him, he performed for us, we were there with a group of friends at his recording studio. I was watching him play the piano and he’s blind, right? And he’s improvising. And it’s just absolutely brilliant and amazing. And as I’m seeing this, I’m thinking, I could see the thousands of hours he’s been putting in just touching these keyboards and knowing where the keys are. You know, it was just mind boggling. How amazing it was. That is the power that the human brain naturally has through hours and hours and hours of effort. That’s how it works. So, you know, he didn’t get there because it was passion. He got there because he was a child prodigy at the age of 11. He was signed to a contract with Motown Records, right? He was playing that as he was a kid, hour after hour after hour after hour. He had a love for the piano, but it wasn’t like every time he sat down, it had to be passionate about it. He had the patience to put up with all of the boring stuff, okay? So you want to discover what you were meant to, what you have a connection to, what you have a love for, right? When you’re a child, hopefully, or when you’re 18 or 19 or 20, that’s the best time to discover it. All right? You decide, and it doesn’t have to be something highfalutin or worth intellectual. You could be great with your hands. You could be great with your body. You could be great with images and visuals. You could be great with words. You could be great in many different areas. OK? They’re all equal. They’re all great. You as a child are naturally… So there’s a book I always recommend for people called The Five Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner, in which he talks about the five forms of intelligence that humans have. Each brain biogenetically is wired in one direction or the other. You want to know that you want to feel it inside of you. It’s like a feeling, it’s not an intellectual thing. You feel when you’re doing sports that it’s good, it’s a natural thing, it’s what I’m meant for. When you’re involved with words like I was when I was eight years old, it felt right. It felt like a natural fit. I have to follow this path. When you’re three or four years old and it’s music like Stevie Wonder and you’re hearing this in your head, wow, that’s it for me, right? Okay, you feel it, you feel this connection. All right, now you fast forward to when you’re 18 or 19 years old and you’re having to make a career choice. Okay, so I call that your 20s, the most important phase of your life. That’s going to make or break you in some way. If you spend your 20s trying to learn skill in something that connects to you deeply, right? then things are going to happen to you by the time you reach 30. You’ve discovered your life’s task. It may not be something so specific. For me, it was writing words, but I didn’t know what to write. I tried novels, I tried journalism, I tried theater, I tried screenwriting. But you know it, it gives you a direction, and you try and you try and try, and you know that’s what you were meant for, that’s what you were destined for. You feel connected to it, you feel a love for it, and so when it comes time to do the tedious stuff, you’re able to do it because you know in the end it’ll pay rewards, you’ll get better and better at it, and the connection is so deep that to not do it would be miserable. So you can’t think of everything in life having to be pleasurable and having to be passionate. There’s going to be boredom, there’s going to be tedium. How do I deal with it? You have to feel a greater love than just mere pleasure or passion. It’s got to be something so deep within you that to not do it will make you deeply unhappy. For me, not to write or be a writer, I don’t think I’d be alive right now. I would’ve been so miserable. I would’ve been so alienated from who I am. So that’s what’ll get you through, that’s what a life’s task is.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you think about that, in the book you talk about the first phase, which is your apprenticeship, on your journey to mastery. When you’re in that apprenticeship phase, when you’re maybe early in your career, you’re early on your journey to becoming the pianist, the violinist, the podcaster, the entrepreneur, whatever, What are the most important things to be selecting for as it relates to the job you take, the people you’re around, that kind of thing? Like if there’s a 23-year-old listening to this that is an apprentice at a floristry shop making bouquets of flower, and they’re being offered five different jobs in the industry of floristry, which one should they be looking at if they’re in the early steps of their apprenticeship?

ROBERT GREENE:

Very easy question to answer, thank you. you want to look for the job that offers you the most possibilities of learning. So if you’re going to go to a florist shop where there’s only one other person there, it’s like an entrepreneur who started it, and you’re going to be like their right-hand man or woman, and you’re going to learn, and the pay is half of what you could get at this very fancy, you could be working at the shop at some department store where they’d pay you triple, Take the job that pays one-third where you’re gonna learn the most you’re gonna learn about the business you’re gonna learn from the ground up and You know, there’s gonna be a level of excitement where you know, we might not survive another few months. We’ve got to work hard We’ve got to be motivated. We’re all on the same page here a lot of people when they’re 23 They grab the job with the biggest paycheck and that’s a mistake because if you go to like a large large firm and You’re kind of lost. You don’t have as much responsibility. You suddenly have to deal with all the political games, the 48 laws of power. You’re not paying attention. You’re not developing skills as much. You don’t have as much responsibility. Take the job that has one half the salary, but you’re responsible. You’re going to be learning and it’s up to you. That’s the most important thing you can do when you’re at that point in your life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You say there’s three steps in that apprenticeship. Deep observation. Is that what you mean when you say deep observation? You mean like being able to observe the job happening or do you mean something else?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, it means that. It also means… So most people when they start a job, their first impulse is, I’ve got to impress people. I’ve got to make them like me. That’s that inward direction that’s so deadly in seduction and it’s deadly in life. You want to be outer-directed. You want to observe the codes and conventions of your field, the social codes, you know, what’s acceptable behavior, what’s not acceptable behavior, the skills involved, the various heuristics, the various things that you have to learn that create skill. You want to be a sponge absorbing what’s going on around you. What are the things you need to learn? What are the valuable skills? What are the things that aren’t valuable? Who are the people you need to avoid? Who are the people you need to emulate? You’re a laser, you’re just observing everything around you and not worried about yourself. That’s the proper, that’s deep observation.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You talked about skill there. It’s all well and good seeing skills and knowing which skills are important, but acquiring those skills is point number two when you’re in that apprenticeship phase in life, skills acquisition. And this kind of goes to what you’re saying with the working in a florist shop next to the entrepreneur, you’re going to be hands-on, you’re going to be doing, which is also goes to what you said earlier about parents and children, like putting them in situations where they get to do stuff. Yeah. A lot of jobs don’t offer that. A lot of jobs don’t offer the difficulty, the challenge, right? How important is that?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, we call it learning by doing. And you see, some things play into how the human brain operates. That’s what you want. I give the image in the Introduction to Mastery, pardon the alliteration here, but the brain has a grain to it. You want to work with that grain, you don’t want to work against the grain because it’s counterproductive. And one of the grains of the brain, sorry, is learning by doing. When, you know, flashback 300,000 years ago, and we’re sitting there, we’re making tools out of bones, out of wood, etc. The way the skill was passed on to other people and didn’t die with one generation was you watched this person making the tool and then you watched them and you learned and you imitated them. Flash forward to the medieval period in Europe, where they had apprenticeship schools. Seven years, you’re learning masonry, you’re learning carpentry, you’re learning whatever. For seven years, you’re sitting there watching somebody make things and you’re doing it. That’s how the brain operates. You learn by doing, not by thinking. Not by thinking, oh, this is how things are fitted with mortars, et cetera, et cetera. No, I’m doing it with my hands. The human, the brain and the hand have the most connection of any part of our body because so much of our power as a species depended on our hands. We don’t have much of that anymore, but learning by doing things with your hands or making things is how the brain is wired. So you want to go with that grain. So you want to do things, you want to make things, you want to be learning through action, not through just a lot of talk and, you know,

STEVEN BARTLETT:

As you might know, this show is now sponsored by Airbnb. I can’t count how many times Airbnbs have saved me when I’m traveling around the world. Whether it’s, you know, recently when I went to the jungle in Bali, or whether it’s when I’m staying here in the UK or going to business in America. But I can also think of so many times where I’ve stayed in a host’s place on Airbnb and I’ve been sat there wondering, Could my place be an Airbnb as well? And if it could be, how much could I earn? It turns out you could be sitting on an Airbnb goldmine without even knowing about it. Maybe you have a spare room in your house that friends stay from time to time. You could Airbnb that space and make a significant amount of money instead of letting it stay empty. That in-law, that guest house, that annex where your parents sometimes stay, you could Airbnb that and make some extra income for yourself. Whether you could just use some extra money to cover some bills or for something a little bit more fun, your home might be worth a little bit more than you think. And you can find out the answer to that question by going to airbnb.co.uk slash host. One of the things that you referenced at the start of this conversation, I think maybe even off camera, was in 2018 you had a stroke and that changed your life in a very fundamental way. Can you tell me what happened and how it changed you?

ROBERT GREENE:

It was a terrifying experience. I was in a coma. I emerged from it and suddenly, I’m somebody who’s very physical. Sports was a huge part of my life. I would swim very long distances. I love mountain biking. I was doing all kinds of hiking. It was extremely important to me. Every single day I did something physical to take my mind off things. Suddenly, it’s taken away from me. The left side of my body is basically paralyzed. I have no control over it. To this day, I still have problems with it. Can’t swim. Can’t mountain bike. Can’t hike. Right? I can’t take my mind. I can’t think while I’m taking a hike. I can’t type. For a writer, that’s not much fun. I had to deal with crap that I’ve never had to deal with in my life. I had a pretty easy time. compared to this. I had to learn new life skills when I’m already 62 years old. That isn’t easy stuff. I don’t want to whine or complain because people deal with worse stuff all the time. A lot of people get cancer, et cetera. But anybody who’s had a stroke knows what I’m talking about. It’s very hard because you can practice and practice and practice and practice hours and hours of therapy. I do over an hour of therapy every day and you hardly notice any results. The frustration. It takes you 10 minutes to tie your shoes. You can’t button your thing. You have to get other people to do that. It’s hard to cut food. You have to be patient. You have to accept this. You have to find another way of loving your life, of accepting these things that you took for granted before. And I tell people, I look out my window now, where I’m writing, and I see people walking their dog, and I put myself in their shoes, That must be so great just to walk your dog down the street. What a pleasurable thing. They don’t realize it. You take it for granted now, please don’t take it for granted. Understand that the ability that you have now to run, to walk your dog, to swim, to type, it can be taken away from you. And just appreciate your life for what you have because the things that I love were taken away from me and I wish they hadn’t been. So I’ve had to adjust myself.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You know, when something like that happens in life, when you when you are the victim of a tragedy or instance or circumstance or something that happens, there’s often a degree of unfairness surrounding it. And when I read about that incident in 2018, I read that it was a bee sting that caused a clot that caused the stroke.

ROBERT GREENE:

Yeah, I know. It’s actually, I think, a wasp. But if that wasp had been, like, moving, the wind had been a little different and moved this way instead of this way. may not have had a stroke. But I can tell you this. So in May of that year, the stroke was in August. In May, I’d finished The Laws of Human Nature, which took me five years. And when I finished that book, I felt like I was near death. I was so exhausted. I was so drained. My wife was really worried about me because I just looked really haggard. Slowly, I kind of recovered, but then in July, I went to New York and I forgot my blood pressure medication that I take. So my blood pressure was starting to rise. And then I came back to LA and I walked in this park and the bee, the wasp stung me here and my whole chest turned red and it was like the most unbearable feeling. So I went to the hospital, they gave me this drug called prednisone to relieve the itching. Prednisone increases your blood pressure. And so when I ended up having the stroke, the blood clot, it was right where the wasp sting was. So the neurologist said, probably all this cholesterol was released from that drug, from that wasp sting here, and that’s where the blood clot occurred. But there were all these other circumstances that kind of led to it, a kind of a perfect storm. And maybe if I hadn’t had that wasp sting, it would have happened four months later under different circumstances, and I would have died. Because what happened was I was driving my car when I got my stroke. My wife was in the other seat. She saw something really strange going on my face. I didn’t notice it. She forced me to pull over at the side of the road. 90% of the time, I’m alone. I’m swimming, I’m hiking, I’m driving. Could have happened four months from then. She wouldn’t be there. I’d be dead right now. So I can’t really think in terms of, oh, if that wasp had been diverted. It would be a good feeling, but it’s too painful for me to imagine. I like to think of, fortunately, someone was there who saved my life, because it could have very well happened four months from then, because my body was worn down. and something much worse could have happened.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That journey you described of having to rebuild and relearn and redesign your life, we’ve talked about the topic of power so much in this conversation. In that moment, it sounds like your power, to some degree, had been taken from you.

ROBERT GREENE:

You know, you learn, like, at least for me, when I look to people, I look to people differently after my stroke. had more empathy for them. I’m normally an empathetic person, but I was looking at people in the pandemic who got long COVID, who were having strokes or were having terrible circumstances. Or when I look at people who were disabled, because I’m essentially disabled now, I understand them. And also, the other thing is, when I look at people who are really poor, who are struggling in life, they feel really dependent and helpless. I felt that physically. I don’t feel that materially because I don’t have that problem anymore, thank God. But I have more empathy. I understand it, not in an intellectual way, but in a visceral, physical way, that sensation of I don’t know where my food’s coming from. I don’t know what’s going to happen the next day. I’m weak. I’m dependent. I’m helpless. It’s miserable. I kind of understood that feeling now on a different level, on a level that affected me personally. It’s a lot different than having it affect you in an intellectual way.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The phases in that journey to where you are today, the first phase after the incident, you wake up, you realize that your life has changed. What’s going on in your psychology? What’s going on in your mind? You talked about helplessness and depression.

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, to be honest with you, what happened to me was right afterwards, there was a level of delusion in my mind. I kept thinking, Well, in three months, I’ll be back at it. In six months, I’ll be swimming. In a year, I’ll be hiking again. I wasn’t aware of how hard the process was. And then six months, eight months, a year down the road, as I realized I was wrong, that’s when the depression set in. That’s when it really started hitting me. I thought I’d be back. Here I am four years on. I thought I’d be back to my life, but I’m not. You know, so that’s what was the hardest struggle was actually a year in there and going, there’s a phase where you kind of plateau where you’re not really progressing anymore. That’s the worst part of it. I’m progressing now again because I have a great therapist, but I had to deal with really bad depression about a year, a year and a half in when it started to realize this is my life, man. I’m going to always have this funny arm that’s bowing in. I’m going to be walking like this. I never expected this in my life. So I’ve had to deal with that and I’ve had to kind of find a way to not let it get me down, to find other pleasures and joys in life, et cetera, which I have.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How do you find a way to not let it get you down? I’m thinking now about people that are listening to this that might be struggling with their own subjective struggles in life, they’ve been, they’ve lost their job, they’ve, you know, they have a disability, whatever it might be. What are the successful strategies you’ve deployed to try and remain, keep that peace of mind?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, I don’t know how much of it is applicable because I’m at a phase of life where I don’t have material worries, you know, and I could have had a kind of stroke where my physical element would have been untouched, but my brain would have been damaged, which is another part. That would have been worse, because I wouldn’t have been able to write another book. And I have a very active mind. So for me, being able to write another book is my salvation. So when it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon when I get down to writing, it’s the happiest moment of my life. I feel at peace. I’m back to my work. And I love my work, and I love what I’m writing about. It’s saved me a lot. I do meditation. I’ve been meditating now for about 12 years, I think, more than that. Every morning, it’s a ritual. I have to meditate. If I don’t, something is wrong. And I’ve never missed a day, I can honestly say. And it just calms me down. It just gives me a strength throughout the whole day. So I get up, 7 o’clock. The sun’s usually shining because it’s Los Angeles. And I go, it’s the morning. I’m greeting the morning, I’m greeting the sun. It’s like I’m somebody 4,000 years ago in a tribe. Here’s the sun. It’s a miracle that there’s even something like that. The birds are chirping, I’m looking at the ivy, the sky is blue. I just calm myself down. Intrusive negative thoughts start popping into my mind. You didn’t do this. You have a podcast today at two o’clock, Robert. You want to do this, that, and the other. I’d get rid of them. I’d go, calm down. Put that away. Ground yourself. It’s helped immeasurably. The other thing is, always keep in mind that there are people who have it worse than you. So I don’t want to feel sorry. I don’t like the sense of feeling sorry for myself. In fact, sometimes I turn it around and I look at that person walking the dog or jogging and I go, I actually feel sorry for you because you’re not aware of how precarious life is. You’re not aware of how this can be taken away from you. You’re not aware of how precious it is to just be alive and just to see the sky and the birds. So I feel better than you in a way. I turned it around. I don’t want to feel sorry for myself. There are people who have it worse. I read in the newspaper all the time, you know, cancer, you’re in Ukraine, or I was dealing a lot with people in Iran right now, what they’re dealing with. I don’t have to deal with that kind of crap, like being in Iran and dealing with that daily life. How horrifying, you know? These are thoughts that take you out of the moment where you’re feeling sorry for yourself and you’re kind of grateful for certain things. So those are some of the strategies I’ve had to kind of create for myself.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I find it so, I guess, powerful to hear those strategies because we all get caught up in our narrow perspective and our own subjective feelings that we’re suffering or that life is against us. And then that kind of torments us in many ways. As you’ve post-stroke in 2018, Is there anything else that you have learned about the nature of happiness from that incident that you might not have known before that incident, that I might not fully understand now? The things I heard you talk about are the importance of a sense of purpose, how perspective and gratitude are central to our feelings of happiness. But is there any other observations you’ve had that, I’m just saying this from my own selfish perspective, because I want to know.

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, first of all, I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve solved everything because I’m a work in progress. I have moments where I get so frustrated. It’s almost like I have Tourette’s syndrome. Like I can’t You know, I’m still four years in and my arm is still like this and I still can’t brush my teeth the way I want. I get very frustrated. So I’m getting better, but it’s still a work in progress. I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve somehow this, I’ve mastered it because it has mastered me. I have a long way to go, but I’m getting a lot better, a lot better at it day to day. Um, you know, I don’t know. I think I’ve kind of touched on everything only in the sense of

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What about connection? You talked about your wife.

ROBERT GREENE:

Yes, she’s helped me a lot. God bless her soul, she’s had to take care of me. And I was somebody who’s always prided myself for being independent. That was another thing that was taken away from me. I was traveling around the world, doing book tours, going to book festivals, doing interviews, doing consulting in various different countries. I could still travel, but it requires a lot more. So I lost my independence. I had to have somebody help me with food every single day. I need things being done for me. And I feel terrible that, you know, she’s been put in that position, but she’s been very gracious about it. And she understands she has a lot of empathy because she knows what I’ve lost. So having somebody in your life, if I were alone, I couldn’t deal with it, man. I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it. It just would have been too much for me. It would have been too depressing. That depression that sucks you after a year would have leveled me. It’s just, I couldn’t have made it. So that’s an incredibly important aspect. And just appreciating the little things in life that I just You know, it’s a cliche and I hate saying cliches, but, you know, I have that feeling almost every day where I’m looking at somebody going, man, that must be, I’m like riding my bike and I’m seeing somebody just sitting in a park, reading a book on a bench and I’m going, God, that is so much fun just to be able to do that. I can’t do that anymore. But I put myself in their body. The little things in life that you take for granted are filled with so much happiness and joy that you’re not thinking about. If that person sitting on a bench reading that book only realized what this person riding by thinks, maybe they wouldn’t take it for granted. So some of those little things that you don’t think about have incredible importance, at least to me, having lost them. So I don’t know if I’m, I wish I had something better, but that’s, I can only come from my own experience. I can’t make it up.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Well, your books tend to focus on the nature of the human condition. How we are as humans for better or for worse. And it was interesting because as you were talking over several topics, when you’re talking about seduction and the 48 laws of power and mastery, there’s a part of me that’s, you know, that started to feel a little bit, I don’t know, feel the darkness that is innate within humans a bit too much maybe. That we’re a little bit too contrived and manipulative and conniving and whatever else. And I was thinking, do I really like humans? Yeah, I’m one of them. I’m very conscious of trying to separate myself. I hear people doing interviews when they’re talking about society. And I always think you are society. I am human. I’m all of the things you’ve described in many, many ways. But has your journey of learning about humans and human nature made you personally more loving towards humans, more optimistic about the human race, or has it made you the opposite, honestly?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, it’s made me more loving, but it hasn’t made me more optimistic. You know, there’s so many things that seem to be going awry in the world today. Now, I happen to be The form of meditation I do is Zen meditation. And in Zen meditation, there’s this idea of what’s called the Tathagata. which means, it was another name for Buddha, and it means things as they are. And one thing you meditate is the world isn’t good or bad or ugly or evil or unjust, it just is. Things just are. This is just the way the world is. This is the karmic chain, the wheel of dharma that’s been going on for thousands of years. It just is. It’s just the state of affairs. It’s your discriminating your mind, it’s your mind that creates all of these things. Let go of that and you can connect to the way the world is without judging it and it becomes this very beautiful place. And so a part of me wants to think of this is just the way things are, but a part of me goes, This isn’t good the way things are, and I hope they’re changed. So knowing human nature and knowing how human nature tends to twist things, how whenever we invent a new piece of technology, it could be the telephone, it could be the television, it could be the internet, it could be cryptocurrency, or it can be, you know, AI. It tends to twist and darken and degrade and pervert anything that was once maybe beautiful or interesting. It makes me worried about the future. So there I turn pessimistic and I’m worried. But then I always think that there’s hope with young people. And here I’m spouting another cliche. Damn, I’m going to shoot myself after this interview. But I feel like when I was young, I was angry about things. I didn’t like the way the world was. It was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and yuppies and ugly values I didn’t have. And I thought there was something wrong with the world. I was angry and I wanted to change it. Young people are still like that. And I think a lot of young people, Gen Z or whatever the next one is, whatever they call them, I don’t know yet. They’re growing up in a world that isn’t healthy, that isn’t right. And when you’re young, you have all these energy, all this physicality, and you don’t like it. You don’t feel comfortable in it. And I know a lot of young people don’t feel comfortable. And at some point, they’re going to rebel. And they’re going to say, I’m tired of all this virtuality. I want something real. I want real experiences. That spirit of rebellion that I see seeds of and signs of gives me hope. And I hope that it continues. Because I remember once I had a dream, probably the most memorable dream I ever had. It was maybe about 15 years ago or so. And I dreamt that I was there in the year 2072 or something like that. I was walking around the year 2072. It was the streets of New York. Everybody looks so happy. Humans finally figured out how to do well in this world. They figured out what matters. There’s hope in this world. That was my moment in that dream. This has always sort of stuck with me. Maybe that will happen. Maybe it won’t. I don’t know. I’m not Nostradamus. You know, so I struggle with that. I struggle with part of me is pessimistic and part of me seeks seeds of hope, particularly in young people. And I really, really, really wish they figure it out because my generation, generations before, we’ve kind of screwed this world over. Things aren’t good right now. And I’m hoping that spirit of rebellion, that young energy will kind of come and kick the apple cart and say, screw all this. We want a different world.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to ask it for. Um, and the question that’s been left for you to answer is in adult life, when were you most happy and why? And then brackets, it says, are you this way now? And if not, why?

ROBERT GREENE:

Well, I have to say the happiest moment of my life came at that turning point when I was 38 or so. And I was given the opportunity to write the 48 Laws of Power and it came out and my life had changed. And so the contrast from being in a small apartment, rather poor, rather desperate, where people were beginning to worry about me, and suddenly things were clicking together and I was having fun and I was having all these adventures and I had a reasonable amount of money, the shift was so radical and so dramatic that it was extremely exciting, you know? And it was almost like a drug high. It was pretty damn intoxicating. I don’t have that now because it’s 25 years ago and I’m kind of still riding off of that and the high has worn off. But I can remember in my body how depressed I was and that feeling, and I never lose it. I’m very grateful for what I have because I know it could have turned out very differently. So I still feel that initial happiness because I know if you have success when you’re 24, you’re not ready for it. You don’t realize how evanescent it could be, how it can disappear and how important it is. I never had that because I struggled for so long and so many bad jobs. So the happiness, the euphoria isn’t the same. It’s not the same intensity. But I’m still riding on that wave because I know where I was before it happened. And it’s been an amazing journey. You know, my wife, who’s been there for me, goes, can you believe that you were having dinner with Stevie Wonder when you were 12 years old? You told me, Robert, that that was the first album you ever bought was Inner Visions. And what would you have told yourself when you were 12 years old that this was what was happening? I would have flipped out. It’s been an amazing journey. I can’t complain. My whining complaint card was taken away from me in 1998 when I published that book. And so I’m still feeling the last vestiges of that euphoria from back then.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Robert, thank you. Thank you so much. I’ve been a tremendous fan of your work for what feels like forever in my life and your wisdom, your willingness to confront difficult subject matter that a lot of people would avoid because there is darkness enlaced in a lot of the subject matter that you’ve written about in some of your books, but it is very It’s very human, important, as you say, objectively neutral darkness that just is. And for you to confront that over and over again in your work makes it some of the most important work I think anyone could do because it’s the work that a lot of us avoid. But your vulnerability and openness today as well have been like a shot at my ass in terms of gratitude and the importance of perception as it relates to our happiness and our sense of self. So thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation more than I could express in words.

ROBERT GREENE:

Thank you so much, Stephen. It was a great interview. I was telling Ajwama that I’ve done thousands of these podcasts and I know I can tell, I’ve done my 10,000 hours, I can tell a great interviewer from a mediocre interviewer and you were in that elite category because you ask really great questions and you’re a great listener and it’s been really fun. So thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It means a lot to me. Thank you, Robert. Okay. You’re welcome. Quick one. As you guys know, we’re lucky enough to have BlueJeans as a sponsor and supporter of this podcast. For anyone that doesn’t know, BlueJeans is an online video conferencing tool that allows you to have slick, fast, good quality online meetings without any of those glitches that you’d normally find with other meeting online providers. You know the ones I’m talking about. And they have a new feature called BlueJeans Basic, which I wanted to tell you about. BlueJeans Basic is essentially a free version of their top quality video conferencing. And that means that you get immersive video experiences, you get that super high quality, super easy and zero fuss experience. And apart from zero time limits on meetings and calls, it also comes with high fidelity audio and video including Dolby Voice. They also have expertise grade security so you can collaborate with confidence. It’s so smooth that it’s quite literally changed the game for myself and my team without compromising quality at all. So if you’d like to check them out, search bluejeans.com and let me know how you get on. Over the last couple of, how long, maybe four months, I’ve been changing my diet, shall I say. Many of you who’ve really been paying attention to this podcast will know why. I’ve sat here with some incredible health experts and one of the things that’s really come through for me, which has caused a big change in my life, is the need for us to have these superfoods, these green foods, these vegetables and then a company I love so much and a company I’m an investor in and a company that sponsored this podcast and that I’m on the board of recently announced a new product which absolutely spoke to exactly where I was in my life and that is Huel. and they announced Daily Greens. Daily Greens is a product that contains 91 superfoods, nutrients, and plant-based ingredients, which helps me meet that dietary requirement with the convenience that Huel always offers. Unfortunately, it’s only currently available in the U.S., but I hope, I pray, that it’ll be with you guys in the U.K. too. So if you’re in the U.S., check it out. It’s an incredible product. I’ve been having it here in L.A. for the last couple of weeks, and it’s a game changer.

First, I feel like I owe you a debt of gratitude, and I want to say thank you for the impact you’ve had on my life. And I’ll point at the specific impact you’ve had on my life. And you asked me before we started recording why this podcast had been successful. One of the reasons is actually something I’ve gained from reading and listening to your work, and that’s this real commitment to trying to be your true self and trying to be your truth. This podcast wouldn’t be successful, and I wouldn’t have been successful in terms of pursuing myself had I not understood the importance of truth across all facets of life and in my relationships, which is a real pivotal thing for me.

JORDAN PETTERSON:

So what’s changed in your relationships as a consequence of that?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I believe it’s really difficult to truly connect with someone if you’re not speaking and being your truth. And I wasn’t. I think I was wearing a mask in my relationships in the context of I didn’t express how I was thinking and feeling. I was trying to be who I thought my partner wanted me to be. And at the point when I let down the mask and I started speaking my truth, actually as I was departing from the relationship, the relationship got stronger than ever before. And it was like we were never actually connected until I was being true with her, with my feelings, with what I wanted, with my life. And since then, I would categorize my relationship as being the strongest thing I’ve ever seen in terms of a romantic connection with someone.

JORDAN PETTERSON:

And so when you were starting to talk in your relationship in a more truthful manner, What did that mean that you had to admit? I mean, you just said that part of it was a disconnect between who you were trying to be and who you really were. So that’s a persona issue, right? So you think maybe, and everyone has this proclivity to some degree, is there deeply self-conscious and uncertain. And so, instead of allowing the person they’re with to connect with that underlying uncertainty and inadequacy, they act out a persona. And then the problem is that, well, perhaps the person falls in love with that persona, but there’s no real connection there. It’s an artifice. And, you know, having said that, one of the things that Carl Jung, the great psychotherapist, said about a persona is, Don’t be thinking that you’re better off if you never formed one. So for Jung, it was a voyage from, say, undifferentiated self in infancy and so forth, through persona to authenticity. Because you have to act out your ideals to some degree, right? And you also have to formulate an avatar of yourself, in some sense, that’s a mediator between you and other people in casual social encounters. Like, you don’t want to walk into the bank and have the teller tell you about his or her day when you say, how are you doing? Right? I mean, now and then that can happen, but generally it’s too much intimacy too quickly. And so you need this functional shell. But the problem arises when that functional shell is all that there is. And then the real person underneath is just desperate and unhappy because nothing of what’s being acted out reflects a true underlying reality.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is the consequence, the long-term consequence of acting? So many people, especially because of the world’s I live in, on Instagram and social media, we kind of build out these personas, and then we almost follow the implicit instructions that come with those personas.

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Well, that’s the problem right there, is that, well, I’m trying to get a hold of the Disney people at the moment because I want to do a lecture series on Pinocchio, because I think Pinocchio is a brilliant work of art. If you’re a puppet and an actor, and Pinocchio is both at times in that movie, both a puppet and an actor, so why an actor? Why is there something wrong with being an actor? Well, the first question is, well, who sets your role? And then the second question is, who’s pulling your strings? So you’ve put on this front that is there to make you popular and sexy and desirable and to mask from yourself your own inadequacies. But that’s a role. Well, who wrote it? And for what purpose? And so Jung said, for example, that we all acted out a myth, whether we knew it or not. And you know, maybe you’re acting out a tragedy. Maybe you’re acting out narcissus. You don’t know. Because you’ve put that on yourself in an attempt in some ways to deliver to people what they want, or more accurately, to look as though you’re delivering to people what they want. And it’s not nothing to do that, right? Because at least you’re attempting in some sense to adapt to the social world. Someone who’s really infantile and dependent, someone who’s never left home, part of their problem is that they haven’t crafted a persona. So you don’t want to denigrate it entirely, but it’s no substitute for the real thing. And it turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing, but that’s also the adventure of your life. And so if you aren’t truthful, and that means, unfortunately, especially at the beginning when you start to be truthful, it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility. So it’s very painful. Without that, you don’t have the adventure of your life. You have the role that you’ve acquiesced to. And that’ll take all the meaning out of your life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

adventure of your life. You say imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that. I encounter these young people who appear to know who they could be or they’ve imagined who they could be but for whatever reason they seem to choose the certain misery of their current situation, the job that’s sucking their soul out or that relationship over the uncertainty they’ll encounter as they go on the adventure of their life. So what would I say to these young people who always say to me, Steve, I want to do this, but you can see them stifled by fear because it’s like… Yeah, well, it’s like, make a plan, man.

JORDAN PETTERSON:

So when I was… doing my clinical work, which I did a lot of career work with my clients, both at a beginner level, I would say, like really a beginner level with people who had no employment whatsoever, no history of employment, who were undereducated and who lacked every skill you could possibly imagine. These are people who were really in dire straits, up to people who were operating at the top of their profession, but who could still strategize forward. And so, For example, let’s say you’re at a dead end in your job. Okay, so I don’t find my work meaningful. All right, so that’s a problem statement. It’s like, well, why not? I find the work I do repetitive and boring and without spirit. I have a bad relationship or a neutral relationship with my boss who doesn’t know who I am. I have problems with co-workers. All of that needs to be differentiated, right, and analyzed in detail. So we might say, for example, let’s say you believe that you’re undervalued at work. And maybe you are. What you need to do is you have something to say. And we would have to figure out what it is that you have to say. But it would be some variant of, I’m bringing more value to the table than I’m being compensated for. and that’s demoralizing me. And it’s also not good for you, you being my boss, because if I’m actually more valuable than is being recognized, then the fact that you’re not valuing me properly means that I will become demoralized, I won’t work properly, and you won’t get the best out of me. So it’s bad for both of us. And if your boss is in principle not amenable to such a discussion, then what you should seriously consider doing is finding another job. OK, so let’s say we’re going to set you up for this. OK, this isn’t like next week’s Enterprise, man. This is your life. So the first thing I would ask is, well, do you have your resume or CV in order? Well, I haven’t typed it up for three years. Well, what do you think about bringing it up? Well, I’m pretty nervous about that because there’s some holes in it. And, you know, I didn’t do so well in college and I’m kind of embarrassed about my resume. It’s like, Okay, bring it in. Let’s go through it. Let’s at least update it. Let’s look where the holes are. Let’s look at where the inadequacies are as far as you’re concerned, right? This isn’t my judgment. It’s your judgment. Let’s walk through those judgments and see if they’re warranted because maybe you’re just too guilty and ashamed and self-conscious and anxious and you’re not you’re looking at your resume more critically than someone else would, and maybe there’s some holes that you need to rectify. You know, you were two courses away from your BA and you dropped out or something like that. Well, Maybe we need six months to address that. And at least, even if you can’t be fully educated, you could be taking some courses online. And so when you went to a new job interview and they said, what about this hole? You’d say, well, I came to terms with that six months ago and in an effort to rectify it, I’m taking the following courses and here’s my plan for completion. That’s a really good answer. And anyone with any sense who’s interviewing, will accept that as an indication that although you’re not perfect and who is that you have a good plan and that you’ve thought it through. Like that’s the kind of answer that in all likelihood will cement your candidacy for the position. Okay, so now you’re going to go to your boss. Well, you have to have your CV and your resume in order and you have to be able to stand on it solidly and which at least means that you’re prepared to address the inadequacies in a credible, realistic, believable and truthful manner. All right, now what you do is apply for like 10 jobs. You don’t have to take them, but maybe you have to go to an interview or two or three or four. And maybe there’s a bunch of opportunities out there for you that you didn’t even know about. And maybe someone offers you a job. And so now you can go to your boss and say, here’s the situation I’m in here at work. Here’s my evaluation of the problems in relationship to me. Here’s what I could do for you if you gave me a 40% raise and the opportunity to progress, but I’d like to see a plan for that. And I’ve been looking for other opportunities before conducting this discussion, and I have some. Well then, if your boss treats you with contempt at that point and doesn’t listen, then perhaps he or she is a little more narcissistic than might be optimal, and it’s time to find a new job. But this isn’t something you do trivially, and so when you’re doubtful, say you’re trapped, you ask yourself, well, why am I trapped? And that’s a hard question, right? Because some of it’s your own inadequacy, a lot of it. And all of the part of it that you can deal with is your own inadequacy. So even if it’s unfair, you know, even if you’re hemmed in for any number of reasons, inappropriate, like ethnically predicated oppression, let’s say, or maybe you live at, you’re in a workplace that really is sexist in some fundamental sense. Well, That’s not good, it’s not just, it’s not fair, it’s not meritorious, all of those things. And maybe you shouldn’t be there, but what you can do to begin with is every bloody thing you possibly can do to put yourself in the most virtuous and powerful negotiating position possible. And you have to think like a snake in some sense to do that. You got to get the details right. You have to be prepared to bite. And you have to have your eyes on the prize, so to speak. And people aren’t taught this sort of thing ever, really. They’re not taught how to negotiate. They’re not taught how to goal set. They’re not taught how to conceptualize appropriate success in some broad sense. In some sense, that’s what the humanities are supposed to teach people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

On that point of understanding my inadequacies or someone’s inadequacies, I really believe that it’s really difficult to undergo self-development if you don’t have self-awareness. And I was really trying to understand from your writings how someone is to build their self-awareness. It’s almost like the unknown unknown. If you don’t have it, how do you build the thing?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

I know a good exercise for that. It’s like a prayer in some sense. In fact, I would say it’s proper prayer. If you want to know something about yourself, sit on your bed one night and say to yourself, you got to mean this, like you got to be desperate. This is no game, this. It’s like, my life is not everything I want it to be, and perhaps it’s not everything that I need it to be. And by need, I mean my life is so unbearable that The suffering that’s attended upon that is make me nihilistic, cynical, bitter, resentful, homicidal, genocidal, unable to have a good relationship, prone to punish people for their virtues because of my jealousy, driving the proclivity to see evil everywhere except within my own heart. Like, these are problems, man. And you ask yourself, you sit on the bed and say, okay, man, I’m ready to Learn something. Like, what’s one thing I’m doing wrong that I know I’m doing wrong that I could fix that I would fix? It’s like, you meditate on that, you’ll get an answer. And it won’t be one you want, but it’ll be the necessary one. You know, and it’s often something that will point you to small things. So Carl Jung said, people in the modern world don’t see God because they don’t look low enough. And so imagine you’re in your messy bedroom, you know, and you’re sitting on the edge of the bed trying to have an honest dialogue with yourself. And the little voice says, you know, it’s pretty disgusting in here. And you think, well, I’m way above such trivial niceties as organizing my room. It’s like, now that’s pride. That’s arrogance. If you’re above organizing what’s actually yours, How in the world are you ever going to organize anything else? And so you get on your knees and you think, well, it’s time to, you know, take a brush to the toilet. And maybe that’s where you start. And so, and that works like that works. You start making those micro improvements, like real micro improvements, real on the ground, actual micro improvements to things, you know, that are wrong. You’ll improve unbelievably rapidly.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What you’re talking about there sounds to me a lot like an overdose of arrogance and also the need for humility. Do you think the Western world suffers from arrogance because of our relative privilege and luxury that we kind of overlook?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Of course, well, that’s a temptation, right? I mean, when the radical lefty types go after people for their unearned privilege, they have a point. Now, the point is, The existentialists called it throne-ness. That’s a Heideggerian term. And throne-ness is the fact that we kind of experience life as if we’re tossed into it, thrown into it. You’re male and not female. You’re Hindu and not Christian. You’re tall and not short. You have an arbitrary range of talents and an arbitrary range of limitations, none of which, in some sense, you chose. It’s the cards you’re dealt. Now, some of those are cards of privilege. Now, maybe you’re born intelligent. Maybe you’re born symmetrical. Maybe you’re born healthy. Maybe you’re born into a culture where it’s much easier not to be absolutely deprived. Maybe your parents are rich. And so, all of that, in some sense, is unearned. Now, along with that comes a good dose of existential guilt, because at the same time, and this is true for anyone, regardless of their cultural background, the ground we walk on is soaked in the blood of historical atrocity. And so that’s on you, because, you know, people think, well, who’s the Nazi? Well, it’s the fascist, or it’s the, or who’s the radical communist? It’s the radical left-wing ideologue. And the fundamental truth of the matter is that’s best dealt with as a spiritual matter, is the adversary is within, really. Most profoundly. And so you have to take the responsibility for that historical atrocity onto yourself. I was talking to Guy Ritchie this week about his movie King Arthur. It’s quite an interesting movie in many ways. And when Arthur, who could be the hero, takes the sword, he’s so overcome by visions of his murderous uncle that he can’t pick up the weapon. Well, think about that. Now you have weapons at your disposal. But they’ve been used by your murderous uncle. How dare you wield them? And the answer is, maybe it’s easy just to leave the sword on the ground because you do want to be responsible for atrocities going forward. And don’t think you couldn’t be. And don’t think you might not enjoy it. And so, the way you pay for your privilege is with your virtue. I mean that most particularly. You have these opportunities and this existential guilt. And the way you expiate that and atone is by doing your best to live the best possible life you can manage. To speak the truth, to treat people with respect, to abide by the principles of the dignity of the individual and to put your house in order. And that’s how you pay for your unearned privilege. All of us. And we all have our privileges and our curses, you know. All of us have that. That’s why it’s not useful to be envious of people. You know, you’re a young man, you see someone drive by in a Ferrari with a blonde and you think, my God, he’s got everything. And, you know, the woman in the car is a prostitute who’s got a cocaine addiction and her life is just one catastrophe after another. And he’s had to lie and cheat his way into this position. And he’s afraid that everything’s going to come crashing down on him. And that’s what you’re jealous of. And it’s just not that profound. You don’t want someone else’s fate. Man, your fate’s enough. And your adventure’s enough. It’s plenty. It’s more than you can ever fully realize. And so that’s also part of the reason that we all believe that the individual has some intrinsic dignity. It’s don’t be so sure that your position and your room is so damn trivial. It might be your attitude towards it that’s trivial. And if you’re in dire straits and dire circumstances, just look at how much opportunity you have to make things better. So not that it’s easy. You don’t even want it to be easy. No, so.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

On that point of you don’t want it to be easy, I really contended with this idea of struggle and chaos in my life and the role it plays. And once upon a time, I thought I was trying to rid my life of chaos and struggle. I thought that’s why I was trying to get rich and get the Ferrari and the blonde. I thought that would create a life free of struggle. But then I looked at some studies and I heard about this thing called gold medal depression when Olympians come back from the Olympics and they’ve lost orientation. And then the day when someone offered to buy my company for a, eight, nine, nine figure number and it filled me with this emptiness and this dread and I tried to understand the role that struggle would have to play for me to be a fulfilled human being for the rest of my life.

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Yeah well that the observation with regard to your company that’s a great observation. I mean we’re built to walk uphill and when you reach the pinnacle of the hill you want to stop and appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance because it’s the uphill climb that it’s from the uphill climb that we derive our value and I mean this technically so almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm and that’s to be filled with the spirit of God by the way because that’s what enthusiasm means that’s experienced in relationship to a goal. And so in some sense, and this is part of the religious enterprise, you want a goal that you can never attain. Right? So you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it. You think, well, that’s frustrating. It’s like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. But it’s not because as you pursue that goal, you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant. And that’s why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense transcendent. You want them to be above everything you’re doing so you can continually move towards something that’s more sublime and better. That’s what you are. You’re here to live, not to sleep. And the problem with the vision of Mai Tai’s on the beach is that, well, first of all, that’s a vision of drug-induced unconsciousness. Second, it’s only going to work for about a week. Third, you’re going to be a laughingstock in a month and depressed and aimless. and goalless. You want a horizon of ever-expanding possibility. And so it does happen to people, because they’ve staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal. And it can be a pretty high-order goal. It was in your case. But then you think, well, now I’m there. Now what? Well, the answer can’t be Well, I’m going to live in the lap of luxury and never have to leave the face. What do you want to be? A giant infant with a gold bottle? You never have to do anything but lay in your back and suck? It’s like… Well, you see the problem with that as a conceptualization. It’s no, you want to be… like an active warrior moving uphill with his sword in hand. And that’s dynamic, that’s exciting. That’s why so many young men disappear into video games. That’s all acted out in the video game. So they have to act that out in their own life. Not that I despise video games, because I don’t, but they’re not a substitute for life. They might be good training under some conditions for life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

One of the things I was also really, really keen to ask you was about what’s happened in the world over the last two years. One of the shifts we’ve seen in the business world is this move to remote working. And I hate it. And I hate it for a variety of reasons, because I feel like there’s very few institutions in my life where I have a chance to meaningfully connect with people. Dating has become screens. Socializing has become screens. And the office, the institution of the office in my life was one of the places, especially as a younger man, where I got to meet pretty much 90% of my current best friends and also partners. And I really worry about sitting behind a Zoom doing my work for the next 10 years. What is your take on remote working?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

I like it and I don’t like it. I think it’s very difficult for us to understand our embodied environments well enough to duplicate them in a healthy and comprehensive manner in the virtual world because we just don’t understand what it is that we’re doing when we actually do things rather than represent them. So, for example, I’ve thought a lot about online university. Okay, so then you could imagine Well, you can certainly imagine online lecture courses, and you could say, well, the fact that they can be delivered on a large scale, very inexpensively, is a virtue. You can bring the knowledge to a very large number of people at a low cost, so why not do that? And so that’s half the university. And then you could say, well, imagine that you generated the system of universal tests, which is possibility. And that means you could bring accreditation to everyone at a low cost as well. And that’s that. University’s online. But that presumes that you know what the university is and you don’t. Because, well, here’s some other things the university is. An excuse for young, a credible excuse that’s socially sanctioned for young people who have not yet established a career goal to adopt an identity of upward striving for four years away from their parents while they meet a new group of friends. Like that might be 90% of the university for all we know because it’s certainly, for me for example, when I went to college, I left home when I was 17, and I left this small town I had grown up in, and in many ways, I left the peers that I had been associating with. Now, a couple of them came to college with me, so I had a toehold there. But I made an entirely different group of friends, and they were friends whose goals were quite radically different from the friends that I, let’s say, in some sense, left behind. The reformulation of my peer network might have been the most important part of the first part of my education. Now, I was fortunate at this place. It was called Grand Prairie College. I had seven professors, seven, which is really good, who really loved to teach. And so I also learned a lot in the formal sense. But while I was doing that, I was also negotiating, well, how much partying do you actually do? Because zero isn’t the right amount, but every goddamn night till three in the morning isn’t the right amount either, because you have to balance that in some sense with practicality and upward striving. And how do I live with other people? My roommates. I had one roommate who’s a really good friend of mine still, and he walked a thousand miles with me this year when I was ill, literally. I really liked living with him because he was a tough guy. Worked in lead smelters and he was a cowboy and he was a tough guy. Four years older than me, about three years older than me. He’d come back to school after bouncing around through these like tough working class occupations and he had his feet on the ground in lots of ways and I really liked him as a roommate because I’d buy some groceries and then he’d buy some groceries or I’d make dinner and he’d make breakfast and none of that was ever explicitly negotiated. He was just very aware of this reciprocal, it’s reciprocal altruism technically, he was very good at. We were both good at tracking our mutual obligations and fulfilling them. So we had a very peaceful relationship. I lived with him for a year and then a little bit at different times and in different places. And I learned to… live with a whole variety of roommates. I had many roommates. We had a kind of a frat house in the first college I went to and I think anywhere from 6 to 20 people lived there depending on the week, you know. It was really, it was ridiculous. It was way too much fun and that was also a problem but When I look back on that time in my life, I certainly can’t reduce the educational experience to virtual classes and virtual tests. Maybe that’s 10% of it. And we don’t know how to replicate those environments that are so formative, especially in their everydayness, you know? Because you live with your roommates. That’s a 24-hour thing. And so The problem with virtualization is that we don’t understand our environments well enough to be certain that we’re not excluding something vital when we concentrate only on what we think conceptually is important. Now, I meet with my son pretty regularly for a project we’re working on, which is an app that will teach people to write while they write and use it. So we’re quite excited about this. But I meet with him virtually once a week. And it’s actually very efficient. He’s on the screen. We can see our project in front of us. We can do mutual editing of some of the underlying material, educational material. There’s a real place for it. I have a cottage up north in Toronto where we’ve set up a studio like your studio here, although ours isn’t quite as impressive, but I can have an interview and discussion with anyone, anywhere in the world, even in a foreign language, and that’s like unbelievably remarkable. But that doesn’t mean that we know how to virtualize reality or that we should flee into it, right? And these new technologies, they’re unbelievably radical and they’re very hard to master and so we all have to be careful and try to keep our feet on the ground to some degree when we’re using them. So for example now, I’ve really only figured this out in the last three months, I get up and I do a series of exercises that my wife taught me that are based in the kundalini yoga tradition, that’s real helpful, flexibility and breathing exercises, that reduces my anxiety during the day I would say about 25%. and then I try to reserve some time either for writing or I’m working on a number of artistic projects and so I’m going to do one or those for a couple hours in the morning and then maybe a walk or something with my wife and breakfast. I have breakfast during all this. And then I can turn to the sort of connected world, email and the podcasts and so forth. And so there’s this balance between privacy, introverted privacy, let’s say, and disconnect from everyone, except for my wife, and then contemplated reconnection with the virtual world. That seems to be working out pretty well. You want to get a balance of that that’s actually, to use a terrible cliche, sustainable, right? So you want to hit your projects hard, but you have to leave in that not with entertainment but with culture because those are not the same thing. Entertainment is an approximation to culture and you need to leave in that with culture that’s beauty and drama and art and all of that and then with intimate relationships and friendships and well it’s very difficult to get the balance of all that correct and It’s very difficult to do that virtually. But I certainly wouldn’t forego the technology, and neither would the rest of us. It’s like people complain about their phones, but they carry them with them everywhere they go. And I’m not cynical about that. The phone, it’s not a phone. God only knows what it is. But it’s definitely not a phone. And so it’s not surprising that since it just appeared and it’s so insanely powerful that we don’t know what to do with it and that might even wreck everything. Like God only knows, Twitter itself could bring civilization to a halt. We don’t know how to manage the unintended consequences of our technological prowess.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And that’s exactly it. We invent technology, often it seems, for efficiency or to increase productivity. And it’s almost impossible, because of that ignorance to what the unintended consequences might be, to predict them ahead of time.

JORDAN PETTERSON:

So we optimize… The essential doctrine of conservative political philosophy, right, is beware of unintended consequences. It’s like, oh no, this thing will just do what I want it to do and nothing else. No, even Marx knew that wasn’t true. Marx developed the concept of alienation. We get alienated from the products of our effort. That’s part of the reason he didn’t like factories. And fair enough, because factory work, which is repetitive, in some sense destroys our artisanal relationship with what we produce. Now, the problem with Marx’s analysis is that Yeah, but it’s pretty damn efficient and it lifts people out of absolute poverty really quickly. But that doesn’t mean that existential philosophers after Marx developed the concept of alienation to quite a high degree. And technology does alienate us because of its artificiality and its coldness and its mechanistic nature, all of that. Well, we have to contend with that wisely. Then you ask, well, how do you contend with things wisely? And I would say, well, don’t pollute your thoughts with deceit. You compromise your own wisdom. How are you going to make intelligent, not intelligent decisions, wise decisions? That’s why you shouldn’t lie. It’s like you’re warping the mechanism that orients you in the world. Do you really want to do that? This is a brutal world, man. And I’ve seen this in my clinical practice. People whose houses are built on foundations of sand, and the wind starts to blow, and the floods start to rise, and they are in such trouble. Such trouble. If you’re lucky, and something terrible comes your way, and you’re reasonably honest, and your relationships are in good order, maybe you won’t end up in hell. And I mean hell, I don’t mean death. There’s lots of situations you can get yourself in where death would be far preferable to what you’re going through. So, you need to be afraid of that. It’s like, don’t lie. In my clinical practice, in 20 years, working with every sort of person you could imagine, I never ever saw anyone get away with anything, even once. So, Yeah, we’re all subject, not least to the judgment of our own conscience. Try to escape from that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

No one can escape from that. Over the last two years, the world has gone through this pandemic. For a lot of people, this is the first time, for a certain generation, this is the first time they’ve experienced such unpredictable, tectonic, destabilization in their lives. Like we, I didn’t even believe society was something that could close. I didn’t believe the tech, there was, I didn’t even know there was tectonic plates under my business that could shut down my business, right. And also in your, over the last two years you’ve undergone some really, you know, I don’t even know what the right adjective is to use to to Tectonic’s not bad. We’ll go with tectonic then. Sure. Tectonic, you know, unfortunate challenges, I’ll say, in your life but also, you know, with your family. What are the lessons we learn from the pandemic and from that type of tectonic suffering about what actually matters in our lives?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Well, we’ll see with regard to the pandemic because Although in some sense it is in some ways over, our reaction to it is by no means over. And part of the reason that we overreacted, I would say so precipitously to it, is that we were unprepared for such things in our naivety. And then we rushed to imitate a totalitarian society in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic emergence. And that’s something that everybody should think about a lot. And we’re not done with all that totalitarian nonsense yet. A lot of that’s driven by, well, fear and naivety. I mean, 50% of Democrats in the United States believe you have a 50% chance of being hospitalized with COVID, and 25% of Republicans believe the same thing. And you can point a finger at people and laugh at their ignorance, but you should really ask, well, why is this overestimate? of that magnitude and what does that mean in relationship to policy. And I’ve had conversations with people advising at the highest level of government, particularly in Canada, who’ve told me flat out, and they’re very reliable sources, that none of the COVID policy for the last year was driven by reliance on science. It’s all opinion poll. And that’s really pernicious because, well, who’s asking the questions? And how did they set up the answer? And who’s answering? And in what emotional state? And so to what degree are we led by considerations of short-term propitiation of unwarranted fear. Well, that’s no way for free people to live. It certainly won’t work in the long run. We’re already seeing tremendous supply chain disruptions and likely the emergence of an inflationary pressure that we haven’t experienced since the 1970s in the aftermath of the oil shocks. And none of that has sorted itself out yet. I believe that we will conclude that our response to the pandemic caused more death and misery than the pandemic itself. And we have no endgame in sight. Another thing I asked the people that I was speaking with is like, when is this over? Well, we don’t know. Well, what would over look like? Well, we don’t really know. And now what you see is this insistence on about a monthly basis that a new and radically different variant has emerged. And this virus, viruses mutate all the time, but this virus particularly mutates. And there are small mutations and medium-sized mutations, numbers, let’s say, and also effect. larger-scale mutations, when is that a variant? Well, how about whenever it’s convenient for the pharmaceutical companies? You think, well, that’s cynical. Is it now? The biggest lawsuits in the history of the American judicial system have been levied against the largest pharmaceutical companies on a regular basis for the last 20 years. And since when has it been a proposition of the political left that pharmaceutical companies necessarily have our best interests in mind? Now, I’m not particularly cynical about pharmaceutical companies. I think they have a hard job, both in terms of research and development and marketing and sales. And they’re going to do what they can to market and sell. But that doesn’t mean that they are now to be the arbiters of all public policy because our politicians are too cowardly and incompetent to do anything but devolve their responsibilities to so-called experts, domain experts. Politics is not public health. That’s medicine. Politics is the art of analyzing the entire situation and charting a course forward, all things considered. And for politicians to trot out the experts and say, follow the science, just means that they’ve abdicated their own responsibilities. And I think it’s appalling. I mean, I’m not convinced that the evidence that masks work is scientifically credible. It’s certainly at least doubtful. And that’s just masks. I read a paper the other day suggesting that to prevent the transmission of one case of COVID, you have to lock down a thousand people. How is that justifiable? especially given that the mortality rate of COVID is actually quite low, unless you have a pre-existent health problem, particularly obesity, and although old age also qualifies, as it does for most diseases, but not all. And with regards to, let’s say, the issue of child vaccination, it’s like children have an unbelievably tiny chance of dying from COVID. I don’t think there’s any scientific justification for immunizing children under 12. Now, at least it’s debatable, and I’m not a domain expert, although I’m a decent scientist and I know how to read the research material. Well, we’ll see what we have to learn from these tectonic shifts underneath. And, you know, you might ask yourself, well, was that a tectonic shift in dire physical necessity because the COVID virus was genuinely so dangerous? Or was it an indication tectonically of our absolute inadequacy in the face of even a moderate existential challenge? And maybe it’s a little column A and a little column B, you know.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So. I have to ask the question. If we were to make your Jordan Peterson the president of the world and these were your decisions to make, do you know what you would have done differently or in response to this virus emerging in Wuhan?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

I would say, well, thank you for the offer, but I declined the position. And the reason I would say that is because I think the right solution to the most serious problems is to be found at the level of the individual. So I don’t think if I wanted to pursue what I regarded as the ultimate goal, the ultimate goal for me is the encouragement of the individual. And that’s not essentially a political enterprise. It’s essentially a theological enterprise. And politics has to be subordinate to that. And so I’ve debated throughout the entire course of my life whether I would adopt a political career. It was my initial ambition when I was very young, 14, I would say. But when push came to shove at every decision point in my life, if I had to choose between working on the encouragement of the individual or pursuing a political career, I always chose the former. And that’s happened every time the decision has come up. I’ve been approached by people in Canada to involve myself more deeply in a practical role and also publicly as a political figure, but I’d rather do what I’m doing. I’m in contact with people working politically all the time, both on the People in the middle, people on the right, people on the left. I’m agnostic about that because I know full well that conservatives have something to say and left-leaning liberals have something to say. That’s basically predicated to some degree on their temperament. Conservatives tend to be more conscientious, so that’s orderly and industrious, dutiful, patriotic, willing to make and keep verbal contracts, reliable, capable of implementation at the level of detail. That’s kind of conservative virtues there, but they tend to be lower in creativity, openness to experience. They don’t think as divergently, and their conscientiousness tends to constrain their creativity. Whereas the liberal types, they’re high in openness to experience. That’s the creativity dimension, but they tend to be lower in conscientiousness, particularly orderliness. And so what that means is those with a liberal temperament tend to be creative slash entrepreneurs, and those with a conservative temperament tend to be managerial and administrative. That doesn’t mean they can’t run businesses. Well, you want a conservative person to run your business. You might want a more liberal person to pepper you with off-the-wall ideas, you know, and then if you’re going to run an enterprise, business or a society, there has to be a continual dialogue between people of different temperaments so that we can keep the ship of state, let’s say, tracking to an ever-moving destination. That’s why free speech is so necessary. It’s not another right. It’s the right. So because none of us know what’s going on in the final analysis, because the future is different than the past, really, we have to talk about what to do all the time. Because even if we made wise decisions in the past, that doesn’t mean that we can mindlessly replicate those decisions right now in the present to deal with a changing future. So I want to help encourage people to become the sort of people who can engage in that free dialogue. And I think that’s the best way forward, especially as we all become more technologically powerful. It’s like, you better be smart enough to use your iPhone. And that’s pretty damn smart, let’s say wise, because that’s no trivial gadget. And if you’re not careful with it, it will turn on you. It will build authoritarian presumptions into our artificial intelligence systems, for example. And then look the hell out. So if you’re going to have a hydrogen bomb, you better be wise enough to wield it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

On that point of the encouragement of the individual, we all have people in our lives that we want to encourage. We hope. Yeah, we hope, right? And we sometimes fall foul of trying to force our own bias, our own intention for them on them. What is the best way, if I’ve got a friend in my life or a partner that I want to encourage to come out of their place of despair into a better place, how do I effectively do that without overpowering them or stifling them or making them feel inadequate, which is sometimes the consequence of trying to change someone you love?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Well, example’s good. But then I would say disabuse yourself of the notion that you know what is best for this person. You don’t, not only do you not know, you actually don’t want that responsibility for two reasons. Let’s say they do what you say and something good happens to them. Well, whose victory is that? Yours or theirs? And if it’s yours, did you just steal it? And then let’s say they fail following your advice. Well, they pay the price for that. And you can skip away merrily and say, well, I should have spoke more carefully. It’s like, you don’t mess about with people’s destiny. You do not know where they’re headed. Now, having said that, you do what you’re doing in this interview, in this podcast. You ask people questions, real questions, you know, like, how are you feeling? I’m not doing so good today. Well, you know, what’s up? What’s going on? And you can’t think, well, I’m going to ask questions to lead this person in a particular direction, because that’s the same game, the same instrumental game. You have to see what it is that you want to know. Because I see this when people ask me questions after my lectures, you know, now and then, or during a Q&A, now and then people get up and they’ll ask a real question. It’s part of the ongoing dialogue. Something struck them. They stand up. There’s something they really want to know. It’s an honest question. And that goes real well. Not infrequently, someone stands up with a little prepared speech that’s packaged as a question. So I get this from Christian traditionalists fairly frequently. They get up and they ask me about my religious convictions, but really what they want to do is corner me into admitting that I should accept Jesus Christ as my savior and join a particular, let’s say, denomination. It’s not a question. It’s just a manipulation. And so your questions, like your statements, your questions should be honest. And if you ask people questions and you really listen, they will untangle themselves. And that’s partly why people love to be attended to, you know? If I meet people on the street, you know, I ask them their name. They’re all usually flustered when they come up to me. They don’t really want to interrupt me, and then they’re flustered. And the first thing I do is shake their hand and ask them their name. And I listen, you know. I’m not that good at remembering names, but I listen to it. And they know how to say their name, and so it kind of settles them down. And then it sort of marks them out as a person against the background, eh? And then if I pay attention to them and listen, they will tell me something in like 10 seconds that I need to know. Because they have something to say, you know? And then if you listen, people tell you what they have to say and then you get wise because you collect all that. And so you want to help someone. Well, first of all, you decide that you’re aiming towards help, right? And that you do that in the spirit of ignorance. This is what every good clinician learns is, I don’t know where you’re headed. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. This is a hard problem, man. It’s like, what’s your problem? I don’t know what your problem is. So let’s find that out first. And then let’s find out one thing you can ask people. This is actually useful in an argument with someone you love. They’re upset with you. What are your preconditions for satisfaction? Now, I wouldn’t state it like that. If I could give you what you wanted right now in the context of this argument, and I wasn’t doing it in a manipulative way, what is it that I would have to say or do that would, in principle, satisfy you? And that’s a hard question, you know. And the person might say, well, I think you should apologize about this, and then I will say, what words should I use? And they’ll say, well, if you loved me, you’d know. And I would say, no, I’m stupid and ignorant and I don’t know what the right words are to satisfy you. So why don’t you give me a hand with that and I’ll utter them inelegantly and awkwardly in a good faith demonstration of my commitment to peace. And that won’t be so good because maybe it would have been better if I came up with it myself, but maybe next time I can do slightly better. And that works. It requires the person who’s after you to think through the question even of whether there’s anything that could be said or done that would satisfy them. And if the answer to that is no, well, probably the relationship is over. But certainly, the person that they’re accusing has been put in an absolutely impossible position. But usually, almost inevitably, if the person meditates on it for a bit, there is something that would satisfy them that can be negotiated, as long as they’re willing to give you the opportunity to do it, you know, stupidly and badly. So, listening, man. Jimmy Carr, I talked to Jimmy Carr two weeks ago, the famous comedian, yeah, he’s real interesting. He said comedy is the most dialogical of of the entertainment forums and I thought, well, what do you mean by that? Because you’re just talking. It’s a monologue, right? Now, I do monologues, but I pay attention to the audience, right? I’m always talking to individual people in the audience and watching their reactions and listening to the audience as a whole. So even though it’s a lecture, let’s say, or a talk, I’m watching the audience and responding. So we’re in a kind of dance. Well, Carr pointed out that comedians, before they hit the road, and this is virtually invariably the case, they have their new routines, so their corpus of potentially funny jokes, and then they do 200 shows in front of small audiences, and the audience either laughs or doesn’t. And if you’re listening, you collect all the jokes that people laugh at. If you do that 200 times, you have nothing but hilarious material. But you listened. And then you can go out on the road. And that was very interesting to me because humor is a mysterious phenomenon. experientially and conceptually, and it’s sort of precognitive and instinctual, but it’s also extremely sophisticated, then there’s an element of transcendence about it, right? Because you can laugh at yourself, and that’s in some sense the highest form of humor. And so it’s so interesting that we can criticize and elevate ourselves at the same time, and that we find that intensely pleasurable. And so a good comedian collects ways to do that, shares them with the audience, and he’s listening. And so if you want to help someone, the best way to help someone is not to give them advice, but to listen to them.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I had a guest actually come on this podcast before Jimmy Carr. Jimmy Carr was on two weeks ago and we had a great conversation about happiness and the nature of happiness. And the guest before Jimmy Carr wrote in my diary, which is a tradition we have now where all the guests that come on write a question for the next guest. So there is a question there for you. But the guest wrote a question which changed his life, which is, are you happy? And I, from reading your work and understanding your position on happiness and it not being the thing to aim for, which really struck me because I thought, you know, I thought life was the North Star of our lives was to try and be happy. I guess my question is, I was going to ask you that question.

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Aim to be good and pray for happiness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So the question I was going to ask is pretty much that is, what is a better question for me to ask you if I’m checking in on you? Because we asked that question with good intentions. Are you happy? What’s a better question for me to ask Jordan Peterson? How are you doing? How are you doing? How are you doing?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Brilliantly and terribly. That’s… You know, when you listen to a profound piece of music, one that sort of spans the whole emotional experience, It’s not happy. Happy is elevator music and probably you just shouldn’t listen to that at all, right? And you think, why? Well, it’s harmless, it’s treacly, it’s sweet, it’s simple, it lacks depth, it’s shallow, that’s a problem. It doesn’t have that deep sense of awe and horror, I would say, that is characteristic of the best of all music. You know, you listen to some simple music, so-called. Hank Williams is a good example, you know, the blues cowboy from the 50s who died of alcoholism when he was 27 and whose voice sounds like an 80-year-old man. Simple melody, you know, but There’s nothing simple in the song and in the voice. It’s deep, you know, it’s like the blues. It’s like black blues in the States from the 20s and was certainly influenced by that tradition. There’s this mission of a deep suffering at the same time as you get the beautiful transcendence of the music.

And that’s awful in the most fundamental sense, but you need an antidote to suffering and it has to be deep.

And deep moves you tectonically and it’s not a trivial thing, but that’s better than happiness. And maybe if you’re lucky while you’re pursuing that and while you’re immersed in it, you get to be happy. And you should fall on your knees and be grateful for that when it happens. You know, it’s a gift. It really is a gift. And it comes upon you unexpectedly, your happiness, you know. But you aim to climb uphill to the highest peak you can possibly envision. And that’s better than happiness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why did you include terribly?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Well, for example, now when I go wherever I go in the world, people come up to me and they’re usually… I wouldn’t say they’re happy to see me. They’re often in tears, you know, and they often have a pretty rough story to relate. You know, they were suicidal or nihilistic or homicidal or trapped, desperate, you know, and they tell me that real fast. And then they say, I’ve overcome that to a large degree and thank you for that. And you think, well, that’s really something to have that happen over and over. In some ways, you might think, well, how could anything better possibly happen to you than to have people come up to you all over the world, strangers, and open themselves up like that, like they’re old friends, so quickly. But at the same time, it’s an awful thing because you see even in the revelation of their triumph, the initial depth of their despair.

So I wouldn’t change that, but it’s not nothing. It’s certainly not just happiness. It’s better than happiness, but it’s almost unbearable. God, tears again.

It’s been quite a two weeks in the UK. It’s been amazing. It’s been amazing. Such a great country, this country. Such a profound place and it was so wonderful to see Cambridge and Oxford and to be welcomed by the students and

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I saw the cues around the block and the reaction you got. I watched the talk in Cambridge and it was so wonderful to see because it, you know, I know that you don’t do what you do for credit. That kind of seems to be, you know, the antithesis of pursuing your truth and doing it in the cause of truth. It was so wonderful to see someone that I know has had such a profound impact on so many be received in such a way. We have a closing tradition. One of the, you know, I don’t want to do this, but one of the really great CEOs in our country, a young guy who’s bought a multi-billion dollar company, really great guy, sat here yesterday and I actually told him for the first time who he’s writing the question for. And I couldn’t believe his face. Oh my God, that’s the one person I want to have dinner with. This is probably the most successful young person in our country. And so he knew who he was writing the question for. So the question that the previous guest wrote for you is, why do you do what you do?

JORDAN PETTERSON:

To see what will happen.

Some programs you cannot predict, right? You cannot predict how they’re going to end. You have to run them. Well, you know, I believe that truth will save the world. I believe that. So, you speak truthfully. And you watch what happens. And you take your consequences. You know, and maybe you hope and have some faith that in the final analysis things will work out in your favor. Perhaps they will and perhaps they won’t, but that’s faith, eh? That’s faith. Faith isn’t believing in things you regard as ridiculous, sacrificing your intellect. It’s a decision, you know? Will truth, beauty and love save the world? Well, you can find out.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Thank you doesn’t seem to quite cut it for the impact you’ve had even on me and also for giving me your time. I know you understand the tremendous value of time. I’ve seen it so much in your work. So I’m going to say thank you, but I’m also going to make a commitment to do something which I think is more important, which is just to be truthful. And I think with the platform I have and the years I have ahead of me, maybe that’s the greatest good that I can do to the world. So because you’ve come here, that’s a pledge and a commitment I want to make to you. as my highest form of thanks that I can give in a karmic way. Hopefully that will make the world a better place for everybody.

JORDAN PETTERSON:

Well at least it will help ensure that you won’t make the world a worse place.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Thank you so much. Thank you. For everything. Thank you. Much appreciated. A huge honour. Thank you.

Dr. Joe, 95% of who we are by the age of 35 is programmed. When I read that in your work, it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks because I just turned 30. And if what you’re saying there is true, without realising it, there’s a puppet master that sits above me, that’s calling the shots in a way that I don’t think I’ve realised. Is that true?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I think if we define a habit as a redundant set of automatic, unconscious thoughts, behaviors and emotions that’s acquired through repetition. A habit is when you’ve done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your conscious mind. Then it’s programmed subconsciously. So then when the body knows how to do it better than the conscious mind, then for the most part, the greatest habit we have to break is the habit of being ourselves, right? So there’s a principle in neuroscience that says that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you keep thinking the same way, if you keep making the same choices, if you keep doing the same things, if you keep reproducing the same experiences and feeling the same emotions, your biology begins to become hardwired in a sense, it becomes programmed. So in order to change something, to arrive at a new vision of your future, if you wanted to arrive at a new goal or new vision of your future, you’d have to change something about yourself in order to get there. And you’d have to change the way you think, the way you act and the way you feel. When you begin to become conscious, of those unconscious thoughts, so conscious that you don’t let them slip by your awareness unnoticed or unchecked by you. If you catch yourself speaking in a limited way or you become conscious that you’re behaving in a certain way, in a habit, and you can notice or pay attention to how you’re feeling, then you’re no longer the program. How your consciousness observing the program, you’re only unconscious when you’re in the program. And so to change then is to become so conscious that you don’t go unconscious again. And in a sense, that is consciousness that is really the puppet master that really decides who we want to be. I think the biggest problem is that people lose their free will to a set of programs. And so their body is basically programmed into a predictable future based on what they’ve done in the past. So to change then, to change that habituation takes an enormous amount of energy, an enormous amount of awareness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why is this operating system, this program, useful? Because I look at everything the way that I do, and from doing this podcast and speaking to experts, I’ve stopped thinking that my body is against me. And I’ve started to realize that there’s a reason for these things. There’s a reason for the habits and patterns. So why is this useful? Because it seems to be working against me in so many ways.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, first of all, when we look closely at certain habits, whether you can ride a bicycle, whether you can speak a language, whether you can snowboard, when you first learn any of those things, it takes an enormous amount of conscious awareness to get your body to do what your mind is intending. But if you keep doing it over and over again, then the body begins to economize it in some way. And so we have a lot of things that we can do automatically or unconsciously or subconsciously that allows us to multitask, to drive your car, to talk on the phone, to do several different things at the same time. So a habit isn’t a bad thing. They can work for you or they can work against you. The problem is if you’re, as an example, complaining. and blaming and making excuses and feeling sorry for yourself and judging other people and you practice that and you get really good at whatever you practice. You practice that enough times that you’re unconscious to the fact that you’re doing it. The moment you become conscious that you want to change that, you’re going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to feel unfamiliar. It’s going to feel some degree of uncertainty. You’re leaving kind of familiar known territory and you’re stepping into the unknown. And so many people, when they want to change a habit, they have to be willing to be uncomfortable to do it. But habits can work for us. There’s a lot of great habits that you and I both have that I would never want to change. or would want to evolve in some way, but then there’s a lot of habits that don’t serve us. And so a person really wants to set a vision of the future, whatever that is, and they just have to agree that in order to arrive at that vision, they have to change in order to get there.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Someone said to me that there’s a certain type of behaviour pattern that we can’t change. They said when we get trauma under the age of 10, things that happen at a very early age, some of those things cannot be changed. And then there’s things that happen later in life that can be rewired and changed. Is that true? Are there some traumas, behaviour patterns that just appear to be too stubborn and too resistant to change?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

If you asked me that question just a few years ago, I probably would have a different answer than I do today. Because if you look at a lot of the work that we’re studying in terms of human change and human transformation, we’ve seen people with really difficult pasts, really brutal pasts that were abused and traumatized at a very early age. And then repeated traumas that took place in people’s lives. And they had night terrors and they couldn’t be in relationships. They had social anxiety. They had a lot of health conditions. We’ve seen them completely change, completely change to be happy people again, to free themselves from the past. I would never put a limitation on change because I just don’t think you can really predict that. I think many people that are learning how to change and they understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and how it gets easier, I think for the most part people can change all kinds of things and when they do change Our research shows that their brain changes, their heart rate changes, their gene expression changes. There’s thousands of metabolites that are being released into their bloodstream that weren’t there prior. There’s a host of different changes that take place biologically that kind of support the person’s transformation.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is there a specific transformation that sticks in your mind? as being the most as the clearest evidence that you should never write off someone’s ability to transform. Wow.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I’m so pleased to tell you that my beliefs have been challenged just in the last two years in witnessing so many different changes in people’s health that I never knew was even possible. You know, everything from stage four cancers that were in a very progressed state that metastasized to organs and tissues and bones in the body, a complete reversal. in that health condition. Not once, not twice, not three times. We’ve seen it many times. We’ve seen people that were blind, that have been deaf, that have ALS, that have lupus, that have MS, that have Parkinson’s disease, that have spinal cord injuries, that have strokes, PTSD. myasthenia gravis, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy. We had a woman that had her thyroid removed, surgically removed, and I know this is difficult even for me to accept, and grew a new thyroid back. You know, we have the medical evidence for that. So I don’t know any longer what the limit is. I think there’s something really cool happening in the world when people believe in themselves. And when you believe in yourself, you have to believe in possibility when you believe in possibility you have to believe in yourself. So when somebody Has the opportunity and I think a story is There’s no there’s everybody loves a story. There’s nothing better than a story and when someone stands on the stage in front of 2,000 people and and talks about their journey to heal themselves from a chronic health condition. And it’s not always pretty. They lose things. They lose family. They sometimes lose their careers or get sick before they get better. And you see this person’s persistence and you see that they were not doing the work, their inward work to heal. They were doing the work to change. And if they understood, if they truly changed that, their biology should change. And they were uncompromising every day in showing up for themselves and staying conscious of their unconscious self and then reprogramming themselves in some way. And they tell that story, it’s the four minute mile. It’s somebody breaking through a level of consciousness or unconsciousness and the collective that’s observing the example of truth. they’re actually relating with that person in a way that causes them to examine possibility differently. And when you become conscious of a new possibility, a change in consciousness is a change in awareness, right? So now it’s in the collective. And lo and behold, it’s not uncommon. We just had this happen in our week-long event in Denver just a little over a week ago, two weeks ago. We had six people stand up out of a wheelchair by the end of the event. Now, I wasn’t expecting that. But one person that had MS in the middle of the week had a very profound experience, very profound experience. And a professional athlete, NFL football player, and stood up. And he stood up for the audience. When he stood up, he said, I thought I was going to a yoga retreat. I thought my brother was taking me to a yoga retreat. I had no idea what we were doing here. And then he said, I just, I just never loved myself. And it was his act of change that somehow changed his health condition. He somehow up-regulated genes in different ways, suppressed the genes for MS, and somehow he was more mobile, he was walking by the end of the event, and he was the magic number one. And when everybody saw that and the audience was excited, we started seeing other people have a similar experience. Now that possibility is becoming more of a reality for people. So I will always, I never limit what could actually happen, but I can tell you that what an amazing time right now to witness people really doing the uncommon.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you recited that story, I could see the emotion in your face as you say it. And I can only imagine with the information that you have and the beliefs you have about healing, change, transformation, the sense of urgency you must carry and the sense of like responsibility almost, I guess you must carry, knowing what’s possible.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, well, I do feel responsible for always keeping the information based in science and as pure as possible. I feel it’s really important to do the research that we’re doing. I mean, we’ve studied so much from a scientific standpoint, the process of change and the process of transformation and what meditation actually can do for a person in terms of their biology and and some of the changes that we’re seeing just in seven days. My responsibility really is to give people my greatest understanding of the truth and numerous opportunities to experience it, nothing more. There is a way to inspire people into possibility. And so we combine different models of science, whether it’s quantum physics or neuroscience or neuroendocrinology psychoneuroimmunology, the mind-body connection, epigenetics, electromagnetism, all of these sciences allow people to understand themselves better. And if knowledge is power, knowledge about yourself is self-empowerment. You can empower people to do something with it. So, the more you understand what you’re doing in the process of change, the more you understand why you’re doing it. As I said, the how gets easier. So, we now know that if you give people sound scientific information, and that is the contemporary language of mysticism. And they can learn that information. They’re basically making new circuits in their brain. That’s what learning is. Learning is forging new synaptic connections. But if you don’t review what you learn, if you don’t repeat it, it’s so much easier to forget it than to remember it. So you’ve got to repeat it over and over again. So we allow people in our workshops to then begin to turn and teach it back to somebody. They have to really explain it. If they can’t explain it, it’s not wired in their brain and they’re going to… something’s going to be left to conjecture, to superstition, to dogma, to spirituality. And that’s not the result we want. We want them to use science as that model. And if they can explain that model and remind themselves what they’ve learned, reproduce the same level of mind, nerve cells that fire together, wire together. So they begin to install the neurological hardware in their brain. By teaching others. Yeah, exactly. So that they are prepared for an experience. So then, if that information is installed in their brain, that philosophy, that theory, that knowledge and information, and now they can remember it and they have that model of understanding. And they understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. If we can set up the conditions in the environment and give them the proper instruction. If they can get their behaviors to match their intentions. If they can get their actions equal to their thoughts. If they can get their mind and body working together. They’re going to have a new experience. Now, experience enriches circuitry in the brain. That’s what experience does. The moment those neurons begin to string into place, though, another part of the brain makes a chemical. And that chemical is called a feeling or an emotion. And the moment you feel unlimited, the moment you feel grateful, the moment you feel empowered, the moment you feel whole, now you’re teaching your body chemically. to understand what your mind has intellectually understood. The information is just not in the brain now, the information now is literally in the body. And now you’re embodying the truth of that knowledge, of that philosophy, of that theory. So then you’re teaching your body and instructing your body chemically to understand what your mind has intellectually understood. Okay, so then that information that’s coming as a new experience is changing your biology in some way and we’ve actually shown this. So then if you’ve done it once, then it means you should be able to do it again. And the idea is to be able to repeat an experience. And if you can repeat it over and over again, both neurologically and chemically, neurochemically, you can condition your mind and body to begin to work as one. And when you can do it so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your conscious mind, it’s innate in you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So I want to map out this process so that I make sure I understand it. starts with the neurology, which I heard is a thought which you then ingrain in your mind by teaching it to someone else. Is that accurate?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, first thing you have to do is you got to give people information. Yeah. And science is probably the closest to the truth in terms of information. And so when your brain is exposed to information and you’re present and you’re paying attention, that neurons begin to connect. That’s what learning is. Learning is forging new synaptic connections. The Nobel Prize research, Kandel in the year 2000, the researcher said that if you learned one bit of information and you paid attention to that information for about an hour, He would double the number of connections in your brain as a result of your interaction with that information. But if you don’t review it, if you don’t repeat it, if you don’t have to think about it, the circuits prune apart, right? So if learning is making new synaptic connections, then remembering is maintaining and sustaining them. It’s so much easier to forget this information than to remember it. So you learn it. Once I got a person’s head nodding, then they turn to the person next to them and say, let me try this out. Let me try this out and see if I can repeat it. And so between the two of them, they exchange that information and they start to build a model of understanding. Ah, I understand. I got that. Okay. Then we advance the information a little bit more and they’re adding new stitches into the three-dimensional tapestry of their gray matter. And they have to remind themselves what they’ve learned, reproduce that same level of mind. Mind is the brain in action. As you install those neurological circuits in your brain then, now you’re prepared. It’s the forerunner to the experience, you’re prepared for the experience. So give the proper instruction, get your body involved, get involved in the process. the experience then causes circuits to become more enriched. That’s what experience does. And then it makes a chemical and that chemical is called a feeling or an emotion. And the stronger the emotion you feel from the experience, the more you remember it. And what is that experience? Abundance, health, wholeness, a mystical experience, success, a new relationship, a new career, a new life, whatever the person’s, whatever that vision, that person wants to arrive at in the future. And to actually go from the thought of that vision to the actual experience of it. And the distance between that thought and that experience is called time. So if we can teach people to shorten the distance between the thought of what they want and the experience of having it, then they start believing more that they’re the creator of their life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What would you say to somebody that doesn’t think thoughts matter that much? I would say 95% of the world plus, or maybe more, 99% of the world plus sees thoughts as something that we are, you know, it’s my head talking. It’s me talking in my head. And as long as I don’t act on those thoughts, they’re inconsequential.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I would say then that’s the truth. Is it the truth? I don’t know. But for me, my thoughts do matter. I think every thought that you have makes a chemical. And you can have thoughts that make you feel good and thoughts that make you feel bad. And I think that if 90% of the thoughts that we think are the same thoughts as the day before, the same thoughts lead to the same choices. The same choices lead to the same behaviors. The same behaviors will create the same experiences. And the same experiences produce the very same emotions. And those same emotions influence a person’s very same thoughts in their biology, Their neurocircuitry, their neurochemistry, their hormones, and even their gene expression stays the same because they’re staying the same. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I do think that if you think differently and you learn new information and you have new thoughts, if you can make new choices and demonstrate new behaviors and create new experiences and arrive at new goals and feel new emotions, I would say that’s evolution. And I think that people really, really secretly believe in themselves on some level. And I think being defined by a vision of the future or really always, always dreaming of another great experience, I think is a great reason to wake up in the morning.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve had lots of conversations with very smart people on this podcast from multiple disciplines, you know, psychiatrists, psychologists, athletes, health practitioners, and they’ve given me such great advice. on which is irrefutable scientific advice on so many areas of my life and for some reason there’s still areas of my life that I still can’t act upon that advice and I think probably for most of my listeners who’ve heard great advice on this podcast and they think yes that’s who I want to be I have an intention to stop eating sugar at 1 a.m at night or I have an intention to become organized or to be this kind of friend or partner They have the information, right? What there’s something stood in the way of me doing something about that information on a regular basis.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah Well, I can give you a few answers for that. Unfortunately It normally takes crisis trauma disease Diagnosis betrayal loss a person has to reach that lowest denominator Where nothing’s making that feeling go away Has to. Well, not they don’t have to, but this is human. This is the human condition. This is the moment where they don’t feel like returning the texts. They don’t feel like going to dinner and seeing the same people. They don’t feel like watching the same television show any longer. The sports car, the wardrobe, none of that is making this feeling go away. This is a moment of reckoning for the soul. And this is really when you could actually see yourself through the eyes of someone else because you don’t feel like yourself anymore. And that’s the moment where people begin to change. They can see how they’ve been thinking, they can notice how they’ve been acting, they could pay attention or become aware of how they’ve been feeling for the last 20 years. And that idea in neuroscience is called metacognition. That’s the moment you’re no longer the program. Now, what we believe and what we’ve seen and what I think is a much better approach is being defined by a vision of the future. And if you understood that you could actually elevate your state without anyone or anything every single day, and hold whatever that intention of your future is. And it takes a coherent brain to do that. And feel the emotion of your future before it happens. That is, you know, you can’t wait for your wealth to feel success. You can’t, or abundance. You can’t wait for your new relationship to feel love. You can’t wait for the mystical experience to feel awe or your healing to feel whole or grateful. That’s kind of The old model of reality of cause and effect, waiting for something out there to change or take away this emptiness, this lack that I feel in here. If you teach people then they could elevate their state and we teach that model through meditation. And they can combine that clear intention with an elevated emotion and teach them how to make that heart of theirs more coherent. If they do that properly then, they’ll live their life feeling like their future has already happened. Now, from that elevated state, instead of that self-limited state, they can become as conscious of that unconscious self as they could if they were at that limited state. And being defined by that vision of the future, getting up every day inspired by it, and not letting any person, any circumstance, anything in our life remove us from that vision, that would be a day well-lived. So then, most people then, they have that vision of the future. but they give up on that vision because in order for them to arrive at that vision, they have to do something. They have to think differently. They have to act differently. They have to feel differently. And it’s so much easier to make the same choice every single day. And the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, you’re going to feel uncomfortable because you’re stepping from the known into the unknown. So some people would rather cling to their self-pity than take a chance in possibility. They’d rather tell the story of their past instead of telling the story of their future. They’d rather believe in their past instead of believe in their future. It’s so much more important though to romance your future instead of romance your past. And I think if people understood that they could actually arrive at it, I think many people have done this already in their life. I think everybody at least once in their life has done something great. And when they did something great, they just made up their mind. And they made a decision in that moment to do something or to change with such firm intention. that the amplitude of energy in making that choice caused their body to respond to their mind. That the choice that they were making to change became a moment in time that they would never forget. And the stronger the emotion they felt in order to change, the more they remembered the choice. And we could say then that they’re giving their body a taste of the future emotionally. And they’re literally aligning to that destiny. We discovered that if you keep doing that every day, somehow you arrive at that destiny and your biology will literally begin to change to look like you’re living in a different life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What are some of the biggest myths relating to behavior change and I guess character and personality change that hold people back?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Probably belief. I think in so many ways that a belief is an unconscious process. A belief is a thought you keep thinking over and over again until it’s hardwired in your brain. And most beliefs are based on past experiences. And so many people have a belief about something that has to change in order for them to arrive at a new place in their life. And what we discovered a lot of times with people in this work is that they, when they say, for example, they were healing themselves of a health condition. Sometimes they would do their meditations three times in one day. And I asked them, why three times? And they said, because I stopped believing. And when I caught myself no longer believing in it, I had to sit down and change my belief again. In other words, they had to get up believing more in their future instead of believing less in it. And they have to change their state of being to do that. So I think that that’s a limitation. I also think that unconsciously we’re always waiting for something out there in our life to change so that we can change or feel the relief of the lack of what we don’t have. And I do think that’s kind of a limited model of reality. I think when you start changing inside of you and you start seeing the changes happening outside of you, you go from being a victim in your life to being a creator of your life. And I think that when that occurs, then all of a sudden it’s no longer a have to. It’s something that you want to do. You actually don’t want the magic to end in your life. So now you become a work in progress by investing in yourself. And when you invest in yourself, you invest in your future. So there’s probably a chronic disbelief that many of us have that we’re not creators of our life. And only when we get the parking space or something good happens to us do we believe that we’re the creator of our life. But imagine a world where everybody actually took responsibility in being the creator of their life and no longer the victim of their life. I think we would see a dramatic shift in consciousness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That makes people feel uncomfortable, this idea of personal responsibility. It’s almost become quite a controversial idea, the idea that we are the creator of our lives, because then I have to accept responsibility for all the bad things that happened. Dave dumped me. I got fired from work. Someone bumped into my car and it hurt my neck.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, maybe that happened by default. Maybe that happened by not creating. Maybe you were just left to the randomness. of reality that maybe you’re not creating. And the fact that you’re not creating, you’re left to the effects of your environment actually controlling you, controlling your feelings and thoughts.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

By creating, what do you mean by creating?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, if you woke up every morning and you truly made time to think like this, okay, If my personality creates my personal reality, and my personality is made of how I think, how I act, and how I feel, if I wanna create a new personal reality, a new life, I’m gonna have to change my personality. And most people try to create a new reality, a new personal reality, as the same personality, and it doesn’t work. We literally have to become someone else. So if you said, okay, Let me not default and go unconscious to that 95% of who I am that’s programmed. Let me become so conscious of the way I think. Let me become so aware of how I’m going to act today. Let me decide what emotions keep me connected to my past and bring me to a lower level, a lower level of energy. Let me not go unconscious. And then if you said, okay, The belief is just a thought I keep thinking over and over again. What thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? And with attention and with intention, to begin to familiarize yourself with a new way of thinking. Meditation means to become familiar with. If you keep firing and wiring those circuits, you’re going to begin to install the hardware repeated enough times and it becomes a software program that could be the new voice in your head that says, I can, it is possible. If you said, okay, when did I fall from grace yesterday? When did I lose it? Oh my gosh, it was with, at work, with my coworkers, with my ex, with my enemy, with the news, with traffic. Acting this way is not gonna make me happy. If I had another opportunity, another opportunity, how would I do it? If you could close your eyes and rehearse in your mind, mentally, how you’re gonna behave in certain situations,

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ll give you a specific one. Anyone. So I’ll give you the specific one where late at night, on occasion, I’ve eaten things that I really regret eating. Also, another one that I’m trying to work hard on is I can be very messy when I travel. So my hotel room can look like a mess. And I don’t like that about myself. And I don’t know why I do it, but it’s almost like you talk about being unconscious. I’m clearly not thinking about it, but that’s part of the problem. And it’s the same with the bloody sugar at midnight, eating, ordering things that are, and then feeling instant guilt 10 seconds after I put it in my mouth.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, it may be that on some level, well, you could actually be addicted to the guilt, not to the sugar. And so you return to the same emotional state that allows that action to reoccur. So if you said, let me decide how I am going to act, what I’m not going to do, and you rehearsed it, the research on mental rehearsal says your brain will look like you already did it. that you’ll be so present the brain won’t know the difference between what you’re imagining and what is real. The brain will begin to change to look like the experience has already happened. Now, you’re priming your brain for that behavior. Keep rehearsing it. Rehearsing it how? Well, mentally rehearsing, mental rehearsal is one of these great ideas in neuroscience where you can actually install circuits in your brain, right? So everybody has done this. Musicians do it. They’re playing a song in their mind all the time. Athletes do it. They’re always going over their moves. Dancers do it. Actors do it. So many people rehearse mentally what they’re about to do. And when they do that, they actually prime their brain. They actually can change their brain and change their body just by thought alone. Physiologically changed. Physiologically changed. You can take a group of people that never played the piano before and divide them into two different groups and do functional brain scans on both groups. One group They’ll come for two hours a day for five days, and they’ll practice these one-handed scales and chords. Now, you learn something new, you make new connections in your brain. You get some instruction, you get your body involved. When you get your body involved, you’re going to have an experience. You pay attention to what you’re doing, and you repeat it over and over again. Nerve cells that fire together, wire together. You’re going to begin to install new circuits in the opposite side of your brain. That’s common. You do the scan at the end, you see those actual physical changes. You take those people, the other group, and you ask them to close their eyes without lifting a finger, have them mentally rehearse those scales and chords, and at the end of five days, they grow the same amount of circuits in their brain as the people who actually physically demonstrated the act. In other words, they were so present with what they were doing, the brain did not know the difference between the real-life experience and what they were imagining. The brain was physically changing. to look like they already experienced it, they already did it. So now, you take those people, never played the piano before, they’ve just been mentally rehearsing for two hours a day for five days, you set them in front of a piano, and they could actually play those scales and chords, why? Because they primed their brain for that behavior. So then if you’re going to prime your brain for a new behavior, whether you’re the CEO of a company, whether you’re a parent, whether you’re learning something, the more you rehearse it mentally, the more you prime your brain and body for the act. So you could actually practice rehearsing how you’re going to change in your life. And if you keep doing it enough times, your behaviors will match your intentions automatically because you have the mind installed to do it. If you don’t have the mind installed to do it, you’ll go back to the same past behavior.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So I play through that scenario of making the decision differently.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Exactly. And rehearse it in your mind until it feels right. Until you feel like, I could actually do that. And go from start to finish without losing your attention. And so that it gets easier each time you do it. It makes sense then, you’ll actually do it. And then if you said, okay, Enough of this guilt. I’ve felt enough of it. I don’t like feeling that way. I could actually break the conditioning of that emotion in my body. Can I condition my body? Can I teach my body to feel something differently? What would be the feeling that I want to feel if I was able to do it? Would it be worth? Would it be self-love? Would it be freedom? Would it be joy? Let me teach my body emotionally. What a future could actually feel like before it happens. If you keep doing it over and over again, you’re going to start making more of those chemicals. And it’s going to become easier for you to do it. It’s going to become familiar to you. And that’s exactly what meditation is. To become familiar with an old self. To know thyself. Become so conscious of that unconscious self that you don’t go unconscious to that self. And how many times do we have to forget? Until we stop forgetting and start remembering. That’s the moment of change. What thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? Let me become familiar with those. What behaviors do I want to demonstrate? What would greatness do? What would love do? And actually rehearse a greater way. Rehearse it enough times so that you could actually step into that footprint. Teach your body emotionally that there’s another way to feel and do it over and over again. It’ll become familiar to you. And so the model of change is unlearning and relearning. It’s breaking the habit of the old self and reinventing a new self. It’s pruning synaptic connections and sprouting new connections. It’s unfiring and unwiring, refiring and rewiring, deprogramming and reprogramming, losing your mind and creating a new one, unmemorizing emotions that have been stored in the body and then reconditioning the body to a new mind, to a new emotion. Turns out if you teach people how to do that, in seven days you can see very profound biological changes if they immerse themselves into the experience.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And what do those biological changes look like?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, so we run week-long events around the world. And I think it’s so important to do events in person with community because it’s a flock, it’s a herd, it’s a school, it’s a collective. And so that exact process in seven days, we take people through a very immersive experience. And we do functional brain scans or fMRIs or quantitative EEGs before they start the event. And then we, at the end of seven days, we look at their brains at the end of seven days. And there are dramatic changes in the way their brain works, very significant changes. Some of them are really outstanding changes. We teach people how to create more heart coherence. When you feel anger, when you feel frustration, when you feel impatience, when you feel resentment, your heart beats out of order. When you feel gratitude, when you have kindness and care, When you feel love for life, your heart beats in a more orderly fashion, you can actually train somebody to get good at feeling that way. And we use that and we see people at the end of seven days be able to regulate their heart much better. And it’s a function of really how soon or how slow we age. We take blood and we measure 2,882 different metabolites in a person’s blood. And at the end of seven days, we measure again. And I can tell you that if you’re a novice meditator, really never meditated before, kind of your first event, and you go through that seven day process, at the end of seven days, there’s so many biological changes that are taking place in the collective, in the community, not just one, not just two, the majority of people, and I mean a significant majority of people, suggesting that their body literally is living in a new environment, in a new life. and there are chemicals in their bloodstream, in terms of information, that wasn’t there prior to the event. In other words, some way, without taking any drug, without taking any exogenous substance, without changing their diet, without changing their lifestyle in any other way except going through this process, eating the same foods that they typically eat, that at the end of seven days, there’s chemistry, there’s biology that suggests that somehow their biology is changing significantly. We measure gene expression. I can tell you that you can change your gene expression in seven days. We measure the microbiome, and once again, seven days, there are dramatic changes in the microbiome, and the mind somehow is making significant and effective changes in our body. Our research is pretty outstanding because a seven-day intervention that’s producing these effects, there’s not a whole lot of drugs that are as effective. And we’ve discovered that the nervous system makes a pharmacy of chemicals right now that works better than any drug. That’s what we’ve discovered, and it’s all within you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I am a fixer in my friendship groups. And what I mean by that is I’m someone who probably over-involves themselves in trying to help friends change stuff, which is a gift and a curse, often times a curse. But I often get, because I love someone and they’re close to me and I want the best for them, when I see that they are experiencing a recurring pattern of behavior or habit that is causing them unhappiness, loneliness, to miss the goals they have in their life of becoming a husband or a wife or a partner or whatever it might be, I have a growing sense of frustration. And that sometimes manifests itself as trying to fix and help and give advice and change them. You must experience that in a different way. You’re much smarter than me. You must experience that in a different way when you meet people that you can see having these recurring patterns of behavior. And when you see that in them, has there any has there any ever been frustration on your part? Have you ever been frustrated that change hasn’t happened in someone that you loved?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

God, you know, I think it’s such a noble act to change. And I understand how hard it is to change. I understand that process. So I think the greatest thing that I could ever do for someone is to show them what change looks like. It’s so much more profound than anything that I could ever say. And I would never offer my opinion to them. I would love them unconditionally because I maybe see a part of myself that I’ve changed and I understand how hard it is to change. Or I understand that they’re gonna have their moment when they’re ready to change. And so I think it’s really interesting because what I’ve learned over the years is that no new information can enter the nervous system that’s not equal to the person’s emotional state. You can give them the answer, the right answer to the problem and they won’t hear it because it’s not relevant, equal to the emotion that they’re experiencing. What we’ve learned is that when you take people in, let’s just say seven days, just cross the river of change, go from the old self to the new self, immerse yourself fully into it, Break free from the chains of those emotions that keep you anchored to the past. Overcome those habits and behaviors that keep you programmed into a predictable future. Overcome all those aspects of your beliefs that keep you stuck in a certain state in terms of how you’re thinking and those hardwired perceptions. Seven days break free and normally the person has the answer to their own question. I think that’s when it becomes really relevant when you have your own insight, your own epiphany, when it’s your own truth because you’ve worked to get beyond it. People, when they analyze themselves or analyze their life within some disturbing emotion, when we looked at the real-time brain scans, we saw that they were actually making their brain worse. They were driving their brain further out of balance, overthinking, overanalyzing. When you analyze something within an emotion, an emotion is a record of the past. So you’re thinking in the past the solution could never be there. Free the person from that emotion and of course they see it from a greater level of consciousness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

For all those people listening right now that are like me that try and fix Because through what they think of as love, I may be doing it for other reasons, but what could they do to be a better ally or friend or partner to that individual? Based on everything you’ve said, that maybe they need their own moment or their emotional system isn’t in regulation with their information.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

God, any time we want to do anybody a great service is to help them out of their emotional state. I mean, it’s not a lecture that’s going to help them. Come on, let’s go do something. Come on, let’s go. Just get them doing something, just breaking themselves out of that state. It’s not like the answer. It’s that they have to change their state to get the answer. So if I were to do anything, I would want to help them shorten their emotional reaction to get beyond the emotion. Whatever that is and I wouldn’t be a lecture would be something fun that we did or something unusual that we did or just Trying something just let’s just do something And I think I think showing people what what what love looks like show them what joy looks like show them what happiness looks like I think I think people notice that I think I think they pay attention to that it gives them permission to do the same So maybe just show up as the person you would want to be around if you were feeling that way.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you look at the state of the world at the moment and the direction of travel, the trajectory of, you know, technology and the way we’re living our lives and the decisions we’re making at a collective level, what are the things that most concern you?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, I always ask myself, is it getting better or is it getting worse? And I think in my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the world as it is today, just with so many variations of so many things. And I question the information that I’m receiving. And I think that we need some type of intervention as a species. We need a change. We need an intervention in some way.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You question the information you’re receiving from where and what kind of intervention are you suggesting?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I just don’t know that the information that I am exposed to or information that people are exposed to is the truth. I just question that these days. Because you can get so many degrees of it. And I don’t know if it’s… based in altruism, you know, for the goodness of human beings or for self-interests. And I think people are waking up more to the understanding that something has to change, you know, for us to really survive as a species.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what are the symptoms of the cultural disease that you’re talking about? What are they?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

A lack of connection. You know, you know, we’re in 3D reality, you know, connecting, communing, cooperating. creating, I think those are things that, I think if you keep people in survival and you keep them in fear and you keep them at war and you keep them angry and you keep them in pain and you keep them confused and you can control their attention by controlling their emotions, I think we’re gonna, you know, we may not make it, you know, as a species. But I think that when people truly come together, in an elevated state. I think it’s collective networks of observers that determine reality. And I don’t think it’s the number of people, I think it’s the most coherent. in heart and brain that begin to produce effects. So the coming of a new consciousness has to be a collective. It’s not one person. It’s a collective group of people. And I believe that you get enough people collectively coming together that we can hopefully steer it in a different direction. Hopefully. Yeah. How about you? Are you optimistic? I am. I’m optimistic because I think people by nature. are good. I think there’s goodness in human beings. And I have the privilege of traveling around the world and I see that. And it transcends countries and cultures and races and gender. It transcends diet. It transcends all that stuff. It’s just when people are happy with themselves and in love with life, I think their natural tendency is to give. And I think we’re wired to do that when we’re not in survival.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

when we’re not in survival. When you use this word survival, are you talking about the fight or flight state that many of us live in?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, I would say that living in stress is living in survival, and stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of homeostasis. Stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance. The stress response is what the body innately does to return itself back to balance. The problem is, is that if you keep turning on that fight or flight system, you keep turning on that emergency system, you’ll actually cause people to stay out of balance. And that imbalance becomes a new balance. And they’re headed for some type of disease, some type of breakdown. No organism can tolerate emergency mode for an extended period of time. And when you’re in survival and that primitive system is switched on, it’s really about the self. When you’re in survival, you have to take care of yourself. The emotions of anger, and hostility, and aggression, and competition, and frustration, and resentment, and envy, and jealousy, and insecurity, and fear, and anxiety, and hopelessness, and powerlessness, and depression, and pain, and suffering, guilt, and shame are all derived from the hormones of stress. And psychology calls them normal human states of consciousness. Those are altered states of consciousness. And when we’re in that state, when we’re living in survival, we experience separation, we divide in a lot of ways. And so there’s biology that goes along with that, and the hormones of stress heighten the senses and cause us to become materialists. And now when we’re in lack or separation, we force outcomes, we control outcomes, we fight for outcomes, we compete for outcomes, we manipulate outcomes. In a lot of ways, we turn into more of a primitive self. It’s hard to change that, especially when you don’t have enough money, or you just lost your job, or you just ended a relationship, or your best friend passed. It’s really hard to move beyond those emotional states. And so I think that teaching people how to change those emotional states and move out of those are really important. And 75 to 90% of every person that goes to a healthcare facility in the Western world goes in because of psychological or emotional stress. That’s eight or nine out of 10. And emotional stress and psychological stress are the ones that tend to be the most harmful. Because if it’s not T-Rex that’s chasing you, but it’s your co-worker in the next cubicle, what was once very adaptive becomes very maladaptive. And the rush of those adrenal hormones become kind of addictive to people. And they use the problems, they use the conditions in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. They need their enemy to feel hatred. And if their enemy died, they’d still feel hatred, or they’d find another one. They need the bad relationship, they need the bad job in order to feel, and that’s why it’s hard to change. And people become addicted to the life they don’t even like. And so if you can turn on the stress response just by thought alone, by thinking about your problems, then that’s the truth, you can become addicted to your own thoughts. And if the long-term effects of the hormones of stress push the genetic buttons that create disease, your thoughts can make you sick. Then the question is, if your thoughts can make you sick, can your thoughts make you well? And we’re actually discovering that that’s absolutely possible. So then teaching people then a little bit about how to manage their emotional state and to self-regulate I think is a great gift for people because when they begin to break an addiction to any emotion or the conditioning of any emotion, There’s going to be cravings that go on just like any addict. And many people overdose, and many people have bad trips. And so when they start changing and the body’s craving those familiar emotions, the body starts signaling the brain of memories, or to think certain ways, and to make certain choices, do certain things, crave certain experiences, just to feel that same emotion. And people say, well, This feels right. No, that feels familiar. That really feels familiar and and many people will tell the story of why they feel that way based on some past experience and it’s usually Not in the recent past. It’s usually many years ago like a toxic relationship or whatever that is. And so I They’re basically saying I had an event in my life and since that event I’m still living by the same emotion and I haven’t been able to change. And they’ll tell the story of that past and in psychology the latest research on memory shows that 50% of that story isn’t even the truth. They’re making it up because they don’t have the same brain as they had then. And so then people are reliving a miserable life they never even had just to excuse themselves from changing. And they embellish the stories so that it sounds really hard to change. So what is that point then for a person when they say, the only person that this emotion of hatred or anger or frustration or resentment, the only person that this is hurting is me. Because those chemicals are down-regulating genes and creating disease. And a person finally really realizes that and they really decide to change. When they overcome the emotion, the memory without the emotion is called wisdom. And that’s the name of the game in three-dimensional reality. Now they’re ready for a new experience. It’s not reliving the past. You don’t need to. You don’t need to talk about it. All you need to do is overcome the emotion. When you overcome the emotion, you’re free from the past. You can see it from a greater level of consciousness. And that’s when a person, so many times when they truly change, they’ll say this. We’ve seen it over and over again. They reach that point where they finally break through, and some of them have had some really difficult pasts. They’ll say, I would not want to change one thing in my past because it brought me to this moment. That’s the moment the past no longer exists. And they can look at their betrayers and see it all had to happen for that moment. And now they’re free. They no longer belong to the past. They belong to the future.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve never heard the concept or idea of being addicted to a negative emotion. People talk to me about being addicted to dopamine and pleasure and, you know, and all those things and, you know, like masturbation and sugar. But the thought of being addicted to a negative emotion, it’s what you said to me earlier about the guilt.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, think about this. What do people do when they feel an emotion? What do they do? They rely on something outside of them. to make that emotion go away. So whether it’s the masturbation, or the pornography, or the gambling, or the shopping, or the sugar, or the whatever, it’s all because they’re trying to make that feeling go away. And they’re using something outside of them. So then there is some emotion that the person is regulating. That’s why they’re doing that. They’re doing that, right? So change the emotional state, and it makes sense then the need to do it diminishes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 which is not, doesn’t seem to be very easy to do, change my emotional state.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, again, I think if you understood what you were doing and why you were doing it, just like learning anything, if you understood a formula, I think it wouldn’t be as hard as you think it is. I mean, because there is a way to change.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And step one in that process of change is new information.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Always. It’s the forerunner to any experience. Without the information, we doubt that it’s possible. And again, the information and the science removes the doubt.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I was doing some research recently about why people change their beliefs and why they don’t change their beliefs. And some beliefs they’re more susceptible to take on, some information they’re more susceptible to take on. One of the things I read about was when they believe the source. Another thing I read about was when it’s good news. So in studies where they say to someone, you’re more attractive according to the public than you believed, they’re likely to shift rather than finding out they’re less attractive. And also things like health, you’re more healthy than you thought you were genetically, they’re more likely to shift a belief. The nature of our beliefs and the nature of belief change, I was writing in my book about how looking in the mirror and telling yourself something, like some of the sort of modern day manifestation community believe, doesn’t seem to work. Just looking in the mirror and telling myself that I’m beautiful and rich and successful and powerful doesn’t seem to be an effective way to cause actual belief change. Do you agree or disagree with this idea that you can look in the mirror and say something to yourself?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

When we study belief and the change in belief, I’ll answer it on two levels, Stephen. The first level is that in order for a person to change a belief or perception about themselves and their life, the majority of those people made a decision with such firm intention that the amplitude of that decision carried a level of energy that was greater than the hardwired programs in their brain and the emotional conditioning in their body. As I said earlier, their body literally responded to their mind. The choice that they were making became a moment in time they would never forget. They’ll tell you where they were, what time of day it was, who they were with when they made up their mind to change. It became a long-term memory. And the stronger the emotion we feel, the more altered we are inside of us, the more we remember that choice. That’s why we need pain sometimes. And it’s when you said, when you painted yourself into a corner and you said, this is it. I don’t care how I feel, body. I don’t care how long it takes, time. I don’t care what people think. I don’t care what’s going on in my life, environment. I’m gonna do this. And you made up your mind. The moment you felt that emotion, you were aligning to a new future and to change is to be greater than your body, to be greater than your environment and to be greater than time. And so when a person comes out of the resting state, because your body is trillions of cells, 70 trillion cells, and they’re all spying on your brain. And if you were sitting there and you said, nine out of 10 times, I’m going to fake standing up. One time I’m actually going to stand up. Before you ever made that conscious decision, your body is so precognitive. it already knows when you’re going to stand up because it’s got to release a certain amount of adrenaline so the same volume of your blood goes to your brain. So if you’re sitting on the couch with a remote control and you got your cell phone here and your iPad here and your computer here and your dog here and your beer here and the big TV there, and you’re eating your popcorn and you say, you know, I think I’m gonna change tomorrow. What do you think your precognitive body’s gonna say? Relax, he’s lying again. He’s not willing to signal the body it’s time to ride. There’s no signal to the body. And so making that choice to change your state of being with a clear intention and elevated emotion actually changes your state to believe in that future more than you believe in your past. Keep it up. Keep doing it. That’s a big explosion in the field. That’s important. That’s a change in energy. And nobody changes until they change their energy. And when they change their energy, they change their life. So then you make up your mind to do that and all of a sudden you have that synchronicity. You have that serendipity. You have that coincidence. And all of a sudden you’re saying, hey, that worked. Something I did inside of me produced an effect outside of me. I’m going to pay attention to what I did. I’m going to do it again. Let’s try it again. Let’s the experiment continue. You do it again, and then you say, well, when did I stop disbelieving? Oh my God, I stopped disbelieving when I ran into that person, we had that conversation, and oh my God, I returned back to my old belief again. Okay, next time that happens, this is what I’ll do, and you rehearse it in. So your evolution in your belief in self changes as well. So then, so many people, second point, will actually say this, you know, I read the philosophy. I understand the knowledge. I understand what it means to change. I understand the power of meditation. I saw the testimonials. I saw people heal. I believe it’s the truth. I just didn’t believe it could work for me. This is a big moment. This is a moment where you step out of the bleachers and you got to get on the playing field. That’s the person who says, if this works, and I believe it works, I got to prove it to myself. I got to actually prove it to myself that I believe that it could work for me. And some of them show up every day for a year and never miss their work, never miss their meditation. A whole year in changing from the old self to the new self. They were doing their meditations to change, not to heal. They were doing their meditations to change and when they changed, they healed. They did their meditation sometimes three times a day because they stopped believing. They start disbelieving and they were like, I defaulted. Why? Because I’m feeling the emotion of my past. Some stray thought, some response to someone or something caused me to feel it and I forgot. I’m back to the emotion that’s familiar and I can’t believe in that future. I’m believing in my past. Let me sit down and change my state of being again and get up believing in my future again. And sometimes they had to do it three times in one day and when they understood That’s the environment that signals the gene, that’s epigenetics. And the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion, and it is. You could actually signal genes ahead of the environment by changing your emotional state. They were doing it with that intention. And when you assign meaning to the act, you get a greater outcome and you turn on the prefrontal cortex. And now your biology literally begins to change. And we have data that suggests by just having the intention to make certain genes, to make certain proteins or signal certain genes and make certain proteins, just having the intention literally begins to cause the body to make those chemicals.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what causes relapse in those moments? Because I’ve had multiple moments where I thought behaviour change had been established, and I managed to conduct a new habit cycle and new behaviour, favourable intended behaviour for a period, and then something happens in my life. almost subconsciously. Seamlessly. Seamlessly. And I’m back to the old circuitry.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

You went unconscious. You went unconscious. And normally it’s unconscious to some thought or some response in your environment. You see someone or you do something or you have some interaction in your outer world And the moment you have that interaction, it causes you to feel a certain way and you return back to the past, basically. The emotion is the past. And the body’s actually living in the past. It’s so objective it doesn’t know the difference. It doesn’t know the difference between the real life experience that’s creating that emotion and the emotion that person’s living by every day. It’s believing it’s in the same past experience again. And it will behave in the past and it will think in the past. Subconsciously? Subconsciously, seamlessly.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So I could, for example, if going to, I don’t know, let’s say France, I had a traumatic experience in France when I was 10 years old, let’s just say. And then I go to France when I’m 30 years old and I get back, I just start eating junk food, for example. And I don’t know why. I’ve like fallen out of my gym habit and I’m eating junk food. Theoretically, that could be my subconscious that’s falling back into experiencing that survival without me knowing it.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yes, so if to change is to be greater than your environment, to be greater than your body, and to be greater than time, then your neocortex, your thinking brain, is a reflection of everything you know in your life. It’s an artifact of the past. It’s a record, repository of everything you’ve learned and experienced to this date. And you have a neurological network for everything known in your environment. Your parents, your friends, your car, your computer, every object, every person, everything. You have a neurological network for your identity as your body, from your past, for your ambitions in your future. Your brain is a reflection of everything that’s known. And because you’ve experienced all these elements in your environment, there’s an emotion associated with it. So you have an emotion associated with certain people, different emotions associated with other people, different emotions associated with other objects and things and other places in time. So then There’s so much research to show that when you put a person in the same environment and they see the same people and they go to the same places and they do the same things at their exact same time, it’s no longer their personalities creating their personal reality. Their personal reality is creating their personality. Their environment is controlling unconsciously or subconsciously the way they’re thinking and the way they’re feeling. So when they see their co-worker, when they see their friend, when they see their parents, they’re seeing their parents, their friends, their co-workers and the neurological network as a memory of the past. And because every one of those people has an emotion associated with it, they start feeling the emotion that’s connected to them and now their state of being then is returning back to the past. So then to change then is to be greater. than your environment. To think, act, and feel differently in the same conditions in your life. That’s called change.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And how would I do that? I walk in, I see my parents, mom, dad, dog, house where I grew up in. Is there something that I do in that moment, before that moment, when I woke up that morning to make sure that I didn’t slip off into the unconscious memory and then therefore get this sort of unconscious feelings about that experience?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, whatever it is that you want. If it’s overeating, I don’t know, I’m making stuff up. If it’s some emotional button that you have with your family, and you don’t want to feel that way, yeah, I would rehearse that if I didn’t want to have that. If you have a great, if you’re, I mean, I go to, when I would go to my parents’ home when I got older, it was all, most of the associations were so fond for me, just being at home and being with my parents and remembering where I grew up, it was always fun for me. And coming back and see how much I changed in coming back and seeing the life that I lived at one point, you know, one point in my timeline. So if it’s something that you truly want to change, you’re going to remind yourself how you’re not going to think. You’re going to remind yourself how you’re not going to act. You’re gonna remind yourself how you’re not gonna feel, and you gotta remind yourself enough times so you don’t forget, because the moment you forget, you go unconscious. Then you’re gonna remind yourself how you are gonna think. You’re gonna remind yourself what you’re going to do, and rehearse it in your mind, and you’re gonna remind yourself what feeling you wanna stay in the entire time so you don’t default back to the old self. If you practice that, I guarantee you, you’ll make some progress. If you lose it, nothing wrong. Tomorrow’s another day. You got another chance and we just get really good at whatever we practice. So then when you return back into your life and you say, okay, no person, no place, no thing, no object, no circumstance, no pain, no craving is gonna cause me to move from this state today. I guarantee you. If you’re able to maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day, something unusual will happen and will come in a way that you least expect. that surprises you and leaves no doubt that what you’re doing inside of you is producing some effect outside of you. And the moment you see the feedback in your environment as a result of your internal change, you’re gonna pay attention and do it again. And you’re gonna start believing, God, did I really create that? Did that really happen because of how I changed? That’s when the game really begins to become exciting. Practice. Practice. I’ve been at it a long time.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I can tell. Practice. People hear that they go, Joe, how long? How much practice? You know, are you talking about, I’ve got to, I’ve got to do this for three, four, five years or, you know, and that practice, what does that look like practically for someone like me who hears everything you’ve just said and wants to make changes and curious of my life? Okay.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

There’s two times when the door to the subconscious mind opens up. When you wake up in the morning, because your brainwaves are going from delta to theta to alpha to beta, and when you go to bed at night, you go from beta to alpha to theta to delta, and you slip through that scale pretty quickly in the morning and the evening. But your brainwaves start to change during those times, and one of the features, one of the important elements of meditation is to get beyond the analytical mind. And what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind. So 5%, as we said, is our conscious mind, 95% is programmed subconsciously. And if you’re gonna try to change yourself with your conscious mind, you’re outside the operating system. So then you got to learn how to change your brainwaves, slow them down, get beyond the analytical mind, and enter the operating system where you can rewrite a program, where you can make those changes. And so learn how to do that, practice, learn how to do that. And again, it’s not a big deal. It’s easy to learn. And then once you can slow your brainwaves down, and you’re more suggestible to what you’re thinking, now you can reprogram. You can’t do it with your conscious mind. You can say, I’m healthy, I’m healthy, I’m wealthy, I’m wealthy, I’m unlimited, I’m unlimited, I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m whole, I’m whole, and your body’s saying, no, you’re not, dude, you’re miserable, you’re unhappy. That thought never makes it past the brainstem to reach the body, right? So… It’s important for us to, in the morning or the evening, instead of reaching for our cell phone as the first thing, as a habit that we do, and checking our texts and our WhatsApp and our Telegram and our social media and our Instagram and our Twitter and Facebook, whenever else people do their emails, they get connected to everything known in their life. Before you start that, try this out as an experiment. Before you start your day, instead of falling into that redundant habit, you know, go on autopilot, just say, okay, if the change is to be greater than my body, to be greater than my environment, be greater than time, and the environment’s so seductive, and my body’s craving certain emotions, and it’s programmed to get up and do things, I’m gonna sit my body down, I’m gonna tame the animal here. And when I’m ready to get up, we’re gonna get up. Not when it’s tired or when it wants to go. You could literally go inward and forget about your outer world. No longer think about anything out there. If you could lose track of the familiar past or the predictable future and fall into the present moment. And if you were sitting there in silence aware of nothing but you and you said, okay, what is the greatest expression of myself I can be today? and do that exact process. Let me write down two thoughts that are not going to slip by my awareness unnoticed by me today. Two memories, whatever it is. What are two behaviors I want to change today? Let me stay conscious of them and not go unconscious to them today. Even if it means how I speak. What are two emotions that I live by every day that I can literally change? I want to become conscious of what they feel like in my body. I want to catch them the moment I start feeling them. Let me review them over and over again, enough times so I don’t go unconscious. Okay, now I’m conscious of my unconscious, that 95%. How do I want to think? How would greatness think today? Let me review it. Let me repeat it. Let me remember how I am going to think. Let me remember how I am going to think. Let me remember how I’m going to behave here. How am I going to act here? Let me rehearse a change I want to make in a certain circumstance. Let me think about how I do want to feel today. Let me open my heart to life again. Let me feel kindness and care and love and gratitude and appreciation. Let me just bring up that feeling. Let me feel it with my heart. Let me keep bringing it up so I can bring it up enough times, I want to get so good at bringing up this feeling with my eyes closed, I can do it with my eyes open. Practice that, and you not make a decision to not get up until you feel that emotion. And ask yourself, can I stay in this state my entire day? And if you can’t, and you go unconscious, ask yourself at the end of the day, how’d I do? Where do I go unconscious? Okay, tomorrow morning, new day, new lifetime. Let me go again. Let me try again. And it’s the practice, it’s the repetition that causes the change. Now here’s the beauty behind this, because all of a sudden, when those synchronicities start to happen, when the coincidences start to happen, it’s no longer a have to. It’s no longer all cheese. I gotta go create my life. It’s not like that It’s like the magic is happening. You don’t want it to end like you you realize that you are actually creating outcomes in your life And now you’re not you’re you’re you’re you’re wanting to do the work because you want the magic to continue in your life And that’s kind of what I’m super proud of with our community. We’re doers, you know we they do the work not because they have to because They love all the changes that happen in their life as a result of it, whether it’s a mystical experience, a transcendental moment, a great opportunity in their life. They’re like, wow, I somehow had a hand in creating this. So the excitement of life, the adventure of life, the unknown becomes the quest.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m so, so I’ve got to admit, I’m one of those people that wakes up in the morning and then just gets dragged, dragged off out of the bed by my phone and notifications and off into my day, totally unconscious. And there’s been so many things that I reflect on in my life and go, man, I just really want to, I’ll get home at the end of the day and I’ll look at certain instances where I responded in certain ways and go, man, I hate that about myself. And I really want to change that. And it happens again the next day. And I come home and I think, man, I hate that about myself. And I really want to change that. And it happens the next day. And it’s been happening for two years.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

When do you want to change that? When you’re ready to change that, you will. When it becomes boring and it becomes predictable.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I don’t want to have to wait for a crisis.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, now that you know, you can’t not know. Now that you know, you can’t not know. And on some level, you may have a belief that you think this is hard.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I’ve struggled with it. Yeah.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah. And it’s just like, uh, you going, learning snowboarding and never taking a lesson. Right. It’s going to be like, it’s going to be tenuous. It’s going to be challenging. It’s going to be difficult. Put your time and learn how to do it. And it gets easier as you do it. It’s just like, you just, you just have to learn the formula. There’s a formula that we’ve discovered that it’s, it’s actually enjoyable when you do it right. and you actually like it. People want to do more of it because it feels so good. I mean, you look at the HRV measurements of our community, look at our brain scans. These are people that, they’re not faking ecstasy. They’re not faking it. Their brain is at such a level of arousal. And the arousal’s not pain, the arousal’s not Fear, the arousal is not aggression or anger. The arousal is ecstasy. The brain is going in this heightened state. They’re making a connection to something really big. And that feels really good. And when they realize that they’ve hit something really big and it’s not coming from anyone or anything outside of them, they stop looking for it out there. And they realize it’s been within them the whole time. I think so many people, want so many things in their life, but what we really want is wholeness. Because when you have wholeness, you can’t want. How could you want when you’re whole? You only want when you’re in lack. When there’s brain and heart coherence, there’s a level of wholeness that takes place where a person is no longer interested in separation or lack. They feel like they have everything they want. That’s a great place to be in. And we’ve discovered that the more relaxed you are in your heart, the more awake you are in your brain. It’s relaxed in the heart and awake in the brain. And we teach that. People actually can get good at doing that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I really wanna talk to you about this brain coherence and this heart coherence. I have to close off on that morning routine thing by asking you exactly what did you do this morning? Ooh.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

This morning. I was up probably around 4.30. Yeah. Why? Because there’s nobody that can bother me at that time. There’s no emails. There’s no texts. There’s no, there’s my, it’s my time. What time were you in bed? Um, probably between 10 and 11. Okay. That are not enough sleep for you, huh?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Well, no, that is, I think I actually measure my sleep. So I, and I look at it every day. That’s part of the reason I’m dragging out of bed, but

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, for me, four in the morning, five in the morning is a really great time. I’ve just conditioned my body that way. That’s the time. And I spend a little time remembering what I’m doing. What am I doing? What are you doing in this meditation? Why are you doing this meditation? What are you about to do? I like to just get myself in my think box, organizing what am I not going to think about? What am I going to stay away from? What am I not going to do in my meditation? Let me review that. What am I going to do? Subs by www.zeoranger.co.uk When I get that all worked out then I get in my play box. In my play box there’s no thinking. I’ve got all the thinking done in my think box. In my play box it’s really about me changing my state. And so I allow for two hours every morning. Doesn’t mean I always take it or need it, let me say that. But I allow for two hours. Sometimes I like to just get my mind straight and then I do the work. I do the work and I like to get to that point where when I’m done I feel like something changed. Yeah. What does the work look like? It’s meditation. Yeah. It’s finding the present moment. It’s getting into the unknown. It’s getting beyond myself, disconnecting from my body, getting beyond any thought of anyone or anything, getting beyond time, moving beyond space and time. Turns out when you focus on nothing, there are so many amazing things that happen to your brain. I’ve seen the scans over and over again. What have you seen in the scans? Well, there’s this thing in the brain called modularity. And when we’re living by the hormones of stress, and stress is when you can’t predict something, when you can’t control something, or you have the perception that something’s going to get worse, you switch on that fight or flight nervous system, and the rush of those chemicals causes us to become alert, to become aroused. and we narrow our focus on the material world. And so when you’re not able to control everything in your life and you can’t predict everything in your life, you start shifting your attention to everyone and everything, every person, every object, every place. We’ve all had that experience when we’re under stress and every one of those people, those objects, those things, those places has a neurological network in the brain. So like a lightning storm in the clouds, the brain begins to fire out of order very incoherently. It becomes modulated or compartmentalized. It’s a house divided against itself, and those individual compartments don’t talk to the rest of the brain. And we tend to get over-focused. You never notice when you’re under stress, you’re obsessing about something, you’re over-focusing about something, you’re over-thinking something, you’re over-analyzing, you’re driving your brain higher and higher into higher states of arousal, high beta brainwave patterns. We discovered that if you teach a person to go from a narrow focus on something physical, something material, and broaden their focus, open their awareness and put their attention on space, on nothing, and create what’s called a divergent focus, the act of sensing and no longer analyzing thinking, begins to slow the brainwaves down from that beta brainwave state to a low-level beta and then all of a sudden to alpha. If they keep doing it, sensing space tends to cause those different compartments that were modulated or divided to begin to synchronize. And what syncs in the brain actually links in the brain. So the brain starts firing in a more holistic state. In other words, every single area of the brain is resonating at the same frequency. And now the brain is functioning as one neurological network instead of individuals. And that kind of holism, that kind of order feels really good. It feels really good. And so people practice slowing their brainwaves down, not only to get beyond the analytical mind, but to cause the brain to fire in a more coherent way. And if we’re going to have a clear intention about what we want, the more coherent the brain, the clearer the intention. So we’ve seen in seven days, even in four days, these dramatic changes in the levels of coherence and order that take place in the brain. The brain’s firing in a more holistic state. That’s when the person notices a change in their anxiety and their depression and their PTSD, whatever it is. There’s more order in the brain. And the act of focusing on nothing and opening your awareness to space creates that kind of amazing change.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Did you set an intention this morning? I did. Can you tell me what it is?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Oh, I want to be relaxed and awake. I want to be present with everything that I do. I want to stay in my heart the entire day. And I want to be inspired by, you know, the idea of helping people change.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you struggle? I do. Yeah.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

What do you struggle with? Wow. I run a lot of different aspects of my company. I have events side. We have a product side. We have corporate consulting. We have 250 corporate trainers. We have a vitamin company called Biocentropy. We work with remote coherence healers that actually are, we do research and they’re remotely changing people’s health. We have a huge research team with University of California San Diego. We have a lot of players on the team. We have non-profits. What else do we have? We have an inner health coalition for physicians and doctors and healthcare practitioners around the world that want to teach a different model. So I have a lot of different things that I have my hand in. And I think, you know, I’m creative by nature. And I like to be creative. And sometimes I have a lot of obligations in terms of making decisions for 2026, decisions about things that I need to do, documentaries, whatever it is. And I think I struggle with not having, wanting more time for being creative. And that’s kind of the fun part of my job, whether I look at the data, I see the research, and then I go, oh my God, I want to do a meditation. Now I understand how to do this meditation or teach this better. All the information that we’re gathering in our research is to teach transformation better. That’s why I want to close the gap between knowledge and experience. So we have billions of data points, and it’s a lot of time to look through all that and to learn about it. But if I would choose to do something, I would love to study the research more, love to create more meditations, teach some more unique courses. And so I think one of my challenges really is to be able to stay creative with everything I have going on in my life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 I think everyone that’s a high achiever always wishes they could pause time.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I think we’re at such a level of growth right now too, just globally. I mean, our events sell out in 10 minutes, you know, five, 10 minutes. And we have a waiting list of sometimes 10,000 people. That’s a problem. You know, that’s a, And I won’t give up doing live events. I won’t do it online. I think there’s something special that happens in community.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And so. I’ve never met someone who is so mission driven and doing so well in this department that also isn’t paying a personal cost for the mission in some regard or capacity.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, I think I’ve learned a few things over the years about that. I think one of the great things, number one, is I have an amazing team. I mean, I am nothing without my team. And they’re creatives, and they’re cool, and they’re emotionally intelligent, and they’re not nine-to-fivers. They share the same mission with me. They see the same vision. They do it for the same reason. Somehow they’re part of that change and transformation. And so my team is able to allow me to do something really, really unique, and that is to focus on what I love to do more than anything else. So my team is a super, super huge help for me. So I think that it’s an important element. The other thing that I work on, I think, every day of my life is to be the example of everything that I teach. I mean, that’s important for me because I want to be in the game with everybody. So when I see transformation, when I see miracles, when I see healings, when I see change, when I see poor people become rich, whatever that is, and I’m a part of that, I think it’s really, it humbles me. It really makes me more humble in seeing what’s possible for human beings. And so I never want this work to be about me. I want it to be about you. I want it to be, I want to celebrate your story.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You know, I,

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I want to be there for that person when they open their eyes and we’re blind and they’re seeing for the first time. I want to be right there. I want to be there. I want to remember that moment and her joy. So for me, I work on being the example in every way that I can. And sometimes it requires a lot of extra time to do that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is the, and this is an interesting use of phrase, because I’m saying the word cost as if it’s a negative, but I just, I think everyone that’s leading a mission, whatever that might be, and they’re really dedicated to that mission and the way that you are flying around the world, continuing to do it in person, where most people, you know, everyone knows you could just do it online and you’d probably make more money, to be honest. You know, there’s people that just have moved online post-pandemic. You’re giving a level of dedication and personal investment into this mission. that must, well I assume, it must come at a personal cost to some degree.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

You make sacrifices. You have to sacrifice relationships at times, you know, sometimes you can’t be where you want to be. But I think that the people in my life that love me understand my mission and they respect that. Sometimes I’m on six different time zones in four weeks and that’s a lot for my body, you know, but God watching somebody on the stage just the other day tell the story of how she overcame trifacial neuralgia in one moment in the event. She wanted someone to chop her head off. That’s how much pain she had in her face for years. One moment. She said, I have no pain. That was the first time I’ve not had pain in years. To me, like, that’s worth all the lost luggage, the missed flights, the jet lag, that to me is worth more than all the gold in the world. I mean, I don’t know, it’s just so uncommon and yet something innate in us wakes up. Something wakes up in us when we see that. We forgot. We forgot and somehow we remember. You ask my staff, what is the greatest part of their job? They’ll tell you being a part of transformation, being a part of it, being a part of that. So there is a cost always. And at the same time, I really work on figuring out ways to do things better. I mean, I think that’s one of the things I love about myself is just learning from my experience, learning from my past. And I think experience is the greatest professor. and just saying, okay, if I had another opportunity, how could we do it differently? How could we serve better? You know, how can we make it easier? What can we do differently? And again, I just have a great team that’s super committed to whether they’re running events, whether they’re creating logos, whether they’re doing a brand, whether they’re managing the website, whatever they’re, you know, running them, composing music with me for meditations or doing research. We just have really people that share that same mission. And I think changing individuals one by one to somehow make a change in the world, And being a part of that’s pretty cool.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Was there a catalyst moment in your life that sent you more so in this direction?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Sure. I mean, I got run over by a truck in a triathlon in 1986 in Palm Springs, California. And I broke six vertebrae in my spine and I had bone fragments on my spinal cord and I had the neural arch of T8 compressing on the cord. So the typical prognosis for that, you know, is, is, uh, Harrington rod surgery. They, they put these long stainless steel rods in your spine. So in my case, it would be from the base of my neck to the base of my spine, stabilize the entire spine. And, um, I just had four opinions from four of the leading surgeons in Southern California and I was in my 20s and I just couldn’t imagine myself living on addictive medications or not being able to do whatever I love to do physically. So I decided not to have the surgery. I just went against the opinions of the experts and I just thought maybe there’s a way that my mind could heal my body. And so that started my journey and somehow it worked. So I’ve been spending the rest of my life studying that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Had that not happened, do you think you would have gone in a different direction? Sure.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. What if the worst thing that happened to you is the best thing that happened to you?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And that starts this, you create this belief in your mind that you can heal yourself using your mind.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, it was kind of crazy because I think when you’re faced with crisis in a situation like this, we tend to focus on the worst thing that could happen instead of the best thing that could happen. And that’s because of the hormones of stress and emergency. You always prepare for the worst. Better chances of survival if you think about the worst. It took an enormous amount of energy for me to stop that, to stop thinking that way and stop feeling that way. Six and a half weeks of a dark night of the soul, I would say. Because I couldn’t get my brain to do what I wanted it to do. Even though I theoretically and understood it, I just kept defaulting. And I spent hours. And finally I was able to kind of get control over it. And then as soon as I started noticing some changes in my body, that’s when I just, The moment I started feeling my limbs again, and the moment I started noticing I was moving a little better, I knew somehow I was having an effect. And that’s the moment it all changed for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Running all these businesses, Joe, and you have such an empire of businesses and projects and people and teams all over the world. How have you managed your relationship with technology? Because technology is omnipresent in my life. And that’s why I say I get dragged out of bed by it.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Steven, I never planned on doing any of this. I never planned on doing any of this. I mean, all the corporate stuff just came out of a few lectures because there were CEOs and presidents of companies that urged me to create a model for change for companies and organizations. I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to do an inner health coalition with doctors, just our community. There’s an emergent consciousness that says, please do that. So we’re working on, in the same vein of the same mission, giving people, our community, listening to our community and creating more of that for people. I don’t have any difficulty if it’s part of the mission to do any of those things. I think it’s, I think if I were just doing my events, and that’s it, and we could just do that, my life would be a whole lot simpler. But all these other things that we’re doing now in terms of, they also bear a lot of fruit. I mean, the research that we’re doing right now is, I can say right now, Stephen, that what we’re doing is no longer pseudoscience. I can say that now, it’s no longer pseudoscience. I could say that in seven days, your body can make a pharmacy of chemicals that work better than any drug. I can tell you that one intervention called meditation can change a host of different health conditions. There’s no drug that does that. So if I weigh all those different things that I have to evolve in some way against the effects it’s producing, it’s always, for me, worth the effort.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Are you happy? Yeah.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

What does that mean? That I don’t need anyone or anything to make me happy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That’s your definition of happiness?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I think, yeah, I mean, if you have a kind of a freedom of expression without any real limitation and you’re comfortable with you and you love what you’re doing and you feel good about it. And sure, I mean, I’m always in the river of change. I’m always looking for blind spots. I’m always working on evolving who I am. I always want to evolve my experience. I always want to look to see if it serves me. Do you have sad days? I have days where I’m overwhelmed by just everything.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what are the symptoms of that overwhelm?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

It takes me a little bit to focus my attention again. Just too many things I have to think about. So I have to take a little time and get centered and organized. But do I have sad days? I don’t know. Sad. I don’t really know sad, but kind of days where I’m kind of introspective without needing much emotion. Yeah, I have those days, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

If this were to be your last day on earth, Joe. Wow. And there was just a central message that the millions of people that could be listening right now, you felt that they needed to hear, that would serve them the best and serve us collectively the best. What might that central message be?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

it’s important for people to believe in themselves. I think it’s really important for people to remember that they’re the creators on some level and they have a hand in creating in their life. And that possibility is something that they should always keep their mind open to. I think that we’re greater than we think. We’re more powerful than we know, more unlimited than we could ever dream.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you realize how many people you’ve helped um gosh i don’t know i don’t know maybe you must be moved by the feedback you get because i was reading through testimonials and messages and all the top comments and stuff and it’s really really profound stuff you know and it’s hard to imagine a world where that that doesn’t touch you know

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

sit with you, for better or for worse. You know, people stop me a lot of times and I’ll be somewhere and they’ll say, hey, I know you hear this a lot, but you really helped me or you really changed my life. And I always say to them, I never get tired of the story. It’s the feedback for me that inspires me to keep doing what I’m doing. So I love the stories. I love those. I love to hear them. And it challenges many times my own belief about what’s possible. So yeah, I think I love to celebrate that with people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This next chapter of your life is successful. We sit here 10 years from now and you say, Steve, that was a fantastic decade for you. What would have happened in that decade for you to say that?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Gosh, we would publish a lot of papers that show how powerful people really are. We would have our own research center where we could do even further studies on cancer, on all different chronic health conditions. We were studying the effects of healing on others, and we have really profound data on that as well. I think that the conversation in healthcare and medicine could change on some level. I mean, the conversations that I’m having with researchers and physicians are not the same conversations I was having just two years ago, especially when they look at our data, they kind of fall out of their chair. I mean, it’s, I mean, as an example, a drug study is about 25% causality. One in four respond and it’s usually you know, 60 days, 90 days a year before you see a change. Our data is between 75 and 85% causality. That means eight out of 10 people are getting a response and they’re not taking anything, no exogenous substance. In other words, their nervous system is producing a pharmacy of chemicals that works better than any drug, right? So I think the conversation around emotional regulation and emotional health could change. That’s something that I’m interested in. I think meditation could be something that is a way of life for more people to be healthier and to be happier and to be more whole. I mean, when I started this journey, you couldn’t even say meditation in public. You couldn’t say it in certain organizations, corporations, government agencies. It was not allowed, right? Now it’s sexy, now it’s cool, right? So, demystifying that process, because there’s so many colloquialisms and slangs and idioms that have to do with meditation, demystifying that process. You know, we don’t teach any traditional meditation. We don’t teach anything that’s based on culture or religion. We teach meditation based on the data we see, based on the brain scans, based on the HRVs, based on the data that we’re collecting. We know the words now, we know the music, we know the timing, we know a lot of things in terms of transformation that has helped us in so many ways.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What do you think is going to become sexy in 10 years from now that’s not sexy now? Like meditation?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

God, I hope it’s not AI. I hope it’s not. I hope it’s not. I hope it’s something that has to do with the human spirit.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m interrupting this broadcast with a very special announcement. Two years ago, I started writing a book based on everything I’ve learned from doing this podcast and meeting all of the incredible people that I’ve had the privilege of meeting. but also from my career in business, from running my marketing businesses, my software business, my investment fund, and everything else that I’ve been doing in business and life. And from this, I’ve created a brand new book called The Diary of a CEO, The 33 Laws for Business and Life. If you want to build something great or become great yourself, like the guests that I’ve sat here and interviewed, I ask you, please, please, please read these 33 laws. The book I always should have written. If you like this podcast, this book is for you. And it is available now in the description of this podcast below. And every single day until it’s out later this month, one person that pre-orders it, that takes a picture of their pre-order, uploads it to their story on Instagram or social media and tags me, will win a gold version of this book signed by me. And there’s only 33 copies of those available. So pre-order it now, tag me on social media when you do, and 33 of you are going to win a very, very special book. For those of you that don’t know, this podcast is sponsored by Whoop, a company that I’m a shareholder in, and I’m obsessed with my Whoop. It’s glued to my wrist 24-7, and for those of you that don’t know, it’s essentially a personalized, wearable health and fitness coach that helps me to have the best possible health. My Whoop has literally changed my life. Weep is doing something this month which I’d highly suggest checking out. It’s a global community challenge called the Core 4 Challenge. Essentially, they guide you through a set of four activities throughout the month of August that are scientifically proven to improve your overall health. I’m giving it a go and I can’t wait to see the impact it has on me and I highly recommend you to join me with that. So if you’re not on Weep yet, there is no better time to start. If you’re a friend of mine, there’s a high probability that I’ve already given you a Weep because I’m that obsessed with it. It is the thing that I check when I wake up in the morning. It’s the first thing that I look at. I want the information on my sleep to then plan my day around. So if you haven’t joined Whoop yet, head to join.whoop.com slash CEO to get your free Whoop device and your first month free. Try it for free. And if you don’t like it after 29 days, they’re going to give you your money back. But I have a suspicion that you’re going to keep it. Check it out now and let me know how you get on. Send me a DM. Much of your work is now trying to bring people together in 3D. And I saw this as I was on your website earlier on today. I was looking at some of your upcoming initiatives. One in particular was this walk that you’re doing, which I found really, really interesting. This is the first ever global walk that will take place on Saturday, September the 23rd, 2023 this year. All the details are at www.walkforthe.world. And I was reading about why you’re doing this, and the words community came up, the words illusion of separation came up.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, I think, you know, if you study the peace gathering projects that have been done, peer-reviewed articles of peace gathering projects, when people come into a community, they meditate on peace, a city. The crime rates go down, violence goes down, car crashes, car accidents go down, economic growth goes up. Somehow there’s a change in the collective. But when the meditation ends and the peace gathering project ends, the crime rate returns back to the same, the car accidents and the violence return back to the same ceiling value as it was before. It’s not enough to just pray. It’s time to be the prayer, right? So walking meditation, we do in our community and we do a lot of them because you’ve got to be able to walk as it. You’ve got to be able to do it with your eyes open. Doing it with your eyes closed is a practice so you can do it with your eyes open so you can demonstrate it. Demonstrate peace. Demonstrate love. Demonstrate change for the world. And so the walking meditations, there’s four types of meditations. There’s seated meditation, we do a lot of that, and that’s traditional. There’s a standing and a walking meditation. And there’s a lying down meditation. And we teach all of those. But the standing and walking meditation is a great way to stand up for the world. and decide, if I change and enough of us change, we could actually change the world. So meditation starts with our eyes closed, standing up with our eyes closed, and getting into an altered state. Music changes, we open our eyes, and we walk as that change. We embody that change. We live that change. We think about what we’re going to leave behind for a new world. What if I change? Am I part of the whole? Could I affect the whole? And so a person walks for a period of time, they stop again, they close their eyes, they recalibrate, they get back in that feeling, they open their eyes and they walk again. And so walking meditation is a great way for thousands and thousands of people from around the world to walk for change in the world. And we have such compelling data about collective networks of observers with brain and heart coherence that somehow when you have a random event generator in our ballrooms, and people change their state and they have an intention, that random events become less random and more intentional. In other words, a machine that’s programmed to toss a coin a thousand times a second, multiple times a second. The more you toss a coin, the more you’re gonna get 50-50, right? So if you have a machine in the room and nobody’s in the room, you see just kind of this line stay right around the 50-50 mark. But when you fill that room with people, and they change their state and they have an intention, all of a sudden you see that line break way out of normal. And a program machine that’s normally flipping zeros and ones starts behaving very differently. It tells us that collective networks begin to determine reality. And it’s not the number of people. It’s not the amount of energy. You have entropic energy. It’s the most coherent group of people. So if we come together on one day, and this will be one of many walks, You leave everything behind. Bring your family, bring your friends, bring your co-workers, bring your neighbors. You never have to have done a meditation before. We’ll guide people through it. We’ll give them the mp3 file. And we have just over 800 or 900 cities now from around the world that are from people from around the world that are participating. And the numbers are growing, so we don’t know where it’ll go, but it’s our first attempt to just say, if we just can move the needle one degree and off that trajectory, off that timeline, just in another timeline, then it’s served its purpose. So yeah, we’re excited about it. It’s the first one, and hopefully we’ll do some more.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ll put all the details below wherever you’re listening to this so you can check it out. I was wondering as you were speaking, Joe, I was asking myself, you’re someone that’s constantly doing research and developing new ideas and hypotheses about the world and the way humans are and the way the universe is. Do there exist beliefs in your head that you’re too scared to share?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

You mean beliefs that I have that are from experience? Or beliefs that I have that are conjecturous?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Either. Both.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, I have a very strong belief that the probability of us seeing the truth in reality is zero. I think that we perceive less than 1% of reality. The brain is missing out on a lot of data. And I think we should never exclude ourselves from the unknown. You know, I think there’s a whole part of the unknown self that we’re unaware of, that I think exists beyond linear time and space. And I do believe that it’s real.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And you don’t know what that is?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Oh, I do, yeah. I think it’s a realm beyond space and time that I think, you know, your eye right now is perceiving a very small spectrum of frequency, a visible light. It’s a very tiny slice in the electromagnetic spectrum. And that visible light, red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, violet, is actually bouncing off of the slowest and most stable form of energy called matter. And that gives us this perception of separation, right? Well, that small spectrum is less than 1% of what we actually can perceive. So I think that our senses plug us into reality, into three-dimensional reality. But I think there are realities that exist beyond space and time that we’re unaware of.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That we can tap into?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, yeah, I do. And I think there are latent systems in the brain that, once activated, allows the brain to transduce that energy, that frequency, into profound information.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Does psychedelics drugs work in that way?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I think psychedelics give a person a perception of reality that’s beyond three-dimensional reality. We’re discovering that the nervous system makes its own pharmacy of psychedelics. In fact, we have really recent data that shows that many people that have a mystical experience in our work that have fMRIs look like they’re on psilocybin. Yeah. And yet your nervous system’s making that natural chemical endogenously.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And how were those mystical experiences triggered?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I’ll give you the short version. There’s a tiny little gland in the back of your brain called the pineal gland. And the pineal gland has tiny little crystals inside of it that are stacked up on top of each other, rhombohedron in shape. And that little tiny gland acts like a radio receiver for electromagnetic frequencies. And when those crystals can become activated, like a radio receiver, they can pick up frequencies that are beyond your senses, the quantum. And they can transduce. It’s called a transducer. It can transduce that frequency like a TV antenna into profound imagery, a very full-on sensory experience without your senses.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Explains a lot. Explains a lot. My girlfriend always talks to me about the penile gland and DMT and, you know, and the power of everything you’ve just described. I just want to remain open minded. because being closed-minded at any point in my life is not conducive with progress and growth. So my desire in doing this podcast generally is just to learn from people that have new perspectives on the nature of the world and to remain humble in the fact that I know very little. So what you said at the end there about us knowing, almost knowing zero about the nature of true reality or whatever that might mean, I do believe. I do believe that I know very little about the true nature of reality and my senses have deceived me, whether it’s in psychedelic states or other states, so I’m very aware of the fragility of this experience or, you know, whether truth is what I think it is.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

 Yeah, well, I think it only takes one mystical moment, one transcendental moment for us to realize that we’re missing out on a little bit of reality.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they’re leaving a question for. If you were made president of this country and you had to implement laws that would make our lives better, What would you do and why?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Wow, where do we start? Oh boy. Well, I would consider education to be a much bigger priority for both people that teach, that they’re rewarded in a better way, and the educational system to be more Socratic and more stimulating for people to question and to have healthy debates. I think that’s great. I would consider looking at the medical model a little bit more and really look to see if healthcare is really helping people in this country. I would find ways to unify different sects or different organizations or bring them together, bring them to the middle in some way. I think standing up for principles instead of politics is a really healthy thing to do. I’d probably try to figure out a way to reduce the debt, to end war, to find ways that we could coexist with other countries. I’d certainly think a lot about artificial intelligence and decide if it was really, really healthy for human beings. I would encourage in many ways different religions to come together and find ways to get along. I would spend a lot of time with regenerative agriculture in bringing life back to the soil and back to the earth and figure out ways to help the oceans and species that are passing. and to address healthy food, food that is good for people, that is medicine for people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Joe, thank you for your work and thank you on behalf of all the people, the millions of people all around the world that you’re clearly helping without really even knowing it. I’ve never seen such profound testimonials in anything I’ve ever seen. And also the reason why I actually have this on the table isn’t because you asked to promote me. I think your team actually said I didn’t need to put it on the table, but it’s because one of our members of our team, their elderly relative has been going through a lot of pain and struggle in their lives. and they read your book and it really, really helped them this week. So they asked if I could get it signed on behalf of them, which I think is a testament to the impact you’re having on people. So thank you so much, Joe. It’s an honor.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

No, thank you, Stephen, for all the work you do also. I appreciate it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s funny, every year around this time of year, for whatever reason, I go on a little bit of a psychological shift. And that psychological shift, I think, is somewhat inspired by summer. But it’s also inspired by the fact that I want to feel strong in this season of life. And as I age, strength training is my number one form of training. And the question becomes, how do you build muscle? And how do you become strong in terms of supplementation? And this is where Huel’s nutritionally complete protein product is my best friend. for a couple of reasons. One, it tastes better than any protein product I’ve ever tried. Two, in terms of the nutritionally complete aspect, it has the vitamin and minerals you need. It’s about 100 calories, so it’s incredibly light, but it also packs over 20 grams of protein into every serving. Try the salted caramel flavor. It is the bomb. And let me know how you get on.

Daniel, your work is so incredibly impressive, reaches such an incredible depth, charters new territory, and it’s been an unbelievable, clearly very passion-driven career you had. So my first question for you is, why are you doing this?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

It’s a good question. I started off being obsessed by human evolution. Ever since I was a kid I was really interested in human evolution and I spent much of my early career working on skulls and heads and why they are the way they are. And then I kind of got involved in public health and issues of health and disease kind of through the back door. I sort of slowly shifted my research trajectory towards studying the evolution of running and then the evolution of physical activity and its relationship to health and disease. And I’ve become part of a movement that’s often known as evolutionary medicine, which is how to apply evolutionary theory and data to issues of health and disease.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Evolutionary medicine. I’ve never heard that term before, but I love it. Where has your work on evolutionary medicine, let’s call it, where has that taken you? Where has it taken you to learn, to research, to study?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

You know, so much of what we think about in terms of health and disease comes from a tiny fragment of the world’s population. Almost entirely, like 90% of all the medical information comes from people from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. So in order to study how bodies really work and how our bodies evolved to be, you have to leave places like Boston where I live and go to places like Africa or Mexico or wherever to look at other populations and look at how those populations are transitioning to lifestyles like mine. And so we’ve been working in Kenya for the last 15 years or so, and I’ve traveled to some other parts of the world as well, India, to kind of collect some data, but mostly in Africa.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

After doing all of this work and after taking in all of this information, how has it shifted your perspective on running, exercise more broadly? Have there been any sort of significant cognitive perception changes?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah. I actually had a, I mean, it doesn’t happen very often, but I had kind of an epiphany moment when I was working in Mexico. We were collecting data on the Tarahumara, also famous for their long distance running. And there was this elderly guy, he’s about 70-something years old, and he’s famous for his distance running, and I was asking him how he trained, and I had asked this question to a whole bunch of other people, and the translator I was working with was always struggling to ask that question, because it turns out there’s no word for training in that language. The concept of training doesn’t exist. So she was trying to explain to this guy what my question was, and even without a translator, I could figure out just from his tone of voice, he was like, why would anybody run if you didn’t have to? And I suddenly realized, yeah, of course, exercise is a very weird thing. If you’re a farmer and you’re working super hard every day in the fields without machines and whatever, or if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you’re walking five to 10 miles a day and digging and throwing, doing all kinds of hard work and you’re barely getting enough food, Why on earth would you go for a needless five mile run in the morning?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I mean, it’s crazy, right? The most viewed videos of yours, and the most viewed moments in those videos, address one question. Do you have any idea what it might be? No, actually. The biggest myths in exercise. Right. I think you actually pointed out one there with the insight you got in Mexico. The way we exercise, going to gyms, practicing, is natural or human, but evidently it’s it’s a consequence of the privilege of our lives and the comfort we have of not having to seek out our dinner every day. What are some of the other biggest myths within exercise that you’ve come across in writing this book?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Gosh, there are so many. I had to actually limit it to 10. So I think if you want to understand physical activity and exercise, you also have to understand inactivity. And I think one of the biggest myths out there is that you need eight hours of sleep a night, and that sitting is when you’re smoking, you know, that basically, And if you think about those two different myths, why is it that we’re constantly told to sleep more and to sit less? Actually, it seems a little contradictory to me, right? And it turns out that, let’s take sitting first. So there are all these slogans like sitting is the new smoking, and it’s really bad for you. And every time you sit in your chair, you lose two hours of your life, and whatever. It turns out that all animals sit. My dog sits, cows sit, chickens sit, every animal sits. And hunter-gatherers also sit. In fact, some of my students actually put sensors on hunter-gatherers, and we’re doing some research in farmers as well. But they sit just as much as Westerners. So sitting, there’s nothing special about today’s life. It’s that we sit all day long and don’t do anything when we’re not sitting. And furthermore, the big difference is not so much how much we sit, but how we sit. So it turns out that people who, If you get up every once in a while, interrupted sitting is actually much more healthy than non-interrupted sitting for the same amount of time. In the West, people sit for an average of about 40 minutes at about, whereas hunter-gatherers, for example, or farmers in Africa where we work, get up every about 10, 15 minutes. When you do that, it’s like turning on the engine of your car, driving around the block. you’re turning on all kinds of cellular mechanisms, you lower blood sugar levels, all kinds of genes get activated, and it turns out that that is by far the most important way to sit. So just get up every once in a while, just pee frequently, make a cup of tea, pet your dog, whatever. Thinking when I’m on planes and I’ve got a long flight. I always sit in the aisle, right, so I can get up a lot. Always.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What about sleep then?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

So sleep is another interesting one. So this idea that you need eight hours of sleep has been around for a long time. It’s been around basically since the Industrial Revolution. So colleagues in my field, so in evolutionary medicine, have put sensors on people who don’t have all the things that we’re told have destroyed sleep. So think about it. We’re told that TV and lights and And our phones and all these things are preventing us from sleeping. Edison destroyed sleep, right? So when you put sensors on people who don’t have any electricity, and they don’t have TVs, and they don’t have phones, and they don’t have any of these gadgetry, it turns out they sleep like six to seven hours a night. And they don’t nap. So this idea that natural human beings sleep eight hours a night is just nonsense. It’s just not true. And furthermore, when you start looking at the data, seven hours, if you actually look at, if you graph sort of how many hours a night you sleep on the x-axis and sort of some outcome like cardiovascular disease or just how likely you are to die, It’s kind of a U-shaped curve. So people who don’t get much sleep are in trouble. But the bottom of that curve is pretty much always about seven hours. So people actually do better if they sleep seven hours rather than eight hours. And yet we’re told that if you don’t sleep eight hours, there’s something wrong, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Oh, so you can oversleep.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, yeah. I mean, there’s also some complexity to this, too, because, of course, people who are ill might be sleeping more. And so there’s some biases that creep into how you analyze the data. But basically, it turns out that seven is, for most people, optimal. But there’s a lot of variation, right? Teenagers sleep more, older people sleep less. It’s complicated.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

One of the things that’s popular in culture as well is this idea of doing 10,000 steps a day.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah, now that’s fun. You know, that started because of a Japanese pedometer. But right before the Olympics were in Tokyo in the 60s, they had invented the pedometer. And they were sitting in a boardroom, and they were discussing what to call the pedometer. And just out of the blue, they picked 10,000 steps, because that’s apparently an auspicious number. and it sounded about right. There was no science behind it. Interestingly, it turns out it’s pretty good. If you look at steps per day and health outcomes, your average hunter-gatherer walks between 10,000 to 18,000 steps. Depends on male, female, et cetera. And if you look at steps per day and outcomes, But around 7,000 to 8,000 steps, the curve kind of bottoms out. There doesn’t seem to be a huge advantage to taking more than that per day in terms of large epidemiological studies. So it turns out to be not that bad a goal, but it’s not a perfect number like a lot of things. It’s a reasonable goal to shoot for.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you started writing this book about exercise and running and all these subject matters, was there any instant changes or any real lasting changes that you implemented into your own life from everything you’d learnt? I think about that all the time with this podcast. I’ll have a guest on, I’ll have these mini Eureka moments and then something will stick. So I’m wondering, having studied all of these people all around the world and looked at their bodies and exercise and physical exertion, what have you taken into your own life that has stuck?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

I would say that I’ve become more serious about doing some strength training. I’ve always loved walking and running and endurance kinds of activities, and I’ve always sort of hated doing weights. I just don’t like it, and I’m a wimp. I’m not a very strong person, and people tend to do what they like. You get reinforcement from it, and the more I study the importance of resistance training and the more I study the importance of doing weights, especially as you age, The more I started kicking myself for being lazy about that. So now I try to do a good two strength workouts out of every week, at least, and take it more seriously. Because especially as you age, loss of muscle mass can be really debilitating. The technical term for that is sarcopenia. Sarco is the Greek word for muscle, and penia is loss, or muscle loss. So as people get older, they tend to lose muscle, and when you do that, you become frail, and you lose functional capacity, and then that starts off a vicious cycle, right? Once that happens, then you’re less likely to be physically active, and then of course when you’re less physically active, your muscles begin to waste away more. and it’s very debilitating. And so I think as we get older, and I’m getting older, it’s more and more important to kind of incorporate that. So I think that’s the one thing that I’ve taken to heart.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

From what you said there, it sounds like not doing resistance training, not lifting weights as you age, almost accelerates aging in any sort of superficial sense. But also in a physiological sense, you’re increasing the speed of aging.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah, I’m not sure if I’d think about it that way, but I think I’d kind of reverse it slightly, which is that Aging is just the clock ticking off, right? There’s nothing we can do about age. But senescence is the way our bodies degrade as we get older. And what physical activity does, maybe the most important thing about physical activity, is that it slows senescence, especially for certain organs and systems. And there are different kinds of physical activities. So there’s endurance physical activities, like running, walking, et cetera, swimming. and then strength or resistance physical activities. And they have different kinds of ways in which they slow various properties of senescence, which we colloquially call aging. And all of them are important. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting about humans, in fact, I think it may be the most important thing about this book, and you asked about myths earlier, the most important myth, I think, by far, is this idea that as you get older, it’s normal to be less active. And that is just not true. We evolved to be grandparents. We evolved to live. One of the things that’s most interesting about humans, maybe, is that we evolved to live about 20 years or so after we stopped reproducing. No other animal does that except orcas, maybe killer whales. But with the exception of killer whales, humans have this really weird life history. We evolved to be grandparents. But grandparents in the old days weren’t, you know, retiring to Florida, or I don’t know what they do in England or whatever, go to Mallorca or whatever, and kick up their heels and play golf or whatever with carts. Grandparents in the olden days, or in many cultures still today, are working. They’re working in the fields, they’re hunting, they’re gathering, they’re getting food for their children and their grandchildren, they’re helping with childcare. And that physical activity, that’s what their job is, to be physically active, but in turn, That physical activity turns on an amazing suite of physiological processes that counter aging. Turns on repair and maintenance processes that not only keep our muscles strong, but also keep our DNA from accruing mutations, keep our mitochondria numbers high, keep the cells in our brain from accumulating gunk so that prevents Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. I mean, for every system of the body, physical activity has benefits that slow the aging process. And so when you stop doing it, you accelerate, and that’s the way in which you perceive it as accelerating aging. But really, it’s the absence of physical activity which lets aging run amok.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

In your first book in 2013, the story of the human body, in chapter 12 you said, you used this phrase, use it or lose it basically. We evolved to use or lose our bodies. And I was sat with someone recently and I was trying to figure out why it appears that when people retire or, the other instance I’ve seen is, when their elderly partner passes away, it appears as if they don’t live much longer. It’s kind of like folklore or something that once you retire, your days are kind of numbered. And I was trying to figure out the evolutionary reason for that, but it sounds like that’s kind of what you’ve explained there.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, I mean, I think part of that is depression, right? When you lose a partner, I mean, grief and depression, your cortisol levels go up, your immune system goes down. I mean, it’s really tough on your body. I mean, psychosocial stress plays a serious physiological toll. But also, as you just pointed out, when people retire, they become less active. And that loss of activity has enormous effects on every aspect of our body and our minds. Physical activity is important not just for physical health, but also vital for mental health. And I think a lot of the problems that, a lot of mental health issues we have today, depression, anxiety, Some of them, to some extent, we can attribute that to less physical activity. And as people age, becoming less physically active, again, makes them much more vulnerable to a wide suite of diseases.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So would you say we shouldn’t retire?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Or, if you do retire, I mean, retiring is, again, another modern weird thing, right? Nobody retired in the past. I mean, if you’re a farmer, it’s like a subsistence farmer, name it, any place, right? It’s not like suddenly you hit 65 and all of a sudden you no longer have to work in the fields. You work in the fields until you’re dead, right? And hunter-gatherers don’t retire. They continue to be physically active until they die, right? Or until they get too sick. So it’s a very modern Western concept. And yes, we do pay a price for it. But you, of course, can replace you know, work that you do with challenging, rewarding, fun things to do. The important thing is just not to stop being physically active. One of my favorite studies ever published, without a doubt, is a study done by a guy named Ralph Paffenbarger. He realized that places like Harvard are fantastic for studying aging, because Harvard, like other private universities, never lets go of their alumni. So, until the day you die, they’re asking you for money on a regular basis. And so he got the Alumni Association, the Harvard Development Office, to let him follow a series of Harvard alumni from several years, and keep asking them questions about their physical activity levels, and also their diet, and whether they smoked, and stuff like that, and then detract them for 25, 30 years. And what he found was that the alumni, we have to correct it for every factor you could think of, that as the alumni got older, the effect of physical activity on their health outcomes was bigger and bigger. So alumni who were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, for example, who were exercising four or five times a week, they had about 20% lower death rates. By the time they got to their 60s and 70s, the alumni who were exercising more had 50% lower death rates. So as you get older, and this has been replicated again many times, but what he showed was that as you get older, exercise becomes more, not less important for maintaining your health.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I was saying to Jack, my dad is 60-ish, but he’s very, very out of shape. Very, very out of shape. And I was in Indonesia and I was with my girlfriend and we were going white water rafting. So we had to go down this really big hill with all these stairs. It was like 300 meters of stairs. And I remember just thinking, my dad wouldn’t be able to do this. were at his age at 60 and I want to be able to go down those stairs when I’m his age because at the bottom there was a fun activity with someone I loved and to think that I’ll get to a point in my life where not so far away in the grand scheme of things where I won’t be able to go up or down some stairs because I’m 60 because of my sort of genetic predisposition as I saw it was quite sad but having heard you say that it’s really feels much more like a choice than it is genetics

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah, look, we have this expression in my field, which is that genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger, right? Some of us have genetic predispositions towards being more likely to get diabetes or heart disease or this or that or the other, but our great, great, great grandparents in different environments weren’t getting these diseases, or they were getting them at much, much, much lower frequencies. And it’s not because they were dying earlier. It’s because these diseases were less common. So I think we too often blame our genes for many of these diseases, many of these health problems. And I’m not in any way denying the role of genetics, but that environment is way more important. And we have control over our environment to some extent. And so, if you want to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, reduce your risk of diabetes, reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s, dementia, exercise isn’t a magic bullet. It’s not going to prevent you from getting those diseases completely, but it lowers your risk quite substantially.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And we know why, too.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

I mean, we have an immense amount of data on why that’s the case. For every single one of these diseases, we understand the mechanisms by which physical activity has important mechanistic effects on these diseases. So there’s epidemiological data, there’s mechanistic data, there’s personal data. The problem is that it’s hard to do, right? It takes willpower to overcome the inertia of doing what’s completely normal, which is wanting to take it easy. I just flew yesterday from Denver to Boston. And in the airport, there are these escalators right next to the stairway. And the escalator and the stairs, it wasn’t a huge stairway. Everybody’s lining up to take the escalator, and the stairs are totally free. So, being me, of course, I’m not allowed to take the escalator unless I have to. So, I ran up the stairs, but those people taking the escalators, there’s nothing wrong with them. They’re not lazy. It’s just an instinct. It’s an instinct to take it easy when you can. And we now live in a world where everybody can do that, because we have escalators and lifts and cars and shopping carts and all these wonderful devices. to make our lives easier and now you have to overcome this fundamental basic instinct to take it easy in order to be physically active. And that’s basically what exercise is. And furthermore, if you’re unfit and you’re not really, exercising isn’t any fun, right? It’s unpleasant. You sweat and you get hot and you get cranky and it’s not that rewarding until you get fit. And so people hate it, right? And then we blame them for being lazy. But they’re actually just being normal. And I think we need to have more compassion towards people who struggle to exercise.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn’t have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it’s a dream where we feel like we’re only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people who watch this channel regularly and have hit that subscribe button. means more than I can say. And if you hit that subscribe button, here’s a promise I’m going to make to you. I’m going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can, now and into the future. We’re going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we’re going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. This basic instinct to take it easy. Are we evolved to be lazy, take escalator riders?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

 Well, I wouldn’t use the word lazy, but we are evolved to take it easy, to rest whenever possible.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So we’ve now got ourselves into a bit of a comfort crisis here because everything in our lives is optimizing us for convenience and ease.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Right, right. And well, it’s also, it sells, right? I mean, comfort, I mean, who prefers to sit in economy as opposed to business class? Nobody, right? Comfort is nice, right? Who prefers shoes that are uncomfortable, right? We, you know, comfort’s, You know, we love comfort, right? But since when is comfort necessarily better for you, right? I mean, are comfortable shoes actually better for you than going barefoot? Are comfortable chairs better for you than, or taking the lift better for you than taking the stairs?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It is in the short term, or at least it appears to be today.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Right, yes, because we often value the short-term benefit over the long-term cost, right? Hyperbolic discounting is the technical term for that. So we live in a world where we pay extra for comfort, and we’ll prefer it. But now we also live in a world where we have to now go out of our way to be physically active because it’s no longer necessary. And so again, I go back to my original statement, which is that people have evolved to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only. When it’s necessary, rewarding. When we don’t make it necessary, we need to figure out ways to make it rewarding. And that’s hard. It’s very hard.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Making it rewarding. So one way that you might make something rewarding is by looking at the stick, and then the other side is maybe the carrot, but just looking at the stick then, you were going through a series of diseases a second ago, Alzheimer’s, high blood pressure, all of these kinds of things, cardiovascular diseases. I almost think we’ve come to assume that these are inevitabilities of life. Yeah. We’ll get cancer. Yeah. One of us will get. Yeah. Someone in here is going to get Alzheimer’s. And that’s the way we live. So we’re preparing to medicate when that day comes. That’s right. I get, God forbid, diagnosed with something.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

That’s absolutely right. In fact, that’s what medical students today are taught, right? If you go to medical school today, you’re taught that as people get older, their blood pressure goes up. I can tell you that’s just not true. It’s in the Western world where people are physically inactive and eat crap diets that their blood pressure tends to go up. But there are plenty of people I’m actually one of them, right? Who don’t have high blood pressure as they age. And guess what’s the best way to prevent getting high blood pressure as you age? It’s not like a broken record, but we have this idea that as you get older, yes, you’re going to, and we’re lucky, right? Because we don’t die from smallpox when we’re 30. We’re lucky to get cancer when we’re 60, right? What we’ve done is we’ve confused diseases that are more common with aging, with age being a cause of those diseases in the first place. And they’re not inevitable diseases. And many of them are preventable. And the problem is that in our society, we don’t value prevention very much. We may talk about it, but we don’t really put our money where our mouth is. In the US, which is arguably one of the worst healthcare systems, is the worst healthcare system among the industrialized Western world, We spend approximately 3% of our budget, our medical budget, on prevention. And yet when people walk into a doctor’s office, 75% of the time the disease is, according to the Center for Disease Control, a preventable disease. So we essentially spend nothing to prevent diseases that overwhelm our system and cause enormous amounts of misery. It’s a completely backward, stupid system. And the good news is it’s not that hard to prevent a lot of these things. It takes willpower, and it takes education, and it takes access to good quality food, and whatever. So on the one hand, it’s very depressing. On the other hand, the optimist in me says, you know, we really can do something. And people, even if they’re not wealthy or whatever, I mean, there are simple things that everybody can do to improve their health outcomes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

These diseases we encounter today as we age and just generally in our society, when you look at hunter-gatherer communities or you look at certain tribes around the world, maybe in Africa, do you see the same the same types of diseases in the same occurrence, level of occurrence? Or is there some diseases which just don’t, like, I’m wondering if like, if, because you know, cancer seems to be so popular, for example, as a disease and Alzheimer’s and these kinds of things. So I wonder, has that always been the case throughout human history? And is that the case in other parts of the world?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

And it’s such a good question. So first of all, some of these diseases are really hard to measure in non-Western populations, because we don’t have the diagnostic tools. So nobody really knows how common cancer is in a lot of parts of the world. The data don’t exist. That said, when you make estimates and you do look at the studies that are out there, and even if you look in historical records in places like Europe, where people have been keeping track of this, there’s no question that cancer rates have been rising, and that cancer rates are much, much more common in the Western world. There’s a strong association between cancer and wealth. And that’s because cancer is basically a disease of energy. Because cancer is basically natural selection gone awry in the body. It’s when cells start competing with each other in ways that cause and start multiplying and dividing out of control. It’s a kind of natural selection. And what is it that those cells are doing? They’re competing for energy. And when you have more energy, like when you’re eating more and being less physically active, you basically feed those cells. So high levels of insulin. Insulin is highly related to cancer. High insulin levels are carcinogenic. high levels of energy, you cause women, for example, to increase the amount of estrogen and progesterone that they produce. Men produce more testosterone. These are hormones that, of course, are good for reproduction. Again, we evolved to have as many babies as possible, right? But that doesn’t mean that translates into health, right? So more estrogen, more progesterone increases risks of, say, breast cancer. More testosterone increases the risk of prostate cancer. So if you look at most diseases, right, people are more physically active. They have lower levels of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. They have lower levels of insulin. They have lower levels of blood sugar. All of these depress cancer rates. And on average, people who are physically active have much lower rates of almost every single kind of cancer that you can think of. Women who get 150 minutes of physical activity a week have, on average, about 30% to 50% lower lifetime breast cancer risks than people who are sedentary. And yet, for some reason, this is not a well-known fact. And we have epidemiological data, we have mechanistic data, we understand how and why it works, and yet how often do you hear about cancer prevention? We talk about treating cancer, which is all important. If I get cancer, I would like it treated too, thank you very much. But why don’t we spend more energy and activity and have more education about how to prevent cancers in the first place?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Physical activity, I’ve never had that before, so that’s really helped me. to add more value to exercise in my mind you’re talking there about insulin levels and how that has there’s a link between your insulin levels and your chances of getting cancer sugar glucose inflammation bad

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

I mean, look, if you really care about your health, don’t smoke. That’s kind of obvious. I think everybody knows that. Get some exercise. I don’t think you need me to tell you that. And cut down on foods that are high in sugar and low in fiber. What we call high-glycemic foods. Those are the foods that elevate your blood glucose levels, your insulin levels shoot up. And insulin, the basic function of insulin is what we call an anabolic hormone. Its job is to store energy. Glucose. Glucose, but also fat. Okay. So what insulin does is to get energy into cells.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So it’s like a taxi. It’s like an Uber.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

It’s like a taxi. It’s telling other cells to do that. Insulin, for example, binds to other cells that are the actual taxi. It’s like calling the Uber, I would say, maybe. When you eat food, insulin levels go up because its job is to store that energy. When you exercise, insulin levels go down because you want to then reuse that energy. So, when cells get more energy, they’re more prone to going out of control, basically. And inflammation is caused by basically by getting, you store so much fat in your cells that those fat cells start to swell. And when those start to swell, like anything, they start to rupture, they get damaged, and that damage attracts the immune system, and the immune system gets turned on, and that causes inflammation. So too much adiposity, too much fat, over-swollen fat cells, is a primary cause of systemic inflammation. And inflammation is like the slow burn in our bodies that causes, widespread damage to pretty much everything you can think of. And it turns out that the two ways to deal with inflammation are, one, to prevent it. So, don’t eat foods that are pro-inflammatory. Anything with a lot of sugar, basically. Sugar is highly inflammatory, or trans fats are highly inflammatory. But also, it turns out, many people don’t know this, but you also want to turn down your immune system, right? You want to turn the dial down. And I don’t know, just give you one guess what it is that does that. Exercise. Exercise. And the way it does that is that when you’re physically active, you’re using your muscle cells. It turns out muscles are also an endocrine organ. Your muscles are producing a molecule called interleukin-6, IL-6, That, in low levels, is pro-inflammatory, but at high levels, it’s actually anti-inflammatory. It turns down inflammation. And your muscles, because a third of your body is muscle, right? When you go for a run, or swim, or bike ride, or whatever, you’re producing a ton of this stuff, and it turns down levels of inflammation. So people are physically active. even if they’re overweight, are actually controlling and regulating their inflammation. And we never evolved to regulate inflammation because, in this way, because we never evolved to be physically inactive. Until recently, nobody was physically inactive, unless they were dying, right? So we never evolved an alternative mechanism to regulate inflammation other than physical activity.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 and we didn’t live in a world with this much sugar.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

We never lived in a world. I mean, it’s astonishing. You pay more money for foods today that have less sugar added, right? I mean, that’s just ridiculous, right? Because it’s so cheap. And sugar is, you know, we love, everybody loves sugar. I mean, I’ve gone hunting with hunter-gatherers, you know, foraging with hunter-gatherers. And I can tell you that they’re honey addicts, right? I mean, I’ve gone out with these guys and they go from, you know, if they fail on their hunt, like by 10 or 11, if you haven’t killed an animal, you know, that’s it for the day, right? And then it turns from being a hunting expedition to a honey collecting expedition. And they’ll go from hive to hive to hive, get smoke, burn out the bees, and just gorge themselves on more honey than I could possibly imagine to eat. Except these are lean, physically active hunter-gatherers and they handle it just fine. But it’s the Paleolithic equivalent of eating Mars bars all day long.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But they’ve been out doing physical activity for how long?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah I mean the average day is about 15 kilometers of walking with some running. So they can cope with it. How many hours is that?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Oh that’s two to three hours probably. Okay so from that I have garnered that I need to do 15 kilometers a day for two or three hours every day.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, remember, it’s not a prescription, right? So, that’s kind of like the paleo fantasy, sort of naturalistic fantasy that if you live like a hunter-gatherer, somehow your world will be perfect, right? That’s basically what the paleo diet is sort of all about, right? And that’s not true either. Yes, you need to be physically active, but it turns out that any physical activity is better than none. And if you look at any curve of any output, any health outcome, like how many years you live or whether you’re likely to get cancer or heart disease or whatever, any little physical activity, your curve starts to fall quickly. Your likelihood of cardiovascular disease, just a few minutes a day of exercise has big benefits. But eventually that curve flattens out, and it flattens out well before the hunter-gatherer level. So you don’t need to be a hunter-gatherer in terms of physical activity to get the benefits.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve asked a few people this question. I don’t think anyone’s really answered it, but I suspect you might be able to. If you were responsible for redesigning the nature of our modern world to make it more matched and less mismatched, What are some of the first things you would do to help society benefit in terms of our happiness and our health? I think about this all the time, because we don’t seem to be turning around. We seem to be hurtling in a direction, kind of unconsciously, towards artificial intelligence and moving less and being more sedentary and taking pills more to fix everything. Lonelier than ever before. If we were to redesign it, blank canvas, piece of paper,

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

That’s a tough question because we’ve essentially given ourselves what we want. I can go into a supermarket and I can do something that’s unimaginable until recently. I can have basically anything. I can eat better than the king of France a few generations ago. I can New York. There’s every cuisine possibly available to me. I don’t ever have to climb the stairs, I can take elevators. We’ve made our world so convenient and comfortable, and yet there are consequences to many of the things that we crave and want. In an ideal world, you have to honour and respect people’s desires. I don’t believe in preventing people from taking the elevator or forcing them to eat whole grain bread as opposed to white bread.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But if you banned white bread and you banned elevators other than for those people that need it for accessibility reasons, etc.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

They would do better.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 over the long term, they’d be healthier and happier.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

They would, right. So it’s really a balancing act between respecting people’s liberties and choices and educating them and helping them. So in my world, I would do more to nudge people. Instead of banning sugar, I would tax it more. Instead of pushing all kinds of foods on people, I would push, why don’t we advertise healthy foods the way we advertise unhealthy foods, right? I mean, when’s the last time you saw an ad for just how amazingly healthy asparagus was, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 But that doesn’t get the part of my brain going, does it?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

No, it doesn’t. But we could do more to nudge and encourage and help people, right? You don’t have to like ban sugar and cookies, right? But simply promote and help people help themselves, right? Most people want to eat healthier food. Most people want to exercise. But they live in a world where it’s hard to do it, and they live in a world where there are very few incentives. I would make it such that healthy food would be as inexpensive as unhealthy food, and make sure that people had incentives, and make it also fun to be physically active. Like, for example, I mean, who doesn’t like to dance? Every culture in the world has dancing. Dancing is a form of physical activity. It’s social, it’s fun, it’s engaging. Why doesn’t every town in America sponsor dancing? It would probably do an enormous amount for people’s physical health and their mental health. I mean we could do that, I mean that’s just one example, right? So I would, and why is it that in medical schools doctors don’t learn about, they don’t study nutrition and they don’t study exercise and they don’t learn, because our medical system is designed to treat people after they get sick rather than prevent people from getting sick. So, we need to reverse how we fund healthcare. Schools of public health are these little marginalized places where great ideas go to die, and medical schools where all the money is, and doctors aren’t taught to I mean, there are entire fields of medicine that don’t have the word preventive associated with it. I mean, have you ever heard of preventive orthodontics or preventive optometry or preventive orthopedics? I mean, it just doesn’t exist, right? So, we could do a lot more and have enormous benefits.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Chapter 11 of this book, you talk about someone who has taken their own approach to getting people moving and exercising in their own business. That’s the Bjorn Borg company. I love that. Bjorn Borg company. Can you tell me about that?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah, so I was curious about this idea of how to get How to help people be more physically active, right? And again, my fundamental hypothesis is that we evolve to be physically active either when it’s necessary or rewarding. And so I was curious if there’s any companies in the world that have made physical activity necessary. In other words, what if we force people to be physically active? And I found one. So far, I think there’s only one company in the world that I know of. Maybe there’s some others, but this is the only one I’ve ever found so far. And it’s the Bjorn Borg Sports Company in Sweden, where the CEO of the company is this crazy exercise addict. And he requires every member of the company to exercise. They have sports hour every Friday at 11 o’clock. So, actually, when I was searching around and I was working on the book, I found an article about them, and I clicked on the company website. And you know how most companies have a little contact us? So, I clicked on the contact us, and I wrote a little note saying, Dear Bjorn Borg Company, I’m a researcher, an evolutionary biologist. I’m interested in exercise, and I’m fascinated by how your company requires people to exercise. Could I learn more? And the next morning, there was an email from the CEO of the company saying, why don’t you come and visit us? So, I hopped on a plane a few months later, went to Sweden, and they let me, he was so nice, he just let me go anywhere in the company. And I went to Sports Hour, and I talked to employees throughout the company. And it was fascinating. I mean, a lot of the employees of the company, first of all, a bunch of people apparently left the company when he took over as CEO and acquired this. But it doesn’t matter who you are. You could be working in the mail room, you could be the CEO, you could be a visiting board member. Whoever you are, if you’re there on Friday, you have to go exercise with them. And they have this pretty serious kind of exercise thing. And apparently some people quit. But pretty much everybody else said, you know, it’s actually a pretty damn good thing. Do you agree with that approach? Well, yes and no. Every university in the world used to require, and every school supposedly requires exercise, right? I’m sure you had some kind of phys ed required in your school. Those standards are slipping around the world, and more and more kids are doing less and less in school. Universities are no exception. It used to be that all universities required some degree of physical education. Mine was no exception. In fact, Harvard was a leader in that back in the 100-something years ago. And over the, since basically the 1970s, that’s basically disappeared. Although most students, if you ask them, they think, yeah, that’s actually a pretty good idea. So, I don’t know, maybe we can bring back exercise as a, and the thing is that if you get used to it, right, when you’re young, you’re more likely to do it when you’re older, right? Because you set, that’s the age in which your habits become, well, your habits become your habits, right? And so there’s a certain age where if you can keep making it a habit, you’re probably more likely to continue doing it for the rest of your life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

we kind of see it as overreach, don’t we? I was thinking about if I was to announce one of my companies that everyone is now required to exercise, it would seem like tremendous overreach. If I announced that everyone is required to read a certain book, they’d do it and it’d be fine. And it might be seen as a positive thing, right? It might be a representation of our values, that we are learners and we’re innovators and we keep nourishing our brains. But if you turned around to your team and said, listen, we’re all required to go for a run every day or something, people would, it just feels personal. Like that’s not the responsibility of an organization to tell me to go exercise.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

But we have company retreats. I mean, we do all kinds of stuff where people are required to do it. So I don’t know, I challenge you, try it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What we do and what we’ve always done, we even do it with this team, the Driver CEO team is about 30 people. So we have a fitness channel in the company, Slack channel, the communication channel that we use. And in that channel, and we did this at my previous company as well, where we would enable and facilitate. So someone started a women’s football team, so we enabled it and promoted it. Someone started a men’s football team, so we enabled it and promoted it. And this also applies to non-physical, sort of exercise-related clubs, like someone starts the reading club, and we enabled it and promoted it. And we also paid for it. If they need new kits, for example, when the women’s football team wanted to have their own uniforms, we paid for it. Because we saw a huge value in terms of staff retention, connection, community, and all those things that actually lead up to staff retention, if we could have more social clubs outside of the office. You know, if you’re thinking about leaving a job, there’s a number of things you weigh up. The pay, the job, whatever. But you also weigh up how the community, like the group of people I love and how much they bring to my life. And I actually think in the remote working world, it’s something that CEOs and leaders have really not paid enough attention to. if they really want to retain their team members, they should have them together as much as they can, even outside of the office, bonding. In a world where screens are on the rise and pubs are on the decline and social activities and churches are on the decline, there’s less sort of institutions that connect us socially, work has a big opportunity to do that. So one of my big things always in my head is like, how can I get the team members of my companies to hang out more? And a multiplier to that is, how can I get them to hang out more and move their bodies more? Because then they’ll feel better. Right, well, think about it. It’s play, right? Play, yeah, exactly.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

And play is another thing we evolved to do, right? Kids play. And we’re one of the few species that plays as adults, right? And what is play? Play is a way in which you learn cooperation. You build community, but you also move your body, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

In the first chapter of your book, you say that you went to visit the Native American tribe, and I’m going to try and pronounce this, the Tarahumara. Tarahumara. And they’re famous for their long running. Yes. What did you learn about running from them?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, they have been famous for well over 100 years. Many people have gone to study the Tarahumara and have commented on their amazing ability to run. But what I really learned from them is that, for them, physical activity is spiritual. You know, there’s this book, Born to Run, that describes their running and calls them a hidden tribe of superathletes. They’re not hidden, and they’re not superathletes. And the one thing that the book missed was that the main impetus for the running, they do these famous long-distance races, is that it’s a form of prayer. It’s really very beautiful. And it’s a metaphor for life. And it’s also an opportunity to bet in sports and all that. It’s all wrapped into one. And what I’ve learned is that this actually used to be almost universal among Native American populations, Native American tribes. Everybody had long distance races and ball games, and they all had a spiritual element. It’s just that they’ve retained their traditions because they’re in a very remote part of Mexico that’s essentially inaccessible. We all used to do this, all humans used to do this. In fact, if you look around the world, every population has a tradition of endurance events.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Some of the subject matter you talk about in your book, but also outside of your book, is how we used to run in terms of, you know, I was at the foot doctor. What’s it called? I don’t know what they’re called. Podiatrist. That’s what I said. Podiatrist. What did I say? But I went to the podiatrist the other day because I got this, what’s it called when you’re I’m going to point it at my foot. This part of my foot here started to get lots of pain. Plantar officiitis. That’s it. Plantar officiitis. I started to get some plantar officiitis. And it was just this ongoing pain. And they prescribed me some insoles. I stood on a couple of machines, some soft stuff, and they measured my foot and took this scan of it and said, right, basically you’re standing wrong. Your arch is a bit too flat take these insoles and wear them in all of your shoes I just I always think in these moments when someone prescribes me something that’s not natural I go Why like Where did I go wrong? And I think that’s the key question. Where did I go wrong? Who lied to me? To the point now that at 30 years old, I have these bloody insoles that I have to put in all my shoes. Because presumably, that’s not natural. Presumably, my ancestors don’t have bloody insoles.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Plantar fasciitis is what I would call a mismatch disease, right? A disease that’s more common or more severe because our bodies are inadequately adapted to modern environments. And in your case, and as is the case with a lot of people, you have a weak foot. So we, you know, you look like you go to the gym, look like you’re a pretty fit person, right? I’ll make a bet you strengthen pretty much every muscle group in your body except your feet. No comment.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, but we don’t, right?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

One of the reasons is because we encase our feet in stiff-soled shoes that are very comfortable. And the reason the shoes are comfortable is that your foot muscles have to do less work when you’re using those shoes, right? We have shoes that are stiff soles, they have arch supports, and your foot has four layers of muscles in them. And those muscles are supporting your arch. And at the bottom of those four layers of muscles is this layer of connective tissue, the plantar fascia. And the problem with the plantar fascia is that if it stretches too much, like anything else, it gets inflamed. But it’s got almost no vascularization, so it’s very hard for it to repair itself when it gets inflamed. To prevent plantar fasciitis, the best way of preventing it is having a strong foot. A strong foot is a healthy foot. So the way to treat the disease in the long term is to strengthen your foot. But if you want to just alleviate the symptoms, That’s what your podiatrist did. By giving you an insole, it’s basically preventing your arch from collapsing as much, making it more comfortable so your plantar fascia gets stress less, and so it can kind of alleviate that stretching and hence the pain. So that’s a typical example of what I call disevolution. It’s what happens when you treat the symptoms of a mismatched disease rather than their causes or preventing their causes. So podiatrists are a bit like drug pushers in that sense, right? Because they’re essentially putting your foot in a cast, right? And for the rest of your life, you kind of have to keep using them, unless you strengthen your feet. So there’s nothing wrong with those, you know, treating the symptoms. I mean, pain is no fun. So wear the insoles, right, to kind of, you know, alleviate the pain. But also work on strengthening your foot, and I think you’ll find that the plantar fasciitis will disappear and never come back.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So the plantar fasciitis has now healed after about a month of wearing the insole. I no longer have the insoles with me here in New York and I don’t have them in any of my shoes because I’ve also taken a bit of time off running on my feet. I was playing a lot of football. So now I’m at a point where I can go to the preventable stage, prevent it happening again, and you said to strengthen my foot. How does one strengthen their foot?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Good question. So there are some exercises. They’re kind of foot doming exercises and things like that. I can send you some links to videos showing you some good foot strengthening exercises. So that’s one way to do it. But the other way is to wear more minimal shoes, to wear shoes that aren’t stiff-soled, that don’t have arch supports. Go barefoot a lot, right? And that will naturally strengthen the muscles in your foot because you’ll have to use those muscles. So you ever gone for like a long walk or run on a beach, right? And afterwards your feet are kind of tired, right? The reason your feet are tired is because you’re now walking on a compliant surface, right? It’s not stiff. So your muscles are having to work more to stiffen your foot to push you forward, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Jack, could you go grab the black shoe out of my bag? I just want to show him something.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

So wearing shoes that aren’t as stiff-soled, where they don’t have arch supports, will slowly strengthen your feet. But, and this is a huge but, if you do too much too fast, your plantar fasciitis will come roaring back and you’ll hate me. You’ll never forgive me because, yeah, those are Vivo barefoots. Yeah, I wear the same shoes. Oh, you’ve got the same shoes on. Great shoes. Yeah, those are wonderful shoes. Those are exactly the kind of shoes that will help strengthen your feet.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

These are fairly a new addition in my life. Yeah. And they feel really strange because you can kind of feel the floor. Yeah. It’s exactly what you’ve described.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

But, you can transition. If you have weak feet, which I’m guessing you do, if you suddenly, that’s the only shoe you wear all the time, you’ll probably regret it. So, slowly, slowly, slowly increase the percentage of time, just like anything else. If you suddenly decide to lift huge weights that you can’t lift before, you’ll hurt yourself. The same thing is with your feet. So slowly it does it, but if you do it gradually and slowly and carefully, you can build up strength in your foot and you’ll be a happier person.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And this goes back to everything else you’ve said about how choosing comfort, choosing to have a nice supportive shoe has actually just kind of deferred a problem off into the future for me. It’s the same with diet, it’s the same with avoiding exercise and being sedentary and all these other things, where when you choose the easy road in the short term, which is this wonderful cushioned shoe I’ve chosen, the muscle hasn’t built up in my foot and I’ve paid the price. So I need to, again, choose discomfort more in the short term, go up the stairs, run barefoot to avoid the consequences later down the line?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t think you have to run barefoot, though it can be fun. But yeah, I mean, and I can think of plenty of other examples. We love comfort, but comfort’s not necessarily good for us.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you look at these tribes, do you know who Liver King is? Huge, massive muscles, talks about ancestral living. What do our hunter-gatherer ancestors look like in terms of their… Not like him. No? Okay.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

I mean, look, think about it. Muscle is really expensive. It’s actually a super expensive tissue. About a third of our body is muscle, and it’s using up about a fifth or more of the calories that we’re expending just sitting there, not even using them. They’re very costly tissues. And so, if you have more muscle than you need, you’re basically adding to your cost of And if you’re a hunter-gatherer or even a subsistence farmer living on the margin of food security, having more muscle than you need is actually deleterious. Remember, the only thing that natural selection cares about is how many offspring you have who survive and reproduce. It doesn’t care if you’re strong or healthy or nice or loved or fun or whatever. It only cares about whether you have grandchildren. That’s it, right? That’s the cold calculus of selection.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

My brain is going, if I have big muscles, I’ll have more romantic opportunities and I’ll have grandchildren.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, only up to a certain point, right? So if more muscles, if they attract the opposite sex and make them want to reproduce with you, yes, that could be a benefit. I’m not so sure how much women are attracted to the liver king, and that’s not something I even want to know the answer to, and certainly shouldn’t ask him. But there’s a reason we have use it or lose it, which you mentioned earlier, right? When we increase our demand, we increase our capacity. When you go to the gym and you work out, you build muscle. But if you stop using those muscles, you lose it. And that’s an adaptation, because you don’t want to spend extra energy on muscles you’re not using. So you want enough, but not too much. You want to be economical with muscle mass. And so if you look at the data from Hunter-Gathers, and people have done that. They’ve done grip strength tests, et cetera, and all kinds of other fun things with it. like mini olympics when we’ve done this too um people are reasonably strong but they’re not super strong and they’re not they’re not buff and built and bulked and all that sort of stuff they’ve got enough muscle to do what they need to do but no more and the reason why people find muscle attractive anyway is because it’s this evolutionary signal isn’t it of uh reproductive value and resources maybe and the ability to go out and

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you know what I mean? Why does a woman, for example, find a man with muscles or in good shape attractive in 2023 when we’re not hunting for gazelle?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, I’m not a psychologist, so I’m not sure if I’m qualified to answer that, but I could venture to guess that obviously if you’re trying to, you know, we pair bond as a species and we have been for millions of years probably. You want to pair bond with somebody who’s going to, because we also have cooperation and food sharing, right? You want to pair bond with somebody who’s going to be able to bring home the bacon, literally and figuratively, right? But bringing home the bacon does not mean looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger, at least back in the day. Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the day, right? bringing home the bacon back in the day meant being a persistence hunter, being able to run long distances and being moderately strong. So they looked more like a marathoner or a football player than they did a weightlifter, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So it’s conceivable, it’s conceivable that someone who is really, really big is actually less attractive because they wouldn’t have been able to hunt and run and hunt as well as someone who is a little bit

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah, you have to feed them more, too. And those are precious calories. So I’m going to guess that, look, if you look in non-Western populations, you don’t see physiques like that. This is a privilege of people who are able to go to gyms and weigh powder shakes and all that kind of stuff to kind of build their crazy muscle mass. But it’s not something that our ancestors were able to do on a regular basis, that’s for sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

A quick word on Huel, as you know they’re a sponsor of this podcast and I’m an investor in the company. One of the things I’ve never really explained is how I came to have a relationship with Huel. One day in the office many years ago a guy walked past called Michael and he was wearing a Huel t-shirt and I was really compelled by the logo I just thought from a design aesthetic point of view it was really interesting and I asked him what that word meant and why he was wearing that t-shirt and he said it’s this brand called Huel and they make food that is nutritionally complete and very, very convenient, and has the planet in mind, and he, the next day, dropped off a little bottle of fuel on my desk. And from that day onwards, I completely got it, because I’m someone that cares tremendously about having a nutritionally complete diet, but sometimes, because of the way my life is, that falls by the wayside. So if there was a really convenient, reliable, trustworthy way for me to be nutritionally complete, in an affordable way, I was all ears. Especially if it’s a way that is conscious of the planet. Give it a chance. Give it a shot. Let me know what you think. There’s another myth that you bust, which I thought was really interesting, because I think I know a lot of people that have used this as a reason not to run. They say it’s really bad for your knees.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Oh, man, that gets me so mad. Right. I mean, I hear this from doctors all the time. Right. Oh, yeah. Running is bad for your knees. Now, it is true that knee injuries are the most common running injuries. But arthritis, which is really what they’re usually talking about, it’s absolutely definitively not true that running increases rates of knee cartilage damage and arthritis. So arthritis is caused by cartilage wearing away in a joint, right? And it’s a myth that running actually increases cartilage damage. If you have arthritis, running is excruciating and problematic. But if you don’t have it, running actually, if anything, may be slightly preventive. Because cartilage joints, like everything else, benefits from being used, right? And so physical activity actually helps promote strong and healthy joints. We used to think that it just caused them to wear away, but actually, you know, like cars, you know, wearing away their tires. But now we know that actually physical activity promotes repair mechanisms in cartilage just as it does in other tissues in the body. And of course the other thing about running is that I think a lot of people run incorrectly today. So that’s why we started studying barefoot running a few decades ago is because if humans have been running for millions of years, most of that time we were running barefoot. So we’re kind of curious, how did people run before shoes? And what we learned was that today, shoes have these cushioned heels that enable you to essentially run the way you walk, right? You land on your heel. And everybody who’s barefoot sometimes lands on their heel, but people who are barefoot often, more often than not, land on the ball of their foot and then let their heel down. It’s called a forefoot strike or a midfoot strike. And when you do that, we worked out the biomechanics of that and published a paper on the cover of Nature. showing that when you do that, you actually prevent your foot from crashing into the ground, causing what’s called an impact peak, a collisional force. You run lightly and gently. So if you were to take your shoes off and run up Lexington Avenue here, I guarantee you, you would not be landing on your heels. Within a few steps, you’d start landing on the ball of your foot because it hurts less. And so that’s how we evolved to run. We evolved to run in a way that doesn’t involve slamming into the ground with every step. And that causes less force around your knee. The trade-off though, because nothing comes for free, everything has trade-offs, is that it’s harder on your ankles. Your calf muscles and your Achilles have to do now a lot more work to let your heel down. And so people who switch from heel striking to forefoot striking often have Achilles tendon problems. They get calf muscle problems. If they don’t do it properly, they’ll get, if their foot muscles aren’t strong enough, they’ll get all kinds of foot problems, right? So you can’t just suddenly become a barefoot runner and start forefoot striking. If you’re gonna switch, you have to switch gradually and slowly and build up strength and learn to do it properly. Another thing people do is they tend to run like a ballerina high up on their toes. That’s really hard on your ankles and your calves. So you’ve got to do it properly, but it can have enormous benefits. And we know, again, if you run that way, it puts much less force on your knees. And again, knees are where people get injured the most. So I think a lot of knee injuries come from the way in which we run.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So would you recommend, if you can, to run more barefoot? Especially if you have those kind of shoes we just discussed.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, I think what matters is how you run, not what’s on your feet. So I would say a barefoot style.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How do I learn to run in a new way, though?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, I mean, there’s some tricks. So one of them is, first of all, I don’t know how you run, so maybe you already run just fine. But a barefoot style tends to be a high stride rate or high stride frequency, so 90 strides per minute or 180 steps per minute, roughly. You know, 170 to 180 steps a minute is about right. Relatively short strides, so you’re not throwing your leg out. And to me, the most important thing is not what we call over-striding. If you ask any coach on the planet, they’ll say over-striding is bad. Overstride is when you throw your leg out way in front of you and you land. And that leg is a stiff leg. So a stiff leg means more force, right? And it’s harder on your knees. And so a good runner lands with their shank, with their tibia vertical. So their ankle is below their knee. When you do that, pretty much everything will work out properly. It’ll mean that you won’t land hard on your heel. It’ll mean that your leg will be acting like an excellent spring. You will produce a lot of braking force. To me, I think the most important skill in running is not to overstride. So don’t worry about how you’re going to hit the ground. Just worry about your overstride. If you solve your overstride, you’re more likely to run well.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What’s the best kind of cardiovascular exercise for the promotion of good health? Because I’ve been doing some crossfit stuff. I’ve been doing some HIIT workouts. I’ve been trying not to run because I’ve had a few injuries. I’m trying not to run as much because it seems to be a little bit more impact than if I’m bullshitting myself there. So I’ve been doing some HIIT workouts for 30 minutes a day when I leave here.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

You do HIIT works every single day?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Pretty much every day at the moment. We track it with a group of friends we have. There’s 10 of us in a WhatsApp group. Whoever’s last whoever does the least workouts every month is evicted and there’s a raffle So there’s a raffle yesterday on the first the first yesterday Yeah for a new member and we do that every month and we’ve done it for three and a half years That’s great. I’ve been in there. I was the first ever member.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

So I’ve been in there for three and a half years Well, I think you know, I mean the most the best exercise the one you like do it there’s no one that’s like better, you know, like the You know, I think you’ve got to mix it up. There is no one perfect exercise, right? I mean, I think what you do sounds actually pretty good, right? You’ve got a mixture of low, slow intensity, some high intensity, you want to have some strength training, you want to have some cardio. I mean, we never evolved to do one thing, and our bodies are too complex to benefit from just one thing. mixing it up is the obvious way to go, right? I think the bedrock for any kind of physical activity, I mean, you ask anybody, right? Cardio is the bedrock of exercise, right? it promotes the most health benefits. It’s good for your burning energy, it’s good for your cardiovascular system, it’s good for controlling inflammation, but there are different kinds of cardio in high intensity versus low intensity. And there’s also strength training, which is also important. We’ve tried to medicalize exercise. It’s like there’s a proper dose. Take this pill this many milligrams, this many times per week. Exercise, it doesn’t work that way. There is no optimal dose. Everybody’s different. It depends on are you more worried about heart disease or Alzheimer’s or diabetes or depression or are you previously injured? Are you fit? Are you unfit? It’s impossible to prescribe exercise in this kind of medicalized way. It doesn’t work.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

A lot of people exercise because they believe it will help them to lose fat. Belly fat. One of the biggest debates on the planet. It has been a huge debate. Even on this podcast, I’ve had multiple people come and say a whole range of things about weight loss and cardio. And I’m kind of, I don’t know what to believe anymore.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, anybody who isn’t confused doesn’t understand what’s going on, right? It’s sad that there’s such a debate, but that’s how science works, right? So, as you know, I wrote about that in this book. Part of the explanation for the debate is that, again, what dose are you analyzing and what population in what kind of context, right? So pretty much every major health organization in the world recommends that you get 150 minutes per week of physical activity. That’s kind of like the benchmark. That’s what the WHO, the World Health Organization, considers the division between being sedentary versus active. So, and a lot of people are unfit and overweight and struggling to be physically active, have struggled to get 150 minutes a week, right? So a lot of studies prescribe 150 minutes a week of exercise, walking for example, or moderate intensity physical activity, and then look at the effects on weight loss. And guess what, when you walk 150 minutes a week, which is what, 20 minutes a day of walking, which is about a mile, a mile a day, you’re not going to lose much weight. You’re basically burning about 50 calories a day doing that. That’s a piddling amount of calories compared to drinking a glass of orange juice. So surprise, surprise, those kinds of studies show that those doses of physical activity are not very effective for weight loss. However, plenty of rigorous, controlled studies that look at higher doses of physical activity, 300 minutes a week or more, find that they are effective for helping people lose weight, but not fast and not large quantities. So you’re never going to lose a lot of weight really fast by exercising. It’s just not going to happen. Because, you know, a cheeseburger has, what, 800, 900 calories. You have to run, you know, 15 kilometers to burn the same number of calories. You’re going to be hungry afterwards, too, so you’re going to make some of that back. You have compensation. So physical activity is actually, there’s just no way around it. You have to be a flat earther not to argue this way. Physical activity can help you lose weight, but it’s not going to help you lose a lot of weight fast, and not at the low doses that often are prescribed. But the one thing that we do agree on, and I think this would not be controversial, is that physical activity is really important for helping people prevent themselves from gaining weight, or after a diet, from regaining weight. And there are many, many studies which show this. One of my favorite was a study that was done in Boston on policemen. Policemen kind of have a reputation for having too many donuts and being overweight, right? And Boston is no exception. So they did this great study at Boston University right across the river. where they got a bunch of policemen on a diet, a really severe diet. The policemen all lost weight, but some of the policemen had to diet and exercise, some just dieted alone. And as you might imagine, the ones who dieted plus exercise lost a little bit more weight, not a lot, just a little. But, and then they tracked them for months afterwards, because most people after a diet, their weight comes just crashing back, right? The policemen who kept exercising, even after the diet was over, and they went back to eating whatever the hell they wanted, donuts, whatever, They’re the ones who kept the weight off. But the ones who didn’t exercise, the weight came crashing back. Another good example would be, have you ever seen the TV show The Biggest Loser?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Yes, where people go on and lose weight.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Yeah, so there’s a crazy show, right? These people, you know, this is like totally unhealthy. They were confined to a ranch in Malibu and these people lost ridiculous amounts of weight. A guy named Kevin Hall at the National Institute of Health studied them for years afterwards and looked at, and most of them regained a lot of the weight that they lost. And there was one person on the show who did not, and that was the person who kept exercising. And that’s just yet more than one data point, but there’s lots and lots of evidence to show that physical activity, its other important benefit when it comes to weight, is preventing weight gain or weight regain. When we talk about dieting, we talk about exercise or diet, exercise or diet. Like, why is it an or? I mean, why isn’t it exercise and diet? Diet is, of course, the bedrock for weight loss, but exercise also plays an important role and should be part of the mix.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

On the police example and the biggest loser example, I can relate in the sense that when I exercise, when I go through the moments of my life where I’m most committed to exercise, I’m also most committed to my diet. Yeah. Because if I go to the gym, I will not then leave the gym and have a donut or a pizza. Absolutely not. It seems like wasting the effort. So if you look at the sort of correlation between the moments in my life where I eat healthiest, they’re also the moments in my life where I’m most focused on the gym. And I noticed there was a couple of months ago, I had a bit of a motivation slump, managed to stay in our little WhatsApp group, but coasted down the bottom of the leaderboard for a couple of months on end, just like surviving every month by one. And through those moments, my motivation in the gym had gone down and my diet had gone down. The minute I managed to get in the gym and do a big workout, the same day my diet came back.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Of course, right? And they co-vary, right? And that’s one of the reasons why when people do big studies of, you know, you can look at what people die of, right? What’s on the death certificate, you know, cancer, heart disease, whatever, heart attack. And then you look at what caused the cancer, what caused the heart disease. When people try to do that, it’s almost impossible to separate diet and exercise because people who tend to eat better also tend to exercise more. They’re both, in our modern upside-down, topsy-turvy world, they’re both markers of privilege. People have money to go to the gym, also have money to buy healthy foods. And people who care about their physical activity also tend to care about their diet. So at that level, they’re very hard to separate. However, if you’re studying a particular component of a system in a randomized controls trial in a lab, you can separate them out. And so we know that they have independent and also interactive effects.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is the most important thing we haven’t talked about, Daniel?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

I think the most important thing is that we need to be compassionate towards each other. I mean, there’s so much shaming and blaming and prescriptions. The reason I entitled the book Exercised is that we make people feel exercised about exercise. uncomfortable and unconfident and shamed and you know here you and I are having this conversation but I can tell that you you take you know you’re you’re I mean I know I’ve listened to enough of your podcast you care about your your health and you care about diet you care about exercise and people may look at you and think gosh, I wish I was like him, but it’s just not me. I’m not there, right? And they may feel put off by our conversation. And I think that so often these discussions make people feel bad about what they’re doing. And I think that what we need to emphasize is that if you put a chocolate cake and an apple in front of me here, I would want to eat the chocolate cake. And I might eat the apple only because you’re there. But if you weren’t there, I would eat the chocolate cake, right? And when I’m in my building at Harvard, my office is on the fifth floor of this old Victorian building. Every single day, I want to take the elevator. And the only reason I take the stairs is that if anybody catches me in the elevator, I’ll be a hypocrite. It’s not that I don’t want to take the elevator. I do want to take the elevator, right? I guess you guys say lift, right? And we make people feel bad for taking the elevator, right? They shouldn’t feel bad. It’s an instinct. And so, I think we have to figure out ways to help people without shaming them and without blaming them and without bragging and whatever, talking about the marathon they ran or this, that, or the other. Make them feel less uncomfortable about the topic and realize that you don’t have to swim the English Channel or run a marathon or join your WhatsApp group and do crazy HIIT workouts every day. By the way, you don’t need to do HIIT workouts every day to get the benefit. Instead, just taking the stairs in your building every day. Anything is better than nothing, and you’ll get benefits from that. And I hope that that’s the message that needs to get out, right? Anything is better than nothing. And if you can get started on that pathway, then it’ll eventually become self-rewarding. And that leads me to the other topic that we didn’t talk about, which is the reward system of physical activity. You and I, I’m really looking forward to my run tomorrow morning in the park. I love running Central Park. It’s one of the best places in the world to run, right? A fantastic view from the top, and it’s just gorgeous, right? But when I run Central Park tomorrow, I’m gonna get a big dopamine hit. My body’s gonna produce all this dopamine, which is the molecule that says, do that again, right? It’s a reward. Gamblers get dopamine hits, right? People who eat chocolate cake get a dopamine hit, right? But if I were unfit and overweight, I wouldn’t get that dopamine hit. And so when people start exercising, they don’t get the reward that people who are fit and accustomed to doing it get. And then they’re made to feel bad, like you didn’t enjoy your run around Central Park. Well, it takes months, if not years, before you actually get that reward. Really? Yeah, because just like being overweight causes you to become insensitive to insulin, you become insensitive to all kinds of other hormones and neurotransmitters and dopamine is one of them. So it’s not an instant like benefit, right? It’s hard. And so we need to be compassionate again towards people who are struggling to become fit and struggling to get their award. And also if you’re overweight and you run around Central Park, it’s like if I were carrying weights and running around Central Park, it’d be much harder, right? It’s challenging. Once you get into that state, it’s hard to get back to the state of activity. We need, as a society, to help those folks rather than judge them.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Those folks that are struggling, and I was one of those folks that were struggling for many, many years. I would say to myself every year, pretty much all of my adult life, that this was going to be the year that I’d get fit. I’d try all of these various different, you know, fad exercise things, buy all this stuff. I announced in 2017 that I was going to work out every single day, and that lasted for six months, and then I yo-yoed back out of that. It never stuck with me until 2020, and that’s, I’ve been exercising six days a week since 2020, 82% of days. And I reflect and try and diagnose how I went from someone who, what was it that changed? And if I can figure out what it was that changed at the most fundamental level in my mindset or my attitude or my life or whatever it was, then I can help other people figure out that too or at least give them more sound advice or at least be more empathetic. Whatever’s required to help them, you know, and I have a platform here where I speak about exercise a lot and these things. What’s your suspicion? What’s your suspicion on what it is that makes people go from being, you know, maybe having a negative opinion towards exercise or their ability to be disciplined with it to becoming an exerciser?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Do you know? This is a question that obsesses me. In fact, we have a big project right now, a big grant to actually study this right now. Because the more I study it, the more I think it’s social. The more I think that, again, I think people are physically active, i.e. in our modern world, exercise. for two reasons, when it’s necessary or rewarding. And what makes it rewarding for most people is the social aspect. And that social aspect can take many dimensions. It can be running with a group of friends, and you know, you might want to go only a mile, but your friends convince you to run another mile, right? And you end up running two miles, right? Or you’re feeling bad and crappy, and your friends help you do it. Or, I’m a running buddy, right? And I often meet friends for early morning runs. And I can tell you that the evening before, it seems like a great idea to meet Aaron at 6 a.m. on the corner of Mass Avenue and Linnean. The next morning at 6 a.m., I’m like, I want to stay and bread with my wife. I don’t want to meet this nasty, smelly guy at 6 a.m. in the cold and dark. But I agreed to meet him, and out I go. And I’m usually glad I did it afterwards. Or we can go on. There are other social ways. Or dancing. Nobody thinks of dancing as exercise, but it’s exercise. So that’s one important social dimension. And the other one, though, is accountability. I describe in the book, there’s a friend of mine in San Francisco who’s struggling to exercise. So she signed up for a program, it’s this company called stick.com, I don’t know if you’ve run across it, where it’s a commitment contract where you send like $1,000 to them and they keep it in a bank account, they probably invest it and make a lot of money on it too. But, you set up a referee, and you agree that I’m going to not smoke, or this or that or the other, or in this case, exercise. And if you don’t do it, and your referee is keeping track of what you do. you get to choose something negative. So in her case, her husband is her referee, and if she doesn’t walk, I can’t remember what, every day she has to walk a certain number of miles, her husband will tell her, or tell the website, and it’ll send $50 to the NRA that week. And she hates the NRA with a burning passion.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is the NRA?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

The National Rifle Association. They’re the people who are trying to prevent gun control legislation in the United States. And they have effectively prevented gun control legislation in the United States, which now kills more children than cars in the United States.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So if she doesn’t exercise, sorry, if she doesn’t do it, then?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Then money goes to this organization that she hates. So this is a stick, if there ever was one, as opposed to a carrot. And I don’t think she’s, every time I see her, I ask her, have you kept up the watch? She says, oh no, the NRA hasn’t gotten a penny. So for her, it’s been very effective. So she’s made a commitment contract that stings, that really hurts. Now, I think that might be a little on the extreme side, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that to everybody, but she’s accountable. She’s made herself accountable in some ways. And I think people can find ways to make themselves accountable to a friend, a loved one, a parent, you know, priest, who knows what, right? You might, or hire a trainer. I mean, that’s kind of what a trainer does, makes you accountable, right? And I think, so those are, again, social ways to help people be more physically active. So I think there are multiple ways of doing that, and I suspect that is going to be the most effective sort of set of tools that will help people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

One thing I actually do is that on the screensaver of my phone, it has something that really inspires me. So I see it every day and it’s that reminder for me, which reinforces my why across my life. It’s actually my home screen on my iPhone is actually a bit of a mood board for me. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to leave it for. And I don’t get to see it until I open the book. The question is, what is one aspect or feature of your life that causes you the most friction slash discomfort and how can you change or fix it?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

I would say it’s my tendency to compare myself to others. You know, life is short, life is precious. We’re all experiments of one. And when I think about, when I engage in that, oh, so and so has such and such, that’s a really bad habit, that’s a really bad trait. It never leads anywhere good, it only leads towards, either I think about how I have more of something than somebody else, that leads to, I think, unhealthy feelings of pride, or, feelings of jealousy, you know, so-and-so has this award or such and such, and that’s kind of pernicious. So I think that’s a bad habit that I work hard to overcome.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Because it changes your expectations of yourself and that steals happiness? It steals happiness, yeah. It steals happiness. Thank you for the work you do, Daniel. Very important. Very, very important and increasingly important. I think when we look at the health outcomes, especially here in the United States of people, I mean, you actually share a number of them in the book, which I didn’t. We didn’t really go into, but they’re just horrifying. Yeah, it’s scary out there. especially as it relates to exercise. There was one in particular that I wrote down because it horrified me. I can’t remember, it was just all the stats around the current healthcare epidemic.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Only 50% of Americans ever exercise, ever.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Really? Ever?

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Ever. And only 20% meet those very minimal World Health Organization standards. We’re a nation of couch potatoes and the rest of the world is headed our way.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

but not if they get this book. Because I think it is a real perspective changer and it’s a real eye opener and it’s a necessary one. So thank you so much for writing it. You’re fantastic at what you do. And I’m now a huge fan of your work after delving in deeper and deeper and deeper. So I can’t wait to see what you do next. Well, thank you. And I recommend everyone to go get this book exercised because Yeah, I thought I knew a lot about exercise, but from reading that and having that window into hunter-gatherer ancestors and tribes and other cultures, it really, that whole idea of a mismatched life, how mismatched my life is in so many fundamental ways, from diet to exercise to socializing, and these kind of books helped to realign.

DR DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN:

Well, thank you, although it seems that you’re doing a pretty good job.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m trying, you know. I think we’re so far from being human, though, that there’s still a long way to go for all of us. So thank you, Daniel.

Professor Seyfried, if someone walks up to you on the street and they’re, you know, they know nothing about science, they know nothing about medicine, et cetera, and they asked you, what do you do and why do you do it? How would you respond?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

I’m a professor of biology at Boston College. So in that role, I spend a lot of my time working with undergraduates and graduate students and training them to be scientific literate in various aspects of biology. The research program that we have at the university is also focused on understanding how to manage cancer better, how it originates, and how to prevent it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How much of a problem is cancer globally? What are the sort of headline statistics on the macro view of cancer for someone that really doesn’t know?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, well, it’s getting worse. I can’t say. It’s in the millions. I know precisely what’s going on in this country because the American Cancer Society every year distributes the data on cancer. We have almost two million new cases diagnosed per year in the United States. And we have 1,700 people a day dying from cancer in the United States, which comes to about 70 people per hour in the United States. Now when I went to China, I looked at some numbers there, and it was 8,000 people a day are dying from cancer. Obviously, the population is so much larger. And I don’t know what it is in the UK. I mean, we’d have to go to their cancer registries. But what we do know is that it’s supposed to be a lot worse by 2050 than it is today. So there seems to be no reduction in death, suffering. for this disease, and I can speak to the reasons for that. But right now, I would say it’s a global epidemic of cancer. It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse. More people are dying from it. There’s no major advance in reducing death rates. So it’s a great tragedy. And when we understand what’s causing it and what we’re not doing to prevent it or treat it, it’ll be recognized as the singular greatest tragedy in the history of medicine worldwide. When they come to know what I know about this disorder, and then they realize what we’ve been doing in a misdirected way, it’ll be recognized as the greatest tragedy in the history of medicine.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What types of cancer are people dying from? What is the most popular types of cancer for men and women?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, it’s always been lung cancer pretty much for men and women. Lung cancer has always been the number one. But we have pancreatic breast cancer, colon cancer. These are all on the rise. Colon cancer is on the rise. Pancreatic cancer is on the rise in this country. I can’t speak for other countries. They may vary slightly due to diet and lifestyle issues. But lung cancer has always been recognized as the number one cancer.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 How many people in the United States then, based on the statistics, would develop cancer?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, it seems to increase every year, so it’s kind of a moving target. It doesn’t seem to go down. You know, what it is today, I don’t know, but what I do know is the numbers of people that are dying each day, because the American Cancer Society comes out with, I think it’s 612,000 people will die this year, 2024, from cancer in this year. So divide it by 365 and it comes out to just about 1,700 people a day. Divide that number by 24 and you get about 70 people an hour based on the numbers provided to us from the American Cancer Society. when they say we’ve made major advances in cancer incidences, right? So in the 1990s, they instituted the anti-smoking campaigns, all right? So today, if you read, they say we have reduced cancer deaths by 31 or 32 percent. Wow, that sounds really impressive. So what they do is they take the number, this is what the National, the American Cancer Society has done, it’s published in their papers. Okay, if we didn’t stop smoking in the 90s and everybody continued to smoke, the trajectory would be very, very high. Because we stopped smoking, we have 33% lower death than if we didn’t stop smoking. But the trajectory is continuing to increase, maybe not as steep as it would have been had we continued to smoke. So it was clearly a prevention. It had nothing to do with a treatment. It had to do with prevention. That was giving the, oh, we’ve made major advances in reducing cancer death rate. Yeah, because people stopped smoking. for many, many people. More people would have died had they not smoked. So we have people that are not real people. We’re just looking at what would have happened if we didn’t stop smoking.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What are the leading causes of death worldwide in terms of diseases? I hear that heart disease is number one.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

I think that heart disease is number one. Cancer is number two.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And there are many different types of cancer, right? There’s hundreds of different forms of cancer.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

If you look under the electron microscope, or a correction, even a light micro… This is how most cancers are diagnosed, by light microscopy. You look under the microscope and you see a bunch of cells that are dysmorphic in the way they look, and then they all have genetic defects and all this kind of stuff. But they all have one thing in common. They depend on a fermentation, energy without oxygen. So all cancers are a singular type of disease. It’s just that they happen in different tissues. But when you look at the underlying problem, they’re all very, very similar. They can’t live without a fermentation, which means energy without oxygen. So that’s the common pathophysiological problem in all cancers, whether it’s a colon, brain, breast, bladder, skin, lung. We’ve looked at all these cancers, and they’re all essentially using the same mechanism to grow out of control.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So what is that fermentation you mentioned?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Fermentation is energy without oxygen. What does that mean? We breathe air and we exhale CO2 and water vapor. And those are the waste products of the food that we eat. Everything is broken down and combusted in our mitochondria of the cell. And the waste products are CO2 and water vapors. Those are the waste products. But if you and I were to stop breathing for any particular time period, our bodies would fill up with lactic acid and succinic acid, like if we were to have a heart attack or when somebody has a heart attack. They don’t die instantly. If they’re there for five or seven minutes without oxygen, they may die because the brain dies. But if you can get the heart to beat again and get oxygen back in the system, you can come alive again. But when we have that massive interruption of oxygen into our body, The cells fall back on an ancient—they immediately turn on these ancient pathways to get energy without oxygen for a short period of time. And that’s the sugar glucose, which is already in our bloodstream from the food we eat, and the amino acid glutamine, which is an amino acid in our bloodstreams. Highest level of amino acid is the glutamine. These two fuels are now burned for energy, obtain energy without oxygen. These pathways upregulate and you can get ATP, which is energy. to keep you alive for a short period of time. But your bloodstream is filling up with the waste products called lactic acid and succinic acid. Lactic acid is coming from glucose, the sugar, and succinic acid is coming from the amino acid glutamine. And they build up and that tells you you’re fermenting. You’re getting energy without oxygen because you’re not breathing. Very simple. You’re not breathing, but I’m not dead yet. Now, of course, if you don’t get it for very long, you die. It’s just that. Now, the other way you can stop oxygenation in our bodies quickly is with the poison cyanide. So if we—God forbid—we were to take cyanide, we’d be both dead within a minute. We’d just—because our bodies are completely shut down of energy from oxygen. Now here’s the cancer cell. The cancer cell can live in cyanide. Cyanide does not kill a tumor, okay? Otto Warburg showed this a long time ago, and we’ve also shown the same thing in our lab. Others have shown this. The interesting thing is when you look at cancer cells, even in the presence of oxygen, even in oxygen, they’re throwing out lactic acid and succinic acid. What does that mean? That means the organelle inside the cell that generates energy is not efficient. It’s inefficient. And the cells are using ancient fermentation. And when I say ancient fermentation, you have to realize the Earth is 4 and 1 half billion years old. The organisms that existed on our planet 2 and 1 half billion years ago were all fermenters. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere until the photosynthetic bacteria started making oxygen. There were living cells. They had no oxygen. And they were growing like crazy, unregulated growth, just unregulated. What’s going on here? And they would die as soon as the fermentable fuels were dissipated. As they gobbled up everything, they would just die. So they lived as long as they could reproduce and have fermentation fuels. The cancer cell in our body is doing nothing than falling back on these ancient fermentation pathways that become accelerated, upregulated in the tumor cell because the efficiency of the energy coming from the mitochondria is now depleted. It’s defective in many different ways. So this is very clear. And this happens in lung cancer, colon cancer. We’ve looked at all the major cancers, and we found out these common defects are seen in all the cancers. So they’re all very similar in their metabolism. They’re very different in what they look like under the microscope. Lung doesn’t look like colon, doesn’t look like brain. They’re very different genetically. They’re all different from each other. But they’re all common in a dependency on this ancient pathway of energy metabolism.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Can you take me back? You mentioned a guy called Walt Wahlberg there? Yeah. Can you take me back on the journey that the scientific community, or at least you, have been on to arrive at the conclusion that the central sort of causal factor, at least an indication of the causal factor of cancer, lies in this shift in energy systems? Where did this understanding start in research?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, it started with Otto Warburg, for sure, in the 1920s. The other linkage, before I tell you what Otto Warburg did, because I was like everybody else, I thought cancer was a genetic disease, and I heard about Warburg, didn’t really know what he was talking about. invested any time thinking about what he said. But Linda Nebling was a PhD nursing student at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. And she took these two little hopeless kids, brain cancer. We call hopeless cases when they have no predictability of long-term survival. And she gave them a ketogenic diet, the lower blood sugar, and she was able to rescue these kids. One eventually died, the other one was lost to follow-up. And she said her strategy was based on what Otto Warburg had said about glucose and cancer. So then I said, Warburg, I said, who the hell, let me go back and check out who this guy was and what he did. Because I was seeing similar things in the mouse with that drug that was lowering glucose and we were shrinking these tumor cells. And we published a paper, one of the first ever papers linking that how high your blood sugar is determines how fast your tumor will grow in the mice. And now this has been replicated in all human cancers. The higher your blood sugar, the faster the tumor grows. The lower the blood sugar, the slower the tumor grows. Undeniable for all different human mouse cancers. Wow. So Warburg had said this a long time ago, back in the 1920s. He was taking slices of all kinds of human and rat mouse tumors and slicing them up. And he noticed something really strange about these cancers. They take in less oxygen compared to the normal tissue from which they came. Wow, so they’re kind of like oxygen deprived. And they were throwing out this lactic acid waste product that he was saying. And they were taking in so much more glucose than the normal. So the normal cells take in just a little bit of glucose and they can make tremendous energy from a tiny amount. This guy was taking in huge amounts of glucose, but not fully metabolizing it to CO2 and water, but dumping it out as lactic acid, which is a breakdown product of glucose that is not fully metabolized in the cell. Wow, he said, this is unbelievable. And then he did all kinds of tissue. I looked at his data. It was unbelievable. He was cutting humans, mice, rats, and seeing the same thing over and over again. And he was saying the origin of cancer has to do with something in the ability of the mitochondrion, the organelle, to generate efficient energy from oxygen.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So the mitochondria is the part of the cell that creates energy?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

It’s the part of the cell that creates energy through oxidative phosphorylation, which is burning energy using oxygen, okay?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, so it’s like an engine.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

It’s an engine, a very highly efficient engine. This is an organelle. You have to realize, we have the cell, and we have a nucleus that everybody knows about, this nucleus, and then we have all these little organelles in there. We have lysosomes, and we have the mitochondrion, which is like a spaghetti network inside the cell. They fuse. It’s actually a second living organism inside our cells.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And to simplify what they do, the mitochondria, they convert oxygen and glucose into energy?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yes, they combust energy. They take the foods that we eat have carbon-hydrogen bonds, OK? And we break those down inside our mitochondria. And when we break those bonds down, we create a hydrogen gradient. And we dissipate that gradient through an impeller mechanism that generates energy like crazy. It’s unbelievable. Very efficient, highly efficient. But the cancer cell has corruption in that system. But it doesn’t happen overnight. As Warburg said, if you break that system too acutely and too fast, the cell will die. It doesn’t have the… So you have to have two things to get from oxidative phosphorylation to energy with minimal oxygen fermentation.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Sorry, just to keep it simple, from a normal cell to a cancerous cell?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

From a normal cell to a cancer cell doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a chronic damage to the ability of that organelle inside the cell to generate efficient energy. So all we have to know with cancer is that they’re – how are they growing so rapidly? Why are they going out of control? How come it’s so hard to kill them? Because as long as you have those fermentable fuels that drive this ancient fermentation pathway, they will continue to grow and they’re very hard to kill.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And the fermenting fuels are glucose and… And glutamine. Glutamine.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah. Okay. So here, let me tell you in a nutshell. Are you ready? Brace yourself. Are you ready? I’m ready, I think so. Are you braced? Are you braced? Sufficiently braced. He’s sufficiently braced. Okay. So a solution to the cancer problem, to manage cancer without toxicity, is to simultaneously restrict the two fuels that are needed to drive this dysregulated growth while transitioning the whole body off to a fuel that the tumor cells can’t use, which is fatty acids and ketone bodies. So when we take the cancer patients or the mice, We put them into a calorie restriction, lowering the blood sugar that I said is one half of the two fuels. You can lower that down really, really low. And then we use specific drugs to target the glutamine. And together we can selectively restrict the two fuels while we transition the whole body over to ketones. We as a species evolved to be in nutritional ketosis for the majority of our existence as a species, like one and a half million years. For centuries and centuries, thousands and thousands of years, our species, you and me, our ancestors, were always in a state of nutritional ketosis because there was very few carbohydrates in the environment for them to be consuming. Right? So the cancer cell, the body, you and I could, if we stopped eating and we took a low-carbohydrate diet and just did water-only fasting, we would get into nutritional ketosis, where the normal cells, our brain, our kidneys, our heart, can be burning these ketone bodies because they have a good mitochondria and they can burn these fuels effectively. The tumor cells have a bad mitochondria, they can’t burn those fuels. They’re dependent on glucose and glutamine. We can replace glucose and glutamine with ketone bodies in the normal cells of our… So we selectively marginalize these tumor cells slowly over time. They slowly start to die, the blood vessels disappear, and the body comes in and dissolves them.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So for someone that has never heard the term keto before, ketosis or ketones, In a simple way, what are ketones?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Ketones are water-soluble breakdown products of fatty acids. They’re beta-hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate. These are small molecules that are water-soluble. The liver throws them out like crazy. Kidney a little bit, but mostly liver. So as I told you earlier, when we don’t eat, You get anxious, mainly because our brains are addicted to glucose. It’s like cocaine and nicotine and whatever. You start getting all antsy. I haven’t eaten anything, you know. What’s going on? So then once the body realizes, you ain’t going to eat anything. We have to start mobilizing out of our fat resources. And the fats go into the bloodstream as triglycerides, which are three fatty acids attached to a glycerol backbone. They go to the liver. The liver chops them up and puts out these little water-soluble ketone bodies. The name ketone body is kind of a weird thing from biochemistry, but they’re called ketone bodies. And they can supply the brain with energy, the heart with energy. And not only that, they’re a super fuel. It’s unbelievable that mitochondria burns these ketones. Okay, but their energy—remember I was talking about how energy efficient the mitochondria become? When they burn ketones, they become even more energy efficient. It’s unbelievable how—they don’t need as much oxygen to generate more energy. That’s why they—my colleagues called, and some of the greats in the biochemistry field called them super fuel, because you can get more energy, bang for a buck, burning a ketone body than you can burning a pyruvate coming from glucose, or even a fatty acid. And the biochemistry for that is interesting. But the bottom line is, when you transition away from these fuels to key, don’t forget, we evolved. Our ancestors were always in a state of ketosis. You get into that state by consuming very few carbohydrates and having a lot of energy. And this is the way our ancestors were.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what can we learn from our ancestors about cancer? How prevalent was cancer, when we look back at our ancestors, if they were often in a state of ketosis?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, well, it’s hard to determine from skeletal records, but I think we can look at modern man who live according to their traditional ways. You know, Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian physician, went to Africa and looked at Africans that were living according to their traditional ways. And he said, one of the weirdest things, they don’t have cancer. It’s like, what? Cancer was extremely rare in Africans, in Inuits living in the areas, British, when they came, you know, in looking at the health conditions of folks that lived in the Arctic Circle, cancer was not there. They had other things, but they didn’t have cancer—Aboriginal folks. So it seems as though our living—we can’t go back 50,000 years ago because we don’t have people to examine. But we have people to examine today, and that was one of the things Schweitzer and several other physicians from Europe would go to Africa, and they would look at some of these tribes that were traditional, and they were saying, whoa, what’s going on with these Africans? How come they don’t have cancer? But when modern diet lifestyle entered into their societies, cancer out of control.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What about our other primate cousins?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah. There’s never been a documented case of breast cancer in a female chimpanzee, and they’re 98% similar to us in gene and protein sequence. You know, what’s going on with that? Monkeys, they don’t generally form cancer. They’re eating. They’re not eating what we eat, okay? Don’t forget, we did not evolve. to eat pork pies and Dunkin’ Donuts, jelly-filled donuts and pizzas. We did not. Our ancestors did not eat this, right? We were killing and eating animals. As I said, we ate everything that walked, crawled, flew, or swam on this planet, became part of our diet. We did not have donuts on every corner, delicatessens on every corner. We evolved over this period of time just like our primate ancestors. The animals, chimps and gorillas and things that you see in the zoos, are fed their natural diets as if they were living in their habitat, their natural habitat, whether it was in South America, Africa or wherever it was. We’re not throwing in jelly donuts every day and pizza pie into the chimpanzee pen. And as a matter of fact, I even went to the zoo down here in Boston, Franklin Park Zoo, and also at the San Diego Zoo. I said, how come you guys don’t give these guys—run down and get a big pizza for these animals? Oh no, it would be animal cruelty. Their systems aren’t geared for this. Well, neither are we. We have an obesity epidemic. We have all these different chronic diseases. Why? We didn’t evolve to eat all this crap that we’re eating today. So what I’ve told many people in these podcasts is that our food science and technology and our society’s technology has evolved so much faster than our biology.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Can you explain to me, in simple terms, the role that exercise is playing in staving off cancer?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, exercise lowers blood sugar, you know, and also lowers glutamine. So, the two fuels that are driving—now, we can’t completely remove glutamine by exercise, that’s for sure. But my late good friend George Cahill published some papers on showing how exercise could actually lower glutamine availability. So, it’s a little bit of a push. But you’re also— When you exercise, you’re burning and you’re not eating a lot of carbs, your mitochondria are burning ketones and the oxygenation from all the exercise is keeping those mitochondria super healthy at their highest level of energy efficiency. You’re building muscle as well, aren’t you? Yeah, well you can build muscle but you’re certainly getting aerobic exercise. Oxygen is coming in and you’re burning ketones, which I already told you is a super fuel. So your body is super healthy. These bodies from the Paleolithic period, these men were jacked. There was no obesity in these people. They had tremendous energy. They’re not dying from the things that are killing us. They’re dying from injuries and infections.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you described this slow and gradual shift in the cell as it moves to this sort of ancient system, It sounded very gradual, so in my head I thought, OK, so does that mean that the cancer is a gradual process that is kind of building up in me or isn’t building up in me based on the lifestyle decisions I’m making and my environmental factors right now? I’m trying to say, does cancer start slowly? Years before you find it in a doctor’s office.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, it is a gradual process, but it can be impacted by several provocative agents from the microenvironment. Lack of exercise. So we’re not exercising nearly as much as our Paleolithic ancestors, bar none, right? We have massive amounts of processed carbs in our diets. We have a lot of emotional stress, mental emotional stress that’s impacting negatively on our biology. We have lack of sleep. Sleep, a lot of us, because we have stresses. You have to have, when you put all of these impactful things together in one person, you can put yourself at risk for cancer, all of which will damage and reduce the efficiency of mitochondria. And also the joy of living, having friends and friendships and this kind of thing reduces stress in a lot of different ways, makes people enjoy getting up and having a nice day rather than being depressed or these kinds of things. You put all this together and you put yourself in a diet and a lifestyle that puts you at risk for damage to oxidative phosphorylation and the transition from one form of energy to a fermentation energy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And what I’m trying to understand, is that a gradual process?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

It’s a gradual transition. You have to be able to do that. And how long does it take for a colon, a group of cells in a crypt of your colon, to transition from one stage to another? You have to be constantly under stress, those cells in that organ. Now, why somebody gets colon cancer, another person gets breast cancer, another person gets bladder cancer, and some person gets a brain cancer, and all these different kinds of cancers. Whatever happened, The process was causing a gradual disruption of oxidative phosphorylation, oxidative respiration, and a gradual transition to a fermentation. Like in the brain, the neurons rarely if ever get cancer, but the glial cells that support neurons, they are usually the source of the origin of cancer in the brain for those kinds of cells. And you can look at different cells and some are more or less prone. And why this guy got lung cancer from smoking cigarettes, this guy got bladder cancer from smoking cigarettes. How did it all start? It all started from a population of cells in one of those organs having a chronic, not instant, a chronic interruption of oxidative energy followed by an upregulation of this fermentation energy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So really we need to be thinking about all the things that have caused dysfunction in the mitochondria. Absolutely. I want to get a list of the key things that are associated with causing this dysfunction.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Okay, carcinogens.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, so carcinogens.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, and you know, there’s many, asbestos, there’s all kinds of chemicals in the environment. You hear about this, oh there’s a whole list of carcinogens. And they put them on the labels on different chemicals. They say carcinogenic potential and whatever you have.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What are the types of things that are carcinogenic that most people don’t realise?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

 Oh, well now we’re talking about microplastics.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

We’re talking about… Is that in part what causes breast cancer? Because I always think about deodorant with breast cancer and… the stuff that we’re kind of lathering onto our hands.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, well, the one that was most interesting was the talcum powder one. How does talcum powder would cause ovarian cancer? Okay, it’s taken up into the urogenital tract and it forms a foci in a part of the ovarian tissue. What’s a foci? A locus, like a collection of material. A foci is an area where, say, talcum materials would be accumulating. And that leads to an inflammatory area of the body. And our immune system comes in to see what’s going on. Our immune system is a healing machine, and they see something that’s not normal. Normally they would clean it up, but they throw cytokines and growth factors on there, leading to damage to mitochondria and dysregulators, and then you get this tumor that starts.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So if I get a talcum powder granule or whatever and it goes into my body, my body then tries to attack it to sort it out and in doing so it creates inflammation which leads to…

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

 damage the mitochondria in a particular group of cells near that foci.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, and this is applicable to, I guess, a lot of different nanoparticles.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, and microplastics, so this now, they’re looking at this. But then we have chemical carcinogens, tetrahydrochloride, there’s all kinds of other things that can actually damage arsenics and these kinds of chemicals, urethane. Anything that could chronically damage a mitochondrion, forcing, over time, forcing it to upregulate the fermentation, the energy without oxygen.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Isn’t this most things? I’m trying to figure out how to live my life.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, well that’s why it was called the oncogenic paradox. But you can avoid that, that’s why I’m saying, if you can keep your mitochondria healthy… How? exercise and reduce consumption of highly processed carbohydrates.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do I need to be avoiding these microplastics as well?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

You know, the problem with microplastics, they’re very ubiquitous. We’re not really sure. We’re just now becoming aware of it. Nobody really knew that before. Look it up. But it could cause small foci in different populations of cells. But, you know, it’s very hard to really chronically damage mitochondria. Mitochondria are a tough organelle. The problem is we chronically abuse it without realizing what we need to do to keep it healthy. So even if you are exposed to chemical carcinogens, even if you are exposed to all these things, but you’re keeping your body as healthy as you possibly can, You could possibly delay or even prevent the damage to the mitochondria even though you are being exposed to this. So it’s actually in your hands. You can actually reduce risk. for cancer by knowing what keeps your mitochondria healthy. Vigorous exercise, fasting, water-only fasting. You know, it’s very hard, but sometimes when we were putting mice on calorie restriction, it was hard to get them to get tumors. Their body was so healthy. This was shown years ago by a couple of scientists in mice, using mice that developed a lot of breast cancer. If you put them on a calorie-restricted diet, the incidence was way, way down. So, cancer is very preventable. It’s a very preventable disorder. It’s just that we’re doing everything we possibly can to induce it in our diet and lifestyle.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

A lot of big institutions believe that cancer is a genetic problem. You believe otherwise?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

The evidence is striking. I mean, it’s not whether you believe, it’s what the data tell us. So, according to the somatic mutation theory of cancer, mutations in the nucleus lead to dysregulated cell growth. That’s the somatic mutation theory. In the mitochondrial metabolic theory, it’s a transition from oxidative phosphorylation to a fermentation metabolism inside the cell. The mutations are largely irrelevant. What do you mean by that? When the mitochondria become defective, they throw out ROS, reactive oxygen species, that are carcinogenic and mutagenic. Whoa, what does that mean? Causing mutations. So a lot of the mutations that we see in the nucleus of the tumor cell that is the subject of the somatic mutation theory, are downstream effects of the dysfunction of the mitochondria. So, the mitochondria is causing a downstream effect, which are mutations, which, according to the somatic mutation theory, are the cause of the dysregulated cell growth. Let me tell you why that’s absolutely untrue. There’s some cancer cells growing out of control that have no mutations, and normally not discussed. Well, how can that be? That’s a challenge to the theory. If the theory says that all cancers have mutations, and you have some cancers that have no mutations, and they’re growing out of control, that should say, well, bell ring one. Thank you. Then the somatic mutation people, people who think this, said, OK, we have a problem here. Not all mutations are the ones that cause the dysregulated, only some. And we have a name for those some. That’s called driver mutation. OK, now it’s a nice term. Because some of those mutations are called passengers. They don’t really do anything. But the drivers are the ones that lead to the dysregulated cell growth. So we should be focusing our attention on these driver mutations. New evidence from the recent scientific literature, can you believe this? They’re taking tissue, normal tissues from patients, different organs and things like this, from not patients, from normal people, no cancer, perfectly healthy, like yourself here. We would take tissue from you and say, oh my Christ, look at that, you got driver mutations in your esophagus and your different parts of your body, you got a driver. But you don’t have a tumor, what’s going on with that? How do you explain that these driver mutations are causing dysregulated cell growth when we have thousands of driver mutations that are there that are not causing dysregulated cell growth? Oh, okay, that’s another problem. The biggest devastating information against the somatic mutation theory is if you take the nucleus from a tumor cell, cleanly take it out of the tumor cell, and you have another normal cell here, you take the nucleus out of the normal cell and you put the tumor cell into that cytoplasm, you get regulated growth, no dysregulated growth. But if I have the normal cell and have a tumor cell, take the tumor nucleus out of there and take the normal nucleus and put it into the tumor cytoplasm, which contains mitochondria, defective mitochondria, dysregulated cell growth. This has been seen over and over and over again.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So just to summarize that, so if you take the tumor nucleus out of the cell and put it into a normal healthy cell, everything’s fine? Everything is fine. But if you take healthy cell nucleus and put it into a tumor cell, you still have the same- Dysregulated cell growth. Tumor growth. Which means that it’s not the nucleus. Absolutely. It’s something else.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

It’s something else. And that’s the mitochondria. And I told you, then you have cancer cells with no mutations. And then you have driver mutations in normal cells that never become cancer. You put all those things together and you have to be a hopeless ideologue to think that cancer is a genetic disease. It’s a silent assumption in the field that cancer is a genetic… Every textbook of biology, cell biology and biochem, cancer is a genetic disease.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why hasn’t people’s opinions changed despite the evidence that you present?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

It’s a very difficult thing. It goes back to when you have one theory replacing another theory. It’s called paradigm shifts. And all in history of science, paradigm shifts have been met with great, great resistance. The clearest one was the Copernican Revolution, when for 1,800 years, Astronomers, our earlier astronomers, thought the Earth was immovable in the center of the solar system. For 1,000, this was Claudius, Ptolemy, Aristotle, and the Bible, and all these. The Earth is immovable, and the sun, and the moon, and the planets all revolve around the Earth. 1,800 years. Even Copernicus was working with these mathematical formulations. His Kep was being constantly confused until, He said, what happens if we put the sun in the center of the solar system and consider the earth as simply another planet that would revolve? All of a sudden, things started to make sense. And Giordano Bruno, a theologian, was put to death for suggesting that Copernicus was right. There was a tremendous resistance on the part of the Roman Catholic Church at that time. And this is the same thing that happened when Louis Pasteur Instead, the germs rather than bad air are the cause of disease. And when Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution came, it’s not special creation. It’s natural selection that can explain this. These were massive paradigm changes in the history of science. And what we’re seeing today is the same thing. The mitochondria is the center of the problem with cancer, not the nucleus. The mitochondria, it’s a mitochondrial metabolic disease. And once you realize that, we’re going to drop these death rates massively in a very number of years for sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So if we take two paths then, if we realize that, that the mitochondria is the center of the dysfunction and ultimately disease in the cell.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

If we go down that path, What impact do you think that’ll have on the cancer statistics over the coming years?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

It’ll drop it massively, OK? I’m not going to say we’ll get rid of cancer completely. But here’s the thing. We may never get rid of it, but we can learn to live with it and keep it at bay if we know that it can’t survive without these two fuels. And you can do a diet and lifestyle that can restrict the availability of those two fuels and keep your mitochondria as healthy as you possibly can.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What if we don’t go down that path, what do you think?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

then you’re going to be right. One out of two people are going to be having cancer. Your statistics are going to be absolutely correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is there anybody that you believe, because you know, when we talk about these subjects, often we think of like big pharma and the incentives and money and follow the money and you’ll figure out why people don’t want change. Is any of that sort of conspiratorial thinking?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

correct in your view? I don’t know if that’s conspiracy. I don’t like conspiracy terms. That’s absurd. I like what are the facts of what we’re looking at.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But do you see a resistance from Big Pharma to entertain this point of view?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

What do you think? I mean, do you think this is, I mean, you’re making a lot of, not you, but people in those industries, the hospital industry is making enormous amounts of money. They’re awarding, we get $7 billion a year for cancer research in the National Cancer Institute, awarding many, many, not all, many grants to look at for gene mutations and all this kind of stuff. And we have drugs that are extremely expensive based on a somatic mutation theory of cancer that are basically not dropping the death rate. As I said, while we’re talking here, we’re going to have 140 people dead from cancer, 1,700 people a year, it’s getting worse and worse. As you said, we’re always running for raising money for cancer research. Where’s all that money going? What are you doing with all that money? No accountability. And then when you look at the scientific advisory committee of all these societies that you’re running for, they all think published papers on cancer is a genetic disease. It’s too hard for the field to accept at this point. It’s too traumatic at what I’m saying. It’s too disruptive to a massive industry at this time. They will come to gradually adjust to what I’m saying. It’s just a matter of time, because we cannot continue this trajectory. It’s immoral what we’re doing to some of these people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I read a stat that said the global incidence of early-onset cancer increased by roughly 80% between 1990 and 2019. That’s in the BMJ oncology. Early-onset cancer is basically patients under the age of 50. And when I think about this, growing up in the UK, whenever there’s a fun run, a charity race, a marathon, whatever it might be, Cancer research gets the money. And to hear that, you know, there’s been so much money invested in cancer research over the last couple of decades, but there’s been an increase of 80% in early onset cancer in the same period. For me, I’m like, this research doesn’t appear to be being very effective.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, as I said, what people don’t do is they never ask, where’s the research go? What kind of research? What are you doing? What is the research? It’s the theory that drives the impetus to do research.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Now, a lot of great stuff has been done on keeping people alive that suffer from cancers, right? Because if you think about the probability of dying from a cancer, I’m assuming that has gone down.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, to some extent it has. There’s two ways of looking at it. It’s called progression-free survival and overall survival. These are the terminologies that are used in the clinical world of cancer, and they represent the approval of drugs through the Food and Drug Administration. If you have a drug that improves progression-free survival—progression-free means it looks like the drug is working on the tumor. Because, you know, the tumor, you can see it, it gets bigger and bigger and more lethal and more lethal. And if I see it not growing nearly as much, I say, wow, look at the—it’s slowing what we call traditional progression, okay? It’s called progression-free survival. And then you have overall survival. So, you have two ways to approve drugs, mostly for cancer, right? How does it work on progression-free survival, and how does it work on overall survival? Well, they stop looking at overall survival. Now, somebody’s going to bark and say, well, you know, bottom line is mostly progression-free, which means that the patients, it looks like the tumor is being effectively managed, but they live only a couple of months longer than they would have if they didn’t use this drug. So, therefore, it’s approved. And that, as opposed to overall survival, you know, you’re only living a two, okay, you’ve lived two and a half extra months, the tumor looked like it was managed pretty well, but your overall survival is this much, but you didn’t see the tumor growing. we’re going to approve that drug. So a lot of the new drugs that we’re giving do a really good job at progression-free survival, but they do a horrible job in keeping people alive much longer, which ultimately is what you want to do. You want overall survival. Let me give you an example. Avastin, Bevacizumab, this is an immoral drug that should never be used on people. It was blocked because it caused colon perforations in women with breast cancer. They still use it on brain cancer. And so in the tumor, you’ve got a tumor. You can see it with PET imaging. Not so much PET. MRI and CAT scan, you can see it there. And it’s looking there. OK. You can see it. Now you give the patient Avastin, which is this anti-angiogenic drug. It’s supposed to stop the abnormal blood vessels, right? They think that the angiogenesis blood vessels is driving the dysregulated growth. It’s the fermentation that’s driving the dysregulated growth, by the way. So all of a sudden, you give the, and the tumor kind of disappears. It doesn’t look like it. Whoa, patient gets all excited. The physician looks and says, look at that. Look at that. Looks like you’re doing well. What it does, what the drug does is it causes the tumors to pop. permeate your entire brain, just like spreading it through your whole brain. You don’t live any longer, but you had this progression free. Look at the tumor. So the patient gets excited because it looks like the tumor is disappearing with this very expensive drug. But what it does is it almost guarantees that that patient will not survive because you spread the tumor cells through the whole brain. So this is why I call it an immoral kind of a thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 But chemotherapy and sort of these radiation therapies, they have proven to keep people alive who otherwise would have died.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

In some cases, it can. And that’s another thing we have to look at. And I work heavily in brain tumors and glioblastomas and things like that. When you irradiate somebody’s brain who has one of these tumors, you free up massive amounts of glucose and glutamine in the microenvironment. And if you look at the survival, when we did survival, looked at survival curves for glioblasts throughout the world, you can’t even design experiments so consistent how fast people will die. It’s like all the different hospitals have the same survival, same survival. What are you doing? Well, we do chemo, we do surgical debulking, temozolomide, and we give steroids, which raise blood sugar, and we irradiate, we irradiate, we irradiate, and everybody’s dead. So, not everybody, but you know, five-year survival is very, very low. Ten-year survival is almost zero.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 But if you’ve got a breast cancer or if you’ve got… This is brain cancer I’m talking about.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

This is freeing up. Now, yes, if you have a circumscribed tumor and it’s not anywhere else, you can come in with a radiation or surgical procedure and essentially cure that patient. But if you have any level of spread or anything like this, that person now – and also if you’re taking a toxic poison into your body like red devil, doxorubicin, they call it red devil, your pee turns red, everything turns red.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is that chemotherapy?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yes, it’s a chemotherapy to kill a small group of cells or maybe a little bit of a spread. But your hair falls out, your body gets brutalized by this. And then if you survive the cancer, and many people do, we have millions and millions of cancer survivors on this planet, but many, many folks in that group suffer from the adverse effects of being poisoned or irradiated or surgically mutilated. I mean, they have to change their whole—and oftentimes the cancer comes back, or they die from cardiovascular disease, or they die from secondary adverse effects of being brutalized with medieval—I call it medieval—approaches to this. Are you kidding me, what they’re doing to cancer patients? So, when we do metabolic therapy, We shrink the tumor down for sure. Then the surgeon can come in and he sees it’s smaller, fewer blood vessels because of the metabolic therapy, and we can take out a greater amount of this. And then we transition back to prevent this tumor from recurring. Metabolic therapy can be used to not only prevent the cancer, but can also be used to treat the cancer. Now, let me tell you, most hospitals, most people say, well, you know, I really want to do things to prevent cancer. Can I do standard of care before I have a tumor? What do you mean? You want to go into a major cancer clinic and have doxorubicin and radiation to your body just in the event that you might get a cancer? This is absurd. But yet when you have cancer, that’s what they do to you, right? But with metabolic therapy, you can use it as both a prevention and a treatment. It’s just that with the treatment, we bring in some more drugs to target the glutamine. We don’t do that on the prevention side.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I was just looking at some stats as you were speaking around this five-year survival rates of a variety of different cancers over time. And it does appear that survival rates of these cancers from breast cancer, prostate cancer, to lung cancer, to leukemias and various melanomas has improved since the 1970s. So the 1970s to the 1990s to 2010s, there’s been an improvement in the survival rate, which I guess is a credit to the research that’s been done. What you’re saying is that the treatments we have still today are horrific.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, and the survivals are not that much greater. It’s not like you’re getting massively longer survivals.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, I mean, and I have to preface that these stats might not be right because this is AI we’re dealing with here. But there’s a 5%, for example, with breast cancer between the 1990s and 2010, there’s just a 5% difference.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

In overall survival? In overall survival. Okay, so your survival, your overall survival is two and a half to three months greater.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I don’t actually have those stats.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

No, but that’s the evidence, the papers that we’re looking at.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So how do we prevent Prevent this then. I’m 32 years old now, so I want to make sure that I live my life in such a way that I limit my chance of cancer. One of the things I always reflect on is the fact that many of the people that I know that have got cancer, breast cancer or other forms of cancer, appear to be remarkably healthy.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, always at the beginning. Not always, but many times the person comes in and says, geez, I just was diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t know I had it. I didn’t feel bad. And then all of a sudden you get treated and they look like death warmed over.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But I’m saying, like, how can healthy people be getting cancer if there’s this sort of central… Well, because, as I said,

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

And we’re seeing this, I’m seeing it in my own, I’m getting more and more emails from young people in their 30s, late 20s, 30s, early 40s, like with colon cancer, breast cancer, and all these kinds of things. But look at our diet and lifestyle situation today. Those things that I’m talking about, lack of exercise, a lot of stress, poor sleep, bad food, all of this kind of stuff impacting parts of our bodies. So what do we do about it though?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

know about it. And then what do we do? So I know now.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

That’s personal choice. I’m not here to take pieces and jelly doughnuts off the market, for sure, or a breakfast here. I love that stuff, too. But the question is, I don’t eat it every day. And I know if I do, it’ll kill me. So yeah, skipping meals, water only occasionally. There’s a lot of things you can do to keep your mitochondria healthy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, so tell me what those things are.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Just exercise. You look like you’re a pretty healthy guy. Yeah, I go to the gym. You don’t look morbidly obese to me. Not yet. Not yet.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Well, that’s important because you don’t ever want it yet. We won’t be in America too long.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, well, and listen, it’s not just the United States. We were kind of like the first ones to plow that field, but it’s starting to spread everywhere. I think in China they have the most 200 million obese people in China now.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So should I be on a keto diet then?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Here’s what we did, okay. We developed a glucose ketone index calculator at Boston College, all right, my students and I, because we were trying to work with cancer patients’ blood sugar and ketones independently of each other. We had a ketone meter and we had a blood glucose meter. So we were monitoring ketones by itself and glucose by itself. And we worked with a very nice woman from America who lived in Nice, France, who since passed away from a brainstem tumor. It was very, very difficult. We kept her alive very long, but eventually we didn’t know what we know now. But she got into an argument for a handicapped parking spot with her neighbor upstairs, and her blood sugar went through the roof. She ran upstairs, and she took her blood sugar. And she says, oh my god, the tumor’s going to grow. I said, what’s your ketones? And she says, oh, it’s still 2 and 1⁄2 millimolar. Well, that’s still pretty high. Usually it’s very, very low. It’s very high. So my students and I, we said, you know, this is too traumatic to try to measure these two independently. Why don’t we make a singular number, divide the glucose in millimolar in the blood by the ketone in millimolar in the blood. Now you get this number that’s much more stable. And it allows the cancer patient to know that if I keep this zone at 2.0 and below, my tumor cells aren’t going to be able to grow very fast. I did this for the brain cancer, right? Now it’s being used for all cancers. And now it’s being used for guys like yourself who just want to stay healthy. Because what it is essentially is a quantitative determination of you’re in the paleolithic zone or not. Oh, so if I’m at 2.0, like my friend Dominic D’Agostino, he’s always down in these zones. He’s a Paleolithic man living in modern society. What’s a Paleolithic man? That’s how our ancestors were during the Paleolithic period.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, so he’s got the right balance of glucose and ketones in his blood.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Like we did when we were hunting mammoths and buffaloes and these kinds of things, when we were hunter-gatherers in the thousands of years of our existence as a species, tens of thousands of years. He is in that zone. Is he in keto? Yeah, well, that’s what the low GKI is. That means you’re at a level of keto. Yes, he doesn’t eat a lot of carbohydrates in his diet. He eats leafy vegetables and a lot of meat and this kind of thing, sparingly on fruits. Like grapefruits, we learned from the epilepsy field, grapefruits provide a tremendous amount of vitamin C and do not spike glucose. That’s very interesting. So you can have certain fruits that can keep you in this metabolic zone of pain. I call it the Paleolithic zone, which is the way we evolved when there was no cancer in our existence.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When people hear that, they might start jumping on the paleo diet. I don’t even know what the paleo diet is.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Not a paleo diet. It’s diets that are low in carbohydrates, okay? Mediterranean diets. People say to me, they’re told, what should I eat? Should I eat this and that? Normally, you would eat foods that have very low glycemic index, which means the speed with which glucose is released, like a banana, very high in glycemic index. You eat a banana, your blood sugar immediately spikes. Many fruits are like that. But you want foods that keep a low steady GKI. Now, I built that calculator for brain cancer patients initially, then we realized it’s powerful for all cancers. We put the cancer patient in the low glucose ketone index, we get them down in there, then we come in with the glutamine targeting drugs to kind of polish off these tumors or put them in even a more dormant state. But now we’re finding all these young kids, like yourself, all these 30, 20-year-olds with your GKI, I mean, they’re out there weightlifting and they’re looking at their G, they don’t have cancer. They’re just excited to see if they can get into this paleolithic zone by themselves. And that, yes, that will prevent cancer, because you can’t get cancer if your mitochondria are healthy. If you’re in a paleolithic zone where our ancestors rarely have ever got cancer, then you’re back in this, oh, you mean to tell me I can’t eat this and I can’t eat that? What does it do to your GKI? Oh, it makes it go up. Well, don’t eat that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So you did a study on dogs, a dog with a tumor. Yes. Can you tell me about that study?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

It was a woman came to me. And this is what I say, you don’t have to have a PhD in biochemistry to understand some of the things. This woman had no degree whatsoever. She just heard about what we did to these mice. And she did the same thing to her dog. It was a pit bull. And at age seven years old, it had a big mast cell tumor on its lip. So she listened to my YouTube video over and over. She said to me, I just kept listening. She says, I got some raw chicken. She says dogs, wolves evolve to eat chickens. So she got some chicken, chopped up the chicken. She cut the calories. She found some dog food calculator to how much calories the dog was getting. She cut the calories. The dog lost only 5% of its body weight. She got pollock fish oil, raw eggs, and cut all the calories. Everything was all natural for this dog. And all of a sudden, we have the pictures. You can see them if you saw the picture. Big tumor on its lip. The veterinarian said, this dog is going to survive. You have to give him chemo and radiation and surgery and all this kind of stuff. And it’s going to cost a lot of money. The dog’s going to have diarrhea. She didn’t want any part of that. So she said, well, let’s just try this metabolic thing. And she’s kept all the records and the pictures, and what she did, and how much she gave the dog, and all this. So I was able to get all that information from her, put my friend Lauren Nations, who is a veterinarian, on the paper. Because I said, what, biology guy at Boston College is telling you how to manage cancer in a dog. We’ve got to have some veterinarian out here to validate, to make sure he’s there. And he looked at the pictures, and we looked at all the things. It disappeared. So what happened? was the dog eventually died of heart disease at 15 and a half years of age. So essentially, that’s the only—when people say, well, metabolic therapy cure cancer, I say metabolic therapy is never considered a cure for cancer. It’s an effective non-toxic management for cancer. But in the case of that dog, it appeared to work. to cure the dog, but that’s the only one I’ll say, oh, he’s going to say a cure cannot. That dog died from old age from a heart attack. And we did it with a brain tumor guy, Pablo Kelly, who just passed away, unfortunately, from a surgical. He had a major cerebral hemorrhage after his surgery from Devon, England. You know Devon, England? That’s where I’m from. Are you from Devon? Yeah. Oh, wow. Well, Pablo was there. He just passed away, fortunately. We were talking to him the day before he passed away. Pablo. Pablo Kelly. So he was from Devon, England, had a glioblastoma, which is the worst of the worst. They said, and he’s all over your newspapers there in Devon. He was always sending me articles from England. Man rejects standard of care. So he had this glioblastoma, and they took the tissue out. Which is brain cancer. Yeah, brain, the worst of the brain cancers. They took the tumor out and they said, oh, it’s inoperable, inoperable. But if you do radiation and chemo, you might live nine, maybe 12 months at the most. Well, Pablo came from a family of like, we don’t dabble in this kind of medicine. We’re more holistic kind of people. So he emailed me, this was in 2014, and said, I want to try this metabolic thing. So he rejected chemo and radiation. And they said it wasn’t surgically capable of being completely removed anyway. So he did this. I gave him the information that I give to everybody. And this was way back before we knew a lot of what we now know. And I said, this poor guy, he doesn’t want it. And they said, you’re going to be dead. They browbeat him. They tried to force him to put that radiation mask on. They hacked his beard off, all this kind of stuff. And he just jumped up. He said, I can’t do this stuff. So he didn’t take any steroids. He didn’t take any radiation. He didn’t take any chemo. He just did the metabolic therapy. And he’s on English television or things with all of his paleo diet, which is actually a very low-carbohydrate diet. He had the avocados there. He had the fish oil there. He had this different stuff. Two or three years go by, he emails me. I said, Jesus, Pablo, I thought you would have been dead. You’re still alive? What’s going on with that? So he calls me up, and he says, you know, I went in for a CAT scan. The doctors are still surprised that he’s alive. And they said, this tumor is still there, and it’s growing. And they think they can cut it out now. So he was three years on just metabolic approach. He didn’t take any glutamine inhibitors, which was really remarkable. So anyway, he asked me, and I have physician friends that are radiologists that can look at it. We measured it when it was first diagnosed in 2014. And then we saw it did become a little bigger. And now the surgeon said, I think I can get it. It looks more resectable. Here it was inoperable. Now it becomes resectable. So he took it out. And Pablo recovered really well. And the surgeon says, I think I got it all. Wow. And Pablo is measuring his glucose ketone index with our ketone monitor. So I had every day, sometimes two and three, five years of data on Pablo Kelly. Can you believe this? So anyway, Pablo thinks he’s cured because the surgeon, all of a sudden, he goes back to his kind of weak, weak ways. And you can see that his GKI goes up. And all of a sudden, the tumor starts to show up again. Puts the fear of God back into him. Goes back on a more restrict condition. Another three years goes by. And this time, the tumor is growing slowly, very slowly. Don’t forget, glioblastomas kill you very quickly. With standard of care, you can barely get out of at his age. If you can get two years, you’re doing really good. So anyway, now he’s three, and he’s got six years out. And he says, you know, it’s still back. I’ve got to go in. So this is second debulking. First debulking goes off, gets back on. Another second debulking. Another three years goes by, he has a third debulking. Can you believe this? A debulking? A debulking is the cutting the tumor out. It’s the surgical removal of this tumor. But he’s never had radiation or chemo or any of the kinds of what we call standards of care. And now, I talked to him a couple of weeks ago, and he was doing really, really good. He had the third removal. And we were laughing with myself and Dr. Duryea and my associates. He says, yeah, can you imagine? I’ve had now three operations on a previously inoperable tumor. So we were saying, wow, they got that one wrong, didn’t they, Pablo? And they kept wanting to irradiate him and do all this stuff. And he said, no, no, I’m going to keep doing this. And so we were speaking to him. And he’s now 10 years. The tumor was diagnosed in August 2014. And he passed away August 2024. They tried to go in and get the last bit of tumor out of his brain. He came out, we talked to him. Thumbs up, smiling, talking like crazy. Six hours later, cerebral hemorrhage and he dies. So, he didn’t die from the cancer, he died from a surgical problem with the surgery. So, he was a—you talk about long-term survivors. You rarely survive two years with a glioblastoma. The fact that he was out ten years, and if he hadn’t had that last bit of surgery, the guy would have still been alive. Because he was talking like you and I are talking. This is a guy who has a terminal. So, I said to Pablo, I said, you could outlive me. I said, we’re all terminal to some extent, right? We’re never—all of us aren’t going to live to—I said, sure, he was a young guy. He was only 20, 22, or 23 when he was diagnosed. He was in his 30s now when he passed away. Ten years, so he’s 33, 34 years old. And I said, you know, I could be dead before you. And we were laughing, and we had a good time. And the next thing I know, I get an email from his wife. He said, Pablo is on— I said, what the hell happened? What happened to this poor guy? And it wasn’t the cancer. So I don’t know how long he would have lived, how many more things. But what I’m saying, oh, he’s an anecdote. Well, listen, if I had a drug that did what metabolic therapy did and I could get more people like Pablo, are you kidding me? They’d be running all over the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And when you say metabolic therapy, you mean the combination of the calorie-restrictive, ketogenic approach?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yes. Avoiding. Well, first of all, you’re avoiding things that are going to kill you. The radiation is going to kill you. For many people. Not all people. Okay, everybody say women. Well, listen, go have people look at the data themselves for crying out loud. And you can see how long you’re going to live. He didn’t do what they grab everybody in. What did he do specifically? He didn’t take radiation or chemo. And he brought his glucose ketone index down to the 2.0 zone and kept it low. And he took some supplements and a few things here and there. But he wasn’t really targeting the glutamine like we thought. We found now certain parasite medications will be effective in targeting glutamine. So we’re doing all non-toxic strategies to manage cancer. You don’t have to be brutalized by the system if you know what to do and how to do it. The problem is most of the poor oncologists never heard of what I’m talking about. The stuff I’m telling you right now, they never heard of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The risk is someone gets cancer that’s listening to this, or someone has cancer that’s listening to this. I mean, statistically, there’s a lot of people listening to this that have cancer right now. And they’re speaking to their doctor, and their doctor is saying, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, et cetera, et cetera.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

And glucose has nothing to do with the tumor. Eat whatever you want.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, and so what do you say to those people who’ve just got a diagnosis and their doctors are saying, right, listen, this is pretty severe. We’re going to suggest that you take chemotherapy. You’re not telling them not to take chemotherapy, are you?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

I’m not telling them that. And what we found is that when you are in nutritional ketosis with a glucose ketone index of 2.0 or below, my colleagues that we work with in Istanbul, Turkey, were able to show that chemotherapies at much lower dosages can be even more therapeutically powerful when you’re in nutritional ketosis. So you don’t have to get rid of a lot of these different procedures that we have today. I’m just saying radiation for brain cancer. I’m not saying radiation for lung or some of the other cancers. Because if you can shrink those tumors down and make them very weak and vulnerable, a surgical procedure, a radiation procedure, even low-dose chemo could come in. And even immunotherapy. If you took a big tumor and shrunk it down to a small nub, and it’s resistant to a lot of the things, they all have to share something in common for them to survive this path. That might be an immunotherapy could come in because they’re going to target whatever all of them have together, and you could possibly get rid of it that way.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m thinking of a friend of mine that has been diagnosed with brain cancer, brain tumour. And this is one of the most, you know, it’s a woman in her 40s or 50s, trying to keep her anonymous as possible, who is just the most fit athletic person that I know, eats amazingly well, is literally known for exercise. And I’d go, how? How is it possible that someone who I would probably say is fitter than I am, if you looked at their sort of metabolic health, has got a severe brain tumour?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, they can stay healthy for, and I’m not saying everybody who has, and it depends on what kind of a tumor it is as well. Is it a glioblastoma, oligodendroglioma, you know, peanut, there’s a lot of different kinds of tumors.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Well, I know that it’s not growing necessarily, but it’s big and it’s in the brain and they’re going to remove it for a surgical operation.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, if they can, what we always suggest for the brain cancer, if you do metabolic therapy up front, and I’ve had surgeons tell me this, you can shrink it down. Because one of the, it’s angry, it’s an angry thing, right? And you can see some slight invasion. If you can shrink that down so that it’s more circumscribed, now the surgeon can look at it and go, oh my God. We know many, many scientific publications. The more you can debulk, that’s called the removal of the tumor, debulking, the longer the patient will survive. The evidence is massive to support that. But, you know, with a lot of these brain tumors, you don’t get it all, and there’s always some little piece that remains, and when you irradiate, you explode the ability of the cells to ferment energy, and it’s very hard to kill them. But if you can get the majority of it out and then transition the patient back into a metabolic state, keeping the pressure on those tumor cells, you can remain healthy like Pablo. I mean, these guys can

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And what you found in mice is that when ketogenic diet was combined with a hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the average survival time was increased by roughly 80%.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, even more sometimes now. But okay, so why do we do hyperbaric oxygen, right? That’s the question. What’s going on with hyperbaric oxygen? Why is this like a good thing? It works best when the patient and the mouse is in nutritional ketosis. Okay, so look, we have a tumor. We irradiate that tumor. How does the radiation kill the tumor cells? It hits oxygen, blows up, and it causes a reactive ROS. And it’s like stepping on a landmine. It blows the tumor up, right? So cancer cells protect themselves, even though they make a lot of rust. They’re this close to death anyway. But they have a very powerful antioxidant system. And interestingly enough, besides causing the dysregulated growth, The glucose and the glutamine also protect them to some extent from the ROS that they’re making. Can you believe this? The ROS. ROS. ROS. Reactive oxygen species that are carcinogenic and mutagenic. So they destroy our proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. They’re disruptive molecules. So radiation will cause a ROS in the microenvironment. ROS that’ll blow up and kill cells, normal and tumor cells. But if you want to selectively kill tumor cells with ROS, not to cause your hair to fall out, your gums to bleed, and all this crazy stuff, you take the patient, you put him in nutritional ketosis, and you say he’s got low GKI, then you go into hyperbaric oxygen, which dissolves oxygen directly into your blood now. It’s better than just breathing 100% oxygen, because you can actually dissolve oxygen in the bloodstream. then you’re taking away the two fuels that protect the tumor and you’re giving it internal ROS, which kills the tumor internally, only to the tumor cell, not to your surrounding tissues. So you’re killing, selectively killing tumor cells without collateral damage to the rest of your body. As a matter of fact, the rest of your cells are getting super healthy because they’re burning ketones and pure oxygen. Unbelievable. How do we measure if our… Can you believe this? I can’t even believe I’m saying this stuff myself. You really got to know the biochemistry, and you have to know the physiology of your own body, and you have to understand evolutionary biology.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Most people just aren’t that intelligent, including me. It’s not intelligence. Most people kind of want things, sort of simple principles that they can live by and implement.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

And also quick and easy. Yeah, of course. Okay, they don’t want to do what I’m talking about it. Because it might be, oh, the other thing, let me tell you one thing and remember it. If you do metabolic therapy, success rides heavily on your shoulders. You’re not sitting there like some mannequin and some guy’s poisoning or radiating you. To make metabolic therapy work, you are the one doing the GKI. You’re the one. It’s your soul. You’re responsible for your existence on this planet. You’re going to put your precious soul in the hands of someone who has less of a knowledge about the problem than you might.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

As an entrepreneur, I’m always looking for ways to connect and to create, and that’s why I decided to launch the Conversation Cards. I turned to Shopify, who also sponsored this podcast, and Shopify made it so easy to set up an online store and reach all of you, no matter where you are in the world. I remember the challenges we faced when we first launched the Diary of a CEO conversation cards. Managing inventory, ensuring a seamless checkout process, and reaching our audience. Shopify stepped in and made everything so straightforward and efficient. It was like having an entire team of experts by our side, allowing us to focus on creating content and connecting with you. What I love about Shopify is, no matter how big you intend to grow your business, they give you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. And to say thank you for listening to this podcast, we’re giving you a trial, which is just $1 a month, and you can sign up by going to shopify.com slash Bartlett. The link is in the description below. Could you be predisposed genetically to cancer?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, that’s where those germline mutations, but you can manage that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Because people think, you know, my grandmother had breast cancer, my mother had breast cancer, so, you know… They live in a common environment, too.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

It’s not like you’re… Like, you know, to prove that, you and all the siblings would have to be raised in a different environment, different countries, different lifestyles, and then see if you all got cancer at the same time, under all these different conditions, that’s definitely genetic. That’s like Huntington’s disease, Tay-Sachs disease, or these kinds of things, where they’ll manifest regardless of the environment.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So are you saying to me that I should, as a 32-year-old man that’s cancer-free, God willing, thank God, touch wood, I should calorie restrict myself to keep my mitochondria healthy and my metabolism healthy now? I should be in a sort of calorie-restricted state?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

You know, I say it’s good to visit the state. Our Paleolithic ancestors had no choice. There wasn’t a donut shop on every corner. There wasn’t pizzas. There weren’t the kinds of highly processed carbohydrate foods available to them.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So should I be fasting? Should I be doing keto?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

You know, I don’t want to tell you what you should or should not do. I’m not a physician here. I’m a scientist. I study what causes these things and I study how to manage them. You have to read what I’m saying and you have to come to your own decisions about how you want to conduct your life. I’ve given you information. What’s your view on fasting? Fasting is a powerful way to get your body into nutritional ketosis, but it ain’t easy. Try doing it. You try doing it and see how easy it is. It ain’t easy, right? But that’s why we developed this procedure where if you go, rather than going cold turkey and say, well, today I’m going to have a big, I’m going to eat as much as I can, and then tomorrow, okay, you can go the way I can. It’s the second, third days when you start to really know what the hell is going on, believe me. I’ve tried it, it ain’t easy. That’s why we developed a zero carb diet for 14 days, 10 to 14 days. Just zero, you can eat meat, fish, chicken, whatever you want, but just don’t eat any bread, pasta, this kind of thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

On keto, how do we get into that sort of ketosis state that people often talk about?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Measure your glucose ketone index. With the Keto-Mojo meter, you can buy it from Amazon. Okay. Okay, you can buy it. Now, don’t forget, they get a free Libra meter now for the blood. They’re working on ketone blood meters, but it’s not there yet. Right now, the Keto-Mojo or some other Keto meters, where you prick your finger like a diabetic, You take a glucose strip and you put it on the blood and you put it into the machine, it tells you what your glucose is. Squeeze your finger a little bit more, take the ketone strip, touch it to the blood, put it in the meter, it gives you the ketone value. Push the button, GKI comes right up. Okay. Okay, very simple. Everybody can buy it from Amazon, get the meter, buy the consumables, and then they can test it. This is what Pablo, this is what all the cancer patients, the ones who really want to get into metabolic ketosis.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I think I’ve tried keto before, and I say think because I didn’t measure my keto levels, so I was assuming I did.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah, no, it’s really, people say, well, I haven’t eaten, you know, I’m in keto. How do you know? Well, I blew into this thing and the bulb came on, I peed on a strip, it looked like it was ketosis. They are indirect measures. The most accurate is the blood measure.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s hard to stay in that state for most people, right?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Because the temptations in our society are so strong. Paleolithic man had no choice. That was his state. That’s all he knew for thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. That’s all he knew. He didn’t say, let me go down to get a big jelly-filled donut down at the end of the river there. No, there’s none of that. He had to live in that state. Now we have so many temptations, all the things that we are biologically clear for. When you see obesity, that’s evolution in action. They are the descendants of our long ancestors that could hold on to energy so efficiently. We were an energy-starved species for the majority of our existence on the planet. So anything we ate would be very little waste. We never pee out glucose. Glucose is converted to fat and we store energy as fat. So those guys are energy-efficient human beings. Now all of a sudden we find ourselves with everything. That’s evolution in action, man. You’re allowing to see how we can store energy so efficiently. Because our ancestors lived through such environmental forcing. We had famines. We had long treks. Our body could store energy so efficiently. Because we had to store what little we could get from the environment.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Now we’ve got 300 million Americans in this food environment where when they walk out their front door, they see it’s a Dunkin’ Donut. They can lie in bed and order a Dunkin’ Donut to their front door in 10 minutes.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

You don’t even have to un-ask the car. They can’t get through the window. No energy expenditure, energy in.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So, you know, giving them this information might be fairly futile because the temptation… Okay, well, I’m not here to tell people, again, I’m not here to tell people what they should or should not do.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

I’m just here to explain, like, why do we have all this? It’s not mystery. It’s all biological evolution. You understand biological evolution? Almost everything that I’m talking about makes perfect sense. And unfortunately, that’s not part of our scientific literacy anymore. So we need what? Discipline? Discipline is important. Discipline is important. You know, every major religion had a point of fasting, whether you’re Islamic, Judaism, or whatever. Catholicism, Hinduism, whatever. They always had some sort of fasting. Why do you do fasting? Because you want to purify your body. You want to become closer to God. You want to feel in control. And if you do it with prayer, it’s even better. So there was a reason for doing all that. And people realized the ancients knew this kind of thing. But we don’t do that anymore. We don’t go 40 days without food like Jesus did in the deserts, but a human being, you could absolutely do that. I know because I can look at your weight, I can look at your size, and I can pretty much tell you how long you can go before you died. And how do I know that? Because George Cahill, a good friend, late George Cahill, ran the Joslyn Diabetes Center. And he evaluated people that were just water-only fasting until death, and some of those constant maize prison camps and things. So he was able to know how long you could go. Now, what about Angus Barberi went 377 days without food. George Cahill would fast some of these obese people for 250, 300 days.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What happens inside their body?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

They’re burning fat. So what happens is you burn fat. OK, liver stores a lot of bones, store the minerals. You can get minerals from your bones. You can get a lot of fat storage.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Vitamins are stored in fat, a lot of vitamin D. Outside of the weight loss, what’s going on in, you know, we said religious people used to fast to get closer to God, which seems to me to point to some sort of cognitive change.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yes, and that’s from burning ketones. When you burn ketones, I said in the brain, when your brain starts shifting to ketones, your energy, the bang for the buck for each calorie that comes in from a ketone body, increases the efficiency of oxidative phosphorylation. So you’re more focused? Massively. And you know, this is why our ancestors, if you are dependent on killing some animal for your survival, and you are out on the hunt, you are focused. Because if you’re not focused, you’re going to starve to death. So every sense organ in our body is super jacked when you’re in these ketotic states. So, and these guys walking around with headphones, listening to, you know, all this. I mean, this is like depriving ourselves of the natural ways of our ancestry. Don’t forget, we’re not just—you and I are not just here over the last, you know, 100, 300, 400 years. We are the descendants of members that are same as us, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago. They just didn’t have the technology that we have today. But if you could bring a Paleolithic man from, say, 500,000 years ago and you gave him a bunch of donuts and told him, he would die and went to heaven. You mean to tell me I don’t have to go out and kill the elk anymore? They’re going to hand me the food right through the window. Of course he’s going to do that. You go in the cave and you throw a bunch of jelly-filled donuts into a bunch of cavemen who have been chewing on the half-eaten rat or something. You think they’re not going to eat those jelly donuts? They have some chimpanzees live with a family down in Florida. I know there’s some YouTube thing. The chimps, they’re eating the food with the family. And then they give jelly sandwiches to the chimps. They’re banging on the table. You’d think they were going to go crazy. Chimpanzees loving the jelly sandwiches. Do you have kids? Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 What advice would you give to your children, if they’re listening to this now, about how to prevent their chance of getting sick from cancer or these other… Well, they’d probably say, well, Dad, how come you don’t do a lot of the things?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

First of all, I’m not telling… I told you, I don’t tell anybody what to do or how they do it. I’m just telling you the science behind why things work. Yeah, my children, my two sons, they’re all very, very successful. And they said, if we ever got cancer, we would be doing the metabolic therapy, if we were to ever get cancer. And I said, just keep exercising and do what you can do, the best you can in our environment. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m eating a jelly donut. I’m drinking beer. I’m drinking whiskey. Why? Because I like it, but I’m not going to be doing it all the time. I’m going to eat pizza, sure, but I’m not going to be not doing it. I do intermittent fasting. I don’t eat for 18, 20 hours at a time. I do a lot of exercise over at the university, the gym and the facilities that we have. But I understand. And then if I were to get cancer, I would have to bite the bullet and do what I know works, as much as it wouldn’t be pleasurable. But it would be certainly a better alternative than being irradiated and poisoned.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m telling you that. If that has brought your conviction to the point that you’re so convinced that the real issue is this sort of metabolic dysfunction, Why aren’t you optimizing your life to be sort of metabolically perfect?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, because I live in the same society you do. Yeah. Okay. And fortunately, yes, our technology has improved significantly. You know, I’m not a monk. I’m not going to be in some monastery, you know, chanting something. I am a member of this society just as you are, and I enjoy the things that we have to offer us to make our lives a little bit more pleasurable. There’s nothing like sitting down over a nice meal and having a discussion with some wine and enjoying it. Enjoy the moment, but not to be locked into that kind of diet and lifestyle all the time. It puts you at risk.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

There’s an election going on in the United States at the moment, Trump versus Kamala Harris. If you won the election, and you became President of the United States and you had to introduce some regulations or some laws around food and all of these kinds of things, what would you do?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Well, I think, you know, you’re talking about a food industry, you’re talking about a multi dimensional economy, I would not, again, you don’t want government to tell you what you should do. You should make the choices, but you have to recognize are there choices and what are these choices. Right now we’re not seeing or understanding how things harm people. If we have an obesity epidemic and that would put you at risk for all these horrific chronic diseases, why do they not know that?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 We introduced some regulation in the UK regarding smoking, so you can’t smoke inside anymore.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

But you see, your secondhand smoke can impact negatively the person sitting next to you. This obese person’s personal choice to be obese is not going to make you obese or sick. So this is a different kind of a situation. That has to come from internal to the person. And they have to be concerned with their own health.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What about drugs, though? Like, cocaine is not legal, so why can’t they intervene to say you can’t have Dunkin’ Donuts? Because they’re both, you know, going to harm the individual.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

I think you’d get a revolution if you can’t eat a Dunkin’ Donut. You’re not going to get a revolution if you can’t have cocaine. You try to go down here in Brooklyn and take away all these donuts from people. You know, you’re going to see they’re going to go. You know, it’s like, it’s personal choices. I mean, I like Dunkin’ Donuts. I mean, I like the coffee especially. But you can go to a donut shop and get some of these crullers and jelly fills and honey dipped. Are you kidding me? These things are delicious. You ever get these blueberry muffins? You tremble when you eat some of this stuff. And I’m not going to take that away from me. But if I want one, I’m not going to be, oh, every day I got to eat. No, I just don’t eat it. On the weekend, I might get one. And even sometimes two or three weeks, months go by before I’ll get one. You know, but when you get it, man, you enjoy it. You really love it. Are you hopeful? I am very hopeful. Because when the science comes, you can’t suppress the truth. It’s going to come out. The evidence, the scientific evidence is there. I’m documenting this scientific, and it’s based on the shoulders of Otto Warburg. Are you kidding me? I mean, this was a giant in the field of biochemistry. It’s not like I made this stuff up. I’m just extending what he has done to a new dimension and putting it into a practical application, which he had never done. So it’s just an extension of the knowledge base over this time. Why do you care so much? Why do I care so much? You know, I’m not in it for the money. You know what I’m in it for? I want to see the scientific principles substantiated. If you know that you can keep these people alive at a higher quality of life based on the knowledge of the science that’s doing that, that’s gratification, man. It’s gratification to know that these, because you were right on understanding the mechanism of the problem. And if you say, you know, if we do it the way, we’re writing a big treatment protocol as we speak, it’s under review, a really comprehensive treatment protocol, and we institute that in the clinic, and for glioblastoma patients and these advanced cancers, they’re not living a few extra months, they’re living several years longer. Why? Because you knew the science. What’s wrong with that? That’s gratification. You don’t have to make a billion dollars on that. All you have to know is that all those folks are living longer because you understood the science that was put into practical application. What’s wrong? Our research is supported by philanthropy and private foundations. That money allows me to do these experiments, to test what I’m testing on preclinical models, and then we translate it back into the clinic directly. And we see, like Pablo Kelly, he should have been done years and years ago. He lived all those years extra. He’s had a wife and he’s got kids. He didn’t have to have his sperm frozen. He didn’t have to have any of that stuff done. What’s wrong with that? I’m seeing people that should have been dead a long time ago, and they’re still alive. And they’re saying, I’m doing fine. I get calls from people, jeez, I thought that guy would have been a goner. He’s still alive. He’s doing well. I said, that keeps me going because it tells me that we’re on the right path. This is a solvable problem. This cancer can be dropped significantly. You can take away the fear. People now put it on their shoulders. I know what to do, how to do it. I’m going to follow this. Will it work for everybody? No, but it will help a lot of people, much more than what we have today. But it’s paradigm change, massive paradigm change. So they will come to know. It’s just a matter of time. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I ain’t going anywhere. I’m continuing to do this. I’m going to get better and better results, and we’re going to keep pushing. I’ve published these case reports in the scientific literature. Let the scientific field make their decision on the results from these papers.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And if you are to succeed, what happens?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

People improve. I’m not going to live forever. But I know that what I’ve done with following Otto Warburg and cleaning up the misconceptions and misunderstanding of why he was stalled when the field ran off chasing genes, we’ve got to bring it back on track. It’s a metabolic problem with metabolic solutions. So that will help a lot of people. But it’s also going to change a lot of way people are thinking about this. But I can tell you, they want to open clinics. I get calls from Asia, Africa, South America. They want to open clinics. People are being brutalized by a system that’s not working. Don’t forget, besides the terrible financial, personal, physical toxicity, people are going bankrupt. Their marriages are falling apart because they can’t pay for the expensive drugs on these cancer things. And they die and the bills are passed on to their loved ones. This is immoral stuff.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is there a particular case study that’s broken your heart more than any others?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Trudy DuPont, we built a glucose-ketone index calculator on her. We’re still devastated by Pablo’s loss. A guy that I’ve known for 10 years worked him through, and then all of a sudden he gets a cerebral hemorrhage and dies. He was our poster child for how long you could live with a glioblastoma on metabolic therapy, but he didn’t die from the cancer. Yeah, there’s some others that we wish they could have lived a little bit longer with appropriate help. What I find is that sometimes within the family there’s a lot of And the guy, he says, I really want to do what you’re doing. But my wife and kids say, I’m foolish to do that. So it’s still a very—we’re in a very early stage of this. We haven’t really worked it out into an effective standard yet. It will come. And the other members of the family get super help. When they all work together and they do it, everybody says, I never felt so healthy in my life. Guy Tannenbaum had advanced prostate cancer. He wrote a book, and he’s on the web. And he had hypertension, high blood pressure, overweight, obesity, everything. And then he does several 18-day water-only fasts, got himself. Everything, all these things went away. His diabetes went away, his hypertension, high blood pressure, and the cancer can’t be found. So is he cured? I have no idea. But he’s managed? Yes, he’s managed. And he’s healthier. So what’s wrong with that? Isn’t that ultimately what medicine wants to do? Keep people alive longer and a healthier quality of life? How many more do we need? They say, oh, that’s a fluke. That’s a fluke. That’s a fluke. That’s a fluke. That’s a fluke. How many damn flukes do you want?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

If there’s someone listening now, and I’m sure there’s going to be many thousands and tens of thousands of people listening, that are currently battling cancer, have early stage diagnoses.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

I know. I feel bad about this because people say, oh, I want to do metabolic therapy. Where can I go? And they go to their local hospital and get slapped out. There’s no evidence. Everything that should come out of my mouth has never been taught to me in medical school.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So what do you say to those people?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

I say, I’m sorry that the medical establishment has not come to recognize what I’m saying. And then I tell them, the change has to be coming from the people. It ain’t going to come from the top medical schools. They are doing what they’re doing. The status quo is very profitable. The status quo is very effective for these people. But it’s not helping the cancer patient as well as it can. And don’t forget, we’re not throwing out all this stuff. We’re just asking people to know how to use the tools we have in a better way. We don’t have to throw out immunotherapies, radiation. We don’t have to throw out toxic poisons. We just have to know better how to use it when the patient is in this new state. And the data will prove it. But who’s going to do that? Who’s going to do that? The doctor says, I’d love to do this, but I’m going to lose my license if I do it. What’s going on with that? They wrote the standard of care as if it were ingranted. It can’t be changed. No, it should be flexible. When new evidence comes up, I don’t believe your evidence. What number do you not believe? What piece of science do you not believe on this? Well, I haven’t read it. You can’t be right when 99% of the world says it’s this way, and you’re saying it’s something different. That’s confirmation bias. You’re not looking at the numbers. And then when they get cancer, you come to, hey, what can you do for me? You know, it’s like that. But yes, it has to change. It will change because we’re on the momentum to move it. People are coming to know this. And once the change happens, it’s going to be like a major, major change. And people are going to have to just readjust.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Thomas, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they’re going to be leaving it for. And the question that’s been left for you is, imagine the end of your life. Your closest friends and family are at your funeral. What do you imagine or hope they say about you?

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

He changed the course of cancer treatment for the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It. That’s it. Dr. Thomas Seyfried. That is exactly what you’re doing. And I think that’s an extremely You know, I can’t even find a word that describes the profundity of such a mission because so many people are struggling with cancer as if it is this sort of opaque black box of a disease that strikes us at random and picks on people like roulette and debilitates their lives out of the blue. And having more information out there about the root causes of these issues turns the lights on and allows us to go in search of better solutions to what has always been a really, really complex, hard to understand disease. Your work runs almost entirely, I believe, on philanthropic donations, right? That’s right.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

So that’s people that… They make donations to both my university, Boston College, which is a Jesuit university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. And we follow the Jesuit philosophy of service to others predominantly, and private foundations.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So if someone wants to make a donation, where do they go? Do they go to your website? I know there’s a donation button there.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

They go primarily to our university. On my university biology webpage, there’s a donation button. And Travis Christopherson’s Foundation for Metabolic Cancer Therapies, which is a 503 foundation, he supports our research through philanthropic donations to his foundation.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I would urge anyone that wants to support your mission to go to your university website. There’s a donation button there, which I saw earlier on.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Click that button and they can make a donation. That’s right. And Travis Christofferson’s foundation, which is the Foundation for Cancer Metabolic Therapies. It’s a 503 foundation. Travis Christofferson’s. When people email me, I send them the links to those foundations. I cannot accept personally any money from anybody, okay? It’s one thing. It’s one thing. I’m not here. So people say, oh, I want to give you money to do it. No, no, no. I can’t. You have to give it to the university that comes through me through the appropriate channels to support my research through the university.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Dr. Thomas Seyfried, thank you so much for your time today, and I’m hugely inspired and enlightened by everything we’ve discussed. And I think there’s a bunch of very straightforward practical things I’ll be implementing in my life, specifically buying one of those bloody machines so that I can keep on my GK index.

DR THOMAS SEYFRIED:

Yeah. GKI. GKI index. Yeah. Glucose Ketone Index. Well, listen, thank you very much for having me here because your programs and others alert people to know that there are alternatives, effective alternatives. And once the system changes, the outcomes will not be so bleak as we currently have them today.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Isn’t this cool? Every single conversation I have here on The Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you’ll know, I asked the guest to leave a question in The Diary of a CEO. And what we’ve done is we’ve turned every single question written in The Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you’ve got every guest we’ve ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We’re finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com. They’ve sold out twice instantaneously, so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Dr. Tara Swart, what are the sort of existing ideas that your work and what you speak about is confronting? The like unhelpful existing preconceptions about the brain human potential that your work is confronting head on.

DRA. TARA SWART

So the first thing I came up against, because this was around the time of the financial crisis, was the lack of understanding of the brain body connection. So these high performing executives were kind of acting like their body was just the vehicle that was moving their brain around from meeting to meeting. And both disrespecting their physical health, but also not understanding that what they were actually really being paid for was to use their brain. And they weren’t creating the best conditions for that brain to operate in. And I’m talking about really basic things like sleep and a good diet and hydration and not being sedentary, managing your stress, et cetera. So, you know, this tiny organ, if it’s not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing its job, it’s not going to and a crack’s going to appear somewhere. And the first time I really kind of had a big confrontation with a bank was when people were dropping dead on the trading floor of heart attacks and they asked me to work more in my capacity as a former medical doctor to help with the physical stuff. And I said, I can’t do that if we don’t address the mental and emotional piece, because that’s what’s causing this. And they just could not get that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What did you want to do with those people in a specific and practical sense? If you could have, you know, been in charge of preventing them from dropping dead on the trading floor, where would you have started?

DRA. TARA SWART

the understanding that stress, so everything that you’re experiencing mentally and emotionally that’s challenging, and things like a lot of travel, which is challenging for your body, that that raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which comes from your adrenal glands, and that cortisol courses around your blood through your entire body and brain, and the brain has receptors for understanding what’s going on in terms of threat to your survival. So in a 24-hour cycle, depending on your age and your gender, there’s a normal range for cortisol. So it can go up and down like this. You know, if something challenging happens, we need to adapt and rise to meet that challenge. But when that level is above the top range all the time, these receptors in your brain basically think that there’s an imminent threat to your survival. So there’s this whole cascade of hormones and basically cortisol causes inflammation in the body. So inflammation of your vascular system, inflammation around your heart and everything else, gut and other things. But particularly around that time, we were seeing a lot of heart attacks caused by stress. This was in the absence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking, it was all stress.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I read a study and I was watching a TED talk that seemed to make the case that stress was somewhat subjective, i.e. it’s an interpretation of events. So one can be in a situation where they feel very stressed, you can put a different person in that situation and they wouldn’t experience it as stress. Also, there is, I think there’s quite a famous TED talk that makes the case that stress only has physiological consequences in the form of disease and inflammation and the heart attacks you’re describing. if we believe that stress is going to have that effect on us, if we believe stress is bad.

DRA. TARA SWART

It’s bad, yeah. I get that. Is that true? So I would define stress as when the load that you perceive on you physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually is too much for you to bear. So yes, it is subjective. When I moved into business and leadership, people would use the terms good stress and bad stress. And I found that really difficult having been a psychiatrist and seeing people actually break down to think that there’s any such thing as good stress. But what I have, you know, the way that I’ve adapted that over the last 10 or 15 years is that there’s an adaptive response, which is a healthy response to a challenge. And we have that for a reason. We need that. And that can be a good thing. But that should be a spike. It should go up and it should go back down again. If it stays high all the time, that’s not good.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

My second question now is about the contagion of stress. Once upon a time I googled, because I had a thesis, I googled, is stress contagious? And it came up and it said it was contagious. Is it contagious? In what circumstances do we need to be aware of that contagion? And more importantly, how and why is it contagious?

DRA. TARA SWART

Okay, I will tell you the answer to that. But I’m going to ask you a question first. Have you ever walked into a room with someone and by the time you’ve left that meeting with them, you just feel so drained? Okay, so you know the feeling, so I’ll tell you how it works physiologically. I’m going to start with something else to like build you up to this story. So did you know that women who live together or work closely together will synchronize their menstrual periods within two or three months?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, I found this out many years ago, and it has completely changed my perception on so many things. So many things. Because I have to be honest, I’m a very sort of logical, I need like science and evidence. And so I always thought about I don’t know, physical things. If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. It’s kind of been my framework for thinking about life. And when I heard about that, I checked it was true, found out it was true, and it broke the frame in which I think. Because if it’s possible that invisible forces now between me and you are interacting with our bodies, I go, well, what else is possible?

DRA. TARA SWART

 I’m already using a certain form of eye contact with you to create emotional resonance.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Uh-oh. What have you done to me?

DRA. TARA SWART

We’re gonna get sidetracked. You want to go back to the hormone?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What kind of eye contact are you using with me?

DRA. TARA SWART

Tell me.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So, basically… We’ll go back to the hormone thing, we’ll just park that.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, we’ll park that. It’s related. So, when a baby is born, One of the ways that it learns what emotion the mom’s experiencing, how it understands its own emotions, you know, everything that grows over childhood and teenage into, you know, pro-social behavior, starts off mostly with eye contact with the mom. So at first they can hardly see anything. They can just kind of see two blobs and then they start to understand more about like micro facial expression changes and stuff. But eye contact with the mom is hugely important. So most people are right-handed, so they’ll be holding their baby in their left arm so they can still use their dominant hand to do stuff. And that means that when you gaze at your baby, your right eye is looking into their left eye. And then that interaction from the optic nerve is going around the brain. It’s impacting the amygdala where emotions come from. And it’s creating this emotional resonance loop that’s part of how the mother and the baby bond. So that right eye to left eye eye contact is the most bonding eye contact that you can have with someone. Now, you could say, oh, but my mum was left handed or you could be left handed. But, you know, if I’m taking a chance on trying to build that bond with someone, that’s the statistically most likely one to create good resonance between you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So you walked in here and you started looking in my left eye.

DRA. TARA SWART

I waited till we sat down. I gave you a hug, you gave me a hug. So all of those little things, they start to, and we’ve laughed about a few things before we’ve come on air, those are the sorts of things that create higher levels of the bonding hormone, oxytocin, so you’re more likely to lower your guard, trust the person, take a healthy risk. So yeah, I mean, like I said, I know that stuff, so I live my life like that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 I just want to make sure I’ve got that clearly in my mind so I could repeat that to someone else later.

DRA. TARA SWART

It’s great for dating.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, of course it is. I think we might go down that path a little bit. But the reason that works is because there’s this association in our brains that if someone is looking into your left eye, it kind of triggers something, a bonding response that is quite innate in us.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah. Is that the TLDR of it?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah. Okay. Super interesting. What else? What else? If I’m trying to bond with someone. So everybody listening to this right now, whether they’re in work, they’re in sales, they’re looking for a partner, whatever. It’s a nice little trick to look into someone’s left eye. I’m going to only look into your left eye for the rest of the concert.

DRA. TARA SWART

With your right eye.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How do I? I’m just looking with both.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, you feel like that. But once you start doing this, I promise you, you will notice a difference.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, what else? What are the tricks to make, to encourage bonding?

DRA. TARA SWART

Encourage bonding, so physical interaction. So, you know, depending on the appropriateness of it, minimum handshake, maybe a hug, maybe a kiss on the cheek, you know, depending on what situation you’re in.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I do this handshake where we hugged so we didn’t handshake. Many, many years ago, I read an article that if when you shake someone’s hand, you put the other hand over the top of it, it creates a sense of warmth and trust. So I’ve been doing that for 10 years now. Give them my left hand or my right hand and the other hand goes over the top of it.

DRA. TARA SWART

It’s definitely extra. And you see this in a lot of kind of more ancient cultures that there is like more of a handshake than what we do, which seems it’s just one hand and it’s quite brief and stuff. So, yeah, the more of that kind of physical touch that you can get the best. So, you know, everyone that I’ve met since I’ve come in this morning, I’ve either shaken hands with them or hugged them. And I would not not do that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is there anything else in terms of encouraging the release of oxytocin that you’re aware of? What are the behaviors that increase that bonding chemical in our brains?

DRA. TARA SWART

Eye contact and touch are the main ones. Laughing together is another one. And then not to do with another person, but if you take a bath rather than a shower, then you’ll release more oxytocin. Massage helps. Well, you’re immersed in warm water, so it feels like a hug.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So you would theoretically get out of the bath and be kinder and happier and more people would want to bond with you more?

DRA. TARA SWART

Well, you’ll be more in the mode of bonding, doing that. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So interesting. What about vulnerability? Because I heard shared struggle is one of the things that raises oxytocin.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah. So, yeah, going through something not necessarily traumatic, but that’s highly emotional, that is very bonding as well. So we see this a lot on the reality shows where people are like, oh, we’re going to be friends for life. You know, if you do something like a skydive or a bungee jump in a group, then, you know, you do feel more bonded to those people. But they’re not as practical as the just the little things that you can do every day.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, so let’s go back to this hormone conversation. We’ll take that off the shelf. So we’re talking about stress and the contagion of stress.

DRA. TARA SWART

So you started by setting the scene with the fact that women who interact with each other physically closely, they synchronize their menstrual cycles. And so whenever I want to explain something that’s complex, or I don’t actually know the current neuroscience, I always take it back to what happened in ancient times. So when we were living in the cave, the men hunted and gathered and lived quite nomadically. So sometimes they would go away for months at a time. And actually, if they went far enough away and were closer to another cave of the same tribe, they would actually just stay there and never return to the original tribe, original cave. But mostly they would leave for weeks or months and then return to the original cave. And in those days, the most fundamental important thing for the survival of the human species was that the alpha male must pass on his genes. So if he was going to be away for months and he couldn’t, you know, there weren’t men there to defend the women from predators. Maybe there was going to be a spell of the ice age and they would all freeze to death or they wouldn’t have food. He needed to make sure that at least five women were impregnated with his sperm at the same time, so that if there was a food shortage or there was like stillbirth or miscarriage or whatever, at least one out of five would survive. So to be able to do that, they had to be fertile at the same time. So that’s why that mechanism exists. Now, we don’t need that mechanism now, but it’s still wired into the way that we operate. So those sex steroid hormones like oestrogen and progesterone, they leak out of our sweat about this far around us. And that’s why if you’re living with another woman or if, you know, you’re sitting across the desk every day, then particles of hormone from my sweat would go into the, through the skin of the other woman.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

If she’s within what distance?

DRA. TARA SWART

I mean, it’s not, you wouldn’t have to be sitting next to each other. If you live together, then that means you’re interacting enough that it would happen. Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So particles… But not if you work together.

DRA. TARA SWART

If you work together and you sit right next to each other every day, then it does happen, too. So, you know, in a small office that’s got like six girls in it, that the menstrual synchronization will happen. Interestingly, it’s led by the alpha female. So, yeah, so you can you can work out if you don’t know already who the alpha female is. Well, if you know, basically, let’s say my cycles don’t change and everyone says, oh, I’ve got my period early or I haven’t had my period yet, but now it’s started, then that would mean that probably I was the alpha female.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 How does the body know who the alpha female is?

DRA. TARA SWART

That will be to do with levels of testosterone.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why does that matter who the alpha female is? Why does it matter that they sync up with her?

DRA. TARA SWART

I don’t know if it really matters. I think it’s just a case of physiology. So it’s a little bit like in the troops of gorillas, the stress levels of the silverback gorilla affect the other gorillas more than gorillas who are peers to each other. So there is, we have a natural hierarchy and it must be related to survival as well.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So she was, probably the person who the alpha male was going to impregnate first probably so everyone needs to kind of fall in line because when she starts having sex they need to be ready yeah okay and also it’ll probably be to do with things like you know survival genes so it’ll be the people with the hardiest genes because that’s what you’ll want to pass on as well okay makes sense most resilient okay

DRA. TARA SWART

 Okay, so where were we?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Stress and contagion.

DRA. TARA SWART

So basically cortisol is a hormone that works in that same way. So cortisol is the main stress hormone. And this one doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, but it does matter where you are in the hierarchy of the organization, as I just mentioned. So Usually in that conversation I mentioned to you where you go into a room and you just feel completely drained afterwards, usually the person that comes out feeling drained is less senior than the person that’s had that effect on them. And that’s why this is so crucial to leadership because your stress levels as a leader, as a CEO are going to have more impact on everybody else than the rest of the people put together basically. So managing your stress is obviously important for you, but it’s important in terms of what happens to other people. And the first issue I came up against was CEOs and CFOs that said, well, I won’t show them that I’m stressed. I won’t tell them what’s happening with the numbers. I won’t display emotions in front of them. And I said, they’re still going to know physiologically, it’s going to impact them. So now you really have to do something about it. And the other thing about cortisol, which is quite funny, well, one of the side effects is quite funny, is that as a survival mechanism, it will help you to store fat around your abdomen. So, you know, again, in the cave, if you were potentially going to like not find food for a month, then if you had extra fat around your abdomen, you could digest that and survive till you could find food. So with my clients in financial services, it got to a point where as soon as I walked into the room, they just lift their t-shirt up and say, now you know how I’ve been in the last month. And then I had a really, really funny incident when I was speaking at a bank and the CEO’s PA was there in the audience. And I was explaining that, you know, leadership stress leaks down, that that stress can lead to abdominal fat that you can’t shift. And she shouted out, so he’s the reason that I’m fat. But Steve, no one laughed. Really? Yeah. And that’s when I knew that, okay, he obviously is like really stressing everyone out.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Oh gosh, no one laughed. No. Through fear or something or just because they all just thought it was true?

DRA. TARA SWART

It wasn’t funny. It was true.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Jesus. So stress causes belly fat?

DRA. TARA SWART

Belly fat that’s really hard to shift. So again, what I would see with people is that they would say, oh, I’ve put on a bit of weight around the middle, you know, had to loosen the belt a bit. So I’ve started eating less. I’ve started exercising more and I still can’t shift it. And again, that’s when I would explain this is the impact of cortisol. As long as you’re still leaking out extra cortisol, nothing’s going to change. And like I said, even exercising more or eating better, less or differently, whatever it is, wouldn’t shift that fat. You had to get to the root cause. You had to reduce the cortisol.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It also made me think about when you consider promoting someone in your organization, you have to be very careful that if you put a particularly stressed cortisol leaking individual high in the organization, there’s going to be a significant impact for everyone below them.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

DRA. TARA SWART

Is that accurate? Is that an accurate observation? Yeah, no, that’s a really good way of putting it. I mean, I always think of that phrase, what got you here won’t get you there, which is more about the fact that people get promoted because they’re good at what they do, but they don’t really get taught all the best management and leadership skills. But that’s a really pertinent point. If there are a person who is stressed, particularly who suppresses stress, which some of these successful people do, then it would have an impact down the organization.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 It begs the question then, so if someone’s listening to this and they go, you know what, I’m a leaky cortisol person, I’m highly stressed, and it’s probably getting to people around me, what can I do about that?

DRA. TARA SWART

So first of all, if someone’s saying that, half the battle is won. The problem is when people are not aware of that. But let’s say you are. So let’s say that I give you that list of signs and symptoms that you’ve got high levels of cortisol, which include things like sleep disruption, because cortisol is part of the 24 hour clock. Melatonin helps us to wake up, cortisol helps. Melatonin helps us to fall asleep, cortisol helps us to wake up. Maybe you’ve noticed the belly fat. Because of the really strong connection between the brain and the gut, any sort of reflux or indigestion symptoms are often signs that you’ve got high levels of cortisol too. And of course, things like irritability and mood changes. What I mostly would hear people say is that I can just about keep it together when I’m at work, but when I get home, if my kids are, you know, annoying or my partner’s asking for too much, I just snap. So that means you’re like one step away from snapping at work if somebody like pushes you too far. So that’s not good. because cortisol is pro-inflammatory it’s very drying of the system as well so you might notice that your skin’s really dry or you’ve got skin problems. Your skin isn’t just the physical border of your body it’s the psychological boundary of your body too so often stress shows up in the skin. Then there are two main things that you can do One is physical exercise, because you can literally sweat cortisol out of your body. So you can sweat excess cortisol out of your body by doing aerobic exercise. The other one is journaling. So writing out what’s on your mind, rather than just let it be in there and keep going round and round. Or if you’ve got a therapist or a trusted friend, speaking it out loud. So it’s all about getting cortisol and or the negative thoughts that are associated with your stress out of your brain-body system.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I think this is fascinating. I looked at the back end of our YouTube channel and it says that since this channel started 69.9% of you that watch it frequently haven’t yet hit the subscribe button. So, I have a favour to ask you. If you’ve ever watched this channel and enjoyed the content, if you’re enjoying this episode right now, please can I ask a small favour? Please hit the subscribe button. Helps this channel more than I can explain and I promise if you do that, to return the favour, we will make this show better and better and better and better and better. That’s the promise I’m willing to make you if you hit the subscribe button. Do we have a deal? I’ve had a real revelation in my life over the last, um, maybe six months about sleep. Again, it’s why I said, I think before we started recording that I don’t have any meetings scheduled before 11am and I sleep with my eye mask on and I just wake up when I wake up.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, me too. Oh, really? Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve never really met anybody that has that. It is a privilege, I have to acknowledge that, that not everyone can do because of work circumstances or whatever else, but the importance of sleep. You’re a neuroscientist. There’s a lot of people who have dysfunctional sleep. We live in a world where I feel like it’s increasingly difficult to have great sleep. How important is that for the brain? And also, we were talking about stress there, but for containing our stress levels,

DRA. TARA SWART

It’s so important, I can’t stop going on about it. And I do understand that for some people it’s not a choice, that they just don’t sleep well or their sleep gets interrupted because they’ve got young kids or they do shift work. So I’m not particularly talking about the people where there’s a reason that you can’t sleep in this way. I’m mostly directing this out if you have a choice. this is the way that you need to sleep and this is why. If you don’t have a choice, there are some things that you can do to mitigate it as well. I mean, obviously I have done shift work as a junior doctor in the NHS and I travel a lot, so I’m like jet lagged half the time, but I try to do everything I can to make that as good as possible. And the reason is, We’ve always known that when you sleep, you lay down your memories and new learning, you process your emotions, the cells in the body regenerate themselves. We’ve known that for a long time. That’s never really been enough for these very driven CE level people to want to give up eight hours a night to sleep. If they feel they can get by on four or five, then they’ll rather do that because they’ve got so much to do. The ideal is eight hours and 15 minutes in population norm studies. So that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone, but for most people, that’s the ideal. Actually sleeping more than that can be depressogenic, so it can start to lower your mood. So you don’t want to really be sleeping for nine plus hours, but you ideally need to be in bed for nine hours to get that amount of sleep. And so there was some award winning research around 2012 to 2014 when we were beginning to understand how important the cleaning of the brain is overnight. So this entirely new system that we didn’t know existed, which is called the glymphatic system. It’s like the lymphatic system in your body, but it’s to do with glial cells. So it was named the glymphatic system. That system is a very active kind of waterway channel cleansing system of the brain. We used to think that the fluid around the brain and there’s ventricles, which are like lakes, and then there’s just like trickling areas that that sort of passively dripped through the brain overnight. We did not expect to see like jets of fluid flushing out toxins from the brain. So the exact things that we see in the pathology of dementing diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, like tau proteins and amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. How do you say that in English? Those things are being flushed out of the brain very actively overnight. And that process takes seven to eight hours to complete the cleaning. That’s why you need to be in bed for eight to nine hours.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So it takes seven or eight hours of restorative sleep or just being in bed?

DRA. TARA SWART

Just sleep, not in bed. If you’re in bed awake, you’re not asleep. You know, you have to be asleep, but you’ll go through the different sleep cycles every 90 minutes. This isn’t in time with that. This is just taking seven or eight hours to flush this stuff out of your brain. So one of the things I do say to people who don’t sleep well is if you find yourself awake at night and you’re not lying on your side, turn yourself onto your side because that’s the best position for this cleansing process. I actually have a special pillow that makes me sleep on my side because I wasn’t naturally a side sleeper. So it doesn’t matter if it’s the left or the right, but that is a better position in terms of the veins in your neck than sleeping on your back or your front. So that’s one thing you can do. Oh, you woke up, you know, your sleep was disturbed. At least turn yourself onto your side.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is the special pillow? You just bragged about it then moved on, I feel like.

DRA. TARA SWART

It’s a memory foam pillow. Am I allowed to mention the brand?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Of course, yeah. We’ll make sure they sponsor it before they go.

DRA. TARA SWART

It’s a memory foam pillow. My one is by Tempore UK. And they actually gifted it to me because I was talking about side savings. Yeah, it’s great.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, I’m a side sleeper, my girlfriend’s a back sleeper, but I can’t sleep on my back. It’s funny because I start on my front, that lasts for 15 minutes because I get bad back at the bottom of my back, I roll onto my side. But I’ve always wondered if there was, when you look at tribes and our ancestors, how they would sleep? Would they sleep in groups? Would they sleep alone? Would they sleep on their side, their back? Do you know the answers to any of that?

DRA. TARA SWART

I know that co-sleeping is definitely how we evolved from co-sleeping, so in groups. And what I find interesting is that you needed to huddle together like that for physical warmth in the cave, but it also, because of that proximity and interaction, you got more of the bonding hormone, oxytocin, so you also experienced the warmth of being part of a tribe. And I think they slept on their side because they would have to be ready for an attack from a predator. So you’d need to keep your dominant arm ready to grab something. And most likely they slept on their left because they would have been protecting their most vital organs, the heart.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I was just thinking then about this bonding chemical and how it comes out when we’re in close proximity. A lot of couples, a lot of people, me sometimes as well, sleep in the spare room because I have work commitments, that’ll mean that I’m up early or my partner has work commitments, that means she’s up early. Even some of my friends who are in the early stages of parenthood have separated and have a sleep divorce situation. When you talked about the bonding and the oxytocin being released when we’re in closer proximity, and obviously at night time is when we’re literally touching each other, is it conceivable that by separating rooms and by doing a sleep divorce, we’re actually eroding our bonding?

DRA. TARA SWART

I would never do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You would never sleep in a different room from your partner?

DRA. TARA SWART

Never. apart from maybe if there was a young baby and one person had to go to work and one person didn’t that i get but that’s temporary and Ideally, people would find ways to make up for that. I mean, I guess you’re in a bit of a love bubble with the oxytocin from the baby at that time, so that is quite neuroprotective. But co-sleeping is fundamental to our survival. It was physically when we were in the cave, but now I would say emotionally, spiritually, it’s fundamental to our survival. I mean,

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 What do you mean by co-sleeping, just to clarify?

DRA. TARA SWART

Sleeping together. So mostly in, you know, in our society, that’s as a couple, but a lot of other cultures, the whole family sleeps together.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why would you never do it? You seemed quite passionate about that.

DRA. TARA SWART

Because it’s so good for you. The bonding, the physical warmth, the skin-to-skin contact, the love, the trust, you know, I mean, I’ll put up, if somebody’s waking up early and I don’t have to wake up at that time, I’ll even put up with that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So you’ll have less quality sleep.

DRA. TARA SWART

It won’t be less quality sleep. I’ve worn HRV monitors and shown that even at the time, if my husband woke up at five and I wouldn’t wake up at all before eight, and he gave me a kiss goodbye, I got a spike of resilience at that time. Resilience?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah. How do you measure that?

DRA. TARA SWART

So I was using that finish technology where you wear the HRV monitor with a gel pad on your chest. And so it’s color coded for whether you’re doing light exercise, heavy exercise, whether you’re stressed, or whether you’re recouping resilience. And mostly people recoup resilience overnight. But, you know, you could clearly see with people with young children, you could see when they were woken up overnight, it would go into stress. Some people recoup resilience during the day if, you know, let’s say you’re like with your partner or your sibling and you’re just sitting together and it’s super relaxed, or if you love your job, you know, that you can see that happening during the day as well. But because I am so obsessed with my sleep, I wouldn’t normally welcome any sleep disturbance, but the power of sleeping together and cuddling all night is so neuroprotective that I would encourage everybody to do it. I also know some people who say, oh, I sleep better if I sleep on my own. But we were not meant to survive on our own. We are meant to survive as part of a tribe. And I think now, you know, since the pandemic, people are more lost and lonely and disconnected than ever. If you’ve got somebody that you can actually sleep with overnight, I strongly suggest that you do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So I want to go in that direction because I’m super compelled by that, the change in the world and the lost, the lonely, the disconnected. But just to pause for a second on this word resilience you’re using linked to heart rate variability. You’re talking about like a physiological resilience, like the body being more resilient versus the kind of, when we talk about resilience, we say it in more of a psychological context of like, I can withstand greater stress or pressure, but you used a heart rate variability monitor that measures the distance between heartbeats and saw that when your husband gave you a kiss, your heart rate variability increased, which means that your body was more physiologically resilient.

DRA. TARA SWART

It actually measures both because it compares your heart rate variability to your heart rate. So it knows if you’re exercising because your heart rate has gone up. But if your heart rate is at like base level, then the change in variability can either mean that you’re stressed or you’re recouping resilience. If your heart rate is high, then it’s obviously physical. But it’s a factor of both. So it’s not just looking at physical resilience, it is looking, when it’s in this turquoise zone, that is actually more about recouping psychological resilience. But those two things, they feed into each other, but it can tell the difference because of your heart rate. So obviously I was asleep, so my heart rate was low.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And you saw what on the monitor when he gave you a kiss?

DRA. TARA SWART

I literally saw, because it does it by every 15 minutes as well, and I saw the highest spike of turquoise at that exact time.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Funny because my girlfriend a couple, about a month ago or two months ago, I left the house quite early in the morning, maybe about the similar time, 6am in the morning, when she was still in bed and I came up to her and gave her like a big kiss, I basically kissed all around her, this is so soppy, I kissed all around her face and on her nose and just gave her a big big hug and stuff and I walked away, like got on the taxi and left or whatever. And she said to me, the same day or the day after, she went, I don’t know what happened there, but it unlocked something in me. And, you know, then my girlfriend went on to say she had some challenges with her menstrual cycle and she came on her period.

DRA. TARA SWART

That’s amazing. I love that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And she’s always right. Like when she says things to me and she knows this, but I give her a credit. I’m always skeptical because we think differently. She’s quite spiritual. I’m very like, I need some science. And, um, she said that to me and I just thought a kiss and a hug in the morning. It hasn’t, couldn’t have had any physiological impact on her. But, um, now I’m starting to question whether once again, I was wrong.

DRA. TARA SWART

That’s amazing. I mean, you know, some of these things can’t necessarily immediately be explained by science, but if you use your intuition, then you have to ask yourself and I feel like you are coming around to thinking that could be true.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When I’m given a reason, I accept things. If there’s even a slither of science that could justify it, then I come around to ideas, but I do need the science. Do you think that men and women are different in terms of their intuition and their ability to, you’re smiling, their ability to kind of understand some of these forces that exist in the air? Because my girlfriend seems to be so attuned to feelings and intuition, and I’m less so.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, so let’s put it like this. If you had 100 people in a room, 50 men and 50 women, and you asked them to line up in order of height, not all the men would be taller than all the women. In the middle, there’d be a bit of a mixture. And it’s like that with the brain and intuition and everything else. Yeah, there are some, there’s some disparity. So I think most people would agree that it feels like more women are in touch with their intuition than men, but it’s absolutely not all women versus all men.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you believe women are more in touch with their intuition?

DRA. TARA SWART

I think they’re more open to accepting that it’s a thing. And I believe that the more men need the science to explain how intuition works.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Interesting. I wonder if there was like a brain, a neurological reason for that. I think there’d be more women and men that believed in intuition and those like feelings that are hard to explain.

DRA. TARA SWART

And this, you know. That’s changed a lot. I mean, I remember when I was teaching at MIT about seven years ago and I was teaching the science of intuition, someone actually stood, you know, it’s all senior leaders in the classroom. It’s executive education. Someone stood up and said, well, I’m not going to make a really important decision like hire or fire based on my gut feeling, am I? And he was quite young and quite a few of the older guys turned around and were like, that’s absolutely how I would make my decision and my most important decisions. But at that time, it was still kind of like, not everybody was really sure that that’s like your superpower. But I think people are beginning to understand more that with age and experience and wisdom, you do understand that intuition is actually your strongest, should be your strongest decision making modality.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is intuition?

DRA. TARA SWART

So because you can’t remember everything that you’ve experienced in your whole life, but somewhere in the neural architecture and in the gut neurons as well, that information is stored because you have experienced it. So maybe you would say that you understand that wisdom and experience is the product of patterns that you’ve seen repeating in your life that are conscious to you. Intuition is the lessons that you picked up along the way that you’re not conscious of, but they’re still stored in your nervous system. And so the less conscious you are of them, the deeper they’re pushed into the nervous system. So there’s a process called Hebbian learning, named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb, and that is It’s basically, you know, neurons that fire together wire together, but it’s that the things that you’ve learned today, like things that you’ve learned by speaking with me, that’s going to be very front of mind and kind of just in like little pathways that are just kind of connecting up with each other. But stuff that you learn when you were five, like when you put your hand in a fire and it burnt you and you never, ever want to do that again, that’s deep down. You’re not really conscious of that. But, you know, and other things maybe that you don’t recall. So we believe that your, that wisdom gets pushed from the outer cortex into the limbic system, which is the emotional system of the brain, into the brainstem, into the spinal cord and into the gut neurons. And that’s why they sometimes call it gut instinct, because it’s that feeling of knowing something, but not knowing why you know it. But it’s actually to do with the fact that you have wisdom and experience that is, it’s embodied in you, but you’re not conscious of it necessarily.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s quite surprising to hear that those memories, that wisdom can be in the gut. People think of, you know, I think I’m certainly someone who always thought that my cognition, my memories and my, all of the intelligence exists just in my brain.

DRA. TARA SWART

Your memories and your cognition and your IQ are in your brain, but your intuition is in your brain and your gut.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This sounds super stupid, but I don’t care. I should just be, I should just be honest about my stupidity. Where in my gut? I thought that was like my stomach. That’s where I put the food.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah. So, you know, you’ve got your stomach, you’ve got your small intestine, you’ve got your large intestine. Yeah. You have other organs, your liver, your spleen, your kidneys. And they’re all innervated, which means they’ve all got nerves going into them. So does your heart. So, you know, we could have a similar conversation like this about your heart as well, because your heart only knows how to beat because of the nerves that penetrate it. So, you know, this round brain in here and the spinal cord that goes down the center of your back, that gives rise to all of the neurons that go out to your arms, your legs, all of your organs, your skin, which is your largest organ. And so that’s how that works because every single part of your body has nerve cells or nerve pathways in them. So that’s the connection. That brings us back to what I was saying about the brain-body connection. They’re intimately connected and it’s a bi-directional thing. They can’t exist without each other. And the more you understand that there’s that constant feedback going back and forth, the more you can tap into that kind of thing. The more you can know days before you’re going to get sick. I bet your girlfriend knows days before she’s going to get a cold or flu. Yes, she does all the time. And my clients never know. And as soon as they go on holiday, they’re sick the whole week.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why when they go on holiday?

DRA. TARA SWART

Because they suppress it to be able to do their job.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And you can suppress illness or you can just not acknowledge it.

DRA. TARA SWART

It’s not necessarily that they had a cold virus that they suppressed, but it’s that their body is, you know, the immune system is being run down by the cortisol. And so as soon as it gets a break, that’s when it kind of succumbs. And there was a time after the financial crisis when I had people saying, I’ve had, you know, I’ve had this cold for like four weeks now, six weeks, but everybody’s got it. And I was like, I’m sorry, but do you actually think that’s normal? Do you think it’s normal to have a cold for more than a week? And, you know, then it takes a challenge like that, because also the other thing that happens in, you know, with groupthink, whether it’s at work or in your social circle, is that we don’t challenge each other enough on those sort of things. So if a friend said, oh, I’ve had this cold for six weeks, I might say, oh, poor you, but if I wouldn’t, but someone might. But, you know, it’s also about saying, is there something else wrong? Because that’s not that’s not usual. And for me, that would absolutely lead back to cortisol.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Second ago, we were going to go down the pathway of the looming crisis that you speak about. What is the looming crisis that you’re concerned about?

DRA. TARA SWART

Stephen, I saw this looming at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s not looming anymore. It is, we are in crisis. So, all of the health anxiety and the uncertainty and the fear and the loss that we experienced during the pandemic was bad enough. It caused a level of stress that no one who’s alive today has experienced before. But we’ve come out of it You know, we’re relatively, I don’t know if I could say back to normal or in the new normal. And we have not paid any attention to the consequences of what happened to us. And when I say us, I mean everyone from the babies that were born at that time that never saw anyone but their immediate family, the teenagers that interestingly boys did better than girls because they play video games on the internet, so they stayed connected. The older people that were isolated, the people that lost loved ones, et cetera. There’s so many things, I could say more things than that. We haven’t really acknowledged that that’s what happened and what we went through. Most people are not really understanding what’s changed for them or what’s going on for them at the moment as a result of that. And we certainly haven’t made any plan for the future. You know, I’m really into indigenous wisdom at the moment. And one of the things I’ve learned about the first Americans is that when they make a big decision for their community, they imagine the impact of that decision seven generations into the future. We don’t even think about one generation into the future. We just think about like what’s going on right now. We don’t even really think about our own future like some of the time. I remember thinking like literally in March of 2020, this is going to be a mental health crisis, like whatever happens physically. And as time went on more so, I thought mental health crisis, mental health crisis. And then I started to think, okay, what else could it be? And I had time, of course, to indulge in some of the other areas of interest that I couldn’t when I was like traveling and working full on. So I started reading more about spirituality and ancient cultures and stuff. And I thought this could be a spiritual revolution.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you say spiritual revolution, It’s a very big, broad term. What do you mean?

DRA. TARA SWART

If I look back, and you’ve led a very nice story of my journey since I changed career, is that it started off with that physical piece. For me, where I was working, there was stress, but people were having heart attacks. Then I spent many years working on mental resilience with people. And emotional regulation was part of that. And that became important again in the pandemic because we were in like closed quarters with people and, you know, and it was just very different and it was hard and it was homeschooling and working and everything. What I’ve seen as some of the good things I’ve seen as a result of the pandemic is that we’ve definitely appreciated again the importance of our time in nature. So I think most of us felt that, that, you know, being able to get out and be somewhere green was really important. And because there was like no planes and no traffic, you know, we could see the stars in the sky again. We saw amazing sunsets. People began to appreciate birdsong. And now the studies are showing that time spent in nature actually has a really positive impact on your physical health, your mental health, and your longevity. So, you know, that’s one good thing that’s come out of it, but are we all still, you know, making time for that or are we just going back to kind of our old ways? The other thing, things of interest that have come out is that having a purpose that transcends yourself is really important to your mental health particularly, but it will have knock-on effects. So, you know, you could say, well, I do my podcast and I love doing my podcast and I get to meet interesting people. And I, you know, I share that knowledge with others. A lot of that is still to do with self-satisfaction. So having something that doesn’t necessarily do anything for you, but gives you purpose in life is really important.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what could that be? That could be?

DRA. TARA SWART

That could be volunteering. It could be, um, For me, I give out a lot of free information on Instagram and not to try to get work or anything like that. It could be, so when I say volunteering, that sounds quite big, but it could be like asking your elderly neighbor if you can do their groceries for them when you go to the supermarket. It could be calling up a friend and checking that they’re okay. Just something that makes you feel like life is worth living. but doesn’t necessarily earn you money or directly improve your life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve spoken to a lot of therapists who talk about the fact that two of the things we never want to feel is like we’re A different and B we’re not enough. And I was thinking about that through the lens of our tribes. In the context of a tribe, if I was different, there was a risk of me being kicked off the tribe. And if I didn’t feel like I was enough, I, again, would have a risk of being kicked out of the tribe because I’m not valuable to the tribe. And in the context of what you were saying about serving others, is that, again, sort of like a prehistoric desire to feel like we’re adding value and we are of use to the tribe by serving the greater good of our tribe? Is that where that instinct comes from, Manas?

DRA. TARA SWART

I love what you’ve done, which is exactly what I said, which is when I’m not sure of the answer, I’ll go back to evolution. I always do that. Yeah, I love that. I think I hadn’t thought of it like that exactly like that before, but I think it’s true. You know, a tribe, sadly, could not afford to carry dead weight. So if you weren’t enough, you know, if you were injured, if you were immobile, if you were elderly, if you weren’t contributing, then you might get left behind. And then there’s this really interesting new area of research called neuroaesthetics or neuroarts, which is about having some kind of creative activity in your regular schedule. So there’s lots of research that shows that if you’re not doing something creative once a week, and that could be dance, music, painting, drawing, going to the theater, reading a novel, so really quite broad. Time and nature actually is included in it. Because nature is the palette that we all love. You could have different taste in art or music to me, but all humans love nature because we’ve always been in that beauty. So the impact of that on your mental health and your physical health and your longevity is huge as well. But even just like every morning, I actually thought of this this morning because I wanted to mention this, but I had zested a lemon last night when I was cooking. And so this morning when I went to get the milk out of the fridge, I smelled it because it was in the fridge and I just thought, that is so beautiful. And so they say things like, you know, if you’ve put like a bunch of flowers on your bedside table and it smells nice and that’s the first thing you smell in the morning and then you like look at the beautiful flowers. If you’ve got objects of beauty in your house, if you listen to birdsong in the morning, that’s all neuroaesthetics. It’s living a life that is aesthetically pleasing to your brain and that’s good for your health. Why? Should we go back to evolution?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Should I make a guess? Please, that’s my favourite thing to do.

DRA. TARA SWART

I think it’s to do with safety. So if you were able to spare your mental resources to appreciate beauty, that must mean that you’re safe. That must mean that you’re not just trying to survive. So it’s actually, I mean, we do appreciate beauty. So seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting nice things, it’s going to make us feel better, but also We’re only going to be doing that if we have the luxury of being able to do that, and it can be such small things. But also what it signals to your brain is, I’m safe because I have time to read a novel or I have time to crank the music up and dance around my living room.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Through the frame of this idea that pathways that fire together, wire together, I was also thinking about every time I’ve seen a tree, I’ve been safe. So is there an association that trees are safety? You know what I mean? Every time I’ve been out in nature, I’ve been physiologically, psychologically safe. So is it now the case that because there’s that neurological association, the pathways have widened and fired together. If I, you know, you talk about the brain body response. If I put myself in that situation again, it will signal to my body that I’m safe.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, that’s neuroplasticity. It’s repeating that and giving yourself the message that every time I’m around trees, I’m safe. I feel safe. It won’t be the same for everyone. I would imagine that, again, when we lived in the cave, that we naturally did things like looked at the stars in the sky at night, danced around the fire, did cave paintings. So that’s very wired into our psyche as well. They would adorn themselves a lot more than we do. So that appreciation of aesthetics has always been there and not just from nature, from some of our rituals and ceremonies as well. And really the conclusion that I’ve come to with this whole spiritual crisis and then the potential revolution is that all the things that we need to go through that revolution have always been in the world as long as we’ve existed. And that, to me, is beautiful, because it’s not like we have to do some crazy new different things that we’ve never thought of before. We can The way that I put it is we know about generational trauma and intergenerational trauma and epigenetics and how all these bad things can come down the line, but there’s also a lot of beauty and wisdom that’s there that we can have access to. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel at all. We can just go back to doing the things that we did when we were at peace.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s interesting, but that’s not easy to do in the world we live in, because we’ve built a society and a world where… We live in these like white, four white walls in cities alone. We’re more lonely than ever before. We order our food using glass screens. We use pornography as a replacement for intimacy and connection. We use social networks instead of socializing. Internet connection has reduced real connection. You’d have to like completely redesign society it seems.

DRA. TARA SWART

You can start with yourself. So I completely agree with what all those things that you’ve just said is how most people live. But I don’t live like that. How do you live, Doctor? I actively try to spend as much time in nature as I can. And I have like a lot of like plants and flowers in and around my house. I am very, very careful about who’s in my tribe. So it’s positive, meaningful, deep, spiritual relationships. I don’t use pornography or dating apps. I’m just going through your list. Yeah. And I, you know, I try.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What do you think of pornography on the brain?

DRA. TARA SWART

I mean, the two most basic drives in the brain are sex and food. So the potential impact is huge. I agree with you that increasingly it has created a big disconnect between men and women in real life, which is really sad.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is that disconnect?

DRA. TARA SWART

I think that the ideal of what a woman has to be or can be is very distorted by pornography. I think if I put together, you know, what I hear from my friends about dating apps with that, that the way that people feel they can treat others has really, really changed. And I think this has accelerated since the pandemic as well. So there’s a real lack of empathy for the consequences of your actions and comments on other people. And I think pornography contributes to that because it changes the way that men view women. I think the impact on women in terms of what you have to look like, like how much plastic surgery you have to have, what you’ve got to be prepared to like do in an intimate relationship or actually the biggest issue I would have is what you’re expected to do when you’re not even in an intimate relationship. You know, just when it becomes more of a transaction, when the rules have changed about You know, again, what I hear now very commonly is, oh, well, we’ve been on three or four or five dates or whatever it is. That must mean, you know, move to the next level kind of thing. So I think that going back to having like really respectful relationships, having a lot of empathy for other people, looking out for the people in your life that might be lonelier than you. I mean, I absolutely do not have my phone in my bedroom, but when I say limit screen time, that is a difficult one because we all use our screens for work and to communicate with our friends. But there are studies that show the amount of time you spend even communicating with friends online versus face-to-face has all sorts of impacts in terms of like how socially comfortable you are, how empathic you are, It can even have on teenagers a really big impact on body dysmorphism. So it’s fine to actually spend quite a lot of time online as long as you are also spending a lot of time with people face to face.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

One of the things you said there was about limiting who’s in your tribe. Why is that important? Why is it important to not hang around with certain people and spend more time with other people from like a neurological perspective in terms of our health and our outlooks and our outcomes and neuroplasticity?

DRA. TARA SWART

So if we just link this back a little bit to the question that you Googled, which is, is stress contagious? Then there’s another rabbit hole you could go down, which would be about social contagion. So there are statistics that show that in your social group, if someone gets divorced, you’re more likely to get divorced in the next year. If someone in your social group is obese, you’re more likely to become obese. Now, I’m absolutely not saying don’t be friends with someone because they got divorced or they put on weight, but I’m talking more about the attitudinal stuff. So the, you know, how you treat other people, how kind you are, how generous you are, how open you are to conversations about intuition or spirituality. Basically, you meet people who are at a similar psychological level to you. And so, We’re always working on ourselves, hopefully. And you want to be with people, if you are, then you want to be with people who are growing too, who are open to challenge, who are learning, who are interested in exploring spirituality, who care about their mental health and other people’s mental health. So it’s really about, you know, having this circle of trust and knowing that you’ve got support, but equally that if you do something that’s really not okay, that somebody is going to tell you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You mentioned the word earlier, neuroplasticity. What is it? Why did it matter? And I think from looking at your work previously, you had a bit of an epiphany on this subject matter in your career where you realized that, you know, are you probably like most, most people don’t even think it’s a thing. They don’t think it’s, they think that once you grow up, you’re set in your ways, but it sounds like there was an epiphany at some point in your career where you realized the importance and the possibilities that neuroplasticity presented.

DRA. TARA SWART

Well, we have to start by saying that when I was at medical school and doing my PhD in neuroscience, we did not know about neuroplasticity. So we absolutely thought that when you physically stopped growing, that everything in your brain was set for the rest of your life, that you couldn’t change your intelligence, you couldn’t learn to manage your emotions differently, that it would be much harder to learn new things. What we know now is that the brain is actively growing and changing till we’re about 25. Fuck. I missed it. No, you didn’t. You didn’t miss it. I’m 31.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I know I look 24, but… You didn’t miss it.

DRA. TARA SWART

So from 25 to 65, and I would say even beyond now, if you don’t do anything to change your brain, it will tend to plateau. So, you know, if you’re in a job where you do the same thing every day and you’re pretty good at it, you could stay like that for the rest of your life. And that is fine for some people. If you do things that are intense enough to force your brain to change, then you can basically learn lots of new things, but also get what we call global benefits in your brain. So let’s say you decided to learn a new language. Maybe you’d learn Portuguese or French.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Have you spoken to her? Have you spoken to her? That just felt very, it feels like, you know when someone says something to you and it feels like they’ve already had a conversation behind your back because it’s so on the money. No, I actually have a deal with her this year that I’d learn Portuguese by the end of the year. I’m in September now and I know six words. So that just felt a little bit close to home. So let’s move on.

DRA. TARA SWART

So that’s great. So you have actually a reason to learn one or two languages. If you do that, your brain will not only get the benefits of being able to speak French or Portuguese, but you will actually improve your executive functions. Now, these are the highest functions of the brain. Things like being able to regulate your emotions better, solve complex problems, think flexibly, think creatively, override any conscious or unconscious biases that you may have. These are great benefits to get from actually just doing something like learning a language or a musical instrument. And it can be smaller things like travel, interacting with people who’ve had a different life to you, cooking something new, taking a different route to work, reading a newspaper or a magazine that’s very different to what you normally read.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Doing a podcast.

DRA. TARA SWART

Well, you do this every day. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it’s not inducing neuroplasticity in your brain, although you’re learning new things. But I’m meeting different people. Yeah, you’re meeting different people, you’re learning new things. But it’s probably not what we would call attention intense enough. to actually be shifting pathways in your brain.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So having all these conversations isn’t like expanding my

DRA. TARA SWART

It is in terms of the facts that you’re learning, but your actual process of finding a person, doing a bit of research into them, meeting them, having a conversation with them, being good at asking them certain questions, that’s a very natural pathway for you. So you’re getting better and better at it, but that’s not a new big change in your brain.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what, okay, right. So I think when people hear about neuroplasticity, when I first heard about that it was even a thing, it was a revelation that we could do things to change our brains. What is it that people typically want from neuroplasticity? They wanna be someone else in other ways. They want new habits. They want new ways of thinking. They wanna stop being a negative thinker or an overthinker in certain situations. If I wanted to stop being an overthinker or a negative thinker, or if I wanted to, there’s certain habits we all have and that I have in my life that I’m like, I just feel like it’s me now.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, like procrastination.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Procrastination shows up sometimes.

DRA. TARA SWART

I’m just saying that because I’m not learning.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Who have you spoken to? No, I don’t procrastinate too much because I don’t really have a choice these days. I procrastinate on some things. I think we all do things that I find.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, we all do. No, I’m really glad you’ve taken this into the intangible because obviously I use the analogy of language as a great one to help people understand that you, you learn something new, it builds up that pathway in your brain, it shifts your brain around, it has other benefits. But what people are really looking for is changing habits and behaviors that are not serving them in life. So whether it’s lack of motivation, overthinker, negative thinker, lose your temper, you know, sort of feel very stuck, people-pleasing, you know, like so many things.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Mood, reactions, unreactedness.

DRA. TARA SWART

So the process for that, which is underpinned by neuroplasticity, like the physiology of what happens in the brain, is raised awareness. So let’s say that you’ve, you know, you’ve had a relationship break up again for the similar reasons and, you know, whatever happened before. So then you get to a point and you’re like, okay, last time I just kind of didn’t really deal with that and just moved on to the next relationship. Now I’m beginning to see there’s a pattern. I think I need to do something different.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Step one is spot the pattern.

DRA. TARA SWART

And step one is 50% of the battle. So, you know, once you know, okay, this is a thing that I think, or I believe, or I do, that comes out with a result that I don’t want, that is half the battle. So once you’ve done that, you don’t try to change anything straight away. The next stage is called focused attention. So you look around in your life, at work, in your personal life, in like sports, if you play sports, with different types of people and through your past, where are the times I’ve done that? What triggers me into doing that? Or what pushes me into doing that?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Let me give you an example. So we can work through these steps with an example. Got a friend in my life that repeatedly dates people who are married or in a relationship. And it ends how you’d expect it to end, in her heartbreak. But it’s this spiral she’s on. So step one would be becoming aware of this pattern. You’re dating people that are in this, for some reason you’re

DRA. TARA SWART

So in this case, that is obvious. If you’re getting into relationships with people who are already attached, you’re aware of that. What I would want to dig into with her is what it is that she believes about herself that makes her think that that’s okay. And I’m imagining already that there must be a level of self-worth that has struggled, and maybe there’s something in her childhood that’s caused that. You’d only do that if you didn’t believe that you deserved someone of your own. So that’s the kind of conversation I would have with someone like that. I would probably ask her like, you know, what goes through your mind when you decide to do that again? And she would say something that she’s conscious of thinking. I would want to dig below that and ask what it is that she believes about herself that makes her think that. So that’s quite an important part of the raised awareness is getting below the thought into the belief. Next step is, well, certainly if she’s got a history of this is, you know, maybe in journaling, acknowledging, writing down, okay, this time that I went out with someone that was, you know, kind of engaged in a relationship with someone else, or this time I had an affair with a married man, what happened? Like that decision making process, the point from which you agreed to get into that, what was the consequence? So really, That’s the focused attention, marrying together that decision with the consequence. You know, one of the things I say is you are basically the sum of every decision that you’ve made in your life. That’s who you are. So once there’s a bit more understanding and attention around like what causes that and how it happens, the next stage is deliberate practice. So the first challenge is going to be the next time she meets a man who’s not available. And she may not yet be able to say no to that. She may have to make another mistake, but she’ll make it armed with all the knowledge that she’s got now. And she’ll see it for what it is. Or she will be able to say no to that man this time. So the next step is deliberate practice, which is where you say, OK, I used to behave like this. This is the new me that I want to be as somebody who says no to every man that’s married, who, you know, replaces every negative thought with a positive thought or whatever it is that you’re working on. You then look for scenarios to practice this new behavior and at first it will be hard because you have a pathway there that may have been set since childhood that is used to doing a certain thing and the brain is a very energy hungry organ so it’s always trying to use the path of least resistance. Let’s say I’m an overthinker, okay, and you’re asking me these questions, and I’ve got this voice in the back of my head saying, why is Stephen asking me that? What’s he trying to get to? Is he trying to trick me? What I would try to do is silence that voice in my head and say, okay, in this podcast with Stephen, I’m gonna focus on him, I’m gonna take his questions for what they are, and I’m gonna speak from my area of expertise. I’m not gonna worry about that other stuff that can go on in my head. And let’s say this time I managed to do that 50% of the time. And then I go and do another podcast next week and I managed to do it 75% of the time, you know, and so on. Eventually this new pathway that I’ve been building will become stronger than the one that I had before. And then every time I turn up for a podcast, I’ll just be completely present and attentive and I’ll get to the end of it. And that’s the new me now.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So behaviors that we repeat. So let’s start starting at the beginning of those three steps. The first step is becoming aware of the pattern in our lives. The second step is becoming really cognizant of the pain or the consequences of that pattern. And the third step is kind of like setting an intention for who we want to become and the goals we have and then practicing it as much as possible. And that is the three steps to

DRA. TARA SWART

The fourth is not a step but the fourth factor is accountability because most people left to their own devices will give up on that process when it feels too hard. That’s step three. Yeah. You know, with years of practice and journaling, I have become better at holding myself accountable. But for most people, there’s got to be some external, so it could be a friend. One of the reasons I’m a big fan of doing these action boards is that there’s a very tangible thing in front of you that with images of what you said you wanted to achieve this year, which you can clearly and your friends and family can see at the end of the year, whether you did or you didn’t. And, you know, of course you can have an actual like professional person that is there, like your language teacher to hold you accountable.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

We’re gonna have to edit this out because you really are pushing this. You’ve got an agenda here. I’ve been really, you talked earlier about, just a second ago, about how When you’re trying to create a new pathway, if there’s an existing one that is very well established from your childhood, it’s increasingly harder. So I’ve always been unorganized. I grew up in a home that looked like an atomic bomb had hit it. It was just a shit show inside. It was an absolute mess. So that habit of just being messy is quite well-established. The pathway in my brain of being messy is well-established. But more broadly, I’m thinking here about trauma and how trauma looks in the brain. When we’ve had really traumatic early experiences in our life or in the context of my friend, we might’ve learned that we’re not deserving of someone or we’re not worthy or we’re not enough or we’re different. That might be a really well-established pathway. Doesn’t that… suggest that there are some behavior patterns that are just practically immovable, practically unchangeable?

DRA. TARA SWART

I don’t want to say yes to that, but what I am going to say is we’ve moved away from using this term hardwired, which kind of means like it’s there forever. And we talk about soft wiring now because of neuroplasticity. I know people who have been through incredible amounts of trauma. There’s going to be an example coming up on my podcast soon, who has done so much work on herself that she’s really in a beautiful place as a psychologist and a Vedic astrologer helping other people learn to deal with their trauma. So there’s a lot that can happen. She was clearly a very resilient person and got herself educated. Some people deal with the consequences of trauma for the rest of their life and you know it runs their life and it’s sad. You may not be able to deal with every single thing that you’ve experienced or the full extent of what you’ve experienced but I do believe that there’s a lot that everybody can do.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Earlier you talked about generational trauma. and epigenetics, as you said. What are both of those things? The first time I heard about generational trauma, I thought it was like woo-woo, fluffy, hopeful, like wishful thing, like a nice way to blame your ancestors for the way that you are. When I first heard about this concept that you could be passed down trauma from your parents or your grandparents, it just seemed like it couldn’t possibly be true.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, I know. I mean, it’s a relatively new area of research. So I’m actually going to separate this into a few things. So generational trauma, and you can look this up, is related to specific times of acts that were placed onto particular marginalized groups. So like first Americans, slavery. In Asia, there are some particular groups that were treated in a certain way. And that is, so the impact of generational trauma is when something happened to one generation, there’s a psychological spillover and it can be something to do with you always feel isolated or you always feel lonely or you always feel at the margin or you always feel left out. That’s because a whole generation retreated in a certain way and that has an impact. Intergenerational epigenetic trauma is about how some external event actually changes the expression of your genes. So we have a genotype and a phenotype. Genotype is your DNA, it doesn’t change, but the phenotype is which bits get switched on and switched off. The most famous examples of this are the Holocaust and the Dutch famine. But there are other examples. And we are sufficient generations away from that now to have seen like three plus generations changes in the stress responses. And so and it’s not always bad. So sometimes people are more resilient because their grandparents or great grandparents went through something terrible. Sometimes people are more anxious and it’s hard to know necessarily why things might go one way or another. I always say to people that you aren’t born with the genes that your parents had when they were born, you’re born with the expression of the genes that your parents had around the time of conception. And then, of course, your mother’s stress levels through the trimesters of pregnancy. And this isn’t meant to blame anyone for what happened in the past or how stressed they feel when they’re pregnant. It’s meant to raise awareness of the fact that if you have something in your family’s history or you did have a particularly stressful pregnancy, you can use neuroplasticity to improve the chances of your baby expressing genes that will be more helpful for them in life than if you didn’t know about all of this stuff.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So if you had a particularly stressful pregnancy, let’s say, you’re a woman who was really under stress when you were eight months pregnant, how does that impact the baby? And what symptoms are you likely to see in that baby that it wouldn’t have had otherwise?

DRA. TARA SWART

OK, so I’m going to give you a really tangible answer before I take it back to the something we were talking about before. Imagine the mother’s a heroin addict. That is affecting the baby, right? Yeah. And that’s because they share the same blood supply. Yeah. So if the mother is stressed and she’s got high levels of cortisol, then that cortisol is going through the placenta into the baby’s blood supply. And basically being stressed from in utero could switch on genes for not being resilient to stress or being more liable to anxiety or mood disorder. And it’s already starting off, you know, inflammation in this like tiny baby that hasn’t even been born yet. I know that sounds terrible and I really don’t want this to come across like all moms have to be completely zen and never get stressed because that’s just not reality. But, you know, everything that you can do, of course, to manage your stress during pregnancy is helpful. but then completely understanding that if your child then starts to show any symptoms of anxiety or inability to manage their emotions after an age where they should be able to do that, you can introduce them to meditation. You can sit with them and talk to them about their emotions and how they’re feeling. There are lots of really great books and videos that you can use to educate children about that kind of thing. I always say knowledge is power, and unfortunately, difficult things can happen to people in life, but every time something like that’s happened to me, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of, okay, what can I find that can help me to overcome this and be better?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s just thinking about, as you were talking about grief and the brain, the relationship between, you know, what happens in the brain when we’re experiencing grief and stuff. Think about grief and heartbreak as strong emotions. So many of us, including one of my best friends, is recently grieving a relationship he’s lost. And I’ve got another friend that’s lost someone in their life who’s passed away. And it’s such an all-consuming force that seems to be resistant to advice. I just wondered if through your work, you’d learn anything about grief in the brain and heartbreak in the brain.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, so I think there’s so many versions of grief that we’ve seen, particularly in the last few years, which is loss of sense of self, loss of someone through a relationship breakdown and loss of someone through actual death. And it’s interesting to hear you say as a caring onlooker that it’s something that’s so overwhelming and resistant to advice. I strongly believe that to ever heal from grief you have to go to the bottom of the hole and however you do that is not something that anyone else can comment on. I think if you are doing things like throwing yourself back into work or like partying too much to avoid it that’s not right but if somebody has to go somewhere emotionally to deal with grief they’ve got to be supported and allowed to do that. And then maybe at times gently nudged in terms of like, how are you doing? You know, is it kind of, are you feeling any sort of like healing or resolution or understanding or acceptance? I do think particularly with grief that if we haven’t been through something ourselves, it’s really hard to imagine how bad it is, even though you might, you know, care very deeply.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What makes you think that? What makes you think that you have to go to the bottom of the hole?

DRA. TARA SWART

Because I think we are very avoidant emotionally. I think that’s part of the greater issue that I was talking about, which is being lost and disconnected. And I remember when my first marriage broke up and I was changing career, thinking if I hadn’t been a psychiatrist and know the things that I know, I can see how you could end up on a psychiatric ward going through the break down of a marriage. So all I’m trying to say, I’m not trying to say you have to feel terrible. What I’m trying to say is you have to process all the emotions and you kind of have to surrender to it a bit because if you try to gloss over that, it will come back and bite you later. And I’ve seen many stories of that happening where people, you know, did really great things like write a book about it or, you know, shower all of their care and love and attention onto other people. And then eventually found that they hadn’t actually dealt with their own emotions. So when I say go to the bottom of it, I don’t necessarily mean feel really terrible. I mean, process all of the emotions fully because then you can actually heal and at some stage move forward. It doesn’t mean you forget, you know, the person or what happened, but if you try to gloss over it I think this it’s it’s dangerous because it’s such a deep it’s such a deep emotion it’s such a facing of your own mortality.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Quick one, I discovered a product which has changed my life called Eight Sleep and I’m so proud to say today that I had a chat with the founder of the brand and they are now a podcast sponsor and one of the things I’ve come to learn on this podcast from speaking with sleep experts like Matthew Walker is how important temperature is when it comes to sleep. The temperature of your room, the temperature of your bed. And also one of the big insights I had from speaking to some experts was that the temperature of the room should fluctuate throughout the night as you move through different stages of sleep. So when you first get into bed it should be quite cool in bed, it should then get a little bit cooler and then the temperature should increase near the end and that is a reflection of what would have happened in nature once upon a time. You’ve probably come to learn that I have sponsors on this podcast that I use and products that I love. My sponsors should be a reflection of the conversations I’m having but also a reflection of what I’m using in my life. So to celebrate them being a new podcast sponsor, I always want to get a discount for you guys and I’ve got one. Go to 8sleep.com which is E-I-G-H-T sleep.com Slash Steven and if you do that, you’ll save a hundred and fifty dollars on the pod cover that I have on my bed The one I’m talking about grab your pod cover Send me a DM and let me know how you get on as you may know This podcast is sponsored by heel if you’re living under a rock, you might have missed that I’ve come to learn over time, not all of the products they have are for me, but the ones that are for me have really, really changed my life in a profound way. All of the products are designed for different use cases and different people. For me, as you’ll probably know, the ready-to-drink bottles are a staple of my life at the moment, and they have been for many, many years. But for a lot of other people, they have the Hot and Savory, which is a five-minute hot meal that’s nutritionally complete. It contains all the good stuff that all Huel products contain, which is the 23 vitamins and minerals and the wonderful balance of sort of nutritional completeness. And then you have the bars as well. If you’ve heard about Huel on this podcast, you’ve heard me talking about it a lot, you’re aware that I’m an investor in the company, you’re aware that I’m on the board of the company, and you’re not sure where to start, I would highly recommend starting with the Best Seller Bundle. Basically, we’ll send you a package in the post containing all of the favorite products that people love, and then you try them all and stick with the ones that really, really fit you. The link is in the description below to try the Best Seller Bundle. In your book you talk about the mechanisms of neuroplasticity. What are the mechanisms of neuroplasticity and the three factors that have the biggest impact on changes in the brain?

DRA. TARA SWART

So the first one is myelination and anyone who does a lot of sport who repeats a certain weight training will understand that that’s what’s happening in their muscles. You know when I said you come here pretty much every day and you sit with someone and you interview them and you’re really great at asking questions. That’s like something you’re super good at that because you repeat it, it becomes like a superpower. And that means that what’s happening there is myelination. So myelin is a fatty substance that coats some neural pathways, and those pathways become fast pathways. Now, there’s a reason from evolution why we have some fast pathways and some slow pathways. And the reason is that if you put your hand in the fire, your reflex to snatch your hand out is a fast pathway, but your pain reflex is a slow pathway, because if you were incapacitated by pain, the minute you put your hand in the fire, you wouldn’t be able to get away from it. One of the mechanisms of neuroplasticity is becoming even better at something that you’re really good at, and that happens through myelination. The most common one, which is something that you’re quite good at, but if you had loads of time, you could become really good at it, but you maybe don’t have loads of time, happens through synaptic connection. So that’s the one that can feel like quite hard work, but if you put in the effort, then you can change your brain. So that means that neurons that already exist in the brain connect up with each other and start to form new pathways. And the third mechanism, which doesn’t happen a lot in the adult brain, but it does happen around the hippocampus because we do lay down new memories in life, happens a lot in children’s brains, is called neurogenesis. And that is little embryonic nerve cells that float around in the brain actually becoming fully formed nerve cells, neurons, and connecting up through synaptic connection and maybe getting myelinated. And there’s a factor, a growth factor that’s involved in that, the embryonic cell becoming an adult cell, which is called BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor. And trophic means growth. So neurotrophic is growth of neurons. And the things that contribute mostly to that are aerobic exercise and eating dark skinned foods. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 dark-skinned foods.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah so let me just cover the exercise one first because this is one of my fun facts which is that if you are regularly doing aerobic exercise the turnover of those cells in your brain is about 13-14 percent.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So like the the amount and the speed in which they like die die off?

DRA. TARA SWART

No the speed in which they go from embryonic to full-grown. Oh okay. Yeah okay so because we want neurogenesis to happen. Okay If you haven’t been doing exercise for a while and then you start, the rate of cell turnover is like 30%. So it increases after a period of inactivity with new aerobic exercise. So that’s my excuse for like being a couch potato half the time and then starting up again.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Oh yeah, who are you kidding? Okay, so it will accelerate the speed in which you’re making those connections.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, making the embryonic cells grow into new cells and then connect up with existing ones.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So I want to make sure I’m super clear on this, so if I’m trying to develop, if I’m trying to speak a different language, by doing exercise that has an impact on… Oh, it’ll help you learn and retain memories, yeah. So in In simple language, if I’m doing aerobic exercise, my ability to accelerate my neuroplasticity will increase. Yeah. What if it’s like not aerobic exercise? What if I’m just lifting big weights?

DRA. TARA SWART

There are benefits to your brain of other types of exercise, but weight training doesn’t relate to neurogenesis as much.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

DRA. TARA SWART

This isn’t so much about language, but it’s another example of mind over matter. So this was an experiment done on two groups of weightlifters. Thought you might like this one. That’s a big compliment.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Thank you so much. You think I’m a weightlifter? You think I identify as a weightlifter? You looked at me and thought weightlifter.

DRA. TARA SWART

Totally.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Thank you so much.

DRA. TARA SWART

Um, this was finger and elbow weights though, so maybe not so glamorous in this experiment. Okay. So one group lifted finger or elbow weights. I think this was a two week study and they showed, I think it was about a 40% increase in muscle mass of the targeted muscle group for those weights. Their counterparts only imagined lifting weights for two weeks. They lifted no weights for two weeks. They just sat there and they visualized themselves lifting weights and they had a 13% increase in muscle mass.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Interesting. So we can tell our brain to grow muscle.

DRA. TARA SWART

Have you been secretly doing that? No, but I could be doing that instead. I’ve been going to the gym.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’d be much easier if I could just watch the football and tell myself that I’m lifting weights.

DRA. TARA SWART

Well, I don’t think you can watch the football. I think the whole, like, visualisation and, you know, intention and attention stuff was an important part of that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I mean, that speaks to the power of our thoughts again, doesn’t it, really? If our thoughts can tell our brain to grow muscles.

DRA. TARA SWART

Has that been, is that… It’s in the book.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But is it like, is it… Is that widely accepted as the truth? I’m surprised there’s not like personal trainers that just sit you down in an empty room and just go, right.

DRA. TARA SWART

Well, think about the number of athletes that use visualization as part of their training. Of course they do the exercise and the practice and everything, but that’s hugely used in sports.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Interesting. It’s obviously not a case that I would just then go home and start imagining working out, but it does, again, remind me of the importance of just thinking about positive things that are in line with my goals.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah. I mean, what’s the harm in imagining yourself more muscular or more youthful alongside eating the dark foods and getting enough sleep? You know, it’s like it’s part of the package. Do you want to know what you should eat so that you can… Please, what is this dark skinned foods? So basically, you know, at the basic level, we want people to have a healthy, balanced diet, mostly plant based. But where you can choose a darker version of a food, the pigment in the skin of that food has higher levels of antioxidants called anthocyanins, and they also contribute to neurogenesis. So it’s basically like eating black beans instead of white beans, or eating blueberries instead of strawberries, dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate, purple sprouting broccoli instead of green broccoli, and good quality coffee counts as well. Yeah, so I try to vary what I eat, but also always choose the darker option if I can.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay, so is there anything else that one needs to know about the process of neuroplasticity. So from what I’ve ascertained so far, it’s about understanding the patterns we have in our brain, understanding the consequences of them. Repetition is key to establishing new pathways. Is there anything else that I need to be really aware of? Because I do want to grow my brain and change my brain.

DRA. TARA SWART

So the accountability piece, which we’ve discussed, but also creating the conditions in your body for your brain to be able to do all of that stuff. And so, you know, this is a bit of repetition, but sleeping roughly eight hours a night, having regular sleep and wake times seems to have an additional benefit. We don’t know why. So within an hour, so go to sleep between 10 and 11, wake up whenever. Not being sedentary, so being physically active doesn’t necessarily mean you have to pound it at the gym. To be honest, in terms of neuroplasticity, you don’t want to do too much high intensity exercise because it spikes your cortisol levels. So it’s better to do kind of quite gentle exercise. Eating 30 different plant products a week and varying the color as much as possible. you know, managing your stress, whether it’s through meditation or just like removing the causes of stress. If you’re doing and being hydrated, if you are doing all of those things and you want to play at level two of the game, you could start doing time restricted eating. So only eating between, I only eat between 12 noon and 8 p.m. But you could do 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. So that kind of fasting is very beneficial for your brain as well. But only if you’ve got the foundations right. It’s not going to help you if you don’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 What does it do for the brain fasting, intermittent fasting?

DRA. TARA SWART

Well, it helps to regulate your blood sugar levels. So, you know, spiking blood sugar levels aren’t good for your body or your brain. And fasting and calorie restriction, they do have like brain health and longevity benefits. that, you know, only if your foundations are right. You know, somebody who’s stressed or eats badly or doesn’t sleep enough will not benefit from time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting. Because it is a form of stress on your body, but it’s a form of stress that your body can take and use to build resilience if the baseline level of stuff is good.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And for neuroplasticity to happen, we need to be taking on big cognitive challenges, challenges that kind of break existing pathways. So I want to learn to DJ. I’ve been learning for about 12 months now. That feels like a big cognitive challenge for me. Yeah, that’s great. That’s the type of thing that would establish a new pathway in my brain. Absolutely. Someone’s just looking to build their self-esteem and their confidence. What does the brain tell us about the process of doing that? Does it go back again to what we said about awareness, about understanding the feelings and the consequences and about setting goals and repetition and accountability?

DRA. TARA SWART

It will get to that, but there’s actually a little bit of a jumpstart to that, which is really helpful, particularly in terms of confidence and self-esteem, which is that usually there’s a particular recurring negative thought that’s associated with feelings of lack of confidence. So if you can identify what that is and create a positive affirmation that’s like the opposite of it or something that counteracts it, then that can be a great way to get started. My phrase would have been, it has to be perfect and it’s not gonna be perfect. I wouldn’t have been able to say this last year, but now I would probably be able to say, it is going to be better than perfect. It is going to be amazing. Like, I know it. But to get myself there, I could have said, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it’s going to be great. Or I could have said, maybe it will be perfect. Sometimes a question I ask myself is, what’s the best possible outcome that could happen here? So it’s changing your language in your mind about the things that you think. So that’s basically metacognition, which is that you can understand your own thinking, and then reversing that narrative quite strongly, even if it doesn’t feel like it’s totally true, and just repeating that so much that you start to wear down that other pathway.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Does language really matter? The language we say to ourselves?

DRA. TARA SWART

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It really matters. Yeah. How we speak about ourselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How do we know that matters?

DRA. TARA SWART

I mean, it’s neuroplasticity. If you’re repeating something in your mind or out loud. Then if that’s being repeated more than another statement, it’s the one that your brain is going to believe.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So we can trick our brains effectively by saying something else to ourselves repeatedly. Because there’s this whole movement in the personal development community which says you just kind of look in the mirror and you say to yourself, like, I’m beautiful, I’m attractive, everyone’s going to love me, I’m going to be rich. And I found it hard to get on board with that train. Because I know I’m bullshitting myself. In my subconscious or whatever, I just know if I said those things, I’m not saying about myself, but saying those very, very far away things, I just think my brain is smart enough to know that I’m bullshitting myself.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, I think there’s an element of reality to it. So there’s a few things there, which is those particular things that you said are very shallow. They are not really the things that people should need to be saying to themselves. What I find, and I picked this up from the podcast with Lewis, is he said that sometimes he would just say to himself, I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m okay. And actually just sometimes saying to myself, I’m safe. is that’s what I need to hear, not I’m beautiful and I’m amazing. That does feel like A, it’s the kind of thing that everybody probably wants to say. B,

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 It’s not addressing the underlying issues.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, it’s not addressing and I’m going to be rich. I mean, that’s the worst one because you actually have to do stuff to make that happen. You know, you can’t just say that. So I think finding the stuff that you need to say to yourself that is not to do with social expectation or parental expectation or, you know, social group. what everybody else is doing, like what you really want to know for yourself that’s going to set you up to be able to go out into the real world and do the stuff that you need to do to get the other things that you want.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

There you said, you can’t just say it, you have to go out and do it. Now when people hear this term manifestation, it’s highly associated with just kind of saying stuff or thinking stuff. And it’s less associated with actually going out and doing it. So a lot of people just turn off when someone talks about manifestation, because it sounds kind of woo woo, put it on the vision board, and it will happen. And in fact, I think I’ve said this a few times, but I had, I wouldn’t say it was an argument, but a disagreement, which resulted in the person I was speaking to literally getting out of a taxi in the middle of New York City and walking off. I was on a date many years ago and the girl was saying to me that she goes, you can just manifest anything into your life. So you can just think about it and then it will happen. So I said to her, I was like, you think you could just like think about becoming a millionaire and then it will happen. And she goes, yeah. And I go, and you wouldn’t even have to like do all the stuff. And she was like, no, you could just like think about it and the universe will attract it into your life. Do you believe in manifestation? And if so, what form of manifestation and how is that supported with neuroscience?

DRA. TARA SWART

So I believe in manifestation based on your brain, so your thoughts, your beliefs, your actions. So where I’ve called my book The Source, I have said your brain is the source of you being able to attract everything that you want into your life. So I sat down one summer and I like researched the laws of attraction and just looked at whether I could explain them through cognitive science, which is psychology and neuroscience, and I could. So I was kind of like, oh, I’m onto something here. And the first stage for me was understanding that it is absolutely to do with the way that you think, but then it’s not magically like attracting something in the atmosphere. It’s to do with the changes that you make based on your thought process. I do believe in vision boards, but I call them action boards because I see them as a representation of what I want, but I still have to go out there and make those things happen. I think it’s also much more empowering to believe that it’s your brain that’s making that stuff happen and not some external force that you’re not really sure what it is.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So how would I manifest something into my life? Say I want to manifest a great relationship. I’m in a great relationship, but say I was single and I wanted to manifest the perfect partner. How would I manifest the perfect partner into my life? Using the brain as the source.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, so with that one, I think the preferred method is to create a list of the attributes that you want in that person. But you then have to make sure that you are everything that is on that list.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So if I want a blonde, I’ve got to dye my hair. No, I’m joking. I’m joking. Okay, I get what you mean. So you’re talking about fundamental qualities and values. And then making sure that you represent those qualities and values. I’ve never heard anyone say that, but that is so important because I know so many people who would write a list that they couldn’t meet themselves in terms of fundamental values. They probably want their partner to be disciplined, to care about their health, to be honest. And if they ask themselves, are they those things? They’d probably fail at that. To be fair, my partner is so much better than me in so many ways, nearly every way. I’d probably fail at that list too. Why is that important?

DRA. TARA SWART

I think that you hear a lot of people saying, this is what I really want in someone. But you never really hear people saying, I’ve really worked on myself and this is what I believe I have to offer. And so psychologically, you meet people at the level of psychological evolution that you’re at, but equally on the sort of flip side of the coin, you meet people at the level of psychological wound that you have. So to be in a balanced relationship with someone that’s really great, you’ve got to be bringing something to the party. I mean, no one’s going to go out with you if they’re really amazing and you’re a drag.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But drags want amazing people. And this is the problem, right? It’s true, right?

DRA. TARA SWART

 I guess so.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Are you scared to say it? When I was a, when I was at optimal drag in my life, when I was the most drag in my life, I attracted drag people, but I wanted amazing people and I could never get them.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah. But I feel like with you, that was part of your journey of knowing that you could become an amazing person. I believed I could. Yeah, exactly. So you got an amazing person once you did the work that took you out of dragsville.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Amen. Okay, so that’s super interesting. So make sure you are the things on that list because we’ll rise to the level of our values and we’ll fall to the level of our wounds.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, I love the way you put that, but also that, you know, what you have to offer in a relationship is just as important as what you want out of it. And I don’t know, as a society, we just don’t really seem to think about it like that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

There’s actually a note in my diary where I wrote People who focus on what they want don’t typically get what they want. People who focus on what they have to offer typically get what they want.

DRA. TARA SWART

 That’s amazing, that’s like basically the same thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, I literally just parroted it off you, plagiarized it. No, but it is in my diary, and I posted on my Instagram story a while ago, that it was just an observation to me in business, when you hire people, the people that are focused on like, can I get a pay rise, can I get a pay rise, don’t typically get the pay rise, but the people that focus on what they have to offer, they’re the ones that you give all the, you promote and you give the pay rise to, because they’re focusing on the most important thing, which is, I think over prolonged periods of time, not always in the short term, and not always in every case, but life will eventually give you roughly what you deserve over a long term, generally, for most people, not always, because there’s gonna be someone that says, so you can’t what about me, because I’ve presented the caveat. But generally, that’s what I’ve observed. And I’ve seen people cheat the system. I’ve seen people get a little bit further ahead than their talent, or their value, but life has a wonderful way of bringing us back to the level of our values. And you said it in relationships, life will drop you to the depth of your wounds or to the height of your values. So really, if you want to find a sustainable way to get what you want in life, it’s to do that work on what you can offer other people.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah. And as you were speaking, it made me think that actually, let’s say if I was constantly like, oh, you know, I want I want this pay rise. I want that man. That’s got to be a cortisol inducing state in your body. But if instead of that, I’m like, what can I do for Steven? I have so much love to give. That’s going to be oxytocin. And who’s someone going to be more attracted to?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Interesting. Oh, that’s so true. One of the things I want to talk to you about that has been risen in culture recently is neurodivergence. Big topic. Autism, ADHD, so much there. I had a mother send me a voice note the other day. Her child has just been diagnosed with autism and she’s really struggling with it and trying to understand what it means and where it came from and was it hereditary? And there’s so many guests on my podcast have talked about the rise in diagnosis of ADHD and is it something that we are, causing by the way that we choose to live our lives. From an understanding of neuroscience, what is neurodiversity and what are causing it and what is curing it?

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, so this would come more from my experience as a psychiatrist when I did do some work with children as well. So neurodiversity is basically anything that doesn’t fall into the category of a typical brain. So you know, the way that most of the population think and how their brain works. So that would include things like dyslexia and dyscalculia and ADD, ADHD, and autism slash Asperger spectrum, and other things. I think that a lot of it is to do with better diagnosis. So I’m not saying it isn’t the case that these things have risen, but I think we’re also much better at diagnosing them. So for example, when I worked with mostly little boys with ADHD, when I saw them for the first time and I took the full family history, there was quite often an absent father who’d actually been in like several different relationships and like couldn’t hold down a job. And you kind of thought, yeah, he probably had it, but was undiagnosed. So there is an element of that. I do think that it is an adaptation to the world which is changing at such a rapid pace which is you know always switched on so much technology and some people would say that autism is even like a form of evolution in a way to like help us keep up with the changing pace of the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So you don’t necessarily think we know if it’s increasing in prevalence

DRA. TARA SWART

 I think it is, but it’s partly naturally increasing and partly because we’re better at diagnosing it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. I do wonder as well sometimes things like dyslexia, whether humans have always had an element of dyslexia, but it’s more, it’s more obvious and more of a, more of a challenge in the world we live in. Think about the schooling system and writing and education, these are fairly new constructs.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so this isn’t to do with neurodivergence, but to do with things like gender identity and sexual orientation. What I found in my research with the indigenous wisdom is that those things were understood long ago. There was a place for people and an understanding of you know, their role in society and sometimes even an elevated role. So it’s really interesting that we’re grappling with things now like, you know, what gender does your child want to be and what life, you know, is your child going to have if they’re gay or whatever? And like, apparently these ancient cultures were dealing with this like all the time, no problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Your second series of your podcast is going to focus on some of this work that you learned. Yeah. What are some of the interesting things that if you could only tell me a few that you think would have the most significant impact on my life and you can’t mention learning Portuguese, what would you tell me about?

DRA. TARA SWART

So one theme that’s come through quite strongly is related to creativity, which was kind of mentioned, but that doing things like humming and chanting are actually like really beneficial. And they’ve obviously been around forever and we don’t really know why people did them in the first place. But in terms of expressing creativity and like calming down the nervous system, that’s one thing that seems to have come through from kind of like Ayurveda, but also from the first Americans as well. James Fester said that to me. Did he?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That humming was good for your health and immune system, I think he said. Yeah. Like through your nose.

DRA. TARA SWART

 there’s different, you know, there’s different times you can do, um, even just like, um, go on.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I can see you were avoiding it. I’ll be in the trailer.

DRA. TARA SWART

But also humming, like at the back of your throat, humming, like between your lips. So like, Oh, it’s such basic stuff. I mean, you can do that on the tube, you know, you can do it. That was going in the drain.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why would that help? Why would that help us?

DRA. TARA SWART

I don’t really actually like know the answer. I’m just thinking of this like, what can we get from indigenous wisdom that could help us now? But I guess it’s something to do with regulating your parasympathetic nervous system.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. That’s actually what he said. Yeah. Yeah. Now I’ve remembered. This point about aging generally, longevity and aging, one of the really interesting things you talk about in the book is this idea of sort of psychological priming and psychological priming of aging. And that psychological priming is the effect that the mindset of aging has on our physical body. How our thoughts about aging affect our physical abilities. What I interpreted from that is our thoughts about aging have an impact on our aging.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah, so actually there’s a really fascinating study, it’s one of my favourite ones to talk about, which was three groups of octogenarians. What’s an octogenarian? People in their 80s. And one group was the control group, so they just lived like normal for a week. One group had to reminisce about being in their 60s for most of the week whenever they had an opportunity to and one group were actually driven to retrofitted versions of their homes that looked like what their house looked like 20 years ago. They were given newspapers dated from 20 years ago They had photos of themselves in that house when they were in their 60s. And one of the things was they got there and they were sort of like, okay, you know, who’s going to carry our suitcase up to the bedroom or whatever? And they were like, no, you’re 60 now, you carry your own suitcase. So it literally started from the minute they got there and these little old ladies had to, and gentlemen had to carry their cases up. After one week, the people in that group were taller because their posture improved. They had better musculoskeletal coordination than they had a week before. In before and after photos that were shown to people that didn’t know them, they were rated as younger in the one week after photos and the photos from arriving at that place. And the reminiscing group also had some improvements, but not as much as a group that lived like they were in their 60s.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And so there was three groups. The ones that went back and relived their life, the ones that reminisced and the ones that did nothing at all. Wow. And that really goes to show the impact of what we think about ourselves and then all of the physiological consequences of that. You talk about this, your eyes as well. that you were going to get, was it like laser eye surgery or something?

DRA. TARA SWART

No, no.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s just like people told you you needed glasses.

DRA. TARA SWART

Well, my optician told me so he’s of Indian origin, same age as me. And he said, oh, I think, you know, you’re probably going to need reading glasses next year. And I was like, no, I do not want reading glasses. That makes you look really old. And he was like, yeah, I know. I know we both look younger than we are, but, you know, your eyes are going to age just like anybody else’s. And I was like, no, they are not. So I left, came back a year later. He said, how’s it going with the reading? I said, it’s fine. And he sort of went, OK, Tara. So he’s doing my eye test. He spins around on his little chair halfway through and says, your eyes haven’t got worse. They haven’t even stayed the same. They’ve got better. And I said, I know. And he said, What have you been doing? And I said, Well, I just said no to you when you said, I’m gonna have to get reading glasses. And when I’m like looking at my phone or a book, and it feels like it would be a bit easier if I moved it further away. I just don’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what’s that doing in the brain? Why is that? Why did that improve your reading?

DRA. TARA SWART

Um, Well, I hadn’t experienced a problem with my reading, but he was obviously seeing the numbers slightly change. I really didn’t do much more than what I’ve just said. So it was like not accepting the limitation and then not changing my behavior. And I think that’s what you see from the third group of people, which is that they had to change their behavior to live like without any help and in a way that they had to when they were younger. So that essentially removed the limitations that we impose on ourself, which is that if I’m X age, it must mean that I need reading glasses or I need a walking stick or whatever it is. There’s a kind of opposite experiment to that, too, which was done with young medical students in Florida, and they had to walk between five rooms and on the table. were five pieces of paper with a word on it and you had to string a sentence out of it. But that wasn’t the real experiment. They thought that was the experiment. The real experiment was that in one of the rooms, the words that were on the table were Florida, beach, sunshine, walk, bungalow. And all of them walked more slowly out of that room than any of the other rooms because those words are associated with retirement. and that made them slow down. You asked me, is language important to our brain? That’s how important it is.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So just saying words can change our behaviour so quickly.

DRA. TARA SWART

That’s what the experiment showed.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve been thinking a lot, you know, I said, I’ve got this vlog on YouTube called Behind the Diary. And in two of the episodes, I’ve caught myself out while I’m filming because I said words that I thought would be unhelpful. I think people, someone in the comments actually challenged me because there’s one day when I’m filming Dragon’s Den and I’m filming myself, I’m just talking about what’s going on and I go, oh, I really need a coffee this morning. And I stop myself and say, I shouldn’t say need. And then I go, there’s something about this casual use of the word need throughout our lives that is disempowering me. It’s making me a slave to the coffee. So I make this point, which I’m sure people think I’m a little bit weird for making that. I really need to not say the word need associated to the things because I will then probably develop a psychological and maybe a somewhat of a physical need for that thing.

DRA. TARA SWART

And it’s also just bringing that word need into your life, like you don’t have enough, that you need something. I’m constantly changing my words, tweaking them like that. So I would say, oh, I’m going to treat myself to a coffee.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And that was your decision. You were powerful there as a choice you made. There’s an overarching point here about personal responsibility as well. When people talk about, I can’t exercise, I don’t have any time. It feels like a really disempowering frame versus I’ve got other priorities, which feels empowering. And I think about this all the time, because if you ask someone why they don’t exercise, they’ll typically blame it on some force. the frame makes it seem like there’s a force that’s controlling their life for them that has not given them the time or that they could not. Whereas really it’s just typically a case of priorities and your child or your job that pays your mortgage can be your priority. But I think it’s important. I’ve always felt it’s important to acknowledge the fact that you made the choice to take care of your child or to go to your mortgage paying job versus I didn’t have any time. This is why I think about language so much and the language that I use and how that’s dominating my life, even constantly telling myself that I’m unorganized, like messy. So how that’s probably making me a messy person. What haven’t we talked about that we probably should have talked about? Is there anything at all, any studies or any insights into the brain and how we change habits that are stubborn or anything else at all that you’ve learned from the ancient wisdom

DRA. TARA SWART

 I know that we’ve talked like very broadly on lots of different things, but I hope that for me, my intention with every sentence that I’ve said to you is that people should realize how much potential they have in their brains, like how capable they are of having an even more amazing life than they have already.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I think I accept that now more than I ever have before, because I’ve had this conversation with you. I think I accept that there’s so much untapped potential in me and that I’m not this kind of fully formed, rigid lump of cells. I can change fundamentally. I think a lot of people probably, if they’ve gotten to this point in the conversation, will also accept that. If you were to close with I guess the step one, like the thing that I should immediately do as I move forward in my life from here, that would help me to start moving towards that person that I want to become. The organized, great partner, successful in his business, great with his podcast, all of those things. What is that first step? And you know what’s funny is because my brain keeps thinking about the taxi driver that I met on the way here, who said he’d listened to the podcast and he told gave me a little bit of a window into his world. So he’s driving the cab every day. And I meet a lot of cab drivers that listen to the podcast and we chat. And oftentimes they sometimes they have dreams of doing other things. So they might say to me, I want to start my own business one day. And I’m just looking I’m looking for the first couple of steps. But I reflect on what you said and go, they’re going to be so hardwired into their patterns and their jobs and their habits and their routines that it’s very hard to make that jump.

DRA. TARA SWART

Yeah. So if I could give people a takeaway to start with, that’s really simple, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of hard work at the other end of it. It would be, be very clear on what it is that you want. So you’ve mentioned a few things. Spend five minutes sitting down and visualizing those things being true, and then give gratitude for that. That would be my first step.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Give gratitude for?

DRA. TARA SWART

Those things being true. Just five minutes, I’m a great partner. I’m not messy. My podcast is super successful. Like, see it, feel it in your body. Taste it in your mouth. Hear it in your ears. Completely immerse yourself in that for five minutes, longer if you can. And then just be so grateful for all of that. Essentially, what you’re doing is moving your brain from a fear state to a trust state. And that is the gateway to making these changes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Thank you so much.

DRA. TARA SWART

Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Really a thought provoking, wonderful conversation. And I’ve learned so much and you’ve given me so much food for thought. And you’ve changed my mind on a lot of things in my life.

DRA. TARA SWART

That’s a great compliment.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You know, and I know a few things about neuroplasticity because I’ve had guests here that have spoken to me about it, but I have a better understanding of it now. And I also understand, I think most importantly, the part of manifestation that is understandable through the lens of science, I guess. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to leave it for. This question is, what could you choose to change and choose to feel great about?

DRA. TARA SWART

The same thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That’s what the question says. What could you choose to change and choose to feel great about? I assume it’s the same thing.

DRA. TARA SWART

I could finally realise my dream of feeling like I am truly a creative person and I’m not exactly sure how that would look yet but I’m on the path to it so I think getting clearer on that would feel great and actually doing it would also feel great.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You were already a creative person though.

DRA. TARA SWART

Thank you so much for saying that. I feel like I have one more step to go before I really feel that I’ve done that because that was such a deep seated thing for me. I mean, there’s a bit more of a backstory to it, which I didn’t give you, but my English teacher said to me, you are so good at drama. You should read English at Oxford and go to RADA. And I came home and told my parents and they literally said, my dad said, over my dead body, you’ll go to medical school. And then after that, you can do whatever you want. And so I think there is that frustration in there that’s been in there for a long time. Like these days, you can’t imagine anything better than your kid coming home and one of the teachers having picked them out as exceptional. but of course at that time there were no brown people on tv so it was seen as an even bigger risk than than it would be now and i have to say you know every time i see someone that looks like me who’s like made it as an actress i just it makes me so happy um so what did your father say then I think that Indian parents, they think that stability is the key to happiness for their children. So having a stable career, having a regular salary. I don’t really come from a family of entrepreneurs, which is why it was so crazy when I gave up my job and started up a business, no one could understand it. And I was afraid of not having a regular paycheck. And then at some point I realized I could earn zero in any one month, but I could also, well, you know, there’s no limit to what I could earn and I think this realisation came when in one month I invoiced what I was earning in a year as a doctor.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Didn’t they think you were your grandmother reincarnated?

DRA. TARA SWART

And she grew up in a village in India and didn’t have access to education. And that was a big regret of hers. So I was given, you know, the best education that money could buy. Got an M.D. and a Ph.D. It’s like overcompensation. And it wasn’t really necessarily what I ever wanted.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Thank you so much. Giving me so much to think about. What a wonderful conversation. What a wonderful ray of sunshine and light you are in the world. I’m so excited to see your career continue to evolve and touch and help so many people. All of your work is incredible. You’ve got your podcast coming up as well, which I think everyone’s going to be super excited to hear about, because if it’s anything like this conversation, it’s going to be of tremendous, tremendous value. When is that? When is that going to be out?

DRA. TARA SWART

It’s launching on October 4th, but season one is already available to listen to if people haven’t listened to it already.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

reinvent yourself with Dr. Tara, which is the second season, which is in that second season, you’re aiming to do a lot of the ancient wisdom stuff. So exciting. Really, really excited to hear that. So October 4th, we’ll look out for that. Thank you so much for your time.

DRA. TARA SWART

Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Dr. Tara Swart. There’s actually the word art in your name. Oh, that’s so cute. But there is, have you ever noticed that? No. Okay. Well, I’m excited for our next conversation and to hear about how you’ve pursued that creativity because it’s certainly within you. And it’s such a wonderful honor to have met you today and to learn from you.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.