World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed

My guest this week is Matthew Syed, he has written some of the most important books in the self development, self improvement, team, company building space. His ideas are original, challenging and important. He is a British journalist, author, broadcaster and former table tennis player. He competed as an English table tennis international, and was the English number one for many years. He was three times the men's singles champion at the Commonwealth Table Tennis Championships (in 1997, 2000 and 2001), and also competed for Great Britain in two Olympic Games, at Barcelona in 1992 and at Sydney in 2000. After leaving the world of table tennis he embarked on a journalism career working for The Times. Throughout his career he has published four books that are highly regarded taking all of the learnings across his life as an elite level sports man and journalist. To say this conversation is diverse would be an understatement, we covered everything from creating innovation, build confidence and how to reach your full potential. This man is fascinating, engaging and thought provoking, trust me when I say you need to hear this. Follow Matthew: Twitter - https://twitter.com/matthewsyed Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/matthewsyedauthor Website - https://www.matthewsyed.co.uk Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In a fixed mindset, people think that success is all about talent, having the gift. A growth mindset is saying, okay, talent obviously matters, it's a factor, but it's not enough. It's what we do with our talents. I wasn't the best table tennis player in the world. I never got into the top 20 of the world rankings. But with that attitude, I maximized my own potential. I think leadership counts when it comes to innovation. I mean, the way Amazon conduct meetings, and then when they start talking, the most senior person always speaks last. You'll get an unvarnished access to the insights of your brilliant team, rather than speaking first and everyone basically converging on what you as a leader has just said.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  There are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas, huge potential, who never act on their dreams. But having the idea doesn't mean a thing. You've actually got to act on that idea. Honestly, I think we shouldn't underestimate how damaging it can be if.

• 1:09Steven Bartlett?

  Matthew Said, he's written some of the most important, challenging, thought provoking books in the self-development, self-improvement, team development, team building, company building, leadership space. And his ideas are original, they are challenging, they are fresh, they are important. He was an elite level sportsman and his ideas come from the world of sport, but also the world of business, from politics, from writing, from culture, from society. He evangelizes about diverse thinking, about including more ideas, about challenging leadership, about challenging yourself, about what it takes to start, and why most people spend their life sitting on ideas that could potentially change their life, but are seemingly imprisoned,

• 1:54Steven Bartlett?

  trapped and blocked by their own mindset. He talks about how some of the most talented people in the world can fall short of their potential, and how some people with seemingly no talent at all can achieve miraculous things. If you apply the learnings from this conversation, I have no doubt that it will make you a better person, it will make your teams more innovative, and it will lead you to living a more fulfilled life. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Matthew, everyone wants to be successful.

• 2:38Steven Bartlett?

  Everybody, I don't know one person that doesn't want to be successful. So I think it's probably quite important to define what that word means under your own definition of that word. The holistic definition, not just a professional definition, but how would you define that?

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Well, look, it's great to be here, Steve. I think that's quite a deep question, quite a philosophical one.

• 3:00Steven Bartlett?

  We're only just getting started.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  I know, what kind of opening question is this? Obviously, as a former sports person, I was a table tennis professional for a number of years. Success was defined in terms of winning matches and achieving very clear, tangible objectives, like winning the national championships or the Commonwealth. And so, but I think when it comes to life beyond sport, it's so objective in something like the 100 metre sprint, you want to beat your PB. And you can see it on a digital readout at the end of a race, how close you've come or whether you've achieved that objective. In the life beyond sport, I have to say, one of the things that is quite difficult,

• 3:43Speaker 00

  I think, for sports people to transition is it's more elusive, more subjective, more ephemeral. And I think it is a really difficult thing to define what you personally mean by success. I'm not 100% sure that I've defined it for myself yet. Have you?

• 4:02Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I'm getting closer on a, in a professional sense. What I would, how I'd answer that question is I'd say, I think I'm successful if, in my professional life, if I am striving.

• 4:17Steven Bartlett?

  If I'm taking on a worthwhile challenge with people I love. So the key terms there are worthwhile, subjective, define it how you like, challenge, which I think is integral to being motivated and getting up in the morning and, you know, all the emotions you need to be internally, internally fulfilled and motivated. And then with people I love, which I think is just a really, which speaks to community and human interaction, which I think is part of our human.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the, yeah, look, that makes a lot of sense to me. I have to say, one thing that, given what you've just said, you'll probably agree with. I think the narrow way that success has sometimes been defined in Western capitalist societies has been deeply mistaken, that it's all about how much money you have in your bank account. And I think we all know, although, you know, it's a bit of a cliche to say that it doesn't provide happiness, certainly not of a sustained nature. I think that that thing about social interaction, the thing that makes me happiest for sure is putting one's heart and soul into a project, like for example, writing a book.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  And then getting a letter from somebody who explains in their own way how it has positively impacted their life. And there is no feeling like that for me as a writer. And that really is a powerful engine to motivate you to come up with a new idea for a new book. The fact that you know, it's having, it has meaning for other people. Not that they've paid money to buy it and that money has been transferred via a publisher into my bank account. That is much less significant. I mean, it's great if you do get money for it, you know, you can look after your kids or you can do something with it. But it's that feedback, that sense of making some

• 6:03Speaker 00

  kind of a difference. I mean, in a funny kind of a way, that's why for a long time, as I came towards the end of my television career, I wanted to go to politics. I thought that is the place where you can make the most difference, right? You've got the levers to do something interesting. And then I realized it was not quite as fun avenue perhaps as, as writing.

• 6:23Steven Bartlett?

  Why, why is it that human beings seem to get so much intrinsic joy from helping others?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  I think this is of great and deep significance. And, you know, just to put a historical lens on this, after the Enlightenment, the idea was of human beings as individuals.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Individualism was the great goal of political life. And I think we conceived of people as deciding to perhaps interact with other people, deciding to have families. And you might remember Margaret Thatcher once said, there's no such thing as society. There are just individual men and women and families. I mean, she had more to say after that. It wouldn't be fair to say that was her entire philosophy by any means. I think she was a great prime minister in many ways. But but if you actually go back deeper in human history, when we, our ancestors lived at the same time as the Neanderthals, the Neanderthals had had probably bigger brains than us. They may

• 7:24Speaker 00

  have been individually smarter, but humans lived in tighter, more socially connected groups. What does that mean? It means if somebody learns something useful, they can share it with one of their kin. And therefore, they can also share it with their children. They can get a cross pollination of ideas. They can bring ideas together. And then it gets passed down the generations. And it was that sociality that conferred a competitive advantage on our ancestors above Neanderthals. It's it is, I think, our distinctive quality. We are social beings to an extent greater, I think, than any others, except the insects like ants who, for slightly different evolutionary reasons, cooperate at scale.

• 8:10Steven Bartlett?

  And there's an element of virtue signaling, social media, that's sort of seems to have exacerbated this amongst our my generation in particular, who all seem to want to change the world, but can't necessarily tell you what they want to change. They just want to be a person that's changed the world.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  That's interesting. That's interesting, because about a decade ago, I started looking at, you know, now I'm, I believe I'm not fifty.

• 8:32Steven Bartlett?

  You look great.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Well, I was gonna say, I don't, if you ever do you remember oil of Ulay?

• 8:36Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  That's probably the slightly older people will remember. I don't use that, by the way. But I started looking at how aspirations have changed since I was in my childhood. So when I was at university, everyone wanted to work for the UN. That was kind of considered the great sort of panacea of life. But 10 years ago, a lot of people were saying in surveys of young people, what do you want to do in life? What do you want to be in life? And the answer was famous.

• 9:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Famous, you know, not, not to have a body of work that gives you fame. You know, to walk, you know, you want to walk down the red carpet, having created an amazing film. But no, they just wanted the red carpet. And I thought that was, that was a dangerous thing. And I, I'm, I'm sure there's been a correction since then, but I think the obsession.

• 9:22Steven Bartlett?

  There's been no correction. But, and I think maybe in some respects, it's got worse. I've just, it's a real phenomenon I've noticed in my generation where after I'll come off stage doing a public speech, whatever. The kids will come up to me and say, I want to be a public speaker too. And I never wanted to be. I pursued my desire to start a business and a byproduct of that was they pay me to speak on stage now. And fame also, in my view, should be a byproduct of the pursuit of something that's intrinsically important to you. Right?

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Absolutely 100% correct. And that's why the obsession with fame is a massive danger, I think, to a, to a culture. The, the thing about speaking, so, so a completely unintended side effect of writing my first book. So, so I'm finishing table tennis and I'm like, you know, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? You know, how am I going to define success? And I decided to write this book in 2000, when did it come out? 2010 called Bounce.

• 10:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  An unintended side effect was being invited to give a speech at a big corporation, an investment bank, an American investment bank. And obviously, you know, as an ex ping pong player, I'm thinking, what is going on here? You know, how am I, you know, imposter syndrome. And also, you know, I went to a, I went to a comp, you know, we didn't do any, almost no public speaking. You know, we, we learned stuff, we learned things in the classroom, but the idea of getting up and, and speaking in front of an audience was kind of very alien. So I wasn't that good, right? Because I hadn't practiced that, I'd never done it before. And I came off the stage and I thought, you know what? I'm just not cut out for this. If I'm invited again to give a talk to a company, I'll just politely decline.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Then I thought, and it took me about, I don't know, 48 hours to think, what a ridiculous way to hijack my own development. If you actually had the right attitude, if you had the right mindset, you can probably learn these skills and take advantage of these brilliant opportunities. Cause you always learn, don't you? When you go and speak in an organ, so I Googled public speaking practice. And the first hit was called Toastmasters. And this is like a global network of just public speaking clubs where other normal people go to the club to develop social confidence. And the one nearest me in Richmond was in Twickenham, just over the bridge. And there was Franco, Lloyd's on the High Street. And just a group of, you give a speech, they'd give you feedback.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  And the mentoring was a really important part of it because you need a bit of feedback and you know what you could have done better. And then about two thirds of the way through, there's something called table topics, where somebody writes the list of topics on cards, but no one else in the room knows what they are. So you have to go to the front, you pick it up and then turn around and spontaneously talk for a minute on whatever topic. The first one I ever did was the Natural History Museum. You know, that's terrifying, right? You're not used to it, but you you learn and you develop that skill. So so learning how to speak publicly, it it took me three or four years. And I'm not saying I'm brilliant at it now by any means, but my goodness, how much better when you have a can do attitude to towards it.

• 12:23Steven Bartlett?

  And that brings us to the topic of mindset really nicely. You know, I've I've heard you talk about having a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. What is the difference between the two?

• 12:32Speaker 00

  So I think for, thank you. I think for what it's worth, I think this contrast is is so important. I mean, I can talk about it through my own life, but you know, in a fixed mindset, people think that success, however defined, is all about talent, having the gift, having the genetic inheritance and all, you know, having the personality trait in order to excel. A growth mindset is saying, okay, talent obviously matters. It's a factor, but it's not enough. It's what we do with our talents. So people in a fixed mindset have two massive risks. One, they think they're so talented, they don't even need to try. So think of a young person who's just been invited to join the Manchester United Academy.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  And they're suddenly getting money into their bank account. They're able to buy the fast car and they think I'm God's gift. And they, and the amount of academy coaches who have come to me and said, we don't understand it. We had this hardworking youngster, we invited them into the academy and then they just went off the rails. It's a fixed mindset. They think their success is assured, so they stop putting in the hard yards and don't transition into the first team. So that's one danger. The other danger. Is people who don't think they're God's gift, but what like me at Goldman Sachs, you make one failure and you interpret that as meaning I obviously don't have talent. Therefore, I'm just going to give up. Do you see what I mean?

• 13:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, so that's the negative version of it.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you've got the I'm super talent is everything and I've got it. So therefore I don't need to try. Talent is everything. I don't have it. Therefore, I should give up. They're both terribly damaging, I think. A growth mindset, it doesn't mean that we think we're all going to be the best speaker in the world. I wasn't the best table tennis player in the world. I never got into the top 20 of the world rankings. But with that attitude, I maximized my own potential. And going back to your thing about success, that's not a bad definition. Now I think about it, you know, to try and be the best that we can be in our own lives. Doesn't mean we're going to be the best who ever lived. You know, not everyone can be Muhammad Ali or Serena Williams or, or who, or Albert Einstein. But to be the best we can be, I think is something wonderful.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  And just from my own perspective, I think trying to feel one's own potential, going on a journey that has some meaning, there's something wonderfully uplifting, something satisfying about that, too.

• 14:52Steven Bartlett?

  I really like the combination of those two ideas. The, this idea of being the best you can be, but realizing that it's a pursuit towards something that you may never get to, right? So the journey and the journey towards being the best you can be at something which has a lot of meaning to you. Maybe, maybe that's the definition we were looking for.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Now, I think that that point you make about the journey is really, really important. What was it? I think it was Robert Louis Stevenson said to travel is a better thing than to arrive.

• 15:17Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And in a weird kind of way, I can say I talked about trying to win the nationals. But first of all, the nationals, I remember winning, going home. I was living on my own in a flat in, in Richmond and I got home and I thought, is that it? You know what I mean? It was the, the fun was actually the. The training and the camaraderie with my practice partners and seeing those small improvements through time.

• 15:39Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that's consistent with most high performance athletes and business people. And I was reading this piece, and I think it was in The Telegraph, about Olympic depression, where you have the Olympians who train for the Olympics, and whether they get a gold medal, like Michael Phelps, who fell into depression, or whether they lose, either way, the outcome is they just lose orientation in their life.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:00Steven Bartlett?

  And this is why I, and also I felt it myself, when a company came along when I was 24 and offered to buy my company, and I go home, look at Rightmove, look at all the cars I can buy and everything, and I feel this sense of emptiness and like, but then what? What's my life without this?

• 16:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:14Steven Bartlett?

  And genuinely, that was like an existential crisis, because it's like, I can't sell this thing, but the insecure broke kid in me thought he was doing this to sell this thing.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:23Steven Bartlett?

  And it was just this really, you know.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  It's one, I think, one of the deep paradoxes of the human mind. I mean, the, the sense of anticlimax.

• 16:32Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm, gosh.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  When one achieves a long cherished ambition, I want to be a millionaire, I want to buy an Aston Martin, I want to win the Olympic gold medal. I remember talking to Victoria Pendleton.

• 16:43Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah, the Olympian.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, because you live, the cyclist, the Olympian, you know, you live with this ambition. It's what gets you out of bed in the morning, right? I want to win the Olympic gold. It's what, when you're on the track, she was explaining, you know, it's what makes you push harder, because you've got this, this goal, this destination, that's pulling you, this magnet pulling you towards it.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Then when you get it, you wake up the next day, and what on earth is getting you out of bed? What's causing you to push yourself? That's one of the reasons, I think, people who make money very quickly face massive, many, not all, and this is well documented, cyclist, I mean, you'll know about the people who win lotteries.

• 17:23Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm, oh my gosh.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Whose marriages can end, who end up in often depression, and that's not a cliche, this is well established. And I think it's because you get something, and then it's like, what is left to pursue in life? I do some interviews for The Times, sports stars, and I mentioned Victoria Pendleton, Billie Jean King.

• 17:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Exactly the same.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  David Beckham.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Ryan Giggs. I mean, I've interviewed, you know, most of the Ronaldo, most of the leading, many of the leading sports people, and it's the same story. And I think what I've noticed is that capacity, as you did, that capacity to take a step back and to say, you know what, I'm feeling low, feeling empty, I need to find something else that's gonna galvanize me. And that's what gets people back on.

• 18:19Steven Bartlett?

  And I think the antidote is being aware of that.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:23Steven Bartlett?

  And because then, now when I achieve things in my life, I don't come into those achievements with this expectation of exponential joy. And so I can almost enjoy it more.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Right. You know? Yeah, no, I totally get that. I'm trying to think, you know, I think, look, just one of the things that I've noticed from my own personal life is the more busy I've got, sometimes you don't take enough time to take a step back and to say, you know, this was a great thing that happened, or to be in the moment when something is happening with one. Do you have kids?

• 18:57Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  No, with one's children or wife or partner or whatever. And I think I'm slowly, you know, I write books on this stuff, but I'm learning all the time. And that's one of the reasons I want to do the podcast. And I've read about you, I thought you've had such a different set of experiences to me. I'll learn a lot from you too.

• 19:16Steven Bartlett?

  Let's talk about failure then, something you talk about at great length. I think tend to believe that a lot of the reason why people don't reach their potential, however we define that, is because they are risk averse. And failure is something they just can't, their self-esteem just can't bear.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  I think that's, I think that's true. My own sense is that this has been exacerbated. By the social media. So you tell me how the social media, it may have changed a lot since I wrote my first book for young people. But at the time psychologists had come up with this concept of the curse of perfectionism and that their thesis was that young people are obviously now on the social media a lot. And a lot of people, when they're putting together their social media posts, they do it in such a way as to make their lives look really good. You know, this is the holiday I just had on this wonderfully sunny beach and you know, they might even airbrush photos to make themselves look better. And this is my wonderful performance on the piano.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  And and the problem is people then start to think that success is about looking and acting in a perfect way. That's massively problematic because why would you want to try anything new? Which is inherently a risk. If you're doing something the first time, you're obviously not going to be perfect. And if you do mess up, you draw the, it goes back to the fixed mindset. You draw the conclusion, well, I'm obviously not talented enough because I haven't nailed it the first time around. I think this was also bolstered by, in you're on reality television now, I think reality television, the idea of instant success. Instant gratification, overnight elevation into into the heavens. And if you, you know, particularly young people think that success is like that.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  They don't realize the incremental steps you need to take to fulfill your potential because as you know, most businesses succeed. Because, you know, I don't know whether you're familiar with the American jargon, but you know, you get a minimum viable product, you test the value proposition early. You find out the inevitable deficiencies in the prototype or the piece of software. And then you make adaptations. In Silicon Valley, they call it failing fast. In other words, they're failing fast in order to get to a better answer. If you stop the first time you fail, or if you don't try at all, you're never going to get to an answer. If you think of the history of science, science is a success, the most successful human institution because scientists by and large are willing to test their hypotheses.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  You know, they test it, they look at the empirical evidence and they change it in the light Of what the evidence is telling them. That is the basic pattern of science. And and I think the problem is, as you alluded to, is that if young people are like, goodness me, I don't want to look anything other than perfect. It destroys their capacity to grow and and to have a a life of fulfillment. Because J K Rowling put it brilliantly. She said, the only way never to fail is never to try. But then your life is a failure because you've just stayed in your comfort zone the whole time.

• 22:16Steven Bartlett?

  I see that. I resonate with all of that so much and that specifically this this idea. I love the science analogy because seeing it as a hypothesis. You're right. In science, you you start with hypothesis. You're not romantic about it. And then you go and pursue and you you you agnostically go and test it.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:31Steven Bartlett?

  Whereas you're what you're saying is, you know, young people or ambitious people generally will start with a hypothesis. And they will long in need for it to be perfectly correct.

• 22:44Steven Bartlett?

  And this is also why businesses fail because founders just they just do everything. And I I failed in my first business for many years because of that. Because I was obsessed, romantic about my hypothesis being correct, not romantic about the outcome, which was trying to be a successful person.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  I I I look, I I I think I think that's really, really significant. And I think it's a great, great way of framing it. Look, by the way, some scientists fall in love with their theories.

• 23:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  And they can't adapt it. I mean, there's been a few examples during the pandemic. And and by the way, I mean, I don't know if listeners are interested in this, but there's a brilliant study by Philip Tetlock, who's an American psychologist. And he looked at forecasters, so people trying to predict next year's GDP or oil price or other things of this kind. And he found a really interesting pattern that the highest reputation forecasters who are on television the most.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  On average, make the worst predictions. And can you see what, what is an error of ego? An error of prediction is an opportunity to adapt the model in order to make it more predictive in the long run. But if you've been on the TV and you're supposed to be the god of forecasting, you start defending your prior assumptions. And so people who have an ego that gets in the way of hypothesis testing, they are brilliant at creative self justification. That I think the people who are most dangerous to companies and innovation are intelligent, highly talented people in a fixed mindset. They're just inveterate obstacles to making the changes you need to change in order to get the business to where you want to go to

• 24:21Speaker 00

  or where you want the economic model to get to and so on. So I think it's the same in meetings. You know, I've, I, as you know, I'm very interested in how, how businesses succeed. And the, the forum in which we take most key decisions are meetings because no one person has a monopoly on truth. So you want to talk to other people. But these can be really ineffective. If people think that when someone challenges you, they're, they're insulting you. They're not, they're testing your hypothesis. We should think of meetings as mutual hypothesis testing so that we can collectively get to the best strategy or idea. And I think when you frame it in that way, you take the stigma out of challenge and dissent and failure.

• 25:03Steven Bartlett?

  Let's challenge that then. So if, if we've got a meeting, we've got five, 10 people around this table. We've got an intern over there. We've got the CEO there, got managers, directors around the table. One new person, one person's been here for 10 years. You've got all these different sort of dynamics of people trying to get promotions, get a pay rise. Oh my God, the CEO is at the table. I don't want to be an idiot. I don't want to say anything dumb, you know, and all of those like dynamics. How do you get those dynamics out of the way and just become focused on letting the best idea win?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Right, so this is really well studied.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  I think the thing to, to try and really convey is how dangerous the dynamics you've described can be.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Because what tends to happen in a very hierarchical organisation, where the CEO or the team leader has discretion over pay and promotion, is that people don't say what they think, they say what they think the leader wants to hear. That's fine if the leader knows everything there is to know, because you're just basically ventriloquising. So in a simple environment, you don't need to have a team, right? You just have the leader make a decision and everyone. But when it's a difficult, complex decision, in other words, the ones that confer a competitive advantage on a business, the leader needs to hear the different perspectives to make a better judgement. But the extent to which this happens, a good example is in aviation.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  So I'll describe a classic case in the... Aviation's a great area to study, by the way, when it comes to team dynamics. So this is United Airlines 173, and it's a flight that took off out of Denver, Colorado in December 1978, and it's flying to Portland in Oregon. And as a plane's coming in on the final approach, the pilot pulls the lever to lower the landing gear. And you know, when you're in the cabin, you hear it go down and clicks into place. But on this occasion, there's this really loud bang, the plane kind of deviates, and a light that should illuminate on the dashboard to show that the wheels are down, it hasn't gone on.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  So the pilot doesn't know if the wheels are down. It's pitch black, so they can't ask air traffic control to look up. So he puts the plane into a holding pattern above suburban Portland, and they try and troubleshoot the issue. So the first thing is the engineer. So in these days, the cockpit had a captain, a co-pilot and an engineer. The engineer goes into the cabin, and on this particular model of aircraft, when the wheels are down, two bolts chewed up above the wings, the bolts are up, but they're still not 100% sure, right? And you want to know if the wheels are down before you come in. So the pilot, they radio to the manufacturer and, you know, they're kind of explaining what's happened. The manufacturer's like, "Yeah, we think the wheels are down, but we're not sure." Then the pilot's like, "I wonder if the reason that the light didn't go on on the dashboard is because of faulty wiring."

• 27:49Speaker 00

  So he starts playing around with the... And the plane's still in the holding pattern, as they're doing all of these different checks. But at this point, another safety critical issue has come into play. The plane's running out of fuel, right? And the engineer knows that the plane is running out of fuel because he can see it going down to zero on the dials, right? He has a big incentive to tell the pilot that the plane is running out of fuel because otherwise he will die. So you have this juxtaposition of objective information and maximum incentive. But in the 1970s, it was a command and control

• 28:31Speaker 00

  culture. You know, the pilot was, do you know what I mean? Yeah, the pilot was deemed to be the boss, the omniscient controller, and the other two were supposed to basically carry out that controller's instructions. And they called the pilot sir. It was almost always a man, right? And, and, and so imagine if the engineer says to the pilots, now, why do we have a team? We have a team because no one person has all of the information. They're narrow in their perceptual bandwidth. Other things are happening at the same time. But if the engineer says to the pilot, you know what, we're running out of fuel, the implication is the pilot didn't know that already. The pilot might get offended. Isn't he supposed to know everything? And we know from this and many other incidents that in that situation,

• 29:15Speaker 00

  we don't speak to each other directly. We don't test hypotheses directly. We code our language. We mitigate our speech. And from the voice recorder, from the black box, we know that the engineer said, instead of, we need to land because we're running out of fuel, critical information for the pilot to make the right strategic decision, he said, oh, we're kind of getting low on fuel here. And the pilot, because of the insinuation, he knows everything, wasn't even listening. So the plane crashes, but not just that plane. A number of incidents in the 1970s of exactly the same kind happened because communication was so skewed by this very steep hierarchy. It happens in surgical operating theatres,

• 29:57Speaker 00

  famously, where nurses can't speak up because they're worried, if I say something, this is a surgeon. You know, the, the, the, the big cheese. And we know from, you know, for what it's worth, from randomized control trial evidence, Lee Thompson at Northwestern University, meetings are a catastrophe, the vast majority of them. Absolute disaster. Because people are not sharing information. They're basically playing a political game to curry favor with the boss. So what you, so the, so the short answer is you need what's called psychological safety. It's, I hate the jargon. All that means is an environment where everyone feels they can be candid and they can say what they really think. And hypotheses are tested.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  When Google did a big data analysis of its most successful software development teams, psychological safety was the biggest predictor of success. Because it means you're getting that interplay of ideas that's so important.

• 30:54Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because, you know, these big companies, well, big companies by, by definition, I guess, have more ideas.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:02Steven Bartlett?

  But they are often the least innovative.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:06Steven Bartlett?

  And that seems like a bit of a, it should be the other way around. You would, one would think that the biggest companies would be the most innovative because they have more brains, more ideas, but they're just worse.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting point you make there. So bigger, you're right. So, but, so it's, well, let's think about that. What would generate good ideas? It's the number of ideas, not the number of people. If you have an organization with a very homogeneous culture, very command and control, a lot of sociological convergence, you might have 10,000 people all thinking the same way. I mean, you've seen professional services companies where you see the senior leadership team, and they may look a bit different, but they're all absolutely thinking exactly the same way. They've been there so long. That's a big danger for companies. See, with cities, you increase the size of cities, they become more innovative. Companies get less innovative because they get so much convergence. They have a lot of people, but they think in the same, it's an echo chamber, basically, right?

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Whereas startups, sometimes a startup might be an idea that's completely off the beaten track, and then suddenly you've got this opportunity to scale. But even with startups, you know, often when they go public, they start to lose their capacity to, to, to innovate. And I think that's why, you know, I've written a book on that. You need a culture of diversity so that you begin to protect and, and, and value. The diverse ideas that enable an organisation to anticipate future disruptions and come up with new innovations.

• 32:33Steven Bartlett?

  Talk to me about creating a culture of diversity in your in your business then. If you're starting a company, if you're running a company at scale, how do you increase the diversity of ideas?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Right. Yes, so the most important, for me, the most important thing by far is landing the argument as to why it matters. A lot of people don't think it matters. I mean, I remember going to an HR conference and the speaker was talking about diversity is a wonderful thing, you all need more of it, and it will always help you do better as an organisation. And this really awkward customer at the back said, can I ask a question? And they're like, yeah, okay. Imagine I am the coach of an Olympic sprint relay team.

• 33:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  And suppose I've got, you said, who was the fastest person in the world at the time was Usain Bolt. Suppose I've got Usain Bolt in my team. And suppose hypothetically I had cloning technology so I could clone Usain Bolt, to have four Usain Bolts in my four by one hundred relay team. There's no diversity in that team, but they're all very fast, right?

• 33:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  If you said you need to diversify your team, that would mean hiring slower runners. I don't want to do that as an Olympic coach. And it was like the air in the room, just it's like it'd been punctured and everyone was like, that's an awful thing to say. But he was right. That question was right. You know, in simple activities, cognitive, diversity of opinion, cognitive diversity doesn't help you. If it's obvious what to do, why would you want diversity? If you've already got a solution, a canned solution, you just need to scale it, you don't need diverse. But when there's a complex environment, that logic turns on its head. So if you imagine, for example, you've got five people, each one of whom has one brilliant idea, you might think you have five brilliant ideas, but if they all have the same idea, you've only got one.

• 34:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  All you need is two different ideas and suddenly you've tripled. Three hundred percent increase in the creativity of that group. That's where cognitive diversity matters. And if your mission is to solve complex problems, diversity is the cornerstone of how well you do it. And once you land that argument, people start to. At the moment, people say, too many people think diversity is a politically correct box ticking exercise. And when diverse voices come in, they're condescended to, they're not properly included. Once you realise it's a strength, organisations start to harness it to do the great things that they want to do.

• 35:06Steven Bartlett?

  I can imagine that organisations don't, typically organisations don't know what they don't know. And they don't, they don't know what they don't have as well. So if you, do you know what I mean? It's like an unknown, I know. So when the board, when these like, let's say we've got six white, six year old board members sat around a table of a real, a company that's really successful. And then they go, you know, what's their incentive to hire? They think we've been doing great. We're all very smart. Are you smart? Yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, you smart? Yeah, I'm smart. Yeah. And like, how do you make the case to them that they need to hire a black woman? And that's going to help when they've just been killing the game with these six white men?

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Right. Well, it depends. So again, you're absolutely right to ask the question. It depends on the context.

• 35:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Let's say, for example, the organisation is an advertising company. And they've traditionally been selling to white, middle aged men who think rather as they do. The, if they only want to sell to white men, then there may be no advantage in hiring somebody with a different perspective. If they're seeking to broaden their capacity to sell to people from different demographics, they won't have the tacit knowledge that they need in order to do. If you think of the CIA, they hired brilliant analysts in the post-war period. And they thought they were the best intelligence agency in the world. But a lot of the information was obviously confidential.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  It's only now we can see how awful they were because almost everyone, almost a hundred percent of their analytical team were white, middle class, west coast, Anglo-Saxon Protestant liberal arts graduates. Nothing wrong with that background, right? But if you're trying to assess threats emerging from around the world. The Soviet Union, how would you possibly understand the probability of a conglomeration of different nations falling apart if you've been brought up in a stable, middle-class family in America? How are you going to understand tribal sectarianism and the risks of radicalisation in the Middle East when you come from that background?

• 37:16Speaker 00

  You know, when we invaded, when, when the, the UK joined a coalition to invade Iraq, you know, there was a genuine view that you impose democratic institutions and it will work effectively. There was no real understanding of the history of Iraq and how those institutions would be hijacked by sectarian interests, because these guys had gone to university, they'd learned all sorts of interesting things, but they had no deep understanding of the dynamics in that country. So if, if I was talking to the, for example, the Director General of the CIA, I would be explaining, you know what you know, but in the complex world, there's stuff that you don't know. There's stuff that people who think like you don't know.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Be creative about how you optimize the diverse insights that can help you do the job you want to do. Now, if it was, um, uh, the CIA, demographic diversity is critical. You need to have people from different backgrounds who have had different experiences in order to understand emerging threats. For an advertising team, it would be different. For a team of economic forecasters, I can tell you what it would look like mathematically. You want highly accurate individual forecasters whose models generate diverse predictions, because when you average them, you get an incredibly, it's called the wisdom of the crowds. So there are ways to do it. I mean, there are tools that we use with our clients to make this work. And for what it's worth, the really, you know, obviously slightly self-serving thing

• 38:40Speaker 00

  to say, but I think most of the innovative organizations are thinking exactly what you've just said. We need to figure out what it is that we don't know quickly, have some tenuous sense so we can start plugging these blind spots.

• 38:52Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 38:55Steven Bartlett?

  And on that point of innovation, which we touched on, what are the, so running a business, running a global business as it scaled, I could see that we were getting less innovative. You kind of get complacent, you build teams, you get, you know, your teams get more comfortable with how it's always been done. And then just getting them to disrupt themselves becomes increasingly difficult, especially when more people get involved, things seem to slow down, someone goes on annual leave. And then you've, so you've got a new innovative idea, you put it on an email thread, it stumbles around the email thread for four months. Nobody's incentivized to do that because they're all getting paid to do their current job. And you don't typically have like an innovation team. So when it's everybody's job, it's nobody's job. These are all probably, you know, and then these are, and then you talk about failure as well. People aren't incentivized to fail in big organizations.

• 39:38Steven Bartlett?

  What are the parameters or the factors or the dynamics of a team that does innovate?

• 39:45Speaker 00

  So I think, I, look, I think that's all right. And I think it's a bandwidth issue. I mean, you talked about a team that's been successful thus far. I mean, take the legal profession, which have, you know, used the billable hour for a very long time, have done a particular, and they're busy and they're making money. But I hope that it's not a particularly unique insight to say that many of these legal firms will be out of business in a decade if they don't leverage machine learning, right? And AI in all sorts of different ways and start to disrupt the, so you can carry on being busy whilst your equity value is about to disappear. Right? So unless one is able to say, not just, we need to be doing

• 40:27Speaker 00

  things well for our clients and doing what we've always done effectively, but we need to also be thinking about how we do things differently and better. You may well be busy, you may well have satisfied customers, but it just takes one competitor to innovate and you're out of the game. So I think that that is a good way to focus minds on sparing some bandwidth to that question of innovation. So it doesn't just get dropped.

• 40:53Steven Bartlett?

  It's tough, right? Because that often means a change in personnel.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:58Steven Bartlett?

  And nobody likes that idea in big organizations. I think this about some of the big advertising groups, like they call them the big six. And the big six have been around, some of them, one of them in particular, has been around for a hundred years doing advertising.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  What are the big six?

• 41:11Steven Bartlett?

  Like WPP, publicists, those kind of, and I was thinking, you know, in their executive teams, you've got people that have been there for 20, 30 years. Then this thing called social media comes along. And they're thinking, oh my God, so it's not billboards anymore on TV. And where does that leave me? And I'm not going to know what TikTok and Snapchat are. And the threat of having to replace oneself, I think, often, and your ego often

• 41:36Steven Bartlett?

  means that you go down with the Titanic.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and, you know, for what it's worth, you see this in, in, in, in many different areas. So I think, I don't, do you admire Amazon as a company?

• 41:46Steven Bartlett?

  Admire?

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:47Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, in some ways, not in others.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they should pay more tax.

• 41:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, what they've done is just staggering.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Right. But, but I mean, I think, so I think leadership counts sometimes when it comes to innovation. I mean, he's obviously no longer CEO, but I think if you read Jeff Bezos's letters to shareholders, they're all about the stuff that we've been talking about.

• 42:08Steven Bartlett?

  Failure experimentation.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  Unbelievable commitment. You know, we talked about the meetings, you know, dissent and then commit. Almost all of the, I mean, the way Amazon conduct meetings, you know, they will, as you know, they'll, they'll read the, the agenda item in silence. So that every single person is bringing an independent perspective to bear on what are the risks of this? What might make it? How could it be improved? What might make it fail? And then when they start talking, the most senior person always speaks last. You'll get an unvarnished access to the insights of your brilliant team. Rather than speaking first and everyone basically converging on what you as a leader has just said. So they have a range of ways of trying to ensure they sustain.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  But, you know, Amazon will, will probably struggle, but they've done well so far. And it's, it's, I think it's a good case study of how to, how to sustain it. But it's not, but I, I've got to say, honestly, well, one of the things I'm most interested in is, you know, I mentioned I'm 50. I'm totally bewildered by social media. And you obviously, you, you inhabit, right? That world, you know it. You've got a nuanced, granular understanding of the whole thing.

• 43:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Imagine you're me.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Right. So now, what do, you know, I, I don't know, I don't think, I don't have the faintest idea of how to usefully engage with the social. I came to Twitter late, my tweets are rubbish. I mean, look, if anyone's following me, thank you, but I know I'm not very good at it, but I, it's an alien world for me and I'm not, I've never been on Facebook.

• 43:45Steven Bartlett?

  So we're speaking.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Sorry?

• 43:46Steven Bartlett?

  So we're speaking.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Right. So what should I do? How do I learn?

• 43:49Steven Bartlett?

  How did you learn to speak?

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Toastmasters.

• 43:53Steven Bartlett?

  Well, it's a similar thing.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  But it isn't though, because, is it?

• 43:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's, I, when I did my first public talk, I was 14 and I'm, I always say this, I was, I was speaking in front of like parents evening, my, I'm shaking, my hands are sweating so much and this paper's shaking so much. I realised I'm not going to be able to read the piece of paper because it's moving too much. So I just made up the speech and it's a similar thing with Twitter. You just said I'd done my first tweet, awful tweets. And then you're like, it sounds like you quit. Or you start, or you were disinterested.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  I'm still there, but I don't do it very much. I've kind of, I, I, actually, I say that, I've probably done a few thousand tweets, but I came to it late and I, I still feel that if you had, okay, let me ask you this. If you had to summarise what you know.

• 44:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  About the social media and, and how one engages with it, how one, you know, one wants one's articles to be read. You know, how would, is it impossible to encapsulate that in a minute?

• 44:46Steven Bartlett?

  I would say, so, so what I do professionally, what I used to do professionally is I'd go and do these talks, telling people all about social media, all the tips, tricks, techniques, algorithms, all the psychology and really explaining it to them. And then I'd end my talk by telling them that everything I've just told them probably won't be the case in three to six months because it changes so much. And, and what that therefore means is the only way to know what I know is to play with the toys as often as you can. And it's, and so for, this is why I say to people when they come up to me and say, how do I become a social media expert? I say to them often, like, name something you're interested in. They'll go, you know, I don't know, cars. I'll say, go make a car Instagram page and run it. Because then it puts you in the trenches and it makes it puts you in a growth moment. Right.

• 45:31Steven Bartlett?

  So I, and it's just practice and it's, that's all it is. So if you want to become a master of this thing, that's constantly changing and there's 10 updates to the top four social media apps every single week, then you have to have a reason to be showing, you have that, life has to be giving you a reason to show up every day and open it up and look at it and, and perform these iterative tests, which give you this feedback loop. So for me, the real savior for me as a social media CEO, and most of the things I went on to sell to clients were learnings that I got from two places. The first is in my company, I create this thing called ever-changing landscape, very, very simple, internal group, everybody shares everything they know every day. Oh my God, I've just seen TikTok

• 46:13Steven Bartlett?

  have launched this new button, goes into the group. We then text it to all of our employees at nine AM in the morning, every morning on WhatsApp. So, and it's this constant loop of what's new, what's changing. Our mantra as a company became keeping brands at the forefront of what's possible. And what, but that slogan appreciates the fact that there's a, a marketing director shitting themselves because it's changing every day. And they want to be at the forefront of what's possible, but they're shitting. So it feels like two jigsaw pieces. I'm shitting myself because this thing's changing. You're saying you're going to keep me at the forefront of what's possible, which is going to make me look good to the CEO. We're going to help a social chain. And the, the second thing that kept me at the very forefront and made me good at social media is I run my personal brand on social media, which means that on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter,

• 46:57Steven Bartlett?

  every day, I'm either tweeting, I've got a team that helped me now, but I'm tweeting, I'm looking at the numbers, doing a post, looking in the comments. Okay, that didn't go well. Click on the insights button. Loads of people seem to share this one. Why is that? Ah, maybe that's because there's eight posts and getting the subtitles. Oh my God, look at the retention number. When we did subtitles, the retention's so much higher. Click on the insights. Oh my God, look. So when we do that at the start of the video, 80% of people fall off in the first five seconds of all of my videos. So I've got to do something special in the first five seconds. And it's that constant learning over 10 years. Then people call you an expert. It's not, I've just been playing with a toy longer.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that, that, I mean, it's, it's great to hear you say that because I think that's the pattern of learning in pretty much all fields.

• 47:39Steven Bartlett?

  Every field in all aspects of life.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's science, right? You're getting the iterative feedback.

• 47:44Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  And the more granular the feedback, I mean, if you know that people are switching off the video after five seconds or 10 seconds.

• 47:51Steven Bartlett?

  Changes them.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  That's better than just knowing.

• 47:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  That 50% dropped off over the total time. So, so it's the granularity and speed and objectivity of that feedback. So playing with, do you think that, um, so you may think this is a cop out, but say you're, you know, here's me now trying to get. If you, if you're a writer.

• 48:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  And you obviously got a lot going on.

• 48:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  In terms of coming out with a new book, do you think it's outsourced? I mean, obviously you can, you could outsource it to a brilliant person to do.

• 48:17Steven Bartlett?

  You could outsource it to a brilliant person to do. A lot of charlatans, a lot of snake oil salesmen. So it's fine. How, how do you know what's good when you don't know what's good?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Well, that's one of the reasons I like, well, as it happens, I have tried to do that. And I've had a number of proposals and I'll check with you at the end of this podcast.

• 48:33Steven Bartlett?

  That's what we'll do in exchange. I'll help you find someone that is actually good.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  That's the quid pro quo, right? You could be a lovely cup of tea.

• 48:39Steven Bartlett?

  There you go.

• 48:42Steven Bartlett?

  What I, what I would say is you can learn one channel, one or two channels with, no matter how busy you are. And if you do learn one or two channels, the impact it will have on your business, your, as an author, as a, as, as a, you know, someone that shares their ideas with the world and creates blogs is tremendous. You only have to learn one or two channels better than 95% of people. And to do that, you just need to use it every other day. And if I was you, I'd be thinking Twitter. I'd be thinking, it depends, medium is an interesting one. I'm going to give you three. Twitter, LinkedIn and Medium. I wouldn't bother with Instagram if I was you. If you're a writer and you're, you're, you're, the audience that you speak to with the ideas you convey, LinkedIn, Twitter. Super easy to learn.

• 49:27Steven Bartlett?

  And I, I know that sounds like really, of course I'll say that because I'm sorry. Like, but those two platforms I think will have a exponential impact on your business.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  It's interesting. So it's, it's funny, I, I, so somebody in my office handles the LinkedIn and, and Instagram, but I've, I've, I've not really been on them enough and, and learned. So this is really, really, really helpful. Do you think that social media? Has been a force for good in the world. Because it's difficult. I mean, I don't know if you you've been following the news on that the last, well, you probably have the last forty eight hours. But I see, you know, we talked a bit earlier about how we can converge with people who think the same as us. And we've obviously seen that on certain types of social media where you get these echo chambers.

• 50:11Steven Bartlett?

  Trump.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Trump, the filter bubble, other things of that kind. But at the same time, you have access, if you want it, to lots of different voices and people in certain types of societies can blow whistles on things that are going wrong. You know, I I think the the the political consequences of the social media are among the most important of my lifetime.

• 50:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  I obviously am not a native and, you know, I have a particular analysis. What what's your take on that?

• 50:39Steven Bartlett?

  So the great things to come from social media, the first things that spring to mind are important ideas being shared at scale and change happening faster than it ever possibly could have. So you think about key movements around LGBTQ rights, you think about certain causes, you think about atrocities happening in certain parts of the world. Having a window into those things and those ideas spreading very quickly and the consensus being arrived at quickly, therefore, action being taken quickly, therefore, change and political change happening at light speed, I think is amazing. I think one could say being able to make some type of connection with people in faraway lands.

• 51:21Steven Bartlett?

  However, on the adverse consequences of social media, the biggest ones for me are the the things like Instagram, which create, which will ultimately lead you to believing that you're a piece of shit and not enough.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  And how does it do that? Because everyone's life looks so good.

• 51:36Steven Bartlett?

  Everyone's amazing.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Right, right. So that does happen on Instagram.

• 51:39Steven Bartlett?

  Of course, yeah. I mean, the algorithm will show you the prettiest people typically, typically, the prettiest people that have the best lives. And then obviously, there's this almost like Black Mirror-esque ranking where if I post a selfie and I'm not looking on my A game, I'll get less likes. So that's like the the world going, um, five out of ten Steve today. And then I come back with the filter and I'm posing and I've done a little Photoshop here and the Facetune here and I come back looking at my fake self and it's Instagram, oh, well done. And then it's incentivizing me, it's, you know, positively reinforcing me to live a more fake, more shallow, more materialistic life.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  That's so interesting. And and people do. You know, they changed their phones to look better.

• 52:21Steven Bartlett?

  I read about this in my book, the CEO of an app called Facetune said that Facetune is basically an app that allows you to very easily, without any editing skills, change completely how you look. You can change your skin color that make you make your face have no spots on it. You can suck your face in, your hips in, and it's so easy to do. And on top of, and so the CEO of that company said that he hit a goldmine. And he says openly, he says, I, it was just a goldmine. The amount of downloads the app has had from young people who want to change how they look is staggering. Then you have this other thing now with which with these face filters, where I can put a filter on and it will just clear my skin up and suck my face in just a little bit. And now people, you know, people can't operate without them. I think I'm

• 53:05Steven Bartlett?

  probably guilty of it, too. If I can just press this button and it's going to increase my prospects of dating. And I'm going to get better positive feedback.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Don't tell me you're having problems getting dating. I mean, that

• 53:14Steven Bartlett?

  I can't, well.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Actually, they can't, the people can't see you. It's a handsome guy here.

• 53:21Steven Bartlett?

  And that's the downside.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  That's the other thing. Young people are all so muscularly, well, I just, I'll tell you what I was about. No one was interested in kind of having, have you met Ben Francis?

• 53:30Steven Bartlett?

  I have, yeah, yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Because we interviewed him on

• 53:31Steven Bartlett?

  On this podcast.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  You've been on it?

• 53:33Steven Bartlett?

  He's been on here.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  Oh, has he? He's a great guy. But he was like, all these, the two sort of iconic young entrepreneurs. But this thing about Instagram is really, really interesting, really interesting. So you think it is actually incentivizing people constructing fake.

• 53:52Steven Bartlett?

  There is no way it isn't. If you, so let me give you some more information on this. So when, when they did this stack, this vast report on which social platforms are having the most adverse impact on young people's mental health, Instagram was standout. It's a visual platform, which is ranking you on how you look. And the algorithm will show you the richest, the richest, most beautiful, most successful people. You've got the Kardashians on there with 150 million followers who are literally have been in the last couple of months, been like a paparazzi person took the photo of them on the beach, and then you got to see what they posted. And it's, they don't look the same. And you've got 100 million girls following this person who is lying about.

• 54:37Steven Bartlett?

  The fact that they don't have cellulite and they they're not a normal, you know, because this is, these are normal things. We will have, you know, cellulite and this and this and the rasher and spots here. But that, and you think about how we attribute the value of anything in our lives through contrast and in which the context in which we see it. So if you put, I talk about this in my book as well. If you put three TVs on a wall in an electronic shop, people will think the most expensive TV is too expensive and too bougie. They'll think the cheapest TV is probably going to break and not very good. So typically they go for the middle one. Whereas if you remove them, the two in which you, the two next to it, then they make different decisions. And you've seen this with like Ash's paradigm and you see it on menus and the way that we attribute the value.

• 55:19Steven Bartlett?

  Like I would be the prettiest, richest, most successful person on planet Earth if there was nobody else on Earth. Because it's all a measure of comparison. And Instagram is a billion people measure of comparison. Where do I rank?

• 55:34Speaker 00

  You've written about this, didn't you?

• 55:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I need to read my book after.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm gonna read it.

• 55:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  I mean, that would be fantastic. What was it? How to be a happy millionaire?

• 55:41Steven Bartlett?

  No, it's, it's, the title is Happy Sexy Millionaire. And I'm, I'm kind of trying to Instagram people, Instagram bait people into buying the book, right?

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 55:50Steven Bartlett?

  Because much of buying books is virtue signaling.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Joe, you're right, right, right. So the other thing that intrigued me on the way here today was listening to the podcast where you say, this is my podcast, you know, I'm slightly embarrassed about, don't tell anyone about it, whatever you do.

• 56:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  You know, I would never have, I would never have thought of that as a way of having a handle on a part. I love that. Absolutely loved it. But it's in a funny kind of way. It's kind of like, as a parent, it's a bit like reverse psychology.

• 56:17Steven Bartlett?

  Like vegetables, right? We're getting your kids to eat vegetables or something.

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But, but, you know, I think the true, the truth of human psychology are probably, you know, I mean, you mentioned Ash. Hey, by the way, you know, on psychology and on, on the global reach of Twitter, you talked about Ash's conformity experiment. That's, that varies systematically around the world. So, so in, in Western countries, more individualistic countries, people deviate more from the herd.

• 56:45Steven Bartlett?

  Explain what that is, because.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so if I, if you're thinking of the same experiment.

• 56:50Steven Bartlett?

  The lines.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So Solomon Ash, one of the most famous experiments in in modern psychology, he drew a number of vertical lines,

• 57:04Speaker 00

  which were of the same length, and then a fifth line that was significantly different in length to the other four. And then he got people to answer the question, do you think these, I think I've got this broadly right, do you think all of these lines are of the same length? And if you have people answering that on their own, like 99% say the fifth line is of a different length to the other four. But what Ash did is he got, you know, 10 Confederates to come in and say, oh, they're the same. And then, oh, they're the same. And then the third person, oh, yeah, they're the same length. And the fourth person, they're the same length. Then when it gets to the actual subject of the experiment, they're like, oh, my goodness, if all these people think that, they must be the same. And so they say, yeah, they're all the same.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  So they're effectively disbelieving the evidence of their own eyes in order to fit in with the crowd. Now, that conformity bias, which surprises a lot of people, is stronger in other parts of the world than it is in in Western.

• 58:01Steven Bartlett?

  Can I just add as well on these lines? When you see these lines, there is no possible way that that small line is anywhere near the size of the other lines. But as you say, because of conformity, these participants just go along with it. And it's just beggars belief that that's how human psychology works.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  But there is a good reason for it, if you think about it. I mean, every now, well, is there a good, I mean, there's a number of different theories about why it happens. But one of them is that occasionally one can get things wrong that seem obvious. And if there's a lot of people who are independently saying the same thing, that's very good evidence of what they're saying is true. And so humans, I think that bias evolved probably to enable us to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd. The crowds, if they can, I mean, crowds can converge on things incorrectly, but not independently of each. So if you imagine a stock market bubble. That's one person buying, another one seeing that person buying, and then another person seeing those two buying, and they get a bandwagon effect.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Whereas if ten people independently say that these two lines are different, and you have no reason to believe that they're lying, that's a good reason to start doubting. So I think there, but, but, you know, the reason I mentioned it is there is this global systematic variation in psychology. So you may have heard of, uh, you know, something called the fundamental attribution error, um, where we tend to blame people for things that are, things have gone wrong because of the situation.

• 59:34Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  That's much stronger in the West than it is in the rest of the world. Cognitive dissonance varies fundamentally, even visual illusions, um, vary around the world. Uh, and the reason I mention that is I think, um, you know, it's helpful for businesses to understand it, but I think it, it actually reaches into our deep history and how human societies evolve, which, which is a topic of my next book, but I thought you might be interested in that.

• 1:00:01Steven Bartlett?

  One thing I, I, I certainly do want to talk to you about as well is how, as an individual, because we've talked a lot about companies, um, and teams, how as an individual, one is to reach that, this is a super broad question, and I hate asking broad questions because you tend to get broad answers, but how as an individual, one could reach their potential, or what, what are some of the fundamental things that block people from reaching their potential? We've talked about a fear of failure. Um, we've, we've also touched on the idea that people don't start because of that fear of failure, and they don't get the feedback loops. But what are the other common sort of threads that you see in, in the reason why people never get near their potential in life?

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  So, so in addition to those things, so fixed mindset, fear of failure, risk aversity, all the things we've addressed, the other thing I think is I've become more interested in.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  It's related to what we said, but I think it's different is is what you might call initiative or agency or proactivity. I remember having an idea, um, this is in the nineteen seventies, early nineteen eighties. I was going to table tennis competitions and carrying this very heavy bag, blue Holdul, Ascot Holdul, and thinking, my goodness, this is really doing my back in.

• 1:01:13Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  And it was just retrospectively obvious that the solution to a problem that many people had who were travelling a lot is to put wheels on luggage, right? Wheel suitcases, which we all have now. Um, but having the idea doesn't mean a thing. You've actually got to act on that idea, right? You've got to say, right, I'm going to try and design something. I'm going to try and sell it to a department store. I'm going to try and market it. I'm going to try and buy a shop. I'm going to have to pay rent. I'm going to have to go to the bank and get some debt. That is a ma- there is a massive difference between a dormant passive idea and one that you act upon. Another example, I lived on Richmond,

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  uh, on a road in Richmond when I first moved there in my mid twenties, and it had no off street parking. What I didn't realise is that in Richmond, parking is a nightmare. Because all the houses have less parking spaces than there are, sorry, there are more, there are less parking spaces than there are houses. And so people park on the street and then they get taken up and you end up having to park ten minutes away. A few doors down, I noticed at the top of the road, there's a house with a parking space that is always empty. I thought to myself, yeah, I should knock on the door. Or I should, I should write them a note. And so I'm willing to pay rent or to, or to buy it from you. But I never

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  got round to doing it. And, and then a few years later, I was at a house party, and this person said, oh, I used to live on Montague. Well, oh, really? That's interesting. I lived there too. He said, yeah, I had the house at the top. I said, what with the parking space? And he said, yeah, what I never understood is that no one ever came and asked whether they could rent it. And I thought, that idea was in my head and I never acted on it.

• 1:03:00Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Because there is a, there's a fundamental inertia in a lot of us between, you know, it's easy to have an idea. It takes a bit of, you know, I remember when I was injured in table tennis and, you know, I wasn't practicing, I wasn't doing anything. I was sat at home. You know, just posting a letter felt like an unbelievably tough thing to do. You have to go all the way to the post office.

• 1:03:24Steven Bartlett?

  What's the psychology?

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  You have to buy a stamp. You know, oh man, it was like, oh, I'm struggling. You know, this, this, the psychologist I've got interested in recently is a guy called Michael Fraser. He's a German, really interesting guy. And he looked at the unification of Germany, right? After the fall of the Berlin Wall. And, you know, the, the West German businesses were like, this is fantastic. We're going to have this pool of really keen workers. And it just didn't work out because the East German, um, generalizing a little, but the East German workers had worked, had worked in, in a communist system where all the decisions are taken by the party bosses. And so if a machine broke down, instead of taking action to fix it, they would just wait for the boss person to come along and fix it for them. If they needed the telephone number, they would wait and they wouldn't

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  act on it. And I think that being able to, Richard Branson, you probably know, I mean, I, I got to know little, you know, he talked about how, I mean, I think this is probably slight, well, he, he, this is the way he tells it. You know, Virgin Atlantic, he, he was flying to the British Virgin Islands, uh, to meet his girlfriend. Uh, he has a stopover in Miami. Uh, they're bumped off the flight, they delay it to the next day and everyone sat there going, this, this is a disaster. Then he thought, well, hang on a second, I could charter a private plane, which were, which were in the airport. So he, he, you know, took the initiative. Probably a few people had that idea. What about chartering a private plane? But he actually picked up the phone and said, right, how much will

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  it cost to charter a plane? You know, $10,000. He then went around to all the people with a blackboard saying Virgin, you know, flight, this is the amount per ticket. Some people bought it, they managed to take the flight. And then when he got home, he rented a Boeing and, and went from there. And I think that proactivity. Is absolutely critical. You go to school for all those years, you get to sixteen. But what about going out there and you're about to take a decision about what your future career will be. You know, in my day, when you came out of university, some people would be in the same career for life. And you take that decision without going in asking people, what was it like in this job? Could I perhaps work for a day in this job?

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  A lot of people I went to university with took jobs without any of that proactive analysis of what it would be like. Now, you as an entrepreneur have this in spades. I want more entrepreneurship in schools. I want proactivity. Instead of learning business studies concepts. This is another experiment by Michael Fraser. Instead of people doing an MBA, he gave them a short course on converting ideas into action. He calls it the action cycle. Those entrepreneurs compared to a control group, you know, had, had, you know, twenty five, I can't remember the exact amount, but five times more successful businesses or twenty percent higher profits. It was published in Science magazine. So, you know, I think that's a really, really big deal.

• 1:06:20Steven Bartlett?

  That's a minds, I just can't get over this idea that you saw that that car parking space and you know, you didn't, you didn't knock on or send a letter. And I'm trying to understand linked also to what you then talked about with Richard Branson at that airport with the, with the blackboard going around and trying to sell this airline that he'd just come up with. What is the mental, like cultural, mental, psychological difference between the people that sat there and thought, I'm just going to accept this situation as is, like you did with the driveway, or like the other passengers who had just been cancelled did? And the person that takes the initiative, what is it about them? And what is blocking, I guess a better question is, what is blocking those

• 1:07:03Steven Bartlett?

  that are sat there on the airport floor thinking, fuck, I'm, my life is over. Or I can't find a car parking space. What is blocking them? And is it, this is my hypothesis, there's some kind of mental equation we're all doing very, very quickly. That's weighing up the effort it would take and also our perceived outcome of success, our perceived chance of success in endeavour.

• 1:07:24Steven Bartlett?

  And and coming to the conclusion that it's just not worth it or possible.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  I don't think that's what's I I I would reject that hypothesis. I don't think people make a rational calculation. I think it's more habit. Once you're used to doing things, once if you've been at a school where and and some people are lucky enough to go to school where where you are encouraged to to to make things happen. To, you know, some schools, you know, they are actually asked to start a business, to pick up the phone, to to to engage with other people as they seek to do something. You begin to, it becomes a habit. The idea of writing a letter and dropping it, it's like, no big deal. That isn't a barrier for me. It becomes a, it becomes second nature.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  I can tell you from this parking space, I was, you know, I was just in a, it was just pure inertia. I hadn't learned that entrepreneurial mindset. I did. I mean, that took me a long time to learn as well.

• 1:08:19Steven Bartlett?

  And you think, I'm just thinking about how I would teach someone to be proactive.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  I I so for I I've thought a lot about this too. And I, you know, I I think you get people to do it. So what Fraser does in his courses, he keeps linking ideas to action. You're not allowed to have an idea without acting upon it. He calls it the the active ingredient. So you get into a habit of so so one one of the entrepreneurs. So so he's done these experiments in Europe and in Africa. But in one of, I mean, he tells great stories about it, but it's such a long time since I read the papers. So I think habit, doing it again and again and again, you begin to get into the routine of linking ideas to action. I honestly, I think we shouldn't underestimate how

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  damaging it can be if we if we just continue to go with the flow and we're not prepared to to break it from time to time.

• 1:09:13Steven Bartlett?

  Then you're kind of just a puppet to the course of life, I guess, in some respects.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Right. And I think, yeah, I think there are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas, huge potential, who never act on their dreams. You had the dream, but the the, think about your dream.

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  That would remain dormant in your head had you not acted. These are distinct phenomena. The idea and the action. You can have ideas and dreams without acting on them.

• 1:09:45Steven Bartlett?

  I just, my, yeah, so I get a lot of DMs from people. You can imagine the DMs are, I've got a great idea. And you know that 99% of the people you speak to are never going to do anything about it because the hardest part is, is doing, it's just day one. It's like, think of the name of the company. But they, they just, well, I call them sofa preners. They have the idea on the sofa. It never makes it up out of the sofa.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:11Steven Bartlett?

  And that's like 99% of people. And I, I wonder what the barrier is between like, starting, I, I, I sometimes hypothesize that it's because of this culture of perfectionism and this culture of needing to start at a perfect point with all the resources, all the knowledge, all the contacts, the right team, which is not the case. I mean, if you look at how Ben Francis started his business or I started mine, it's Googling on a computer, how do you build a website? And doing that for three months. Um, but I, but I always, I always wonder, I think we could, we would, we would unlock so much potential if we were able to get people just to the starting blocks. And we can't, they're all on their sofas.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and, yeah, I, I, yeah, I, you describe it brilliantly. A couple of things that might be worth throwing in, there's a guy called Mike Barton. He was the chief constable of, of Durham Police. And he kept getting rated the highest by the independent inspector of the constabulary. And I, I remember, I was really intrigued by this. So I, I talked to him and met him. And he said that if he could, he would ask every wannabe police officer to take one year off to start a business and for it to fail or to succeed. Just so they started learning, using their own initiative, because that is what great policing is about.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Um, Stanley McChrystal. Stanley McChrystal was the head of the task force in Iraq after the invasion that were trying to quell the insurgency of al Qaeda. And at the time, it was a real, you know, it was a top down model. People at the bottom were passive. If they wanted to get anything done, they had to go up the chain of command, get sign off and it would go back down. So lacking agility and not really using their brains. And he pushed.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  Authority down the chain of command, people could, they could, as it were, initiate action against Al Qaeda targets if they thought it was sensible to do so. And it had a big, big effect on the success of the army, the number of operations, but also the percentage of successful operations. So I think that, you know, I think there's a lot of different people who are, who are working along the lines that we're talking about right now. But for me, education is a key. And I would like to see more work done in schools to really equip young people with this active ingredient.

• 1:12:25Steven Bartlett?

  You, you've written, I think we said six books, right? Six books now. Um, they, they center around topics like high performance and mindset and, and the like. Um, what's the biggest thing that you're a contradiction on in terms of what you can write about and know and, and profess to the world, but then you struggle with in your personal life to implement?

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  That's a great question. That's a great question. I've, I've never been asked that before. So one of the things I'm thinking, so, so I, I, you know, write newspaper columns or a sports column for the Times and a political column for the Sunday Times, right? And, and, and I think one thing that I try to do is, is read other people who, who disagree with me. Cause that's a really useful thing because either you really understand why you think they're wrong, or you realize there's a weakness in your own argument. But now I think about, I think the last fortnight, I haven't, I haven't been doing that enough. Um, so I must remember that as a discipline to, to constantly read those sources that

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  I know are going to be different. I've got a question for you, by the way. So this is another one that I'm thinking about a lot. Um, what you, what, what's your view of the word woke? So if you're, if you're my age, you know, people, what, you know, cancel culture.

• 1:13:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  Is that a good thing or a bad?

• 1:13:53Steven Bartlett?

  Which, which, which part? So, I mean, I was actually, funnily enough, I was listening to Piers Morgan talk about the word woke last night.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  Where, where were you listening to it? Why?

• 1:14:03Steven Bartlett?

  It was a 60 Minutes Australia interview and I don't know why, it just came up in my, I watched 60 Minutes Australia because I'm in the algorithm, so I'm in the echo chamber, so it's serving it to me every day. And he's done an interview in the last 24 hours regarding Meghan Markle and explaining, you know, he's being a bit of a crusader now, saying, I was cancelled for standing up for my opinions. He's like really going for it now. And so I don't really want to get into definitions because then people are just gonna, but so cancel culture, I think, is a bad thing because I think, I mean, we saw one yesterday where the cricket player who said some very, you know, racist things 10 years ago when he was a teenager, has now been suspended from the England cricket team 10 years later.

• 1:14:47Steven Bartlett?

  He said a couple of things, you know, about, you know, he said something.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  Seen it.

• 1:14:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I don't want to repeat it because someone's gonna clip it in the Daily Mail.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  That's my column for, for.

• 1:14:56Steven Bartlett?

  Is that what you're writing about?

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, I, it's racist, I'm a person of colour and I think it's ridiculous that he was cancelled. Yeah, he said some stupid jokes, some stupid slightly racist jokes 10 years ago. Are we really going to create a culture where we're going to rid him of his livelihood for some stupid tweets when he was a teenager? Because I tell you what, I don't know a single human being that's not cracked a slightly inappropriate either slash partly racist joke in their lifetime. And this idea that publicly we're all angels, perfect angels, who are here to judge others to the same standard of false perfection that we portray is just like deeply toxic. And then also, we're now on the, on the idea of like free speech. We're now stopping the best ideas because we're judging them based on whether they fit or not.

• 1:15:42Steven Bartlett?

  And this is, again, we talked about divergent thinking and thinking, having more diverse thoughts and accepting them and welcoming them and interrogating them for their merit, not whether they fit, I think is awful. And my last point again is, there's been a couple of moments, Black Lives Matter, some other issues where I've, my opinion has been in neither camp. And I, it's just, you know, totally unacceptable because I would say Black Lives Matter issue, I did a post, you know, the narrative was if you don't speak out, then you're a racist. Silence is violence, blah, blah, blah, blah. And after George Floyd was tragically murdered, I did a post saying, listen, people process traumatic events in various different ways.

• 1:16:24Steven Bartlett?

  So going to social media and posting about it isn't actually a very human way to process trauma. So if someone isn't speaking, it doesn't make them a racist. And also, you know, and, and, and the problem with the thinking there is people will look at your opinion and say, he's not wearing our football kit. He must be one of them. And because he's not wearing our football kit, the socks, the shoes, the shorts, the shirt, he must therefore believe all of the things that the right belief. And they put you, and it's so binary, you, there's no appreciation or space for nuance. It's not the way to get to the best ideas, right?

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  Look, I, I'm really glad to hear you say all that. I agree with everything you said. And I'll add one other thing. So I concur with all of those three points. I think they're, they're very powerful. The other thing, I'm from a half Pakistani, half Welsh background, you know, so I had the P word a lot in the seventies and eighties. And I'm sensitive to racial discrimination. And I saw my father not get from a brilliantly talented person not get promoted because of his color. And that, you know, it leaves a real scar on someone growing up. The other thing is I think it's a complete absence of an analysis of how to improve the lives of people from ethnic minorities. Canceling somebody who

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  sent a tweet nine years ago in their formative years, it is almost like a fig leaf for true action. Civil rights movement is a great thing in America, in my opinion, Martin Luther King, Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  But I think we have to acknowledge that it hasn't achieved many of its most basic objectives. If you look at the number of black people in prison, the education gap, the income and wealth gaps. I think there's a real empirical question about what we do. And it's not going to help those massively important demographic statistics to cancel somebody. And it's almost like it's a it's a surrender when we should be doing things that can have a tangible effect.

• 1:18:28Steven Bartlett?

  This is what my post said. It was nine slides long or nine tweet threads. And the conclusive point was, I'm going to be black forever. So if you want to help me and my future kids and my kids' kids, a black tile on Instagram or a hashtag doesn't actually address the problem. Canceling someone, telling organizations they need to donate doesn't actually help the problem. If you really cared, if your care was genuine and not survival oriented or virtue signaling orientated, you'd probably be thinking about systemic issues. And you can't capture or you know, or you'd be reading or educating yourself, which are all things that won't take place in the public forum. So go at the systemic stuff or, you know, educate yourself. That to me feels

• 1:19:08Steven Bartlett?

  like a more genuine way to change things. Hashtags, black tiles, cancelling, does it just seems like

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  ephemeral.

• 1:19:17Steven Bartlett?

  You care more about yourself, right?

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  It's kind of narcissism, I think. At its worst, it can be that. And the people react to that post.

• 1:19:27Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what? On that particular one, everyone agreed. And that's crazy because no one was saying it. And it's like, because I'm a black guy, it was like, I gave them space to disagree. So it was actually on Instagram, it did 600,000 likes.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:19:47Steven Bartlett?

  Which is a lot of likes, right? It did hundreds and hundreds of thousands of shares.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  My record is probably fifty.

• 1:19:51Steven Bartlett?

  It's one of my best, I think one of my best performing posts ever. And it was funny because you had like, I don't know, three black people in my, in the comments section being like, yeah, you meant to be like angry at me. But then when I'd asked them, I'd say, which one of the slides do you disagree with? And tell me the sentence you disagree with. You can't find something you disagree with in the post. It's the sentiment that this is not the party line.

• 1:20:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. By the way, one other thing, the Wisden, the cricket magazine, wisden.com have managed to find a post from an England player that was controversial, I think racist or misogynistic, but before they were 16 years of age. So they haven't published the name yet. But can you imagine if that person was suspended for something they said when they were effectively a child? Because we talked about failure. If anyone who aspires to the England cricket team never says anything publicly, never writes a school essay that might come back to haunt them. You know, you never, the way we learn is by saying things and then being challenged.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  You don't lose all of that if you basically just either toe the party line or say nothing at all. That's, that would be a catastrophe for a dynamic liberal society.

• 1:21:08Steven Bartlett?

  Imagine that all the progress that would have been lost.

• 1:21:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:21:10Steven Bartlett?

  Had people not have stepped outside of a party line and instead of, you know, stood on top of podiums and made speeches that people disagreed with and got them stoned and shot. And I mean, that's where most progress seems to come from. It seems to come from an outlier, an original thinker.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  Well, that's right. And, and you know, I mean, it might sound old fashioned to say this, but you know, John Stuart Mill, Locke, the founding fathers in the United States, what used to be called the Western miracle, you know, the fact that economic growth was, was very close to zero percent for the first two million years of the species to which we belong. Right? I mean, it was very, very tiny throughout our history. You know, somebody who was born in 2000 years ago and somebody was born 1500 years ago would have seen very little change in society. And then economic growth started taking off in the eighteenth century. And now, obviously, it's doubled and trebled and quadrupled.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  And we expect growth to be two to three percent a year. And if it's, if we have two consecutive quarters of negative growth, we call it a recession. One of the reasons that happened is because of exactly what you say. People were freed from the constraints of the party line. You could say something that, for example, the religious authorities didn't approve of, that the sun is the center of the solar system, not the earth. You can test hypotheses. You can say the world is older than six thousand years. You start to adapt your understanding of the world. That's science. That's technology. And I think the more constra-, you know, now, free speech doesn't seem fashionable these days. But those ideas, in addition, by the way, to things like due process.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  The thing that has made me trend, the only time I think I've ever trended on Twitter, is when I defended due pro-, so the idea that in order to be punished for something, you have to have had some kind of an independent process, some independent tribunal, to establish, having listened to different sides of the argument, whether the crime had taken place. Now, that, again, is something that takes societies a long time to create a, an independent rule of law. You know, judiciary that's in, and, and people were like, that's outrageous. Because I was defending somebody who had been accused of a racist remark. And I said, yeah, racism's wrong, but let's wait for the process before this person is sacked.

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  The implication was I was defending racism itself. But that is not the same thing. But I worry a bit that we're losing that, that distinction.

• 1:23:47Steven Bartlett?

  I think there's certain people fighting back.

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:50Steven Bartlett?

  And that'll be, and maybe it'll swing back the other way.

• 1:23:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I hope so.

• 1:23:53Steven Bartlett?

  I, I would hope so too. Um, self-belief. I'm very intrigued as to, um, you know, some, certain people in our society are more self-believing than others. Um, you see differences in, um, genders and races and, and backgrounds. And I think a lot of people in my DMs, and I'm, and this is where the question comes from. I have so many young kids in my, my DMs that are struggling with, um, confidence or lacking self-belief. And I wondered if you had any words of wisdom for those in my DMs that can't find confidence and self-belief.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  I think for what it's worth that self belief, self esteem, other things of that kind are overrated. And the reason goes back to something we said earlier. I mean, there was a movement in the seventies and eighties in western education to build self esteem in young people. And the way to do it was to let them succeed all the time. Right? So you might remember this, but you give them easy tests, get them to pass, and give them lots of tests, and then praise them for how super talented they were. They get all this self esteem and they can change the world. People were so worried about undermining self esteem that there were no losers in sports days at some schools. I don't know,

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  have you heard of this? Everyone's a winner.

• 1:25:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, everyone gets a sticker.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  And that was all about building, it was called the self esteem movement.

• 1:25:22Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  But it failed. And the reason it failed is because people would keep succeeding and they'd get all this self esteem. And then they'd be given a difficult test, right? Or they would leave school and they'd actually hit the real world where they would fail. And what happened? All the walls of their world would come crumbling down. Oh my goodness.

• 1:25:44Steven Bartlett?

  Never failed before.

• 1:25:45Speaker 00

  Right. Self esteem that is fragile. And people would protect their self esteem by not trying new things. Right? And that's a disaster. Self esteem can be very fragile. I like to talk much more about resilience. We want, I want my children to be resilient, to try new things, to mess up, but not to be devastated by it. And that I think is a much better course. Now, it may be that when people are talking about confidence, what they really mean is resilience. I want to be able to walk into a room, give it my best shot, things don't go slightly wrong, I'm going to carry on regardless. Every person who's a success has had some really tough, difficult moments. And I just think that's an inevitable part of learning.

• 1:26:28Steven Bartlett?

  How do we build resilience in ourselves?

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  Growth mindset's very strongly related to it. So instead of, you know, for parents out there, I don't, you probably have a very young audience, I'm shy of major, but the parents out there, it's very easy to praise young people for their talent. You're super talented. They've just drawn a picture. You're super talented. You're the next Picasso. You think they're going to develop all this self esteem. The problem, as I've said, is that, you know, the moment they draw something that isn't Picasso, as soon as they get negative criticism, oh my goodness, I'm no Picasso after all. Much better thing to do is to praise them for the effort or the process. Well, I love the way that picture, the colors fit together. They think, oh, right, if I want to develop as a painter, I have to make the colors fit together in a more sophisticated way.

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  You're aligning their mind and motivation with the journey they need to take to fulfill their potential. So it's good experiments praising for effort, praising for process is a much more positive thing than praising for talent and fixed attributes.

• 1:27:32Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because in my company, I came to learn that the most effective way to get my teams to innovate was to praise them for the effort and the process as opposed to the outcome. Because if it became about the outcome, the success or failure of the experiment, then, which is largely actually outside of their control, right? When you're doing, so if I say to my team, right, we're going to build this website and we think it's going to do this. Whether it does that or not, whether this product market fit, whether it's a success or a failure, isn't actually in their control. The bit they can control is starting, doing it and the process of getting to the point where we press go live. And so what I learned in the last year of my business was we would celebrate the conducting the experiment, not the outcome of the experiment.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  Exactly right. That is exactly the same thing. And it's interesting that if you look at R and D, you know, have you heard of Six Sigma?

• 1:28:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  So one of the things, I mean, one of the big mistakes, I mean, Six Sigma is a great process, you know, like lean manufacturing or

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  things of that kind. It's basically squeezing out variation, isn't it? So if you imagine making a car, you know, manufacturing car, all it takes is one component in the engine to be of the wrong size or specification and the whole thing won't work. So Six Sigma is about delivering and executing with no variation. But when you're innovating, you need variation, you need to try new things. If you're trying to create a new computer program, a new website or a new drug, and you don't know which combination of ingredients they're going to create, you need to try lots of combinations. If you penalize people for failure

• 1:29:07Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:29:07Speaker 00

  and you're only judging them on the outcome and it fails and then they're like stigmatized, they will never try. You need, you know, that's where fail fast car, yeah, you've nailed it. That's exactly the insight that I think is important.

• 1:29:22Steven Bartlett?

  And I guess the last thing I want to talk to you about is leadership and how to how one can become a better leader in whatever field of life you're you're in, whether it's sports or whether it's business like me. What are the attributes of successful leaders?

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  Well, I think I think it's a very difficult job.

• 1:29:48Steven Bartlett?

  Leadership?

• 1:29:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, extremely difficult. I don't know if you'd agree with this, but I do think even in a psychologically safe, you know, where people can speak up, a leader still needs to make the decision. I think it can often lead to confusion over who's in charge if it's a completely democratic organisation.

• 1:30:05Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 1:30:06Speaker 00

  You need leadership. So I believe my own view, based on evidence, is that you need social hierarchies in order for organisations, institutions and societies to succeed. But you want those hierarchies to work. So leadership, I don't think you can outsource it. You need to make judgements, you need to take ownership of those judgements. But I think if I had to say one thing, okay, I'll give you my and this is based on knowing a lot of like you know, many, many leaders in lots of different contexts over a long period of time. I think the best leaders have a hybrid approach to leadership.

• 1:30:39Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  And what I mean by that is when you're evaluating what we should do next, you need to be humble. You need to encourage different ideas and you need not to be threatened when people dissent because that encourages people to speak up. But when you've made a decision and you've found the destination and you're going for it, I think you need to then have confidence and you know, you need to galvanise. That's where charisma comes to the fore when you articulate the mission. Because at that point, having different ideas, you know, you're already on the way. That can often be quite disruptive. I mean, obviously, you do need to change the trajectory if you know something. But I think that in

• 1:31:24Speaker 00

  funny enough, in sport, you see so humility and evaluation, confidence and execution. It's the same in sport. So. If you imagine you're a surgeon or in surgery, if you're humble at the time you wield the scalpel, this might go wrong, I don't know everything, your hand's gonna be, if you're Tiger Woods in the 18, you wanna be absolutely confident when you take the putt, execution. But then if the surgeon says, I'm a genius, I'm brilliant, you know, I'm confident, I don't need to learn, they'll never evaluate what happened and therefore won't improve. I tell you, it made me think, I once ghosted David Beckham.

• 1:31:59Steven Bartlett?

  Kind of like a fixed mindset, right? Complacency creeps in and.

• 1:32:01Speaker 00

  Say that again, sorry.

• 1:32:03Steven Bartlett?

  Talking about the surgeon that's sure they're right, and it's the fixed mindset analogy you made, and then complacency creeps in.

• 1:32:10Speaker 00

  It's a disaster because what you wanna do after a surgical procedure is review it in a completely honest way. So you can find out things that you did wrong and could improve. But if you have utter self-confidence, I don't need to improve, that's exactly, as you say, a fixed mindset response, you don't improve through time. Beckham, I ghosted his autobiography a few years ago, and he told me about when he took the free kick against Greece. How old are you, by the way?

• 1:32:37Steven Bartlett?

  Twenty-eight.

• 1:32:38Speaker 00

  So you won't even, you won't remember this guy?

• 1:32:40Steven Bartlett?

  I remember, I will never forget. It was the World Cup qualifiers, and he ran to the left corner. I'll never forget.

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  That's right, that's right. So it was extra time, he needed a score to get through. And Teddy Sheringham tried to take the ball. And you see on the video Beckham snapped, and he said, when I took that free kick, I was 100% I was gonna make it. That's a useful thing to have, right? But you meet Beckham away on the training pitch, the humility, I need to improve the way I take free kicks, I need to look at the things that went wrong in the previous game. I need to, just see that. So leaders need to be both humble and confident, depending on where they are on the performance side, when they're out there executing, confidence, when they're evaluating, reviewing.

• 1:33:31Speaker 00

  I think most of the best leaders have it. You know, Sachin Adella at Microsoft is a great example of that. Humble, you know, their market cap has grown over a trillion dollars since he took over. You know, very humble person, I've met him a number of times, great, great person. But there is confidence when he's galvanising his team towards a decision that they've debated and discussed.

• 1:33:54Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's so true. I was just running through all the great leaders that I know. And those, um, those attributes seem to be there. Even, you know, a good example is Sir Alex Ferguson. Rio Ferdinand sat in the chair and he told me that Sir Alex Ferguson is obviously known for the hairdryer and being very clear on what he wants. But then if Rio went to Sir Alex Ferguson after a game and said, you know, you didn't support my brother. Anton got racially abused and then Rio wore a shirt in protest of it. Sir Alex Ferguson was really angry. Rio went to him after the game and had a chat with him and Sir Alex admitted he was wrong. And held his hands up and somehow managed to make it up to Rio within a couple of words.

• 1:34:34Speaker 00

  But you know, that's, that's right. That's exactly right. That's, but it goes with Ferguson. He always hired, you know, assistant managers who challenged his perspective. You know, Carlos Queiroz, Mike Phelan, Mullenstein, McLaren. He also would often do competitions for his players to guess who would be in the opposition team. He would go to other clubs and watch the way they trained. Ferguson came from govern, from a very working class background. He never lost his capacity to learn, never. And he was always had a certain level of humility. But once they were out there and performing, he was incredibly self-confident. And I don't think that's a contradiction.

• 1:35:22Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. It makes me kind of reflecting then on how important it is to be curious throughout your life, even when new tech technology like social media pops up and you're a little bit disorientated by it. And I see that in really great, successful leaders that I know in my life, business owners, CEOs, the ones that are the most curious tend to have the best long-term outcomes and longevity. And I think it's hard to teach curiosity. I do, I do wonder myself, because obviously I made my money off social media. And even now, I'm getting too old for that.

• 1:35:56Speaker 00

  Are you still working in the business?

• 1:35:57Steven Bartlett?

  No, I'm not working in the business anymore. No, I resigned at the end of last year. So now I'm a free agent working on a new business, but in a similar industry, slightly different, much bigger ambition, I guess. And I'm working across multiple industries. So I'm like working in a psychedelics biotech firm that's about to list for, you know, several billion dollars. I'm working, I'm on the board there and work with that team and working in a variety of different companies all around the world that are in mental health, consumer goods, social media, you know, and I think I've done that as well because I, as I talk about my book, I want to like resist my labels. I want to stay curious. I want to stay emerged in worlds that I don't know. I'm working on a blockchain company

• 1:36:40Steven Bartlett?

  at the moment, which is web 3.0 using Ethereum and smart contracts. And it's my, I like being diverse in my thinking, because I actually think that's where creativity comes from in a weird way. And the, one of the things that enables me to have this podcast is I have a very diverse view of the world and a very diverse view of organizations and people. And that will make me good at, it sounds like a crazy thing to say, like we're putting on a theatrical show in Manchester, sold out. It's like this, it's called the Diver CEO Live. There's a big choir, all this, all these really amazing things. And when I look at that show, what it is, it's a culmination, it's a very, very different show, but it's a culmination of all these random experiences I had in my life, going to the theater for the first time, listening to a choir, watching Kanye West, a light show I saw, and all of

• 1:37:24Steven Bartlett?

  these little things. And so I think, you know, you write about it, you talk about diversity of ideas.

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  I'll tell you, I'm going to send you a copy. So my latest book, well, a couple of years ago now, was called The Power of Rebel Ideas, The Power of Diverse Thinking. I'm going to send you a copy. I want to have a copy of your book. I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it this week.

• 1:37:42Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow. That's fast.

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  Well, how many words is it? Is it very long?

• 1:37:47Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:37:49Steven Bartlett?

  Seventeen thousand. No, no.

• 1:37:51Speaker 00

  Seventy.

• 1:37:51Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, no. It's fifty five thousand words. It's not very long.

• 1:37:54Speaker 00

  I'll get through that.

• 1:37:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's interesting. You'll be particularly intrigued by, I think, by the first couple of chapters, which focus on social media, the world we're living in, keeping up with the Kardashians' generation, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  Well, I've got to say, you know, I know we're coming to an end. You are. You're exceptionally articulate.

• 1:38:11Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, that's a huge compliment.

• 1:38:12Speaker 00

  So I kind of, you know, I, I'm interested in that because I think, you know, I definitely didn't have that when I was at school. I wasn't able really to put sentences together.

• 1:38:26Steven Bartlett?

  You should do a podcast. You just have the most amazing voice.

• 1:38:28Speaker 00

  I've got to tell you, my brother found an old tape of me being interviewed as a fifteen year old. When I got selected for a national team, I just really started. I think we need more of that, learning how to, you know, communication is so important, getting our ideas across so that somebody can understand not just what we say, but what we mean.

• 1:38:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Speaker 00

  And I think that's a, I think that's a radically learnable skill. You know, a lot of the top speakers have practised it.

• 1:38:55Steven Bartlett?

  YouTube aside, it's one that's in decline because of screens, typing.

• 1:39:00Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:03Steven Bartlett?

  You don't have to talk to each other anymore.

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Steven Bartlett?

  Zoom. Anyway, listen, thank you so much for your time. It's been such a pleasure to meet you. You're, I mean, you're an individual that's had such a tremendous impact on the thinking, especially of people in the professional but also self-development world. I remember reading your book a long time ago on a plane bounce and how intrigued I was by the emphasis you put on this growth mindset and practice and being teachable and your, your, where you are in life not being set in stone, if you're willing to put in the work and practice. And yeah, I mean, my team here are also huge fans of yours. Matt over there has read all your books and he'll read them in twenty four hours. This is, this guy's a monster.

• 1:39:45Speaker 00

  Matt, thank you. Love that. No, it's been great to be here. It's a tremendous honour, thank you so much. For me too, and good luck with it. I'm gonna follow you with huge interest Thank you. from now on. And you're about to hit the mainstream, aren't you? Dragonstone hasn't been broadcast yet. Not yet, no, January time, so yeah. Good luck. Thank you.