Steven Bartlett: Why I Asked My Girlfriend To Marry Me! Being Independent Is A Mistake

Steven Bartlett, the host of The Diary Of A CEO, opens up about something he rarely talks about: his relationship. He’s just announced he is engaged to be married! And his take is simple: independence isn’t the flex we think it is! If you want that dream life, you’re going to need someone to build it with! We dive into the mental frameworks that have made Steven the success he is today and why his quitting framework is your 2026 super power. And if you're a creator or an aspiring creator you’re going to want to listen to this! This is the perfect episode for setting your goals and intentions for your most ambitious year yet. ⸻ Timestamps (00:00:00) Intro(00:02:26) Why Steven Never Wears Shoes(00:03:46) Handling Pressure: The Lesson Padel Taught Steven(00:07:28) Confidence Rituals That Work(00:08:40) Steven’s Mental State (Cold + Rational)(00:11:03) Why Steven Stays Emotionally Neutral(00:12:19) Making Decisions Without Certainty(00:14:49) Your Best/Worst Decision Is People (Hiring Truth)(00:16:56) The Culture Test Steven Swears By (FlightStory)(00:19:43) “Paper Walls”: The Invisible Rules Holding You Back(00:26:54) Childhood Failure Creates Adult Confidence(00:28:05) People-Pleasing Keeps You Trapped(00:30:01) Shopify Ad(00:31:23) Maggie’s First Upload (Online Ridicule)(00:32:56) Steven’s 3 Rules for Hot Smart Rich(00:36:58) Why Thinking About Death Is Liberating(00:38:25) How to Find Your Mission (Stack Small Wins)(00:44:39) Can Anyone Be a Creator?(00:45:28) The 1% Rule That Built a Global Podcast(00:49:24) Steven’s Quit Framework(00:53:50) Embarrassment Is the Price of Entry (Creators)(00:56:01) First Principles: How Steven Thinks(01:00:10) How to Build Yourself Into a Top Creator(00:58:07) Those 3 Pinned Posts Explained(01:01:19) Bilt Ad(01:02:23) Cozy Earth Ad(01:03:29) Why Those 3 Photos Are Pinned (Meaning)(01:04:40) A Voice Note From Mel(01:06:32) “Romantic Independence” Is a Mistake(01:09:33) Make Dependency Sexy Again (Relationship ROI)(01:11:50) What a Successful Relationship Actually Takes(01:14:27) Conflict Resolution That Works(01:16:00) “I Felt Like the Failure” (Steven’s Childhood)(01:17:01) Youngest Sibling Energy: Bend the World(01:20:42) The Spider & The Barrier (Breaking Paper Walls)(01:23:14) Why Advice Doesn’t Land(01:23:55) Not Knowing Early Is a Superpower(01:26:08) Rapid Fire: Last Thing You Bought(01:26:24) “WAIT… YOU’RE ENGAGED?!”(01:26:57) Why Steven Finally Chose Commitment(01:28:29) The Engagement Ring Story(01:28:58) Describe the Ring (Details)(01:30:09) Avoidant Attachment & Changing Your Pattern(01:31:53) Modern Dating: Too Many Options, Less Love(01:35:11) Fatherhood: Trusting the Next Chapter(01:37:29) How Marriage Changed Maggie(01:40:03) Love + Ambition Can Coexist(01:42:54) More Rapid Fire(01:43:19) Steven’s Favourite DOAC Episode(01:44:35) Eggs or Watermelon Forever?(01:44:52) Working With a Superfan(01:46:24) Steven’s Favourite Podcast(01:47:03) What He’d Call This Season of His Life(01:47:54) Steven’s Biggest Achievement (Explain Like You’re 10)(01:49:16) How Can Hot Smart Rich Help You Right Now Shopify - http://Shopify.com/HSR Bilt - http://joinbilt.com/hsr Cozy Earth - http://cozyearth.com with code HSR ⸻ Hot Smart Rich: Join 250,000+ angels and subscribe to the Hot Smart Rich newsletter: https://hotsmartrich.com/subscribe Hot Smart Rich Money Mindset: https://shorturl.at/pJWLc Merch: https://hotsmartrich.shop/ YouTube: https://shorturl.at/IXXFZ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hotsmartrich/ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hotsmartrich Maggie Sellers Reum: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maggiesellersreum/ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maggiesellersreum LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sellersmaggie/ Locker: https://www.wantlocker.com/users/maggiesellers ShopMy: https://shopmy.us/maggiesellers Amazon Storefront: https://www.amazon.com/shop/maggiesellers ⸻ Follow Steven Bartlett: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/steven Diary Of A CEO: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDiaryOfACEO 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.

• 0:00Maggie Sellers Reum?

  If you're starting a business, there are certain things that are so fun to think about. Y'all know I love a mood board, so everything that relates to the creative, the name, the brand, the website, the vision board. But then there are the things that make you pause and ask, "Am I even doing this correctly? Or do I even want to be doing this?" Like forming your business, getting the right documents, keeping your personal information private. This is where our sponsor, Northwest Registered Agent, is so helpful. They're a one-stop shop for founders who want to launch and legitimize their business without turning it into a giant admin spiral. They help you form an LLC or a corporation, act as your registered agent, and give you tools like a business address, operating agreement, website, phone number, professional email, and free guides.

• 0:43Maggie Sellers Reum?

  They also have real corporate guides who know your local laws. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/hsrfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/hsrfree.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18+.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  I said this the other day, and people found this to be not a good thing to say, but I don't care. The key to being a great content creator or doing really anything with your life is accepting embarrassment is the price of entry. Now, what's the inverse strategy? Embarrassing yourself because you never reached your own potential. So I have a choice: inconvenience or inconvenience? This is probably why my friend said to me, "You're either being prison or a millionaire," because I was gonna do something.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  I was gonna do something.

• 1:54Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Why do you think you're like that?

• 1:55Speaker 02

  When I reflect on my podcast, my journey, how I started, it is this commitment to embarrassingly small steps that gave me evidence about who I was and counteracted evidence that existed there before. I think people think of me starting the podcast, I called like Netflix, I called some big time producer, but actually, I wish you could have seen me that day, embarrassingly small steps.

• 2:14Maggie Sellers Reum?

  What are those common characteristics of highly driven, highly successful people?

• 2:19Speaker 02

  I think one of them is this idea of pushing on paper walls. One of the attributes I look for is are they the type to question constraints? And we try and get everybody to realize the things that they're told this has always been the way to go up to it and check, push on it.

• 2:32Maggie Sellers Reum?

  What is the state of your brain every single day?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  It's a really good question. Um, there's a narrative of people trying to avoid dependency. Don't depend on anyone, stand on your own feet, be your own boss. And I think this is a mistake. I'm very excited about depending on other people and having other people depend upon me. Let's make dependency and commitment sexy again.

• 2:54Maggie Sellers Reum?

  What is the last thing that you put on your credit card?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  I shouldn't say this.

• 3:08Maggie Sellers Reum?

  In case you missed it, you're allowed to be hot, smart and rich. So let's get into it.

• 3:19Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Stephen Bartlett, are you ready to get hot, smart, rich?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 3:23Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Would you pause with that?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  I was wondering whether I should answer that question honestly, but you know, I guess I am like, how does one get ready to get hot, smart and rich?

• 3:30Maggie Sellers Reum?

  It's a mentality. It's a feeling.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:33Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Don't rip apart the hot, the smart, the rich. Like it's all a being. It's an energy. It's just that feeling when you feel like you can go and do everything. But I was gonna ask you, you can't interview me in this interview, Stephen. Were you nervous at all to come down here? Because you don't do interviews very often.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I'm not nervous. I was really excited and I hope I do a good job for you.

• 3:53Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  You know, that's, that's how I think, think about it.

• 3:55Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I noticed you wore a completely different outfit for me. You usually do like kind of a uniform. And one of the things that I noticed is you don't wear shoes.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Which for someone that is the second biggest podcast in the world, that has really thoughtful conversations around business and AI and the future of health, like, why the no shoes thing for you?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  You know, when you're having a conversation with someone and they're holding their phone?

• 4:18Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  The frame often matters more than the picture in life.

• 4:21Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  And them holding their phone lets you know that they have a series of priorities and you're one of them. I think a lot about what things say, what objects say, and then what the downstream consequence of that is. And on my podcast, which is founded in my kitchen, which is meant to be a private conversation between me and this person about often very intimate, deep things. Shoes signal that I'm going somewhere. Shoes signal that I'm not staying. Shoes signal that I'm not at home. So from episode one, I took my shoes off because that type of conversation is not one where you wear shoes. So that was just a decision I made. And there's lots of intentional decisions that we make on set to try and encourage the type of conversation that we're looking for. So yeah, people always say to me, should I take my shoes off? I said, you can keep yours on if you want, but I'm going to keep mine off. And there's carpet as well, which I think is really

• 5:06Speaker 02

  important. So yeah.

• 5:08Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I'm smiling because that was a very intentional decision that I made, episode one. I had a pillow on my lap because I was nervous and I wasn't wearing shoes. I read something and I watched it on Behind the Diary, when you talk about what you said to yourself before you went out for Jimmy Fallon. Can you repeat what you said the minute before you walked out to that huge stage?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Okay, so I'm going to have to take a couple of steps back here. I was in Los Angeles, where I live most of the time now, and I was playing paddle with my friends. So my five best friends flew out to Los Angeles for my birthday. We spent seven days together. We played paddle every single day. Some people don't know what paddle is. It's like pickleball, but it's more fun.

• 5:45Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  That's controversial. And my friend Ash, who has trained in Spain, who is, you know, technically a really good paddle player, he, for some reason, Was coming bottom when he played all of us and I couldn't understand why because he's had the most training. And so I started watching him play and I noticed something very clear, which was when he took an L, when he lost a point. You could see he would emotionally become unregulated and spiral down, which would hurt his performance. And I've sat with so many neuroscientists, I've, I've probably held more brains than ninety nine point nine, like real brains. The ninety nine point nine percent of the population. I have a fairly solid understanding of how the brain works and the different compartments of it. And what I, the way that I interpreted his, his behavior was that he was starting the game playing with his prefrontal cortex.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  And then when he took that loss, he would become emotionally regulated in his limbic system, the emotional center of the brain. Which would then impact his performance and he was mentally spiraling, which was hurting his ability to play. So when he came off the court, I sat him down and said to him, there's something I've learned, Ash, which is if you can keep yourself in your prefrontal cortex. The logical rational part of your brain, it won't impede your performance. So I'm going to give you some lines to say to yourself. And these lines were, that point doesn't matter. I'm going to win the game anyway, because I am the better player. And he went out onto the pitch, up until that point, I was the champion. And then he beat my friend Logan, he beat my friend Michael, he beat my friend Oliver, which he had never beat before. And then he beat me. For me, this was a tremendous aha moment.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  And it's really a broader point about how to deal with difficulty, nerves and emotional dysregulation in life. Which correlates to like the greatest athletes and founders and CEOs that I've ever studied, even Roger Federer as a prime example, which I talked about behind the diary. I remember watching Roger Federer, who's arguably the best tennis player to ever do it. His commencement speech where he said that he'd lost roughly forty eight percent of the points in his entire career. Which means that even the best to ever do it, half the time, they're dealing with losing, they're dealing with taking Ls. But Roger Federer went on to say in that commencement speech, the, the, the issue isn't losing. The issue is if you let that loss cascade emotionally into what you do next.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  So Roger Federer's key thing was to become the best to ever do it, you let the loss go. And the next point is a brand new start. It doesn't matter. I'm going to win the game anyway, because I'm the better player. And so before I walked out to Jimmy Fallon, I felt super, I did feel quite nervous because it's so far away from the world that I live in. Like you've got seven minutes and you're meant to be funny and you've got to say something interesting. You don't know what's coming. Studio audience, not my game. The paddle thing had just happened. So behind the curtain, I said to myself, you're going to do really, really great. You're going to be funny. You've spent your whole life being interviewed. You are so ready for this. And I walked out and it went really, really well. And I'm not a manifester, like I'm not a, I'm not the type of person that believes in like woo woo.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Look at yourself in the mirror, high five yourself and you'll be fine. However, I've sat with enough neuroscientists in my life, probably 20 or 30 of them that I've interviewed to know that what you say to yourself has a direct consequence on your neuroscience. Your neuroscience has a direct consequence, obviously, on your behavior. So now I'm a bit of a believer in self-talk.

• 8:58Maggie Sellers Reum?

  So have you seen my HSR love notes every single day?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Every single day.

• 9:02Maggie Sellers Reum?

  So I post them probably three to four times a week.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:06Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And it's something I've done for three years, pretty much every single day in my journal.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:11Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And it's a little bit hard for people to understand because I'm such a positive, optimistic, happy person. Like, that's my personality. But my brain can be a really, really, really dark place, like scary thoughts. And I started noticing like, wow, I'm a really confident person. I go out and I take big swings and I have no problem. Like, I literally took all of my life savings to work and live in the United States by putting all of the money I had into an E2 visa. Bet every single thing that I had on believing I could make more money than what was in my savings account and building a business in the States. So it was like such a contradiction of being extremely confident. But like having a really dark side of my brain that would tell me things like, people hate you. You're not good enough.

• 9:56Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You can't do that. And so I started doing these love notes because I was like, I need to bring that like inner confidence out every single day. And I'm so interested for someone like you because we do have so many commonalities that we're going to go into. Like, what is the state of your brain every single day?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  It's a really good question. I think I have a bias to optimism. I think. It's so hard because you don't know anyone else's brain. Like, you've never lived in anyone else's brain. So this question's quite tricky because you're not sure what's unique about yours or what isn't. But I'd say I have a bias to optimism. I say, providing I've slept, my baseline is positive. And I think because of the last 15 years of my life and being a CEO and a founder at a very young age, I've also developed a little bit of, I'd say, a little bit of coldness. And what that is, is it's emotional, it's knowing that sometimes, you know, I was 21 years old when I had

• 10:55Speaker 02

  employed hundreds of people and then as I, you know, as I got to 27, I had 500 employees around the world. And at any, any moment, whether it's Christmas Eve, your birthday, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve, you would get bad news. All you need is one person to give you bad news a day when you have 500 employees to know that you're going to get bad news today. So I learned, I think, this ability, this almost trauma response to stay calm within the chaos. That means when things are great, I'm the same. And sometimes I have to feign happiness or excitement. Happiness wasn't the right word. And when things are terrible, I'm the same. I'm a very, very stable person in that regard. And I think this is something that I've had to learn. It's partly who I am anyway, but it's also something that is like a trauma response

• 11:39Speaker 02

  to going through all of the difficulties and all of the bad news and, you know, being a CEO at 22, 23, 24, 25 years old, getting hacked, losing 80% of your business, having to, you know, have team members that are double your age and dealing with their problems too. And I think I'm a very stable person in that regard. My head is a good place to be.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  And I think partly because I have a bias towards being very rational.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  And you know, like Ali, you said in your head, sometimes it says people hate me.

• 12:08Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Obviously, they don't.

• 12:10Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Of course.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Which I'm saying is, you would agree, that's, that's not a rational thing based on the evidence you have.

• 12:16Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Agreed.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think I'm a very rational person, sometimes to a fault because you, you know, when you're dealing with a romantic partner.

• 12:25Maggie Sellers Reum?

  We'll get into that later.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Rationality is not the best approach, but it helps in business, I think, because you're able to think clearly even in the most horrific storms.

• 12:33Maggie Sellers Reum?

  So would you say that you have the highs and then you have the lows naturally and you've had to learn how to go more even keel? Or you were just born being more like, okay, I know how to think rationally and think logically. And so the highs don't get you super excited because what you even said to me when I signed my deal, I'm like, my authentic reaction is to jump up and down with joy.

• 12:56Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And it was interesting to be met with you.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Do you remember what I said?

• 13:00Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You said, the hard work starts now.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I'm not excited.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I'm focused on the work.

• 13:06Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Right.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  And that's my like, my default when I sign a deal is I'm now forecasting the set of challenges we now have. And so I'm so far ahead forecasting the set of challenges that we now have, that in my head, there's just no time. So for you, obviously, I try my very best to be excited for you and, you know, but I take the responsibility that the incoming storm is my responsibility. So I'm thinking ahead, like I'm thinking about the meetings I have to have with certain peoples to make sure we do a good job for you. And that's like my entire focus, it's just, it's just the way it is. When you hear this, you can think, oh, this guy, you know, he's, um, he doesn't live a happy life. I do, like I do, I wake up in the morning happy, but I, I'm very hard to swing, down or up?

• 13:50Maggie Sellers Reum?

  It is so interesting because although we're so similar, that is such a big difference for me and it's something I know I need to work on as now like a leader and a CEO. But I think two things that are huge commonalities to both of us, that I think a lot of people will relate to. One, we didn't learn through resume virtues. So we didn't go and chase the Harvard on our resume, the Goldman Sachs. We went and learned through the game of life. When you dropped out of school after one class. And you were no longer paying for tuition. What is the most expensive lesson that you've had to learn instead of paying for that tuition?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Even that is an example of the way that I think can work because the reason I dropped out after one lecture was because logically, rationally, I went to that room, I saw my peers sleeping on the table, the guy at the front of the lecture was asking me to make a hypothetical poster for a hypothetical business.

• 14:47Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  I looked around and thought, oh, this is like school where I failed. The rational first principle question is, is this going to get me where I want to go in my life to become an entrepreneur? If I get this degree and I'm an entrepreneur, who am I going to show it to? If I'm an entrepreneur, immediately it was a violation of rationality. I never went back. And so there's something in here which is extreme rationality and a great relationship with uncertainty. I did not need a plan B. And I genuinely believe in life, your relationship with uncertainty will almost wonderfully correlate your outcomes. Like, how good are you at jumping off the cliff when the paraglider is 51% assembled? Or do you need it to be 100% assembled before you jump? Because if you do, then you're going to overstay your welcome in situations that don't serve you. And this is what I see a lot of.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  I see people come up to me a lot in the street because of the diarosia and they'll ask me questions like that what they're trying to do is get me to cultivate more certainty in their life so that they can get to 93% before they make a decision. And we all logically know 100% certainty only exists in hindsight. So you have to get good at. This is something Barack Obama said when I spoke on spoke on stage just after him in South Parliament years ago. He said, my biggest decisions in my life, whether it was getting Osama bin Laden in those compounds in Pakistan, even though we'd never seen Osama bin Laden was in there, we didn't have an ID that he was in there. I had to get to 51% certainty and make the decision with the knowledge that I did it with the best available information and be at peace with that. I think there's so much, so much power in that. And the great founders that I've interviewed or all studied like Jeff Bezos all have this same principle of like low certainty decision making.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  But going to your question about the biggest regret or

• 16:22Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Most expensive lesson.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Most expensive lesson is all, it's always going to be the same thing. And it's going to be the same answer for everybody listening. Can you guess what it is?

• 16:30Maggie Sellers Reum?

  No.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  The best decisions you make in your life and the worst decisions you'll make in your life will all be people.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Does that track for you personally and professionally?

• 16:44Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I think so. If you break down.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Your husband.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Your sister.

• 16:48Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  The best decisions I've made in my life and the worst decisions I've made in my life were all people. And in business, it's the same. It's aiming too low because maybe I was insecure and I didn't think I could manage someone that was more talented than me. Or the best decisions were aiming really, really high. And I think when you look at the data, both personally and professionally, whether it's in your personal life, the impact it has on your net income, if you marry well, your mental health, your social connections, because some partners can be really isolating and they can cut you off from your family. Your friends, if one of your best friends takes up healthy hobbies, you're like 50, 60% more likely to take up those exact same hobbies. So it impacts your health outcomes as well. And then in business, I mean, the definition of the word company is group of people. That is the entire game.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  And at 18, 19, 20 years old, when I was starting out as a founder, I did not know this was the game. I thought the game was work seven days a week, have really great ideas, then you become a billionaire. I was wrong. I didn't really learn this. I'd say until about three years ago. Now, I can, now people can say that they know it, but then my test of you knowing it is you showing me your calendar. And me seeing how many hours you've allocated to finding truly exceptional people. And if it's five, then you don't, you haven't learned this lesson yet. Brian Chesky, who I interviewed and who I consider a friend, to be honest, who's the founder of Airbnb, says that great founders spend 40 to 50% of their time on headhunting. And I can tell you this morning alone, we're at like midday now.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  I've spent 50% of my morning hiring and doing that culture test survey and contacting candidates and writing new questions for the culture test survey. I've spent 50% of my month on hiring. The plane ride over here, 50% of my time on that plane was spent hiring. I really understand this is the game.

• 18:26Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Can you explain what your culture test is?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  I think culture is the most important thing. And I've interviewed so many of the great sports players or Manchester United players, which is my football club, who worked under Sir Alex Ferguson, who in my opinion is the greatest manager of all time, to know that culture is the most important thing. I remember when I sat down with Daniel Ek, who's the founder of Spotify, him saying to me that when I was 20, I thought culture mattered and hiring mattered. When I was 30, I thought it was, you know, probably one of the most important things. And now at 40, I think it's the single most important thing. And this tracks, in the case of Sir Alex Ferguson, who's one of my great managerial icons, I would assume that the reason why he's a great is because he had great tactics. Like, that's what you'd think. You'd think that he does something on that whiteboard that other managers aren't doing. But when you sit down with his players and ask them, what was Sir Alex Ferguson so good at? Why did

• 19:12Speaker 02

  he go for 26 years winning everything to the point that he could fire the star player and still win? And then he could fire the star player again and then still win? And then he could fire David Beckham and then still win? How does someone do that? They would all say to me, it's all about culture and man management. Rio Ferdinand, who was one of his great players for a long time, said to me, guess how many times he came into the training ground dressing room in those 26, 27 years? I said, how many? He goes, once. He didn't need to come in there because the culture was in there. So if one player didn't act in line with the culture, we would correct it. We would have the conversation with that player. A lot of companies think of culture of a group of people as words you write on a, like a whiteboard or aspirations you have. We're going to be ambitious. We're

• 19:52Speaker 02

  a resilient team. We're really enthusiastic. But culture's actually, in my view, how you behave. It's what you would do in a given situation. The culture of hot, smart, rich is what a hot, smart, rich person would do on, I'm talking about your team members, on Christmas Eve, when they get a text from your biggest client, let's say it's Apple, and Apple say, hey, we're logged out of our account. What do they do? Do they ignore them till New Year's? Do they? Send them the email right away. Do they roll their eyes and send them a rude response and remind them that it's Christmas? How you behave in a given situation is your culture. And so we built Culture Test as a way to predict how people will behave.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  You've done the Culture Test. It asks you 35 questions now, which try and figure out exactly how you would behave in a given situation. And it's the single most predictive thing we've discovered to find high performance and alignment. I care more about culture than I do qualifications. I I've probably hired thousands of people now in my career, thousands and thousands. And I can't tell you once where I've ever asked someone what they degree they got in university or what their grades were, or those kinds of things. My game is all about what's driving you and how are you going to behave when it matters the most?

• 21:02Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Do you remember what I scored?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Very high.

• 21:05Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Do you remember the exact number?

• 21:06Speaker 02

  I know you remember because I can see the smile on your face for the last six minutes.

• 21:10Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Ninety eight percent.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:12Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And it was very interesting because this past week, Jason, who's worked with you for 10 years, he sent me a voice note and he was like, I had no idea how similar you and Stephen really were until this moment, this week, where I've actually got to see it in practice because it's like hypothetical. And then it's two months of now really being able to study you and see what you're like. First, I would love to hear from you what you think the commonalities that we have are that would score us 98%. And then in practice, have someone that's worked with you for 10 years, say we are so similar, while we're also fundamentally such different people. Like, what are those common characteristics of highly driven, highly successful people?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  I think one of them is this idea of pushing on paper walls. Have you heard me talk about this before?

• 21:59Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I would love for you to explain it to people that haven't heard it, but yes.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  You've never heard it?

• 22:02Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I've heard it, of course, but the listeners, we don't know if they've heard it.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So one of the questions in the Culture Test, which I love the most, because it's very, very rare for people to click this answer. But I think it's, I can make the case as to why it might be the easiest and most important thing you can do to be more productive in your personal life, or more productive in your business, or more productive as a manager. And it's this idea that I've I've written about in my upcoming book, which hasn't been published yet, called pushing on paper walls. The question in the survey asks you, it says, there's an event taking place in a couple of weeks' time, in six weeks' time, an important supplier who has some things you need for that event tells you that they won't be able to get you the stuff in time. What do you do?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 23:12Speaker 03

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• 23:42Speaker 04

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• 24:11Speaker 02

  You have three options on my culture test. Option number one is scale back the event. So take things away from the event. Maybe we'll remove some of the cupcakes, whatever, so that you can hit the deadline now. The second one is push back the event date. So do it in the future. Give yourself more time. And the third answer is the paperball pushing answer, which is just ask the supplier why it takes six weeks. It's so crazy because about 7% of people click that button, but that is so clearly the right thing to do because you'll be able to relate to this in your own life where you've just asked somebody why a constraint is a constraint, and they will volunteer up information that means you can reduce and change the constraint. We hire a guy called Andrew who works on Behind the Diary, my YouTube channel.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Andrew's in the Philippines. We need Andrew to do his animation from behind the diary in about two to three days so that we can pass it to the next person in the team so that we can hit the seven day deadline. I messaged Andrew. Andrew's been working in one of my other companies for four years. I said, how long is it going to take you to edit this? Andrew said to me, nine days.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  At that moment, you find yourself at a crossroads. This is the paper wall pushing crossroads. What you do. Andrew just told you nine days. Well, a paper wall pusher says, why does it take nine days? I said to Andrew, why does it take nine days? And I was in the chat with Will and Alex. And do you know what Andrew said to me? Andrew said, well, I've got an old laptop, so it takes nine days to render. And I said, so what would we have to do to make it take two days? He goes, you buy me a new laptop. So $2,000 fixed a problem. That's now going to save me 60% of my time for years. $2,000. Crazily, Andrew didn't offer up that information because when people are trapped in paper walls, traditions and preference and the way it's always been done, they don't know that they are.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  They've accepted it themselves. And when you look back through history at some of the greatest companies that have ever been built, whether it's, you know, even a company like Zara, which was founded by a guy called Amancio Ortega. He existed in an industry in fashion where the rule was that fashion takes nine months. So you spend a couple of months in January designing it, five, six months getting it manufactured in Asia. Then you'll have it on the shelves by September. So you've just got to kind of hope that you were right about your guess of what people want in the future. Amancio Ortega asked why. And then he got all the rebuttals that everybody gets. It's going to take too long. Manufacturing in Asia is 10 times cheaper. We'd have to fly it by air, not ship it. The costs are going to be too high. He said, okay, that's exactly what I'm going to do. So he built the factories in Spain and in Portugal.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  He had his staff trained on the floor to watch what people were buying and wearing and sketch it that day and send it to the design team to have it manufactured in the country that day. Of course, the economies of scale were impacted, so he could do shorter runs. But that didn't matter because he's selling out everything and not having to go on sale. It was all a paper wall. The whole industry was a paper wall. And Amancio Ortega launched Zara, which everybody knows now, with this model of going from sketch to the rack in 15 days. And he is worth $150 billion because of that, because he pushed on paper walls. And as I went through history and looked at. Bernard Sado, the first man to ask the question 50 odd years ago, why do we all carry our suitcases? Because 50 years ago, suitcases didn't have wheels on them because

• 27:21Speaker 02

  there was a paper wall that men would never be seen dead pulling a suitcase. Bernard was in walking through an airport, saw a machine that had wheels on it, went home, took the wheels off his wardrobe, put them on a suitcase, took them to a retailer. The retailer said we'd never sell any of those. Men would never be seen dead pulling a suitcase. In fact, in paper wall industries, there are sub industries created to protect the paper wall. So there's bellboys at hotels. Back then, there was every train station, hotel, or whenever you moved in public, you would pay someone to carry your suitcase for them and blow their back out. Bernard kept pushing on this retailer. Eventually, they said, we will sell it, but only if we sell it to women. They put it on sale. After he pushed and pushed and pushed, men queued up and bought, sold out their suitcases. And now 99.99%

• 28:05Speaker 02

  of world suitcases have wheels on them. All it took was one person to push on the paper wall. And lastly, there was a study done by, I mean, there's a gazillion examples of this. One of my favorites also, um, from, what's his name, Roger Bannister, who everybody told, nobody could break the four minute mile, it'd never been done before. Scientists at the time said, if you try and break it, your lungs will explode. This is what, and he wasn't even a runner. And this is part of what I think paper wall pushers are. They're typically quite naive. So he's this part time runner. He says, forget that, I'm going to try anyway. The remarkable thing is he breaks it like April 1987 or something. But the even more remarkable thing is that within days of him breaking it, a record that had never been broken before, like 15 other people run a four minute mile. It was a wall made

• 28:48Speaker 02

  of paper that looked like it was made of cement or granite. But it was actually just preference and everyone had just spent their life walking around it and not trying it out. So one of the attributes I look for, both of my team members, um, in founders that we employ, we, we give this test to founders as well, is are they the type to question constraints? A Stanford study recently showed that founders who have a bias towards believing that deadlines are optional, deploy 300, roughly 300% more features than founders that don't and get to profitability 250% faster. So in my company now, Paper Walls is a Slack channel. It's vernacular, it's vocabulary we use. And on the way here, I actually posted in that channel and we try and get everybody.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  To realise that the things that surround them that they think are made of cement, the, you know, the, the things that they're told this has always been the way. This is how it's always been done, to go up to it and check, push on it. And you do that.

• 29:46Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Don't you think, like, I'm just thinking back to myself as a kid.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:49Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And like, I can remember this one very specific situation. My parents let me dress myself and I was creative, like I've always been creative. So I'm wearing like something in my hair up here. I'm wearing a pigtail down here. I'm wearing stripes. I'm wearing polka dots. I'm wearing like just the weirdest outfit and my mom loved it. She was like, this is how I know my daughter is going to be creative. And I will never forget one of her friends that dressed her daughter perfect every single day, came up to me at the schoolyard when we were all getting dropped off. And she was like, Maggie, like, can I switch something around on you and fix your hair? And I was like, no, and, and you have an ugly shirt on today. And I was like so sure of myself and just like, obviously I looked ridiculous. And obviously I was like brave and didn't want an adult to come and correct me. And I think a lot of the time, when you think about who you are as an adult,

• 30:32Maggie Sellers Reum?

  you think about the four, six, seven, eight year old version of yourself. And you can tell who those paper wall pushers are all the way back to childhood. Do you agree?

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And typically, I think it's a consequence of being given space to fail when you were younger, like being given space to make a decision, it to be wrong. And then genuinely, a lot of paper wall pushers are, have a streak of rebellion in them for some reason. Like the system did them wrong in some way and they have a bit of a chip on their shoulder where they like to question

• 31:01Speaker 02

  the way things are. And I guess the inverse of that is if you're a people pleaser, you will never push on paper walls. Because people pleasers, they don't like to be rude, disruptive or disagree. Now, I would say to those people pleasers, you're going to be annoying either way. Like you're going to annoy some, this is like, most of the principles I think about in my life, I'm like, you have to think of the inverse strategy and you tend to find that the inverse strategy also leads to disappointment. And one of the things I always talk about with my team and when I'm talking about content creators is like, the key to being a great content creator or doing really anything with your life is accepting embarrassment is the price of entry. Now, what's the inverse strategy? The inverse strategy is embarrassing yourself because you never reached your own potential and having to live with that. Like a broken record in your head over and over again, all the what ifs.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  What Brony wear when she interviewed people on their deathbeds described as the regret of not living the life I could have lived. That's also bad. Like, yes, me starting a podcast with a sock over my microphone that I bought from Apple and it sounding terrible was embarrassing, but so is not doing that over the long term. And I think the same here, which is you can push on paper walls, you can ask people why, and you will probably be a little bit inconvenient. But you know what's also inconvenient? Having to fire all your team because you were a people pleaser and you weren't one of the founders that was delivering that 300% uplift in productivity and you failed. That's also an inconvenience. So I have a choice, inconvenience or inconvenience? And in the case of, you know, I was talking about Roger Bannister.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was a bit disruptive at the time. He was disagreeing with the scientists about what could be done. But in hindsight, do we remember Roger Bannister as annoying? No, we remember him as a legend. We remember all that he did because he pushed on paper walls and he is, he is held up there and talked about on podcasts in 2026 as a legend, not as annoying. And that's how history remembers paper wall pushers. They remember Amane Ortega as a pioneer.

• 32:57Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I always knew I was going to be an entrepreneur, but it still didn't take away the nerves and unprepared feeling that every single entrepreneur has before they actually start. No matter who you are, starting a business can be overwhelming with a constant feeling of doing everything, but nothing at all, all in the same moment. But now, looking back on what we're building with HSR, I can't imagine not taking the plunge and getting rid of those golden handcuffs to become my own boss. So if you're ready to join me and take the entrepreneurial plunge, one of the best tools that I can recommend is our show sponsor Shopify. If you want to sell online or in person, it has everything

• 33:38Maggie Sellers Reum?

  you could ever need to make that happen. They have hundreds, and I mean hundreds of store templates to pick from so that you can customize to match your branding. And they have AI tools that write product descriptions and edit photos for you. Or if you need Help with the marketing side. Shopify will create email and social campaigns on your behalf. It grows with you, whatever stage your business is at. So in 2026, stop waiting and take that leap. Start selling with Shopify and sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/HSR. That's Shopify.com/HSR.

• 34:19Maggie Sellers Reum?

  It's so funny that you say it in that way because I think I was doing a lot of reflecting as we were going into our announcement, right? And the words hot, smart, rich, very polarizing. And your team was actually the team that came up with the saying for the male version of an angel, which is an Angelo. And I think most women listening to this will realize that it's like women backing women, but it also is around women having allies in men. And when I first started making videos, that was like, I'm a hot, smart, rich girl. Here's a day in my life and like, I actually, looking back at that time in my life, was the most unhappy version of myself. But it was like that mentality of like, I am going to be that one day. And so I'm going to already claim that energy and start these videos with like,

• 35:03Maggie Sellers Reum?

  here is a day in my life as a hot, smart, rich girl. And I will never forget the first time that I got ripped off of TikTok, which was like my little safe space on the corner of the internet where like, I don't think I was really ready to pay the price of embarrassment yet fully. I was ready to do it in a place where like, people didn't really know me. But I wasn't ready for like the world of VC and where I wanted to be to really understand what I was doing. And it gets put on this VC meme page and the amount of comments from male VCs around just like ripping me apart was ruthless. And I think it just reminded me of that moment where I was like, I so easily could have quit in that moment and just gone back to like, okay, I'm just going to go to the status quo.

• 35:45Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And there was that little paper pressure in me that was like, I am going to keep going. What was the first impression that you had when someone puts in your Slack channel, Grace Miller? Hey, I love what this girl is doing with the name Hot Smart Rich. As obviously a male Angelo, an ally of what we're doing. What was your first impression of that?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  So I've got lots of thoughts that came to mind. There was actually three that came to mind at the same time and they're slightly different, but they're speaking to the same thing. The first is back in the day when I built my first company, I had written on the walls, indifference is the least profitable outcome. Make people feel something either way, because you can only take care to the bank. Like, they care to hate you, they care to love you, but indifference, when they don't feel anything about you, you can't cash that in as a brand, as a marketer. So that's the first thing that came to mind. The second thing that came to mind is what you describe is the exact price of entry, that everybody listening to this right now will have to pay to do anything. To think that we can just have positive attention without the inverse is just a fundamental

• 36:50Speaker 02

  contradiction about how the world and the brain and everything works. If you're going to make people really, really care, you're going to make other people really, really care for other reasons. And I think great brands through history create an or situation, not an and situation. What I mean by this is when I first met one of my investments called Perfect Ted, who had built this matcha energy drink company, then I think the fastest growing matcha company in the world, I sat them down and said, what we need to do for you is make sure it's clear when the customer walks down the aisle, that they are a Perfect Ted matcha customer, or, key word, or, not and, or a Red Bull customer. We will never grow this business if they're both. If it's an and, if they think, they look at Perfect

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Ted and go, I can be a Perfect Ted customer and a Red Bull customer, we are not distinctive enough. So you have to create an or situation. And the way that you do that is by clearly, unapologetically standing for something. The opposite approach again becomes indifference, you become sameness. And the entire world is trying to pull everything in this moment, you, me, the plants in this room, towards sameness. That's what happens when we die.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Your body right now is about 20 degrees higher than this room. When you die, it will become the same. So we always, at all times, all organisms are fighting against sameness. And it requires a huge amount of energy, but it's ultimately what makes companies, brands, people distinctive. Jeff Bezos actually wrote about this in his last ever shareholder letter at Amazon, where he cited Richard Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker. And he talks about how this is just a fact of the world. Like, your environment right now is doing everything it can to bring you back to sameness. And you're burning calories as we speak to keep your pH levels and your temperature different from the environment. So when you step out into the world with a brand like Hot Smart Rich, which is not sameness, it's very much distinctive. The world is going to expend a ton of energy pulling you back down.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  And your job is to remain distinctive. And with that will come all the upsides that you seek, but it will become some you didn't choose and didn't expect. Jeff Bezos says in that letter, he says, Amazon will die the day that it gives up that fight. It will retreat to nature. It will become, you know, like the plants when they, when they give up their fight. And so this is, this is why embarrassment is both the price of entry, but it's also the price you pay every single day. And so you really need a framework for why you're doing this. Because that gravitational pull back to being typical, being the same, being like the crowd, fitting in, like the crabs in the bucket analogy, it's, it's gonna be strong. So you better have a counterforce that's, that's even stronger. A lot of people will be listening now, they're going, I could never deal with that.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  I could never have a thousand people telling me I'm an idiot on the internet. It's like a muscle.

• 39:34Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  You build it when you break it. So, you know, you've got a kind of, it's, hopefully, you know, your rise is, is not Justin Bieber. Hopefully, it's a gradual one where you can really work on that muscle and understand what it is. And the, the other thing I have to say is like, I don't know what religion you follow, but just never forget the fact that you're gonna die. And for me, having been really, really clear on the fact that I'm gonna die someday, and it could be today, it could be 10 years from now, or it could be 50 years from now, and that not even like my great, great grandkids will remember me. It's remarkable how quick we're forgotten. And for some people, that'll feel like a depressing thing. For me, it's the most unbelievably liberating thing to know that all this stuff,

• 40:17Speaker 02

  the stuff that I I might have worried about this morning, or yesterday, or this week, is just gonna fade into nothingness. And it it means that I can truly be myself. I can truly do the thing. Because I know I'm gonna die. And I know when I die, none of it's gonna matter. And actually, what's gonna end up being the most consequential thing is the ride that I had with the people that I loved, and did I live in line with who I truly am? So, death has been such an unbelievably wonderfully liberating thing. And sometimes when I look up at the night sky, when I was at Joshua Tree a couple of weeks ago, and I can see all the stars, and the guy was telling me that that star over there is 25 million light years away. And we go, wow, none of this matters. None of it matters. And I live in this dichotomy. It feels like a like a huge dichotomy of

• 41:02Speaker 02

  knowing that absolutely none of this matters at all. I have no concern or regard for my legacy. Doesn't matter. Again, all of these things would become attachments, and then attachments become like a ball in chain. So, no regard for my own personal legacy, no regard for what happens when I die, which means I can truly live.

• 41:20Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You said something to me last week when we were doing our photo shoot that actually has stuck with me, and I've written down every single day. And I think I've said it to so many people, they're probably annoyed at me at this point. You said, Maggie, you need to stop focusing on proving people wrong, and you need to start focusing on proving people right. And I think my whole life, I have so focused on like, all the haters, all the like, the nonbelievers. And it was a little bit of a stroke of an ego when Stephen Bartlett, second biggest podcaster in the world, like Dragon on Dragon's Den, like all of the accomplishments that that you've had, taps me on the shoulder, and is like, I see something in you. And of course, there is an element to that where it's like, see? Like, I was I was right all along. Someone saw this in me.

• 42:03Maggie Sellers Reum?

  But it stuck with me because I think so many people listening to this are going into the new year and thinking about like becoming their best self. And then they let all of the people that are coming into their life, say all of the things that are going to keep them from achieving their potential. And not all of them are going to have a Steven. Like you say to me every single time I see you. It is my job to help you reach your potential. I see you. I didn't have someone like you for the first 12 years of my career. For the people that are listening to this, that are going to be swayed for another year, from the people that doubt them and put all of these things in their head of why they can't do things, how do they start

• 42:44Maggie Sellers Reum?

  focusing on proving the people right, instead of proving these people wrong, that are trying to take them away from their mission?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  So I think it really starts with collecting evidence for yourself, because everybody listening now, including you and me, we both have almost this bookshelf.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini in Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini in Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses setup required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 43:28Speaker 03

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• 43:58Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Like a bookshelf over there, this bookshelf of books on it. And every single book is, you can think of it like evidence. And it's evidence that's come from your childhood, what someone said to you, how things then played out and how you interpreted them. And the only way, and that bookshelf, the problem is, it's, yes, they're books, but they're also instruction manuals. They then inform what you do in the future. So someone listening now who has a bookshelves full of doubt and skepticism and things going wrong and them interpreting them badly, it's like, it's really crazy advice for me to say, like, just do the thing.

• 44:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Because my words are not greater evidence than all that sits on your bookshelf. What I need to do is I need you to conduct certain behaviours, then they're going to be embarrassingly small behaviours that are one at a time going to replace those books. That is the game. And I've sat with so many psychologists that have told me about how people turn their lives around. And you would think it would be like, you know, I need you to just jump off the cliff. In fact, I remember one particular psychologist telling me that he was working with a young patient who couldn't leave their bedroom. Bedroom's stacked to the walls with filth and plates and all these kinds of things, and they're scared of going outside. And on day one, what they do is they bring the Hoover in. They do nothing else. That's day one done.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  On day two, they plug the Hoover in. That's day two done. On day three, they turn the Hoover on. By day 30, this person has a clean room and they're outside. If you tried to get them to climb Mount Everest on day one, they would have looked up, experienced cognitive dissonance, which is the discomfort you face when you're facing a very big challenge, and they would have never done it. But by breaking it down into small steps, just pebbles instead of Mount Everest, it's remarkable how much your life can change. The advice I would give that person who doesn't have a mentor or someone to push them out of their bedroom or to push them up Mount Everest is to start stacking small wins. The reason people don't do it is because those small wins are so embarrassingly small that they don't think they're consequential. But actually, when I reflect on my podcast, my journey, I reflect on how I started, it

• 46:22Speaker 02

  is this commitment to embarrassingly small steps that gave me evidence about who I was and counteracted evidence that existed there before. You know, even like starting my podcast, I think people think of me starting the podcast, like I made a phone call and then I called like Netflix and then, you know, I called some big, big time producer, but actually I wish you could have seen me that day. I wish you could have seen me in that white room at my old company, turning to the team, being like, I think podcasting is going to be a big thing. I have this idea for a podcast. I need to think of the name and then me coming back three days later and being like, what about the diary of CEOs? And then me thinking about that for another day and come back the next day and going, actually, the diary of a CEO. Then that night, walking to, instead of going straight home, walking to Apple and buying a $99

• 47:06Speaker 02

  microphone and bringing it home. And then the next day, taking it out the box. And then the next day, plugging it in and going, how do you edit? And then me loading it like GarageBand and there's, oh, GarageBand comes with the Mac. Then me trying to speak into it and playing around with these plugins and then cutting it and then, you know, and then doing that embarrassingly small steps. Now you've got the second biggest podcast in the world. We're adding 700,000 subscribers a month. Amazing. Embarrassingly small steps. And if you try and jump to where I am now, the leap is so big that it will cause all that discomfort. That means you'll be paralyzed into inaction. So that's the game. It's, and you know, every step of the way, you slowly take those books off the shelf. So it's slightly contradictory advice, but it's just how change happens. And I know it's the same for you.

• 47:51Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Totally.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Because it's the same for everybody. But when you're sat there looking at a Maggie Sellers, what you, what the problem is, the 99% of people showed up recently. So they see the finish line and they go, oh, that's a long way away. They don't want to put the sock over the microphone because they're trying to figure out how to get the to stop on the mic like I did. It's embarrassingly small steps. And that's the only way that I know how, you know?

• 48:20Maggie Sellers Reum?

  It's so interesting hearing you say that because even for me, there was a level of like intimidation, right? The embarrassment is the cost of entry every single day. You're so right. Like having you come here to this studio with these tiny little mics and like, of course, there's been an evolution, but there's still so much to do and so much to go. And I remember you saying this where you were like, if I had looked at Joe Rogan when I wanted to start, I never would be one and two with him, right? Because it's like, even for me, looking at you, it's like, well, it's on, like I'm coming for you, but it's going to take me a long time and a lot of little baby steps to get there. But I think the barrier to entry for creators now is so low, for entrepreneurs is so long, but let's just stay on, on creators. Do you believe that every single person can be a creator successfully?

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Not, not really. I don't think, I don't think every single person can do everything. And once upon a time, it would have been really, really easy for me to tell you yes. But I think with wisdom and age, you come to learn that people are different and they have. You know, one of the biggest things that stops people being able to do anything, whether it's entrepreneurship or creating, is self-awareness. It's do you actually know what you're good at and how you're received? And if you don't, then you'll continue to aim at the wrong target. And going back to your other point, because I think this was super important, is that when we started the podcast, we knew we were going to do really well, once we got going. And the reason we knew we were going to do really well is we realized we'd discovered a secret philosophy that everyone else signals. And it kind of goes back to what I was saying about embarrassingly small steps, which is this whole principle of one percents.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  You'll be very familiar with this because it's, there's two phrases that I use most popularly in my office and in my companies. And that is failure. We try and increase the rate of failure. And the second is this idea of one percents. I remember realizing that in order to catch the biggest podcasters in the world and to build the biggest show in the world, all I had to do was care more about the small stuff. Because this goes to the point as well about momentum, creating psychological momentum. There's a study I often talk about where Harvard Business Review asked people when their best day of work was. And they asked them to keep these diaries every single day and just write what happened that day. And at the end of the study in Harvard Business Review, they found that the people

• 50:28Speaker 02

  who were most motivated had experienced a tiny win, even if it was a one percent win, like a tiny little thing. So what that speaks to is this idea that if you start finding tiny little ways to improve, it creates the feeling like we're going somewhere, which overlaps with what Sir David Brelford taught me, who's in the first chapter of James Clare's book Atomic Habits. He told me that when he went into the British cycling team as the performance director, and he saw that they were down and out and depressed, and they didn't believe in themselves, and they were the laughing stock of the world. The thing that turned them around was, of course, focusing on the one percents, which is making the bottles bigger, making the pillow softer. But he said to me, what people don't realize is when we started finding these small wins, the team felt like we were going somewhere. Somewhere and they stopped leaving the office at 5pm and started leaving at 2am.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  The power of compounding small little gains is unbelievable. And so when I looked at our early progress for the diary of a CEO, for example, and I plotted it on a graph and I was like, okay, if we just keep changing our trajectory by 1% in tiny little ways, measuring the CO2 levels in the room, or A B testing 100 different titles and thumbnails, or measuring the impact an exclamation mark has on the title, which we found out gives 0.2% more click through, which is fantastic, using the color red instead of using the color green for the thumbnails, which gave us another 1.4% additional click through. If I just kept my team focused on the turning over the small stones that everybody else thinks are inconsequential and don't matter.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  All I need is time. That's what the graph said. It said that if I just keep finding these tiny little wins, all I needed was patience. And all of my competitors are looking for the next big leap forward in innovation in podcasting. They're looking for some new YouTube or some new Spotify, some great leap forward, because that's what people think the game is. But our bias has always been to aim at the small things. And the great thing is you find more of them. It creates psychological momentum. And sometimes when you turn over small stones, you find huge prizes. I think I told you about like a 10 second change I made to my podcast that increased the amount of people that subscribed by 300%. What kind of team would bother to A B test 50 times a 10 second change? One that's focused on the small stuff. I think about this in almost every field of business of investing

• 52:38Speaker 02

  is can you out care the competition on the smallest things?

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Because really it's the smallest things that you can do something about and they're easiest to find. So because it's so obvious to me now. It's so obvious to me now, but it still doesn't, no matter how much I've said it to people, it still doesn't appear to be obvious to anybody else. Like you would think it was petty that when Jemima changed the air freshener in the diary of a CEO studio and posted it on our Slack channel, she got like 25 fire emojis.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Most people would think that was petty, but then Daniel Ek walks in and goes, man, it smells so good in here. I go, mm, 1%.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  We're 1% closer and it's for, you know, all I need to find 100% of those to start compounding at at least a rate of 100%. So that is most of the game. But again, you've seen compounding return graphs, right? Because you're an investor and you know, you understand finance. It's slow than it's fast. And because it's slow than it's fast, you look at any compounding return graph, it's like this and then whoop, like a hockey stick. So what kind of maniac, unless they've developed a religious belief about 1% gains, is going to go through three years of flat? Well, yeah, that's going to be number one soon.

• 53:44Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Is this where your quitting framework comes in when you're not seeing improvements from 1% growth?

• 53:51Speaker 02

  So I'll give you the full quitting framework. And this is really for anybody that's thinking about quitting a thing, whether you're thinking about quitting a job or a relationship, whatever it might be. Typically, you're thinking about quitting for one of two reasons. It is either hard, and again, I keep these very broad, or because it sucks. And I define them differently. Hard is the challenge is difficult. Sucks is it's more of a mental feeling and emotional element. So you're running a marathon, you're on the 22nd mile, you're raising money for a charity that means a lot to you. That's hard. You're thinking about quitting. The question becomes, is the effort that I'm putting in worth the rewards on offer? Mile 23, I'm raising $10,000 for a charity I love. Is the effort worth the return? If something's hard in life and it's not, the rewards aren't worth it, quit. If it is, then stay. Going

• 54:35Speaker 02

  down the other side of the framework, you're thinking about quitting something because it sucks. The next question should be, is there something I can do to make it not suck? If there isn't, so if it sucks, and there's nothing you can do to change that, you should quit. If you, there is something you could do, marriage counselling, speaking to the CEO, speaking to the board of directors to make it not suck. The next question should be, is the effort it would take to make it not suck, which is going to marriage counselling, worth the thing on the other side of that effort? So you're having a difficulty in your marriage, you could change it, you could go to therapy, but is Dave worth it? Like, is the relationship with Dave on the other side actually worth the effort we would take? And in my former business, Social Change, that's exactly where I got to. I felt like there was something I could do to make it not suck. But the effort it would have taken,

• 55:18Speaker 02

  another 18 months of arguing with these, you know, very serious German people on my board about the future of our company, was no longer worth the return, the financial return and the emotional return on the other side of it. I thought I could change it. I didn't think the effort would be worth it to fight to change it. So I quit. However, if you do think it's worth it, you should stay and fight because all things in life, whether it's relationships or even good things, require continual effort for course correction. And that's how I think about quitting. I think generally, one of the real toxic narratives in society is that quitting is for losers. And it appears to be the case in my life, but also in the lives of the people that I've interviewed, that they are remarkably good at quitting, like really remarkably

• 56:03Speaker 02

  good at quitting when all external evidence tells them that they're a maniac for doing so.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Like, almost every story of someone that I sit with on my podcast involves this one moment where objectively, they were an idiot. And I say idiot because all of the evidence, the logical financial incentives orientated towards them staying at university, staying in that high-flying job, not leaving for 10 years Darren Brown to go and do magic tricks on a table in the middle of nowhere. But again, this goes back to the point about why embarrassment is the price of entry.

• 56:36Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I can relate a lot to that because I think it's a common theme in my life, like both in relationships, calling off an engagement, moving into Calabas with my stuff in storage, having no idea what I was gonna do, like to work relationships where I was making like a hundred and twenty thousand dollars right out of school at Salesforce, best performing BDR in the entire world and was like, I am so unhappy making a hundred cold calls a day. I've learned what I can here. I now need to go to a startup environment and fail a little bit. I went from making a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year to sixty thousand dollars a year and people thought I was crazy. They were like, you have the dream job. You work nine to five, you make a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, you're loved, you're recognized, you get all of these different things from Salesforce.

• 57:21Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Like, why would you go and do that? If I think back to the other piece of quitting, it's also being really brave and it's taking really big risks and it's being able to say no to something that's not good enough because there's something better for you. And I think so many people listening to this, especially at this time of year, will be like... It's good, but it's not great. But shouldn't I just stay in the good? And it takes a very brave, confident person to be like, I'm actually gonna go from good to find great. I have now 12 years working in either corporate or startup environments.

• 58:03Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I've invested in 20 different companies. I've had 40 people sitting in this chair. And I can really confidently say, women specifically are really afraid of taking the same big bets that like, men don't even think twice about.

• 58:20Maggie Sellers Reum?

  What is your advice to someone that's listening to this that has that, they have a good life, but it's not great. And they either need to quit or find confidence to go and pay the price of embarrassment, to go live their dream life. Like, what do you say to them?

• 58:37Speaker 02

  It's so interesting because I interpret it like completely differently. And this goes back to the rationality point, which is, when I dropped out of university to start my business, that was not brave. Brave was staying. Because I'm so clear on my North Star that anything that jeopardizes it, including spending three years being miserable, is the risk. That is the risk. That requires great bravery. I think I'm a coward because I won't risk the most important thing, which is my happiness. And so, really, I think the answer to the question, if I break this down to first principles, is are you really, really clear on what your North Star is? Like, as if you're really, really, really clear on what your North Star is in your life, what matters to you the most. And I would hazard a guess that it's happiness.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Then anything that jeopardizes that is the risk. That is a huge risk you're taking. So staying at Salesforce with that kind of clarity is the biggest risk one could take in that scenario, because it wasn't making you completely happy. And it wasn't going to make you completely happy off into the future. It wasn't going to completely fulfill you into the future. And, you know, going back to the thing I said about you get one life. And for me, the greatest risk any of us could take, which requires bravery that I just don't have, is to...

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Is to live an unhappy one, an unfulfilled one. Like, that's craziness to me, but that's just the way that I I think about it. And I'd rather struggle, I'd rather go back to shoplifting Chicago town pizzas than to go back to university. You can see with the the way that I think about situations, why it's kind of like hard for me sometimes to understand why anyone would sit in misery for seven years if they have a choice. I have to say a choice because everyone's life is very nuanced and they have kids and mortgages and all kinds of things. But if you have a choice to make a step in a different direction, the greatest risk is not doing that.

• 1:00:21Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Why do you think you're like that?

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  I think you need frameworks for making decisions in your life, or else you won't make the decision, someone else will. And emotion is such an unbelievably powerful force. You know, that if it makes the decisions through your life, it it won't

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  walk you to fulfillment, it'll walk you somewhere else. It'll, because it will, you'll be dragged by fear. And a life dragged by fear is not, is not a life that ends up with the things I think any of us want. And I think a lot of people are dragged by fear. Their whole life is just pulled through by the powerful limbic system that is like eighty percent in charge of the of the factory. So if I can just stay in with, you know, my logical decision making frameworks as much as I possibly can and think from first principles, I think I get better outcomes. And I think this idea of thinking from first principles is a really important one that I should probably try and explain, which is whenever you're faced with a decision, instead of accepting conventions answers to this decision or something that's been done before or someone else's opinion, what you do is you ask yourself what you know to be true for sure

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  right now for you in this situation. So even with podcasting, right? Let's use that as an example. When I started as a podcaster, everybody told me that in podcasting, you put it on audio on Apple and Spotify. And that's how podcasting works. Now, from first principles, I go, where are my audience? That's a first principle question. And the answer to that question is they are on YouTube, they're on all social media platforms. Another first principle question would be, how am I going to tell new people that this show exists?

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Well, they're on social media. Okay, so we need to do clips. That's a first principle solution. They are on LinkedIn, on email, so we're going to need to show up there as well. And when you think from first principles, you end up building better solutions and solutions that are more designed for the present moment. When you reason from analogy, which is how it's been done, you make sameness. And I think about the same in our lives. Like, we're told that in a relationship and in marriage, it needs to look this way with the white dress and you walk down the aisle and you do it like this and then you say these vows and then you... These are, these are solutions made 100 years ago for, for, for someone else's life in a different time, when they didn't have technology in a different world. Have we pushed on the paper wall to check that these solutions are still the right ones for me? And that's really what first principle thinking does.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  It just pushes on some of these preferences and traditions to see if they still hold. And the same is in my life. Like, people say, go to university, get a job, get a mortgage, have kids, the end, I guess, death, the end, retire, the end. Can I check? Can I check? And the way you do that is by asking those questions. What do you know to be true right now about this particular problem set? We want to just use the blueprint that others have handed to us. So first principle thinkers or paper wall pushers, much harder to do, but they get all of the upside.

• 1:03:13Maggie Sellers Reum?

  As someone who was once told by friends, you're either going to be a millionaire or you're going to go to jail.

• 1:03:20Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I'm just trying to find, like, how is this 17, 18, 19 year old thinking in first principles? Like, when did that switch happen for you?

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  It's gradual.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  All the principles that I care about, the 1% thing I talked about, pushing on paper walls, faith, all of these things, it's like they start as polystyrene and then you stress test them with real world scenarios. And over time, they go from polystyrene to being made of like titanium. And then they become my religion because I've stress tested them so many times in so many different contexts to know that this principle really, really matters. And I think principled thinking is critical because it's kind of like, you can go through life guessing at stuff, or even when I speak to your audience now, I could give them like tips and tricks and tactics, but that is all a fish. What they need is a fishing rod. A fishing rod is going to help them navigate over the long term. And this is why I think of principles. I try and find principles. I try and write them down, understand them, find stories from history that have cemented them, and then I try and live them and instill them in my team. Because if we're principled as a team, I don't need to be there.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Like, everyone knows 1% is matter in my team. And they're 5,000 miles away in London right now, for example. They'll be thinking about 1% and paper walls. So it becomes our religion. And then that's culture.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

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• 1:05:56Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You just said something where you said, "I pull from lessons of history." And I fundamentally believe that there are three types of creators. There's creators that build from their personal experiences. There's creators that build from their expertise. And then there's a mix of both. You are top creator globally in Forbes, top creator of 2025, Time Magazine's first-ever Time 100 Creators List. That is this year. If you had to pick how you've built to be one of the top creators globally, do you build out of any of those categories?

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  I guess the third one resonates with me the most is, I just am all parts of me online. So, and it's reflected in the conversations we have in the diary of a CEO. Like, if you looked at my YouTube algorithm, you would see me...

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Watching such a wide variety of things from AI to trying to understand business to psychology to childhood from like it's a reflection of who I am. I'm just very, very broad. I am, I am a bit strange because as a creator, I, I mean, I guess my background is in business because that's where the, the first couple of people knew me from. And now people know me as a, a lot of people know me as a podcast, which I find super weird. It's like so weird to me.

• 1:07:04Maggie Sellers Reum?

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• 1:08:28Maggie Sellers Reum?

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• 1:09:09Maggie Sellers Reum?

  So visit cozyearth.com and use my code HSR for 20% off. Can I show you the thing I'm the most fascinated with?

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 1:09:17Maggie Sellers Reum?

  So people, I think, define their personal brand with three pinned images that are on their Instagram. Yours are steven.comvaluation. You did a partnership with Prince William for Homestead UK to end homelessness in the UK. And then there is Jimmy Fallon. Why are those pinned?

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  I think the first one, the steven.com announcement is pinned because it's the 90% of my life. And steven.com is my entire focus at the moment. The Prince William thing is probably just because I find it so crazy that Prince William asked me to help him with this stuff.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  And that we're working together on Homewards. So I think it's just so crazy. And my parents are such big fans of the royal family. Like the only time I've seen my dad cry in my life was when Diana died. So my mom's Nigerian as well, so she's just a huge fan of the royals as well. And then Jimmy Fallon, again, it just couldn't be, it's very strange for a kid like me that was born in Botswana, moved to the UK and lived in Plymouth, which is like the countryside, to be sat there. Very strange, especially considering I'm not like an A-list celebrity and I'm not like an actor or anything. So it's very, it's very surreal for me to be in that frame, like the iconic Jimmy Fallon show. So it was, um, yeah, it's crazy. Crazy.

• 1:10:26Maggie Sellers Reum?

  It's so interesting because I think the more that I get to know you, the more that I'm fascinated with you, like all of the hobbies that you have. And I think you do have a really amazing way of turning things you're passionate about into entrepreneurial pursuits, right? But there's one element of your life that I feel like I would love to talk about, which is your relationship with Mal.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  No comment, I'm joking.

• 1:10:48Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Can I show you something?

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:10:50Maggie Sellers Reum?

  So she sent this.

• 1:10:53Speaker 06

  Oh love baby. I was asked to send you a surprise message, which feels so ironic, because you are usually the one who surprises everyone else. I know you don't often pause to reflect on the journey, so.

• 1:11:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm just reflecting and remembering, I never ever met someone like you that is so optimistic, so composed, looking forward, moving, creating, imagining what's next with so much passion and depth. I see the man behind the questions, the interviews, the conversations, and I don't often tell you that, but you really are a superman.

• 1:11:43Speaker 06

  Really, a superhuman. Even on those days where you feel so down, you show up and your people advise. It's insane, the depth in your mission, the impact that you have on millions of people listening to the conversation that you have every week, but also the impact that you have on your family, your best friends, is truly precious.

• 1:12:09Speaker 06

  And we are so proud of you. I love you. Mm. Bisous.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  When were you speaking to my girlfriend?

• 1:12:18Speaker 06

  How does it make you feel?

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, she um, she, she knows me better than anybody and.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, she knows me better than, than anybody, because she just gets to see it all. So I actually learn more about myself from hearing things like that. And generally, when she says things, I like listen very intently, because, you know, probably like your partner, they, they really understand the full picture, more so than anybody on planet Earth understands the full picture. So, yeah, she's um, she's very special and she's, she's very, very special. And in many respects, she's like everything that I'm not. She's just like an angel that fell from the sky. That's kind of how I describe it to my friends. We've been together for almost seven years now and she's very much just like, she's what I'm aspiring to be.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  Every sense of the word. She's what I'm aspiring to be more like.

• 1:13:10Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You know, it's one of the most interesting conversations I thought you had was with Tim Ferriss. And at the end of the interview, there was probably like five, 10 minutes left. You talk a lot about why a lot of male podcasters have remained single. And I want to play the other side out because I think you've now been in a committed, loving relationship with Mel for seven years.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Why?

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  I mean, there's several ways I can answer this question because it's true. I, I am pretty shocked that a lot of the major podcasters, I'd say really outside of Rogan, don't have kids. They don't have a partner. They kind of seem to be in not very stable, long-term relationships. And I think the reason why I've chosen to take a different path is because I know rationally, logically.

• 1:14:03Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Oh my God. Bring me emotions, Steven.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  I know that as it relates to happiness, fulfillment, everything that matters in life, it is the better path to take. Now, of course it comes with its costs, but I, I have sat down with some of the most, you know, important psychologists on, on the, in the world and people that have one particular guy who's ran the longest ever study on human happiness. Study shows that over a hundred years, you know, the people that start the study have actually died. It's been going for so long that the thing that delivers the highest amount of happiness over the long term for men and women is the quality of the relationships. And as part of that, your romantic relationships, not only does it extend one's life, but it makes everything much more worthwhile. And so logically.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  I know that it's the right thing, but you know, the other answer is just like, she's so great. She is. She's like, I don't believe, and this again is me being sounding super logical and rational. I do not believe I could ever find anybody better on planet Earth, ever. Now, that might also sound romantic, but it's also very rational. Like, I don't believe I could ever find someone better. And I want to be a father. I want to have lots of kids. We're trying, hopefully soon. And I think it's the path to a better life. And it's a lost, it's a lost thing in our society. People are having less kids and they're seeing relationships as being things you can throw away and they're trying to avoid all commitment. There's a narrative of people trying to avoid dependency. Don't depend on anyone. Stand on your own feet. Be your own

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  boss. And I think this is a mistake. Because when I think about human beings and why they are that way that they are, we got here from dependency. We got here from relying on our tribes, from relying on other people. In fact, the defining trait of being a human, the reason why we can take on the grizzly bear is because of cooperation. But society, because it sells very well, is convincing us that independence is happiness. And I look across my friendship group and I go, actually, my friends with the greatest amount of independence that are freelance, that are working in a skyscraper in Dubai, that are financially free, that have no kids, no partner, no puppy. They are the ones that are calling me the most and are struggling the most. And then

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  there's someone like my brother, who's a year older than me, Jason, who has three kids under the age of six, lives in the countryside in Lithuania with his family, with a job and with commitments and with people depending on him. One of the most stable, happy, fulfilled people I know. I think this idea of like maximizing freedom and maximizing independence in many respects is a lie and that we need to, we need to re-anchor ourselves to something bigger. And that can be, you know, you and then your family and friends and then your community and then your nation and then for some people it's even like their sports club or whatever. And then it's their religion. And then maybe it's something more bigger like the universe, but we need to be anchored.

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  And Mel helps me anchor and then I'll have kids and a family and responsibilities and dependencies. And I think that's what it takes to both be a good man, but also a good human being. I'm very excited about depending on other people and having other people depend upon me.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  And I'm really like, I really am about to start a mission to try and take this on. I really think it's a bad thing. Loneliness is through the roof. Gen Z are unhappy than ever before. They have less friends than ever before, less connections, less dependencies, less responsibilities. I don't think this is something to celebrate. I would like us to depend upon stuff.

• 1:17:34Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I don't know why, maybe this is why the universe brought us together to do this, but there was an article that came out. Did you read the article that was like, it's embarrassing to have a boyfriend now by Vogue? And I had a really adverse reaction to it because it was all of these women basically saying like, it's embarrassing to have a boyfriend that treats you badly, which it is for sure, but it got taken to a totally different context, which is around like, you don't need a man, you don't need anyone, independence. And like, as much as I totally agree with like the underlying mission of that article, I actually believe fundamentally, to your exact point, like we are better people when we have relationships and we have community.

• 1:18:17Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And there is such a large conversation right now for ambitious women that's like, men aren't keeping up. There aren't people that are going to be able to make your life bigger and better and have it be an abundance driven dynamic between the two of you. It's all about win or lose. And I always look at every single relationship as win-win. How can you find a win-win situation? And so it's a mission that like, I do take on myself as well because I think with my partner and I, we're a really great example of like, I have my own world. I have my own life. I have my own thing. I have my own financial independence. Like, he makes me the best version of myself, but like, I have a life outside of him and he loves that and vice versa. What do you think it takes to have a dynamic like that or like you and Mel?

• 1:19:01Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Cause you seem to have a really good one based on that voice note and just seeing you guys interact like that's been probably one of the best parts of getting to see you of like what you're really like is seeing the woman behind you.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  I think if you build anything, it's it's rough and hard. And everyone in a relationship or anyone that's got a family will understand this. But again, we're optimizing for a culture where you avoid hard things and discomfort and conflict. And I think even with AI coming into the picture, it's going to become even easier to have a relationship with something that requires no friction. And there's nothing in my life that's worth it with no friction. Like even going to the gym, everything in my life that I've that I've done that's meaningful and worthwhile comes with friction. So the first thing is realizing that me and Mel, when we have conflict, that this is not a sign of our inadequacies or our lack of love for each other. It is an opportunity for us to understand each other more and for us to grow. And it's me and her against the conflict, not me versus her. And this has really, really helped us.

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  This continual reminder that we're on a team against the problem and that generally knowing that conflict is to be expected. It's normal. And even though Instagram says otherwise, arguing about small things is like healthy. I saw something the other day on Instagram. It's like a couple talking about how they'd never had an argument in three years. I was just like, fuck, they're so fucked. Like you are so fucked. If you haven't had an argument in three years, you are you are seriously screwed. Because you're you're probably suppressing and avoiding. And the the key to conflict resolution is this question, which is, does each conflict make you stronger? Does it heal to one hundred and one percent or ninety nine percent? If you're having conflict that heals to ninety nine percent, it's a matter of time before this thing ends.

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  If you're having conflict that heals to one hundred and one percent, which as Mel often says to me, the roots are getting deeper, then you'll be fine over the long term.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  And I said this the other day and people found this to be not a good thing to say, but I don't care. I think I have an opportunity and a responsibility to model what it is to be a good father and a married man and committed and.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  I think with the platform I have, I do take on that responsibility. Someone rebutted me the other day and said, you shouldn't live your life for other people in that way, but I very much live my life for other people with what I do anyway. Like, I try and have conversations that I think will benefit them. And so can I also be an example that I think will benefit young men? Where you can see someone who is, has a family, you know, is in a long-term committed relationship

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  and is honest about the trade-offs and the difficulties and such. So I, I'm excited about that season of life, which I'm trying to get into now.

• 1:21:44Maggie Sellers Reum?

  What's the birth order of you and your three siblings? Are you the youngest?

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  I'm the youngest of four.

• 1:21:48Maggie Sellers Reum?

  So growing up, did you always feel like you were the problem solver and like taking on responsibility? Or that's something that you learned?

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  I was the failure in our family. I think I was written off as, he ain't gonna make it. Of course, my brothers were geniuses. They're like, you know, rewriting the textbooks to make them harder because they didn't think they were hard enough and getting a hundred percent in the textbooks that they'd rewritten to make harder. They were super geniuses. My sister's super smart as well. And then there was me who like was falling asleep in lessons. Turns out I had ADHD, wasn't paying attention, wasn't attending school, was intercepting my report cards so that my parents didn't see them. When I got my grades back from my GCSEs, I just put them in a scanner and changed them and gave them to my dad. Like, I just, school wasn't for me. I got expelled, then I got unexpelled because the school said I made them a lot of money because I was doing lots of little businesses on the side for the school. School wasn't for me. So I was, I think, written off, but I think the parents didn't care.

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  I think they thought, we've had three good ones, so we can, we can, we can have a runt.

• 1:22:45Maggie Sellers Reum?

  So where does that come from then?

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  I think it's ultimately the most important thing that ever happened to me because being the youngest meant that I got more of that independence and freedom that we talked about earlier, which means room to fail. We were also the black family in an all-white area, which meant I had a ton of shame. So you've got lots of room to experiment because your parents are now so busy that they're not coming home. And then you've got huge shame, which is this driving force. And you want to solve the shame problem. Space and shame means you start doing things which build evidence. And evidence is self-belief. And self-belief at 14 years old, because you managed to sell out a nightclub for an under 18s event at 15 years old and 900 people came and you came home with a bag of money, is like a really amazing thing to learn at a young age, which is I can have an idea.

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  And then in nine days, I can walk through the door with a huge bag of money. Oh, the world is bendable. Like, I can just bend the world. Oh, interesting. Goes back to the whole thing about paper walls, like at fourteen years old, realising that there wasn't a gap between idea and execution, like the realisation of that thing. It's just an unbelievable thing to learn at such a young age. And I had to learn it because I wanted the same stuff my friends, my rich white friends had. And the only way I was going to get it is if I did something. This is probably why my friend said to me, you'll either be in prison or a milli now, because I was gonna do something.

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  I was gonna do something.

• 1:24:09Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Honestly, I can't believe that I made it either because, like you, ADHD, school was really hard for me and I had to try really, really, really hard. But I'm so glad that things were hard. And to your point, like having friction and not having everything come so easily to me, made me the person that I am today, where it's like paper wall pusher and one percent better.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  I think this is such an important question, which is like, how mouldable and malleable do you believe the world is? And I think everybody listening now will have a different perception of how much they believe they can grab hold of the world and like putty, like bend it into the shape that they want for themselves. I think Steve Jobs said this in his commencement speech about his most important realisation in his life was realising that you can bend the world in the direction you want to. I think that is the thing. How much do you think you can influence the world, your world? Bend it in whatever direction you want. At a very young age, I learned that it was extremely bendable and actually that was my only chance. Was bending it myself.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  Because when you have two brothers that are geniuses, you compare and you go, I mean, we understand the value of anything by the context in which we see it. So you've got two geniuses there at home and then you've got this kid, me. So you go, oh, okay, so I'm gonna be broke and poor. Ah, okay. So if I try and compete with them on academia, university, school, I'm gonna be broke and poor. So I need a different way.

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  And they used to stand there when I was younger and they used to have a debate, a bet. I think the bet's still going. Who would be a millionaire first? They would never have involved me in this bet. It was just Jason and Kevin arguing continually through my childhood, who would become a millionaire first? And I'm thinking, I need to find a different path. I'm going to go through the bushes. You know, like there's the path. I'm going to go through the bushes. I'm going to go through the jungle. And at a young age, because I did those events and stuff and did a couple of deals with like vending machines. I realized that all of these people my, that were my age were going to be adults with me. And that was, I just remember that 14 years old, remembering, oh my God, so these people are going to be the adults that I'm, you know, contending with. And if I can get them to come to my party or use my vending machines now at 15, when I'm 35, I'll just do more of that stuff.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  I'll just make things and then sell it to them. And I'll be fine. And that was the real moment where I like school was like over for me. I really gave up on school at that point. There's a video on YouTube.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

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• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  Maybe for people watching, you can play the video.

• 1:27:54Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  And they take an ant and they take a biro and they draw a circle around the ant and the ant immediately thinks it's trapped. Like you're looking down on that piece of paper from a bird's eye view and thinking this ant could just run across this biro mark. But the ant is convinced that it's trapped. It has accepted that as its limitation. They make the circle smaller with the biro. The ant thinks it's trapped again and it won't leave that smaller circle. And then they do the same thing with a spider. They put the spider on a piece of paper. They draw a circle around it. And as the spider is running to escape the the biro, they're drawing, they're drawing more and more circles and it's kind of weaving them, weaving them, dodging them, not stepping on them. And then you see this one moment in this video where the spider steps over the biro.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  And you see this like moment of realization where the spider realizes that that that barrier that it had previously accepted as being a wall. It realizes that it's BS and it can never be trapped by the biro again. It just walks over it. And I think about that in all of our lives. There is a circle you've drawn around yourself right now. Even if it's a big one, and there's a circle I've drawn around myself, where we've told ourselves how far someone like us that comes from where we come from. And with all the best available information and role models we have, how far we can go. And we have accepted it, even me, even you, even Elon Musk, even everyone listening right now. And that the key, just like with the ant, is to realize that that is a figment of your imagination and that it exists.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  And your job, I think, is to continually put one foot over that line and then it expands again. And at a very young age, 14, 15, that's exactly what happened. I realized that the world was bendable and that these barriers weren't weren't real things. They were just preference and tradition and that I could. I could write new ones because I'm not smart, not good at math, not good at, was never good at science, not good at English. None of these things. Still can't spell, still think I'm dyslexic because I can't spell simple words. Like I can't spell the word entrepreneur. Must have written it like 10,000 times. So I can't spell it. So what is the thing? The thing for me was just. A genuine belief that things were possible. If you told me to go to the moon next week, I genuinely believe that there's a way.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  There's a way. I'm one email away from the person that's sending the rocket, a persuasive fucking email to go into the moon. That I think is the thing. And I don't know how you give that to people. They're gonna have to fail their way there. They're gonna have to stack up an undeniable amount of evidence.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  One small.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Experiment at a time.

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  It's super tough. You know what's interesting? The further I've gone in this world, the more I've realised how hard it is to give people advice.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  Because when I was younger, I would say cliche platitudes all the time, like just keep going, never quit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the more I've gotten older, and the more I've been able to interview people and understand their world and what torments them and those negative thoughts, and I hate myself and everybody hates me. The more I've realised that giving someone else advice from your own wiring and psychology and neuroscience is like, is so reckless and it's so naive. So much of when I try and give people advice these days, it's all about like, what can you do to learn the lessons you need so that you can change your life?

• 1:31:04Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You said something like, the more interviews I do, the less sure of what I know.

• 1:31:11Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And it's interesting because I feel similarly around investing. When I made my first investment, I was like, I'm going to be a millionaire off this investment. Like this is working. And now 20 investments later, it's like, I am so doubtful of everything. I see all of the problems that they are going to run into. But like, when I was early on and naive, I was like, this one's making me a millionaire. This one's a billion dollar company. And it was really interesting when they put that in the research doc around the interviews of like, do you feel that way? You feel less sure about what you know now, 500 interviews in than you did when you first started?

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And your example, you've never been wrong as an investor when you start.

• 1:31:53Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Right.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  So I think the more you've been wrong, when you thought you were right, the more you accept that you might be wrong right now.

• 1:32:02Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  That's the same with interviewing. It's, I thought I knew X thing, and then 47 people in a row. And emerging science and research showed me that X thing was not the truth. And, you know, so then you live in a permanent state of having strong beliefs, but holding them loosely because you're well aware that you've been wrong 500 times in the past and that everything is is open to change. And that's, I mean, that's the definition of science. It's it's a bunch of hypotheses that they continue to test. And the more you know, the more you realize you didn't know as well. So the more I discover things about the gut microbiome or psychology or neuroscience, I go, wow, for the last 30 years, I've just been freestyling, but there's 47 trillion bugs in my belly. And they're like, running

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  the show and running my serotonin and controlling my mental health. And there's this like gut-brain axis, you know, you go, wow, this is magic. So it's like doors just keep flinging open and you're going into rooms of just, you know, more to learn, which is a beautiful thing and a wonderful thing in how I think we should all live our lives. We should live our lives in the pursuit of that kind of growth and ignorance.

• 1:33:08Maggie Sellers Reum?

  We should live our lives as happy, sexy millionaires and hot, smart, rich girls.

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  Exactly that.

• 1:33:13Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay, Stephen Burley, we have to finish with some rapid fire.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:33:16Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay. What is the last thing that you put on your credit card?

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  So the last thing that I put on my credit card.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  I shouldn't say this. When's this coming out?

• 1:33:26Maggie Sellers Reum?

  January 7.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  Okay, my engagement ring.

• 1:33:34Speaker 02

  Hopefully I'll propose, but it's I'm going to propose in around Christmas time, so.

• 1:33:38Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Oh, my God. Are you serious?

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You just got the same reaction to seeing the video that we made. We're so happy for you.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Oh, my gosh. Wait, I could do a whole other episode on this. We have time to ask a question. Someone tell me.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  You can ask me whatever you want.

• 1:33:54Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay. Wait, I'm so happy to hear this because I've heard you talk a lot in podcasts where you were like, I wasn't 100% sure that I wanted to get married, but I know it's really important for Mel.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:06Maggie Sellers Reum?

  When did you decide?

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  So it goes back to it goes back to a whole thing about first principles. I wasn't entirely convinced that marriage is the best structure for. Uniting two people because there's so many flaws to it. And the whole process of, you know, you have to go to court and ask the court if you can get out of the thing. If it doesn't work out and how that. And then you look at the stats and go 50% of people fail. And would I buy a TV if I knew it was going to blow up? You know, 50% of the time. So it felt like a broken thing to me from first principles. And I wondered if there was a better way. Also, again, this is me being super honest. I'm like massively avoidant of commitment and I have been since I was a kid. Cause my mom and my dad didn't look like they were in a good relationship. I thought my dad was trapped. I've always been avoidant of commitment.

• 1:34:49Speaker 02

  So that's part of the reason in those early episodes as well, the diary of a seer where I'm like, I'm never going to get married. And then you grow up and then you meet the right person and you, and you understand.

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  You understand things more and it's important for Mel, but also I want to get married too, you know? And.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  So what am I waiting for? If, if what I said is true, that I don't think I'll find a better person. And if it will give her stability in our relationship, et cetera. And we want to have kids and the kids be stable, et cetera. Then I concluded that I have 51% certainty that it makes sense.

• 1:35:29Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Dude, I have so many things that I could talk to you about, but.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  I paid for the ring yesterday, I think we're, yeah. So this is quite front of mind. It's quite difficult to find a ring, you know?

• 1:35:37Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Where did you get it?

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

  Well, about four years ago.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  She was talking about engagement rings with a friend and I was looking over her shoulder and looking at the ones she liked. And I was on Pinterest, I was like looking at her Pinterest and just like saving the ones she said she really liked. So I've had this folder in my phone for like three or four years of the ones she said she liked. And we were in New York yesterday and there's a jeweler in New York that my, some of my friends that I really trust told me to go see. And they've made a, they've made the ring for us.

• 1:36:07Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Can you describe the ring?

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  Let me see yours.

• 1:36:14Speaker 02

  It's it's quite similar to yours. So it's it's like a big diamond. And then, I mean, this is how the fuck am I going to describe it? What? They're all the same, aren't they?

• 1:36:22Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Emerald cut, round cut, oval, no clue. Does it look like this?

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  It's oval.

• 1:36:28Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay, love oval. Gold band or silver band or platinum? Like, does it? Does it look?

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  It's got it's a thin band with, shall I show you?

• 1:36:38Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yes, please. Okay.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  With little diamonds around the band as well, because she wants to wear another ring with it.

• 1:36:43Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Yep.

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  She wants to stack it. I heard this four years ago. She wants to stack it. So she can stack it with a gold or silver ring, whatever she wants, if it's diamond.

• 1:36:52Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Are you gonna do a big proposal or?

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:36:55Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  No, I'm not gonna post about it. I'm not gonna Instagram it.

• 1:36:58Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I was gonna say, are you gonna pin it to your profile?

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  None of the world's business.

• 1:37:01Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay.

• 1:37:02Speaker 02

  I'm really not about that. Like, it's not my it's not my thing to bring my personal stuff to the world generally. Like, I talk about Mel sometimes on the podcast because I'm talking about our personal stories, but I'm not like out here posting our relationship.

• 1:37:15Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  I think some things can be.

• 1:37:18Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I am so excited for you. Wait, I have to ask you something. You said avoidant. I used to be very avoidant before my current relationship. I'm now secure. And I actually would say I lean a little bit more anxious than I ever thought I would because I was extremely avoidant in relationships.

• 1:37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Has your attachment style changed with Mel?

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it goes to what I said about evidence. Your avoidance is just going back to the bookshelf analogy. It's just a bunch of books you have on there that have given you evidence that the right approach and model for love is to be avoidant. Now, what sometimes happens with avoidance is someone gets over the castle wall. They try and make the castle wall as high as they possibly can. No one's coming in. Someone gets over the fucking wall and they change you from the inside, one book at a time. They give you new evidence that actually this relationship isn't something to be fearful of, and you're not gonna lose your freedom, and they're not gonna hurt you. And that's what happens. And Mel is Mel is, I'd say, secure. And she got over the wall. And everything I thought about being in a committed relationship with a woman, she, I think I low-key stress-tested it, and it turned out to not be true.

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  So I have new evidence now. She doesn't impinge on my freedom. She lets me be who I want to be. She supports me. I don't feel like I'm in jail.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  And so I guess I'm more of a, I'm definitely more secure now than I was avoiding, for sure, for sure.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  But it's been a long road, like it's not, things don't change overnight. And you can still be triggered easily by your old style. You know, if something really, it's, I learnt this generally about trauma and our attachment styles is you never really heal to zero. It's always there. But um, it stops making the decisions. But it's still there. Somewhere. You know, on a bad day, an unslept day, I'm sure we could bring that out of you.

• 1:39:02Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I am so excited for you. This is exactly what I wanted to hear. Oh my God, okay.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  What are you excited about?

• 1:39:11Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I think it's exactly what you said, like, I think if you're okay to have that responsibility, I think there is a huge responsibility for men that are successful, driven, opinionated, loving, abundant, generous, kind, smart. To show the world that like, this is another way. And I think that it's been hard.

• 1:39:42Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Especially before I met my husband, like, see where the relationship dynamics were going and to see the type of culture that we have celebrated, which is like, there's always so many options.

• 1:39:53Maggie Sellers Reum?

  People are disposable.

• 1:39:56Maggie Sellers Reum?

  The things that we value a lot about femininity and about women sometimes like aren't actually valued by men like you. And I think you with this decision are actually proving to a lot of people that like, those types of relationships and those dynamics exist and don't settle. And don't, that, that is what is embarrassing. It is embarrassing to settle, but it is not embarrassing to have a boyfriend. And it is not embarrassing to put yourself out there and it is not embarrassing to try. And I think you signaling this step is part of the responsibility that you were talking about. It makes me really excited.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  It's so crazy that it's rare.

• 1:40:35Maggie Sellers Reum?

  It is, though.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  It is, it is rent. I think that's a really crazy thing. And even the idea of settling, like if you think about our great grandparents, great, great grandparents, they grew up in a village. They didn't have mobile phones. A lot of them probably never got on a plane before and flew anywhere. And so they fell in love at high rates or similar rates of satisfaction with someone in the street. And they lived a great life. And when, again, when you go to their satisfaction or happiness, they didn't find Ken in Miami and that didn't make them any happier. So there's clearly something that comes with this whole idea of, um, of feeling like you have too many choices that actually means that you don't appreciate any of the choices. And I mean, they've done the studies in supermarkets where they put out like 20 jams. And then they have someone walk in and ask them to pick a jam.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  They either don't pick one because there's too many options. And whichever one they pick, because there was 19 others they didn't pick, they're less satisfied with their option. Whereas when they put five jams or three jams, people are much more satisfied with their option. And realizing that this is part of human psychology means to me that like, bro, when you, when you're with someone and they're, they're, they're great, and yes, there's problems. Unless, yes, you could be with someone else. That's probably not going to scream at you for the first six months at least. Work on it like you work on your business, invest in it. And, um, yeah, and have kids and don't be so nihilistic and don't make it all about yourself. And don't just focus on the bag and, you know, have responsibilities and have babies that are going to scream at me and, and wake me up in the middle of the night,

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  even though I'd rather be building my whoop score, you know, like, sounds like a good idea to me. It's so funny because there's, it's like, one part of my brain is like, the evidence I have now tells me this is a terrible idea. Because it's going to come at a cost of things that I right now enjoy. And then I have to have this religious belief that there's this life I've never experienced with these upsides. I've personally never experienced. I know what I'm giving up, but I don't know what I'm getting. When I'm talking about like being a father, having lots of five kids and getting into marriage, I know what I'm giving up because I've got it, but I don't know what I'm getting.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  So I have to

• 1:42:48Speaker 02

  I have to I have to really go to what it is to be a human and I have to say my ancestors, my wiring is designed to get tremendous meaning and joy from taking on this responsibility and from stepping into this commitment. And

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  so I'm gonna do it.

• 1:43:06Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Is this the first non-logical decision you've ever made in your life?

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  It seems to be non-logical, but it's actually perfectly logical. It just requires it just requires, it just requires a little bit more thinking. That's why I went right back to my ancestors and was like, how am I designed? And, you know, I've sat with childhood psychologists and all kinds of psychologists that talk about what happens when you have kids and the emotional changes and the meaning and fulfillment. And I've interviewed the guys from Harvard that have done the longest study on human happiness. So I've got the evidence to know that this is the right path for me, but I haven't experienced the upside yet. I mean, of course, you can only experience what it is to be a parent when you are one. You can only experience what it is to be married when you have done it. So I have to believe in the evidence that I have, but I understand why people don't do it because especially when their life is good. Why would you, why would you sacrifice that? What for?

• 1:43:53Speaker 02

  Something you've never seen and experienced doesn't seem to be, doesn't appear to make a lot of sense. You know? This is why people aren't doing it. The richer they get, the more abundant their life becomes, the less they want to have dependencies or commitments. And so they don't. And I, I can't blame, like each to their own, honestly. And it's not to say that I'm going to be happier than someone that doesn't have kids or isn't married. It's not to say that at all, but for me, I believe that I'll be happier being married and having lots of kids.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  And I think

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  I think especially the commitment to a woman in a, in a marriage is some, is a positive thing to model. And I think it's also positive to model being a dad that, you know, has people counting on him.

• 1:44:40Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I am, I think I'm so taken aback because like as I've gotten to know you as the person behind Stephen Bartlett, like host and entrepreneur, it's like, it is something I just went through and it does change you in a way where I think people are like, how's married life? And you can say that surface level answer of like, it's great, but like, it did change me for the better. And I think, you know, my, my husband and I talk a lot about purpose. And I think I have a life's purpose in HSR. Like I get the messages from women and I know what this conversation alone will do for them. Like, for me, having my own purpose outside

• 1:45:24Maggie Sellers Reum?

  of that, that's like, my family. The thing that like I always tell my husband is my worst fear was being as driven as I am, which is why we scored 98% on the culture test together, or I matched you, but having no one to share that with. Like that was legitimately my worst fear. Cause I knew I was gonna get there. Like I have fundamentally believed since I was little that I was gonna be successful. And then my worst fear was I get there with who and with, like for what?

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, same. Yeah, same.

• 1:45:56Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And honestly, like having my husband now, he says this to me all the time, because he waited till he was 45 to meet me, to get married, to do the thing. And he said, it is the worst business decision I will ever make in my entire life. You are the worst business decision, but you are the best decision I've ever made in my life.

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Everything is a trade off. And I think when we're looking for perfect trades, where there's no downside, we end up living a significantly worse life. It's just about being intentional about the trade. And it sounds like he was really intentional about the trade he was making. He was well aware that it might hurt his business, might make him less productive and you. But the upside was, yeah, all the, all the things that make the success worth it anyway. Like, if you've ever bought a big house, or if you've ever bought something nice, the first thing you want to do is come experience with people you love. You want to invite people over, get them to sit in the front seat. And so, yeah, one of my real deep fears for my whole life was that, especially knowing how avoidant I was, that I would be successful, which I was pretty sure of when I was younger. And

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  then I'd, I'd be lonely, you know? And that sounds like a horrible place to be. I think the only thing worse than being lonely is being lonely in a big house.

• 1:47:08Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Or a private jet.

• 1:47:11Maggie Sellers Reum?

  It's so interesting because one of the big conversations I've had with like a lot of executives in media recently is like, all storytellers are trying to answer a question, right? And if you think about like what Love is Blind does to our society in America, they're answering the question like, can you fall in love without seeing someone? And I really thought about that as it relates to HSR. Like, what is the question that I'm trying to solve with this? And I really think it's, can you have it all? And I ask everyone almost that's sitting in that chair, can you have it all? And the answer is always like, you can, but not at the same time, and whatever. And I think with this last part of this conversation that was supposed to be rapid fire,

• 1:47:51Maggie Sellers Reum?

  but I'm glad it came up, was like, I think you're showing people that you can, that you can have it all. And I don't want that to feel like a lot of pressure, which I know it is. But I think, yeah, it signifies something more than just like you and Mel deciding, because even of itself, like, that's amazing. And I'm, because I know both of you, and I've gotten to see her soul in like such a genuine way, like she just radiates love. Like, I'm genuinely happy for the two of you. But on like a bigger scale, I think it does from a male's perspective, and one of the big things for this year with HSR is like, you know, 30% of our listeners are actually men.

• 1:48:31Maggie Sellers Reum?

  And I speak to women a lot because like, I know who I'm talking to, and it's great that there's peripheral listeners, but I don't want to lose like who this is really for, right? And I think those people that are listening to this are going to feel something, hearing you talk about you making the decision to get married, as someone that could easily choose not to, and have an easier life, maybe. And I just know that like, you sharing that is going to make more of an impact, maybe than anything else you've said, which is crazy. But what do we all want at the end of the day? Love, connection, relationships. So I'm really happy that you shared that with us.

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  Thank you. And I think that, no, I think that's all really astute. I think that's really, really on point. And I don't think I would have an easier life.

• 1:49:25Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You don't think so?

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  No. It goes back to what we're saying, like choose your annoying or choose your hard. I'd have an easier life in some respects and then I'd have a much harder life in other respects. And on balance, I'd rather have an easier life by getting married and having kids and being a father and versus the the easy life of, you know, more freedom. But then dealing with the difficulty of being lonely and unfulfilled and flippant relationships with people and dating and having to go, hi, I'm Steve, you know, I just, that's not an easy life for me, so.

• 1:50:03Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay, can I keep going on my rapid fire? Okay, you could only pick one for the rest of your life, Stephen.

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Maggie Sellers Reum?

  A 7 a.m. call time or never drinking ketone IQ again?

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  I would say 7 a.m. call time.

• 1:50:16Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay. Was that hard for you?

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  No, not really, because I do want to wake up earlier.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  I do want to wake up earlier. I think it'd be good for me.

• 1:50:25Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay, we can go for runs in the morning.

• 1:50:27Speaker 02

  Please.

• 1:50:27Maggie Sellers Reum?

  What is your favorite episode of DOAC ever?

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  I'm gonna say episode 101 with Mo Gorda. But just because it was the most shared episode ever and because he wasn't a celebrity, so it wasn't being shared because he was a famous person. It was just so profound and he said so many things about life and happiness that have stayed with me. And the one I always talk about is this idea of expectations. And he said to me that you're happy in your life when your expectations of how your life is supposed to be going are met. And you're unhappy when those expectations go unmet. And I use this as a framework to think about why I'm unhappy at certain moments in my life. And it's always without exception because I had an expectation of how something was gonna happen. And it's currently falling below then. And this also gives us a framework for being able to control our happiness, which is managing one's expectations of ourselves, of others, of our partner,

• 1:51:17Speaker 02

  of our dog when they poop in the house, or whatever, or someone cuts you off in traffic. And this is where gratitude has become and has always really been seen as one of the great answers to happiness because gratitude is the realization that your expectations are being met in various areas of your life right now.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  And if you think about everything that's made you unhappy in the last week, I guarantee it's all about an expectation you had about something. So, yeah. My God, episode 101.

• 1:51:44Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay, you can only pick one for the rest of your life, eggs or watermelon?

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  Eggs.

• 1:51:48Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Really?

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Damn, I watched your men's health video and you were like, I love watermelon.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  I do, but eggs. Come on, eggs are like protein and watermelon is just water.

• 1:51:56Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I was absorbing myself in your world, basically for the last few years, but then really over the last few days. Have you ever worked with someone who's such a big super fan?

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know, I don't know. But you do know a lot about me, which is, which is really a compliment. You know, it means a lot to me and I'm very appreciative of that.

• 1:52:13Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You're honestly one of the people I marked out as my inspiration.

• 1:52:15Speaker 02

  It's so crazy how weird that feels to me. It feels, it makes me uncomfortable.

• 1:52:19Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Because of me or because other people?

• 1:52:20Speaker 02

  Generally.

• 1:52:21Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:52:21Speaker 02

  Makes me very uncomfortable.

• 1:52:24Maggie Sellers Reum?

  But I'd rather it be you than someone else.

• 1:52:26Speaker 02

  I think maybe it makes me uncomfortable because of the last question, which is then it creates an expectation. And I just, I don't want to meet anyone's expectations. It's like.

• 1:52:32Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You can't put that pressure on yourself because we all have to manage our own expectations. And like, before you got here, I was so nervous. I was, like, the whole week I've been really nervous. Like, even my brother-in-law's calling me being like, okay, you gotta calm down. Like, it's gonna be okay, you know? And right before you walked down here, I said on the vlog, like, I just want to get rid of my expectations. Because whatever happens, happens. This is supposed to be fun. Like, this is, this is supposed to be fun. And as soon as I did that, all my nerves went away. I let go of the expectation of what I was expecting. And even to recap it, like, I don't even know if this was what I was expecting, but it's better.

• 1:53:11Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You know, and like, the feeling that I have leaving it is so much better than what I had come into it with. And so even though you feel an expectation on that, it's not up to you to manage other people's expectations. Because I'm your biggest fan and now I work with you and like, have this special access. It's up to me to manage my own expectations. It's not up to you.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  That's beautiful.

• 1:53:32Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Fave podcast that isn't yours or a Flight Story Show?

• 1:53:36Speaker 02

  It would be, they're like true crime podcasts.

• 1:53:38Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay.

• 1:53:39Speaker 02

  It's basically all I listen to. I, I watch a ton of YouTube. I don't really listen to podcasts. I know, it sounds crazy. I don't really listen to podcasts. It's rare that I listen to podcasts. Very rare.

• 1:53:50Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Is that because you don't want to get influenced by what they're doing?

• 1:53:53Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:53:54Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay.

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  I just prefer to watch YouTube and watch videos about specific subjects and probably a little bit shorter.

• 1:54:04Speaker 02

  But I do listen to podcasts sometimes. It's just when there's, I like the All In podcast.

• 1:54:08Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay, here we go.

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  I do listen to them, but I watch them on YouTube, yeah.

• 1:54:11Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Okay. If you could title this season of your life, what would it be called?

• 1:54:15Speaker 02

  It would be called Liftoff, probably. A lot of things going on. Obviously, just, you know, Steven.com has launched as a business and that's, I'm building all the foundations of that company. And then, you know, in the whole marriage, kids realm, we have liftoff. So it'd be liftoff. A lot of starts, a lot of things starting all at once. It's quite scary.

• 1:54:44Maggie Sellers Reum?

  You know, it's my favorite saying.

• 1:54:45Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 1:54:46Maggie Sellers Reum?

  When you're on a rocket ship, don't ask what fucking seat you're on, just get on and go. And honestly, I've always, like, when people have asked me about you, I'm like, he's on a rocket ship and I didn't ask what seat I'm on. I just got on the fucking rocket ship and waited for liftoff. So the fact that you just said liftoff is literally crazy. I know this is one of your favorite questions to ask candidates when you are hiring. So after achieving so much success, Stephen Bartlett, can you explain your biggest achievement like you're 10 years old?

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  My biggest achievement, bar none, and it's so easy, it's so easy, this question for me, is

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  falling in love with someone, then falling in love with me, and us building a relationship together, bar none. It was the only thing that I didn't think I could do. So it's the, it's the thing that I'm most proud of and the thing that I cherish the most. And I say to Mel all the time, I just check with her, I say sometimes, I'm like, do you still believe that I would delete everything that I am? All my business, all my success, my bank balance to protect this relationship? And I ask her this often. And if she answers yes, then it's evidence that I've correctly prioritized the things that matter the most. And so she's been saying yes many times in a row recently. So I'm happy about that.

• 1:56:10Maggie Sellers Reum?

  Well, it wouldn't be an interview without making me cry. So Stephen Bartlett, thank you for getting hot.

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  I love how you say my name, by the way.

• 1:56:17Maggie Sellers Reum?

  I know I say it wrong, but like.

• 1:56:18Speaker 02

  No, no, it's fine. I like it.

• 1:56:19Maggie Sellers Reum?

  It's iconic, so I'm not switching it. Thank you so much for coming on. Can I ask you one more thing?

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:56:25Maggie Sellers Reum?

  How can HSR help you right now?

• 1:56:27Speaker 02

  Helping to push into the world this narrative that.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  Independence isn't all it's cracked up to be. And that there's a risk to independence. There's a risk to everything in life. There's always a trade off. So when people tell you about standing on your own two feet, you don't need anyone, you don't need a boyfriend, whatever. It would, I think it'd be really net beneficial for society if we all collectively just questioned this a little bit and thought deeply about the value of dependence and relying on others and being part of something, whether it's a religion or a community like, like this community. There's huge value in that. And even your community, you have one of the most incredible communities I've ever seen. Like, isn't that evidence that, isn't it great to like, depend on other people and to be part of something? So the, the, the thing I would ask is that people,

• 1:57:14Speaker 02

  when they encounter the narrative that is the antithesis of this, to just push back on it and to, let's make dependency and commitment sexy again.

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:26Speaker 05

  Done. Love it.

• 1:57:38Maggie Sellers Reum?

  If you're starting a business, there are certain things that are so fun to think about. Y'all know I love a mood board. So everything that relates to the creative, the name, the brand, the website, the vision board. But then there are the things that make you pause and ask, am I even doing this correctly? Or do I even want to be doing this? Like forming your business, getting the right documents, keeping your personal information private. This is where our sponsor Northwest Registered Agent is so helpful. They're a one stop shop for founders who want to launch and legitimize their business without turning it into a giant admin spiral. They help you form an LLC or a corporation, act as your registered agent and give you tools like a business address, operating agreement, website, phone number, professional email and free guides.

• 1:58:22Maggie Sellers Reum?

  They also have real corporate guides who know your local laws. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/hsrfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/hsrfree.

• 1:58:43Speaker 04

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• 1:59:12Speaker 07

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