Lessons in Happiness, Side Hustles, Self-Care, Productivity, Luck and Business - Season 3 Round Up
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Hey friends and welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast where it's my immense privilege to every week sit down with authors and creators and entrepreneurs and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help live our best lives. Now we are approaching the end of season three of the podcast so thank you so much if you've been a listener or a viewer or a subscriber to the show, awesome to have you here. And in this episode we're going to do a little bit of a roundup of some of the top moments from this season. So

If you haven't had a chance to listen to all the episodes of the season, then this will be great because you'll get a lot of bang for your buck. Or even if you have, this will be good spaced repetition of some of the top moments, some of the top lessons that we've learned across the guests that we've had in the last season of the podcast. So I hope you enjoy this little roundup episode. Your brain is capable of anything. I mean, my new book is exactly about that. It's exactly about your brain being able to do anything.

What you tell it to do, right? But if you leave it uncontrolled, its tendency, its instinct is to look for what's wrong.

Why? Because it's a survival machine. It is there for the simple reason of detecting if there is a tiger so it can protect you. And yes, if there are no tigers, it can go on and invent iPhones. But it's still, even as it's inventing iPhones, trying to detect everything. Is my boss annoying? Is my boyfriend, girlfriend trying to leave me? Am I going to starve? Whatever. But that's until you take charge.

If you take charge, you know, that little voice in your head, I basically say it's like your computer. It's like your device. You can tell it what to do and it will do it. And once you start to take charge, that machine can be instructed to look for what's right. And when you look for what's right, my claim, I have no scientific evidence behind it, that 99.9% of your life is right.

Okay. Whoever you are, you know, I have, you know, I have a tiny bit of a sore throat today, but that happens to me twice a year. Most of the year, my, my voice is okay. Right. Most of us live our entire life on solid ground. Most of us never, ever see an earthquake, right? Ever, unless it's in the news. And even if you do, it's like once or twice in your lifetime, the baseline of life is okay. Yeah. And then, and then the negatives are,

just happen, you know, there are dips out of okay and then back to the baseline, right? And when you see that, then it's only fair to instruct your brain if you want to see the truth, if you want to acknowledge the truth of your life, it's only fair to instruct your brain to look for 99%, 99.9% as I say, of good things.

So I have this very simple exercise when my brain tells me something wrong about anything. Okay. Okay. I ask for nine other good things about the situation. My mom occasionally asks me if I'm happy, you know, and then I'm like, yeah, I feel like life is a 10 out of 10. And she's like, but you don't look very happy. I'm just, you know, I have a resting bored face. I always seem to look tired, bags under the eyes and all that stuff.

But the way I was previously defining it was that kind of contentment was this sort of baseline level of peace and acceptance and calm. But then happiness was, I was always unsure, is happiness more like a kind of hour by hour, minute by minute fluctuation? Or when we say happiness, are we referring more to this sort of climate rather than weather, this idea of like long-term, long-term-ish contentment, I'm happy with how life is going? The target is definitely to be happy. So happiness is binary.

If you don't mind me, let me talk about the happiness equation for a minute. When I struggled with my unhappiness as a young man, having been given everything, I was so fortunate. I had the most beautiful wife, two amazing kids, fortune and power, if you want. I had so much money, the big villa and so on. I was miserable.

And the idea for me was like, so what is happening? Why is it not working for me? And I attempted in a very crazy scientific way, believe it or not, as an engineer, I said, okay, so we're going to have to look for that happiness thing. And what do engineers do? The first thing we do is we define the problem. Okay, so what is that happiness thing? You need to know what it is before you look for it.

And interestingly, there was no definition anywhere. And so I went out and I said, okay, let's write down moments where we felt that thing called happy. I wrote down, if I remember correctly, 92 bullet points at the time. I feel happy when my daughter smiles. I feel happy when I have a good cup of coffee. I feel happy when I have an enriching conversation and so on. And I started to look for

commonalities between those points. In an engineer's way, I was literally looking for a fitting line. It's like you take a few random readings from a machine and you just put them on a graph and if there is a line, that line is the equation of how that machine performs. I

I was looking for that line. I plotted those moments against everything, you know, my height, my weight, my, you know, age, my hair on my head, whatever that is, right? And seriously, I was very open to the idea of those moments when I felt happy, were they because I lost my hair in my late 20s that I started to feel unhappy. So it's a worthwhile experiment. But no, there was no relationship at all. The only relationship was this.

Happiness was not triggered by any single event. As a matter of fact, the same event, I said, I feel happy when my daughter smiles. That same event made me happy most of my life. It made me very unhappy when she once failed a class in school and came back from school smiling.

Right. When, you know, why is that? When, you know, I'm generally, I feel happy when my daughter smiles, but when she was smiling after failing a class, I sort of had a feeling in my head that she may be not, does not realize the weight of the issue or that she's not responsible or whatever. But even the same event does not always trigger happiness. And when you start to see that, you say, so what is happiness then? It's not just the events of our life. There is something else in the equation at play.

And the other thing is your expectation. I expect that my daughter will smile all the time other than the times where she needs to be more responsible. Okay. So my expectation is when someone fails an exam, they should not be very happy.

Okay, interesting. Now, you put that in an equation and suddenly it becomes very clear. Happiness is events minus expectations, right? If you want to complicate the equation a little bit, it's equal to or greater than because if events beat expectations, so it's equal to or greater than the perception of events.

minus your expectations of how life should be. Okay, so happiness equation, happiness is greater than or equal to events minus expectations. One, I guess, issue with this idea, issue in inverted commas, that I've never quite been able to square is the response of, does that therefore mean that we should just have low expectations for everything in life and always think of life with a slightly pessimistic outlook so that whatever happens, then life, it's a surprise and it's a good thing.

And when people say that to me, I kind of think, yes, yes, asterisk. Well, I don't know what the asterisk is. If your target in life is to be happy, okay, honestly, then yeah, lower expectations will make you happy. Okay. So, you know, if you basically tell yourself, I know many friends in my life that decided that they've had enough of life, you know, the fast-paced lives. They went and lived in the Dominican Republic. And the only thing that would make them unhappy on a day is that there is not enough wind to kite surf.

Okay? And they make enough money to live a very simple life and they want to kite surf. That's it. Their expectations are very low. They don't expect a Ferrari. They don't expect to be able to live in a big city. They don't want to go to museums. Their expectations are low. And apply that to anything. I go to India and if, you know, many, many people, hundreds of millions of people don't expect to eat today. Give them a bowl of rice and they're very happy. So if your target is happiness, yeah, that's the way to go.

If your target is success and impact on life, however, you need to go the opposite way. And the opposite way is I need ambition. So when I wrote Solve for Happy at the beginning, I wrote it with the mission of 10 million happy. And then 10 million happy happened very quickly. And my team got together and said, maybe we should set a bigger target. So we didn't set 11. We didn't set 100 million. We set a billion happy.

Now, a billion happy is a crazy target to have. How many people in the world have reached a billion people? But it's a nice, ambitious target.

a target to aspire to. So when I wake up in the morning, year one, when we've, you know, we've achieved another 10 million or so, I don't tell myself, that's it, we've achieved, we're done. I say to myself, there is still a way to go, there is still more to do. But you're stuck between those two extents, if you want. One that says, have no expectation at all, and you'll be happy. And the other says, have extremely high expectations, and you'll be successful.

What's the problem with the modern world is that we believed in this and not that. You know, the problem with the modern world is when you're growing up, I'm sure, I don't know your mom, but your mom told you success is more important than happiness. Go thrive in life. Or that success leads to happiness. Or that success leads to happiness, right? So we believe that. Yeah. Well, it's not true. I mean, how often do you meet someone who's successful and rich and famous and swimming in money and everyone's attracted to them and paparazzis are all around them and they're miserable?

Success doesn't always lead to happiness. Now, between those two, there is a midpoint, like everything in life, which is I need a realistic expectation. A realistic expectation is not lowered than how it should be, and it's not higher than how it should be. I need an ambition that is higher than the realistic expectation, and I need a contentment that sometimes even my realistic expectation might be missed. And in that case,

While I aim for a realistic expectation and a high ambition, I'm getting the best of both worlds. I'm trying to be successful. And at the same time, I'm contented as I go through that path when life misses my expectations sometimes. The whole side hustle thing. So from when I was 17 and I read The 4-Hour Workweek, I was like, all right, cool. Side hustles are the way forward, passive income, blah, blah, blah. I spoke to a bunch of doctors who I knew and I was like, you know, how much do you really enjoy your job? If you won the lottery, would you still do medicine? And

And half of them were like, I would quit immediately. And the other half were like, I'd go part-time. And I was like, why don't you go part-time? And they were like, well, because I need to pay the bills, mortgage, kids, etc, etc. And so in my mind, I was like, cool. Clearly, the answer here is that I want to be able to do medicine for fun. And I want to have enough streams of passive income on the side to be able to clothe myself, feed myself, and buy a house and do all those things. Because it seems like medicine in the UK is not necessarily the path to that right now. Yeah.

But then there's some, it is somewhat unfashionable to suggest the whole side hustle thing these days. I guess when I was at university, you were like one of the OG influencer side hustler type people. And certainly in the book, you kind of talk about that a little bit.

How do you think about this balance between people could have side hustles if they want to make streams of income to become financially free, et cetera, et cetera, versus the kind of backlash to that of like, oh, but now you're telling people to work a second job in the evenings and that's bad. Yeah. So I think that it's exactly that. It's not black and white. And I think that when we present it online as black and white, and actually, if you're using any hours in the evening to relax rather than using those three hours to be building your own Shopify page and making this much money, then you don't like time. You just like discipline, like all of these things.

I think that it can both be true that you can make lots through that and create a great life for yourself through that. And that also be really kind of this kind of toxic tie that I admit very much myself that I kind of have in my own like head between your productivity and your self-worth and your ability to monetize every single moment of your time. I think that I will be the first to say that side hustles will be

are an incredible way to make money outside of your main job. Or for me, it was when I was a student or even before that I was babysitting every night or doing music tutoring, like all of these things. I kind of, when I got into making money, it was actually because I became obsessed with the fact that, you know, if I get 20 pounds a month from my parents, I can make

£25 a night from babysitting. So I've already doubled my technical income for the month and just got completely obsessed with that idea. And then when I worked at IBM, I was doing the kind of Instagram stuff on the side and selling stuff and that kind of just snowballed. And so I can't sit here and say like, oh no, side-classing is really toxic.

I think that it's marketed very toxically. And I think this, we do need to kind of question the idea that actually the amount of money we can make is capped only by our time. And I also think that we can acknowledge that actually creating separate passive streams of income is a really important and really effective way to make more money. And I also think that now we're in an era where that, you know,

privilege is more important to talk about than ever but also at the same time the online space has hugely democratized starting a business in the way that the barriers to entry to starting a business are way way way lower and so it's kind of I just think that as long as we talk about it with the nuance of the whole conversation then great I think when we sell it as this kind of like you're relaxing in the evening or

that's why you don't have a house and that's why you're not driving a Lamborghini. I think that's kind of, I mean, it just, it sells on Instagram, doesn't it? Constantly so excited by the concept of Tala and I can't wait to see, you know, how and where it like goes. And I think that that's, you know,

That fulfills me. We have an amazing team that are super excited all the time and work so hard because they believe in it too. And I kind of hope that shows. I'd have to talk about some book stuff. Working hard, hardly working. There's a few things in here which I found super interesting that I'd love to get your take on. And...

The first one was kind of very early on in a way. When I saw the title, my editor at Penguin actually sent me an advance copy of it. I think I did a thing for it or something. And I saw the title, I thought it was going to be like, oh, here's how you can work hard while also being chill about the thing. Oh, like a four-hour work week. That kind of vibe. And then I read the book. I was like, oh, okay. It's like this contrast, but also not this contrast between productivity and self-care.

kind of. So I would love to hear your take on that. I know you've kind of literally written a whole book about it, but what are your current thoughts on productivity versus self-care and that theoretical dividing line between the two? So I began to write the book right at the beginning of the pandemic because there was kind of a stage where there were these two big different kind of parties online. One was like team productivity and one was like team self-care. And

The team productivity one was like hustle 24 hours, like sleep when you're dead, like all of these things, like big lions in the background of like a big graphic being like,

Yeah, that kind of like sleep while you're dead, all of those types of things. And it was just like hustle, hustle, hustle, like side hustle culture, like Forex traders, like you can make all of this money, but also like a more subtle version of that, which was like very like girl boss culture, like a lot of this stuff, which I will have benefited hugely from. And then there was this other side, which was like self-care. And that was like, no, like do what you need to do. Cancel that job that you've got for your wellbeing. Like...

quit your job, go into something you love, like take a bath, put on a candle, like wellbeing. And then it was like, there was like nothing in between. So like if I post something being like, oh, one of my big productivity tips,

is X. I'd get like an influx of like, it's like pandemic, not a productivity contest. And like, how dare you say I should watch a TED talk at lunch? Like I should be out in the park. And it's like, yeah, great. Like if that works for you, at the same time, I post something being like, I decided not to work late today and to do this instead. And like the productivity people would be like, well, like you can do that because of X, Y, and Z. And actually we all need to do this and like all of that. And there was like, there's no like middle ground. Right.

And actually there was no acknowledgement of the fact that actually we all need productivity and we all need self-care. And that was the kind of like working hard, hardly working thing. The book split into working hard, which is filled with productivity tips. A lot of talk about the, you know, generational kind of like passion paradoxes and like all of these things, managing your time, defining success, goal setting, like all of these things, a lot very much like within this kind of like social media world.

And then the hardly working side is kind of essentially the complete opposite. But the whole idea is to create a productivity blueprint that doesn't completely negate the idea that we actually need rest or relaxation or sleep. And I think that

A lot of productivity books and a lot of books that have done really well in the kind of like self-help, but businessy, worky, improve your life way are types of books that you can like stick to for, you get really inspired by and stick to for about two weeks after.

And then you're like, you completely burn out because it's not sustainable because it's not based on the fact that actually we're all human as well. And then on the opposite side, there's like all of these wellbeing books that are like, do this and do this and do this. And then after two weeks, you're like, well, now I've lost my job. So it's like, there was none of this middle ground. And the whole idea was to create a productivity blueprint for this generation that actually

actually acknowledged the reality of social media, the 24-hour news cycle, even things like house prices, the fact that we actually have to work for X amount of time to be able to do X, the fact that we can do whatever online, the fact that we are bombarded with all types of success, whether it's like a friend from school's marriage or someone's promotion or

You know, like a baby or like any of these things were bombarded with those things all the time. So it's like very different from just seeing who's the last to leave the office, all of these different things. And yeah, the whole idea was to create this kind of blueprint and also take what you need type thing that would be really actionable, but also was baked into today's culture rather than being...

like the stuff from back in the 2000s that tells you to work x amount yeah i love it make some money one of one of the lines that i was listening to the audiobook anyway and you said sometimes productivity can be self-care yeah and i was like oh that's interesting

What's going on with that? So I think that's one of the main triggers for the book was actually the fact that people would be like, oh, self-care, relax. And I'd be like, actually, sometimes self-care is meeting that deadline that you're currently not on track to meet, but actually respecting your future self and your goals is...

getting the fuck up and doing the work that you need to do for that. And like, we cannot market self-care as always like doing nothing. Sometimes self-care is working harder because you're currently not working in line with what you want to make happen. And I think that again, the internet hates that because it's like,

It doesn't fit into this idea of like well-being versus productivity. It's the actual understanding of the fact that both are one and the other. Like self-care isn't always running a bath. If you're running a bath and you're about to miss three deadlines and that's your paycheck for the week, self-care is not running a bath. I refuse to believe that self-care is running a bath. So that was...

A lot of the stuff in the book is around how to action actual self-care and like how to know at what point something will be self-care versus self-sabotage or any of these things to create a life that revolves around, you know, your boundaries and where you need to be more productive and where you probably need to stop being so harsh on yourself. So the book is titled Building a Second Brain, a Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. A thing that we probably should have addressed earlier, but like...

What the hell is a second brain and why is it? Why does it help you organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential? Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. A second brain, think of it

Think of things you already do. So, you might have a journal or a diary. Imagine if everything you wrote in that journal or diary was saved forever, was searchable, that you could actually drive insights from it. You could go ask it a question. What have I thought about money in the past? What have I thought about personal growth? How have my dates been in the past? What did I learn? You could actually mine the insights from that.

That's a journal or diary. Now imagine notes you took from books or articles. Now imagine even practical things like grocery lists, packing lists, travel itineraries. Okay, now add bookmarks that you saved from the web. Now add any kind of document that you've created from the past.

All these things are things we largely already do to some capacity. But now imagine getting all of that material, which like we said, is just data. All of that stuff is just information. And you save it, you centralize it all in one single central place.

where you know will be preserved forever, you know you can always search for things, you know you can, once it's saved in the same place, start to link things together, start to tag it, start to organize it. What would be the value? What would be the value of the aggregated sum of all that material? That's your second brain.

Okay. So a cynic would say that, well, what is the value of that? Why do I care if my, like, surely isn't it a bad thing if my private journal is in one place for some evil corporation to access forever? Like, why do I need to care about my shopping lists? Yeah. Books I've read, I've read a few fiction. I've read Twilight. I've read Fifty Shades of Grey. In addition to getting things done, why does it matter if it's all in one place? Yeah. I would say a few things. If you make anything,

And I'd say more of us are makers or creators than you would think, right? If you're writing long emails, if you're writing reports, memos, analyses, project plans, like most knowledge workers have some, virtually all knowledge workers have some kind of output.

You can't just sit down and make something from scratch. Or if you do, it won't be very good. You won't have a lot of kind of interesting ideas to add to it. You need as a creative person, some repository, some store of ideas and insights to draw from, or else you're going to be doing that classic thing that we want to avoid, which is looking at the blank page or looking at the blank screen, right? And trying to come up with an idea, which is one of the worst experiences, right?

I would say even broader than making things, think about decisions. A decision is something that you, in a sense, create, right? You take into account all this information, all these inputs, what your team thinks, what your colleagues think, how the economy is doing, what people in your industry say. You are incorporating all of those inputs into a decision.

I would say that is something that you need to draw on existing material. Any kind of outcome, right? Like it's difficult to go out into the world sort of naked in idea terms and make things happen without any research, without any creative raw material, without any planning. It's just hard to do. Yes. So the way that I kind of, you know, when people ask me, oh, what's the deal with the second brain thing? I'm like, it's basically a digital note-taking system that...

that you can put anything into and that you can then use for the things that you actually care about. So I think this is very easy to give an example to if you are, for example, a writer. You know, there's this idea of a commonplace book, which is a thing from, from,

from back in the day where anytime you read a book or you have an insight, you have an idea, you write it down in this one book. And now if you have multiple of these books that you've collected through 10 years of your life and you come to writing a book, you're like, cool, I now have all of these insights I've already gathered. I've already got the raw materials. It's almost like taking notes in class. If you're then writing an essay, you're mining the notes you've taken in class, doing a little bit of Googling, but mostly doing it from stuff we've read in class, wider reading, other insights, maybe a little note that sparked when you were in a lecture.

And then you're assembling your essay based on those raw materials rather than assembling your essay from the blank page or attempting to assemble your essay via a Google search where you're just going to be derailed by SEO content marketers who are writing the most boring ass listicles to help drive content for their things. Exactly. So in a way, you're creating your own Google. Yeah. Your own sort of.

external brain, your second brain that you can then search for relevant things. And I guess that's easy enough to think about. Let's say if you're a student and you're writing essays, easy enough. If you're a YouTuber, you're like, cool, I get to mine this for content ideas. What about not obvious things like that? Or what other use cases are there for a second brain outside the scope of I'm a content creator slash student? Yeah. There's all these little mundane things just from people's everyday lives. Like

I'll give one very simple example. I'm driving by the hardware store. As a parent, it's like I have to make use of every single minute. If I'm driving by the hardware store, I want to take advantage of that opportunity. Opportunistically, no. Is there anything that I could just pop in, pull in right here, pick it up from the hardware store, which is across town, right?

rather than trying to, from my home, set aside all this time to go to the hardware store. So here's the question. How can I, within seconds, look at some resource, some place, and know all the things that I might want to pick up at the hardware store?

And I did that. I actually had this as a micro case study in the book. I went into my notes, went into the project folder for the studio that we were building, went into one note that had things to pick up at the hardware store, right? Which I could have also done a search for.

And then right there in the note, I kind of reorganize it, put some things at the top, put some things in a section that says, don't worry about it for now. And that way it's like I can take advantage of a spontaneous opportunity in my day, which is driving by this hardware store to also pick up those items, which I would never be able to remember. Right. And it would also be hard to sit there in the parking lot and try to like make a new list and try to remember all the things that we were talking about two weeks ago that I have to pick up.

Okay. So it's like your second brain is offloading functionality from your own brain to be forced to remember things like three weeks from now when I happen to be swinging by the supermarket, what are the things that I need to grab? Yeah. And so it's not just like notes that you're taking from lectures, as it were, or videos that you watch or books that you read. It's also to-do lists for projects that you're working on.

let's say you're remodeling your studio let's say you're i don't know getting something installed in your kitchen let's say you're trying to make your bedroom look a little bit nicer yeah those are all i guess projects yes in our life yes and unless you're used to thinking like a productivity nerd you might not think of them as projects like yes you know install bookshelf in bedroom or sort out cable management on desk setup like what do i need for that well i need some cable ties i need one of those like plastic boxes to put into yeah i need some kind of

cleaning implement for my keyboard because my keyboard is a freaking mess. I'm not going to bother getting those things right now. So let's just chuck them in a to-do list such that next time I happen to swing by the hardware store, I can just pick up those things and it becomes a sort of seamless part of my life. Is that kind of the idea? Exactly.

Yeah, I think people sometimes they think, oh, second brain, this is this advanced futuristic technology. It's going to be this like, you know, exoskeleton that's going to give me new powers and new capabilities. Sure, maybe eventually. But instead, think about instead of the top of your skill hierarchy, the bottom. What is the stuff that you're trying to memorize? What is the stuff that you're trying to keep in mind?

These little things, are you trying to keep in mind the homework assignments your kid has to complete this week that you're helping them with? Are you trying to keep in mind places you want to visit next time you're in this country? Are you trying to keep in mind the ideas from the meeting with your boss last week?

Are you trying to keep in mind ideas that have come up in a marketing meeting? You probably don't even realize it, right? Because we were never taught, oh, that thing you're trying to keep in mind, don't keep that in mind. In fact, we're usually taught, keep this in mind, remember this. Like you can even notice the things people say in these little conversational moments. They're like, oh, can you...

Can you remind me of this or keep this in mind or bring this up next time? I'm always like, no, I can't. I'm a fickle, fragile human being. I have to write it down.

So what happens is if you replace the, instead of adding new levels of thinking, replace the bottom levels, which then frees up your time, frees up your attention, frees up your energy, which you can then dedicate to those higher levels. Just a quick break to tell you about the sponsor of this episode, and that is, surprise, surprise, ShortForm. ShortForm is the single best service that summarizes the world's most popular books

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the world of ideas and how some ideas, I think when it comes to nonfiction, we can often tend to take authors' ideas at face value, whereas Shortform really helps us engage more critically with those ideas, which is awesome. If any of that sounds up your street and you want to subscribe to the world's best service that summarizes books, then head over to shortform.com forward slash deep dive. And if you hit that link, which is also in the video description and in the show notes, that will give you 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much, Shortform, for sponsoring this episode. What's your take on this idea of kind of

luck as a broad? Well, yeah. So the luck stuff, I was at Hearts, had been at Hearts for 10 years. I was interviewing people for somebody else's project. Actually, I'd stepped in. It wasn't my project. Interviewing people about moments, key moments in their lives. And this guy came in and just described himself as really lucky. He said, I get these chance occurrences. They always work out for me and bump into people. And he said,

And increasingly convinced that we are presented with opportunities all the time. And it's whether we make the most of them. I think it's really easy to think, this is my career path. You know, I'm going to be a medic or I'm going to be a magician or whatever it is. And once you lock into that, the problem is you then miss opportunities or other ways of thinking and doing. And that happened at that moment. You know, I was interviewing this guy and I thought, luck is a really interesting topic, actually. And psychologists have pretty much ignored it.

So I started doing some work on psychology of luck. And we ran some newspaper articles saying, you know, if you think you're lucky or unlucky, contact Richard Wiseman. And there was about a thousand people getting in contact and it grew. The media liked it as a topic.

And then that became the basis for the very first book. I never intended to be an author at all. I struggled to read even. So it just wasn't something that I intended to do. It just kind of came along. So I guess, were you trying to publish academic papers in psychology journals?

Exploring the idea of luck. Absolutely. I was doing that. I published quite a lot of papers. And then through a guy called Simon Singh, who's an amazing sort of mathematician and public communicator, he introduced me to his agent, Patrick Walsh, an incredible agent. And Patrick said, what are you working on? And I actually at the time was working mainly on the paranormal. So we put together this book proposal about the paranormal.

No publisher wanted to really put it out. And it was a chance conversation with Patrick. He said, what else are you doing? I said, I'm doing stuff on luck. And he said, well, you try to make people luckier. I said, well, yeah, we do that with interventions and so on. And that was the basis again of the very first book.

Okay. So many questions about the paranormal stuff as well. Before we go down that, I'll just put a bookmark on there. Is it the luck factor? The lucky factor. The luck factor, yeah. The luck factor, yeah. So you've got like four principles that people use to become luckier. I wonder if you can kind of elaborate on those because I'm sure our listeners would be very... So these are the principles, the different ways in which lucky people think and behave. So we have they're open to opportunities. And when those opportunities come along, they make the most of them.

And you saw that all the time. They're very flexible. So they've got an end point. They knew they wanted to, I don't know, be successful or, you know, financially well off or whatever it was. But the way they were going to get there, they didn't really know. They were looking at the way the wind was blowing and then setting sail to make the most of that. Very flexible folks. Second, they tend to trust their intuition. And when they get that gut feeling, they really do treat it as an alarm bell and take it quite seriously.

Third, they're optimists. And so that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They kind of continue in the face of failure and so on. And fourth, I think it's probably the most important principle, they're extremely resilient. So when bad things happen, they could bounce back. And so I remember I interviewed hundreds of lucky and unlucky people. One of them was this guy that was in the lucky group. And he came in for two interviews. Between the two interviews, he'd fallen down the stairs and broken his leg. It's

So the second interview, he comes in with his leg in a cast. And I say, I bet you don't consider yourself quite so lucky now. And he says this wonderful answer, which still sticks with me. He said, you're kidding.

He said, you never know the impact of something like this. He said, sure, it's annoying at the moment. But he said, last time I went into hospital, I fell in love with a nurse there. We were happily married 25 years later. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. He said, don't label it bad luck. You never know what's going to come from this. So it's an incredibly resilient sort of attitude. Yeah.

And so those are the four things, the opportunism, the intuition, the optimism, and the resilience. And is that something that people can learn or does it tend to be a sort of innate trait? Well, that's a very good question. So obviously, all of us are a mixture of our genes and a nature of nurture, basically.

And I'm not very interested in the nature end of things. I'm not very interested in things that can't change or don't change. So I think all of us can make the most of our potential. And that's the bit as a social psychologist that fascinates me.

The challenge is how do you do it? How do you do it? And when I looked at these self-help books, I realized that this stuff wasn't evidence-based. People were just making things up. Some of it might be helpful. Some of it might not be. And so we started to come up with interventions and test them. And that was the basis of Luck Factor, which is these things which actually we know make a difference because we've done the studies to support it.

So going a little bit meta on this, what does it look like to test an intervention on something like luck if you're running the experiments? Yes. So I like experiments that pose exactly those problems, which is how do you do that? In our studies, we would take groups of people that didn't consider themselves lucky or unlucky. We'd ask them to do something, and then you monitor that group. Your problem is you haven't got a control group. Okay.

So then it's compared to what, basically. So you can then have another group of people that aren't doing anything, which is good, better at least. The problem there is you don't know that maybe it's the doing of anything that kind of helps. So we often have a third group, which is that we say, here's a lucky mascot or a lucky charm, carry that around. It's like placebo almost. Exactly. And that's the sort of way you start to look at those interventions. And so what kind of interventions are –

We did super simple things, in part because the complicated things didn't work. So, for example, we'd ask people to keep a luck diary. And this was at a time when positive psychology, which now sort of falls under, was around, but it wasn't huge. We were doing some work into this. So the luck diary, the end of each day, you write down a sense of gratitude you have for your friends or health or career or whatever. It was all gratitude intervention. Yeah.

Or the best thing that's happened in the last 24 hours. Or something negative that used to happen that no longer happens. Okay. And what that means is you start to build up a written record and you do have to write it. If you just think it, it doesn't work. You start to build up a written record of how lucky you are, how fortunate you are, how good your life is. And that starts to then change people's self-perception.

And that's when you start to see these changes in behavior, changes in perception, and ultimately changes in physical health and well-being and financial success and so on. And you can measure all that.

Well, yeah. I mean, that's what psychologists do. Some of it's ticky boxy stuff. It's how good you feel. And some of it is, you know, number of trips to your GP or longevity of relationships or income is much more hard measures. Okay. What sort of kind of numbers of people are we talking in these kind of studies? Well, I mean, those studies are quite old now. So at the time we're probably running groups of 50, something like that. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, because I remember I did psychology for my third year at Cambridge when we do the intercalated

BSC thing. And there were all sorts of posters on the thing. Would you like to be paid 20 pounds to take part in a thing with a computer game and a thing? And no one quite knows. It's like, I know this is a psychology experiment. So I know like, you know, things are not quite as they seem. But I had a bunch of friends who were like, oh, 20 quid for doing a computer game for an hour. Why not? Like, this is...

Great money for a student. Yeah, no, they're fun. I mean, I like experiments that are meaningful. I mean, a lot of psychology experiments are a little bit on the dull end. I mean, psychologists are astonishing. They can take something as wonderful as a human being and reduce it to something really dull really quite quickly. So some of my favorite luck studies was we would invite people to be interviewed and

But that meant they had to go to a certain room, which meant they had to walk along a certain corridor. And we'd put money on the corridor, on the floor of the corridor. And so the question is, did they spot it? And the lucky people tended to spot it and the unlucky ones didn't. As in lucky as in people who self-identify as lucky? Always self-identify. It's always a self-perception. Okay. Yes. And so by the time they got to the room for the interview, the study was finished.

We'd say there is no interview. It was just whether you spotted the five or 10 pound note. And so I love these things. We did so many of these great little studies. Oh, there was one. It was some TV show. I think Darren Brown maybe had something to do with it, which was University Bar, where you could sort of like red and blue coins. And like the red coins would give people actual alcohol and the blue coins would give people placebo alcohol. Oh, yes. And there was no difference in behavior between the two groups. Yes. Yeah.

I don't know that Darren did that, but yeah, certainly I've done similar stuff. And then basically you realize alcohol to a large extent is a placebo, which is phenomenal. And Darren's great. Darren's fantastic. He filmed his first show ever. I was part of that first show and we met way back then, 20 years ago. Like Darren Brown live? I think it might have been even Mind Gamers all the way back. Okay. So it's great. Yes. Yeah. I saw him live about two weeks ago and he's an astonishing performer. Oh yeah. He's amazing. I've seen all of his live shows. It's like,

Yeah. Lucky journals. So these things work.

Yeah, they work. They change people's self-perception. And one of the things that that does is then change how their friends and colleagues behave towards them. Okay. So we forget that we give off a certain, you know, self-identity vibe. Yeah. And that other people reinforce that. Okay. And so we come to convince ourselves that's who we are. Yeah. And once you start to change that and other people see you as more successful or lucky, they'll give you more opportunities or they'll talk to you more or whatever. Mm-hmm.

It's in the same way that our emotions are contagious. We all enjoy being around happy people because it makes us feel happy.

And so the lucky people tended to be happier. They had a bigger social network, which meant they got more opportunities. But also when things went wrong, there were people there to help them. The unlucky people tended to be social isolates. What does your process look like from, I guess, idea to video being published? What are the steps along the way? Who are the people that sort of get involved with making an idea come to life? Yeah. So let's go with a classic video, reviewing a phone, right? So...

Step one is the phone arrives at the studio and I take it out the box. Sometimes I'll shoot the unboxing if I know that's going to be part of the video. And I put my SIM card in it. I set it up and I start using it and I start testing it. We have a, so I actually mentioned, I forgot one of them earlier, a writer, researcher, script supervisor. David will help me with a lot of the research and making sure we've got all the points worth mentioning about this device, about this phone, all in one doc. So I'm taking notes as I'm using it. We're brain dumping into this document.

And then eventually we get to the point where we're like, all right, I think we've got it. I think we've got everything. Let's turn it into a script, a story, a through line, something that's worth watching. That's basically my job is to translate all of this information into the headline, the thumbnail, the thing that will live on YouTube.

Then we shoot the thing. So there's sort of two versions. I'm sure you've do this too. There's a roll and B roll. So you shoot your a roll where you're talking to the camera and then you have pieces where, you know, you're going to be, you know, you're talking, but you also have like footage ready for when you're going to,

talk about that stuff. We typically start with shooting a roll so that I have all of the talking out of the way. And then we know all the little quirks and things that I've mentioned. And then we will go shoot all of the rest of the B roll to cover all the things we need. A lot of that is Vin and Brandon shooting B roll off on their own. A lot of that is I've got a couple of shots in mind I need. I'll, I'll grab them and go up to the roof and we'll go shoot some stuff that I know we need to get.

We cover the whole script. Everyone has access to the script. Then it gets edited. For the most part, that's just me ingesting all the footage and laying it down on the timeline. And then if there is any sort of extra fancy visuals, then we'll go sort of next level. Say this one has a robot shot in the intro. I'll be editing the main video while Andrew...

Vin and Brandon will go off to the robot studio and we'll make their incredible masterpiece. And then that can tie in back to what I've been editing. So they'll give me a couple ideas. We'll pick one. We'll go, this is one that would really work with the YouTube tagline. And sort of, you can see the whirlwind happening as the content gets made. It gets to the end of the process. I finished the video. We give it one last walk through the whole timeline, watched the whole video together. Any last adjustments? Okay, it's good.

export, upload, publish. I got glimpses of your view into this in your Cullen and Samir interview. But how are you thinking about short form content like shorts and reels and TikToks

And I know you've got the MKBHD Shorts channel where some of the stuff on that has been cool. But for example, if you wanted to, you could 10x your output on short form content to think. And you could be thinking, hey, TikTok is where all the kids are at. Let's just bang out the content on TikTok. But it seems like you're not going down that approach. So how do you think about TikTok-y type content?

Yeah. Okay. So that last point you made is really very close to how I think about it is like the demographics of our audience. So again, I'm 28. A lot of my audience is right from about

14 to 35, let's say, just like 15 years less to maybe 15 years older, just somewhere in there. And endlessly, probably undefeated with creators, what I'll see is as they get older, their younger audience that was closer to their previous age becomes less interested. And I guess their older audience becomes more interested. So when I see TikTok,

I'm like, that's where the youngest parts of my audience will inevitably be. If I want to talk to those people and anyone using TikTok, that doesn't mean you're a child. That just means like that's the average of what a TikTok scroller is doing. If I want to reach that younger audience, I guess I should be on TikTok. But is that my goal?

Or am I really just concerned with reaching the same people who are making a purchase decision, who have some disposable income, who have a choice to make about what piece of tech to buy? And maybe the age of those people isn't going to change. I mean, it's cool to get kids into tech. I still think that's awesome. And I think there is probably a cool way that we can make short form content accessible.

that is interesting to younger audiences. And maybe that's a net positive because we can get people interested in tech and that's cool. But I think the target demographic is actually the same age as it's always been, whether it's shorts or longer videos or podcasts or anything like that. So it sounds like you don't feel that pressure of like, like I've spoken to a bunch of other creators who, and myself included, who sort of feel that pressure of, oh crap,

TikTok is where all the new people are. Everyone shows that like maybe YouTube is on the decline. Am I going to stay relevant by... Am I going to try and force myself to stay relevant by kind of adapting and becoming a TikToker as well? Yeah. Okay. So that's a different question. So relevant. If my goal is just to be famous, which I don't want...

then I would be all in on TikTok, right? But here's a different way of thinking about it. When I'm going to search for the new iPhone comes out, where do I go look for that video? I go to youtube.com and I type in the YouTube search box.

that is where I want to live for those people who are searching for that information. If that answer ever changes, if it's like the new phone came out, let me go into TikTok and see what people are saying about the phone. Then I guess that is when I'll feel that pressure. But I think for the people who feel the pressure to be relevant or the pressure for the eyeballs or the fame or something like that, then you'll feel the pressure because TikTok is 100% accomplishing that now. The most viewed piece of content I've ever made in 15 years

is a 12 second TikTok of me unfolding the LG wing. It has 35 million views. If I wanted the eyeballs, I'd be all over TikTok. But I think it's different. It's just that people searching for things, the people making purchase decisions, I'm trying to make valuable content for them. And so that's still YouTube. Have you ever, have you found any other sort of meta skills that are generally useful for life?

Yes, but they weren't taught in university. So one is storytelling and selling. I think the number one skill that helped me be a strong founder, especially in the early days of building our business, is the ability to sell. And I think I'm blessed in the sense that that's just...

one of my intuitive superpowers. It's something my dad worked on with me as I was growing up. He was really focused on my ability to articulate. He thought that was really important. I ended up taking a business communications class at Newcastle.

Michigan. But to be totally honest, I didn't find it very valuable. Half the time was spent doing kind of public speaking. Half the time was spent literally like digital communication, like how to write an email. And I found that to be tough, tough as in like not helpful. But yeah, I mean, sales, I would say is that if you are trying to elevate yourself as a professional in any way, not just as an entrepreneur, just in your career, you find yourself selling yourself and

far more times than you realize. So like just even talking about a business when we were starting Morning Brew, we're talking about a startup that was a media company. Media companies are generally not venture backable, so you can't raise from institutions. We had a newsletter. That's all we had. We had 30,000 subscribers at the time. We weren't making any money, but we had to raise money in order to possibly get to a place of making money. And so

selling investors on why a 21-year-old and a 19-year-old who have a media company where media companies are generally not profitable businesses and we weren't making money yet. And by the way, it's not really a media company. It's a newsletter. We had to sell them on why they should put their hard-earned money in our business. We had to sell our initial employees on why they should leave their steady jobs to join a business that's making $0. And

And we had to sell advertisers because that was the first way we made money as a business. We had to sell advertisers like Discover Card, large financial institutions on why they should even bother wasting their time on a company that reaches 30,000 people versus allocating that time to thinking about, say, a television commercial that reaches millions of people.

And so I'd say that is the number one meta skill. I'd actually argue it's a meta skill even like in personal life, not just professional life. I've heard a lot of people say that, that, you know, the skill of selling is kind of, yeah, is one of the most useful skills you can have. But I've always kind of wondered and I never quite followed this thought of like, what does that actually mean? Like, I wouldn't say I'm good at selling, but I guess I have sold stuff in the past and I just don't really think of

selling is like a thing. You sell yourself on YouTube every time you post a video. And this is actually an interesting thing. And I've thought a lot about this is what's the difference between sales or selling and storytelling?

And my view is just if something comes off as selling, it's just shitty storytelling. And so my view is like, why do people watch your videos for a long time? Why did you just hit 3 million subscribers on YouTube when there's a bunch of an abundance of content? Because you're not the first person to talk about topics related to productivity, to bettering yourself, right? You have found a way to storytell.

in a way that captivates people and keeps them engaged. So you are innately good at storytelling. I just don't think, I think it is quite natural and intuitive to you. It doesn't feel like work to script and then deliver that in front of a camera. You couldn't be where you are today without being exceptional at storytelling. How do people get better at this? It's a great question. My answer would be it's a combination of practice,

of shadowing and feedback and of understanding the fundamentals of what it means to storytell well. So going in reverse order, I think that there are tried and true, there's the science to it. There's like tried and true formulas for what is a captivating story for people.

And so like, for example, I'm reading the book Creativity Inc. right now, which is the story of Pixar. Like there are story arcs, which is like there is a hero. The hero is on a journey. The hero on the journey experiences a challenge. In experiencing the challenge, they go through adversity. They overcome the challenge.

and they reach their goal. Like that is one story arc. I think there are a number of formulas this way. So at base level, I think studying the best storytellers of all time and studying the formulas that they use to tell stories is the first step.

The second step is what I would say is the combination of practice and shadowing. And so the example I'll use for you is in the early days of Morning Brew, when we had to pitch advertisers on advertising in our newsletter, I had never sold in a professional setting anything before.

But I had to do it. There was no option. We had to make money. And so I got reps pitching probably in our first year, 250 advertisers on 30-minute calls about who Morning Brew was, what we stood for, and why spending your money with us was worth your time and your money based on what your goals were. And the first pitch I did, probably the second pitch, probably the 20th pitch I did was really bad. But every time I would take –

five to 10 minutes after a pitch and I'd have a reflection period where I would write down what are the things that I think I did well and what is one thing I would change for the next pitch I do and I would record every pitch I did as well. So then thinking about shadowing and feedback, right? I was delivering feedback for myself and

But a big thing that I did with our junior salespeople when they joined Morning Brew was when they would do a pitch in the early days, I would join them on those calls so that first of all, like I would do the sales pitch. They would listen to me. So they would sponge up that information. We would do that for a few weeks and then gradually I would hand off the reins to them where they would start doing the pitch.

We would record it. We would listen back to it together after, which by the way, for anyone who hasn't listened to their voice before and hasn't listened to themselves do a sales pitch, it is going to be excruciating for you to do the first time, but it is so valuable. I would give them feedback and then they would

Use that feedback the next time and you know, you look at a company like Gong Gong is a multi-billion dollar sales software company There's a reason it's such a valuable business So what God basically allows you to do is allow sales orgs to record every sales call they have and then in in a database or

holds all of the sales calls organized by who the seller was, the type of client that it was. And it also will do things as sophisticated as say, what percentage of the time on the call were you talking versus what percentage of the time was the person talking? And it will categorize what were you talking about? Almost like, you know, on YouTube, how you can kind of set the chapters of an episode. It does that automatically in your sales call.

And so then any seller can go on to Gong and study what are quote unquote the best calls that have led to the conversations that convert their clients. At the end of the day, there is this art and science to understanding what works for you to storytell in a way that leverages your strengths, but also understanding the science of

What works well and what are kind of like the natural story arcs that people over the course of time are always attracted to? Nice. That's a great answer. Was that off the cuff or have you thought about it before? That was off the cuff. Bloody hell. That was good. That was a three-part framework. I love it. I'm just like, bloody hell, man.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast.

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