Martin Lewis Exclusive: “It’s Time To Stop Being Taken Advantage Of”

A company's job is to screw you Our job is to screw them Martin Lewis is on a mission to change the way you think Nobody's really that interested in money stuff, but they're interested in their money stuff, I think there was a bank account. It was Barkley, they were paying people £100 to sign up for a while. I told everyone to go and do this and we closed that bank account in 3 hours. You can not. Confidence in the market. Trust only comes from

being

trustworthy. Three people in one week called me. God, how I couldn't face it absolutely broke me, I just couldn't breathe, which ignites that anger of wanting to go out and challenge the system when a 90 year old grandmother struggling with early dementia is paying the maximum for her energy bills because she can't access the system and don't understand what to do, that's criminal and you sit there, well, someone, someone has to do something.

Hi everyone, I'm Jake, listen before we continue. I just wanted to leave it. Come on in and say thank you to all our new subscribers, this channel is growing like crazy and this is the truth, okay, the more subscribers we have, the bigger the channel gets, the bigger it gets, the bigger the names we can attract , so before you look at this. video please just spend 5 seconds pressing subscribe it's good for us but it's also great for you and it really helps grow this channel thank you very much and enjoy Martin welcome welcome to the show thank you for having me here a little nervous why is it always more comfortable to speak as expert on saving money instead of talking like me, yes this is a little more intimate than what I'm used to so I wonder where you're going with this, but you realize and understand that you're not.

You who have lived a very interesting life have experienced many things and that has real value for people. I hope so. I hope some of this is helpful. Some things are personal and some things and I'm not sure how. Much of anyone's individual IND experience may resonate with many people, but I think there are some common learnings. Yes, I'm sure it's great. Well, let's start with what we always do. So what in your mind is high performance, to me high performance is doing well, having people listen to you and having impact, that's where I am at this stage of my life right now, so one of the things that I try to do everything is that I talk to my team, uh, when we write. something and I explained to them that we should always consider that anyone who reads or watches is selfish, not in a pejorative form of selfishness, but in the idea that in reality no one is that interested in money things, but in their money things, so for me, high performance is getting people to do things that improve their lives and also trying to get policymakers and regulators to do things that improve their lives at the same

time

and achieving that would be my definition of where I am. now. high performer, so where did you learn that trick of talking to the individual, not the masses?

I invented. Most of what I did was invented and I took care of the University. I worked at City PR and then trained. I earned a later credit in broadcast journalism. I am a journalist by profession, I am very proud to be a journalist, television journalist by profession, but then I came up with the concept of saving money on a very small small television channel around the year 2000 that I had worked for. the BBC in business journalism and personal finance I went there and there was this opportunity. I was one of the five journalists hired. Everyone else had a lot more aerial experience on my part, but I was the only one who knew Isa from the inside out. because she had worked in personal finance, so they offered me after a while, they said we had this little offer of the day program. um we want you to do a minute we want you to do the best deals and originally they wanted It's going to be like Christmas deals and I was like, I'm not interested in that, but how about I do some real research on what the best Consumer Finance products are and did they go well?

I said: I'll tell people what the best deals are on a lot of things. They said okay, try it, so this was a channel that ran for 3 hours and then they repeated it eight

time

s. So my minute was originally 1 minute in the first hour and then it was 1 minute every hour and when that channel came. went bankrupt, um, it was 10 minutes every hour and it was kind of the main stay and I built this little web platform and I worked on it and I used all of that to really build out the research that was done and what had been happening before in my world. from personal finance journalism, well, there had been Alvin PA, who some people may remember, who was very much an expert on

stop

ping spending, whereas I'm a uh, how to game the system, how it works, do.

I'm sure you understand, accept the complexity that always exists, especially in the early days, that was my motto, it's complex, so let's accept that and give it back to them and that's what turned me on at the time, more now it's about the consumer campaign and so on. I did that and I built it and I had to make it all up. I never read anyone else's books. I still don't look at other websites to try not to take ideas that come from elsewhere and when I first set up the website, if you're talking about where everything came from.

I remember talking to a good friend of mine who now didn't talk about this because he's in that industry about the site and he was like, oh, you got two things wrong. I told him: what did I do wrong? First of all, I said that no one wants to see a face on the front of a money website. You know these are meant to be professional, no and I said, but I think people want to see the whites of the eyes of the person who's doing it and he said and you don't have any ads. I said well, I'm not going to let anyone pay me for what I say, so that was his advice.

I didn't listen like I never do and it happened, but I think that speaks to that. A really intangible but incredibly powerful force of trust, people trust you, so when we were researching this, I was struck by the example of what trust means, which is trustworthiness, credibility and intimacy, people feel like they know you. and that is then divided by self-awareness. Where you spend your time is to get rich or to help other people and I think you tick all of those boxes in an incredibly powerful way that for the listeners, if we understand that confidence can make you happier, it makes you more productive. helps in relationships.

I think it's a topic worth exploring if you don't mind, so I sat in on an energy summit run by David Cameron when energy prices were rising. If only they were where they were, now you know this is a fraction of what we have today and one of the heads of the big energy companies said prime minister, we need your help, people don't trust us and therefore we don't we are passing on the information that we need and we need your help and we need everyone in this room to help ensure that customers trust the energy companies and David Cameron nodded and said yes, absolutely, we need to look at that and I raised my hand and I was at the end of the room, I wasn't quite as big as I am now, if you know what I mean, I was at the end of the room, I raised my hand and they ignored me and I kept my hand up and nothing happened and I kept my hand up loud and finally he turned to me and he said yes and I said: I just want to say that having heard the call for trust I will do my best to make sure that no one trusts you because you are not trustworthy.

The latest data shows that 56% or whatever of people. Those who go to their call centers receive incorrect information. I won't tell people to trust you until you are trustworthy. For me it can't. Trust the market. Trust only comes from

being

trustworthy. It just comes from a history of doing the right thing or at least that's the way it is. try to do the right thing and there is a differentiation between the two as long as people try to do the right thing that is good enough because you know there is a perfection and in fact I think energy companies have become more reliable since so. because they've had to change the way regulation works and the things that happen, they're charging too much, but at least I mean, I'm not saying they're trustworthy, but they become more, it's all relative in terms of when they say something. now it works that way there's one thing we all have in common we all run a gang of two so here we are in the middle of the first high performance race here in east london how important is willpower?

Be it you in your training and preparation for today, what will really benefit me is the sleep tracking which has been huge when I look at the tree and it doesn't tell anyone what I can and can't do so it gives me that information. I really looked at the recovery, so like yesterday I was thinking, oh, I've really done a lot of RS and I thought, what would my recovery be like? Should I do like 5km yesterday? I thought if my recovery is almost 80 or whatever then I'll do it, so I literally did an s because of the day.

I say that if you want to bring out the best in yourself it is essential, so if you want to find your own version of high performance, then we will help you on that journey. I think it's about you understanding the type of ABS. flows from your body and if you are interested in that then it's perfect, it's not about being a fellow elite athlete, it's actually about being kinder to yourself, just give it a try, you're from ATT. I've talked before about the fact that I have career paranoia and to anyone starting out in a company, I would really say this.

I once gave a talk for a friend to some young entrepreneurs and they were just starting out and someone asked me about you know what shortcuts and I said, who can

stop

shortcuts? It helps a small business become a bigger business, but if you want to be a big business and you've

taken

shortcuts, you're going to kill yourself down the road because if you blow that trust early, you have to be trustworthy from day one. Don't think that if you grow a lot by 20 times people won't look back and say, but wait in the first year, didn't you do that?

That's who you really are, so you have to get it right from the moment. start if you intend to know an entity or be trustworthy in that way. I have massive professional paranoia at a ridiculous level that drives my team crazy, it drives me crazy and the best example I can give you is that we had a deal with a telecom provider once that was the best deal on the market was a broadband company I won't give the company it's not fair to say that when we negotiate an incentive voucher for signing up to the site it should always be one that is automatically paid or unclaimed or I won't have it, so we negotiated an incentive voucher for the site, but the company was also giving their own coupon which was a standard deal for non-direct users, so to visit any other site that had another coupon that you had to claim then you had a voucher that you had to claim and then you had an extra one on top we negotiated that you didn't have to claim well we live with that is a standard term and condition.

Then I found out because someone told me that the amount we would be paid if someone clicked on us and didn't claim their Broadband company voucher we would receive more, so we would get paid more money if people didn't claim their voucher, although, for Of course, let's go and tell people to claim the voucher and I said we can't make the deal and they said what do you mean and they said you're not going to encourage people to say we can't make the deal and I don't want them to. no one thinks we have a perverse incentive and although Over My Dead Body we will act in a way to discourage people from claiming their voucher, the fact and they like it, no one will know, it doesn't matter, someone somewhere will know and that.

It's not right for us now that rule still stands. I don't say it at some point because I don't investigate every robbery that happens for something like that that hasn't been carried out, but when I found out it was a red line. for me and we actually said we wouldn't take that extra money and again how did you come to realize that trust is almost what people had because I didn't set up the website to make money. There was no way to make money when I installed it in the first place, that was never the intention.

I never said. You know, I get asked to do entrepreneurial talks all the time. I rarely do it and if I do, I call myself. an accidental entrepreneur, it just wasn't my goal, you know, and I think so. My goal was to be a campaign journalist, you know, and it came through the financial sector, that's what I do, you ask me what I do. I'm a journalist I'm not a businessman I'm not a website owner I'm not any of those things I'm a journalist and I'm a campaign journalist that's what I am so it's not that I was How can I be the most trustworthy person?

It's just that I'm a campaign journalist and I act like a campaign journalist and I try to be a very political party but a political party and that's that paranoia. I hate people. Saying I've done something wrong, nothing bothers me more when someonequestion my motives. I don't care if people call me CW correctly, but when someone asks you, you're only doing this because you know you're vested. interest or something, I mean, that's what makes me see red and the nature of the site and the nature of your work now, when you say about the campaign, it's largely about what I see about typos and I'm interested in Going back to that early age where you noticed inequality around you partly because of the school you grew up in, yeah, so I grew up pretty strangely. in a special education school because my father was the principal and It was a boarding school and we lived above it, so I learned at a very early age the privilege, you know, the privilege I had of having good mental capacity. and being able to learn and not fight um you know I remember crying when I was 15 I won't mention the individuals Nam because it's not fair there was a boy who had spent three years learning to tie his shoelaces, he had severely restricted mental capacity and he tied his shoelaces and I was there the first time he did it and I think there are very few people in this world who would climb a mountain that high, I mean I can still feel it now and and and that you I know you want a definition high performance, that individual three years to tie his shoelaces and the day he did it he simply said yes and most of us who were there, who were not one of, know that our eyes were like my eyes.

Now let's remember, so that's high performance and high performance is always an individual thing, what you're prepared to do and it's based on your aptitude, your ability and how much you want to do it, so yeah, grow into that. The environment taught me a lot, as I say, about privilege and the birth appearance that I was born with and that I didn't have to struggle to learn how to tie my shoelaces. You know, I could never learn to play the piano. I was not born. with that gift, but tying my shoelaces was fine and other things were fine.

I wasn't a consumer advocate when I started out on the topic of saving money when I started out as a money saving expert, my view was that we actually had a bumper sticker that I said, you know a company's job is ruin you, our job is to ruin them, which was really contradictory, is that what you really felt, you know companies spend billions of pounds on advertising and marketing and teaching their staff to sell and consumers don't get nothing. buyer training and no financial education and it's an unbalanced market, so actually some consumer aggression, never personal aggression.

I don't mean that in a bad way, but instead of saying no, I'm not going to let them do that. for me, I'll find, I mean there was a bank account, I think it was Barkley's, it was a terrible bank account, but they were paying people £100 to sign up, even if they didn't switch. correctly because this was before they put in all the criteria that prevents me from doing things like this, so I put in my email and this was in the early days before we hit a million people, but it's still pretty big. I said everyone go and do this and we closed that bank account in 3 hours, which meant that all the people who it wasn't a good bank account for didn't get it, but they all got £100, you know, and that was the use of information to go.

So I had a shift and when the turn came I met a friend of a friend who was a mental health social worker and he told me that they loved my website. I told him that I don't use it for myself, I use it for my clients and that It was an epiphany moment in the early days. My point of view was that if you do this and you succeed, you win, and if you don't, that's your problem, you lose and you get ripped off, and that's what I have. A very different view on that now, you know, one in four people in the country have a mental health problem at some point in their life and people who have mental capacity problems, you know, and they're stressed because you have had a new baby or the beginning. of dementia or you just know that work is really hard right now or you just had a nervous breakdown and there are all those moments in all of our lives when we are not as capable as we normally are and, in fact, Now I believe much more that there has to be a systemic change to protect people rather than just relying on a few individuals to protect themselves and that's been a change since probably around 2000 when I started.

How do we end up in this? So the position that society is against people in many ways is that we have to depend on people like you and be very agile and very smart so as not to be overturned. I think we always have, always have been. So, I think we are more aware of it now and I think part of that is the democratization that the Internet brought. I think the Internet was amazing for Ena because it allowed people to search for instant resources and find information about what they want. I mean the Internet has been an incredible force for good and evil, and I and I believe that that awareness, you know, you had programs like that in life that empowered the consumer, you had Watchdog, which I was a big fan of. fan.

And I think it is an absolute tragedy that the BBC, our public service broadcaster, has reduced that to a concession on a single programme. I mean, I think it's a shame during the cost of living crisis that there's no mainstream now. consumer program that is on Prime Time BBC there is on ITV but there isn't on BBC and I would love the competition and it always did something different watch doog Curative looks at people who have had problems. I am preventive all my time. The goal is to try to prevent problems in the first place or fix them when they have occurred, when there is an Injustice by Design and it is built into the system and they are doing it with full knowledge, that is when I come into action and that is when it is a The story, you know, at the moment I'm working at Motor Finance, uh, claiming what's going to be the next big thing and it's discretionary commissions where lenders were telling car dealers that if they wanted more commissions, they could just raise the rate. of interest and them. they did it but they didn't tell people about the discretionary commission and now there is a massive investigation by the regulator and I think people are going to recover huge amounts of money from anyone who bought a car or a van or other ways of motor vehicles with financing. before 2021, that will be over the next year, the biggest thing that will come to light and there will be billions of pounds returned, systemically deliberate, you know, PPI, 40 billion systemic written, failed sales to scam the most vulnerable members of society, deliberate, deliberate and calculated people. an almost worthless product that is run through a very clever script The lady sells she doesn't even tell people that they got the product saying that when people ask for a loan they will tell you yes, it is fully insured and it is totally insured means we will send you a second product on top of that, that's where all the profits are and we're not even disclosing the fact that we're selling them a second Prof product on top of that and that's why 4 billion was paid for that, although there it is where I like to start the human era.

Every once in a while, when we hear the passion in your voice, like anger at that kind of systemic injustice, I'm interested in knowing what the source of what ignites that anger to want to expose yourself and challenge the system, I think. Sometimes when you understand it, you know when you immerse yourself in it and you live and breathe it, and you know that the people who design these systems are also immersed in it, and then you just think, you bastards, that you have deliberately done something to prophesy. and you're taking that away from a lot of people whose lives are going to be impacted much worse.

I'm not anti-capitalist, you know, I believe in making money, I believe in entrepreneurship, I believe in all those things, but I think you want to be able to sleep at night, so when I made the claim from the bank, they got back a billion pounds, which it was like the predecessor to the PPI claim, which was even bigger and in the early days of both they were I ran simultaneously and I made form letters at the time instead of the tools we use now. I think we did six million form letters for bank charges and more at PPI.

I mean huge numbers and later I met someone who worked for the debt charity. I probably met someone. them around 2010 2011 and they said they had worked in banks in the early days of my banking positions and PPI sample letters and what she told me was fascinating, she said do you know that about 20% of your letters and they do you know? mine are approximately 20% of your letters where it says your name your address your details people would leave that in they would not delete your name your address your details and 5% of your letters people would simply send the letter without adding their details so that people post a form letter, they print it off the site, they say your name, your address, nothing personal, your case, they post it and I find it to be one of the most fundamentally depressing things of my entire career, so here they are with the Britain's largest financial institutions that have deliberately and systemically defrauded millions of ordinary people who already needed to borrow at the time and the 5% of people who had them.

The products trying to get their money back had such limited mental capacity or functional literacy that they didn't understand that they needed to put their details on a form letter. I mean, that's criminal, that's criminal and you sit there, well, someone, someone has. to do something, you know and I remember the last few days of PPI we negotiated alongside to make sure that when they closed it down, the FCA made sure that firms put money in to help vulnerable people claim because it's too difficult. for some people, but I mean, I don't know about you, but I think that's a tragedy, yeah, and we have to know, I'm talking about a lot of things, I'm talking about energy, we don't have a social rate in this country right now I'm a big supporter of a social tar, what does that mean?

Look, we have opted for a competitive model. We have opted for a market competition model in which the change in energy should now make it cheaper without being rude. You two, if you could save 20% on your energy bill and you had to take action and you didn't do it right, that's your problem, you're both perfectly capable of doing it, but when a 90 year old grandmother struggling with dementia starts You are paying the most for your energy bills because you can't access the system and you don't understand what to do and therefore you pay more to boil a kettle than me, that is our problem, it is a society problem and the Easiest you know the finances and the surface of my life, the more I feel the injustice towards people who go the other way so I think there is a I think that's probably the correlative relationship, but it's very interesting that you feel that way because most people feel happier, more relaxed if they have a few Bobs in the bank and the outside world perceives them as successful.

It is very interesting that your emotions are quite different. I think having money in the bank is Great, it doesn't make you happy but it certainly takes away a lot of the negatives and gives you a safety net and allows you to take care of your loved ones and that's incredibly important. It's not so much about the money. I know it's probably a little strange of me to fight against the injustice that people can be as rich as me in the world, right, but I mean, I'm very happy to be. I'm not saying, I'm not saying no and and that's what it means I choose what I do, I don't have to work, I'll never have to work another day in my life, so nothing I do anymore has anything to do with it because I need to go and make money, um, I choose. what I do and why I do it and that is the greatest luxury and the greatest freedom you can have, you know that your life is under your control and interestingly I tend to think that most people who have made a lot of money tend to be. . those who don't stop working because they are motivated, then there is a virtuous circle there.

I think part of the guilt comes because you know, I remember in the pandemic and then my head on my desk crying, you know, weeks on end of the messages that were coming in and the desperation in people's lives um and there will be people sitting there and I say, why don't you give them money? because it doesn't work, because it doesn't matter how much money you have. It takes you five minutes, everything can disappear. I put money into charities and organizations to try to help and I work it that way. You know, my big charity, my money and my mental health charity is about trying to change the system to improve people's lives directly. brochures for some people, you know, it's just spitting in the sea, it's nothing, but I'm sorry when you read that and because I'm the expert in saving money, because I'm the expert in dealing with people's financial problems and not meI don't have them, I think that helps alleviate some of the guilt that came with selling the website and you know I'm still in charge of all the content and strategy.

People think I'm still there and I'm driving them crazy. every day um uh as chief executive these days, but when I sold it and I was going to be publicly rich and I expressed it quite deliberately, yes, because I mean I had an asset that was worth many millions of pounds and I crystallized that asset deris and then I had cash of the same amount. I wasn't richer the next day, I just had it in a different asset class and the site had already been very profitable beforehand, so I was already doing very well financially, but the knowledge because I had grown.

I hadn't, I don't come from a rich background by any means, I knew that publicly I was going to be very rich and I was worried about what people would say, you know, I was torn between whether I would get a reaction from people as good as me. I want the guy who talks to me about what to do with my money to have done very well with his money or they are going to say well how can he how can he have some clue about our lives and it makes me laugh these days because I get people who talk about them You will talk to me from Pol, oh, you get it, Martin, but then Richy Sunuk or anyone else with all their millions in the bank and they, you know, how can they understand it?

And I say, well, it doesn't stop you from understanding it. it doesn't exclude you, as long as you work hard and care, you know, and it also gives you the chance to put money into trying to help people, which I do both in my day job and in my charity funds. moment when someone came to you and said look, you can make three times more money on this website doing this, yeah, a lot, I mean, people talk about when I sold, I refused, you know, and I sold for not make money, what people will say, yes. of course not, I didn't, the pressure was too great, I couldn't execute it, I couldn't control it, I wanted to concentrate on what I was doing, I wanted to take risks, so that was probably the biggest financial problem.

The incentive to take risks instead of making money was a risk, but I also want to say that it was too much. I couldn't face it. My mental health was having problems. I just needed to take some pressure off and selling was incredibly pressured, but. I went to a corporate finance advisor, which is what you do in these circumstances. I know I wanted to do a beauty show and I was like, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa I'm not interested in selling to anyone who sells products. I'm not interested in singing. anyone who has products and applications in the future.

I want someone to subscribe to my editorial code, which is effectively an Ethical Charter that says money saving expert, and as long as I'm there, it's still valid and I'm still legally bound. will always do what is in the interest of its users first, ahead of its own financial concerns, we will never mine data, we will always be free to talk even about the parent entity and all those things were in my absolute red lines for the sale, we just had a buyer because everyone else and some of them, you know, the conversation was about five times what I got and I got a lot of money and four or five times a lot of money is a lot of money, but that's what I did.

I don't want to know when he said do you want don't tell me don't tell me how much they want to give because I'm not interested but we well I was interested but I felt like I didn't want to I know if you know what I mean, yes, but can we explore the topic that you said about the weight of responsibility that you carried because I'm interested in that element of trust that we talked about as you were growing the business and you started having to? Trust that other people have similar ethics and a similar drive and desire for redlining that you had.

How did you learn to do that? Cascade the idea that it is your reputation you are putting in other people's hands. You're very interesting, uh, uh, one of my former senior staff members who came from a very commercial place, it's not as difficult as you think, it's actually okay, uh, and I think this is probably more important, his lesson is more important than mine. I want MS to see and the work I do to trust them because that's my stated core belief which is quite debatable, that's what I believe and that's why I do it, that's what it's all about, simple, I wanted to be very successful. financial and also fundamental beliefs that make the The right thing is that a tough guy came with a very high level.

I'm not sure they want me to mention his name so I won't, but he came from a very commercial place and he was very high in the organization and we spoke after two or three months and said, look, you have to understand that the most The important thing is that we always do the right thing, we always do the right thing for our users and we must protect that above all else and I greatly expected this. Very callously commercial person, he said, "Well, my opinion is that we should always do what is right for our users before anything else," he said because our greatest financial asset is the trust that people have in the site and therefore , we cannot do anything that violates.

That, from his purely business perspective, his idea was that for brand longevity I hate to think about the brand, but for the longevity of the brand, the organization and the site, he came to the same conclusion as I did and we worked incredibly well together. because We had a really shared goal even though we had completely different sets of beliefs driving us to achieve it, so that was never so difficult in trust. I mean, Bas stress is responsibility. I mean, I find it very difficult. I'm always very careful how I talk about my mental health, so I don't go into detail about my mental health.

But often I'm very well and then I have periods where I'm not very well and one of the first periods where Yeah". Not very well, in fact the first period when I didn't feel very well coincided with the bank charges we talked about before and three people in one week called me god and they can't on the subway, you're a God, I do everything what you say. I got everything back from the bank charges and that broke me. When you talk about the praise, people completely broke me. I just couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I kept saying "you." You're a God I do what you say I can't stand it and I know it sounds, it's just a lot of pressure to put on someone, these people you've never met, you know nothing about and I want to do the right thing. and you go, but you're not even telling me that I read everything and made my decision, you're just telling me that I would do it and I'm always trying to empower myself in my head.

I try to empower people to give them the information. and guidance to make the right decision, but I don't want to make that decision for them, the pandemic was very difficult and coming out of the cost of living crisis it was very difficult, for that reason, I'm just talking about the number of people who say , you know, killer phrases, I am, I trust you, I do everything you say, you know, I mean, I find it, I hope there's no arrogance in me saying it, but I find it very difficult and then I go through everything I've I have done wrong in my life because I am a human being.

I have done many things wrong. I don't want to say anything, you know, but a lot of things I feel guilty about. I remember the person I was really shitty to in college, right? and I just think. oh god, that was a horrible thing I did to that person. I remember this and that and, oh my God, they're going to start talking about it and everyone you know, so the more people put you on a pedestal, the more you'll feel. Think, oh God, they just won't do it, you know something is going to happen that will break that and I don't want to break that trust because I think what I do is really important and you would know that I want it and the bigger it is.

I have the hardest thing, so there is incredible pressure and I and I find it very difficult. It's an exaggeration. I can't deal with it sometimes. I can not deal with it. So could you share it with us? Although because I think there are a lot of people who hear this they will feel pressure in different types, this is how it manifests itself. Could you tell us some of the methods you have learned to cope under pressure? I've been asked that question before and, honestly, no. I won't do it because I don't do it well and I don't want anyone to learn from me I do what I can What about your biggest mistakes?

So H look, um, I'm trying to learn the breathing stuff. I'm not very me. I test my breathing. I can't do meditation well. I mean, sleeping is pretty hard. All those things. I try to talk about it. I have had therapy. I've done all those things, but when, when, when it's bad, it's bad. main coping mechanisms huge amounts of exercise walking a lot in addition to exercise always being in a book, that's one of my big rules, so for me it has to be I only have two types of books, it has to be science fiction or fantasy or historical fiction It can't be anything that would trigger thoughts about my world and I must always be in a book.

What I mean by this is that if I'm struggling and stressed I can't start a book, so my rule is anytime. Once I must be reading a book that I'm enjoying because then if I'm struggling and stressed I can stay on it so every time I finish a book I always get into another book as a top priority so I'm always on the half a book, that's one of the few pieces of advice that works and find distractions, find anything that can take your brain away. I don't care if it's playing a game on your phone, which is something I do.

I'll find a game that But distraction is very important, but the problem with that is personal what I deal with. You know, some people have depression. I don't have depression. Mine is based on anxiety. I have anxiety and we all need to find our own different things. I've been to universities and I've given talks about how to be successful and one of them, you know, I say there are four things, talent, but I think a lot more people have talent than they know, hard work and all those people. who say, oh, I only do four hours a day and I've been very successful.

I just think, I think most people are very successful. They work very hard. I mean, I spent a decade working 90 hours a week, you know, that's exactly what I did, that's how I got here when I was building the website myself, that's what I was doing. Focus. I think it's incredibly important. Focus like a laser. You can't be the best at everything. Try to be the best at one thing and then The last thing, I say, which is, without a doubt, the most important, luck, and anyone who tells you that there is not an element of luck in what they do, is again lying to you. .

Don't get better, it's not true, there are many incredibly hard-working, talented and focused people who have not been successful and that is another reason to give it back because I am aware that I have been very lucky, but the advice I have to say. Within all this, do you really want to be so successful? Because there is a cost, there is a cost to trying as hard as I do and other people, and I look at some of my incredibly brilliant contemporaries from college. that on paper they have not been successful like me and that maybe you know everyone when we were leaving I was at the LSC there were a lot of people who were really motivated there, everyone who left thought that they really wanted to be successful and there were many who , probably in three or four years, they were suddenly gone.

Actually, I can make a good income and I can work 9 to 5 and make a good income and then I can have a good life and that's all pretty good for me. I'm not sure I want to push and I was there going Zone Zone Zone I think I have balance at the age of 51 if I compared myself to some of them, I think if you add up the total happiness that each of them has had. They're ahead on the happiness score, so I think people need to know how hard you want to work, how much you really want to be number one at what you do in the big picture, not most people can't be.

So a lot of people will fail and even if you succeed, I'm sure you've met some people who have had great journeys to the highest level of success and high performance and that I haven't had to pay for. but I've certainly paid for it in many ways and, you know, locking yourself in doing spreadsheets for many hours while other people were missing out on social life, missing out on interactions with family, certainly, I was 30 in the running stage of my career and the impact it has had on my mental health with the responsibility that comes with it.

I'm not asking anyone to repent, to feel sorry for me. I just think it's a choice. I also think it's something really important. We speak because we are a podcast that attempts to peel back the layers to reveal the truth. There are plenty of other podcasts and social media platforms telling young people who work 24 hours a day, don't take a break, be relentless, be in a hurry, you know. do something on the side, push yourself to the limit, work, be the hardest worker in the room and I think that never takes luck into account and then it leaves us in a position where there are people who say, "Well, I've done all those things and I still haven't accomplished anything and then it leaves people feelingmuch worse than feeling better it's not a form of empowerment telling everyone else it worked for me it's a form of empowerment like you're saying actually saying that This comes at a price, and I can only speak from my experience.

I'm not saying it will be like this for everyone. I'm sure there are some people who have been down that path, but most of the people I know are I've been successful, I've had a real sacrifice to get there, and actually you know you need to make the decision whether that's right for you. You and I know happiness. I don't think enough attention is paid to happiness as a way to success, so when you think back to when you left LSC with that PIR group you described, did you consciously decide that you were going to sacrifice happiness to achieve this?

And I'm interested to know if you would go back there, so I felt incredibly motivated at that moment. I mean the people who went to university with me, some of them I'm sure will say that I was unbearable while I was at university, so I left school. He was relatively shy and quiet at school. You know, I've never been diagnosed with this. but I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for many years. You know, I never left home until I was 18, so I didn't go out, I didn't go to the party and you had help and no, it was the '80s, it wasn't, it was the '80s, you know, I went back to school after They killed my M and no one said a word to me, it was the 80s, you know.

Me and I couldn't, I couldn't leave the house because I hadn't been in the house when she was killed, so um, uh, so, no, I didn't and I had no life. I didn't have teenage years until I was 18. nothing, I mean, I, this is not an exaggeration, I think I was, I'll tell you, the story is worth telling, the story and I saw. I've never been to a party. He had always made excuses for why he was busy and he was. I wasn't sitting at home because I couldn't and I got to 17 and I was coming out of my shell and thinking I actually want to go and socialize and be with people and I got invited to a role. a girl I shared the bus with and who you know and she said to me: why don't you come? and you know you're going to meet people, so I really wanted to go to her party and then I thought, what do you wear to a party?

I'm 17. Don't know. Should I wear a suit? Should I wear jeans? It just seems like he didn't know because he had never been because as of two days ago he was 12 years old. I hadn't been anywhere and I didn't know it and my sister didn't live at home and I didn't trust my father and stepmother, right? I didn't think they'd meet you because I'm 17 and I'm like, oh, you won. I don't know and they said, "Let's drive, let us know what to do with CU." I was scared, so when I was 18, I mean, I didn't really have experience with anything other than going to school and being depressed, right, clinical depression, depression, causal depression, so I quit at 18 and then I had this kind of eclectic year that I went.

I went to Camp America and worked at a summer camp, uh uh, which was pretty hard. I was feeling incredibly homesick until the last few weeks I had this wonderful moment at a pantomime they did where I was supposed to be the sound guy backstage at St and the women of whoever was going to play the Fairy Godmother weren't there this week and They told me: could you read their nines? and I was very shy and I still am very shy. I'm just now an interpreter, there's a difference and they asked me and they said well, you read the lines and I went, I said, okay, I'll read the lines and something broke in me and instead of saying Stato, so I said, I went poof and I came out and did it. interpreter. and they were falling down, everyone was laughing and saying, will you do that tomorrow?

You will do it? So I said, "Okay, I've never been on stage before, I've never done anything like that before" and I did it and I thought "wow" and then I worked as a video operator with a lovely group of graduates who took me to pubs and clubbing for the first time. I mean, I didn't know what you did in pubs, so I knew and I was quite honest with them, and I would know. I wasn't with my friends from school and they took me out and said, well, come with us and then I worked, then I worked as a salesman, that is, I think that anyone who wants to work in a business should have to do the mandatory service as a salesman, I think it should be mandatory what you were selling, caravan awnings, it doesn't matter what you sell, you are selling it well and it was about learning how to communicate an incredible lesson in communication and right before that I had worked as a bar worker to learn more, so I worked in a bar and then I returned to Camp America for the second time with a totally different level of confidence.

I became head of staff entertainment doing shows all the time doing that kind of stuff and then I appeared on The University and I had flipped like a pancake, so having been a shy person and never having gone out, I was full of this exuberance. and confidence that I would say bordered on arrogance, but it wasn't bordering on it, it was just arrogance and I could do anything in The first week of college I ran to be president of the university and I got it and I ran for three other positions. I had three positions with him in my first week at the University, you know, and I liked the student. politics and at the end I was student president and I was, you know, the loudest and most dominant person in the University, I mean, I cared about what I did, I loved what I did, but boy, I was out there and that's why I was a It was a very different phase, but spinning like a pancake is the best way I can describe it, but you're not kind enough to yourself, are you?

And that's obvious by the way you talk and the little things you say when you talk. about being arrogant in college. I sit here listening to that heartbreaking story from years past and think, "My God, you deserved to be that person." University, maybe you were compensating for time L. Nobody knew, yeah, but now we know, right? So you can look back on that now and say: Yes, I was out there, yes, I made a lot of noise, yes, I was a brush, yes, my voice was heard, yes, I impacted the people around me because you had spent five years without leaving your house like that.

It was the moment you deserve it man, it stuck with me, best example I can give you CU, you should have always had some color for this. This was a little later, when I went to do my graduate degree in broadcast journalism and again. I had been president of my union at this point and had been quite successful, so I had a little more confidence, but I was still in that absolute, you know, nothing can touch me. The face is gone and my friend Carrie tells her story and they all laugh at me, all the people who did my course, who were still a lot of my great friends, so we went to the course and it's a broadcast journalism course and we're Between all the journalists who are signing up, there are around 2,300 people in the room. and we leave and it's just one registration day and the course starts the next day, so I said, I met one of the other people who signed, I said it's a shame we can't all go and meet each other.

It's not like that and they said yes, but I mean how we wanted to know, there are no cell phones or Whatsapp or anything like that at the moment, well I think we had cell phones, but there is no no and he said how was he going to do it. I said oh. okay, I stood up, I said to everyone in the broadcast course, I have a very loud voice, I won't do everyone in the broadcast course, in 30 minutes we go and I name the local pub, we will be there, we will see. you're there so we can all beat before the start of the course and everyone stopped and looked really and they went and they all left, how did you do that?

I mean, obviously, it's easy how many people showed up, everyone, there you go, there are a lot of beautiful things that people can think of from this conversation. I mean, I think one of them is that we're not fixed. You know, there will be people listening to this who are maybe more towards broken than towards the right place, and I think. It's important that they hear your story and understand that things don't necessarily last forever and you can't necessarily fully recover, but you can get back to a place of happiness, but more than that, and you know, it's me.

I am a patron of the charity uh bement for young children and unfortunately I have seen children who have children of some friends of mine who lost their parents very sadly and one of my messages now, when I look back on what happened I want to say, apart from getting advice. Oh, for God's sake, get counseling. Have someone to talk to. There are excellent techniques for dealing with pain. You know nothing will fix it, but they will allow you to handle it better. But I have a lesson. For anyone grieving at any age, don't scold yourself for smiling.

I can't tell you enough. You know you lost someone yesterday. You have had the biggest tragedy of your life. If something happens that makes you smile, your reaction that day is: stop because you shouldn't be styling, screw that M, screw that the most important thing you know is someone who went through childhood trauma, the most important thing is Grab every smile you can grab and if it comes, don't fight your smiles. Never try to be less happy than you could be and don't feel guilty for being happy. I mean, make sure it's appropriate if there's someone else there who's going through a different time, but don't fight your smiles and if I could go back and say anything to that horribly injured young man.

It was just going and trying to be happy. You know, I'm not sorry and I did it. I felt like my responsibility was to cry and be miserable and I think we need to change our gratitude. and we need to be open and we need to talk. I'll tell you a final story if you want and when I worked at summer camp and I'm Jewish and it was a Jewish summer camp I worked at summer camp and unbelievably There was a little boy in the division that I was working at. The next year I went and I was head counselor and we got a call from the division head and me and they told us that unfortunately his mother had just passed away. of cancer and his father had passed away the year before and the new parents and he was 11, almost 12, which is exactly the same age as me and Keith, who was the division head, said one of you needs because By the way, the rules that one of you must follow when told and one of you needs to pack for him, so we flipped a coin and I won.

I packed well, which I was very grateful I packed for him. um and we packed him up and then he came back to camp a week later and the next thing on Friday night they did this very low level religious service and the rabbi that was taking the service said now some of you will know that this boy has returned you know, and he said his name, all eyes, there are 400 children, they turn to him and they all would like to get up and do it, he is an 11 year old boy and be silent and I was sitting near him and I saw his face just wrinkle and I felt a wave of anger.

I just walked over and picked him up. I picked it up and got it out of there and you know, and I would ask you. I apologized to the deceased rabbi he was. Okay, I finally realized it and just said the last thing I needed was 400 people pointing it out. You know, no one talked to me, but you also don't want to stand up and say, "Oh, there's a kid who's an orphan now." it's effectively what was said and attacked and we just went and sat and chatted so you know, smile when you can yeah, absolutely thank you so much for sharing so much with us, like you started this conversation by saying you left too.

Yes, about five times so far. I think, although you know, this podcast is called high performance and I think sometimes people come to it for serious life lessons and how I can improve. I think sometimes just open and honest vulnerability is really what high performance is. and I think you're a perfect example of someone who is willing to sit down and share everything you have because I think it's really valuable to other people. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you. A real pleasure.