Diary Of A CEO Responded To My Takedown. I Wasn't Ready For This

0:00 So, the other day on Instagram, I got a message from Steven Bartlett. >> This week, we're going to do something different on this podcast. This podcast is about this podcast. >> And some of you might know the backstory. so in January, I made a 30-minute video about Diary of a CEO. You know what's wild is that right now we are living through the most documented era of success advice in the history of the human race. Every morning, millions of people wake up, plug in their earbuds, and mainline interviews with the most successful people on the planet. And the argument in the video was roughly this. Steven's podcast claims to be about how to succeed as a CEO and, you know, in life in general. But I say that isn't it isn't what it claims to be. I say it uses a superficial representation of success to sell you products. This product called Daily Greens is one of the most highly requested products at Hu, but it's never been sold in the UK before until now.

1:04 >> And then a few weeks ago, I said a shorter version of that thesis in a podcast interview with Jimmy the Giant, right? And the clip went viral on Instagram and got a million views. >> Is Diary of a CEO keeping people poor? >> Yeah, totally. Diary of a CEO is basically gaslighting you into thinking that you are the reason that you're not getting rich. His his book is like the 33 laws of business and success. The idea that there's this successful thing.

1:30 I wake up at 5 in the morning. I cold plunge my dog. I kind of like I bathe in warm piss. But you know what that optimizing does? The psychology of optimizing. Firstly, it tells you it's all your fault. If you're not doing it, you haven't got it because of that reason, right? And so it gives you a framework to blame yourself. That's first, right? Which is sinister. >> And then Steven Bartler replied, "Four laughing emojis. That is not the title of my book and it doesn't mention any of those things. Rolling on the floor, crying, laughing emoji. But yes, my guests talk a lot about how to be healthy on my show, which I think is a great goal to have. We also talk about aliens, politics, business, investing, football, AI, and lots of random things.

2:11 And honestly, I was a bit surprised to get it because firstly, why is a man with an audience of tens of millions and according to Forbes, $45 million a year annual income from his podcast alone doing five emojis worth of not caring about a comedian that he's never heard of at half past midnight? Secondly though, why does he feel the need to defend himself? Like, what am I going to actually do to him? I'm a nat on the elephants behind. By the way though, it was only one word that I got wrong from his book title. I called it the 33 laws of business and success. It's the 33 laws of business and life. I sincerely apologize for understating the ambition, but even then it doesn't change anything about what I was saying. Like, and I found the whole thing really weird, right? So, I replied, "I can't be sure this is a real Steven Bartlett because you didn't mention Hule."

3:11 I'm sorry. I couldn't help myself. I did the cheap social media thing and took a pop. But actually, I wish I hadn't taken that pop because the more I thought about it, the more the whole interaction kind of bothered me because firstly, who are either of us actually talking to there? And I realized something that is going to take this video to explain. And this is a big one. And because of that, there are more studies than usual.

3:39 >> So this week, I'm going to tell you the truth about everything. After all, this podcast was founded on truth and honesty. And I've not seen any other podcasters tell you the things that I'm about to tell you about this business, about this medium, and about this industry. >> Like me, you're probably going to start off thinking that this video is about Steven Barlet. and then you're probably going to think it's about me, but what it's actually about is way more up than that.

4:04 >> So, without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. >> So, the first question I want to ask is, why did I feel so comfortable taking the piss out of someone that I haven't met? And the answer is because I feel in a weird and completely one-sided way I kind of know him.

4:35 So in 1956, two researchers at the University of Chicago who are Donald Horton and Richard Wall were watching this brand new thing called television and they began to notice something odd about how audiences talked about presenters. People described presenters like they were friends. They even worried about them. They felt, and this was the word that Horton and Wall kept hearing, they felt known by them. And they gave it a name. They called it the parasocial relationship, which is a relationship with all of the like cognitive machinery of intimacy running on one side only. like a phone call where you've been talking for an hour and the other end is just a recording of somebody going, "-huh. -huh. Yeah.

5:24 Yeah. Oh my god, you're so right, Barry. -huh. -huh. Yeah. Oh my god, you're so right, Barry." -huh. -huh. Yeah. Oh my god, you're so right, Barry. How many of you would notice that? Well, you're not all Barry, I guess. And that was 1956. The screens were a size of a biscuit tin and there were two channels on and off. However, the setup that they were describing is now in our pocket 24 hours a day. Psychologically personalized to our nuanced tastes and preferences by an algorithm that because of big data actually knows us better than we know ourselves. And Steven Bartlet is on that thing a million times a day. Hey there, it's just you and me here. Just us. Just the two of us. Come on. Let's be parasocial together. Just you and me.

6:18 There's nobody else here. In fact, forget about the other viewers. They don't get me like you do. You really get me. Come on. Let's be parasite. Yeah. I don't want to carry on with that. That feels wrong. I'm sorry just to you though. Just sorry to you. Not anybody else. Everyone Anyone else that's watching this, it's not this isn't for them. I don't feel bad for them. I feel bad for you. No, I can't do it. It feels too bad.

6:49 so two Stanford researchers, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, spent years studying this and wrote it up in a 1996 paper called the media equation. And what they found, to put it bluntly, the human brain evolved over millions of years in a world where every face that you saw was physically present. And every voice belonged to someone who could see you back. We evolved in a world, our brains evolved in a world in which the anything that seemed real was real. If you saw a face talking to you, it was attached to a real person. There weren't video images and such. If you saw a spear coming at you, it wasn't a picture of a spear. It was a real spear.

7:28 So those ancestors that pondered the question is it reality or not are not our ancestors. They got killed off right into the ones who won the evolutionary battle are the ones who took things at face value. Who saw a face and said it's a person heard a voice it's a person. So natural experience. Along comes this tricky 20th century media. And our old brains are not up to the task of saying aha turn the switch on and off. Up media real life media real life. There is no switch in the brain that does that. So what basically happens is these these new media tap into our old brains and our old brains our new brains can overcome that. So we respond socially and naturally very powerfully and very richly because it was exactly the right thing to do until this tricky media came along.

8:19 >> Screens are evolutionarily speaking about 11 seconds old. So the brain runs its old software. A person on a screen is processed by your brain as deep as a person in the room. Because if you thought about it for a second, I mean, it really doesn't make any sense because you're looking directly at someone constantly. I mean the the the if you looked at a human being in front of you the same way you looked at a screen just with the intense silent not saying anything just watching taking in you know that's wrong. You couldn't do that to a person but a screen you can just go like right now you're looking at me I'm looking at you it's a fierce amount of eye contact right here and you would never do that to someone else. You would never just passively listen, let alone watch.

9:13 Just watch. Carry on talking. I'm listening. I'm just taking it in. I am watching you. You are my little podcast. Because you know, modern you knows that the camera can't see you, but your amigdala does not. And that old software, it's the reason why you talk back to the TV. Right. Right. We've all done it. talk to the television. If you talk to your toaster like that, you'd be committed, right? Call that toast, you can't. But actually, while we're on the subject, spare a thought for how weird this whole arrangement is from my end, right? I'm sat here in my flat talking to literally nobody. Like, this isn't what I normally do when I'm at home. Like, and and also, this isn't exactly me either. This is a performance. I'm a comedian. I've learned how to talk to audiences and seem natural or relatively unnatural.

10:05 Like it's it's all a big con. Like normally, for example, I blink a lot more. Yeah. I don't keep my head this still and and I don't do unbroken 30 minute monologues. I'm actually often mostly quiet. Me doing this completely relies on someone outside this room seeing it. Because if nobody watches this video, I'm literally a man in his flat talking earnestly to a thing. For all the live feedback I'm getting right now, I might as well be doing it to aing toaster. And it's actually 33 laws of business and life. I apologize for understating the ambition.

10:49 So, thanks for watching. I mean it. Because it's only your presence on the other end of the screen that stops this being a full-on mental breakdown. Cheers. But I got distracted. I'm talking about your end of this because you have access to me in a way that I don't have to you. Like the fact that you're gaping at me right now parasoially without any consequence for you is evolutionarily speaking unnatural. I mean they should call it parasocial media really, right? because that's I don't know if I told you how much I regret moving in here. And on top of that, there's something else I discovered, right? Because this can actually be shown on an MRI. So, in 2005, a neuroscientist called Rodrigo Kean Kakora. I mean, it's amazing that he got any science done, right? He must the amount of sex he must be having with that name. Anyway, my name's Barry.

11:45 Rodrigo Kanakora published a paper in Nature that accidentally became famous because his team were studying single neurons. Are you a single neuron? Mhm. Not for long. And they found cells that fired for one specific person. >> Surgeons put electrodes inside the brain. For clinical reason, these electrodes end up being most of the time in the hippocampus, which is an area that is well known to be involved in memory. Through these electrons, we can record the activity of multiple neurons each of them up to 100 neurons simultaneously or so. And then we do very simple experiments. For example, we just show pictures and see if any of the neurons we're recording respond to any of the pictures we're showing many years ago doing this type of experiments.

12:31 Actually, when I started doing this experiment, I found a neuron that will fire to any picture of Jennifer Aniston and nothing else. So, I show 87 pictures. Seven of these pictures were of Jennifer Aniston. the neuron fire to each of the seven pictures of Jennifer Aniston and not to the 80 pictures of many other people and that's what people in neuroscience now call the Jennifer Franiston neuron. I mean that was the first one but the interesting fact was that the neuro was not fing to a picture specific about Jennifer was fing to her to the concept Jennifon then we carried on doing experiments and then we found not only the fire to the pictures of a person they can also fire to the name of the person if I write the name the neuron fires if I write any other name the neuron doesn't fire and something that may sound trivial but it's not trivial at all they also found they also respond to the spoken name if I say the name of a person if I say Jennifer Aniston the neuro will also fire completely different sensory modality because now you are not seeing the stimulus you are hearing the stimulus the neuron is not fing to the stimulus itself it's fing to the meaning of the stimulus it's not fing to this picture or this other picture of Jennifer Aniston or Halib or Oprah Winfrey whoever it is that the neuron fires to is far to the concept and it's kind of like detach from the sensory stimuli so it's fing to the meaning >> each person you know and have heard of in your life has their own individual brain cells. We all have dedicated neural real estate to Jennifer Aniston.

14:01 Like think about what that means. You have brain cells whose full-time job is a woman from friends. She doesn't pay rent and she's been squatting in your brain since the ' 90s. And somewhere in your head right now, there are sales on the Steven Bartlett account. You've given him an office in your skull that he doesn't pay rent for and has never been in.

14:32 Nice meeting you. >> Steven has dedicated neurons in all of our brains. >> Well done, Steven. You win this time, my friend. Or not my friend. YOU'VE DONE IT AGAIN. SO, the obvious question, right, is why evolution would build a brain that remembers, has neural space for individual celebrities, just random people that you've seen on television. And the answer is, well, it wouldn't. Evolution wouldn't do that. Evolution built a brain for a world where this just couldn't happen. Where the only people that you know are those that you meet in person. They're right in front of you. And those people needed dedicated areas in your brain. The anthropologist Jerome Barkau made this point back in 1992 for the entire history of our species minus the last century. Anyone whose face you recognized, whose voice you knew, whose gossip you followed was by definition a member of your own community. Knowing about someone was knowing someone. There was no other kind of knowing. So when a team led by Charlotte Debbaca surveyed 838 people in 2007 asking why we consume celebrity gossip, the answer that came back fit entirely our evolutionary priorities. Why do we follow celebrities? Well, we follow celebrities using the same mental machinery our ancestors used to study the most successful members of their own tribe.

16:06 the best hunter, the best forager. You watch them, learn from them, gossip about them. Our brains can't distinguish high status member of my tribe from man on a screen with good lighting and a supplements company. Debbaca and her team found that exposure to someone through the media alone was enough to make people process celebrities as members of their own social network. And that's it. Just exposure, just seeing it. And the brain just runs the program.

16:43 I know this person. Simple as that. Which surely reframes every success podcast on Earth, by the way. Right. Diary of a CEO is 50 million people gathered around a fire watching the best hunter explain the hunt. >> >> Welcome to Diary of Hunter Gatherer, where I talked with some of the biggest and best gatherers and best hunters. What are their gathering tips? Can they hunt and gather? Next guest gathered more berries in a single moon than most people gather in three moons.

17:21 Uggh. How are you so good at gathering? I look at ground where the berries are. Look at ground where berries are. Most podcasters make their money from reading out adverts in the middle of a podcast episode. And most podcasters get these advert deals from some kind of podcast advertising company that acts as a middleman between the podcaster and the brand. >> This episode is brought to you by Rocks.

17:54 When you need something harder than wood, I recommend rocks. Rocks. So, in 2007, three researchers, George Newman, Gild Desendrich, and the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research with a title that, well, sounds like a podcast for literalists. And it's called Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects. And they ran experiments, right, on what people would pay for objects owned by famous people. And they found that people pay significantly more if the object had been touched by the famous person. Like a jumper worn by someone famous is worth more than an identical jumper just from their wardrobe that they never wore. And right, this is my favorite detail in the entire kind of study. The value drops if the object has been washed. Yeah.

18:53 Washed. So essentially human beings will will pay extra in actual money for celebrity residue. The essence of the person soaks into the wall and sterilizing it rinses the celebrity magic out. >> >> Snoop Dogg is online. He's selling a halfsm smoked blunt with a as an online memorabilia auction. A gin and juice rapper smoked this thing in front of an official authenticator earlier in the year. Right now, the the half smoke blend is going for a little over $2,000.

19:54 And there's a word for objects that carry the transferable essence of a person. And that word is relic. The medieval church, if you didn't know, ran an entire economy on relics in particular on bones of saints. Bones, actual bones of the saints. And the thing is, we look back at those medieval religious people in our age and we think they'reing idiots. Like, and yet we are them.

20:25 >> Taylor Swift, yesterday we told you about the singer sold out and rain soaked Saturday show at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Well, now listen to this. That rainwater is up for sale. Yes, jars of droplets from Taylor's Bejeweled Aerys tour. Look at this. >> Oh my god, >> they're popping up online for hundreds of dollars. >> In a series of studies published in 2002 and 2003, >> researchers developed the celebrity attitude scale. And what it does is it grades celebrity worship in three ascending levels, like the fan equivalent of a defcon system, right? So level one is entertainment social, which is I enjoy talking about him with my mates. That's level one. Level two is something that they called intense personal.

21:15 Yes. Well, I agree with him implicitly and I trust his opinion. And level three is what the researchers with the calm of scientists called borderline pathological. If he asked me to do something illegal, I would do that thing. That's the example on the actual questionnaire. And there are brain studies to match. By the way, like researchers have measured fans brain waves and found that their neural response to their favorite celebrities face scales with their score on that worship questionnaire. Like the devotion is visible on an electrode.

21:54 And the thing is your body knows all this. Like not your brain, your body. Like you don't think it. You don't think worship. You feel it. You don't think, "Oh, I love St. Taylor Swift." You feel loyalty to Taylor Swift. Like, have you ever seen like footage of people meeting their idol? Like the crying, the shaking hands, the knees going Rock, >> my man. My hero since I was like 5 years old.

22:37 >> Did we get the shot? >> What's up, dude? >> Did we get the Can we get the picture? >> No tears. No tears. Mary, we noticed during soundcheck we noticed. There she is. You were crying. >> Yeah. Hi, Harry. I was crying. >> Mary and cousin Harry noticed that you were crying. He's going on tour this summer and he'd like to give you VIP tickets. Don't Don't hurt yourself.

23:08 Don't hurt yourself. Are you okay here? These are No, I'm not kidding you. That's from Mr. STYLES. >> I LOVE YOU. I don't know if you ever heard this, but I think there's footage out there where when the Beatles would do gigs, a lot of the fans were so overwhelmed by the sight of the Beatles, not only would they scream so much that other people couldn't hear the music, but they would wet themselves. Like there was talk around certain venues of like, oh yeah, you know, we really have to mop up after the Beatles have performed because people lost control of their bladders while watching their idols. That isn't what happens when you meet people.

23:49 That's what happens when you meet gods. >> Mr. Pit and Jolie recently walked through the air, which was bottled in a mason jar at the premiere of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The Mason jar with potential celebrity breath was initially listed for $9.99, but it quickly gathered traction and was sold for an incredible $75,000. >> So, two psychologist, Jonathan Hate and Daca Countner, who Dacer, by the way, I mention so often that I should really call him a friend of the channel at this point, but obviously Dacer doesn't know it. But they are my mate and I'll do something illegal for him. Just ask me, Dacer. I'm here for you. I'll do it like that cuz you're my mate. I'm level three for you, Daca. Bit much. So anyway, Jonathan hate and my friend Daca Kelner who I die for, they mapped the emotion of awe in a 2003 paper and their definition of awe was awe is what you feel in the presence of something so vast that your existing mental model can't hold it. And your brain actually has to rebuild reality for it. It's like the the emotion that humans built for storms, for mountains, for gods, for Steven Bartlett. And here's the thing, though. You're not nervous and tongue-tied because of Steven Bartlett.

25:05 Not at all. You're nervous and tonguetied because of the years of relationship that you've already had with him when you meet him. Because if you meet Steven Bar, you spent 200 hours with him. He's been in your kitchen, on your commute, in your earbuds. your headphones in bed at 2 am. Get out of my bed, Bartler, you sex pest. You have a rich, deep, textured relationship, right? And it's entirely with a character that your own brain wrote using his face. Like when people meet their hero, they often say, "Well, he wasn't what I expected." Of course he wasn't, cuz you only ever met the myth that you created. Like, he can only ever disappoint you because he's competing with a version of himself that you authored. And you're a very generous writer. You've got a really great imagination, but that's not who he is.

25:55 And that's half of this problem, right? Is that the relationship is real on our side and non-existent on his side. >> I have something to give you. Will you read it? >> Yes. >> Will you personally? Not now. >> Yes, I will read it. Yeah. >> It's where like your podcast caught me at a moment in my life where >> Did you go on? >> I could have went either way and >> it's really transformed my life and I >> No, I I mean from the bottom of my heart, you have no idea how much you transformed my life. Steven occupies the psychological position of someone I know without me having to take any of the restraints or actually any of the duty of care that might come with actually knowing him because I don't know him. Of course I don't. Everything that I've just described is why I don't know him.

26:38 The parasocial wiring, the dedicated neurons, the relic logic, the all response, I'm not responding to him. I'm responding to my idea of him. It's as if I know him, but I don't. He's just this big thing that I can poke at. He may as well be my toaster. And all of that is why I felt safe enough to take the piss out of Steven Butler online. Hell, it's why I made a video about him in January. Like, cuz I know the voice, the face, the mannerisms, the agenda, the persona. I mean, I can actually physically imagine him writing that reply on Instagram. Oh, someone someone's got the the title of my book wrong. No, no, no. Of life. And we talk about aliens.

27:17 Oh, people. But that's not fair, is it? Because in that moment when he's texting and responding, like he's just like me. He's a dude behind a keyboard having a feeling, right? So, all of this tells you what he meant to me. But what do I mean to him? Jesus Christ.

27:59 >> Guys, dude, please stop. Stop. I'm not going to sign anything. Okay, I literally have to go. I'm sorry. That was a lot. That scared the out of me. >> For real. I'm just a human being. Okay. >> Please stop me. Please. I'm going I'm going I'm going home. >> Good night. All right. stand maybe as you stand and wait for your turn. >> Humans can maintain roughly 150 meaningful relationships in our head. There's a lot of research on it. It's called the Dumbar number which is roughly the amount of people that as we evolved were in the clan. We're in the tribe. And it really has been a stable number of the the number of people that we can meaningfully interact with in our lives. They might be online. They might be in your family, but it's the number of people that you can care about. Now, Steven Bartlett is known by millions.

28:52 he can be a person to all of us, but we cannot all be people to him. And yet, for about a minute at 12:30 one night, I was real to him. Like, he felt the need to reach out to me and respond to that clip. Why? Why did the emperor respond to the graffiti? >> If I had a greater sense of perspective, I don't think things would bother me at all. I think so. When I say this, I want to be clear that I'm not the type of person that will ever reply to anything.

29:22 I'm not the if I see something and it's Steve Bara is a whatever. I won't reply to it. I won't get involved, but it'll affect you. >> Well, I'll think about it and I'll think about it for a little bit longer than I I'd like to. Even if there's chaos outside of me, I want to find that calm within my chaos. I want it to be a place that I can go back to as a choice. And if it's not, then I'm going to be dragged like a plastic bag in the wind for the rest of my life around by whatever someone else is saying or doing. There are practical steps like change the notifications on Twitter so you can't see most of the stuff which I've done that on LinkedIn and my other channels. I don't search my name ever, but there's always going to be a friend that sends me something.

29:58 >> Steve, have you seen this? >> So in 1995, the psychologist Mark Liry published what's called the sociometer theory. >> We stumbled upon a finding. I started doing research on social rejection. the area of people's efforts to be accepted and how they react when they're rejected was really underressearched. And so we started doing a lot of studies looking at people's emotional reactions when they feel like they're being left out or rejected or ostracized. And what we began to find in a couple of studies, we simply put in a measure of self-esteem, just wondering what would happen. And every one of those studies when people felt rejected their self-esteem went down. And most of the time when they felt accepted, their self-esteem went up. And it was almost like it was a I started thinking of it as a gauge almost an internal psychological gauge of how accepted or rejected I felt. And that led us to to develop the theory you just mentioned called sociometer theory suggesting that self-esteem is our internal gauge of the degree to which we currently at the moment feel accepted or rejected by other people because it seems to go up and down like a fuel gauge. If we have a lot of acceptance in our tank, we feel good about ourselves and if we have rejection, we feel less good. If you think about the importance of having good connections with other people and being accepted and being valued and being integrated into groups, we have to have a monitoring system that tells us when we may have done something that would damage our relationships with other people that would lead them to devalue us or reject us. And in my view, self-esteem is part of that system.

31:39 >> Self-esteem is an instrument on the survival dashboard in our brains. And it evolved because for our ancestors, rejection by the group was a death sentence, an actual death sentence. We needed each other to survive. So we all come fitted with a neurological needle that twitches at every frown in our social group. But obviously that gauge was built for a village of 150. But Steven Butler's gauge is now wired to the entire English-speaking internet. And you might say, "Well, actually, him, the criticisms come weighted against the compliments surely, and there's loads of compliments. He's getting his. Surely they balance out." But actually, no, because it's been shown that the needle barely moves for compliments because there's a second piece of wiring on top.

32:32 So, in 2001, Roy Balmeister and colleagues published a review whose title pretty much says it all really, bad is stronger than good. And across every single psychological domain they examined, negative information outweighs positive. Losses beat gains. Criticism beats praise. One cruel sentence outlives a thousand kind ones. >> Evolution selects based on what enables you to live longer and reproduce more. And avoiding bad things is more important than finding the good things. I mean, let's consider some some food that might be good or might poison you. well, it's more important to avoid being poisoned if you happen to miss out on a good meal. That has some cost. but but one meal missed won't kill you. Whereas one poison dose can kill you. In a sense, life has to win every day. Death only has to win once.

33:33 >> Which is why, you know, like in a gig, you remember the one heckle and none of the laughs. Like I've done decades in comedy and I can tell you I can pretty much tell you the postcode of every single place that I died on stage and none of the encores and just be clear there have been thousands of encores is just I can't remember them. Okay, >> we learn a lot more from bad events than from good ones which is why this idea we should shield children from failure and bad experiences. I don't think this is a a healthy development. it's it's well known. You you you think harder about what went wrong, what could I fix, what could I do differently after something bad. A success kind of tells you, well, you did everything fine. No need to think anymore about it. No need to analyze or pick things apart.

34:20 so that's the sense in which we we we process information more thoroughly. I was going to may say too with the brain stuff I think some of it we covered in the original article the late great John Kyopo was studying this and he had several papers showing that almost as soon as as you see something you know whether it's so as soon as the brain knows what something is very soon after it sees it hundreds of a second it knows also then whether it's good or bad and if it's bad it it there's more activation.

34:56 There's more processing. Oh, pay attention to that. Figure that out. >> So, Steven Bartlett, arguably the most listened to man in Britain in bed at midnight and among the 100,000 daily worshippers, there is one clip of a comedian saying the empire is built on And the ancient gauge of self-esteem, the one that kept his ancestors alive on some plane or other starts screaming, "The tribe is turning. The tribe is turning." And then there's a question of status. Now, I've spoken a lot in the past about what power does to the brain.

35:32 And actually, you can see in this video here or this video here, but what about fame? >> Why am I unhappy? Okay. Okay. Stephanie Gaga hybrid person, why are you unhappy? Why is it that you want to quit music? >> As a Beatle, we made it and there was nothing to do. We had money, we had fame, and there was no joy. >> In 2009, Donna Rockwell, a psychologist who'd worked around celebrities for years, and David Charles published a study in the journal of phenomenological psychology, built on a long interviews with massively famous people.

36:10 And out of their interviews came a consistent language and perspective on fame. Fame arrives in phases. First the lovehate rush. Then and this is the word celebrities use addiction. Then acceptance. Then adaptation. And the adaptation part if you read it is the sad part. Because adaptation in the world of fame, being famous is permanent mistrust.

36:44 Every new person and most old people in your life become a suspect really. What do they want? Who will they tell? It's isolation inside a crowd. And really, I kind of feel like that finding should be pinned above every TV and film and YouTube studio in the world because the famous person, their personality splits. They develop what participants in the survey themselves described as a separate entity. The celebrity self, which is a character wearing their face who must be fed, maintained, staffed, and protected like a second business, while the original person operates it from inside.

37:30 >> Spending days just shaking people's hands and smiling, taking selfies feel shallow to my existence. I have a lot more to offer than my image. >> One of Rockwell's participants described fame as something that happened to them that you then have to live alongside. an entity wearing your face that you work for. >> I thought that all would be helped and healed and soothed by fame >> because when I get famous >> and I will be less lonely and I will be understood and I will be loved and that love will go in and heal any of the broken parts. And then I came to see that it was actually quite isolating >> because that's what people say, isn't it? I want to be famous. What do you want? I want to be famous. Oh, do you mean by that you want to be isolated in every single area of your life whenever you're in a group of people in particular and that you're actually kind of working for your own image of yourself? Is that what you mean? Fame?

38:22 Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, that's what I want. All right, don't question me. I want fame. Whatever it is, I'll take that. >> Disregarded as a human, this is what it's like. So, I'm just trying to go to dinner and I've asked these people several times to get away from me. Step to the side. Step to the side. >> This person I've asked several times to to go away and they will not. They're hiding their face because they're ashamed because I've asked them these are all the people that are >> Can you sign completely disregarding all of my >> first time to see you?

39:01 Then go away. Happy to see you. >> So, I want all of you kindly to please leave me alone. Yeah, sure. >> Following me. >> Can you give her something nice? >> The sociologist Irving Gooffman that you might have heard of, like in his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, described all social life as theater. Like everyone performs a kind of front stage self and everyone has a backstage, right? The dressing room where the costume comes off and the face relaxes. Like you have one. It might be your kitchen at midnight, your mates from school, the version of you that your only your sister sees, or the backstage basically is where you're self-reovered. Like, you know it. Yeah.

39:42 But if you're famous, you don't get one. When millions of people know your face, the theater follows you onto the street, the gym, the hospital, the funeral, even into your family home. >> It's actually way easier to get in front of celebrities than most people think. And here are the three steps I took to get in front of CVB. Step one, find out where they're going to be and get yourself there. The key here, be prepared. You never know when the opportunity is going to come. So, always have your cards, samples, whatever ready. Be concise. You want to know what you want to say to them. Practice your lines. You've only got a few sentences to tell them what you're about. Get them excited and not sound like a lunatic stalker. I get to walk around in life how I want, but there probably aren't that many rooms in the world where Steven Bartlett doesn't have to be Steven Bartlett TM, the brand, and that's pressure.

40:32 >> You can't come to work and be authentic. Like, no one wants me to come to work when I'm I'm underslept and be my authentic self. >> You probably experienced this as well, but there's like an ongoing always on paranoia, which I think is just this numbing paranoia in the background. And and that's that's that's a lot of pressure to never have a bad day in public. And it actually gives me huge empathy for someone like Justin Bieber who goes out in public on his worst days and tries to pick up a can of milk and there's fans literally outside his front door in New York City. This is my home. You know what I mean? Where I live and I don't appreciate you guys being here. You guys can be anywhere. This is my home. You know, this is where I, you know, at the end of the night when you come home and you want to relax, it's my space to do that.

41:16 I'd appreciate it. >> Can I give a >> The sociologist Ali Hoschild put it another way. In a 1983 book, The Manage Heart, she studied flight attendants who are required as part of their job to produce warmth for strangers for a living. >> I wanted to look at actually at the interior of my mother who who was a diplomat's wife and had to be gracious to people. all the time and I could see the strain and so I wanted to look at women who did that flight attendants who have to make the world seem safe even though you're thousands of miles up in the sky and to take the edge of off of hostility and to lift relax people. And I discovered a whole world of people who were really good at doing what I came to call emotional labor. to evoke the right feeling, to suppress the right feeling, to to keep yourself fitting what the job requires you to feel.

42:32 >> Welcome to the widewide world of TWWA. These are the hostess training center living quarters in the suburbs. The dos mundo apartments, two worlds. >> They had a whole language. They took for granted what I was searching >> >> to articulate in name. I one flight attendant said to another flight attendant. I could observe them too.

43:04 oh, Irene, I had three turnarounds this morning. Well, what's a turnaround? It's it's a passenger that comes in. I rate that his luggage has been lost. You know, what can I do without my luggage? You go, I have important meeting. And the flight attendant would say, I am so sorry about that. I know just how you feel. I've lost my luggage. Why? Just last week, you know, it was just awful. But we're really working on it, sir. You know, so that's a turnaround. and he deescalates his distress. And to look at the cost of it, can you get estranged from what you would feel if you weren't doing this work? The whole thing opened out a world.

43:52 >> And that manufacturer, the required one, hour after hour, and the chronic gap between what they feel and what must be displayed produces burnout and a kind of self-estangement. You begin to lose track of what feelings are yours. >> Here is where the girls are taught how to be a more poised finished product. How to sit, how to walk, how to stand, carry your coat. >> Celebrity is emotional labor with no landing. You don't get to get off the plane. And it's one that looks like one everybody's envious of, but people are lucky to have. So nobody empathizes. You can't get off the plane. You've got this fake smile on the whole time. You don't get to be backstage at all. And everyone's going, "You lucky bastard."

44:44 And as I was researching this, I actually started to feel a bit guilty. Like I couldn't stop thinking about Steven Bartlet. Like posting at 12:30 at night, most likely alone. I mean, to be honest, if he's with someone that's even bleeer like cuz what's he doing? He's responding to like this random BG looking Yahoo comedian that's slagging off his entire enterprise. Like, and that comment like when you look at it, like you really look at what he wrote, there's something sad about it.

45:20 The first thing you notice are the laughing emojis. Doesn't it feel like there's three too many for the point he's making? One laughing emoji says, "I found this funny." But five, five says, "I would like the court to note that at no point was I even remotely bothered, your honor." And then there are the defensive brackets. We talk a lot about being healthy on my show, open brackets, which I think is a great goal to have, closed brackets. So, he's interrupted his own reply to establish for the record that health is good. But of course, health is good. I was criticizing the commercial machinery around self-improvement. I wasn't suggesting he's ideologically committed to spreading scurvy.

46:13 And then there's the word edited. Now, I don't know what he edited. Maybe it was a typo. Maybe he changed the list. Maybe he thought, "No, aliens should come first. That's what the podcast is really about." Maybe he started off with five angry emojis and he thought, "No, wrong tone for the brand." We can't know. But what we do know is that he changed something. He wrote the response, posted it, read it back, and then went in again.

46:41 He cared. And look, all of these things are tiny, tiny details. The five laughing emojis, a tiny detail. The defensive brackets, a tiny detail. correcting me for getting one word wrong about the title of his book, a tiny detail. Listing every other subject that the podcast covers, a tiny detail, like doing all this at half midnight, a tiny detail. Editing the post, a tiny detail.

47:11 Any single one of them means nothing. But if you put them all together, they start to look like something. To me, they look like a man who cared quite a lot about getting his response right while also caring that nobody should think that he cared, which are actually two quite difficult things to do in the same Instagram comment.

47:44 And then suddenly underneath the blue tick and the 50 million listeners and the laughing faces, I saw something ordinary and relatable. And I think I hurt his feelings. Like not terribly. I don't I don't think he threw his phone across the room and screamed into a sache of fuel. But to my eyes, as I read it again, he looked a bit vulnerable, a little sensitive, almost like a real person.

48:19 So, naturally, I took the piss. Oh, mate, I was a And look, I'm not trying to let myself off the hook, but I think some responsibility has to come from the format, the very nature of the way you communicate through these tools. And by that I mean context collapse. Two researchers, Alex Marwick and Dana Boyd, published a study in 2011. So online, all of your separate audiences, your mates, your critics, your customers, your journalists, your mom, they all collapse into a single indivisible crowd. And every word that you say has to be addressed to all of them at once, which means that a famous person can't reply to a person. There is no such channel to do that, not publicly. So when Steven Bartlett typed under that clip, he wasn't talking to me. He was performing a man untroubled by criticism for an imagined gallery of millions. And I was a prop in a show about him, which to be fair is exactly what he is in this video and in my last video. He's just a character in my story. And that's where I come in. I feel bad and I have to say this because the whole channel my whole channel tries for transparency. So the full full embarrassing disclosure is that when the notification came in, right, Steven replied, right, my body did everything that I've spoken about before. My heart rate raised. Like I screenshotted it. Absolutely. I showed my girlfriend. I mean, I didn't I don't have a girlfriend, but I asked somebody out literally so I could send them a screenshot of Steven replying to me. And then I replied, what did I reply? I don't know whether you're even the real Steven Barllet cuz you didn't mention Hule. So, first it's a joke. Of course, it's a joke. I'm a comedian and I've got to show people that the joke is my version of the four crying laughing emojis. It's me performing a man so relaxed about this that he's doing bits.

50:31 And this is the whole thing. I roast Steven for drafting his casualness at half past midnight and there I am heart rate at 110 carefully constructing casualness second. No, it's it's a pretty good joke. I didn't send the first draft. I know I didn't because I never send the first draft. Like somewhere in my head there's a folder of rejected replies and every one of them was auditioning for the same gallery. So I edited mine as well. Like I just didn't edit mine online. In some ways it kind of made his edit more honest than mine. I wasn't replying to Steven either. There's no channel for that. I was performing comedian handles multi-millionaire for an invisible crowd on the off chance that the exchange got screenshotted. And I'm juicing that screenshot right now. What do you think this video is? But thirdly, look at what the joke is. It's a status move. It's you're not the real Steven Bartlett. I'm doing dominance in one line to a man whose attention had just made my hearts skip a beat. Like the sociometer got a signal accepted by high status male and my entire evolutionary toolkit stood up and went quick hide how much that meant.

51:40 Quick hide. Don't let anyone show. So two men, two phones, both performing for crowds that weren't in the room. And neither one of those men is talking to the other one. And there's no way out of it. Like what's the whole exchange? It's two puppets waving each other. It's like a prison visit. Both of us performing our brand either side of the glass. Him performing being amused, detached, and authoritative. Me performing comedian who can't be bought. Do you know what this reminds me of? The Wizard of Oz.

52:14 >> Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz. >> The big head, the fire, the voice like thunder. And then the little dog pulls back the curtain and there's a small sweaty man pulling levers shouting, "Help! PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. >> That's basically what me and Bartler are. Like regardless of the status gap, we are just bloss. And if you think about it, isn't the Wizard of Oz like really a story about two prisons? Like the people in Oz, they can't see the man because the machine only shows them the god. That's our prison. the parasocial wiring, the relic logic, the guests with 150 names. But the man can't see Dorothy either or the people of Oz because from behind the curtain there's no window. There's only levers and the roar of his own amplified voice coming back at him. Like that's his prison. The soundproof room, the self-esteem gauge that never sleeps. The celebrity that never turns off. Like I did half an hour in January slagging off Diary of a CEO. I did 10 minutes on it on Jimmy the Giants podcast. Again, attacking the fundamental premise of his whole enterprise. I still don't agree what it stands for. I think it's part of a bad system that ends up gaslighting and fleecing ordinary people who are just trying to do better for themselves, takes advantage of them. But to be honest, and let's be honest, full transparency, there's something about this that's futile as well. Like the algorithm has fed you a video about two people that you don't know having a beef with each other's brands. And you can watch that video here. Oh, actually, no. Just here.

53:59 This is the video. This is there. There's no nothing. This is just it. This is you don't have there's no lit link. You just carry on watching. That's it. But I mean, come on. What are we doing? Like actually, what are we doing? What are you doing? Like because I know what I'm doing. Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking to absolutely nobody in an empty room. That's what I'm doing. But what the are you doing? Look at where we're spending our time. Like where all of this attention is going. We are all living through the largest transfer of human intimacy in history from people to screens.

54:37 Intimacy away from people who know you towards people who don't. Every hour that I've spent with Steven Bartlett and I've spent money came out of my human hours account. I spent them on a man who cannot give it back. And the algorithm doesn't show me or you Steven Bartlett because you asked for it. It's because your brain treats a familiar face as a tribe member. A tribe member holds that holds your attention.

55:07 And attention is the mother lode, the mother payload. our intimacy machinery, the same mechanism that bonds you to your mom. All of us, we're all bonded to your mom. Those intimacy circuits are currently absolutely being ridden like a horse in a rodeo by a server farm in Nevada. And like, don't get me wrong, there's no winner here either. So is Stevens. his socio meter and midnight scrolling the edited emojis ridden because the platform doesn't care which side of the curtain you're on because it's farming both sides because we're all being ridden and it's the most valuable thing we own. The thing our entire evolved organism exists to protect our capacity to know and be known is being striped.

56:06 So, I really do hope you're living a life. Don't get caught in this mess. Leave me and Bartlett to our own Save yourselves. It's too late for me. It's certainly too late for Bartlett. Just leave us to our own nonsense. Just go. And I I kind of it sounds when I say it's too late for me, it sounds like a line, but actually I do mean go. That's it. That's all I've got. This is the end of the video. I've got nothing more for you.

56:45 Go out there and and live your lives. That's This is it. Go. Yeah, I know you're going to be weighing. You kind of think this thing is a bit, don't you? But it's really not. I mean, thanks for watching, but now go and live your life. There's going to probably be another thing that comes up that you want to that pushes you to click, but don't.

57:32 Yeah, this is it. Bye. Stephen, I think it's just you and me now. It's just us. Actually, I kind of I should say sorry because I was a bit of a dick. And yeah, I'm sorry.

58:09 I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you. I hope hope we didn't I know we got off on the wrong foot, but come on, let's go out for a pint sometime. Cuz you know, you're the only one that understands me. It's just you. You understand me. Nobody else does. Nobody else does, Stephen. Just Just you. Just me and Steven. I'd kill for you, Stephen. Obviously not a human, just like a rabbit or something. I'd kill a rabbit for you, Stephen.

58:45 Like, why don't we go out for a drink or something, you know, like that? And and I mean it. This is the real me. Look, I'm blinking and everything. Look, I'm I'm here. I'm, you know, come on, let's go out, you know, no lights, no camera. I'll take you to for a drink down my comedy club. Come on, come down to the Bill Murray. We're, you know, we're natural. I'm gonna say it. Bedfellows. I think we're, you know, I think we get on. I think we vibe. Just two dudes, you know, shooting the Just me and you, Stephen.

59:17 Yeah. Stephen, should we there? Steven. Steven. Steven, are you Steven? Are you there? Steven. Steven. Steven. Stephen, are are you still there? Stephen, Stephen, are you there? Stephen, are you there? Stephen, Stephen, are you there? Steven.

59:50 Steven, are you there? Are you there? Steven, it's Barry. Steven, let me know if you're there. Steven. Steven. Steven. Steven, are you are you there? Stephen.