Philip McKernan - One Last Talk

Full transcript: Philip Mckernan on London Real

5:26 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Philip McKernan, the inspirational speaker, author and filmmaker. You work with entrepreneurs and business leaders all over the world to help them seek clarity about their future and move through mental roadblocks. Your new book, One Last Talk: Why Your Truth Matters and How to Speak It, was developed through your speaker series and takes people on a journey to discover their truth and speak it out loud.

5:48 Philip, welcome back to London Real. It is so good to be here. So good. It’s great to have you here. It was three and a half years ago, I think, when you first came to London Real and you did a talk for our Academy, I think the night before, and then we had an epic conversation.

6:03 I remember the big phrase that always came to my mind is, what’s your relationship with money? And you have a great way of really kind of digging into people’s brains and pushing them to answer hard questions. And then we had you back, I think, less than a year later, but one of our super focus groups, and people always ask me about you. And I remember you always telling me about One Last Talk, and I remember being like, yeah, okay, that sounds kind of cool, and I didn’t know if I got it, but with this book I now get it, and so I’m super excited for you to talk about, you know, this whole journey.

6:34 So what have you been doing the last couple of years? Well, apart from walking down streets and walking into Whole Foods in Boulder and having people say to me, I know you because you’re on London Real, so thank you for that. I’ve been busy. I’ve been busy being a little unfocused in the early days and I’ve been busy figuring out how I want to show up in the world and how my work needs to evolve. And I’m a massive fan of reinvention to some extent, but I think it can cross a line where you start to reinvent all the time for the sake of reinvention.

7:03 So what I do will always stay the same, but how I do it needs to change to keep me on edge. And what’s emerged for me, I think, in the last couple of years is One Last Talk is something that I, and it is a choice, but I feel I have to bring to the world because it’s not about Philip McKernan. So I think that’s emerged as the thing that we’re spending a lot of time, energy and focus on and bringing it out to the world and hopefully being received well. Yeah.

7:27 I mean, when we talked about a year ago, you were always doing lots of things, you know, you’re consulting with some high-level people in corporations and, you know, some high net-worth people, and then you’re also speaking at events, and then you were doing this One Last Talk as well, and you were always so passionate about it. You’d say, Brian, you see these people when they get on stage, like this one woman, and everyone cried, and you were telling me these things and I was like, wow, it sounds epic, but you know, it was a lot of things you were doing and I didn’t know which one you were going to do, but I could tell you were passionate about this. Yeah.

7:57 But then to see it come into this book, it feels like you went all in on this, because this is no joke to create something like this, and it’s gotten really big. So when did you decide that this was something you wanted to push? Because also you’re not a guy for publicity, you know, you don’t push yourself, you don’t push your stuff, you let people come to you, which is, you know, I guess good and bad, I don’t know. Tell me about that. I think the biggest thing that emerged for me, and I had great people around me who have supported and challenged me, including yourself over dinner the last time I was in London and we met, and you said it is a bit unfocused.

8:31 And so it was another reminder for me that people were wanting to be involved in it or wanting to understand it but would, but should be challenged to do so, because they couldn’t get it. And I think I was struggling with my relationship as it relates to One Last Talk. You talk about relationship to money, my relationship to One Last Talk, how do I fit into this and how does it fit into me? And what I was trying to do was get this thing moving without being at the center of it, because it’s actually a platform or a space for men and women, in many cases who have never spoken publicly in their lives before, to share a deep part of their truth or their personal narrative.

9:05 And I didn’t want to make it about me, but what I realized is actually, if you are the visionary, if you are the founder, get out of your own goddamn way. If it’s about you, it’s about you, don’t let that inhibit it. So putting my name in this book and putting this book out there, I think deciding to write the book actually, decide, sitting in Burger King. I wasn’t at that Burger King, by the way, not that I judge, anyway. There was, I came out of the gym and I was on the phone to the editor, I pulled in and I sat there, and he said, are you gonna write this book or not?

9:34 And I remember saying yes, and that was the moment. It was on 30th Street, I think, in Boulder, Colorado, where I live, and I said yes. The minute I said yes, the universe started to conspire to make this happen in ways that I could not have imagined. Hmm, that’s really fascinating, because I feel the same thing with London Real. I was always kind of hesitant to stick myself out there and as here’s the guest, here’s the guest, here’s the guest, but you know, it’s only when I actually put myself out there and show things about my life that people can get it.

10:04 So it’s like, stop being selfish by not putting yourself out. Absolutely. Well, I think some of that sometimes, and I believe this is true in the work I do, I think sometimes we’re brought to some extent kicking and screaming to the very thing we’re destined to do. And another example of this is that when One Last Talk was born, it wasn’t called One Last Talk, it was called the Real Summit, and I wanted to create an event that would disrupt the events space to some extent, and we can get into that or not, as the case may be, as we talk about One Last Talk, but I wanted to start, I wanted something done, wanted something different.

10:34 And I find that I was in a real, yeah, wanted something very real. Okay. And that was the point, the Real Summit, and this was about seven years ago, and a great example of sometimes how we wait for perfection is I was in a store and I think it was like Tibetan bowls, the bowls, you hit them and they vibrate. Yeah. And there was a lady there looking and I said to her, you’re gonna buy a bowl?

10:56 She, as I’m saying, the podcast and she says, I’m gonna use it at the beginning and the end. I said, when’s the podcast gonna be launched? And she said, when I have everything ready. And I said, like what? She said, all the equipment, reminds me of this amazing studio.

11:08 But of course you didn’t wait till you had this amazing studio, you started, and she was waiting. And my friend Ian looks at her and says, why don’t you start on an iPhone and see what happens? So we started with the Real Summit and the speakers coming said, but how do I prepare for this? Because you’re saying I’m not allowed to speak about Donald Trump, not allowed to speak about global warming, I’m not allowed to speak about Brexit, so how do I hide away, what do I come with?

11:31 And I just said, just imagine it’s your one last talk. And every time I used One Last Talk and out of this rule, people had a visceral reaction. They went, oh wow. And then we pivoted it to One Last Talk because that was a thing that we really wanted to create. Okay.

11:46 And One Last Talk, what does that mean? Does that mean I’m about to die and this is my last thing I can say to the world? Absolutely, and in some cases we’ve had people who are sick with cancer, for example, and may not be on this planet as long as you and I or other people, but the essence is that you don’t have to wait till you’re dying. And I think that’s the problem. There’s a little analogy or story I heard recently about the man who went to the hospital to say goodbye to his father, and as his father was dying and the doctor said it’s time, and he says he’s passing away, and it’s time for the conversation.

12:19 And this young man, his son, said, what conversation? And the doctor says, the conversation you should have had 20 years ago. Because the doctors see these conversations, these moments of forgiveness, these moments of I’m sorry, these moments of I’m proud of you. And men and women are waiting their entire lives to hear from their father, in many cases if not their mother, I am proud of you. And sometimes they’re building entire businesses, going to the Olympic Games, and I’ve worked with people in that capacity and what they’ve yearned for their entire lives are the words they often hear at this side of, on the deathbed with the parent, the person they’ve learned that from.

12:52 I just want to bring that conversation forward. We don’t have to wait that long, we shouldn’t have to wait that long. Right. That’s the purpose of this. What are the rules and boundaries on this?

13:02 So you can’t talk about Trump and Brexit and you can’t talk about your company? Yes. So what are the what are the rules, because that’s what makes this unique, it has guidelines. Yes, very much so. The idea is that the talk you create, whether you choose to do it out of One Last Talk event or not, or you choose to do with your family, or you choose to run One Last Talk event, a little gathering at home, we’re not, we’re not controlling you right now.

13:22 Because you work with, you know, professional athletes, CEOs, billionaires, but this is for anybody. This is for anybody, under anyone on earth. We want them to go through this process, but the one ask we have and the one invitation we have is to deliver their One Last Talk to at least one other human being. Otherwise it has no value, otherwise they don’t release that talk, you know, you know, to the world, they’re that truth. And I feel that everybody has a One Last Talk in them, and while the One Last Talk is about them, it’s not for them, because the bigger picture here is whether, when you deliver a part of your truth, maybe it’s the story you’re embarrassed about, maybe it’s the thing you want no one to know, maybe it’s the thing you’ve forgotten about or tried to forget about, but when you deliver that truth to the world and you let it out into the world to one person or a million, someone somewhere is going to hear that and go, I am not alone.

14:11 And if they see value in your story, it might awaken them to believe that their story has value and that their story matters. If they start to own that, then they start to see that they matter, they then can get the courage and the conviction to share their truth. Can I give you a quick example? Please. There was a beautiful lady called Lena, she’s just a stunner, and she’s from Toronto, and I’d done some work with Lena.

14:37 Lena came to One Last Talk in Boulder in Colorado, she sat in the 20th row, whatever it was, there’s 150 people in the room, and this girl called Neely stood up and shared about, in her case, sexual abuse that she known in the world knew about other than maybe her mother, and she never imagined sharing something so personal, something that she had a lot of shame and a lot of embarrassing Marbury Simon Durant could free her, and she’s going on to do a podcast to help women who’ve been in that situation after the fact. But Lena’s sitting in the audience, she’s a dark-skinned lady, she’s beautiful, and she’s been developing white spots all over her sign, all over her back, and in that moment when she heard Lena’s talk, her story came back, the story that she had buried.

15:21 She buried it in Pandora’s Box, she built a motorway metaphorically, she’d built a skyscraper on top of it and said, that does not affect me, that is not going to hurt me, that is not going to control my life. And in that moment when she heard me, she acknowledged that it wasn’t gone, that it is there, that it is part of her truth, and that maybe she needs to begin to accept it, bring it back into reality so she can truly deal with it so it doesn’t grip her and control her. She left there and the spots started to dissipate.

15:49 Three months later she stood on a stage, I asked her to, in Toronto and told the story for the first time ever to anyone, and her brother was in the room, about the day that she was sexually abused. And she said, the reason I’m standing here today is because if I don’t share this, it’s going to kill me from the inside out, and the second reason is because of Lena, who is sitting in the third row in Toronto. And she looked at me, she says, I’m doing this because of you.

16:18 That’s the ripple effect that One Last Talk is happening in the world, and it’s, it’s, it’s somebody said it’s like five years of therapy in one book. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what they said. Okay. And so the talk is about you but it’s not about you, because it’s the, it’s something that you can pass on to another human. Yes.

16:37 It can give them a value, a perspective, something. Yes. Okay, but you’re not there to give advice. So for example, I was doing a speaker workshop recently, so we helped the speakers craft, the ones that are going to go and speak at the event, and one guy steps up and he said, you know, there’s so many people in the world that are out of alignment and doing work they shouldn’t be doing. I said, whoa, stop right there.

16:58 Well, I said, let’s just make this about you. He goes, I spent 15 years working in areas I didn’t want to work in. I said, great, now you’re not telling anybody, you’re not pointing the finger, you’re showing them and you’re allowing them to come on a journey with you if they want to, you’re inviting them. I think there’s too many conferences out there where people are standing on stage telling you what you should and shouldn’t do with your life. That’s fine, we’re just trying to spin it a little bit different.

17:20 Right, so it’s about my journey and my story and my talk, but the ultimate aim of that is to add value to someone else. Hundreds and listening, and okay, because if we don’t do that, Brian, what’s happening is almost everybody I approach goes, but I don’t, I don’t have a One Last Talk. Now my friend John, oh my god, you need to talk to him, actually can I get you his number? I go, no, I’m talking to you. But I don’t, I don’t have a One Last Talk.

17:46 Almost everybody I’ve ever asked believes their talk, theirs, therefore they’re saying their story doesn’t have value. If we can awaken them to the possibility and the reality that that’s not true, when people step off that stage they look different, they feel different, and they give themselves permission to show up different in the world. Yeah, you know, I think I gave my version of my One Last Talk this last year with this movie I did called The Iron Mind, and I went back to 16 years ago where I had buried this, you know, drug addiction I had had and this overdose that I had had, and I had never told anyone, including my wife, and it all kind of came up in this atmosphere and training, and going back to New York City in the same neighborhood and flashbacks to me ruining my life and ruining friends’ lives, and I’m telling you, Philip, it was this dark hole in my life that I thought would never ever ever have any, any purpose, and yet by exploring it with people it became the source of light for people.

18:45 And I was terrified and to use the word heroin, and I remember I sent the email out, because we do a kind of a weekly episode, and the video team was like, maybe we’ll just say addiction, and I was like, guys, we just have to go all-in, and I sent this wrong email out and just released it, and nothing but positivity and light came back, whatever sent. And now I realized that there was a purpose for me doing all that suffering, now is was to let everyone else know that it happened to me and it’s okay and then we can talk about it and we can move forward. But I totally get the purpose of you asking people to go inward, and I thought it was buried and it wasn’t affecting me, but of course it was, so yeah.

19:24 Well, what’s gonna, we, and I’m sure you’ve seen this, isn’t, I’ve always used this example is Wayne Rooney, who is obviously a, you know, famous British soccer player, English soccer player, and I was a, you know, big Man United supporter, and I just use him as an example, but I look at my my 9 year old Charlie, who idolizes Man United, looked at Wayne Rooney and sees him in the lines, playing in front of 70,000 fans when he played for United, and scoring goals and driving the big cars and making all the money, and my little guy is idolizing him, putting him on a pedestal and wanting to, dreaming about being him to some extent, but only knowing one side of the coin. And everybody’s got darkness, whether it’s in the past or it’s in the present or it’s gonna be in the future, we all have darkness.

20:03 Um, but if Wayne Rooney turned around, so listen guys, to my son or anybody else, you know, just so you know, that’s what you see here, but this is the truth. I’m not asking to download everything, I’m not asking to get dark and deep and, you know, can I say don’t be a soccer player, but just give Charlie both sides of the coin. He, it’s not his, you know, it, there’s a moral obligation, I think, sometimes when you’re in the public domain just to allow people to see some of your truth.

20:27 And I think what would happen if he did that is people would move from idolizing him to loving him. Yeah, yeah, he would not put him on a pedestal, but they would love him. And I think when you have the courage to be vulnerable, I show people all of you, the warts and all, I think people then, you allow them to be human as well, you allow them to give themselves permission to name their mistakes. Why is it so counterintuitive? Because when someone does open up, almost always they are showered with, like you said, love.

20:51 Like I said, that no longer an idol, we now love them, we want to connect with them, we want to feel and know they’re real, and yet most people won’t do it in the public eye. It’s a no-no to do that. Will we ever get over that, do you think? I think we’re getting over, I think that the challenge, and I said this last night, we ran an event, One Last Talk event in Dublin, I think the challenge is that people are now using vulnerability as a mechanism to sell or to buy, supposed to manipulate to some extent from a marketing standpoint, and I think now what’s happening is that’s turning people off.

21:22 So there’s the happiness movement, then there was the authenticity movement, now it seems to be vulnerability is the latest sexiest thing, but if you sit in an audience or even on television, um, you can tell, I think we, if you just, just, just shut your eyes for a second, listen, you can tell when somebody’s just trying to be authentic for the sake of it, as opposed to somebody who’s sharing a part of their deep truth because they’re ready to do it and they’re tired of carrying the burden and they’re tired of pretending everything is awesome on Facebook every day, because it’s exhausting. I know what that feels like. It is exhausting, pretending to be something you’re not.

21:59 I did that for 37 years of my life and I still do it to some extent today. You never stopped doing it. I think that the moment you think you’ve stopped doing it, I think you’ve become complacent. For 37 years I was definitely trying to show the world our betaine to the world, I was something, I was in front, pretend myself for Christ’s sake, and it was absolutely exhausting. Hmm, what makes this different than a TED talk?

22:21 I’m sure you’ve been asked that. How is that different? Because it’s similar, time you ask people to tell these stories, it’s the other kind of form after the people know. How is this different? Well, I think TED has done an extraordinary job and they have, it’s ideas worth spreading, and that’s the point, and a lot of it is very intellectual ideas, but science, in the future, and that’s great, there’s a great place for that, but this is not about anything that lies outside of you.

22:42 It’s a part of your personal truth, and that is the, that’s the invitation, that’s the ask, and the minute you start talking about something else, even by saying here’s the three things based on the life I’ve lived I think people should do, the minute you do that you’re kind of pointing the finger. So it’s about showing a part of your personal narrative, a part of your personal truth, and your story and your truth can often be very different things. My story is where I was born, where I grew up, the school I went to or the college I didn’t go to, the job I had.

23:06 The truth was like, what was the essence of who I was, how I was feeling during those times, what was the pain that I had that no one knew about, what was the joy I experienced. So it’s not all dark stories, but there tends to be an emphasis on some of the more painful things, because our greatest gifts lie right next to our deepest wounds, and I really believe that. And when we can accept those, we free ourselves, we accept all of our stories, because many people, if you think about life as a book, most of us have a couple of chapters in our lives we’d rather forget or we’d rather go, ch, like Brian’s chapter eight or nine and Philip’s chapter one, but Jesus, might I, I don’t want those chapters of my life.

23:46 So they’re walking around this earth trying to fit in, trying to stand out, trying to do whatever it happens to be, but yet they’re basically rejecting a significant part of who they are, those two chapters that they’re ashamed of, they’re embarrassed about. If they can start to accept them and bring them into the life, they’re accepting all of who they are, they’ll give themselves permission to achieve success that ordinarily I believe they will sabotage. I really believe that, I’ve seen it, I’ve had absolute evidence of this.

24:12 When people share all of who they are, I promise you, you’d already know this because of the movie you did, I guarantee you’re gonna, you’re gonna experience more success because you’ve shared all of you with the world. People are going to want to lean in, they’re gonna want to be close to you, they’re gonna want to know you more, they’re gonna want to support you more, they’re gonna go, wow, there’s guts, there’s a man who has the courage to share all of his story. What do you tell your students and people that are reading this book and they’re in Chapter four or five and they, that they panic, I can’t go there, I’m having a panic attack, Phil, I’m remembering this thing that happened to me when I was eight years old and I’ve got to stop.

24:50 What do you tell those people? I’m sure you deal with them live, but even if someone’s watching us, like, what if they get really close and then they can’t go there, what do you tell them to try to get them through? I’d put the book away. Don’t, there’s no point. I don’t want anybody pushed to the edge, this is not about pushing somebody right to the edge so they’re so uncomfortable with the talk they’re about to deliver on the talk.

25:09 Forget about what they did, deliver the talk, because this is not what these conversations about, this is about doing the talk for yourself, going through the process of going through the different exercises and understanding who you are at a very, very deep level. You may never want to give the talk publicly in your life, that’s okay, you don’t have to, but I would ask them to, if something starts to come up like that, put the book away. I mean, it’s obviously something that’s new or something that is old but it’s new in terms of how you’re, like, you haven’t dealt, what did you have a name dish, and maybe it’s time for you to get some therapy or go to see somebody or get some expertise to help process that if you feel that it consumes you.

25:44 I want people to be able to share a part of their narrative that pushes them a little bit, but not to the point where they get lost in the pain of us. There’s no purpose to that, because they’ll get up and they’ll do a talk at an event and you’ll see that they’re just so lost and consumed by the pain, they haven’t done any work on us really, and that’s no good to anybody. You just, you’re disrespecting yourself in that case. And what are these events like and what are the people in the audience like and, you know, how do they, how do they kind of play out?

26:14 So what’s very, very interesting is we literally ran one in Dublin last night and I was concerned about the Dublin, the Dublin market. I often say that are the Irish psyche, it, to some extent, I always say that people will get to an event early in North America to sit in the front row, people will get to an event early in Ireland to make sure they get the back seats. What does that mean? Meaning that they, they want to be there but they don’t want to be seen to be there, they want to be there but they don’t ask questions, they’re intrigued but they’re not all in, and they’ve got one foot out the door and one foot in so they can, they can kind of, you know, duck and dive if they need to.

26:45 However, I was pleasantly surprised. I would say it’s a smaller One Last Talk local event, so these are local events that we’re running around the globe, and so there wasn’t a big audience, it was a beautiful, you know, kind of very intimate environment, and eventually they warmed up. But in America they are a lot more forward with their questioning and their curiosity, but you’ll often get people in the room who just want to hear their own voice and they want to tell a story, they almost want to do a One Last Talk in the room, and I’ve got to be obviously managed too and carefully so, it’s, it’s a mixed bag, and they get people who get stirred up a little bit and it stirs up stuff for them and they want to process that in real time, and sometimes there’s an opportunity to do that with me or not, as the case may be.

27:26 Okay, I need four 15-minute ox4 minute talks last night and then afterwards you answer questions. I get, every time the speaker finishes then we have an opportunity for audience members to expand and ask a question, and then I will, I will support the speaker if required, because some of these guys and girls have never spoken before and that’s a big thing. 80% of the speakers, at least around the globe, have never actually spoken publicly before, and that’s something we wanted to change in the speaker space, because we believe that some of the greatest gurus at events are not on the stage, they’re in the audience, and we wanted to give them an opportunity and get, then give them a voice to support the world.

28:01 And so yeah, no, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a fascinating, and to see them come off a stage going, gotta touch, and then to hear the feedback, people coming up and hugging them, and I just get to sit back and watch this unfold, and then they look at me go, somebody, somebody really liked my story and they’re gonna have a different conversation with their daughter because of my story, and as I gonna say, yeah, of course. I mean, it’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s very hard to do, it’s despair to describe the, the how that pans out and how that feels to witness that. Yeah, I’m just thinking about, like, look at my choices when I want to go out and, you know, for a night out in Dublin or in London, you know, it’s blockbuster movies, it’s concerts, it’s everything that’s not gonna be real, and yet we crave human sharing, these painful experiences that remind us of the human condition and we’re all part of this, but in this day and age it seems like there’s a lack of these things.

28:57 Yes, it seems like we’ve engineered them out of our life. Like you said, we’ve got the Instagram feed, we’ve got the Netflix thing, which means we can really just consume media that’s designed for us to tell us what we want to see or hear or happy stuff, but that doesn’t really make us grow. No, well, we don’t, we’re avoiding pain a lot, sort of avoiding pain, like people avoid me and, you know, as you said at the very beginning, like I, I poke people, they avoid you, they avoid me like that.

29:22 I mean, I was at an event, reason I walked in was a guy sitting over to my right, right in front of me, and I’ve seen him three years in a row at this event, and I’ll, you know, I said, how you doing? He said, good. And I walked up around, I said, oh, we’ve never had a chance to meet. And he goes, because I’ve been avoiding you like hell. I went, and I kind of laughed.

29:38 He goes, no, I’m serious, I just, I love your work, I watch everything you put out there, but you scare the s*** out of me. And this guy runs a multi-million dollar business, he’s got a beautiful family, he’s got his s*** together on the surface, on the outside, but I represent a kind of a mirror, and, you know, people often say, oh, McKernan will make you cry. I won’t. Not that powerful. I’ve seen you make some people cry.

30:03 Well, no, I create an environment where perhaps they need to cry, okay, and perhaps I’ll ask the question or maybe I’ll just push, push, push something a little bit further and maybe the emotion comes out, but I can’t make somebody cry. I just, I actually don’t believe I can. So what he said to me after is, there we go, we sat down joking and I said, you’re a serious with that comedy. Said yeah, and he said, I know this stuff I need to deal with, I just can’t go there right now.

30:28 I’m afraid that once I open that box, I’m just gonna get lost in those, but I worry about how that’s holding him back and where it’s holding him back and where it shows up, leaving me aside, whether it’s me or somebody else, is by not addressing that stuff, what is the cost? What is the cost? Maybe there’s not a cost, but I see that, I see that there is a cost. Yeah. Peace of mind, or our clarity, are connecting, allowing people to connect, am deserving, success sabotage, this shows up in so many different ways.

30:56 And when you go and speak at these events, and I’ve seen you speak, you know, in front of a couple hundred people, and, you know, high performance people, that kind of thing, you know, certain themes come up with these people, right? I mean, you’re literally in real time drilling down to these people a lot of times and evaluating the surface versus what you think is down inside and what’s really going on in the heart. What are these themes that you see over and over again, or what are some times you think that the story people are telling themselves versus certain reality and relationships with certain things in the world?

31:27 What are some of these common elements? I think identity. I think a lot of people lose themselves in what they’re doing. I think from a business standpoint, we talked about, you know, athletes and sport and, you know, with the film that you just did, Iron Mind, you know, where you talked about, is this an addiction, you know, these triathletes, athletes and everything else, and I’m not suggesting at all it is or at all it isn’t, but on occasion it can be.

31:50 And I think what we do is we lose who we are into what we do and it becomes our identity, which is fine initially and fine maybe in the middle of it, but eventually it runs out when you sell the business or the business is taken away from you or you retire from the business or whatever it is, that at some level you’re going to be challenged and it’s going to be taken away from you, and then we start to struggle to find out who we are because we, you know, we basically lost all of ourselves in that. So that’s number one, in no particular order. Number two is, I often see people climbing a mountain towards success, whether it’s a business or a multi-million dollar business or whatever it happens to be, and they get to the top of the mountain and they’re unsatisfied, and I think we’ve talked about this in the past, is they’re successful but they’re not satisfied, and they wonder what’s wrong.

32:35 And then what they do is they look across the horizon, meaning life, and they go, oh, I just picked the wrong mountain. So when they climb that mountain, they pick the next endeavor and they go down and climb the next mountain, it’s another five or six years, and realize they could climb that mountain and the same pattern happens, but they’ve never stopped to ask themselves a couple of very simple fundamental questions, is, what is the pattern here that I’m unwilling to address? What am I not seeing?

32:57 Am I doing these things for me or am I doing them to impress somebody else, etc. And the other area I see probably the greatest pain or disconnect is relationships. So many entrepreneurs, the leaders that I meet and work with, tell me that they have a great relationship with their wives or their husbands or their children, and it turns out that when we take the time to really explore that, it turns out that that’s not the case, but they’re telling themselves it is so they don’t have to address the truth, but yet deep down they know they’re not as connected as they could be.

33:28 Hmm. So there’s a couple, is there, is that because it’ll always be that way when they’re spending so much of their time in their business or is it because they’re not doing the things they need to do to make those relationships better? The greatest gift, that the greatest gift that I guess, the most rewarding work I do is not when an entrepreneur says, oh, I now spend 2.4 hours a week, based on my new app, more with my children playing with Lego, and I’ve monitored this for the last six months and I’m up to point four hours.

33:56 It’s when someone looks at me with conviction and emotion, their eyes go, I became the father I never imagined I could be, I’m connecting. It’s not about this, it’s not nothing to do with time, it can be about time but rarely ever is. And so because entrepreneurs often think, oh, they just spend more time at home, I turn off the laptop and I turn off the computer, that’s a measure of how connected I am. I know many entrepreneurs, they’re on the golf course but yet they’re feeling guilty about not being in the office, they may as well be in the office, it’s a complete waste of time, or they’re at home and they just had a BlackBerry, I would have aged myself, or the iPhone is off, um, but they’re thinking, and I’m saying there’s no sin in thinking, it’s just that they’re finding it really hard to connect, but they’ve never learned to connect, they’ve never been schooled in it.

34:38 And I find that at the end, and the research is staggering, of how many people go to their deathbed with major life regrets, and a lot of the regrets are around about the things we didn’t do as opposed to the things that we did. And a lot of it’s about connection, and the other day I think ultimately it all comes down to connection. He does, right, at the end of the day, all connection with self, right? They don’t have great relationships with themselves.

35:03 Talk about that, because I see over and over again people I meet in my line of work now, whatever the hell this is, is that people ultimately just crave that connection, and with all of our technology these days it actually makes us less connected. Yes. And I think that’s why people watch our show, because they watch someone pour it out for an hour and a half and really connect with a human in a way they haven’t felt in a while, but they crave it, and they crave it.

35:26 So I love to talk about that as well, but talk about the connecting with yourself, because that’s interesting, which I think this is the most fascinating connection, our connective opportunity, a relationship in the world, and a lot of people say it’s God, and whatever you believe in, I respect it, but I believe the most important relationship is the one that we have with ourselves, or the one that we don’t have with ourselves. And I think what it would be, an amazing just question or something for anybody to consider watching this is that, when was the last time you spent quality time with yourself without your phone on, without your laptop on, without a movie, without a book, without anything? It was, when was the last time you listened?

35:57 I encourage every one of my coaching clients, not everyone who does this by the way, just so we’re clear, every single one of them to spend at least minimum two days and one night away with themselves, minimum once a year, but I’d lean towards twice a year, like every six months. And I remember one client going, so you could just see he was like, it’s just, just, just so, and it was like, anyway, he was just getting, it was squirming, like he was so uncomfortable. So like, what do I do?

36:23 Like, it’s a strategy thing, like it’s a brainstorm? No, but what do I do? I think goes, we just hang out with yourself. Because I can’t sit in the car, we’d have the radio on, you’re expecting me to go away for two days? I’m not, I’m just asking you to consider, do it or don’t do it.

36:38 So he rings me about 4 weeks later, there’s a quick question, just a bit of clarity, but this thing I said, yeah, go for it, was myself and Chris who’s on the coaching program at the time, he said we’re both gonna go away together, but we’re not gonna hang out during the day, we’re gonna sleep in the same, like, you know, house, whatever, is that okay? And I said, what do you think? He goes, probably not. I said, great, well, get off the phone, stop wasting my time, and I put the phone down.

36:57 He came back and he just said it was the most painful thing he did, he went to a place called Tofino on the west coast of Canada, on Vancouver Island, beautiful area, and he said it was the most good, not spend the time with himself has changed, and as a result of him getting to a point where he was comfortable enough in his own skin just to have time with himself, it’s improved every other relationship in his life. Mm-hmm. It’s allowed him to connect with other people in ways that he never imagined, because what’s her benchmark, right?

37:32 You know, when I say to myself, you know, let’s just say I have a girlfriend and I just say, you know, myself, my girlfriend, we get on great right now, she’s amazing, what’s my benchmark for that? What’s my historic precedent for that? Is my last girlfriend or my friends’ girlfriends or whatever, but what if it could be so much better than it is right now? I’m always intrigued, I’m a greedy bastard in that sense, it’s like, let’s just say it’s 80%, what if I can, I want another 5%, other relation, I don’t know, that 10%, and I find that we spend a lot of energy in our businesses trying to get the next bit of productivity, but a lot of us don’t take the time to say, hang on a sec, how could my relationship with my kids be better?

38:09 Well, when I retire, when I build this business, and then I have enough money, and then I’ll be able to take them to the Bahamas. I don’t know one adult that I’ve ever met that I’ve worked with in a coaching capacity said, I wish my parents had worked harder, I wish they were less present and made more money so we could go and have more holidays together. Never met one. Right, right, yeah, it’s interesting when you see people either say, I’m working to later one day spend time with my family, or the other one, I love this old chestnut, is I’m doing it for the kids, you know, I sacrificed this for the family.

38:42 And I actually rewatched the whole Breaking Bad series recently, I don’t ask me why, I got hooked on a holiday and I watched the whole thing and I watched it differently, and the whole time Walter White’s is like, he’s selling meth and risking his life and he’s always like, I’m doing it for my kids, I’m saving millions of dollars for the kids, and then the very last episode he said, you’re right, honey, I was doing it for me the whole time, from my ego. Yeah. So how often do you see that?

39:04 All the time, all the time, and I always say, is that cool? Now, are your kids okay with that? They go, what do you mean? Have you talked to your kids? How you set Johnny and Mary down and said, no kids, your dad’s not gonna be as present as he could be, you won’t be at some of your soccer games, and if he is they’ll be on a mobile phone or whatever it happens to be.

39:21 And I’m not sitting here pointing the finger and judging, I fall into the same trap, I still do this. Brian, my kids still take me on and say, dad, you’re on the phone, or whatever, so I’m not here to preach, I don’t want to be preaching and say I have it all figured out. I said don’t, but if you’re doing it for your kids, just make sure they know so they have a choice in this thing, but don’t assume that they’re going to be okay with your choice. And one of the other areas I see this a tremendous amount is where people go, okay, I get it, I’ve watched enough of Brian’s episodes, I get it, I’m not in a career path I want to be in, in fact I’m miserable and I’m doing something every day that kills me, but I just don’t have the clarity about what’s next.

39:57 And a man put his hand up in, at an event I spoke in Vegas with 600 people in the room, he put his hand up, okay, I get it, I don’t like what I do, and I said great, nice. I walked up to him and I looked him straight in the eyes and I said, so I said, so what’s the question? So he’ll have, how do I, how do I get the clarity about what’s next? That’s the only thing that I’m missing in order to make a change. It’s okay, dangerous story by the way, dangerous statement, and I looked at him and I said, I’ll tell you what the problem is right now.

40:25 And he says, girlfriend, I’ve never met him before, 600 people, how would I know? And I said, the pain is not bad enough. And he said, well, number one is I disagree with you, number two is how would you know that when you never knew me, we’ve never met before. I said, I can see in your face, and I said I’ll prove it to you right now. He said, okay, go for it.

40:43 And I said, how long have you wanted to get out of this industry that you’re in, this job that you hate? Eighteen years. I said, excuse me? 14 years. I said, excuse me, can you say that again?

40:53 Okay, 14 years. I said, exactly. Do you have children? He goes, yeah. I said, give me the name of one of your children.

41:02 Unless to say, called him John. I said, how old is Johnny? Said 8. I said, let’s fast-forward 20 years and John sits down in front of you and says, daddy, I’m in a job I hate, it’s miserable, it’s killing me every day, I just, it’s, it’s annihilating, it’s killing my soul, what would you say? I haven’t finished the last syllable, get out, get out, don’t, don’t do that to yourself, why would you do that to yourself, get out now.

41:25 And then he caught himself, he looked around and he just goes, ah, s***. So I said that’s gonna be a lecture in 20 years, or the conversation doesn’t even need to happen, because that boy is brought up in a house with an inspirational father that puts value on his own skin and makes a change and doesn’t wait. And when you do that, your son will learn from you every single day. And yet that man’s justification was a lack of clarity, but also he stays getting a paycheck doing something he hates so he can send his kids to private school.

42:04 Now, did your comment give him the clarity? Probably not. No, no, because it wasn’t enough pain yet. I said, I think, I think my memory’s cracked, I said with respect, and I hope I’m wrong, I don’t think you’re gonna make a change until the pain is bad enough. I was gonna write a book, Brian, called Wake-Up Call, and even if I do, no one needs to buy it, because the premise, I’ll just tell you very quickly, and I’ve done a lot of research and I’ve done a lot of interviews with people who’ve had a wake-up call, meaning a free life, major life thing, whether it’s depression, you know, an accident, or, you know, facing their mortality, so many close to dying, whatever, and if they change, sometimes they don’t, and I think it’s purely down to a value in their own skin.

42:44 If they just go back to smoking or back to the same lifestyle or whatever, I think it’s a value thing, but the ones that do pivot are the ones that do change. If I had to really oversimplify all the research, it sums up like this: every one of them simply gave themselves permission to do the things they always wanted to do, or to take the risk, the old sponsor, to take our adventure in ways they always wanted. That’s it. It is not any more complex than that, and the job is to try to get people just to wake up a little bit sooner, but just the ones that want to wake up.

43:16 And I’m gonna share, can I share one more little nuance, because I had a phone call with a girl about a month ago, let’s call her Mary, and that’s called a company, Google her, her name is not Mary, it’s not Google, and she said, I said, why are you here today, like why are we on this call? She says, I want clarity about what’s next, I realized that what I’m doing is not fulfilling. So great, so what is the number one block for you making a transition? She said, you know what, I think I’m just comfortable.

43:43 Now there was a time not long ago I would have accepted that and moved on. I went, really? I said, you don’t look comfortable to me. I see a woman who was in a lot of pain but is unwilling to feel the pain, and she burst into tears and she says, I’m in agony. She’s telling herself a most dangerous statement on earth: I’m comfortable.

44:08 She may as well be lying on a bed of nails, she is the most uncomfortable person I’ve seen in a long time, but she’s telling herself this story that is, I’m happy. No, no, this is great. I’m not asking everyone to question everything all of the time, that’s exhausting, but just on occasion, turns, am I really as good as I tell myself I am? And if I’m not, why not? It’s so simple, answering that question to you by saying, you’re right, I really am Israel, might give her the opportunity of giving herself permission to make that move.

44:37 Yeah. Okay, just even naming the fact that you’re not as happy as you, you, you’re trying to be, and then you can start to see your life for what it really is. Maybe he’s not treating me with respect, maybe this job is not for me, maybe this city I’m not meant to be living in, maybe there’s a career path out there for me that has yet to be uncovered, has yet to be found. And a lot of people put a lot of, hopefully I can get this just to make sense, but a lot of people put a lot of emphasis on the execution, so people say to me all the time, oh my god, you’re so brave, you moved from the country you love to North America to reinvent, Detroit ever, or maybe in your case, wow, what an achievement, into a film, numbers of film, wanted to do it, feel like one achievement, and I get that and it’s great, but the real courage comes when I was sitting in Ireland questioning my reality.

45:27 People don’t ask about that, and to sit there, and to sit there with my wife who’s sitting outside this door, outside the studio, and to sit there and go, is this really it? Is this as good as it’s gonna be? Is there something out there for us that we have yet to find? Is what’s possible for us, is our greatest work yet to come? That was the courage, the execution was just the byproduct of that.

45:51 People who have the courage to stop and ask themselves very simple, very fundamental questions without the need to just allow the answer to come, they’re the most courageous people on earth. It’s never just coming back to two life events for me. One woman was, you know, kind of the rock bottom of me, you know, my addiction and choosing to leave New York City, and one of them was choosing to leave banking, and you know, with both of them I kind of finally saw with some clarity, what the hell are you doing?

46:19 This is not working, and in a weird way kind of gave myself the permission to go do something else, especially to change from banking. Yeah, I finally was like, what are you doing, you’re not happy, this doesn’t make any sense, and you don’t have to live by this weird value system, which was my relationship with money at the time, that finally was questioned and broken down, and I gave myself permission to just make this next move, but it took that kind of introspective moment to break that. Yeah, and that’s tricky.

46:49 It is tricky, and I remember chatting to a lady one day, and I may share this, the last time each other’s, I’m not sure, but this was because this was a number of years ago, and I said to her, which was chatting about a business and she was rambling out of her business and I can talk business, and by just sense that she was, it was like she was trying to control the conversation, and I just said to her, how’s your relationship with your kids? She’s, it’s amazing. I said, how do you know?

47:13 And she was perplexed by the challenge, by the question, perplexed, and she actually got angry because you’re questioning my relationship, I know because they’re my kids, it’s my life. So great, I’m just asking. The, her energy told me a lot about, you know, where she was at. I said, so let’s just discuss it for a few minutes and see how great it really is, and maybe, and there are times where someone will discuss something, I go, I apologized, nothing in it, I just, my job is to challenge, I’m not just challenging for the sake of a challenge, where I really feel you need to be challenged.

47:45 And I’m, twenty minutes later she is, it’s not that great, is it? And I said, not really. But now she can do something about it. Right, right, but up to that point it was everything’s awesome, it’s 100%, so there’s no room for improvement. Is that relationship perfect now?

47:59 No, but is it way better? Yes, because she did something about it, she was conscious about it, she took action about it, she had the conversations about it, she sat down with her kids and said, this relationship’s not as good as I think it could be, do you agree? And they both agreed and then they could have conversations and change it. What do they do if they don’t have a Philip McKernan in their life to come and call them on things? Well, this is where I should say something like, oh well, they have to go to my events or whatever, but I actually don’t agree.

48:23 I think that we can ask these questions, but I do believe, and I believe this on a personal level, not just a professional level, I do believe by having somebody external challenge us, I think we can go to different places, and I think to have somebody there that they trust and somebody who’s, let’s say, a professional, but someone that is disconnected from the outcome emotionally, financially, physically, whatever, so it’s not your cousin or your aunt or a brother, because no matter how good they are as a mentor or how good they are as a facilitator or a coach or just a person, they’re still got your best interest and they’re still connected emotionally to where they feel you should be and therefore they may not challenge you accordingly. So I do believe that we all need to get external support at some point.

49:09 Okay, that’s not available to you, just ask yourself the questions. Relationships, I know you do counseling with them, what comes up a lot when you speak with couples? And you know, relationships are tricky, you know, they really are, and they’re constantly changing and the people are constantly changing, but what is something you usually find out, or the weather questions that you ask when couples come to talk? If I had to sum up, you come to retreats and stuff with couples?

49:34 Yes. Yeah, so we had to sum up couples in, if I had one sentence, just try to sum up statement, I would sum it up like this: show me a man who wants his wife or his partner to do nothing other than believe in him, and I will show you a woman who wants to be loved for who she is and not who you want her to be. And what I mean by that is, most men, I’m speaking generally for a preferred for obvious reasons, most men want a partner that believes in them, that has their back and everything else.

50:01 There’s a lot of research that shows that that’s not the case, they’re not in situations where their partner fully has their back. And a lot of women want to be loved for who they are, not who you want them to be, but men are notorious for wanting to, they say, help their female partners grow, but how they interpret that, often the women in the relationship often interpret that as, if you want me to grow, I don’t see that you want me to change, so therefore you want to just change who I am. Can you not just love me for who I am?

50:31 So I’ve seen this with my own wife, so I see that as a fundamental one. Of the other big challenges, as somebody is growing, if they’re truly growing and they’re out there and they’re doing personal development or they’re growing themselves and they’re reading and they’re watching your show and they’re on retreats or they do whatever and they’re on this spiritual kind of growth path, whatever it happens to be, there’s often the sense where there’s somebody being left behind, or somebody unwilling to grow, and I think that book partly cause that energy, and you keep sending them the little Google link with the 10 steps, you keep slipping a book under their pillow, goods, I just read that book, there might be, and they don’t see that as you’re trying to support them.

51:03 And we as men typically rationalize, we’re, but I just want you to be happy, I just want you to be happy, like why are you getting defensive? And I just give you a book and your wife or your girlfriend looks down as us how to be a better mom or how to be a better wife, or sometimes, are you kidding me? So I see that disparity, and it’s almost like a mountain as well, as one person’s going up, not always the man, it’s the women first or the men were, it varies, but as one person’s going up, it feels like the other person’s been left behind, and I see sometimes that then people stunt their growth, they stop growing because they’re afraid if they disappear into the clouds in the mountain that they won’t be able to see their partner.

51:38 And for me, I had to turn my back on my wife and I said to her, I’m letting you go, I will never give up on you, well I’m letting you go, I have to do what I need to do on this earth, otherwise I will die with regret. And I looked back, and it sounds like a condescending analogy, that’s not my purpose of it, and she took a step and she leaned in, and she has her own story and her own pain and her own chapters of her own book she did not want to name and bring up, and it’s in the book, and she started to grow herself, and now that lady out there has got a strength about her and a directness and a presence that I knew was there but I’d never seen before, and she’s a stronger person, we have a stronger relationship for it. But that’s because you decided to be you and not to try to kind of push her to change.

52:27 You just, I’m going where I’m gonna go, and you either inspire it, but you can’t even try, you can’t even try to inspire them, you just have to be you and love them for who they are and that’s it, and they’ll start to see a shift in you and go, I want to be, I want to, I want a piece of this. And I think one of the big misunderstandings in relationships is people often say to me, I want to work with you with my wife or with my husband or my partner or whatever, and because I want to get my partner on the same page, and I get, again I get that, I get that intellectually, but one of the greatest challenges, that sounds to me like I want to control her, I want to control him, because one of the things that, it’s sold, what I do believe there’s a lot of merit in it, often we we find ourselves in a relationship with somebody that has something we feel that we don’t have, or we genuinely don’t have to the same extent, they have a cheekiness, they have a sense of humor, they have a, you know, a seriousness or whatever, in other words opposites attract to some extent, we see something in them that we don’t identify in ourselves and we don’t feel that we have, but then we spend the next five, 10 or 15 years trying to change them to be like us and see the world like us, and we start to squish the very things that attract us to that person in the first place.

53:35 So getting on the same page is actually a mistake, it’s all about control. So to me it’s about two separate tracks, and then knowing that if you’re coming to a mountain and your wife goes out here and you’re part, that you will come back together. So a lot of it’s about fear, a lot of it’s about insecurity. I’ll give you a quick example, a practical example, and a lot of us are putting, put a lot of us put way too much expectations on our partners to make us happy.

53:57 We think that my wife is here to make me happy, and we may not say that, but deep down we actually hold that to be true, and she’ll never live up to that expectation because it’s too much pressure. And I was at an event, couples workshop we did, and I remember one woman saying, we just ask you a question, cuz myself and my wife, this Pauline stepped in to help on this occasion and we’re gonna be doing it together more in the future, and I said yeah, she’s, what do you guys do with money? And I said, like how to make it or spend it or invested?

54:24 She, cuz no, like just like bank accounts, same bank account and I rent. Okay, so this is a classic example how the question being asked has nothing to do with the issue, nothing to do with the issue. And I said great, so the question is, what do we do, we have a bank, separate bank accounts, joint? I see a great symbol, forget about us for a minute, what do you guys do? She goes, we have separate bank accounts.

54:44 I looked at her husband, I said, what do you want? I want a single bank account. I said, why are separate bank accounts so important to you? She says, because I want my independence. Sounds logical.

54:58 So great, let’s talk about independence now. My next question is very important: do you feel, as a woman, independent right now with your two bank accounts? Do you feel like you’ve got independence as a woman, as a human on this earth? She said, no. I said, a new bank account, the same bank accounts, 50 separate bank accounts, none of that s***’s gonna make a difference.

55:25 Let’s get to why you don’t feel independent, because that’s an old narrative, that’s an old story, that’s something that’s been haunting her for a long time, and anybody who deeply wants security, all this demonstrating is how insecure they are. And then suddenly it was like, whoa, now we got to the real s***, because it was nothing to do with a bank account. It’s, he asked that question so she could, you know, kind of confirm what she wanted or find something new to give her that independence, and then you reflected it back that this is something deep down inside.

55:57 So not to expect our better halves to fill that void to, quote unquote, make us happy, and then think that there are male and female archetypes, is and the man believed in him and then the woman loved her for who she is. Yeah, not who you want her to be, those are some basic ground rules. There is a massive pandemic in the world, epidemic, pandemic, pandemics, the bigger one is, no, I was doing, I was mess it up, but anyway this is a bigger, there’s a massive pandemic in the world, loneliness, and you talked about connection, that we have never been more connected as humans through mobile technology, etc., etc., and yet, and we can have 20,000 followers on Facebook, we get a 50,000 Facebook, Twitter followers, we can run an organization, we can sometimes lie next to somebody at night and yet we have a loneliness inside of us.

56:42 How is that possible in the world that we live in today? And that comes back to the relationship with self. If you want to improve your relationship, I would encourage you to let go of the need to change your relationship, work on yourself and trust that if you are meant to be together, that you will be together, but a lot of relationships end up being about control, and I think that is the, the epitome of the worst type of energy that you want to be in a relationship.

57:13 And an example of this is, I take time for myself, when people used to say to me that the idea of a couple of days away on my own was, it, so what’s Pauline gonna do? I don’t know, but that doesn’t feel fair, like what, you, like why are you going away, what, what does she get to do because you’re doing that? Listen, whatever she wants, but if you’re in a relationship where if you get to go away for a night then your wife has to go away, or vice versa, and it becomes this competitive thing, well, I would ask you to seriously look at your relationship and wonder what’s really going on.

57:41 Yeah, that’s powerful advice. About six months ago I went down to Costa Rica and had a few ayahuasca ceremonies, and it’s a subject of our next film called Dissolution, just talk about the human ego and how we process it. How do you feel about someone going into a situation like that to try to know more about themself through a medicine, as opposed to being alone with yourself or meditation or other work? How do you feel about that, ayahuasca specifically or the whole journey around you or, plant medicines or psychedelics?

58:14 I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know much about that space and I’m okay saying that. I go down to Peru historically to do the Give and Grow trips that I do, and where we bring entrepreneurs down and we give back and then we go hiking in the mountains, and everyone assumes that, not going on the trip, people often say, oh, you do ayahuasca down there, and I’ve just personally never been drawn to it. Okay, I don’t know a lot about it, and I do believe that using plant-based natural medicines to tap into certain parts of ourselves, there’s a lot of amazing evidence that I’m aware of that shows that it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s a really, really good thing.

58:51 So my view and that is I don’t know enough about it, Brian, to really comment in a kind of an authoritative sense, but if it works for people, great. I have met a number of people that feel to me they’re over-reliant on it, that they need some substance, now we can call it a natural substance, an organic substance, so therefore it’s accepted, but it’s an external substance and they need it in order to connect. I’m at, man recently that’s been just under 14 times and it’s almost like the only time he can really connect with himself is using that medicine, whatever medicine he uses in Peru, and I’m assuming it’s an ayahuasca process, um, and that to me feels a little bit interesting and there are, if I’m very honest, it feels off to me and I’m wondering why he has become so reliant on using, having to go to Peru in order to connect when he’s back in the United States.

59:45 That doesn’t feel right to me. Yeah, and I think you make a good point, I met people with like sixty ceremonies and it’s like, whoa. So I agree, you could kind of get addicted to this kind of dreamworld and introspection world but, uh, not have to come back and do the work in reality. For me it’s a, it’s kind of like a hardwired, you know, kind of in my head into my heart and I get some pretty straight-up analysis of myself and allows me to really connect and think a lot, but it’s usually something I only do once every couple of years, and yeah, to be continued on that one.

1:00:17 Um, talk to me about children. I’ve got two young boys, last time we spoke here I had no kids. I mean, I have my stepdaughter, she’s amazing, she was ten at the time, now she’s 14. I’m trying to connect with these new beings, my boy, one boy’s two and a half, I just feel in the last few months I’ve actually started maybe to have a relationship, or he doesn’t ignore me when I go in the room, but it’s still really new to me and it’s been hard, you know, at the same time it’s been taxing on my wife, and she’s of course had a really connected relationship with them because, you know, she carried him for nine months and cared for them, and it’s been a really weird dynamic and I’m trying to just go with it, but what do you usually tell your clients when it comes to connecting with children or even relationships with children and what to think about or what to consider?

1:01:01 Yeah, I mean, it’s been a difficult one, I shared with you outside before we started, you know, for the first couple of years I just didn’t connect with my kids at all. I didn’t want kids, and this might sound a bit weird, but a lot of men actually don’t consciously choose to have children, and I presented this to a client of mine one day and I said, did you choose to have children? He goes, Philip, you know, my wife got pregnant, I got her pregnant, we had babies, whatever, like what are you saying?

1:01:24 I said, no, you kind of, like, there’s a lot of us, it ends up being a societal thing or partners wanted it, it feels like either an organic thing or an expectation or a combination of all the above, but very few men actually really consciously sit down and make a choice to be a part of bringing a child into this world, and I think that’s something that might sound so obvious, but we don’t make a choice, then you feel like you’re not a part of it and you feel like this has been, this is happening, and it’s like the train’s on but you’re not, you’re not on the train but you should be. The other thing I’m seeing an enormous amount of men in particular in business, entrepreneurs, driven founders and leaders in business, a huge amount of men struggling deeply with their inability to connect with their kids and the overwhelming judgment they have towards themselves for their inability to do that, and what they do is they’re not curious because they’re too busy being judgmental, and when there’s judgment present there’s no possibility of growth.

1:02:23 So if you wake up in the morning, say you’re going out at night, you go, you know, I’m not drinking, I’m on this amazing new diet, plant-based, whatever it happens to be, not drinking, a nice glass of wine, and then you have five and you go home, there’s every likelihood you wake up and have the breakfast you shouldn’t be having because you want to reiterate how much of a loser you are, how you’ve screwed up, how you’re not capable of being disciplined, and then you have the lunch you shouldn’t have and you probably drink again the next night. It’s the same principle, is when they kind of connect with their kids, they start to just reconnect with the very thing they’re familiar with, the thing they can control, which is business. So would you, and I’m not speaking about you personally, why would you go home, walk in the door to be ignored by a little kid who just wants mom or he wants, you know, the breast milk or whatever, he wants the toys, why?

1:03:11 And then try, fail, you’re better off just being in the office. In our minds sometimes, better in the office controlling something and connecting, and that’s how I show up in the world, that’s how I, that’s my functionality to provide, and I feel that the judgment is killing this opportunity for growth. So that’s number one. But number 2 or whatever, their judgment is judging yourself, judging self. Okay, like I suck at this, I suck at this, I’m no good at this.

1:03:37 Yeah, okay. I’m working with a gentleman who reached out on Facebook in a closed group and he said, I on a good day, you know, he was talking about him as a parent, about Paw Patrol and the fact that his kids, his worst, the worst words that shoot in his stomach are, daddy, will you play with me? And what I would, you know, and I’m gonna be spending some time with this man, and he said, I’m the worst father ever, I’m a bad human being, now does anybody have practical advice of how I can connect with the kids?

1:04:05 And then there’s over 50 comments of people saying, oh, do the things you wanted, you know, you connect through the lens of your passions and stuff, wrestle with your kids, all the practical stuff, that’s great, but why is he in this situation? And what I would love to know is how was he, how was he fathered or how was he parented, what was his relationship to parenting, what is the context here, what does the schooling he had, and to start building it from there from the ground up and giving himself a break. I mean, it took me, as I said, five, six years to really begin to connect with the kid, with Charlie, and no one is on Facebook saying I’m a s***ty dad, but everyone’s on Facebook typically showing photographs, you’re on the swings, you’re this, and I’m thinking, holy s***, I look around the world, there’s nowhere I can go to have this conversation.

1:04:52 And I was tagged about a year and a half ago on Father’s Day by a gentleman called Derek and he said, to all the amazing fathers I know, and I was one of say 40 fathers, and for a moment it’s kind of cruel, and the ego was just celebrating, and then I said, but do I feel like a good dad? Am I? And I answered no, and I said, I wonder how many of those dads that were tagged truly feel like great fathers. And it’s being the most, if you ask me what’s my greatest challenge in life, it’s parenting, my greatest challenge.

1:05:31 I can write a book, I can run events, I can sit here and maybe do a good job, maybe not, I don’t know, hopefully deliver some value to somebody in the world, but never know how to figure out my kids and how to make it a, you know, be a fantastic parent. No, but like the greatest advice I believe I can ever give anybody, and this is obnoxious, so heads up in advance, is no matter what you do, you’re gonna f*** your kids up. And what I mean by that, before anybody judges, and judge me afterwards if you want, but just bear with me for one moment, what I mean by that is the realization I had is, if I over-smother my kids and hug my kids, I’m gonna smother them and they’re gonna have issues, if I’d never hugged them, you know, never ever hug them and tell them I love them, they’re gonna have issues, and if I do it in between, they’re gonna have issues.

1:06:14 So it’s back to this idea of letting go, and I will never give up on my kids, I would take a bullet for my children, but I’m not going to live my life for them, and as parents I think a lot of us maneuver our lives to fit in with our kids and I think that’s a mistake. If I can be the best human I can be, the best opportunity, with the best husband I can be, and therefore be the best father I can be, and every time I try to change my life to fit my family, and it just doesn’t work. What’s an example of that?

1:06:47 What would an example be? This won’t be like that, well, I’m not gonna do this so I can be a better father, I’m not gonna do this, moving to the United States, okay, I left Ireland for no apparent obvious reason, I love the country, love the people, all my family are there, and I needed to go to North America, and people always say, easy for you, you didn’t have kids. Well, no, wasn’t easy at all, was the hardest decision probably ever made. And then we did it again, after nine years of living in Canada we moved to Boulder two years ago, and people say, why Boulder?

1:07:16 And I said, I don’t know, it was one of these, but intuitively I knew I needed to be in America, and we have two kids now, we have a now nine-year-old, a seven- year-old, and if I looked at it purely through the lens of my children, there’s a bigger argument to say we should be back in Ireland with their cousins and their grandparents, both sets of grandparents, and I said no, that would be a decision that I feel we would regret. We need to do what we need to do, and when I say we, me personally, my wife personally, I do this thing called isolated dreaming, I would recommend everybody do it. Draw a picture of what you want, a drawing, ideally a full paint, and get a full goddamn canvas and draw a painting of what you want, take some space, journal a bit, then draw a painting or paint a painting, don’t bring your kids into it, see if you’ve got three kids, screw the kids, I’m joking when I say that, I would screw the kids, screw your wife, screw your husband, they’re all gone, it’s just you, draw the painting or paint the painting of what it is you want, and that’s called isolated dreaming, isolate, in other words it’s just you in the world, and then you put that back, you look at that and say, now how do my kids fit into this?

1:08:26 Now how does my partner fit into this? But if I thought about, say, moving to Boulder, but Charlie doesn’t like the snow and Maggie loves the heat, no, you know, Jesus, then where’s the perfect place for all of us? I drive myself to mentis, where do I feel I need to move, communicate that to my wife, and hopefully she supports me or vice versa, and when we move, we believe if we put ourselves in the firing line and in the best place to succeed as people, not just in business, we would be the best parents we could be.

1:08:52 And then the final thing is, always be vulnerable with your kids, allow them to see your pain, allow them to see your discomfort, allow them to see you fail. How many fathers and parents don’t play sports with their kids that they’re not good at, play the games that you’re s*** at so your kids too can see your humanness. It’s controversial, then, you know, a lot of people say you can’t come home and tell your kid you had a horrible day and you hate, you hate their mother, and like it, I like, like what, no, no, not every day, I’m not saying you do that all the time, but if, but on occasion, you already might say to me, how was the talk you did, dad, in Vegas or wherever, was nice, him, you know, honestly wasn’t a good, wasn’t a good one, he’s, like, well why not?

1:09:29 And we just talk about it for a few minutes, I’m not talking about downloading all the time, cuz that’s not fair on anybody, it showed it, allow them to see that, you know, allow them to see that you’re human. Yeah, and I agree, if you had moved to Boulder then you would be compromised, living a life for the kids, and then they would be compromised living with a father who’s being compromised, and the resentment just builds slowly. Yeah, well, I’ll give you a quick example of the vulnerability, or the call of vulnerability, but I remembered sharing a story about some stuff I did as a kid, like bad stuff, like smashing windows or stealing stuff or whatever, like, you know, just stuff that kids do, or maybe they don’t, maybe I did, and I remember telling, telling my kids this one night, and my wife was like, can we be going to utilize this, really happening, and I just told them these couple of stories and my kids are like, fascinated.

1:10:13 So anyway, fast forward a few weeks later, Maggie’s across the road with her friend and her friend or herself or this other friend decide they’re gonna put rocks in the mailboxes of the neighbors, they were to fill them with, with, with, with with rocks. So Maggie’s the person that we say in Arden to keep sketch, to keep a look out, and the other two kids put all the rocks in and Maggie keeps an eye out, whatever, and anyway she tells Charlie, our nine- year-old, and I come home one day and she said, he says, Maggie’s feeling guilty, she says she’s told Charlie and Charlie says, tell dad. She’s on, I’m not telling dad cuz, I says, well why should, two dads done way worse than you.

1:10:46 And it was just this funny thing in the house that by me showing some of these things, the sharing things that I’d done that weren’t so cool, it gave her permission to come to me and say, dad, I did this thing and I feel really bad about it. We just had a great conversation, but that’s a small example. Yeah, but I think fundamentally it’s the same thing. Yeah, I totally agree, and I had a conversation with my fourteen-year-old stepdaughter when the movie came out about my addiction, and Ashley, she was the hardest person to talk to, like I told my wife and then I talked to her, but I was dreading her more than my wife because this is a girl that, she was 6 years old, looked up to me, and I said, look, this is what happened to me and if you want to talk about anything I have questions, and it was so hard, and afterwards she was just like, she was like, wow, okay, I really thought you told me, and that’s opened up so many more conversations about life and about all of this stuff, and it’s just made me now we can talk, you know, and have a relationship, you know, as opposed to some idolization.

1:11:40 I think that is bang-on. I mean, it was a 17-year-old boy, you’ll manage and say at a One Last Talk event in Boulder with his dad, and he’s not a hugger, he doesn’t hug his dad, whatever, and at the end of the event he comes up and I give him a hug, and he turns around, random, Matthew hugged me, and his dad was like, we’ve never met before, and I said, great to have you here. I said, you mind me asking you a question after he heard all those speakers, and these were all adults, and we want to do a One Last Talk for youth in the future, I said, what’s your number one takeaway from what you just witnessed?

1:12:10 And without missing a beat he said, it’s great to know that adults have problems too. Like what? And the game changer happened when he watched his dad do a One Last Talk and he realized that the pain that he’s in, the things that he’s challenged with, you know, the spots in his face, the awkwardness with girls, his inability to connect, is to all the different nuances of grammar, his dad experienced the same thing, but his dad never told him, and then suddenly was able to go and have a conversation with dad which turned into multiple conversations, and what do you think happened?

1:12:49 They got closer. Yeah, powerful stuff. Right, I want to ask you about something, a term that you coined that I will always talk about and quote you on, and that is your relationship with money. I think you should be your next book, honestly, and it comes back to a story I always tell. I used to take these bankers out to dinner in the city and we used to, you know, I was all paid for and I’d taken these really nice dinners and he ordered a nice bottles of wine and towards the end of the dinner I’d always say, why are you doing this?

1:13:18 And they’d be like, oh, to make a lot of money, on everything. Why do you want to make a lot of money? I want to buy a Lamborghini or whatever. And I’d ask him a few more questions and finally it would come out, cuz I want to show that girl who said no to me in high school that I’m actually worth something, I want to show my dad that I’m not worthless, I’m, it always comes down to something, you know, and it always reminds me of you when you’ve asked that question, and I’ve seen you ask it in front of a bunch of live audiences, like, what is your relationship with money?

1:13:42 Can you talk about that statement and what kind of reactions it gets from people and what does even that even mean? Yeah, when I say that to people, most people don’t even know what I’m talking about, it always takes people aback, and I say that to a lot of my students. Well, I’m assuming that anyone’s gonna watch this in the future, they’re gonna be able to pause the video at any point, so I would ask everyone this question right now, and I would ask you to hit pause and I would actually just reflect on one question, that is, if you had to come up with one word that best captures how you feel about money, what would that one word be?

1:14:18 And the last people, if you did pause right now and take a moment, and when I’ve asked that question sometimes people think, they think it’s an intellectual night, and again I reiterate that this is how you feel about money, and let’s just say we have ten people in the room, Brian, I guarantee you’ll have love, power, energy, hate, worry, scarcity, fear, you will have a melting pot, a mixture of just masses of different emotions around money, and just that one word. Another thing people can do is if I ask you to draw, and I’ve done this multiple times, I went to a financial institution, so an organization who brought me in to Salt Lake City and I worked with their team and I decided that in this show, thinking, well, I’m not gonna talk about money because, I mean, these are experts in money, the wealth management firm, like, you know, and I decided that just out of curiosity, that’s been the first twenty minutes, I turned around to the owner and I said, what do you want me to do, you want me to keep going with the money thing?

1:15:19 And he said, absolutely. The dysfunctionality and the relationships that people had to money in the room and the the spread in terms of the difference was enormous, and then of course we pivot into, so how’s this show up in sales, how does this show up in your relationship to your wealthy clients, how does this show up in your ability to connect with people who have money, want money or don’t have money, and then we start to see how some of their frustrations in terms of their growth and continuity in their team are starting to show up because they’ve got such colorful f***ed up relationships and money, but such dysfunctionality with money in some cases that it was absolutely coming into these relationships. So what an exercise, asked me to draw money, took on what were like, like a hundred dollar bill, I said no, draw money, huh, what does money mean to you, draw, and then we’ve got them just to share these pictures and it was fascinating.

1:16:09 So and our relationship to money comes from our past, so how did you grow up around money? What was money, was money spoken about, was money spoken about in a particular way or was money never spoken about, because it was never spoken about in my house, we weren’t allowed to speak about it, so therefore it became a taboo subject indirectly, and therefore I feared it, therefore I was uncomfortable around it, therefore I thought there’s something wrong with that. My parents never sat with that intention, but the reality is that’s what I picked up, and arguably, and I say this with a lot of respect, is my other brothers, my other David and Robert, we’ve even talked to this, is not obsessed, but they’re almost, you know, this seems to be a lot of interest in money, and I’ve almost gone the opposite way and not wanted money.

1:16:45 So like who’s right? There’s no right or wrong, it’s just different, but understanding it, because how it shows up today and how it influences your decisions is staggering, staggering. But one word, how do you feel about money, and that alone will give you an awareness, and then you can start exploring, and sometimes with someone to say power, and I go, so basically without money you’re gonna have no power, freedom, without a mighty good or no for you. I disagree, I think money can allow you some choices, lifestyle choices, but money doesn’t give you freedom, like real human spiritual freedom does not give you freedom, you have to give yourself that freedom, you have to, but, but if somebody feels that freedom, money equals freedom, and they’ll typically have a number, they won’t be free until they reach that number, and here’s that, here’s the prior, the guarantee, when they reach that number they still won’t have it.

1:17:34 I have seen a lot of those guys. Yes, that number becomes 10x. Yes, and 100x, 100 percent, and maybe it’s because they’ll never get there or it’s just, it’s the road they’re asking the wrong question, and aren’t they always big beautiful round numbers, 1 million dollars, ten million dollars, 100 million dollars, where there’s turnover, profit, money in the bank, cash, equity, whatever, they always tend to be big round numbers, and therefore I’m not saying that that means equals are all wrong, but it is interesting that there’s a lack of substance behind the why.

1:18:00 And here’s another thing in relation to money, I want more money so I can make an impact. Now to me that’s a tragedy because I feel that you don’t need money to make an impact. Yes, we built an orphanage, improved three years ago, we raised $70,000 in order to go to the orphanage, we couldn’t actually physically build an orphanage with that money, but I believe through One Last Talk, for example, or helping a neighbor or whatever it happens to be, mentoring a young person, mentoring an old person, mentoring somebody, and you know, helping somebody, you can make an impact in ways that you cannot imagine, and you don’t need money to make an impact, and we made a film about it, Give and Grow, we did, we, the whole was all built on this idea that you don’t need money to make an impact.

1:18:42 And writing a cheque is never the same as connecting with a human being and helping them and giving them a hand up. Ever. It’s nowhere near this, I’m not even close, is it sometimes? Is it sometimes opposite of that? Sometimes it is a bit opposite of that sometimes.

1:18:57 And I think sometimes people feel that their value to the world is their ability to write a check. And you know, I met a, there’s a client, a friend of mine, client of mine, he brought me down to do some speaking about a fly’s up nose, Jes, we go for London. I don’t wanna give this impression that I just deal with all these high flyers and very wealthy people because that’s not my sweet spot, but on occasion I get a phone call from somebody well-known or, you know, in the public domain, and they flip for a day, we play golf, run away to chat, and we went for dinner and I paid the bill.

1:19:27 And he goes, you don’t do that. I said, what do you mean? Because my friends know, no one ever pays the bill. And I said, well, I said I would, I would, I would, I would challenge your friends, or I was something unto us, and he looked at me and he literally teared up, and I said, we, I said we won’t be friends if this is the way, if you just pay, I’ll pay for everything all the time, that’s not friendship in my world. And we came outside, I bought him dinner, I didn’t buy him a Lamborghini, I didn’t give him a new jet, and didn’t buy him a new Patek, bought him dinner.

1:19:56 He put his arms around me, said thank you for dinner, I said yeah, you’re welcome, he goes, no, thank you for dinner, and we parted, and I can tell you what’s going on. He has got a ton of people around him, he pays cuz he thinks that’s what value is. Now there’s generosity and then there’s paying for stuff for the sake of it, they’re two different things, and he just pays all the time and he feels that’s value. I see him for who he is, he’s a beautiful man with a massive heart, I’m not after him because he flies a jet, I’m after him because he’s got a big heart and he’s a beautiful human being, but no one sees that.

1:20:29 No, because he won’t allow them to see that. And he should think about that, relationship with money. 100%, because for him it’s something. Yeah, it’s so complicated, so you’re asking people to just pull the string, go down the rabbit hole, use the one word, draw it, that’s a great one, and just start asking yourself these questions. Yeah, and what you find is subtleties, going, actually, you know what, I do remember dad saying this thing, I do remember mom always worried about money, and it’s just the awareness.

1:20:58 So people go, what, awareness is not enough? Of course it’s enough. I mean, the iPhone now they’re telling you how often you’re spending or how much time you spend on your iPhone in a week, they don’t then pivot into the five-step system of how you reduce it or whatever, just the awareness alone can be a great start, and then you talk to your partner and then you talk to your business partner, you say, I got a set, and then you, okay, so that’s why you always freak out when it comes to a bonus day, or that’s when we, every time we’re about to take a risk and to acquire a new company or to get a new deal or whatever.

1:21:28 I mean, the business application for this conversation is staggering, there, I worked with so many entrepreneurs that say, oh no, I’m intuitive and I run my business like, just go, I feel like it, and they’re consumed by money but they’re unaware of it. Yeah, and therefore when they’re in a deal they’re in a bit, how much is the money conversation, there’s scarcity, their relationship to money playing out in the conversation and therefore the decision, therefore the results. Just be aware of what’s driving you.

1:21:54 Yeah, that’s all, and then you’re fully equipped. Yeah, my relationship with money has changed a lot over the last few years and changed over time, and I remember when I was in the room when you asked this question to the whole London Real studios three and a half years ago, I wrote, I said something, somebody behind said something like horrible or some nasty word, but I was just like pain and pain or something is what I said, but like more and more I do, I start thinking about money as, I know I’m now seeing money like energy is what I see it, I see it as something that it has to flow and it has to move and it has to have a purpose and it’s something not to be held on too tightly. I used to just hold on to it or I have to get enough of this to survive, and so I’m constantly examining how I feel about it and then trying to see, are you behaving that way?

1:22:38 That’s, yes, and a lot of times I’m not, and I’m like, wait a second, you see, act enlightened, you tell you something in mind, but you actually still acting like that banker or the broke kid before you were the banker with the money in the bank, and again the broke kid with no money and then the banker with the money in the bank that doesn’t touch it, I mean you’re both kind of weirdly broken away. Yes, and broken also, I think that’s what you’re thinking about all the time, so now it’s just, it gets to the, we replace, and I’ve had conversations with guests here and they talk about that, some people that’s, they’re in the business of making money and some people that aren’t, and they’ll talk about how they feel about it as well, and it’s an interesting conversation.

1:23:11 Where it’s also interesting is when it comes up in business, are we all, most of us have clients that we don’t feel respect us so we don’t respect them, or they’re not a fit, but we’re scared of them because they represent twenty percent or 40 percent or hundred percent or ninety percent of our revenue, and I see so many people that are unwilling to execute or have a conversation with them or change the dynamic or change the relation or let them go because of the money, they say they represent such a significant part of it, and to me that never, there’s no winning there, no one wins there ever. I think eventually, I think sometimes maybe there’s a revenue thing, you need to put the lights on, and so therefore you might need to, you know, take an income stream somewhere as long as it’s kind of like legitimate, and, but it’s not fully aligned, but I think eventually, I think the people are willing to say no, I’m not meant to do this work and I’m not gonna let money drive me, as soon as they say no to that work, something else shows up, and that has happened to me a lot.

1:24:06 Yeah, I mean, there’s a big chunk of my life, you know, and you know in the banking world, I mean you get this money but it comes with terms, it comes with terms, you know, it’s a, you know, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of, you know, blood money out there, there’s a lot of people that, you know, want to get the money, you know, maybe you want to, you know, sell crack cocaine on the corner or sling derivatives in the banking world, and yeah, I just got my money at home, but you didn’t, your character has now, it’s, it’s affected and your choices are affected and your compromises and everything that goes with it, and you get to own that baggage along with your bank balance. Yes, and you might own that longer than your bank balance. Yeah, so these are good questions to ask.

1:24:44 Something else you said, I think in a previous conversation, was, what’s your relationship with relationships? And I wonder if you could talk on that, because I think it’s a really interesting question, because you just said, I grew up in a home where we can’t talk about money, and we did this, or mom had this relationship to money, dad had this, but what is your relationship with relationships, what does that mean? So what that means is when we do work with couples, and we do a couples retreat, going back to the couples situation, I think is the best way to contextualize this, is when they come into the room, what we do is we kind of set them up, and in a nice way or in a kind of a jovial way, we kind of historically have given them, well, what are the things that frustrate you about your partner, and what are the things you’d like to see them do differently or change?

1:25:20 And typically they walk in with a laundry list, everything from why does he leave his underwear on the ground to I don’t understand why he says these sniping comments and I always feel hurt, and unheard or unspoken, seen, or whatever, and there’s this long list of things or short list of things. So they come in, you normally see them, like, okay, so when do I take the laundry list out now, and when do I get into this, and when do I start having to go with him and making sure that everyone sees how awful a husband he can be on occasions or whatever. And then I say, so great, great guys, you’re all here, fantastic, so we’re gonna start off by getting a sense of what your relationship to relationships was, and so we kind of separate the couples and they start to do these deep reflective questions and exercises about what they witnessed at home, you know, what they saw between the parents, did the parents love each other, did they demonstrate love, did you feel your mother was heard, did your dad see, you know, all of these kind of deep or very subtle but somewhat significant questions.

1:26:11 What was the energy at home, how do you feel that love was demonstrated, and you know, had it, and what happens is they’re going, she’s, I don’t remember, they’re learning stuff about themselves, and then we bring them back and the only thing that I talk about is what they learned about themselves. So I said, there’s my wife, and I go, you know what, I realized that my mom and dad never hugged publicly, for example, et cetera, et cetera, and then the husband, to their other partner sitting there going, wow, and they’re starting to say, so we start building up this profile of what each person witnessed growing up as relates to relationships, what they witnessed in others, and how they witnessed those people feeding and allowing them to exist in the same place.

1:26:53 By the time we get to the laundry list, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist because here’s what happens: the competition or the judgment or the frustration is replaced by compassion and an understanding of why the person does the very thing that pisses you off. They’re not doing it to piss you off, they’re doing it because that’s what they were schooled in doing, and the other person sees that for the first time, they go, now I know why you do that, you do that because that’s what your dad did to you.

1:27:21 And I, it’s one of the most beautiful things to take a step back and look at how you were in relationship as a kid, how your relation with your parents, how they were in relationship, because that’s what your schooling was, that’s what your schooling was, that’s the basis in which you have entered into this world. Do you not think it’s important to go back and understand that and how it shows up today? And by the way, if anyone says that’s, by the way, just going back to, I’m deviating a little bit, but here, this is a huge thing I see: well, I’m not gonna parent like my dad, I’m not gonna be like my mother.

1:27:57 Well, number one is, with that energy you’re exactly like your father and you’re exactly like your mother, and it’s by pretending you’re not, denying that reality, trying to be different is the very thing that’s going to keep you in the same loop, but accepting that whether I like it or not, I’m like my mom and my dad, one more than the other, I’m gonna accept the parts that I’m like, but I’m also gonna change the pieces I don’t. And I see too many parents trying to do the opposite. I grew up in a house of one bedroom and the four brothers shared the one bedroom, my kids are gonna have their own bedroom.

1:28:29 So you spend 20 years building a business so you can buy a seven-bedroom house in the countryside so your kids are there, but do you love what you do, and what has it come at the cost of? Your kid has a bedroom, his own bedroom. I’ve worked with clients, they’ve got a garage full of s***, every piece of plastic that’s ever been made in China that spins and jumps and heads and flies around in circles and everything else, and entertains them, entertains them for two hours until they go to the next thing, but how’s your relationship to them, more important, how’s your relationship to yourself, because you do work you don’t want to do, how do you think that shows up as a dad?

1:29:03 And by the way, did your kids want that or is that what you wanted for them? That conversation with your kids is powerful. Like anybody watching this who is in that frame of, I’m gonna do this for them, like literally think about sitting down with, you know, your five-year-old, your seven-year-old, ten-year-old and saying, okay, guess what, this is what I’m gonna do, this is my grand plan, when I die you’re gonna have all the money you ever need and you’re gonna have a house and all this stuff, and that’s, don’t worry, don’t worry, but it means that I’m not going to be here, I’m not gonna do this, I’m gonna be angry at home sometimes, I sound good, and they’re gonna be like, what are you talking, or you’re talking, why would I want anything that resembled that?

1:29:44 Yeah, and yet so many people are just obsessed with that absolute, we can’t give him a life I never had, like I said, give him the seven-bedroom house, I am going to give him the life that I never had. Right. Yeah, it’s all about you. Yeah, and that relationships, relationships is deep, we parent, Brian, I feel, and I say this with a lot of love and respect because I do it myself, okay, so I’m not here trying to point a finger, we parent from such a deep selfish place and yet many of us wrap it in a bow, going, but I just want the best for my kids.

1:30:16 And I’m gonna give an example and I’m not trying to put my wife under a bus, although even though I can because she’s not in the studio, but I remember I talked about college and we just have different perspectives of college and how we’re gonna approach that or not, as the case may be, and I remember saying, so why do you want the kids to go to college? So I want them to experience the fun. And I say, but what fun should, well, the fun I had. So you want them to have what you had?

1:30:36 Okay, great. And then we just kept going down this path and it wasn’t right or wrong, and then eventually, and my wife went on to be an accountant, and but you’ve got to understand why she became an accountant, she became an accountant, worked for an organization, worked for another organization, another organization to find out, ultimately, she was miserable to ultimately find out she never really wanted to be an accountant, and what happens is the pattern continues unless you understand why you got there. If you’re in a dysfunctional relationship, there’s a strong likelihood you’ll find another dysfunctional relationship unless you understand why you keep attracting that dysfunctionality.

1:31:10 It’s not always the other person’s fault, you chose to be in that relationship. And we had a great conversation when I said, so how did you become an accountant? She said, I went to my career guidance person, he noticed I was good with numbers and he recommended I become an accountant. I said, okay, great, now that’s the intellectual surface story, but why did you become an accountant? Well, I grew up in poverty and I wanted to escape the poverty, an accounting was the way out.

1:31:37 She spent 42 years running from what she didn’t want, which was poverty. Now that’s a great energy source to move away from to get something going, but eventually I believe everyone has to stop and say, okay, I’ve run fast enough from what I don’t want, maybe it’s time to stop in my life right now and consider what it is I do want, because if you keep running from what you don’t want, you’ll end up making inauthentic decisions, doing the s*** that you don’t really want to do, to die on your deathbed many years from now wondering, what if it was different, what if I was meant or destined to do something different in this world. That’s the power of understanding why we do what we’ve done, why we are where we are, and what is really driving the decision.

1:32:25 She just didn’t want to experience poverty and somebody said to her, this authority figure said, you’re good with numbers, your sister is an accountant, oh by the way, accountants get paid well and they’re in demand, boom boom boom. It’s not wrong, it just wasn’t gonna serve her for the long term. Hmm, I guess we can examine all the decisions we’re making, underlies relationship ones and career ones and money ones and parenting ones, and keep asking ourselves, why are you making these decisions and are they out of fear?

1:32:53 And yeah, which I guess it’s getting to know yourself better. It is, and I don’t want people to be obsessed with it, Brian, like I want people to enjoy, I want people to go out and have dinner and I want people to play in the park without constantly obsessing about it, but I just think that, I’m not asking people to go overboard, I’m just asking people to start asking themselves questions. There’s too many people that have their head buried in the sand and they’re afraid because they know there’s something out of alignment, they know there’s something off, and it feels so overwhelming to even begin.

1:33:21 I’m just asking, just to lean in, just ask yourself one question: is this the city I want to live in, is this the relationship I want to be in, is this the work that I meant to do, without any judgment. A great question, a very simple question is, and it’s great to watch how you respond to this, you personally or your audience, if I was to say your greatest work is yet to come, how does that make you feel? Do you lean in, lean into the camera right now, are you leaning into the screen, are you leaning into your MacBook, oh hell yes, yes, are you going, oh my god, that scares the s*** out of me, are you numb?

1:34:02 Because it really gives you a sense of where you’re at in the journey and what you believe is possible and how aligned you actually are. When my friend James Curley took over as president of Levi Strauss, one of the things he did is he went in and he surveyed the key people, the ownership, the management of Levi Strauss, which is a collective brands, about a five, four or five billion dollar business, and what was frightening is almost every person in a senior position felt that Levi’s best days were behind them. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying that is not the place I want to work, that is not the future or the environment or the energy I want to be around.

1:34:48 I believe I’m just getting started and I would love everyone else to feel that as well, with enthusiasm as opposed to judging and saying, oh well, in that case I’ve wasted ten years of my life, what good is that. So if someone had the numb or they got intimidated by that feeling, then they should question, speak curious what they’re doing, be curious why, why, and if they’re excited by it then maybe that’s a sign that they’re on a track. And the thing for Pauline, when she made the pivot, I mean she literally went to her, she’s now gone on to resign her designation as an accountant, because what happens is if she kept it then it’d be one foot in, I’ve thought out and experiment with things but not be fully in, and like she burnt, like the Vikings did when they got to land, they burned the ships, no going back.

1:35:29 Okay, and she resigned her designation and the day she did that, then the universe conspires to support you, to show you opportunities and possibilities that were hidden before that you could not see, and you also work in a different way to find out, uncover stuff that didn’t exist, and you know what she’s doing now, not because it’s an opportunity, not because the market’s there, not because we have a network, it makes sense, is because she wants to. She’s networking with couples, she’s now doing some work with, you know, coaching some women, and she’s integrating the business, never imagined in her life she’d be doing it, and you know what, she’s brilliant at it. Hmm.

1:36:03 She’s different than me, which is a good thing. Yeah, and she’s brilliant, and that started because she asked herself those questions. Absolutely. Why did I want to become an accountant? But where the wheels fall off every time is, appalling, initially went to there, but if I give this up then I’ve wasted all that time in college, like, oh no, if that’s how you see it, that’s a fundamental mistake, because that will prevent you from moving forward.

1:36:28 It’s just a chapter, it’s like a relationship that turns out to be bad or a failed marriage. Look, I think some of the worst statements ever, the failed marriage or broken home, maybe it’s the greatest failed marriage ever, maybe it wasn’t, it was the best, you know, maybe it was, it was meant to happen, but we use these things. I mean, and just going back to relationships, you know, I, one of the stables, it drives me nuts, two statements is, my better half, I’m a, happy wife is a happy life.

1:36:53 I know too many men trying to keep their wives happy and they’re compromising who they are at the core and they’re building up resentment. And the other thing is when you say my better half, if you break up with your partner, your better half is gone and you’re left with the s***ty half. I know we’re just splitting hairs and we’re talking about wording, language is everything, but language is key. If you honestly believe your wife is better than you are, you know, and this thing, and I know it’s joking and I can sit here and maybe the two is considered, we’ve all be both married up or whatever, but actually the fact is that actually healthy?

1:37:25 Did my wife ask to be put on a pedestal or does she want to be seen as an equal? I’m not answering for her, but I think I have a good guess to say she doesn’t want to be partners, but she wanted to be respected, she wants to be loved, but she does not want to be idolized. Yeah, yeah, that’s powerful stuff. Tell me a bit about Philip, what is your life like, what are some of the things that you do every day to make sure you can keep doing this, because you’ve got a lot of energy and you do a lot of stuff.

1:37:52 I’m going to talk a little bit more about your charities, but Jesus, when you start talking about this stuff you do, I remember earlier, you know, our previous conversations, I’m like, what, and you’re going to India and you’re going to Peru and you’re doing One Last Talk and you’re doing lots of consulting and it’s a lot. How do you maintain that energy? Because you’re always, well, it’s simplified in the sense that I do one main retreat a year in Ireland and a second one in Ireland, and I do a weekend workshop in Boulder once a year, and that is basically what I do instead of One Last Talk now.

1:38:26 So for example the couples workshop, we might do an event maybe early next year and we do that once every three or four years, that’s more of a kind of a passion project for us, it’s not a full-time thing, and I do way less consulting, way less 121 stuff, so I work with the odd private client that comes around but typically right now I don’t work with any private clients, and so 90% of my energy is in One Last Talk and how do we bring One Last Talk to the world. Good. And that is exciting and it scares the s*** out of me at the same time.

1:38:53 Good, I like that. And you want a million of these books, which means you’re gonna have a serious effect on the world. I want a million of those books sold within the next five years. It’s a strong statement, Philip McKernan. Three years ago we didn’t, never told me than ever even here ago he wouldn’t, I said I would not, I promise you.

1:39:12 Talk, she was your, your, and your, your not your intake, but your, your, your questions around the interview, the pre-questions, and it really got me to sit there and I said to myself, I really struggled with that, I sat without for days, what is it? Because I’m not gonna b******t Brian, I respect you way too much to come in here and just throw b******t at you, and I said, what do I really, really want with this book? And it’s a million copies, and it’s not just a round number for the sake of it, because to me that million, that’s a million speakers that’s scientifically it’s been proven have directly influence over 258 other human beings, so you start to multiply the numbers.

1:39:45 I want a million copies of that book sold in five years. The old Philip wouldn’t have said that. And maybe is that the Irish upbringing where you can’t be that brazen and you can’t say that thing about yourself because you’ll get beat down by everybody else? It is ingrained in our society that you don’t speak too highly about yourself and that anyone around you is gonna make sure that they clip you down if you do so. They call it the tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand, I think it is, and the analogy, and again I love our little, our Irish people, but there is that thing there and I used to be very defensive around that, pissed right now, but it’s true, and there’s this little story about two guys walking down the beach and there’s a mansion up on the cliff and the American looks up and goes, wow, I’d love to meet that guy and ask him some questions about how he achieved that success.

1:40:29 The Irish guy goes, I could never see him, and I’d find his car, I’ll put a nail, I’ll scrape the side of the door. And now it’s not exactly like that, okay, and that would be very derogatory for a lot of Irish people if and when they hear this, but there is a little bit of a simmering, don’t get too big for your boots, and I think that’s a humbleness that I think allowed the Irish to be loved in many cases around the world, but also successful too, and successful, but I also think it’s time where the Irish start to own who they are and start to break free from the shackles and to be confident and to make statements, and because we’ve, you know, we have that power. So he’s like a Conor McGregor, an outlier or a god?

1:41:09 Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, sir, but he gets away with it and the whole nation loves him for it, as far as I’m aware. I mean, I don’t spend most, I spend about two or three months of the year in Ireland and I think he’s respected for the most part in Ireland, and why wouldn’t he be? I’m not into the fighting and the stuff of that necessarily, but I respect him, and I respect, and I think some of it is the whole showman stuff and it’s part of the gig, but I tremendously admire his attitude, and if he wasn’t as confident and as direct as he was, you know, people wouldn’t fear him.

1:41:40 Yeah, professional stuff, but I can’t name any other Irish people that do that, so, and you would besides, you know, it’s difficult. Not the 1 million, but I love to hear you say this, I love that, and I love that you’re all in on this. Yeah, and I think you were telling me earlier, the more you go all-in on this, okay, somewhat selfless pursuit of I want to give this back to humanity, the more wonderful opportunities open up for you. This is the gift of the world.

1:42:03 And I, you know, can I read, I’ve never, everything I brought was a little piece of paper here because there’s a statement that I heard, it’s from the Bible, I’m not a very religious person but I would consider myself a very spiritual person, and there’s a guy called Yanik Silver and he basically owns some event and he read this out and I just went, it, there’s very few statements that have haunted me, it’s just gone through me, and I asked him ages ago and I said, where’s that from? And he said, it’s from the Bible. So, and I never, and the Bible, so, but I’d like to read this and I feel this is massively true: if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

1:42:41 If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. Let’s read it one more time: if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And I just think it is extraordinarily dramatic, like destroy you, and I do feel more now than ever before that if people don’t share their truth, the part of themselves that’s been hidden from the world, and our methodology is the One Last Talk method, if you like, they’ll never be fully alive, they’ll never be fully free, and they won’t free everyone else around them, and that’s the mission I’m on for the next, I don’t know how long, maybe till the day I die, who knows.

1:43:40 I love it, man. I’m so excited about this and I’m so excited about you and this vision and focus and allowing yourself to say these big bodacious goals and to go ahead and be the face of this and keep talking about it, like we need you to do that. And I want this in cities all over the world, I want people running One Last Talk events all over the globe, and exactly how we’re gonna get there I don’t know, but I know what’s gonna happen, absolutely going to happen.

1:44:03 Okay, I like it. Um, a bit more about you, what do you do on a daily basis to just keep fired up, to just stay you, to, you know, keep your energy and stay focused? You have practices, you know? I’ve never been a big, big one for practice, I think a workout, I mean I’m not the biggest guy in the world but I’ll do work, I do workouts, I mean I work out probably four or five times a week, you know, when I’m in a rhythm. I eat pretty well for the most part, but I don’t have, like, traditional, I don’t meditate, I don’t, I don’t fast, intermittent fasting for example, something I’m gonna start the new year cuz I’m intrigued, I do test things.

1:44:39 I think you know, if I think the biggest, the two things I probably do is time with my family quite a bit more now than ever, but I’m more present and my kids even say that to me, but I just get such fuel from the work I do and the feedback from the clients, when I get an email from a different part of the world, when I get a, just something that, not that you’re amazing, but one of these, like, because of the work we’ve done, because of One Last Talk, it has improved this relationship, and that just ignites me and I feel that I’m driven so much by the results that we get with our clients, it just, it’s just a fuel that it just brings a different energy to the table. So I’m not sure I’m answering your question but I’m doing my best. You know, that’s, but that’s helpful.

1:45:23 If I were to ask a bunch of your friends, what’s Philip McKernan’s superpower, what would they tell me? It is, oh Jesus, Brian, I don’t know. No, but like how are you able to get all this stuff done and, like, you know, make all this stuff happen, cuz it’s no small thing, you know. Well, it’s funny, last out there’s a great friend of mine, Shane Craddock, and he lives in Dublin and he asked me, he said, I want to know, how do you, like, how do you get so much stuff done, how do you manage, I can’t, you, what do you do?

1:45:49 And I, I don’t know, I’ve never sat and analyzed it. I don’t have a time thing I work on, I wake up in the morning and with the exception of phone calls and designated things that are set in my calendar, like coaching calls or a new client, you know, conversation or new opportunity, I wake up and it’s very organic and I’m drawn to the things that I feel I need to do that day in order to impact the world, and I know maybe I’m not answering your question, but there are days I wake up, Brian, there’s nothing in my calendar, I’ve created of days and there’s no plan. I have a Trello board that I hardly ever open, much to the frustration of my amazing supportive assistant, she’s way more than that, Amy drives, I don’t look at it maybe once every two weeks or something, but I wake up and I lean into the things that I feel intuitively need to be done to bring us forward and I execute, like, rare, I execute like unbelievably fast and I execute religiously and I’m just constantly pulling triggers.

1:46:51 Well, and you’ve always been that way? No, god no, I was too scared to execute on anything because I was afraid I would fail, and now I’ve become very friendly with failure because it’s not real failure, and I know we know that, but I’ve become very, very comfortable with something not working, and I think that’s allowed me, it’s almost I assume certain things are not gonna work, just keep pulling the trigger, and what’s happening is I was pulling the trigger like a machine gun and now what’s happening, it feels like it’s getting really focused, and like we’re gonna be launching One Last Talk in our first company, I’m about to sign a contract to work with my first professional sports team in 2019, we’ve just launched One Last Talk in the prison system, in the maximum-security prisons in America, and we’re gonna be running an event in a maximum-security prison or a high-security prison to bring it to the world, because we want to demystify a lot of these men and women who truly have made mistakes, you want to reform, not the ones that would do the same thing tomorrow if they’re let out, like we’ve got, like, a lot of things going on, but it’s all under the lens of One Last Talk and it’s all very, very focused in that regard.

1:47:54 Yeah, that makes sense. We have a tiny team, right, tiny. I wouldn’t know it. What was the best day of your life and the worst? Probably, I was going to share a story that I’ve shared a lot, about my best day of my life was at an orphanage in Sri Lanka, which has shaped a lot of who I am, but you know what, last night was probably one of the best days in my life, and I’ll tell you why.

1:48:26 My mother, who is definitely has been my hero, one of the most intuitive people I’ve ever met in my life, probably the most intuitive, but she never trusted it, so she never really executed on it, she has point-blank refused to go to any speaking event, be in a room when I do an event, cuz she’s just too nervous, and she came to the event last night in Dublin, and I haven’t sat with this long enough to figure out why, but that meant the world to me. Hmm. And I went up to her bedroom last night and I kissed her on the head and I said, thank you for coming to the event last night, I said, that meant the world to me and I love you.

1:49:05 I came out of her room and the only person that was there was my wife, and I just did this to myself, and I didn’t realize I’ve been waiting almost my entire life for that moment last night. Why did that mean so much to you? I wanted my mother to see, you don’t leave Ireland historically unless you’re dying, the famine, you don’t leave Ireland unless you literally cannot afford to put bread and butter on the table for yourself or your family, and I left Ireland at the back end of the Celtic Tiger, the greatest economic boom in Irish history, when it was going like that, and I always felt at some level, my mother’s never said this to me, I always felt that I’d not betrayed my mother, but I always felt that I’d let her down, and I wanted her to see why I did it, that my journey on this earth is not about me, my journey is to make the difference in as many people’s lives as I can before I kick the bucket, and I wanted her to see that I needed to do this to make the biggest impact I can.

1:50:36 Did she see that? Yeah. Did she tell you she knows? She knows. Okay, and you know she knows.

1:50:43 I know, she’s a powerful, thank you, I know she knows, she looked at me in a way that she has never done ever, and she said, I get it. Well, she knows, and that was 15 years coming. They’re more, I’m 46 years old and, okay, and you left Ireland 46 years coming, for six years, credits, it’s about 11 years coming from the day I left. All right, but it’s still 46, but I feel the leaving was representative of everything, because I’ve always been a bit of an outlier to some extent in my own way, and I feel like last night, while it wasn’t an arrival, it’s a magical place, but it was a moment where I said, you see, all the sacrifice, all the pain, all the uncertainty, this is why I do what I do and this is the journey I needed to take.

1:51:26 Yeah, I mean, not that you need more encouragement from me, but if you’re having moments like this, Philip, you are obviously on the wrong path, on the right path, and if it scares the hell out of you and you have these bodacious goals for humanity, you’re obviously on the right path. And you know, I think we both know Ryan Holiday, and he’s got the book The Obstacle Is the Way and it’s tattooed on his arm and it used to not really make much sense to me and then it kind of made sense to me and now every day it makes sense to me. Yes, absolutely.

1:51:53 I’m going into the most, the hardest thing to do. Yeah, which is something you’re doing, and going all-in with no life raft. And the funny thing is though, there was a while there that I was trying to achieve that result and I was consciously executing or trying to get events going in Dublin and trying to do this and trying to do that or trying to be seen, and I truly have let go of that, and last night happened very organically. I was assuming she wouldn’t be there and lo and behold who turned up in the room, and it’s when you let go of seeking that recognition, that validation, to be seen by the very person you’ve been waiting your whole life to be seen by, or whatever, is often the time that’s when it happens, it’s the only time it can truly happen.

1:52:31 Yeah, because it’ll happen sooner, it’s not real. Yeah, it’s funny how that works. Yeah. Um, what scares you? I think the thing that’s maybe, there’s many things, but I think the thing that scares me the most is falling into a pattern that I see so many speakers fall into, and that is setting out with a great intention, being pushed onto a pedestal by many people, allowing themselves to do that, so it’s a two-way thing, and believing, started to believe their own hype and getting lost in all of it, getting lost in the noise and beginning to believe that you’re something you’re not, and that would be probably the number one thing that I’m scared of.

1:53:12 And I think that’s a good thing, but I think it’s a detrimental thing, I think it’s prevented me from stepping out and creating audacious goals and saying I want a million bucks, and minimum million bucks of this being sold, by stepping out and taking One Last Talk, because I was afraid that if I became successful or this concept became successful I would get lost and people might say, well, allure in that, that’s, that’s new to Chris, because they saw me. Well actually it’s not, because I believe there’s a disproportionate amount of speakers or authors or writers or famous people, whatever you want to call them, in the world that I’m in that I’ve gotten lost, and the statistics are staggeringly high, statistics of them getting lost, so starting on stage and sharing one thing but going behind stage and living a completely different life.

1:53:55 Right, right, and I see it all the time. Right, so they’re on repeat, they’re giving you the message people want to hear, they’re no longer passionate about it, they’re not really living it, and they rinse and repeat because they’re stuck in this cycle. They’re not all at that, but there’s a disproportionate amount, and a lot of the people that I had on pedestals wrongly, I got to meet behind closed doors and in the green room at speaking events, in a bar afterwards, and they’re not even close to who I thought they would be or wanted them to be, and I’m not blaming them, I blame myself partly for having these heroes and, you know, creating an expectation that they were never going to live up to, but realizing that many of them are very disconnected and very lost and unwilling to change and see it, which to me is the scary thing.

1:54:39 So, and now one of them would probably say, I’m, few of them have come to me and work with me and I’m very privileged to work with a lot of very well-known speakers now, but some have become, a lot of them, they don’t see it, it just slipped bit by bit by bit by bit, and before they knew it, they are deviated from who they were, and to me that is a really scary reality, because I don’t know how to stay, I don’t know, I don’t have a mechanism to protect myself from that, and yet my wife says I do, and I think one is she grounds me, and is I always give the results of my work back to the client, I never take ownership of it. As much as they try to say, McKernan, my life is better because of you, I go, no, your life is better because of you, and when I do that, I truly do that, and I think that’s the only thing that’s saving me right now.

1:55:27 Yeah, I think you’re okay there, I think we’ll be alright, I’ll let you know if you do. I’d rather err on the other side. Hey, what would we be surprised to learn about Philip McKernan, something you do or something you like that we just would be surprised? Oh, man, I love poetry, I write poetry sometimes, that’s something that not many people know about. I want to stand on a moving train, and I’ve never shared that publicly before, ever.

1:56:00 I really want to stand on a moving train, and I think it comes from growing up as a kid watching Indiana Jones, because he was definitely my hero because he represented everything I was not. He was good-looking, he was bold, he didn’t give a s***, but he cared deeply for humanity and he did what he wanted, he was adventure and whatever, and then watching him on a train or something, I don’t know what it is, I told my kids, racing my dog, I get my little guy goes, daddy, are you for real? I said, I’m gonna stand on a moving train, okay, out in the wilderness somewhere, I’m gonna jump on a train, I know this sounds bizarre, like the top of a train, I’m gonna climb up on it, I stand at the top of a train when it’s moving like 30 miles an hour or whatever, whatever it is.

1:56:40 Okay, I like it. Something I want to do, and I know it sounds bizarre and I’m slightly embarrassed, but not even that embarrassed at all, a bit mentioning, but that’s something that no one really knows except my wife and my two kids, no one else. I wonder stand under moving, I kind of want to do it too now. I’m going to stop you, you are okay, guaranteed. All right, I believe you, sounds like fun.

1:56:59 Indiana did it as well, right, so who knows. Um, what, what keeps you awake at night? What keeps me awake is, what it’s kind of a haunting sense that comes in and out of my life is almost the opposite of what I share it around, you know, the shadow side of what I shared around my mom, and that is, am I gonna die in America? Yeah. I’m like, am I gonna get old and die in America?

1:57:28 Is that where I want to be? And while I have got tremendous conviction most days that I’m living in the right place, doing the right work, there are occasions where there’s such a deep longing for the country of Ireland, that’s why I do retreats in Ireland, cuz that’s my way of coming back and showing people a part of who I am. There’s a haunting nature of being away from the country you love, and it’s like it’s part of who you are, it’s in my bones, it’s in my blood, I love the country, and when I get back to Ireland and, you know, people say, wow, it’s just amazing to see you in your natural state, it’s just a, you, there’s an aliveness that comes out of you and it’s very palpable, but it haunts me on occasions that I’m not living there, but yet I know deep down I know I’m not meant to, right now.

1:58:16 Yeah, yeah, and it still haunts me, Brian. Yeah, you’ve told me this before. Yeah, yeah, and I can see it, and I’m sure when you go back there’s things that drive you crazy about it, not sometimes it’s nuts, but, like, I can see you’re connected. I know you do these walking retreats in the West of Ireland and they’re powerful and you know you do it with, you know, families and you’ve done it with your son as well. Yeah, and that’s, I can see that’s homage for you, but that’s interesting, you know, I don’t feel that way about America somehow.

1:58:41 I don’t, but you know, it’s different, you know, when you’re, Ireland is smaller and it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, you guys have a history and, yeah, it’s, it’s its thing, you know, and so it is. I don’t feel that way about America, but that’s really interesting. Um, Philip, I always ask everyone a few questions at the end, I’m gonna ask you these, I might have asked you before but answers changed, no, and everything, you know, now especially after this One Last Talk writing adventure, if you can make that phone call to the 20-year-old Philip and give that young man a bit of advice, I guess he’s in Dublin, Ireland, at this point.

1:59:11 Yeah. What would you tell? Don’t avoid the pain. Don’t avoid the pain, your pain is your friend, it’s gonna be your greatest teacher, and you’re doing everything to avoid the pain, but trust me, don’t do that, don’t go looking for it, but be open to it when you receive it, just don’t allow it to consume you, don’t allow it to just allow you to wash over you, and know that whatever it is, whatever you’re struggling with, whatever pain you’ve been through, whatever pain you’re in right now, it is going to have a purpose if you allow it to, but feel the pain.

1:59:40 Okay, your quote from this book is, your greatest gift lies next to your deepest wound. Yes. Right, when I’m getting the wound, when I’m in the traumatic experience that sucks so much I can’t even think about it sucking so much, how do I have that perspective? I don’t think you do. Okay.

2:00:00 And I don’t, I’m not sure you’re meant to, but it’s what I’m asking people to consider in hindsight is, don’t block that story away, don’t throw that pain away, don’t put that down to just a bad time or whatever, that your pain has a purpose, and I know it sounds ludicrous to some people if they’re very highly charged, don’t you tell me my pain is a purpose, I should never have experienced this, and that this is s*** of my life, whatever it is, and I would have felt like the same thing, but like, what’s the choice, what’s the alternative? Allow the pain to consume you, allow the pain to control you, try and use all that energy to stuff it into that box, builders build a road and a skyscraper on top of the story? Or do you take an opportunity to see, okay, maybe there’s a possibility that I was meant to experience this or that, because I’ve experienced this I have got a gift that allows me to connect or see or move through this earth differently than somebody else, and while I would not have wished my pain on anybody, my worst enemy, I promise you, and I really mean this, is I look back and it’s bizarre to say, is that if I didn’t go through that, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today.

2:01:08 One Last Talk would not exist, that book would not be sitting on your lap right now, and we wouldn’t have had the event we had last night, and I wouldn’t have connected with my mother the way I did, and those people wouldn’t have shared their truth, and Lena wouldn’t have gotten rid of the spots in her skin, and she wouldn’t have shared her story, and the whole thing wouldn’t have happened, if it wasn’t for your pain. There you go. On that same note, best advice you’ve ever received, could have been from a parent or a friend or someone along the way or something you heard or read?

2:01:40 Oh, there’s something in my mind, there’s something just there and it’s eluding me right now. We come back and it’s always a hard walk. Yeah, I mean, I’ve done a very basic level, my mother used to always needs to drive him, not know, your health is your wealth, or, and I’ve said, yeah, mom, yeah, I’m gonna be rolling my eyes and everything else, and cuz they’d party, because there’s a woman who didn’t look after her own health, which also deeply saddens me on many levels, and as simple as it is, you know, if you don’t have your health you don’t really have a whole lot, and you can’t do all these amazing things and you can consider these questions and you can’t change your life and you can’t connect to other people.

2:02:21 So yes, but as simple as that is, in many respects it is the oldest piece of advice I’ve heard, it’s not necessarily unique to my mother, I’m sure, but it’s probably, in hindsight, the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard. Yeah, last part to that 20-year-old watching us around the world, advice to them, you know, they’re growing up in it in different worlds, and I know a lot of us old people say, it’s back in my day it was different, and now with social media it’s different, and we had TV, but still it is this weird hyper-connected world that makes you feel disconnected. It’s a world where Instagram will always show us a hundred people that are having cooler lives than us, that are never in pain, right, that never had any trauma, and that’s our role models.

2:03:03 What advice do you give to them? Well, I think number one is, don’t assume education is gonna be the answer for you. There’s too many people going to college and they’re going to college because they don’t know what else to do, so I’m unclear about what’s next, so are going to get a degree, and I think the challenge with that is you spend another four or five or six years, you know, passing time, maybe studying and learning some great information or whatever it happens to be, but you know, when you come back you still have to face that person in the mirror, you still have to face yourself.

2:03:52 Good advice. And let me ask you one more question, something I’ve been thinking about a lot the last few years, and you know, I get the privilege of, you know, speaking with incredible people like you every week, and I get perspectives and wisdom coming at me in a lot of ways, and the people I really resonate with and the people that really seem to know what they’re talking about, and intuitively, last time you told me to trust my intuition and I’m trusting it much more these days, is that they seem to all be saying something similar to me, Philip, and I want to get your thoughts on that, and that is that essentially we are all connected as humans, we’re really connected, and yet we’re kind of brought up in this world where we’re taught that the individual wins and it’s all about me and I have to win and get mine and get this thing, but no one else, no one seems to find the happiness in this, and what it all seems to come back to is giving something back to other people, helping someone else, teaching them, mentoring them, some type of contributing to this greater good, because we’re all gonna leave someday.

2:04:57 Yeah. And I’m seeing this expressed in One Last Talk in a massive way, even the parameters of the talk, I mean you spelled it out right in the beginning, this is, it’s about you but it’s not about you, it’s about passing it on to one person or more people, this, it’s this energy inside of you, this knowledge, this narrative that you’re not alone, that I went through this, that it’s like we’re trying to contribute to take this humanity to another level or extended consciousness or a better place, and I see this from lots of people, former bodybuilders and, you know, new science people and martial artists and speakers and authors, and it’s a theme, folks, I keep seeing, and I keep feeling it, you know, that we’re all here to really give back to each other and make it better.

2:05:42 What are your thoughts on that? Because I’m sure 20 years ago you might not have believed that, but your actions are showing me that this is what you do believe. Have you got your head around how we’re all connected or what we’re here for? I do and I don’t, I mean I’ve got some ideas, and I, the story I told myself the longest time was, when I make enough money, when I have my s*** together, when I have whatever, then I’ll come back and do the things I want to do and I’ll help the people I want to help, with, in the way I want to help them, and maybe I wasn’t open to it, but no one said, well why didn’t you just start doing the stuff you want to do at the end now and see what happens?

2:06:19 And I never imagined I’d be doing what I’m doing, I didn’t do it because there was a market opportunity, I didn’t do it because I felt I could make money, I mean you can ask my wife, I mean I never, once, it was never about the money, and we had $200 in the bank account when I finally said, f***, I’m gonna do this, this coaching thing, and coaching and what I do, and the speaker is tough, it’s a tough gig, but my life absolutely transformed, and I’m not exaggerating, and it wasn’t a moment or a day, but I bet you think it probably was, and that was in Sri Lanka when I went and I worked with those orphans, and I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but I got blown open that day, and I realized that I had value and I could give that value to humanity and I could make an impact and it didn’t need to be a millionaire in order to do it, and what I’ve set out and on the journey in my own way is to awaken as many people to their own gifts as possible so they get to go on and make an impact as a parent, as a leader, as a writer, because a lot of us misunderstand impact, and I say this with a lot of love and respect to you, Brian, is I think sometimes maybe people look at Brian and go, wow, look at all the interviewees, look at all the downloads, look at the movies, and oh my god, if that’s my reference point for impact, like Jesus, where do I start?

2:07:36 So I think it’s all relative to you, I think impact at home is one of the most powerful things ever, you know, so impact, you know, to me if I can awaken as many people to believe they have value, to get in touch with that gift, I mean the journey for me is identity, understand who you are, uncover your gift, impact the world, the byproduct of that is a meaningful legacy, but I think a lot of us are trying to pursue a legacy and we’re going, we’re going the wrong way around. So to me my life is all about impact and I’ve never had such fulfillment, and I’ve tough days and I doubt and I fear and I’m scared and I cry and I laugh, but I would never trade it for anything. Sounds like my life.

2:08:21 Philip, super excited for this book, I’m guessing people can find it on Amazon, on your website? Yeah, onelasttalk.com, and they can get it there or they can go to Amazon and many different parts of the world and buy it there. Right, and anybody can go through this, you can go through the process to the talk, even if you don’t want to give the talk, but then you can potentially give that talk in a local setting all around the world, even if you’re in prison, you can do this, this is going to be everywhere and it’s definitely something that it’s worth everyone exploring.

2:08:50 We’re bringing it into organizations or bringing it to companies and we’re looking for people to bring it to different cities around the world to run it and we’re gonna help them with facilitator training and coaching and, you name it, across the board, so we’re all in on this. I love it, I love it, I love it. When you sent me this copy, this book, I read it, I was like, yes, yes, it’s going all in, so I’m super excited. I love this message, I love giving back, I love this whole interconnect thing, I love this vulnerability and I’ve seen it just connect people, hyper-connect people, and you just see these humans, they’re like, they’re feeling alive when you see people share these stories, and I haven’t even been to one of your events yet and I want to go, but I love this stuff, so thank you so much, Philip, and come see us next time.

2:09:32 Farewell in place for supporting made ways that you know anyways, you have no idea, so thank you. Yeah, you’re welcome, it’s my pleasure. All right, until next time, thank you.