Peter Samuelson: True Happiness Comes from Helping Others

In this episode of The Search for Success, Winston sits down with Peter Samuelson, a film producer, pro-social entrepreneur, and author of Finding Happy: A User’s Guide to Your Life, with Lessons from Mine. Over the course of his career, Peter has not only worked in Hollywood producing major films, but has also dedicated much of his life to building organizations that help vulnerable communities and inspire positive change.

In their conversation, Winston and Peter explore Peter’s journey from growing up in London to building a career in Hollywood, and the pivotal moments that led him to focus on service, leadership, and impact. They also dive into the ideas behind his book Finding Happy, discussing what happiness really means, how people can find their “compass” in life, and why helping others often leads to the deepest sense of fulfillment.

The episode closes with reflections on success, purpose, and the steps young people can take after high school to build a meaningful life. If you're searching for direction, motivation, or a deeper understanding of what it means to live well, this conversation offers thoughtful insights and practical wisdom.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to The Search for Success. It means the world to me when I hear that people are tuning in, so thank you. Our guest today is Peter Samuelson, a film producer, a pro-social entrepreneur, and the author of Finding Happy. Throughout his career, Peter has produced major films, founded organizations that helped vulnerable communities, and dedicated much of his life to using storytelling and leadership to create positive change. In this conversation, we'll talk about Peter's journey from growing up in London to working in Hollywood, how he discovered his calling to help others, and the lessons behind his new book, Finding Happy. We'll explore what happiness really means, how people can find their compass in life, and what steps young people can take to build a meaningful and purposeful life. Peter, welcome to The Search for Success. Well, first off, I want to say it's a it's truly an honor to have you onto this show. I think that the perspective of individuals like you can do so much for 18-year-olds and young adults as a whole. And I know that that is partly the reason why you wrote this book, which I was able to read not a not a fair amount, but I was I was able to get through some pages and I can see your goal. So to start, I kind of want to give some context to the audience about the the journey to kind of get you onto this show. And kind of, I mean it was pretty quick, but it's from your chapter 12, get your foot in the door and then don't blow it. Yaman. You cannot make luck happen any more than a lightning strike. And often it does not, but you can absolutely try to sign to stand out and be ready to grab the opportunity. I think that kind of speaks truly to kind of my thinking when I was like this conversation we had on Friday afternoon was so influential to me and to my peers that I realized I had to reach out. And within a couple hours, I decided to shoot up an email and kind of put my foot in the door. And I think that with your response and it we made it happen. And I think that's kind of the goal is to try to grab that opportunity and to create one. You can't wait for an opportunity. So my question to you to start off, how you said that you have to market yourself because no one will market it for you. How has marketing yourself gotten you to the places that you need to be that you did not know were possible beforehand?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

I think you our tendency as you know a regular human being is towards modesty. We tend to talk down people who are too full of themselves. So it's a bit of a tight rope. On the one hand, it's true, if you don't market yourself, no one will know you exist. And then, you know, think of it this way: it's like you're in an envelope and it's dark, and you're sitting there cross-legged in the middle, and you have a pencil. You can choose, you can just sit there for your whole life, and you'll be perfectly content sitting in the middle of the envelope, or you can choose to poke with the pencil, but you don't know where the edges of the envelope are. Sure. Every so often you'll poke with the pencil and you'll go through the envelope and you'll think, Whoops, I will never be a concert pianist. But then your great privilege in your teenage and early 20s years is you can pull the pencil back and go in a different tangent, and you can find what it is that will fulfill you. Now, in order to do that, yeah, you have to get out there. You referred to the Le Mont chapter. So what happened there is that if you don't mind telling everyone, what what what happened there is that I was 18 just, and I managed somehow to finagle myself a scholarship to Cambridge University. But they did a, I think, a very clever thing, which was to enforce a gap year. You could you found out around Christmas time that you got in and got your scholarship, but you couldn't go until late October of the following year. So you had to go and fill 10 months with something or other. And I met a man, I didn't know when I met him, but he was actually the partner of Steve McQueen, very famous actor back in the day, sort of combination, famous, you know, if it was Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and Leo DiCaprio now, like those three rolled into one. So Steve McQueen was, you know, the cheese. He was a very big deal. And this was his producing partner, and he said to me, Tell me about you. And I said, Well, I just got myself a scholarship to Cambridge. I'm gonna study English and French. He said, Oh, how uh is your French? I said, Well, it's really, it's pretty good. And he said, Is it good enough to be an interpreter? And I like, I thought, oh, this man is offering me a job if I play this and I don't blow it. So I said, Yeah, I'm I'm really completely fluent. I could do that. Do you need someone to help you? Why? He said, Oh, well, I'm Steve McQueen's partner. I'm on my way to Le Mans through London, and he said, When could you start? And I said, I don't know, tomorrow, maybe? Need to pack. And I found myself literally kind of midnight the following day, having put my little tiny car on the ferry, gone over to Calais, drove down to Le Mans, and I spent the next 10 months of my life in Le Mans. And it was the lightning needed to strike. I needed to be standing in the right place. Just fluke that I met Relier. Like, but I also needed to kind of, and I think one does, you you have to market yourself. What was I going to say? Well, you know, it's schoolboy French. I don't know about being an interpreter on a film, sounds pretty scary to, you know, I didn't say any of that. I said, yeah, I'm completely fluent. Now, what actually happened was I was reasonably fluent, but there's stuff in the context of a specific industry that you just don't know. I didn't, how do you say flange focal depth, hyperfocal distance, all that stuff that's specific to filmmaking? I had to, you know, I got myself a damn great dictionary and carried it around with me. But a month in, having lived and breathed in French, it was completely fluent. And I still make terrible mistakes. But so I think that is the answer. Marketing yourself, you don't want to be a so-and-so. You don't want to look as though you're so full of yourself. Why would anybody want to spend five minutes with you? And it's in some ways, you know, personal modesty is a good thing. But not when you're trying to get a job. You've you've got what, 20 minutes in an interview, and you have to present, you have to sell what they're buying. And in order to do that, you better leave your modesty outside the door. And there's a way of doing it with a little bit of oh shucks. You know, I hope it doesn't sound you know too pushy, but actually, you know, I am. I'm completely fluent. And I would, my goodness, to be able to work on a film set as the interpreter for 10 months. You know, I also said to him, Would I get paid? You don't want to seem too eager. I said he said, Yeah, you would get paid. I'm sure it would be for you, you know, quite a lot of money. And I said, That'd be good.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

So there I was. I think the idea of stepping outside your comfort zone, that's where the most amount of growth happens. And like you said, if you if you went to this man and you said that, nah, I don't really speak French, it's schoolboy French, that would be a missed opportunity for you. For the people who may not know your story, I remember you told me that you were a medieval literature major in Cambridge and our conversation on Friday. So, how does that get you to LA and kind of the height of uh Hollywood to be a major film producer?

SPEAKER_01 8:58

No one in my family had ever been to university. My dad left school at 14. I had a mentor, and that would be one of my takeaways for you and those who are listening or watching. You've got to get a mentor. Find someone. It might be someone in your family. If you're lucky enough to have a terrific dad or grandpa, well, that might be your person. But if not, and you know I work in one of my nonprofits that I founded, First Star. I work with hundreds and hundreds, actually, upwards of a thousand teenagers in foster care. They haven't got any mentor. But the the quest needs to be you've got to get one. You need to find someone who's already done the stuff that you are perplexed by. And it's amazing how you can get people to help you. If you actually, with all due modesty and humility, you say, I've been watching you, sir, and I just I so admire what you've been able to accomplish. Would it be possible just for me to ask you a couple of questions, and then maybe from time to time I promise I won't be a pest? But if I'm perplexed by something, could I ask you for advice? Watch how fast you've got someone who is going to be on a Zoom or in a breakfast or a coffee with you on a regular basis. People love to be asked to help someone that they, you know, think is is doing their bit. You can't be a lazy so-and-so and have a mentor because they get fed up with you. But so long as you're upholding your end, just about anyone will help you. I've met, I mean, look, I got Steven Spielberg, I got a 20-minute meeting with him, which lasted nearly two hours. And uh by the end of it, and we had a wonderful time. And by the end of it, he said, What do you want me to do? And I said, It's a new nonprofit. You're the chairman, I'll run it, and we are going to bring this newfangled internet stuff in an audio-visual networking of seriously ill children from hospital to hospital. I didn't really know how we were going to do it, but we both knew that what the internet made possible was long-distance communication. And you have seriously ill kids in hospitals, especially if they're immunocompromised, they can't be touched. So they, you know, in one move, some kid who's 15 is deprived of all their friends at school, all of their family, and you know, the nurse only comes in wearing a spacesuit so as not to give him an infection. And we used the internet. It was so early in wiring in hospitals that we would we did six hospitals initially across the country. We had to have a guy with a backhoe dig a trench in order to put the the broadband optical fiber T3 cable in because it might go down the main road, but there definitely wasn't one into a hospital. They only had telephone lines, and that didn't have enough broad uh enough bandwidth to hold the the visuals and the sound. So I do think getting a mentor is very important, and that's what I got.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

I think it it's scary, but you have to reach out, and you have to be the one that's gonna do that. Otherwise, it'll never grow. I think I think you bringing up your foundations is a perfect segue to the next topic, which I want to talk about, which is finding your calling and your purpose beyond your career. You've started, I have Starlight Children's Foundation, I have Star Bright World, which was co-founded with Steven Spielberg, I have First Star, and then Everyone Deserves a Roof. I think my question to you is at some point in your career, it expanded beyond film into building organizations that help people. What sparked that shift from film to becoming a pro-social entrepreneur?

SPEAKER_01 13:27

It's a little bit like being in the right place when the lightning strikes, but in a in a different direction. It's not necessarily professional opportunity. And let me say, it's not instead of your day job, you know, earn money, pay the rent, buy a house, you know, have a family, all the stuff that needs financial wherewithal. You've still got to do that. In the subset of what should be my career, well, it should be something that gives you joy and satisfaction. What I found was making things that that endure, films, was a very good thing. But I do believe, and it's in the book, there are three chapters called The Meaning of Life, part one, part two, and part three. Beginning of the book, middle of the book, end of the book. Short-term and medium-term happiness is you know, ring your own bell. For me, it's a big tub of chocolate ice cream, a spoon, and something interesting to watch, and nothing, no one to bother me. But long-term happiness, I would say, my aha is that I've realized it is getting outside your own interests and go help someone else. I think that is as close to the meaning of life as I can get, hopefully, not sounding too Maudlin. So, what happened for me, it sort of fell on my head. I had a younger cousin. I was, you know, early 20s, living in LA, beginning to produce, you know, this was after Cambridge, after Bachelors and Masters, and no work in the UK. But I had been the interpreter for this American producer on a second film that was about the Monte Carlo rally, a guy called Tony Bushing. And when we got to Monte Carlo, he said, This was great. Do you want to come back to LA? See how we edit. You don't know anything about editing. I said, No, I know absolutely nothing about editing. I said, I, you know, I'd be honored, but what would I live on? He said, You get paid. You come and work and be the, you know, the dog's body at Paisley Productions. Yeah. You'll make the coffee, we'll drink it, and you'll learn the business. And so, you know, that was being in the right place at the right time. But the pivot to get outside your own zone and go help someone, my younger cousin was still in London, and she phoned me and said, I've done a dreadful thing. I think, maybe. The film, she she was a fledgling actress back then. And the cast of this film called Arabian Adventure, they had visited the children's hospital in costume to sort of amuse the kids, and she had befriended this 10-year-old little boy, and she had said to him, Sean, what would make you happy? And Sean said, Oh, that's easy. I want to go to Disneyland, which was a crazy idea because he was in a hospital bed, terminally ill with a tube up his nose and an IV and not looking too good. I said, Well, we'll have to do it now. If you promised him, go and talk to the doctor, go and talk to a parent. And the mother said, Brenda, said, We would love to come to Los Angeles. So we flew Sean and his mom over. They didn't stay in a hotel. They all moved into my apartment and the cousin as well. And we did everything you shouldn't do with a dying child. And we all had a splendid time. And you went back to London, and it was very sad in one way when he passed, but in another, we all knew. He knew. And we talked about it. And, you know, life has quality, and we had done a bit of work on that with him, and not just quantity. And it it I couldn't get out of my head the idea that it had been quite easy to do. You know, if you're a film producer, you can organize damn near anything. And bringing him and his mum over was, you know, complicated, but it wasn't impossible. And it was certainly affordable. And I called a meeting. What do film producers do? We call meetings. And I thought, okay, the other thing film producers do is we can crew a film. Who do I need at this table? I need a lawyer. I need an accountant. I need a graphic designer. I need someone who understands the politics of hospitals. I need a doctor. I need this. I need that. And I just stood there and said, this is what we just did. Do you think maybe we could four, five, six times a year, we could find some sick kid. I'm sure there are a lot of them in hospitals, and we'll just ask them what would make them happy, and then we'll do it. And everyone said, Yeah. And the lawyer said, What do you want to call it? I need to incorporate and get a 501c3 nonprofit standing. And I said, I haven't given it any thought. What do we want to call it, guys? And the I I'd had one date with the young lady who I then I remembered she said she was an accountant. And I had asked, I said, hello, I'm so sorry I didn't call you. What a so-and-so I am. I apologize. I need an accountant for a new charity. Could you please come to the meeting? She said, You are a so-and-so, but I will come to the meeting. And then when the lawyer said, What do you want to call it? She said, You know that children's rhyme, Starlight, Star Bright, First Star I see tonight, etc. Why don't we call it the Starlight Children's Foundation? So I won't tell you any of the middle, but here we are all these years later. Starlight has raised and spent $1.3 billion with a B. We're in Australia, Canada, United States, UK. We've helped well over a million children and their mums and dads. It's still the same idea. This kid is sad and they're ill. Let's see if we can make them happy. How could that be bad? You know, principal donors now and sponsors, Disney, Nintendo, etc. It's a very, very big children's charity. It's now I ran it for 20 years, hands-on. And then, you know, we had money. And then I got Steven Spielberg to come in for the Star Bright World part of it as the chairman. And then we raised yet more money. And then I got Norman Schwartzkoff, the general, to come in as head of fundraising because he was fearless. A man who didn't know fear. He would I would go with him to meet some incredibly important potential donor person. And I'd be a bit scared. And the general would say his first sentence, he'd say, Good morning. Let me tell you what we're going to need you to do. And then he'd name some huge amount of money. And they would sit there and say, Yes, sir, I uh we we we'll be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Absolutely. You talked about starting something meaningful, whether that's a film or whether that is a charity. For an individual, a young adult who wants to start something that holds value to them individually, how can they get a team behind them to make that image come through? Whether that's a culture on a soccer team, or whether that's a podcast, or whether that's another type of business, how can someone get the necessary people behind them?

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Okay, two important concepts, and you've got to conquer both. One is you have to be able to tell the story as though the it already exists. What we're gonna do is this this is why it has value. And preferably you need to move someone's heart or make them very excited or make them laugh like a drain. You you you have to put from your head through your mouth into the brain of the other person a vision of. Why the it that you are going to get them to help you with is important enough that they should make it a priority and they should want to help you. In order to do that, you have to probably talk to members of your family and friends and so forth, and you just practice and practice and practice. Narrative storytelling is the way you get anything done. And the second question is really how do you put a team together? First of all, you intuit, you're ahead of the game, you realize I have to have a team, and not just if I'm organizing, you know, lacrosse or something where you clearly need a team. Everything needs a team. You can't do it on your own. Now, how do you put a team together? It's partly with that narrative storytelling, being able to talk compellingly about something that doesn't exist yet, so that people get excited about it. And that, you know, is an art and it's a science, and you just do it again and again and you get better and better at it. The other thing is you have to know how to lead a team. Leading a team is not simply telling everybody what to do. There's a book by Peter Drucker called Servant Leadership, and it's a truth, and it is a far better way of running a company or any kind of endeavor because servant leadership is that you are in charge. And in the end, you do tell people what to do. However, you make them feel as though they are dramatically personally important to the whole thing. You it's not just a question of praising people, it's also giving people responsibility. It's it's showing that you rank them highly as a collaborator. I couldn't have done any of this stuff. I went to a testimonial dinner last night at a country club for a guy called Henry Fields. Henry has been my wingman through 35 years and five charities, and he still is. And yeah, Norman Schwarzkopf, terrific, can raise money from anyone. Steven Spielberg, the world's greatest creative designer, a great privilege, each of them. But you also need Henry Fields, because Henry Fields is the one who helped me actually do it. There is no point in having a script for a film if you don't make the film. And getting from script to film, think of what you need. You need $20 million, you need a cast, you need a director, you need all your heads of department, you need equipment, you need to decide where the money is going to come from, who's going to distribute the film, how will it be marketed? It's very complicated. You also have this dreadful thing called the law of unintended consequences, which is that some damn thing will always go wrong. And you just have to expect it. But you need people next to you where when something goes wrong, you say, okay, let's look at this in a reasoned, cool, calm. That's kind of calm is a big part of leadership. You don't shout at people, you encourage them to give you their best. And remember, if you're organizing a non-profit, you're not paying them. So you don't have any right to shout at them or lecture them or whatever. You have to bring them along with you and make them feel as though I'm so proud to be on this football team. I just, you know, I I we are greater than the sum of the parts. And it's called servant leadership. There's a book, there's a website, I think. It's a thing. It's worth studying.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Okay. Before you move on to the next topic, I want to read a quote from Gandhi, which is the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. I think what you've done and what you continue to do is the extraordinary. And I think that it is you are a blueprint of what someone can strive for. For someone who's 18 years old with without the means, without the network of Steven Spielberg, what are three things, actionable items that they can do on a day-to-day basis to be able to call themselves maybe a pro-social entrepreneur or a philanthropist to get to that point? Three things.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

One, get a mentor. And if your goal is to be a philanthropist, to be a pro-social activist, go get a mentor who's already doing it and say, This is who I want to be, this is what I want to do. Could I ask you some questions? Because you've already done it. I mean, in my own little way, you are giving me the pleasure of trying to help you. There is no way on God's earth I would say to you, Winston, you're on your own. You know, good luck with it, but I I haven't got time. Of course I will help you. You know, it's my honor. So the first thing is get a mentor. The second thing is volunteer to someone else's cause. It's a fantastic opportunity. Watch how far, if you volunteer to some charity you care about, watch how fast you get promoted. Anyone who dares to raise their hand and have a good idea is the vice president for implementing the idea in about 15 minutes. You get promoted much faster in a nonprofit because they haven't got money to pay you. So they they have to give you activation and the ability to see your your your help turn into something good. So that would be my second thing. Go volunteer. My third and fourth, or 3A and 3B. 3A is learn what servant leadership is and apply it to your own leadership skills because it's more powerful. People who are, you know, dreadful people who just shout and scream and order people around, that's terrible. In the end, think about legacy. You have to start somewhere. If you volunteer for a cause that someone else is running, you will learn an awful lot and you will be appreciated. Also, by the way, when I talk to teenagers and young adults, how do you find someone to love and to be loved by? Well, is it seriously flipping left and right on an app? I don't think so. Those are lies, those pictures. You'll be disappointed when you go have the coffee. Is it that you go to a bar and lets uh two people who are each drunk see whether they like each other? That's not going to look so good in the light of day either. I think go volunteer. There's a chapter in the book, selflessness can be selfish, and that's perfectly okay. There's lots of advantages to getting outside your zone. In the end, it's about legacy. No one dies and wants on their tombstone, he died with three billion dollars. They don't put that on tombstones. What they put is lifted up the lives of children, cured twelve kinds of cancer. She became uh the the the best paramedic that ever worked in in the Valley of Vale, you know, that kind of thing. It's all to do with helping other people. That is what legacy is. I had an interesting experience just recently. You know what a family office is. Some a family that is really very wealthy often has a family office that does their investments and their taxes and so forth. But sometimes, if they're in the level of wealth where they're not billionaires, but they're certainly multimillionaires, there are there are combined family offices that do those services for multiple families. So one of them is Gen Spring. And Gen Spring asked me if I would come in to Florida, to West Palm Beach. They put me in the Breakers Hotel to make a speech. And I said, Well, you've got all your wealthy families there. There's like 400 people there for their annual meeting. And I said, What do you want me to talk about? And they said, Well, G3 would be good. And I said, You mean an aeroplane? What are we talking about? And they said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. G1 is grandma and grandpa, and they made the fortune. They were they worked incredibly hard. They they opened one store and they built it up into the largest chain of something or other in the country, and they made an enormous amount of money. G2 are their children, now fully adults, but all with MAs and CPAs and MBAs and JDs and all the rest of it. Definitely with the worth work ethic, whether they work in the family business or they work elsewhere, they definitely know how to work hard and to have self-discipline and so forth. And then they said, then there's G3. G3 is the challenge generation. It's the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren. Grew up with Silver Spoon. It's very, very difficult for them to find their mojo, find their value. They're often enormously insecure. If they have very good parents, they won't have the G3 effect. But mostly it's just very difficult to find their groove. They have, you know, substance abuse challenges, they have interpersonal relationship challenges, they have difficulty staying in university, and there's too much dropping out, and everything's too easy. And without need and without good mentors, it often doesn't turn out too well. So that's the speech that I made there. It's not affecting you because you probably because you've got wonderful parents, you've grown up well and you have the motivation. For others, I say, and I said at the Gen Spring thing in West Palm Beach, I said, here's what you do. You have a foundation, you have a donor advice fund. On the board of it, put your kids, put your grandkids, put your great, put your nieces and nephews, and make them the spotters, send them out to find what you should be sponsoring, have them then go check up. Was it any good? You know, philanthropy sometimes doesn't work. Did did did the homeless people buy the clothes or did they, you know, buy a big bottle of brandy each? So put your young people in charge of helping at the grassroots, and they will learn what can only be learned at the grassroots, which is servant leadership, humility, and everyone has worth. And the golden rule, you know, you see an old lady living in a damp cardboard box. If you're a human being, your instinct is, oh, I got the refrigerator, she got the box of the refrigerator. What's wrong with this picture? And your instinct is put it back level, you know, correct it being out of whack. And that is, it's interestingly, it's not the golden rule, you know, fix stuff that's broken in society is not just human beings. They did a big old experiment where they, in a bed of flowers, they pulled the petals off some of the flowers to make them asymmetrical, and they then videoed the bees pollinating the flowers. They would not pollinate the ones that were asymmetrical. It's really interesting because whether you're a bee or a human, you don't like things that are out of whack, that are unfair. The difference is the bees just turn away and go to the perfect flowers and propagate them. That's the survival they think of the fittest. Humans, we're we're better than that, and we're more proactive. We're out there sticking petals back on, you know, and trying to fix things and get a home for the old lady living in the cardboard box, etc. And in doing that, we absolutely can find our own contentment, our own satisfaction. You you can advance as a young adult in business with people that you meet by volunteering in a charity with them. Look to the left, look to the right. Who are these people? Wow, they're exactly who I want to know. They're like pre-validated by taking the time to go and volunteer.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

I like that. I think I I think there's actionable steps that an 18-year-old can take on a day-to-day basis. And it doesn't have to be these grand scheme events that that that they do well on Instagram. They can they can be little minute acts of kindness, and that built up will then bring meaning and purpose into your own life. I think I would like to get a little bit into this book, which I will post about on my socials. I will leave a link at the end of this podcast. This book can do a lot of good from the little that I've read. My question to you is in this day and age, and especially kind of my motive behind this podcast, was the idea of finding happiness. And that's why this was this is I'm so happy this worked out between you and I. And trying to redefine the things to get to happiness. I want to ask you, what do you think people under misunderstand about happiness in 2026?

SPEAKER_01 36:58

I think people believe that happiness is things or that it can be measured in numbers. I actually don't think it's any of those things. I think happiness is intrinsically subjective and you have to continue working at it because you get used to whatever is your steady state, and then you are neither happy nor unhappy. You're in your sort of center zone. But I think if you want to continue having joy, you have to continue expanding the envelope of making the best of yourself. You know, remember, you may discover by experimenting that you are not the world's, you know, table tennis champion, nor are you a concert pianist. But somewhere out there, there is something that is going to give you joy. For me, it's making stuff in the sense that if you make a charity and then keep it alive and raise money for it and bring the right people in and so forth, you have the enormous joy of visiting the pointy end of your charity and seeing smiles on the faces of kids in hospital because you've given them beautiful hospital gowns with Disney designs and Marvel designs and so forth. And they're brand new, and they get three: the one that they're wearing, the one that's on its way to the laundry, and the one that's coming back from the laundry. And when they go home from hospital, they take those gowns with them. The look on their faces when they realize this is theirs and this is not disgusting and with mysterious stains on it. Rather, it's like smells new, is new. You know, it's just one of the eight things that Starlight does. Visiting the results of that, having had that idea and seeing the joy it brings is just makes me very happy. So I I have it completely clear that in order for me to be happy, I do get joy out of making films. Most people think that happiness should be found through a selfish quest. I think happiness is found by helping other people. There's this the second law of thermodynamics, which weirdly is also found in the scriptures of 174 world religions, it's this sense of balance. It's the theory in science of entropy that if you do not take care of a system by applying energy, you won't have a system. You know, if you don't oil the engine in your car, it won't go round. If you don't nurture a family, watch how fast you won't have a family worth having. If you don't take care of nature and our planet, you know, we'll lose Florida. It'll be underwater and all that kind of thing. We all have to do our bit to put in, in and it's wonderful because not only are you creating intrinsic good for other people, but if you're clever, you'll say to them, thank you for thanking me, but could you pay it forward? You know, go help three people. And in fact, this conference that I hope you're coming to in Florida in May, it's the whole conference is to try to get our act together in creating a self-propagating, viral TikTok, YouTube, and other social media-based, influencer-fueled, self-propagating breeder reactor for kindness. You know, hatred is very strong. Hatred is very seductive because it has to do with, you know, feeling macho and punch someone in the face and hate them with all your energy. We need to, if we're going to save our civilization, if we're going to save our planet, if we're going to save our country, our democracy, we need to find ways to build bridges. And if we do that, we will thrive as a people. And if we don't, I think we're at risk of losing the whole thing. And the way to do that, in my view, the conceptual core way to do it is we have to build bridges of common interest and kindness that cross over what are otherwise these terrible moats of, you know, separation. There's, I read a thing recently that in Germany, where they know a thing about historic hatreds, there is a triangular park in Berlin, and on one of the sides of the equilateral triangle is a mosque, on another side is a church, and on the third side is a synagogue. And they each do their thing, they each have their own minister and their own congregation. But once a week they have the popluck, lunch, or whatever it is, in the middle of the park, and the grandmas go sit with the other grandmas and work out that they're all worried about their grandchildren. They all have the same interests and aspirations and so forth. You know, and the dads have similar financial or professional struggles, or they're interested in the same sports team, or whatever it may be. But it's to do with in the middle of that park, bringing your identity, but realizing you have much more in common with the people that otherwise you might think you were very different. No, you're not. And I do think we need an influencer-fueled, self-replicating, pay it forward three times, and we've got a whole system. If you come to the conference, you're going to be the star because they're going to say, yes, that's exactly who we need. Winston will lead us.

SPEAKER_00 43:26

Hopefully. Hopefully. I think being able to lead is important. I think, and knowing your role as a leader and figuring out what that kind of leadership style may be. I think that my closest friend of mine, I would consider him to be an extraordinary leader, but he's quiet and he and he leads by example. And I'm more of the hoorah, loud, and I keep people accountable. And and I think that that's why we work so well together. I would like to kind of get into more of the themes of this podcast. And you've you kind of wrote about it. Um On your chapter about the Revenge of the Nerds, which is is failure a matter of opinion? What is success? Revenge of the Nerd. You talked about kind of the story of the initial screening of the Revenge of the Nerds in 1984, which ended up being to be a complete, total disaster. Your friend Tom said this is the worst score I've ever seen, and your face dropped, and the color in your face uh became white. I actually I want to ask you, with failure and success, um, how do you view each of them and how has that definition changed over your chance?

SPEAKER_01 44:41

Well, the first thing is if you want to raise venture capital, there are big and medium and small companies that invest in people's ideas, start up venture capital. A lot of them are in Silicon Valley, but not all of them. They're all over the place. When you go and meet with them, you pitch your little heart out and you tell them again, what are you doing? You're using your narrative storytelling skills to put into their mind's eye the enormous value of your idea when it will exist. Except it doesn't exist yet because you need their money, their capital in order to get it there to develop it and to put it into production, whatever it may be. So you you use your narrative storytelling. When they start asking you questions, they never say, tell me about your most recent success. What they do ask is, tell me about where you have failed and what did you learn from it. And you have to be able to answer that. There is nothing the matter with failing, you know, so long as you learn from it. And in fact, I would go so far as to say there is no such thing as success unless there was some failure on the way. I mean, I fail lots. Don't ask me about when I raised $2 million during the war in Bosnia to send pallets of medical supplies to Bosnia. Where my idea went wrong, I got the stuff donated, I had it in the warehouse, I couldn't crack the transportation. There was a war going on in Bosnia. You couldn't just sort of call FedEx and say, ship this to Bosnia, no such thing. I tried everything. I tried the strategic airlift command, you know, of the US Air Force. I tried through NATO. I couldn't get the stuff there. And I tried and tried and tried and tried. And in the end, the war was winding down, and I still had this $2 million worth of pharmaceutical stuff on pallets in a in a warehouse. And I I thought, you know what? I'm never going to get it there. But what I did is I found sort of hospitals, charity hospitals, hospitals for you know people on welfare, people on Medicaid, and I donated the stuff there, and they were very grateful to have it. So it wasn't a complete waste of time. But I failed in getting, you know, what I realized is it's one thing to get the stuff on the pallets, but you've got to think through the transport. How do you ship stuff into a war zone? Very difficult. In this case, it was you know impossible. So I think we have to learn from our mistakes. When I'm making a film, people say no to me all the time. No, you cannot put your camera position on top of our tower. It's an old tower, it'll fall down. We don't want your crew up there, you know, spoiling it. Oh, okay. So there's two solutions to that. One is, you know, go talk to someone who's more senior who might say yes. The second might be if you can't get the tower. Well, these days you'd probably use a drone to put your camera on. Back in the day, sort of in my heyday, we would have used a great big camera crane or even a construction crane next to the tower. That'd be your vantage point. There's usual a way around. I I once had to, I made a television commercial for Chevron. And the whole point of it was that we had American regular retail Pontiac cars that we flew into Morocco, which was not easy, and they had to retrace the route of the Monte Carlo rally up through Morocco, across Spain, all the way across the south of France, using Chevron gasoline. And I said, How will anyone know the difference? You're not allowed to fly more than a five-gallon gallon can of gas on it on an aircraft in Europe. How are we going to get the gas there? They said it'll have to be in five-gallon cans. Like 200 of them we had to fly in. And then I discovered you cannot and you could not import gasoline into Spain. Illegal. A government monopoly on the sale of gasoline. Not allowed. So I bought a truck, a 10-ton truck, it was a vegetable truck because that was cheapest, but I had a roof welded on it, and I put four 55-gallon drums underneath, plumbed with pipes into the engine of the truck, and that's what we filled up with the Chevron gasoline. Well, might you say, why didn't you just use Moroccan gasoline and and fib a bit? The answer was because we had a lawyer there from Chevron who was there to make sure we didn't cheat. So it had to be the Chevron gas. So we we filled up the 455-gallon drums, and I was ready. If Spanish customs had said, why are you bringing this crappy old truck into Spain? And by the way, why have you got so much gasoline underneath? I was ready. I was going to say it's a Trans-Sahara truck. You know, you have to carry your fuel with you. And they never asked any of that. I had had the roof put on so we could put the camera grip and electrical gear inside. And they were so interested, the customs people at Algeciras looking at the camera equipment, oh, Panavision. I've heard of Panavision, you know, all that kind of thing. They never even looked underneath. That was how we got the gas in. And then we siphoned it out, put it into not five-gallon drums, but you know, 15-liter things. And that's how we made that little film. So there's usually a way, you know, if the window, if the door is locked, go around the back, see if there's a window to the problem that's open. Ingenuity is very important. But the fact that your best bud is the quiet, more retiring kind of lead-by-example, and you're Mr. Externally facing marketer, you may have the correct board of directors for a really excellent endeavor, whether it's for-profit or non-profit. That sounds as though you've got compatible leadership, leadership that's compatible with each other. That's a huge advantage. Just because people volunteer in a nonprofit doesn't mean that they're wonderful. I mean, one of the things I've learned by trial and error is sometimes people volunteer for the wrong reasons and they're unreasonable and they think, well, you can't fire me. I'm a volunteer. And I say, Well, I know you're a volunteer. Somewhere out there, there is a charity that will really need someone with your particular personality. We are not that charity. Good luck to you. You have to put a compatible team together, and you have to show them through servant leadership that you rate them. You know, you don't just love them, you give them face. I'm very big on certificates. Certificates are cheap, and you say thank you with them. And it's amazing to me. I go in some powerful executive's office who's volunteered to one of my seven nonprofits. What does he have on his wall? Not something from the Better Business Bureau or something. He has one of our Starlight or Starbright or EDAR or Aspire. That's the certificate on his wall. He wants to, you know, and I put on the certificates. I I put thank you on behalf of the thousands of seriously ill children you have uplifted. You know, that kind of thing. That is what makes people feel good. That is what they put on their tombstone. They people value their lives not in numbers, but in what they've achieved helping other people. A man never stands so tall, but when he stoops to hold the hand of a child in need. What did Jesus say? Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Doesn't matter what religion you look at, if you uh seek out in any scriptures the secular stuff is the skill of helping others, of you know, it takes a village to raise a child, it's all over in that proverb which is throughout Africa, in every other geographical place. Lift up your community, get outside your zone, and it has selfish benefit. Who are these people volunteering with me? I love these people, they care about what I care about. Let's do it together.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

For I have two traditions that I like to close with that I I created, and and one is which is to involve my listeners and to involve the audience uh that may be listening. On the last podcast, someone went onto my website, which is the search-for success.com, and there's a place where they can leave a question for the guest. And my good friend, his name is David. He asked, What is something you know now that you wish you knew at 18? One thing. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

I'm talking to David, a young man. Realize, and you can Google this and study it a bit, your brain wiring and the components of your brain change in your early 20s. After your mid-20s, you have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, which is the chess game of life, where you are able to think through some challenge one, two, three, five moves ahead. If I do this, then he'll do that. But if he does that, I'll be able to do this. But that won't be any good, maybe, because of that. It's thinking it through at multiple steps. Until you turn 25-ish, you're operating not on the prefrontal lobe because it hasn't built itself out in a young man, you're operating on the amygdala. Until your mid-twenties, you're operating on the amygdala, and the amygdala is the sort of reptilian three F's fight, flight, or freeze. You know, you come out of your cave, and there is a saber-toothed tiger. You and your friend are frozen to the spot. Oh my god, what do I do? Do I run? Do I fight it or do I freeze? Up until your mid-twenties, those are your choices. After your mid-20s, you think it through. Well, I don't have to run faster than the tiger. I only have to run faster than him, right? And so I would say understanding how your brain works, it means that in assessing danger and risk, which is very, very difficult, especially for a young man, the girls somehow get mature earlier. And it's not, don't take risks, but start with if I take this risk, if I, and I did, it's in the book, I used it to illustrate. There's a chapter called What is a good risk? What is a bad risk? How can I tell the difference? And I said, I once locked myself out of the house. I must have been about 18 or 19. And I thought, oh, I'm going to be in terrible trouble. I'm not going to wake up my parents. And I thought, I wonder if I could, I'll just climb up the drain pipe. And then there was a ledge about half a brick wide. And I put my foot on it and I went sideways at the third floor level along this ledge, hanging on by the grout to an upper line of bricks, road bricks, and I got to an open window and I climbed in. I went to bed. The next day, down in the garden, I looked up and I thought, what an idiot I am. I could have paralyzed myself. I could have been dead. So I would say, in assessing risk, the first thing is if it might kill you, don't do the damn thing, you know? Because to be dead means you won't achieve anything, right? You'll be the dead one, and everyone will mourn you, and that's not good. Sleep on it. You think smarter before you go take a risk, just sleep on it. Sometimes people say you have to do this, you have to say yes, right now, right now. Those are usually the wrong decisions that you have to make in that kind of a hurry. Sleep on it, make the decision Sunday night and not Friday afternoon. Better decisions. And realize you can only operate with the brain you've got right now. And if you are a young man, it isn't terribly good at mitigating life-threatening risk. So especially important to sleep on it.

SPEAKER_00 59:02

I think David will like that. The second tradition that I thought of is to leave a couple, or usually it's one, but I could not decide between these two quotes. I leave these quotes up for the audience to think about. I try not to talk about them because I want someone to feel it and be able to think about it. So the first one is we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give, Winston Churchill. And the second one is, and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make by the Beatles. Both English. I know you have, I know you're from England, so I thought you would appreciate those. Peter, this has been an unbelievable honor, and I can't help but to be proud of myself to to take agency, and I and I'm and I'm so thankful that you were able to receive my request. And I am also emphatically excited to be able to foster a relationship with you and all the amazing things that you do. Thank you, Peter.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:03

Well, thank you.