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it's very rare that you get to meet entrepreneurs that are following and have followed in the steps
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that you followed in in your life and like so whenever i meet people like you and ben francis who
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is similar age to me who has like similar life ambitions um i see it as like this really amazing
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rare opportunity to learn for myself and to ask honestly like selfish questions and i saw on your twitter i think it was
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over the mental health week period you did a tweet where you talked about your experiences with
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depression burnout and anxiety and from what i know about your story you experience those things in that
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order so i think that's a good place to start which is let's talk about depression and the the role that
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depression played in your life and where it came from and how you've overcome or are overcoming all handling depression
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yeah so interesting actually because um i i realized when i started to talk
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about mental health stuff even more interestingly than what you've just said i kind of realized that
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i'd been burying another mental health problems actually the the tweet was more depression burnout anxiety
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um and insomnia but actually it's really interesting i did a podcast interview with a nutritionist
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called rhiannon lambert and when i was preparing for that i was going over my the fact that i'd grown up fat and the
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fact that um you know i probably did have an unusual relationship mentally with food and
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um suddenly like i was unpacking what had happened in my 20s and i actually had bulimia i used to throw
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up for like four to five years not intentionally though this is like quite unusual but that's
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how deeply rooted this mental health problem was i would eat something and i would throw a lot of it
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up um my friends would like know about this but it wasn't like labelled and i went to you know specialists in harley street to
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see what was up and they were like medically you're fine so psychologically there's something there
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anyway i haven't done it since i was about 26 or whatever but it suddenly occurred to me a few weeks ago really interestingly
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that you know being able to label like the time i got depression the time i got anxiety the time i got
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insomnia the time i was burnt out i remembered those moments this one i'd
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actually buried as a story right in my head and never i'd never expressed it in my whole life to anyone
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publicly at all full stop um and it was a couple of months ago i wrote a newsletter on mental health and
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uh and nutrition um and i admitted for the first time then that i'd had bulimia and like what the symptoms
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were and how long it had gone on and the fact that i was basically like losing lots of weight getting really skinny and all i saw was someone fat
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um and it was so interesting to me like two revelations that came from that one is that um if it's
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so uncomfortable right it's for me it's really embarrassing to admit to myself that i was weak enough to have a mental
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health condition that bad that i would psychologically throw up when there was nothing biologically
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wrong with me um that's really awkward to admit to yourself it's also far more terrifying to admit it publicly
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once you've uncovered it and it kind of made me reflect on the fact that um sometimes like these things
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are actually just so painfully embarrassing about your personal life that you can even bury it to yourself did you ever understand why you were
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bulimic was there because it's a psychological like comorbidity so what was the cause it's really hard to
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say what the cause was because i got it after i'd lost weight um so you know by the time i was sort of 21 or whatever i was in perfectly
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reasonable shape um but i got it at like 23. um and actually there was a result of it um the
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only time i was ever hospitalized it's a really random but hilarious story in its own way
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um because i've been throwing up i've been basically like hurting the inside of my throat right and i was at a festival one time and i
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had a coughing fit in in hackney and i had a coughing fit at the hospital and i coughed a hole in my
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throat literally it's called a pneumomedia steinem it's a very unique
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thing to happen apparently and fortunately it was close enough to the royal london hospital to go in there and show them right
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and basically what happened to me was my head started to grow so i was with my friends feeling fine other than this
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cough and one of my friends just looked at me and was like whoa and i was like what they're like may your head is massive
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i'm like i'm not even talking mate maybe a dick no no your head is growing what is going on i was like what and then
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everyone else was like oh my god anyway walks to the hospital um it's sort of like five
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in the afternoon or whatever because there's a day festival um and there's like you know it's east london there's quite a lot of genuinely
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like gang related things people are bleeding everywhere all this stuff and they just see me and they're like that guy's next
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and put me and i went into intensive care for like the whole week um whilst they were basically trying to sew up this hole in my throat when you say
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your head was your head was growing so oxygen was going uh not going like in my mouth and through my
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bloodstream properly somebody was escaping around my head and my brain so it was like an emergency procedure to like like get me on
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uh meds and sort me out but it's so interesting because even knowing that that had happened to me i didn't relate the cause
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to actually a deeper root cause which was another mental health problem um to be honest with you like i couldn't
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say to you what the trigger was beyond this like story you know the things that we grow up with the people
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that we grow up with those little you know bullying and things like that i mean you know in some good respects
00:05:29
because i grew up fat i've got a good personality and a sense of humor so i've always been like able to really connect with people because i just never
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had it all my way kind of thing do you know this this story about you know um people that are fat having
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better senses of humor and being a little bit more you know quote and quite bubbly yeah why why is that i think self-deprecation
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can sometimes be like a defense mechanism right and and ultimately you know with these things you're going
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to hear them a lot if you grow up you're going to hear it a lot right you're going to go to a new environment someone's going to bully you for the obvious and so
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you kind of find a way of coping with it in your own way um for me it's just interesting because
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the other mental health um issues that i've had in my life i'm able to trace back usually to a
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moment or a thing or reflect on why this one kind of just happened later and then as soon like you know i had it for
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a few years but then it just also went away at what age was this so about 23
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to about 27. are you old now uh 33. so it was so you had it for 23 to 27 for
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about four years and you overcame yeah but like
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naturally i wasn't doing anything different i mean i started to learn what foods would make me more sick than others if that makes sense as well
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um but i find it super interesting again less so i mean we're cool to know
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the trigger obviously but it's almost less so that and more so the fact that um it kind of ran its course as
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well was interesting to me and that i buried it right in my head um and actually 27
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um you know was the start of like a whole other you know experience in life for me anyway
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so it is possible that um you know these things are related to stress and other things
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um my entrepreneurship journey started at 24 so it's not completely unrelated but not quite not
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not enough to actually label it and say it's for a thing um but then you know the
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other the other experiences um that i've had with with mental health a lot clearer so i
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think depression is a really complex term um and the only i think it's really
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worth saying the only relation that i've got to depression that i'm comfortable talking about
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um is after my father passed away and i think that's really reasonable right and so this is
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the thing i like because i work so so much with people in mental health and experts i know like depression is also
00:07:57
not something to claim you have when you feel down or you know it's very different like and
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obviously there is a spectrum of these things as well but for me my depressive episode was
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right after my father passed away because he was on life support for six months and overcame
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when they said he's 100 going to die actually survived made it out of the hospital into
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recovery home and then someone basically had a cold around him and he died of their cold catching their cold
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after the entire recovery process um the truth of the matter is that my depression was actually interestingly
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sort of linked with a lack of belief in um a higher power or whatever you
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want to call it justice like everything right because in fairness yeah and like my dad was like such a generous spirited guy
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he was blind he had all of these things wrong with him anyway and still like was just the funniest nicest
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warmest person anyone knows and um the last person on earth to kind of deserve something like that
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and so for me the um the experience after he passed away so
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he believed in god so when he died i was like that's my connection to god gone
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therefore i straight up believe in nothing um you know i think it's really interesting to have conversations with people
00:09:14
intelligent people like yourself when you talk about purpose and vision and these things it's very
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hard to imagine that you've got a purpose a vision for anything if suddenly you've switched
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and you've switched off and you've said i believe in nothing you did totally destabilized yeah yeah i remember the the feeling of
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being i was religious until i was when i was christian until i was 18. and then which i think will surprise a lot of people because i'm a very
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rational sort of someone that makes a lot of decisions and things from first principles or logic and then at 18 i lost my faith per se
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and it was the most like the two years following that were the two most destabilizing years of my life
00:09:50
as i i became a total obsessive atheist which means i read every book watched every documentary video
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and then i got to the point and this is when i realized that i'd overcome my sort of wobble where i no longer cared about
00:10:04
engaging in these debates with people that agreed or disagreed with me and i was at peace with my own beliefs
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that um i guess which is like agnosticism if that's a term and the other really destabilizing moment in my
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life where i lost my sense of purpose was the day someone offered me about
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20 to 30 million um hypothetically to buy my business and 18 year old steve shows up i've
00:10:28
talked about this a few times because he thought we were doing this for money he thought that was the goal
00:10:33
and so i go home that night i remember where i sat like it was yesterday i'm typing rightmove.com looking at
00:10:38
houses at 24 years old and then i'm looking at these houses and i'm getting this real sort of deep sense of um unfulfillment by
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thinking well that was that was it that was the game and then like okay so um auto trader boom
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boom lamborghini aventador i'm looking at this aventador and feeling like i'd be poorer not in a financial sense but in like a
00:10:59
spiritual sense if i chose to step on what's clearly a hamster wheel
00:11:04
and and that so from that day the day after i didn't know why i was i didn't know
00:11:10
why i was working hard anymore i didn't know why i was building the business and i had to then go in search of a real form of stability in my
00:11:15
life which was you know i love it but i thought i loved it for another reason i thought i loved it for money
00:11:21
but i loved it for connection and for conversations like this and those things but to go back to your point please um
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you're talking about how you lost your sense of sort of stability i guess yeah i lost what i believed in this world
00:11:33
yeah and if you don't have a sense of belief it's really hard to find your purpose and i i would say that i
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i went through a few years of that um very important age sorry uh so 24 my dad
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died so i mean also similar time to having the yeah i mean i didn't even realize that as
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i until i was saying it just now um but so probably related obviously um but
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i i went through about three years of not believing um
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in anything right like really and you know not very nice about it either um so i
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grew up jewish um and i've always said in fairness you know i think judaism is as bad a
00:12:17
religion as all the other religions you know i don't actually personally uh like any one of them
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but i do love what they all mean but then you know it's very possible to be wise and not associate yourself with a
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religion and what i've learned which i find so interesting is my identity my connection to
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spirituality and judaism is a weird one as well because it's like a race and a religion so it's like you can actually be not
00:12:41
religious you can lose your religion but still be the race yeah um and that's that's like an actually it's a positive in a way because it
00:12:47
means you don't have to disassociate from cultural values but you can disassociate yourself from religious ideals
00:12:54
and what actually happened to me was you know i would be relatively difficult
00:13:01
and question people a lot when they would talk to me about their religious beliefs i'd want to dig into them and i'd really
00:13:06
want to challenge the way that they think and why they think these things and how they can defend them but not trying not to be an absolute
00:13:11
[ __ ] but just using my own i guess bitterness and my own experience of growing up being told
00:13:16
to believe in something which is very different to finding something and you know when my father passed away
00:13:23
and i didn't have this connection to it anymore i also felt like i didn't have a connection to spirituality or anything
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and so it's very weird to have like almost the death of a religion as a human being because that's your death of your
00:13:35
connection to this earth and purpose and everything and it wasn't until i was 27 really um
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one of my really good friends told me about um and obviously we've been talking about christian angermeier as well like our mutual friends so this is
00:13:47
a relevant conversation told me about ayahuasca and i'd never heard of it before i didn't even know what it was
00:13:53
um and i went on a retreat with him and um i mean i came back that weekend
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completely i mean when i say a 180 i went from the most cynical non-believer in the
00:14:07
whole world negatively so to like without sounding like a complete
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[ __ ] like positively enlightened and confident never never
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more confident of anything in my life um of spiritual realism
00:14:24
and what i believe in and ultimately what i believe in when i have these like fun conversations with people now about
00:14:30
spirituality which is you know what do i believe in i believe in nature i believe in
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looking at the beauty of the world and how cycles work which is science right and the way
00:14:41
that my ayahuasca experience actually opened my eyes to believing in something spiritual or greater than myself
00:14:48
was 90 percent of my hallucination was observing what happens in nature with cycles
00:14:53
right birds bees oxygen air soil all of this recycling all the time
00:14:59
for a sustainable system and being like you know that is in itself a scientific miracle but
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something greater than us that's always happening throughout time and it was a real shift for me because
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a i overcame my depression from that b i suddenly believed in something
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even if that's something is nature and when people are like and i get this from christians quite often as well because they're like you know what do you mean
00:15:22
you believe in nature like what is that i'm like i mean it's it's more believable than a guy that walked on water
00:15:27
yeah and when they like get annoyed i'm like i've got nothing against jesus i'm just saying that like believing in nature as ridiculous as
00:15:35
that sound is a profound belief and what's important is it is a belief and having a belief has actually helped
00:15:42
me helped guide me to then work on things like what are my personal values you know which you talked about you know mental
00:15:48
models what do i say yes to a no to in life well you can only figure those things out if you spend time with mental models
00:15:55
first principles thinking about what things mean to you in life and then suddenly
00:16:00
other things start to come into flow and and so i really want to just double down on this ayahuasca experience
00:16:06
what exactly did you do on that experience so ayahuasca is essentially uh and it's
00:16:12
completely natural it's tree sap from the amazon um and it's been practiced for thousands of years and
00:16:17
you know i won't go into like the whole history of psychedelics but i could do because i've read a lot about it um the the reality is it's sacred
00:16:26
so our shamans have like a legal license to practice with it um and they it's a guided experience so
00:16:32
the most important thing to say to anyone thinking about ayahuasca or whatever like it's not something you do at home on
00:16:37
your own at all ever you could do that with mushrooms you can definitely do that with lsd
00:16:42
you definitely do not want to do that with ayahuasca because um in my experience the other
00:16:48
psychedelics are a bit like you can have sort of one foot in this world one foot in that world and ayahuasca is not even in this
00:16:56
plane you're just somewhere else but what's fascinating and very common from people's recollections of ayahuasca
00:17:02
trips is you have a spirit guide called mama ayahuasca that's what everyone calls
00:17:07
her um and in all of my experience of doing it and
00:17:12
i've done it about 12 times now so i almost go back every year by the way it's an incredibly painful experience
00:17:18
and it's very difficult to do and it's not something you look forward to which is why it's like rockish rocket fuel growth um which is
00:17:25
why i do it because you learn all the things about yourself you don't want to hear you don't want to know and you confront the
00:17:30
worst realities and i've learned more in those weekends that i've done this then you know you can learn with therapists
00:17:36
and you can learn yourself so staggering everyone says this to me and it's and you know you mentioned a guy called
00:17:42
christian angermeier context he runs a company called a thai which are are now developing um psychedelics as a way to
00:17:49
cure treatment resistant depression um it's really sort of a groundbreaking company and he sat with me in his
00:17:55
his penthouse just across across the street in fact from where we are now and he was telling me that you can let
00:18:00
you unlock the brain by taking these drugs and you discover truths about yourself which
00:18:05
in many experiences which is similar to what you're describing will have a permanent lasting
00:18:11
transformative impact on the way you see the world and it like corrects your thinking and it's it's
00:18:16
it's crazy crazy for a normal person that isn't in this world or doesn't understand this to think that you can take
00:18:23
a magic mushroom or a drug or a psychedelic or whatever you want to call it and overcome grief there's a great book
00:18:30
by michael pollan called um how to change your mind and in it he talks about this problem with
00:18:35
psychedelics it's a bit like dreams right you're having an ineffable experience so to describe it for people was generally
00:18:41
quite boring what i think is more interesting in a sense is to discuss the outcomes that i've i've got from it
00:18:48
um so the first time you know very quickly because you asked the experience was the hallucinogenic
00:18:55
experience like i said was watching the cycles of the earth develop and were you conscious because right so
00:19:00
you haven't done it yes so you drink it it takes about an hour for me you lie down the pitch blacks fluid
00:19:06
it's like a shot it tastes disgusting but some people like it you lie back um and and the shamans basically start
00:19:12
playing music and it's a completely guided facilitated experience with them if you're having problems they come over they help you if you need to be taken
00:19:18
out the room they look after you it's like you know it's busy night there's noises like a lot of people throw up
00:19:24
how's this for irony i didn't throw up for my first 10 times which everyone was like that's super weird i was like yes especially
00:19:30
considering my history really bizarre um but the
00:19:35
um the experience i saw was the one i needed and there's a really deep insightful experience you get from
00:19:41
psychedelics which you can often go in wanting a thing but it isn't what you need and in this experience what i
00:19:47
wanted was to see my dad and to connect with my dad but it isn't what i got what i got was
00:19:53
um a vision of understanding how everything in this earth is living
00:19:59
in a cycle like a beautiful miracle and so it was less about like seeing micro things and seeing macro things
00:20:05
being in it if it's taking me to a place i don't want to go and a door i'm not ready to open
00:20:11
you can negotiate you can actually say i'm not ready for that yet and sometimes it'll push you and say open it anyway but sometimes it will
00:20:17
actually listen to you and let you go sort of back into your body so it is a really fascinating
00:20:23
experience and what i'd say about it is it's the number one most important thing i've ever done in my life
00:20:28
um and especially because it's not pleasant um the first time i
00:20:34
did it was you know the single most life-changing moment in my life not only got over my depression you know
00:20:40
i went and spent the whole day with my mum the next day explained everything that i'd experienced um you know not a
00:20:46
mum's favorite chat hearing your son talk about psychedelics but certainly is in context of like helping me get over
00:20:51
something she was aware i was suffering from um the single greatest lesson i've learned in ayahuasca is about gratitude
00:20:58
so i was going through a period i think i was 30 potentially it was a few years later and
00:21:05
uh things were going well at the time so my attitude my mindset was i want this i
00:21:10
want that right what's your intention going in well i want this i want that that's like how you answer it because you're not enlightened enough
00:21:16
to understand the psychedelic experience right yeah yeah and you can write it down and come back to and be like that was what i was looking for in this journey
00:21:22
um but actually the lesson i learned so i was asking you know how can i 10x what i do
00:21:28
how can i be more how can i become better how can i have more impact you know me me me me all these questions um i was
00:21:36
instead transported to um like basically i'm not sure where in
00:21:42
the world but a very poor part of the world where there was this like kid like begging
00:21:47
in the street basically and i like became that kid and i became this person like trying to
00:21:53
get water for his family and having to walk miles for it and
00:21:59
50 of my whole entire psychedelic experience that night was literally walking like a mile in this
00:22:04
boy's shoes and it this lesson sort of came to me about you know it isn't always about what you
00:22:10
want and it isn't always about like you know asking for more it's actually about having gratitude for
00:22:16
what you have and when you have enough gratitude for what you already have you will unlock the path to more
00:22:22
and you know there's this thing that i've learned as well which is when you go into experiences it's helpful to have a totem
00:22:27
right so i carry a different stone in for each experience and i have these stones at home anyway i have this stone
00:22:32
by the side of my bed um and every single morning that i wake up the first thing i see is this stone
00:22:38
literally just a pile of crap stone but the point is it's imbued with this message for me and i wake up every day and i'm grateful
00:22:46
for having running water in my bathroom there and that is like an unbelievably poetic
00:22:52
and powerful way to live your life past an experience to wake up in camden town in london being you know
00:22:59
so fortunate like i am but with a real genuine reminder of gratitude as opposed to like waking
00:23:04
up groggy and being like hey i'm grateful for waking up today this is like it means something to me so these little triggers and shifts they
00:23:12
emotionally change something in you but i've learned a lesson the hard way through ayahuasca as well which is
00:23:17
just because you're learning lessons this is like all wisdom right it doesn't matter whether you get it from ayahuasca or you get it from you know your
00:23:24
instagram posts you can read it and it can resonate and you can be like wow that's powerful
00:23:29
without action it means nothing so if you don't create then the steps
00:23:35
to be better based on what you learned you're wasting a very powerful weekend and painful
00:23:40
weekend and i've been guilty of that too i've learned i've learned lessons that i haven't necessarily followed
00:23:46
through with and you know and and sometimes it's because they take bravery
00:23:51
and i feel like i'm not ready for that bravery up and so we were talking about the other day you know with the exactly with personal
00:23:58
branding exactly actually that's actually a good segue on to that topic as well because it's something that i know for a fact a lot of people
00:24:04
struggle with in different forms and um but in but also specifically with this topic which is
00:24:11
putting yourself out there on the internet um i know this because a lot of people have told me but also
00:24:17
because i've been there right so let's if we rewind a couple of years in my own life
00:24:23
a guy called ash jones says to me you should make a youtube channel i dismiss the idea obviously because i'm
00:24:28
like well people are going to think that i think i'm mahatma gandhi like or like people are gonna think that i think i'm a genius or
00:24:35
that i think i have all the answers so i'm not doing that eventually after two years he sits me down in this room and it took
00:24:41
about eight or nine hours for us to shoot a two-minute video because i couldn't speak i i was
00:24:47
self-conscious and all of these things and i was plagued by that thought that my friends back home who knew me in
00:24:54
school will think oh steve's a [ __ ] he's changed what's he doing who does he think he is and that almost imprisoned me it almost
00:25:00
stopped me from doing the thing that actually liberated me made me the most fulfilled i've ever been and by allowing me to be my like true
00:25:08
self and in fact what i wanted to do was be true to myself and um
00:25:15
it felt like i was worried that people would think i was um being something i was not trying to fake
00:25:20
myself and so i guess the question that i have for you is you know a lot of stuff but you've not
00:25:28
you know you've got a great podcast secret leaders you've got a new podcast as well which is centered around your brand heights um
00:25:35
you've struggled to put yourself out there on the internet and social media can you explain why yes i mean such a good question
00:25:40
steve um but also because we connect a lot on this right so you're like my unofficial mentor with a few voice notes where i'm
00:25:47
like he's got a [ __ ] point here um
00:25:52
so you know it's i guess i'll put it a slightly different way you know i was listening to one of your early but you sent me this actually your podcast with
00:25:58
with him so what was his name ash jones yeah yeah you told me to listen to an episode which i did and you know he was talking
00:26:04
about the early days of social chain you learned early that you you were bringing in most of the revenue like
00:26:09
steve was bringing in most of the revenue therefore the business decision made lots of sense to center that around you i think when you're doing b2b that makes
00:26:16
loads of sense the challenge i have is um my products are b2c right they're for consumers
00:26:23
and putting as much time and effort and thought and energy into promoting myself is is mental
00:26:29
energy i should be putting into the brand and you know there is i think uh probably a reasonable compromise and
00:26:35
also like all things this is a bit of a developing scenario however um you know it's a very
00:26:41
fair thing to say that i'm not the product this is the product um inside my company we could all agree
00:26:48
that that is like broadly true right we're selling a thing we're not selling me whereas you know going through exactly the same
00:26:54
experience at social chain you guys if you weren't in the room you guys would have come to the same conclusion which is steve's the greatest like part of the
00:27:00
funnel here so we as a company succeed when steve's succeeding so that's the kind of marketing final we should back so you
00:27:07
know i can see you sort of smirking at me because this is the story i tell myself okay fine because i was like this doesn't make
00:27:13
this is the story this is the story that i tell myself it doesn't mean that it's true um
00:27:18
you know then there's another question about platforms right so um you know this isn't a mental health
00:27:24
condition um but i do have imposter syndrome and you know we've talked about this in the
00:27:29
past as well but um you know the first business that i scaled
00:27:34
uh was grabble and which is when we first met yes um and you know that
00:27:41
that was me going into technology and fashion having had no experience previously i was in advertising before
00:27:46
and i love changing industries and i love challenging myself to completely wipe the slate clean and do something new but it comes
00:27:52
with imposter syndrome that's what i've learned about myself right i'm i'm full of the internal monologue of
00:27:58
i'm not good enough no one cares what i think and i don't deserve to be doing this it's someone else's dream
00:28:03
um that doesn't change right in me that that voice is still
00:28:09
there um however you know a really good thing if you're aware if you're consciously
00:28:14
aware of your limitations especially like some of your mental frailties creating steps to improve those things
00:28:20
are helpful so with heights the first thing i did just over 100 weeks ago we started a newsletter
00:28:25
because i was like i'm going to get imposter syndrome so badly in a space of neuroscience and nutrition
00:28:32
not neuroscientists or nutrition like it's going to be awful for me so i'm going to write a newsletter every week
00:28:38
and i'm going to read a science paper every week and i am going to distill that into three minutes because when you read something you learn it once and
00:28:44
when you share it you learn it twice so the process of literally rewriting this was creating neural pathways
00:28:49
and embedding the information into my brain so i was like in a hundred weeks it's actually what i told myself and it's just
00:28:54
been 101 now um in 100 weeks i won't be a neuroscientist or a nutritionist but i will have read over 100 science
00:29:01
papers and i'll know what science says is good for your brain according to journals experts etc which
00:29:07
would be an amazing step to create an amazing habit to build to get over my own mental frailties and
00:29:14
my own story of imposter syndrome so when it comes to social media i feel like i've got the same thing which is
00:29:20
like um when my last company failed and i didn't know what i was going to do
00:29:25
next i looked at like my social media platforms i was like you know where am i going to spend time rather than where am i going to waste time
00:29:31
ultimately right because you can get caught up in this silly game and then thinking personal branding where do i feel
00:29:37
comfortable that would be a good place to start and i chose linkedin and the reason i chose linkedin was because i told myself
00:29:42
a story which i completely believe to be true anyway which is whatever i do next i'm a serial
00:29:48
entrepreneur right as in i'm fine not having any money i'm fine working for other people for free doing all these things but i'm always going to
00:29:53
start something else myself again so if i know that to be true it means i'm always going to hire people
00:29:59
and what do really smart and impressive people want from their boss they want to know who they're working for they want to know what your values are
00:30:05
they want to know what you believe in they want to know what kind of things you share and so i was like linkedin is the only place that could credibly do that for me
00:30:12
right and i actually went from i mean it's not you know that impressive but i went from like 3 000 followers or something to almost
00:30:18
25 000 on the basis of and as you know there's no putting money behind anything in linkedin or anything
00:30:24
literally just by being myself by writing about how i'd failed by writing about what i was working on
00:30:30
next by working and and also all of the things when you know writing about what you're working on next is such a difficult thing to do because it's
00:30:36
probably going to fail as well and it did you know before heights um with three iterations of things that i
00:30:42
was publicly putting out there and getting feedback on and stuff that we had to kill because it didn't have legs um it's a horrible time for an
00:30:49
entrepreneur in between or it can be certainly in between people like what do you do and your identity is in flux and you
00:30:56
know you're like do i talk about this new thing that i've just discovered that might not be a thing in a month preaching here dan i know right exactly
00:31:02
exactly but it's such a complicated answer to give in the now yeah um so anyway like on the personal brand
00:31:08
thing like i decided linkedin was a place i felt comfortable because i can be my authentic self because i am an entrepreneur because i
00:31:13
am someone who is willing to go big and fail and like actually figure out
00:31:19
why and talk about why and i think this stuff is so important um for entrepreneurs to
00:31:24
connect openly and honestly because i absolutely hate and the one thing i will not miss about networking events
00:31:30
is like going to them and everyone talking about them killing it you know that is literally poison in our society it's
00:31:37
nonsense so everyone just talking about how they're killing it stops people from saying actually you know shit's really hard
00:31:43
right now this is the problem i'm dealing with and this is like how it's making me feel if you're able to say that to another
00:31:50
entrepreneur because you've created the container in the environment to be comfortable to do so that person can probably help you and if
00:31:57
you are stuck with the narrative that everything's going amazingly all the time and that's all you're telling people no one can help you
00:32:04
figure it out when you actually could do with the help you know it's the other thing going slightly off piece sorry but
00:32:09
you know my biggest bug bear in entrepreneurship is stealth mode i think stealth mode is like the most
00:32:16
stupid thing that an entrepreneur can claim to be in full stop because as you know ideas are worthless execution is
00:32:22
everything anyone that's ever built a business knows how stupid it is stealth mode is when people say like working on a new business in
00:32:28
finance in stealth mode right i'd love to see i mean not telling anybody yeah i'd love to tell you what my startup is but it's so amazing you'll
00:32:34
steal it so i'm not going to tell you guys all the time all the time so many people
00:32:40
do it and and i i i give the most direct feedback on linkedin probably very similar to you like loads
00:32:45
of people asking my help for loads of things all the time and if i ever see stealth mode on their thing i'm like i don't talk to anyone in stealth mode
00:32:51
fyi stealth mode is such a stupid thing because it's it's it's like how do i describe
00:32:57
like saying i'm afraid of feedback but it's yeah but it's also like saying i've got something that i can't tell you
00:33:05
yeah why did you tell me you had something i know you know just don't start the conversation with me i'm a curious
00:33:10
person what it is but you know you're attention seeking but you don't want to tell it's like it's a weird form of
00:33:15
like i don't know flirtation i don't know um but i want to get to this point about
00:33:21
why you we have this conversation yeah like a week or two ago about instagram and making videos of yourself
00:33:28
and putting your ideas out there what is it that's stopping you doing that you talked about imposter syndrome i guess that kind of relates to the
00:33:34
business side of things more what's stopping you going on instagram putting a video on your instagram and saying
00:33:40
this is what i think these are my ideas comment below if you agree yeah you're it's a great question um
00:33:46
so i guess as a starting point like it's worth saying that i think a very healthy way to approach stuff like this in your life is to to
00:33:53
choose a place build confidence and go on from there so i feel like that's what i did with linkedin i understood that that's the
00:33:59
place where i'd feel least impostery and so i'd start there now you know i picked up on on twitter i
00:34:06
mean twitter is like my favorite platform that's when i spend probably the most time on um but you know it's it's got a very short
00:34:13
half-life so it's kind of impossible to to consistently come up with gems um
00:34:18
instagram you know to me was this place where just beautiful people live young beautiful people live and that's all
00:34:24
anyone's interested in and that's not really my world right i'm interested in challenge i'm interested
00:34:29
in mental health i'm interested in stories um and i interestingly i wasn't finding
00:34:35
that on instagram so i was like what am i doing i don't really belong in this place at all um i'd say like a hundred percent
00:34:41
like inspired by the way that you've approached your instagram like sharing insights because insights and like distilling my thoughts into something
00:34:48
and writing them down that is something that i do i just don't publish them or i was on linkedin
00:34:53
so actually like what i've now started doing on instagram is like literally taking a leaf out of your book after our chat which is going through
00:35:00
some of my high performing linkedin posts that you know might have got one or two thousand likes and being like if
00:35:05
it was popular there i guess it'll be popular let's have a go and trying to get over it now slowly but surely but it's this
00:35:12
constant belief that no one wants to hear what i have to say yes of course and that's what i was getting
00:35:17
at and like where does what are the forces that are
00:35:22
at play which are making it feel like some like psychological discomfort if you are
00:35:28
to tell the world what you think on instagram let's say what in your mind what is it friends back
00:35:34
home is it this particular person sometimes i can think of a particular person and i can think that person from four
00:35:41
years ago is going to think i'm a dick 100 dude like the thing that i've learned which is so interesting is
00:35:47
90 percent of my fear of what people will think is based on my school friends yes who like you know i only speak to a
00:35:56
bunch of them now you know identity is such an interesting thing and you know you have it when you're um you'll be going through it right now
00:36:02
and i empathize right you're not steve from social chain anymore yeah right and that's you know for ages you know i was down from gravel now i'm
00:36:08
down from heights um you know people do that and that's fine but it's important you don't over
00:36:14
compensate that identity for yourself attached to your business because we're all on a path and we're going to go
00:36:20
through a journey and the journey the stories are going to change and when you over attach yourself to a particular
00:36:25
part of the journey is where you can find struggle and that's and on that point you build your life around
00:36:31
that identity so your friends the you me your music your interests and so you you would have collected
00:36:37
through your life a bunch of people who know dan as this exactly and you're gonna have to shed
00:36:42
some of them potentially by by stepping into your new identity 100 and that's a i guess a conflict or a
00:36:48
100 and it's difficult right but as you grow you edit and you know you need to really consider
00:36:54
who you're editing out of your life and who you're welcoming into your life and i think you know there's the the
00:36:59
practical reality that what was good for you five years ago is no good for you right now and frankly you know the highest
00:37:06
leverage decision you can make i'm still terrible at this by the way but the highest leverage decision you can make is picking what to say no to
00:37:13
and the hardest thing you can do is say no to opportunities that you would definitely say yes to so you know that includes friends that
00:37:21
includes saying i don't have time for this friend anymore or this identity this part of my
00:37:26
identity anymore even though i like it i like them i like all this stuff because
00:37:31
frankly there's you know this shedding almost that we do as human
00:37:36
beings um you know the you know in reptile form it's very physical right they're literally shedding a skin
00:37:43
but as humans you don't see this change but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen and we go in these cycles and i think a
00:37:49
lot of you know mental health conditioning is attached to our holding onto the past and refusing
00:37:55
to sort of embrace the future and that's why you know i think it's really important
00:38:01
to set out a clear understanding of your purpose a clear understanding of the things you will say no to and won't say
00:38:06
no to and acknowledging that that changes right so i do an exercise like this every year um and it takes about five or six hours
00:38:14
i do it with my wife it's like a whole massive like briefing document essentially on your vision your purpose your friends
00:38:19
like all of this stuff um spending the time thoughtfully thinking about these things which people do not do enough of
00:38:26
is so important because if you're not reflective and you're not spending time thinking manifesting essentially who you
00:38:33
want to be in the future then i think you're going to miss a massive opportunity to grow
00:38:39
um you know i because you know i work in the brain space now in in brain care neuroscience
00:38:46
you call that neuroplasticity right it's this idea that the brain will grow it's plastic and it's essentially changing in whatever
00:38:52
direction you choose to take it in if you are episode 53 of chapter two we
00:38:57
talked about this on the last episode so it's very relevant oh really okay fine yeah so neuroplasticity is that
00:39:02
um if you are into spirituality like i am then it's called manifestation right
00:39:08
it's spending the time thinking about what you're gonna do and how you're gonna get that and then to put it into like super
00:39:13
business terms if you're into business it's called planning and execution so there are these different ways to
00:39:19
articulate the same point but the point is if you just spend your days going um bit
00:39:25
by bit not really thinking about where you're going to go and what it means to you it'd be very hard for you to make good
00:39:31
decisions and frankly and this i guess actually speaking like personal branding a more popular post i
00:39:36
did recently was about stamina and the things i've learned about rest which is that as a founder and a ceo you learn that
00:39:45
you're not paid for your stamina right you pay yeah you pay mo gorda for sorry not mo
00:39:50
called mo farah for his stamina right he's got to run a [ __ ] 10k that's
00:39:55
stamina right that's what athletes are paid for i'm paid for my decision making people
00:40:01
invest in me and they invest in heights for my decision-making abilities and overworking
00:40:06
giving yourself burnout not taking space to rest not listening to what you know to be
00:40:12
true and spending the time planning that's bad decision-making yeah um if you can't do those things for your own
00:40:19
body you know it's like what i said is if you can't be the ceo of your body you do not earn the right to be the ceo
00:40:25
of your company you gotta you've got to look after your mental state and your physical body
00:40:30
first by thinking and finding the space carving out the space to think what does good decisions look like that
00:40:37
fit my purpose and where i'm looking to go and if you can do that and you can answer those things you actually start
00:40:42
to learn things start to add up and and that kind of segues back to the
00:40:47
initial tweet where you talked about depression anxiety banner and insomnia so let's talk about burnout then it's a
00:40:54
very um a very popular topic i actually think one of the most listened to episode of this podcast was
00:41:01
the top was the one about burnout and us being a burnout generation and how we've kind of glamorized it we're
00:41:06
optimizing our lives so we can fill it with more things to do did you burn out how did you burn out and you understand
00:41:13
why you burnt out 100 um you know garyvee is a very clever man
00:41:19
um very intelligent but you know he has created a negative impact on society
00:41:24
that he would probably be upset about because he seems to be a lovely man that really deeply cares about stuff from what i can see i believe his authenticity but he
00:41:32
has created hustle culture and hustle porn and you know what i met gary vee had him on this podcast
00:41:38
and you're right i think in every um depiction of him there he's a genuinely
00:41:44
authentic person you meet him and think you are who i thought you were online um
00:41:50
and you're completely right in the sense that because he's being his authentic self which we can't
00:41:56
you know uh um we can't criticize anyone for being in fact that's what we tell everyone to be be
00:42:02
yourself and chat you know and be willing to share it with the world the issue i think as you're pointing out
00:42:08
is his lack of appreciation that
00:42:13
about nuance and that everyone is fundamentally different and everyone's not gary vee i had that problem too when i started
00:42:18
i couldn't understand why people weren't sacrificing their lives to build businesses and working until four in the
00:42:23
morning and sleeping under the desk i thought everyone that wasn't doing that was both an idiot and inferior and wasting their time and
00:42:30
wasting that time and they would never be happy because as far as steve's bartlett's brain could tell him
00:42:36
that was happiness yeah and because like all of the pain that you suffer is part of part of the game and yeah but that stuff
00:42:42
isn't this is the thing right that stuff isn't not true you do have to grow growth is painful and you will have
00:42:49
sleepless nights and all the other bits and pieces that is part of the parcel the thing where we confuse this is it's all mutually exclusive aka
00:42:56
my identity has to be that and only that because that's how gary v and like a few other geniuses in society
00:43:02
have got to the top of their games but here's the thing like there's two
00:43:07
reasons why i had burnout last time the first was because i wasn't happy on what i was working and
00:43:12
running a startup can feel a bit like a cage sometimes so uh unless you're really sure i say this
00:43:18
all entrepreneurs all the time are you sure this is the company you want to build because if it's not you're going to be doing it anyway and
00:43:25
then you are your own bird keeper you have locked yourself in a cage and that's what i did with
00:43:31
grabble i got lucky i found a niche an opportunity
00:43:36
it grew exponentially really quickly millions of downloads had a million monthly active users in our end we had
00:43:42
like a you know even acquisition that failed sadly but you know would have made us millionaires was
00:43:47
a real journey with that company it was fashion for tinder basically yeah exactly and it was a real it was a real
00:43:54
exciting journey but at no point did i enjoy it um really like
00:43:59
not at no point my ego enjoyed it right and we won loads of awards um you know we won the award we wanted
00:44:05
like we were like we just want to be written about in techcrunch and all this stuff and in 2017 we won best mobile startup in europe over depop at the
00:44:11
techcrunch europas we didn't even turn up to that awards to take that award
00:44:16
because i was having such a bad time mentally i didn't even go to the awards of a ceremony my friend picked up that
00:44:21
trophy and took a photo on our behalf i was sitting at home drinking whiskey feeling really terrible about myself
00:44:27
um why because that was living someone else's dream i
00:44:32
didn't care about fashion um what was the force that made you live someone else's dream yeah good question uh a bit of
00:44:39
serendipity in the sense of um you know listening to users going on a bit of a journey and the product sort
00:44:46
of developing and then it getting catching fire before you really have an opportunity to stop and say no that's not really for
00:44:53
me like you were getting dragged you weren't pulling a bit yeah a bit but then at the same time like you know
00:44:58
like everyone i'm scared of failure so i didn't want to be a failure so i wanted to make it work and you know by hook or
00:45:04
by crook i was willing to like push really hard to make it work and you know i look back on my time with grapple and
00:45:09
other than like working hard i was working against my purpose and i could feel it and when people ask me i'm
00:45:14
actually like as you know always to my detriment honest so
00:45:19
i would tell people including the wrong people including investors that you know my heart really isn't in it and like all
00:45:24
this stuff because you know all i had left for authenticity was to be honest in these
00:45:29
conversations with other people you know i've just finished writing my book um not trying to plug it although happy
00:45:35
sexy millionaires happy sexy millionaire available on all bookshelves no it's not pre-order um but there's a chapter in there where i
00:45:41
really investigate burnout and the reason there's topics like self-awareness and burnout which we haven't quite yet properly defined
00:45:48
everyone throws it out there on instagram oh i'm feeling burnt out but nobody's like gone down the rabbit hole to figure out the innate causes or
00:45:55
the psychological or social causes of it so i just wanted to like go as far down as i could go
00:46:00
and i tend to believe the depth that i've got to with my thinking and the research that i've done
00:46:06
is that you typically get um you stand a higher chance of burnout in situations where you are extrinsically motivated um
00:46:14
to do x activity because i view my life and i think about all the things that i do intrinsically like walking i've never
00:46:20
got burnt out walking my dog or playing with my dog you know i've never got burnt out um
00:46:26
like reading books that i love and those kinds of things but when it comes to getting paid to
00:46:33
do something that i don't intrinsically enjoy doing burnout is almost inevitable at some
00:46:38
point not just by now right but then my but then motivation and i started looking at motivation and the spectrum
00:46:45
it sits on of on one end being totally uh extrinsic you're literally doing it because you're forced to
00:46:51
and then on the other end doing it because it's an innate passion an intrinsic passion and all of the things on this end where you
00:46:57
you're paid and you're forced to burn out seems to show up and on the other end when it's it's
00:47:02
intrinsic and you love it and you're doing it for the sake of doing it i never get burned out and my motivation seems to last the course of time so i
00:47:09
wanted to see if that resonates with you yeah but let me tell you something else that's interesting that i'm i'm consciously aware of because i've had
00:47:14
burnout and by the way my experience of it was you know i just couldn't get out of bed for a month really um that was it i basically just
00:47:20
stayed in bed and i just like i couldn't face going to the office i couldn't face leaving my
00:47:25
team in the office yeah and you're lying in bed well i got my co-founder and i just like explained that i'd literally i didn't
00:47:30
know what it was at the time i was like i think it might be depression i didn't know what it was though this is the thing i probably didn't even say those words how did it feel um just like just no
00:47:38
energy whatsoever just like no no ability a bit like when i had corona virus to be honest just like zonked
00:47:43
um not and nothing i was doing was able to make me feel like i was getting the energy
00:47:48
i think the reason why as well was um again i like i'm a helpful guy i really
00:47:54
believe in my greatest superpower full stop is connecting people right i've got infinite numbers of ways i've connected
00:48:00
people eight people have got married that i've introduced you know they say three in heaven but you know i don't quite believe in heaven so
00:48:06
it's irrelevant but point being um you know so many co-founders introduced
00:48:12
i really just believe in the serendipity of creating you know moments where you know that person and that person just should have
00:48:18
that chat and i force it to happen so because of that because i really believe in serendipity as well
00:48:24
um i do try and say yes to people and help them out so what was happening to me at gravel was
00:48:30
we were flying we were like number one in the app store and all this stuff so the inbounds start coming like thick and fast right and so i was like
00:48:36
i can't do this the way i was doing it which is like all over the place i'll go to old street at 6 00 a.m
00:48:42
every single tuesday and wednesday um and between six and nine i'll do like sessions right
00:48:48
if you come meet me between that time and like your 45 minute slot i'll fit you in and then tuesday and
00:48:53
wednesday became tuesday to thursday and then before i knew i was doing it like almost every single day
00:48:58
trying to be so helpful and it was great because i i i get loads of energy from that right like
00:49:04
so much there's you know great quote of you know there's no such thing as altruism because you're ultimately doing it for yourself and i
00:49:10
believe that um however so it's like find your motivation and then turn it but i overdid it and so the result
00:49:17
the net result was like one day i woke up from my alarm trying to do it and i like basically couldn't move and that alarm basically you know kept
00:49:24
going for the next few days and i was like nope i just can't do it i can't go to work i can't get out of bed
00:49:30
it's really like it's really strange time but the thing that's really interesting to
00:49:35
me this time right so i analyzed that as partly burned out and i was trying to do too much to and
00:49:40
not spending enough time on myself not having any rest not being sensible about my personal space
00:49:47
and my life which was stupid but the kind of thing you learned the hard way quite often and then the other thing was obviously
00:49:53
like i was working on a business that i wasn't very happy and i was having more fun meeting these people and helping like make introductions than i was
00:49:59
working my own business now with heights you know very consciously aware of the opposite problem to be true so we just talked
00:50:05
about burnout from some of your insights right one of my fears from heights is you know
00:50:10
i won't see burnout coming because now i'm living my purpose now i am so passionate
00:50:16
i get so much motivation and pleasure from working on heights that i could do
00:50:21
this 24 7 um and i diarize stopping myself right i literally put in
00:50:28
my diary to stop like all my things rest naps peloton
00:50:33
like all of the things like i talked to you earlier about like my shakti meditation these things are in my diary
00:50:39
because if it's in my calendar i'm going to pay attention to it and i'm going to respect it and if i don't i won't respect my own boundaries because i know
00:50:46
that i'm intrinsically a bit of a workaholic and if i'm passionate you can't stop me so i have to stop myself
00:50:51
sure and knowing you know taking preventative measures towards things like burnout
00:50:56
if you are happy um i think has been a really like mature decision that i'm really proud of taking
00:51:02
this time around because it's a bit like the imposter syndrome right how am i going to overcome it i'll write a newsletter every week great i feel way
00:51:08
less like that now same thing burn out i don't feel like i'm going to get burned even though i've been sitting in my bedroom pitching you know
00:51:16
to investors like all of february and march like it's not a great existence because of lockdown and if i said you yeah listen
00:51:22
uh i'm the same i'm a workaholic and all these things i'm an entrepreneur i'm going to build a big business dan what is the one thing i can do to
00:51:29
avoid myself getting burnout what would you say that is you would say is diarizing and scheduling time
00:51:35
to do other things like you know i had near l on this podcast and he talked about he writes the book indestructible he
00:51:41
talks about how he will literally schedule time in his diary to see his to spend some time with his
00:51:47
partner and take his kids for a walk and and those kinds of things is that what you're saying you're saying yeah yeah
00:51:52
i mean i've got um i do have like a list of habits that i've created for myself and you know talking about habit
00:51:58
formation um terrible error everyone makes is like oh i'll listen to dan i'll do all of these you know habits no i
00:52:04
pick like one new one a year to be honest with you my number one mental health hack full stop
00:52:09
um that i say to everyone everyone always asks me my one thing mine's going for a walk um you know spending an hour or so
00:52:15
walking if you can do that without being distracted i mean i listen to podcasts and audio books but
00:52:20
i also go for some where i don't take anything with me and i just go for the walk um that's my number one health hack um
00:52:27
because it's not only good for your brain but good for your body and because it puts you into there's two
00:52:33
things one we live in london actually to be honest like gets way worse of rep about rain than you know you would think because i don't
00:52:39
go out with a raincoat most days um but even if it's raining you still go out and that's a great moment to just be
00:52:45
with the elements and accept that you know things aren't always perfect even the manifestation of rain you know it's a great moment to just go
00:52:51
out and be like things aren't perfect but i owe it to myself for my own rest and for my own space to
00:52:57
do this today and the other reason honestly is because on average i get to listen to about 50
00:53:03
books a year just by doing that one thing so as someone who's like a lifelong learner and happiest when i'm
00:53:08
learning the amount of books that i've devoured by stacking that you know habit onto my daily walk has
00:53:15
been the fastest way to grow yeah and so we talked about burn out there the next thing so and that's that
00:53:21
was during your time at gravel the next thing from that tweet was anxiety yeah so the anxiety and insomnia were
00:53:28
completely linked with each other so a really really fascinating experience
00:53:33
to me the most interesting of all of them really because at the time i got and so at the time i
00:53:41
got insomnia and this is when anxiety starts to build because anxiety does go with it insomnia
00:53:47
very well because uh you start to get scared of going to sleep which builds anxiety you can't really sleep when you've got anxiety so
00:53:53
it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy like every single night so i had insomnia for six months
00:53:58
and my symptoms were i'd go to sleep at midnight but i'd wake up at 2am and at 2am i was wide awake and there
00:54:04
was no going back to sleep whatsoever no matter what i did so this was a time when business was
00:54:09
going well i was pretty happy in life i was getting married um yes my dad had passed away but my mom
00:54:14
had just recovered from cancer so i'd had like the whole fear of her and she's already had it before and recovered once so very unlikely to
00:54:21
recover the second time but she had i have a roof over my head i practice gratitude you know like i am just that archetypal
00:54:27
[ __ ] that's just too smug for the world and i just suddenly
00:54:34
couldn't sleep and i was like i don't understand like i have everything that i wanted and i'm not i don't even want much
00:54:40
you know i've worked on that stuff so where has this come from and you know
00:54:47
basically chronic anxiety the feeling of chronic anxiety is lots of sweating lots of self-doubt
00:54:55
um lots of um almost like a bit of a personality change in me you know outwardly i'm
00:55:02
quite confident but you know this experience with anxiety was sort of really making me question everything about what i say
00:55:08
how i feel who i am and you know it was in this cycle where if i'm about
00:55:13
to go to sleep i'm not going to be able to go to sleep because of this you know these feelings of doubt
00:55:19
and stories i'm telling myself and it became this perpetual illness and by the way i tried so many things right because when
00:55:25
you say doubt yeah and the story self-doubt self-doubt about business self-doubt about business self-doubt
00:55:30
about who i am um and about why i'm feeling like this anxiety is such a complicated thing
00:55:36
because um you know there's a great uh i think it's by lao tzu the it's not a perfect um verbatim
00:55:44
quote but he said something like depression is a symptom of sadness for the past we've lived anxiety is obsession and confusion over
00:55:51
the future you're gonna have and that's why like mindfulness and being present is the antidote and i think i really resonate with that
00:55:58
because you know my own depression experience was loss of my father the past my anxiety was like the person
00:56:04
hey was anxiety about the night i night sleep i'm about to not have but also like you know who who am i
00:56:09
going to be what's going to happen how long can i live like this feels like it's self-fulfilling in a way as well exactly so the the truth is i tried all
00:56:17
these different things so like i went to i did therapy i did sleep therapy i used all the apps calm sleepio
00:56:24
i tried you know uh cutting out alcohol i tried drinking much more alcohol like i tried you know
00:56:30
like you name it i'd like not smoked weed for a while i was like right that's it getting a weed habit back you know like anything that you could
00:56:36
possibly do to just like stay zonked but i went to the doctor and he recommended me sleeping pills
00:56:43
but that really irked me i mean we just talked about lost connections johan hurry right um i don't appreciate medication
00:56:51
that will work that night as solving my problem and i'm smart enough to know that it wouldn't solve my problem it would just help me sleep that night
00:56:57
so i've still got those sleeping pills and i never use them and i kept on going for this journey the search for why
00:57:03
this was happening and it led me in the end to a dietitian which i'd never worked with before and by the way i didn't even know what a
00:57:09
dietitian was and heard of nutritionists because isn't that just everyone on instagram um but a dietitian
00:57:14
uh had no idea but it turns out a dietitian is basically a nutritionist with a scientific degree they can work
00:57:19
in the nhs and they work with sick people so if you have a sick problem like insomnia you go to a dietitian and they
00:57:25
will literally tell you medically what they can do to affect your
00:57:30
your experience and she just said to me um she basically asked me about what i was
00:57:35
eating and my habits and like all this kind of stuff and i told her and this is someone who i think i'm quite healthy generally speaking and she just said
00:57:44
um you're basically not getting enough brain food and i was like i don't even know what that means like i don't understand the context of that
00:57:49
statement and she was like well let me put it this way your brain is an organ right
00:57:54
it's 60 fat 90 of the fat in your brain is this one compound called dha and most
00:58:01
people that come to me with essentially mental health problems which is what you currently have have nutritional deficiencies and don't
00:58:08
realize there are three main things that i would recommend in your condition one is omega-3s the other is b vitamins
00:58:15
because again that's for energy so she explained that i'm having a spike at 2 am so i need that spike not to happen i
00:58:20
need to have like much more slow release of b vitamins in my energy supply in my body every day and then the third thing was blueberry
00:58:27
extract because it's an antioxidant and would help make lymphatic system whilst i slept right she's saying this stuff to me i'm like
00:58:34
so skeptical i can't even tell you not only not a supplement taker um but she's now recommending me three supplements and i've been given pills by
00:58:40
the doctor and i'm like i mean like come on how is this gonna be any better so you can imagine my complete and utter
00:58:46
surprise when i took those three things i mean they were very expensive they were like
00:58:51
medically prescribed ones so super potent from you know i think it was whole foods
00:58:57
or planet organic they were pricey but within two weeks i was sleeping like a baby and i wasn't i
00:59:02
wasn't feeling anxiety and when you have a moment like that in
00:59:08
your life and you know this because you're a deeply inquisitive person it makes you stop
00:59:14
and it makes you go hold on a second like this was so simply solved i don't
00:59:21
actually believe it to be true this must be placebo this must be finally my placebo that has caused this
00:59:26
um instead i did what i do i'm quite nerdy i started reading science papers because i kind of you know the one thing
00:59:32
i do hate on instagram is like everyone's a nutritionist everyone's at this everyone's at that i'm like i don't want to listen to some guy that
00:59:38
takes nootropics telling me about like my brain and mental performance i want to see what scientists that don't take any credit
00:59:45
actually have to say about this stuff and i learned that there are thousands literally of
00:59:51
science papers this is why i did the newsletter i knew i'd never run out of content it's like literally the deepest well of content
00:59:57
ever ever ever to do what i'm doing um there were thousands of science papers on all of these ingredients and
01:00:03
how they impact not just your mental health below the baseline so if you're suffering from insomnia if you're suffering from
01:00:09
anxiety even if you've got depression schizophrenia like so many medical papers scientific
01:00:15
journals sorry um about the impact of taking a high supplementation of xyz or obviously
01:00:22
much more food of that particular ingredient and the impact it's had and then when
01:00:27
you're at the baseline all of these examples about nutrition impacting your mental performance so this is things like decision making
01:00:34
focus energy like all of the things you we want in life right no one wants to really be recovering from a mental health problem they want to be
01:00:39
at their baseline and thriving and it just took me by so much surprise because i was like well if this isn't
01:00:46
like if this is so well known in science why didn't i know about it i was working in shoreditch
01:00:51
at a scaling startup like bearded glasses hipster [ __ ] like you know keto vegan like yes i've
01:00:58
heard of all of them um all my friends intermittent fast yada yada this is just like common sense brain
01:01:05
food why is that not a thing that people know about why is taking care of your brain not something
01:01:12
anyone's actually talked about clearly and actually found a really meaningful way
01:01:17
to communicate what that stands for and what science papers do really badly
01:01:23
is like you know when i synthesize them there's about two or three sentences that are saying the point but it's just
01:01:28
covered with jargon they're boring as [ __ ] um so i was like first step newsletter i will add some
01:01:33
emojis and some lols and make it millennial and fun and i will get people to read science papers without even realizing they're necessarily reading
01:01:39
them so every week you'll learn something from a scientific journal which i will link back to that you can click and by the
01:01:44
way no one clicks it and you can learn something that science says is good for your brain every week and that is essentially how the journey
01:01:51
with heights actually started with this like realization that something as
01:01:56
you know when you you know the beautiful moment in life where you can spot an opportunity so big
01:02:04
and actually solved by the power of communication and brand um you know a lot of people say brand
01:02:11
and comms that is not a market strategy that is not defensible
01:02:16
i think those people are idiots and the wrong market because you know my counter to that is do you
01:02:22
think that buddhist monks got everyone meditating or was it calm and headspace do you think that we
01:02:30
love to run because we watch the olympics or is it nike getting in our heads do you think that people around the
01:02:35
world are doing yoga because of like you know some ashram or do we actually think it's lululemon
01:02:41
brands create change in the world that we want to see and brands connect
01:02:47
with human beings and create communities and the power of social media and standing for something
01:02:52
is where brands take something that was always done before anyway stick a tick on a shoe it's still just a
01:02:57
shoe like lululemon like it's just like a little logo an omega logo on pants it doesn't matter the way that
01:03:04
you express what you do and why you do it is the thing that has the power to change and my opinion and my own experience of
01:03:12
being you know in that shoreditch hipster [ __ ] area where you just know about things
01:03:17
like early and trends to have never come into contact with something so important that can have such an impact as
01:03:23
nutrition and mental health nutrition and taking care of your brain to me felt like a calling right i've just
01:03:30
suffered for six months i've overcome something this is all i want to do with my life
01:03:36
and so you started heights and so i started heights how's it going great question we launched january the
01:03:43
6th in a pandemic well not in a pandemic yet i have to say you know i saw this on my facebook feed
01:03:49
and um i think i messaged you about investing in the company just because it was beautiful i saw the
01:03:55
branding on the website and the way that you'd done the website and i was like this team get branding and in the direct
01:04:00
to consumer world it's interesting what you were just saying there about comms and like the way that i hear it is like storytelling and
01:04:07
um platforms um enabling um
01:04:13
almost democratizing the access to like build great products now because back in like if we think about nike shelf space
01:04:20
or you think about the the you know the power that the unilevers have you're in fact not the war isn't always
01:04:26
storytelling and brand or comms it's in fact like knowing a guy or price points but in the direct to consumer social
01:04:32
media world brand and comms and storytelling can win and
01:04:38
product design exactly in product design which is a huge part of the story and that for me was beautiful so i i uh i was straight in there to try and
01:04:44
invest in your company and i mean you know you know for a fact that i've been taking heights ever since
01:04:49
january i think yeah yeah december maybe what's your experience been as a customer then i i love it and you know
01:04:54
this is and this is this is where i really this is why i always also really wanted to talk to you today so there is probably
01:05:01
several people on a spectrum of like you know devout um vitamin takers or and then there's
01:05:07
people that don't understand or believe in it yeah i was that yeah and so how do you confront the skepticism because with products like
01:05:12
this it is hard for the user to establish cause and effect and like there's other factors that
01:05:18
might happen in my life that may cause an effect almost in establishable so like say i take my i
01:05:24
take the the heights for one week straight but in that week i have just the worst mental health week because of other
01:05:30
factors how do i know so i guess it yeah it's a great question i think there's two parts to this right
01:05:36
so one is um like supplements deserve a bad rep this is the most important thing to address
01:05:42
first and foremost because when i went i was like why is she giving me this like prescribed stuff i kind of just go to holland and barrow or boots and just buy
01:05:48
the things that she says there um it turns out there's this weird marketing thing in supplements where
01:05:53
you can put a minimum in so there's the amount according to science that will have an impact on your body brain whatever and then there's a marketing amount
01:05:59
which is way lower that you're allowed to put in on that product so if you say like vitabiotics or you know a lot of products there's an
01:06:06
asterisk on those boxes they're legally obliged to tell you tiny small print on the back that
01:06:11
what you're taking is actually a fraction of the daily amount that you're meant to have according to science but marketing wise they can say promotes
01:06:17
healthy this promotes healthy that um you know my favorite story on this is probably uh seven seas the biggest amiga
01:06:24
right because we all grew up as children our parents give us seven cs and you know that's the biggest amiga three brand in the whole entire world
01:06:30
now every single day according to science we're meant to have a minimum like an rda if you will
01:06:35
250 milligrams of omega-3s right you can get it from your food or you can get it from these pills
01:06:40
as a safety net it's essentially what a supplement is right is if you're not getting the food supplement not instead of don't take
01:06:47
supplements instead of eating they're supplements so it's like a safety net now that 250
01:06:52
milligrams the minimum you can put in is 45 milligrams so guess how much seven seas put into
01:06:58
their number one best-selling product 45 on the dot and that means you have to take seven c's for six days straight
01:07:04
just to get one day's worth of the scientific dose you're meant to get but it's all small print and a consumer
01:07:09
doesn't see that and supplements for whatever reason have been able to do that so when we went into our supplement design
01:07:14
right this was the awesome thing me and my business partner joel came from a tech background at this point right we've done user experience
01:07:21
we've done all this stuff and we are very much into this idea of because we're not from this space we're going to win because we are going to
01:07:27
approach this completely differently a we start with community building a newsletter and an audience asking questions to that audience about
01:07:33
what we should do and how we should do it and can we see how they behave so here are the things that we learn most people like a lot of people are
01:07:39
super open-minded about taking supplements starting supplements right the problem with supplements is it can be very difficult
01:07:45
to feel the impact or know they're working and so like a lot of things with prevention and well-being in general it's a commitment to the person you want
01:07:52
to become more so than it is like a medication which cures a problem and you're like oh that got fixed that's great that's
01:07:58
over so you know we got really fascinated by this idea of like how can you help
01:08:03
people build habits with our product design how can we overcome this problem that supplements have the you know in january massive
01:08:10
surge loads of people start but very few people continue if you can get past the hurdle of someone trying something your job as an
01:08:16
entrepreneur is to figure out how to make them a real customer not just a first-time buyer um you know
01:08:21
you talked about that bottle that bottle was designed with our newsletter audience by going into
01:08:27
people's homes and asking them very weirdly and quite often the wives show us what you do with your supplements
01:08:32
and everyone has these supplement cupboards because we neither of us were supplement takers before like we even started this right so we didn't know what normal behavior
01:08:39
was which means you get to ask these great open questions which is where you get the best answers so like everyone has a supplement
01:08:45
covered reason they all look the same and what happens is psychologically and we got told this
01:08:50
the whole time people basically open their cupboards see so many that are like broken promises at the time they promised they
01:08:56
were going to start and didn't continue i feel attacked yeah they feel guilty they feel guilty and they're like well i
01:09:01
can't just take the vitamin c because i said i'd take d i said i take that and everything else and they're always separate so people just give up and you know
01:09:08
there's two things to that there's one there's sort of like guilt about the promises that you were like with the person you wanted to be and then the second is just again you
01:09:14
know it's set and setting or you know out of sight out of mind so but
01:09:19
also for me it's i will complete you completely right i'll commit to what this person that i want to be which is
01:09:24
i'm going to develop this new healthy habit which involves me taking zinc every morning or whatever i do it for three days and if you look
01:09:31
at that you know famously but maybe miss attributed quote from einstein doing the same thing over and over again and insanity yeah and not
01:09:38
getting and getting the same results i'll take zinc for three days and because i can't see a difference
01:09:44
it's much like going to the gym for a lot of people although you do eventually see a difference with the gym and the great thing about when you get to the gym is you get the pump
01:09:50
and you use a little bit of sweat so you think something's going on when i take my zinc
01:09:56
nothing next day nothing no so it's almost like a belief and uh and that's i think what i've
01:10:02
struggled with historically so here's here's the thing so like we hear this kind of stuff with heights and we
01:10:08
we love this because it's like opportunity right it's like challenging opportunity that's how everyone did it well that's
01:10:13
dumb we're gonna do it better so like our first thing was um the number one reason most people do not continue is because they forget
01:10:20
out of sight out of mind so we designed a bottle that passed the wife test that wives were like yes i'd put that on my bedside
01:10:26
table or yes i'd have that out in my living room like you've just done right you've got your bottle there but there's no other supplements there it's because it
01:10:32
looks nice and because it makes you feel good because you're looking after your brain and it's there it's like virtue signaling exactly it's actually signaling to
01:10:38
yourself completely i'm the kind of guy that looks after myself i look after my most important organ and
01:10:43
this is my symbol of doing that so that was like an important first step then you know the capsules themselves
01:10:49
are in like patented clever capsules so you've seen like there's omega-3 on the outside the nutrients on the inside that's
01:10:54
important because we learned that lots of people take supplements at different times of the day ritualizing when you build a habit
01:11:00
is really important so if we could make these that you don't have to have them with food like you do with most supplements
01:11:06
because of the absorption the absorption happens because the dha omega-3 on the outside is fat
01:11:12
when this when this dissolves in your gut the new literally the capsule dissolves the outer capsule with the inner capsule at the same time the
01:11:18
nutrients have been dissolved in fat that is the same effect as what you get from food so those capsules have been designed
01:11:24
also around habits to help people pick a time and you know a lot of people don't eat breakfast right and so they just end up
01:11:30
forgetting their supplements full stop so we did it so that you can start the same time so you get ritualized like
01:11:36
with by having the bottle out and you see it and then the most important part which is communication
01:11:41
so we actually have something like a brain health score essentially it's like an algorithm put together by a couple of neuroscientist phds
01:11:47
and you take it before you start and again we do a 15-day check-in and then before
01:11:53
we send you your next month because it's a subscription through the letterbox before we send you your next month we ask you to take it again
01:11:59
now what happens for most people in the first month let's be real right like you just said you know
01:12:05
scientifically typically speaking this product will last will take three
01:12:11
months for you to feel anything like all supplements so it's a bit of a long game right you have to believe in
01:12:16
that now in the first month for you to feel an impact maybe you will because where your
01:12:22
nutritional levels were coming from and your mental state was coming from but maybe you won't so how can we help nudge you there well we can give you
01:12:28
awareness so yeah so we sent people that this brain health survey right and you know self-administering but it gives you a bit of a baseline
01:12:34
a score at the end of like you know where you are right now and then we start sending you coaching comms like very short emails
01:12:40
and snappy bits of information about how to take care of your brain that you might not have thought about things that are really small little habits that you can
01:12:46
build in and people start to read them they have an unbelievably high open rate because
01:12:51
you've just taken the first step to choosing to look after your brain so from that point on why wouldn't you
01:12:56
read the emails of the thing that's coaching you to do those habits and what we find is in the first 25 days or something
01:13:03
like 90 i think it's more than that like 93 of people have improved their brain health score on a self-administered
01:13:09
basis from paying attention right not from the vitamins not from anything else but suddenly
01:13:16
they're interacting with the brand they're and they're welcoming a brand into their life whose sole focus is about how you can take care of your
01:13:22
brain you've got all these really interesting very very respected people just helping to coach you on your
01:13:27
journey um and that is such an important part of this
01:13:32
because you do have the disbelief in the first couple of months right and people like to be able to see and
01:13:37
measure improvements and that's hard to do instantly with supplements but it isn't hard to affect
01:13:44
how someone feels and help encourage them to make changes in their own lifestyle that will make them feel better that is the brand's
01:13:50
responsibility and that's our responsibilities that's what we work quite hard on so where i'm really passionate about building this brand is
01:13:55
as a community it started as a newsletter community is everything to me bringing people along on this journey of brain care and
01:14:01
understanding why it's important you know the amount of money that we spend on skin care or hair care every day but nothing on brain care the most
01:14:08
important organ in our body is so completely normalized in society to have skin care
01:14:14
and hair care rituals and budgets in households but not for our brains and so you going
01:14:20
back to the business side of things um you started grabbing yeah didn't go well yeah and you were an estimation of
01:14:25
it you said you know you struggled with fears of failure and it failed one i was when you were talking about imposter
01:14:32
syndrome and when you and and when you're talking about some sort of confidence issues around putting yourself out there
01:14:39
all of those things seem to sit in contrast to something else you said which is
01:14:44
that you're the type i think this is a not a verbatim quote but you said it earlier on you said you're the type of
01:14:49
person that's just going to keep starting and you know you're going to fail potentially and that seems like someone that's high confidence and very very self-assured
01:14:56
and is not scared at all and then the other side of you seems like someone that is
01:15:01
the antithesis of that so i'm wondering how you you kind of like content because i i do believe that you will
01:15:07
save that god forbid not that i believe in god as you know now um but you believe in forbid
01:15:13
yeah i believe in forbid forbid um heights doesn't go to plan um reaches its lows yeah that's another
01:15:20
way of saying it you will start another business at some point based around something else how do you find the guts
01:15:28
to keep going despite failure and i'm guessing maybe it speaks
01:15:35
to your motivations as to why you wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place right i'm intrinsically motivated by
01:15:43
growth and learning so the way that i like to think of myself is oh someone else said this to me and i
01:15:49
just i thought it was so poetic and i was so impressed with her for using these words which is like a lifelong intern
01:15:54
um you know this was a founder she'd gone to stanford had a really successful career and then she basically coming to intern at
01:16:00
heights for a few months and i was like you know like i talked to you about i did that in other companies as well but it was
01:16:06
interesting to me to find someone else that did that and i was like i mean like you know i could learn from you rodney the other way around she's like
01:16:11
i'm a lifelong intern everywhere i go i'm a lifelong intern and i'm like i talk about myself as a lifelong
01:16:16
learner but lifelong intern was like even more powerful right i was like wow that's you know it's a real mindset towards you
01:16:23
know um redefining what success is yeah because as long as you're learning well
01:16:29
not you i as long as i am learning i am fulfilled and i think we all have this like one
01:16:34
thing we know to be true about ourselves right um starting a business is super hard right and you know
01:16:39
i'm like i say not a nutritionist not neuroscientist had no experience in the space have never launched a vertically
01:16:45
integrated supply chain like from three different countries our ingredients come to from 10 different countries
01:16:50
because we literally source the highest quality so the omega-3 comes from like canada and the blueberries come from italy like
01:16:56
nuts but all of that stuff it's so exciting to learn and like the
01:17:03
the opportunity to learn all of these things are new gets me out of bed and so the whole like
01:17:09
failing and starting again you know that's got nothing to do with you know confidence or lack of or
01:17:15
anything it's got absolutely everything to do with knowing where i'm in my uh sweet spot
01:17:20
there's a term that i learned years ago that sums it up so perfectly which is icky guy are you familiar with japanese
01:17:26
guy that's me i'm living my icky guy right now what is it guy uh so icky guys japanese term
01:17:31
um basically looks like a venn diagram on a venn diagram right so you're at the center and then the different aspects of things
01:17:38
like you know what makes you happy what makes other people happy what makes you money what makes other people fulfilled
01:17:44
it's like ticking off all of these things and it's like if you can find that where you are in the center and you could say
01:17:50
am i contributing to society yes am i waking up every morning fulfilled yes am
01:17:56
i mentally challenged yes it's like ticking off all of these things it's like this weird flower you should definitely check out for people watching
01:18:01
and listening to this podcast on youtube i will put the ikigai graph on the screen now yeah it's amazing it's
01:18:07
amazing and and you know and i come back to it all the time you know i had my honeymoon in japan because of uh discovering ikigai really because i'm
01:18:14
like so you know i'm very spiritual yeah well i had a spiritual wedding in ibiza and then i
01:18:19
did my my honeymoon in japan and you know it was all it was like hikes and spiritual searches and stuff and
01:18:24
you know there's another fantastic uh japanese proverb which is uh literally translated as fall seven
01:18:32
rise eight but what it means is like if you fall down seven times rise up the eighth and you you we talked about success and failure
01:18:38
just in that moment and you said that i think you immediately defaulted to talking about
01:18:44
the purpose which was you love progression sort of intellectual progression growth
01:18:49
and learning and it almost seems to me that one of the ways to escape from the fear of failure
01:18:56
if you even think about what happened at grabble the faith you describe that as a failure one of the ways to escape from the from
01:19:02
ever failing again is by redefining what success is redefining what failure is and it sounds
01:19:08
like you've almost redefined success now as growth and learning and you and you won't fail at that even if the company
01:19:14
goes down right so this is like it's almost like you've developed a strategy somehow not to be able to fail again because failure
01:19:20
now isn't losing the company it's losing your per losing your way like you did with grabling becoming someone you're not and being
01:19:26
extrinsically motivated and it's exactly that and you know i think the opportunity
01:19:32
that we all have as human beings to be creative is to certainly accept that things are not
01:19:37
going to go on a straight path but you know when when confronted with these
01:19:43
like horrible moments of like things like failure and everyone else thinking that you're a failure
01:19:49
blow gets softened a lot when you get to reflect and think about what you learned you know really interesting experience
01:19:55
that uh joel and i did after failing was we went to uh business psychologists
01:20:00
and we had a facilitated sessions over the course of a week with the this was your fault that was my
01:20:07
fault i take blame for this i blame you for that letting it all out right and then we spoke about you know what
01:20:13
our we did personality tests and we looked at where our crossovers were and we had like for the first time a real clear view of strengths and weaknesses gaps
01:20:19
and could map out some of the poor mistakes and decisions that we'd made that led to failure and
01:20:25
interestingly like you know rehiring in in heights this time the thing that we've had for the last
01:20:30
year before we had any employees was a set of company values and hiring processes and all sorts of
01:20:37
like interview tips and hiring docs based on our values before we hired our first person we must have had them for
01:20:42
nine to 12 months because we were so certain of understanding who we are and what we
01:20:48
stand for being the company values and that those company values lead to hiring the right
01:20:53
people with the right mindset and that those people are the greatest leverage you could have as a founder to do less of the stuff
01:20:58
yourself and enable brilliant people to take it forward um i think that's probably the one of the
01:21:04
most important things i've done in my life with spending time on company values with a business partner by
01:21:10
identifying gaps weaknesses and spending time hearing
01:21:15
my failings from my best friend so much of what was true um that i
01:21:22
demonstrated a lack of focus um i'd been overly honest right so i hadn't picked my moments he's like you
01:21:28
know i appreciate a very like transparent person but you know but you know he's like you know you don't have to like tell an investor to their face
01:21:34
that you don't buy into the business that they've given you money for like you could have a filter if things like that then
01:21:40
this is this this is the behavior was the most hurtful thing he said i think the most the most hurtful thing
01:21:46
that he said was that um you know he felt that i had um not
01:21:54
not contributed 50 50 right and that i had like an almost
01:21:59
irresponsible attitude towards what i was trying to get out of the business compared to what he
01:22:05
needed to get out of the business and that was a really meaningful start for us to decide on the next business too
01:22:11
because what he meant by that was joel is like a very intelligent person so he is motivated
01:22:17
by challenge if something is hard to fix right then he'll find a way to fix it
01:22:22
that is like he'll get up in the morning for that i won't um i'm motivated by making an impact and
01:22:28
feeling like i'm having a difference and telling a story and impacting people and then telling me that you know that made them feel this
01:22:33
way that is like all emotion for me right here's pure like logic and challenge so
01:22:38
by me you know constantly discrediting the work that we were doing by saying things like that right by
01:22:43
being too open and honest about my purpose and not putting on the filter i was literally without care or remorse
01:22:51
making fracturing yeah fracturing what he believes in and his ability to succeed and his ability to tell his own
01:22:57
story about the hard work he put in and i think all of those things were true i'd say that it was
01:23:02
60 40 if i was being brutal to myself 70 30 like you know the success of our last company
01:23:07
on him and to be honest like a lot of the failure was related to me and i personally don't regret any of it and i
01:23:13
really don't believe he does either but being able to say this stuff to each other with a
01:23:18
letter to all out that then also gave me the confidence to say like joel came up with like two or three business ideas
01:23:23
before like heights and we were like figuring out what we want to do i was just like no mate i'm going to do the same thing again i don't care about that thing
01:23:29
yeah but it's really exciting i'm like it's not to me right no one is going to have their health or
01:23:34
mental health impacted that i feel like that's my space that's where i want to be so really really enabled us to just you
01:23:41
know look at my mistakes of the past and my character and say if you want to work with me you know that i'm going to have to work
01:23:46
on something i feel purposeful about that otherwise this is non-negotiable for me otherwise we'll repeat history
01:23:52
and you've got another partner in your life which is your uh your wife um when did you get married
01:23:59
what age uh well two years ago i got married two and a half years ago when did you meet her
01:24:04
ah well uh do you know the story at all no i don't know okay fine fine so technically speaking i met her
01:24:10
at 18 on the khosan road for one night uh but i didn't sleep with her uh in thailand okay um in bangkok i
01:24:16
didn't sleep with her but i tried to chat her up and stuff and it was a straight up no right um so she's she was best friends with my business
01:24:22
partner joel's sure best mate a cousin sorry so anyway the point being um that's how we met her originally and
01:24:28
i'd like you know sent some very awkward facebook wall messages when that was a thing like you know trying to chat
01:24:34
over the years it was always annoying um and then at like 30 or 31 like on my birthday um
01:24:41
joel basically reintroduced us and i was like i'm having a party why don't you just come etc and she's older than me right she's two
01:24:48
years older than me so i was a bit like you're 32 i'm 30. you're a bit too old to pick right now your mates are married i literally gave her all the banter i
01:24:54
was like your mates are married you're running out of options i'm still available you know let's do it you're not going to do any of that yeah
01:25:00
she found it hilarious anyway she did she did um come join me at drinks and like the rest is history and actually
01:25:05
our relationship's been super interesting because we spent the first year um not monogamous
01:25:11
um we spent the first year openly so we spent the first year openly communicating that we'll sleep
01:25:18
with other people but they were all like more like one night stands whereas we were like coming back to each other which was interesting because
01:25:24
she's just like hilarious really good fun really funny and so i enjoy hanging out with her but it's
01:25:30
very clear like you're not my girlfriend and she was like great i'm not your boyfriend no problem we did that for a whole year
01:25:35
why were you saying that why were you not um yeah because i like loads of reasons like one is like i'd come out of
01:25:41
a horrible relationship the last time where i i wasn't treated particularly nicely and i just didn't didn't make me want to get
01:25:47
married for sure um and i told my mom and her that i wouldn't get married incidentally um so i was like i don't
01:25:53
believe in marriage and i don't really believe in monogamy and like those are my beliefs i told you about this book sex at dawn i highly
01:25:58
recommend you read it so i had been telling myself the story that this wasn't going to happen so you were rejecting her
01:26:04
kind of in a way and protecting myself absolutely um and you know i think that was mutual for
01:26:09
whatever reason for for a year and actually after a year you know we had that awkward conversation i almost
01:26:15
like where she actually you know said like what are we gonna do like this is getting like a bit silly now you know i'm getting on i'm like 75 now
01:26:22
i need to get married um and um and so i said you know i almost said no
01:26:28
they there and then i said let me sleep on there and i was about to say no but then all my friends were basically like you know she's literally wicked like why
01:26:34
on earth would you do that to yourself like what have you got to lose and from that point of saying yes and
01:26:40
being in a relationship with her i proposed to her the like it's six months later and we got married a year
01:26:45
later so it was actually a really short relationship you're on meeting to marriage you you met when you're 33 now yeah you met her
01:26:51
at 30. yeah so you proposed when you were 31 yep and okay so you've been together for two
01:26:56
years now yeah and so i always find it super fascinating when i meet an entrepreneur that's super
01:27:02
busy and you know in love with their business and their ideas and and is a workaholic on to some degree how they manage to keep
01:27:09
their relationship balanced because i haven't figured it out yet yeah and i
01:27:15
i take the faces that i've gone through different sort of levels of immaturity in my life so the first phase was um meeting great
01:27:23
people meeting a great girl and thinking to myself you need to wrap your life around me
01:27:28
i'm not going to change a thing about myself i'm the most important thing in the world the world revolves around me you're welcome to
01:27:34
join the orbit but i'm not going to change at all didn't go well
01:27:40
unsurprisingly and then like trying to find a little bit of um compromise
01:27:45
somewhere in me um but still being ruthlessly apologetic didn't go well um and now i'm at a place where i'm
01:27:51
currently single completely single and i need the answers i i'm less
01:27:58
i don't want to be one of these [ __ ] [ __ ] narcissists that i just read about one in the newspaper i won't say any names martin sorrell um
01:28:05
and what i've what i read about people i think it was his ex-wife that described him was very very similar to the behavior
01:28:11
that i'm exhibiting which is this kind of self-centeredness that excludes everybody but ultimately
01:28:17
will run the risk of actually being self-harm when i make myself lonely and miserable um because i don't appreciate the value
01:28:23
of a relationship so i want you to help me with the answer well let me tell you i told myself the
01:28:30
narrative that being in a relationship i don't have time to be in a relationship right
01:28:35
um that's my narrative um being married and all of these things
01:28:40
will close opportunities down to me and my life will be worse for it um and
01:28:46
that's fine those are stories and like everything you know we convince ourselves of all sorts of stories and i do believe in you know finding
01:28:53
um not just the one but ones i really don't believe that there's one person for you in the world i believe
01:29:00
there's many and i think having a spiritual connection with others and you know for some people like a sexual connection
01:29:06
with multiple partners i think that this stuff is totally acceptable a b completely
01:29:12
biological like biologically scientifically more normal for us
01:29:17
than monogamy which is essentially because of christianity in the world
01:29:23
and and frankly you know even though it's not what i do with my wife currently we've had conversations about
01:29:29
you know in five years or in ten years right if we weren't sleeping together because we weren't finding ourselves like you know
01:29:35
sexually attractive or whatever at that point you know would we consider having the conversation like opening up our
01:29:40
relationships huh can i ask you that question yeah yeah i'm not answering it almost now
01:29:46
which is like yes we would we would do that and would you be comfortable with her sleeping with other men that's very different question because
01:29:52
uh right now no future me maybe um logically right logically if i took
01:30:00
emotion out of it absolutely because if i didn't want to at that point sleep with my wife it would not be fair
01:30:07
to deprive her of sex because of how i was feeling and so i think having a maturity towards
01:30:13
your relationships and to all relationships is so important and a lot of
01:30:18
you know what really upsets me like so many people get divorced um one of the most common reasons people
01:30:24
get divorced is because they cheat and you can avoid that by having a conversation like i still love you
01:30:31
and i still think everything i already always did think about you but for whatever reason the sexual
01:30:37
attraction has gone and either we are going to work on that together or we should explore other options and
01:30:43
like everything in life steve the most uncomfortable conversations are the ones you need to have
01:30:49
so i think a really smart way and i would say this because you know i'm
01:30:54
doing it but i think a smart way to approach your relationship is like you approach your business
01:30:59
so you set out a vision for your relationship and you say this is what we want to be
01:31:04
and where we want to be in 50 years what does that look like um you know recently
01:31:10
i did this with my wife we were in portugal we were with some friends i told you i was working in portugal for
01:31:15
a month during lockdown um we were staying in like a villa with some friends and like we'd kind of been okay in lockdown but like now she's
01:31:21
around other people she's being a cervix snappy like kind of [ __ ] we were just getting on each other's nerves and i went for like
01:31:26
a long walk on the coast with her and i was just like where's this coming from like five wise right why are you doing that why are you doing that but
01:31:32
why are you doing that right and we got kind of got to the crux of the issue um you know these are things that i'm
01:31:39
annoying about and what i do that irritate her and obviously like these are things you do and it's like okay let's take a break from like
01:31:45
right now the things that are annoying us about each other let's flip the script in 50 years what
01:31:51
are the things that we're going to be saying doing and believing about why we love each other what does that look like
01:31:56
so like literally let's imagine in the future how we are and work back from there so objective right a long happy and
01:32:04
fulfilling marriage so you know you might be familiar with okrs so objectives and key results
01:32:09
we implement them at heights as a startup but also melissa she's the um director of operations for europe
01:32:15
middle east and africa for vice and she put okrs into vice so we're both fan of the system right and
01:32:22
the system is literally this is the objective you're trying to get to these are some measurable key results that would have to happen for us to achieve the
01:32:28
objective so we decided to try and apply this framework to our marriage right what is the objective a long
01:32:35
sustainable happy and fulfilling marriage what are the key results that get us there well we broke them down into mind
01:32:40
body and soul right and from there you get to cascade down these key results right so
01:32:45
they start to say a little bit like okay so mind for me meditation is really important for her you know she doesn't really want to do
01:32:52
it but like from a compromise point of view because she knows that i believe in it and stuff she'll do it with me similarly you know from a mind point of
01:32:58
view she wants to be heard right so how about um you know we will ask each other how our days are
01:33:05
but systematically as a habit right we'll build it as a habit another one was you know we'll teach you some
01:33:10
each other something new every day so we're always growing these kinds of things literally became
01:33:17
a habit tracker list that we fill in in our journal every single night did i teach melissa something new today
01:33:23
did i um ask her how her day was did we have sex were we intimate right were we cuddling
01:33:29
and you know spending time did i have personal space because really important to have space away from your partner these literally become habit trackers
01:33:35
that if you think about it really methodically you know did we exercise for 30 minutes a day these things
01:33:41
if you do them you know the compound gains of the results you get in a marriage if we're literally doing these
01:33:47
things together if i'm asking how her day is and i'm listening if i'm
01:33:52
spending time like learning something new to teach her because i want to and she'll reciprocate the same
01:33:58
it will literally create these moments where we're not in our work and we're not doing other things we're
01:34:03
doing this with each other and they don't have to take very long but they are like things that we've taken personal responsibility for
01:34:10
to achieve it's it's people some people a certain type of person will listen to that and they'll think to themselves
01:34:16
how robotic how robotic and you know i had the same conversation with near il who came on this podcast yeah
01:34:22
and he's the king of this stuff right yeah and he talked about how he literally schedules time to be with his wife and to you know to see the kids and to play
01:34:28
with the kids and a certain type of person listening will think well that takes the specialness and the magic and the
01:34:33
spontaneity out of just like living and being you know free to go in whatever direction and it
01:34:39
also when you listen to that you that you start to think about how
01:34:45
us as humans have over this is potentially a thought over
01:34:52
organized and over routine and really over thought every facet of our life and one of the things that i
01:34:59
have a sometimes a bit of a visceral bad reaction to is like and you would have heard about
01:35:04
all this stuff that you know the 10 habits of highly successful entrepreneurs you got to get out of bed drink the green tea do the yoga write in
01:35:10
your diary do 10 star jumps then call your mum until you love her and and it gets to the point that it's one of mine to be fair
01:35:16
yeah every day if you listen to all of this stuff your day would literally be completely
01:35:22
unconscious it would be what's the next thing in my list of how to be a good human and so how do you kind of contend that
01:35:29
rigidness with creating space for lack of rigidness and just [ __ ]
01:35:35
seeing where the wind takes you is a great question in my experience so far this particular bit of rigidness has
01:35:41
created more space not less space for me interesting um and the reason is because if you
01:35:47
think about the opposite of this right so if you don't do some of this stuff if you don't
01:35:53
i mean there's so many examples that are like filling my head right now so if i don't ask my wife how her day is
01:35:58
regularly if i don't exercise regularly if i don't you know meditate every day this is me personally right
01:36:05
okay what are the outcomes of that my wife is not going to feel listened to we might end up in an argument how much not how much time does the argument take
01:36:11
up how much mental energy after the argument's over is going to distract me from all the other things i could do that day right
01:36:18
the things i wish i hadn't said like all of the things right call that day a write-off maybe a couple of days
01:36:23
right that takes up loads of time if i don't meditate every single day i have a very loud mind i'm much slower at
01:36:29
making decisions in general right so it is actually taking up more time to not build that habit in for myself but don't
01:36:35
go for my daily walk personally a i'm not making time to read listen and learn so therefore my
01:36:41
personal growth as a human being is slowing down because i really believe that you know the way that i can build a
01:36:48
better life for myself is funneling wisdom into myself choosing what i read and choosing who i listen to and
01:36:55
choosing what i believe to an extent right i love reading counter views to stuff like i'm a lefty i love
01:37:01
i follow loads of conservatives and right-wing republicans because it's healthy for me but i'm choosing to funnel stuff
01:37:06
into my life so again by not doing that i could be more aimless and more free
01:37:12
and i wouldn't necessarily be following the path to making better decisions as a human being which also speeds things up
01:37:18
if i don't call my mom every day she will call me up and ask me why i don't love her which will make me feel like [ __ ]
01:37:23
for three days so i actually find that this stuff in in my you know again not exercising you
01:37:29
know you don't have to ritualize half an hour five days a week like i have in my diary right but if i don't i actually start to
01:37:36
feel achy i start judging myself you think about these things like actually they
01:37:41
create time they don't take away um in my experience and that's exactly what nier said which is that
01:37:46
you know he's he's planning his time so that he has more time to do the things intentionally that he wants to do i my
01:37:53
last question on the relationship point is about bringing your problems home and how you've kind of because this is
01:38:00
one of the big problems i have as well is along with the like selfishness around my business being the most important
01:38:05
thing sometimes is how do you
01:38:11
not bring your problems home but then also like not make her feel lonely when she sat
01:38:16
right next to you by being off with the fairies and you know i was reading um elon's book the book written about
01:38:23
elon musk and it talked about how he would you know come home and be you know a little bit of a recluse even though everyone's around him and he's in
01:38:29
his head and he's just focused on his problems his life he's working incredibly hard to the point he's sleeping on the floor how have you
01:38:35
managed to find the balance in the relationship um is it just the okay ours is there does she unders does
01:38:42
she get it yeah i think i'm lucky like a she gets her and b she enjoys her personal space
01:38:47
and she's super busy as well and she's super busy as well right yeah exactly and we have you know she's got scale up
01:38:53
she's running a big company like she only reports the ceo so she's got a lot of responsibility does sometimes it go in the opposite
01:38:59
direction as well where you're not getting enough out of her in terms of attention no i think we're both really
01:39:05
lucky like we both like our own company and we both like each other's company so you know you can kind of be happy either
01:39:10
way if you're lucky enough to learn what you like and how to be with yourself which takes
01:39:15
quite a lot of learning a lot of us are very dependent on other people um and if i was still completely dependent on my wife's attention and my
01:39:22
wife like in general then i might be like that but i've come to learn you know how to listen to myself how to
01:39:28
make time for myself how to spend time enjoying being on my own as well
01:39:33
and i think that's a really important skill to learn because otherwise i think the answer would be true and i think you know she's got the same
01:39:38
which is you know i'll listen to podcasts about performance and habits and stuff and
01:39:43
she'll listen to case file on repeat oh my god is she a case firefighter oh man if i hear that australian pricks
01:39:49
absolutely one more time oh my god i've listened to every episode there's a uk one called they walk amongst her i'm obsessed with true crime
01:39:56
yeah so is she so obsessed well listen it doesn't work out yeah exactly exactly yeah yeah she makes me watch
01:40:02
true crime stuff on netflix and it freaks me out i have this really bad habit of because i can't sleep without listening to something
01:40:08
yeah so i'll be it'll be 2 a.m in the morning just got in bed with my partner or whoever i'm with
01:40:13
and i'll say do you mind if i just put on a a murder podcast yeah about like a
01:40:19
serial rapist yeah and then like every single i keep asking the question but the answer is always saying
01:40:25
steve babe it's 2 a.m i don't want to listen to a story about a serial rapist right now
01:40:30
while i'm closing my eyes in the dark [ __ ] so i i get my phone or my airpod and i put it in one ear where they can't
01:40:36
hear it and that's how i fall asleep yeah so she's exactly the same and she like she you know we actually i mean it's
01:40:43
i find it so interesting you know she will make me watch these things on netflix because she's like but it's so
01:40:49
interesting right but actually they really they actually quite damaged my mental health because you know you see things like you know
01:40:55
but that husband loved that wife so much like why does he end up killing those two daughters and his wife oh you're talking about america
01:41:00
yeah the most recent one but like there's you know all of them you know at the end of the day like why someone goes from you know lovely
01:41:07
and humane and kind and wonderful and all the things i like to believe about people in the world to that terrifies me really so it has it
01:41:15
has and this almost what you've just said then sent my mind back to the start of this conversation about
01:41:20
religion and belief and purpose and and what you know before when i was holding they're usually religious even more
01:41:26
terrifying yeah yeah but this the reason i find it so fascinating is because it gets to the truth in human
01:41:31
beings which is something that i know we're both deeply interested in which is like finding the true nature of humans and in the example we've talked
01:41:37
about there in america murderer that by the way because i'm such a nut i'd read that story i'd watched documentaries on
01:41:43
it three four five years ago so seeing on netflix and their depiction of it was fascinating but there you have
01:41:48
just the perfect perfect example of how um unboxable and unpredictable
01:41:54
human nature can be when forces like infidelity and love and um a normal person the fact that a
01:42:01
normal person can go from being this lovely dad who was quite placid to smothering his own children and an
01:42:07
affair teaches you something valuable about the nature of being human and um and for me that is like awesome
01:42:16
that is awesome oh and and that's why i think i'm so obsessed with those things is they teach you
01:42:21
the lessons in a violent emotional gripping way about the true nature of
01:42:26
being human yeah i mean she feels the same way whereas i'm just like you know it just plays on my mind really
01:42:33
it plays my mind to the idea of like well that could happen to me then that's why because i'm like i'm so kind
01:42:40
loving you know full of you know good energy but so was that guy in that example so was that guy so so is
01:42:46
every review of what that guy was like from all of his friends and everything else so how can that happen to a person and this
01:42:52
is the fascinating thing which for sure he met someone else clearly he was he was he was in a marriage
01:42:57
which had lost its passion yeah a loveless marriage he decided to stay probably for the sake of the kids he
01:43:02
decided comfort over a decision which he probably should have uh made a tough decision which he should have made in the short term for the long
01:43:08
term good and it caught up with him and for me that's like isn't that life where you suppress making a short-term tough decision but
01:43:15
that comes back to exactly what i was saying right which is yeah that comes back to the relation no it comes back to setting
01:43:21
a vision for your relationship and you know having a plan and talking about in advance right you
01:43:27
know if you're really smart you'll talk in advance what happens if one of us cheats what happens in this scenario right what
01:43:33
would happen if we fell out of love and you know there's no point like you know planning the perfect life if you
01:43:39
don't crisis plan the things that happen to all human beings and if you've got a great relationship
01:43:45
with your partner i think it's so valuable to treat it like you would your business which is scenario planning spending some time
01:43:52
talking about what would we do in this kind of crisis and how would we behave because by doing that with my wife like
01:43:58
i you know we've got permission to bring up that horrible conversation right like in theory that that would never happen to me because if i
01:44:04
wanted to cheat on her i'd have the conversation with her and i've got permission to have that conversation because we've talked about it
01:44:10
i thought you meant that like i want to murder you tonight conversation no i probably wouldn't tell
01:44:15
her it'd be a nice surprise um but you know what i mean isn't like you know there's permission in our
01:44:20
relationship to address the difficult things and that's why in some respects you know i treat my marriage like i treat my
01:44:27
business which is you know something that i deeply care about if it's successful
01:44:33
and everything that i put into my life is about making these things successful
01:44:38
to the best of my ability and what i've learned is doing those things from a sense of
01:44:44
vision and clarity and communication and values as well because you're talking about transparency and you know
01:44:50
honesty and exactly i i am as a when i started dating you know i was
01:44:55
like 18 years old whatever i thought that i was looking for i had a checklist if you said steve what's your type i'd be like okay the
01:45:01
brown hair the this that this they want to look like this they want to talk like this and this list was almost like it was
01:45:07
endless right of like little specific superficial things i was looking for in a partner and after a couple of you know bad
01:45:13
relationships and bad experiences and maturity and self-awareness and understanding myself i got close i was like what are the
01:45:19
fundamentals what are the like the unnegotiable things that i can't be without and where i'm at now and i kind of want to get your take
01:45:25
on this and see if it resonates at all with you is i have three things that are like fundamentals that i need
01:45:31
to fill so the first one i've kind of defined as they need to be intellectually stimulating to me which you can say you know
01:45:37
being able to have a conversation being able to um yeah like release my mind or else i'll
01:45:43
almost i feel like i'll get a mental um disorder if i can't release my thoughts because you know we're very
01:45:48
similar people in terms of our cognition the next for me is sexual attraction
01:45:54
i used to think it was like they they're pretty they're hot but i realize that sexual attraction is much different to
01:46:01
be than being pretty in the mind of the world and the third thing is um i would hope that they would make me a
01:46:07
better person and you i'm that's intentionally broad that could be a spiritual thing it could
01:46:13
be helping me become a better ceo in my business better at my podcast or whatever so those are my three things
01:46:18
intellectually stimulating sexually attractive and they make me a better person however you want to define
01:46:24
that what are yours well i have to say sexual attraction is such an important
01:46:31
thing to me in general but what i've learned is and you learn this a lot the more you read about relationships
01:46:37
that is actually something that wanes for everyone doesn't mean it will go and it doesn't
01:46:42
mean you won't be attracted to your wife or your husband or anything like that but it wanes and you as a human being
01:46:48
become less sexual the older you get right that's just biology so
01:46:54
i've learned not to make that one of the most important things on the basis of i wouldn't say it's the most important
01:47:00
thing purely on the basis of um i'm more likely to fall out of love with the
01:47:05
person that i'm with if one like you just said they don't intellectually challenge me
01:47:13
second one again like you said like they have to help me grow in some respect or certainly be with me on the journey
01:47:20
because in a you know in a lot of relationships including my marriage like i am the one forcing a lot
01:47:25
of the growth but i'm like that and i can be quite irritating to be around because like i
01:47:31
just always want more growth more this more that that book this podcast some people just want to chill out and that's good for me as well
01:47:37
right as in that is growth being pushed back and being like exactly dressed stop here you know she's the one who's like you're
01:47:44
doing too much you've got to stop like read this book i read an amazing book called rest by alex song yam ping i think his name
01:47:51
is um brilliant book much better than why we sleep and all the other ones that you would read about this stuff
01:47:56
and really really helped me grow by realizing recharging is such a humongous part
01:48:04
with that third point and like think about it it was a it was one person i was with that would stop me working yeah and she
01:48:10
would make me realize the value of everything else but work so she'd be like let's go to this garden
01:48:15
which is something steve would never usually choose to do yeah but when she took me my life was better
01:48:20
and so i think when people think growth they think oh like clapping at the back when you're i'm like no take me out of my world and
01:48:26
show me something else that'll add value to my life that i wouldn't ordinarily pursue and how much more productive you are as
01:48:31
a person as well when you've got space and time and you've had thoughts there's a reason why thoughts come to us in the shower or on
01:48:37
walks right it's because you're literally scientifically speaking your default mode network your dmn in
01:48:43
your brain is being activated by that moment of rest so you know it is neuroscientifically
01:48:49
true there's loads of studies on it but it's hard in the moment when you're people like us to take the rest and so having like you
01:48:55
know a partner that's there that forces it on you as a culture like you know almost every single evening now i don't do any work
01:49:02
which is so different to me but like last night we watched the mask together right like we will watch something like you know trashy fun
01:49:08
whatever but it's like not work laptop down we're eating dinner we're chilling out and it's like a rule
01:49:15
and you know i have to have a very good reason to break that rule and it's made me a happier healthier person but
01:49:20
you know without that guard rail i would just carry on working and you talked about the sexual point there i want to say a very personal
01:49:26
story that i've never shared before about why that made my made my list and this is a dynamic list that's changing as i mature
01:49:32
i met a girl that was the other two so i met a girl that was the most intellectually stimulating person i've
01:49:37
ever met she was actually a model so she's absolutely gorgeous she's also like a just a genius and she
01:49:43
she challenges me with a sense of like like she doesn't care who
01:49:49
i am or what i've done in my life or what i've achieved um and so that made me a better person
01:49:54
she was an absolute genius and she was gorgeous went to have sex with her after you know two months of you know
01:50:02
fumbling hot air balloons and all of this stuff i'm really hoping she isn't listening but the whole point of this podcast is
01:50:08
to be honest so and it just wasn't there the first time ever in my life and i experienced
01:50:15
what i can only describe as a feeling of like horror um total disappointment not with her or
01:50:21
anything like that but that that was the thing yeah and it felt like such a pathetic thing to stand
01:50:27
in the way of someone that i thought was perfect so and i got out of bed i tried again i tried again i tried to get over a couple
01:50:33
of days and i realized that it wasn't there and i got out of bed and i remember a text my best friend i said i could never see her again because this
01:50:39
is something that i didn't realize is actually so important to to a relationship even though it sounds pathetic when you saw
01:50:46
they weren't good in bed but they were perfect in every other way it sounds pathetic but it was the truth
01:50:51
and that's what made my list my other my other thing is sense of humor yeah so you know one of our company
01:50:58
values is have a sense of humility a sense of humor and humility because we jam sort of too and in the same one but
01:51:04
i believe so strongly in that which is work can be very serious life can be
01:51:10
very serious um but finding moments to connect
01:51:15
and laugh i mean so good for your brain but just so good for your
01:51:21
soul um you know spending every day with my wife in lockdown right
01:51:28
you know just us two etc etc like thank god we make each other laugh you know like we we have we both have a
01:51:34
very similar very dark sense of humor um you know one of our things is actually um
01:51:40
my when we fought on our first date um i brought up my dead dad and how actually one of my favorite
01:51:46
things to do in like social situations is to bring up my dead dad to make other people feel awkward
01:51:51
um just like because it's like kind of funny anyway she was like oh my god i do that about my dad and it turns out that her dad had died like a year after mine
01:51:58
or whatever so we um as like our second date or something we decided to go out on
01:52:03
father's day together without our fathers and everyone else just had their dads around we went to the hoxton hotel
01:52:09
and they came over they're like would you like the father's day menu we're like i know our dads are dead thanks and just literally like found it the
01:52:15
funniest thing that only us two would find so funny right because it's just so uncomfortable for everyone else but
01:52:21
to ask that kind of like dark humor like ways to connect and like weirdness that other people
01:52:26
it's like you're connecting on your pain as well because people [Music]
01:52:31
yeah and like how many of like you know comedy greats are you know coming suffering yeah not just suffering but also coming
01:52:37
from huge places of insecurities as well and that's their platform to bring on so i think those things all really match up
01:52:43
but by 100 i think you know finding someone who makes you laugh and gets your quirks so so so important
01:52:52
because humans are weird um i think it's lovely if you can be your fullest
01:52:58
weirdest self in front of other people are you happy yeah i was thinking about
01:53:04
this question um the other day someone asked me two answers to that one yes i am happy like the the blunt
01:53:10
answer is yes i'm happy because i'm fulfilled the good question isn't it yeah but i know that's your body body language
01:53:15
yeah because because because the question that i asked back to this person was i am happy but why is happiness so
01:53:21
important like why is that the question you want to ask me like is it does it matter that i am happy
01:53:26
is it binary yeah and is it binary but like why does that matter to you and why does that matter to me
01:53:32
because i think a much better question is am i contributing um you know am i fulfilled
01:53:40
and am i contributing because if i'm doing those things i'll be happy and i know that to be true whereas for
01:53:45
me asking that happy is a bit like you know binary it's yeah and it's like straight to the point and it's like there's nothing really behind that it's
01:53:51
undefined as well undefined and also like really depends on what you're asking me that day i will be like no today i'm not happy to
01:53:57
if you ask me if i'm contributing to society and does that make fulfill me yeah and make me feel like
01:54:03
i'm living my purpose it won't matter what i feel like today are you fulfilled very but i have so
01:54:09
much more to do i i one of the real fascinating things that i've learned um is and i again i've read about this
01:54:15
at length in my book is how binary questions like that are the cause of so much pain and no one
01:54:22
realizes it that the cause of so much like misunderstanding pain and um and anxiety so like another great
01:54:29
example is if i asked you now if i said are you in love and immediately you have a bunch of
01:54:35
problems there first you've got to define in love no one's ever told you what that is they've never shown you it no when you
01:54:41
were born they didn't say okay down if you ever feel like this it's in love you've got it from instagram and movies so you over immediately have to overcome
01:54:47
that and then you have to try and understand if what you're feeling for this person fits into that box and and i think one of it's so crazy
01:54:55
that especially from what i do on instagram and putting myself out there tons of people send me their problems and usually it's because they they're
01:55:02
trying to fit into a binary box and they don't even realize that like steve i'm not sure if this is my passion i'm like that is a super
01:55:09
binary thing it either because have you found your passion that that presumes a yes or no answer
01:55:15
whereas if you say you're like are you feeling fulfilled it's a much more it's an answer that appreciates it's a gradient and not just a gradient but a
01:55:22
gradient that different things impact yeah so you know i mentioned contribution like you know
01:55:27
there's many ways to contribute and you know being outwardly successful or building a company or
01:55:33
you know you know having a high-flying career you know they don't tick that many boxes in terms of contribution a lot of contribution
01:55:39
comes back to what you do for society for what you do for your family for what you do for people that you care about you know
01:55:45
that stuff is a much broader question and it's like a cup that's
01:55:51
never full right so it's nice because it's got different levels and you kind of know deep down if you feel like you're living
01:55:56
your purpose and contributing to the level that would make you proud and you also know when you're not which is great because
01:56:01
again it's not bad that you're not it's just like well i could actually improve some stuff by giving it some focus and i think that's why you've got to
01:56:07
continue to like question the question as much as you try and answer the question sometimes are you scared of dying great
01:56:15
question um why is it a great question great question because um i don't believe in fear of death fear
01:56:22
of death is literally um like illogical because fear of death is what actually makes you
01:56:29
fear of life so if you're scared of dying then you approach your life in a very different
01:56:34
way and actually the greatest fear that we should have is not living your life in a true way so no i'm not at all
01:56:42
scared of dying um it's also really worth saying that like ever since doing ayahuasca like i
01:56:47
100 convincingly believe in things like reincarnation soul
01:56:52
spirits other planes all of the woo-woo crap that just like sounds completely bizarre
01:56:59
for me to think that i would ever say those words it's not even is it from like a scientific perspective you describe
01:57:04
incarnation exactly that's why i believe in reincarnation because i see it everywhere around me um so the reality is i'm not in the
01:57:12
slightest bit scared of death um and i think that that's uh the biggest blessing that i got from doing
01:57:18
ayahuasca was no fear of death um because that's a potent powerful feeling not feeling
01:57:24
like knowledge insight right that's categorically so quick for me to answer that question and no
01:57:30
um it helped me deal with the you know death of my father when my mum got cancer it helped me come to terms with
01:57:35
what might happen to not have her around as well this is life people die so you have to approach it
01:57:42
right you can't pretend that isn't going to happen it's the only thing that's guaranteed so having a philosophical understanding
01:57:49
of what that means to you and then how that impacts your life or maybe holds you back is a terrible thing so it's usually a
01:57:55
fear of death that essentially limits our life in my view i i feel the exact same and the
01:58:02
experience i described to you where i lost my faith in christianity at 18 was also the
01:58:07
exact moment where i um because up until that point i believe that there's heaven and
01:58:12
there's a heaven and hell and that was a [ __ ] terrifying thing so for the next two years i went on this search of what the answers were got obsessed with
01:58:18
reading about atheist books and it was actually richard dawkins that said um you can you should really fall in
01:58:24
love with the beauty of of the world and like the true nature of nature he talks about being able to go into a church
01:58:30
and crying even as an atheist because of the beauty and the wonder but also on the point of death he's one
01:58:36
of the questions one of the things he said was a lot of people are scared of death because it's the unknown and they and when you're religious you think it's i'm
01:58:42
gonna burn or i'm gonna be in this place with all these good people that sound kind of boring but when you when i got to the point
01:58:48
where i was agnostic or atheist or whatever you want to call it he said like how did you feel a hundred years ago was that i didn't
01:58:54
didn't feel anything were you scared were you were you fearful no no because i wasn't here and he said that's how
01:59:00
you'll feel then and then like that when i lost the the this idea that i would burn or go to
01:59:05
or you know go to this other place and be judged in some way it all became about now and it was as you described it was this liberating
01:59:11
feeling of then okay well this is it if this is it then i i you know everything is so much more special this isn't an audition
01:59:18
this is the [ __ ] show and my life completely changed and i i i i i completely agree i i asked the
01:59:24
question which is a strange thing to ask in like what i don't know what you really want to call this a business podcast because it's so fundamental to me and
01:59:31
because i think the fear of death is so deeply illogical and as you say imprisoning it's like yeah so listen we've had we could talk
01:59:38
for hours and hours and hours um what an amazing conversation i'm so thankful for for you for coming
01:59:45
on and sharing your insights you know it's interesting because the dan that
01:59:50
didn't want to do personal branding was like oh well you know i have a direct to consumer product and what's my personal brand fit
01:59:56
in that but the most convincing sales pitch for this product was in fact when you talked about
02:00:02
you it's not when you you know you know what i mean yeah and i think that i mean of course like you talking about
02:00:07
the struggles you've had and the agenda and motivations that went into creating
02:00:12
your product is the most convincing thing yeah and that's again why your personal brand and you building it and even why it's having this conversation
02:00:18
is so i think so incredibly important um i always finish this podcast asking one question which i'm sure
02:00:23
you've had before which is about the dinner party we're at a nice table now just imagine there was two other seats at this table who would you
02:00:29
bring to the table and why your arms crossed again yeah sorry i'm just getting into the serious mode like
02:00:34
thinking about this okay um so i think um i think to be honest
02:00:44
i'd want like an ancient philosopher like i'd love like you know just be so cool like marcus aurelius i would say
02:00:51
one big fan of meditations um you know stoic philosophy i read meditations um after my first
02:00:58
business fail someone bought it for me um and i read it again every year it takes like an hour to read and it's just such a great reminder of
02:01:04
you know yes the world is tough and yes the world is [ __ ] but everything is what you make of it and
02:01:09
really the world you're living in is all it all exists inside your own mind and once you understand that you can
02:01:15
control a lot of how you feel so marcus aurelius would be one and i would say the second
02:01:22
you know this is pathetic and i'm sorry but you know dennis bergkamp is my all-time hero
02:01:27
i'm laguna um and you know the man was a magician and so classy and such a authentic and
02:01:34
great leader in so many ways and iconic i feel though i hear huh fearful
02:01:39
fearful oh yeah oh the opposite of jesus he won't fly but he does walk on water
02:01:45
crazy when i heard that that he refused to fly yeah yeah you're right yeah yeah yeah totally correct yeah he's got a bunch of uh interesting anxieties yes i
02:01:52
could ask him about that maybe get marcus and well exactly and if i had a third um if you were being generous
02:01:57
to be honest with you okay so yeah um oprah yeah why uh
02:02:04
literally just think she's phenomenal yeah it felt stupid asking why yeah i mean just in every way right as
02:02:09
in i just it's hard to pick a thing but let's just say then because of personal growth media brand
02:02:15
understanding wealth and leveraging your wealth for good and storytelling i mean i could
02:02:20
just go on like you know her list is just ridiculous so a hundred percent oprah
02:02:25
um and uh oh i don't know i feel like i i feel like uh you know once the fourth
02:02:31
seat it's literally sitting sitting where he would be my french bulldog because he started sprinting around attacking uh
02:02:36
imaginary other french bulldog yeah exactly pablo um and then um i'd actually say my
02:02:42
fourth would be lewis hamilton um because i think what he's achieved
02:02:49
even before literally breaking a record like a couple of weeks ago um is so awesome and i love i'm so proud
02:02:57
of the fact that he's british i'm so proud of the fact like obviously even though i'm a white guy i'm so proud of the fact of what he's doing to using
02:03:03
his platform to take a stance actually being political with his message when he knows he has such a big
02:03:08
platform which is a thing that a lot of people choose not to do and choose to back out of so he's a man that stands for morals and
02:03:14
values secondly um he's vegan so you know i like i think it's interesting that he's chosen he's
02:03:20
gotten such a high performance no fail like attitude but is like as a
02:03:26
plant-based person clearly environmentally conscious even if he's in f1 which is obviously debatable but um he's got these like clearly deep
02:03:34
rooted values about how he wants uh the world to be and he is manifesting and living them in being
02:03:40
basically the greatest racing driver that's ever ever lived that's what he will end up as because he just beat schumacher's record
02:03:45
um and he seems like quite a nice bloke just in general like i just like when i
02:03:51
see interviews of him i just like what a relatable guy that says you know he doesn't seem like a
02:03:57
knob superstar at all so i would just love to the reason for him is i just love to talk to him about
02:04:03
mindset and focus because when you think about it that is all you're doing in an f1 car yeah that
02:04:09
is the in my opinion the most focused you can be is driving formula one i don't think there is any other i don't
02:04:15
think i don't think anything tops that so i would love to know how you achieve that kind of level of flow and focus
02:04:20
like week in week out nothing would be more interesting so marcus berkamp oprah and uh sounds like a
02:04:28
wicked dinner yeah hamilton sounds amazing listen thank you so much for your time today it's a pleasure to consider your friend
02:04:34
uh a mentor through the content you produce in your podcast secret leaders but also just an all-around good guy and um you you're you have a a way of
02:04:42
being honest and open which was not only perfect for this podcast but it's so tremendously valuable for people like me
02:04:47
for everybody listening and i want to thank you for that as well because it's not always the the the easiest thing to do you know
02:04:53
people default to massaging the ego or trying to get you know press for
02:04:58
being positive and and untouchable and perfect and i think you've taken a different route which is serving
02:05:04
a much needed uh positive service to to the world so thank you for that as well and pleasure yeah i'm sure
02:05:11
you will uh pick up this conversation again soon thank you so much for listening to this episode of the diary of a ceo
02:05:16
listen if you're on the podcast store or you're in spotify or you're listening to it in some kind of app do me a huge huge favor leave a review
02:05:24
and hit the subscribe button if you're watching this on youtube right now i need another favor i need you to
02:05:30
hit the like button and if you'd be so generous to leave a comment one person that does this will be joining me in march at the diary
02:05:37
of a ceo live show in manchester and you'll be coming backstage and meeting me and the other members of our team
02:05:43
thank you so much for listening and i'll see you again next monday
02:05:54
[Music]
