The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Overcoming Depression, Burnout, Anxiety and Insomnia with Dan Murray-Serter

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

In this weeks episode of The Diary Of A CEO titled "Overcoming Depression, Burnout, Anxiety and Insomnia with Dan Murray-Serter" we discuss: - Depression - where did it all start? - Psychedelics - Posting online despite what people think? - Burn out - Anxiety - Supplements & brand - How do you find the guts to keep going despite failure? - Relationships - Are you happy? - Are you scared of dying? - Dinner Party Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. It's very rare that you get to meet entrepreneurs that are following and have followed in the steps that you followed in in your life. And like, so whenever I meet people like you and Ben Francis, who is similar age to me, who has like similar life ambitions, I see it as like this really amazing rare opportunity to learn for myself and to ask honestly, like selfish questions.

And I saw on your twitter i think it was over the mental health week period you did a tweet where you talked about your experiences with depression burnout and anxiety and from what i know about your story you experienced those things in that order so i think that's a good place to, which is let's talk about depression and the role that depression played in your life and where it came from and how you've overcome or are overcoming or handling depression. Yeah, so interesting, actually, because I, I realized when I started to talk about mental health stuff, even more interestingly than what you've just said, I kind of realized that I'd been burying another mental health stuff even more interestingly than what you've just said i kind of realized that i'd been burying another mental health problem so actually the the tweet was more depression burnout anxiety um and insomnia but actually it's really interesting i did a podcast interview with a nutritionist called riannon lambert and when i was preparing for that i was going over my the fact

that i'd grown up fat and the fact that um you know I probably did have an unusual relationship mentally with food and um suddenly like I was unpacking what had happened in my 20s and I actually had bulimia um I used to throw up for like four to five years not intentionally though this was like quite unusual but that's how deeply rooted this mental health problem was I would eat something and I would throw a lot of it up um my friends would like know about this but it wasn't like labeled and I went to you know specialists in Harley Street to see what was up and they were like medically you're fine so psychologically there's something there 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 that you know being able to label like the time i got depression the time i got anxiety the time i got insomnia the time i was burnt out i remembered those moments this one i'd actually buried as a story right in my head it never i'd never expressed it in my whole life to anyone publicly at all full stop um and it was a couple of months ago and I wrote a newsletter on mental health and uh and nutrition um and I admitted for the first time then that I'd had bulimia and like what the symptoms 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 um and it was so interesting to me like two revelations

that came from that one is that um if it's so uncomfortable right for me it's really embarrassing to admit to myself that i was weak enough to have a mental health condition that bad that i would psychologically throw up when there was nothing biologically wrong with me um that's really awkward to admit to yourself it's also far more terrifying to admit it publicly once you've uncovered it and it kind of made me reflect on the fact that um sometimes like these things are actually just so painfully embarrassing about your personal life that you can even bury it to yourself and did you ever understand why you were bulimic was there because it's a psychological like comorbidity so what was the cause yeah it's really hard to 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 reasonable shape um but i got it at like 23 um and actually there was a result of it um the only time i was ever hospitalized um it's a really random but hilarious story in its own way um because i'd been throwing up i'd been basically like hurting the inside of my throat right and i was at a festival one time and i had a coughing fit in in um hackney and i had a coughing fit at the hospital and i coughed a hole in my throat um literally it's called a pneumomedia steinum it's a very unique thing to happen apparently and fortunately it was close enough to the royal london hospital to go in there and show them right and basically what happened to me was my head started to grow so i was with my friends feeling

fine other than this cough and one of my friends just looked at me and was like whoa and i was like what they're like mate your head is massive i'm like i'm not even talking mate don't be a dick no no your head is growing what is going on i was like what and then everyone else was like, what? They're like, mate, your head is massive. I'm like, I'm not even talking, mate. Don't be a dick. He's like, no, no, no. Your head is growing. What is going on? I was like, what? And then everyone else was like, oh my God. Anyway, walked to the hospital.

It's sort of like five in the afternoon or whatever, because there's a day festival. And there's like, you know, it's East London. There's quite a lot of genuinely like gang related things. People are bleeding everywhere, all this stuff. And they just see me and they're like, that guy's next. next 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 your head was your head was growing so oxygen was going not going like in my mouth and through my bloodstream

properly somebody was escaping around my head and my brain so it was like an emergency procedure to like like get me on uh meds and sort out. But it's so interesting, because even knowing that that had happened to me, I didn't relate the cause to actually a deeper root cause, which was another mental health problem. And to be honest with you, like, I couldn't say to you what the trigger was beyond this, like story, you know, the things that we grow up with the people that that we grow up with, those little, you know, bullying and things like that. I mean, you know, in some good respects, because I grew up fat, I've got a good personality and a sense of humour. So I've always been like able to really connect with people because I just never had it all my way kind of thing. Why do you know this, this, this story about, you know, people that are fat having better senses of humour and being a little bit more, you know, bubbly yeah why why is that i think self-deprecation can sometimes be like a defense mechanism right and ultimately you know with these things you're going to hear them a lot if you grow up that 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 you kind of find a way of coping with it in your own way um um for me it's just interesting because the other mental health um issues that i've had in my life i'm able to trace back usually to a moment or a thing or or reflect on why this one kind of just happened later and then as soon like you know i had it for a few years but then it just also went away at what age was this so about 23 to about 27 and you're how old now uh 33 so it was so you had it for 23 to 27 for about four years and you overcame yeah but like 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 um but i find it super interesting again less so I mean we call to know the trigger obviously but

it's almost less so that and more so the fact that it kind of ran its course as well was interesting to me and that I buried it right in my head and actually 27 you know was the start of like a whole other you know experience in life for me anyway so it is possible that you know, was the start of like a whole other, you know, experience in life for me anyway. So it is possible that, you know, these things are related to stress and other things. My entrepreneurship journey started at 24. So it's not completely unrelated, but not quite, not enough to actually label it and say it's for a thing. But then, you know, the other experiences that I've had with mental health are a lot clearer. So I think depression is a really complex term. And the only, I think it's really worth saying, the only relation that I've got to depression that I'm comfortable talking about is after my father passed away. And I think that's really

reasonable, right? And so this is the thing I like, because I've worked so much with people in mental health and experts, I know like depression is also not something to claim you have when you feel down or, you know, it's very different. And obviously there is a spectrum of these things as well. But for me, my depressive episode was right after my father passed away because he was on life support for six months and overcame when they said he's 100% going to die, actually survived, made it out of the hospital into a recovery home. And then someone basically had a cold around him and he died of their cold catching their cold after the entire recovery process and the truth of the matter is that my depression was actually interestingly sort of linked with a lack of belief in um a higher power or whatever you want to call it justice like everything right because

in fairness and yeah and like my dad was like such a generous spirited guy. He was blind. He had all of these things wrong with him anyway. And still like was just the funniest, nicest, warmest person anyone knows. And the last person on earth to kind of deserve something like that. And so for me,

the experience after he passed away, so he believed in God. So when he died i was like that's my connection to god gone therefore i straight up believe in nothing um you know i think it's really interesting to have conversations with people intelligent people like yourself when you talk about purpose and vision and these things it's very hard to imagine that you've got a purpose a vision for anything if suddenly you've switched 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 being i was religious until i was well i was christian until i was 18 and then which i think will surprise a lot of people because i'm a very 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 and it was the most like the two years following that were the two most destabilizing years of my life as I became a total obsessive atheist which means I read every book watched every documentary video 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 engaging in these debates with people that agreed or

disagreed with me and I was at peace with my own beliefs that um I guess which is like agnosticism if that's a term and the other really destabilizing moment in my life where I lost my sense of purpose was the day someone offered me about 20 to 30 million um hypothetically to buy my business. And 18 year old Steve shows up. I've talked about this a few times because he thought we were doing this for money. He thought that was the goal. And so I go home that night. I remember where I sat like it was yesterday. I'm typing rightmove.com looking at houses at 24 years old. And then I'm looking at these houses and I'm getting this real sort of a deep sense of um unfulfillment by thinking well that was that was it that was the game and then okay so um auto trader boom boom 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 spiritual sense if I chose to step on what's clearly a hamster wheel and and that from that day, the day after, I didn't know 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 life, which was, you know, I love it, but I thought I loved it for another reason. I thought I loved it for money.

I loved it for connection and for conversations like this and those things. But to go back to your point, please, um, you're talking about how you lost your sense of sort of stability, I guess. Yeah. I lost what I believed in this world. 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, I went through a few years of that. very if you age sorry uh so 24 my dad died so I mean also similar time to having the yeah I mean I didn't even realize that as as I until I was saying it just now um but so probably related obviously um but I I went through about three years of not believing in anything, right? Like really, and, you know, not very nice about it either. So I grew up Jewish.

And I've always said, in fairness, you know, I think Judaism is as bad a religion as all the other religions. You know, I don't actually personally like any one of them, 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 religion and what i've learned which i find so interesting is my identity my connection to 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 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 means you don't

have to disassociate from cultural values but you can disassociate yourself from religious ideals and what actually happened to me was you know i would be relatively difficult and question people a lot when they would talk to me about their religious beliefs um i'd want to dig into them and i'd really 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 asshole, but just using my own, I guess, bitterness and my own experience of growing up being told to believe in something, which is very different to finding something. And, you know, when my father passed away and I didn't have this connection to it anymore,

I also felt like I didn't have the connection to spirituality or anything. 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 connection to this earth and purpose and everything. And it wasn't until I was 27, really. Um, one of my really good friends told me about, and obviously we've been talking about Christian Angermeyer as well, like our mutual friends, so this is a relevant conversation, told me about ayahuasca. And I'd never heard of it before. I didn't even know what it was. And I went on a retreat with him. And I mean, I came back that weekend completely. I mean, when I say a 180, I went from the most cynical non-believer in the whole world, negatively so, to like, without sounding like a complete twat, like positively enlightened and confident, never more confident of anything in my life of spiritual realism and what I believe in and ultimately what I believe in when I have these

like fun conversations with people now about spirituality which is you know what do I believe in I believe in nature I believe in looking at the beauty of the world and how cycles work which is science right and the way that my ayahuasca experience actually opened my eyes to believing in something spiritual or greater than myself was 90 of my hallucination was observing what happens in nature with cycles right birds bees oxygen air soil all of this recycling all the time for a sustainable system and being like you know that is in itself a scientific miracle, but something greater than us that's always happening throughout time. And it was a real shift for me because A, I overcame my depression from that. B, I suddenly believed in something, even if that something is nature. And when people are like, and I get this from Christians quite often as well, where they're

like, you know, what do you mean 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. 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 that sound is a profound belief. And what's important is it is a belief and having a belief has actually helped me, helped guide me to then work on things like what are my personal values you know which you talked about you know mental models what do i say yes to and no to in life well you can only figure those things out if you spend time with mental

models first principles thinking about what things mean to you in life and then suddenly other things start to come into flow and and so i really want to just double down on this ayahuasca experience what exactly did you do on that experience so ayahuasca is essentially uh and it's completely natural it's tree sap from the amazon um and it's been practiced for thousands of years and 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. The reality is it's sacred. So our shamans have like a legal license to practice with it. And it's a guided experience. So the most important thing to say to anyone thinking about ayahuasca or whatever,

it's not something you do at home on your own at all, ever. You could do that with mushrooms. You can definitely do that with LSD. You definitely do not want to do that with ayahuasca because um in my experience the other 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 plane you're just somewhere else but what's fascinating and very common from people's recollections of ayahuasca trips is you have a spirit guide called mama ayahuasca that's what everyone calls her um and in all of my experience of doing it and i've done it about 12

times now um so i almost go back every year by the way it's an incredibly painful experience um and it's very difficult to do and it's not something you look forward to which is what it's like rockish rocket fuel growth um which is 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 worst realities um i've learned more in those weekends that i've done this than you know you can learn with therapists and you can learn yourself staggering everyone says this to me and it's and you know the you mentioned a guy called christian engelmeyer yeah context he runs a company called a tie which are are now developing um psychedelics as a way to cure treatment resistant depression

um it's really sort of a groundbreaking company and he sat with me in his his penthouse just across across the street in fact from where we are now and he was telling me that you can let you unlock the brain by taking these drugs and you discover truths about yourself which in in many experiences which is similar to the one you're describing will have a permanent lasting transformative impact on the way you see the world and it like corrects your thinking and it's it's 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 a magic mushroom or a drug or your psychedelic whatever you want to call it and overcome grief there's a great book by michael

pollan called um how to change your mind and in it he talks about this problem with psychedelics it's a bit like dreams right you're having an ineffable experience so to describe it for people is generally quite boring what i think is more interesting in a sense is to discuss the outcomes that i've i've got from it um so the first time you know very quickly because you asked the experience was the hallucinogenic experience like i said was watching the cycles of the earth develop and were you conscious because i haven't done yes so you drink it takes about an hour for me you lie down in the pitch blacks fluid it's like a shot it tastes disgusting but some people like it you lie back um and and the shamans basically start 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 out the room they'll look after you it's like you know it's busy night there's noises you like a lot of people throw up 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 yeah especially considering my history really bizarre um but the um the experience i saw was the one i needed and there's a really deep insightful experience you get from psychedelics which you can often go in wanting a thing but it isn't what you need. And in this experience, what I wanted was to see my dad and to connect with my dad, but it isn't what I got. What I got was a vision of understanding how everything in this earth is living in a cycle, like a beautiful miracle. And so it was less about

seeing micro things and seeing macro things 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 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 actually listen to you and let you go sort of back into your body so it is a really fascinating um experience and what i'd say about it is it's the number one most important thing i've ever done in my life um and especially because it's not pleasant um the first time i did it was you know the single most life-changing moment of my life not only got over my depression you know i went and spent the whole day with my mom the next day explained

everything that i'd experienced um you know not a mom's favorite chat hearing your son talk about psychedelics but certainly is in context of like helping me get over something she was aware i was suffering from um the single greatest lesson i've learned in ayahuasca is about gratitude so i was going through a period i think i was potentially, so it was a few years later. And things were going well at the time. So my attitude, my mindset was, I want this, I 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 to understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can write it down and come back to me like that was what I was looking for in this journey um but actually the

lesson I learned so I was asking how can I 10x what I do how can I be more how can I become better how can I have more impact you know me me me me me all these questions um I was instead transported to um like basically I'm not sure where in the world but a very poor part of the world where there was this like kid like begging in the street basically and I like became that kid and I became this person like trying to get water for his family and having to walk miles for it and 50% of my whole entire psychedelic experience that night was literally walking like a mile in this boy's shoes. And it this lesson sort of came to me about, you know, it isn't always about what you want. And it isn't always about like, you know, asking for more. It's actually about having gratitude for what you have. And when you have enough gratitude for what you already have, you will unlock the path to more. 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, right? So I carry a different stone in for each experience than I have these stones at home. Anyway, I have this stone by the side of my bed. And every single morning that I wake up, the first thing I see is this stone, 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 for having running water in my bathroom there and that is like an unbelievably poetic and powerful way to like live your life past an experience to wake up in camden town in london being you know so fortunate like i am but with a real genuine reminder of gratitude as opposed to like waking up groggy and being like, yeah, I'm grateful for waking up today. This is like, it means something to me. So these little triggers and shifts, they emotionally change something in you. But

I've learned a lesson the hard way through ayahuasca as well, which is 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 Instagram instagram posts you can read it and it can resonate and you can be like wow that's powerful without action it means nothing so if you don't create then the steps to be better based on what you learned you're wasting a very powerful weekend and painful weekend and i've been guilty of that too i've learned i've learned lessons that I haven't necessarily followed through with um you know and and sometimes it's because they take bravery and I feel like I'm not ready for that bravery yet and so it's we're talking about this the other

day you know with the exactly with personal branding exactly actually that's actually a good segue onto that topic as well because it's something that i know for a fact a lot of people struggle with in different forms and um but in but also specifically with this topic which is putting yourself out there on the internet um i know this because a lot of people have told me but also because i've been there right so let's if we rewind a couple years of my own life a guy called ash jones says to me you should make a YouTube channel. I dismissed the idea, obviously, because I'm like, well, people are going to think that I think I'm Mahatma Gandhi,

like, or like people are going to think that I think I'm a genius or 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 about eight or nine hours for us to shoot a two minute video because I couldn't speak. I was self-conscious and all of these things. And I was plagued by

that thought that my friends back home who knew me in school will think, oh, Steve's a dickhead. He's changed. What's he doing? Who does he think he is? And that almost imprisoned me. It almost 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 truest self. And in fact, what I wanted to do was be true to myself. And, um, it felt like I was worried that people would think I was, um, being something I was not trying to fake myself. And so I guess the question that I have for you is, you know, a lot of stuff, but stuff but you've not 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 you've struggled to put yourself out there on the internet and social media can you explain why yes I mean it's

such a good question 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 like he's got a fucking point um so you know is 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 with him sorry what was his name ash jones yeah ash yeah so you told me to listen to an episode which i did and you know he was talking about the early days of social chain you learned early that're you were bringing in most of the revenue, like 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 loads of sense. The challenge I have is, my products are B2C, right? They're for consumers. Putting as much time and effort and thought and

energy into promoting myself is mental energy I should be putting into the brand. You know, there is, I think, probably a reasonable compromise. And also, like all things, this is a bit of a developing scenario. However, you know, it's a very fair thing to say that I'm not the product. This is the product um inside my company we could all agree 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 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 funnel here so we as a company succeed when steve's succeeding so

that's the kind of marketing funnel we should back so So, you 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 a ton of sense. This is the story that I tell myself. It doesn't mean that it's true. You know, then there's another question about platforms, right? So, you know, this isn't a mental health condition. But I do have imposter syndrome. And, you know, we've talked about this in the past as well. But, you know, the first business that I scaled was Grapple, which is when we first met. Yes. And, you know, that was me going into technology and fashion, having had no experience previously.

I was in advertising before. And I love changing industries. And I love challenging myself to completely wipe the slate clean and do something new. But it comes with imposter syndrome. That's what I've learned about myself, right? I'm full of the internal monologue of 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. That doesn't change, right? In me, that voice is still there. However, you know, a really good thing if you're aware, if you're consciously aware of your limitations, especially like some of your mental frailties,

creating steps to improve those things are helpful. So with Heights, the first thing I did just over a hundred weeks ago was start a newsletter because I was like, I'm'm gonna get imposter syndrome so badly in a space of neuroscience and nutrition not neuroscientists or nutrition like it's gonna be awful for me so i'm gonna write a newsletter every week and i'm gonna read a science paper every week and i am going to distill that into three minutes because when you read something you learn learn it once, and when you share it, you learn it twice. So the process of literally rewriting this was creating neural pathways and embedding the information into my brain. So I was like, in 100 weeks, it's actually what I told myself, and it's just been 101 now, in 100 weeks, I won't be a neuroscientist or a nutritionist, but I will have read over 100 science papers, and I'll know what science says is good for your brain according to journals experts etc which would be an amazing step to create an amazing habit to build to get over my own mental frailties and my own story of imposter syndrome so when it comes to

social media I feel like I've got the same thing which is like um when my last company failed and I didn't know what I was going to do 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 ultimately? Right. Cause you can get caught up in this silly game and then thinking personal branding, where do I feel comfortable? That'd be a good place to start. And I chose LinkedIn. And the reason I chose LinkedIn was because I told myself a story, which I completely believe to be true anyway, which is whatever I do next, I'm a serial entrepreneur, right? As in, I'm fine not having any money. I'm fine working for other want to know what your values are 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 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 25 000 on the basis of and as you know there's no putting money behind anything on linkedin or anything literally just by being myself by writing about how i'd failed by writing about what i was working on 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 probably going to fail as well and it did you know before heights um with three iterations of things that i 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 entrepreneur in between or it can be certainly in between people like what do you do and your

identity is in flux and you know like do i talk about this new thing that i've just discovered that might not be a thing in a month preaching to the choir here dan i know right exactly exactly but it's such a complicated answer to give in the now. Yeah. So anyway, like on the personal brand 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 am someone who is willing to go big and fail and like actually figure out why and talk about why. And I think this stuff is so important for entrepreneurs to connect openly and honestly, because I absolutely hate, and the one thing I will not miss about networking events is like going to them and everyone talking about them killing it. You know, that is literally poison in our society. It's nonsense. So everyone just talking about how they're killing it stops people from saying, actually, you know, shit's really hard 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 entrepreneur because you've created the container in the environment to be comfortable to do so that person can probably help you and if 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 figure it out when you actually could do with the help you know it's the other thing going slightly off piece sorry but you know my biggest bugbear in entrepreneurship is stealth mode i think stealth mode is like the most stupid thing that an entrepreneur can claim to be in full stop because as you know ideas are worthless execution is everything anyone that's ever built a business

knows how hard it is stealth mode is when people say like working on a new business in finance in stealth mode. Right. I'd love to tell you what my startup is, but it's so amazing. You'll steal it. So I'm not going to tell you. Mate, all the time, all the time. So many people do it. And, and I, I, I give the most direct feedback on linkedin probably very similar to you like loads of people ask 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 fyi stuff made is such a stupid thing because it's it's it's like how do i describe like saying i'm afraid of feedback but it's yeah but it's also like saying i've got got something, but I can't tell you.

Why did you tell me you had something? I know. I know. Just don't start the conversation with me. I'm a curious person. I'm going to ask you 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 like, I don't know, flirtation.

I don't know. But I want to get to this point about why you, we had this conversation. Yeah, sure. Like a week or two ago yeah about instagram and making videos of yourself 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 business side of things more what's stopping you going on instagram putting a video on your instagram and saying this is what i think these are ideas. Comment below if you agree. Yeah, it's a great question. 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 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 place where I'd feel least impostery.

And so I'd start there. Now, you know, I picked up on Twitter. I mean, Twitter is like my favourite platform. It's one I spend probably the impostery. And so I'd start there. Now, you know, I picked up on on Twitter. I mean, Twitter is like my favourite platform is when I spend probably the most time on. But you know, it's it's got a very short half life. So it's kind of impossible to consistently come up with gems. Instagram, you know, to me was this place where just beautiful people live, young, beautiful people live. And that's all anyone's interested in. that's not really my world right I'm interested in challenge I'm interested in mental health I'm interested in stories um and I interestingly I wasn't finding 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 100% like inspired by the way that you've approached your Instagram, like sharing insights because insights and like distilling my thoughts into something and writing them down. That is something that I do. I just don't publish them or I was on LinkedIn. 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 some of my high performing LinkedIn posts that, you know, might've got one or two thousand likes and being like if it was popular there i guess it'll be popular here let's have a go and trying to get over it now slowly but surely but it's this constant belief that no one wants to hear what i have to say yes of course and that's what i was getting at and like where does and what are the forces that are at play which are making it feel like some like psychological

discomfort if you are to tell the world what you think on instagram let's say what in your mind what is it friends back home is it this particular person sometimes i can think of a particular person yeah and i can think that person from four years ago is gonna think i'm a dick a hundred percent dude like the thing that i've learned which is so interesting is 90 of my fear of what people will think is based on my school friends yeah same like you know i only speak to a 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 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 down from heights um you know people do that and that's fine but it's important you don't

over compensate that identity for yourself attached to your business because we're all on a path and we're going to go through a journey and the journey the stories are going to change and when you over attach yourself to a particular part of the journey is where you can find struggle um that's and on that point you build your life around that identity so your friends the your music your interests and so you you would have collected through your life a bunch of people who know dan as this exactly and you're gonna have to shed some of them potentially by stepping into your new identity. And that's, I guess, a conflict. 100%. And it's difficult, right? But as you grow, you edit. And, you know, you need to really consider who you're editing out of your life

and who you're welcoming into your life. And I think, you know, there's the practical reality that what was good for you five years ago is no good for you right now. And frankly, you know, the highest leverage decision you can make, I'm still terrible at this by the way. Um, but the highest leverage decision you can make is picking what to say no to. 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 includes saying, I don't have time for this friend anymore, or this identity, this part of my identity anymore, even though I like it. I like them. I like all this stuff because frankly, there's, you know, this shedding almost that we do as human beings. Um, you know, the, you know, in reptile form, it's very physical, right? They're literally shedding a skin, but as humans, you 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 lot

of you know mental health conditioning is attached to our holding on to the past and refusing to sort of embrace the future and that's why you know i think it's really important to set out a clear understanding of your purpose a clear understanding of the things you will say no to and won't say 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 i do it with my wife it's like a whole massive like briefing document essentially on your vision your purpose your friends like all of this stuff um spending the time thoughtfully thinking about these things which people do not do enough of is so important because if you're not reflective and you're not spending time thinking

manifesting essentially who you want to be in the future then i think you're gonna miss a massive opportunity to grow um you know i because you know i work in the brain space now in in brain care neuroscience you call that neuroplasticity right it's this idea that the brain will grow it's plastic and it's essentially changing in whatever direction you choose to take it in if you are episode 53 of chapters we talked about this on the last episode so it's very relevant oh really okay fine yeah so neuroplasticity is that um if you are into spirituality like i am then it's called manifestation right it's spending the time thinking about what you're going to do and how you're going to get there and then to put it into like super business terms if you're into

business it's called planning and execution so there are these different ways to articulate the same point but the point is if you just spend your days going um bit 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 decisions and frankly um and this i guess actually speaking like personal branding a more popular post i 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 you're not paid for your stamina right you pay yeah you pay mo gordat for sorry not mo gordat mo farah for his stamina right he's got to run a fucking 10k that's stamina right that's what athletes are paid for

i'm paid for my decision making people invest in me and they invest in heights for my decision making abilities and overworking giving yourself burnout not taking space to rest not listening to what you know to be true and spending the time planning that's bad decision making yeah and if you can't do those things for your own 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 of your company You've got to look after your mental state and your physical body first by thinking and finding the space, carving out the space to think, what does good decisions look like that 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 to learn things start to add up and and that kind of segues back to the initial tweet where you talked about depression anxiety

burnout and insomnia so let's talk about burnout then it's a very um a very popular topic i actually think one of the most listened to episode of this podcast was the top was the one about burnout and us being a burnout generation and how we've kind of glamorized it we're optimizing our lives so we can fill it with more things to do did you burn out how did you burn out and do you understand why you burnt out 100 percent um you know uh gary v is a very clever man um very intelligent but you know he has created a negative impact on society 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 has created hustle culture and hustle porn and you know what i met gary v had him on this podcast and you're right i think in every um depiction of him there he's a genuinely authentic person. You meet him and think, you are who I thought you were online. And you're completely right in the sense that because he's being his authentic self, which we can't, you know,

we can't criticize anyone for being. In fact, that's what we tell everyone to be, be yourself and be willing to share it with the world. The issue, I think, as you're pointing out is his lack of appreciation that about nuance and that everyone is fundamentally different and everyone's not gary v i had that problem too when i started i couldn't understand why people weren't sacrificing their lives to build businesses and working till fouram in the 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 wasting their time. And they would never be happy because as far as Steve Bartlett's brain could tell him, that was happiness. Yeah, and because like all of the pain that you suffer is part of the game. And that stuff isn't,

this is the thing, right? That stuff isn't not true. thing right that stuff isn't not true you do have to grow growth is painful and you will have 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 my identity has to be that and only that because that's how gary v and like a few other geniuses in society have got to the top of their games. But here's the thing, like there's two reasons why I had burnout last time. The first was because I wasn't happy on what I was working and running a startup can feel a bit like a cage sometimes. So unless you're

really sure, I say this to 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 then you are your own birdkeeper. You have locked yourself in a cage. And that's what I did with Grapple. I got lucky. I found a niche, an opportunity. It grew exponentially, really quickly. Millions of downloads and a million monthly active users in our end. We had like a like a you know even acquisition that failed sadly but you know would have made us millionaires was a real journey with that company it was fashion for tinder basically yeah tinder for fashion exactly and it was a real it was a real exciting journey but at no point did i enjoy it um really like not at no point my ego enjoyed it right and

we won loads of awards um you know we won the award we wanted like we were like we just want to be written about in tech crunch and all this stuff and in 2017 we won best mobile startup in europe over depop at the tech crunch europas we didn't even turn up to that awards to take that award because i was having such a bad time mentally um i didn't even go to the awards of a ceremony my friend picked up that trophy and took a photo on our behalf i was sitting at home drinking whiskey feeling really terrible about myself um why because that was living someone else's dream i didn't care about fashion um what was the force that made you live someone else's dream yeah good question a bit of serendipity in the sense of um you know listening to users going on a bit of a journey and the product sort of developing and then it getting catching fire before you really have an opportunity

to stop and say, no, that's not ready for me. Like you were getting dragged, you weren't pulling. A bit, a bit. But then at the same time, like, you know, 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 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 other than like working hard, I was working against my purpose and I could feel it. And when people ask me, I'm actually like, as you know, always to my detriment, honest. So I would tell people, including the wrong people, including investors that, you know,

my heart really isn't in it and like all this stuff because you know all I had left for authenticity was to be honest in these conversations with other people you know I've just finished writing my book um not trying to plug it although happy sexy millionaires happy sexy millionaire available in all bookshelves no it's on pre-order um but there's a chapter in there where I really investigate burnout and the reason that's topics like self-awareness burnout, which we haven't quite yet properly defined, everyone throws it out there on Instagram or I'm feeling burnt out, but nobody's like gone down the rabbit hole to figure out the innate causes or the psychological or social causes of it. So I just wanted to like go as far down as I could go. And I tend to believe the depth that I've got

to with my thinking and the research that I've done is that you typically get um you stand a higher chance of burnout in situations where you are extrinsically motivated um 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 got burnt out walking my dog or playing with my dog you know I've never got burnt out um my dog or playing with my dog. I've never got burnt out like reading books that I love and those kinds of things. But when it comes to getting paid to do something that I don't intrinsically enjoy doing,

burnout is almost inevitable at some point, not just burnout, but then motivation. And I started looking at motivation and the spectrum it sits on, of on one end being totally extrinsic, you're literally doing it because you're forced to. 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're paid and you're forced to, burnout seems to show up.

And on the other end, when it's intrinsic and you love it and you're doing it for the sake of doing it i never get burnout and my motivation seems to last the course of time so i 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 because i've had 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 stayed in bed and i just like i couldn't face going to the office i couldn't face leaving my bed team in the office yeah and you're lying in bed well I got my co-founder and I was just like explained that I'd literally I didn't know what it was at 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 energy whatsoever just like no no ability a bit like when I had coronavirus to be honest just like zonked um not and nothing I was doing was able to make me feel like I was getting the energy I think the reason why as well was um again I like I'm a helpful guy I really believe in my greatest superpower full stop is connecting people right I've got infinite numbers of ways I've connected 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 it's irrelevant but point being um you know so many co-founders introduced i really just believe in the serendipity of creating you know moments where you know that person and that person just should have that chat and i force it to happen so because

of that because i really believe in serendipity as well I do try and say yes to people and help them out so what was happening to me at Grapple was 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 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 6am every single Tuesday and Wednesday. Um, and between six and nine, I'll do like sessions, right? If you come meet me between that time and like your 45 minutes slot, I'll fit you in. And then Tuesday and Wednesday became Tuesday to Thursday. And then before I knew it, I was doing it like almost every single day trying to be so helpful. And it was great

because I, I get loads of energy from that, right? Like so much. There's, you know, a great quote of, you know, there's no such thing as altruism because you're ultimately doing it for yourself. And I believe that. However, so it's like find your motivation and then 10 exit, but I overdid it. And so the result, 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 going for the next few days. And I was like, nope, I just can't do it. I like basically couldn't move and that alarm basically you know kept 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 it was really like it was really strange time but the thing that's really interesting to me this

time right so I analyzed that as partly burnout and I was trying to do too much too and not spending enough time on myself not having any rest not being sensible about my personal space and my life which was stupid but the kind of thing you learn the hard way quite often and then the other thing was obviously 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 working in my own business now with heights you know very consciously aware of the opposite problem to be true so we just talked about burnout from some of your insights, right? One of my fears from heights is, you know, I won't see burnout coming because now I'm living my purpose. Now I am so

passionate. I get so much motivation and pleasure from working on heights that i could do this 24 7 um and i i diarize stopping myself right i literally put in my diary to start like all all my things rest naps peloton like all of the things like i talked to you earlier about like my shakti meditation these things are in my diary 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 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 sure and knowing you know taking preventative measures towards things like burnout if you are happy um i think it's been a really like mature decision that i'm really proud of taking this time around because this is 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 less like that now same thing burnout I don't feel like I'm going to get burned out even though I've been sitting in my bedroom pitching you know to investors like all of February and March like it's not a great existence because of lockdown and if I said to you yeah listen uh I'm the same I'm a workaholic and all these things i'm an entrepreneur gonna build a big business down what is the one thing i can do to avoid myself getting burnout what would you say that is you would say it is diarizing and scheduling time to do other things like you know i had nero on this podcast and he talked about he writes the book indistractable

he talks about how he will literally schedule time in his diary to see his to spend some time with his 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 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 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 pick like one new one a year to be honest with you my number one mental health hack full stop 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 walking if you can do that without being distracted i mean i listen to podcasts and audiobooks but i also go for some where i don't say anything with me and i just go for the walk um that's my number one health hack um because it's uh not only good for your brain but good

for your body and because it puts you into there's two things one we live in london actually to be honest like gets way worse a rep about rain than you know you would think because i don't 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 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 out and be like things aren't perfect but i owe it to myself for my own rest and for my own space to do this today um and the other reason honestly is because on average i get to listen to about 50 books a year just by doing that one thing so as someone who's like a lifelong learner and happiest when i'm learning the amount of books

that i've devoured by tacking that you know had it onto my daily walk has been the fastest way to grow yeah and so we talked about burnout there the next thing so and that's that was during your time at gravel the next thing from that tweet was anxiety yeah so anxiety and insomnia were completely linked with each other so a really really fascinating experience to me the most interesting of all of them really because at the time i got and so at the time i got insomnia and this is when anxiety starts to build, because anxiety does go with insomnia very well, because you start to get scared of going to sleep, which builds anxiety. You can't really sleep when you've got anxiety. So it's like a self-fulfilling

prophecy, like every single night. So I had insomnia for six months 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 was no going back to sleep whatsoever, no matter what I i did so this was at a time when business was going well i was pretty happy in life i was getting married um yes my dad had passed away but my mom 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 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 dickhead that's just too smug for the world and i just

suddenly 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 you know i've worked on that stuff. So where has this come from? And, you know, basically chronic anxiety, the feeling of chronic anxiety is lots of sweating, lots of self-doubt, lots of almost like a bit of a personality change in me you know outwardly I'm quite confident but you know this uh experience with anxiety was sort of really making me question everything about what I say how I feel who I am and you know it was in this cycle where if I'm about to go to sleep I'm not going to be able to go to sleep because of this you know these feelings of doubt and stories I'm telling myself and it became this perpetual illness and by the way i tried so many things right because when you say doubt yeah and the stories self-doubt self-doubt about business self-doubt about business self-doubt about who i am um and about why i'm feeling like this anxiety is such a complicated thing because um you know there's a great uh i think it's by lao tzu the it's not a

perfect um verbatim quote but he says something like depression is a symptom of sadness for the past we've lived anxiety is obsession and confusion over 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 because you know my own depression experience was loss of my father the past my anxiety was like the person a was anxiety about the night i night sleep i'm about to not have but also like you know who who am i going to be what's going to happen how long can i live like this it was like it's self-fulfilling in a way as well exactly so the the truth is i tried all these different things so like i went to i did therapy i did sleep therapy

i used all the apps calm sleepio Sleepio. I tried, you know, cutting out alcohol. I tried drinking much more alcohol. I tried, you know, 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 possibly do to just like stay zonked. But I went to the doctor and he recommended me sleeping pills, but that really irked me. And we, you you know we just talked about lost connections johan hurry right um i don't appreciate medication 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 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 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 dietitian was. I'd heard of nutritionist because isn't that just everyone on Instagram? But a dietitian had no idea. But it turns out a dietitian is basically a nutritionist with a scientific degree. They can work 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 work with sick people so if you have a sick problem like insomnia you go to a dietitian and they will literally tell you medically what they can do to affect your your experience and she just said to me um she basically asked me about what i was 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 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 statement and she was like well uh let me put it this way your brain is an organ right it's 60 fat 90 of the fat in your brain is this one compound called dha and most people that come to me with essentially mental health problems which is what you currently have have nutritional deficiencies and don't realize there are three main things that I would recommend in your condition one is omega-3s the other is

b vitamins because again that's for energy so she explained that I'm having a spike at 2am so I need that spike not to happen I 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 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 so skeptical i can't even tell you not only not a supplement taker but she's now recommending me three supplements and i've been given pills by the doctor and i'm like i mean like come on how is this going to be any better? So you can imagine my complete and utter surprise when I took those three things. I mean, they were very expensive. They were like medically prescribed ones. So super potent from,

you know, I think it was Whole Foods or Planet Organic. They were pricey. But within two weeks, I was sleeping like a baby and I wasn't, I wasn't feeling anxiety. And when you have a moment like that in your life and you know this because you're a deeply inquisitive person, it makes you stop and it makes you go, hold on a second. Like this was so simply solved. I don't actually believe it to be true. This must be placebo. This must be finally my placebo that that has caused this and instead I did what I do I'm quite nerdy I started reading science papers because I kind of you know the one thing I do hate on Instagram is like everyone's a nutritionist everyone's a this everyone's a that I'm like I don't want to listen to some guy that takes

nootropics telling me about like my brain and mental performance. I want to see what scientists that don't take any credit actually have to say about this stuff. And I learned that there are thousands literally of 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 ever, ever, ever to do what I'm doing. There were thousands of science papers on all of these ingredients and how they impact not just your mental health below the baseline so if you're suffering from insomnia if you're suffering from anxiety even if you've got depression schizophrenia like so many medical papers scientific journals sorry um about the impact of taking a high supplementation of xyz or obviously much more

food of that particular ingredient and the impact it's had and then when you're at the baseline all of these examples about nutrition impacting your mental performance so this is things like decision making 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 at their baseline and thriving and it just took me by so much surprise because it's like, well, if this is so well known in science, why didn't I know about it? I was working in Shoreditch, a scaling startup, like bearded, glasses, hipster, twat,

like, you know, keto, vegan, like, yes, I've heard of all of them. All my friends intermittent fast, yada, yada, yada. This is just like common sense brain food. Why is that not a thing that people know about? Why is taking care of your brain not something anyone's actually talked about clearly and actually found a really meaningful way to communicate what that stands for? And what science papers do really badly is like, know the when i synthesize them there's about two or three sentences that are saying the point but it's just covered with jargon they're boring

as shit um so i was like first step newsletter i will add some 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 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 way no one clicks it um and you'll learn something from a scientific journal, which I will link back to that you can click. And by the way, no one clicks it. And you can learn something that science says is good for your brain every week. That is essentially how the journey with Heights actually started with this realization that something as you know, when you, you know, the beautiful moment in life where you can spot an opportunity so big and actually solved by the power of communication and brand. You know, a lot of people say brand and comms, that is not a market strategy. That is not defensible. I think those people are idiots and the wrong market because, you know, my counter

to that is, do you think thathist monks got everyone meditating or was it calm and headspace do you think that we love to run because we watch the olympics or is it nike getting in our heads do you think that people around the world are doing yoga because of like you know some ashram or do we actually think it's lululemon brands create change in the world that we want to see and brands connect with human beings and create communities and the power of social media and standing for something is where brands take something that was always done before anyway stick a tick on a shoe it's still just a shoe like lululemon like it's just like a little logo an omega logo on pants it doesn't matter the way that 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 being, you know, in that shortage hipster twat area where you just know about things like early and trends to have never come into contact with something so important that can have such an impact as nutrition and mental health nutrition and taking care of your brain to me felt like a calling right i've just suffered for six months i've overcome something this is all i want to do in my life and so you started heights and so i started heights how's it going great question we launched january the 6th in a pandemic. Well, not in a pandemic yet. I have to say, you know, I saw this on my Facebook feed and I think I messaged you about investing in the company just because it was beautiful.

I saw the 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-to-consumer world, it's interesting what you're just saying there about comms and like the way that i hear it is like storytelling and um uh platforms um enabling um almost democratizing the access to like build great products now because back in like if we think about nike shelf space or you think about the the you know the the power that the unilevers have you're in fact not the war isn't always storytelling and brand or comms. It's in fact like knowing a guy or price points. But in the direct-to-consumer social media world,

brand and comms and storytelling can win. And product design. Exactly, and product design, which is a huge part of the story. And that for me was beautiful. So I was straight in there to try and invest in your company. i mean you know you know for a fact that i've been taking heights ever since january i think yeah yeah december maybe what's your experience been as a customer then i i love it and you know 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 several people on a spectrum of

like you know devout um yeah vitamin takers or and then there's 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 this it is hard for the user to establish cause and effect and like there's other factors that might happen in my life that make cause and effect almost in establishable so like say i take my i take the the heights for one week straight but in that week i have just the worst mental health week because of other factors how do i know so i guess it yeah it's a great question i think there's two parts to this right so one is um like supplements deserve a bad rep this is the most important thing to address

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 the things that she says there um it turns out there's this weird marketing thing in supplements where you can put a minimum in so there's the amount according to science that will have an impact on your body brain or whatever and then there's a marketing amount which is way lower that you're allowed to put in on that product so if if you say like vitabiotics or, you know, a lot of products, there's an asterisk on those boxes. They're legally obliged to tell you tiny small print on the back that 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 healthy this promotes healthy that, um, you know, my favorite story on this is probably, uh, seven

C's the biggest Amiga, right. Cause we all grew up as children, our parents give us 7Cs. And, you know, that's the biggest omega-3 brand in the whole entire world. Now, every single day, according to science, we're meant to have a minimum, like an RDA, if you will, 250 milligrams of omega-3s, right? You can get it from your food, or you can get it from these pills as a safety net. It's essentially what a supplement is, right? It's if you're not getting the food, supplement. Not instead of. Don't take supplements instead of eating. They're supplements.

So it's like a safety net. Now, that 250 milligrams, the minimum you can put in is 45 milligrams. So guess how much 7Cs put in to their number one best-selling product? 45 on the dot. That means you have to take 7Cs for six days straight 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 doesn't see

that and supplements for whatever reason have been able to do that. So when we went into our supplement design, 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, 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 approach this completely differently. A, we start with community, building a newsletter and an audience, asking questions to that audience about 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 super open-minded about taking supplements, starting supplements, right? The problem with supplements is it can be very difficult 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 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 over so you know we got really fascinated by this idea of like how can you help people build habits with our product design? How can we overcome this problem that supplements have that, you know, in January, massive 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 entrepreneur is to figure out how to make them a real customer, not just a first time buyer. And, you know, you talked about that bottle, that bottle was designed with our newsletter

audience by going into people's homes and asking them very weirdly and quite often the wives show us what you do with your supplements 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 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 cupboard reason they all look the same and what happens is psychologically and we got told this the whole time people basically open their cupboards see so many that are like broken promises of the time they promised they were going to start and didn't continue i feel attacked yeah they feel guilty they feel guilty and they're like well i can't just take the vitamin c because

i said i'd take d i said i'd take that and everything else. And they're always separate. And so people just give up. You know, there's two things to that. There's one, there's sort of like guilt about the promises that you were, like the person you wanted to be. And then the second is just, again, you know, it's set and setting or, you know,

out of sight, out of mind. So- But also for me, it's, I will, you're completely right. I'll commit to this person that I want to be, which is 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 at that you know famously but maybe misattribute attributed quote from einstein doing the same thing over and over again and insanity yeah and

not getting and getting the same results i'll take zinc for three days and because i can't see a difference 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 and a little bit of sweat. So you think something's going on. But when I take my zinc, nothing. Next day, nothing.

So it's almost like a belief. And that's, I think, what I've struggled with historically. So here's the thing so like we hear this kind of stuff with heights and we we love this because it's like opportunity right it's like challenging opportunity that's how everyone did it well that's dumb we're going to do it better so like our first thing was um the number one reason most people do not continue is because they forget out of sight out of mind so we designed a bottle that passed the wife test that wives were like

yes i put that on my bedside 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 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 virtue signaling to yourself completely i'm the kind of guy that looks after myself i look after my most important organ and this is my sig symbol of doing that so that was like an important first step then you know the capsules themselves 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 important because we learned that lots of people take supplements at different

times of the day ritualizing when you build a habit 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 because of the absorption the absorption happens because the dha omega-3 on the outside is fat when this 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 nutrients have been dissolved in fat that is the same effect as what you get from food so those capsules have been designed 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 forgetting their supplements full stop. So we did it so that you can start the same time. So you get ritualized by having the bottle out and you see it. And then the most important part, which is communication. So we actually have something like a brain health score. Essentially, it's like an algorithm put together by a couple of neuroscientists, PhDs, and you take it before

you start. And again, we do a 15 day check in. And then before 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. Now, what happens for most people in the first month? Let's be real, right? Like you just said, you know, scientifically, typically speaking, this product will last, will take three months for you to feel anything, like all supplements. So it's a bit of a long game, right? You have to believe in that. Now, in the first month for you to feel an impact, maybe you will because where your 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 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 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 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 build in and people start to read them they have an unbelievably high open rate because you've just taken the first step to choosing to look after your brain so from that point on why wouldn't you 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 like 90 90, I think it's more than that,

it's like 93% of people have improved their brain health score on a self-administered basis from paying attention, right? Not from the vitamins, not from anything else, but suddenly they're interacting with a brand there and they're welcoming a brand into their life. Whose sole focus is about how you can take care of your brain. It got all these really interesting, very, very respected people just helping to coach you on your journey. And that is such an important part of this because you do have the disbelief

in the first couple of months, right? And people like to be able to see and measure improvements. That's hard to do instantly with supplements, but it isn't hard to affect how someone feels and help encourage them to make changes in their own lifestyle that will make them feel better that is a brand's responsibility and that's our responsibilities that's what we work quite hard on like where i'm really passionate about building this brand is as a community it started as a newsletter community is everything to me bringing people along on this journey of brain care and

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 important organ in our body is so completely normalized in society to have skin care and hair care rituals and budgets and households but not for our brains and so you going back to the business side of things um you started grabble yeah didn't go Yeah. In your own estimation of it, you said, you know, you, you struggled with fears of failure and it failed when I was,

when you're talking about imposter syndrome and when you, and, and when you're talking about some sort of confidence issues around putting yourself out there, all of those things seem to sit in contrast to something else you said, which is 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 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 and is not scared at all and then the other side of you seems like someone that is the antithesis of that so i'm wondering how you you kind of like contended you because i i do believe that you will say that god forbid not that i believe in god as you know now um but you believe in forbid yeah i believe in forbid forbid um heights doesn't go to plan yeah um reaches its lows yeah that's another way of saying it you will start another business at some point based around something else how do you find the guts to keep going despite failure and i'm guessing maybe it speaks to your motivations as to why you wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place right i'm intrinsically motivated by growth and learning.

So the way that I like to think of myself is, someone else said this to me and I just like thought it was so poetic and I was so impressed with her for using these words, which is like a lifelong intern. You know, this was a founder. She'd gone to Stanford, had a really successful career. And then she basically coming to intern

at Heights for a few months. And I was like, you know, like I talked to you about that. I did that in other companies as well. But it was interesting to me to find someone else that did that and i was like i mean like you know i could learn from you rather than the other way around she's like i'm a lifelong intern everywhere i go i'm a lifelong intern and i'm like i talk about myself as a lifelong 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 know, um, redefining what success is. Yeah. Because as long as you're learning, well, not you, I, as long as I am learning, I am fulfilled. And I think we all have this, like one thing we know

to be true about ourselves. Right. Um, starting a business is super hard. Right. And you know, I'm like I say, not a nutritionist, not neuroscientist had no experience in the space have never launched a vertically integrated supply chain, like from three different countries, our ingredients come from 10 different countries because we literally source the highest quality. So the Omega-3 comes from like Canada and the blueberries come from Italy, like nuts.

But all of that stuff, it's so exciting to learn. And like the opportunity to learn all of these things are new gets me out of bed and so the whole like failing and starting again you know that's got nothing to do with you know confidence or lack of or anything it's got absolutely everything to do with knowing where i'm in my uh sweet spot you know it's a term that i learned years ago that sums it up so perfectly which is icky guy are you familiar with japanese icky guy that I learned years ago that sums it up so perfectly, which is Ikigai. Are you familiar with Japanese Ikigai? That's me. I'm living my Ikigai right now. What is Ikigai?

So Ikigai is a Japanese term, basically looks like a Venn diagram on a Venn diagram, right? So you're at the centre. And then the different aspects of things like, you know, what makes you happy? What makes other people happy? What makes you money? What makes other people fulfilled? It's like ticking off all of these things people fulfilled 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 am i contributing to society yes am i waking up every morning fulfilled yes am i mentally challenged yes it's like ticking off all of these things it's like this weird flower you should definitely check it out for people watching and listening to this podcast on youtube i will put

the ikigai graph on the screen now yeah it's amazing it's 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 like so you know i'm very spiritual yeah well i had a spiritual wedding in ibiza and then i went and did my my honeymoon in japan and you know it was all it was like hikes and spiritual searches and stuff and you know there's another fantastic uh japanese proverb which is uh literally translated as fall seven rise eight but what it means is like if you fall down seven times rise up the eighth and you we talked about success and failure just in that moment and you said that um i think you immediately defaulted to talking about the purpose, which was you love progression,

sort of intellectual progression, growth and learning. And it almost seems to me that one of the ways to escape from the fear of failure, if you even think about what happened at Gravel, you described that as a failure. One of the ways to escape from ever failing again is by redefining what success is redefining what failure is and it sounds like you've almost redefined success now as growth and learning and you and you won't fail at that even if the company 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 now isn't losing the company it's losing your losing your way like you did with

grabble and becoming someone you're not and being extrinsically motivated and it's exactly that and you know i think the opportunity that we all have as human beings to be creative is to certainly accept that things are not going to go on a straight path but you know when when confronted with these like horrible moments of of things like failure and everyone else thinking that you're a failure, that blow gets softened a lot when you get to reflect and think about what you learned. You know, a really interesting experience that Joel and I did after failing was we went to business psychologists and we had a facilitator sessions over the course of a week with the, this was your fault,

that was my fault, I take blame for this, I blame you for that, letting it all out, right? And then we spoke about, you know, what 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 and could map out some of the poor mistakes and decisions that we'd made that led to failure. And interestingly, like, you know, rehiring in heights this time, the thing that we've had for the last year before we had any employees was a set of company values, and hiring processes, and all sorts of like interview tips and hiring docs based on our values before we hired our first person, we must have had them for nine to 12 months because we were so certain of understanding who we are and what we stand for being the company values

and that those company values lead to hiring the right 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 yourself and enable brilliant people to take it forward. I think that's probably one of the most important things i've done in my life was spending time on company values with a business partner by

identifying gaps weaknesses and spending time hearing my failings from my best friend what do you think so much of what was true um that i demonstrated a lack of focus um i'd been overly honest right so i hadn't picked my moments it's like you know i appreciate a very like transparent person but you know but do you know he's like you know you don't have to like tell an investor to their face 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 as i'm this is this this is the behavior was the most hurtful thing he said i think the most the most hurtful thing that he said was that um you know he felt that i had um not not contributed 50 50 right and that i had like an almost irresponsible attitude towards what i was trying to get out of

the business compared to what he needed to get out of the business compared to what he needed to get out of the business and that was a really meaningful start for us to decide on the next business too because what he meant by that was Joel is like a very intelligent person so he is motivated by challenge if something is hard to fix right then he'll find a way to fix it that is like he'll get up in the morning for that I won't um i'm motivated by making an impact and 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 way that is like all emotion for me right he's pure like logic and challenge so by me you know constantly discrediting the work that we were doing by saying things like that right by being too open and honest about my purpose and not putting on the filter i was literally without care or remorse making his

fracturing yeah fracturing what he believes in and his ability to succeed and his ability to tell his own story about the hard work he put in and i think all of those things were true i'd say that it was 60 40 if i was being brutal to myself 70 30 like you know the success of our last company 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 really don't believe he does either but being able to say this stuff to each other with a letter to all out that then also gave me the confidence to say like Joel came up with like two or three business ideas 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 yeah but it's really exciting i'm like it's not to me right no one is going to have their health or 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 know look at my mistakes of the past and my character and say if if you want to work with me, you know that I'm going to have to work on something I feel purposeful about. Otherwise, this is non-negotiable for me. Otherwise, we'll repeat history. And you've got another partner in your life, which is your wife. I do, yes. When did you get married? What age?

Well, two years ago, I got married. Two and a half years ago. When did you meet her? Ah, well, do you know this story at all no i don't know okay fine fine so technically speaking i met her at 18 on the kosan road for one night uh but i didn't sleep with her uh in thailand okay uh in bangkok i didn't sleep with her but i tried to chat her up and stuff and it was a straight up no um so she's she was best friends with my business partner joel's sure best mate a cousin sorry so anyway the point being um that's how we met her originally and i'd like you know sent some very

awkward facebook wall messages when that was a thing like you know trying to chat over the years it was always enough um and then at like 30 or 31 like on my birthday um 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 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 was like your mates are married running out of options i'm still available you know let's do it you're not gonna do any of that other than this yeah she found it hilarious anyway she did she did um come join me at drinks and like the rest

is history and actually our relationship's been super interesting because we spent the first year um not monogamous um we spent the first year openly so we spent the first year openly communicating that we'll sleep 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 she's just like hilarious really good fun really funny and so I enjoy hanging out with her but it's very clear like you're not my girlfriend and she was like yeah great I'm not your boyfriend no problem I did that for a whole year why were you saying that why were you not um I've been yeah because I like loads of reasons like one is like I'd come out of 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 married for

sure um and I told my mum and her that I wouldn't get married incidentally um so I was like I don't 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 highly recommend you read it so I've been telling myself the story that this wasn't going to happen so you were rejecting her kind of in a way and protecting thyself. Absolutely. Um, and you know, and I think that was mutual for whatever reason for,

for a year. And actually after a year, you know, we had that awkward conversation. I almost like where she actually, you know, said like, what are we going to do?

Like, this is getting like a bit silly now, you know, I'm getting on, I'm like 75 now I need to get married. Um, and, um, and so I said, you know, I almost get married um and um and so I said you know I almost said no they there and then I said let me sleep on it and I was about to say no but then all my

friends were basically like you know she's literally wicked like why on earth would you do that to yourself like what have you got to lose and from that point of saying yes and being in a relationship with her I proposed to her the like six months later and we got married a year later. So it was actually a really short relationship from meeting to marriage. You met her when you were 33 now. Yeah. You met her at 30.

Yeah. So you proposed when you were 31? Yeah. Okay, so you've been together for two years now. Yeah. And so I always find it super fascinating when I meet an entrepreneur that's super busy and in love with their business and their ideas and and is a workaholic on to some degree how they manage to

keep their relationship balanced because I haven't figured it out yet yeah and I I'll tell you the phases that I've gone through different sort of levels of immaturity in my life so the first phase was um meeting great people meeting a great girl and thinking to myself you need to wrap your life around me 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 join the orbit but i'm not going to change at all didn't go well unsurprisingly and then like trying to find a little bit of um compromise somewhere in me um but still being ruthlessly apologetic didn't go well um and now i'm at a place where i'm currently single completely single and i need the answers i i'm less i don't want to be one of these

fucking asshole narcissists that i just read about one in the newspaper. I won't say any names, Martin Sorrell. And what I read about people, I think it was his ex-wife that described him, was very, very similar to the behaviour that I'm exhibiting, which is this kind of self-centredness that excludes everybody, but ultimately will run the risk of actually being self-harm when I make myself lonely and miserable, because I didn't appreciate the value of a relationship so i want you to help me with the answer well let me tell you i told myself the narrative that being in a relationship i don't have time to be in a relationship right um that's my narrative um being married and all of these things will close opportunities down to me and my life will be worse for it. And 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 not just the one, but ones.

I really don't believe that there's one person for you in the world. I believe there's many. And I think having a spiritual connection with others and, you know, for some people, like a sexual connection with multiple partners, I think that this stuff is totally acceptable, A, be completely biological, like biologically, scientifically more normal for us than monogamy, which is essentially because of Christianity in the world.

And frankly, you know, even though that's not what i do with my wife currently we've had conversations about you know in five years or in 10 years right if we weren't sleeping together because we weren't finding ourselves like you know sexually attractive or whatever at that point you know would we consider having the conversation like opening up our relationship can i ask you that question huh can i ask you that question yeah yeah i'm i'm not answering it almost now which is like yes we would we would do that and would you be comfortable with her sleeping with other men that's a very different question because uh right now no future me maybe um logically right logically if i took emotion out of it absolutely

because if i didn't want to at that point sleep my wife, it would not be fair to deprive her of sex because of how I was feeling. And so I think having a maturity towards your relationships and to all relationships is so important. And a lot of, you know, what really upsets me, like so many people get divorced. One of the most common reasons people get divorced is because they cheat. And you can avoid that by having a conversation like, I still love you. And I still think everything I always did think about you. But for whatever reason, the sexual attraction has gone. And either we are going to work on that together or we should explore other options.

And like everything in life steve the most uncomfortable conversations are the ones you need to have so i think a really smart way and i would say this because you know i'm doing it but i think a smart way to approach your relationship is like you approach your business so you set out a vision for your relationship and you say this is what we want to be and where we want to be in 50 years what does that look like um you know recently i did this with my wife we were in portugal we were with some friends um i told you i was working in portugal for 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 around other people she's being acerbic snappy like kind of bitchy we were just getting on each other's nerves and i went for like a long walk on the coast with her and i was just like where's this coming from like five whys right why are you doing that why are you doing that but why are you doing that right and we got kind of got to the crux of the issue um you know these are the things that i'm annoying about and what i do that irritate her and obviously like these are things you do and i, okay, let's take a break from like right now, the things that are annoying us about each other. Let's flip the script. In 50 years, what are the things that we're going to be saying, doing and believing about why we love each other? What does that look like? So like literally let's

imagine in the future how we are and work back from there. So objective, right? A long, happy and fulfilling marriage. So, you know, you might be familiar with OKRs, so objectives and key results. We implement them at heights as a startup, but also Melissa, she's the director of operations for Europe, Middle East and Africa for Vice, and she put OKRs into Vice. So we're both fan of the system, right? And 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 objective. So we decided to try and apply this framework to our marriage, right? What is the objective? A long, sustainable, happy, and fulfilling marriage.

What are the key results that get us there? Well, we broke them down into mind, body, and soul, right? And from there, you get to cascade down these key results, right? So 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 it. But like from a compromise point of view, because she knows I believe in it and stuff, she'll do it with me. Similarly, you know, from a mind point of view, she wants to be heard, right? So how about, you know, we will ask each other how our days are, but systematically as a habit. We'll build it as a habit. Another one was we'll teach each other something new every day so um ask her how her day was did we have sex were we intimate right were we cuddling 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

that if you think about it really methodically you know did we exercise for 30 minutes a day these things if you do them you know the compound gains of the results you get in a marriage. If we're literally doing these things together, if I'm asking how her day is and I'm listening, if I'm spending time, like learning something new to teach her because I want to, and she'll reciprocate the same, it will literally create these moments where we're not in our work and we're not doing other things. We're 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 to achieve people some people a certain type of person will listen to that and they'll think to themselves how robotic how robotic and you know i had the same conversation

with near near il who came on this podcast yeah he's the king of this stuff 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 with the kids and a certain type of person listening will think well that takes the the specialness and the magic and the spontaneity out of just like living and being you know free to to go in whatever direction and it also when when you listen to that you think you start to think about how us as humans have over, this is potentially a thought, over-organised and over-routine and really over-thought every facet of our life. And one of the things that I have a, sometimes a bit of a visceral bad reaction to is like, and you would have heard about all this stuff that you know the 10 habits of highly successful entrepreneurs you've got to get out of bed drink the green tea do the yoga write in your diary do 10 star jumps then call your mum and tell her you love her and

and it gets to the point that is one of mine to be fair every day if you listen to all of this stuff your day would literally be completely 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 rigidness with creating space for lack of rigidness and just fucking seeing where the wind takes you is a great question in my experience so far this particular bit of rigidness has created more space not not less space for me. And the reason is because if you think about the opposite of this, right? So if you don't do some of this stuff, if you don't, 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 regularly, if I don't exercise regularly, if I don't, you know, meditate every

day, this is me personally, right? 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 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? 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, 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 making decisions in general, right? So it is actually taking up more time to not build that habit in for myself. If I don't go for my daily walk, personally, A, I'm not making time to read, listen, and learn.

So therefore, my personal growth as a human being is slowing down because I really believe that, you know, the way that I can build a better life for myself is funneling wisdom into myself, choosing what I read and choosing who I listen to and choosing what I believe to an extent, right? I love reading counter views to stuff. Like I'm a lefty. I love, I follow loads of conservatives and right-wing Republicans because it's healthy for me, but I'm choosing to funnel stuff into my life. So again, by not doing that, I could be more aimless and more free, and I wouldn't necessarily be following the path to making better decisions as a human being, which also speeds things up. If I don't call my mum every day, she will call me up and ask me why I don't love her, which will make me feel like shit for three days so i actually find that this stuff in in my you know again not exercising you 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 feel achy i start judging myself you think about these things like actually they create time they don't take away um in my experience and that's exactly what near said which is that 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 last question on the relationship point is about bringing your problems home and how you've kind of because this is one of the big problems i have as well is along with the like selfishness around my business being the most important thing sometimes, is how do you not bring your problems home, but then also like not make her feel lonely when she sat right next to you by being off with the fairies. And, you know, I was reading Elon's

book, the book written about 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 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 managed to find the balance in the relationship um is it just the okrs is there does she understand does she get it yeah i think i'm lucky like a she gets it and b she enjoys her personal space 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 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 direction as well where you're not getting enough out of her in terms of attention and no i think we're both really lucky like we both like our own company and we both like each other's company so you know you can you're not getting enough out of her in terms of attention. No, I think we're both really 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 way. If you're lucky enough to learn what you like and how to be with yourself, which takes quite a lot of learning.

A lot of us are very dependent on other people. And if I was still completely dependent on my wife's attention and my wife, like in general, then I might be like that. But I've come to learn, you know, how how to listen to myself how to make time for myself how to spend time enjoying being on my own as well 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 which is you know I'll listen to podcasts about performance and habits and stuff and she'll listen to case file

on repeat oh my god is listen to case file on repeat oh my god is she a case file fan oh man if i hear that australian pricks one more time oh my god i've listened to every episode there's a uk one called they walk amongst it i'm obsessed with true crime yeah so is she yeah so obsessed well listen yeah work out yeah exactly exactly yeah she'd love she makes me watch 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 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 and i'll say do you mind if i just put on a murder podcast yeah about like a serial rapist yeah i know and then like every single i keep asking the question but the answer is always saying

steve babe it's 2 a.m i don't want to listen to a story about a serial rapist right now while i'm closing my eyes in the dark and i'm fucking so i i get my phone or my airpod and i put it in one ear where they can't hear it and that's how i fall asleep yeah so she's exactly the same she like she you know we actually i mean it's i find it so interesting you know she will make me watch these things on netflix um because she's like but it's so interesting right but actually they really they actually quite damaged my mental health because you know you see things like you know but that husband loved that wife so much why does he end up killing those two daughters and his wife

oh you're talking about american murder yeah it's 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 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 has and this almost it sent you what you've just said then sent my mind back to the start of this conversation about religion and belief and purpose and and what you know before when i was holding they're usually religious even more terrifying yeah yeah this the reason i find it so fascinating is because it gets to the truth in human 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 about there in

american murderer that by the way because i'm such a nut i'd read that story i'd watched documentaries on it three four five years ago so seeing on netflix and their depiction of it was fascinating but there you have just the perfect perfect example of how um unboxable and unpredictable human nature can be when forces like infidelity and love and um because that was a normal person the fact that a normal person can go from being this lovely dad who was quite placid to smothering his own children and an affair teaches you something valuable about the nature of being human and um how and for me that is like awesome that is awesome and and that's why i think i'm so obsessed with those things is they teach you the lessons in a violent emotional gripping

way about the true nature of being human yeah i mean she feels the same way whereas i'm just like you know that's it just plays on my mind really it plays on 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 loving you know full of you know good energy but so is that guy in that example so was that guy so it shows every review of what that guy was like from all of his friends and everything else so how can that happen to a person this is the fascinating thing which was he met someone else clearly he was he was he was in a marriage which which had lost its passion yeah a loveless

marriage he decided to stay probably for the sake of the kids he decided comfort over a decision which he probably should have made a tough decision which he should have made in the short term for the long-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 yes but that comes back to exactly what i was saying right which is you yeah that comes back to the relation no it comes back to setting a vision for your relationship and you know having a plan and talking about in advance right you know if you're really smart you'll talk in advance what happens if one of us cheats yeah what happens in this scenario right what would happen if we fell out of love um you know

there's no point like you know planning the perfect life if you don't crisis plan the things that happen to all human beings um if you've got a great relationship with your partner, I think it's so valuable to treat it like you would your business, which is scenario planning, spending some time talking about what would we do in this kind of crisis and how would we behave?

Because by doing that with my wife, we've got permission to bring up that horrible conversation, right? Like in theory, that would never happen to me because if I 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 i thought you meant they're like i want to murder you tonight conversation no i probably wouldn't tell her it'd be a nice surprise um but you know what i mean as in like you know there's permission in our relationship to address the difficult things

um that's why in some respects you know I treat my marriage like I treat my business, which is, you know, something that I deeply care about if it's successful. And everything that I put into my life is about making these things successful to the best of my ability. And what I've learned is doing those things from a sense of vision and clarity and communication.

And values as well, because you're talking about transparency and, you know, honesty. Exactly. I am, when I started dating, you know, I don't know, 18 years old or 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 brown hair, the this, the that, this. They want to look like this. They want to talk like this.

And this list was almost like, it was endless, right? Of like little specific superficial things I was looking for in a partner. And after a couple of, you know, bad relationships and bad experiences and maturity and self-awareness and understanding myself, I got close. I was like, what are the 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 on this and see if if it resonates at all with you is I have three things that are like fundamentals that I need to fit so the first one I've kind of defined as they need to be intellectually stimulating to me which you can say you know being able to have a conversation being able to um yeah like release my mind or else I'll almost I feel like I'll get a mental

um disorder if I can't release my thoughts because else I'll almost, I feel like I'll get a mental disorder if I can't release my thoughts. Because, you know, we're very similar people in terms of our cognition. The next for me is sexual attraction. I used to think it was like, they're pretty, they're hot. But I realised that sexual attraction is much different to them being pretty

in the mind of the world. And the third thing is, I would hope that they would make me a better person. And that's intentionally broad. That could be a spiritual thing. It could be helping me become a better CEO in my business, better at my podcast or whatever. So those are my three things. Intellectually stimulating, sexually attractive, and they make me a better person, however you want to define that what are yours well i have to say sexual attraction is such an important thing to me in general

but what i've learned is and you learn this a lot the more you read about relationships that is actually something that wanes for everyone doesn't mean it will go and it doesn't 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 become less sexual the older you get, right? That's just biology. So I've learned not to make that

one of the most important things on the basis of, or I wouldn't say it's the most important thing, purely on the basis of, I'm more likely to fall out of love with the person that i'm with if one like you just said they don't intellectually challenge me second one again like you said like they have to help me grow in some respect or certainly be with me on the journey because in in a you know in a lot of relationships including my marriage like i am the one forcing a lot of

the growth but i'm like that and i can be quite irritating to be around because like i just always want more growth more this more that that book this podcast and some people just want to chill out and that's good for me as well right as in that is growth being pushed back and being like exactly rest stop here you know she's the one who's like you're doing too much you gotta stop like read this book i read an amazing book called rest um by alex song yam ping i think his name is um brilliant book much better than why we sleep and all the other ones that you would read about this stuff and really really helped me grow by realizing recharging is such a humongous part actually what i meant is with that third point and i think about it it was

a it was one person i was with that would stop me working yeah and she would make me realize the value of everything else but work so she'd be like let's go to this garden which is something steve would never usually choose to do yeah but when she took me my life was better and so i think when people think great they think oh like clapping at the back when you're where you're i'm like no take me out of my world and show me something else that allowed value to my life that i wouldn't ordinarily pursue right and how much more productive you are as a person as well when you've got space and time and you've had thoughts there's a reason why short thoughts come to us in the shower um or on walks right it's because you're literally scientifically

speaking your default mode network your dmn in your brain is being activated by that moment of rest so you know it is neuroscientifically 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 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 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 whatever but it's like not work laptop down we're eating dinner we're chilling out and it's like a rule 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 you know without that guardrail I would just carry on working and you

talked about the sexual point there I want want to tell you a very personal story that I've never shared before about why that made my list. And this is a dynamic list that's changing as I mature. I met a girl that was the other two. So I met a girl that was the most intellectually stimulating person I've ever met. She was actually a model. So she's absolutely gorgeous. She's also like a, just a genius. And she challenges me with a sense of like, like she doesn't care who I am or what I've done in my life or what I've achieved. And so that made me a better person.

She was an absolute genius and she was gorgeous. Went to have sex with her after, you know, two months of, you know, hot air balloons and all of this stuff. I'm really hoping she isn't listening but the whole point of this podcast is to be honest so and it just wasn't there the first time ever in my life and i experienced what i can only describe as a feeling of like horror um total disappointment not with her or anything like that but that that was the thing yeah and it felt like such a pathetic

thing to stand 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 again over a couple of days and i realized that it wasn't there and i got out of bed and i remember i texted my best friend i said i can never see her again because this is something that i didn't realize is actually so important to to a relationship even though it sounds pathetic when you say, oh, they weren't good in bed, but they were perfect in every other way. It sounds pathetic, but it was the truth.

And that's what made my list. My other thing is sense of humour. So, you know, one of our company values is have a sense of humour and humility, as we jam sort of two in the same one, but I believe so strongly in that, which is work can be very serious. Life can be very serious. Um, but finding moments to connect and laugh, I mean, so good for your brain, but just so good for your soul. Um, you know, spending every day with my wife in lockdown right 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 very similar very dark sense of humor um you know one of our things is actually um my when we on our first date um i brought up my dead dad and how actually one of my favorite things to do in like social situations is to bring up my dead dad to make other people feel awkward 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 or whatever so we um as like our second date or something we decided to go out on father's day together without our fathers and everyone else just had their dads around we went to the hoxton hotel 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 funniest thing that only us two would find so funny right because it's just so uncomfortable for everyone else but to us that kind of like dark humor like ways to connect and like weirdness that other people you're connecting on your pain as well because we talked about the self-disparagement and comedians and stuff yeah and like how many of like you know comedy greats are you know coming from yeah not just suffering but also coming from huge places of insecurities as well and that's their platform to bring it on so i think those things all really match up but by 100 i think you know finding someone who makes you laugh and gets your quirks so so so important because humans are weird

um i think it's lovely if you can be your fullest weirdest self in front of other people are you happy yeah i was thinking about. Um, the other day someone asked me two answers to that one. Yes, I am happy. Like the, the blunt answer is yes, I'm happy because I'm fulfilled because isn't it? Yeah. But I noticed your body language because, because, because the question that I asked back to this person was I am happy, but why is happiness so important? Like, why is that the question you want to ask me? Like, is it, does it matter that I am happy? Is it binary? Yeah. And is it binary? But like, why does that matter to you? And why does that matter to me? Cause I think a much better question is, am I contributing? Um, you know, am I fulfilled and am I contributing? Because if I'm doing those

things, I'll be happy. And I know that to be true. Whereas for me, asking that happy is a bit like, you know, binary. It's like straight to the point. And it's like, there's nothing really behind the question as well. Undefined. And also, like, it really depends on what you're asking me that day, I will be like, No, today, I'm not happy today. If you ask me if I'm contributing to society, and does that make fulfill me and make me feel like I'm living my purpose? It won't matter what I feel like today. Are you fulfilled? Very, but I have so much more to do. One of the real fascinating things that I've learned is,

and again, I've read about this at length in my book, is how binary questions like that are the cause of so much pain and no one realises it. They're the cause of so much misunderstanding and no one realizes it that the cause of so much like misunderstanding pain and um and anxiety so like another great example is if i asked you now if i said are you in love and immediately you have a bunch of 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 when you were born they didn't say okay dan 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 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 when it's so crazy that especially from what i do on instagram and putting myself up there tons of people send me their problems and usually it's because they they're trying to fit into a binary box and they don't even realise it. They're like, Steve, I'm not sure if this is my passion. I'm like, that is a super binary thing. Because when you say, have you found your passion? That presumes a yes or no answer.

Whereas if you say, 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 gradient that different things impact. So, you know, I mentioned contribution. Like, you know, there's many ways to contribute. And, you know, being outwardly successful or building a company or, you know, having a high-flying career, you know, they don't tick that many boxes in terms of contribution.

A lot of contribution 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. That stuff is a much broader question and it's like a cup that's 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 your purpose and contributing to the level that you would make you proud and you also know when you're not which is great because 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 continue to like question the question as much as you try and answer the question sometimes are you scared of dying great question um why is it a great question great question because um i don't believe in fear of death fear of death is literally um like illogical because fear of death

is what actually makes you fear of life. So if you're scared of dying, then you approach your life in a very different 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 scared of dying um it's also really worth saying that like ever since doing ayahuasca like i 100 convincingly believe in things like reincarnation soul spirits other planes all of the woo-woo crap that just like sounds completely bizarre for me to think that i would ever say those words it's not even woo-woo is it from like a scientific perspective you described reincarnation 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 slightest bit scared of death um and i think that that's

the biggest blessing that i got from doing ayahuasca was no fear of death um because that's a potent powerful feeling not feeling like knowledge insight right that's a potent, powerful feeling. Not feeling, like knowledge, insight, right? That's categorically so quick for me to answer that question and no. It helped me deal with the death of my father when my mum got cancer. It helped me come to terms with what might happen to not have her around as well.

This is life. People die. So you have to approach it, right? You can't pretend that isn't going to happen. It's the only thing that's guaranteed. So having a philosophical understanding 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 fear of death that essentially limits our life in my view i'm i feel the exact same. And the experience I described to you where I lost my faith in Christianity at 18 was also the exact moment where I,

because up until that point, I believed that there's a heaven and a hell. And that was a fucking terrifying thing. So for the next two years, I went on this search of what the answers were, got obsessed with reading about atheist books. And it was actually Richard Dawkins that said, you should really fall in love

with the beauty of the world and the true nature of nature. And he talks about being able to go into a church and crying, even as an atheist, because of the beauty and the wonder. But also on the point of death, one of the things he said was, a lot of people are scared of death because it's the unknown. And when you're religious, you think it's, I'm going to burn, or I'm going to be in this place with all these good people. That sounds kind of boring. But when I got to the point where I was agnostic or atheist or whatever you want to call it,

he said, like, how did you feel 100 years ago? I didn't feel anything. Were you scared? Were you fearful? No, no, because I wasn't here. And he said, that's how you'll feel then. And then when I lost this idea that I would burn or go to this 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 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 this is the fucking show yeah and my life completely changed and i i i i completely agree i i asked the question which is a strange thing to ask in like a while i don't know what you even want to call this a business podcast because it's so fundamental to me and 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 for hours and hours and hours um what an amazing conversation i've loved it so thankful for you for coming on and sharing your insights.

You know, it's interesting because the Dan that didn't want to do personal branding was like, well, well, you know, I have a direct to consumer product and what's my personal brand fit in that. But the most convincing sales pitch for this product was in fact, when you talked about you, it's not when you, you know what I mean?

Yeah. And I think that, I mean, of course, like you're talking about the struggles you've had and the agenda and motivations that went into creating your product is the most convincing thing. And that's again, why your personal brand and you building it

and even why us having this conversation is so, I think so incredibly important. I always finish this podcast by asking one question, which I'm sure 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 bring to the table and why your arms crossed again yeah sorry i was just getting into the serious mode like thinking about this okay um so i think um i think to be honest

i'd want like an ancient philosopher i I'd love like, you know, just be so cool. Like Marcus Aurelius, I would say one big fan of meditations, um, you know, stoic philosophy. I read meditations, um, after my first business failed, 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, you know, yes, the world is tough and yes the world is shit but everything is what you make of it and really the world you're living in is all it all exists inside your own mind and once you understand that you can control a lot of how you feel so marcus aurelius would be one and i would say the second you know this is pathetic and i'm sorry but you you know, Dennis Bergkamp is my all-time hero, so I'm a gooner.

And, you know, the man was a magician and so classy and such an authentic and great leader in so many ways and iconic. Fearful, though, I hear. Huh? Fearful. Fearful. Oh, yeah. Oh, the opposite of Jesus.

He won't fly, but he does walk on water. Crazy when I heard that, that he refused to fly. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, the opposite of Jesus. He won't fly, but he does walk on water. 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 interesting anxieties. Yeah, so I could ask him about that. Maybe get Marcus and...

Well, exactly. And if I had a third, if you were being generous, to be honest with you... Four, four. Oh, I got four. Oh, all right. Okay, so yeah. Oprah.

Yeah, why? Literally just thinks she's phenomenal. Yeah, it felt stupid asking why. Yeah, I mean Literally just think she's phenomenal. Yeah. It felt stupid asking why. Yeah. I mean, just in every way, right? As in, it's hard to pick a thing, but let's just say then because of personal growth, media brand, understanding wealth and leveraging your wealth for good and storytelling.

I mean, I could just go on like, you know, her list is just ridiculous. So a hundred percent Oprah. And, oh, i don't know i feel like i i feel like uh you know once the fourth seat literally sitting where he would be my french bulldog has started sprinting around attacking uh imaginary other french bulldog yeah exactly um and then um i'd actually say my fourth would be lewis hamilton um because i think what he's achieved even before literally breaking a record like a couple of weeks ago um is so awesome and i love i'm so proud 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 his platform to take a stance actually being political with his message when he knows he has such a big 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 values. Secondly, he's vegan. So you know, I like I think it's interesting that he's chosen he's on such a high performance, no fail, attitude, but is like as a plant-based person, clearly environmentally conscious, even if he's in F1, which is obviously debatable. But he's got these like clearly deep rooted values

about how he wants the world to be. And he is manifesting and living them in being 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. And he seems like quite a nice bloke just in general like i just like when i see interviews of him i just like what a relatable guy this is you know he doesn't seem like a knob superstar at all so i would just love to the reason for him is i just love to talk to

him about mindset and focus because when you think about it that is all you're doing in an F1 car yeah that 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 think anything tops that so I would love to know how you achieve that kind of level of flow and focus like week in week out nothing would be more interesting so Marcuscus burkamp oprah and uh sounds like a wicked dinner yeah lewis hamilton sounds amazing listen thank you so much for your time today it's it's a pleasure to consider your friend 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 being honest and open which was not only perfect for podcast, but it's so tremendously valuable for people like me, for everybody listening. And I want to thank you for that as well, because it's not always the easiest thing to do. You know, people default to massaging the ego or trying to get, you know, press for being positive and untouchable and perfect. And I think you've taken a different route,

which is serving a much needed positive service to the world. So thank you for that as perfect. And I think you've taken a different route, which is serving a much needed positive service to the world. So thank you for that as well. And yeah, I'm sure what you will pick up this conversation again soon. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Diary of a CEO. Listen, if you're on the podcast store

or you're on Spotify, or you're listening to it in some kind of app, do me a huge, huge favor, leave a review and hit the subscribe button. If you're watching this on YouTube right now i need another favor i need you to 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 of a ceo live show in manchester and you'll be coming backstage and meeting me and the other members of our team thank you so much for listening and i'll see you again next monday