Author: The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

0:00:03 You said there’s two types of effective training.
0:00:07 One of them is hypertrophy.
0:00:08 Very good.
0:00:10 And the other one is periodization.
0:00:18 So periodization is the scientifically based organization of any kind of training that you want.
0:00:21 Hypertrophy training is a type of training.
0:00:22 It’s just muscle growth training.
0:00:27 It’s like a fancy science word for just getting more jacked, putting on muscle.
0:00:30 That’s the technical definition of hypertrophy.
0:00:35 And when you train for hypertrophy, you can do it kind of like by feel and more or less at random.
0:00:37 And you’ll get pretty good results in most cases.
0:00:40 But to get your best results, you want that training to be periodized.
0:00:47 Periodization is the scientific approach to how to organize your training to get sort of roughly three things.
0:00:50 Some of these are a bit more for athletes and not regular people.
0:00:52 Get the best results that you can.
0:00:55 Peak at an appropriate time, abs for summer.
0:00:58 And minimize injury risk.
0:01:07 And taking all the science that we know, that plan that you’ve made because you did it in an evidence-based fashion, that is now what is considered a periodized plan.
0:01:10 So that’s how those two concepts relate to each other.
0:01:14 What do I need to know about hypertrophy in order to be able to achieve it?
0:01:15 Is there anything really foundational?
0:01:18 Because I think everyone wants a bit of muscle growth.
0:01:21 I think I spend too long in the gym.
0:01:23 I think I could be much more efficient when I’m training.
0:01:31 What would you recommend that I start thinking about as foundational principles when it comes to hypertrophy muscle growth?
0:01:33 One is specificity.
0:01:41 It’s the most important principle in all of sport training and exercise science is, what am I here for?
0:01:41 What do I want?
0:01:47 Because you can do a bunch of exercises in the gym and you’re like, that was great.
0:01:48 And someone’s like, are you getting the results you like?
0:01:50 And you’re like, well, what I want is a bigger bicep.
0:01:52 Like how many bicep exercises do you do?
0:01:54 Like, I think upright rows, maybe.
0:01:56 So I want a bigger bicep.
0:01:59 If we just focus on me getting Stephen Bartlett a bigger left bicep.
0:02:05 So specificity is telling yourself, okay, I want bigger biceps and whatever X, Y, Z other muscles.
0:02:13 Then we move in to the principle of overload, which means you have to challenge yourself.
0:02:23 If most of your sets, someone else watching them can’t tell if you’re warming up or doing what’s called a working set, like a real set, you have a problem.
0:02:33 So towards the end of all of your sets, either the weights are slowing down or even if it’s the same speed, to you, they feel perceptively harder.
0:02:39 You know, you do this, this, this, and in a couple of reps, you’re like, that’s what you want.
0:02:42 Every real working set should be challenging.
0:02:47 You should be approaching every real set with just a teeny, teeny dose of trepidation.
0:02:49 Like, oh boy, here we go.
0:02:51 I’m going to have to try.
0:02:53 Once you have that.
0:02:56 And a set is a group of repetitions.
0:02:56 Correct.
0:02:59 So if I do 10 repetitions, that’s one set.
0:02:59 One set.
0:02:59 Yeah.
0:03:03 And so your sets have to be sufficiently heavy.
0:03:13 Anything between roughly five reps per set and 30 reps per set where the last few reps are getting close to you not being able to use good technique and lift the weights.
0:03:14 Check plus.
0:03:18 So there’s not a set, a perfect amount of repetitions to do.
0:03:19 There is.
0:03:21 It’s a trade secret, and I’d have to say it off camera to you.
0:03:22 Okay.
0:03:22 NDA to sign.
0:03:23 Okay, we’re off camera.
0:03:24 All right, great.
0:03:25 So it’s 17.
0:03:31 So there’s just tons of tons of contextual nuance kind of stuff.
0:03:35 Some people, some of their muscles will seem to respond better to sets of five to 10.
0:03:42 Other folks, even the same person could have muscles in their body that really respond better to sets of 20 to 30 and everything in between.
0:03:52 But generally, you get in the exercise science data, you’ll have a group of people training for sets of roughly five reps and another group training for sets of roughly 30 reps.
0:04:02 And their change in muscle growth over 8, 12, 16 weeks is statistically undifferentiable, which means if I delabel the groups and you don’t know which one’s which, you can’t actually tell me who trained with higher reps or lower reps.
0:04:04 For muscle growth, it’s roughly the same.
0:04:06 And that’s so crazy.
0:04:07 We’re using the same weight.
0:04:08 I’m guessing.
0:04:09 No, different weights.
0:04:13 A weight that is challenging for five reps is much heavier than a weight that is challenging for 30.
0:04:13 Okay.
0:04:15 So I do wonder this all the time when I go to the gym.
0:04:22 I wonder if I should be doing, I don’t know, 30 reps of 10 kg on my bicep or I should be doing 10 reps of 20 kg.
0:04:23 They’re both right answers.
0:04:24 No wrong answers there.
0:04:34 And they both have the same chance of growing my muscles as long as the strain that I experience subjectively is difficult at the end of those sets.
0:04:34 Okay.
0:04:35 Interesting.
0:04:38 Which is really good news because that’s like another thing you don’t have to worry about.
0:04:43 Which means at home I can get any range of weights versus having to get really, really big ones to grow my muscles.
0:04:47 As long as they’re not so tiny that you’re on rep number 45 and you’re like, I could just do this for forever.
0:04:51 Or they’re not so enormous that you’re like, I can’t really even do two reps of this.
0:04:55 Anything between roughly five and roughly 30 reps challenging is really, really good.
0:05:02 How many sets and how often do I have to visit the gym to get this bicep to grow?
0:05:05 That answer depends on how much you’ve been doing before.
0:05:05 Okay.
0:05:18 But if you’re new to the gym, two sessions a week with two to three sets per session for your biceps is something that’s going to cause months and months and months of consistent progress.
0:05:19 Really?
0:05:20 Can you do more?
0:05:21 Yes.
0:05:23 Do you have to do as a beginner?
0:05:23 No.
0:05:29 Eventually, as a more advanced person, do you need to do more sets and perhaps more sessions to get consistently better results?
0:05:30 Yes.
0:05:37 But for beginners who haven’t been to the gym very much or at all, the minimal effective dose is profoundly small.
0:05:41 Which is why I can say things like if you work out for 20 minutes twice a week, you’re going to get great gains.
0:05:47 What if I go to the gym and I do six sets on my biceps and I just go to the gym once a week?
0:05:52 Does the distance between the workouts in a muscle group have an impact?
0:05:52 Yes.
0:05:56 Once a week training gives you good results.
0:06:01 But twice a week training for the same muscle gives you notably better results.
0:06:05 Training three times a week versus twice.
0:06:08 Training four times a week versus three times.
0:06:15 Training five times a week versus four times is an exponentially de-escalating amount of impressive differences.
0:06:18 So one time a week works.
0:06:19 It’ll get you results.
0:06:23 Two times a week gets you like one and a half times the results.
0:06:24 Like way better, better.
0:06:29 Three times a week is like another little bit more results.
0:06:29 Still notable.
0:06:34 Four times a week is like you got to be training for a while to notice the difference between three and four.
0:06:40 Four and five is contextual and nuanced and I can’t actually tell you that categorically five days a week is better than four.
0:06:44 There are some things I would have to know about your plan and everything else to make that conclusion.
0:06:46 So really I want to be aiming at twice a week per muscle group.
0:06:47 Twice is our minimum.
0:06:51 Two to four times a week is what I say is kind of the best overall recommendation per muscle group.
0:06:59 And if you train all of your muscles together at the same time, a whole body workout, which most people in the realm of just, I’m busy and I can’t train a lot.
0:07:06 It would be all of the major muscles of your body in the same session twice or three times or four times a week.
0:07:09 And that is an awesome beginner fitness plan.
0:07:14 What’s going on in my muscles that’s encouraging them and making them grow?
0:07:15 And when are they growing?
0:07:16 Is it when I go to bed at night?
0:07:19 Is it when I, do they grow the minute that I curl the dumbbell?
0:07:21 What’s actually going on?
0:07:26 Because sometimes understanding what’s actually going on inside helps me to think through and change my behavior.
0:07:27 Yeah.
0:07:41 So the primary stimulus for muscle growth is there are molecular machines in your muscles, in your muscle cells, and they are designed to detect the presence of tension.
0:07:46 And when your muscles generate tension, the molecular detector machines go, ooh, we got tension here.
0:07:52 And they start saying to other parts of the cells, like, hey, let’s get this muscle growth thing started.
0:07:52 Start it.
0:07:53 Not happening.
0:07:54 Start it.
0:07:55 It’s a stimulus of muscle growth.
0:08:00 There are a couple of other mechanisms which might slash probably have an effect.
0:08:06 And that a couple of them are metabolite sequestration, which is a very fancy way of saying the burn.
0:08:22 You know, at the end of a set, you’re like, ah, the metabolites, the byproducts of training, if they accumulate to high levels, it’s been shown in tons of animal studies and a few human studies that, like, mechanistically, they might also tell the molecular machinery that grows muscle for you.
0:08:26 Again, later, to, hey, get the muscle growth process.
0:08:27 Another one is the pump.
0:08:28 So, you know, you do a couple sets of biceps.
0:08:30 You’re like, oh, my God, what’s going on here, baby?
0:08:31 Flash it at some girl.
0:08:33 She runs away, as usual.
0:08:40 And the actual cell swelling itself might play a causal mechanistic role in generating more muscle growth.
0:08:48 But we know it’s probably at least 80% of the muscle growth anyone will see is because of those receptors for tension.
0:08:55 Muscle growth, as soon as you leave the gym, is a negative because the gym is catabolic.
0:08:57 It breaks down your muscle.
0:09:00 Actually, training breaks down more muscle than it builds.
0:09:18 However, as you go home and you start eating food, protein, carbs, fats, and you have several meals per day and you’re resting, when the food’s coming in, several hours after training begins, if you measure muscle growth consistently, which is real difficult to do, they don’t do it super often.
0:09:22 You have to keep people in the laboratory, you have to do radioactive tracers and measure all this weird stuff.
0:09:29 Every couple of hours they measure, the amount of muscle growth that’s going on in the biceps goes up and up and up and up.
0:09:35 And it usually peaks about half a day to a day and a half after you lift, depending on how hard you went.
0:09:41 If it’s a pretty easy workout, it peaks a little sooner and drops off about a day or two later.
0:09:48 If you train really crazy hard, it’ll peak like a day, day and a half later, and then half a week later, it’ll drop off back to baseline levels.
0:09:55 But it’s this really smooth curve and you’re growing muscle at every single point under that curve.
0:09:57 So when you say, is it while I’m sleeping?
0:09:57 Is it while I’m eating?
0:09:58 Is it while I’m resting?
0:10:02 The answer is all of those, except it’s not at the gym.
0:10:03 You don’t grow muscle at the gym.
0:10:05 You give yourself a signal to grow muscle at the gym.
0:10:07 And then what you do outside of the gym matters.
0:10:08 So some people train really hard.
0:10:10 They don’t eat right.
0:10:11 They don’t eat enough protein.
0:10:16 Their sleep is total, insert bad word here, and their stress levels are just totally psychotic.
0:10:22 They train hard, and then week after week after week, they’re like, I’m not seeing any results.
0:10:27 Well, the results are actually created when you’re resting, when you’re sleeping, when you’re eating nutritious food.
0:10:31 They’re stimulated in the workout, but that’s just phase one.
0:10:38 Phase two, the actual growth occurs outside of the gym, and it occurs not at any specific time point, like a magic window of two hours after the gym.
0:10:39 Like, that’s when all the growth occurs.
0:10:41 That’s actually when it just starts to go up.
0:10:43 It’s four days afterwards.
0:10:49 So if you train twice a week, you train on Monday, you’re growing a lot of muscle on Monday night, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
0:10:52 Back towards the end of Wednesday, you’re just not really growing much more muscle.
0:10:54 You go back to the gym Thursday.
0:10:55 You hit it hard again.
0:10:56 You hit that curve up.
0:10:58 By Sunday, you’re totally relaxed.
0:11:01 During Sunday, you’re not growing any muscle.
0:11:03 Your body’s really recovering a lot of that fatigue.
0:11:07 And then by Monday, you’re fresh as a pickle, and you’re ready to go at it again.
0:11:11 How long will it take me to lose the muscles that I’ve gained if I don’t go back to the gym?
0:11:13 So again, focusing on this bicep.
0:11:14 I train it.
0:11:15 I do two times a week.
0:11:16 I get it nice and big.
0:11:19 How long before it vanishes?
0:11:21 Great question.
0:11:22 Two-part answer.
0:11:29 Part one is within about two weeks of not training it,
0:11:36 the first reduction in muscle that is detectable by modern machinery occurs.
0:11:42 So if you don’t lift for two weeks and we put you in an MRI scanner or a DEXA scanner,
0:11:45 let’s say a week and a half you don’t lift, I can’t tell.
0:11:48 You’re not really losing any muscle yet.
0:11:49 You’re just going insane.
0:11:51 And so me personally, I’m like addicted to lifting.
0:11:54 So if I don’t lift for a week, I’m like, oh my God, oh my God, all my muscles gone.
0:11:59 There is some kind of intuitive truth to that because when you don’t stress your muscles,
0:12:04 when you do stress your muscles, they get a little bit inflamed and they bulge up a little
0:12:04 bit.
0:12:10 So when you’re not training for half a week to a week, your muscles look smaller, like
0:12:12 they’ve lost weight, but it’s really just all water that they lost.
0:12:16 You do one gym session thinking like, oh my God, my biceps are gone.
0:12:20 A week and a half later, you do one session at the end of that, you flex and you’re like,
0:12:22 oh my God, I’m the biggest I’ve ever been.
0:12:25 I was just delusional that whole time because that stuff comes back super quick.
0:12:29 After about two weeks of not lifting, we start to lose muscle.
0:12:33 But it happens really, really slowly and takes weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.
0:12:39 After several months of not lifting, you’re going to look considerably smaller on your biceps,
0:12:44 but probably not as small as when you started lifting because your muscles have a certain
0:12:46 memory, if we can call it that.
0:12:46 Is that true?
0:12:47 Very true.
0:12:53 And so a lot of times when you gain an initial amount of muscle, especially if you’ve been at it for
0:12:56 years, it just never goes back to the same size as when you started.
0:13:00 It’s just always going to be bigger until you reach your 80s or something like that.
0:13:05 That being said, yes, you will notice reductions in size.
0:13:07 So two weeks is the direct answer there.
0:13:10 And it’s going to take weeks and weeks and months and months to recede.
0:13:12 However, here’s part two, and this is awesome news.
0:13:19 Because of that muscle memory situation, however long it took you to gain the muscles initially,
0:13:27 it’s going to take you an order of magnitude, a factor of 10-ish or so less time to get it back.
0:13:34 If you’ve been more jacked before, if you’ve had bigger muscles, they come back to their old size.
0:13:41 If you lifted for eight months, you got a bigger bicep, and you stopped lifting for three months.
0:13:43 And it looks about the same as when you started.
0:13:46 If you’re really careful, like, okay, it’s a little bit bigger, but really it’s just back to square one.
0:13:51 Most people think, oh, my God, another eight months just to get back to where I started?
0:13:52 Like, forget the gym.
0:14:00 The truth is after roughly about a month, maybe as little as three weeks, you’re going to have the same size biceps that you did in your peak.
0:14:09 Because the degree to which your tissue grows, if it’s been a certain size before, especially if it was notably bigger than normal,
0:14:15 and you held that around for a few months and a few years, it comes back in a way that is so fast.
0:14:22 If you experience it yourself, it’s like you don’t believe that it’s happening to you.
0:14:24 Have they been able to, like, scientifically test this?
0:14:25 Oh, yeah, all the time.
0:14:27 Yeah, retraining studies, detraining, retraining.
0:14:32 Oh, yeah, they’ve done studies where they purposefully, like, lift for a while, and they stop lifting for a long time,
0:14:34 and they see how long it takes to get back.
0:14:42 And there’s one study I’m familiar with offhand that there’s a group of people that trained consistently for multiple weeks,
0:14:46 and there’s another group of people that trained consistently for a few weeks,
0:14:51 and then took two weeks completely off in the middle, and then just started retraining again for a few weeks later.
0:14:57 Both groups had identically sized differences in muscle at the end of the study.
0:15:01 And so you’re like, okay, so that group that trained consistently never took two weeks off.
0:15:06 Could we say that they purposefully, like, dunked two weeks of their time away for nothing?
0:15:07 Uh-huh.
0:15:20 Yeah, your body goes right back into regaining old, lost muscle so rapidly that this is such great news because, look, let’s say you lifted consistently most of the year.
0:15:21 Holiday season comes up.
0:15:22 Winter holidays.
0:15:25 You’re not going to the gym as much.
0:15:26 Maybe not at all.
0:15:28 Three weeks later of no gym, you look at yourself.
0:15:34 You look a little small or kind of deflated, and you’re like, oh, my God, I’m going to have to restart all this from scratch.
0:15:35 Nope.
0:15:38 Two weeks later, you’re in the best shape of your life again.
0:15:44 If you left the gym for six months, one or two months later, you’re in the best shape of your life again.
0:15:45 That’s how rapidly it comes back.
0:15:48 So it’s really good news for anyone who hasn’t been in the gym and is feeling guilty about it.
0:15:49 Go back.
0:15:50 Get consistent again.
0:15:52 You’re just going to skyrocket.

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0:00:32 I want people to start thinking about their feet.
0:00:37 Because the implications that we’ll have for longevity is massive.
0:00:40 But there is plenty of things we can do for foot strength and performance.
0:00:43 You can actually do this at home, and I’m going to educate you here.
0:00:45 There’s a lot we can talk about here.
0:00:46 That didn’t sound like a compliment.
0:00:50 Dr. Courtney Conley is a world-renowned foot doctor.
0:00:53 Who’s making people rethink everything they know about their feet.
0:00:54 And the shocking truth about their shoes.
0:00:58 One in three people will experience foot feet.
0:01:03 And it really starts to deter your physical health, your emotional health, your mental health.
0:01:04 Because you can’t do most things.
0:01:07 And I know this because I was a ballet dancer and then a triathlete.
0:01:11 I had all of the diagnoses, bunions, neuromas, heel pain.
0:01:15 And not being able to walk and not being able to move, you can go to some pretty dark places.
0:01:17 But when you look at the statistics,
0:01:22 5,000 steps a day can reduce the risk of having symptoms of depression.
0:01:26 And also reduce your risk of all-cause mortality by 15%.
0:01:27 Wow.
0:01:28 Here’s a bigger well.
0:01:31 9,800 steps can reduce the risks of dementia.
0:01:36 So it’s the most underutilized, easily accessible activity that most of us are not doing.
0:01:38 What about footwear choices?
0:01:42 Footwear has such a big implication on our function, for example.
0:01:46 Around 70% of children are wearing shoes that are too narrow.
0:01:49 I’ve got a range of footwear here that most people wear.
0:01:51 So what do you think of these shoes?
0:01:53 You shorten the muscles in the back of the leg.
0:01:55 What is the issue with wearing these?
0:01:57 So they change the structure of the foot.
0:01:59 What about this one here?
0:02:00 You’re going to make me start sweating.
0:02:02 So let’s talk about some good shoes then.
0:02:03 Okay.
0:02:05 So these are the things you want to look for in a functional shoe.
0:02:06 First.
0:02:08 Quick one.
0:02:10 Just give me 30 seconds of your time.
0:02:11 Two things I wanted to say.
0:02:16 The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.
0:02:17 It means the world to all of us.
0:02:19 And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had
0:02:22 and couldn’t have imagined getting to this place.
0:02:25 But secondly, it’s a dream where we feel like we’re only just getting started.
0:02:28 And if you enjoy what we do here,
0:02:31 please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly
0:02:34 and follow us on this app.
0:02:35 Here’s a promise I’m going to make to you.
0:02:39 I’m going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can
0:02:41 now and into the future.
0:02:43 We’re going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to
0:02:47 and we’re going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
0:02:48 Thank you.
0:02:53 What are we getting wrong?
0:02:55 And at what stage in our life do we get it wrong?
0:02:59 It feels like you have a little bit of beef with shoes.
0:03:01 A little bit.
0:03:01 A little bit of beef.
0:03:03 I’ve got a range of different shoes here.
0:03:07 But what is it that we’re being sold or told
0:03:11 that is fundamentally not aligned with what it is to be a healthy, strong, happy human?
0:03:15 I always say that if we started with our children
0:03:17 and put them in the right footwear, I’d be out of a job.
0:03:21 Because that’s when it starts.
0:03:24 That’s when the foot starts developing.
0:03:29 And that’s when we start to build strength and, you know, structure to the foot.
0:03:35 And from a very young age, we start interfering with what goes on the foot.
0:03:42 And when you think about all of the things that the foot can do, it’s why I’m obsessed with it.
0:03:47 I mean, there’s bones and ligaments and the foot should be designed – it’s designed to move.
0:03:50 The arch recoils.
0:03:53 So it should lengthen and then it should contract.
0:03:55 There’s four layers of muscles in here.
0:04:01 So when we look at the function of the foot, we have to respect that.
0:04:06 And I think footwear can deter the function of the foot.
0:04:11 So is the biggest risk – just to make sure I’m super clear – that I will fall when I’m older?
0:04:13 Is that the key risk?
0:04:21 I mean, I don’t – I think that is one of the sequela of what’s going to happen if we don’t start paying attention.
0:04:35 But when you look at function as a whole, things like walking, one in three people, and probably over the ages of 45, will experience foot pain.
0:04:36 Yeah.
0:04:44 So other than low back pain, there’s really no other diagnosis that you’ll see those types of numbers.
0:04:47 And here’s the issue with foot pain.
0:04:49 You can’t do much.
0:04:51 You can’t go for a walk.
0:04:54 You can’t go for a hike.
0:04:56 You can’t do most things.
0:04:58 You can’t walk to the mailbox when you have severe foot pain.
0:05:05 So it really starts to deter your physical health, your emotional health, your mental health.
0:05:13 So it’s one of those things I’m extremely passionate about because it’s not just about pain.
0:05:17 It’s about what happens when you can’t walk and you can’t use your foot.
0:05:22 And is the foot connected to the ankle, which is connected to the calf, which is connected to the back?
0:05:29 Is there sort of a whole body holistic issue here?
0:05:30 Is it all interconnected?
0:05:32 Yes, 100%.
0:05:39 Especially when I see, you know, patients that have bilateral symptoms at their feet.
0:05:40 So that would be both sides.
0:05:41 Okay.
0:05:50 So, for example, if I see someone with bilateral bunions, okay, which would be the bump on the inside of the big toe.
0:05:51 Yeah.
0:05:51 Okay.
0:05:57 You have to ask yourself, where is this abnormal load coming from?
0:05:59 Let me just check my bunions.
0:06:00 Yeah.
0:06:01 Check.
0:06:02 Check.
0:06:02 Yeah.
0:06:03 Right.
0:06:04 Where is it coming from?
0:06:08 Is it, you know, is it something that has to do with the pelvis?
0:06:09 Right?
0:06:15 Because when I’m standing, if I tilt my pelvis forward, I should feel my arches drop.
0:06:21 So there’s a direct correlation between what’s happening at your hips and your pelvis and what happens at your foot.
0:06:26 And when I were to tuck my pelvis, you should feel the arches lift.
0:06:31 So when we start to see things happen at the foot, it’s a window.
0:06:36 It’s a window to what’s going on, not only at the foot, but everywhere else in the kinetic chain.
0:06:41 When patients come to you, what kind of symptoms do they have that are connected to the foot?
0:06:44 Bunions, neuromas, hammer toes.
0:06:46 What’s a neuroma and a hammer?
0:06:52 So a neuroma is a nerve irritation in between the toes.
0:06:56 So the most common you will hear of is a Morton’s neuroma.
0:07:00 And that’s typically in between the third and fourth toes.
0:07:01 Okay.
0:07:02 And it can be very painful.
0:07:05 Remember we talked about when you go to push off when you’re walking.
0:07:06 Yeah.
0:07:11 The wider and the stronger the forefoot is, the more stable it is.
0:07:22 So if I have a foot that doesn’t have splay or that looks like this and you’re trying to push off of it, you can irritate the nerves within the forefoot.
0:07:23 Okay.
0:07:27 And you can develop these nerve symptoms at the forefoot.
0:07:27 Very painful.
0:07:35 What are the other types of sort of injuries or symptoms that people come to you with that you then route back to the feet?
0:07:36 Hammer toes.
0:07:38 Hammer toes, which is?
0:07:40 The clawing of the toes.
0:07:40 Oh, okay.
0:07:41 Yeah.
0:07:41 Right.
0:07:47 And this is what’s cool about the foot because it’s the only place in the body where you can see aberrant loads.
0:07:48 What does that mean?
0:07:50 Abnormal load, dysfunction.
0:07:53 Because you can’t see it at the knee.
0:07:59 You can’t see it at the hip unless you were to take imaging where you’d start to see structural change.
0:08:01 But you can see it at the foot.
0:08:05 So you should be asking yourself, man, why am I developing hammer toes?
0:08:08 And maybe I should pay attention to that.
0:08:17 Because bunions and hammer toes also will increase your risk of falling and also decrease balance.
0:08:18 That’s a problem.
0:08:25 I had plantar fasciitis, which meant that I struggled to walk for a couple of weeks a few years ago when I was training for a football match.
0:08:35 And that’s really what started me on my journey of understanding the foot and trying to understand how to strengthen it so that I could be more active.
0:08:42 Because if you’ve never experienced plantar fasciitis, which I’m sure some of my listeners have, it really is an awful, awful thing.
0:08:47 What’s the rest of the list of those kinds of injuries that people can get from having a weak foot?
0:08:49 Is there anything else that we haven’t covered?
0:08:52 Well, plantar fasciopathy is probably the most common.
0:08:53 That’s your heel pain.
0:08:53 Okay.
0:09:00 And I do think that that is a diagnosis that we need to look at a little bit differently.
0:09:05 Achilles tendinopathy, also very, very common.
0:09:11 Other tendon diagnoses, posterior tibialis tendon.
0:09:14 So that’s the tendon that runs along the inside of the foot.
0:09:18 And it’s one of the biggest stabilizers of the medial column of the foot.
0:09:19 It’s a powerhouse.
0:09:23 That in the soleus, which is your calf, lower the calf muscle.
0:09:25 Powerhouses of the lower leg.
0:09:30 And all of these tissues can be strengthened and produce power.
0:09:35 And we need to start looking at the foot just like we look at every other part of the body.
0:09:37 So what do you do for a living?
0:09:38 And who are you?
0:09:43 Well, I’m a chiropractor by nature.
0:09:46 I went to chiropractic school.
0:09:56 You know, I knew that I wanted to get into some type of medicine that was proactive, you know, not reactive.
0:10:00 I didn’t quite have interest in surgeries or pharmaceuticals.
0:10:03 Movement has always been a very big part of my life.
0:10:09 And so I knew I needed to stay in that arena.
0:10:11 So what did you do?
0:10:14 When I was younger, I was a dancer.
0:10:16 I was a ballet dancer.
0:10:20 And then I shifted gears into being a runner and then a triathlete.
0:10:28 And I didn’t know at the time why movement was a necessity for me.
0:10:36 You know, I certainly wasn’t thinking, oh, you know, I need to do this because of longevity or because I’m going to have a better VO2 max.
0:10:41 You know, and now in hindsight, when I think about it, it was a means of survival.
0:10:45 Movement was survival for me.
0:10:52 And in my teens and into my 20s, you know, I had some personal demons that I fought.
0:11:00 And the one thing that was consistent that I felt I could control was making sure that I stayed moving.
0:11:06 And the problem is, is when you have foot pain, you can’t do that.
0:11:14 And because movement was a lifeline for me, it was a mode of survival, there were days where, you know, I was a dancer.
0:11:19 I had all of the diagnoses we just talked about, bunions and aromas, heel pain.
0:11:26 And when you tag on day after day of not being able to walk and not being able to move, you can go to some pretty dark places.
0:11:40 And so I just, it was a mission of mine to figure this out and figure out how I can personally be able to continue to move, but then also be able to hopefully help other people.
0:11:42 It got tough for you, didn’t it?
0:11:43 I can see it in your face.
0:11:45 Yes.
0:11:52 Because for this to matter this much to you, then it’s personal to say the least.
0:12:02 It changed my life when you’re, you know, I think whenever we have a passion, there’s always this quest personally behind it.
0:12:07 And so I saw what it did for me.
0:12:17 And then over the past 20 years, being able to see what it has done for my patients is why I’m even more heart pressed to get this information out there.
0:12:18 Walking.
0:12:20 Yes.
0:12:23 We don’t do much of that these days.
0:12:34 It seems to have gone out of fashion with all the Ubers and the other ways to get around and all the sedentary behavior that we do living and working in offices.
0:12:39 What should we know about walking and how important it is?
0:12:41 Because I’ll be honest, I don’t walk that much.
0:12:42 Yes.
0:12:49 It’s, I always say it’s the most underrated, underutilized, easily accessible activity that most of us are not doing.
0:13:01 So if you think about, if you look at the research on average step count that most people globally are taking, it’s about 45 to 4,900.
0:13:03 Okay?
0:13:08 Which means that there’s a lot of us that are taking less than that.
0:13:13 So when I’m working with my patients, we always look at baseline numbers.
0:13:14 What’s your baseline?
0:13:23 So for example, if you had a person who was walking 2,500 steps a day, I mean, some of us would be like, wow, that’s not a lot.
0:13:26 But for a lot of us, it is.
0:13:39 If you were to walk an additional 500 steps in a day, your baseline’s 2,500, you can reduce your risk of cardiovascular mortality by 7%.
0:13:40 Wow.
0:13:42 Here’s a bigger wow.
0:13:52 If you have a 1,000-step increase, you can reduce your risk of all-cause mortality by 15%.
0:13:53 Dying of anything.
0:13:54 All-cause mortality.
0:13:59 15%, that’s a big number for 1,000 steps.
0:14:03 So I have a story for you.
0:14:10 This is a patient of mine, and it just, you know, warms my heart to talk about him.
0:14:17 Because when I saw him, he was two years into a diagnosis of heel pain, 27 years old.
0:14:30 So he had gone to see a bunch of people, and the last doctor that he had seen told him to limit his step count to 2,500 steps a day.
0:14:31 Why?
0:14:33 To rest.
0:14:34 To rest the foot.
0:14:37 Now, this is chronic pain now.
0:14:39 We’re not talking acute heel pain.
0:14:46 We are two years into this song and dance, and he’s being told at 27 years old to take 2,500 steps a day.
0:14:50 So he comes into my office.
0:14:53 We’re talking about all of this, and he’s also a quadruplet.
0:14:58 So it was one of the first quadruplets I think I’ve ever treated.
0:15:03 So he has, you know, which why I think pain is so difficult.
0:15:12 It’s so complicated because now you have this 27-year-old who’s seeing his siblings who are at 27, like, enjoy their life and doing all these things.
0:15:14 And he’s being told he can take 2,500 steps a day.
0:15:17 So he’s now living in his father’s basement.
0:15:24 And he’s afraid to go above 2,500 steps.
0:15:29 And he used to tell me, he’s like, I cry a lot.
0:15:31 I’m depressed.
0:15:33 And wouldn’t you be if…
0:15:42 So there wasn’t any magic exercise that I was going to give him two years into this.
0:15:45 There wasn’t any magic orthotic or magic shoe.
0:15:47 He had done all of that.
0:15:48 Shame on me if I would have done the same thing.
0:15:51 So we had a conversation.
0:15:59 And I knew I needed to get him outside and I needed to get him walking.
0:16:00 That was my goal.
0:16:01 Forget about the heel pain.
0:16:02 We didn’t even focus.
0:16:04 We didn’t even talk about the heel pain.
0:16:06 I knew I needed to get him outside and start loading his foot.
0:16:12 Two years, this foot, by the way, when you’re walking, four to six times your body weight.
0:16:14 It can handle four to six times your body weight when you’re walking.
0:16:19 But you don’t load it appropriately and muscles atrophy.
0:16:24 So I told him, we had a long, long conversation.
0:16:29 And I said, we’re going to slowly start to introduce steps.
0:16:40 And if you think about this, if we were to say, add a thousand steps a day, to some people that might not sound like a lot.
0:16:45 But to someone who’s taking 2,500 steps, that’s almost 50% of what they’re doing.
0:16:53 So we introduced the concept of a micro walk, which is a five-minute walk.
0:16:59 So a five-minute walk is about 500 steps.
0:17:00 Okay.
0:17:05 A 10-minute walk is about a thousand steps.
0:17:06 Okay.
0:17:07 Right?
0:17:10 So that makes it like a little more digestible, right?
0:17:12 So you’re talking to him, you’re like, listen, all I need is five minutes.
0:17:17 And so we started five-minute walks.
0:17:24 And for the first couple weeks, it was, you know, there were good days, there were bad days, and there still are.
0:17:27 But we were starting to build his confidence and movement.
0:17:31 We were starting to get him comfortable on his foot again.
0:17:42 And it was, you know, it was one of those cases where I just, like, I really enjoyed working with him and watching what had happened.
0:17:47 Because if you look at step counts, I knew what number I was trying to get to.
0:17:58 Because if you look at depression, for example, 5,000 steps a day can reduce the risk of having symptoms of depression.
0:18:08 If you get to 7,500 steps per day, it can reduce the prevalence of the diagnosis, of depression.
0:18:14 So that was, in the back of my head, I’m like, we just got to keep working towards these numbers.
0:18:18 So while we were doing that, we were strengthening his foot.
0:18:20 I had him in different footwear.
0:18:27 And at the end of each week, we were also talking about three good things.
0:18:29 Tell me three good things that happened to you this week.
0:18:33 And in the beginning of treatment, it was a struggle.
0:18:38 Stephen, it was a struggle for him to think about good things happening in his life.
0:18:45 And I spoke with him probably about a month ago.
0:18:49 And his email is, like, my why.
0:18:57 He was, like, on average, he’s walking between 5,000 and 6,000 steps a day.
0:19:03 He still has good days or still has bad days, more good days than bad days.
0:19:08 But he said to me, he’s like, I can’t tell you the last time I cried.
0:19:10 He’s going to church.
0:19:12 He’s spending time with his dad.
0:19:18 You know, and it’s not the step count.
0:19:20 It’s the person behind the step count.
0:19:23 And that’s why I think this stuff is so powerful.
0:19:25 I saw it change my life.
0:19:26 I saw what it does to my patients.
0:19:32 I mean, it has the capacity to improve not just your physical health,
0:19:34 but how you interact with the world.
0:19:40 It has a completely different meaning when you understand
0:19:42 the real sort of human consequences it can have on someone’s life,
0:19:43 for better or for worse.
0:19:50 And it’s not often until we have some kind of injury or issue
0:19:54 that we realize that our feet and ankles were there.
0:19:54 Yes.
0:19:56 And that’s certainly been the case in my life.
0:19:58 It wasn’t until I got plantar fasciitis that I was like,
0:19:59 oh, my God, I should have been doing something about this sooner.
0:20:01 And then, as I told you before we started recording,
0:20:03 I’ve currently got a high ankle sprain.
0:20:05 So I pulled some ligaments in the top of my ankle,
0:20:07 training for this game called Soccer Aid.
0:20:11 So I’m now going through the whole process once again of, like,
0:20:14 figuring out what I did wrong and what I should have been doing
0:20:17 as a preventative measure to try and strengthen my feet.
0:20:21 One of the things I think most of us get wrong is our footwear choices.
0:20:26 And I’ve got a range of footwear on this table in front of me here.
0:20:28 These are the types of shoes that most people wear.
0:20:32 From a very young age, I think we all wear shoes like this.
0:20:34 Yes.
0:20:38 Sort of narrow shoes with a big heel, if anyone can’t see our conversation at the moment.
0:20:45 So like the typical trainer, what is the issue with wearing these from an early age?
0:20:51 When I was doing research to have this discussion with you,
0:20:55 it was fascinating to me when you look at the statistics of,
0:20:58 especially with children, with girls,
0:21:03 around 70% are wearing shoes that are too narrow.
0:21:04 Too narrow, the end part.
0:21:05 Yes.
0:21:05 Yeah.
0:21:08 Remember we talked about the widest part of the foot should be the toes.
0:21:09 Mm-hmm.
0:21:11 So when you look at a shoe like that,
0:21:13 that is not the widest part.
0:21:15 It’s tapered.
0:21:17 See how the toe box looks like it’s tapered?
0:21:18 Yeah.
0:21:18 It’s pointed.
0:21:19 Correct.
0:21:19 Yeah.
0:21:23 So when you put your foot in there, it’s doing this.
0:21:25 Mm-hmm.
0:21:27 It changes the structure of the foot.
0:21:29 It’s like the lowest hanging fruit for me,
0:21:33 is just wear a shoe that fits your foot.
0:21:39 because when it’s in that position, it changes the structure.
0:21:45 If I walked around with my arm in a sling for 10 years,
0:21:46 would my bicep get weak?
0:21:47 Yeah.
0:21:49 You’d lose your mobility as well.
0:21:49 Correct.
0:21:51 If you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it.
0:21:58 And so that’s why I think footwear has such a big implication on our function.
0:22:01 Men’s dress shoes.
0:22:02 Men’s dress shoes.
0:22:02 Yeah.
0:22:04 I mean, that is crazy.
0:22:06 The point on that.
0:22:06 Yes.
0:22:07 It’s funny.
0:22:11 My brother lives in New York City, and we have this conversation all the time.
0:22:13 And he’s like, look at this one.
0:22:13 It’s wide.
0:22:15 I’m like, nope, that’s not wide.
0:22:16 Okay.
0:22:18 And they’re stiff.
0:22:21 And they’re, you know, again, changing the structure of the foot.
0:22:25 A lot of those shoes also have a little bit of a heel-to-toe drop.
0:22:26 Yeah.
0:22:27 Yes.
0:22:28 Yeah.
0:22:32 So that is when the heel-to-toe drops, so the heel and the toes sit in one plane.
0:22:37 But when you have a higher heel-to-toe drop, it’s like you have a mini high heel on.
0:22:37 Yeah.
0:22:40 And what’s the problem with that?
0:22:49 Well, if my foot is supposed to sit flat, I have tissues in the back of my leg that are
0:22:51 in a good length-tension relationship.
0:22:55 I have even pressures across my foot.
0:22:56 Yeah.
0:23:02 The second I go and change those things, where I go into a heel, you put additional pressure
0:23:03 on the front of the foot.
0:23:06 You shorten the muscles in the back of the leg.
0:23:12 So you start changing the function and the structure of not only the foot, but everything
0:23:13 that sits above it.
0:23:17 Your calf, your hamstring, your back.
0:23:22 Do you see a lot of back injuries that are relating to things like heels?
0:23:22 Yes.
0:23:23 You do?
0:23:30 It’s all, you know, I see mostly people come in for foot pain.
0:23:34 And I always say to my patients, I wish it was just about the foot.
0:23:38 I wish I could just look at your foot and say, this is what it is.
0:23:40 It’s all right here.
0:23:41 But it’s not.
0:23:44 Because there’s a body that sits on top of the foot.
0:23:50 The strength of the hip, for example, controls the foot.
0:23:52 It controls how the foot unlocks.
0:23:57 So you have to take that into account when you’re looking at patients with foot pain.
0:24:02 But this, this is the shape because it’s fashionable, right?
0:24:02 Yes.
0:24:07 It’s my biggest, you know, I always tell, my daughter, because my daughter, you know, she’s
0:24:08 like, you make me wear these platypus shoes.
0:24:13 And I’m like, listen, it’s function over fashion.
0:24:14 But I get it.
0:24:20 That is my biggest challenge, is making, you know, is looking for shoes.
0:24:21 But they’ve come a long way.
0:24:23 They’ve come a very, very long way.
0:24:25 And I think that we’re getting there.
0:24:31 Is there an issue with the thickness of the heel on these shoes?
0:24:34 This big, when I say the thickness of the heel, I really mean the thickness of the sole.
0:24:36 So the cushion and the…
0:24:37 The cushion.
0:24:40 It’s, I mean, it’s really, really soft, soft and cushiony.
0:24:44 And there’s about, you know, an inch at the back here of sole.
0:24:45 Yeah.
0:24:49 The cushion conversation is always very interesting.
0:24:53 There’s always a trade-off.
0:24:58 So there’s a lot of popular shoes right now that have a lot of cushion on them.
0:24:59 Yeah.
0:25:06 And it’s hard to argue when someone goes into a store and they’re given this shoe that has
0:25:11 this pillow on it and they’re standing on it for three seconds and they’re like, man, this
0:25:11 feels really good.
0:25:23 The problem with cushion is that the more stuff that’s between your foot and the ground,
0:25:25 the less you feel.
0:25:28 So there’s a loss of sensory acuity.
0:25:30 There’s a loss of sensory perception.
0:25:32 Remember the foot is…
0:25:33 Imagine the foot’s a sensory organ.
0:25:34 And it is.
0:25:40 Because there’s thousands of receptors that are, you know, screaming for information to
0:25:42 help keep us upright in a biped.
0:25:48 So when we start interfering with how that foot feels, you can expect there to be problems.
0:25:55 Now, if you have someone that’s standing in place all day long, right, on concrete, on
0:25:57 man-made surfaces, there’s a time and a place.
0:26:04 But my non-negotiable is at least keep the foot in its functional position, which means a
0:26:04 wide toe box.
0:26:09 So you want to stand on concrete all day long, fine.
0:26:12 Put some cushion underneath your foot.
0:26:13 Help yourself out.
0:26:14 That’s okay.
0:26:20 But at least allow those toes to splay so that you can have balance.
0:26:24 You can have your foot in a position that can propel you forward.
0:26:27 I was just thinking about my foot as you’re talking.
0:26:29 And I’m pretty sure, like, my…
0:26:33 I’m pretty sure, like, my pinky toe looks…
0:26:37 I’m not going to be able to sell pictures on OnlyFans of my feet.
0:26:40 Because my pinky toe is kind of, like, crumpled in.
0:26:41 It, like, curls under, right?
0:26:41 Yeah, it’s, like, curled under.
0:26:42 Right.
0:26:43 Kind of looks like a shoe.
0:26:44 Like, you had a shoe there, like…
0:26:45 Excuse me.
0:26:46 No, but you’re right.
0:26:47 It is.
0:26:48 It is like that.
0:26:52 It’s kind of, like, been pushed in and underneath.
0:26:54 And I guess that’s not natural.
0:26:55 No, it is not.
0:26:58 How does a natural foot look?
0:27:01 Like, have you been to see a tribe who don’t wear these cushioned shoes?
0:27:06 Have you seen what, like, an uncushioned foot looks like?
0:27:07 I’m obsessed.
0:27:09 I watch people’s feet all the time.
0:27:12 I was just in Belize with my mother and daughter for spring break.
0:27:13 Slightly creepy.
0:27:14 Sorry.
0:27:15 It is, isn’t it?
0:27:19 And you’re looking at people’s feet on holiday.
0:27:21 I’m always looking at people’s feet.
0:27:23 Because it tells a story.
0:27:24 It’s like someone’s gait.
0:27:26 You know, watching someone walk tells a story.
0:27:29 You can tell if they just got fired or if they just got promoted, you know?
0:27:34 But when you look at someone’s foot, I was in Belize and with my mom and daughter.
0:27:41 And there were these two guys building a house, you know, a little bit off the beach, barefoot.
0:27:44 And I’m looking at their foot and I’m going, wow.
0:27:46 It was wide.
0:27:48 It looked thick.
0:27:49 It looked flat.
0:27:50 It looked flat.
0:28:00 And, you know, I think in our society, if you will, when we think of a flat foot, we think, oh, this is bad news.
0:28:01 We better go get an orthotic.
0:28:03 An orthotic is a?
0:28:08 A device that you put underneath the foot to help modify loads.
0:28:10 What do they call those in the UK?
0:28:12 Insoles.
0:28:13 Like an insole.
0:28:13 Okay.
0:28:14 Yes.
0:28:23 And so I’m watching these guys build this house and they’re like coming up on their toes and they have all this, you know, toe range of motion and all this strength and power to their foot.
0:28:30 And I’m like, that’s what our foot was designed to do is to be strong, to support.
0:28:31 It’s like building a house on sand.
0:28:32 Yeah.
0:28:35 You have to have a foundation that you can build upon.
0:28:38 And it was really cool to see.
0:28:39 It really was.
0:28:47 When I had that pain in my foot, which they told me was plantar fasciitis, they recommended that I go to some foot doctor person.
0:28:50 And this foot doctor person measured me up for incels.
0:28:51 Yes.
0:28:56 And I put the incels in and then I took the incels out.
0:28:59 And instead of that, I just wore different shoes.
0:28:59 Yeah.
0:29:07 So a lot of people’s first sort of diagnosis and the thing that they’re told to do whenever they have foot pain or back pain or whatever is go get some incels.
0:29:10 Is this what you think we should be doing?
0:29:13 Because it’s really, really common.
0:29:17 It’s like it seems to be the like in medicine, they throw pills at you.
0:29:22 If you have certain symptoms, it seems to be the first thing that we do when someone has a foot problem or an ankle problem.
0:29:28 First line of intervention is that’s why you want to change how we’re viewing the foot.
0:29:31 It’s either if your foot hurts, here’s an orthosis.
0:29:34 Which is a foot orthotic, an insert.
0:29:34 Yeah.
0:29:37 Or if it hurts worse, get surgery.
0:29:53 If you look at the research on plantar fasciitis, okay, so itis being acute, it will tell you that putting an orthosis or something to modify the load underneath the foot can be beneficial.
0:29:55 Initially.
0:29:59 Because you want to offload something that hurts.
0:29:59 Yeah.
0:30:02 But if you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it.
0:30:09 So what they’re not – the part of the conversation that’s being missed is the and conversation.
0:30:15 It’s wear this insert and strengthen your foot.
0:30:25 Because the goal should be to have an exit strategy for the insert and get your foot back on the ground.
0:30:34 Because I have patients – Stephen, they will come in with 20 pairs of orthotics, 20 pairs of inserts.
0:30:35 They’ve tried this one.
0:30:36 They’ve tried that one.
0:30:39 They’ve tried different shoes, higher heel-to-toe drops, more cushion.
0:30:42 And I’m sitting there going, we’re missing the boat here.
0:30:45 So let’s have the and conversation.
0:30:54 One of the muscles that is a good predictor of having heel pain, okay, is it runs parallel to the plantar fascia.
0:30:56 So it’s flexor digitorum brevis.
0:31:00 It basically takes the four toes and presses them down.
0:31:03 There’s ways you can assess for this.
0:31:13 So we’ll look at their toe strength, and it almost always correlates with the side that has the heel pain on,
0:31:17 because it shouldn’t be one of those conversations where you’re like, man, I wonder where this came from.
0:31:18 No, your foot is weak.
0:31:20 Your foot is weak.
0:31:22 There’s a lot of load going through it.
0:31:27 And the structures are, you know, getting beat up.
0:31:30 There’s something Daniel Lieberman said to me, which I’ve never forgotten.
0:31:37 He said if you took a child and you put them in two-inch-thick gloves from the day that they were born,
0:31:43 and then you took those gloves off at 30 years old, can you imagine how deformed their hands would be?
0:31:46 And that’s, like, very much the way that we live our lives.
0:31:51 We spend pretty much all day wearing these big cushioned shoes that sometimes have these heels on.
0:31:56 So it’s no wonder that so many people are getting foot problems, ankle problems, back pain.
0:31:56 Yeah.
0:31:57 One in three people.
0:31:58 One in three people.
0:31:59 Foot pain.
0:32:06 I mean, it really is a statistic that we need to be paying attention to.
0:32:11 We use this word plantar fasciitis, but we didn’t explain what it is and what the symptoms of it are.
0:32:15 Is it essentially pain in the heel of your foot?
0:32:16 Pain in the heel, yes.
0:32:23 And they’ve played around with, you know, the terminology, being it plantar fasciitis,
0:32:26 so more of an acute issue, versus plantar fasciopathy.
0:32:32 Because oftentimes these cases will turn into, you know, having heel pain for very long periods of time.
0:32:33 Yeah.
0:32:34 So then you have to treat it differently.
0:32:38 You don’t treat something that’s acute the same as you would treat something that’s chronic.
0:32:44 And so you have to look at, how can I build the resiliency to the foot?
0:32:45 How did it happen?
0:32:49 How did all of this happen?
0:32:51 How did plantar fasciitis happen?
0:32:52 Like, how did I get it?
0:32:54 So I’ll tell you what I was doing.
0:32:56 I was living my life as normal.
0:32:56 Yeah.
0:32:59 And then I started training to play for this soccer game.
0:33:03 And I started training several, maybe twice a week.
0:33:11 And then maybe by week four or five or six, I get this horrific, ongoing pain,
0:33:16 which lasted throughout the entire day, where I couldn’t walk easily.
0:33:18 It was especially bad in the mornings.
0:33:22 And, yeah, I thought I’d, like, broken something or ripped something in my foot.
0:33:27 And when they told me that it was plantar fasciitis, I’d never heard that term before.
0:33:29 But understanding what I did there, how did I get it?
0:33:35 When I see, I hear very similar stories with that diagnosis.
0:33:42 There always seems to be some impetus of, I added load too fast too soon.
0:33:44 I went on a longer hike.
0:33:50 I, this was one of my favorites, I went barefoot during COVID around my house.
0:33:54 And everybody wanted to blame the fact that, you know, don’t ever go barefoot.
0:33:59 And I was like, maybe it’s just because your foot was weak and you weren’t ready to handle these loads.
0:34:04 You add loads too fast too soon.
0:34:07 And the foot just says, you know what?
0:34:11 You weren’t ready to give me this amount of load this quickly.
0:34:12 Okay.
0:34:14 And that’s, you know, when you asked me earlier about
0:34:20 why do we need to pay attention to our foot strength?
0:34:23 Is it just because, you know, we’re going to, we want to prevent falls when we’re 70.
0:34:25 This is the why.
0:34:29 Because we want to have healthy feet, strong feet.
0:34:34 So you can say, hey, I want to go play a soccer game and I don’t want to worry about having plantar fasciitis in my 30s.
0:34:42 Or, I mean, now with this ankle sprain that I have, pulling my ligaments, which takes you out of activity for so long, which is horrific.
0:34:52 That’s like a big part of this, which is if you get an injury, if you get a bad injury, if you get like an Achilles tendon issue or you tear a ligament like I have, or even plantar fasciitis.
0:34:58 The inactivity that stems from that causes a bunch of downstream issues.
0:35:00 So my muscles are going to atrophy.
0:35:03 I’m going to lose muscle over this next couple of weeks in my lower half.
0:35:07 I’m going to get probably a little bit lopsided because the injury is on my right side.
0:35:10 So now my left side’s having more of the burden.
0:35:17 My lower legs, my upper legs, my lower back is probably susceptible now to some kind of injury as well.
0:35:25 And it feels like, you know, this downward spiral of injury just because I didn’t strengthen my foot.
0:35:27 What do you think of these shoes?
0:35:30 These are women’s heels, but listen, anyone can wear them.
0:35:31 It’s 2025.
0:35:33 What do you think of these shoes?
0:35:37 Well, it doesn’t look like a foot.
0:35:41 Your foot in that position is not the position it is supposed to be in.
0:35:44 Now, with that being said, there is a time and a place.
0:35:53 You know, I don’t think I’m going to win the battle of, you know, you need to wear, you know, functional footwear 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
0:35:55 Time in those shoes should be limited.
0:36:04 Just like with, you know, other things, it’s moderation.
0:36:09 Do you see a lot of women getting injuries because they spend too long wearing heels?
0:36:17 I don’t know if acute injury, but a weakening of tissue, yes.
0:36:22 Because, you know, I live in Colorado now, so I don’t have that.
0:36:25 There’s not too many women in Colorado that are wearing heels.
0:36:29 However, when I go to New York City, it’s a different conversation, different environment.
0:36:36 So, you know, I have to say, I have to use the, that is not the position that you want to keep your foot in.
0:36:41 It’s changing the structure of your tissues, changing the pressures in the foot.
0:36:47 Not to mention, those aren’t, I don’t care what anybody says, that’s not comfortable to walk around in.
0:36:49 People will be like, oh, I’m really comfortable in heels.
0:36:50 I’m like, are you really though?
0:36:53 The lengths we go to to look good, they’re right.
0:36:54 That’s right.
0:36:57 Okay, so let’s talk about some good shoes then.
0:36:57 Okay.
0:36:59 I’ve got two pairs of shoes here.
0:36:59 Okay.
0:37:03 One of them is Vivo Barefoot.
0:37:03 Yes.
0:37:05 Who are actually a sponsor of mine.
0:37:08 Ever since I started talking about feet.
0:37:10 And then, I don’t know this brand.
0:37:11 What is this brand?
0:37:12 That is ultra running.
0:37:18 So, let’s talk about the things you want to look for in a functional shoe.
0:37:21 My non-negotiable is the wide toe box.
0:37:24 The toes have to be able to splay.
0:37:29 When you think of all the diagnoses that we talked about, bunions, neuromas, hammer toes,
0:37:34 when the forefoot can splay, the foot’s going to function better.
0:37:36 So, that’s number one.
0:37:40 Number two is having the heel and the toe in the same plane.
0:37:47 And number three is having a shoe that is thin and flexible.
0:37:54 When you wear this type of footwear, I call this a workhorse shoe.
0:38:04 Because there is more loads going through all of your tissues, through your bones, through your ligaments, through your tendons, through your muscles.
0:38:09 So, your foot gets stronger when you wear this type of footwear.
0:38:10 There’s research on that.
0:38:14 Now, you have to earn your right.
0:38:19 This is the plantar fasciopathy conversation.
0:38:25 You can’t go from wearing an aggressive, high-cushioned shoe.
0:38:26 Like this one here?
0:38:28 Yes.
0:38:31 With an insert, for example, and say, oh, this stuff makes sense.
0:38:35 I’m going to go take that off and I’m going to go wear this 24 hours a day.
0:38:36 You won’t like me.
0:38:37 Why?
0:38:39 Because you’ll say, hey, my heel’s hurting.
0:38:41 Because you haven’t done the work.
0:38:44 It’s, hey, let’s do these foot exercises.
0:38:46 Let’s wear this for 10 minutes a day.
0:38:49 And then people are like, wow, that does feel better.
0:38:54 And then it’s a transition into wearing this more often.
0:39:04 Now, when you have patients that have had a very weak foot or clients that have had a very weak foot with different diagnoses,
0:39:10 this is a hard, you know, shoe to walk around in for extended periods of time.
0:39:18 So, that’s when we’ll talk about footwear that still puts the foot in a wide position, wide toe box.
0:39:19 I love this shoe.
0:39:26 And I also like the mesh upper because you can, the toes can expand in here.
0:39:32 I still have zero drop, right, where the heel and the toe sit in the same plane.
0:39:38 But you’ll notice the difference between the two shoes is the amount of stack height or the amount of cushion.
0:39:40 There’s more stuff.
0:39:41 Yeah.
0:39:49 So, on this shoe, it does look like the, you call it a plane, looks level.
0:39:49 Yes.
0:39:50 Okay.
0:39:52 And it’s got a good toe box.
0:39:52 Yes.
0:39:56 You can see from this side that the toe box is wide so you can splay.
0:39:57 But it is elevated.
0:40:00 It’s elevated off the ground.
0:40:00 Yeah.
0:40:02 But the heel and toe are in the same plane.
0:40:03 Okay, fine.
0:40:05 But it’s still elevated though.
0:40:06 Yes.
0:40:06 They’re still like quite a thick.
0:40:07 Yes.
0:40:10 That’s not too much of a problem because it’s still flat.
0:40:11 It depends on what your goals are.
0:40:12 If I’m running.
0:40:17 That is, I think, a great shoe to run on, to run with, right?
0:40:22 If you’re running on concrete, if you’re running on asphalt, you want a little something underneath the foot.
0:40:31 What about the Nike Alpha Flies, which is my…
0:40:32 You’re going to make me start sweating.
0:40:32 Really?
0:40:33 Oh.
0:40:37 This is my current running shoe and I bought it because it looks great.
0:40:37 Yes.
0:40:40 I mean, you know, it’s…
0:40:45 I have torn the ligaments in my ankle, but I look good.
0:40:47 Here’s the super shoe, right?
0:40:48 So here’s this shoe, right?
0:40:50 And here’s your super shoe over here.
0:40:50 Yeah.
0:40:51 Okay?
0:40:58 When you look at that shoe, there’s certain characteristics to that shoe that you definitely do not see in this shoe.
0:41:00 One of them being the toe spring.
0:41:03 So see how it kind of lips on the front of the shoe?
0:41:04 Yeah.
0:41:04 Okay?
0:41:05 This part here, yeah.
0:41:05 Yes.
0:41:11 So if I had that shoe on this table and I went like this to the front of the shoe, it would literally rocker for me.
0:41:14 So it facilitates the rocker of the foot.
0:41:16 Sounds great.
0:41:17 You put that on, you’re like, man, this is great.
0:41:18 I can fly.
0:41:21 If you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it.
0:41:29 So there is research that shows when you put your foot in a position with toe spring, you will weaken the intrinsic muscles of the foot.
0:41:37 So I’m not saying don’t have race day and wear that shoe, right?
0:41:40 The research will tell you 2% to 4% running economy.
0:41:44 People run faster because the shoe has the technology to facilitate gait.
0:41:55 But if you train in that all the time and you never let your foot get stronger, it’s just a matter of time.
0:41:58 You’re going to say, my hamstring, my foot, my this, my that.
0:42:05 And it’s like, that’s why the conversation has to happen is this is the shoe that you’re going to get stronger in.
0:42:08 Spend time in your training shoe.
0:42:10 And then that’s your speed day.
0:42:11 That’s your race day.
0:42:16 So it’s having the shoe spectrum, knowing when to dance along the spectrum.
0:42:19 I feel like I can bounce in these.
0:42:22 I mean, you probably can.
0:42:24 I literally, when I put it on, I was like, wow, I can bounce.
0:42:25 That’s right.
0:42:28 I think it has like a piece of metal going through the middle of it.
0:42:29 Yeah, there’s carbon in there.
0:42:32 You know what another fun fact is, though?
0:42:34 Certain plyometrics.
0:42:36 So plyometric is training the spring of the body.
0:42:38 So think like jumping.
0:42:47 There’s research that will show you that plyometrics also increase capacity in running by 2% to 4%.
0:42:52 So my conversation I have with my patients is, listen, what if we stacked therapies, right?
0:42:55 What if you did plyometric work?
0:42:56 Which is?
0:42:57 Jumping.
0:42:57 Yeah.
0:42:58 You know, once or twice a week.
0:43:01 And we worked on your strength.
0:43:05 And I had you in these shoes the majority of the time.
0:43:09 And then on race day, you want to throw that shoe on?
0:43:11 It’s like you’re running.
0:43:13 You’re like a running fairy.
0:43:15 You’re like running and things look beautiful.
0:43:19 And everything is, you know, because you have a strong body on top of the shoe.
0:43:26 But if you put a weak body and a weak foot in that shoe, you got to earn your right.
0:43:29 Should we be standing more often?
0:43:32 Because most of us work and live in offices now.
0:43:33 And we sit at desks.
0:43:35 And I, you know, I do this podcast, sat down.
0:43:40 Do you think much about standing desks or how often we should spend bipedal?
0:43:42 Or I think that’s what you referred to as.
0:43:45 I think that it’s more about movement.
0:43:49 I don’t know if standing in one place is any better than sitting in one place.
0:43:56 Other than when you’re standing, you can actually, like, you know, move around and, you know, make it more active standing.
0:44:00 But it is a matter of taking movement breaks.
0:44:03 Like that’s, I call them, you know, movement snacks.
0:44:09 All of us spend a lot of time either sitting all day long or, you know, standing at our desks.
0:44:18 If we were to take micro walks, a five-minute walk, a couple times a day, the system stays moving.
0:44:19 You’re staying active.
0:44:26 And you’re slowly, you know, inching up that step count that we know is so important for not only physical health but emotional and mental health.
0:44:28 That’s what I like about it.
0:44:34 I think you mentioned there was an association with movement, walking, and dementia.
0:44:35 Yes.
0:44:36 Alzheimer’s risk.
0:44:38 What does the science say there?
0:44:51 You know, when you look at step counts, if that was going to be our baseline, 9,800 steps per day can reduce the risks of dementia.
0:45:00 But what I think is the cool part with that is 3,800 steps, you get 50% of the maximal benefit.
0:45:16 So if you were to, let’s just call it 4,000, shoot for 4,000 steps, you’re going to get a benefit, a 50% benefit.
0:45:25 And some of my favorite research on looking at that population with walking is relationship walking.
0:45:36 There’s really cool studies looking at walking in groups for the elderly population and how that has a social connection.
0:45:38 And it improves their emotional health.
0:45:42 And it combats loneliness and feelings of isolation.
0:45:45 And that is the beauty of a walk.
0:45:49 Run clubs are getting incredibly popular at the moment, aren’t they, all around the world?
0:45:52 Are you seeing more and more people come to you as a result of that?
0:45:52 Yes.
0:45:55 I think also, you know, it was interesting.
0:45:58 I was working at the running event in Austin, Texas.
0:46:00 And I was teaching there.
0:46:03 And so a lot of the shoe stores were there.
0:46:13 And one of the bigger shoe stores had said that the majority of their clients now are actually walkers and not runners.
0:46:16 And I thought that was pretty interesting.
0:46:19 And I’m thinking to myself, I wonder why that is.
0:46:24 Like, are more people reverting to walking because they’re getting injured when they’re running?
0:46:29 Are they, you know, I’m making all these conclusions in my head.
0:46:33 I’m like, well, is it because we’re going in the wrong direction with footwear?
0:46:37 Because we’re creating this shoe that is basically doing the work for us.
0:46:38 And it feels so good.
0:46:41 And, you know, people aren’t putting the work in anymore.
0:46:43 I don’t know.
0:46:46 But I’m certainly going to do my best to change that.
0:46:52 You brought me a box, which I have here in front of me.
0:46:55 Foot health kit.
0:46:55 Yes.
0:46:56 That’s what it says on the front of the box.
0:46:58 A foot health kit.
0:47:01 I mean, what is in this box?
0:47:04 It’s like my little, like, bag of treats.
0:47:06 You know, when I started doing this, it was funny.
0:47:09 This is what you give people is a bag of treats.
0:47:09 That’s right.
0:47:11 For their birthdays and stuff.
0:47:15 I want people to start thinking about their feet.
0:47:22 Because I think there’s such implications for their health.
0:47:25 And I wanted to make it easy.
0:47:31 Because when we think about all the things we need to do to stay healthy, it’s like, I have to strength train.
0:47:32 I have to, you know, eat this.
0:47:33 I need to VO2 max.
0:47:35 I need my cardiorespiratory fitness.
0:47:35 There’s a lot.
0:47:39 So, I wanted to make it easy.
0:47:46 So, I, um, first, what, one of the things that is in there are toe strengtheners.
0:47:47 So, I’ll pull them out of the box.
0:47:51 So, those are toe spacers.
0:47:52 Toe spacers?
0:47:53 Yes.
0:47:55 So, is this all the same thing, right?
0:47:55 Yes.
0:47:57 So, these are toe spacers.
0:47:57 Correct.
0:48:00 And then, there’s this.
0:48:01 Yes.
0:48:01 What’s this?
0:48:03 Those are toe strengtheners.
0:48:04 Toe strengtheners.
0:48:04 Okay.
0:48:05 So, that’s my toe workout.
0:48:06 Yes.
0:48:07 There is this thing.
0:48:08 A band.
0:48:11 And then, there’s this ball.
0:48:12 Yes.
0:48:14 So, this is like, this is my foot gym.
0:48:15 That’s right.
0:48:17 Can you show me how this stuff works?
0:48:18 Absolutely.
0:48:19 Okay.
0:48:20 So, these are my feet.
0:48:23 And these are my ankles.
0:48:27 So, I had plantar fasciitis in, I believe it was this foot, actually.
0:48:32 And then, right now, I’ve got a high ankle sprain, which is some kind of ligament here has been torn.
0:48:34 And they told me that it’s torn on all three sides.
0:48:40 So, I’ve been in a boot for the last couple of weeks, but I’ve taken it off over the last week or two.
0:48:42 And I was on crutches as well.
0:48:47 What are you, the minute I took my socks off, you became fixated on my feet?
0:48:48 Yes.
0:48:50 What do I need to be thinking about?
0:48:52 And what can you see just by looking at my feet?
0:48:57 You know, when you’re looking at this foot here, you can start to see this little bump here.
0:49:03 You can start to see bumps on the top of the big toe.
0:49:04 Okay.
0:49:08 And the diagnosis is a hallux limitus or a hallux rigidus.
0:49:15 And basically, what that means is that you have formed arthritis on the top of the toe.
0:49:21 So, it prevents you from getting that full range of motion that we need when we walk and run.
0:49:22 Okay.
0:49:23 Okay.
0:49:30 If the bump goes out to the side, that’s what we call hallux valgus.
0:49:31 That’s the bunion.
0:49:32 The bunion.
0:49:32 Okay.
0:49:33 Okay.
0:49:44 So, that’s why the foot is a window to mechanics because you can see loads, aberrant loads, right?
0:49:45 Why is this forming here?
0:49:49 So, you know, one of the first things I’ll want to look at is how much range of motion.
0:49:51 The big toe, it’s all about the big toe.
0:49:57 When we’re walking, we put a lot of loads and force that go through the big toe when we walk.
0:50:05 You should have about 40 to 45 degrees to walk out of that big toe.
0:50:06 So, here’s Eddie.
0:50:10 Here’s 45 degrees.
0:50:11 Up.
0:50:11 Up.
0:50:12 Okay.
0:50:14 So, yes.
0:50:16 So, what I’ll want to see is how much range of motion.
0:50:18 Can you see how he’s off the ground, though?
0:50:22 I want the ball of the big toe on the ground.
0:50:24 That’s a good amount of range.
0:50:26 That’s the first nice thing you’ve said about my feet.
0:50:29 We’re just getting started.
0:50:30 I’ll find something else.
0:50:33 And then you want to look at toe dexterity.
0:50:37 So, in other words, can you isolate your toes?
0:50:40 So, can you lift just your big toe on the right?
0:50:41 Good.
0:50:44 And then on the left.
0:50:46 That’s actually quite hard.
0:50:48 Like, I’ve never had to do that before.
0:50:52 It’s funny because when you’ll see people that have poor awareness to their feet,
0:50:56 when they try to lift their toes, you’ll see them, like, their hands.
0:50:59 I’m like, your back isn’t going to extend your toe.
0:51:00 Okay?
0:51:03 And then put your big toe down and then extend your four toes.
0:51:05 Yes.
0:51:07 No, that pinky is not.
0:51:08 That’s not listening.
0:51:10 There you go.
0:51:11 In here.
0:51:13 Okay.
0:51:19 And then what I want you to do is you’re going to lift up all of your toes and spread them.
0:51:25 And you can see, two, three, and four, right?
0:51:26 They don’t want to spread as much.
0:51:29 Earlier, we talked about those neuromas.
0:51:32 The neuromas live within the toes here, right?
0:51:34 Right in between the toes.
0:51:41 So, if we have issues with nerve problems here, you’ve got to be able to splay.
0:51:46 So, you wear Vivos.
0:51:54 You know, when you allow your foot to be in a shoe where the feet can actually splay, you’ll start to see changes.
0:52:01 But imagine if you, you know, we’re in a shoe where your foot, I mean, I had a, I was at an expo working a couple weeks ago.
0:52:04 And this woman came up to me and she’s like, man, I can’t figure out why my foot hurts.
0:52:10 And I took her shoe off and I’m telling you, her foot looked like this.
0:52:12 It looked like a shoe.
0:52:17 And I took a picture and I showed it to her and I was like, did your foot look like a foot or does it look like a shoe?
0:52:20 We don’t really know the difference these days.
0:52:20 No.
0:52:24 Because remember, the widest part of the foot should be the toes.
0:52:30 So, that’s what we want to look for in the front of the foot.
0:52:32 We also talked about that muscle.
0:52:34 What side did you have the heel pain on?
0:52:38 I believe it was the right side.
0:52:42 So, one of the things we’ll do, and you can actually do this at home.
0:52:44 You could use like a credit card.
0:52:48 So, in my office, we can actually measure that.
0:52:51 But if you were to do it at home, you just take a card and put it underneath the toe.
0:52:53 Okay.
0:52:54 And make sure you’re lined up here.
0:52:55 Yep.
0:52:57 And some people will also do that.
0:52:59 See how you’re like holding your leg.
0:53:00 Just the toe.
0:53:04 And then I’ll try to pull the card out from under you.
0:53:07 And I shouldn’t be able to do that.
0:53:08 I should feel some tension.
0:53:12 And then I’ll ask the patient, where do you feel this?
0:53:13 What’s working?
0:53:18 And if they say, my hip, my quad.
0:53:19 It’s the wrong guy.
0:53:21 We’re talking about the foot.
0:53:23 So, you should feel that in the arch of the foot.
0:53:26 It may be into the calf.
0:53:26 Mm-hmm.
0:53:28 Okay.
0:53:28 Big toe.
0:53:30 Flexor halicis longus.
0:53:34 This guy, by the way, this muscle, starts over here.
0:53:42 It’s very important to strengthen this muscle when you have a history of ankle sprains.
0:53:45 Starts on the fibula, which is the outside of the leg.
0:53:49 It comes down the foot, crosses under, and inserts into the big toe.
0:53:53 Then I’m going to take the card, and I’m going to put it underneath the four toes.
0:53:57 The muscle that we’re looking for, yes, that’s beautiful.
0:53:59 See how you got that little…
0:54:01 See, that’s the second compliment I gave you about Shri.
0:54:06 I’m going to put this underneath your toes.
0:54:07 Yeah.
0:54:09 Right?
0:54:10 A little…
0:54:11 Yep.
0:54:14 And then don’t let me pull the card out.
0:54:17 And you should feel that in the arch of your foot.
0:54:20 Patients that have…
0:54:21 I’m not really feeling it, to be honest.
0:54:23 I’m not feeling it in the arch of your foot.
0:54:23 Okay.
0:54:23 Oh, what?
0:54:24 Okay.
0:54:25 There you go.
0:54:27 Roll the bottom of the foot.
0:54:27 Like this?
0:54:28 Yes.
0:54:29 Just wake it up a little bit.
0:54:32 There’s a bunch of receptors on the bottoms of the foot.
0:54:35 So when we can’t feel things, then it shouldn’t surprise us.
0:54:40 You know, if we’ve been walking around in footwear that compromises the function of the foot,
0:54:44 or we’ve had injuries, you start to lack what we can feel.
0:54:46 So just wake it up a little bit.
0:54:48 And how long would you do that for in the morning?
0:54:50 60, 90 seconds.
0:54:51 Do you do this every day?
0:54:52 I do.
0:54:57 I’ll tell you when I, like, if I’m standing at my desk, I’ll keep the ball there.
0:54:58 Okay.
0:55:02 When I come back from a run, I do this whole little setup.
0:55:04 But I wear these all day.
0:55:06 What is that that you’re wearing now?
0:55:08 So these are toe spacers.
0:55:10 So they do exactly that.
0:55:11 They splay the foot.
0:55:13 And why are you wearing that?
0:55:17 Remember when I was telling you about my years of being a ballet dancer?
0:55:18 Okay.
0:55:23 In pointe shoes, I wore orthotics for a long period of time.
0:55:24 I wore ill-fitting footwear.
0:55:26 And my foot was weak and things hurt.
0:55:27 Okay.
0:55:31 And we talked about why I needed to fix all of that.
0:55:35 You can see my bunion here.
0:55:36 Okay.
0:55:41 So I work on all of this stuff all the time.
0:55:45 And toe splay is a big part of that.
0:55:52 So when I have these toe spacers in, they splay the foot for me.
0:55:58 Every pair of shoes that I wear is compatible with a toe spacer.
0:56:00 Okay.
0:56:01 So you don’t wear any narrow shoes?
0:56:02 No.
0:56:04 That’s my non-negotiable.
0:56:05 Okay.
0:56:06 And this is important.
0:56:11 There is a difference between a wide toe box and a wide shoe.
0:56:15 So people will say, well, I ordered the wide.
0:56:19 The width will come here.
0:56:22 That’s where they change the width.
0:56:29 But if the toes are still tapered, the width has to extend into where the toes are.
0:56:32 So that’s where you got to be careful.
0:56:35 It’s a wide shoe is not a wide toe box shoe.
0:56:39 And if you try to wear these in just a wide shoe, you’re not going to be comfortable.
0:56:43 So if I wore this for one year, what promise could you make me?
0:56:47 Or what could you tell me the benefit and the upside would be?
0:56:52 You would definitely see improvement of the splay of your foot.
0:56:53 Yeah.
0:57:03 And when you have the tissues, the splay, you can start to improve the strength of the foot.
0:57:04 And what’s downstream from strong foot?
0:57:05 Go up the chain.
0:57:08 You have better toe strength.
0:57:10 You’re going to build a better platform.
0:57:13 You’re going to have a jet engine on a jet engine.
0:57:14 So your ankle mobility.
0:57:17 Then your knee extension, your hip extension.
0:57:20 Because your foot is doing what it was designed to do.
0:57:23 Which is be mobile and be strong.
0:57:25 Okay.
0:57:27 We need to pay attention.
0:57:30 If things go south from here,
0:57:35 You can expect there to be changes up the chain.
0:57:37 I see it all the time.
0:57:43 This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train and think about our bodies.
0:57:54 When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the Diary of a CEO, he explained how modern shoes, with their cushioning and support, are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what nature intended them to do.
0:58:01 We’ve lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet and this is leading to issues like back pain and knee pain.
0:58:11 I’d already purchased a pair of Vivo Barefoot shoes, so I showed them to Daniel Lieberman and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot movement and rebuild my strength.
0:58:14 But I think it was plantar fasciitis that I had where suddenly my feet started hurting all the time.
0:58:18 And after that, I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the Vivo Barefoots.
0:58:21 And research from Liverpool University has backed this up.
0:58:27 They’ve shown that wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength by up to 60%.
0:58:35 Visit VivoBarefoot.com slash DOAC and use code DIARY20 from my sponsor for 20% off.
0:58:37 A strong body starts with strong feet.
0:58:40 Is there anything else that we need to be aware of?
0:58:41 What is this other stuff here?
0:58:42 You’ve got like toe strengtheners as well.
0:58:47 So before we get to those, with, you know, the big toe and the four toes, this is when you can use that band.
0:58:48 Right?
0:58:50 So you just put your heel on there.
0:58:51 Okay?
0:58:53 You grab your four toes.
0:58:56 Right?
0:58:59 It’s like you’re doing a bicep curl, but you’re doing it with your toes.
0:59:02 And you press into the band.
0:59:04 And you lift up.
0:59:05 And you press it into the band.
0:59:06 There is research.
0:59:08 Four sets, 12 reps.
0:59:12 I mean, these are some of the things that they work on to improve function of the foot that helps with plantar fasciitis.
0:59:14 Okay.
0:59:16 And then you go around the house.
0:59:17 Then you grab the big toe.
0:59:20 Keep that ball of the big toe on the floor.
0:59:21 And then press.
0:59:23 Yes.
0:59:27 Right?
0:59:29 And it’s a good place to start.
0:59:31 You’re building strength in your foot.
0:59:37 And if you want to, if you want to really get after it, go for just the little guy.
0:59:38 Oh my gosh.
0:59:39 Little piggy.
0:59:40 Let’s have a look.
0:59:49 It’s really wild because the abductor digitomy, the muscle that abducts the little toe is just as big as the big one.
0:59:52 We like just sort of like, oh, that toe is just there to, you know, hit furniture.
0:59:56 It stabilizes the outside of the foot.
1:00:00 What is the difference between someone that does this and doesn’t do this?
1:00:03 Well, let’s start with pain.
1:00:03 Yeah.
1:00:07 They, and I use the word prevent injury.
1:00:09 That’s tough for me.
1:00:14 You want to create an environment where you can have the best opportunity for function.
1:00:25 So when people strengthen their foot, they are going to have a foundation that’s going to have resilience to the rest of their system.
1:00:27 This is what we, we walk on.
1:00:33 You cannot build a jet engine on a paper airplane.
1:00:38 I’m working with a lot of, you know, athletes right now are getting bigger.
1:00:39 They’re getting stronger.
1:00:40 They’re getting faster.
1:00:50 And if you look at the rates of injuries at the foot, they’re going up because we know the amount of loads that go through the foot when we walk and when we run.
1:01:00 So if we want to do a bunch of squats and do a bunch of deadlifts and do all the sexy stuff, but not pay attention to the foundation on which we’re putting all of this on, you’re going to run into problems.
1:01:05 So from a function perspective, you’re improving your function from the ground up.
1:01:09 You’re providing a better environment for your body to decrease pain.
1:01:14 And when we get older, it’s, you know, you don’t want to be chasing your tail at this stuff.
1:01:16 How does this dovetail into mobility and flexibility?
1:01:18 Because that’s something I’m thinking a lot about at the moment.
1:01:30 I realize that as I do a lot of upper body workouts and stuff like that, when you watch me, like, pick up the weights and stuff, put them back down, I look like I’m, like, I’ve got the mobility of someone that you would think.
1:01:31 I think it was double weight age.
1:01:34 And I wondered if it, a lot of it starts with our feet.
1:01:37 So we talked about the big toe.
1:01:42 When you’re walking, the big toe has to extend a certain amount.
1:01:43 Okay.
1:01:44 I’m going to show you here.
1:01:45 Okay.
1:01:50 So when I’m walking, I have to have a certain range of motion out of my toe.
1:01:55 And that gives me range of motion out of my knee and out of my hip.
1:02:00 If I cheat the system, so let’s say this is the only amount of range I have.
1:02:03 Let’s say I have a big toe that’s only going to extend 20 degrees.
1:02:06 You’re going to compensate.
1:02:08 You might shorten your stride.
1:02:11 You might take shorter steps.
1:02:16 You might not get access to hip extension because your toe isn’t going into full extension.
1:02:20 So you will see some type of compensation.
1:02:24 You know, the other one I think about is ankle mobility.
1:02:33 You know, I was listening to one of your podcasts and you were talking about the story of you rafting in Bali, I think.
1:02:33 Oh, yeah.
1:02:39 And how you were, you know, walking down the stairs and how it’s something that you want to be able to do.
1:02:50 And I was thinking to myself, I’m like, if you were to ask someone, if you wanted to continue to be able to do that as you age, what would you work on?
1:02:53 Probably via two max.
1:02:54 Endurance?
1:02:55 Yeah.
1:02:58 Your hip strength, maybe.
1:02:58 Yeah.
1:02:59 Right?
1:03:02 Your core strength, your hip mobility.
1:03:06 I think very few people would say ankle mobility and toe strength.
1:03:08 But here’s the deal.
1:03:11 If you don’t have a good toe strength, where are you going?
1:03:13 You could be falling.
1:03:16 If you don’t have good ankle mobility, same thing.
1:03:20 So ankle mobility is a big one.
1:03:28 Also, it gives us access when we squat, when we go up and down a stair, even walking.
1:03:30 So what do you mean by ankle mobility?
1:03:31 Do you mean my ability to go like this?
1:03:33 This, dorsiflexion.
1:03:47 The ankle also plantar flexes, and it inverts and everts, but the one I’m talking about when you’re, you know, this ankle dorsiflexion is something I look at with all of my patients.
1:03:50 And it’s not stood up, is it?
1:03:52 Sorry, it’s not sat down, is it?
1:03:52 It’s stood up.
1:03:54 Like, he would…
1:03:57 If you, you can do it, you look at it seated, yes, but you want to keep that heel on the ground.
1:04:00 Okay?
1:04:02 I mean, that’s, that’s all we’ve got there.
1:04:03 Okay.
1:04:10 And we’re looking for about, you know, between 20, 30 degrees.
1:04:14 But this range of motion is very restricted.
1:04:15 Remember the high heel conversation?
1:04:15 Yeah.
1:04:20 You walk around in a high heel for a long time, ankle dorsiflexion is affected.
1:04:30 And what can I do to improve my ankle mobility to prevent myself getting injured or getting pains or issues with my lower leg, upper leg, back?
1:04:39 You know, I think joints, you have to look at joints from two perspectives, both mobility and stability.
1:04:40 How well does it move?
1:04:43 And how well can you control that motion?
1:04:44 Yeah.
1:04:44 Right?
1:04:49 So, you can work on static stretching, dynamic stretching.
1:04:59 The other thing I would be looking at here, though, is the strength of one of my favorite muscles, which is the soleus, this big calf muscle back here.
1:05:00 Okay?
1:05:06 Because it’s the soleus, right, that helps control this motion.
1:05:21 And, you know, if you had a seated calf raise machine here, and we wanted to look at baseline, like, what can you do with your single leg seated calf raise?
1:05:22 Which is this one, right?
1:05:23 Yes.
1:05:31 The capacity that the soleus can produce is, it can put eight times your body weight going through your forefoot.
1:05:33 That’s a lot.
1:05:39 So, there was a study that looked at return to run.
1:05:49 So, they were looking at how much strength, if you will, can we produce out of a seated single leg calf raise?
1:05:50 Yeah.
1:05:53 One and a half times your body weight, six times.
1:05:55 Well, six reps.
1:05:55 Yes.
1:05:56 Okay.
1:05:56 Single leg.
1:05:57 Okay.
1:06:03 So, you would put one and a half times your body weight, plates, six times.
1:06:05 That’s a lot.
1:06:11 If you were to do it standing, holding half your body weight, six reps.
1:06:15 But we don’t train the lower leg like we do everywhere else.
1:06:16 No.
1:06:17 Especially men.
1:06:18 Yes.
1:06:20 And don’t care about legs.
1:06:21 Yeah.
1:06:29 I always say it’s, you know, the machine at the gym that should have the longest weight line is the seated calf raise machine and it’s always open.
1:06:37 What do you see the biggest mistakes that runners make outside of the alpha fly issue, wearing those big cushioned shoes?
1:06:41 Is there a certain way that we run that is causing us problems?
1:06:44 And also, are we running too much?
1:06:47 Because some people, they really get hooked on running.
1:06:50 I mean, I love it.
1:06:54 I think running is one of the best forms of activity.
1:06:58 I think if we wanted to keep it very simple, overstriding is the enemy.
1:06:59 Overstriding?
1:06:59 Yes.
1:07:00 What’s an overstride?
1:07:04 So, if I’m running, right, here’s my foot.
1:07:04 Yeah.
1:07:08 I want my foot to strike as close to my center of mass as possible.
1:07:10 As in, as close to your body as possible?
1:07:10 Yes.
1:07:10 Okay.
1:07:15 So, overstride would be as if I landed with my foot all the way out here.
1:07:16 Okay.
1:07:17 Yes.
1:07:18 Got you.
1:07:26 So, our calcaneus, this heel bone, was beautifully designed to absorb shock.
1:07:27 Okay?
1:07:32 When I overstride and I can feel it, what am I going to do?
1:07:33 That’s going to hurt.
1:07:35 So, you’re not going to do it anymore.
1:07:37 You’re going to overstride and you’re like, ah, that hurts.
1:07:44 So, I’m going to adopt my gait pattern and I might not overstride and bring that foot closer
1:07:47 to me so you strike differently.
1:07:49 You want the foot to hit in line with your body?
1:07:51 A little bit in front of the body.
1:07:51 Okay.
1:07:53 It’s the heavy overstride you want to avoid.
1:07:54 Okay.
1:07:54 Okay?
1:07:59 But if I can’t feel anything, you don’t know.
1:08:03 That’s the, the more stuff on the shoe.
1:08:07 You can overstride hot and heavy and because you have all this cushion there, you’re like,
1:08:07 well.
1:08:07 Yeah.
1:08:13 So, that’s, you know, the argument of allowing your foot to be able to feel things.
1:08:16 What about this whole thing with gaits and stuff?
1:08:21 Because sometimes when, when I was videoed from the back and someone in the comment section
1:08:24 was like, you’re like, gait is wrong or something when you run, Steve.
1:08:27 So, I don’t know what he meant.
1:08:28 I couldn’t see his qualifications.
1:08:30 So, I kept it moving, but.
1:08:33 Everybody has a certain gait.
1:08:34 What is a gait?
1:08:36 You have a running gait or a walking gait.
1:08:41 It’s just your, what happens when your foot strikes the ground to the time it hits the
1:08:42 ground again.
1:08:45 So, you have certain stride lengths and step lengths.
1:08:46 Okay?
1:08:52 So, when I’m, if you were, if we had a treadmill here and I would have you start running, that
1:08:53 would be your running gait.
1:08:59 I’d be looking at you from the back, from the side, from the front and seeing what happens
1:09:04 when your foot hits the ground, when it comes back up into swing phase, what’s happening
1:09:05 above the foot.
1:09:06 So, what are your hips doing?
1:09:07 What is your pelvis doing?
1:09:13 So, you’re really looking at the person and then you’re also looking at, you know, what
1:09:22 am I seeing that I think could be, you know, a factor in either pain or poor performance?
1:09:27 And then you see those things and you’re like, okay, let’s start working on this.
1:09:29 But this is the interesting thing with gait, right?
1:09:35 Someone will see something and they’ll say, okay, you need to start doing calf raises.
1:09:43 If they also don’t cue gait, right?
1:09:44 Or let’s work on your cadence.
1:09:47 Let’s work on some type of skill.
1:09:50 Strength and skill light up different parts of your brain.
1:09:54 So, you can get really good at calf raises and great.
1:09:58 But if you want to be a good runner, you have to look at different things.
1:10:02 So, what’s the most common issue with someone’s gait?
1:10:03 The overstride?
1:10:04 Overstride.
1:10:07 And then also kind of the crossover.
1:10:09 Why is that a bad thing?
1:10:13 It takes away some of that efficiency.
1:10:19 So, oftentimes you can see, you know, if someone’s crossing over, when they land, they’ll have
1:10:22 more of this kind of collapse through the extremity, if you will.
1:10:22 Okay.
1:10:23 Okay?
1:10:26 We want to control the foot when it hits the ground.
1:10:28 That’s why the hip conversation, right?
1:10:31 The hip controls what happens at the foot.
1:10:33 Are we supposed to be barefoot?
1:10:39 We are supposed to let our foot function how it was designed.
1:10:42 And that is letting the foot feel the ground.
1:10:46 Now, we live on man-made surfaces and we walk around on concrete.
1:10:51 So, for me to say, yes, we should all be walking around barefoot, that’s a conversation that’s
1:10:52 difficult to have.
1:11:00 But the stronger that your foot becomes and the more resilient that it becomes, you can handle
1:11:01 these things a lot better.
1:11:06 And it makes interacting with your environment so much more fun and easy.
1:11:08 What are these?
1:11:08 Okay.
1:11:14 So, my daughter was a rock climber and she was up in her room one day and she had the
1:11:17 bands around her fingers and she was like strengthening her hands.
1:11:20 And I was looking at it and I was like, man, I’m like, I want one of those for the foot.
1:11:24 And I’m looking for them and I couldn’t find them.
1:11:25 So, I said, well, here we go.
1:11:30 So, I designed these and they’re different resistances.
1:11:35 So, it’s the same concept as you would with your hands.
1:11:37 You just put them around your toes.
1:11:37 Okay.
1:11:38 Okay.
1:11:39 Give me the easy one.
1:11:39 Which one’s easy?
1:11:40 That’s the easy one.
1:11:40 Okay.
1:11:41 Here we go.
1:11:43 Are they all the same size?
1:11:45 Would you need different sizes for different size feet?
1:11:46 Nope.
1:11:50 So, when your toes splay, you can slide those on a little easier.
1:11:53 My little piggy is completely redundant.
1:11:55 It’s doing nothing.
1:11:57 It feels like it’s disabled.
1:11:58 Well, we’re going to change that.
1:11:59 Okay.
1:12:00 Yeah.
1:12:05 So, when you lift up all your toes, try to get your big toe to touch my finger.
1:12:07 Yes.
1:12:09 That’s abductor hallisis.
1:12:10 That’s this muscle right here.
1:12:13 So, people that have like bunions, it’s like just strengthen that muscle.
1:12:14 Right?
1:12:17 So, that guy goes in and you hold right there.
1:12:22 So, now you’re strengthening inside of the foot.
1:12:27 You’re strengthening the muscles inside the arch of the foot.
1:12:31 If you can get that little guy to go out, you’re going to strengthen this guy.
1:12:33 So, you’re just going to lift all your toes.
1:12:34 Good.
1:12:36 And then spread and reach them forward.
1:12:39 Try to keep the tripod of the foot, though.
1:12:40 Okay.
1:12:42 So, I’m trying to lift all your toes.
1:12:43 But keep that tripod.
1:12:45 One, two, center of the heel.
1:12:46 So, lift.
1:12:48 Yes.
1:12:49 Yes.
1:12:50 Yes.
1:12:51 And split.
1:12:52 Yes.
1:12:54 Now, press those toes to the ground as you spread them.
1:12:55 Lift.
1:12:58 Spread.
1:12:59 Reach.
1:13:00 Oh, that’s pretty.
1:13:01 Thank you.
1:13:04 Okay.
1:13:07 So, and that gets, you’ve got ones that get incrementally harder.
1:13:08 So, this would be harder.
1:13:09 This would be hardest.
1:13:10 Okay.
1:13:12 So, we’re doing like 30, 40 reps a day.
1:13:18 That’s how you’ll know someone needs to work on this because they can’t keep those points.
1:13:20 So, they’re kind of like, it looks like their foot’s on an ice scape.
1:13:21 Yeah.
1:13:23 So, that’s the front of the foot.
1:13:24 Yeah.
1:13:32 When you get into this part of the foot, the rear foot, there’s certain things you want to
1:13:33 pay attention to.
1:13:37 We already talked about mobility at the ankle.
1:13:45 But you also want to look at what happens when that heel comes off the ground because this
1:13:49 is when all the magic happens because the foot engages, the intrinsic muscles engage.
1:13:53 It’s basically like, I’m getting ready to propel forward.
1:14:01 So, there’s certain muscles that you want to have some good capacity to be able to get your foot in this
1:14:01 ready position.
1:14:07 So, two we can talk about is one that runs along the inside.
1:14:15 And then, this is posterior tibialis, one of the very big stabilizers of the arch of the foot.
1:14:20 And his best friend, which is the soleus.
1:14:24 Those guys help do this to the foot, help invert the foot.
1:14:27 Okay?
1:14:29 So, go ahead and stand up for me.
1:14:32 Put your foot in here.
1:14:35 I’m going to put this around your ankles.
1:14:36 Oh.
1:14:38 There you go.
1:14:39 Okay.
1:14:41 Spread your feet a little bit.
1:14:44 Toes pointing straight ahead.
1:14:50 Which, by the way, we want to talk about gates.
1:14:57 When I’m moving from point A to point B, my feet should also look like they’re moving in this direction.
1:14:59 If someone’s walking like this.
1:15:01 With their feet pointed out.
1:15:02 Correct.
1:15:02 Yeah.
1:15:03 I want to know why.
1:15:10 Do they have a bone in their lower leg that’s rotated out?
1:15:12 Which could happen.
1:15:17 But if not, you don’t get to walk like that.
1:15:25 So, we want the toes pointing straight ahead as long as there’s no compromise structurally.
1:15:26 Okay.
1:15:26 Okay?
1:15:33 So, what I want you to do here is you’re going to keep the ball of the foot on the floor.
1:15:38 And I want you to drive your ankles almost like you were going to sprain your ankle, right?
1:15:42 So, you’re going to push into that range out.
1:15:44 So, you’re going to take your ankles and drive them into the band.
1:15:46 Into the band.
1:15:46 Yep.
1:15:47 Watch right here.
1:15:49 Okay.
1:15:50 So, here.
1:15:52 This way.
1:15:52 This way.
1:15:54 Yes.
1:15:55 Now, keep that big toe on the ground.
1:15:58 Yes.
1:15:59 Yeah.
1:16:01 See, there’s your other compliment.
1:16:03 That didn’t sound like a compliment.
1:16:11 But what you should feel here is that when you increase the arch of the foot, you should feel it also in the hips.
1:16:13 I feel like I just don’t have an arch on my foot.
1:16:13 I don’t know.
1:16:14 It’s weird.
1:16:15 I don’t feel like I can.
1:16:16 How about this?
1:16:18 Put your hands on your chest.
1:16:20 Rotate to your left as far as you can.
1:16:21 Keep your feet on the ground.
1:16:22 See, that’s pretty.
1:16:24 See that arch?
1:16:26 Yes.
1:16:28 Now, go this way.
1:16:33 So, that’s another way to work on how the foot feels.
1:16:34 Because the foot should change shape.
1:16:35 It should lower.
1:16:40 And it should increase the arch.
1:16:42 So, do you recommend people do these types of exercise frequently?
1:16:43 Oh, yeah.
1:16:45 I mean, you’re standing at your desk.
1:16:47 You know, here’s your movement break.
1:16:48 You rotate 20 times.
1:16:52 Let your foot change shape.
1:16:55 Do your toe yoga.
1:16:56 Big toe.
1:16:57 Four toes.
1:16:58 Lift all your toes.
1:16:59 Spread them and reach them forward.
1:17:09 My physio gave me a towel and he put it on the floor and he said I have to, like, grab it and pull it up and grab it and pull it up.
1:17:11 That’s part of my recovery from my injury.
1:17:14 Do you ever tell people to do that?
1:17:15 You know that towel thing?
1:17:16 Yeah, I don’t.
1:17:17 You don’t?
1:17:17 No.
1:17:17 What?
1:17:21 I don’t want to get anybody in trouble here.
1:17:22 No, call them out.
1:17:22 Okay.
1:17:24 When do you ever do this?
1:17:25 Never.
1:17:26 Correct.
1:17:36 So, unless you were, you know, and maybe in your initial phases of rehab where you are just trying to wake up the foot.
1:17:43 You want to, you know, towel scrunch, pick up marbles like they, you know, that’s a very common foot exercise.
1:17:49 But from a functional perspective, that never happens in the gait cycle.
1:17:53 When you’re walking and you’re running, your toes never do this, or they shouldn’t.
1:18:01 Most people, when their foot is weak, that’s one of the biggest compensations that you will see.
1:18:02 They toe grip.
1:18:07 You’ll see them walking and it’s like, you know, they start gripping the ground.
1:18:10 It’s like feet are weak.
1:18:10 Feet are weak.
1:18:11 They compensate for something else.
1:18:11 Yes.
1:18:12 Okay.
1:18:17 I made the biggest investment I’ve ever made in a company because of my girlfriend.
1:18:28 I came home one night and my lovely girlfriend was up at 1am in the morning pulling her hair out as she tried to piece together her own online store for her business.
1:18:37 And in that moment, I remembered an email I’d had from a guy called John, the founder of Stan Store, our new sponsor and a company I’ve invested incredibly heavily in.
1:18:45 And Stan Store helps creators to sell digital products, courses, coaching and memberships all through a simple customizable link in bio system.
1:18:47 And it handles everything.
1:18:50 Payments, bookings, emails, community engagement, and even links with Shopify.
1:18:56 And I believe in it so much that I’m going to launch a Stan challenge.
1:19:01 And as part of this challenge, I’m going to give away $100,000 to one of you.
1:19:08 If you want to take part in this challenge, if you want to monetize the knowledge that you have, visit stephenbartlett.stan.store to sign up.
1:19:13 And you’ll also get an extended 30-day free trial of Stan Store if you use that link.
1:19:16 Your next move could quite frankly change everything.
1:19:19 Make sure you keep what I’m about to say to yourself.
1:19:23 I’m inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO.
1:19:25 Welcome to my inner circle.
1:19:29 This is a brand new private community that I’m launching to the world.
1:19:33 We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown.
1:19:36 We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I’m recording the conversation.
1:19:38 We have clips we’ve never released.
1:19:40 We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests.
1:19:43 And also the episodes that we’ve never ever released.
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1:19:48 In the circle, you’ll have direct access to me.
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1:20:06 So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to doaccircle.com.
1:20:08 I will speak to you there.
1:20:13 Do you wear socks?
1:20:15 I do not wear socks.
1:20:16 Why?
1:20:20 I just haven’t found any that I, you know, love.
1:20:27 My second and third toes, personal information here, are webbed.
1:20:32 So basically, there’s skin that comes up in between two and three.
1:20:47 So as far as socks are concerned, most of the socks out there, like if you look at a compression sock, when someone puts it on their foot, it literally, like, with my bunion, you’ll see my foot look like this.
1:20:50 Because it’s just suctioning my foot together.
1:20:51 And it’s so uncomfortable.
1:20:54 So my option would be a toe sock.
1:20:59 So a sock that, you know, just fits over your toes.
1:21:01 But because my toes are webbed, I can’t wear them.
1:21:10 What do you think is the most important thing that we haven’t talked about yet that we should have talked about as it relates to foot health and everything downstream from foot health?
1:21:18 I mean, I think, you know, big picture, like what I hope to do, like my passion is to bring awareness to the foot.
1:21:27 And when we start doing that and we pay attention from getting stronger from the ground up, things, life gets easier.
1:21:38 And I mean that not just physically, but just like we talked about wellness, because you’re able to move and get out there and walk and run and move like you want to.
1:21:41 So that’s kind of the big, the big picture here.
1:21:48 I think we talked about the importance of foot strength and foot mobility and driving home the importance of footwear.
1:22:01 I think the biggest, you know, or maybe the lowest hanging fruit for people is if this kind of work seems overwhelming, like I have to strengthen my toe and do all this stuff.
1:22:07 Just wear a shoe where your foot can feel the ground and your foot can be in its functional position.
1:22:08 Start there.
1:22:15 Because the research will tell you just doing that, you will start to improve the strength of your foot.
1:22:19 And I think that’s, that’s key.
1:22:21 And start small.
1:22:22 Transition.
1:22:40 It’s so interesting listening to so many of these, the comments on some of your previous work, people of all ages, but often people that are slightly older, talking about how transformative finding out more information about their feet has been and changing their footwear in particular.
1:22:45 Reading this one comment here from this guy says, he’s 65 years old.
1:22:55 And when he discovered the zero drop wide box toe shoes, he lost all the pain in his feet, ankles, knees and hips within a couple of months.
1:22:57 I hear it all the time.
1:23:01 I hear it all the time.
1:23:12 And it’s, it seems so counterintuitive to us because I think we’ve been, you know, trained to think that our foot needs stuff.
1:23:13 It needs support.
1:23:14 It needs cushion.
1:23:15 It needs spring.
1:23:19 And that changes the dynamics of how your foot interfaces with the ground.
1:23:27 So when you bring it back to what it was designed to do, those comments you’ll hear, you will hear all the time.
1:23:30 And it’s, it’s a wonderful thing.
1:23:32 It’s literally why I do this.
1:23:40 Is there anything else we should have talked about that we didn’t, that you think is pertinent to anyone that’s trying to get control of their foot health?
1:23:49 I mean, I think, you know, I just want to make sure that we highlight the conversation of transition because I think that’s where we lose people.
1:23:55 Is this, when people listen to this, there’s bells going off in their brains going, man, this makes sense.
1:23:56 This makes sense.
1:24:01 They want to go home, burn all their shoes and like go buy a pair of barefoot shoes and call it a day.
1:24:03 You got to earn your right.
1:24:06 So there has to be that transition.
1:24:08 There has to be that.
1:24:09 I’m going to step.
1:24:11 I’m going to build.
1:24:13 I’m going to have a shoe spectrum.
1:24:19 And that, that conversation of a shoe spectrum, there’s a time and a place.
1:24:25 You have your workhorse shoe, you have your cheat shoe and you know when to wear what.
1:24:28 Where am I now?
1:24:30 I’m, I think I’m in the workhorse shoe.
1:24:33 I’m trying not to wear any cushioned shoes as much as I possibly can.
1:24:37 Well, when you think about it with ankle sprains, this is what I find fascinating, right?
1:24:46 When that thing heals, when your ankle heals and you say, well, I’m going to go into a cushioned shoe.
1:24:50 Some of these shoes are getting, getting high.
1:24:55 So you put the sole of your foot on a shoe that has a high cushion.
1:24:59 You see the distance you have from your foot to the ground.
1:25:00 Yeah.
1:25:07 So let’s say you step on a rock and you have poor proprioception because your foot can’t feel real well because you have a history of ankle sprains.
1:25:10 And you step on a rock and you have this far to go.
1:25:11 Where do you think that ankle’s gone?
1:25:16 So my ankle sprain patients, I want them close to the ground.
1:25:20 I want them to feel, right?
1:25:29 So it’s, it’s pretty wild when people are like, I want to wear, you know, all this stuff, you know, hiking boots, another conversation.
1:25:31 What’s wrong with hiking boots?
1:25:37 Well, people will say, I need a hiking boot because I, I want my ankles to feel stable.
1:25:41 And that’s not what they do.
1:25:45 It might be a, and there will be research coming out on this.
1:25:49 When you wear a hiking boot, it’s like a neurological hug.
1:25:53 It kind of feels like, you know, I’m going to have this thing around my ankle.
1:25:54 It’s going to protect me.
1:25:54 It’s going to protect me.
1:25:56 It doesn’t.
1:26:04 And when you walk down a mountain, this foot has to do, remember we talked about this, ankle dorsiflexion.
1:26:10 If you have something that’s going to restrict ankle dorsiflexion, you have transfer loads.
1:26:14 So you end up transferring load to the knee.
1:26:24 So, you know, when my patients say to me, I need a hiking boot, I say to them, listen, why don’t we just work on getting your ankle more stable?
1:26:26 Improving your mobility.
1:26:34 So then you won’t need to feel like you need this thing around your ankle.
1:26:34 And that takes time.
1:26:37 But in the long run.
1:26:43 Is there an issue if I’m wearing the barefoot shoes at the moment and then I start wearing like football boots again?
1:26:45 Or I think you guys call them cleats.
1:26:45 Yeah.
1:26:53 Is there a chance of me getting injured because I spent so long in the barefoot shoes now I’m performing in?
1:26:56 Sometimes you can’t do anything about the environment of the shoe.
1:27:00 So think of a cleat, an ice skate, a ski boot.
1:27:05 There’s certain, you know, sports that require the stiffness.
1:27:18 And so when you pay attention to your foot health and then you put that foot in the cleat, you just make sure that when you get your foot out of the cleat, you do all the stuff.
1:27:19 You take that kit.
1:27:20 You roll the bottom of the foot.
1:27:29 When I get out of my cycling shoes, even though they are wider now, they have wide toe box cycling shoes, I’m always doing stuff for my foot.
1:27:34 Because it’s a – the cleat is an environment for the sport.
1:27:38 So, you know, you pay attention before and you pay attention after.
1:27:43 Courtney, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they’re going to be leaving it for.
1:27:47 And the question that has been left for you –
1:27:49 Oh, this is going to be good, huh?
1:27:49 It is a good one.
1:27:54 What do you fear you will most likely regret 10 years from now?
1:28:00 This is a battle that I have in my head pretty much all the time.
1:28:02 I love my work so much.
1:28:09 It is – it’s just the reason that I feel that, you know, there’s so much I want to do.
1:28:11 There’s so much I want to learn.
1:28:12 There’s so many ways I want to help people.
1:28:14 And I work a lot.
1:28:17 But I don’t look at it as work.
1:28:19 I enjoy it.
1:28:23 But I’m also a mother.
1:28:38 And I need to find that work-life balance where I don’t want to fear in 10 years that I look back and said, man, I worked a lot.
1:28:42 But I really wished I would have gone to her soccer game.
1:28:52 So I’ve created this life for me where I can say, I’m not going to do that.
1:28:54 I’m going to her soccer game.
1:28:56 And she gets mad at me all the time.
1:28:59 But I tell her, I’m like, this is what happens when you own your own business.
1:29:01 She’s like, mom, quit saying that.
1:29:03 I mean, she knows I work my ass off.
1:29:10 But at the same time, she also knows that I can drop anything and go be there for her at any time.
1:29:19 And so that’s what I really want to work on and make sure that in 10 years I don’t look back and say, gosh, I missed some of that.
1:29:24 As I’m often told, you don’t get that time back either, do you?
1:29:27 So it’s not something that’s very easy to correct.
1:29:27 Yeah.
1:29:30 Courtney, thank you so much for doing what you’re doing.
1:29:40 I’m very much looking forward to your book because it’s been a bit of a black box, I think, my feet, my foot health, up until more recently when I discovered your work.
1:29:53 But also just from this conversation today, it feels like I now have a better understanding of how this thing that I thought was largely irrelevant is having a big downstream impact on a bunch of things that I really, really care about.
1:30:08 But also, maybe most importantly, is just having a set of actions that I can take on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, to prevent finding myself in a situation where I’m older and I fall or where I lose my mobility or movement or the meaning in my life because I have something wrong with my foundations.
1:30:14 Hopefully next time we see each other, I will have the strongest feet you’ve ever seen.
1:30:18 I was just thinking the next time we see each other, there’s going to be so many more compliments.
1:30:19 On my feet.
1:30:19 On your feet.
1:30:20 Yeah.
1:30:21 One can only hope.
1:30:23 Courtney, thank you so much.
1:30:24 Thank you so much.
1:30:29 Quick one, just give me 30 seconds of your time.
1:30:31 Two things I wanted to say.
1:30:36 The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.
1:30:41 It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn’t have imagined getting to this place.
1:30:45 But secondly, it’s a dream where we feel like we’re only just getting started.
1:30:53 And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.
1:30:55 Here’s a promise I’m going to make to you.
1:31:00 I’m going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
1:31:06 We’re going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we’re going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
1:31:08 Thank you.
1:31:32 We’ll see you next time.

0:00:04 This was one of my favourite business conversations that I’ve ever had on the Diary of a CEO podcast
0:00:09 and it’s frankly set the bar for every CEO or co-founder that I ever interview.
0:00:12 Brian taught me, more so than any other guest I’ve ever had on the show,
0:00:16 how important hiring, culture and team building is.
0:00:20 The reality of running a small business is that switching off is never really an option.
0:00:25 Even when you try, the ideas, the excitement and all the responsibility is always there.
0:00:29 And because you’re always switched on, it’s only fair that your hiring partner should be too.
0:00:35 LinkedIn Jobs, who are the sponsor of this moments episode, has been that hiring partner for me and for years
0:00:37 because it’s always working away in the background.
0:00:44 My team can post our jobs for free, share them with our networks and reach top talent all in the same place.
0:00:46 So let’s get into today’s conversation.
0:00:53 At the very beginning, I saw this email, which I think is really important
0:00:58 because maybe it’s the most important thing because there are going to be people starting companies now
0:01:00 that are getting a lot of emails like that.
0:01:03 This is from August 1st, 2008.
0:01:06 We were, by the way, so let me give the context of this email.
0:01:09 So Joe Nate and I were trying to raise money.
0:01:14 For everyone trying to raise money, I want you to know that Airbnb was trying to raise $150,000
0:01:19 at a $1.5 million, I think, post-money valuation.
0:01:20 I’ll give you that right now.
0:01:21 Exactly.
0:01:25 And here’s one of many rejection letters.
0:01:26 Hi, Brian.
0:01:27 Apologies for the delayed response.
0:01:32 We’ve had a chance to discuss internally and unfortunately don’t think that it’s right
0:01:36 for fill-in-the-blank investment firm from an investment perspective.
0:01:41 The potential market opportunity did not seem large enough for a required model.
0:01:45 Now, I want you to just put this perspective.
0:01:50 Airbnb handles nearly as much money as the entire GDP of the country of Croatia today.
0:01:54 One in about every $1,500 spent in the world, about $1 spent on Airbnb.
0:01:57 That’s a pretty large market.
0:02:02 In our business, it’s pretty much the same idea as the idea that we proposed that person
0:02:05 who said our market opportunity wasn’t large enough.
0:02:09 So there’s probably a myriad of lessons in that, aren’t there?
0:02:17 And I think that it’s a reminder that the world doesn’t just change, or at least it doesn’t
0:02:22 just transform towards our dreams, ideals, and ambitions that require certain types of people.
0:02:27 We might call them entrepreneurs, inventors, all sorts of people in different domains.
0:02:31 That believe the world could be a little different than the one that they live in.
0:02:35 They have the audacity to believe that they can do it.
0:02:39 And they have the ability to convince other people to go on that journey with them.
0:02:42 But along that journey, everything’s going to be different.
0:02:43 You’re going to get lost.
0:02:44 You’re going to be cold.
0:02:46 You’re going to have like obstacles.
0:02:47 Things are going to attack you.
0:02:48 You’re going to fall down pits.
0:02:52 And the question is when people are cold and they’re shivering and they’re not sure what to
0:02:57 do and you’re running out of resources and rations, can you find your way up that mountain?
0:02:58 Do you know why you’re going?
0:03:02 Can you invent all these different apparatus?
0:03:04 Like there’s a stream you can’t figure out.
0:03:07 You can build a bridge to cross the stream with the limited resources you have.
0:03:09 Can you recruit people along the way?
0:03:11 And can you beat the drum?
0:03:15 And when people are tired and they say, I want to sleep, you say, yes, we’re going to rest,
0:03:16 but we got to go.
0:03:17 Just 500 more steps.
0:03:20 I know it’s right over the edge.
0:03:22 I think we can do a little bit better.
0:03:25 And can you push people outside their comfort zone?
0:03:29 Not enough to hate you, but enough to feel like a trainer.
0:03:32 You’re like three more reps and you don’t want to do it.
0:03:34 And then that very moment, they’re not your friend.
0:03:37 But at the end of the workout, you’re like, thank you for pushing me that hard.
0:03:39 This is that kind of person.
0:03:46 And can you take divergent ideas that no one’s ever seen before and just continue to reformulate
0:03:47 them?
0:03:53 Could you store these ideas in your head, a thousand competing ideas, and just reformulate
0:03:54 them in your mind?
0:03:58 It turns out this stuff is difficult, but you can work your way up there.
0:04:02 Most people watching this have the skill set to be an entrepreneur.
0:04:07 Not everyone has a skill set or the desire to run a giant company.
0:04:09 I don’t think everyone needs to do that.
0:04:14 But a lot of people have the skill set to do something, to start something.
0:04:17 This is what you need to get up the mountain.
0:04:23 And the problem is, imagine we got up the mountain and then somebody was dropped from a helicopter,
0:04:25 having never walked up the mountain.
0:04:29 And you tell them, okay, now you lead this group up the next mountain.
0:04:33 Can you imagine how hard it’d be for that person to drop from the sky?
0:04:37 Or maybe they joined a third of the way up the mountain, but they weren’t there at the
0:04:38 very beginning.
0:04:42 You see, a founder brings three things that a professional manager doesn’t have.
0:04:48 The first thing a founder has is they’re the biological parent.
0:04:53 So you can love something, but when you’re the biological parent of something, like it
0:04:55 came from you, it is you.
0:04:57 There’s a deep passion in love.
0:05:02 The second thing a founder has is they have the permission, right?
0:05:06 Like I can’t tell another child what to do, but if they were my child, I probably could.
0:05:07 I have the permission.
0:05:09 And so you have a permission.
0:05:14 I could rename the, I could rebrand the company and a professional manager would probably come
0:05:15 and say, I can’t do that.
0:05:16 But I know how we named it.
0:05:17 I know how we branded it.
0:05:19 So you know what you can change.
0:05:23 And the third thing that a founder brings is you built it.
0:05:25 So you know how to rebuild it.
0:05:30 You know, the freezing temperature of a company, you know, what temperature it melts, you know,
0:05:35 like what this looked like before it was tooled, where it came from, the alloys, where they,
0:05:36 where they were sourced from.
0:05:38 You’re not just managing it, you’re building it.
0:05:44 And the problem is professional managers typically don’t have any of those three,
0:05:46 at least not in the abundance of founders.
0:05:48 But the problem with founders, there’s two problems.
0:05:52 The first is most of them cannot scale to run a giant company.
0:05:56 And even if they do, the last problem is they don’t live forever.
0:06:00 And companies, great companies usually want to live longer than humans do.
0:06:05 And so therefore you end up with the inevitable challenge that Disney and Steve Jobs had,
0:06:07 which is succession planning.
0:06:12 And actually both of them died prematurely and didn’t, maybe Steve prepared more than,
0:06:13 than Walt did.
0:06:16 And that’s the last step of the journey.
0:06:22 But I think there’s something really special about founders and founder-led companies.
0:06:26 And I think that if you want the world to change, we need more entrepreneurs.
0:06:27 We need more founders.
0:06:30 If you want to empower more women, you should make more women entrepreneurs.
0:06:35 If you want to lift up more economies around the world, you should lift up entrepreneurs in
0:06:36 those economies.
0:06:40 It’s one of the greatest ways to create wealth, to change the world, and to just change the
0:06:41 trajectory of society.
0:06:43 So powerful, Brian.
0:06:46 It made me think about what Steve Jobs did leave behind.
0:06:50 And that’s maybe where the word culture comes in.
0:06:55 Because I would have bet against Apple surviving and flourishing in the wake of Steve Jobs’
0:06:58 passing, because Steve was so, so special.
0:07:03 But he clearly left a set of enduring principles behind culture.
0:07:06 You know, I spoke to Daniel, as you said, as a friend of yours.
0:07:10 He said to me, 20 years old, didn’t care about culture.
0:07:11 30 years old, didn’t know what it was.
0:07:15 At 40 years old, I think company culture and team culture is the most important thing.
0:07:18 When you think about culture, how important is that?
0:07:19 What is it?
0:07:20 How does one go about creating it?
0:07:23 It’s funny you ask this question.
0:07:29 Because last week, I sent an email to the entire company, to all 6,000 people.
0:07:33 And my email was about culture and why it’s important and what it is.
0:07:35 Can I read you a portion of it?
0:07:35 What a privilege.
0:07:39 For the context of the email, I hired a head of people and culture.
0:07:42 Like a different name for HR.
0:07:47 Joni and I have always believed that you must design the culture you want.
0:07:51 Otherwise, it will be designed for you.
0:07:53 And you might not like what emerges.
0:07:59 The people and the culture they create at the heart of Airbnb.
0:08:05 Simply put, culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation.
0:08:13 In the long run, the culture is the most important thing you will ever design.
0:08:18 Because it’s the engine that designs everything else.
0:08:21 All good designs start with a vision.
0:08:26 And I want working at Airbnb to feel like working at the world’s largest startup.
0:08:31 I believe we can grow into one of the largest companies in the world without feeling large.
0:08:34 A company that’s still run like a startup.
0:08:39 With the best people in every discipline collaborating at high speeds with intense focus.
0:08:42 All well maintaining mental bureaucracy and communication layers.
0:08:46 And to make this happen, we’re going to reimagine HR function.
0:08:51 Because too many companies have lost sight of what HR was originally designed to do.
0:08:54 Reducing it to merely an administrative function.
0:08:58 Yet at its core, HR is about people and culture.
0:09:01 And it’s one of the most strategic functions within a company.
0:09:02 That’s why we don’t call it HR.
0:09:05 Because it should be about bringing out the very best in people.
0:09:11 Most of all, I want us to feel like we’re building one of the most creative places on earth.
0:09:20 A company that brings together some of the best people of our generation to dream up new products and services that capture the world’s imagination.
0:09:31 A place where years from now, people would say, if I was alive during that time, that’s where I would have wanted to work.
0:09:34 I literally wrote that email last week about culture.
0:09:39 It’s so incredible.
0:09:39 It’s so incredible.
0:09:45 Because the greatest leaders that I’ve met all arrive at the same conclusion about culture.
0:09:48 Even if it takes them 10 years or 20 years or whatever, they arrive there.
0:09:53 The question though, because so many CEOs could send that email.
0:09:53 Yes.
0:09:54 Right?
0:09:56 Everyone could just, you know, they just heard Brian say it.
0:09:57 So they copy and paste and send it to their team.
0:10:01 The question is, how do you actually create that?
0:10:02 It’s so great.
0:10:06 So big, huge insight here.
0:10:06 Okay.
0:10:13 I used to think you talk about the culture and you talk about how important it is.
0:10:16 And you write out a list of, well, what is your culture?
0:10:20 Well, our culture are a bunch of principles or values we live by.
0:10:23 So what makes us most unique?
0:10:24 Let’s do a session.
0:10:26 Let’s write out a list of our values.
0:10:28 Now let’s tell everyone the values.
0:10:29 Let’s print them on the walls.
0:10:31 Let’s have people repeat them.
0:10:33 Let’s keep telling people culture is important.
0:10:39 And that stuff can help a little bit, but it’s not how you build culture.
0:10:41 So let me give you a few thoughts.
0:10:48 Your culture is the shared way you do things.
0:10:52 And often they’re based on lessons you’ve learned.
0:10:57 And the lessons you tend to remember the most are the ones that are seared in you.
0:11:02 They come from trials and tribulations from your most difficult times.
0:11:06 It’s the way you rise the occasion in the face of adversity.
0:11:14 Your culture is the behaviors of the leaders that get mimicked all the way down every single person.
0:11:21 Your culture is every time you choose to hire someone, every time you choose to hire someone, every time you choose to promote somebody.
0:11:24 It’s the way everyone does everything.
0:11:29 And the way a leader designs the culture is not by writing out a list of values.
0:11:41 It’s by basically leading by example every single day and taking a survey of every single thing happening and constantly shaping it, pruning it like a gardener.
0:11:44 You know, you don’t just allow the culture to happen.
0:11:46 You design the culture.
0:11:48 You have an idea of what you want to do.
0:11:51 And you’re just constantly getting this group together.
0:11:54 You know, you might have a culture of excellence.
0:12:01 And a culture of excellence means I review all the work and I say, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.
0:12:05 And eventually I could not join the meeting, but people know what I’d say.
0:12:06 They’d say, it’s not good enough.
0:12:07 This is our standard.
0:12:18 And the moment I can not be in the room and the same action happens as if I was in the room, that’s the moment it goes from management to culture.
0:12:20 So it’s like a golf swing.
0:12:27 To teach a golf swing, you’ve got to like probably, I don’t play golf, but the instructor has to watch the person.
0:12:32 And at some point the person learns how to swing a golf swing without the instructor there.
0:12:35 That’s the difference between management and culture.
0:12:39 And culture is something that people learn to develop these shared instincts.
0:12:51 And it’s so important because it’s your ultimate intellectual property, not your technology, not your recipes, not your exclusive contract vendor relationships.
0:13:05 The way you know how to do something, that is the most important thing a company has because all a company is, is a bunch of people, a bunch of money, and a direction that those people are using those resources to go towards.
0:13:06 People, resources, strategy.
0:13:09 And the culture is a thing that bonds those things together.
0:13:12 I hope you found today’s conversation helpful and insightful.
0:13:20 If you’re ready to join two and a half million other small businesses already using LinkedIn for hiring, head over to linkedin.com slash DOAC now.
0:13:25 That’s linkedin.com slash DOAC to find your next exceptional hire.

0:00:01 – Let’s say you have a fight with your girlfriend.
0:00:02 You want to do the right thing.
0:00:04 So you go to ChatGBT and you’ll be like,
0:00:06 this is exactly what happened, tell me what to do.
0:00:08 And you go, babe, I just want you to know
0:00:09 I want to take full accountability
0:00:10 and I care about this relationship.
0:00:12 And she says, did you get this answer from ChatGBT?
0:00:14 And you go, I did.
0:00:15 How’s that gonna go?
0:00:17 Now, you did everything right.
0:00:18 But what makes people beautiful
0:00:20 is not that we get everything right.
0:00:22 It’s that we get many things wrong.
0:00:24 And I think in the modern world we live in, we forget that.
0:00:26 – Simon Sinek is back.
0:00:29 – He’s the visionary thinker inspiring millions
0:00:30 to cultivate human connection.
0:00:34 – Find their purpose and overcome any modern day challenges.
0:00:35 – So with AI, do you think it really is
0:00:37 cause of concern and deeper thought?
0:00:38 – So I’m not in the AI business,
0:00:40 but I am in the humanity business.
0:00:42 And here’s the problem that we never talk about.
0:00:45 People keep telling us, life is not about the destination.
0:00:46 Life is about the journey.
0:00:47 But when we think about AI,
0:00:48 we only think about the destination.
0:00:50 And it’s remarkable ability to write the book,
0:00:52 paint the painting, solve the problem,
0:00:55 but we forget the importance of doing the work yourself.
0:00:56 And I think in our modern day and age,
0:00:59 we have underrepresented the value of struggle.
0:01:02 – I am smarter, better at problem solving, more resourceful,
0:01:05 not because a book exists with my ideas in it,
0:01:06 but because I wrote it.
0:01:09 That excruciating journey is what made me grow.
0:01:11 – But it’s the same for love, friendships, conflict.
0:01:14 And I think that we forget that we give up certain skills
0:01:16 or abilities because of technology.
0:01:19 But it’s like saying AI will provide boats for everyone,
0:01:23 except for the time there’s a storm and you don’t know how to swim.
0:01:25 – And unless we take personal accountability
0:01:28 to teach and learn human skills, they will disappear.
0:01:30 – Sure, you can have an AI friend and trained,
0:01:32 like the best psychologist to affirm you,
0:01:33 the best listening skills that exist.
0:01:36 But my ability to know what to do when my friend is struggling,
0:01:39 my ability to function in the world or my ability to cope with stress,
0:01:42 these very, very human skills are suffering.
0:01:45 – So what are the other skills we need to equip ourselves with
0:01:46 based on the way that the world is heading?
0:01:48 – Two things. One is…
0:01:52 – Quick one, just give me 30 seconds of your time.
0:01:53 Two things I wanted to say.
0:01:57 The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show
0:01:59 week after week. It means the world to all of us.
0:02:02 And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had
0:02:04 and couldn’t have imagined getting to this place.
0:02:08 But secondly, it’s a dream where we feel like we’re only just getting started.
0:02:10 And if you enjoy what we do here,
0:02:14 please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly
0:02:16 and follow us on this app.
0:02:18 Here’s a promise I’m going to make to you.
0:02:22 I’m going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can,
0:02:23 now and into the future.
0:02:25 We’re going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to,
0:02:29 and we’re going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
0:02:30 Thank you.
0:02:37 – Good to see you again.
0:02:40 – It’s just familiar.
0:02:45 It’s so interesting because when I sit down to talk to you,
0:02:49 you’re one of the very few people that I don’t come with a preconception as to what we’re going to
0:02:55 talk about, but I come with a feeling. And the feeling that I bring forth is the
0:03:02 feeling of change and transition. I have lived for 32 years, but I don’t think I can ever think of a time
0:03:15 where the future has felt unclear, uncertain, scary, exciting, and I guess unknown.
0:03:20 And I don’t just mean with technology, but technology is one protagonist in the story,
0:03:25 and there’s many other social stories playing out from politics to relationships to all of these things.
0:03:30 So, my first question to you, Simon, is what are those things? What are the biggest forces of
0:03:35 changes that you see happening at the moment in all of our lives that you think we should probably talk about today?
0:03:43 That is a big question. And I think one of the mistakes we make, and this is in general,
0:03:49 is we like things to be very neatly organized. We like them to be black and white, yes or no,
0:03:56 right or wrong. And as you know, the world is messier than that. It is more nuanced than that.
0:04:02 And nothing operates in a vacuum. Everything is connected to everything, especially in a world
0:04:07 that’s filled with this rising technology called the internet and this burgeoning technology called
0:04:12 the social media. And desires and feeling like belonging become more and more important. We’re
0:04:17 struggling to find them. Loneliness epidemic, stress epidemic, suicide epidemics. These are all
0:04:22 feelings of disconnection, lack of control, and loneliness. And so that only exaggerates our feeling
0:04:26 of loneliness and despair and wanting more and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you add
0:04:34 in AI. And now those feelings of insecurity are just exaggerated like crazy, right? So now I find AI,
0:04:41 there’s an irony to AI, right? So if you go back to the ’70s and ’80s, right, you had the rise of robotics.
0:04:50 And so robots are now coming into our factories and we’re able to cut employees by dramatic amounts.
0:04:56 And we put people out on the street who, they worked in a factory, their father worked in a factory,
0:05:01 their father’s father worked in a factory. Like this is what they know. And they say, but these robots
0:05:08 are changing, they’re taking our jobs. And the ruling classes and the Wall Street classes and the CEO
0:05:14 classes, they go, yeah, I know, technology. You’re going to have to find a new skill. Reskill, reskill.
0:05:17 That’s what you have to do, reskill. Okay, flash forward to AI. Here’s where the irony comes in.
0:05:23 Because the world is always, nature pours vacuum and life seeks balance at all times, right? Not
0:05:27 always immediately, but it seeks balance at all times. It’s always seeking to live room. Okay,
0:05:34 so flash forward to AI. Now you hear the knowledge workers. It’s the knowledge workers who are going,
0:05:42 my job. It’s the coders. It’s the finance people. My job. The plumber is not worried about AI
0:05:50 at all. The baggage handler at the airport hears zero about AI. And so maybe the right response is,
0:05:58 it’s the future, man. It’s technology. Reskill, reskill. Maybe become a plumber. By the way,
0:06:04 money’s really good. You get to work for yourself if you want. So I just find the pendulum kind of funny.
0:06:12 With AI, do you think it’s overblown or do you think it really is cause for concern and deeper thought?
0:06:20 The honest answer is, I don’t know. Everybody falls on one side of, you’re over, you’re over,
0:06:26 you’re, you know, the sky is not falling, chicken little, or the sky is falling and we’re all going
0:06:33 to die, right? The truth, like most things is probably somewhere in the middle. But the real answer is,
0:06:38 I don’t know. And neither does anybody else. And it seems that we should have some sort of controls
0:06:43 because we didn’t put any controls on the internet. They did put controls on the internet in China.
0:06:51 Like children don’t have the same access to social media like kids do here. Europe has controls on the
0:06:58 internet and America doesn’t. And we’re the ones that seem to be suffering more because of the lack
0:07:04 of controls on the internet. So I think some, some, and by the way, when people, you know,
0:07:08 talk about deregulation and no controls, I mean, they make us wear seatbelts in our cars,
0:07:14 you know, there’s nothing that we have speed limits, you know, and, and it’s for the greater good.
0:07:19 And yeah, sure. Your seatbelt’s uncomfortable, but you’ll get used to it. Like, and it’s fine,
0:07:27 you know? So I think the call for no reform is, is wrong. Um, there are correct limits to keep
0:07:34 things safe. I am fascinated by AI, both the benefits and the weaknesses of it, but it is
0:07:42 revealing to me something more important than what other people are talking about,
0:07:49 which is we’re, uh, we’re a results obsessed society, right? Yeah.
0:07:55 We care about output. We care about performance. We care about numbers. We care about final product
0:08:00 more than anything, right? And when people talk about AI, they talk about its remarkable ability
0:08:08 to write the symphony, paint the painting, write the book, write the article, uh, solve the problem.
0:08:15 Like it, it is, and by the way, the technology is incredible. I asked only a few months ago to please
0:08:20 take this and put it in the style of me. And it was, it was fine. I did it with a friend of mine who’s also
0:08:23 an author and we both did it for ourselves. We did it on each other. It was really fun.
0:08:28 And it was fine. I don’t think it was good. It was, it was, it gave me a good start and I could edit it.
0:08:36 I did it recently. We both did it. It was damn near flawless. It was, it was scary good, right?
0:08:42 Now AI doesn’t know the thing I’m thinking about. It doesn’t know that the next book I’m going to write
0:08:45 about is friendship. It doesn’t know the point of view I’m going to have on friendship. If you ask it,
0:08:49 what would Simon Sinek say about friendship? It’s going to be why this and why that, you know?
0:08:53 So it’s derivative, right? We know that it’s not original. We know that. But at the end of the day,
0:08:58 the work is good. The symphony is good. The art is good. The article is good. The book is decent. Like
0:09:02 it’s getting better and better and better. But here’s the problem that we keep not talking about.
0:09:07 People keep telling us that life is not about the destination. Life is about the journey. That’s what
0:09:14 we keep being told, right? But when we think about AI, we only think about the destination. We only think
0:09:19 about the output. We never think about the input, right? I can tell you that, and you and I can both
0:09:27 say the same thing, which is I am smarter, better at problem solving, more resourceful,
0:09:34 better at pattern recognition, not because a book exists with my ideas in it, but because I wrote it.
0:09:41 The excruciating pain of organizing ideas, putting them in a linear fashion,
0:09:45 trying to put them in a way that other people can understand what I’m trying to get out of my brain,
0:09:53 that excruciating journey is what made me grow. And sure, you can have an AI friend. And that AI friend
0:09:59 has been trained like the best, best psychologist to affirm you, the best listening skills that exist.
0:10:04 Just tell me about your day. That sounds difficult. Boy, it’s hard being you. Oh my God, it’s so great
0:10:11 being you. Have you, you know, like it’s an affirmation machine built by a for-profit company
0:10:13 that wants you to stay on. You can’t neglect that.
0:10:17 But for the fact that nobody’s learning how to be a friend,
0:10:22 it’ll feel good. You’ll feel like you have a friend, but you’re not learning to be a friend,
0:10:29 right? And it’s the, what made you a great entrepreneur is not that the company exists,
0:10:33 is that you built it with your hands and you’ve got the scars to show for it.
0:10:39 It was when things went wrong and you were forced to fix them and think that now when problems show up,
0:10:46 you’re quick, you’re smarter. You’re a much smarter businessman now than you were five years ago,
0:10:52 six years ago. Because you did it. And I think what we’re forgetting is that there’s something to be
0:10:59 said for, and by the way, I’m a fan of AI. I want AI to make things, but I would hate to lose out on
0:11:07 becoming a better version of me. And I think that to really learn to grow. And by the way,
0:11:12 I used to have a steel trap for phone numbers. I knew everybody’s phone number. And then all of a
0:11:18 sudden my phone, my PDA, I don’t need to memorize a phone number anymore. I don’t know most of the people
0:11:23 that I love. I don’t know their phone numbers. I type their name in, right? I just have to know their
0:11:30 name. And so my brain literally went on strike and said, fine, fine. You no longer have the capacity
0:11:34 to remember phone numbers. And I can’t remember phone numbers to save my life, right? So we give up
0:11:40 certain skills or abilities because of technology regularly, right? That’s fine. I don’t have a
0:11:44 problem with any of those things because whether I can remember a phone number or not will not affect
0:11:47 my relationships, my ability to function in the world, or my ability to cope with stress.
0:11:53 But my ability to know what to do when my friend is struggling,
0:12:02 my ability to know what to do when I have a fight with my spouse or my partner. My ability to know
0:12:10 what to do when my boss yells at me, but I don’t want to escalate it, or my employee is acting out and
0:12:16 I don’t want to escalate it or fire them. Well, how do I resolve this? I’ve missed out on those skills.
0:12:21 And simply asking AI, how should I resolve this thing? It’ll give you an answer and it may work,
0:12:27 and you’ve learned nothing, right? And so it’s the difference between, it’s like saying AI will
0:12:34 provide boats for everyone, except for the time there’s a storm and you don’t know how to swim.
0:12:41 And I’m okay, use the boat. Also learn to swim. So I think there’s something to be said for
0:12:47 writing your own symphony, painting your own painting, building your own business, you know,
0:12:54 writing your own book. Not for them, not for the output, not for the output, for your personal
0:13:01 growth. Before I got here today, I was writing a post for LinkedIn and I was trying to make the case
0:13:08 that everybody using ChatGPT to write their emails, their social media posts, their investment pictures
0:13:15 that I received, is now making the internet feel really inauthentic. Because people that I knew for many,
0:13:21 many years are now sending me these perfect cookie cutter emails with words that I’ve never heard them
0:13:26 use before. And so when I read it, my brain mentally discounts it as not being their opinion,
0:13:30 not actually being them. And when you feel like you’re speaking to someone’s AI,
0:13:36 the meaning is gone. So I was writing this post about how actually now there’s this premium on
0:13:41 human written language. Like if you make a couple of mistakes and you use the old words,
0:13:46 you don’t use words like forged and robust. I’d like to forge a partnership with you, Stephen.
0:13:50 Furthermore, can we, I’m like, you never said that to me, mate.
0:13:53 Like, so…
0:13:54 The end dashes.
0:13:55 Oh my gosh.
0:13:55 It’s funny, right?
0:13:56 It’s crazy.
0:14:00 But what you’re talking about, what you’re talking about, have you ever heard of the
0:14:05 Japanese concept of, um, uh, uh, wabi-sabi?
0:14:05 No.
0:14:11 So wabi-sabi is a Japanese design concept, which is beauty in that which is temporary or imperfect.
0:14:15 Okay? So have you ever seen Japanese ceramics?
0:14:15 Yeah.
0:14:19 They’re wonky or the, the, the glaze is not even.
0:14:19 Yeah.
0:14:22 And they’re beautiful. You know why? Because they’re handmade.
0:14:29 Tree bark. Trees. You know, when you have a wooden bowl. Wood is beautiful. Why? It’s imperfect.
0:14:31 Right?
0:14:31 Unique.
0:14:32 Unique.
0:14:42 Things made on a machine are the same and less beautiful. And things made by hand are beautiful
0:14:47 because they’re imperfect. What makes people beautiful is not that we get everything right.
0:14:52 It’s that we get many things wrong. And what makes us fall in love,
0:14:56 is not the person who’s perfect. It’s the person who accepts our imperfections.
0:15:00 And we know we’re in love when we learn to accept theirs. Not learn to, want to.
0:15:08 Right? And you’re 100% right. I now know in the art world, artists are being asked to sign
0:15:17 affidavits that say, I painted this. I made this. Not AI. Not because it’s better or worse.
0:15:22 It’s because I want to know it was touched by human hands. And so I think you’re right.
0:15:31 What will happen is everything will be so perfect that it’ll be as if we’re all driving or using
0:15:36 things that everything came off a conveyor belt. And what we will start to desire is things that are
0:15:43 made by hand. Because by the way, think Rolls-Royce, Ferrari. It takes 39 months to get a Ferrari.
0:15:45 You know why? It was made by hand.
0:15:46 Yeah.
0:15:46 Yeah.
0:15:50 Right? And one of the things that makes it expensive is the technology and the carbon fiber
0:15:54 and all that. But the other thing is it’s slow and was made by people.
0:15:57 Human error. The value of human error.
0:15:58 The value of human error.
0:16:04 Scooter Braun said to me the other day, he said, we could watch a computer play chess with another
0:16:10 computer. He goes, but the chess games that have the highest demand are one human versus another.
0:16:14 Because when a computer plays a computer, the moves are predictable and they’re the same and
0:16:17 they’re perfect. But it’s the human error of two human chess players who are worse,
0:16:20 objectively worse at chess. That makes it so fascinating.
0:16:26 Yes. That’s any sporting event. Any sporting event. It’s not the perfection of the game. It’s
0:16:32 the error that loses the game that adds the drama. And it’s like trying not to make a mistake is as
0:16:36 powerful as trying to get everything right. And it’s the humanity of the sport, the humanity of the
0:16:41 competition. It is the imperfection. And I think that we forget as people what makes us beautiful.
0:16:47 Like when you go on a first date or a first interview, all you do is present perfection.
0:16:54 Put on my best clothes, you know, dressed up. I don’t dress like this every day. I dress up
0:17:00 on my date, right? My interview, I don’t wear this. This is what I wore for my interview because I want
0:17:06 to put out a good impression. And I practiced and I make myself confident. I’ve got a great job and I’ve
0:17:10 got a great personality and I love my mother and my goodness, everything’s great. And then you get in
0:17:17 the relationship, you get the job and you become a slob, right? This is what AI is. It’s to your point,
0:17:20 it’s fake.
0:17:24 It’s on the interview example. The minute you started describing that, I immediately flashback
0:17:29 to an interview I had last week at our company where a young kid walks in wearing a suit. And I
0:17:34 thought, now I have no idea who you are because I know that’s not you. I know that you don’t wear
0:17:40 a suit. You’re 22 years old. You do not wear a suit. So I have no indication. I have no clues
0:17:44 as to who you are. And therefore it’s harder for me to figure out if you fit here.
0:17:50 And I think of, because what he tried to do there was show up perfect, how he, what he thought perfect
0:17:55 was. And in some ways to hide who he actually was. Whereas this is why I like now on the internet,
0:17:57 sloppy text. I like grammatical mistakes.
0:18:01 But you, at the same time, you don’t want him to show up and put his feet on,
0:18:02 to kick his shoes off and put his feet on the table either.
0:18:03 In the same way that…
0:18:07 There’s an element of respect you want. And you want somebody in a first interview to put
0:18:09 on some effort. Now, too much effort…
0:18:09 Yeah.
0:18:15 …is pretty inauthentic. But too little effort. What’s that?
0:18:21 This is my diagram. You’ve got perfect on one end, which is low. And then you’ve got poor,
0:18:24 which is also low. The sweet spot is right here in the middle.
0:18:29 Yeah. Well, I think there’s some truth to that. And so there’s a level of, you know,
0:18:32 like it’s the same thing as like, we all want vulnerability in our relationships, but not on
0:18:37 the first day. Like, I don’t need to know that quite yet. You know?
0:18:43 What are the other skills that you think we need to equip ourselves with based on the way that the
0:18:47 world is heading? Because we’re, you know, like the calculator came along and we no longer needed
0:18:49 to be able to do complicated maths.
0:18:51 I’ve completely forgotten my times tables.
0:18:55 I can’t spell anymore. I said to my friends, the most I can do is nine times nine. That’s like
0:19:00 the top end of my range. But with spelling, it’s the same. I get like half the word correct.
0:19:03 But again, you know?
0:19:04 So what are those skills?
0:19:06 I think it’s all human skills. I think there needs…
0:19:10 So I think where the world is going to go, and at least this is where I’m taking a bet,
0:19:16 is that as the end product becomes easier to produce, it’s the humanity that’s going to suffer.
0:19:23 And unless we take personal accountability, both as individuals and organizations to teach and learn
0:19:28 human skills, they will disappear for all the reasons we’re talking about. So how do I listen?
0:19:36 How do I hold space? How do I resolve conflict peacefully? How do I give and how do I receive
0:19:41 feedback? Those are two different skills. How do I have an effective confrontation? You pissed me off.
0:19:47 Do I know how to approach you as a friend, as a colleague, without creating a massive fight or
0:19:54 losing a friendship over it? How to take accountability. How to express empathy. These skills, these very,
0:19:59 very human skills are the things that we’re already starting to see just with the internet and social
0:20:05 media are suffering. And so I think AI will only exaggerate the loss of those skills. And those
0:20:07 skills are more important than learning how to spell.
0:20:12 One of the concerning things was I heard Sam Altman, who’s the founder of OpenAI and ChatGPT,
0:20:18 launched this thing called WorldCoin a couple of years ago, when ChatGPT really started taking off.
0:20:24 And it has been closely tied to the concept of universal basic income. The idea, the overarching
0:20:32 idea is that in a world where AI and automation eliminate many jobs, UBI may be necessary. WorldCoin is
0:20:37 one way to help implement it. That was stated by the founder of ChatGPT, Sam Altman.
0:20:42 Yeah. I just, again, I’ll go back to my ironic statement before. Isn’t it ironic that they
0:20:46 want to do a universal income, a standard universal income, now that the knowledge workers are losing
0:20:53 their jobs? But when the factory workers were losing their jobs, those same people were massively against
0:20:57 these kinds of things. So, I mean, yes.
0:21:02 What happens to purpose and meaning if we’re being, because for anybody that doesn’t know what universal
0:21:07 basic income is, the idea is the government, the state, whatever, would pay you a certain
0:21:07 amount of money every single month?
0:21:08 Minimum salary.
0:21:15 $2,000, $3,000, whatever it might be, because they don’t think many of us are going to have,
0:21:19 there’s not going to be enough jobs to go around. And I wonder what happens to purpose and meaning
0:21:23 and pursuit and challenge and all these things in a world where we’re just being handed money?
0:21:30 So, we’re not being given wealth. There’s a difference. We’re being given survival money,
0:21:35 right? And so, you know, we have to be very careful that says, you know, everybody who’s on welfare is
0:21:39 lazy. You know, that’s not true, you know? So, we have to be very careful that just because we give
0:21:46 somebody something doesn’t mean that they cease to have ambition or purpose or drive. It’s like somebody
0:21:51 who makes a commission salary, you know, works on commission, and they make just enough to pay their
0:21:58 rent and buy food and that’s it. Like, that’s a lack of ambition, you know? The cases, at least the
0:22:04 people I’ve heard talk about it, they make a compelling case for it, especially in a world where there is
0:22:09 plenty of wealth. But, you know, I don’t know enough about it to make an argument for or against
0:22:16 it, if I’m honest. But I do find it ironic that the Sam Altman’s of the world are calling for it,
0:22:20 given the fact that there’s going to be so many job losses when it’s jobs of their kind. And like,
0:22:26 I also think that’s funny. Like, what’s going to happen when Sam Altman’s product gets good enough
0:22:34 that he can lay off most of his staff? Just curious what happens.
0:22:42 He has made a point of having, I think it’s 100 people or less in his company. He doesn’t have,
0:22:46 like, a big team. And I think part of that is because when I had his TED talk a couple of days
0:22:50 ago, he’s saying, yeah, I think AGI is sooner than we think, actually. And I think we’re going to have a
0:22:55 fast takeoff, which means it’s going to arrive very quickly and accelerate very quickly. So I think he’s
0:22:59 actually preparing not to. Yeah, but what happens to the 90 people he lays off
0:23:03 when he doesn’t need 100? He only needs 10. This is the question.
0:23:06 I’m just curious. I don’t know. And this is why anybody who has an opinion about it,
0:23:11 the answer is we don’t know. But I think people react very differently when it’s their job on the line,
0:23:19 when it’s their income on the line, when it’s their pride, when it’s their ego, you know? I keep hearing
0:23:24 from companies, I mean, we were talking about this before we turned on the cameras,
0:23:29 you know, you talk to, if you want a new website, I guarantee you, I don’t care which company you
0:23:35 talk to. They will all talk about how they’re AI this, AI that. And you ask the question, are you
0:23:38 using AI? Yes, we’re using AI. We’re doing it differently. We’re the future, blah, blah, blah.
0:23:43 And then you ask them for a proposal. It’s going to look like all the other proposals from 2015.
0:23:49 you know, and this is how many hours it’s going to take our people to program this and code this.
0:23:55 And I was like, what happened to all the AI? Why is this slow and expensive when everything’s supposed
0:23:56 to be fast and inexpensive?
0:24:01 Because they’re taking the margin. Of course, they’re taking the margin. And they’ve got a lot
0:24:05 of people doing things the old fashioned way because the business model, you know, people work very hard
0:24:11 to pick. The status quo exists because there are people who benefit from the status quo. You know,
0:24:17 that’s why there is a status quo. And it’s, you know, like I said, everybody’s in to change the future,
0:24:22 you know, until it’s them that’s threatened or their income.
0:24:28 The billionaires that I know, the one consistent thing they’ve whispered to me about AI is that
0:24:32 people are going to have a lot of free time. That’s one of the things that’s been really consistent.
0:24:36 You’re so right when you say that. When I asked you about the future of AI, you said, “I don’t know.”
0:24:40 The reason why I know that’s probably the correct answer generally is because when I sat with the most
0:24:45 advanced people in AI, whether it’s Mustafa, who’s head of Microsoft AI, now CEO of Microsoft AI,
0:24:52 or people from Google, or the CEO of Google, or Reid Hoffman, who’s the founder of LinkedIn,
0:24:57 they all had different opinions, which made me to think actually the right answer is nobody knows.
0:25:02 The right answer is nobody. That is correct. And you always be aware of the messenger, right?
0:25:07 Like you won’t have anybody who owns an AI company talking doomsday scenarios. It’s not in their economic
0:25:12 interest, even if they secretly harbor that. It’s like people who used to run cigarette companies
0:25:17 didn’t smoke and they didn’t let their families smoke. I remember visiting Facebook in the earlier
0:25:26 days and I went into the cafeteria and they had picnic benches. And they were telling me with
0:25:32 pride how they have these communal eating areas to help people maintain relationship. And I was like,
0:25:37 this is hilarious. You literally have a product that breaks relationships, and yet you understand enough
0:25:43 to make people eat together at lunchtime so that they’ll maintain relationship. I mean, the point
0:25:47 being, if you’re economic interest, you know, show me how someone’s paid and I’ll show you how they behave.
0:25:52 One of the scariest conversations I was privy to was a friend of mine who’s a billionaire in London.
0:25:58 He knows the CEO of one of the biggest AI companies in the world who I can’t name. And he said, by the
0:26:04 way, what he tells me in private is not what he’s saying publicly. He said to me that what this particular
0:26:10 CEO thinks is going to happen with AI is pretty horrific. And the CEO of this big AI company is
0:26:14 totally cool with it. It’s and it’s horrific what he thinks is about to happen. And then when I watch
0:26:20 this guy do his like online talks and give his opinion, he’s so nuanced and everything will be
0:26:24 fine. And he’s an AI optimist. Then I heard this scenario at this kitchen table in East London from
0:26:30 his friend about what he really thinks. And it was chilling. Yeah. Like actually the lack of empathy.
0:26:31 Yeah. That makes sense to me.
0:26:35 The obsession with power was shocking to me.
0:26:41 Yeah, the obsession with power and money and all the rest of it. Yeah. But this is because the internet
0:26:48 has done something really strange and and challenged one of my theories head on. Right. So I talk about in
0:26:54 an infinite game, you know, Jim, Jim Carse, his theory, you know, in an infinite game, there’s no winners
0:27:03 or losers. Right. And so like nobody wins, you know, fast food. Nobody wins cars like General Motors,
0:27:09 Ford, Vauxhall. They can all exist at the same time. Right. And they’ll have degrees of success
0:27:14 or not success, but they can all exist simultaneously. No one’s going to win. The exception is in the
0:27:23 internet in the like, like Amazon. It won. Yeah. Like, you know, Google for search. Yep. They won.
0:27:29 Right. And if you start going down like the big, big tech companies, there is only one. I mean,
0:27:35 sure, there’s competition, but not really. Right. Who, you know, Walmart is making a run of it to
0:27:40 threaten Amazon, but Amazon’s still so damn big. You know, all of these companies, there’s only one.
0:27:48 And that’s not good. That you can’t have winners in a, in a category. And so this is why I think the,
0:27:54 the race for AI is so aggressive for AI dominance is so aggressive. And which is why people are not
0:28:00 being careful and which is why they’re not putting controls is because the way that tech seems to work
0:28:05 is there probably will be one dominant standard and then that’s it. And the question is which one,
0:28:11 because I don’t think it just seems to be the way it is, which is a very scary prospect to me that the
0:28:16 fact that we can have winners is, is a bad thing, especially if we, if we pride ourselves on being
0:28:21 capitalists, then there cannot be, there cannot be a winner. And there cannot be one that is so dominant
0:28:24 that, that nobody else can even compete except for scraps.
0:28:31 What are your emotions when you think about AI and what’s happening? Because I, I feel like the
0:28:35 moment we’re living in is a profound one and that we don’t actually realize it. Because when these tools
0:28:41 come out, OpenAI released yesterday, 3.0, it’s the best model ever. The day after my life was the same.
0:28:45 So we don’t really notice it because we go back to work, our clients ask for the same thing. We have
0:28:51 the same team members sat around us. It almost seems like the sound timer is rotated and we’re on a clock.
0:28:57 And it’s a slow disruption of our everyday lives. Sam Altman the other day on his Ted talk three,
0:29:02 four days ago said in the short term, everything will appear the same. But in the long term,
0:29:03 he goes, life is going to be completely different.
0:29:08 Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, and look at any, any technology like the, like AI,
0:29:13 it was kind of the same until it wasn’t. And these are evolutions, not revolutions. Like,
0:29:19 there’s a revolutionary bit, you know, like, I remember when, when the internet showed up and like brick
0:29:22 and internet shopping showed up and all the technologists were like, it’s the end of stores,
0:29:25 it’s the end of bricks and mortar. Like, they’re done. Like, we’ll never go to a shop again.
0:29:30 Well, that didn’t happen. Now, shops struggle to compete against internet, but that’s a price thing,
0:29:35 right? That’s, that’s a business model thing. But we like going shopping because again, they’ve,
0:29:40 all of these companies always forget, especially technologists. They all forget that the end user is
0:29:46 as a human being. And most of us don’t fully understand everything. Even, even our iPhones,
0:29:51 most people use a small percentage of all the capabilities of our iPhones. Most of us don’t
0:29:55 even know how to change the damn settings to make it do something we want, right? Even,
0:30:00 and you, neither do your kids. It’s not an adult thing, right? It’s not an old person thing. Like,
0:30:06 and there’s a few people who get more out of it and good for them. Some people use it just as a phone,
0:30:12 fine. And it’s a bell curve. So I think there will be a few people, a few companies that will get more
0:30:17 value out of these things than the rest of us. But I think he’s right. I think there’ll be a
0:30:23 revolutionary bit and then it’ll settle. I, I, I’m, I find this whole thing fascinating. When you ask me,
0:30:30 how do I feel, you know, depending on what subject I’m talking about, absolute fear and absolute
0:30:35 amazement. I, I, I have, I have both and everything in between. When I think about how it affects democracy
0:30:42 and the ability to make deep fakes and, and how it can manipulate people and their opinions to vote one
0:30:49 way or another, I have real fear, right? When it comes to like productivity and the reshaping of
0:30:54 business, you know, technologists and people who were part of the internet revolution, they love to
0:30:58 say, you know, 20 years ago, 80% of the jobs we have now didn’t exist. They love to say that,
0:31:04 right? But when you ask them now though, they, they, they, they seem to think that I think it’s
0:31:07 the same, which is all those people are going to lose those jobs in white collar, you know,
0:31:12 white collar jobs and knowledge workers. They’re not, they’re not going to not work. There’s going
0:31:17 to be new jobs. The IRS digitized a whole bunch of years ago, right? They got rid of all the
0:31:22 accountants and they put in all the computers, right? Do you know how much money the IRS saved
0:31:28 when it, when it changed completely changed the way it looked? The answer is zero. Yes,
0:31:34 they got rid of all the accountants. They need to hire all the IT people. So the, the, the, the,
0:31:39 the workforce looked different, but it didn’t get smaller. And so I think it’s the same thing.
0:31:44 What it’s going to work. We also, we already know the massive, incredible amounts of energy
0:31:51 that it takes for AI to work. Data centers that use up massive amounts of electricity,
0:31:57 like we’ve never seen in our lives. Like nuclear has to be a thing. There isn’t enough coal or oil
0:32:03 or solar or wind to power these things. It just doesn’t exist. So nuclear has to be a thing.
0:32:08 So go be a nuclear engineer, go, you want to get an advanced degree. I don’t need you to be a coder.
0:32:13 You know, coding was a thing for, go be a nuke. Because by the way, you’ve got to be just as smart
0:32:19 to be a nuke as you have to be a, so you’re going to start to see that, you know, you’re going to see
0:32:25 energy work. I just think the jobs will change. I don’t think they’re going to like, I completely,
0:32:28 one thing I do disagree with, you know, it’s just not like you’re going to be a bunch of people
0:32:32 walking around bored. I just think the jobs will change.
0:32:35 If there was a 10-year-old kid stood here now and the 10-year-old said to us,
0:32:39 said, guys, what do you think I should focus on?
0:32:41 I would say two things.
0:32:48 One is going back to human skills, learn how to be a good friend to your friends.
0:32:49 Okay. How do I learn that?
0:32:52 You’re going to really need that. How does a 10-year-old learn that or how do you and I learn that?
0:32:54 Both.
0:32:57 A 10-year-old learns it, that when they go and have a play date at a friend’s house,
0:33:01 a smart parent takes away all the phones. I would hate that the 10-year-old has a phone in the first
0:33:07 place, but if they do, take away all the phones and make the kids go play. That when they have a fight,
0:33:14 the parents make them say sorry. Go over to your friend’s house and knock on the door and you’re
0:33:18 going to say sorry for the thing that you did. We’re going to teach kids how to resolve conflict.
0:33:22 We’re going to teach kids how to pay compliments. We’re going to teach kids how to take accountability.
0:33:33 And these are all the skills of, well, what did you do wrong? It’s not always the school or the
0:33:40 teacher. Maybe your kid is disruptive. And so accountability is a real thing. And so I think
0:33:44 if we teach those things to 10-year-olds and to adults, I think it makes for a better society.
0:33:49 And the other thing is go learn a real skill. And I don’t mean that prompting isn’t a real skill.
0:33:54 That’s not what I mean. It’s what I said before, which is it’s the excruciating, like what makes
0:33:59 great relationships great is not that you get along all the time. The best marriages, the best
0:34:05 relationships, they’re not absent of conflict. It’s they know how to resolve conflict peacefully.
0:34:10 By the way, I believe in world peace. I don’t believe in a world without conflict. I believe a
0:34:13 world in which we can resolve our conflict peacefully without the need to go to war to resolve conflict.
0:34:18 This is why I like democracies, because democracies can solve conflict without bullets.
0:34:22 So I, the human skills one, but I say a real skill, me like go do something difficult,
0:34:30 build something, design something, imagine something, write something. And, and, and, and by the way,
0:34:34 I’m totally fine. Even if you plug into chat GPT and say, tell me what’s wrong with this. Your grammar’s
0:34:46 all screwed up, you know? And like I said, I, I am smarter because I did it. I’m the reason I’m more
0:34:50 confident than when I was younger. And I think that’s one of the things you do. People talk about
0:34:56 you get wise with age, you know, and like, and you know, you have more confident as you get older. And yes,
0:35:01 that’s all true. And there’s multiple reasons for it. But I think one of the reasons is, is the things that are
0:35:08 happening to me now, I’ve gone through those things before. They were scary and kept me up at night the first
0:35:16 time. And now I know how to do it. I’m not afraid of it anymore. And so I think what happens as you gain
0:35:25 experience is you lose fear. And if chat GPT or whatever AI product we use does everything for us, I think you just
0:35:31 end up scared. One of the things that I’m contending with at the moment, with this new technology that’s
0:35:37 arrived, being an entrepreneur, seeing this huge opportunity, thinking about the dotcom boom and
0:35:44 all the great opportunity that that created. People talking about the age of abundance and all these
0:35:49 things is I’m contending with the question on a personal level, which is when is enough enough?
0:35:53 And maybe this question is more pertinent now than ever in a world where creating stuff,
0:35:59 building stuff, starting a company, launching a book, the cost of creating these things,
0:36:05 whether they’re good or not so good, has gone to basically zero. So we can all theoretically from
0:36:12 our computers now become movie directors and authors and software developers. And so with this possibility,
0:36:19 opportunity, and the thing we need to deploy is intention. Like, what do I do?
0:36:23 What is the thing that’s going to lead me to happiness? Do I pursue all of these things and
0:36:28 start building and creating and running off down that path to climb some ladder? Or do I take a
0:36:32 second? When is enough enough? And as an entrepreneur who is in this moment has a lot of resources, could
0:36:37 roll the dice, could start all these new companies, could do all of these things. When is enough enough?
0:36:52 Right. Like we, there’s something to be said for gratitude. And if you want to make it money, we know
0:36:58 the data on this, right? I think once you reach, I can’t remember the number, it’s $70,000 a year of
0:37:04 income. Like, like when you’re talking about money, you can’t buy happiness. Like it absolutely buys
0:37:09 happiness up to a certain level, which is survival. And then a little bit more, you know, but once you
0:37:14 reach a certain level, like the, there is no discernible increase in happiness that comes with
0:37:22 money. Now, what money buys is options. You know, what money buys is time. You know, um, those things
0:37:29 are true. And you, you said it like some of the people that you and I know who have made generational
0:37:35 wealth, they’re not discernibly happy. The ones that are happier were happy before they made the
0:37:42 money. And the ones who thought the money would buy them happiness or worse, the money took away their
0:37:46 purpose because when they made the money, they were driven by something that they accidentally made the
0:37:51 money. They built businesses that were, that those were their passions and their cause. And then the
0:37:57 money came and they weren’t building the thing anymore. And you know, this, this is the, this is
0:38:02 the difference. It’s like why this, this is really interesting. It also gets the question is why is it
0:38:06 that small companies are more innovative than big companies, right? Like you think about it when you
0:38:10 say, what’s the secret for, for innovation? When you want to have resources, you want to have great
0:38:14 people and you want to have great market opportunities, and then you can have great ideas. Okay. So big
0:38:18 companies have tons of money. They hire, have all the best people. They have mature marketplaces that
0:38:23 people generally know who they are and they’re the least innovative organizations on the planet,
0:38:27 right? Then you have little companies that have no money. They’re bootstrapping it. They don’t have
0:38:31 enough people. Nobody knows who they are in this shit market conditions. And yet they’re more
0:38:35 innovative. And then big companies innovate by buying the little companies. You know, that’s basically
0:38:39 what happens. My exit, your exit, big company kind of innovates. They just bought you, right?
0:38:47 Why is that? Why is that the rule? And so it goes directly to this. I think, I think the reason is,
0:38:53 is because when you’re small, your ambitions are bigger than the resources you have to achieve those
0:39:01 ambitions. Every small business has outsized ambitions, like beyond objectively stupid. Like
0:39:04 you look at what they have and what they’ve got, and they tell you where they’re going to be. And you’re
0:39:11 just like, no. And yet some of them do. And I think the problem with big companies is their ambitions are
0:39:16 well within their, their capabilities of their resources. In other words, their vision isn’t big
0:39:21 enough. And I think your vision has to be bigger than the amount of money, resources, and intelligence
0:39:28 that you have to achieve that. And what that produces is creativity. And so it goes right back to this,
0:39:37 which is if, if, if we can do so much with AI, then we need bigger visions. And so when you ask me,
0:39:43 how do you find happiness? I think that we need to set our sights on things that are bigger than finite
0:39:50 success. And I think we do need a gratitude practice, regardless of how little or how much you have,
0:39:55 to be grateful for what you do have is a profound impact. I went through this with the LA fires,
0:40:01 right? The, I was very lucky that my house survived and I didn’t have to get evacuated,
0:40:07 but the evacuation zones were getting closer and closer. And two things happened that were profound
0:40:13 that I will, that live with me now. One which is resolvable and one which is unresolvable. We were
0:40:18 all obsessed with this app called Watch Duty, which is how we track the fires. It basically took all the
0:40:22 publicly available information and put it in one place in a really amazing way, right? Started by this
0:40:27 amazing, amazing, amazing entrepreneur named John Mills. And we were all obsessed with Watch Duty. We all were
0:40:33 on this app the whole time. And one of the things we were watching was the wind. Because if the wind shifted,
0:40:38 it could profoundly impact your life. And I remember having this experience, like we were all watching
0:40:47 the wind and the wind went away from me. And I thought, oh, thank God. And in that moment, I knew that
0:40:52 somebody was looking at that going, oh, God, no. And it’s not like service where I’ll eat a little
0:40:56 less so that somebody can eat more. I’ll give up some of my incomes that somebody has. It’s not one of
0:41:00 those. I don’t want my house to burn down so somebody else’s house doesn’t burn down. And I had to live
0:41:07 with this paradox of how unfair the world is that simultaneously my relief in good news was somebody
0:41:13 else’s stress and bad news. And there was nothing I could do to change that. So that paradox is horrible.
0:41:19 And it was right in front of me. So that’s one. But it’s the second part, which is the evacuation
0:41:26 zones were coming a little closer. And they were one zone away from where I live. And we didn’t know
0:41:31 if we were going to be woken in the middle of the night with an alarm to evacuate. We didn’t know.
0:41:38 And so I had to go through the process of packing up my car and making my go bag. And I put as much
0:41:42 stuff in my car as I could. And I had to, you know, we all play that game. It’s like, if there’s a fire and
0:41:46 you have to run out and grab two things, what would you grab? I had to do that, right? A lot
0:41:50 of people in LA had to do that, right? You actually had to make the decisions. What am I going to take
0:41:54 and what am I going to leave behind? And I found myself bringing things that I never thought were
0:42:00 important to me. And I found myself leaving things behind that I thought I would take.
0:42:06 But the one thing that was amazing was stuff that I couldn’t fit, but I still had love for,
0:42:11 like my favorite painting in the world. It’s just, I couldn’t fit it in my car. I stood there in front
0:42:17 of it. And I said, thank you. And I said, goodbye. And it was like saying goodbye to a loved one. You know,
0:42:21 I hear this, you know, somebody loses a parent. They go, look, it was awful. And, you know, he suffered
0:42:28 as on his deathbed, but I’m glad I was with him to say goodbye. And it was the most amazing thing to
0:42:37 have gratitude for something that I don’t want to lose, but accepted that I, I might. And it’s made
0:42:44 me a lot more disconnected from my material things, especially the things I said goodbye to, because
0:42:49 I’ve already said goodbye to them. I had, I just sold some of my art for, for charity and people said,
0:42:53 how did you love your art? I’m like, I know it’s like my art’s like my babies. Like that. How did you
0:42:58 choose? And I said, I’ve already said goodbye to everything here. I did it months ago, you know?
0:43:06 And I think this idea of gratitude, gratitude for what we have, but also like, you’re going to lose
0:43:12 your parents. All of us will lose our parents. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully they don’t ever have
0:43:19 to say goodbye to us. But if things go well, we’re going to have to say goodbye to our parents. And we
0:43:26 can’t be angry about it. We want to say thank you for the times we had. And I think to have that level of
0:43:32 appreciation for everything in our lives, how temporary all of this is, I think that’s, it makes
0:43:38 you happier. I know it sounds like, I don’t know, it makes you happier to just look at someone and be
0:43:44 grateful. You know, failed relationships. You could be angry at the other person, or you can be grateful
0:43:50 for the lessons they taught you and, or for the good times you had. And I think to change our minds to
0:43:55 gratitude. And you can, you know, it sounds, it’s a little bit, you know, hippy-dippy to have a
0:43:59 gratitude practice. And that’s fine. You know, if that’s your thing, lie in bed every night or keep
0:44:07 a journal and just say the things you’re grateful for. But I don’t know if it works without an evacuation
0:44:14 zone approaching. I don’t know. But to go around your home and just say thank you to the things that
0:44:19 you like is a weird thing. How many of us, how many of us, when was the last time you called a
0:44:27 friend out of the blue and just said thanks for being my friend? Like, hey, just wanted to call
0:44:34 and just tell you I love you. Just tell you thank you. And, you know, that’s all. No, just a quick,
0:44:37 just two minutes. Just, just want to say thank you for being my friend.
0:44:41 I think if I said that to one of my best friends, they’d think I was losing my mind or something,
0:44:44 or that something was wrong. They’d be so concerned because it’s such an unusual thing for me to have
0:44:49 done. Okay. So you can do it this way. So I had a guest on the podcast and he came up with this
0:44:54 thing that is so outside of my personality, but I’m going to try it. Yeah, that would make sense.
0:45:00 And you could do that. You know, I’m, I’m new to this. You know, I, I know for years, people have
0:45:04 been like, you should have a gratitude practice and keep a gratitude journal. And I tried it. I was like,
0:45:10 okay, I’m grateful for my sister, grateful for what I’ve, um, for my family, grateful for my
0:45:15 friends, grateful for the life that I live. Right. Good night. All right. Next day.
0:45:21 I’m grateful for my sister, grateful for my family, grateful for my friends, you know? And I found it
0:45:27 so repetitive that I was like, is this worth it? Like, sure. Like every now and then something was
0:45:32 different and new. And I’ve come to come to the conclusion, like if it’s the same three things
0:45:38 every single day, good. I was thinking about this a lot the other day when someone asked me,
0:45:44 think about all the people in your life and imagine if they were sick and imagine if you
0:45:50 had a billion dollars in your bank and a billion dollars could cure their sickness. Like who
0:45:55 would you cure it for? Would you, would you spend a billion dollars to cure your, your girlfriend’s
0:45:59 sickness, your, your mother’s sickness, your father’s sickness, your whatever, even if it was
0:46:04 the, the, the risk to them was, was low. And you would, I’d give every penny I had to cure
0:46:08 an illness that my girlfriend had, even if the risk was low. And as I was thinking through that,
0:46:12 I was like, but then if you look at my calendar and how I’m allocating my time against these
0:46:17 individuals and against my priorities, there’s a real imbalance here. And over the last couple
0:46:20 of weeks in particular, I’ve been on a bit of a journey of realizing just how important
0:46:23 four or five people in my life are.
0:46:25 I, I, I, I, how much do I neglect them?
0:46:30 Yeah. I mean, like, of course, I mean, we are only when it’s, and it’s, you’re right. Like,
0:46:34 which is if you say give a billion dollars and you can cure this disease that affects, you know,
0:46:41 2 million people, 10 million people, you’d be like, eh, I’ll give some money. Right. But if it was one
0:46:45 family member, you would exhaust every resource. You would quit your job. You would do everything you
0:46:53 can to, for a 1% chance, you know, and people do, they quit their jobs when, and like so many
0:46:57 charities have been started because my father died, my mother died, my sister died, my brother died,
0:47:03 and now I’ve devoted my life to duh. Right. Like, like literally that’s the reason. And it’s because
0:47:07 it’s personal. Of course, that makes sense. It’s why, why are some entrepreneurs good and some
0:47:12 entrepreneurs bad? Well, how personal is the thing that you’re working on to you? Because then I only
0:47:16 like to, like the entrepreneurs that I love, I want to know that they are solving a problem that
0:47:21 they struggled with or that somebody they love struggled with or something. If they read an
0:47:25 article in a magazine, I thought this is a great market opportunity. There is no passion there that
0:47:31 is driven by money and power only. I want to know somebody that is, it’s so deeply personal to them
0:47:36 that they will stop at nothing. They will run through a brick wall and find every creative solution.
0:47:41 And it goes right back to the small company versus big company. It’s, it’s passion. And
0:47:47 a vision that is bigger than the resources that I have, which, you know, I had a conversation with
0:47:56 somebody recently, actually, where they wanted to, we, it was a business problem and they wanted to
0:48:02 change the goals. And I said, we can’t just change the goals because they’re difficult, you know,
0:48:07 so we might miss the goal. It’s true. Yes, we have a very aggressive goal and the likelihood of us
0:48:13 hitting it is incredibly low, but why would we lower it? And they said to me, you know,
0:48:17 I don’t like to fail. They said, I don’t like to fail. And I know you don’t either. And I said,
0:48:23 ah, that’s where you’re wrong. That’s where you’re wrong. I have spent most of my life a failure and I’m
0:48:29 very comfortable being a failure. And I think of myself, not as a success. I think of myself as a
0:48:33 failure. And that’s because my ambitions are bigger than my skills or my ability to achieve those
0:48:38 ambitions. And so almost everything I’ve done with a couple of exceptions have fallen short of what I
0:48:44 had hoped for. I’m very comfortable with that because failing at 80% is really much better than
0:48:51 succeeding at 30%. And I think this idea of fear of failure and embracing failure, I don’t want to fail,
0:49:00 but I just, I, I have, I think it’s important to have dreams that are beyond your skills or your
0:49:06 resources because that’s where creativity comes from. That’s where resourcefulness comes from.
0:49:11 You know, when you go, how am I going to figure this one out? And you told me the stories of your
0:49:18 own team, you know, it’s the resourceful ones. And now we go back to AI. AI is not going to figure that
0:49:23 out, right? There’s, there’s data on this. I have actually never thought about this. This is good.
0:49:29 There was a book called, oh, it was the wisdom of crowds. I think it was that one. I think it was the
0:49:34 wisdom of crowds by James Serecki, where people with experience knew what to do versus people who
0:49:38 were just trained. So I’ll give you the example. This is, and again, I might have the book wrong,
0:49:44 but this was, I remember the case. So there was a bunch of firemen fighting a fire in like the,
0:49:50 in wildfires, right? And the wind picked up and the fire was coming really fast towards these firemen.
0:49:55 True story. And they all started running for their lives as this fire was approaching them
0:50:00 unbelievably quickly. But the problem was if they looked ahead, there was a small hill,
0:50:05 which means you’re going to slow down because you can’t run fast up a hill. And this fire is coming
0:50:13 fast, right? The senior guy on the, on the team started screaming, get down, get down, get down.
0:50:17 And they all ignored him. They were all running for their lives. And he just stopped running and got
0:50:23 down and put his hands over his head and just lay in a ball. And the fire was going so fast that it blew
0:50:28 right over him. And it caught up with the other guys and burned them all to death.
0:50:35 Now they didn’t teach them that in fire school. It was accumulated knowledge of wisdom of that came
0:50:40 from experience that he knew the right thing to do in the moment. He was able to read the tea leaves in
0:50:48 a way and his, his gut, whatever that means, his gut said, the right thing to do is to drop down.
0:50:54 You’ll be okay. And this is why I’m going to sound like a broken record. The importance of doing the
0:50:59 work yourself, of writing the book, painting the painting, choreographing the dance, you know,
0:51:04 composing the symphony, building the business, having the difficult conversations, stumbling and
0:51:09 bumbling, right? The reason for it, like, let’s say you have a fight with your, your, your girlfriend.
0:51:14 You don’t want to be in a fight. You don’t like being in a fight. You want to do the right thing.
0:51:17 So you go to chat GBT and you’d be like, my girlfriend and I had a fight. This is what the
0:51:22 fight was about. Okay. I think I did some stuff wrong. I think she’s did some stuff wrong. This is
0:51:28 exactly what happened. Tell me what to do. And you go, babe, I just want you to know, I want to take full
0:51:32 accountability. I’m really, I’m really sad that this happened. And I want you to know that I care about
0:51:38 this relationship. And she says to you, did you get this answer from chat GBT? And you go, I did.
0:51:45 How’s that going to go? Right now you did everything right. You did everything right.
0:51:51 You did everything right. But for the fact, and it goes right back to what you said,
0:51:55 which is it removed the humanity, it removed the personality. It’s artificial. It’s fake.
0:51:59 It’s everything you said about the job interview. It’s everything you said about all those other
0:52:05 things, about all the resumes, all of the pitch decks. It’s not you telling me sorry. It’s chat
0:52:09 GBT telling me sorry. And even though you went with good intention to get it right, I would rather you
0:52:14 get it wrong and bumble and fumble it with me and be like, babe, I don’t know how to do this. I’m an
0:52:19 asshole. You know, and then she fights with you because you get it wrong and you rumble through it
0:52:24 together. And what happens when you come, you’ve had this happen. I know because I haven’t, I know
0:52:30 anybody, everybody has. When you come out of the fight, you’re closer. Not because you got it right,
0:52:36 because you got it wrong. And if you learn the skill and you get better and better and better
0:52:40 and better, and you do learn the skill of saying the right thing and you do learn the skill, she knew
0:52:44 it wasn’t because you asked AI in the moment because you just wanted to resolve the problem and remove
0:52:48 the tension. It’s because you learn the skill for the time that you don’t know when it’s going to
0:52:53 happen because you’re equipped for this relationship. And it’s that investment in the
0:52:57 relationship rather than trying to transactionally solve the problem before me. And that’s the
0:53:01 difference. It’s infinite versus finite. It’s transaction versus, it’s destination versus
0:53:06 journey. I’m in the journey of this relationship versus I have a destination. I got to solve this
0:53:11 problem now, otherwise this is going to destroy my relationship. And all of this is coming full
0:53:15 circle and it comes right back to everything we started. I think it’s hilarious that you’re
0:53:19 that you’re having a conversation with me about AI because I’m not an AI expert and I’m not in the
0:53:26 AI business. But I am in the humanity business. And I think everything we’re talking about from every
0:53:33 angle, we’re battle testing this idea. And what we can’t get away from is human beings really want
0:53:41 human beings. And human beings really want human experiences. And human beings really want things
0:53:50 made by human beings. And we are not only okay with, we want imperfection. Because imperfection is the sign
0:53:51 of human.
0:53:59 I was just thinking about how when I’m in an argument with my partner, if she was perfect, if she was
0:54:07 completely composed, if she was looking at me without emotion, without expression, and if she was spewing
0:54:13 chat GPT-like responses back at me, it would be a little bit infuriating. But also it would be
0:54:20 completely dehumanizing, as you say. And it’s funny how actually, even in conflict, I want emotion. I want
0:54:25 imperfection. I want human resonance. So it’s interesting because I’ve been like thinking about
0:54:25 what my…
0:54:26 Struggle is a good thing.
0:54:33 And I think in our modern day and age, we have underappreciated and underrepresented the value
0:54:40 of struggle. And if you ask anybody in their life, you know, tell me about a time in your career
0:54:46 where like you felt like, boy, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever done. I’m so glad I’m a part
0:54:51 of this. It’s not the big win. It’s not the big success. It’s not we finished everything on time and
0:54:57 under budget. It’s, oh my God, this one thing went horribly wrong. Oh my God, it went so badly. And yet
0:55:03 the way we came together, like the most important thing in my career was when I lost my passion and
0:55:08 went into deep depression. Never want to go through that again. Really glad it happened. And all of our
0:55:12 relationships, professional, personal, romantic, whatever they are, right? All of our relationships
0:55:18 get better when we go through struggle together. And we know, we know the way the human animal works.
0:55:22 We know that oxytocin is released when you have shared struggle. That’s why when you put people
0:55:28 in bootcamp and they go through shit together, or there’s a natural disaster, like all of a sudden,
0:55:33 I don’t care who you voted for. I saw your house blow down on the tornado. I got you. Don’t worry,
0:55:40 we’re neighbors, right? Like we can put aside all the rational nonsense, the intellectual nonsense.
0:55:45 And at the end of the day, human beings are good at helping human beings.
0:55:51 Struggle also, in many contexts, is the value. So when I think about a Simon Sinek book, the reason
0:55:57 why I value it is because I know that Simon Sinek spent years writing that thing and pulling it
0:56:01 together. The reason why certain handmade things that we talked about earlier are valuable is because
0:56:05 of the pain and the toil that went into them. And when you think about the art world and other
0:56:10 creations through history, the value comes from the fact that human beings came together for a prolonged
0:56:15 period of time and did something. And actually the investment is the value. Like the amount that went
0:56:19 in the top creates… We’re not buying the product. We’re buying the story.
0:56:24 Yeah. Like the Mona Lisa is… You’re not buying the Mona Lisa. You’re not buying a piece of art. You’re
0:56:28 buying the story that goes with the art. The story that it took to create the art. What the artist was
0:56:33 going through. What they were thinking. You’re not buying my book. You’re buying the story of the making
0:56:35 of my book. And the Mona Lisa was stolen from what I understand.
0:56:39 I mean, we don’t even know if the one in the Louvre is the real one.
0:56:42 Because I heard much of the reason why the Mona Lisa is so valuable is because at one point it was
0:56:47 stolen and then they like managed to find it again. And actually it’s just a painting. But
0:56:51 the story of the painting is worth 100 million, 200 million, whatever.
0:56:54 Whatever. I mean, and so this is what we forget. The reason famous artists are famous
0:57:00 is because you buy the story of that artist, not their talent. There’s a lot of famous singers and
0:57:06 actors and painters, dancers who are a lot less talented than the unknown ones, but you buy
0:57:15 into the story. And this is why some celebrities, as much as they talk about the paparazzi and the
0:57:19 tabloids, they want to be in the paparazzi and the tabloids. They want the paparazzi to follow them
0:57:23 because it keeps their story relevant. It keeps them, you know, they’re worth more because they’re in
0:57:23 the zeitgeist.
0:57:29 Apple know this better than anybody because you go to an Apple store and they’ve laid out their
0:57:37 products as if it was an art gallery. The three feet either side of the iPhone create the impression
0:57:42 in my mind that this is a piece of art and there’s only one of them. And the fact that they’ve wasted
0:57:45 all this space, which I know real estate costs money and that must have been expensive,
0:57:50 pulls into the device itself. If I’d gone into an Apple store and there was a thousand iPhones,
0:57:54 like the old electronic stops, all stacked on top of each other, I would assume the iPhone was worth
0:57:59 less. But the story, just by the frame in which I see it, means that, oh my God, this thing is…
0:57:59 It’s theater.
0:58:00 It looks like one of one.
0:58:06 Yeah, it’s theater. And some would call it manipulative, but we want things to feel
0:58:14 valuable, not just be valuable, right? I could tell you I’ve got a… I found a guy who makes
0:58:19 cashmere jerseys and he uses the exact same cashmere as, you know, lower piano, whatever,
0:58:26 some fancy-ass brand, you know? But the problem is it says like Dave’s cashmere shop, you know?
0:58:31 I could tell you everything about where he sources the cashmere, how he makes it, that’s the same
0:58:37 everything. And you’d be like, yeah, Dave’s cashmere shop? Because you’re not buying the
0:58:42 cashmere, you’re buying the brand. You’re buying the story, you’re buying the association. That’s
0:58:50 what’s… That’s why brands have value. Because it’s irrational. And humans are irrational. And
0:59:00 that’s why companies invest in building brands for the story. And so, yeah, I think I’m… You
0:59:07 know, as much as AI scares me, I still believe the thing that the technologists don’t appreciate
0:59:15 and won’t appreciate. And there will be a rebellion. And handmade will become more valuable and handmade
0:59:23 will become more expensive. And people will want to say that. You know, it’s like, you had that person
0:59:27 write your speech for you? You had… Wait, who did the painting for you? They did it themselves?
0:59:35 You know? And I think that’s good. You know, it’s a pendulum, right? We’re going to get enamored with
0:59:40 the technology until it’s boring. This also just expands generally. I know this sounds quite big and
0:59:44 we’re talking about these big things, but just everything that you create, it’s very, very tempting
0:59:49 at the moment to just create something with AI and throw it up on your website, on your social media
0:59:54 pages, or present it to the world, a presentation deck at work. But actually, I’m already noticing
1:00:03 I’m attributing huge value and interest in things that I can identify as human made. I had a flashback
1:00:08 a second ago, so we’re talking about this idea of scarcity to one of my favorite brands in the world.
1:00:13 It’s a clothing brand. And I was obsessed with this clothing brand. I’d spend a huge amount of money. I
1:00:16 don’t spend money on clothes. I would spend a huge amount of money every time they came out with a new
1:00:23 item. One day, the founder of the brand, and everybody knows this brand, he posted a photo from his
1:00:29 factory. It was like a series of video. And what I saw in the video was the shirt I was currently
1:00:36 wearing as I watched the video in a massive bucket with 4,000 others of the exact same shirt. And in
1:00:41 that moment, I fell out of love. I fell out of love. Exactly. Because in my head, I painted this like
1:00:48 artisan picture of them sewing it. These two guys sewing it in their bedroom and then like sending it to me.
1:00:51 It’s probably what it was on the ad too. I think that’s what it kind of like used to be.
1:00:56 So I still had that image. But it got too big. Yeah. One thing that I’ve always understood,
1:01:00 this is true for businesses, this is true for absolutely everything, scale breaks things.
1:01:05 You know, scale breaks things. In the military, they have special forces, special operating forces,
1:01:14 Navy SEALs, SAS, you know, all those folks, right? And there’s a saying in the special forces that’s
1:01:21 basically special, you can’t scale special, right? So you can take whatever training skills,
1:01:24 whatever you have for the special forces, and you give it to everybody, it’s not going to work.
1:01:33 Special can only be small, you know? And so scale breaks things. Scale always, I mean,
1:01:39 like Microsoft versus Apple, right? So Apple wanted the highest quality operating system in the world,
1:01:45 right? So what did they do? They refused to clone, right? They wouldn’t clone their operating
1:01:56 system. And they, as a result of refusing to do that, they never, for years, Apple had like,
1:02:02 in the height of the PC wars, maybe 4% of the world’s operating systems. Microsoft said,
1:02:05 we’re happy to clone our operating system. So it was a little bit different on Dell,
1:02:09 it was a little bit different on IBM, wherever you use it was slightly different. And they had
1:02:13 90 something percent of the world’s operating systems. It’s because you have to trade quality
1:02:20 for scale every time. There’s a reason why buying fancy goods for a lot of money, like, because as
1:02:24 you said, the way you make things has to change, and you have to start making them in factories,
1:02:28 and you have to scale, scale, scale, scale breaks companies. Think about how beautiful companies
1:02:32 are. The number of companies that talk about, oh, our company’s like a family. Get to about 150 people,
1:02:36 200 people, get to Dunbar’s number. Not so much of a family anymore.
1:02:43 I think B2B marketers keep making this mistake. They’re chasing volume instead of quality. And
1:02:48 when you try to be seen by more people instead of the right people, all you’re doing is making noise,
1:02:53 but that noise rarely shifts the needle. And it’s often quite expensive. And I know, as there was a
1:02:58 time in my career where I kept making this mistake, that many of you will be making it too. Eventually,
1:03:03 I started posting ads on our show sponsors platform, LinkedIn. And that’s when things started to change.
1:03:08 I put that change down to a few critical things. One of them being that LinkedIn was then and still
1:03:14 is today the platform where decision makers go to, not only to think and learn, but also to buy. And
1:03:18 when you market your business there, you’re putting it right in front of people who actually have the
1:03:24 power to say yes. And you can target them by job title, industry, and company size. It’s simply a
1:03:29 sharper way to spend your marketing budget. And if you haven’t tried it, how about this? Give LinkedIn ads
1:03:35 a try. And I’m going to give you $100 ad credit to get you started. If you visit linkedin.com slash diary,
1:03:40 you can claim that right now. That’s linkedin.com slash diary.
1:03:47 Is it harder now to find love? Because there’s lots of stats that say we’re having less sex,
1:03:53 we’re lonelier than ever before. Interestingly, this is maybe an adjacent point, but I was looking at
1:04:00 Bumble share price. I love the founder of Bumble. The CEO is really, really good friend of mine. I
1:04:05 think she’s amazing. Whitney. Whitney. I think she is amazing. Has she come on? She has. And I know her
1:04:11 and she’s a wonderful human being. But when I was looking at the Bumble share price, it painted a
1:04:15 really interesting picture because then you, you overlay that with some of these other dating apps
1:04:20 and you see, I mean, this is the. Well, she’s had to come back. She’s just come back in yet to turn
1:04:24 the company around. And actually, interestingly, I saw her do an interview, which is one of these ones
1:04:29 here. And in the interview, she says she’s going to revamp Bumble to make it not about finding love
1:04:34 with others, but falling in love with yourself. Yeah. And there’s also going to be this dating
1:04:39 marketplace. But her first objective is going to be get people to love themselves. Yeah. Through
1:04:44 coaching and all these kinds of things on the app and then find a partner. Sure. Yes. I mean, I,
1:04:50 I agree with that. I mean, it’s like, it’s, I mean, we’re all broken records, right? I don’t
1:04:56 mean that as like a, like we’re all broken souls. Like, you know, your customers will never love you
1:05:01 until your employees love you first. You’ll never find somebody to love you unless you love yourself
1:05:06 first. And look at failed relationships, right? Where there’s so much tension. It’s somebody’s lack
1:05:11 of self-love that contributes to the failing of that relationship. I mean, I have a dear friend who’s
1:05:17 going through it right now. She just can’t find love and she, it’s just, but it’s because she
1:05:23 doesn’t love herself and, and she knows that, you know, it’s a hard thing to do. So if Bumble can
1:05:28 crack that code, more power to them. It’s, it’s a, but this is the problem with a lot of these things.
1:05:33 You know, they’re common knowledge. We just don’t do them. Everybody knows how to be healthy.
1:05:41 Everybody knows how to exercise. Everybody knows what eating right means. Don’t do it because wrong is
1:05:46 easier. And right takes effort. Everybody knows what we’re supposed to do in a relationship.
1:05:50 Everybody knows that we’re supposed to like hold space. Everybody, everybody knows philosophically
1:05:54 what we’re supposed to do, but we don’t do it. By the way, it’s the reason why most people, I’ve
1:05:59 written all these lovely books and it’s the reason why most companies don’t use them. It’s because my
1:06:03 work is like exercise, which is I can tell you every single, if you want to get into shape, hey, Simon,
1:06:08 how do I get into shape? Easy. Every single day, work out for 20 minutes every single day. Okay.
1:06:12 Can I take the occasional day off? Yes, but not too many. Work out every single day and 100% of you
1:06:18 will get into shape. I know it a hundred percent. When? I don’t know. And neither does any doctor.
1:06:24 And that’s my work. Yes, I can profoundly help you find purpose with start with why. I can help you
1:06:29 build trust on a team with leaders at last. I can help you embrace the infinite mindset and have this
1:06:34 incredible calm in life. And the reason most companies won’t do it, this innovate, this is a book for
1:06:38 innovation right here. You want to innovate? Infinite game. The reason most companies won’t do it is
1:06:41 because they need it to happen by the end of the quarter or the end of the financial year.
1:06:46 It may or may not. I have no clue. And I cannot predict that it will or won’t. It’ll work 100%.
1:06:50 I just don’t know when. And the problem is, it goes right back to the beginning of this conversation,
1:06:56 we’re all so obsessed with the output. We’re all so obsessed with the result that we’ve completely
1:07:01 ignored the value of the journey. And people would rather hit the number at the end of the year
1:07:07 than build a good, strong company. Think about it, right? If I meet another entrepreneur,
1:07:11 when I say, so tell me about your company, like we’re hyper growth, we’re a hyper growth company,
1:07:15 we’re a gazelle, right? Like show me, then I always say the same thing because I’m an ass.
1:07:20 Can you please give me one article from a reputable publication, just one, and I don’t care the
1:07:27 publication that says that building a hyper growth company is good for business. Just one.
1:07:34 And the answer is you can’t, because it’s not. And so why are we so obsessed with high-speed growth?
1:07:39 It’s because our investors want us to be obsessed with high-speed growth, right? Or our egos want us
1:07:43 to be obsessed with high-speed growth, right? And if high-speed growth happens by accident,
1:07:49 that happens for many of the unicorns, right? It was an accident. I think building a good company is
1:07:53 better than building a fast company. I think building a good relationship is better than building a fast
1:08:01 relationship. And we’re all so obsessed with speed and immediate results, present company included.
1:08:09 I’ve had to learn this the hard way, that I think there’s something joyful and beautiful about slowing
1:08:16 down, saying thank you, reprioritizing friends. It’s okay. I mean, by the way, cell phones and so
1:08:24 before cell phones, we went to work and then we went home. And we didn’t do work at home because we
1:08:27 couldn’t do work at home because we didn’t have computers at home and we didn’t have cell phones
1:08:35 or people to call us. And so you did work at work and then you left. And I remember when cell phones
1:08:41 started, I remember the advertising, AT&T had this campaign that they showed people working on the
1:08:49 beach, you know, with their computers. I mean, this is like the future, right? And they said, now,
1:08:58 what was the tagline? It was really funny. It’s like, now you can leave work, right? And that’s not
1:09:03 what happened. Work came with us. We never left work. Work came with us wherever. This is the problem
1:09:09 with cell phones and computers and the internet, which is we do not leave work. Work is with us in
1:09:16 our pocket every day, every vacation, every evening, every weekend. As you said that, I thought, do you
1:09:22 know what? That’s so interesting because that kind of means that friction creates freedom in that regard,
1:09:27 if you know what I’m saying. So the friction of not being able to go home and tap away on my computer
1:09:31 all night meant that I had a certain level of freedom because I had to kind of wait for things,
1:09:35 right? So in the same context with AI coming along, now I can build software throughout the
1:09:40 weekend, whether the agency’s working or not. Now I can build anything I want at any time using the
1:09:45 phone in my pocket. The friction has come down again. And therefore the pressure to do it now,
1:09:49 because I can do it now, goes up. And this is kind of maybe what I was alluding to earlier on in the,
1:09:52 you know, when I was saying about how you’re going to get more stressed and more overwhelmed and
1:09:57 more isolated. That’s so good. That’s so, right. It’s, we’re taking work with it. I mean,
1:10:01 it’s like, you know, everybody has a story of like where the battery ran out on their phone
1:10:05 and they ended up having the best night. Yeah. Or the internet went out at work and they actually
1:10:13 got more done. Like you hear these stories all the time, you know, that, that when, when we’re forced
1:10:21 not to take work with us, forced, it takes a bit of time sometimes to relax, but it’s always better
1:10:28 because you learn to stop worrying, stop checking, you know, you know, and you just, I, one of the
1:10:37 things I did, I, I can’t delete Instagram completely as much as I’d love to, but I hit it. So, you know,
1:10:42 you can do that on iPhone and you can take it off the, it’s gone, it’s hidden. It says hide app.
1:10:45 And then I, and when you go into the search, you know, when you go search, it suggests,
1:10:48 I took it off the suggestions, which most people don’t even know you can do that. So I took it off
1:10:52 the suggestions. So when I go to, cause I realized what I was doing is I’m like, when I’m bored,
1:10:55 I just pick up my phone and I just like, and then I see Instagram like, and I just click it like a,
1:11:01 like a zombie. And then I’m done for an hour, you know? So I hit it. So the only time I go to
1:11:06 Instagram is when I have to go to it and I have to type an I N S T, you know, and then it pops up.
1:11:13 And my usage of Instagram has plummeted, plummeted because it has to be intentional.
1:11:16 And the problem with most social media is it’s unintentional.
1:11:23 One of the big things talking about community, Instagram, AI that I think a lot about is,
1:11:33 is the value of in real life community going to rise. And I think we might be on the precipice of
1:11:38 the community revolution. I say this because when I think about what’s going to remain in a world where
1:11:44 creating things goes to zero, like when, you know, once upon a time, if you made a social network or if
1:11:51 you built an app or if you built a movie or a media company or a podcast, that was half of the job. And
1:11:55 the other half of the job was like getting it out there in the world. Yeah. And so now the people
1:12:00 that have the other half of the job, which hasn’t gone to zero now have this tremendous advantage
1:12:04 because we can all create, but we can’t all distribute. And so having community and building
1:12:09 and fostering community, I think now is one of the things that remains. What are the values of a
1:12:12 community? Like how do I build the community? Well, I have a definition of community. And I think
1:12:15 we said it before, which is the community is a group of people who agree to grow together.
1:12:19 Interesting. Community is a group of people who agree to grow together.
1:12:23 And I believe friends are at least two people who agree to grow together.
1:12:29 In marketing, this is the absolute obsession at the moment. Community, run clubs and brands becoming…
1:12:35 Offline is the new online, right? Offline is the new black. Like there’s a company called Clix.
1:12:41 And it was started by, she’s a talented entrepreneur and she was in college and she suffered severe
1:12:47 depression and loneliness and literally struggled, didn’t know how to make friends. And she,
1:12:50 oh, I’ll just call her by her name. Her name’s Alix.
1:12:57 But her company Clix, she started it to solve her own problem, right? My favorite kind of company.
1:13:03 And basically to help her friends at school, quote unquote friends, people at school make friends.
1:13:08 And she did it by taking people offline and taking their phones away. And she would come up with reasons
1:13:11 to come together, whether it was running or this or that. Just like, it didn’t matter what the reason was.
1:13:16 Just a reason to come. That made you, that when you saw the ad hung up on a piece of paper at college,
1:13:25 you know, that you’d be like, I like horror movies, whatever. I like baking. I’ll go to that. Right?
1:13:31 Just a trick. And then basically just, and so she’s built this business, predominantly for young people,
1:13:35 but it’s available to anyone. But she’s built this business to just bring people together,
1:13:40 to meet people without phones offline. And she wants, she has, and there’s a great irony in it.
1:13:44 She has an app that she wants people not to be on. You know?
1:13:50 And what is it that holds a community together? Is it, so like, we want to improve together. So we have
1:13:56 to have some kind of shared value that we want to improve on, presumably. It’s like a community of
1:13:59 runners. They’re trying to get fit together or they’re trying to improve that.
1:14:04 I don’t think it matters. I mean, it’s like, it’s, it’s shared, shared interests is a, is a,
1:14:10 is a way to start a relationship, right? Comic-Con, you know, you know, Nerdvana,
1:14:16 you know, Burning Man, all of these larger than life events, big and small, going to the,
1:14:20 going to the, going to the football, you know, it’s like, you’re everybody’s friend when you wear,
1:14:25 when you wear the right, when you wear the right colors, you know? You know, you see people on the,
1:14:28 on the tube who’s going to go into the same game, they’re wearing the same jersey.
1:14:29 You’re friends.
1:14:35 You’re friends, right? So I think common interest is a, is a, is a trick. It’s a way of getting people
1:14:38 to come together. And it’s a nice place to start because at least conversation is easy,
1:14:41 right. You know, at least one thing about this person that you have in common with them.
1:14:45 Do you need a shared goal in a community? Do you think? Thinking, cause in the football analogy,
1:14:46 we have a shared goal.
1:14:50 Oh yeah. You want to win. I think that’s a very good question. You have a shared goal.
1:14:51 Even in a relationship.
1:14:53 Yeah, I think so. That seems to make sense.
1:14:59 The reason why I’m asking these questions is I am building businesses and brands. And I know that
1:15:02 community is one of the most important things that everyone building a brand or business is
1:15:06 thinking about at the moment. So there’s a big difference between having an audience,
1:15:12 which is what you might have on like a podcast or something and having a community. And I’m as a
1:15:16 brand leader and as an entrepreneur, I’m trying to shift from having an audience over to having
1:15:22 a community. And that’s about like relationships and shared values, shared values. I mean,
1:15:30 I like to think the people who really like my work, not the ones who just like passively like it,
1:15:36 but the ones who really like my work. Like if somebody says, I love start with why, or I live
1:15:42 my life by the infinite game, that it says something about who they are and how they see the world and
1:15:49 And that we share the same values. And that if, and because I am, you know, me, you know, I’m an idealist.
1:15:58 And, and my, I, I’m consistent in the way I talk about things from the day I started to now and won’t ever change.
1:16:06 And, and I think that’s the value of values. And the problem with the modern world we live in and the
1:16:11 pressures that people face is money and fame and all the rest of it. And, you know, influencer status,
1:16:15 I think it sometimes forces us to question our values or walk away from them.
1:16:19 I was invited to a group of, they called it a mastermind group, where there’s a bunch of folks
1:16:24 like me, author speakers who wanted to, this is what they told me, come together to, based on shared,
1:16:29 shared goals, shared values, how we can work together to improve the world together. And I’m like,
1:16:34 oh, sign me up. I’m in. Right. So I went and we sat around and you know who some of these people are,
1:16:40 you know, and we sat around a room and they spent all of their time talking about how they can share
1:16:45 their lists with each other and how they can cross promote with each other. And what margins are you
1:16:49 getting on this? And I’m like, you guys are, and I spoke up. I was like, you guys are just talking
1:16:56 about making more money. What I thought we came here to like do common good together. They didn’t
1:17:02 invite me back, but it was, but the point is, is like the money and the fame is seductive. You know,
1:17:07 this is, this is, this is, this is Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, which is you start off as the
1:17:14 reluctant hero and you get called to your mission for some reason. And at some point in your journey,
1:17:21 there will be something to seduce you away from your mission, money or power. You know, Luke Skywalker
1:17:27 was nearly seduced away from the vision, you know, from the journey. Like this is what, this is what the
1:17:34 hero has to go through. And do you have the friends who will slap you around and keep you in line and say,
1:17:39 no, you signed up for this. You have to stay true to what you’re doing because I think none of us have
1:17:44 the courage or the strength to stay true to our cause by ourselves. Very few of us. We need to have at
1:17:48 least one person who believes in us to give us the strength to stick to it because the temptation,
1:17:52 the temptation, you and I have both at various times gone through it. Like when you start making money
1:17:57 and you start making money for something you didn’t expect, like I never expected to have a career
1:18:02 from any of this stuff, right? It happened by accident. And you get to the point where you start
1:18:10 thinking you’re more important than you are. Do they know, do they, do they know who I am? No, no, get over
1:18:17 yourself, you know, and you start becoming seduced. And I think the seduction, when we turn on social media
1:18:23 and we watch Kardashian, the Kardashian model, and like you have people who pursue influence without
1:18:29 knowledge or skill, like those two buckets, they have the other three buckets, but they don’t have
1:18:36 the first two buckets. And it is temporary for some or unfulfilling for others. And, you know,
1:18:42 the funny thing about that job, you know, I was, I was, I went to a concert and there was this,
1:18:46 there’s a woman who walked down the aisle and some guy was taking pictures of her. She was posing
1:18:52 and the person next to me goes, she’s a famous influencer. And I said, you mean she’s a freelance
1:18:54 employee of an algorithm?
1:19:04 And, and there’s somebody who chooses to be an influencer. That’s what you are. You are a freelance
1:19:08 employee of an algorithm. And the minute they changed the algorithm, you might be out of business.
1:19:15 You just lost like 170 followers.
1:19:17 I mean, maybe.
1:19:20 You just lost like 170 blue ticks.
1:19:26 Like, I don’t have a problem with the concept of being an influencer. If you bring something of value,
1:19:33 the only time I have a problem with it is, is if you make it about you and I have to get more of
1:19:38 everything. In the early days of influencing, there was a young couple that were trying to get
1:19:45 followers and they would do crazier and crazier things. And so she, what they did is he took a
1:19:50 big book, a dictionary, I think it was, and he put it over his chest and she took a gun and shot it at
1:19:56 the book thinking that the book would stop the bullet. And she killed him. She killed him on camera.
1:20:02 Right? Now they admitted, she admitted afterwards, he’s dead, but she admitted afterwards they were
1:20:05 doing it to do bigger and crazier stunts to get more and more followers because the financial pressures of
1:20:13 driving at those YouTube views was overwhelming. And so it’s an extreme case, obviously, of the,
1:20:20 the, the, the, the, how we will lose our minds trying to gain followers. And I don’t mind if people gain
1:20:27 followers by giving, but to gain followers by taking, look at me, look at me, look at me versus I have
1:20:32 something that I think this will help you. And like, there’s not, there’s not, I don’t have a problem
1:20:42 with what it’s, it’s the, it’s the input, right? It’s the intention. Um, anyway, anyway, it’s not like
1:20:46 an old man complaining about nobody. You kids these days and you were influencers.
1:20:51 Simon, I printed off some graphs, which I think are absolutely fascinating and dovetail into everything
1:20:55 you’ve said today, but also into your work generally. So I’m just going to give you all of these to give
1:20:59 you a second to look through them. And I want to get your read and interpretation on them. Okay.
1:21:08 Adults lack of meaning and purpose overall lonely. Okay. I mean, that makes sense.
1:21:15 To me, that didn’t make sense. I couldn’t understand how if someone is low in purpose,
1:21:21 then they are lonelier. I mean, it just makes sense that when you have lack of purpose,
1:21:27 the likelihood that loneliness comes nearby. Like I think family gives meaning, friends give meaning,
1:21:31 like you feel like you’re there for someone else. Um, but if you don’t know why you’re showing up every
1:21:35 day, I think it, it, it, it feels like a lonely existence. Like you feel like you’re searching.
1:21:40 When you have a sense of purpose, it gives you a mechanism to meet people. It gives you a mechanism
1:21:43 to make decisions. It gives you a mechanism to talk about yourself in a way that’s quite inspiring to
1:21:46 others. You know, when you say your why and you, somebody says, so what do you do? You say,
1:21:50 I wake up every single day to inspire people to do what inspires them. What do you do?
1:21:58 You know, like it’s, it’s, I, yeah, I do. I do. And I think it’s, it’s not the thing that makes you
1:22:00 less lonely. I think it’s a mechanism to make you less lonely.
1:22:05 Just as you said that, that why you just gave, it becomes a magnet for me because then I know
1:22:10 who your people are and I know what to talk to you about and it throws down this bridge for me to walk
1:22:16 across. Yeah. Versus, yeah, I’m a dentist. Or I don’t know, which is even worse. Which is even
1:22:21 worse. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, that, that doesn’t seem unusual. Distribution of people feeling lonely
1:22:29 worldwide by gender. So it’s about 50, 50. Are you surprised by that? I thought, for some reason,
1:22:35 I thought men were more lonely. I think that not at all lonely looks like women do better.
1:22:41 I would think, do you think, you thought men were more lonely? I thought men would be more lonely. I
1:22:46 also don’t know what the age groups are because like, I want to know what, how they, like, what age are
1:22:51 they just start, are they starting at? Is it 18? I guess if we just put that all aside, I mean,
1:22:58 women being slightly less lonely than men, I think makes sense because I think women are probably
1:23:03 better at making friends. Maybe I have that wrong. What else we got here? Adults, mental health,
1:23:09 health ratings. 68% of people who have depression are lonely and 67% of people have anxiety are lonely.
1:23:13 Do you think good mental health is a foundation for being
1:23:20 not lonely? I guess. No. I think having somebody who cares about you is a foundation for not being
1:23:28 lonely. And when you’re in a period of strained mental fitness, it definitely can manifest as loneliness
1:23:34 and anxiety. And the best way to manage through that period of, is to lean on the people who you know,
1:23:40 love you. That will help. So I don’t think you can separate the two. So does it affect it? Of course,
1:23:44 it affects it. Can it make you withdraw from your friends? Of course it can.
1:23:50 So I don’t think you can separate the two.
1:23:56 I read a couple of years ago that when people are lonely, they fall into a state of self-preservation
1:24:02 because of some evolutionary sort of mechanism, which meant that if we were alone on the Serengeti
1:24:08 in Africa, we would sleep worse. We’d become more selfish. We’d become more angry. Our cortisol levels
1:24:12 would be up, which means more inflammation. And this idea of self-preservation basically means that lonely
1:24:17 people become more selfish, more bitter, more angry. And that’s not conducive, ironically, with finding
1:24:22 more friends. But it is conducive with survival. It is conducive with being able to fend for yourself.
1:24:52 It makes, it’s more conducive with survival as an individual. Yeah. So like if you’re in a deserted island and you’re lonely and all those things and the cortisol rises and you become better at being on edge, which is a survival mechanism, right? But if you live in a community with other people, then it is counterproductive because we are social animals and I need you to help me and you need to help me. So if we live in tribe together and I’m the selfish asshole, I’m not.
1:25:14 You’re not going to wake me and alert me to danger tonight. You’re just going to leave me. So, so it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, though I think it’s 100% true in a social environment, it becomes counterproductive. And I think you’re right. When somebody feels lonely, they do go into survival and they become paranoid and they think everybody’s out to get them. And it’s, but the problem is, is you don’t live on a desert island. And that’s one of the reasons I think it’s, it’s dangerous.
1:25:25 We’re increasingly being, living on islands. The islands are different now. They’re four walls in a, in a white city. And it’s so funny that so many of my friends are using this word loneliness.
1:25:37 When 10, 20 years ago, it wasn’t, it wasn’t something that I had frequently from, from adults, but now it seems to be also common. In fact, my masseuse yesterday was saying to me that she’s lonely.
1:25:43 And this is a woman that lives in Los Angeles, has people around her, but she’s lonely.
1:25:43 Yeah.
1:26:00 And I remember when she went and she’s, because we had a conversation and I texted her and said, oh, thank you for, for being so open and stuff. I was thinking about like, what advice I could give her. She’s got no friends. She’s in Los Angeles. She’s desperate for friends. She doesn’t have a partner anymore because she’s had a divorce. What advice do you give someone? Is it take more risks?
1:26:27 So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s easy to give the obvious advice. Like you got to put yourself out there. Right. But when you’re in a period of loneliness and stress, it’s hard to find that, that energy and that risk taking. Right. Especially when you’re down on yourself. We’ve all been there. I’ve definitely been there. But the, um, I think for me, what I’ve learned is, um, to put myself second, meaning don’t worry, don’t try and solve my problem. But do I have somebody else who’s lonely that I can help? Like, how do I help somebody else who’s dealing with their loneliness?
1:26:56 And it’s the act of service that is so valuable. If, you know, you guys are talking and she has many clients and somebody else and her willing to admit that I’m lonely, that one of her clients might say, you know, me too. Like her ability to admit her loneliness out loud creates a safe environment for somebody else to admit the same. And then once she learns that they’re lonely, now she can say, tell me about it. And then she can talk them through it and hold space for them. And her ability to help somebody else manage or understand their loneliness will, will help her.
1:27:10 So interesting. Cause one of the hallmarks of her personality, if you met this person, something she says to me every single time she comes over, um, for the treatment is that she doesn’t like sharing herself with people because she thinks if people get to know her, they’ll change.
1:27:16 So literally she has been my misuse for many years now. And if people get to know her, they will change.
1:27:25 She’s scared about people knowing her. She’s scared about people knowing the details of her life. So she guards it all. And it took me, and I’m someone that just asks way too many questions of every stranger I meet.
1:27:35 It took me like 20 sessions just to figure out she had a family. I had no idea she had two kids. And when I asked her, her body language went like this.
1:27:50 Yes, I have kids. And I said, why, why are you so guarded with your information? Well, if people know who I really am and they know more about me, then they’ll change or they may not like me anymore or they’ll think differently about me. So I just keep it to myself.
1:27:56 But I mean, this is the age old problem. I mean, it’s everything you said when you, when people who are driven only by the thing that they want, you know, versus the givers.
1:28:01 And this, I mean, this is the age old problem, which is I’m never, I’m going to keep my walls up high. I never want to love anybody because then I’ll get hurt.
1:28:20 And then you just end up lonely and hurt. And this is, this is goes, this is goes back to struggle, which is, this goes, look, you and I both know that, that if somebody who chooses to go on an entrepreneurial venture or adventure, the statistics bear out that the over 90% of all new businesses will fail in the first three years.
1:28:25 Right? What idiot would ever start a business? Right? You have to be compelled by something.
1:28:42 Else to make you do something with overwhelming statistical chance of failure. Right? And, and it’s opening yourself up to failure. That is the thing that makes it work. You know, at least for a small, small percentage.
1:28:53 But it’s the same for love, which is, or relationship or friendship, which is, it absolutely comes with risk. There’s nothing risk free. Like, yeah, they will. Some of them might change.
1:28:58 Yes. Some of them might not like you for that. Yes. Yes.
1:29:05 And the odds are equal that somebody will fall in love with you and love you and like you and think you’re the best thing and think you’re amazing.
1:29:11 And so if you can’t take the risk, you can’t get the reward. If you don’t play the lottery, you don’t win the, you know, you don’t win the jackpot.
1:29:28 If you aren’t willing to take, I’m not telling you to open up and tell everybody your deepest, darkest secrets, but if you’re not willing to give somebody anything to latch onto, to be like, if you can’t give them anything to say, me too, then, then it’s going to be a hard road.
1:29:34 Or it’ll take somebody to chip away at you 20 times, you know, before you open up.
1:29:39 But the fact that you did and she got her to open up a little bit, she could make a friend in you.
1:29:41 Now she’s fully open.
1:29:41 Yeah.
1:29:43 And we’ve been through everything. I know where she wants her house to be.
1:29:44 Well, there you go. You see?
1:29:58 So you have to point out to her that this friendship and that you know so much and that she feels so safe with you only happened because you chipped away at her and she finally wore her down and she opened up.
1:30:00 And it can happen in two directions, right?
1:30:07 Which is sometimes we have to take the little risk to just tell somebody a little something about ourselves to find something.
1:30:16 Or sometimes it’s somebody who’s so curious about us that they chip away and chip away and chip away and chip away and chip away until we give up and open up and that person becomes a friend, you know?
1:30:20 And so one of the reasons she should be grateful for the friendship is you kept trying.
1:30:25 You could have just tried it three times and be like, forget it. I’ll just lie here quietly and have a massage, you know?
1:30:29 So, yeah, I mean, all of this stuff comes with risk.
1:30:32 I could see it in her face though. I could see myself as down.
1:30:33 But you’re also curious.
1:30:34 Yeah, I can see this.
1:30:36 And so she lucked out because you’re curious about people.
1:30:38 Is this what connection is?
1:30:46 When you said me too, finding something to say me too with someone, is that the essence of what connection is?
1:30:51 I mean, it could be values, it could be interests, it could be many things.
1:31:05 But I think to find, I think, yes, like this is, I mean, if you want to go political, you know, one of the problems in our politics is both sides think they’re right and both sides think the other side is wrong.
1:31:15 And neither side is willing to try to even understand what the other person’s point of view is without thinking them an idiot or thinking them wrong or thinking them sheeple.
1:31:29 And the ability to say, can you tell me more about how you came to your beliefs, I’m genuinely curious, and to not agree or disagree, but to be curious, to be an investigator, you know?
1:31:35 And I’ve done this with people who have polar opposite political views with me.
1:31:44 At some point, we will get to a level of me just chipping away trying to understand that they will say something that I’m like, 100% I agree with that.
1:31:54 And then from that point on, there’s a simple validation, not agreement, but a validation that your opinions do matter and we do have common ground that we can build from there.
1:32:01 And on that validation, they become vastly more open to my point of view also and curious to my point of view also.
1:32:11 And so, yeah, the ability to listen and be curious, even if you disagree, is one of the most underappreciated skills on the planet.
1:32:16 And yeah, I think when you find the ability to say, I agree, then you can find community.
1:32:28 And maybe that’s what we need to heal this country or most of the countries in the world right now, which is one group or one person to just be curious rather than agree or disagree.
1:32:36 There’s something about relationships here as well, because my girlfriend is, you’ve met my partner, and she’s very spiritual, but also, like all of us, she’s emotional.
1:32:45 So sometimes in those interactions, when we sit down and there’s a problem and we spend the first 60 minutes to 90 minutes trying to figure out what the problem is, it doesn’t sound very logical to me.
1:32:56 And one of the things that I think sort of is adjacent to what you’re saying is, my job in that moment actually isn’t to, like, pass through truth and to correct truth.
1:33:02 It is to sit and let someone get it out.
1:33:04 So you and I have the same problem.
1:33:05 We do.
1:33:08 Which is we live above our necks.
1:33:08 Yeah.
1:33:12 And you and I both have the same struggle, which is to learn to live below our necks.
1:33:13 Right?
1:33:16 Like, you and I are head people, and we have to learn to be more heart.
1:33:17 Right?
1:33:22 And I want to understand everything, explain everything, you know, evaluate everything, analyze everything.
1:33:25 And when I come to my emotions, I’ll give you an analysis.
1:33:28 You know, when it comes to your emotions, I’ll give you an analysis.
1:33:32 And so I have to learn to be like, I feel this, and that’s it.
1:33:33 And I feel the same way.
1:33:35 It’s funny, because I’m good at it with art.
1:33:37 You know, I always tell people, you don’t have to understand art.
1:33:40 I’ll take you to a museum, I’ll take you to a gallery, and if you look at a piece, and
1:33:44 I know you’re intimidated to come because you don’t understand art, or you don’t understand
1:33:48 music, whatever it is, and all you need to do, this is the only rule, is do you like it?
1:33:49 I do.
1:33:51 Why?
1:33:51 I don’t know.
1:33:52 I just like it.
1:33:53 That’s it.
1:33:53 You’re done.
1:33:55 You’re done.
1:33:56 I don’t like it.
1:33:56 Why?
1:33:56 I don’t know.
1:33:57 I just don’t like it.
1:33:57 Great.
1:33:59 Excellent.
1:34:03 And now we’re going to look at four, five, six, ten pieces that you like, and I’m going
1:34:04 to see four, five, six, ten pieces that you don’t like.
1:34:10 And I’d be like, you like all of the Impressionists, and you hate all the old masters.
1:34:12 So why don’t we just go see more Impressionists?
1:34:13 You know?
1:34:18 And so when your girlfriend opens up to you, you know, you don’t have to agree.
1:34:19 You don’t have to disagree.
1:34:24 You just have to—and you and I both have to learn to stop thinking and to just, like,
1:34:25 feel something.
1:34:27 When somebody says, where do you feel it?
1:34:27 I’m like, what?
1:34:28 That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.
1:34:29 Where do I feel it?
1:34:33 And they’ve literally—like, I had somebody take me on this journey, and she goes,
1:34:35 you told me an emotion you have, Simon.
1:34:36 You told me an emotion.
1:34:37 Yes.
1:34:39 Where do you feel it?
1:34:40 In your body.
1:34:41 Where do you feel it?
1:34:45 And I’m sitting there going, you’ve got to be kidding me.
1:34:46 You know?
1:34:47 But all right.
1:34:48 We’ll go through this.
1:34:50 All right.
1:34:52 And she says, so you said you feel X.
1:34:53 I’m like, yes.
1:34:53 All right.
1:34:55 Where in your body did you have some sort of reaction?
1:34:57 I—here.
1:34:58 What happened?
1:35:01 It got a little tighter in my chest.
1:35:02 Okay.
1:35:07 And I went on this journey with my friend—what’s my friend, Bea?
1:35:07 Bea Voce.
1:35:10 She’s—she’s incredible.
1:35:15 And she took me on this journey, and she does repair with couples, and she’s just incredible.
1:35:20 And she helped me recognize that my body does react to my feelings.
1:35:28 Tension in my shoulders, heavier breathing in my chest, clenching my fists, you know.
1:35:30 Like, my body does react.
1:35:39 And so I’m learning to experience feelings beneath my neck when my inclination is to do everything above the neck.
1:35:40 It’s a hard skill.
1:35:41 Oh, my God.
1:35:41 It’s hard.
1:35:42 Especially for men.
1:35:46 And so when you’re—when you meet spiritual people, they are all below the neck.
1:35:55 And we think it’s stupid, but they recognize that we have an ability to feel because we want to think about everything.
1:36:00 And so we both have a lot to learn from each other, which is thinking about things has value.
1:36:02 Not all the time.
1:36:15 And so your girlfriend, because I know her, her ability to know her body when she has feelings, I think is way more—has a lot of value to you and to me.
1:36:18 I think it’s, like, the biggest opportunity that you have to form better relationships.
1:36:24 Change in number of posts for automation-prone jobs compared to manual-intensive jobs.
1:36:33 So this is a graph that shows the drop in job postings online for jobs around automation.
1:36:37 Yeah, the knowledge work is going to get hammered by AI.
1:36:54 I met a guy in Japan who—he’s one of the very few guys left, like 100 of them left, 150 of them left, who make samurai swords in the traditional samurai sword way you make them.
1:36:59 You hammer the metal, and he folds his own metal, and he makes samurai swords the way they made them 200 years ago.
1:37:06 And we went to this little workshop, and he’s this little old guy, and he’s telling us the story.
1:37:08 Like, how did you do this?
1:37:09 He’s like, well, I had a desk job.
1:37:11 I worked in a company, and I woke up one day.
1:37:12 I was like, I can’t do this.
1:37:14 Like, this can’t be my life.
1:37:22 And I’ve always been enamored by sword making, so I found an apprenticeship and tried to learn.
1:37:28 And, you know, I’m just starting to get the hang of it, but I have a lot of room for improvement.
1:37:30 And we’re like, how long have you been doing this?
1:37:31 He said, 30 years.
1:37:33 30 years.
1:37:34 But that’s so Japanese.
1:37:36 You know, the Japanese, like, they’ll never be good at this.
1:37:37 I’ll just keep working at it.
1:37:40 And, like, it’s such hard work.
1:37:50 But he, I think there’s something to be said for, I think a lot of us, like, think about how many white knowledge workers, like, ask them what their hobbies are.
1:37:52 You know?
1:37:57 And, like, maybe there is an opportunity to learn a skill.
1:38:00 I mean, look at lockdown.
1:38:04 When we all went through lockdown, I mean, what skill did you practice during lockdown?
1:38:05 What did you learn?
1:38:07 DJing, running.
1:38:08 Cycling.
1:38:09 DJing.
1:38:11 DJing.
1:38:12 Right?
1:38:14 I did kintsugi.
1:38:17 It’s the Japanese art of fixing broken things with gold.
1:38:27 So, basically, you take a broken plate or a broken cup and you put it together and with gold paint or gold epoxy, you put it together and you make it.
1:38:30 The whole concept is you can make something more beautiful.
1:38:33 Like, things can get more beautiful after they’re broken.
1:38:34 Right?
1:38:35 I love the philosophy of it.
1:38:38 I spent hours doing frickin’ kintsugi.
1:38:40 Ask me how much kintsugi I’ve done since we came out of lockdown.
1:38:42 How much DJing have you done?
1:38:43 Zero.
1:38:54 And so maybe all this free time that we’re supposed to get, which I still don’t think will happen, maybe it’s not such a bad thing.
1:38:57 Think about the joy you had DJing.
1:38:58 I had so much fun doing kintsugi.
1:38:59 I had so much fun.
1:39:02 I would spend hours just my head down, focused.
1:39:07 I was so relaxed, not thinking about work.
1:39:08 So, why?
1:39:09 That’s the other question.
1:39:12 We’re talking about how we’re all going to have all the spare time.
1:39:14 We’ve lost all of our spare time.
1:39:18 We have no spare time because all we do is work and think about work and talk about work.
1:39:22 Like, if we go back 40 years, 50 years, there was plenty of spare time.
1:39:25 And people went bowling and they went to the movies.
1:39:28 And they went over to each other’s houses for dinner and they cooked.
1:39:36 Isn’t it a good thing that we’re getting time back?
1:39:40 You know, a lot of us got a lot of good things out of lockdown.
1:39:42 And that’s extreme.
1:39:49 So, like, maybe it’s okay that we get some time back because it sounds like we’ve lost all of our own time.
1:39:50 It fixed the loneliness.
1:39:51 You’d have space for relationships.
1:39:52 You’d have space for relationships.
1:39:54 You’d have space to try things.
1:40:00 And we couldn’t bury ourselves in work and escape from our lives that we hate by just burying ourselves in work.
1:40:09 Like, maybe AI doing some of the work for us is the thing we’ve been desperate for for the past 30 years.
1:40:11 Just saying.
1:40:16 This is quite embarrassing for me to admit.
1:40:20 But if you know me well, there’s something that you know about me, which is a function of my personality.
1:40:22 And that is that I lose everything.
1:40:23 I’ve lost my wallet.
1:40:24 I’ve lost multiple passports.
1:40:28 I now actually have two passports because there’s a high probability of me losing one.
1:40:35 And when you lose your wallet overseas, as I have many times, it’s a particular inconvenience because you also lose your driving license and your credit cards and those kinds of things.
1:40:40 And that’s why I’m so happy that our show sponsor, Exeter, have invented this thing I have in my hand.
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1:41:19 For anybody that likes matcha, for anybody that likes lattes, one of my companies has just launched canned matcha lattes.
1:41:24 And I was speaking with the founder, Marissa, and she said that creating this product has been no easy feat.
1:41:31 They tried launching in 2021, but as is often the case in business, the development process turned out to be extremely complex.
1:41:43 So they’ve spent the last four years testing and refining every single detail to create this, which is a Perfect Ted Matcha Vanilla Latte and a Perfect Ted Matcha Strawberry Latte.
1:41:47 So what we have here in these cans is barista quality matcha straight from the can.
1:41:54 And it tastes like it’s just been made from your favourite cafe, naturally sweet and naturally creamy in a can.
1:42:02 And the reason why I’ve invested in this company and I drink matcha is because matcha as an energy source gives me lasting energy without the big crashes that I get from other products.
1:42:06 You can grab their ready to drink canned matcha lattes at Waitrose, Tesco’s, Holland and Barrett.
1:42:08 And here’s a little incentive for you.
1:42:13 If you go to PerfectTed.com and use code DIARY40, you’ll get 40% off your first order.
1:42:14 Please don’t tell anybody.
1:42:15 Keep that to yourself.
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1:42:20 You’ll get 40% off on PerfectTed.com.
1:42:22 So go use that before they change it.
1:42:27 What are you struggling with in this season of life?
1:42:30 I think I’ve asked you this in every conversation we’ve had.
1:42:33 And the answer’s evolved conversation to conversation.
1:42:34 Yeah.
1:42:35 We’ll both go.
1:42:39 I’m doing so much right now.
1:42:40 By the way, absolute joy.
1:42:44 And I wish I had more time in a day.
1:42:48 And not in the sense that I’m deprioritizing my friends.
1:42:52 You know, you talked about how you, you know, you would give them all your money to secure them, but you don’t give them any time.
1:42:56 I actually treat a lot of, I’ve actually gotten very good at this.
1:42:59 It’s probably when you write a book about friendship, you sort of like take yourself on a little bit.
1:43:04 Where I will schedule friends like meetings in the middle of the day.
1:43:05 Haven’t seen a friend for a while.
1:43:08 Four o’clock in the afternoon.
1:43:10 Tea with.
1:43:13 And I go and I leave the office.
1:43:15 Like, I’m going to a meeting.
1:43:16 Because nobody says, hey, Simon, where are you going?
1:43:17 I’m going to a meeting.
1:43:19 Where are you having the meeting?
1:43:19 At that restaurant.
1:43:20 People are like, have fun.
1:43:24 Nobody will give me any kind of grief if I’m leaving to go to a meeting.
1:43:27 Now I go and see a friend.
1:43:34 And when somebody says, can I cancel this French tea with friend because you have a phone call you have to have?
1:43:34 I’m like, no.
1:43:36 Just like you wouldn’t cancel on my meeting.
1:43:38 Don’t cancel.
1:43:44 So I treat, I put it in and I give them equal weighting to things that I have to do at work.
1:43:45 Because I’ve become much more discerning.
1:43:49 Like, do I have to have this meeting or this phone call today?
1:43:50 Or can I do it next week?
1:43:52 I could do it next week.
1:43:57 And you realize we fake, we fake, we add fake urgency to things.
1:44:01 And I have a friend who’s kind of amazing.
1:44:03 He’s way busier than me.
1:44:09 And he says, I don’t want to spend time with anybody.
1:44:10 Like, I saw it was really funny.
1:44:11 He came out of a meeting.
1:44:15 And he had a meeting with a very fancy person who’s courting him for business.
1:44:16 Right?
1:44:18 Or he should be courting the other guy, actually.
1:44:21 Very fancy person.
1:44:23 And he comes out of the meeting.
1:44:24 I’m like, how was it?
1:44:25 It’s like total waste of time.
1:44:26 I’m like, you don’t want to do business.
1:44:28 He doesn’t want to work with you.
1:44:29 I was like, no, he wants to work with me.
1:44:30 He wants to work with me badly.
1:44:32 Total waste of time.
1:44:33 I’m like, what are you talking about?
1:44:36 I was like, he’s just some rich asshole.
1:44:38 Like, I learned nothing.
1:44:40 I didn’t enjoy it.
1:44:41 And I don’t want to work with him.
1:44:42 And I was like, tell me more.
1:44:47 He’s like, I only want to work with people who, when I spend time with them, they teach me something.
1:44:51 I laugh or I feel inspired when I walk away.
1:44:56 And if somebody sucks my energy, I do not want to work with them.
1:45:05 And I was like, that’s amazing to have that level of confidence that you would turn down money in your business.
1:45:10 And now what if we applied that to as much as possible in our lives?
1:45:14 Like, what if we stopped hanging out with friends who just sucked our energy?
1:45:16 Are they really friends?
1:45:19 Rather than spend more time with people who we enjoy.
1:45:25 What if we take meetings from people we’re excited to take a meeting with, not that we just see dollar signs and opportunity?
1:45:31 And what if we only partner with companies where we really like the people who work at those companies?
1:45:35 You don’t have to have a relationship with the CEO, but they’ve got a good culture.
1:45:36 I really like working with them.
1:45:39 And we make a little less money with them versus that other company.
1:45:44 But I really like them because when things go wrong, I want to call that person.
1:45:46 And people ask me this all the time.
1:45:47 They say, how do I choose a publisher?
1:45:49 And I’ve seen this mistake a thousand times.
1:45:54 I’ve seen people like former CEOs who are like, I now am going to write my book.
1:45:55 I’m like, great, you’ve got a lot to say.
1:45:58 And they’ve got multiple offers and there’s a bidding war.
1:46:01 And they always ask me, which one should I go with?
1:46:02 Which publisher should I go with?
1:46:03 And I always say the same thing.
1:46:05 Choose the one you’re going to fight with best.
1:46:08 Choose the publisher you’re going to fight with best.
1:46:08 They’re like, what?
1:46:10 I’m like, the goal is to make a good book.
1:46:12 There’s going to be creative tension.
1:46:13 There’s going to be fights.
1:46:18 Choose the publisher who believes in your idea, believes in you, wants to make a great book.
1:46:19 Who are you going to fight with really well?
1:46:22 And every single one of them ignores me.
1:46:24 Every single one of me takes the biggest bid.
1:46:27 And every single one of them has written a shitty book that didn’t sell.
1:46:29 Isn’t that just relationship advice as well, though?
1:46:30 Probably, yeah.
1:46:34 Choose the person you’re going to fight with best.
1:46:44 And the number of times that we forget about the quality of the product and we just want – it’s the same for job interviews.
1:46:48 You know, don’t – this is especially true for young people.
1:46:56 Like, when you’re interviewing in a relatively junior job, entry level or slightly above, don’t worry about how much they’re going to pay you.
1:47:06 Like, just – as long as they pay you a livable wage, you know, choose the job based on who you’re going to work for.
1:47:08 Choose the person.
1:47:11 I used to – early on in my career, people – you know, HR people would say, what are you looking for?
1:47:13 I’d always say the same thing.
1:47:17 I said, the thing that I’m looking for is probably, like, looking for love, but I’m looking for a mentor.
1:47:21 And every time I’d evaluate a job, I didn’t care how glamorous the brand was.
1:47:23 I didn’t care how much money they were going to pay me.
1:47:24 And by the way, it’s not like I had money.
1:47:25 I knew they were going to pay me something.
1:47:26 I knew I could pay my bills.
1:47:29 It’s not like I’ve got – I’m not a trust fund baby.
1:47:31 Like, I needed an income.
1:47:38 But one company offered me, you know, $5,000 more and one company offered me $5,000 less, but I really like the person over here.
1:47:38 I took that job.
1:47:47 And it was – if I got one thing right as a young person, it’s that I always chose jobs based on who I would work for,
1:47:51 how much they were going to pay me or what account or what brand I was going to work on.
1:47:56 And that’s the one thing I got right because, yes, I made less money than all my friends in the short term.
1:48:02 But I got an education and a care and a love from somebody who took me under their wing.
1:48:08 I am a – I am – I am – I learned leadership from Dennis Glennon.
1:48:09 I learned leadership from Peter and Tamagio.
1:48:12 I learned leadership from Pamela Moffat.
1:48:17 I learned leadership from these leaders who took a weird liking to me and took me under their wing.
1:48:19 And they were exceptionally good leaders themselves.
1:48:21 And I got that education.
1:48:25 And all of them in the early days paid me less than I could have got somewhere else.
1:48:28 And it’s the same.
1:48:29 Choose the people.
1:48:34 In my book that I wrote, the first chapter in it talks about this idea of these five buckets.
1:48:39 And I’m giving – I’m trying to give young kids advice on how to prioritize their career.
1:48:40 And it sounds somewhat similar to you.
1:48:44 So I’m going to throw this concept at you and see how it lands with you.
1:48:47 So the idea was that we all have these five buckets when we’re starting our career.
1:48:49 And the first bucket is your knowledge.
1:48:50 The second bucket is your skills.
1:48:56 Now, these are the only buckets that no professional earthquake in your career can unfill.
1:48:57 You can be fired.
1:48:58 You can be canceled, whatever.
1:49:00 You still have your knowledge and skills.
1:49:02 But the other three buckets I’m about to name, they can fluctuate.
1:49:06 Bucket number three is your network.
1:49:07 Can fluctuate.
1:49:10 Bucket number four is your resources.
1:49:10 Can fluctuate.
1:49:12 And bucket number five is your reputation.
1:49:13 Can fluctuate.
1:49:24 And the idea is that focusing on those first two buckets when you’re young, choosing jobs based on how much they’re going to fill those two buckets and also what they’re going to fill them with and how relevant that information is.
1:49:26 And when knowledge is applied, it becomes a skill.
1:49:28 So you focus on filling your knowledge.
1:49:30 You apply that knowledge into skills.
1:49:32 And that really is the essence of career longevity.
1:49:43 And as I noticed over time with people that I hired and then watched them throughout their careers and what they did, it seems to me that life over the long term typically brings you back down or up.
1:49:50 to the level of your knowledge and skills, i.e., I had this one kid step down from my company because he got a job offer at 21 to go be a CEO in America.
1:49:53 And as he departs, I’m thinking he has not got the knowledge and skills to be a CEO.
1:49:56 Within 24 months, the company had gone bust.
1:49:59 He was back down to doing the same job he did for me.
1:50:02 And I thought life just like resets you to the level of your knowledge and skills over time.
1:50:04 So what do you think of this?
1:50:06 I think we’re saying the exact same thing.
1:50:08 You did it more eloquently than me.
1:50:11 You know, I think, I think it’s 100% right.
1:50:22 And the people who will fill that bucket with knowledge and skills are the people who, again, for some reason, they’re good people, they’re good leaders, they take a liking to you.
1:50:29 And they will give you, they will put you in situations and they will let you screw up and fix your own problems, fix your own mistakes.
1:50:31 Then that’s what my bosses did for me.
1:50:35 They rewarded my behavior when I got it right as opposed to my results.
1:50:36 Never got rewarded for my results.
1:50:38 I always got rewarded for my behavior.
1:50:43 So if I showed initiative, I got a reward even if the results didn’t follow, right?
1:50:45 And I can tell you a great story on that.
1:50:50 And if I got things wrong, they would say, hmm, wow, what are you going to do?
1:50:52 Really screwed that one up, didn’t you?
1:50:54 Okay, what are you going to do?
1:51:02 And they didn’t, they weren’t happy with me, but they let me fix my own messes and they stood by and I knew that they were there if I needed them.
1:51:08 You know, Peter and Tamagio, one of the best leaders I ever worked for, annoyingly, he never answered a single question I asked.
1:51:10 Hey, Peter, what should I do?
1:51:10 I don’t know.
1:51:11 What do you think we should do?
1:51:12 Well, I think we should do this.
1:51:13 I’m like, okay, so go do that.
1:51:14 You know?
1:51:15 What do you think?
1:51:18 Peter, I’m asking you because I don’t know.
1:51:19 That’s why I’m asking you.
1:51:22 He’s like, ooh, well, you should probably go think about that.
1:51:24 It was the worst.
1:51:25 But what he taught me was self-reliance.
1:51:28 What he taught me was self-reliance.
1:51:33 What he taught me was if I don’t know, then I have to go keep searching and keep talking to people.
1:51:34 I have to have a point of view.
1:51:36 And it may not be right.
1:51:39 And I’ll find that out myself too.
1:51:43 And I also learned to have backup plans from him because something went haywire on me.
1:51:46 And it went so wrong, it ended up being okay.
1:51:48 But he made me sweat it.
1:51:54 And remember, at the end of the day, at the end of this whole thing that went wrong that was totally my fault, the phone rings.
1:51:56 I see it’s 6 p.m.
1:51:57 The phone rings.
1:51:59 I see his name come up on the caller ID.
1:51:59 And I pick up the phone.
1:52:01 I remember the whole call word for word, right?
1:52:03 I pick up the phone.
1:52:04 I go, hello?
1:52:07 He says, close call today.
1:52:08 I said, yep.
1:52:12 He said, better to get shaved by the bullet than hit by the bullet.
1:52:13 I went, yep.
1:52:15 He said, have a good night.
1:52:16 I said, you too.
1:52:18 That was the whole phone call.
1:52:23 And so since then, since that experience, I always have a backup plan.
1:52:29 Now, it doesn’t mean it’s all ready to go, but I’ve thought about if this thing that I’m trying to do doesn’t work, what will I do?
1:52:32 And I at least committed some thought to it.
1:52:34 So if something does go wrong, I’m like, I’m a little bit ahead.
1:52:37 Either have it planned or I’m like, okay, okay, don’t worry.
1:52:39 I kind of, if this happened, I’ve thought about this already.
1:52:42 And it’s only because of these great leaders.
1:52:47 And it goes, this is this recurring theme of this whole conversation, which is it’s the struggle.
1:52:49 It’s the journey, not the destination.
1:52:51 It’s the human beings that guide us.
1:52:58 It’s the human beings that hold space for us that make us better at what we do, better than how we show up in the world.
1:53:02 And AI will absolutely make our lives easier, like most technology makes our lives easier.
1:53:12 That’s kind of the rule of technology, which is to make life a little easier, a little more efficient, a little quicker, a little less, you know, strain on the muscles.
1:53:20 You know, that’s kind of what it does, you know, from the plow, you know, all the way up to the internet and AI.
1:53:21 It just makes life a little easier.
1:53:25 But we’re still human beings who are forced to live with human beings.
1:53:28 You’re writing a book about friendship that we’re all waiting for.
1:53:29 Yeah.
1:53:32 I’m not going to ask you when it’s due because I don’t want to be your publisher.
1:53:35 But I know that they chase and chase and chase and chase.
1:53:38 But my closing question is why?
1:53:45 Of all the things you could have written about Simon, you’re someone who’s able to traverse several subject matters across business and life and everything in between.
1:53:50 But you’ve committed yourself to the struggle of writing a book about friendship.
1:53:55 There’s an entire industry to help us be better leaders, right?
1:54:02 There’s an entire industry to help you have a successful relationship or a successful marriage or even find a partner, right?
1:54:04 Industries, books, companies.
1:54:08 There’s very little on how to be a friend.
1:54:16 And if you think about if you’re going to have a successful career and can survive the stresses of career,
1:54:20 and if you’re going to have a successful romantic relationship or marriage and survive that,
1:54:23 do you know what you need in both of those circumstances?
1:54:24 Friends.
1:54:27 Because when your marriage is falling apart, you go to a friend.
1:54:29 When your job is falling apart, you go to a friend.
1:54:35 And there’s a few things that I’ve discovered about friends that I find delightful.
1:54:40 And I have been reorganizing my life to, as I mentioned it before,
1:54:45 like I’ve been reorganizing my life to ensure that my friends aren’t taken for granted
1:54:49 and that sometimes I do deprioritize work in order to see my friends and spend time with my friends.
1:55:01 Because I know it feels good to them and I know it feels good to me and I know that the only reason I can get through any work stress or personal stress I have is because of those magical human beings.
1:55:02 And I will not take them for granted.
1:55:05 And it doesn’t mean it’s always easy.
1:55:10 I’m conflicted often, but I’m trying.
1:55:19 And I also know if you look at the work, the world today, like there’s so much conversation about loneliness, depression, anxiety, inability to cope with stress, even the obsession with longevity.
1:55:21 Like there’s so much about these subjects.
1:55:26 And some people treat it with drugs and then meditation and vacations and like there’s so many theories.
1:55:31 The one thing that fixes all of those things is friends.
1:55:33 Friendship is the ultimate biohack.
1:55:35 You know, we’ve talked about this before.
1:55:37 I fundamentally believe that.
1:55:42 And if it’s so valuable, like if I know, if you know vegetables are good for you, you eat more vegetables.
1:55:46 If you know exercise is good for you, you do more exercise.
1:55:50 So if I say friends are good for you, shouldn’t you do more friendships, right?
1:55:55 Like shouldn’t you – exercise is not fun or easy and you have to get over a hump sometimes.
1:56:01 Eating vegetables can sometimes be boring and unsatisfying, but you do it or you find new ways.
1:56:07 And so maybe friendship is not always easy or fun, but it’s still really, really good for you.
1:56:10 And the best thing about friends is it actually doesn’t taste like spinach.
1:56:14 It’s like you get the benefits of spinach, but it tastes like chocolate cake.
1:56:18 If you get friendship right, it’s the healthiest thing in the world.
1:56:19 How do I know if someone’s a friend?
1:56:22 I have that conversation with them.
1:56:24 Because I know a lot of people.
1:56:25 Yeah.
1:56:27 I mean, look, and you have deal friends.
1:56:29 You have a lot of deal friends, you know?
1:56:29 Podcast friends.
1:56:30 Podcast friends, yeah.
1:56:33 Work friends.
1:56:36 You know, and we have – look, I’m not talking about – there’s all kinds of friends.
1:56:38 There’s friends that you just like hanging out with.
1:56:42 They’re just fun, but you’re not going to go to them with your problems or to sort out, you know, issues.
1:56:44 You’re just not, work or personal.
1:56:47 They’re just fun, right?
1:56:47 There’s nothing wrong with that.
1:56:55 But I think, you know, I’m certainly guilty of spending time with people that, you know, they fill a space and they make me feel not lonely.
1:57:03 But at the end of the day, I don’t feel smarter, inspired, brighter, lighter when I say goodbye.
1:57:04 I’m just like, all right, bye, that was fun.
1:57:12 And I kind of want to spend more time with people who lift me, teach me, support me, love me, give me a chance to serve.
1:57:15 They open up to me and let me serve as well, you know?
1:57:16 I struggle to make friends.
1:57:17 And?
1:57:18 I think.
1:57:21 Do you know why?
1:57:29 I think I think I’m lazy with it, lazy with friendships.
1:57:33 So I will meet someone, I’ll have a great connection with them.
1:57:37 And then my follow-up, like I don’t really know what to do next.
1:57:38 So I’ll meet someone.
1:57:40 Your follow-up is crap.
1:57:40 Oh, fucking hell.
1:57:42 But this is what I mean.
1:57:43 Like, I’ll meet someone.
1:57:46 I’ll text you and maybe I’ll get a response.
1:57:47 Vice versa.
1:57:50 I think you left me on read.
1:57:54 But you’re the same.
1:57:54 Are you the same?
1:57:55 Or is it just with me?
1:57:57 It’s just with me.
1:57:58 It’s just with you.
1:58:04 But I think my follow-up game is like, crap, I’ll meet someone, I’ll go, oh my God, I’ll see the potential for a friendship.
1:58:07 And then I won’t know what I have.
1:58:09 Or maybe I’m just being lazy.
1:58:10 I’m trying to, I want to be honest.
1:58:13 Maybe I just don’t prioritize it.
1:58:20 I think also when you start having fame and money and you’re used to being the boss, you get away with stuff.
1:58:26 So you show up late, everybody’s like pissed off and angry, and then you show up and they’re like, and you’re like, sorry.
1:58:27 Like, no, no, no, no, don’t worry, don’t worry.
1:58:28 Right?
1:58:30 Like, you get away with stuff in the world.
1:58:30 Right?
1:58:35 And so I think what that does is, and I see this with celebrities all the time, right?
1:58:38 Because everybody yeses them to death and they get away with it and nobody ever holds them accountable.
1:58:42 At some point they just get lazier and lazier and lazier because they can.
1:58:42 Oh, yeah.
1:58:43 You know?
1:58:43 Yeah.
1:58:46 And so they don’t have to put in the effort because other people put in the effort.
1:58:47 Yeah.
1:58:55 And nobody be like, like somebody who’s a nobody won’t say to them, yo, asshole, not respectful.
1:58:57 Oh, you think my schedule doesn’t matter?
1:58:59 I’ve been waiting here for three hours.
1:59:01 Oh.
1:59:04 Just because you’re a celebrity, you think you can just keep me waiting?
1:59:05 Not cool.
1:59:06 Nobody says that to them.
1:59:06 Yeah.
1:59:08 And somebody should say that to them.
1:59:08 But, uh…
1:59:09 They should say it to themselves.
1:59:11 They should say it to themselves.
1:59:12 That would be ideal.
1:59:15 And some of them have the self-awareness to know they’re getting away with it.
1:59:16 That’s even worse because then they’re doing it on purpose.
1:59:17 At least blindness, I think.
1:59:20 You know, they can at least hide behind ignorance.
1:59:23 But, uh, yeah, I mean, friendship takes effort.
1:59:25 Yeah.
1:59:28 There’ll be a lot of people listening now I know that understand.
1:59:31 I think they’ll resonate with what I’m saying, which is I’ll meet someone.
1:59:33 I’ll be like, we could be really good friends.
1:59:34 I see so much in us.
1:59:35 I love what you stand for.
1:59:36 We have so much in common.
1:59:44 And then it drifts because neither party have the tools or the skill of, like, what to do then.
1:59:49 We also live in a strange world where I’ve met people where I have all of that and I follow up, like, immediately.
1:59:50 I’m like, hey, I had such a good time.
1:59:51 Let’s make a plan.
1:59:52 And they’re like, what?
1:59:52 Huh?
1:59:52 What?
1:59:55 Or I call as opposed to, like, texting.
1:59:56 And people are like, what?
1:59:56 Why are you calling?
1:59:58 I’m like, well, we had a nice time.
2:00:00 I thought we’d maybe talk, you know?
2:00:05 And I think we live in this strange world where people put it out there, but they don’t really want it.
2:00:13 Looping us right back to the beginning of this conversation, as you said that about the call, that made me think again about how there’s going to become a premium on human.
2:00:19 Because calling is so archaic to me that when someone does it, it’s like a treat now.
2:00:23 And I was thinking, what’s taking that even further would be writing someone a letter.
2:00:25 If someone, do you know who wrote me a letter?
2:00:29 Evan from Snapchat came on the podcast, the founder and CEO of Snapchat.
2:00:33 And then by the time I’d got back to London, there was a letter on my desk from Evan.
2:00:35 And it just said, I had a great conversation with you.
2:00:37 Thank you for being so thoughtful with the questions.
2:00:38 Thank you for the research.
2:00:39 Here’s my number.
2:00:40 Would love to stay in touch.
2:00:40 Yeah.
2:00:41 And it blew me away.
2:00:42 AI wrote that.
2:00:45 No, it was with a pen.
2:00:47 He had an auto pen.
2:00:47 He just took it.
2:00:49 It was with a pen.
2:00:50 I had a signature and his phone number on it.
2:00:51 I thought, that is so beautiful.
2:00:52 It’s classic.
2:00:53 It’s classic and classy.
2:00:55 There’s a premium on being human.
2:00:58 Simon, thank you so much.
2:00:59 Thank you for being so generous with your time always.
2:01:00 Always.
2:01:09 You always move me forward in my thinking in such a profound and unexpected, always unexpected way that I’ll value tremendously for a very, very long time in our friendship.
2:01:11 I’m going to text back even faster.
2:01:13 We need to go on more dates.
2:01:17 And I look forward to that and look forward to our next date in London, which I know is coming up sometime soon.
2:01:18 Yeah, we’ll go out for sure.
2:01:19 It’ll be fun.
2:01:20 We have a closing tradition, which I nearly forgot.
2:01:21 I do know the tradition.
2:01:23 Which is the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.
2:01:24 Yes, what’s my question?
2:01:30 What are you doing in your life to mentor someone coming up behind you?
2:01:37 And then who is a person that you’d like to mentor, teach, or coach that needs your voice the most?
2:01:42 My team is everything right now.
2:01:44 I want to give everything I’ve learned to my team.
2:01:49 I want the folks on my team to benefit from all the mistakes I’ve made.
2:02:02 And one of the joys of being in founder mode when it’s not the actual beginning is I have way more in my skill and knowledge bucket that I want to pour out.
2:02:14 And so one of the reasons I’m having so much fun in founder mode is because I want to give away everything that I’ve learned so that my team can be stronger and stronger and better and better.
2:02:24 Because I want to leave something that can survive me that, you know, if, you know, the whole school bus test, you know, if the founder gets hit by a bus, will the company continue or will it not?
2:02:28 And I really want to build something where they want to build it without me.
2:02:31 It feels like there’s been a change here.
2:02:32 What was the catalyst?
2:02:41 For the past couple of years, I’ve been just trying out a lot of different things to find a level of excitement and energy that I think I’d lost for a little bit.
2:02:42 And I found it.
2:02:45 Like, this has been, like, the founder mode.
2:02:47 My team are so great.
2:02:50 And they so want to, they so want to push boundaries.
2:02:53 And all I want to do is take the reins off, like, take the leash off.
2:02:55 Like, I want them to experiment.
2:02:56 I want them to try things.
2:02:58 And I’m trying to create an environment where they’re creative.
2:02:59 They do things.
2:03:00 Half of them will fail.
2:03:01 I don’t care.
2:03:01 Let’s try again.
2:03:06 And I just love being around all the creative ideas that they’re coming up with.
2:03:09 My team asked you to bring something that meant a lot to you.
2:03:11 And you brought me this.
2:03:12 And I don’t know what’s in this box.
2:03:18 Ooh.
2:03:22 Two medallions?
2:03:22 Medals?
2:03:25 Those are military challenge coins.
2:03:29 I brought the one, the round one, just to show you what the traditional ones look like.
2:03:32 This is the one I care about.
2:03:33 I mean, I care about them both.
2:03:34 But this is the one I brought.
2:03:39 So these are, only generals or commanders will give these out.
2:03:40 They’re hard to get.
2:03:43 You get them when you do something of service.
2:03:46 It’s less formal than a medal.
2:03:47 They can give it out to them however they want.
2:03:49 And it’s their way of saying thank you.
2:03:53 And the challenge coins that I’ve been given, I’m very, very proud of because I feel like I earned them.
2:03:56 And the thing that I love is when they give them to you, they don’t just hand it to you.
2:03:59 They put it in their hand like this and they shake your hand.
2:04:01 Go on.
2:04:03 And that’s how they give them to you.
2:04:06 And they say, thank you, Simon, so much for coming here and helping us out.
2:04:09 And that’s how they give me the coin.
2:04:15 The reason this one means a lot to me is because I did some work with Air Force Top Gun.
2:04:18 It’s called the Weapons School, but it’s Air Force Top Gun.
2:04:20 And this is their coin and this is their patch.
2:04:29 And I did some work with them to help them get to the core of their why, what their true value was, just to make sure that their culture stays clear and good for a long time.
2:04:45 And we came up with three words, three actions that everybody who goes through Air Force Top Gun is required to do, which is build, teach, lead, which is the idea that you build a skill set, you teach that skill set to other people, and then you build leaders and you lead, right?
2:04:52 This whole idea that you have a responsibility to build, to teach and to lead, accumulate and give and serve.
2:05:00 And the thing that is so powerful is the commandant of the weapons school, after we did the work, he took those words and he put them on the coin.
2:05:00 Oh, really?
2:05:03 And they exist on the coin and they have been on there for years since.
2:05:10 And I am so proud to have given something that has longevity, that is literally on the coin.
2:05:13 Build, teach, lead.
2:05:14 Yeah.
2:05:16 That is such a beautiful mantra for life.
2:05:17 Yeah.
2:05:19 And they’re wonderful people who go there.
2:05:21 And what an honor.
2:05:24 That work that I did ended up on a coin.
2:05:30 And so they gave me the coin out of gratitude for the work that I did and it had my words on it.
2:05:32 It’s not my words, it’s their words.
2:05:33 I just helped distill them.
2:05:36 It’s who they are when they’re at their natural best.
2:05:38 I just helped them put it and codify it.
2:05:40 Simon, thank you.
2:05:40 Thanks.
2:05:43 Always love our conversations and long may they continue.
2:05:43 Likewise.
2:05:49 Quick one.
2:05:50 Just give me 30 seconds of your time.
2:05:52 Two things I wanted to say.
2:05:57 The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.
2:06:02 It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn’t have imagined getting to this place.
2:06:06 But secondly, it’s a dream where we feel like we’re only just getting started.
2:06:14 And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.
2:06:16 Here’s a promise I’m going to make to you.
2:06:21 I’m going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
2:06:27 We’re going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we’re going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
2:06:29 Thank you.