Overcoming Depression, Burnout, Anxiety and Insomnia with Dan Murray-Serter

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It's very rare that you get to meet entrepreneurs that are following and have followed in the steps that you've followed in your life. Whenever I meet people like you and Ben Francis, who is a similar age to me and has similar life ambitions, I see it as this really amazing rare opportunity to learn for myself and to ask honestly selfish questions.

I saw on your Twitter, I think it was over the Mental Health Week period, you did a tweet where you talked about your experiences with depression, burnout, and anxiety. From what I know about your story, you experienced those things in that order. I think that's a good place to start, which is, let's talk about depression and the role that depression played in your life, where it came from, and how you've overcome or are overcoming or handling depression.

Yeah, so it's interesting actually because I realized when I started to talk about mental health stuff, even more interestingly than what you've just said, I realized that I'd been burying another mental health problem. Actually, the tweet was more depression, burnout, anxiety, and insomnia. But actually, it's really interesting; I did a podcast interview with a nutritionist called Rhiannon Lambert.

When I was preparing for that, I was going over the fact that I'd grown up fat and the fact that I probably did have an unusual relationship mentally with food. Suddenly, I was unpacking what had happened in my 20s and I actually had bulimia. I used to throw up for like four to five years—not intentionally, though.

This was how deeply rooted this mental health problem was. I would eat something and I would throw a lot of it up. My friends would know about it, but it wasn't labeled. I went to specialists in Harley Street to see what was up, and they were like, "Medically you're fine, so psychologically there's something there." Anyway, I haven't done it since I was about 26 or whatever, but it suddenly occurred to me a few weeks ago, really interestingly, that being able to label the time I got depression, the time I got anxiety, the time I got insomnia, the time I was burnt out, I remembered those moments.

This one, I had actually buried as a story in my head. I had never expressed it in my whole life to anyone publicly at all, full stop. It was a couple of months ago, and I wrote a newsletter on mental health and nutrition. I admitted for the first time then that I'd had bulimia and what the symptoms were and how long it had gone on.

The fact was that I was basically losing lots of weight, getting really skinny, and all I saw was someone fat. It was so interesting to me, two revelations that came from that. One is that if it's so uncomfortable—for me, it's really embarrassing to admit to myself that I was weak enough to have a mental health condition that bad that I would psychologically throw up when there was nothing biologically wrong with me.

That's really awkward to admit to yourself. It's also far more terrifying to admit it publicly once you've uncovered it. It kind of made me reflect on the fact that sometimes these things are actually just so painfully embarrassing about your personal life that you can even bury it to yourself.

And did you ever understand why you were bulimic? Was there, because it's a psychological comorbidity, what was the cause per se?

It's really hard to say what the cause was because I got it after I'd lost weight. By the time I was sort of 21 or whatever, I was in perfectly reasonable shape, but I got it at like 23. Actually, there was a result of it, the only time I was ever hospitalized. It is a really random but hilarious story in its own way.

Because I'd been throwing up, I'd been basically hurting the inside of my throat, right? I was at a festival one time and I had a coughing fit in Hackney. I had a coughing fit at the hospital and I coughed a hole in my throat, literally. It's called a pneumomediastinum. It's a very unique thing to happen, apparently. Fortunately, I was close enough to the Royal London Hospital to go in there and show them.

Basically, what happened to me was my head started to grow. I was with my friends feeling fine other than this cough, and one of my friends just looked at me and was like, "Whoa." I was like, "What?" They're like, "Mate, your head is massive." I'm like, "I'm not even talking mate, don't be a dick." He's like, "No, no, your head is growing. What is going on?" I was like, "What?" and then everyone else was like, "Oh my God."

Anyway, I walked to the hospital. It's sort of 5:00 in the afternoon or whatever because it's a day festival. It's East London, there's quite a lot of genuinely gang-related things, people are bleeding everywhere, all this stuff, and they just see me and they're like, "That guy's next." They put me into intensive care for like the whole week whilst they were basically trying to sew up this hole in my throat.

When you say your head was growing?

Oxygen was going, not going like in my mouth and through my bloodstream properly, so some of it was escaping around my head and my brain. So it was like an emergency procedure to get me on meds and sort me out. But it's so interesting because even knowing that that had happened to me, I didn't relate the cause to actually a deeper root cause which was another mental health problem.

To be honest with you, I couldn't say to you what the trigger was beyond this story. You know, the things that we grow up with, the people that we grow up with, those little bullying and things like that. I mean, in some good respects, because I grew up fat, I've got a good personality and a sense of humor. So I've always been able to really connect with people because I just never had it all my way kind of thing.

Do you know this story about people that are fat having better senses of humor and being a little bit more "bubbly"? Why is that?

I think self-deprecation can sometimes be a defense mechanism. Ultimately, with these things, you're going to hear them a lot. If you grow up fat, you're going to hear it a lot, right? You're going to go to a new environment, someone's going to bully you for the obvious. And so you kind of find a way of coping with it in your own way.

For me, it's just interesting because the other mental health issues that I've had in my life, I'm able to trace back usually to a moment or a thing or reflect on why. This one kind of just happened later, and then as soon as I had it for a few years, it just also went away.

At what age was this?

So about 23 to about 27.

And you're how old now?

33.

So you had it for about four years and you overcame?

Yeah, but naturally. I wasn't doing anything different. I mean, I started to learn what foods would make me more sick than others, if that makes sense as well. But I find it super interesting, again, less so the trigger, but more so the fact that it kind of ran its course as well. That was interesting to me, and that I buried it in my head.

Actually, 27 was the start of like a whole other experience in life for me anyway. So it is possible that these things are related to stress and other things. My entrepreneurship journey started at 24, so it's not completely unrelated, but not enough to actually label it and say it's for a thing. But then, you know, the other experiences that I've had with mental health are a lot clearer.

I think depression is a really complex term. The only relation that I've got to depression that I'm comfortable talking about is after my father passed away. I think that's really reasonable. This is the thing: because I work so much with people in mental health and experts, I know depression is also not something to claim you have when you feel down. It's very different. Obviously, there is a spectrum of these things as well.

For me, my depressive episode was right after my father passed away because he was on life support for six months and overcame when they said he's 100% going to die. He actually survived, made it out of the hospital into a recovery home, and then someone basically had a cold around him and he died of catching their cold after the entire recovery process.

The truth of the matter is that my depression was actually interestingly sort of linked with a lack of belief in a higher power or whatever you want to call it—justice, fairness, everything. My dad was such a generous-spirited guy. He was blind; he had all of these things wrong with him anyway, and still, he was just the funniest, nicest, warmest person anyone knows, and the last person on earth to kind of deserve something like that.

For me, the experience after he passed away was that he believed in God. So when he died, I was like, "That's my connection to God gone." Therefore, I straight up believe in nothing. I think it's really interesting to have conversations with intelligent people like yourself when you talk about purpose and vision and these things. It's very hard to imagine that you've got a purpose, a vision for anything, if suddenly you've switched off and you've said, "I believe in nothing."

You felt totally destabilized?

Yeah. I remember the feeling of being—I was religious until I was 18, Christian until I was 18. I think that will surprise a lot of people because I'm a very rational sort of someone that makes a lot of decisions and thinks from first principles or logic. And then at 18, I lost my faith per se, and it was the most destabilizing two years of my life. I became a total obsessive atheist, which means I read every book, watched every documentary video.

Then I got to the point, and this is when I realized that I'd overcome my sort of wobble, where I no longer cared about engaging in these debates with people that agreed or disagreed with me, and I was at peace with my own beliefs, which I guess is like agnosticism, if that's the term.

The other really destabilizing moment in my life where I lost my sense of purpose was the day someone offered me about 20 to 30 million, hypothetically, to buy my business. 18-year-old Steve shows up—I've talked about this a few times—because he thought we were doing this for money. He thought that was the goal.

And so I go home that night, I remember where I sat like it was yesterday, I'm typing Rightmove looking at houses at 24 years old. Then I'm looking at these houses and I'm getting this real deep sense of unfulfillment, thinking, "Well, that was it? That was the game?" And then okay, so Autotrader, Lamborghini Aventador. I'm looking at this Aventador and feeling like I'd be poorer, not in a financial sense, but in a spiritual sense, if I chose to step on what is clearly a hamster wheel.

From that day, the day after, I didn't know why I was working hard anymore. I didn't know why I was building the business. I had to then go in search of a real form of stability in my life which was: I love it, but I thought I loved it for another reason. I thought I loved it for money, but I loved it for connection and for conversations like this and those things. But to go back to your point, please, you're talking about how you lost your sense of sort of stability.

Yeah, I lost what I believed in this world. If you don't have a sense of belief, it's really hard to find your purpose. I would say that I went through a few years of that at age 24 when my dad died. I didn't even realize that as I was until I was saying it just now, but it's probably related, obviously.

I went through about three years of not believing in anything, right? Really, and not very nice about it either. I grew up Jewish. I've always said, in fairness, I think Judaism is as bad a religion as all the other religions. I don't actually personally like any one of them, but I do love what they all mean. But then, you know, it's very possible to be wise and not associate yourself with a religion.

What I've learned, which I find so interesting, is my identity, my connection to spirituality. Judaism is a weird one as well because it's like a race and a religion. So it's like you can actually be not religious, you can lose your religion but still be the race. That's actually a positive in a way because it means you don't have to disassociate from cultural values, but you can disassociate from religious ideals.

What actually happened to me was I would be relatively difficult and question people a lot when they would talk to me about their religious beliefs. I'd want to dig into them and I'd really want to challenge the way that they think and why they think these things and how they can defend them, trying not to be an absolute asshole, but just using my own bitterness and my own experience of growing up being told to believe in something, which is very different to finding something.

When my father passed away and I didn't have this connection to it anymore, I also felt like I didn't have the connection to spirituality or anything. So it's very weird to have almost the death of a religion as a human being because that's your death of your connection to this earth and purpose and everything.

It wasn't until I was 27, really, one of my really good friends told me about Ayahuasca—and obviously, we've been talking about Christian Angermayer as well, our mutual friend, so this is a relevant conversation. He told me about Ayahuasca. I'd never heard of it before, didn't even know what it was. I went on a retreat with him.

I mean, I came back that weekend completely—I mean, when I say a 180, I went from the most cynical non-believer in the whole world, negatively so, to, without sounding like a complete twat, positively enlightened and confident. Never more confident of anything in my life of spiritual realism and what I believe in.

Ultimately, what I believe in—and I have these fun conversations with people now about spirituality—is nature. I believe in looking at the beauty of the world and how cycles work, which is science, right? The way that my Ayahuasca experience actually opened my eyes to believing in something spiritual or greater than myself was 90% of my hallucination was observing what happens in nature with cycles: birds, bees, oxygen, air, soil, all of this recycling all the time for a sustainable system.

Being like, that is in itself a scientific miracle, but something greater than us that's always happening throughout time. It was a real shift for me because A, I overcame my depression from that, and B, I suddenly believed in something, even if that something is nature.

When people are like—and I get this from Christians quite often as well—they're like, "What do you mean you believe in nature? Like what is that?" I'm like, "I mean, it's more believable than a guy that walked on water." And when they get annoyed, I'm like, "I've got nothing against Jesus, I'm just saying that believing in nature, as ridiculous as that sounds, is a profound belief." Having a belief has actually helped me, helped guide me to then work on things like: what are my personal values?

You talked about mental models. What do I say yes to and no to in life? Well, you can only figure those things out if you spend time with mental models, first principles, thinking about what things mean to you in life. Then suddenly, other things start to come into flow.

I really want to just double down on this Ayahuasca experience. What exactly did you do on that experience?

Ayahuasca is essentially a completely natural tree sap from the Amazon. It's been practiced for thousands of years. I won't go into the whole history of psychedelics, but I could do because I've read a lot about it. The reality is, it's sacred. Shamans have a legal license to practice with it, and it's a guided experience.

The most important thing to say to anyone thinking about Ayahuasca is this is not something you do at home on your own. At all, ever. You could do that with mushrooms, you can definitely do that with LSD, you definitely do not want to do that with Ayahuasca. In my experience, the other psychedelics are a bit like you can have sort of one foot in this world, one foot in that world. Ayahuasca is not even in this plane. You're just somewhere else.

What's fascinating and very common from people's recollections of Ayahuasca trips is you have a spirit guide called Mama Ayahuasca. That's what everyone calls her. In all of my experience of doing it—and I've done it about 12 times now, so I almost go back every year—it's an incredibly painful experience, it's very difficult to do, and it's not something you look forward to.

It's like rocket fuel growth, which is why I do it. Because you learn all the things about yourself you don't want to hear, you don't want to know, and you confront the worst realities. I've learned more in those weekends that I've done this than you can learn with therapists.

So staggering. Everyone says this to me. You mentioned Christian Angermayer. Context: he runs a company called Atai which is now developing psychedelics as a way to cure treatment-resistant depression. It's really sort of a groundbreaking company. He sat with me in his penthouse just across the street from where we are now and he was telling me that you can literally unlock the brain by taking these drugs and you discover truths about yourself which will have a permanent, lasting, transformative impact on the way you see the world and it like corrects your thinking.

It's crazy for a normal person that isn't in this world or doesn't understand this to think that you can take a magic mushroom or a psychedelic and overcome grief.

There's a great book by Michael Pollan called *How to Change Your Mind*. In it, he talks about this problem with psychedelics; it's a bit like dreams, you're having an ineffable experience. To describe it for people is generally quite boring. What I think is more interesting in a sense is to discuss the outcomes that I've got from it.

Very quickly, the experience was—the hallucinogenic experience was watching the cycles of the earth develop.

Were you conscious? Because people haven't done this.

You drink it; it takes about an hour for me. You lie down in the pitch black. It's a fluid, like a shot. It tastes disgusting, but some people like it. You lie back and the shamans basically start playing music. It's a completely guided, facilitated experience with them. If you're having problems, they come over, they help you. If you need to be taken out of the room, they look after you. It's a busy night, there are noises. A lot of people throw up.

How's this for irony? I didn't throw up for my first 10 times, which everyone was like, "That's super weird." I was like, "Yes, especially considering my history," really bizarre. But the experience I saw was the one I needed. There's a really deep insightful experience you get from psychedelics which you can often go in wanting a thing, but it isn't what you need.

In this experience, what I wanted was to see my dad and to connect with my dad, but it isn't what I got. What I got was a vision of understanding how everything in this earth is living in a cycle, like a beautiful miracle. It was less about seeing micro things and seeing macro things, being in it. If it's taking me to a place I don't want to go, a door I'm not ready to open, you can negotiate. You can actually say, "I'm not ready for that yet," and sometimes it'll push you and say, "Open it anyway," but sometimes it will actually listen to you and let you go sort of back into your body.

It is a really fascinating experience. What I'd say about it is it's the number one most important thing I've ever done in my life, and especially because it's not pleasant. The first time I did it was the single most life-changing moment of my life. I not only got over my depression, I went and spent the whole day with my mom the next day explaining everything that I'd experienced. Not a mom's favorite chat, hearing your son talk about psychedelics, but certainly in the context of helping me get over something she was aware I was suffering from.

The single greatest lesson I've learned in Ayahuasca is about gratitude. I was going through a period, I think I was 30 potentially, so it was a few years later, and things were going well at the time. My attitude, my mindset was, "I want this, I want that." What's your intention going in? Well, I want this, I want that. That's how you answer it because you're not enlightened enough to understand this is not how it works. You can write it down and then come back to it and be like, "That was what I was looking for in this journey."

Actually, the lesson I learned—I was asking, how can I 10x what I do? How can I be more? How can I become better? How can I have more impact? Me, me, me, me, me. Instead, I was transported to basically, I'm not sure where in the world but a very poor part of the world, where there was this kid begging in the street basically, and I became that kid. I became this person trying to get water for his family and having to walk miles for it.

50% of my whole entire psychedelic experience that night was literally walking like a mile in this boy's shoes. This lesson sort of came to me about: it isn't always about what you want, and it isn't always about asking for more. It's actually about having gratitude for what you have. When you have enough gratitude for what you already have, you will unlock the path to more.

There's this thing that I've learned as well, which is when you go into experiences, it's helpful to have a totem. I carry a different stone in for each experience and then I have these stones at home. Anyway, I have this stone by the side of my bed and every single morning that I wake up, the first thing I see is this stone—literally just a pile of crap stone, but the point is it's imbued with this message for me.

I wake up every day and I'm grateful for having running water in my bathroom there. That is an unbelievably poetic and powerful way to live your life past an experience: to wake up in Camden Town in London being so fortunate like I am, but with a real genuine reminder of gratitude as opposed to waking up groggy and being like, "Yeah, I'm grateful for waking up today." This means something to me.

These little triggers and shifts, they emotionally change something in you. But I've learned a lesson the hard way through Ayahuasca as well, which is just because you're learning lessons—this is like all wisdom, right? Doesn't matter whether you get it from Ayahuasca or you get it from your Instagram posts—you can read it and it can resonate and you can be like, "Wow, that's powerful." Without action, it means nothing.

If you don't create the steps to be better based on what you learned, you're wasting a very powerful weekend and a painful weekend. I've been guilty of that too. I've learned lessons that I haven't necessarily followed through on, and sometimes it's because they take bravery, and I feel like I'm not ready for that bravery yet.

We were talking about this the other day with personal branding. That's actually a good segue onto that topic because it's something that I know for a fact a lot of people struggle with in different forms. Also specifically with this topic, which is putting yourself out there on the internet. I know this because a lot of people have told me, but also because I've been there.

If we rewind a couple of years in my own life, a guy called Ash Jones says to me, "You should make a YouTube channel." I dismissed the idea because I'm like, "Well, people are going to think that I think I'm Mahatma Gandhi," or people are going to think that I think I'm a genius or that I think I have all the answers. So I'm not doing that.

Eventually, after two years, he sits me down in this room, and it took about eight or nine hours for us to shoot a two-minute video because I couldn't speak. I was self-conscious and all of these things. I was plagued by that thought that my friends back home who knew me in school would think, "Steve's a dickhead, he's changed, what's he doing, who does he think he is?" That almost imprisoned me. It almost stopped me from doing the thing that actually liberated me, made me the most fulfilled I've ever been by allowing me to be my truest self.

In fact, what I wanted to do was be true to myself. It felt like I was worried that people would think I was being something I wasn't or trying to fake myself. So I guess the question that I have for you is: you know a lot of stuff, but you've not—you've got a great podcast, *Secret Leaders*, you've got a new podcast centered around your brand Heights—but you struggle to put yourself out there on the internet in social media. Can you explain why?

That's such a good question, Steve. But also because we connect a lot on this, right? So you're like my unofficial mentor with a few voice notes where I'm like, "He's got a fucking point." I guess I'll put it a slightly different way. I was listening to one of your early—you sent me this actually, your podcast with Ash Jones. You told me to listen to an episode which I did, and he was talking about the early days of Social Chain.

You learned early that you were bringing in most of the revenue. Steve was bringing in most of the revenue, therefore the business decision made lots of sense to center that around you. I think when you're doing B2B that makes loads of sense. The challenge I have is my products are B2C, they're for consumers. Putting as much time and effort and thought and energy into promoting myself is mental energy I should be putting into the brand.

There is, I think, probably a reasonable compromise. Also, like all things, this is a bit of a developing scenario. However, it's a very fair thing to say that I'm not the product, this is the product. Inside my company, we could all agree that that is broadly true; we're selling a thing, we're not selling me. Whereas, going through exactly the same experience at Social Chain, you guys—if you weren in the room, you guys would have come to the same conclusion, which is: Steve's the greatest part of the funnel here. So we as a company succeed when Steve's succeeding, so that's the kind of marketing funnel we should back.

I can see you sort of smirking at me because this is the story I tell myself. Okay, fine, because I was like, this doesn't make a ton of sense. This is the story that I tell myself. It doesn't mean that it's true. Then there's another question about platforms. This isn't a mental health condition, but I do have imposter syndrome. We've talked about this in the past as well.

The first business that I scaled was Grabble, which is when we first met. That was me going into technology and fashion having had no experience previously—I was in advertising before. I love changing industries and I love challenging myself to completely wipe the slate clean and do something new. But it comes with imposter syndrome. That's what I've learned about myself. I'm full of the internal monologue of "I'm not good enough," "No one cares what I think," and "I don't deserve to be doing this, it's someone else's dream."

That doesn't change in me; that voice is still there. However, a really good thing if you're aware, if you're consciously aware of your limitations, especially some of your mental frailties, is creating steps to improve those things. So with Heights, the first thing I did just over 100 weeks ago was start a newsletter. Because I was like, "I'm going to get imposter syndrome so badly in a space of neuroscience and nutrition." I'm not a neuroscientist or nutritionist; it's going to be awful for me.

So, I'm going to write a newsletter every week, and I'm going to read a science paper every week, and I am going to distill that into three minutes. Because when you read something you learn it once, and when you share it you learn it twice. The process of literally rewriting this was creating neural pathways and embedding the information into my brain. So I was like, in 100 weeks—it's actually what I told myself, and it's just been 101 now—in 100 weeks, I won't be a neuroscientist or a nutritionist, but I will have read over 100 science papers and I'll know what science says is good for your brain according to journals, experts, etc., which would be an amazing step to build to get over my own mental frailties and my own story of imposter syndrome.

When it comes to social media, I feel like I've got the same thing. When my last company failed and I didn't know what I was going to do next, I looked at social media platforms and was like, "Where am I going to spend time rather than where am I going to waste time?" ultimately, because you can get caught up in this silly game. Thinking about personal branding, where do I feel comfortable that'd be a good place to start? I chose LinkedIn.

The reason I chose LinkedIn was because I told myself a story which I completely believe to be true anyway: whatever I do next, I'm a serial entrepreneur, right? I'm fine having no money, I'm fine working for other people for free, doing all these things, but I'm always going to start something else myself again. If I know that to be true, it means I'm always going to hire people. And what do really smart and impressive people want from their boss? They want to know who they're working for. They want to know what your values are, what you believe in, what kind of things you share.

So I was like, LinkedIn is the only place that could credibly do that for me. I actually went from—it's not that impressive—but I went from like 3,000 followers or something to almost 25,000 on the basis of, and as you know there's no putting money behind anything in LinkedIn or anything, literally just by being myself. By writing about how I'd failed, by writing about what I was working on next.

Also, all of the things when you write about what you're working on next is such a difficult thing to do because it's probably going to fail as well. And it did! Before Heights, with three iterations of things that I was publicly putting out there and getting feedback on and stuff that we had to kill because it didn't have legs. It's a horrible time for an entrepreneur in between, when people ask, "What do you do?" and your identity is in flux.

You're preaching to the choir here, Dan.

I know, right? Exactly! But it's such a complicated answer to give in the now. So anyway, on the personal brand thing, I decided LinkedIn was a place I felt comfortable because I can be my authentic self because I am an entrepreneur, because I am someone who is willing to go big and fail and actually figure out why and talk about why.

I think this stuff is so important for entrepreneurs to connect openly and honestly because I absolutely hate—and the one thing I will not miss about networking events is—going to them and everyone talking about them killing it. That is literally poison in our society. It's nonsense. Everyone just talking about how they're killing it stops people from saying, "Actually, shit's really hard right now, this is the problem I'm dealing with and this is how it's making me feel."

If you're able to say that to another entrepreneur because you've created the container and the environment to be comfortable to do so, that person can probably help you. If you are stuck with the narrative that everything is going amazing all the time and that's all you're telling people, no one can help you figure it out when you actually could do with the help.

Here's the other thing, going slightly off-piste sorry, but my biggest bugbear in entrepreneurship is "Stealth Mode." I think Stealth Mode is like the most stupid thing that an entrepreneur can claim to be in, full stop, because as you know, ideas are worthless, execution is everything. Anyone that's ever built a business knows how hard it is. Stealth Mode is when people say, "Working on a new business in finance in Stealth Mode."

Does that mean not telling anybody?

"I'd love to tell you what my startup is but it's so amazing you'll steal it so I'm not going to tell you." Oh God! Mate, all the time! So many people do it. I give the most direct feedback on LinkedIn, probably very similar to you—loads of people ask for my help for loads of things all the time—and if I ever see Stealth Mode on their thing, I'm like, "I don't talk to anyone in Stealth Mode, FYI."

Stealth Mode is such a stupid thing because it's like saying, "I'm afraid of feedback."

But it's also like saying, "I've got something but I can't tell you." Why did you tell me you had something? Exactly! Just don't start the conversation with me. I'm a curious person, I'm going to ask you what it is. You're attention-seeking, but you don't want to tell—it's like a weird form of flirtation.

But I want to get to this point about why you—we had this conversation about a week or two ago about Instagram and making videos of yourself and putting your ideas out there. What is it that's stopping you from doing that? You talked about imposter syndrome; I guess that kind of relates to the business side of things more. What's stopping you from going on Instagram, putting a video on your Instagram and saying, "This is what I think, these are my ideas, comment below if you agree"?

It's a great question. So I guess as a starting point, it's worth saying that I think a very healthy way to approach stuff like this in your life is to choose a place, build confidence, and go on from there. So I feel like that's what I did with LinkedIn. I understood that that's the place where I'd feel least impostory, and so I'd start there.

Now, I picked up on Twitter—Twitter is probably my favorite platform, it's the one I spend probably the most time on, but it's got a very short half-life so it's kind of impossible to consistently come up with gems. Instagram to me was this place where just beautiful people live. Young, beautiful people live, and that's all anyone's interested in. That's not really my world, right? I'm interested in challenge, I'm interested in mental health, I'm interested in stories.

Interestingly, I wasn't finding that on Instagram. So I was like, "What am I doing? I don't really belong in this place at all." I'd say like 100% inspired by the way that you've approached your Instagram, like sharing insights. Insights and distilling my thoughts into something and writing them down, that is something that I do. I just don't publish them, or I was on LinkedIn.

So actually, what I've now started doing on Instagram is literally taking a leaf out of your book after our chat, just going through some of my high-performing LinkedIn posts that might have got one or two thousand likes and being like, "If it was popular there, I guess it will be popular here, let's have a go." And trying to get over it now, slowly but surely, but it's this constant belief that no one wants to hear what I have to say.

Yes! And that's what I was getting at. Where does—and what are the forces that are at play which are making it feel like some psychological discomfort if you are to tell the world what you think on Instagram? Let's say, in your mind what is it? Is it friends back home? Is it this particular person? Sometimes I can think of a particular person and I can think, "That person from four years ago is going to think I'm a dick."

100%. Dude, the thing that I've learned which is so interesting is 90% of my fear of what people will think is based on my school friends, who I only speak to a bunch of them now. Identity is such an interesting thing. You have it when you're—you'll be going through it right now and I empathize, right? You're not Steve from Social Chain anymore.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, for ages I was Dan from Grabble, now I'm Dan from Heights. People do that, and that's fine, but it's important you don't over-compensate that identity for yourself attached to your business because we're all on a path and we're going to go through a journey, and the journey, the stories are going to change. When you over-attach yourself to a particular part of the journey is where you can find struggle.

And on that point, you build your life around that identity—your friends, your music, your interests. And so you would have collected through your life a bunch of people who know Dan as *this*. And you're going to have to shed some of them, potentially, by stepping into your new identity. And that's a conflict or not easy.

100%. And it's difficult, right? But as you grow, you edit. You need to really consider who you're editing out of your life and who you're welcoming into your life. I think there's the practical reality that what was good for you five years ago is no good for you right now. Frankly, the highest leverage decision you can make—I'm still terrible at this by the way—but the highest leverage decision you can make is picking what to say no to. The hardest thing you can do is say no to opportunities that you would definitely say yes to.

That includes friends. That includes saying, "I don't have time for this friend anymore" or this part of my identity anymore, even though I like it and I like them and all this stuff. Because frankly, there's this shedding almost that we do as human beings. In reptile form, it's very physical, right? They're literally shedding a skin. But as humans, you don't see this change, but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

We go in these cycles, and I think a lot of mental health conditioning is attached to our holding onto the past and refusing to embrace the future. That's why I think it's really important to set out a clear understanding of your purpose, a clear understanding of the things you will say no to and won't say no to, and acknowledging that that changes.

I do an exercise like this every year. It takes about five or six hours. I do it with my wife. It's like a whole massive briefing document, essentially, on your vision, your purpose, your friends, all of this stuff. Spending the time thoughtfully thinking about these things, which people do not do enough of, is so important. Because if you're not reflective and you're not spending time thinking, manifesting essentially who you want to be in the future, then I think you're going to miss a massive opportunity to grow.

Because I work in the brain space now, in brain care and neuroscience, you call that neuroplasticity, right? It's this idea that the brain will grow; it's plastic and it's essentially changing in whatever direction you choose to take it in.

We talked about this on the last episode. It's very relevant.

Really? Okay fine. Yeah, so neuroplasticity is that. If you are into spirituality like I am, then it's called manifestation; it's spending the time thinking about what you're going to do and how you're going to get there. And then to put it into super business terms, if you're into business, it's called planning and execution. So there are these different ways to articulate the same point. But the point is, if you just spend your days going bit by bit, not really thinking about where you're going to go and what it means to you, it'll be very hard for you to make good decisions.

Frankly, speaking about personal branding, a more popular post I did recently was about stamina and the things I've learned about rest. As a founder and a CEO, you learn that you're not paid for your stamina. You pay Mo Farah for his stamina, right? He's got to run a 10K, that's stamina. That's what athletes are paid for. I'm paid for my decision-making. People invest in me and they invest in Heights for my decision-making abilities.

Overworking, giving yourself burnout, not taking space to rest, not listening to what you know to be true and spending the time planning—that's bad decision-making. If you can't do those things for your own body, it's like what I said: if you can't be the CEO of your body, you do not earn the right to be the CEO of your company. You've got to look after your mental state and your physical body first by thinking and finding the space, carving out the space to think: what do good decisions look like that fit my purpose and where I'm looking to go? If you can do that and you can answer those things, you actually start to learn things start to add up.

And that kind of segues back to the initial tweet where you talked about depression, anxiety, burnout, and insomnia. So let's talk about burnout then. It's a very popular topic. I actually think one of the most listened-to episodes of this podcast was the one about burnout and us being a burnout generation and how we've kind of glamorized it. We're optimizing our lives so we can fill it with more things to do. Did you burn out? How did you burn out? And do you understand why you burnt out?

100%. Gary V's a very clever man, very intelligent, but he has created a negative impact on society that he would probably be upset about because he seems to be a lovely man that really deeply cares about stuff. From what I can see, I believe his authenticity, but he has created hustle culture and hustle porn.

And you know what? I met Gary V, had him on this podcast, and you're right in every depiction of him there. He's a genuinely authentic person. You meet him and think, "You are who I thought you were online." And you're completely right in the sense that because he's being his authentic self, which we can't criticize anyone for being—in fact, that's what we tell everyone to be, be yourself and be willing to share it with the world—the issue I think is his lack of appreciation about nuance and that everyone is fundamentally different and everyone's not Gary V.

I had that problem too when I started. I couldn't understand why people weren't sacrificing their lives to build businesses and working until 4:00 AM and sleeping under the desk. I thought everyone that wasn't doing that was both an idiot and inferior.

And wasting their time.

And wasting their time and they would never be happy. Because for as far as Steve Bartlett's brain could tell him, *that* was happiness.

Yeah, because all of the pain that you suffer is part of the game. That stuff isn't not true. You do have to grow, growth is painful and you will have sleepless nights and all the other bits and pieces. That is part of the parcel. The thing where we confuse this is it's all mutually exclusive—aka, my identity has to be that and only that because that's how Gary V and a few other geniuses in society have got to the top of their games.

But here's the thing: there's two reasons why I had burnout last time. The first was because I wasn't happy with what I was working on. Running a startup can feel a bit like a cage sometimes. Unless you're really sure—and I say this to entrepreneurs all the time—are you sure this is the company you want to build? Because if it's not, you're going to be doing it anyway, and then you are your own bird keeper, you have locked yourself in a cage.

That's what I did with Grabble. I got lucky, I found a niche, an opportunity. It grew exponentially really quickly, millions of downloads, a million monthly active users on our end, we had even an acquisition that failed sadly but would have made us millionaires. It was a real journey with that company.

It was fashion for Tinder basically?

Tinder for fashion, exactly. And it was a real exciting journey, but at no point did I enjoy it. My ego enjoyed it, and we won loads of awards. We won the award we wanted; we were like, "We just want to be written about in TechCrunch" and all this stuff. In 2017, we won Best Mobile Startup in Europe over Depop at the TechCrunch Europas. We didn't even turn up to that awards ceremony to take that award because I was having such a bad time mentally. I didn't even go to the awards ceremony; my friend picked up that trophy and took a photo on our behalf. I was sitting at home drinking whiskey feeling really terrible about myself.

Why?

Because that was living someone else's dream. I didn't care about fashion.

What was the force that made you live someone else's dream?

A bit of serendipity in the sense of listening to users, going on a bit of a journey and the product sort of developing, and then it catching fire before you really have an opportunity to stop and say, "No, that's not really for me."

It was like you were getting dragged, you weren't pulling.

A bit. A bit. But then at the same time, like everyone, I'm scared of failure. I didn't want to be a failure, so I wanted to make it work. By hook or by crook, I was willing to push really hard to make it work. I look back on my time with Grabble and other than working hard, I was working against my purpose. I could feel it.

When people asked me—I'm actually always to my detriment honest—so I would tell people, including the wrong people, including investors, that my heart really isn't in it and all this stuff. Because all I had left for authenticity was to be honest in these conversations with other people.

You know, I've just finished writing my book. I'm not trying to plug it, although *Happy Sexy Millionaire* available in all good bookstores. It's on preorder. But there's a chapter in there where I really investigate burnout. The reason that topics like self-awareness and burnout haven't quite yet been properly defined is everyone throws it out there on Instagram—"Oh, I'm feeling burnt out"—but nobody's gone down the rabbit hole to figure out the innate causes or the psychological or social causes of it.

So I just wanted to go as far down as I could go. I tend to believe the research that I've done is that you typically stand a higher chance of burnout in situations where you are extrinsically motivated to do X activity. Because I view my life and I think about all the things that I do intrinsically—like walking my dog, I've never got burnt out walking my dog or playing with my dog. I've never got burnt out reading books that I love.

But when it comes to getting paid to do something that I don't intrinsically enjoy doing, burnout is almost inevitable at some point. Not just burnout, but motivation. I started looking at motivation and the spectrum it sits on: on one end being totally extrinsic (you're literally doing it because you're forced to) and then on the other end doing it because it's an innate passion. All of the things on this end where you're paid and you're forced to, burnout seems to show up. On the other end when it's intrinsic and you love it and you're doing it for the sake of doing it, I never get burnout and my motivation seems to last the course of time. Does that resonate with you at all?

Yeah. But let me tell you something else that's interesting that I'm consciously aware of because I've had burnout. By the way, my experience of it was I just couldn't get out of bed for a month.

Really?

That was it. I basically just stayed in bed and I just couldn't face going to the office, I couldn't face leaving my bed basically.

You've got a team in the office?

Yeah, I've got my co-founder and I just explained that I was literally—I didn't know what it was at the time. I was like, "I think it might be depression," but I didn't know what it was. I probably didn't even say those words.

How did it feel?

Just no energy whatsoever. No ability—a bit like when I had coronavirus to be honest, just zonked. Nothing I was doing was able to make me feel like I was getting the energy. I think the reason why as well was—again, I'm a helpful guy. I really believe in my greatest superpower, which is connecting people. I've got infinite numbers of ways that I've connected people; eight people have got married that I've introduced.

So many co-founders introduced. I really just believe in the serendipity of creating moments where you know that person and that person just should have that chat, and I force it to happen. Because of that, because I really believe in serendipity as well, I do try and say yes to people and help them out. So what was happening to me at Grabble was we were flying, we were number one in the App Store and all this stuff, so the inbounds started coming thick and fast.

So I was like, "I can't do this the way I was doing it," which is all over the place. "I'll go to Old Street at 6:00 AM every single Tuesday and Wednesday, and between 6:00 and 9:00, I'll do sessions. If you come meet me between that time in your 45-minute slot, I'll fit you in." Then Tuesday and Wednesday became Tuesday to Thursday, and then before I knew it, I was doing it like almost every single day, trying to be so helpful. It was great because I get loads of energy from that, right? Like so much. There's a great quote that there's no such thing as altruism because you're ultimately doing it for yourself, and I believe that.

However, find your motivation and then 10x it, but I overdid it. The result, the net result, was one day I woke up from my alarm trying to do it and I basically couldn't move. That alarm basically kept going for the next few days and I was like, "Nope, I just can't do it, I can't go to work, I can't get out of bed."

It was really strange time. But the thing that's really interesting to me this time, right? I analyzed that as partly burnout because I was trying to do too much and not spending enough time on myself, not having any rest, not being sensible about my personal space and my life, which was stupid but the kind of thing you learn the hard way quite often.

Then the other thing was obviously like I was working on a business that I wasn't very happy in. I was having more fun meeting these people and helping make introductions than I was working in my own business. Now with Heights, I'm very consciously aware of the opposite problem to be true. One of my fears from Heights is I won't see burnout coming because now I'm living my purpose. Now I am so passionate, I get so much motivation and pleasure from working on Heights that I could do this 24/7.

I diarize stopping myself, right? I literally put in my diary to stop. Rest, naps, Peloton, all of the things like my Shakti mat, meditation—these things are in my diary. If it's in my calendar, I'm going to pay attention to it and I'm going to respect it. If I don't, I won't respect my own boundaries because I know that I'm intrinsically a bit of a workaholic. If I'm passionate, you can't stop me, so I have to stop myself. Taking preventative measures towards things like burnout if you are happy, I think it's been a really mature decision that I'm really proud of taking this time round.

If I said to you, listen, I'm the same, I'm a workaholic and all these things, I'm an entrepreneur going to build a big business. Dan, what is the one thing I can do to avoid myself getting burnout? What would you say that is? You would say it is diarizing and scheduling time to do other things?

Yeah. I mean, I've got like a list of habits that I've created for myself. Habit formation: the one terrible error everyone makes is they'll listen to Dan and do all of these habits. No, I pick like one new one a year. To be honest with you, my number one mental health hack, full stop, is going for a walk.

Spending an hour or so walking, if you can do that without being distracted—I mean, I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, but I also go for some where I don't take anything with me and I just go for the walk. That's my number one health hack because it's not only good for your brain but good for your body. It puts you into—there's two things. One, we live in London, actually to be honest, it gets a way worse rep for rain than you would think because I don't go out with a raincoat most days. But even if it's raining, you still go out.

That's a great moment to just be with the elements and accept that things aren't always perfect. Even the manifestation of rain, you know, it's a great moment to just go out and be like, "Things aren't perfect but I owe it to myself, for my own rest and for my own space, to do this today." The other reason, honestly, is because on average I get to listen to about 50 books a year just by doing that one thing. So as someone who is like a lifelong learner and happiest when I'm learning, the amount of books that I've devoured by tacking that habit onto my daily walk has been the fastest way to grow.

We talked about burnout there. The next thing from that tweet was anxiety.

Yeah, so anxiety and insomnia were completely linked with each other. A really, really fascinating experience, to me the most interesting of all of them really, because at the time I got insomnia—and this is when anxiety starts to build because anxiety does go with insomnia very well—because you start to get scared of going to sleep. Which builds anxiety, and you can't really sleep when you've got anxiety. So it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy every single night.

I had insomnia for six months. My symptoms were I'd go to sleep at midnight, but I'd wake up at 2:00 AM. At 2:00 AM I was wide awake, and there was no going back to sleep whatsoever no matter what I did. This was at a time when business was going well, I was pretty happy in life, I was getting married. Yes, my dad had passed away but my mom had just recovered from cancer, so I'd had the whole fear of her—and she's already had it before and recovered once, so very unlikely to recover the second time, but she had.

I have a roof over my head, I practice gratitude, you know, I'm just that archetypal dickhead that's just too smug for the world. And I just suddenly could not sleep. I don't understand, like I have everything that I wanted and I'm not—I don't even want much. I've worked on that stuff, so where has this come from?

Basically, chronic anxiety—the feeling of chronic anxiety—is lots of sweating, lots of self-doubt, lots of almost like a personality change in me. Outwardly I'm quite confident, but this experience with anxiety was sort of really making me question everything about what I say, how I feel, who I am. It was in this cycle where if I'm about to go to sleep, I'm not going to be able to go to sleep because of these feelings of doubt and stories I'm telling myself.

When you say doubt? Self-doubt about business?

Self-doubt about business, self-doubt about who I am and about why I'm feeling like this. Anxiety is such a complicated thing. There's a great quote, I think it's by Lao Tzu: depression is a symptom of sadness for the past we've lived, anxiety is obsession and confusion over the future you're going to have, and that's why mindfulness and being present is the antidote.

I think I really resonate with that because, in my own depression experience, it was loss of my father, the past. My anxiety was the person—A, was anxiety about the night's sleep I'm about to not have, but also like, who am I going to be? What's going to happen? How long can I live like this?

It feels like it's self-fulfilling in a way as well.

Exactly. So, the truth is I tried all these different things. I went to—I did therapy, I did sleep therapy, I used all the apps: Calm, Sleepio. I tried cutting out alcohol, I tried drinking much more alcohol. I tried, you name it, I'd like not smoked weed for a while, I was like, "Right, that's it, getting a weed habit back," you know, anything that you could possibly do to just like stay zonked.

But I went to the doctor and he recommended me sleeping pills. But that really irked me. We just talked about *Lost Connections* by Johann Hari. I don't appreciate medication that will work that night as solving my problem. I'm smart enough to know that it wouldn't solve my problem; it would just help me sleep that night. So I've still got those sleeping pills and I never used them. I kept on going for this journey, this search for why this was happening.

It led me in the end to a dietitian. I'd never worked with before. By the way, I didn't even know what a dietitian was; I'd heard of nutritionist, but isn't that just what everyone on Instagram—but a dietitian turns out is basically a nutritionist with a scientific degree, they can work in the NHS and they work with sick people.

So if you have a sick problem like insomnia, you go to a dietitian and they will literally tell you medically what they can do to affect your experience. She basically asked me about what I was eating and my habits and like all this kind of stuff, and I told her—this is someone who I think I'm quite healthy, generally speaking. She just said, "You are basically not getting enough brain food." I was like, "I don't even know what that means, I don't understand the context of that statement."

She was like, "Well, let me put it this way: your brain is an organ, right? It's 60% fat. 90% of the fat in your brain is this one compound called DHA. Most people that come to me with essentially mental health problems, which is what you currently have, have nutritional deficiencies and don't realize. There are three main things that I would recommend in your condition: one is Omega-3s, the other is B vitamins, and then the third thing was blueberry extract because it's an antioxidant and would help my glymphatic system whilst I slept."

She's saying this stuff to me, I'm like so skeptical I can't even tell you. Not only not a supplement taker, but she's now recommending me three supplements and I've been given pills by the doctor and I'm like, "Come on, how is this going to be any better?" So you can imagine my complete and utter surprise when I took those three things—I mean, they were very expensive, they were like medically prescribed ones, so super potent—but within two weeks I was sleeping like a baby and I wasn't feeling anxiety.

When you have a moment like that in your life, and you know this because you're a deeply inquisitive person, it makes you stop and it makes you go, "Hold on a second. This was so simply solved. I don't actually believe it to be true. This must be placebo. This must be finally my placebo that has caused this." Instead, I did what I do, I'm quite nerdy, I started reading science papers.

Because kind of, the one thing I do hate on Instagram is everyone's a nutritionist, everyone's a this, everyone's a that. I'm like, I don't want to listen to some guy that takes nootropics telling me about my brain and mental performance. I want to see what scientists that don't take any credit actually have to say about this stuff. And I learned that there are thousands, literally, of science papers—this is why I do the newsletter, I knew I'd never run out of content. It's literally the deepest well of content ever to do what I'm doing.

There were thousands of science papers on all of these ingredients and how they impact not just your mental health below the baseline—so if you're suffering from insomnia, if you're suffering from anxiety, even if you've got depression, schizophrenia—so many medical papers about the impact of taking a high supplementation of XYZ or obviously much more food of that particular ingredient and the impact it's had.

And then when you're at the baseline, all of these examples about nutrition impacting your mental performance. This is things like decision-making, focus, energy—all of the things we want in life. No one wants to really be recovering from a mental health problem; they want to be at their baseline and thriving. It just took me by so much surprise because I was like, "Well, if this is so well known in science, why didn't I know about it?" I was working in Shoreditch at a scaling startup—hipster twat, keto vegan, yes I've heard of all of them. This is just common sense brain food. Why is that not a thing that people know about? Why is taking care of your brain not something anyone's actually talked about, clearly?

I actually found a really meaningful way to communicate what that stands for. What science papers do really badly is like, you know, when I synthesize them, it's about two or three sentences that are saying the point, but it's just covered with jargon; they're boring as shit. So I was like, "First step: newsletter. I will add some emojis and some LOLs and make it millennial and fun and I will get people to read science papers without even realizing they're necessarily reading them."

That is essentially how the journey with Heights actually started: with this realization that something as—you know when you see the beautiful moment in life where you can spot an opportunity so big and actually solved by the power of communication and brand? A lot of people say brand and comms, that is not a market strategy, that is not defensible. I think those people are idiots and the wrong market.

Because, you know, my counter to that is: do you think that Buddhist monks got everyone meditating, or was it Calm and Headspace? Do you think that we love to run because we watch the Olympics, or is it Nike getting in our heads? Do you think that people around the world are doing yoga because of some ashram, or do we actually think it's Lululemon? Brands create change in the world that we want to see, and brands connect with human beings and create communities.

Taking something that was always done before anyway—stick a tick on a shoe, it's still just a shoe. Lululemon, it's just like a little logo on pants. It doesn't matter. The way that you express what you do and why you do it is the thing that has the power to change. My opinion from my own experience of being in that Shoreditch hipster twat area where you just know about things early and trends—to have never come into contact with something so important that can have such an impact as nutrition and mental health, nutrition and taking care of your brain, to me felt like a calling. I've just suffered for six months. I've overcome something. This is all I want to do with my life.

And so you started Heights.

And so I started Heights.

How's it going?

Great question. We launched January the 6th in a pandemic—well, not in a pandemic yet.

I have to say, I saw this on my Facebook feed and I think I messaged you about investing in the company just because it was beautiful. I saw the branding on the website and the way that you'd done the website, and I was like, "This team gets branding." And in the direct-to-consumer world, it's interesting what you were just saying there about comms and branding—like the way that I hear it is like storytelling and platforms enabling—almost democratizing the access to build great products now. Because back in the day, if we think about Nike, shelf space or the power that the Unilevers have, the war isn't always storytelling and brand or comms, it's in fact like knowing a guy or price points. But in the direct-to-consumer social media world, brand and comms and storytelling can win.

And product design.

Exactly, product design which is a huge part of the story, and that for me was beautiful. So I was straight in there to try and invest in your company. I mean, you know for a fact that I've been taking Heights ever since pre-launch in December maybe. What's your experience been as a customer then?

I love it! And this is where I really also wanted to talk to you today. There are probably several people on a spectrum of like, devout vitamin takers or then there's people that don't understand it or believe in it.

I was that.

Yeah, and so how do you confront the skepticism? Because with products like this, it is hard for the user to establish cause and effect. There's other factors that might happen in my life that make cause and effect almost in-establishable. Say I take the Heights for one week straight, but in that week I have just the worst mental health week because of other factors. How do I know?

It's a great question. I think there's two parts to this. One is, supplements deserve a bad rep. This is the most important thing to address first and foremost because when I went, I was like, "Why is she giving me this prescribed stuff? Can't I just go to Holland & Barrett or Boots and just buy the things that she says there?" It turns out there's this weird marketing thing in supplements where you can put a minimum in. So there's the amount according to science that will have an impact on your body, brain, whatever, and then there's a marketing amount which is way lower that you're allowed to put in on that product.

If you take Vitabiotics or a lot of products, there's an asterisk on those boxes. They're legally obliged to tell you, tiny small print on the back, that what you're taking is actually a fraction of the daily amount that you're meant to have according to science, but marketing-wise they can say "promotes healthy this," "promotes healthy that." My favorite story on this is probably Seven Seas—the biggest Omega-3 brand in the whole entire world—because we all grow up as children, our parents give us Seven Seas.

Now, every single day according to science, we're meant to have a minimum—like an RDA if you will—of 250 milligrams of Omega-3s. You can get it from your food or you can get it from these pills as a safety net. Essentially, what a supplement is, right? It's if you're not getting the food, supplement. Not instead of; don't take supplements instead of eating, they're supplements. So it's like a safety net.

That 250 milligrams, the minimum you can put in is 45 milligrams. Guess how much Seven Seas put into their number one best-selling product? 45 milligrams on the dot. That means you have to take Seven Seas for six days straight just to get one day's worth of the scientific dose you're meant to get. But it's all small print and a consumer doesn't see that, and supplements for whatever reason have been able to do that.

So when we went into our supplement design—this was the awesome thing: me and my business partner Joel came from a tech background at this point, right? We've done user experience, we've done all this stuff and we are very much into this idea of "Because we're not from this space, we're going to win because we are going to approach this completely differently."

A: we start with community, building a newsletter and an audience. Asking questions to that audience about what we should do and how we should do it, and can we see how they behave? Here are the things that we learned: most people, a lot of people are super open-minded about starting supplements. The problem with supplements is it can be very difficult to feel the impact or know they're working. Like a lot of things with prevention and wellbeing in general, it's a commitment to the person you want to become more so than it is like a medication which cures a problem and you're like, "Oh, that got fixed, that's great, that's over."

We got really fascinated by this idea of: how can you help people build habits with our product design? How can we overcome this problem that supplements have that, you know, in January, massive surge loads of people start, but very few people continue? If you can get past the hurdle of someone trying something, your job as an entrepreneur is to figure out how to make them a real customer, not just a first-time buyer.

That bottle was designed with our newsletter audience by going into people's homes—and asking them, very weirdly, often people who I didn't know, and quite often the wives, "Show us what you do with your supplements." And everyone has these supplement cupboards. Neither of us were supplement takers before we even started this, so we didn't know what normal behavior was, which means you get to ask these great open questions.

So, everyone has a supplement cupboard. Reason? They all look the same, and what happens is, psychologically—and we got told this the whole time—people basically open their cupboard, see so many that are like broken promises of the time they promised they were going to start and didn't continue. They feel guilty. They're like, "I can't just take the vitamin C because I said I'd take D, I said I'd take that and everything else," and they're always separate. So people just give up.

I feel attacked.

They feel guilty! And they're like—so people just give up. There's two things to that: there's one this sort of guilt about the promises that you were—the person you wanted to be, and then the second is just again, out of sight, out of mind. So we designed a bottle that passed the "wife test," that wives were like, "Yes, I'd put that on my bedside table," or "Yes, I'd have that out in my living room." Like you've just done, right? You've got your bottle there, but there's no other supplements there. It's because it looks nice and because it makes you feel good because you're looking after your brain and it's there.

It's like virtual signaling to yourself as well.

Exactly! Virtual signaling to yourself. "Completely, I'm the kind of guy that looks after myself. I look after my most important organ and this is my symbol of doing that." So that was an important first step. Then, the capsules themselves are in like patented clever capsules; so you've seen there's Omega-3 on the outside, the nutrients on the inside. That's important because we learned that lots of people take supplements at different times of the day.

Ritualizing when you build a habit is really important. So if we could make these that you don't have to have them with food, like you do with most supplements, because of the absorption—the absorption happens because the DHA Omega-3 on the outside is fat. When this dissolves in your gut, the outer capsule dissolves with the inner capsule at the same time the nutrients are being dissolved in fat. That is the same effect as what you get from food.

So those capsules have been designed also around habits to help people pick a time, and a lot of people don't eat breakfast and so they just end up forgetting their supplements full stop. So we did it so that you can start the same time, so you get ritualized by having the bottle out and you see it.

And then the most important part, which is communication. So we actually have a brain health score essentially, it's like an algorithm put together by a couple of neuroscientists PhDs, and you take it before you start. And again, we do a 15-day check-in, and then before we send you your next month—because it's a subscription through the letterbox—before we send you your next month, we ask you to take it again.

Now, what happens for most people in the first month, let's be real, right? Like you just said, scientifically, typically speaking, this product will take three months for you to feel anything. Like all supplements, so it's a bit of a long game; you have to believe in that. Now, in the first month, for you to feel an impact, maybe you will because of where your nutritional levels were coming from and your mental state was coming from, but maybe you won't. So how can we help nudge you there? Well, we can give you awareness.

So we sent people this brain health survey, right? And it's self-administered, but it gives you a bit of a baseline, a score at the end of where you are right now. And then we start sending you coaching comms—like very short emails, snappy bits of information about how to take care of your brain that you might not have thought about, things that are really small little habits that you can build in. And people start to read them; they have an unbelievably high open rate because you've just taken the first step to choosing to look after your brain.

So from that point on, why wouldn't you read the emails of the thing that's coaching you to do those habits? And what we find is in the first 25 days or something, like 93% of people have improved their brain health score on a self-administered basis from paying attention. Not from the vitamins, not from anything else, but suddenly they're interacting with a brand, they're welcoming a brand into their life whose sole focus is about how you can take care of your brain.

We've got all these really interesting, very, very respected people just helping to coach you on your journey. And that is such an important part of this because you do have the disbelief in the first couple of months, right? And people like to be able to see and measure improvements. That's hard to do instantly with supplements, but it isn't hard to affect how someone feels and help encourage them to make changes in their own lifestyle that will make them feel better.

That is a brand's responsibility and that's our responsibility; that's what we work quite hard on. So where I'm really passionate about building this brand is as a community. It started as a newsletter, community's everything to me, bringing people along on this journey of brain care and understanding why it's important. You know, the amount of money that we spend on skin care or hair care every day, but nothing on brain care? The most important organ in our body, it's so completely normalized in society to have skin care and hair care rituals and budgets in households, but not for our brains.

Going back to the business side of things. You started Grabble, didn't go well in your estimation of it—you said you struggled with fears of failure and it failed. One of the things—when you were talking about imposter syndrome and when you were talking about some sort of confidence issues around putting yourself out there, all of those things seem to sit in contrast to something else you said, which is you're the type of person that's just going to keep starting and you know you're going to fail potentially.

And that seems like someone that's high confidence and very, very self-assured and is not scared at all. And then the other side of you seems like someone that is the antithesis of that. So I'm wondering how you kind of contend the two. Because I do believe that you will start another business at some point based around something else. How do you find the guts to keep going despite failure? And I'm guessing maybe it speaks to your motivations as to why you wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place?

Correct. I'm intrinsically motivated by growth and learning. So the way that I like to think of myself is as a lifelong intern. This was a founder, she'd gone to Stanford, had a really successful career, and then she's basically coming to intern at Heights for a few months. I was like, "I mean, I could learn from you rather than the other way around." She's like, "I'm a lifelong intern. Everywhere I go, I'm a lifelong intern."

And I'm like, I talk about myself as a lifelong learner, but lifelong intern was even more powerful, right? I was like, "Wow, that's a real mindset towards redefining what success is." Because if as long as I am learning, I am fulfilled. And I think we all have this one thing we know to be true about ourselves, right? Starting a business is super hard, right? And you know, I'm not a nutritionist, not a neuroscientist, had no experience in the space of having never launched a vertically integrated supply chain from three different countries—our ingredients come from 10 different countries because we literally source the highest quality, so the Omega-3 comes from Canada and the blueberries come from Italy.

Nuts. But all of that stuff is so exciting to learn and like the opportunity to learn all of these things anew gets me out of bed. And so the whole failing and starting again, you know, that's got nothing to do with confidence or lack of, it's got everything to do with knowing where I'm in my sweet spot.

There's a term that I learned years ago that sums it up so perfectly which is Ikigai. Are you familiar with Japanese Ikigai? That's me, I'm living my Ikigai right now. It's a Japanese term, basically looks like a Venn diagram on a Venn diagram, right? So you're at the center, and then the different aspects are things like what makes you happy, what makes other people happy, what makes you money, what makes other people fulfilled. It's like ticking off all of these things. If you can find that where you are in the center and you could say, "Am I contributing to society? Yes. Am I waking up every morning fulfilled? Yes. Am I mentally challenged? Yes." It's like ticking off all of these things.

It's like this weird flower, you should definitely check it out. It's amazing. And I come back to it all the time. I had my honeymoon in Japan because of discovering Ikigai. I had a spiritual wedding in Ibiza and then I went and did my honeymoon in Japan and it was all like hikes and spiritual searches and stuff. There's another fantastic Japanese proverb which is "Fall seven, rise eight."

We talked about success and failure just in that moment and you said that you immediately defaulted to talking about the purpose, which was you love intellectual progression, growth, and learning. And it almost seems to me that one of the ways to escape from the fear of failure—if you even think about what happened at Grabble—one of the ways to escape from ever failing again is by redefining what success is, redefining what failure is.

And it sounds like you've almost redefined success now as growth and learning. And you won't fail at that even if the company goes down, right? So this is like, it's almost like you've developed a strategy somehow not to be able to fail again because failure now isn't losing the company, it's losing your purpose, losing your way, like you did with Grabble and becoming someone you're not and being extrinsically motivated.

It's exactly that. I think the opportunity that we all have as human beings to be creative is to certainly accept that things are not going to go on a straight path. But when confronted with these horrible moments of things like failure and everyone else thinking that you're a failure, that blow gets softened a lot when you get to reflect and think about what you learned.

A really interesting experience that Joel and I did after failing was we went to business psychologists. We had facilitated sessions over the course of a week with the "this was your fault," "that was my fault," "I take blame for this," "I blame you for that," letting it all out, right? Then we spoke about our personality tests and we looked at where our crossovers were and we had, for the first time, a real clear view of strengths and weaknesses gaps and could map out some of the poor mistakes and decisions that we'd made that led to failure.

Interestingly, rehiring in Heights this time, the thing that we've had for the last year before we had any employees was a set of company values and hiring processes and all sorts of interview tips and hiring docs based on our values before we hired our first person. We must have had them for 9 to 12 months because we were so certain of understanding who we are and what we stand for being the company values. Those company values lead to hiring the right people with the right mindset, and those people are the greatest leverage you could have as a founder to do less of the stuff yourself and enable brilliant people to take it for it.

I think that's probably one of the most important things I've done in my life: spending time on company values with a business partner by identifying gaps, weaknesses, and spending time hearing my failings from my best friend. He said so much of what was true—that I demonstrated a lack of focus, I'd been overly honest, so I hadn't picked my moments. I appreciate I'm a very transparent person, but you don't have to tell an investor to their face that you don't buy into the business that they've given you money for. You could have a filter.

What was the most hurtful thing he said?

I think the most hurtful thing that he said was that he felt that I had not contributed 50/50 and that I had like an almost irresponsible attitude towards what I was trying to get out of the business compared to what he needed to get out of the business. And that was a really meaningful start for us to decide on the next business too. Joel is like an extremely intelligent person, so he is motivated by challenge. If something is hard to fix, then he'll find a way to fix it. That is like he'll get up in the morning for that. I won't. I'm motivated by making an impact and feeling like I'm having a difference and telling a story and impacting people and them telling me that it made them feel this way. That is all emotion for me; he's pure logic and challenge.

So by me constantly discrediting the work that we were doing by saying things like that, by being too open and honest about my purpose and not putting on the filter, I was literally without care or remorse fracturing what he believes in and his ability to succeed and his ability to tell his own story about the hard work he'd put it in.

I think all of those things were true. I'd say that it was 60/40, if I was being brutal to myself, 70/30, the success of our last company on him. And to be honest, a lot of the failure was related to me. I personally don't regret any of it and I really don't believe he does either. But being able to say this stuff to each other and let it all out then also gave me the confidence to say—Joel came up with two or three business ideas before Heights when we were like figuring out what we want to do. I was just like, "No mate, I'm going to do the same thing again, I don't care about that thing." He was like, "Yeah, but it's really exciting." I'm like, "It's not to me." No one is going to have their health or mental health impacted. I feel like that's my space, that's where I want to be.

So it really enabled us to just look at my mistakes of the past and my character and say, "If you want to work with me, you know that I'm going to have to work on something I feel purposeful about. Otherwise, this is a non-negotiable for me, otherwise we'll repeat history."

You've got another partner in your life, which is your wife. When did you get married? What age?

Two and a half years ago I got married.

When did you meet her?

Technically speaking, I met her at 18 on the Khao San Road for one night in Bangkok. I didn't sleep with her, but I tried to chat her up and stuff and it was a straight-up no. She was best friends with my business partner Joel's cousin. So anyway, that's how we met her originally. I'd sent some very awkward Facebook wall messages when that was a thing, trying to chirp her over the years, and it was always a no.

Then at 30 or 31 on my birthday, Joel basically reintroduced us. I was like, "I'm having a party, why don't you just come?" She's older than me, two years older than me. So I was a bit like, "You're 32, I'm 30. You're a bit too old to pick right now. Your mates are married, you're running out of options. I'm still available, let's do it." She found it hilarious. Anyway, she did come join me at drinks and the rest is history.

Actually, our relationship's been super interesting because we spent the first year not monogamous, openly. We spent the first year openly communicating that we'll sleep with other people, but they were all more like one-night stands, whereas we were like coming back to each other. Which was interesting because she's just like hilarious, really good fun, really funny. So I enjoyed hanging out with her. But I was very clear, "You're not my girlfriend," and she was like, "Great, I'm not your boyfriend, no problem." We did that for a whole year.

Why were you saying that? Why were you not committing?

Loads of reasons. One is I'd come out of a horrible relationship the last time where I wasn't treated particularly nicely and it just didn't make me want to get married, for sure. I told my mom and her that I wouldn't get married, incidentally. I said, "I don't believe in marriage and I don't really believe in monogamy," and those are my beliefs. I told you about this book, *Sex at Dawn*, highly recommend you read it. So I had been telling myself the story that this wasn't going to happen for me.

So you were rejecting her kind of in a way and protecting yourself?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that was mutual for whatever reason for a year. Actually, after a year, we had that awkward conversation where she actually said, "What are we going to do? Like this is getting a bit silly now. I'm getting on, I'm 75 now, I need to get married." And so I almost said no there and then. I said, "Let me sleep on it." I was about to say no, but then all my friends were basically like, "She's literally wicked, why on earth would you do that to yourself? What have you got to lose?"

From that point of saying yes and being in a relationship with her, I proposed to her six months later and we got married a year later. So it was actually a really short relationship from meeting to marriage.

You're 33 now, you met her at 30, so you proposed when you were 31?

Yep.

Okay, so you've been together for two years now. I always find it super fascinating when I meet an entrepreneur that's super busy and in love with their business and their ideas and is a workaholic to some degree, how they manage to keep their relationship balanced. Because I haven't figured it out yet.

I'll tell you the phases that I've gone through: the first phase was meeting great people and thinking to myself, "You need to wrap your life around me. I'm not going to change a thing about myself, I'm the most important thing in the world, the world revolves around me, you're welcome to join the orbit but I'm not going to change at all." Didn't go well.

And then like trying to find a little bit of compromise somewhere in me, but still being ruthlessly unapologetic. Didn't go well. And now I'm at a place where I'm currently single, completely single, and I need the answers. I don't want to be one of these narcissists that I just read about one in the newspaper—I won't say any names, Martin Sorrell. What I read about people, I think it was his ex-wife that described him, was very, very similar to the behavior that I'm exhibiting which is this kind of self-centeredness that excludes everybody but ultimately will run the risk of actually being self-harm when I make myself lonely and miserable because I didn't appreciate the value of a relationship. So I want you to help me with the answer.

Let me tell you, I tell myself the narrative that being in a relationship—I don't have time to be in a relationship. That's my narrative. Being married and all of these things will close opportunities down to me and my life will be worse for it. And that's fine; those are stories, and like everything we convince ourselves of all sorts of stories.

I do believe in finding not just the one, but ones. I really don't believe that there's one person for you in the world; I believe there's many. I think having a spiritual connection with others and, for some people, a sexual connection with multiple partners—I think that this stuff is totally acceptable, A; B, completely biologically, scientifically more normal for us than monogamy, which is essentially because of Christianity in the world.

Frankly, even though it's not what I do with my wife currently, we've had conversations about, you know, in five years or in 10 years, if we weren't sleeping together because we weren't finding ourselves sexually attractive or whatever at that point, would we consider having the conversation like opening up our relationship and stuff?

Can I ask that question? Would you be comfortable with her sleeping with other men?

That's a very different question because right now, no. Future me, maybe. Logically, if I took emotion out of it, absolutely. Because if I didn't want to at that point sleep with my wife, it would not be fair to deprive her of sex because of how I was feeling.

Having a maturity towards your relationships, all relationships, is so important. A lot of—you know what really upsets me? So many people get divorced, and one of the most common reasons people get divorced is because they cheat. You can avoid that by having a conversation like, "I still love you and I still think everything I always did think about you, but for whatever reason the sexual attraction has gone. And either we are going to work on that together or we should explore other options."

The most uncomfortable conversations are the ones you need to have. So I think a really smart way to approach your relationship is like you approach your business. You set out a vision for your relationship and you say, "This is what we want to be and where we want to be in 50 years. What does that look like?"

Recently I did this with my wife. We were in Portugal, we were staying in like a villa with some friends and we'd kind of been okay in lockdown, but like now she was around other people, she was being acerbic, snappy, like quite bitchy. We were just getting on each other's nerves and I went for like a long walk on the coast with her and I'm just like, "Where is this coming from?" Five whys, right? "Why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? But *why* are you doing that?"

We kind of got to the crux of the issue. These are the things that I'm annoyed about and what I do that irritate her and obviously like these are the things you do. And I was like, "Okay, let's take a break from right now, the things that are annoying us about each other. Let's flip the script. In 50 years, what are the things that we're going to be saying, doing, and believing about why we love each other? What does that look like?" Let's imagine in the future how we are and work back from there.

Objective: a long, happy, and fulfilling marriage. You might be familiar with OKRs—Objectives and Key Results. We implement them at Heights as a startup, but also Melissa, she's the Director of Operations for Europe, Middle East, and Africa for Vice, and she put OKRs into Vice. So we're both fans of the system.

The system is literally: this is the objective you're trying to get to, these are some measurable key results that would have to happen for us to achieve the objective. So we decided to try and apply this framework to our marriage. What is the objective? A long, sustainable, happy, and fulfilling marriage. What are the key results that get us there?

Well, we broke them down into mind, body, and soul. From there, you get to cascade down these key results. Mind: for me, meditation's really important. For her, you know, she doesn't really want to do it, but from a compromise point of view because she knows that I believe in it and stuff, she'll do it with me. Similarly, from a mind point of view, she wants to be heard.

So how about we will ask each other how our days are, but systematically, as a habit? We'll build it as a habit. Another one was we'll teach each other something new every day so we're always growing. These kinds of things literally became a habit tracker list that we fill in our journal every single night.

Did I teach Melissa something new today? Did I ask her how her day was? Did we have sex? Were we intimate? Were we cuddling and spending time? Did I have personal space, because it's really important to have space away from your partner? These literally become habit trackers that if you think about it really methodically—did we exercise for 30 minutes today? These things, if you do them, you know the compound gains of the results you get in a marriage.

If I'm asking her how her day is and I'm listening, if I'm spending time learning something new to teach her because I want to and she'll reciprocate the same, it will literally create these moments where we're not in our work and we're not doing other things, we're doing this with each other. And they don't have to take very long, but they are like things that we've taken personal responsibility for to achieve.

A certain type of person will listen to that and they'll think to themselves, "How robotic." I had the same conversation with Nir Eyal who came on this podcast. He's the king of this stuff. He talked about how he literally schedules time to be with his wife and to go see the kids and to play with the kids.

And a certain type of person listening will think, "Well, that takes the specialness and the magic and the spontaneity out of just living and being free to go in whatever direction." And it also, when you listen to that, you think about how us as humans have over-organized and over-routined and really over-thought every facet of our life.

One of the things that I have a bit of a visceral bad reaction to is like the "10 habits of highly successful entrepreneurs." You've got to get out of bed, drink the green tea, do the yoga, write in your diary, do 10 star jumps, then call your mom and tell her you love her. And it gets to the point where, if you listen to all of this stuff, your day would literally be completely unconscious. It would be, "What's the next thing in my list of how to be a good human?" So how do you contend that rigidity with creating space for lack of rigidity and just seeing where the wind takes you?

It's a great question. In my experience so far, this particular bit of rigidity has created more space, not less space for me. If you think about the opposite of this—so if you don't do some of this stuff, if you don't ask your wife how her day is regularly, if you don't exercise regularly, if you don't meditate every day—this is me personally, right? Okay, what are the outcomes of that?

My wife is not going to feel listened to; we might end up in an argument. How much time does the argument take up? How much mental energy after the argument's over is going to distract me from all the other things I could do that day? The things I wish I hadn't said, all of the things, right? Call that day a write-off, maybe a couple of days, right? That takes up loads of time.

If I don't meditate every single day, I have a very loud mind, I'm much slower at making decisions in general. So it is actually taking up more time to not build that habit in for myself. If I don't go for my daily walk personally, A, I'm not making time to read, listen, and learn, so therefore my personal growth as a human being is slowing down. Again, by not doing that, I could be more aimless and more free and I wouldn't necessarily be following the path to making better decisions as a human being, which also speeds things up.

If I don't call my mom every day, she *will* call me up and ask me why I don't love her, which will make me feel like shit for three days. So I actually find that this stuff in my experience—you don't have to ritualize half an hour five days a week like I have in my diary—but if I don't, I actually start to feel achy, I start judging myself. Actually, they create time, they don't take away.

My last question on the relationship point is about bringing your problems home and how you've kind of—because this is one of the big problems I have as well is the selfishness around my business being the most important thing sometimes. How do you not bring your problems home but then also not make her feel lonely when she's sat right next to you by being off with the fairies?

I was reading the book written about Elon Musk and it talked about how he would come home and be a little bit of a recluse even though everyone's around him and he's in his head and he's just focused on his problems, his life, he's working incredibly hard to the point he's sleeping on the floor. How have you managed to find the balance in the relationship? Does she get it?

I think I'm lucky. A, she gets it, and B, she enjoys her personal space. And she's super busy as well, right? Exactly. She's got a scale-up, she's running a big company. I think we're both really lucky. We both like our own company and we both like each other's company. If you're lucky enough to learn what you like and how to be with yourself, which takes quite a lot of learning—a lot of us are very dependent on other people.

If I was still completely dependent on my wife's attention and my wife in general, then I might be like that. But I've come to learn how to listen to myself, how to make time for myself, how to spend time enjoying being on my own as well. And I think that's a really important skill to learn. We'll listen to podcasts about performance and habits and stuff and she'll listen to *Casefile* on repeat.

Oh my God, is she a *Casefile* fan?

Oh mate, if I hear that Australian prick's accent one more time!

Oh my God, I've listened to every episode! There's a UK one called *They Walk Among Us*. I'm obsessed with true crime.

So is she! So obsessed!

Well, it doesn't work out. Exactly, she'd love that. She makes me watch true crime stuff on Netflix and it freaks me out.

I have this really bad habit of because I can't sleep without listening to something. So I'll be—it'll be 2:00 AM in the morning, just got in bed with my partner or whoever I'm with and I'll say, "Do you mind if I just put on a murder podcast?"

Yeah, that's what she does.

About like a serial rapist? And then like every single day—I keep asking the question, but the answer is always the same: "Steve, babe, it's 2:00 AM, I don't want to listen to a story about a serial rapist right now while I'm closing my eyes in the dark." So I get my phone or my AirPod and I put it in one ear where they can't hear it, and that's how I fall asleep.

Hilarious! She is exactly the same. We find it so interesting. She will make me watch these things on Netflix because she's like, "But it's so interesting, right?" But actually they really, they actually quite damaged my mental health because you see things like—you're talking about *American Murder*? The most recent one, but like all of them. At the end of the day, why someone goes from lovely and humane and kind and wonderful and all the things I like to believe about people in the world to *that* terrifies me.

Really? So it has—and this almost set my mind back to the start of this conversation about religion and belief and purpose. When I was holding onto faith, because they're usually religious even more terrifyingly. But this—the reason I find it so fascinating is because it gets to the truth in human beings, which is something that I know we're both deeply interested in.

Finding the true nature of humans. And in the example you've talked about there in *American Murder*, I'd read that story, I'd watched documentaries on it three, four, five years ago. So seeing it on Netflix and their depiction of it was fascinating. But there you have just the perfect example of how unboxable and unpredictable human nature can be when forces like infidelity and love—because that was a normal person.

The fact that a normal person can go from being this lovely dad who was quite placid to smothering his own children and his wife because of an affair teaches you something valuable about the nature of being human and how—and for me, that is like awesome. And that's why I think I'm so obsessed with those things: is they teach you the lessons in a violent, emotional, gripping way about the true nature of being human.

She feels the same way, whereas I'm just like, it just plays on my mind. It plays on my mind to the idea of "Well, that could happen to me then." That's why. Because I'm like I'm so kind, loving, full of good energy, but so was that guy. In that example, so was that guy. So was every review of what that guy was like from all of his friends and everything else. So how can that happen to a person?

And this is the fascinating thing: he met someone else, clearly. He was in a marriage which had lost its passion, a loveless marriage. He decided to stay, probably for the sake of the kids. He decided comfort over a decision which he probably should have made—a tough decision which he should have made in the short term for the long term good, and it caught up with him.

For me that's like, isn't that life? Where you suppress making a short-term tough decision? But that comes back to exactly what I was saying, which is the relationship—no, it comes back to setting a vision for your relationship and talking about in advance, right? If you're really smart, you'll talk in advance: what happens if one of us cheats? What happens in this scenario? What would happen if we fell out of love?

There's no point planning the perfect life if you don't crisis plan the things that happen to all human beings. If you've got a great relationship with your partner, I think it's so valuable to treat it like you would your business, which is scenario planning, spending some time talking about "What would we do in this kind of crisis and how would we behave?" By doing that with my wife, we've got permission to bring up that horrible conversation.

Like in theory, that would never happen to me because if I wanted to cheat on her, I'd have the conversation with her and I've got permission to have that conversation because we've talked about it. I thought you meant the "I want to murder you tonight" conversation. No, I probably wouldn't tell her, in fairness. It would be a nice surprise.

But you know what I mean, as in there's permission in our relationship to address the difficult things. That's why in some respects I treat my marriage like I treat my business, which is something that I deeply care about if it's successful. And everything that I put into my life is about making these things successful to the best of my ability. What I've learned is doing those things from a sense of vision and clarity and communication and values as well.

Are you happy?

I was thinking about this question the other day, someone asked. Two answers to that: one, yes, I am happy. The blunt answer is yes, I am happy because I'm fulfilled, because I'm living my purpose. But the question that I ask back to this person was: I am happy, but why is happiness so important? Like why is that the question you want to ask me? Does it matter that I'm happy?

And is it binary?

Yeah, and is it binary? Like why does that matter to you and why does it matter to me? Because I think a much better question is: am I contributing? Am I fulfilled? And am I contributing? Because if I'm doing those things, I'll be happy, and I know that to be true. Whereas for me, asking "happy" is a bit like, it's too binary, it's too yes-no, it's right to the point. And there's nothing really behind the question. And it's undefined as well.

Undefined and also it really depends on what you're asking me that day. I will be like, "No, today I'm not happy." If you ask me if I'm contributing to society and does that make me feel fulfilled and make me feel like I'm living my purpose, it won't matter what I feel about today.

Are you fulfilled?

Very, but I have so much more to do. I have learned how binary questions like that are the cause of so much pain and no one realizes it. They're the cause of so much misunderstanding, pain, and anxiety. Another great example is if I asked you now, "Are you in love?" And immediately you have a bunch of problems there. First, you've got to define "in love." No one's ever told you what that is, they've never shown it. When you were born they didn't say, "Okay Dan, if you ever feel like this, it's in love." You've got it from Instagram and movies, so you immediately have to overcome that. And then you have to try and understand if what you're feeling for this person fits into that box.

It's so crazy that, especially from what I do on Instagram and putting myself out there, tons of people send me their problems. And usually, it's because they're trying to fit into a binary box and they don't even realize they're like, "Steve, I'm not sure if this is my passion." I'm like, "That is a super binary thing, it either is or it isn't." Whereas if you say, "Are you feeling fulfilled?" it's a much more—it's an answer that appreciates it's a gradient.

Yeah, and a gradient that different things impact. There's many ways to contribute. Being outwardly successful or building a company or having a high-flying career, they don't tick that many boxes in terms of contribution. A lot of contribution comes back to what you do for society, for your family, for people that you care about. That stuff is a much broader question and it's like a cup that's never full, right? So it's nice because it's got different levels and you kind of know deep down if you feel like you are living your purpose and contributing to the level that would make you proud. And you also know when you're not, which is great because, again, it's not bad that you're not, it's just like, "Well, I could actually improve some stuff by giving it some focus."

And I think that's why you've got to continue to question the question as much as you try and answer the question sometimes. Are you scared of dying?

Great question. Great question because I don't believe in fear of death. Fear of death is literally illogical because fear of death is what actually makes you fear of life. So if you're scared of dying, then you approach your life in a very different way. And actually, the greatest fear that we should have is not living your life in a true way.

So no, I'm not at all scared of dying. It's also really worth saying that ever since doing Ayahuasca, like I 100% convincingly believe in things like reincarnation, soul, spirits, other planes, all of the woo-woo crap that just sounds completely bizarre for me to think that I would ever say those words.

But it's not even woo-woo, is it? From like a scientific perspective, you describe reincarnation. Exactly. That's why I believe in reincarnation because I see it everywhere around me. So the reality is I'm not in the slightest bit scared of death. And I think that's a big blessing that I got from doing Ayahuasca was no fear of death. Because that's a potent, powerful feeling—not feeling, like knowledge, insight, right? That's categorically so quick for me to answer that question and know. It helped me deal with the death of my father, when my mom got cancer it helped me come to terms with what might happen to not have her around as well. This is life. People die. You have to approach it, right? You can't pretend that isn't going to happen. It's the only thing that's guaranteed. So having a philosophical understanding of what that means to you and then how that impacts your life or maybe holds you back is a terrible thing. So it's usually a fear of death that essentially limits our life, in my view.

I feel exactly the same. When I lost the idea that I would burn or go to this other place and be judged in some way, it all became about now. And it was, as you described, it was this liberating feeling of "Okay, well this is it. If this is it, then everything is so much more special." This isn't an audition; this is the show. And my life completely changed.

I completely agree. I ask the question, which is a strange thing to ask in like a business podcast, because it's so fundamental to me, and because I think the fear of death is so deeply illogical and, as you say, imprisoning. Yeah.

Listen, we had—we could talk for hours and hours and hours. What an amazing conversation. And I'm so thankful for you for coming on and sharing your insights. It's interesting because the Dan that didn't want to do personal branding was like, "Well, I have a direct-to-consumer product and what's my personal brand fit in that?" But the most convincing sales pitch for this product was in fact when you talked about you.

It's not when you—you know what I mean? And I think that, I mean, of course, like you talking about the struggles you've had and the agenda and motivations that went into creating your product is the most convincing thing. And that's again why your personal brand and you building it and even us having this conversation is so incredibly important.

I always finish this podcast by asking one question which I'm sure you've heard before, which is about the dinner party. We're at a nice table now. Just imagine there was two other seats at this table. Who would you bring to the table and why? Your arms crossed again!

Sorry, I was just getting into the serious mode, thinking about this. Okay, so I think to be honest, I'd want like an ancient philosopher. I'd love like, it'd be so cool, Marcus Aurelius I would say, one, big fan of *Meditations*, stoic philosophy. I read *Meditations* after my first business failed, someone bought it for me, and I read it again every year. It takes like an hour to read and it's just such a great reminder of, you know, yes the world is tough and yes the world is shit, but everything is what you make of it.

Really, the world you're living in is all—it all exists inside your own mind. And once you understand that, you can control a lot of how you feel. So Marcus Aurelius would be one. And I would say the second—you know, this is pathetic and I'm sorry, but Dennis Bergkamp is my all-time hero. So I'm a Gooner and, you know, the man was a magician and so classy and such an authentic and great leader in so many ways and iconic.

Beautiful, though.

Huh? Fearful! Oh yeah, the opposite of Jesus: he won't fly, but he does walk on water.

Crazy when I heard that, that he refused to fly.

Yeah, you're right, yeah, totally correct. Yeah, he's got a bunch of interesting anxieties. Yes, I could ask him about that. Maybe I'd get Marcus and Bergkamp together. Exactly!

And if I had a third, if you were being generous?

All right, okay. Oprah.

Why?

Literally just think she's phenomenal. It felt stupid asking why. I mean, just in every way, right? In just—it's hard to pick a thing, but like let's just say then because of personal growth, media brand, understanding wealth and leveraging your wealth for good and storytelling. I mean I could just go on, her list is just ridiculous, so 100% Oprah.

And I feel like Pablo wants the fourth seat! Literally sitting where he would be in the fourth seat. For people that can't see, my French bulldog has started sprinting around attacking an imaginary other French bulldog. Exactly. Sit, Pablo. And then I'd actually say my fourth would be Lewis Hamilton.

Why?

Because I think what he's achieved, even before literally breaking a record like a couple of weeks ago, is so awesome. And I love—I'm so proud of the fact that he's British. I'm so proud of the fact, like obviously even though I'm a white guy, I'm so proud of the fact of what he's doing to using his platform to take a stance, actually being political with his message when he knows he has such a big platform, which is a thing that a lot of people choose to not do and choose to back out of. So he's a man that stands for morals and values.

Secondly, he's vegan, so you know I think it's interesting that he's chosen—he's on such a high-performance no-fail attitude, but is like as a plant-based person clearly environmentally conscious even if he's in F1, which is obviously debatable. But he's got these like clearly deep-rooted values about how he wants the world to be. And he is manifesting and living them in being basically the greatest racing driver that's ever, ever lived. That's what he will end up as, because he just beat Schumacher's record. And he seems like a quite a nice bloke. Just in general, like when I see interviews of him, I just like what a relatable guy this is. He doesn't seem like a snob superstar at all.

So I would just love to—the reason for him is I just love to talk to him about mindset and focus. Because when you think about it, that is all you're doing in an F1 car. That is the—in my opinion—the most focused you can be is driving Formula One. I don't think there is any other—I don't think anything tops that. So I would love to know how you achieve that kind of level of flow and focus week in, week out. Nothing would be more interesting.

So Marcus, Bergkamp, Oprah, and Lewis Hamilton. Sounds like a wicked dinner. Listen, thank you so much for your time today. It's a pleasure to consider you a friend, a mentor through the content you produce in your podcast *Secret Leaders*, but also just an all-around good guy. You have a way of being honest and open which was not only perfect for this podcast but is so tremendously valuable for people like me, for everybody listening. And I want to thank you for that as well because it's not always the easiest thing to do, you know? People default to massaging the ego or trying to get press for being positive and untouchable and perfect. And I think you've taken a different route which is serving a much-needed positive service to the world. So thank you for that as well.

Pleasure.

I'm sure we will pick up this conversation again soon. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of *The Diary Of A CEO*. Listen, if you're on the podcast store or you're on Spotify or you're listening to this in some kind of app, do me a huge, huge favor: leave a review and hit the subscribe button. If you're watching this on YouTube right now, I need another favor. I need you to hit the like button and if you'd be so generous to leave a comment. One person that does this will be joining me in March at *The Diary Of A CEO* live show in Manchester, and you'll be coming backstage and meeting me and the other members of our team. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you again next Monday.

When your cat is acting weirder or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted. Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down, buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. VEG ER for Pets. This is Kate. VEG, the better, kinder ER for pets.

When your cat is acting weirder or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted. Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down, buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. VEG ER for Pets. This is Kate. VEG, the better, kinder ER for pets.