Stop Telling Us Everything Happens for a Reason with Anti-Victim Tom Nash

0:00Are you going to treat adversity like the conversation stopper or is it a puzzle to be solved? Right. Your case is extreme and it's different than this adversity that most people struggle in a day. But I like extreme cases because the lessons are easier to discern. For me, losing four limbs sounds like a bit of a shit sandwich to almost anyone who reads that story. But when I sit here and tell you it's the best thing that ever happened to me and even you identify it as a gift, all of a sudden it becomes a really good story. Most of us have experienced some sort of adversity in our lives. And whether it's from well-intentioned friends or our own attempts to deal with our struggle, we often try to downplay how bad it is.

0:41Things could be worse, we tell ourselves. You still have your health. But what if there was another way, a better way to deal with stress? That's why I was excited to have Tom Nash on the show. At 19, he caught a bacterial infection, which has a 2 % chance of survival. But that's not the story. Because of the infection, he had to have both his legs and both his arms amputated. And how did he deal with it? He decided it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He went on to become one of Australia's most popular DJs and a highly acclaimed speaker. He's also the host of his own show, Last Meal with Tom Nash, where he serves his guests the meal they would want to have if the world was about to end.

1:25Tom is one of the best guests I've ever had on the show. He's smart. He's really funny, charming, and insanely inspiring. And he will leave you with the greatest lesson you can ever learn. When we have agency, we can more than get through anything, we can come through anything even better. If you like this episode, please remember to subscribe. This is a bit of optimism.

1:58Tom, thanks so much for coming in. I learned about you from a team member of ours who sent me your TED Talk. Oh, right. You're a pirate. That's getting a bit long in the tooth now. I can't believe... It's still out there. It's still out there. Just so people know what we're talking about, children stop you. Yes. Children stare. Yeah, children do a lot of things. Children do a lot of things. Let's go back. People stare. Yeah, sure. People stare, yeah. People stare. Yeah, so I've lost both arms and both legs. They don't really notice the leg thing because usually I'm wearing long pants like I am now and I'm pretty good at walking with prosthetic legs so they don't really detect that.

2:37But the obvious thing is I have these two hooks. Oh my God, you've got hooks. Yeah. You wouldn't believe how much that's a genuine response I get as well, like people pretending that they don't notice, which is even more awkward. But yeah, kids are the ones that will sort of like, there's no fourth wall there. They'll just go straight for you and ask you whether you're a pirate or not or a robot or something like that and i just have to tell them that yeah of course i am of course of course i love being in america because i get when people from america ask me what happened to me i can tell them shark attack and i totally get away with it because they think everything in australia is trying to kill you um and you know and that that's true most people die in australia from shark attack of course that's exactly right yeah yeah with kids i mean i always play into the idea of it with them being a pirate or a or a robot or whatever it is and i think it just makes them feel a bit more comfortable and i like it when kids are more comfortable asking questions to people with disabilities because you know i think it just de-stigmatizes everything yeah you know if you will so so you you lost your arms and legs when uh when you were 19 yes it was yes so i mean you lived i mean into adulthood able-bodied that's right yeah I was I was an able-bodied person until the age of 19 I was studying at university I was used to be a guitarist actually as well so music was a great passion of mine and it was at one day at college I went in and I felt a general malaise come over me as I was sitting having coffee with a friend waiting to go to a lecture and I thought to myself I might just go home because I was feeling like I was getting a flu.

4:19And so I took myself home and put myself to bed and I had probably what felt like the worst flu I'd ever had in my life. If you've had a really bad flu and you can imagine an order of magnitude more than that, that's kind of what I felt. So the night was really awful. And then the next morning I woke up, texted my stepsister and I said, you have to take me to hospital. Actually, I think I said, you have to send me to a doctor, not hospital. Because as a 19 year old man, you always downplay the whole. She picked me up, took one look at me and said I'm taking you straight to hospital she took me to a local hospital I uh I remember they they had to transfer me because they they looked at me immediately and they said oh you know you've got purple rash all over your face and all over your body and everything's swollen up something wrong with you they knew what it was I didn't at the time so they transferred me from a local hospital to one of the major hospitals in Sydney and I say this is because it was like one of my last memories i was in the back of a an ambulance i don't know if you've ever been in the back of an ambulance and they have the paramedic that's that's with you just to make sure you don't die whatever it is and i remember this guy like it was yesterday he was very serious and he's very stern and i made it my mission to make him laugh because i knew that i just needed to break this guy i don't know what was going on and so i was making a couple of jokes and there's nothing was happening and then at one point i remember saying to him how long till we get to the hospital and he said uh about 10 minutes and i said 10 minutes is what people say when they have no fucking idea how long it's going to take to get somewhere because nothing takes 10 minutes does it it takes seven it takes eight takes nine never takes 10 maybe takes 15 or 20 and this made him laugh and had a bit of a chuckle and we laughed together and then i thought i could i won this guy over at that point i completely lose my memory well what happened was i i got admitted to the hospital and they put me into a coma for a couple of weeks and then when i woke up i realized that uh well i've been told that i contracted meningococcal disease which kind of like a bacterial meningitis just just a fluke just uh yeah exactly it's it's it's contracted kind of like people contract covet or something like this through sharing drinks or someone coughing on you or something like that but it's very rare so i just got extremely unlucky or whatever i was to be in hospital for another 18 months i came really close to death i think i had like a two percent survival wow uh opportunity and i managed to get through that with a help of the doctors and nurses and and some trial drugs and things but during that time i i had amputations so after i'd come out of the coma i had both my legs amputated um and a couple of weeks after that a doctor came into my room i remember this like it was yesterday as well there's one of those other sort of poignant moments this doctor his name his name is peter mates he was one of several doctors that i had and for some reason this guy had a really acute understanding of my dark sense of humor in a way that few people have understood from since and i remember he came into my room once and i'd had my legs amputated arms i had gangrene on them and stuff like that and i was really wanting to keep the arms because as i mentioned before i was a guitarist and you know it wasn't just the lack of independence but like the idea that i couldn't play music part of identity yeah so he came in and i realized the situation was really different because he wasn't flanked by the usual registrars and lackeys that he normally was being quite a high up doctor and he sat down next to my hospital bed and he said so we're going to talk about the arms and i said okay and he said as i see you have two options and i said okay what are they he said we can amputate your arms that's the first option and uh it's pretty rare for people to live with two prosthetic arms but he said it does happen but you'll have to live with prosthetics and i said i don't really like the sound of that what's the other option and he said uh we can leave them and i said okay what's the catch and he said uh oh you'll die i see we share the same uh here um so after i had a bit of a chuckle at that i i realized that um apart from like tapping into the dark sense of humor yeah uh he was giving me a choice yeah for the first time in this whole process yeah because up until then everything had been happening to me right and i had no sense of agency right in the whole process and at that point i mean obviously i was going to say amputate the arms right yeah and that's the decision i made obviously if i'm sitting here in front of you having this conversation what it did was it completely changed my mindset at that point because now I've made the decision to lose my arms and it imbued me with that sense of agency so you're not a victim of the amputation it's interesting you use that word I very much regard myself as an anti-victim yeah what I do in most of my life is is try to I think rail against the concept of victimhood generally speaking there's a subtle but important detail here which is the doctor gave you a choice I mean yeah that's right you had the agency which makes you not the victim because this is something I chose.

9:22I wonder if you woke up one morning and then the arms were gone, if that mentality would be the same or it would have taken more work to get there. That's a really interesting question that no one's asked me before. And I'm not surprised that you're someone that picked up on that. But yeah, absolutely. Like the idea that you actually make the decision imbues you with a deeper sense of agency much quicker. Even if it's a fake decision. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's a choice-ish. Yeah. But you get to say, got it, let's do it. And I think what that points to mostly is that almost everything in our life is the story we tell ourselves and everything is a reframe or it can be.

10:02And so you can choose to look at things that have happened historically as something that you had input in or something that you didn't. And I think people's ability to make that distinction is what decides whether they have the agency moving forward and what they can do with what's happening. This is so interesting because when I sat down with you, I thought, okay, this is going to be a conversation about the importance of sense of humor. Right. I thought this was going to be a conversation about when life gives you lemons, you know, make a joke, right? Because I believe life is made of balance, right?

10:32And this is everything. For everything we get, there's a cost. Of course. And for everything we lose, there's a gain or a lesson. Everything, right? In other words, it's always balance. And I always ask myself, okay, what's the balance, right? So when times are hard i'm like all right what am i getting out of this and when something goes good i'm like careful this is coming at a cost yeah what's what am i going to get this yeah always yeah and so and again every aspect of life so for example if you have a corporate job you know your lows are not that low but your highs are not that high you live an entrepreneurial life your highs are insanely high but your lows are insanely low like it's always balanced yeah and so what i thought we were going to be talking about was that the sense of humor was tapping into the balance.

11:17Because otherwise, if you have imbalance, that's where you end up depressed, lost, victim. And so to find what the gain, what the balance is, is like, okay, something bad has happened. Your identity has changed. Your life has changed. New struggles, all of that. Okay, my sense of humor got darker, you know, and it helps you just sort of live in balance. Yeah. Right? I thought that's what we were going to be talking about. We can if you want. What is showing up here, I actually think is more interesting, which is agency and how one reclaims agency. Now, this doctor gave you a gift, which is he didn't save your life.

11:59He let you save your life. And I guess the question, I mean, we don't know if that didn't happen, if you just woke up with no arms you know what would have happened but are there other circumstances as you've had to change you to relearn to walk you to relearn to function you to relearn to get dressed i mean everything was brand new for you how did agency show up when did you feel like a victim i don't believe i ever felt like a victim i i think there was probably a time where i mean there was no depression that came at oh yeah there was depression i don't believe it came in the form of feeling like i was a victim i think i think you do some get these glimmers of kind of you know why did this happen to me it's not necessarily i think a victim mindset but you you kind of trying to make sense of how you've been selected for this particular brand of misfortune at the same time it's like it's the opposite of a lottery it's yeah that's right you've got a one in ten million chance of being a millionaire or yeah look at me i think it very quickly shifted from why me to you know what next effectively but i think there was an intermediatory step there of kind of why not right and why not being really important when you think to yourself statistically it's going to happen to somebody why not me of course um and that's an important realization because it's the first time that you realize that a lot of these things that happen are just completely random and the universe doesn't give a shit about you and you need to start developing a skin that can handle that effectively i think what you said about balance made me think about something completely different which was that even though you were kind of trying to diagnose this maybe humor is this kind of antidote to the deficit in other areas i think rather than humor being the antidote for me i've found what i call anti-fragility this is a topic that you would know well was developed by nasim Taleb usually with respects to complex systems he's a you know market analyst or options trader whatever it is but I think it applies just as much in psychology than anything else because the human mind is a is a complex system and so what I've identified in my own life along the way is like what advantages have come through having a disability for me you mentioned my TED talk actually before which is the perks of being a pirate we we talked about the idea of being a pirate but the salience underneath that is the perks of what are the advantages of having a disability i mean when i look back on my life now and what i've become i'm a better problem solver i'm a more people say resilient person i'm a more anti-fragile person i believe that there are so many advantages that i've had having a disability just completely in my mindset and the way that i approach life that that's the balance humor isn't the balance the balance is how can i flip the script on this and make it something that's positive and that's effectively the lens through which i view life these days is you know how can i develop habits that are anti-fragile effectively emotionally as well yeah absolutely because physically clearly you have to solve problems you have to figure out how to you know work in the world that's right yeah but are you more anti-fragile and better at solving emotional problems relationships you know conflict at work yeah you know i think so when i talk to a lot of people and particularly in business about anti-fragility it's important to know that like i don't think it's a binary thing that you're you're either anti-fragile or you're not and i think people get a very caught up being like am i optimizing my response you know for positive upside optionality all the time i don't think you need to be all the time but once you develop like the habit of doing it and you get better at it even if two out of five situations you can flip into a positive there will be a net benefit over time when something happens to us and and we're all susceptible to it like oh why me is there something you say a mantra that helps you change the mindset i mean you kind of alluded to it which is not what did i lose but what do i gain it mean is that the is that the thing like is there a mechanism that helps you get the right mindset yeah there is i actually developed a system that i use day to day um i have like three characters that i can play in various different situations and i call them the artist the author and the alchemist and they're for very different applications and if you think about these things as actual characters i like to think of them as people so the artist is somebody who paints perspective right i mean artists always work with perspective if you think about it like a photographer who can zoom in or zoom out of a particular situation so that kind of oscillates between like a narrow and a broad framing of something.

16:58I think that being able to change your perspective on any situation at any given time is a skill that you can develop. You know, an example of this would be if you're drowning in the minutia of your life and work or something like that, it's useful to zoom out and appreciate that you live in a really good country or you have a spouse that's supportive or you have a great family or friends network or your life is on the right track. Maybe if those things are actually all catching fire it's better off to oscillate that framing again and zoom in and appreciate a moment like spending time with your dog on the couch or having a cup of coffee with your spouse or something like that anyone has the choice to be able to make that decision at any point in their life you can run through an exercise whereby you know today is another day you didn't get an email telling you you have bowel cancer right it sounds fucking ridiculous on the offset right but but today is that day for you and i both and if you put yourself in the mental headspace where that is a possibility it does actually lighten the problems that you're going through now you know what i like about it is it works because it's specific whereas you know usually when something bad happens somebody's life you usually get the pablum of like you have your health which is this kind of generic kind of like it's the same kind of idea yeah you know but it's such a generic thought it's too hard to say yeah sure it's it's too hard to appreciate something so broad in general right yeah whereas when you say you know you don't have bowel cancer today you know it's kind of like yeah it's it's a good point you know it's like it's the specificity of the this is why i like your concept of the photographer it's the specificity of it yeah not like hey life is good but rather just take a step back look what you've got that's right are you zooming in or are you zooming out and it's the specificity that I really appreciate.

18:47And then another one would be the author. This was one that I do with myself for the last 10 or 15 years and I never really had a name for it until I put a name on it. But I would imagine myself as my own 80-year-old autobiographer of my own book, right? And it would help me make decisions on what I was doing in life, right? So whenever I had a decision to make and it was really tough and I had to consider a bunch of different variables. I would project myself into the future when I was 80 years old and I would think if this was a story that I was writing and I was the protagonist, what decision would I want the main character to make?

19:29Like what kind of story would I be proud to write, to tell? Autobiographies are very much the stories of heroism and making right decisions. Especially when you write your own book. When you write your own book, right? Exactly. And so you don't want to make the wrong decision but you're also giving yourself this benefit of objectivity, right? Yeah. Of being outside of yourself, of being the third person in a sense. You know that axiom is kind of like it's always easy to give advice to a friend but never take your own advice? Yeah. This is just you putting on that hat and giving yourself advice.

20:01It's sitting on the outside. Yeah. The artist is great for, you know, if you're sort of drowning in the minutiae. The author is great if you have a decision to make but you want to respond in the best way. and then i guess the last one would be the alchemist which is what i live my life by and the alchemist is somebody who turns horrible situations into gold right so how do you find what is the hidden benefit from some horrible challenge that's happened to you you know are you going to treat adversity like the conversation stopper or is it a puzzle to be solved right what are the great things that you can get out of what's happened to you so from for me losing four limbs sounds like a bit of a shit sandwich to almost anyone who reads that story but when i sit here and tell you it's the best thing that ever happened to me and even you identify it as a gift all of a sudden it becomes a really good story and that's what the alchemist does here's where my head goes okay your case is extreme and it's different than this adversity that most people struggle in a day but that's why i was excited to talk to you i like extreme cases because the lessons are easier to discern because it's extreme.

21:11And then you take those lessons from the extreme and you apply them to less extreme circumstances where the lessons are harder to find, right? And so when you talk about the alchemist and when you say, this is the best thing that happened to me, when somebody gets dumped, fired, a small business is barreling down, it seems too simplistic to simply say, change your mindset. This is the best thing that ever happened to you. You know? Like, when there's so much emotion, I mean, I have to believe this is something you developed, not something you had out of the gate. Right? It wasn't the week after amputation.

21:49You're like, this is the best thing that happened to me. That is not how it worked. No. So I guess that's where I'm getting at. What is the process that we have to go through of mourning loss? You know, going through the fear, going through the anxiety, because you've got to go through it. There's no avoiding that. Otherwise, it's just suppression. And you're kidding yourself. Allowing yourself the grace to cry and be depressed and be like, this is normal. You know, I just lost something. I'm going to be depressed. Absolutely. Like, how long was the gap when you went through fuck my life to, you know what?

22:23No. This is the best thing that ever happened to me. And what was the process to get? I'll tell you my gap, but I don't want that to sound prescriptive to people. Because I don't think it's going to be the same for everyone in every situation. but i just want people to appreciate that it's not just some faux spiritual affirmation that you're going through some shit and you just turn your life around change your mindset you know this is the best thing that ever happened to you and all of a sudden you're you have this amazing outlook on life that's that's that's not how this works i went into hospital about middle of the year i i was terribly depressed in the beginning and i noticed that that had a high correlation to physical pain and i know that emotional pain can kind of induce physical pain and all that sort of stuff but pain pain pain sure yeah um but my emotional pain and therefore depression i think was very closely correlated with physical pain because i noticed it getting better as i the pain started to subside notwithstanding i experienced the kind of pain that i didn't know existed and for prolonged periods of time things that you would think oh that's an 11 might be 110 or something like that crazy amounts of pain and so that that was largely unavoidable but i think it sort of skews the results in my head there were these markers along the way having that agency that sense of agency of losing my arms was one marker another marker was you know walking for myself unassisted which would have been about eight or nine months after i first went into hospital actually story about the first time i walked like unassisted was a bit interesting because I had these two prosthetic legs put on me and in the beginning I had a person holding me under one arm and a person holding me under another and then there were a person on each leg moving my leg forward.

24:13So I started with like five people when I first started to learn to walk again with prosthetics and as it would get better and better I would lose people so I lost the people on each leg because I could move the leg by myself and then I just sort of needed balance so I lost one person to my left and I just had this person to my right holding me for balance. The longest period was when I just had him. He was just a wardsman and he would hold me under my arm and every day we would go for little bits of walks around the grounds of the hospital. I remember I couldn't work out what it was that I couldn't walk on my own and I thought to myself, I'm like, it's balance.

24:48I don't have the balance, right? And I had this fear of him letting me go because I didn't, he was giving me the balance. and it was just this one day that I'm walking along with him and I remember we're walking and I'm starting to pick up a little bit of speed, more speed than I had previously. And I said to him, okay, let me go. I don't think he was supposed to let me go. He might have got in trouble for that by the hospital administrators if he'd done it, but he could see in my eye that I was ready and he let me go. And as soon as he let me go, I just started picking up more and more speed and what I got was momentum.

25:27and the momentum was actually what gave me the balance that I needed. So what was happening is he was holding – It's kind of like a bicycle. It's like a bicycle, right? So he's holding my arm, and I'm thinking he's giving me balance, but he was actually holding me back, and I didn't realize that. And so I realized at that point that the momentum, that was what was giving me balance, and that's what propelling me forward, and it was only fear that was stopping me from having him let go. So that was another milestone along the way, right? and so when I say that you know it wasn't like waking up to the next day and being like oh I'm fine now and everything's positive no it's iterative and you have little moments like this over the course of like a year or so and you know what that that hasn't stopped happening I still have moments like that that just make life better and better just don't have the ones that make life worse.

26:17That's my only recommendation. This is such a good insight, which is we go to friends in times of struggle and hardship for help, of course. And it is much easier for us to get through struggle and hardship when somebody is by our side, metaphorically holding us up. Yeah. Giving us balance, making us feel like, you know what, I can walk. Thank you for being by my side. but there is a point where the friend's love and the friend's intention of holding us up is actually holding us back and there's a point at which we have to say to ourselves i love you but i have to leave you now this this support is holding me back yeah it's a dependency you know what i i learned about support networks during my period in hospital is and i had a great support network like not just people who are paid like doctors and nurses but family and friends and things like that and everybody kind of thinks that the support network is good because of what people do for you i actually found out that for me at least and i think this is for everyone support networks are useful because you feel like you owe these people something once they commit to you right it creates a debt of honor effectively so you want to get better yourself because they've invested in you and they believe in you.

27:36I think that's happening for everyone who has support, whether they see it or not. You don't want to let them down. Yeah. They sacrifice for you. That's right. They gave you and you want to make sure that their sacrifice was worth it. That's it. I think that's the best aspect of support networks. I mean, this is what it means to be human, right? Which is, and this is, all these discussions about AI and all of these things, the problem with technologists is they always leave the people out. And they forget that people are still people and we're going to be people all the time. Yeah. And the technology is great and it supports us.

28:05Like they always forget the people part. And so much of people and humanity and humanness, we don't fully understand or we only understand in sort of silos, you know, various social disciplines, psychology and sociology and, you know, psychiatry and all those. But there's so much we don't understand and get. And it's this idea of pride and not wanting to let people down and that the value of a friend is not just that they were there. You know, it's like when a kid graduates high school or university and they're walking across the stage to receive their diploma and there's this sense of pride. But the parents and the friends and the family sitting in the audience also have this incredible sense of pride.

28:46It's this shared feeling that we have with each other. It's called relationship. It's called love. It's called trust. It's reciprocity. It's reciprocity. And like we forget that emotions aren't just in us. when we are close with someone we share in those emotions we share in their pain we share in their pride and in in this case there's i don't know even what i don't even know there's a word for it you know there isn't a word like not wanting to let them down you know some sort of version of gratitude yeah yeah i i think of it the best i could we don't have a word for it isn't that kind of amazing honor i guess but even again we have these phrases but we don't have a word for that shared experience i bet the russians do the germans the germans have a word the germans have weird words for everything yeah that's good yeah um does it bother you when people stare at you no because i i hear from other people who are disabled in some way that it causes great discomfort to be to feel like an object it's funny isn't it so many people uh spend vast amount of energy and resources and money to be objectified on instagram and and some of us just have it and then we don't want it's a gift no i don't give a shit it's fun yeah i think people are just generally curious i mean i do my best to try and make people feel comfortable off the bat and that could be just making a joke about my hooks or making them feel comfortable in another way uh my aim is to once i get to know somebody is to make them forget that I have hooks.

30:21I love this idea of how you, and I guess we have to thank that doctor because I mean, we don't know what the future would have been, but this idea of taking agency and making choices, like I'm going to choose this, that the mindset starts with choice. I really like that. It always does, yeah. You're helping put a lot of things into place for me where there's certain things that what I now know is agency, which I wouldn't have defined as that prior to this conversation there's agency i'm not left with this life i chose this life yeah this is not the metric i have to accept this is the metric i chose i really like this framing a lot i think there's a lot to be i think there's a lot there in your artist author and alchemist um and then the alchemy is always just to your i mean literally in the definition the magical part well actually it's interesting you say that because and i've been following your work for quite a while now thank you you know i remember when i first heard about you know what is your why or whatever and i think i stumbled on mine by accident i don't know when a while ago because you know you think you have it and then you're kind of wrong or whatever and uh there was a there was a guy who came who approached me and said um he said i was you know really great to meet you we'd been chatting for a while he said something along the lines of uh you know i i never would have been able to go through what you did and remain so positive on the other side of it and i remember feeling so deeply upset by that just i'd never wanted that to be what people took away from me yeah and so it wasn't as much that he revealed something he revealed what i didn't want what i wanted was for people to understand that they never really know what they're capable of until they're truly tested right like that's what i want to communicate that's what i want people to get from me and so at that point that was when i realized at least vocationally that everything that i did i wanted to to make it so that people didn't look at me thinking oh i never could be that positive after having something like that i want them to think the exact opposite that like nestled deep inside me there is the power to overcome crazy bad shit and it just hasn't been tested yet i want to agree with you okay cool i i want you to not because it would be way more interesting for the conversation i want to i want to yeah but i don't think i do okay cool tell me Why?

33:06My great aunt survived the Holocaust. And this is Viktor Frankl stuff. Viktor Frankl, who also went through Auschwitz. Yeah. And he came out of it and he couldn't understand why all these people who were suffering the same horrors, that some people had the will to live and some people didn't. Right? And that was how he wrote Man's Search for Meaning at the end of it. That there are certain people who can accept and recognize that we cannot change the circumstances around us all that we have control over, agency, is our attitude, is our response. And my great aunt who came through it, I remember talking to her about it.

33:44And we talk about post-traumatic stress, but we rarely talk about post-traumatic growth. And I read this recently, and I can't remember. I'm going to muck it up so people are going to get angry at me. But that post-traumatic stress is only a recent thing that we started talking about. And we used to talk about post-traumatic growth more. Yeah, right. How you grow from trauma, not just struggle from it. And both are true. She went through the concentration camp with her husband, and she said, you came through it stronger or broken. I came out stronger. He came out broken. This is why we made a great team.

34:22We are there for each other. Yeah. You know, I need him and he needs me. Yeah. It's true. You don't know what you've got until you're tested. But I'm not sure everybody's got it. oh that's what you disagree with yeah oh yeah i mean i don't know whether everyone's got it i don't think everybody has um yeah i well there's no way for me to know that it's not that i think everyone has but i think everybody i think everyone has the ability to surprise themselves it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone could have gone through what i did i don't think they could have i mean maybe not um but i still think everybody underestimates what they're capable of generally speaking that i agree with and we see that in national tragedy but i think our ability to and this is the next line of question i have here which is i think our ability to withstand the extreme stresses of life go up when we have a support network of course you didn't do this alone of course not and that's really important here it's not like you know tom with this inner strength of a of a you know an ancient greek god no you know no i i quite often talk about what one of the things I detest the most is that the self-made myth.

35:32Right. You know what I mean? Like the idea that you were the author and the only contributor to your own success. I mean, like what you are talking with right now in conversation is a person that probably had 11 % to do with who I am right now. I'm a product of doctors and nurses and families and friends and support networks and getting sick in a country that had medical support and they pay for my prosthetics and just I'm literally a melange of all of these things. The only reason I think that's important to identify is because if you want that to be replicable in your own life, you need to have an honest conversation about how you're not the center of it effectively because some of the best people know how to rely on their support networks and use them as resources.

36:20And when we go through adversity together, we're more likely to come through it healthily as individuals. yeah and it's definitely in america we've over indexed on rugged individualism but you see it all over the internets as well especially on social media where you know everybody has to be the hero of their own life you know even when they're expressing gratitude it's always like them by themselves you know welling up in a car yeah you know but look that is fragile that's not anti-fragile think about it right if you are the self-made person if everything that you did relies only on you that's one choke point yeah you know yeah that's not anti-fragile but if you're somebody who's resourceful you mentioned before about somebody who loses their job or whatever it is right um this is a obviously a huge challenge in someone's life but i don't know let's say for example you worked where are we california let's say you work in tech right you earn a couple hundred thousand dollars a year you've been working for like four or five years or something like that but you know you work for nvidia but you've got plenty of friends that you know work for microsoft or Apple or you know all these things you're going to all the conferences you're building this support network all this sort of stuff and then one day you lose your job now imagine that person and then imagine like a recent Columbia grad or some whatever right that doesn't know anybody that's also going for the same jobs who's going to get it the person who has the strong support network and you know what they're probably going to get a better job than they had before because they hadn't even thought to reassess their career path.

37:53So number one, the network is anti-fragile. Number two, getting fired might not be the worst thing that ever happened to you. This is also touching on if you're at the top, just don't believe your own hype because that's when you start believing people have to rely on you. That's when you start breaking the networks because you become an asshole. Yes. And I think to have the humility that this could end at any time. It is amazing to me how many people I bump into and opportunities that are showing up. I'll give you a perfect example. I went to a conference just last weekend and I bumped into a guy who I last saw him 16 years ago.

38:33Right? Now, we remembered who each other, you know, we remembered each other. We've had, I would say, exchanged maybe two texts over the course of 16 years. Wow. Right? Maybe I don't even think text, emails. I don't even think we had each other's phone numbers. Right. I saw him 16 years later. We were happy to see each other and we decided we're going to do something together. Oh, great. Now, you know, if you don't treat somebody nicely 16 years ago. Yeah. That has repercussions. Of course. And it is amazing to me. And I would never have imagined this as I was coming up through my career. It goes back to your photographer.

39:07Everything seems so myopic and everything seems so close. And the number of relationships that show up again. And by the way, the other way around, which is people come to me like, have you ever worked with X? I'm like, actually, I have worked with them. He treated me like a complete chump when I was starting out my career. I'm thinking of somebody very specifically. It sounds like it. As my career was just getting going, this guy treated me like an asshole for no reason. I don't mind if people don't want to work with me. I don't mind if people don't like me. But you don't have to go out of your way to demean me.

39:41Just say no. Yeah. Right? And he went out of his way to insult me. And he was a very successful, powerful guy in his industry. And I was just getting started. And he was an asshole. Flash forward, my career is going pretty good. And all of a sudden, his office calls, not him, because they want to work with me. And I said, not only is the answer no, never call me again. I don't care what the money is. Don't ever call me again. Flash forward, I found out that his company worked with me through an agent. so i didn't in other words it was hidden really so i didn't know oh and so i called a non-consensual business so i called the agency and said whenever you get a request from that company yeah i don't care how much money the answer will always be no there's no word for it but whatever the opposite of loyalty is there's a lot of situations we're finding that there are no words for right right is it just we have limited vocabulary so we're just like well i mean the germans probably get this uh podcast translated into germany please thank you because all of well it'll be much shorter because we'll have all the words for the things that we have to have a whole podcast about yeah uh oh yeah they're just talking about x yeah yeah yeah there should be an inverse to loyalty shouldn't there and again i have no problem with people telling me no i have no grudges i'm not even a grudge holder as a person like when i have fights with people like i can let things go pretty quickly i'm not a grudge holder it was just i was astonished how somebody starting out, that somebody would go out of their way to push down and suppress.

41:14Yeah. For no reason, right? To insult. And now expect that just because money's on the table that I'm going to like be like, woohoo, can't work to work, you know? Yeah. I think that this is the reason you treat people nicely all the time. Now, that doesn't mean I'm an asshole sometimes. I'm angry. I'm tired. I'm short-tempered. Like, we're all imperfect. But to really make the effort to be nice to people. Yeah. Because you just don't know. How did we get on this topic? Yeah, I don't remember. But there was one thing that I wanted to bring up with you, which is kind of like, not entirely parenthetical, but kind of adjacent.

41:51You had this quote that I really love and now I can't really work out how it's said, but I'm sure you'll be able to correct me. It's something like, it's about leadership. It's not about being in charge of people, but taking care of the people. Leadership is not about being in charge. leadership about taking care of those in your charge that's it right i always love that and it made me think of this story that i wanted to tell you about a chef called uh we're talking about food before we started rolling and and in particular in paris do you know a guy called joel robuchon yeah yeah so the first time i ever went to his restaurant this would have been like 20 years ago i met him because he was sort of walking around the restaurant he was a really sweet old guy he came around he just talked to all of the customers and everything i remember saying to him he was like oh what you know how's your night going and i said oh can you give me a recommendation on what to eat and he said what do you like and i said i like to be surprised and he said steak and mashed potato and i was like okay that's not very surprising but it was a very surprising steak and mashed potato i've never had anything like it in my life so he was right but what i noticed is that he was pottering around the kitchen while the you know they've got 20 chefs or whatever doing i never eat there but sure right yeah and he's sort of pottering around and like looking you know and the next time i went back there i sat up at the bar because that's kind of the experience and i had one of the chefs in front of me i was talking to him and i said oh is rebuchon in tonight he's like no no and he's he got really excited he's like but he was in a week ago and he's like you know we really love him here he's like a grandfather to us and i was like that's a weird thing for a sous chef to say or whatever it is but I was and I was chatting to him a little bit about it and I was like you know what is it you love about rebichon and he said oh you know he's just he's just like having a grandfather around he doesn't get in your way or anything but he'll come up and you know if you're doing something wrong like he doesn't yell at you he'll take the knife off you and he'll like teach you a bit of a technique he'll show you how he does it and then he'll hand the knife back to you I remember thinking that's a very unique style of leadership right and it was kind of like leading from the side sidelines but not getting angry about people anyway the third time i was meant to go there i'd made a reservation it was like a monday night this is many years later now it's 2018 i think it was and i remember getting a text from a friend he said what are you doing tonight i'm i said actually going down to latelia and he said i didn't hear rubbish on died today and i was just like oh my my stomach dropped and I was just like fuck should I cancel my reservation I'm like no no that's ridiculous like go down there or whatever so I went down there that night and all of the staff were wearing black armbands like they love this guy so much and I remember sitting at the bar again and I was talking to them and one of them said to me he's taught me everything that I know and all I want to do now has become the best version of myself that i could ever be wow robichon is i mean for anyone listening to this who doesn't know who he is arguably the best chef of all time i think he's got like over 30 michelin stars and he's widely regarded as like a king maker in the culinary industry you know he gordon ramsay and many others who have come up or influenced by him eric repair stuff like that that was his thing he would harbor people and and teach them to be um the best that they could be and you know at the ripe age that he was i forget it was in his 80s or 90s or something like that he didn't become this like culinary despot at any point like he was just loved by literally everybody who came close to him and it was this leading from the sidelines where he would show someone how to do something and then hand the knife back and when i was thinking about it just reminded me so much about some of the leadership stuff that you talk about and taking care of people and at the end of the day they end up loving you and wanting to give you their best and it goes right back to everything you said which is you want to make them proud which is that's right yeah they saw something there's a debt of honor and also agency as well agency and patience and all of these things it's really a beautiful thing it's such a again the you're rubbing off on me with your dark sense of humor um i was gonna say you know the extremity of your experience um yeah oh i've got to hand it to you yeah thanks yeah but the experience is so extreme that the lessons are just so enjoyable to highlight you know i love your framework i i love this idea of agency i love this idea of debts of honor you know which is just another way of saying i'm just so grateful i don't want to let you down i want to prove to you that that believing in me was the right choice yes you know yeah and all of these things i think when you do them you recognize that we can't do any of these things alone all of these things are interpersonal all of them right even even with your lens it's like your lens goes in and your lens goes out what you end up seeing is more people of course you know and to recognize that in every adversity there is something wonderful to be gained from it and if you can't prove it fuck man nobody can there's a lot of responsibility now that you've said that i threw a this is the debt of honor i threw a fuck in there because i know as an australian you wouldn't have understood me without it yeah that i could accuse you of cultural appropriation fair point yeah you're magic um i have a couple questions to ask you you host the last meal with tom nash oh yeah where you ask your guests if you if the world ended tomorrow and you could have one last meal what would it be and then you cook it for them what have you found a person's last meal choice reveals about them obviously it's different for everybody but when I ask a person to choose a meal for their last meal I'm usually trying to get them to trigger something about themselves it could be like a moment in time that they remember fondly or it could be something about you know it could be their childhood or something that their mother made them or something like that and a lot of people in the beginning will just the knee jerk reaction is that something that they really like eating and i usually push back on that and i'm like just stop thinking in that way like let's pick something that means something to you and this is where it gets interesting because what they'll choose is usually correlated with the time in their life where they felt they had more freedom oh interesting say more well give an example tim urban um he picked pad thai and it was because it it reminded him of a time that he was traveling a lot it's not that he doesn't travel now but he would like to travel more than he did but when he was traveling when he was 19 years old you know he was traveling around asia for the first time and the pad thai just reminded him of that of that period uh massy alinajad the iranian journalist chose korma sabzi which is a persian dish beef stew that she hadn't had since when she was back in iran now it would be foolish to think that she was free when she was there but she was certainly connected to her family when she was i think that's something that she longs for and so another question that i ask people actually in some of these interviews is if you could repeat a year of your life you don't get to change anything but you just go back and press play on it again what would that be and invariably people choose a time of their life where they felt they were the most free now that changes for some people yeah for some people it's like well last year i find that people with a high sense of agency pick more recent times and then some people they remember their college years or something like that as feeling more liberated and tend to anchor towards that.

49:46I'm so interested how they chose a meal to reclaim something, that the meal reminded them of something that they either lost or a part of their personality that they like to highlight.

50:02Obviously, you've thought about this. What would yours be? It changes all the time. My current choice of last meal is an English roast cooked specifically by my aunt, who is British, lives in England, and it has to be in winter. Okay? Very specific. Yeah. My aunt lives in England. My dad's British, although they both sort of were born and raised in Bahrain, but she lives there now. And I used to go over my grandparents when they were alive. I used to visit them when I was young. And obviously I would go in when it was Australian holidays and Australian holidays for summer, it's hot over there, but then it's freezing in England.

50:46So I'd go over quite often when it was really cold and I would have this really warm English roast dinner with the turkey and the roast vegetables. And it's freezing outside, but it's warm inside and the fireplace is on. So it's a nostalgia thing. It's a nostalgia thing, but I would always, I would have my grandparents there as well. It's so funny because immediately when I asked the question, Of course, I thought about my own meal. And mine was immediately nostalgia as well. My paternal grandmother was an amazing cook and came from Czechoslovakia and a lot of Eastern European food. And so I sort of grew up on that.