Sometimes the bravest conversations are the ones we avoid

0:00This is Ayo Akemwellere from the Athletic FC podcast. Buying a car should be exciting, not exhausting. And if you're looking for a gleaming SUV to replace your old banger, or you're taking the plunge and going electric, the good news is you can buy your car completely online on Autotrader. Really. Just go to autotrader.com and get picky. Search through dealer listings for the make, model, colour and the features that matter to you. Then just drop in your info and you'll see all the cars that fit your budget. Really. Once you've found the car of your dreams, you can have it delivered to your driveway or you can pick it up at the dealership.

0:37Really. So buy your next car entirely online on Autotrader. Head to autotrader.com or search the Autotrader app. I'm Danny White-Scorn and this is Behind the Title. Simon Gunning, CEO of Calm, joins us to talk about the amazing work that Calm is doing to prevent suicide in the UK. This might be a triggering subject, so please take care when listening. We have to change the culture around suicide prevention. There's so many posters that say it's okay not to be okay. No, it's not. It's not okay to not be okay. There has to be a perspective around preventable suicide. Why would you stop short of eradication?

1:17I just don't think that a single death is enough for us to say that's okay. Astonishingly, it's become the biggest killer in men under 50 and the suicide rate for under 24 women has seen the steepest increase since records began. How can you take action? For the price of a few posh coffees, you can find a potentially life-saving chat on their helpline.

1:41Simon, welcome to Behind the Title, where leaders show up differently. It's wonderful to have you here um actually i i think i cornered you on the spot at a channel four um event which was around mirror on masculinity yeah and and i think i said oh you should come on the podcast and i think you were like no no no no no the others should um was i yes that sounds like me and so uh it's wonderful to have you here i guess for those that may not have met you or no it's not there's nobody left now danny well why don't you start then with a bit of an introduction to who you are your background and why it was important to come on to the podcast today.

2:19Okay. Yeah. Hello. I'm Simon. I'm CEO of Calm. I come from media, much like yourself. So from making stuff in the record business, in the music business and in TV, and then fell accidentally and headfirst into advertising for a while. And then having found myself kind of floundering between gigs and consulting was approached by the chairman of Calm nine years ago, almost, who I knew through somebody in my team at the BBC to come and have a look at Calm when it was teeny tiny, making very little money, less than a million quid a year. Nobody'd heard of it, but there was something really interesting and they just parted company with their founding CEO.

3:07So I agreed to go for a month. That was nine years ago. I think it's always interesting to reflect on, for me, to reflect on my own personal experience, which you don't often do because you don't come across too many people in media other than all the agencies that we work with and stuff. But I also do believe that I'm not going to get out a little violin and start saying, poor us. But I do think from having had lengthy experience of media advertising, that there is a peculiarly nasty side to it and one which maybe reflects certain parts of the way that I see society and communities having changed around things like the erosion of community, the erosion of cohesion.

3:50And it's interesting to me. And I want to kind of kick off, like let's just get into the sheer volume of numbers. Now, to lose anyone, one life through illness or natural causes is sad and it's terrible. And you'll fact check me on these numbers. Yep. Close to 7 ,000 people have been lost in the last decade, maybe a bit more, to suicide. Well, no, it's much, much worse than that. Okay. It's 7 ,000 a year. 7 ,000 a year. Just 6 ,600 a year. The number you've got there is, to me, one of the most awful ones that we've seen, which was it inspired our Miss Birthdays campaign last year with Adam and Eve and ITV.

4:39That's 7 ,400 young people over the last decade. So Miss Birthdays is all about helping what we call trusted adults, which is quite often parents, to confront the issue with their kids, because this is about kids dying. That's 7 ,000. It's actually, as far as the entire population is concerned, in the UK it's just shy of 7 ,000 a year. Wow. That's 10 times worse than you thought. Yeah. That's alarming. Yeah. I mean, you know, again, I think every day 18 people lost to suicide. Yeah. One in four will have suicidal thoughts. So that's one in four people will live with suicidal ideation. But what is really interesting to me about that number is that it's obviously terrifying and awful.

5:32Flip it almost from a marketing perspective and realize actually can be a very positive number. Because the real problem that we have is the fear, shame, embarrassment, stigma is a term that we have about suicide prevention. We don't want to say the words. We don't want to confront the issue because it's horrible. It's embarrassing. It's nasty. When we can really embrace that one in four number, one in four of us in the UK will live with suicidal ideation. Then we can understand that it isn't other people, that it is our loved ones, our kids, our mates, our colleagues, our family. and when we can do that then we start to shift culturally from a position of resistance through to a position of obligation because then we start to understand that we are obligated to look after each other we are a pack we are a cohesive community and if one in four of us is thinking about switching it off then we should we must or we could embrace that ability to prevent it and help the people around us.

6:41So we'll get into you a little bit at the moment, because it's quite a tough subject to be around every single day. Yeah. And I guess I'd love to understand, is there any lived experience that you've had? No. And so what drew you to calm? Well, I am just an absolute anomaly that I've never lost anyone to suicide. It has not touched my life. There was a kid when I was at school, which was a bloody long time ago. but it didn't come across then as like a hugely important I don't know why I guess I didn't know the kid very well and but I've never been close to anyone that's died by suicide which is such a it's like you know I've kind of dodged it and I don't know how it's obviously not intentional what drew me to calm and there's no reason for me to be anything other than completely honest about this was not a fire in my belly to prevent suicide but it was wanting to do this as well as I possibly possibly could run calm and I don't know what that makes me I don't know if that makes me good or bad probably somewhere in between but the outcome of wanting to do it as well as I possibly could is that and honestly calm saves lots and lots and lots of people's lives we get it every every day we get you know people coming to us and saying that we saved this person or we saved themselves or might be.

8:01And over the nine years I've been doing it, that is very, very important to me. It really is that every time I hear about or meet someone who has been saved by Calm or helped by Calm, it's hugely encouraging. But I think more than that, what has really driven me has been meeting people who have lost someone by suicide, especially parents. And I've met quite a lot. And having had two kids, they're not kids anymore. They're massive, I wouldn't say hairy, but only one of them is hairy because he's a boy and he's 19 and I've got a 21-year-old daughter. There is a real determination. I have a real determination to want to change the way that we as a species, nation, look at this issue and how we increase our compassion and our skills to prevent it.

9:04But honestly, Danny, I think the thing that has driven me through it, if drive isn't too self-aggrandizing a term, is just to try to be really, really fucking good at it. and that's in the services that we provide, whether that's our helpline or digital products. And we were launching a big new digital product in January, 2026, which is an app which we have developed and I'm very excited about. Whether that's getting really good at making money and we're not quite there yet. We've gone from under a million to regularly over 10 million, but that's not enough money. It never is. It's an embarrassing amount of money.

9:42We should be, as far as our brand is concerned, we're steady at a third of the adult population knowing what calm is. And sometimes we'll pop higher when we're really, really active. We should be making more money because of the impacts and the brand that we've developed. But so on that effectiveness and on it all being really, really good, another one, which is kind of very close to my heart, is our communication. and us as a campaigning, with a campaign against Sub-Adminable as a campaigning organisation and they were pretty good at that. I mean, there's some pretty striking stuff out there that one might say is harrowing, one might say it's brave.

10:21You know, I think the thing that most people should be able to recall, I'd say, would be people standing on the top of a building. Yeah, yeah. So those are the, I like to think of it as one long campaign lasting eight years. So in between the big ones, we do a rat-a-tat-tat. We've got a really great creative studio and Marcom's team in-house, and we make a lot of our own campaigns that are largely executed across social or out of home. We've got a great relationship with JC Decoe, who give us lots and lots and lots of out of home. And then we work with lots of agencies. We're just about to do a campaign, a release campaign with AMV, with my really good friend, Zav, who we work with, Zav Risa, we work with at Havas as well.

11:08We do a lot of campaigns with brand partners like Iceland Foods and Wix and BMW and Spotify and blah, blah, blah, loads of them. But probably the ones that we really are well known for are the ones we've done with Adam and Eve DDB, which started in 2008 with Project 84 that you mentioned, which was the statues down the South Bank And then that resulted in the appointment of the world's first minister for suicide prevention, which in Boris Johnson's wisdom, he gave to Nadine Dorries. Then we did the last photo, which was focused on the insight that people are often looking for signs. So, sorry, Project 84 was about the fact that people didn't know that 84 men a week were dying by suicide.

11:56It's now 94 men a week, by the way. The last photo is focused on the fact that people are always talking about spotting signs and often there aren't any. So we wanted to engender this feeling that we should always be diligent and we shouldn't wait for somebody to present us what we perceive to be suicidal. And our perception is somebody sitting down at the end of a bed with their head in their hands and that just isn't the way it works. so the last photo was really effective in in lots of ways drew something like 5 000 times traffic to our website or something and that was again with itv and adam and eve and then the most recent one um was miss birthdays which was i must say was just an unbelievably stunning installation yeah but when you heard yourself and presenters talk about it and you understood the juxtaposition of how balloons are normally used versus I was blown away.

12:55Yeah, it was a beautiful thing. I mean, it really was a thing to go and see. I mean, like we can measure the success in terms of awards and it is nice getting awards. So the last photo won the Grand Prix in Cannes, the film Grand Prix, you know, which is pretty nice. But it drove lots and lots and lots and lots of traffic to the specific stuff that we made to help people be ever diligent. diligent um Miss Birthdays had a I think it's the first time we got it really right on the outcome on the output uh so we created a thing called the the Calm Care Kit yeah uh which is a set of very very easy to understand and use tools a bit like Vinnie Jones and Staying Alive you know um about how trusted adults can uh talk to and that the kids about suicide this is because 16 to 24 year olds, the fastest growing group in history to suffer with suicidality, a propensity to consider suicide.

13:49And that behavior is cohort behavior, which they will take through their lives unless we stop it. So the care kit gives four very, very easy steps on our website about how we can protect young people. So it's just done really well in the last couple of weeks. We won gold and three silvers at the Effies and brand of the year, which is nice. Wow. And then at the campaign bigs, we won campaign of the year 2025 and three others. And in Cannes, we won gold and three silvers, I think. And does that translate to revenue for you? Not, yeah, it's really, what we've never done, and that's intentional, with those big outings, and they're every other year.

14:33We have never put a revenue driver, a revenue campaign next to it. It's always been service delivery. I think there's something really interesting, though, when we go out next, and we're just going through the process now for 2026. So our next one will go out in September 2026 is about longer tales of action. So we will definitely be delivering service at the core of what we do. I know what that is. It's in the brief. But what I find really interesting is a guy called Paul de Gregorio. We've come across him at an agency called Rally. I've heard the name. He's very smart. Very, very smart. He's a bit of a Rory Sutherland about kind of behavior change.

15:16Behavior change, yeah. And nudge. so looking at micro actions what can we do to just get some people to do something small something small again and then something big um and and that big might be pay for a call to our helpline which is 15 quid um i don't know what it will be but i find that really interesting when we start to look into real behaviors based off the massive impact the 84 last photo and miss birthdays had the most important thing for miss birthdays is that it's driven over a quarter of a million people to visit and potentially use the care kit. Now, when you're trying to get us a small number compared to kind of Google-esque numbers, but when you're trying to get people to become active suicide preventers, we don't even want to talk about it, let alone do it.

16:03And so when I think about that in terms of a commercial funnel, when we're thinking in terms of awareness, consideration and purchase, we've managed to get 250 ,000 people to actively go through that, through to purchase. They have purchased a suicide prevention product because they visited. They now know what it is. They might come back and they might never need it. Really hope not. But they might remember, hopefully they will remember it's there. They may have used it immediately or they may use it at some point in the future. But to have a quarter of a million active suicide preventers is something that I don't think we've ever, we certainly can, have never managed before.

16:36So I think we can be proud when we take those. Yeah, winning the The Grand Prix in Cannes is just like really lovely. But getting people to really do what we want them to do, much like when you're trying to get them to switch soap powder. Well, I guess you've built that mental availability immediately with people. So the likelihood is that they will be prompted to think about it if they need to. But I've done a load of work around behaviour change, looking at Cialdini, Seven Modes of Influence, the East Framework. and actually the you know the nudging is is really hard and it's a long term shift right and being able to take people that are probably um slightly receptive um you know all the way through to kind of repeating that behavior um and becoming as you say active advocates is amazing um let's let's shift up a gear into simon if we can yeah um uh i guess i'd love to understand a bit about you like we we talk about the backstage pass right and so you've been in very senior roles in your career with that i suspect you've had experiences where actually on the outside everything is amazing on the inside moments where actually jesus shit is falling down yeah it's getting tough like have there been moments like that for you gotcha oh yeah all the way through i mean like i spent a lot of time in the record business making records um um bot was the best one no hansen um the uh yeah you know it's it's so much of a it's so superficial and artificial as an industry, as is TV.

18:28And it was on occasion very, very stressful, but you've got to keep being the tough guy manager. I was a manager. And then I was at EMI Records. And, you know, it's hard to keep up that front, especially when an industry is kind of absolutely dying, and yet you've still got to keep selling it. That was hard. I found TV pretty similar, pretty superficial, and wanted to get out a lot of the time. And I think a lot of people do. I think it certainly is glamorous. You are in the bar at five o 'clock on a Friday and you are going to shoots and you are making records and you are hanging out with pop stars and that kind of stuff.

19:07But the superficiality and the precarious nature of it, I found terrifying. I really did. And it is a strange thing for me to kind of revisit that I did pretty well. I made a lot of really great records and a lot of great television programs. but was pretty much permanently terrified throughout all of it. And certainly the same applies to advertising. It's brutal in its temporary nature and the fragility of, I think, how people feel that, especially in marketing services and advertising in particular, the tempestuous nature of the industry now, where small dips in share price results in absolute carnage.

19:53I mean, ITV is desolate, the number of people losing their jobs. And I've been there a lot. I've been really scared. Actually, for Calm, coming up for two years ago, we had very real financial issues. We don't now. We are really sound. We are very, very solid. and I had to make a lot of people redundant and you have to, as the CEO, be strong about it, show a degree of vulnerability because it was horrible and a lot of those people were my friends and I felt terrible, but it had to be done. And actually the people that left understood that, I think, I hope, because we did it with real sensitivity.

20:43but you have to show up as the boss and you have to do it. Do you still feel scared now? Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes. Right now I feel really solid because the numbers are so good, as in we're very solid in our finances. I do fear the next one, as in the next big campaign. I do fear big problems. Absolutely lovely Ambassador Ricky Hatton died recently. that was a that was horrible i'm not talking about for me i'm talking about you know uh a suicide prevention organizations ambassador dies from uh what is is uh is not officially a suicide verdict but has been indicated that's very likely um that's that's really horrible um for everybody involved i mean obviously for ricky's family and friends it's a billion times worse than it is for us but that is quite scary and suicide is i think you touched on earlier when you're dealing with it it is a little bit like you've got a rucksack and you're you're putting a stone in it each day and it might not feel heavy after a week but after a month or a year it can really get heavy when you're saying that word every single day and and dealing with it every single day for for my team it can get really really heavy and um that can be to your point it can be a point a part in people's lives and careers where you have to show up but it really is weighing you down because because as i as i talk with you i see someone who's really buttoned down like in terms of professionally and someone who is equally compassionate um a family man but as you as you say it there you know it's like putting a it's like another pet wall a rock a pebble yeah has there been moments where you've had to have a word with yourself to say this is a bit much now and i can't i can't i don't know how i'd carry on with this no definitely um it's i'm gonna if the if it gets through the edit i'm definitely going to get my leadership team to listen to the bit where you say that i'm a button-down professional person when they just give you a social clip to circulate because they rip the piss out of me all day and i wouldn't have it any other way um yeah definitely and and lockdown i'm sure a lot of your guests will talk about lockdown i i did send a an email to our all staff to saying that take a break before you break because yeah that was really hard when you're dealing with suicide in lockdown on screens ah um so yeah i have i do have words with myself we do a nine day fortnight which is a lovely thing and i never take it i always work i don't do nine days you know i'll work on what does that mean every other friday is a is a day off and it's it's a cut it's contracted and it won't ever change because of what we do i wanted as we came out of lockdown actually um i wanted to reduce that burden on people a lot of people going to four day four day weeks we're not doing that but we've had a nine day fortnight for a very long time and it is just brilliant so i have had a word with myself recently uh to to abide by the nine days and i'm giving it my best go and today is a working friday so i'm not breaking the rule i'm a firm believer in any industry, big, small organization, if you put your people first, even if you have to make difficult decisions as a leader, even if there are things that need to get done, if you put your people first, the output that they will deliver on your behalf will be second to none.

24:14That is a new concept. And it's a concept that so many people talk about and one that I embrace and agree with fully, but it is a new concept. I mean, like really new. I mean, sort of like in the last 10 years, it was just that was, some people might have said it a little bit 10 years ago. I think people believed it, but people do believe it now. And that is that in a lot of places is coming out in actions as well, which is very encouraging, but it is new. Well, ironically, you see a lot of it in some of the younger tech businesses and I'm not talking about the big ones that we see now, but some of the younger tech businesses that are either examples, it's less about the free fruit that they give or porridge.

24:55It's more about actually, no, we're going to give you a larger portion of the profits that we're making because we know that actually you will feel valued. In turn, you'll be willing and want to get involved more because you feel recognized and rewarded. Yeah. So if we kind of go back into the world of calm for a second, um i'd love for people to understand more about certainly either 16 to 24 group or perhaps over 40s um uh or anything in between what do you think are the triggers these days that are um accelerating this uh suicidal trend that we're seeing i think before we think we think about acceleration we should think about just the propensity to have suicidal ideation which is a species level behaviour.

25:46It's really important that we understand that it's not about being broken, it's about being human. That as a species, we've got these big old brains that allow us to talk to each other and behave in a pack and be the most successful species on the planet. But that has also given us existential philosophy and poetry and the cure and the smiths and an an ability for us to potentially question and doubt our place in the world. We are the only species that turns itself off. And that is really interesting to me that our fear and shame and embarrassment around – I'm trying to not decouple suicide and prevention because where there's stigma and shame and embarrassment around suicide, okay with this stigma embarrassment and shame around suicide prevention no suicide prevention has to be something that we embrace when we acknowledge and understand that it i'm going to bang on about this that it is a just a species behavior it's these over specced things then we can really start to embrace its prevention what's accelerating things in the in a younger audience So you say 16 to 24s, actually 16 to 39s is the broader grouping.

27:05There's a guy, get this, Professor Sir Lewis Appleby. What a title. Great name. Great name. Alliteration. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got a big old moustache. I'm not sure it's curly, but he's at Manchester University, so he's the leading government advisor, his team. For younger audiences, he cites three main things, substance abuse, family breakup, academic pressure, all accelerated and amplified by the stuff you'd expect, social media, social cohesion, those kind of things. That's what he sees in those younger audiences that's creating this really alarming change in behaviour that we just have to stop now.

27:43Because older audiences develop that, certainly my generation, middle-aged men, develop that behaviour in their, in our adolescence and youth, and we've carried it right the way through. And so once that suicidal ideation is there as an option, it continues throughout your life unless we can do something about it, which was why Miss Birthdays and what we call Project Firebreak, which was to stop that behavior early, why that's so, so important. because we have seen growth across the board. Then we see stability. Actually, in lockdown, just to talk about that old chestnut again, we saw a drop for a number of reasons, but largely because of access to means.

28:21People weren't going out. People were, you know. The danger, though, is that when we see this growth in a young audience, that's where we see real growth over the general populace over the next kind of 40 years. So that's what we need to stop. Do you plan short-term or do you plan long-term? Both. Yeah, we have a two-year strategy, which then often brings itself out in the brief to Adam and Eve for our big biannual campaign. And then, as I say, in between, we work with lots of agencies and internally as well in our communication. And then that is either informed by or informs our product development.

28:59And we have a very, very strong data and product development team in innovation. and those products are all about giving people tools for prevention at the heart of it is our helpline but we can only help a limited number of people with a with a human helpline so we need to go you need to be very broad with digital tools the longer cycle is about a five and ten year quite often well has to be all the time actually about commercials how are we going to grow and make more money to make those products to make those campaigns to to do all the things that calm does. But then what in the long term is the real change we want to make in the world.

29:35And we've just completed a new piece of work on what in the charity world is called a theory of change, what we would call in the rest of the world, just our general long-term strategy. And I'm really pleased that we have a real, really solid view of what we want to do in the world over the next five years, over the next 10 years. And that is a really profound change in culture. And anybody who's listened to this who wants to come and join us and be a part of that, we have to change the culture around suicide prevention. And that means that we have to, in the UK first, remove that stigma. We have to make it as we would when we want to take people through, as bang on about it again, we take people through a commercial funnel.

30:29We have to take people through a cultural change funnel as well. We have to go from resistance to not just acceptance, but embracing that joy and responsibility in creating a nation of suicide preventers because it's killing kids. It's the single biggest killer of kids. There's a bit at the end of the Miss Birthdays case study film where a voiceover, which we recorded lots and lots of voiceovers from bereaved parents that was in the... Yes. Yeah. As you walk through the balloons, you could hear the parents talking. And there's a line that just goes into my head, along with all the voiceover on the Evelyn film, which I believe is still the best thing we've ever made, which was the film that went with that experiential.

31:14But then there's a line in the case study film from a mother talking about her son. and she says we used to talk about everything her son who's died by suicide we talk about girls we talk about drugs it never occurred to us to talk about suicide and you can just hear in her voice it's like if i just known if i'd known that it was an issue that an issue that was the most likely thing to kill him if i'd known that according to the wealth world health organization that is the single most preventable cause of death and if i'd known that it doesn't take big million pound machines in hospitals, it just takes us being suicide preventers, not just, I'm not going to diminish it.

31:56I'm not going to say it's a choice. I'm not going to say it's an option. But what I am going to say is that if we can change culture forever so that we all feel almost, I mean, fuck it, a joyful responsibility. I can save people. I can save the people close to me by embracing what it is we're trying to get them to do. And it's so easy once you know how to do it, once you can remove the fear from confronting it, give people the tools to allow them to make a real change. I think it's quite a profound mission that if we can change that in the UK, then we can change that outside of the UK. We can change that in the world and we can change that as a species.

32:41It's a bit grand, isn't it? I think you need to be. I think you have to unapologetically as a one a charitable organization i think you have to be grand i think if you if you minimize or cautiously step into the space or say oh if anything you could give would be helpful it's not anything it's yeah you know dig deep yeah yeah yeah this is a really important subject yeah and i get i didn't but now i've i I really stumble over the term reduce, because if we're going to reduce deaths by suicide, reduce attempts, reduce people living with suicide, and reduce the effect that it has on the people around them.

33:25It's 149 people directly affected by every suicide, by the way. And that leads on, again, to suicidality in those people. Reduce, to me, suggests that if we're going to write that down as some sort of equation, we have to come to an acceptable number. because by how much will you reduce? We'll reduce by 50%. All right, so in the UK, you're saying that three and a half thousand deaths is okay. No, we're not. Eradicate. We have to eradicate. There has to be a perspective around preventable suicide. There are suicides which are not preventable. We should be clear. And we do not go anywhere near assisted dying.

34:04That's not what we're talking about. But when we can think about where prevention is possible, why would you stop short of eradication? I just don't think that a single death is enough for us to say that's okay. I agree. And I think that's how we started off the podcast. Just taking it back into your world before we bring it to a close, how do you or how's this impacted your kids, in particular their education of this subject? And do you find that they not only understand it, but have become advocates or does it, does it scare you that you're educating them on quite a roar? Yeah, yeah, it does.

34:49And that's part of it because I'm, my brain is so conditioned to also be squeamish. I, you know, I used to say quite a lot that I come up to that word and I try to put a little handbrake on and try to get around it without saying it. I don't. That's interesting looking at my own brain because I did. Now I don't. I think always coupling prevention with suicide. Suicide prevention is what we do. That's so different. That's such a positive step change. We're talking about helping, not talking about death. We have to talk about one to get to the other, but you know what I mean. It has troubled me that in having such impact in the way that we communicate with people, could we be in danger of putting it into people's minds?

35:34and creating it as an option. I worry about that, but I do believe that what we do is good. With my own kids, it is really interesting. I've been doing it for like, yeah, nine years. So my little boy was 10 and my daughter was 12. And they don't have any, it's just like, they both walk around in calm merch. I pay for it, obviously. But, you know, they, And for their friends, it's interesting because I don't think that they feel that it is kind of, to use the modern parlance, ick. They don't see the ick. They see the positive. They see the stupid, daft, funny things that we do. They see the fact that Fontaine's DC did a piece of collab merch with us, which is pretty fucking cool.

36:30I'm a big Fontaine's fan. And, you know, to see those two logos in lockup, they think that's really cool. They think that they go into rough trade and calm is everywhere. They see our cultural impact. And in changing those forms of cultural touch point, that's comedy, football. My son and I are both extremely dedicated, okay, obsessive Arsenal fans. Okay, I don't follow it as much anymore, but we're on the same page. They are. And the fact that Declan Rice is our lead sport ambassador is just like beyond exciting and brilliant. And I reserve the right to be a 12-year-old boy every time that Declan Rice is in the room.

37:08But I think there with my kids, it's interesting to me that they've been impacted. Yes, it's been in the house for a very long time. but they see it through that lens of cultural impact which is exactly where i want us to get to that if you can have remesh ranganathan and um lewis capaldi and declan rice and fontaines dc talking about suicide prevention then those those doors are just flying open because it's what you do it's what you need to do it's a part of life a part of everyday humanity and that's how they perceive it they don't see mr suicide turning up and giving them a powerpoint presentation they see it actually acting itself out in real life the key point you mentioned there the ick yeah like I have fear around the podcast and subjects being icky to people.

38:09Yeah. You make real change by removing the ick around positive change. So many people have said, and there's so many posters that say, it's okay not to be okay. That's not. It's not okay to not be okay. Being happy is where we want people to be. and in in we can normalize pain or we can normalize seeking and providing help and and i think that a mistake that we make is to is to focus on the problem rather than accentuate and accelerate the solution so we'll bring it to a close we we have we have something we call the permission slip yes on the podcast which is if you could give permission to society or speech a species as you would say um to think feel act do something different what would that be either on behalf of simon the individual or on behalf of calm the organization i would definitely i would definitely i will say i'm on behalf of me 2025 has been uh repeatedly kicked in the head by a horse um and uh so i've i've been i've experienced a uh separation from my wife of like 25 years uh not an estrangement but a difficult time with my kids um and actually my mum got very ill and we've done medivacs and all those kind of things from other countries and stuff um and i have learned a thing for myself which is about agency not advertising agencies good to get the clarity don't start an agency um is that it's about really actively taking control over what you do.

39:58And I think that applies whether you're 21 and starting off in a career in these things that we do, or whether you're 70 years old, you know, every point in between. I don't think that I really acknowledged and sought agency and a degree of control over my own life. I think I allowed things to roll a lot. Fortunately, in my case, they rolled in directions which were fascinating and exciting and usually really great. But I don't think I really thought, no, fuck that shit, man, and just decided to do what I wanted to do because I knew it was best for me and for people around me. So I would want to give permission, but encourage everybody that might want to listen to, you know, a dickhead like me giving advice is you can exert control you can decide what you want to do you might not get 100 to where you want to get to but just that simple act of deciding to make a change can make you happy simon thank you for coming on behind the title um that was a a thoroughly enjoyable educational um and even if you don't think it really warm um discussion um And I think loads of people will get stuff from that.

41:19So thank you once again for coming on and look forward to people hearing this. Thank you very much.

41:31Simon Gunning: Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.