Alex Partridge | Extraordinary Life Stories

0:11Hello, my name is John Reynolds. Welcome to Extraordinary Life Stories. On this episode I'm talking with Alex Partridge. Alex is the trailblazing entrepreneur who founded Ladbible, one of the world's largest digital platforms known for its viral content and influence on youth culture. Ladbible became a groundbreaking media brand attracting millions of followers and reshaping how news and entertainment consume online. Alex launched the ADHD Chatter podcast where he shares his personal journey with ADHD and explores mental health topics with a focus on raising awareness and breaking stigmas. Is there anyone better placed to have perspective and knowledge in all things ADHD?

0:54I'm very much looking forward to talking with Alex, so let's get into it. Alex, thank you for joining me. John, thank you so much for the invite. I've been looking forward to this. Me too. Tell me, who is Alex Partridge? Well, if you Googled me, it would say I'm the founder of Unilad and Ladbible. More recently, I've founded a podcast called ADHD Chatter which I've been listening to. Good stuff, it's a year and a half ago I started it in my bedroom in Brighton and now we're in a very nice studio in London and 300 ,000 people a month listen to it and I was saying it's a testament I think to the demand for conversations on that topic.

1:35You formed a community which actually is a constant with Unidad and Lab Bible and then the ADHD and neurodiverse community but take me back to a young Alex, the sort of early who and what inspired your kind of life and career decisions? I think it probably all stems down to very early memories of feeling different. I've always had an internal conscious feeling of feeling like I don't belong actually. I remember when I was at school about six years old someone in the classroom said you could be one of the cool kids Alex if you weren't so weird. And it was comments like that really which plagued me throughout my whole school experience.

2:14When I was seven years old I had my first anxiety attack in a classroom, sat at the back of the classroom very happily daydreaming, staring out of the window and the teacher out of nowhere pointed at me and said Alex do you know the answer to that question? And in that moment I remember the whole classroom turned around and looked at me and in that moment of pressure my heart rate accelerated and I abruptly stood up and ran out of the classroom and found someone in the corridor and I said please help me I'm having a heart attack and of course by the time the paramedic turned up and I had calmed down and they reassured me that I wasn't having a heart attack I was having my first anxiety attack at seven years old so my whole school experience was very fearful, very anxious of school.

3:04And what drives the work that I do now is the awareness of the juxtaposition between how I was presenting at school, where I was very anxious and almost unable to contribute to how I was presenting at home when I was in an environment that I felt safe in and I was creating businesses, I was creating, being very entrepreneurial. And it's that contrast between how I was presenting in two very different environments that inspires me now to raise awareness of neurodiversity. Hence the community. That is so powerful. I had a very similar experience. In fact, incredibly, the teacher jumped two-footed onto my table and went, Reynolds, what's the answer?

3:45And I felt the whole... I was probably 10 years old. I was already struggling at school. I never had this conversation with anyone. I was daydreaming. I just felt so distracted, very misunderstood to then find myself I guess as an adult and find how I could work best how did you do that so from going from knowing you felt different having these experiences were you almost like holding your breath through school to then start these different entrepreneurial kind of adventures if you like that then allowed you to find Alex well I found Alex when I was at home. I went through my entire school experience with comments, school reports saying Alex just needs to try harder, Alex is very quiet, Alex has potential, but it never turned into anything because there was this constant layer of anxiety that was disabling me to thrive.

4:38Whereas when I was at home, the same year I had that anxiety attack, I started my first business. I went through all my parents' board games in the house and found the addresses of all the companies that manufactured them. And I spent the summer creating this board game. I made all the pieces, designed the board, wrote all the instructions, absolutely loved it. Sent it off to all of these companies. I didn't hear anything at first, but then two or three weeks later I had a letter and it was from one of them and they said, Alex, and I think they could tell I was seven because my handwriting was really bad, but they said, Alex, unfortunately we're not looking for any new designs at present but always lean into this entrepreneurial spirit.

5:22What a great letter to get back. Yeah I've still got it, I've still got it and it was that contradiction, juxtaposition between how I was presenting, that paralysis mentally when I was at school compared to this creativity and problem-solving and enterprising nature that I was experiencing at home and really that's why I'm so passionate about raising awareness particularly on neurodiversity and and now not only in the school system but also in in the workplace. Yes and actually we're talking off camera and relating it to a chat that I had with Phil Anderson ADHD 360 founder and the stats that are coming out of the prison system which I just mentioned to you I heard they were 25 % and you were suggesting if everyone was able to be tested it could be more like 80 something percent and the fact that these people probably don't even know what they've got so therefore haven't got a coping mechanism or medication to deal with it and it's hereditary so whether it's the school it's just the sort of curriculum that still teaches us how to use a bunsen burner which we never use in life whether it's the workplace that's pretty archaic in a number of ways that it's dealing with neurodiverse people and then the prison system is overwhelmed and underfunded.

6:37What needs to change? I imagine you're at the heart of this. Yeah, you can see how undiagnosed, unrecognised ADHD can lead to criminality when you haven't got that awareness of your impulsivity mixed with the emotional dysregulation that is so common with ADHD, that inability sometimes to put that breaker between an event, a stimulus, and a reaction. You can see how in some situations that can lead to recklessness and doing things that go against the law. The official statistics, as you said, is 25%, but I've spoken to people at very high level in the justice system who would put it closer to 85%.

7:19And there is an argument, controversial one, because I know the waiting lists are very long outside of the prison system, but to screen prisoners on entry. And if you picked it up at source or at that point, then their journey of awareness, medication, treatment could start. And once you become medicated, treated for ADHD, the chances, the likelihood of re-offending once they leave the prison system significantly drops. I mean, you say there's an argument, controversial, but these people potentially are not able to manage their emotions, unable to be aware of why, and they're actually committing a crime that puts them in a system that we as taxpayers are paying for and you'd want them to have help, right?

8:01Because especially if they're going to potentially have children from a hereditary point of view, that then we know how many people are influenced by parents and people around them. It's almost self-predicting that these people potentially will be offending and going into the prison system. It's a good reason itself to be prioritising that. Do you agree? Yeah, I do. Yeah. I mean, I'm for testing screening prisoners on entry. The argument against it, of course, is that in some areas you have to wait eight years. If you're law-abiding citizen, you have to wait eight years for a diagnosis. So then why should a criminal get a Q-jump?

8:42So that's the other side of the argument. And I can kind of see both. But someone's not offending then they're not going to take up another prison system, they're not going to be clogging up the the judicial system. So I can see both. The answer I think is very nuanced and probably you know a lot more to discuss in a... Of course, I totally get it's a bigger picture conversation but one of the things that struck me and it'll be a constant throughout this conversation is that there's probably no one I could talk to that's better placed to have had your own lived experience plus those of others with the ADHD Chatter podcast and 100 guests you've spoken to all sharing their own lived experiences you know and I've sort of asked a question already about what needs to change in those eight-year waiting lists this is this is huge there are so many people that are potentially aware they're affected or are unaware and that you know it should be more mainstream that these people can have access to that why is there such a bottleneck and waiting lists why is it not more mainstream for people to find out and get tested I think the short answer is that there's been a spike of awareness which is brilliant particularly amongst women and girls recently it's been made aware that women and girls can have ADHD you know 15-20 years ago it wasn't even thought of the fact that women and girls could have ADHD it was purely a male thing.

10:08It's that sharp incline in awareness, plus more people talking about it has put an incredible strain on an underfunded NHS, which has caused this bottleneck in the particular department of screening for neurodiversity. I think there's a lot people can do in that interim between becoming self-aware and seeking a diagnosis. I don't think you necessarily need to have a psychiatrist give you that stamp of a diagnosis before you can start going a little bit easier on yourself and giving yourself a bit of an easier time. You get the awareness piece and you realise that if you google what is ADHD it will say struggle with impulsivity, struggle with forgetfulness, struggle with disorganisation and it can be those things but I think with awareness and support, it can also be creativity and pattern recognition and problem solving and being great in a crisis and being able to derive patterns where other people see chaos.

11:12Being an entrepreneur, we see people with ADHD are four times more likely to start their own business. But also on the other side, it's not just a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by traits of impulsivity and forgetfulness. That's what a doctor would tell you. But I think if you spoke to people who have lived with it, it's a lifetime of being told that you're too sensitive and that you're too much and that you're too moody. And a lifetime of not understanding why you're so sensitive to criticism. A lifetime of not understanding why you have to change who you are and put on a mask in different social situations in order to be more palatable for whoever you're standing in front of at that time.

11:55Conforming. This comes back to the education curriculum doesn't it being archaic you mentioned a couple of times there the lifetime it shouldn't be a lifetime and that might be it might feel like a lifetime to get to 18 19 20 let alone some people that are finding out very much through adulthood what education piece do you think needs to come into schools that would have helped you not feel different and have far too long feeling like you you know, you weren't conforming to the system? Yeah, well, firstly, I think that schools need more budget to play with. That's a whole other conversation. I think there's a real problem there with governmental budgeting and not giving schools the resources to tackle this problem.

12:38But ultimately, awareness is key. It's just teachers and parents need to be aware of what neurodiversity is, the different forms of it, how it can manifest. I would always encourage teachers to encourage pupils and parents to work on their self-awareness as early as possible. I think if I was encouraged to work on my self-awareness at a younger age, I would have been more aware of the contrast between how I was behaving at school and how I was behaving at home. And with that awareness, I could have then flagged it to my parents, my parents could have had a dialogue with the school, and that could have been picked up a lot sooner.

13:15And then it could have been a case of, okay, well, firstly, don't put someone like that, don't put anyone on the spot unless they volunteer themselves to answer a question. How can we incorporate movement into a class? Can we incorporate different ways of learning? Perhaps somebody is fidgeting because they need to fidget in order to pay attention. Don't tell students off for fidgeting. It's that kind of stop fidgeting mentality, which can be so damaging because I and many people I've spoken to on the podcast, we have to channel that hyperactivity that is there somewhere. And that could be tapping the foot or it could be playing with a fidget toy.

13:56And if it doesn't channel out through some device or some mechanism, then it can end up in the mind, that hyperactivity. And that's what causes that internal chaos. It's like seven highly caffeinated squirrels barrelling around up there, each one with a different thought, pulling you in a different direction. and that's what causes the anxiety. That's what caused that panic attack when I was six years old. Yeah, it's clearly so needed. And I hope if there's anyone listening and watching that we can develop this into something that parachutes into schools. We're in the JAQ studio, J-A-A-Q. Just ask a question.

14:33So much work being done there to raise awareness and break the stigma with mental health. You've come through your own journey where it was probably man up and stop moaning and stop being difficult and stop fidgeting to it now being really embraced. There is a danger that certain people are now almost using ADHD, neurodiverse diagnoses, to then almost become, I don't want to say famous, but it's almost like they make that their identity. Are you seeing any of that as damaging what's the real kind of need to help people because some people are going a long way towards it and people I know Tanya Bardsley who has had life-threatening you know experiences with undiagnosed ADHD to now be able to live a life she's thriving on and so on she was saying it does feel like loads of people are coming through just wanting to talk about that now and so on and it's diluting you could argue that raising the awareness is what's needed.

15:35But is there a danger of certain people that are almost sort of lowering that bar? It's like that, you know, needs to be sort of channeled in the right way. I hope I've made my point. But it's just that whole like certain people seem to be using it for their own personal gain. Yeah, I think more people talking about it is always better. I think we have to be very careful with the messaging and the language that we use. What I don't think is helpful is when somebody who has achieved something great with living with ADHD comes out and labels it a superpower. I would always push back on the superpower narrative.

16:08Yes, ADHD can enable, and I think it has enabled me to do great things in business. I've sold two big companies, but on the flip side, before I had that awareness piece, I was in hospital numerous times. on the worst case nurses were telling my parents that if I had had one more drink that day I would have died through alcohol poisoning I have always as I got older medicated that anxiety that I was explaining when I was a kid through very unhealthy ways and is that to escape was that an element of not appreciating and enjoying life and just actually trying to find your own way to find and stimulation elsewhere?

16:49It was to go the other way. The ADHD stimulated me enough in the day to run around achieving what I thought was great things. It was in the evening when I was trying to unwind and quiet those highly caffeinated squirrels I mentioned earlier. And that dopamine hit that the alcohol gave me created this allergy in my mind, this compulsion that rendered me unable to stop drinking. We see alcoholism within the ADHD community is four times higher than the neurotypical community and it's that needing to unwind at the end of the day. I now exercise a lot, I now take a hot bath, I now eat carbs in the evening.

17:30I recognise that there's very unhealthy ways to sort of quiet the... The thing that makes ADHD great is also the bit you need to be very careful of when you're not channeling it in a positive, constructive way. And that's why I'd always push back on the superpower narrative because a lot of the time someone will come out and say it's superpower, but they've got a tremendous position of privilege that they're coming from or they've got this support network around them. They've got help. They've got assistance. They've got a life that's been set up that has the negatives taken care of for them. and I think the danger is somebody who's just starting their journey could look at that and go okay I don't relate to the to the superpower element not only do I have ADHD I've got the really bad version of it and that can then compound into that the low self-esteem and the comorbidities that come with ADHD anyway so that's why I would think it's great that more people are talking about it but it needs to be done responsibly and with a narrative that is balanced that does address the positives because there are many like I discussed earlier but they only come once you learn how to manage the the struggles.

18:43Because you mentioned the superpower so many things and some of the people around me often use that term it's often a hyper focus is what that's really describing but of course you can put your hyper focus into positives benefits to yourself and other people around you and the negatives. Channeling that into the positives you know you you have been a very successful entrepreneur and continue to be. In terms of how you put your energies into that and the inspirations behind it, which ultimately has formed a community, tell me the journey that led into Lab Bible, because I want to then open up the whole community conversation.

19:19So Lab Bible started when I was at university. There were countless businesses that I started and essentially abandoned prior to Ladbible. When I was in my first year of university I impulsively spent half my student loan on a six-foot giant freezer and filled it with Tesco frozen pizzas and set up a Facebook page called Quick Pizza. If you wanted a pizza in the middle of the night you would message my page, I would throw one in the oven and I had four people cycling around Oxford at silly o 'clock in the morning delivering pizzas. but then the university shut me down because I didn't have a food safety hygiene certificate.

19:57The entrepreneurial side of things is there, it's brilliant, I love that. It's that learning. Yeah, my second year of university, that's when really Facebook exploded. And there isn't some great inspiration behind why I started Ladbible. I remember being on Facebook that day, there were a couple of other pages, one called Top Lad, True Lad, and I thought I'd start something similar because that looked quite fun. And that's when I just became hooked on Facebook and growing these pages. I remember just hyper-focusing on what was good content, what was bad content, what was working, why was it working.

20:30I can now look back through that lens of pattern recognition and see that as a bit of a power that enabled me in that moment. And I just stopped going to lectures. My housemates and my family were calling me concerned for my well-being because I I just was not leaving my room. I was so obsessed with growing these pages. Paper focus again, right? Well, now I would look back and call it that, yeah. At the time, I was just in this cloud nine, zoned in. I'd never experienced anything like it. Social media gave me something that I'd never experienced before. I think I can look back now and see its addictive nature and how it's designed to maintain your attention.

21:10I think any entrepreneur who's living with ADHD and wants to start a business, it's the number one advice is to find a landscape that you can build it on that is ever-changing. All of the businesses I had started prior to that, and there were about 15, we won't go into all of them, but I abandoned and quit all of them because they're very static. Social media by its very nature is ever-changing. It's evolving all the time, right? AI now and so on, yeah. And because of that, it maintained my attention. And the same with the podcast now. Yes, it's a business as a podcast with 300 ,000 people listening every month in the studio but really it's a brick wall made up of bricks and each brick is an episode, each episode is a guest, a new person to hyper fixate on and to hyper focus on.

21:55The same with LabBible and the social media businesses, each platform was a different brick, each post was a different brick and that's the key if you are an entrepreneur with ADHD is to find a way to gamify the structure and to break up and to separate it into bricks. Because if you go all or nothing at the beginning and you're suddenly looking at this big wall in front of you and you've built it because we are, we can do amazing things in short amounts of time, but if you don't understand all of the bricks you'll look at this wall and you'll be so overwhelmed that you'll quit and you'll abandon it.

22:26I love that and actually that community side of things and going straight to ADHD Chatter podcast. Each guest brings in a gift, sort of an item each time. You're never going to know what that is. So it keeps you stimulated. Each guest is a whole new conversation that you learn from and you share to a community that are all aligned from a neurodiverse. And probably, dare I say, plenty of people that are around people that are neurodiverse that want to and need to learn. So the social media side of things, it does get a bad rap, right? You know, and there's the doom scrolling, there's the addictive side of it but it's how you use it.

23:02So you're an entrepreneur that has harnessed that for good if you like, what advice would you give to someone that's trying to be an entrepreneur, harness that whole ever evolution of social media and make a business out of it? I think the business that you ultimately do whether it's on social media or not has to align with your core intrinsic self, particularly true with the ADHD community. It's so easy for us to think of an idea, get super excited about it at midnight, jump out of bed, buy the domain, and within two weeks we're bored of it, and that domain enters the graveyard of domains, because it hasn't aligned with what we're intrinsically interested in.

23:46I think with the ADHD community when you find what you are intrinsically interested in then we can become world-class world-beating at that thing. I think you have to maintain that level of self-awareness and those exercises which I just advocate for so much is as often as you can I try and do it daily I write down what happened today that that made me happy what happened today that made me sad what did I do today that I genuinely enjoyed what did I do today that I struggled with as often as you can, whether it's daily or weekly or monthly. And if you do this consistently, I genuinely believe you can build up an arsenal of self-awareness that will give you an edge in any area of life, particularly important if you are an entrepreneur.

24:31Because businesses, once you're over that initial honeymoon period, which is great fun at the beginning, designing the logo, buying the domain, but it will get really, really hard. Got to be passionate. And if the business isn't aligned with your true motivations at that stage, then you'll quit. And what about, so you mentioned setting up Lab Bible, absolutely fixated on the computer, probably not eating well sleeping well, all the things that at what point did you pull that balance back and I was interested to hear the sort of coping mechanisms you do now, the hot baths and the things that work for you, but you've got to find that.

25:07How did you go from someone that could have made yourself very ill but ultimately very successful at the same time to then get a balance? again a consequence of the self-awareness exercises is really becoming aware of what you're good at and what you're not good at and it's so important to have that awareness and to delegate the stuff that you're not good at we're all good at stuff we're all not good at stuff and it's easy particularly I find with the ADHD community is to try and do everything yourself there's this fear of delegation fear of losing control you have to let go of that and delegated.

25:42If I hadn't done that with social media early on, if I hadn't done that with the podcast, now 100 % I would have become overwhelmed and quit. The second thing is, as a consequence of not doing that, is becoming aware of what your early signs of burnout are. All of us will experience burnout and we have to know when that's approaching and when to take the foot off the gas and to take a break we've all got early indicators of when that might be approaching mine is certainly an increase in irritability and my partner will bring me up on that my diet I think is quite good but if I start ordering takeaway food that's for me an early sign my exercise routine gets stops if I if I start taking my dog on shorter walks little things that are very nuanced and bespoke to the individual person who's listening I transfer data from a computer to a camera most days and we all know how you have to right click and eject the floppy disk USB stick properly if I start yanking it out of the computer I know that that's a sign that I'm probably need to take a break these are all shortcuts aren't they're all little things that show irritation and just getting frustrated and so that's early signs for you of burnout yeah you take action and they will be different for everyone everyone listening their early signs will be very unique to them and it's really becoming aware of what those are and when you start noticing them then take that break even if it's a day off or you lie on the sofa for a few hours.

27:10Think about are you really prioritising your sleep? Being aware of the early signs of burnout has been a saviour for the longevity of the companies. Yeah. You're sitting here now an exited entrepreneur from a Ladbible point of view. There's a number of people that are sort of churning away now aspiring to be successful and be an entrepreneur and they might be either thinking about it in those early stages, trying and failing, carrying on starting or building a business right now. My experience and a number of people I've spoken to over the years that have exited have really struggled with that loss of identity.

27:48They created that business from nothing, put your sort of blood and sweat into it. And also financially. So ultimately there's a big financial reward from selling a business and then some people think that's going to make them incredibly happy in life's you know going to be incredible but actually it can be quite disappointing it can be quite a depressive period for some people I know what was your journey as an exited entrepreneur yeah very similar it's that I'm not sure what it's exactly called but it's this the psychology theory of you sort of get your Everest summit moment or your gold medal at the Olympics moment and and actually it's it's that sort of decrease in dopamine and you can fall into a bit of a depression.

28:28I certainly experienced that when I sold Unilad and LabBible. That's when I had my major problems with alcohol, which I did not see coming. It completely blindsided me. That's when you should have been happiest, right? That's aspiration, or you've made a load of money, you've achieved... Well, that goes back to that pushback on the superpower narrative, because when I was building Unilad and LabBible, I did have tremendous powers, I believe, I was able to channel that in and it got to that level where I was able to sell it. The day I sold it, the following day I was in hospital with a nurse telling my parents that he nearly died.

29:05It was that contrast between when I didn't have anywhere to channel that I desperately needed something and I had no experience. I barely drunk whilst I was channeling it in the business. When I didn't have that location, that source to put it into, I drove to a supermarket and bought a bottle of vodka. Like that's the madness. The lack of purpose potentially because your purpose changes through life. Your purpose until the day you sold was you always had what you were doing with Lab Bible. Strikes me with ADHD Chatter podcast that there's no destination. There's always going to be someone interesting for you to talk to.

29:42You are raising awareness. You are always being stimulated from your own learnings from these people. You're forming a tribe, forming a community. Would you agree with that? Because I'm interested to know if someone wanted to buy the podcast, it feels to me like, well, I want to do this, maybe not forever, but I want to keep doing this. I'm enjoying it. Yeah, I love it. And it's a question I get asked a lot is, what's your plans with the podcast? And I genuinely say the same thing. I don't have a plan. I've never made a business plan. I started it a year and a half ago in my bedroom. Again, I just moved from brick to brick to brick to brick.