TJ Power

0:13TJ, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. I feel like I'm going to learn a lot talking to you today. Let's hope so. Tell me, who is TJ Power? I'm a neuroscientist running a research lab that studies our brain chemicals, things like dopamine and oxytocin, these chemicals that have got quite famous. And I'm a young man with a fiancé. Congratulations. That's recent, right? That is recent. And now a dad-to-be in five months' time. So I've got my business and personal life. It's evolving. Just listening to you saying neuroscientist and a young man, if I was going to be meeting a neuroscientist, I almost imagine meeting like the kind of crazy haired professor.

0:52I will be that one day. Yeah. And there's so much you've already done. So I want to kind of go back to this early life, why you became a neuroscientist and then piece together what you're doing now. Yeah, I grew up as someone with really severe OCD as a pretty young kid. From a very young age, five or six years old, I started showing like real OCD. And my mum was great with it. She had a really good understanding of what OCD was. And I never actually discovered I had OCD till I was in my teenage years. But she got me kind of like brain training that I thought of it as. And quickly became interested in how my brain was working and things like that.

1:29I played a lot of golf as a young kid. My whole dream was to get a green jacket, which I sadly have failed. But that was my initial goal. And that world exposed me very young to psychologists and psychology in general. So I became very interested in my brain, psychology. then at college started going deeper into studying it myself then into university and after navigating lots of challenges in my own mind my family going through various difficulties I felt like this urge to pursue that lane. So there was a personal journey and a sort of personal experiences if you like that led into ultimately the sort of the business decisions if you like that you made.

2:03Yeah I specifically got very fascinated with dopamine itself because I just have a very addictive personality and from like 12 13 years old when I discovered cigarettes and pornography and alcohol like all of that stuff was very very exciting to my brain and then spent a decade not knowing that was bad for you necessarily and just like deep in that world and then at the age of about 23 started thinking oh I want like to build a career and a business and a research lab and realize that my current lifestyle was not gonna enable that to be a reality and then went on a big journey of how do you actually get out of being addicted to dopamine in the modern world how do you get it because that i mean fair play to you you know there are people consumed by that and people don't get out of that you know that is that's a difficult well to get out of once you've gone in right especially with an addictive tendency yes very hard it's been the last five years that's basically all i've been trying to figure out both from a research perspective and deeply observing my own personal behavior and i think nowadays it'd be very unlikely to ever meet a single human that isn't addicted to dopamine in some way.

3:07It could be gambling, it could be sugar, it could be booze, it could be phones, whatever it might be. And for me, it took like hitting a certain low point where I'd been to a festival and partied really, really hard and I'd come, I'd had to leave it early. I had a few days where I thought, wow, like I'm really not treating myself particularly well. And I had some honest thoughts around that. But ultimately, the only way out was I really hated the choir. I hated boredom, hated any time like away from my phone for prolonged periods of time. I'd started like a meditation mindfulness course and thought, oh, that'll be easy at uni.

3:40And it was hell to sit in silence. And I set myself this challenge. This is around sort of COVID time to see if I could go for like walks for a few hours without a phone. And the idea of hours on end in my head was just like the scariest thing ever. There's like stats, isn't there, where people are more scared of that than sort of actually dying. yeah people in in research if they're given sort of 15 to 20 minutes in silence and there's an opportunity to be able to click an electric shock and electrocute themselves will actually choose to electrocute themselves about 67 percent of people will electrocute themselves because you might know the stats that's that's ridiculous yeah we we don't like quiet and there's a big reason we don't like the quietness because in the quiet the truth gets this opportunity to be told to us and often we don't want to hear it and i spent my time out there with these walks being tough at first and then ultimately like really important observations about my lifestyle and my future and my relationships my work came through to me and that began to kind of set the foundation for change it's fascinating there's so many people potentially watching and listening to this that they're either stuck in that world or trying to get out of it so now i want to ask you that what did you do from a personal sort of coping mechanism and i guess finding purpose and then what are you actually doing to help other people with that yeah i knew that my brain would always want dopamine as all human brains do some are just like slightly more inclined if you have more of like an adhd super excitable brain you're just slightly more drawn towards dopamine so it meant that i had to find another source for dopamine and that's why often like people that are addicts also are quite good at getting good at things because they might just get really really into it channeling it right so you were channeling it into all the wrong things that were bad for you So you recognize you need to switch that to something that's more constructive and positive.

5:24Yeah. And the only reason I sit here in this position now with my work is because I've channeled addiction into that lane, effectively. And now I'm in the process of managing that addiction, to be honest, and how I actually switch off. Like a workaholic scenario, yeah. Classic entrepreneur. Yeah. That's my latest battle scenario. You look good for it, though. Thanks. Well, I'm making progress. It's a gradual journey. and the relationship with my phone has become so important to get right because I think the reason we're so addicted to our work is just because it's in our pocket all the time I think it'd be very different if we like went to an office and came home and chilled out with our partner or kids for a while and it's a really good point yeah gradually channeling that deep pull I had for unhealthy dopamine into healthy dopamine was ultimately what kind of set the change so again if you are you you've you've gone to a level where and we'll come to it you've sort of done it as a business but if someone is really consuming negative information spending too long and they know it you've got to we both agree that you've got to know you want to come out of it so what can they do even just understanding and building awareness that you want to come out of it step one is just to go on the walk for an hour without your phone and discover just how addicted you actually are to it because on that walk you'll be like whoa i need that phone and if from a safety point of view, you need a phone on you.

6:41Then you can put one in a bag and have it off, but you can't have it in your pocket because you're just 100 % checking. Then you'll be aware, okay, there's something to do here. The process of then breaking the addiction to the device is very much about where it charges at nighttime and what the decisions are that you make when you wake up, because evolutionarily, our brain is programmed to just look for dopamine from the moment we wake. We wake up and it's like, where's my source of dopamine going to be today? And for our ancestors for 300 ,000 years. It was restart the fire, rebuild the shelter, hunt, forage, whatever it might be.

7:09And their brain would then acquire dopamine from doing something that's effortful and then think, okay, cool, pursue this path throughout the rest of my day. When we wake, as soon as we go into our Gmail and our Twitter and our Instagram and our WhatsApp, our brain is then primed to find dopamine within the phone throughout the day. And you'll notice yourself when you then sit down for your coffee and your work and your lunch and every single moment, you're having this like immediate urge to go towards the phone. Whereas if you learn to beat the addiction first thing in the morning for a period of time you then kind of set a new relationship with a device where it's like you're taking back control it's great advice i love that and there's there's clearly a lot of lived experience and a lot of discipline and then consistency and habit forming that you've gone through yeah you've taken it another level and this is the bit i find really interesting so that entrepreneurial side of you so you're you're looking after yourself at that point and going through that journey when did you start to then bring that into a business idea?

8:00Yeah, I think maybe about five years ago, the first thing I did was I went through this transformational kind of journey over about 90 days from like massive addict to like pretty healthy and beginning to be able to like get myself to actually do some work. And I thought like, oh, this would be so useful for lots of my friends because they were all just like me. Like everyone was struggling with a lot of this stuff that I was friends with anyway. And I set up a WhatsApp group where it was like this 30 day challenge and I just not like charging my friends but just told them i just joined this whatsapp group and i'll give you a challenge each day to see if it can like help you guys get ready because they're all trying to get jobs in london at the time and stuff like that and that i found quite fun i was like that's quite purposeful like helping some of my mates out some of my like family and cousins joined it because they were struggling with various different things and i love doing it it seemed to work it seemed to benefit them there's a dopamine hit there from helping people i don't mean to interrupt your flow but i love that yeah you've switched something that was so destructive to you and probably to the family around you knowing you are not living the best life to then actually getting a fulfillment and donate it from helping friends and family and interestingly when you move towards like not just doing something purely for achievement but actually to contribute you actually add the oxytocin chemical into the equation this feeling of love as well which is a really important emotion especially if you're an addict because you don't actually necessarily get that nice loving emotion as much you're all about pleasure if you're addicted to things.

9:22And I did that for a while. I also, at that period of time, we have this family charity that supports young women navigating cancer. One of my beautiful cousins called Vicky passed away when she was about 27, which was actually a very similar time. I got very addicted to alcohol and stuff like that. And we set up this family charity for her. And then there were all these women at that time. I had this kind of idea forming that could support mental health in general. And I I built my first ever kind of program to support these women that were navigating that situation in their lives. And obviously that's a specific niche situation of loss and pain and fear.

9:56But I had a lot of behavioral intervention stuff that could just support their mood and their relationships and their motivation to do things. And I built this kind of six week program for them at a similar time doing that WhatsApp challenge. Delivered that to them on Zoom and I was like, oh, cool. These ideas seem to resonate. And then at that point, I finally got the courage to post some videos on social media and some companies started contacting. and I had this kind of intervention that I could take them through. And then it's kind of just like very rapidly growing from that nice natural beginning.

10:24I played to you. So there's a real entrepreneurial flair there where you used your education to build programs. And how much time did you spend bringing an external resource and helping? Did you teach yourself that? So you've got the knowledge, but then you've got to put that into a course that people are prepared to pay for and ultimately benefit from. Did you do all that on your own? yeah i really just did it all experientially based on assuming that people might be similar to me and might be having similar challenges and as i started delivering those programs if that hadn't been the case i would have known because it would have been like well this isn't important for us but i started delivering them and so many of these things i was speaking into of food and exercise and phone addiction and alcohol people were like wow yeah like i also am struggling with all this stuff as well and almost like real-time research right yeah and it still continues to be that to this day.

11:12I was just thinking that because the business is Dose Labs, right? Yeah. I want to understand sort of what we're building into the why of how you created that. Yeah. And I want to sort of know who really is sort of wanting to work with you, if you like, and how they're benefiting. Yeah. So I began that process. At that point, I was very fortunate that a director at Coca-Cola contacted me and said, like, I've got quite a young team. You look young. Do you know how to like help them with their addictions to their phones and their productivity and their focus and their mental health because she was struggling with lots of them navigating difficulties with their mental health and I said yeah and at that point I didn't have like a really substantial program but I thought I can go to work and I can work fast and hard I'm going to say yes yeah 100 % I was going to say yes and I just built out what I thought was the best thing I could create at the time I had these six modules in around these sort of topics around these different brain chemicals and delivered it.

12:06They were super happy with it. Still to this day, we have staff messaged that I'm still doing those little challenges. And that was years and years ago that we've begun this first program. And then I've been through like unlimited refinement of how that protocol works to make it very specific 30 day challenges that employees can complete, that will connect them with one another, that will rapidly create change in their habits and their behavior and their performance in work and their wellbeing. And it's just been like a gradual iterating process that also includes the new challenges I continue to face in my mind like as I get now addicted to AI for example that wasn't in my program five years ago but I'm almost finding AI has like an addictive tendency and a reliance that you can create on it and a issue it can create around our capacity to put in effort when we're doing tasks it can do things I was going to ask you that so it's a gradually evolving process to help us continue to manage whatever comes our way I love that and I love the personal connection of you to being able to always have this empathy.

13:00You're always looking at that. How can I help myself with this? And actually realize and recognize that if I'm struggling with this, countless other people probably are. And I love the fact that that refinement, probably the OCD that was probably driving you mad when you were younger. Actually, look how well you're using that now. Yeah, like you saw those slides just now. And those are OCD slides. Like they're built out of a gentle obsessiveness. I'm very pretty obsessive. And on that, and I'm sort of almost fast forward until then come back, but it feels like I can see there's a real excitement in your eyes about the journey you're on.

13:35Yeah. And I feel like I'm meeting you at a really interesting time where there's almost like a bit of that that could happen. You're going to sort of grow into all sorts of big growth, if you like, coming up. But if you've got a destination, is there somewhere you want to take this? Is there clients you want to work with? or is there, is it just, you're really just trying to grow it and see where it goes? Yeah, it's a good question. I really think we're in a very unique time as humanity right now, because we've had humans like Homo sapiens for 300 ,000 years, pre-hominan ancestors for like 2 million years, but they all lived as purely human biological species.

14:14And we're in the one century that will probably ever happen where we merge with a machine. And I think it's a very unique time that we've all been given an opportunity to be alive and gradually over the five years of delivering dose which covers quite a range of different topics it's become very clear that managing technology appears to be the hardest thing for humans to do. The social media addiction, the work addiction, the obsession with money, finance, dating apps. It seems that technology is rooted in so much of people's pain when we go deep into the data and tech is only going to go faster and harder.

14:47AI is going to come at us super quickly. Even just this morning for the first time, I got an agent on ChatGBT to build me a workshop on a software outside of ChatGBT to see how it would do it. And it was phenomenal watching it control my computer. I thought, wow, we're entering a really different era. We've got augmented reality glasses. The companies are trying to nail that. And then we'll enter the world of Neuralink in a decade or so. There are like nine participants now have Neuralink in their brain. And I really want to build the absolute best protocol in the world of how humanity manages the onboarding of technology and the merge with machine effectively.

15:19What a mission. There's an irony that if I turn around to you and said, I want to access those labs now, I've got to go on a computer or a phone. A deep irony. Where do you sit with that? I just don't see it as all bad technology. I think it's amazing. My whole life is enabled because of my phone, laptop and social media. So it's how we use it, right? I guess it's the knife that you're cutting the bread on the table it's for good use if you're about to stab someone that's clearly so it's how you use it right for sure and it's yeah similar to water like we need water pretty bad but it can also drown us so it's like a similar situation and as a content creator like I've had to be really disciplined with social media because it's very addictive the ego-led side of social media with followers and likes and all that kind of stuff and views and I've had to build really good parameters whereby now social media is like the most immense tool in my life but it's not consuming me and it's not just led to my business life.

16:13I also found my partner who's from Australia on Instagram. We met via Instagram DMs. Proper positive thoughts for good, right? I'm pretty grateful to social media. At least that's the social media, social part living to its name, right? Yeah. And... Well, we actually, you don't know this, but I was sent your Instagram handle by two people over the last few weeks saying, do you know, TJ, you should film with TJ. So that actually proves content again. And then I'm looking at your content and thinking, this guy looks really cool. This is someone I want to talk with. Nice. And yeah, that's the situation we're in.

16:46We just got to figure out the best way to manage it. And there is a way in which we can manage it. As Dose Lab evolves, I'm very, very passionate about the kids side of things. I think currently humanity is making some really challenging mistakes about how early kids are seeing short-form content and stuff on phones. it's totally uncensored as well right you know yeah it's uncensored the adults themselves which you know not a lot of not a lot of them are are putting in um barriers or sensors kids can access everything they can access everything so you'll see a lot of stuff you shouldn't too young you'll be very worried about the survival of the planet because of all the like intense news stuff the pornography stuff even with all of that even if it was just david attenborough and it was a short form feed of David Attenborough, which is great content.

17:33If it's a short form feed, it's going to burn their dopamine to pieces and break the key resource that's going to enable them to put an effort in their life. And good mental health and a good life comes from effort. And if you break a kid's molecule that gives them the capacity to put an effort, we're going to face a world where not just mental health wise, we're struggling, but economically, we're going to be really struggling because there's going to be an entire generation that struggle to actually contribute to companies. So well articulated. It's also quite scary. Scary, but there is a solution.

17:58yes so for anyone that because we've had a chat outside of here break down what dose labs is and the initials specifically yeah so dose is this acronym for dopamine oxytocin serotonin and endorphins very conveniently it happens to spell dose those four chemicals i was on a walk like four years ago and i was teaching a lot at university about dopamine and oxytocin serotonin but not endorphins at the time i'd studied it but it just wasn't deep in the lecture series i was delivering and uh then i was like oh endorphins oh it spells dose on this walk and i thought oh that's cool but i didn't even get that excited because i just assumed someone else is going to have nailed a book about those and came home there was nothing which is just like was a crazy must be a cool moment yeah that's my motivation went high then and then i basically like an animal trademark trademarks everything the book and uh each of these chemicals have a very specific function for in for us in our lives they're kind of seen on social media as like just like happy hormones but they have much more to give than that.

18:55Dopamine is this motivation chemical, enables us to do hard things. Oxytocin connects us to people, enables us to experience love which is arguably the thing we need most in the world and we're lacking oxytocin massively. Serotonin is all about our mood and our energy levels and keeping us kind of like steady and stable in our mind and then endorphins de-stress us and take away our kind of like anger and frustration which is an emotion that's very common in the modern world and as we go through a process with Dose Lab, we just get employees or students in schools or parents to deeply understand how their brain chemistry actually operates and then begin completing challenges based on what we call the dose actions that begin to rebalance these chemicals, which is pretty fun.

19:33It sounds really interesting. Is there a more important one of the four? So I guess what I'm saying is if whatever reason someone was lacking one or wasn't in any way embracing one, is that damaging or do we need them in a balance yeah effectively for our ancestors they would have all lived in equal balance all the time because they would have constantly been doing i always refer to our ancestors just for context because for 99.9 percent of human history our brain was built for a very specific lifestyle and then we just suddenly changed it to indoor sedentary tech-based living and our brain chemicals are still like i just want to be out hunting and like chilling out in nature their brain chemistry still wants the work hence the constant work yeah hence the constant work and And so their brain chemicals were imbalanced.

20:16They were doing hard stuff for dopamine, deeply connected with their group to survive for oxytocin. They lived in nature for serotonin. And physically, they were so much more active for the endorphins. They just lived in harmony with their brain chemistry. And that's why when people meet people from the Hudson, for example, the tribe in Central Africa that still operates today, and they try and describe mental health to them, like anxiety, depression, stress, burnout, inattention, they literally can't comprehend it. They're just so happy and they're so steady. They've gone so far away from that.

20:43it because we're really misaligned to what nature wants us to be doing. Again, that being said, there is a way to live in harmony with nature in this modern world. You just got to have a good understanding. And in the modern world, in answer to your question, dopamine is the one that we're really screwing up because we figured out how to hijack it. We don't actually like hijack the other three chemicals, but with dopamine, we artificially spike it with sugar and caffeine and alcohol and phones, social media, pornography. Because we're artificially spiking it, it's very similar to if you got into a manual car, left it in neutral and just like rev the engine really hard, you'd like burn the engine out and the engine would eventually stop working.

21:21Every time we're kind of getting hits of dopamine, rapid hits from sugar and alcohol and social media and so on, we're burning the engine hard. We're exhausting the engine. So the engine's going like that. And then those moments where you're sitting there working, you're like, I know I need to do something productive. I can't really be bothered and every time a task gets a little bit difficult you're like oh I'll just click on email I'll just click on LinkedIn I'll just do something else I'll open TikTok it's because this engine is so tired and we need to try and get the engine to work more efficiently again that makes so much sense I can relate to that 100 it goes back to I was going to ask you what you've already said I was going to say well how do we get out of that but that is put the phone down let's go for the walk that's train yourself off it small steps and just and be present I guess with it because I mean the bit that scares me is I'm 47 I've got I can remember life before order this so i can kind of have that sort of i didn't always do this but the kids coming through that have had a device in their hand and that's all they know yeah that's untraining that is going to be tricky yeah it's very hard to untrain like if you try and untrain yourself from alcoholism for example it's pretty difficult to get out of alcoholism and that's exactly what's happening with the phones and if not way more because it's such it's much more frequent engagement with the device than we ever have with another dopamine source before like we didn't kind of like put powdered sugar into our brain like 300 times a day but we do open our phone like 300 times a day so it's like a much more frequent dopamine hit the device and when we're in schools training all these kids there are some kids that are mentally really healthy and they're doing all right and that's because they have a life that does require lots of effort like they might do like martial arts or football or they play the piano or they're learning to sing or they like love nature or they go fishing and their brain is like oh I like earning reward through effort and I'm sure you do lots of things and you earn reward through effort if you live a life where reward is just given to you for free effectively your brain just begins to give up and just think i get reward anyway i don't need to try that's so fascinating so bringing it back to tj and you've gone through your own journey with addiction mental health to be super stimulated by work now and a really sort of exciting future from a family point of view like getting married child on the way how do you kind of manage being a successful entrepreneur and everything that's going on and find that balance and I'm talking about is there a morning routine what do you do to keep mentally and physically fit yeah I mean there's definitely routines and I'll go into them but there's also like an underlying philosophy that I'm progressively understanding in my mind around work itself and it's really based on how these different brain chemicals operate and what will actually fulfill a human being because dopamine for context is designed to actually never fulfill you and always make you want more for our ancestors that meant they never got complacent with the quality of the fire they made and the shelter they built and their method of hunting dopamine is driven to never ever satisfy so it always progressed hence addiction and they were effectively quite quite addicted to making fires and hunting and stuff that's pretty healthy addiction to have if you're trying to survive and i went through a really interesting experience interesting experience over the last year because for five years I had some really really big dreams as to like could I get on some of the biggest podcasts in the world could I get a big book deal to like go global could I get to a certain amount of followers on Instagram could I reach a certain amount of revenue and I've been so blessed to actually have that experience take place over the last 12 months but I have had this unnerving reality check of the fact it actually didn't feel as good as I was expecting it to feel and the like anticipation of like oh what will my life be like will my mental health just be perfect when I finally get that goal the reality is you enter it and it's like okay so how do we make the revenue more efficient how is my next book going to be bigger and how do I get more followers and more podcasts and there's this acceptance I'm going through of whilst I remain incredibly ambitious my brain can't stop the desire to hunt I'm actually kind of accepting that oxytocin is actually more of a path I want to pursue and the life I can create for George and my partner and I and this future baby and the way in which I can try and find fulfillment in that lane is actually helping me calm down my work addiction because I'm accepting that if I'm to sit on my phone all night every night or work on my laptop on the Saturdays and Sundays which I have done for five years.

25:35I think it's important to recognize that. Work like a nutter. I've really really gone for it and realized that I could do that for the next 20 years but I may feel exactly the same as right now if I do it might not actually be the thing that then finally fills up yes i've done it so i've remained incredibly ambitious remain incredibly hard working but i'm beginning to try and choose oxytocin choose loving moments and slow moments much more frequently and my partner and i are doing lots of like routine based challenges to try and orient towards oxytocin being our priority and not dopamine sorry you throw me because i'm gonna i want to know what they are but i i i sort of mentioned that important though because that entrepreneurial journey that work to get to where you've got to you've had to put the work in.

26:17You've had to, and you've chosen to, but you've also had, and you've obviously clearly manifested and worked towards this huge social following and business success, if you like, and podcast. But you also recognize if you fast forward to 20 years time and you didn't have a wife and kids, the legacy side of things is missing, right? For sure. So bringing it back to these challenges, that's really interesting. Can you give me an example? And this is the interesting thing about the entrepreneurial journey and the desire for ambition because in the pursuit of now oxytocin, and I'll explain exactly what that means, I'm actually finding my entrepreneurial brain is actually working better because it's not so exhausted and my creativity and my capacity to work efficiently is improving.

26:59So the first challenge we did was very simple and it was called meals, bedroom, bathroom, meals, bedroom, bathroom. We'd repeat that like a mantra and it was that you weren't allowed to look at a screen in those three environments, any screen at all, TV, iPad or phone. So you have your meals, and you just gotta make sure you eat them without a screen. So whether that's, whether you're with each other, that's nice and easy, you just talk. When you're on your own, it's harder. Like you sit there for 10, 15 minutes looking at a wall without a meal, and it's like, that is obviously what humans did forever, but suddenly it's like very under stimulating.

27:27Your brain just like has some time and it winds down a little bit. You then have the bedroom component. Not having a screen in a bedroom is hard. Like to never take your iPhone into your bedroom, and there's all these things in our mind, like we need it for an alarm, we need it for all these emergency calls that never arrive. and we gradually tried that getting out the bedroom that was a process and then the bathroom which for some is easy some people might say oh it's gross to take your phone to the bathroom the mass take their phone to the bathroom that's for sure and in these moments we were just trying to create more opportunity for downtime in our brain be present yeah be present and there's this interesting challenge society faces if you look at that niche example of being with your partner when you lie in bed and you both scroll your social media feeds and you're not talking to each other or like cuddling or being intimate your brain is choosing dopamine over oxytocin is choosing the thing that won't fulfill you over the thing that will actually fulfill you which is this interesting interplay where we're choosing something that we know isn't going to fill us up over something that would fill us up and it's this addiction that we found ourself in gradually as we've done more of these challenges this week we've done seven days without tv which has been hard like i like the tea i like all this stimulating stuff and uh so on my lunch break it's like right i'm just gonna sit and look out the window and then what i've discovered though is then i come back like i'm working hard on book two at the moment and over the last like eight days i've basically since doing this tv screen free experiment i've basically cracked the whole second book which i've been struggling with for four months but i was in overstimulation burnout exhaustion not making the time no not making time and then now having these moments where i just like sit and do nothing which i don't enjoy like i'm not someone that's like a monk like i find it It's not something stressful doing that.

29:04But the downtime has proved to actually be really powerful to the entrepreneurial journey and feeling more fulfilled from a personal relationship point of view. So it's been cool. Nice. I said to you when I first sat down, I was gonna learn from you. I'm learning so much. I feel like I just need to keep tipping you upside down and pull it out. There's a lot of things that you could attribute and associate with being successful. You've had a lot of success along this journey. Sitting here now, and I think it's a really interesting time to ask you this, where you've achieved a lot of things that you would have, if you'd ask a younger version yourself, you'd say, if I can achieve that number of followers, that'd be success.

29:38I wouldn't believe it, yeah. Yeah. But sitting here now, what is your definition of success? I still want, obviously, immense progress with Doze Lab. Like, I want that to continue to fly. But if I was, like, looking, like, 10 years from now, like, what would I consider me personally feeling really successful would just be whether I feel, like, calm in my body and brain. Like if I feel chilled out and like quite like relaxed in life, I think that would be me feeling successful. A year ago, I would have said like this size book deal or like this certain amount of reach online or whatever it may be.

30:12But I had the thing and it just didn't fill the thing. It just gave me this like slight like disappointment. And it's very common that experience, like this whole gold medal syndrome where people win the Olympics and then suddenly they feel like ****. And it's like because our brain struggles with the fact it achieves the thing and it doesn't actually feel as good as it expected to. So I'd say my definition of success probably would be just feeling calm. That being said, for me to feel calm, I'm going to need a really successful business that provides finance for my family and everything like that and provides lots of fulfillment, lots of support to kids and adults across the world.

30:45Yeah, that's the thing. Your success is entwined with making so many other people better off for what you're doing, which has got to be a sort of a lovely kind of joint success. And I, sitting here now, wish you all the success with what you're doing. I wish we had longer to talk, but we don't. But I've learned so much and I've learned it in such an articulate way. So thank you, TJ. Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to talk with you. Thanks, mate. Thanks.

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