Tyrrells Crisps & Chase Distillery Founder: 36 Years of Brand Building Wisdom in 3 Hours, The Future of Food, How Gut Health Goes Mainstream

0:00Koyako is a Japanese noodle bar located in Hackney London offering a fast paced dining experience inspired by Japan's train station eateries It specializes in freshly made udon noodles and rich dashi broths. The menu is insane. A rich variety of hot and cold udon dishes, donburi rice bowls and Japanese small plates like karas chicken. I hope I've said that right. Also some banging seasonal vegetable tempura. Koyeko brings authentic Japanese comfort food right to the heart of East London. They've got two locations, one in Hackney, one in Soho in the city. And look, if you want to get your mitts on this absolutely insane grub, use this promo code on your Uber Eats app, Koyoko40.

0:45The details are as follows. You're going to get 40 % off, up to 15 quid off, when you've got a minimum basket of£20. This offer, this wonderful offer, expires on the 28th of July. Get your mitts on Koyoko. Thank you so much. how to get your challenger brand into more supermarkets and increase your current distribution in half the time range reviews are happening right now right this millisecond sainsbury's waitrose tesco ocado co-op all looking for new banging challenger brands don't miss this range review and have to wait another six months it's long don't lose precious self-space your competitors don't let your buyer pick another brand just because you didn't have a grand slam deck.

1:27Northstar Category Management help you create banging supermarket pitch decks so good that buyers find it impossible to say no to. Challenge your brands like Perfect Ted, Trip, Bulbinko, Dash all love Northstar. Look, I am so confident in Northstar transforming your brand. We've got an exclusive Hungry offer. Your first month for free. Yes, free. Plus, we're going to give you a free 30-minute consultancy session to see how your brand is currently performing in category click the link in the show notes to put your consultancy session and thank me later hello guys hope you are wonderful and thank you for listening i'm so grateful honestly that you listen to me blabber on um will chase absolute g one of the og food and drink founders built tyrols sold that for serious wonger goes again with chase siri sells that for loads of Wonga and is now on his third rodeo building, Willie's AVC, which is an amazing brand.

2:27He's got really deep into his kind of gut health. He's a genius. He's the definition of a mad genius and someone I can relate to and love spending time with. There's tons in this. We talk about how you've got to follow your fun as a founder, how to actually build momentum. Momentum equals magic, magic equals momentum, and it just keeps compounding, keeps compounding. We talk about the genius of Tyrell's price laddering strategy, which is so good. How they introduced the root vegetable crisps to the market to drive incrementality to the category, but actually drive more sales of their core product.

3:07And you can apply this to your brand when you're speaking to supermarkets. We talk about the future of food, a lot about Henry Dimble's book, how we actually going to change the food system, the adjacent possible versus theoretical perfect which is rory sutherland's great piece we talk about will's relationship with his bipolar and he has these really dark and kind of negative down days but he's reframed it and i think the greatest founders reframe things he's reframed it into a real positive and a way to actually build momentum we talk about how you find the magic when you're brand building and it's a sorry it's a balance between really focusing on your core but then innovating like hell and it's a dilemma but he knows how to traverse that dilemma better than anyone else um i love this we talk about being in it talk about alan partridge as a brand builder which you think is hilarious but it's about being in your brand being in the trenches and i think founders occasionally think as they get bigger they can step away from it they can step away from being in the trenches but he goes that is where you find the magic that's where you find the magic he talks about a brand being a friend um we talk about his beef with sir philip breen he sounds like a bit of a knobhead there's tons in this and i really loved it it's long don't get me it is long i recommend listing on 2.5 speed if you want to razz through it quickly if you've got three commutes maybe just do it an hour each day uh it is long but it we there's so much i wanted to explore and we got into it so yeah please sit slowly with us and enjoy this conversation thank you so much oh yeah and please fucking share this bad boy really means the world to me thank you kind of it's wild yeah exactly and and it's that it's that time time how time making the most of time so it's your time management so if meals are quite special i think that's the main thing about spending time especially in the mediterranean is is the good thing about it is it's it's an occasion lunch is an occasion you take an hour you've been out in ibiza much yeah yeah and that's even changed quite a lot because it's it's quite a lot of sort of northern european germans dutch a lot of british a lot of um so all the most of the restaurants now have changed so much in the last 15 years what are your restaurants i went there i was there for a wedding in the summer I think it's genuine paradise Ibiza but what what is some of your favorite restaurants out there oh um I think they come and go so much but there's quite a lot of this even very small ones there's like up right up in the north up towards um 14 access ones like cafe gigi and places like that so there's a small ones that have been there for or even sort of Annabelle's in um Anita's in um there are little ones that have been there for a long time but they're just so simple but they've I mean, they're not this, you know, there's some wonderful ones.

6:02My friend took me to this tapas place. I don't know if it could be Anita's, actually, or whatever it's called. That's right in the middle at San... Right in the middle. And it's like very small, like old tables. They kind of, you get what you're given. And if it's the one with the old post boxes, where the hippies used to be there in the 60s, and it's quite... And then there are some, like in Santa Gatrudis, it's like Notting Hill with all the white SUVs parked outside. Oh, really? Yeah, they've gone to live in Santa Gatrudis. and then you've got roots which are very juice smoothie led so there's a lot of groups of people that are just jumping on the healthy food so it's it's quite um it's quite an interesting space but the roots is already good on because he's like quite genuinely what he's doing but there's it's quite interesting but but these how people there because a lot of people apparently if they go to somewhere like ibiza or something for a week they're going to have their whole week planned where they're going for lunch where they're going for dinner what they're doing and And I reckon since COVID, the whole sort of going out scene in the evenings has changed quite a lot now.

6:59It's more lunchtime and the whole lunch occasion than going out at night or whatever. Unless you go to San Antonio where everyone's off their head. And that still works. Yeah, that still works. No, it's madder. I'm good to jump in if you are. Okay. No, I think on those things is, I'll get rid of that, is talking about phones. I think for me the it's like chapters in life it's it's growing up for me I haven't grown up I think I've been aware I've spent 10 years of my life frying thousands of tons of ultra processed chips having carcinogenic warnings coming through all the time with a really smelly business there's an exceptionally profit profitable business so it did what I wanted it to at the time when I farming conventionally and just in business just uh just thinking solely of the cash and then with the distillery learning all about that alcohol business and how much people actually do drink going the fun side of it's going around the world was trying to cocktails in every single bar you know so every importer wherever is that another one somewhere there is isn't it that's your two phones that's your don't trust a man with two phones yeah well i've got three phones i feel like i should be selling cds illegal cds as well with the amount of phones i go around with so yeah i think that's that's going around the world you know and every mixologist would want you to try so it's nothing to have a dose of you know vodka espresso espresso martinis in a night and um and so then now to doing this to going out to being on the it's you change your mindset so you what's quite interesting with a brand and trying to make a brand it's a bit like watching alan partridge when he's um when steve coogan is actually doing alan partridge when he's at home and his whole life he moves into alan partridge so he does everything he lives his life so he doesn't miss a bit so he gets totally into the character so getting into the character of the brand i think to be in the character of the brand how do you get everything is to say say a founder is is trying to is steve coogan and they are trying to be we're rolling by the way so is say a founder is steve coogan and they are trying to embrace and embody alan partridge because i think you're right that the brand is an extension of the founder and as you were saying you've you've grown up and evolved yeah and the brands you've built have evolved in parallel slash synergy yeah yeah good topic yeah you go from crisps to booze you then go on your health care because we were detailing earlier in germany you're now on the health health thing but how do you think or why do you think it's important for founders to be like steve coogan and try and embody alan partridge i think you have to you have to be the past you have to understand the brand you have to understand your community so you can't talk to community as objects you have to talk to the community is your friends so your friends as you grow up they probably evolve you like the same sort of things you have similar interests of the things you like to talk about so i think that's the same with the brand and its community they're they're like-minded so i think for a brand to engage with its community and to and to talk talk about without being dictator you know must be dictating to them and that's for me personally it's like selling snacks it's not rocket science it's quite easy to sell a packet of fried snacks but and then with alcohol it's not too difficult what people the object of people wanting to to drink alcohol what they want back from it in return and then if you're going to sell them healthy fermented foods it's what they want back from that in return so it's a totally different side so yeah i understand so being best friends with your brand your brand is best friends with the consumer i get that with crisps people love crisps i get that with booze people love booze i think there's a massive struggle not with just willies but with this healthy living gut health yeah what are the challenges with becoming best friends because it's a massive education piece as well isn't it yeah i could talk about this one for hours because that's such a go for it such a fantastic point so i think it's it's everybody wants to lead a healthier better life they want to make more use of their time they don't want to be on their phone they want to be free they want to they want their mind to be free we all want our mind to be free um and and that's where things like adhd bipolar dyslexia whatever you bring all these different conditions how you're you know if we come back to that is is how you get there so to manage it we all know our gut is our second brain and that's the first thing i learned with this business so that changed my thought process that learning that if we feed our gut with healthy food and it's healthy and it's happy, our brain with the vagus tract, our brain will be happy.

11:53What's the vagus tract? So the vagus tract is your link between your gut to your brain. So now our gut is basically our second brain. Right. Or it's, so what we feed our gut will exactly, and this has been proven so many times how, and it's so many people now that have proven that if you give up bread, give up gluten alone, how after a few weeks you will feel so completely different. to be free from gluten it's and if you do suffer what they call a leaky gut it just completely frees it just absorbing getting all that gluten into your blood into your brain so the vagus track the connect between the two that is everything that is so we basically we are what we eat whether we're drinking coffee or if we're having ultra processed foods we know all these things are bad for us probably the best example is sugar well the one thing i've learned about this business now is ultra processed foods and mainly processed sugar is probably the worst thing of all for us because there's been trials in the 30s 40s and 50s where they fed rodents on processed sugar and cocaine and the and the rodents would rather go for the processed sugar than the coke and then they took the processed sugar away and put natural sugars in the same form and the rodents would rather go for the coke than go for their the you know the natural sugar so sugar what people don't understand it is addictive and so now with with the likes of coca-cola and putting sugar on everything processed sugar on everything is we know it's bad for us but we're not aware of how much that's why things like the sugar tax that's why i'm so much in favor of that because i think it should have been in the past we would have been better off having a tax on sugar silver spoon sugar than we would have been on benson and hedges because children aren't pretty you know what i mean it all starts with the kids and us growing up and our mentality and when people talk about obesity and mental health probably the processed sugar is probably one of the biggest culprits of this today the so the second brain because i think with gut health um as a as a category i believe there's like champagne problems and cocoa cocoa pot problems so by this i mean so a lot of challenger brands start as champagne problems so they're set up by middle-class founders solving middle-class, creating middle-class brands, solving middle-class problems.

14:11And that's great for those early adopters, people with money. And I think sort of kombucha is one of these examples, maybe apple cider vinegar, maybe kind of high protein crisps or cereal. It's like champagne brands. And I think the challenge of a brand may start as a champagne, solving a champagne problem, middle-class brand, middle-class problem. but as it goes across the adoption curve to go mainstream it starts needs not starts needs thinking about the cocoa pop problem by the cocoa problem i mean not necessarily going for shoppers who are in like um well yeah trying to how do you speak to a shopper who's not thinking about the champagne problem which is gut health they're thinking about what are the price of cocoa pops because i'm a single mother in rotherham who's got two kids to feed and my only concern at the minute is is the price of of cocoa pops and i think brands need to move from champagne to cocoa pops tyrell's did did this perfectly right so tyrell's started as you know premium upmarket crisps but the journey to to the cocoa pop problem is people get oh fuck me those crisps were delicious same with booze the journey is very easy from champagne to cocoa pop so that makes sense yeah yeah yeah good point i don't under with with this i feel like there's a lot of hurdles because for example you know the cocoa pop consumer is thinking how do i get food on the plate for my kids and henry dimblebee's book does a great if you read revenus does a great job of talking about this is is it's not it's not you know the mums and the mums and dads they don't have half the reason that food system's fucked is because they don't have the time to educate themselves on like what they're actually eating it's just like i need to get food for my kids to eat and also a lot of these kids are eating beige foods because they don't want to not that they don't want to try it's just easier for them it's another problem off the mom's mind just to say right i'll give them chicken nuggets because they'll eat it right how do you think as a category not just willies how do you think we go from this champagne middle class bougie problem i think we were talking earlier about you know it's kind of health retreats drinking this stuff how do we go along that kind of tumultuous journey to whereby we can get the whole country in on this gut health thing understanding the second brain like what does that journey look like on the prudent path it's obviously 100 education yep and we our education in food in the last 60 70 years has gone as you said is is knackered he's gone so far off track not just the food the farming has gone off track as well because the farming has tried farmers have tried to keep up with this demand for ultra processed sugar laden and they do say that if you eat anything that was around over 100 years ago it's good for you so olive oil good quality olive oil good quality butter with old-fashioned style cows we had the conversation last night about cows and dairy products and lactose people do not understand there's so much in there that if you drunk old-fashioned cow milk some sort of guernsey's and jerseys that milk is far more nutritiously better for you the modern bread friesian and these modern cows and it's complete it's completely different so that's just a little bit on the dairy side then we've got the gluten on the bread how modern bread varieties have been bred for volume and then we've got through the whole food spectrum so to bring in it to that point to make it simple this is why i like regenerative farming and regenerative food because in the strap line is nutritionally dense foods so what everybody's got to understand is that you it's not volume we should not be buying so back to you know food should be cheap food should be food farmers have reacted to producing food and the food industry from unilever craft all of the big brands have focused on convenience and volume nobody's talked about nutrition yeah so the whole nutrition is look at margarine you know margarine is not a good product look look the big the best example of how knackered the food industry is at the moment is plant-based milks every calf and every restaurant has got a pallet of otterly in there somewhere in the middle of the farm here we've got a vending machine that sells coffee we've got to have plant-based milk in there for even now as most of it is still local real cow milk but plant-based milk you get a packet of oaterly read the back it's got 10 oats in there so you're buying something that's done a thousand food miles on every packet before it's even probably got to the retailer and then it's got 10 of the product in it so what's in the rest of it if you if i was spending you know however much i'm on a packet of oat milk what's what's in it beside the 10 oats that i'm thought i was buying and i think it's simple little questions like this how the whole food industry from convenience but everybody's taught them and they've got to be on plant-based they're on plant-based milks and so there's so misunderstanding about nutrition and food so i think nutrition dense foods we sort of lost the whole nutrition thing so even even chefs and cooking people are knocking things up quickly we've got all the speedy joints but it's it's even like take meat you know people breeding cows for the good ones for the marbling and the meat but if they're all smashed up and turned into burgers you don't need any marbling you know it's like chicken if it's all just smashed up and stuffed into like nuggets is the best example there's a massive chicken plant near here where the nuggets are just the leftovers the last few percent once they've had their joints and things off a chicken they steam off all of the all of the bits and pieces and stuff them together in a in a in a mold and call them a nugget so that that's but that's where we've got to with the food industry so i think nutrition is the most misunderstood thing today and and and for my travels in the last couple of years i think going to bhutan has probably been the best thing for my mental health and nutritional bhutan is just in the himalayas it's just um it's just up above sort of katmandu it's it's only a million people it's run by this like a little magic kingdom it's run by one person it's probably the best place if you ever want to see buddhism or you want to learn about buddhism it's it's a phenomenal what are the one or two things there that really and what stands out with that is improve your mental health is the is the food hasn't changed in bhutan for the last hundred years so they all have little markets in every town it's all fresh veg it's just buckwheat the only corn they no gluten at all hardly there's no obesity everybody's really fit there's nothing there's no fancy cars ever there's not a capitalist society there's they're all on a level so if you want to talk about mental wellness and stress and things and that's where i went there to with the adhd thing i was told it was better to go and talk to the buddhists than it was to go and see a specialist about ad and it probably is what did the buddhists tell you about they told me that i got a monkey mind describe the monkey mind buddhism calls the monkey mind um the crate anybody is thinking faster than other people or they're thinking about you know now at the moment the monkey mind um adhd is seen as a quality for companies like microsoft and different large companies where they want people that can actually think outside the box so if you've got a problem and an issue to solve if you can get individuals who are capable of thinking outside the box so whether it's bipolar whether it's adhd whatever you call it in bhutan they call it the monkey mind because what are the other types of minds um they just have two times of mind in in most buddhism you have the you have you have the different things because obviously you've got different buddhas for different different occasions and and different lines but from my particular instance that that's what i learned because i want it's all about mental mental wellness and if you want to learn about food nutrition and mental wellness there is nowhere better in the world than bhutan because they've escaped for the last hundred years they've had no wars they've had no integration from other countries nobody's managed to get in there they've got it's the most amazing place in the world if you really want to study mental wellness and food culture so what they said they've said you've got this monkey mind i get that kind of diagnosis what did they say were some of the solutions to deal with that because you know i feel like i've got a mendacious little sort of thug running around my head sometimes and it's a superpower but it's also can be quite detrimental and menacing um what what did they yeah what did what what the lessons you took from bouton about managing your monkey mind which you probably wouldn't get if you were to go to central london to some fucking you know 10 grand a session shrink so so the first thing the number first thing is to eat properly because the one thing we haven't discussed yet is that i've given up alcohol now and i'm I'm about 240 days into it and I'm totally free in the only way I can do it now.

23:11I've got some beautiful red wines I'd love to drink, but I'm not going to touch them again. I've gone totally cold turkey on it because I can't have one glass. Because I think if I have one glass, it can quite easily turn into two. And I feel totally different. There's the James Dean quote, which is, one drink's perfect, two's too many, three's not enough. Yes. And I think it's basically that. is you just, before you know it, and I'm the same, you're just like a ravenous hurricane drinking. And if you're that sort of character, Tom Kerridge is probably a great one to talk to about this as well because he said, how do you give up?

23:43And he said, once I had one beer, the next thing I probably had 10 if I was cooking all night and I was drinking beer. I listened to a podcast with him. He would drink a pint of Negroni after service as his opening gambit. Sometimes it's a big night. You get through eight to 10 pints as he's cooking and it goes on. until your body goes on and wants more and more so yes sorry so butan so they said get caging the monkey mind is getting rid of the booze one what else getting rid of the booze the second thing is exercise and exercise now is when i mean exercise it's getting up in the morning and places like lanza hoff are very good mentors for things like this as well so when you wake up is to get outside just go outside wake up with the world just go out and spend even if it's a walk even if it's a five minute walk it's better i runs ideally i try and go every day now at five o 'clock and i try wherever i am in the world i go for a i go for a walk i try and go for a run at that time because if you've got nothing else to think about there's no excuse not to go and do it at that time of day whereas the rest of the day you'll find excuses you can't do it because of this and that so i think first thing if you can condition yourself to get up first thing with probably giving up booze and toxics is you're actually awake then in the mornings i'm still awake at 4 4 30 and i was worried that would i ever find a way of getting rid of the 4 4 30 darkness in my life and and i don't think i ever will those monkeys once one starts banging the symbols together the next thing there's two then you remember something else and there's three and describe describe the 4 a.m dark as i was up at four this morning um i just never sleep in other places i just don't even know you're a wonderful hotel which i appreciate i just don't but yeah describe the 4am monkeys clattering away with their drums what is that detail in your head and that's what they talk about with the monkey mind that once you wake up it's how you condition your mind what you're what you're thinking about so the first what the first thing you have to do is breathe if you start breathing properly and instead of lying in bed cogitating for or just getting up and doing some scrolling or having a cup of tea or coffee and thinking about it get up and go for a walk and go and and go and have that um free your mind and and try and walk backwards or do something different but go and do something something different and wake up with the world so when the world's waking up that's that's a fantastic experience doing that and breathing but if you cogitate on these things you end up just thinking about things and you're wishing and you're dreaming things are happening and they don't happen i think you make it worse yeah there's a stoic quote which is um imagination is always worse than reality and i think that's i love that because you can just as you say cogitate whatever the word is and stew and fester in your own kind of imagination which is detrimental with the is it how do you say it butanist bhutan bhutan yeah yeah that's from budapest and boot so in bhutan so booze walk relinquish the monkey mind what are the other things you took from that most important thing probably is food is to eat well so what do you eat now what's your diet now on a weekly basis i try and cut out all bread bread is the devil's food if you can take bread what does do to you it's just the gluten in it it's just it's just it's just a it just is the devil's food but as in what how does the devil's food kind of pour fire on the devil in your head because one thing i want to talk to you today about mate is the link between food and mental health and i think half a battle back to my original point if this champagne versus cocoa problem i think gut health is is is a great present wrapped in the wrong packaging people don't understand it gut health and mental health are linked so close together but i don't i think the way you'll get shoppers in on the macro level the cocoa pop shoppers to understand it is they don't get your second brain they don't get the manchewatch attract thing whatever fuck it was called but they will understand if we can package it in a way they probably don't even get like not it's regenerative farm farming is a complex word even though i don't understand that but i think if you can package it very simply in terms of like you know how this is good for your head i think more and more people it will move along the adoption curve from a middle class problem to a mass market market basically um so see on that point what's quite interesting yeah when i had this conversation with a lot of people and they're all quite often asked question is it's an organic food just as you said just for the the people who can be seen to be able to afford it and it's not affordable for them for them for the masses and my take on that would be that and i'm not saying organic it's whether it's free range or whatever it does have a premium but you're buying more nutrients so you could live anybody could could buy if you can buy it in the right places can buy it but it's what you bulk up on it's what you bulk you've got to bulk up on vegetables instead of um instead of expensive um you know lacking nutritious ultra processed foods if you compare um what's that film kiss the earth have you did you see with that one who's the guy from google that came from asia and he said when they grew up they used to have a little piece of meat and they used to share it between the family and all bulk up on rice and lots of veg and then when he moved to la he said there were 10 year old children having a same size piece of meat that the whole family would have i think what's crazy and astonishing is when you go to an american airport so last year well the beginning of this show was in miami airport and new york airport the food offering is repugnant like it is just it's all just there's everything you're saying absolute shit the drinks are that big they're full of sugar and you know makes the uk look like a darling example i think what henry talks about in um ravenous he talks about japan going to japanese hospitals because the japanese hospital food is amazing yeah he talks about how you literally have like it's just clean water it's almost being in a kind of serene sanix sanctuary because you just get very clean it's fish um yeah and i think it's it's so you probably say like japan is a sophisticated style of sort of bhutanese because bhutanese is very basic because it's never been influenced by other parts of the world for the last hundred years but japan you ask a lot of you listen to a lot of chefs and they say what's your favorite place to go inspired for food in the world and it's always sort of italy first but japan is quite often second and quite often now japan's coming first it is yeah for that reason the japanese foods but i think what henry talks about in the book is actually japanese got the japanese got fat for quite a period of time people see them as this uh this kind of slim nation but they for a long time they're having a lot of fried food they had katsu curries which were obviously hugely calorific and i don't know what there was a turning point where they actually went more into this kind of clean eating on a huge macro level on a world scale yeah as well if we're talking about the whole world i went to do a food show last spring in india in delhi and it's the biggest indian food show they have and it's like going back in time 60 years the biggest thing for sale is sugar and it's like syrups the biggest stand in the middle is selling i shouldn't use the brand but it's a well-known brand and every show in the world they've got a huge display of just sugar and it's sugar laid laid syrups so india now going through this massive and probably it's only the top of india the ones that can afford to go to these you know food shows or buy this stuff from these multi large shops but it's it's just phenomenal the sugar explosion in the world i'd say the biggest the biggest danger is sugar i think ultra processed sugar has a lot probably to answer for in the last 60 70 years i think this whole sugar thing was a a problem baked in a solution because it was the guy this again henry talks about this in the book it was world war ii we needed something to feed people yeah so the guy came up and the guy i forget his name came up with a thing to produce that corn syrup which meant we could feed people during the war ultimately got everyone through world war ii uh but and that was a solution but then it created this huge change in consumers appetites people became addicted to sugar and then ultimately you get to where we are now which is people are heinously addicted to sugar and i think on a much deeper level there it always is in any solution there's a there's a problem and in any problem uh there's a solution actually if you if you look hard enough what would you say um so just thinking this back to this uh champagne shopper versus coca pop shopper what what do you think are the the prop the problems in terms of making this mainstream do you know what i mean i'd say it's habit getting people to break habits um the whole of europe had never touched coca-cola until the war and then to for coke to get around the sugar tax because they're restricted sugar if they gave free coca-cola to all their all their gis all their um guys that are out fighting in europe they were allowed as much sugar as they liked by the american government so coke took advantage of that and they made masses to give away to all the troops so they reckon that just really drove coke into all so it wasn't just chewing gum and tights and things isn't that's why it's called it's called an americano because of the war isn't it that's exactly yeah because the troops wanted the black coffee and then they took it and then it was it was dreamt up like when i was young there's been advert for mars bars and mars a day will help you work rest and play yeah you know and and it was like coke people used to drink coke because they thought it would give them energy so and then modern take on it is i'll have a red bull and a red bull will give them will give them energy to stay awake or to give them energy to go playing sports what were the so with this bhutan place there was what are the other kind of weird lessons you you took from there that you just could help our listeners who may not be able to access bhutan where society would be today if we weren't spoiled by the last 60 70 years of intervention of sugar convenience and and disruption i suppose to be contented not in a capitalist society as well it's quite interesting to see a society that's not driven by greed and by money and they say envy is probably one of the biggest things at the moment and this desire that everybody should you hear about children that they should be you know to grow up in Bhutan so long as you you care for the soil or you care for whatever profession you you know what I mean and you're a you're a good human being that that's that's all that why is that's how people measure themselves why is envy an issue I think in in our modern society it's this hunger isn't it it's you watch all of the social media no and it's bettering it's always something better to go and buy and to do it's it's sort of um whether you're going to trade on investing or whatever you're going to do it's to be we derive identity from power is i am there's a have you ever there's a book called the bonfire of vanities by tom wolf amazing book it was actually written in the 80s and it was just on the cusp of neoliberalism so margaret thatcher comes in i think it was nixon as well yeah they right like everyone's got it's gonna really fucking fucking flux capitalism capitalism into everyone it was kind of the the age of wall street where people could go and make a shitload of money but they started to define their identity through this book was written in the 80s through their uh through their work yeah this is way before social media so you're reading the book and the main protagonist a guy called sherman mccoy who thinks he's a master of the universe who is on wall street actually ends up killing uh running over this um guy from the bronx this very lower class person and it's it's his fall from grace and i think one of the issues now with on the envy point is that uh if you everyone through social media can be a master of the universe on social media but actually behind closed doors it's creating this toxic envy culture as you say bettering up and stuff but and i think yeah i'd love to know what bouton's bouton's solution to that would be there'd be no there isn't any to start with but there'd be no paid support or no paid customer influences and there's no everything would be on a level a really fine level so to see society you know the probably the average car is is a fiat panda or it's um there's nobody's measured by the cars or whatever they've got or how they live they all wear the same sort of clothes they all live in this society where where it's it's once you get into the airport the kindness the one thing that amazing that that comes in front of everything is just the sheer kindness how how's how they genuinely are very example of that very kind people um just to go and see the the the way they respect i suppose the respect they all have for each other that would probably be the best example so even in restaurants so forever wherever you are they all sort of worship the king so it's the king is is his kingdom it's like a kingdom still where they believe in the whole regime so there's no there's there's no sort of disciplines and things needed as such to control it because it's they haven't got influences of different societies that have come in and changed their culture they've managed to keep keep the culture running and it'd be impossible for any of our western society or to change and go back so it's just interesting to go and see how how a country would be today if it managed to survive the last hundred years without being how a society how people would be evolved in today so as you said that probably the worst thing is is is these things are phones having that constant access to so much information these guys just don't have that they just don't so there's they're not asking these constant questions of why and how they know they know what good food is they know do you know what they know the simpler things in life because from from what we said as well with social media the more you see the more you're comparing your high your blooper reel to someone's highlight reel yes and there's a one of someone i know who's a big influencer like her instagram it's her doing cartwheels on the beach literally saying living my best life yeah i know from other people like she's bulimic like can't even eat has almost ocd about eating a square of chocolate and it's like she's got on social media highlight reel but behind the scenes is is people's blooper reel we almost need another social media which is like i feel shit and actually just saying this is what's actually going on in my life when so you've described your bipolar or like self-diagnosed bipolar i think like describe the the texture of your thoughts when it's high and when it's when it's incredibly low because i don't a lot of founders i know who listen to this may not be to have the same extremes as yourself but the journey is that so describe the difference between the two i think the main thing is is managing expectations and that's just a beautiful saying it's it's it's in life what do you what you expect out of it so and the thing is the more you have and the more you see the more you sort of want and gain all the time so so for me the the whole um bipolar by um by being a adhd or however you want to categorize it do we need to be categorized because we are all different anyway and when i was not that long ago when i was young sort of like a mental illness was was you had mental illness and you were sort of um weak weak and locked away and should put yourself together now everybody's got different degrees of it and we have this wavy line where we're either high or low and but then do we get too far hung up with with all of that stuff as well and it's a really it's a really tricky point that where how you how you control it and so for me personally i i accepted the fact that i didn't want to accept the fact like when i had a tumor in my in my gut i didn't want to accept that but then when you accept it you know how to deal with it you know to manage it life's totally different so when i had um adhd and i actually accepted it and i did the test and then it actually has helped me so a lot of the time i feel with ideas and different things that you want it's the frustrations in wanting to do things and being able to execute them because there's millions of ideas in the graveyard there's so many ideas out there but ideas into action that's what that's what i guess people call success isn't it so it's it's it's for me it it is identifying it but then i don't want to polarize i'm a bit sort of i don't want to polarize myself and put myself in a pigeonhole and i don't think any of us do we want to be we're not all the same we are all different but we do have this line that we fluctuate i think some people have a line that doesn't fluctuate much their highs and lows aren't too far apart for me i have as you were saying i think a lot of us do have these big it's a delicate dance it's one of those things which it's both wrong and right so on the on the one hand you need to be cognizant that you may have this up and down on adhd because if you don't you're just being self-destructive yes but on the other hand if you just think oh i've got bipolar or i've got adhd then you're kind of limiting yourself so you want to say well yeah maybe i do have those things but like let's still crack on so it's this delicate dance between when you are feeling low it's like oh shit this is this is the bipolar kicking in yeah but like you don't want to be like say you are feeling a little bit low which you could do a walk shake off the monkey mind and go and crack on and come here today so it's it is a delicate balance it's nuanced between how you deal with it and i think you're so right if you just box yourself in then you really box yourself in um but yeah describe the texture when it's when it's really low like and that's what we all want to get rid of if if you suffer the low i've suffered the lows what's been the lowest probably i had a really bad time when i was in my late 20s and actually went bankrupt and i got so low i could understand why people um committed suicide put it like that so i got that was my lowest what would the thoughts be in your head when you woke up um well when you when you're thinking about it and it's like suffocating so it's like the lows and the lows and i think that's what a lot of people don't understand with people that do commit suicide is that it's it's an escape it's your brain it's it's and you know people quite often say well they should have talked to me or that it's not as simple as that it's it's when it's closing in on you it's it's closing in on so it's learning how to deal with it and and for me when it was with the business and everything was closing in on me so for me to escape I sort of ran away and went to Australia for um and that's that was sort of always in my story and that's how i you know sort of escaped but then i sort of i sort of came back and and worked out a way of of beating it so it's it's it's a way of escaping when the world's closing in on you and you're and it's just the same in a in a smaller sense that if you're having a dark moment and it's almost like claustrophobic so if you're traveling on this line it's i can understand how people feel with the darkness that you just don't want to you don't want to think about and this is where adhd and bipolar is is really interesting and then how the sort of buddhists deal with it and how people deal with it and is it a product of our of our diet of our society where we're all going to because we're feeding these things with different different products so probably this is where alcohol comes into it big time for me because it's a good thing in some ways to have a drink in the evening to take yourself down there yeah but the trouble is the next day instead of starting back up there where you should be starting the day you're starting the day i'm not boozing at the minute on a negative until you'll find every day you're starting up here you're starting a lot cleaner very clear so you're ready to take it so you're starting closer to where you want to be because we all want to be up there we don't want to be down here we want to be up there so anything you can do so if you can forego that drink in the evening to get you back you know to get you back there the next day that's and how can you do this without dictating and you know so how how can we educate people it's like light is there life without alcohol and and if you don't go out and you don't go anywhere like all my in the past all my skiing trips and everywhere i've been with a bunch of guys and you go out without alcohol i went to the um monaco with a bunch of guys to the um historic grand prix and it was it was fantastic day but it was if you're not drinking and everybody around you drinking and all through of the day they're getting louder and louder and louder and so you're at the and if you're not drinking and you're not um if you're without the alcohol the alcohol is quite um it's quite an interesting part so it's only only so much san pellegrino and green teas you you know you can drink so and and so it's it's just an interesting space that could you go and a lot of people i know deliberately don't go um out because they if they've given up the alcohol because they know they'll get so tempted back into because it's a social occasion isn't it births deaths marriages everything is all celebrated with alcohol we all celebrate yeah no it's and as i say i'm i'm sober at the minute but i go through stages of insidious amounts of drinking which but i actually feel better without it so so just if you could because i'm trying to describe this because i'm i'm been meditating a lot recently and sort of separating myself from that incessant voice or that demon is what people say if you could sort of personify and almost describe what that demon in your head looks like um and how how it speaks to you on those low moments yeah i think it's like success breeds success when you're on a roll everything you do that makes it better gets better and better i think when you're falling everything that goes wrong you you can look at more things on the negative side as well so i think and what is it saying to you is it saying like just like it's almost like suffocating isn't it because when you're when you're feeling low you're looking everything on a negative side so how you break out of that to to reboot your mind so you're looking at things in a positive in a positive way so with the business where i am now that's what i've learned so much about if you can remove the ultra processed foods if you can if you can remove the alcohol that that's a massive you can condition your body to get through through that so you really believe that the diet and the and the 100 percent if if if we if we changed our diet we're all diet led that's why i think we should all be talking about nutritionally dense foods and not ultra processed bulk industrial processed foods and my story goes i've been a farmer for many many years trying to keep up trying to produce large and larger crops every year if you look out there see all those fields they're all clean they're all free of weeds they're all very probably sterile crops a lot of them are just looking for the tons because when you're a farmer producing food you just have to produce tons you don't care about the nutrition nobody's interested dairy farmers everybody they're not interested in the butterfats or the quality of the nutrition of the food they're just interested in that nobody's no farmers are paid for nutrition they're just paid for bulk it's just such a complex again in ravenous but yeah it's such a good book but i think one of the issues with this is it's like we had a simple almost the butan is utopia right let's just say let's say butan's the utopia we have the war which we need to fix we have to win the war otherwise we're fucked by nazi germany right yes that's a big bigger problem to have i'll take a few coca pops for that you know we solve that problem but then we create a problem within that which is this food issue and as henry says it's it's it's such a complex system the whole food system is so complicated on the one hand you've got these big bosses in at mars pepsico who if they don't grow they're going to get fired and on the most basic human level people that need to look after their family you know it's people on a family basis are socialists they need to look after their family so you've got you've got it's not these are the as henry says they're not these demagogues who are trying to make people unwell and fat you've got that you've got then got a whole array of government programs trying to do the sugar tax being one um you've then got these issues with these single parent families whereby as the cocoa cocoa pop problem which is i just need to feed my kids and i think as it what i took from the book is it's almost we need to try lots of different things uh and almost that nudging theory do enough little nudges some will work some won't yeah if i was to say to you and almost if we were trying to get to say a bouton-esque utopia or maybe utopia is too strong a word but a better place in the next 40 years what are the some of the things you'd be doing from like a gut like from a macro perspective to really really change things i think on what you say there the most important thing now that they say 80 of the food we eat is in the hands of eight companies yes and now they're just working on their bottom line they're just out there to make money it's as simple as that they don't care about nutrition or anything in those food they're all they're interested is that bottom line so things won't change like kia stan one of his one of the new Labour government was supposed to be to put the sugar tax in I think that'd be phenomenal if anybody could ever bring a sugar tax in and but actually get people to understand the difference between natural sugar and ultra processed sugar but a sugar tax would be phenomenal but I find I hear now that for them to put a sugar tax in they've got to get permission off Unilever, Kraft and all those eight companies first have got to endorse it well those eight companies are never going to endorse a sugar tax because with the sugar tax they're not going to make any money and they'll all be those those companies will disappear so to be a practical mind we're never going to do that it's like brexit they talk about taking us back into europe we're never going to go back into europe because we'd have to give up the pound can you see people in britain giving up the pound so so it's like it's the culture of how we live and work so with our with our food being in such few hands it's such a fine system as we look from going through covid that nutrition is the last thing on the list so i think with gut health mental health we've got to look at the whole nutrition in our food and there are some great ambassadors like tim specter one two others are doing now there's some wonderful people explaining it but as you said this is just to your champagne top end it's it's how you have healthy food available for for everybody at a price but the education i think the most important thing is to educate humans on the on the benefits of you know and i've seen it my personal story i fried thousands of tons of potato chips of crisps you know constant warnings off the government on acrylamides what's acrylamides acrylamides is a carcinogenic value in the oil when you cook over 50 degrees that's what makes crisps unhealthy yeah you've got you know you've got most fried foods uh are all carcinogenic you know some of the worst things you can have are ultra processed so you've got constant warnings of all that and And then you've got sort of from alcohol, you've got alcoholism.

51:16I've had my time in that as well. So I've seen it from the producing side as well as the consumer side. So it's the psychology of how, where we are. I don't want to be like a hypocrite or, you know, so it's, I've discovered, but we're all learning. I think in our lives, we're all learning how, and we don't want to be dictated to. like a lot of people the whole sort of non-alcoholic thing is led by people that are almost preaching and some people are thinking no i i deserve my drink i want my gin and tonic at six o 'clock or it relaxes me so you know i mean i'll i'll have my ultra processed foods or my cocoa pops because they yeah i also think rory southern talks about the theoretical perfect which is a utopia versus the adjacent possible and actually these ideas move on on the adjacent possible so the theoretical perfect is everyone's walking around uh bare feet like in bhutan drinking kombucha you know taking walks unleashing the monkey mind uh doing yoga but that is just is is a great thing to aim for but it's just never going to be perfect and but the theoretical uh sorry the adjacent possible is like okay what can we what can we do a little bit to get that way So with alcohol, the whole alcohol-free movement's actually booting off, not because loads of people are not drinking or going teetotal.

52:42It's actually because the mass, there's a few people doing that, but the mass are actually doing the adjacent possible, which is, okay, say I'm going out three times a week. One night, I'll cut off the booze. On the Thursday, on the Friday, I'll have three pints and three lucky saints. On a Saturday, I'll have eight pints and one lucky saint. it's the adjacent possible which gets these movements to spread and i'm just trying to think what would the adjacent possible be because i thought at the minute the the whole category of this kombucha and wellness is is people are not saying you specifically but on a macro level it's a champagne problem it's like this is the theoretical perfect you have to do all these fucking things do these protocols eat eat rabbit food and stuff like that sorry yeah yeah but so how do we get to a place where it's like a bit like the alcohol free movement which is the adjacent possible which is more people doing slightly healthier increments so it's like do you do you i don't know i i suppose one example of this would be i actually do think putting the calories on menus at pubs is actually a really good example of that yeah it's like a little thing to do but it's like okay i won't have the pie you know you do enough people not having the pie and having the bread but if you had more of a nutritional value versus because I think that's how people go wrong and that's where Weight Watchers went wrong check those cameras I'm listening yeah people suddenly started dropping out on on calories wasn't it yeah yeah that's the thing is it's the the calories are it's like these there is there is a movement at the moment for drinks so a lot of will say like dash is a good example so people are calorie sorry calorie sugar-free calorie free um everything so that's quite an interesting story because dash really started out as um what was it called that apple juice that was um wasn't capella it sounds a bit like no before that all the people that when those guys started up course no they used to work for um it's still the most famous apple juice now in retailers they they worked for that and then they thought if we mix half water with it and reduce it down we can make and we'll put in tetra packs that's how cross and press came about yeah and then alex and jack now have taken out all of it just put a bit of essence in it's sort of the same audience but as people come away from you know they want to drink but they don't want any calories or anything so it's this it's it's this thing understanding calories and and calories are not bad but it's it's just about nutrition and i think it's it's education on nutrition and the only people who are going to educate are going to be the people who really do give a a man kiss the people at the top of the pyramid that they want value for their for their money so they do value whether it's organic or or regenerative or you know however it's produced if it's free range whatever they actually value the nutrition but that's that's a really good point of yours there because you know we went from the one extreme having traffic lights where you have red amber and green what was the traffic lights there was a traffic light system for whether it was fat or how good how much sugar it had got into it was was whether we're just gonna have traffic lights so instead of having ingredients on the back you're gonna have traffic lights whereas and making food in the last 20 years with brands this is something i find fascinating all the time because it's there to go into something like the distillery where you didn't have to put any nutritional facts on the back about it at all to doing something with like the crisps where you do whereas now what we're making now nutritional facts if you're buying something that's good for you and healthy for you it's even more important to understand so if say tyrell's was organic would that have made a difference i don't think it would have done because crisps are crisps we looked at it with the alcohol you know we had the farm the story people didn't care about that when they're drinking alcohol they just want to it's all about the cocktails and the occasion and the fix but but something like this if you're making a healthy food product people are taking every day as a catalyst to put on their food to bring their food to life to add probiotics and to add add live nutrients to their food then that's that's the that's the hardest bit as a we talked last time and in your book you detail about finding the magic in brands and i thought was a really good point and i obviously you found that with tyrells you found that with chase and they are just darling gorgeous brands how are you finding the magic with this what are the hurdles to finding the magic in terms of making it sexy you know i think this whole gut health thing is kind of like having a really good looking guy or really good looking woman but they're dressed like a tramp and you almost need to like polish them up and make it look presentable to the world and make it look simple it's almost like the rags are all the complications and stuff you just need to make it look really simple trip have done a great job of this yes cbd i remember walking around you know um i was going to say nop nope dope no it was basically you know nop natural mechanics i know it was basically no great show yeah yeah yeah it was basically a uh it was either people presenting cbd and again this is the whole thing of like a good-looking person in raggy clothes what's he gonna do is it gonna get you high is it gonna you were seeing all the kind of the pot semiotics and paraphernalia on one hand the other hand it was really convoluted and that it looked like a pharmacy lab what tricked it is they took the beautiful personal beautiful product and they put it in beautiful clothes yeah and now it's a huge whopper brand and i think this category really interests me because this is clearly good for you it's like how do you make it sexy you know with with chase you literally put the bow tie on the bottles yeah the british bow tie that is a perfect example of making it look sexy you know i'd love to know how you're but i think that's probably the million or the billion dollar question yeah is the magic is the secret sauce and and from my experience nothing was planned so whether you've got any of these whether you watch dragon's den or whatever all of the guys that have made success in life there's as much luck as there is it's a lot of hard work immense amount of hard work but there's a lot of luck because i believe there's a lot of people out there that should have done a lot better than they did they were just at the wrong time the wrong time in the wrong place and i think with that one that's a fantastic point because i used to call it the magic but then i think that was probably the wrong expression so i'd rather refer to it as a secret source what's the difference between magic and secret source the secret source to most people who said what's the secret source they know what the secret source is the secret source is something that works is something like magic is is is wizardry isn't really but secret source especially in america there's finding the secret source if you're a trader and you found you can trade and you've got your right stocks and you're working well that's the secret source so for me the secret source i i didn't plan and you look at everybody's story if you look at james dyson's story for example with the his secret source his magic when he discovered it was the bagless hoover but before that he made a wheelbarrow with a big red ball on the front of it that would go across lawns and and that was going to be his his his his magic his secret sauce for me with tyrell's it was going to be like cider vinegar potato chips were our first thing that i thought we're off to the races with this this soul but then when we did the vegetable chips that was the secret sauce that was the magic with tyrell's that was the bit that just took it off to the races that was that was fantastic when we built the distillery i thought vodka we could make a better quality pure tasting vodka um that would beat sort of grey goose belvide would be all of the brands but where i got that wrong was was the the pedigree and other people aren't so bothered about rather than the occasion but where the magic came would would you mean the occasion well where the magic and the secret sauce with the distillery was the pink grapefruit gin and when we came up with that for whatever reason it just sold it just it just went ballistic it was timing everything about it it made that business explode and it was just that that was the secret sauce and it wasn't planned my plan to build it to make the best tasting vodka in the world and just do that and then we started making different products so the secret sauce that but the secret sauce now with willies i thought just this would be the secret sauce yeah and then now we've got this this just sells itself so this is my this is my eureka moment now this is this is and it just sells itself so yeah it's almost like being you need to be so creating the the brand you've got you've got to be in it to win it yeah but it's being creating the brand is the is getting in the water is a vehicle yeah imagine you're surfing and perry talks a lot about the slip i was on a call with perry yesterday he talked about talks a lot about the slip stream When you're surfing, something pulls you out.

1:01:37Mate, you can either paddle against the water like that or just go to the slipstream and go right up there. I always believe we've got a slipstream channel, so you can think of a channel that no one's thinking about and go and play there. There's Willie's Pies, a darling example of this. They've gone into football stadiums. Fucking huge volume, but no one's really thinking of that. That's their slipstream channel. You can also have a slipstream skew, which is something like the roasted crisps or the pink grapefruit vodka. But, and they're almost, so these slip streams are little waves, but you have to be in the water.

1:02:12So getting in the water is having a brand and having a business. You've got your customers, you've got your way to market. That's being in the water. But then occasionally if you look out and you're kind of vigilant, a wave will come and it will just push you way further. Yes. So the secret sauce with that is the turmeric. How should founders go and look for the secret sauce? Is there a secret to find the secret sauce? that's a fantastic point and i think so many people you talk to nobody finds a secret source straight away they do there's a few cases where you know you can drop into it but quite often you do something that leads to something else that leads to something else in life that gets you to finding it so you've got i think you've got to have your eyes open but if you're like me and you've got the monkey mind or you've got adhd and you're looking for too much and you're making it too complicated before long you've got so many balls in the air you've got so much going on you don't see the wood for the trees so you don't so there's immense thing about focus another thing is how long do you give something before you give up on it as well that's that's a really and then how do you make sure you don't push something that you more believe in personally than than everybody else believes in so it's like that's a great point that's a great point well that's founderitis which giles brooke talks about yes where it's the founder gets so wedded to their idea that they're just too incest they're trying to force feed like fucking fargoire the market they're the product it's like look mate we don't we may not like the hyper convoluted thing that you're so proud of how do you that's a delicate art and science i think is there an example where you've got that wrong where you've tried to force feed the consumers a product that you absolutely loved but they're a bit like we don't get it mate yeah many many times any examples yeah i think probably with the distillery my personal best product that that business made was the marmalade um was the marmalade vodka it was just a phenomenal product it was but then it was so we don't know how to drink it we bought an ex-body shop um machine a vacuum cooker that used to cook these orange peel we used to make marmalade in it and we used to get this marmalade into the into the vodka by by just by vacuum cooking it into there so it's like boarding a cattle on the mountains so you and it was it was amazing product and the audience if it loved it but it just never saw and they made it into marmalade gin people didn't know what to do with marmalade orange vodka but marmalade gin i just mix tonic with it and we'll drink it and so so yeah i put a lot of a lot of effort and a lot of work into that that was going to be the secret sauce but it but then it was going on but we didn't give up you know we had the rhubarb and rhubarb gin that sold okay that was quite good it's quite quirky but then why do you there's only the pink gray and for no reason no reason at all the pink everybody said gosh it was a pink yeah it was a pink liquid and it was it was trending pink liquids are trending at the time but it was just the smell and the aromas and for whatever reason but this is the reason i'm talking about this now is today i cannot put my finger exactly why that works so well with tyrells the reason the veg chips work so well i can't put my finger on because even with tyrells we had the government helping us with sort of they said you've got to get five a day into children so we will have colin the carrot percy the parsnip and this is amazing idea but i said they're deep fat fried they're not healthy at all so our job is to get five a day into children so that's all we want to do is to get all humans to get their base yes i think what you're saying here is is is a very good point i think it's a point about luck yeah and i think there is a massive luck is but i i genuinely believe you can create your surface area of luck the harder you work the more shit I'm not saying shit, sorry.

1:05:51Like, you tried marmalade, you tried, what was the other one? Marmalade, obviously pink grapefruit was the one that worked. And rhubarb. You know, that's huge. It was a big hit. It worked okay, but it didn't, it wasn't a hockey stick. Yeah, yeah. But I think you have to create that surface error of luck. And left the factory empty. Like, look, listen to the Little Moon story. That's phenomenal. how just a tick tock campaign on how they pioneered snacking ice cream really as as uh and then once all of notting hill is is having it and it's off to the champagne classes it just went ballistic and that tick tock they went from 1 million to like 20 million in no time at all it just that's that's a darling example of keep saying darling example today that's an example of how you how a brand can traverse from champagne problem to cocoa pot problem because that tiktok campaign was getting everyone to go into store yeah to it was almost like because i think it was during covid it almost become like an easter egg kind of can you find the little moons absolutely and they couldn't keep up with production so they were deciding whose rationing is applied to them so that made it even more in demand yeah fantastic and and but no you plan these things but it's and we're all very clever afterwards when it works but it's it's how many how many frogs do you have to kiss or how much you know how many how many blanks do you have to fire before you actually how many misses do you have before you actually have a direct hit on something so and your point about luck and management I've come to a conclusion on that now it's definitely 50 50 so anything in life that's a success it's 50 luck and 50 management how what was the management let's dig into the management because that 50 is really important and that 50 gives you the other 50 which is luck which gives you the slipstream channel what are the principles of management and i don't necessarily mean like management in the sense of being a manager i mean in terms of managing a brand that you think gave you a big blanket of luck to throw across all your different products which then have a huge success i personally would describe that in my life as i've been a busy fool i think i've i've done too much and i'd blame that to my adhd i think i've done too much prospecting prospecting meaning looking for new things always looking for that always looking for that something on the horizon so it was only a couple of years ago when i had that four centimeter tumor in my stomach and i lost i lost some of my um gut that it actually until that in my life there was always i was always searching for something that wasn't that was over the horizon there was always something better there was always something and then when you get that and then you've got the thing and it was on it was on my father's funeral day that i was just getting ready for a eulogy and i took the i took the call that I've got a life-changing operation coming up and, you know, I shouldn't have taken that call that morning.

1:08:58But it's like it changes your perspective. So your perspective on life, how you manage it. So you're reading your father's eulogy. Describe the feeling in your bones that day. Because I think it can literally, your life can change in a day, good, bad or ugly. Describe that. Yeah, it was just that sort of thing that when you've got a life-changing surgery and you're going to um it puts everything into perspective so all my life i was racing i don't know what for but i've been racing for this this thing that's on the on the horizon and i couldn't put it into words but there was this thing that i was going for and it's your it's your imagination and this is what whether you call it the adhd or the bipolar however you put it to it's it's it's trying to connect it up to to real live living facts how you can manage your life whether we talk about phones use of phones to our time to best use of fire to whether we drink alcohol or ultra processed foods it's it's all related to this isn't it your brain and how to manage your brain and condition your brain and we all want to become better and do more but it's it's just how we can manage this thing and i think that's such an amazing topic and conversation and nobody's Any smarts have got the answer.

1:10:14It's interesting because it's, and I'm kind of going through this now with the podcast and it's a delicate balance between focus and I actually believe distractions masquerade as opportunities. You know, they go around and you think, oh, this is a nice, not even shiny toy. Like, I think shiny toy is being, is not the best way of, I think there needs to be a better word for it. But it's like, they're genuine opportunities. Like going into new products, new SKUs with me, it's like, do we set up another podcast? i'm thinking of creating a podcast called the challenger chairman yeah with the ex ceo of booths um and but then is is that a distraction uh doing you've only got so much time left in the hourglass exactly exactly where you're going to put that time exactly and also i think you've got to follow follow your fun is one of my big things i think the kpi no one talks about in business is enjoyment it's enjoyment like they say it's not until you're a thing saying four things i've learned in four years of doing a podcast yeah but all of you know everyone at the minute it's in vogue to say the four things i learned or the 20 things i learned all right and i was because i was going to say number one have number two uh well basically have lots of fucking fun was was the point and it's like if you're having fun you can just glide and ooze and groove through obstacles i think if you keep that element of fun and playfulness and actually lack of seriousness in what you're doing you can yeah kind of just groove over things the um also yeah because i think perry describes it as don't go chasing tennis balls yeah how do you so you said that before we hit record you said your biggest mistake or not biggest mistakes you still did really well out of it was selling businesses as the snowball was going or rolling i think i've done more for other people setting other people up than actually finishing it myself if i just stuck with it so yeah i've done more setting things up i think than than finishing them so let's stop let's stop i've done the hard work i think in getting it rolling yeah it's like in life if you're young and you're starting out with nothing you want to get your i always refer to it when i remember when i had nothing was i want to get my ball rolling i want to get i want to get started at the moment we're static yeah and we need to get we need once your ball is rolling you can gather momentum then you can start generating cash and you can operate but if you're static you're not going anywhere so so with tyrells why did you sell it i think it was just um it was probably i could blame that on my adhd again or something like that maybe or but i think it's just um i think if you feel you have a divine right to do something you probably think you can go and do it again which is um which is not always which is not always true so it's but you did do it again i think i was very lucky as well i think and against that 50 50 50 luck or management my trouble is i work i get too involved and this is the high part of my adhd or my bipolar when i'm up there enough is not enough and however fast we're going we want to be going faster and this is a subject i love that it's amazing what human beings are capable love if they can get things right if they get all their ducks lined up and as they're just focusing on one tennis ball and they've got their ball rolling and it's almost like graduating if you make a business a success you've done all the hard work in life the hardest work is going to school so you go to school to learn how to do it and this is like setting the business up and it's like me selling a business when i've just left university and i should have you should you know if you've got something when i look at a lot of other um guys that have set up great businesses from whether it's sort of charlie binghams the jcbs to james dyson you know the worst thing they could have ever done is sell those businesses because they built something so beautiful that they could just keep and so my problem is not problem but my the way i've done it is to go back to junior school again and it's not just it's not not just a financial thing but it's it's the physical people you don't realize how how important but then but then what you said to me last time is when when you're in the winner's enclosure you realize that all the fun is in the race definitely so that's the other point it's the chase it's the chase again isn't it's going back William Chase yeah going back to the chase again but the but yeah I think that's that's really profound when you told me that that's something that stuck with me because I'm realizing that it's just because people say to me you know how are you going to stay on a podcast you go I'm like I don't want to I just want to keep doing having fun yeah um you wouldn't want to inherit it you'd want to make it for yourself because there's nothing better than make if you make something for yourself the self-satisfaction in doing that and it's like children or people if they're spoiled once they're spoiled you once you've had it too easy you've not got the hunger to go and do it so it's like your struggle is purpose struggle is for hunger is amazing word and whether it's a diet or whether it's business or whatever to be hungry yeah and that's why i called it hungry it's kind of a play on play on words but but to your point in terms of the speed and the insatiable desire for more i kind of have that i need to temper it down a bit because it's just and i suppose the the example of this now is like hungry's working like a like a glove like it's just taking four years but i've got enough content now till probably march next year and we're recording this in uh august now so i've got loads of content lined up so i'm now i'm in that kind of tennis ball syndrome like okay i want to make some more money here and i suppose i'm asking you selfishly and there'll be loads of founders going through this is it's like i'm kind of thinking am i just fucking distracting myself to the point where it's going to be combustible or am i being shrewd and actually there is other opportunities out there and is that is another podcast my pink gin i've been grapefruit gin you know it's tricky i don't know i don't know really how to but you've got to be in it to win it and if you weren't doing it with a lot of aggression a lot of drive and a lot of passion you will make it win and it's winning now it's working for you now and it's it's like success breeds success yeah and i think what's good about the way you do it is you're very genuine you're very sincere you could start getting funding and getting people to pay you and sponsor it and paying guests to come on but then you're soliciting for business then and you're not genuinely at the moment you're organically growing so it's whether you're paying for a community as well you can pay keep paying there's lots of brands today that are growing to 100 000 followers 200 000 followers and they're paying to get their friends but it's not genuine it's it's not you're better off to grow i think and have genuine and talk to your talk to all your contacts as friends and treat them on a level rather than they'll do till somebody better comes along and then they'll do till somebody better comes yeah yeah 100 and that's my thing is a small deep connection with people yeah i really believe in that i don't think you need a big but there's a beautiful book called small giants by beau burlingham and it was written in the 90s but he talks obviously now the brand is big but he talks about the nascent craft beer brands he talks about the nascent patagonia and it's the small at the time patagonia is now bigger but at the time it was like this is this really sick business doing really cool um reject like not regenerative that's in my head um good words yeah yeah yeah i'll be i'll have that tattooed on me um but but i think you can build small beautiful businesses and i think there's a there's the there's actually a curse of uh maniacal obsession with growth yeah which is i suppose you've been somewhat somewhat corporate too because you wanted to flip tyrols and then go on to but when you said you made other people successful how so well they've enjoyed the they've enjoyed the spoils of because just to get that ball rolling from from static is a far bigger job than ever than there's thousands of managing directors and people will come in and run businesses once they're up and running where they do a very good job of it um it was like with tyrells at one point once one bunch had it and was the ceo of that said i think my 10 year old son could have done a better job of managing it than the way we have so it's there there are horses for courses but it's a lot easier managing something once it's going than it is and but then is it investable as well that's the other thing it's like we're in this fast moving move today with sort of crowdfunding and different ways of vcs and funding businesses to get going and everybody's thinking of backing it was almost like years ago there's a thing called the three eyes and when the three eyes were investing they just invest in many many companies three eyes the three eyes were an investment group and sort of early days of um of vcs and and sort of investment companies outside banks private pc private and and it's sort of it's quite interesting how what works if you shoot enough shots in the dark hopefully you're gonna you're gonna get it you're gonna get a hit so it's like it's like investing you know people invest in something just because it's on the way up it was like a good example was um was fever tree if you take um we started a distillery we're in um a museum in london we're there with um tim and charles from fever tree they said we're really struggling with this tonic it's um we're going to make ginger beer so the big jug of ginger beer and then and then the gin boom happened and they got everything they did an amazing job with premiumizing tonic and and the rest and the rest is history so that's why i think finding the magic or or the eureka moment is is is so so pivotal is yeah it's almost a full circle momentum equals magic magic equals momentum yes you have to as you say if you just grind your way into some momentum which is you just graft and graft and graft and with tyrols yeah you'll find some magic which is the vegetable crisps yeah that magic magic feeds more momentum so you're on this magic momentum kind of uh cycle but it's just but you need the momentum to create the magic and the magic will get that thing snowballing when and i get asked this a lot so from listeners is how do you actually sell the business because a lot of people listen to this podcast and they're like well that is the end goal that's the shiny goal at the end of the rainbow but like what so what do you do so you get the business was how big did you get till was it 20 million or what was the retail about 15 million 15 million and it was netting a 5 million profit net profit not a ebit but a net profit of 5 million yeah so it was um it was a but it was that's a bloody healthy business then it was a founder led so everything was kept extremely tight all the cogs costs and everything there were no luxuries there was no um expensive salaries and everything was kept to a very tight and that's almost the management part we talked about earlier it is it's a startup you look at a lot of people don't want to go and work for startups because they don't want the pain of having there's no luxuries you know i've had lots of people with tyrells and with the distillery coming in they say well when i were managers that's when i was a so-and-so i had 12 people under me now if somebody doesn't come to work i've got to go and do the job myself it's also linking this to gut health or health is your challenge a brand can get fat and sick by you know almost nefarious cancerous egotistical employees are kind of like your sugar meetings about meetings is cocaine Exactly.

1:21:21And you can't afford those. You can't afford those things. Yeah. And it's so it's almost so that you had it. So you had it really lean. Yeah. You had it five million. But I wasn't intending to sell it. So why it wasn't it wasn't built to sell. So why did you sell it? oh good question i just thought i could probably do better in um in uh in something else i thought i heard about um sydney frank i'd met sydney frank he built gray goose and he built it with basically nothing but uh he sold it six years later for two billion i thought wow that's exciting if you can premiumize that category so it's different categories so it's like fishing in the ponds which means it's not fishing in the ponds well it's which area you're fishing in so so that's why it was a lot more attractive to be in super premium spirit brands they're worth a lot more if you did want to sell something than a than a snack business frying chips and making you know everyday chips so it's it's like it's like what area are you going to go and fish in you've got this choice if you're going to build a brand or build a business you have all of your different places on the river you can go fishing in and it's you've got to go you could decide where you go somewhere because you like being there or you're going to go somewhere because your knowledge and you know where the fish are and and how to do it so it's i suppose the issue in your mind is you've probably got 100 pond and you're trying to fish in exactly and i was a different person and i was thinking about what success were you when you sold it i was um 40 when i sold it yeah and then so how do you see you get this you have this 20 million pound business 5 million net profit lean team how do you what do you who do you call who do you get into the meeting room like what's the structure of the deal if you've got something that good you don't need to sell it you've got people over you i used to have i used to have letters from saudi arabia from arabia i used to have all sorts of tyrell's had all sorts of people all over it wanting so people wanting to buy if you've got something good people will soon find yes the whole be so good they can't ignore it is yeah if it's good if it's if it's if it's sexy and it's looking good you soon got um and then who did you sell it to i sold it i sold tyrell's to um to langham to a to to a VC but it was um yeah I think it's it's it's the sort of decision whether you're um where you are in life with with what you want to do what what you can actually make and but nobody has a divine right what it taught me about that episode in my life was it's it was the people when it was it's really did sink into me how great a group of people and that's one thing i love talking about are people in a business is is having having the right when i mean the right people they're all getting on with each other it's like the audi rings in a line you have you can't in a small business you can't have a vertical structure you have to have a very flat structure because you you can't have two or three people doing the same job you can only have somebody like if you start up as a sole trader you've only got yourself to do everything when there's two you split it by half and so on as you keep growing till you get to a point when you start you've got to have a vertical structure but the one thing I find fascinating with that is building a business from scratch and getting those getting those people in a in a line all lined up all sharing with each other so they all they all look at each other on a level they're not you know then how do you do that on a weekly basis I think I did that by working with them myself I think if you work with people yourself it's a lot easier you can only have one person call in charge in a business and if you've got and and this comes back to focus then again as well if you're very focused on a very simple goal it's it's it's probably getting older and not being it's delegation it's trying to find um people who want to take ownership and they want to actually own own their department and own their but all not one on their own but all together as a team that's and what does it feel like maybe we can talk about when you get that sort of level of I don't know was it 40 million you sold it for well for yeah all together yeah it was somewhere somewhere around could have been around there yeah and then what does it feel like when that money like lands in your bank account is it a good feeling bad feeling ambivalent feeling yeah it's it's back to that um you're it's only when you're in the wind's enclosure you realize the fun was in the race you you realize what um what you had so um it's almost part of the it's almost to me it's almost part of a test to see if i can i can beat that and do it again but as you're getting older you're getting times not going on your side there's there's a thing in a human being's life where i think experience is worth more than money when things went really badly for me in life and i thought i'd lost everything i hadn't lost everything because i had the education i had learned in the first 10 years in business of being totally beaten and trying to trying to make it work and and some there's yeah there's vital lessons in the scars i think what are some of the other big scars in business and or life that have actually retrospectively provided valuable lessons i was listening somewhere to i think people would say like if any sort of painful experience or any sort of setback or obstacle it's like when when they got through that obstacle they were asked would you we give the option we take that obstacle away or or you can just you know just have just they're like we'll keep the obstacle because the lessons it taught taught us what are some of the big scars or deep scars i think the deeper the scar the deeper lesson that you've kind of had on the journey i think the one thing you've got to remember is no no regrets if you're still alive today and i would have been my change in myself where i am now i'd have been totally different if you i'd have got lots of answers for you probably a year ago or a couple of years ago but now i think we're lucky to be alive and i think again it's like managing that monkey mind and managing your mind and being where you want to be personally i think creating a brand bringing it alive it is is a is a some people are quite arrogant with it they think they have a divine right and i i could i could probably be a little bit arrogant when you say when you say divine right like detail that a bit more well if you do something and it's a success yeah you think it's all your you think you're you do and you need we need that confidence because it's like it's like the first the other to name a few school not to name a few schools but to breed prime ministers you almost need to have a divine right in life to be a prime minister so you can always speak above everybody you always carry that divine right you can't be a subservient and ask people is there is there two ways we can do this you've got to say no this is how we're doing it and this is how we're going so i think that's the same for building a brand and so it's like you've got to be so so focused on and give no doubt to everybody that's going to because what you don't realize is everybody's looking at you for direction and you can't say today we're going right and tomorrow we're going left it's you almost need it again that 50 50 split in terms of management and luck i think you need a 50 50 split between kind of blind brash oblivion boldness and what you're doing and your divine right of where you're going yes 50 probably 70 but i think stoicism balancing that out with is a really good way to temper that out and almost say you know the stoics will talk about focusing on what's in your control and and i listening to a stoic author called ryan holley have you ever read his books dub's because the way really good yeah he talks a lot about you know his success he's like yeah yeah i did want to be the author i knew exactly what i was trying to do but actually there was a lot of luck involved and i think that's a nice nuanced middle ground to operate from versus because if you have the divine right you'll just you'll uh the egoism will just kind of engulf you and swallow you, you know?

1:29:16As it does. Yeah, as it does, you just start thinking you're the absolute golden tits. Exactly, and then if you're too humble, you're too weak with it, you get trampled anyway. You don't get above it. So there is a really fine line between that balance. I read somewhere you had a bit of beef with Philip Green. Yeah, it was just be, I entered this competition, this entrepreneur's competition, and I think it was something like 5 million interest-free, and the wonderful opportunity of having a whole week being mentored by uh by philip green and it was um what what period was this oh just around the time i sold tools i think probably 2008 9 yeah and um but it was just it was quite an interesting experience in the fact that um we didn't sort of hit it off together but i think so you sorry you won this experience i didn't win the experience i was one of the five runners-ups but when we went to the final interview it didn't sort of go very well but it was a little bit um we got a a little bit of bravado into that.

1:30:14And so, yeah, it's sort of this divine, going back to the divine right. What happened in the interview, though, specifically? I just think it was like nothing to be, nothing out of the norm. It's a bit like the whole sort of dragon's den, you know, where you've got people with a divine right to, um and there are there are no rules what i love in this well there are no there are rules but there's there's there's no um play there's yeah exactly there there aren't any there aren't any rules in life there are laws we all have laws we've got to abide by but there aren't rules and i think a lot of people think that there are rules and it's and and it's it's again it's back that 50 50 50 50 percent lack and 50 management and i think it's and so many people do it and so many different ways some people are exceptionally lucky and some not so lucky on timing but i i do think it's it's there was an interesting conversation today talking about how you know uh you could go as far as say are people born or are they made or are they made because of circumstances of where they went to school and you know how they lived their life how they've been and and back to this thing that we all want to be better and we want to improve but we are what we are and it's how we sort of work this and every time talking about things like this that's how we'll go back to Bhutan and that's a great way to go and see how society would be if if we didn't have if we didn't have the cash and we didn't have this big you know neoliberalism yes the desire for more and more and more so you guys just didn't hit it off and then but did you that one alone that was um yeah it was just i guess it was just he was he was you know he is what he is and he's um yeah i just think it's i just think it's it's an attitude where it's it's like respect how we talk to people because this is the thing and so i think however successful you get you never get the right to be um to demand respect of of other people you you uh you weren't we all earn respect and i think there's some great entrepreneurs out there that have done some amazing things and and and i think if you can do something in society where it's like um take somebody like like timpson's or something like that you know you've got some amazing entrepreneurs out there have done some phenomenal things and put so much back into society um and and it's the way they go about things so it's um self-publicizing yeah the reason i was asked i was i was digging in on that one is because I think, and it's a bit like when you stood up to Tesco, you know, back in the day, and I think half this challenger brand thing, a lot of it started with you having the cojones to go and tell Tesco to fuck off, basically, for selling your product.

1:33:06And actually that gave retailers, well, actually there are challenger brands out there, because, you know, as the word challenger, I was speaking to Mark Palmer about this, the word challenger brand didn't exist 20 years ago. You know, it was just, you set up a business, which is, you set up a food and drink business, whereas now it's all vogue, in the vogue to be you know i always believe that kind of back in the 80s and 80s it was cool to go into advertising then it was cool well for my when i leave university it was cool to go into banking and make a shitload of wonga and now it's like set up a food and drink brand that's the cool thing to do but back then it wasn't but my point with the philip green thing is i think they can be brands can think both the divine right piece so they can think and it's again it's again very nuance it's like one brands can think we're so small we're just going to let a big investor or big retailer bully us on the one hand which is nefarious yeah the other hand is it's my divine right you need to list this product almost again force feeding foie gras down the buyer's throat that's nefarious so i'm just trying to pull out and detail the and i think with the tesco incident it was just at the time that's where retailers where it's a different matter now yeah how there's a different respect for farmers and producers but at that point that was probably the pinnacle of the food revolution since the 40s 50s supermarkets did an awful lot to clean food up it was in a bit of a state in the sort of 50s and 60s you know there was no standards for farmers anything could be put into but it was probably healthier food but it was you know to this thing where but then they sort of almost took it too far then where it was this thing to provide volume again of um in nutritionally poor foods but just being paid for volume you had to get volume and there was this almost this race to produce volumes of food and and that's why i keep coming about the regenerative thing because it's almost it's almost like going back to the bhutan thing if we were eating or living like they did 100 years ago like they do in bhutan the society would be a a lot better so now we've got everybody now with this you know being mentally aware of what's going on and we've got this new but are we going to give up the cocoa pops and are we going to give up cocoa cocoa pops and sort of things like mcdonald's and you know are we going to have this insatiable desire for cheap ready-made um on the go foods or are people going to change their attitude and all this comes down to the food we eat and the food is probably the most as you said having a food and drink brand that has got a respect is is quite amazing it's quite amazing product because the food we eat is the most is the most important thing you could have all sorts of different brands doing different things but but if you can sell if you can sell wellness if you can get a brand to actually help people understand something i think that's making a difference then that's the one of my obsessions at the minute out of many is is actually napoleon and I was reading like I've listened to quite a lot of podcasts about him and the a lot of Steve Jobs was obsessed with him there's a lot of entrepreneurs who actually read a lot of Napoleon and I imagine kind of you almost were putting this in the olden days like marching on horse to the Tesco head office and sort of saying your point but he's got some really interesting maxims from this book called The Mind of Napoleon that I'd love to explore with you so he's got one which is a genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind and i think back to that management luck point yeah a lot of genius is is doing the average thing when there's fucking chaos going on what would you say is an example of that on in either tyrells or um willies or chase distillery i i would say and to take it from napoleon it's just got to be focus isn't it it's got to be any any great leaders that have had success it's it's it's having that focus to execute the plan to take the plan and to get so i think the one thing napoleon did so well was strategy and as a strategist and the people around him he really did get um a great bunch around him that that that to execute that plan to to be basically be taken seriously wasn't it it worked his plan worked he was a great strategist so it's it's back to that strategy but a very simple strategy as well so what was the strategy how did you because again strategy can be convoluted and strategy like our health can get fat yes and unhealthy where people add in loads of bollocks into it how did you like napoleon get simplify your strategy and maybe you can talk about chase distillery for that i think you've got to find what works you've got there's no divine right whatever you're going to do in life there's no guarantee what it's going to work when you start doing something you don't know what the outcome is going to be yeah it's you know we can easy to see afterwards but when you start you don't know where you're going to be so it's it's learning on the go it's not stop learning i find myself now i've even got to learn even faster now than i have in the rest of my life to sort of to not to what this is all about is wasting time fishing where the fish aren't isn't it we all want to be where the fish are and we want to be sustainably fishing as well we don't want to just you know have a quick flip we want to keep it going so it's it's it's sustainably working it and and strategy focus and strategy and and following that as you said earlier not getting too wrapped up with a romance keeping the romance out of it and keeping keeping an eye on i think you can never do too much for your customers in a in a in a in if you build manufacturing making a product and your customers you can never do too much for your customers what do you mean by never do too much it's well look after all your customers every customer is a customer you say customer or consumer all of them whoever's whoever's paying you money for your brand or your product you can never do too much of them i was listening to what's the special source or magic to to doing that to like that i know they're trying to listen listen to your customer yeah and see what they want and get in the trenches get get out there get get out on the face and see um what what they want it's like if i'm going to another country now take my brand to another country i wouldn't just ring up distributors and send the stuff out there i'd want to do a trade show i'd want to go out there myself and go and you know we've got um Even the government here supports.

1:39:48Ever since I started Tyrells, I spent all my time going around the world, subsidised by the government to go and meet people. And all the time, you're learning. You're learning all the time what customers want, what works. And probably for... things are exporting or brand you think everybody's like us but they're not everybody's different they're all different things all our customers are different so what are some of the interesting surprising nuances you found across different countries because one of my fascinations is like on a deeper level just different cultures back to our japan point like i have like the you know japanese hospital food versus english hospital food versus american hospital food we're still it's hospital food but we're all wildly different like what are some of the countries you've gone to and you've been like fuck that's crazy yeah i think probably the best example is when um i took sort of tyrols around the world and the one place i thought first of all was france and i thought things like we're making these palm parsnips in parmesan chris so making these which i thought would have sold really well in france and it didn't go they bombed and then i found out the parsnips like a pig food there there's no respect for them they don't want them so it's it's it's try you have to be in it so my point is here be in it that's a good point be in the trenches and so you have to get out there get with your customers it's like the most important thing for me in this business are any any anything at all and what i love about dealing with independent retailers they don't talk about money they just talk about your product so the most important customers for me are independence is looking after where your roots where you come from and like national accounts big customers just want to buy it for money and volumes and they just want stats and cash but small little independence their lives depend on it so they'll sell products they love and they buy into so your customers or even if it's d2c d2c is a massive thing now if you can get your d2c right and get subscribers first of all like to describe you want people to describe to let you in to tell to let you tell their story but the second thing is then if you can get subscribers to pay to to buy your your story physically your product and your product is important in their life where they need it regularly every month then then that's the secret to success that is the that is the secret sauce so i just think customer service you can never ever do too much and that's always been my biggest trouble with sales and marketing and building a brand is trying to get everybody into that ethos that you can never do too much for your one thing that really annoys me now at the moment is you go on websites where you suddenly want to buy something you can't just pick up the phone and ring them you just there are so many companies now that just don't want you to i was listening to this podcast the other day on digital marketing on and and the biggest mistake everybody makes is they make these lovely adverts and that but you can't get they don't want anybody to come back to them with um you know it's it's a reaction for an investment you want a reaction if you're going to send your you don't just want to put a podcast out and get nothing back you want you want a criticism you want whether it's good criticism bad criticism but you need we all need criticism and testimonials and that and that to me is excitement is the excitement i want people to ring us and tell us what the product does for it if we can make it better if we can do anything differently and that's why i think that's where i think it all comes from i think the word be in it is really important because that be in it is is is the the link between the management and the luck when you're being in it yeah when you're being in the trenches when you're walking as it sam walton who did Walmart, Walk the Floor.

1:43:18Yes. Is the famous thing. He's like, he is being in it and he's been able to like put his hands into all the kind of the different pockets to really extract out as much information as possible. And I think it's so easy to get distracted and kind of think as you get bigger, my role is not to go and be in the trenches per se. the other thing that napoleon did very well was he would have he talked about the flex of strategy because he was in it he was there at the front line he was there with it he knew he knew because i've only literally got into what why was napoleon so important well he just knew everything was going on he was he was so he was he was in it wasn't he he was there he had his he had his finger on the pulse he was he was i don't think you that's where it was at the final battle wasn't it was quite interesting how it's all about tactics wasn't it all about tactics and strategy and how how to judge that the other people so if you're building a brand it's the market and where everybody else is in the market and it's always um never be jealous what was that was one of um bill gates's his big sayings wasn't it's never be jealous of the competition and that's probably one thing that a lot of brands and a lot of people get quite jealous i i agree with that as well what do you mean by never be jealous of the competition well never be looking at the competition all the time and seeing what they're doing and being jealous of them you've got to be you've got to be only be jealous and probably if they're doing something that you're not but you should be doing things that they're not you do you i think that summary of that was i did the thing in china once and it was about in registering brands and in china you're not allowed to register a brand for at least five years before you've been up and running and these these chinese guys i was talking to they said it's a good thing because it makes us improve we love people copying our goods because then next year we're going to make it makes us make it better all the time so they're always going up upper scale so so i think you can always make it better you know if you've got a if you've got your formula one car right and you've won you've won a race you don't just stop you've constantly got to make that car better and better and more efficient and and with a brand it's got to constantly evolve improve evolve and give its customers all the best brands that work then they're they're restless if you look at anything and probably apple would be at the top of this for innovation and being but look how much they've stagnated post steve jobs dying because they've lost they've lost the napoleon but they didn't like him because the corporates thought he was too crazy he was probably in like they put him in the crazy box yeah and then they never the best part about steve jobs story i like was the fact that he used to paint all the inside of the computers different colors yeah and that's the bit they really used to despair on wasn't it because it was just for the engineers so when the engineers took one to bits there's always a yellow one or it's a green one yeah it was the inside but i think that that point's very clever from a being in its perspective and the leadership is it's how you do one thing is how you do everything exactly and i think it's a signal of perfection and building that culture but i also think in terms of i actually think the best lesson for brand builders is actually just to go and listen to the beatles discography or whatever the fuck like all their albums and you just see how they evolve and it's still they keep their brand dna they keep the beatles it's still john lennon and mccarthy but you know if you look at like what's the was the obviously you've got the the early kind of happy clappy stuff then it gets really kind of crazy when they start taking all the acid and shit like that and it uh but it evolves i think that's in terms of brands the brands need to start but it needs to constantly be restless and evolving exactly so many bands just the ones that die are the ones that don't evolve exactly so probably one of the best examples would be something like peugeot if you asked anybody today what's a peugeot they say it's a car it's and it wasn't a car it started out as a as a lady's corset or something wasn't it or as um they used to make corsets or something apparently i don't know which came first the corsets or the bicycles but then they made peugeot bikes apparently for a long time but the most famous thing Peugeots have made over the years are the Peugeot salt and pepper grinders so they do salt and pepper they do and they have done so most kitchens and most most really that the taste is that if you've got a Peugeot salt and pepper grinder and they made so many they made millions of them but it's it's it's a it's an interesting thing with a brand how from bicycles to corsets to to cars how how that brand's evolved and so if you'd ask most people what they make today to other brands like tabasco that's a fantastic brand how they own the hot sauce market globally and from they haven't done a great deal of innovation but they've just done constant fine fine tuning of enough of enough things so and you know if you think of other brands there's the short race and the long race and that's why i thought with this business it'd be it'd be great to build a brand that could have a hundred year you've got to have a hundred year business plan i think if you've got a hundred year business plan then you've got something that's that's sustainable it's not a fad and and the beautiful thing about this is it's been around for thousands of years before so you're not actually you know you haven't got a a new potion that is scientifically proven or whatever that it's there's nothing like something that's been around since you know was back to hippocrates time wasn't it with vinegars and he said let let food be thy medicine and it was um it's how food's evolved since then you know you're saying right now you're like kind of in crazy learning mode like what are some of your what's your burning curiosity like where's that pulling you to is that into like uh what are you learning at the minute because i think it's interesting the whole gut to mental the whole yeah so what tell me imagine i'm a mind i am basically a dumb three-year-old i don't i know don't know much about it but it was as that wonderful woman said we are what we eat yeah and and and that's a fact but so so say i start necking that um probably not all in one hit but but what's that doing to me to make my mental health better the first thing it's your whole body digestion it's it's with the brand isn't just a product it's the it's the knowledge that it gives you as well so it's everything that follows that goes with it but it's the most important thing is your digestion your ph the ph is something people have hardly spoken about as a farmer you soil this is why i love the whole sort of regenerative farming now it's caring for the soil so that the soil microbiome to the gut microbiome it's so close what's the microbiome so your microbiome is all your microbes or your microbes in your in the soil that how they get from the soil into your gut through the food so if we've had lots of things from pasteurizing to many different ways of treating food probably even from freezing freezing is okay it's helped but it's there's nothing like fresh microbes and if you listen to tim specht or anybody talking about this it's it's those microbes and it's your gut microbes in your gut there's more far more good bacteria than bad bacteria a lot of people think the bacteria is all bad and it's all the the dental babies and and they don't understand that the majority of your body is made up of um good bacteria and the bad bacteria only feeds off things like ultra processed sugar and things so if you keep the ultra processed sugar and the sweeteners and all the bad things out and the alcohol your good bacteria will reign and your good bacteria is your mental is your mental wellness so it's the simple things that i think we've lost things like your ph it's your balance now what does the ph do it's where the people get heartburn or different um your ph is just like a um it's just like a line if you're a farmer with your soil you have to have a good your ph it mustn't be too acid and it mustn't be too alkaline and it's the same with your body if you go eating too much ultra processed and bad foods you're gonna you're gonna knock your ph out so didn't you meet i was trying to instagram you met tim specter yeah did you go on like one of his courses or something like that i met him a few times and i've like yeah i think i think he's done an amazing job for to put simply um gut health at the at the top just like eating 30 different plants every week eating the rainbow eating fermented foods cutting out the sugar all the basics is i think he's he's probably done more for awareness than than anybody has in um yes in a long time it's really do you know seth godin is the marketeer he wrote purple cow of yeah yeah he came on the podcast and he said any idea spreads through status affiliation connection and fear if you want an idea to spread it's one of those three things so gut health linking this to a champagne problem at the minute is quite you have a lot of status as you're into your gut health but and i think that if you get enough if enough influences or not necessarily influences in terms of instagram but enough you know like leonardo cranberry stops being dc 10 in ibiza and starts taking care of his gut health that will you have these aspirational things so there's the status element but then seth also talks about how simple stories spread ideas like the story has to be super simple and you know i was saying like how do we kind of package this beautiful thing in sexy clothing is it's like we need a simple story that can just spread so like the 30 fruits and veg the rainbow i think tim's doing a wonderful job of of making that easy story easy to spread which goes from champagne to cocoa pops so so it's that education so we've all got the basics we know that you know some of the three basic things are oil you have good quality oil you have olive oil you have salt good quality salt and you have good quality acid but then people are now just learning about things like antioxidants nobody's interested in nutrition and antioxidants in the last 20 30 years but now people are beginning to think about nutrition so nutrition dense foods the first thing you start talking about is antioxidants so like turmeric is probably one of your best um antioxidants so it's it's it's to build your especially after coming through covid we had a big word all through covid was immunity everybody is all looking for immunity to be immune then you move on to different words um from sustainable to you know what i mean we have all these trending um trending words that are going around at the time in in humans so so for me it's it's something that not it's not just a product but it can educate you know it's like beetroots we make those beetroot shots they're really popular they go through phases but for for sports for athletics and for antioxidants a beetroot is quite an amazing is an amazing product but it's quite under underestimated product so it's quite a polar product you either like the taste or you don't but there are so much there's so much to learn about it so it's to put it in a simple you know format again nutrient dense rich foods it's like apples modern apples have nothing in them at all but old-fashioned apples like cox's and bramley's and all these old apples we used to have have got really high antioxidants in them so and those are the bits the high antioxidant foods taste quite bitter it's not it's not easy to have you know and as we were saying things like with turmeric say in india they didn't have hot chocolate kids when they went to bed they'd have they'd have um golden milk which they call it which is turmeric mixed with milk you know so they probably would have lived and quite a healthy healthy life and they discovered that you've got to have black pepper with it to get it to absorb into your blood but it's it's like the education process without becoming boring and keeping it exciting and and how your health is your wealth isn't it i think that's and we're finding probably we want to get into more of a younger audience to get them aware and people are there's amazing how many young people today are not are following these lines and are looking for it it's mad the the amount of rory is telling me this the amount of people who just well gen z i mean again i don't like to box people into things into into age groups i think it's a it's just everyone's moving towards this but it's people are as i said that kind of the that adjacent possible thing is way more people are drinking less and being more mindful of what they're consuming yeah what is your you know right at the beginning we said your brand has to be a best friend has to have a best friend i think that's a great way of putting it it's like you need to know who your consumer is and your consumer can't be everyone you can't be best friends with everyone um as you say for example trip is quite clearly their best friend if i was to create an avatar of this would be sort of uh mums and dads notting hill kind of go to ibiza they probably call it ibiza not ibiza those are the sort of people um versus say a liquid death which is trying to be like a punk rock they're quite clearly different best friends yeah who would you say in terms of creating that connection with that consumer you say it's all about customer service who was your best friend at tyrell's who was your best friend at um at at chase distillery and then now and i think this will tears nicely to the last bit is who are you trying to be best friends with with with willies and again that's being in it to find out who your audience is yeah so so so it was the original yeah with tyrells i'd say i'd say with all three brands it would be the same audience we've spoken to the same audience all the way through and the same audience would would actually first thing they would actually they're seeking brands or they're seeking something for the information they actually buy the story so there's lots of fake brands that pop up that are just go straight from naught to 60 in no time because take take innocent smoothies would be a good example just by nobody really pushed the smoothie market in in volume you know i don't know how healthy it was with the amount of sugar in them but it but it did work they went just straight straight to market taking the ben and jerry's model and you know what's the ben and jerry's model if you read the ben and jerry's book it's like they did this thing in the park didn't they with their um ice cream they made some ice cream and they said shall we uh shall we start an ice cream business making ice cream and uh and they did a fantastic job of making ice cream quite cool it was like hargen are before and it was all very serious and very and then ben and jerry's put out they're all like the og challenger brands yeah exactly and they put a colorful happy style about it it's the same with innocent when they did that that was putting a you know around smooth instead of being you know white label supermarket owned sort of or very boring they made it quite you know approachable quite soft and quite um more so there's many ways of doing it and it's it's it's finding your audience and i think because probably for one of my handicaps is i've always wanted to build a factory and get the farm into it as well which i did vow after the last one i wouldn't build another factory in here i'm a built another factory again um and if you look at a good model like say red bull they never put a penny into production or every penny has gone into sales and marketing totally and that's that's amazing it's probably one of the most valuable brands on the but that all that cash has just gone into sales and marketing 100 so but i think with this product i couldn't have outsourced there's no way i could have outsourced it so to get the story behind it that's what we've had to make it does does it help it's almost that factory is your marketing as well it is yeah but but to a lot of people they say it's a distraction um that it's you know that it's an investment in at the top of the pyramid it's very very it's very it's very important to the top of the pyramid so if you look at um say take tyrols and its journey at the very early days say for the first five ten years it was very important that it stay at the top of the pyramid so like it's pricing and things and the reason tesco's wanted it is they what they said we'll list it if you've got to drop the price down to walker sensations and kettle chips price we said no it's 30 more and that's why waitrose and those guys are selling them because they're making more money and they believe the brand they know it's from the farm they got the pedigree and they're paying for that that so that's the other thing is that line isn't again champagne to coco pops yeah exactly this is how half the issue a big barrier as well as the education is price yeah how do we get to a point or how do you if this if your big vision is to get people to help lots of people i think it's a very noble and admiral thing for people who are creating brands genuine brands you know a lot of those kombucha brands are cat piss to be honest um not my friends ones who are probably a see but like my friends have got the real deal but there's some of the bigger companies that's basically just uh you know polishing a turd putting cat piss in a bottle and making it effervescent but the how do you deal with the price like can you do you get to enough volume whereby yeah you can make it you make it more um value that's you have that with tyrols that's what i see super high on the premium side and then as yeah i think there was a thing in the express and they said the world's most expensive crisp the vegetable parmesan ones were something like 35 pence a crisp so the the express did a thing on tyrols per crisp that they had an article or packet packet a single tirrell's parsnip crisp was more expensive than a packet a small packet of walkers crisp so how much was that retailing for i don't know they were like a couple of pounds a packet but they were quite hard work they were handmade you know fried parsnips and beetroots and they were really hard to make so it's back to that i haven't had vegetable crisps in ages economies of scale yeah and um so yeah i think it's it's it's a really valuable point that is how how you can you have to get your value by scale so my objective still is to get a bottle of this into every single kitchen i can and to do that it has to be value it has to give people value it has to they have to understand the value versus what's what it's giving them the quality of product that's inside it so um and there's lots of greenwashing there's lots of quick fixes but there are ways that you can as the value as the volume goes up you obviously do delete your overheads and you do as long as you genuinely do that and share that with your customer you know obviously when you're just making 10 bottles a week by hand it's going to cost you an awful lot money more you know it's like when we had tools we were making a packet of chris used to cost something like 30 40 pence a packet to make a big packet whereas walkers and you know these other guys frito-lays they were knocking them out for about five and six pence a packet so it's it's your cost of it but it's not just the cost of the goods it's your cost of overheads so if you're running a business on your own and you're in a borrowed somebody else's premises or something and you've got your overheads in your garage and you've got your overheads right down but it's then suddenly when it starts that's another a lot of today is balance right is balancing two opposing things and i think that is kind of the the being in it the that is what makes a real formidable founder is is is being able to balance two opposing things and being in the mixer so high rrp to begin with you don't have economies of scale at tyrells then as you said be being wary of the overheads what did your margins look like from say when you went into waitrose early days to like by the end that's an interesting one because you have a tail and in a small startup you have two tails one thing is lots of products and another thing is lots of customers so when when i say when the corporates come in when people want to take it to scale they haven't got time for small customers who only want to buy a couple of boxes they're more after people who want 24 pallets they want arctic loads they want to take the stuff so it's that balance of growing a brand to looking after all your small customers where you came from to i think for the long term for the long term gain and that's that's with all my brands that's been the hardest part was getting people from larger companies because we talked about this one before can people in large companies work for small companies and small companies work for large companies because small companies whether you're a marketing production or whatever you've got to have a very broad you've got to understand all of it but a very large company you're just in one small sector so again it's that diversity of people's minds on how so it's it's it's you know businesses and i just it's just the same going through as a child getting educated starting off in juniors to going up to being a senior to going to university to going in the big world of how it fights on for the rest of its life and how it ages and how it develops and how it looks after itself i suppose so that that's that's probably the pivotal point is is scale to value to how and i think a lot this is where your innovation comes in now so a lot of brands if they made the same product nothing else as their outers went up as the volume of sales went up their average price per unit would have to go down because the only way they could get more sales is to keep dropping in the price if they keep wanting to keep growing all the time but if they're innovative and they could bring out something better or something more interesting then as the sales grow the actual average price grows with it because they're innovating they're bringing something out that other people haven't got well i don't really understand that so say that again so so so if you look at say take turtles for example we had just potato chips and if you just want to keep growing that and growing that and growing that our outers would have grown up outers mean the the boxes the amount of boxes we sold all packets let's say the amount of packets as it grew went up and the average cost would um we diluted a bit but the average what we're earning on every every outer would go down because that's the only way you start dealing in big customers giving them discounts twofers and prices and support but then we brought out the vegetable chips so as the bottle grew the vegetable chips were twice as expensive when we brought the vegetable chips i thought what should we price them at we thought well the amount of work they took was put them in at double the price and they sold and they carried on selling so they were probably your champagne product and they carried on then you could keep the rrp keep the rp when you had it had to add the rp of the the chris versus the the exactly and that's the apple model that's apple if they just made the same ipod that they made what 20 years ago yep they would have to be pretty well discounted now today like the blackberry blackberry didn't innovate so it just sort of it just sort of fell off so the only way they can get more sales is to keep pushing it but if you can innovate innovate and you can bring out something that's all the time doing something that nothing else is doing and and then for me that's that's the secret sauce and then also you can keep the rrp and the margin of the main of the core range exactly so the original product that we want to get in every house that that every home every kitchen is a kitchen essential we can we can afford you You know, you can afford as we go bigger, we can make it get the price right.

2:06:04And so we can afford to help get that in the places. But the secret sauce, the thing that nobody else has got, we've got a product here that's selling itself. And that's like our vegetable chips, if you compare it to Tyrell's. And it's selling so well, we're almost struggling to keep up with it. That's the turmeric, right? Yeah. And so you just bang that first thing in the morning? Yeah. Empty stomach. Yeah. And that will just... Not neat. Obviously diluted. Really? i think we only gave you one last time this is a bit intense i taste the stuff every day nick but it's the best way is to dilute it down with a bit interesting that's but then it's not just taking at the moment 80 90 percent of the customers buying willies and buying acv are buying it as a as a daily dose as a health product but if we can get people to use it and to replace things like sarsen's malt vinegar if we can replace you when you put it on your chips why put just dead malt vinegar on your chips when you can actually put live healthy gut healthy stuff on instead so this is where the brand gets interesting so if we can get an everyday product you need to increase the number of occasions exactly all day all day long and even now the most popular thing this now is it's an alcohol alternative if you're having a cocktail if you put the eureka in it if you know all you need to put with this is sparkling water there's a um there's an olive oil brand which is i don't know if whether this is genius or corrupt but i think genius and corrupt are kind of interesting uh planes to play along but it's called grasa which they basically got olive oil it's fun it's genius it's fantastic yeah you don't ask about the quality of the oil or something yeah it just there's two yeah the sizzle and the drizzle two sorts of olive oil there's early season harvest which is harvesting knowledge when they're green yeah which is what you would high antioxidants that you put on your food or this leave it to go till the end it goes all yellow and it's at the end of the season you know this brand oh yeah it's it's genius they've also what they've done is they've got so for listeners they've it's an olive oil brand they've put olive oil in a can which you can recycle basically they've also got these squeezy bottles the reason I think the squeezy bottles are genius.

2:08:12Well, every chef. It's because that's how chef uses it. So when you're at home, the young foodie cook they're probably trying to target thinks, oh, fuck me, this is how chefs in the restaurants do it. It's genius. And also the sizzle and drizzle, they're basically doubling their rate of sale. But they're actually educating people at the same time because nobody knew about early and late harvest olive oil. Yeah, it's genius. Hardly anybody knows that olive oil only lasts for a year. Yeah. How many people know that? So the drizzle is the... It's the late harvest. It's the oldest stuff. And so that's what you'd whack on a salad or a fucking...

2:08:38the drizzle is the fresh is the green so when you look at olive oil the green the greener it is not the off on the late if you're pouring it on your salads or something the greener it is the better the healthier it is and and the more the higher your antioxidants and your polyphenols are in it as well so the later it is the more tired it's getting so the more the more yellow so that's what you're using to cook with so it's but it's genius in the sense that it's it's it's hitting a few things the one is packaging is is selling a recyclable packaging that everybody that's that's getting the good looking boy or girl and dressing them up in gucci and and against everybody at the moment people say gosh we can't use plastic plastic's out and but what do chefs use every single kitchen has plastic refillable plastic squeezy bottles they don't want glass and they don't want tetra packs and different things in there they want something that just you know so so that that is very very very clever and the rate of growth they're growing out now is just phenomenal yeah tell me about regenerative farm regenerative regenerative regenerative regenerative farming because i don't again i'm just the most interesting thing with that is nutrient dense rich foods now but how but where is it going and the reason i with my story i find it so fascinating is if you asked me 10 20 years ago and you told me where i would be i would never believe you i would have classed organics and and free from farmers as being probably tree huggers or i'd call them um i would i would have said it's people doing it for just a hobby and they and it's not sustainable to do it whereas and that was because of my growing up being brought by supermarkets to grow high value low nutrition crops you know in my tyrells days and and you know that was one of the reasons i set up tyrells to go from being a potato farmer to making a product out of them because i couldn't make the money out of growing high value we were like a hamster on a reel you have to go bigger bigger crops every year so the most important thing with regenerative farming is we're talking about the nutrients we're not talking about volumes and getting stuff cheap into mccain's and into mcdonald's we're talking about nutrition dense foods we're talking about healthy food so it's it's totally the opposite end of the scale so it's for me for where i am with this business it's so so relevant and it's it's it's the story and i with a brand if you can tell a story at the same time and and there's one or two that are practicing quite well at this there's ones like um riverford that uh guy watson scott river he did that as well he did yeah and that's a phenomenal brand and that's no and he really wears his heart on his sleeve and he is talking about sustainable he's talking about the soil microbiome not just the you know so if you're and again it takes you back to your champagne your pyramid again that where but but for me i think everybody should be able to afford to buy organic food and so it's it's how you cook it the brand wild farmed yes yeah quite again i was meant to do a podcast for them but it got moved because i think they just launched into waitrose um but with the regenerative so it's all it's all just the i don't understand how it's really regenerative is totally chemical fertilizer free is letting everything is letting the soil on its own do every feeding the soil so with With proper regenerative farming, you put more in and you take out.

2:11:53All these things, it's not complicated. So with regenerative farming, you feed, you put more tons of organic matter in the ground and you physically take crop off the field. The way conventional farming has been done, you don't put anything in, you take off and you just put back a bit of artificial fertilizer. So you're not putting any organic matter back into it. So a bit like you as a human being living off pills. If you were living off pills and glasses of water, you could probably survive. but it wouldn't be as healthy as that nutritional fresh organic matter that you'd consume with the with your plant-based diet it's um yeah it's super interesting i want to ask some random questions here um one is is who who's someone you wish you forgave earlier oh that's a good point isn't it um wow um i suppose myself really for naivety for um for you know you get some people they sort of almost blame their parents or they blame different um different people but but i think it's education and we're all responsible for our own education so my education on food and food production has has sort of gone from from building these brands and being aware and being in it and actually finding out what what's happening where it's coming from where it's going to so so forgiving yourself so myself i suppose it's like when i had a four centimeter tumor in my gut and i had a life-changing operation to remove part of my intestines i um i blame myself i blame myself for my diet and what i'd eaten and how i'd left and it's like self-punishment almost that you think you know you think why did why did i eat the wrong things and do the wrong things so it's um yeah i kind of agree i agree with that did you ever have any um like not like enemies who drove you forward in business or no i've always loved competition i think competition is healthy but have you ever has ever got to the point where it's like you've had it's been busted combustible you know i'm just asking asking this myself is there's um i've more earlier when i was a kid right people would basically just tell me i couldn't do it yeah and they're not like and it's people i sort of wish you wanted to do it even more wish you but i just sort of i i held too much resentment to it to a point where it was like it was like wind in the sails for the first bit but then it just became like quite uh actually became it was one moment it was wind in the sails and it became like a shackle on your ankles and it's like you need to at some point let that shit go did you ever have that or was that what only not really until until probably this business where there's all of the righteous um all the righteous people that say um and they think there is a book of rules and they're not ready for we're almost going back in time with this we're taking away all of the things we've done in the last 60 70 years to food we are trying to make a fermented living foods back to as they were made many many years ago to a commercial in a commercial factory rather than doing in a kitchen we're doing it in a commercial factory and that's the bit i think people find really interesting and we're trying to make traditional foods to scale in a modern commercial factory without all of the unnecessary additives and processes so so yeah so doing this um obviously it creates a bit of conflict with people that are in the market or other people coming into the market so so to answer your question yeah that that would be um that would be where um um well i think it's but then it's it's a good thing because if you're if you're spurring a reaction we're doing something good we're changing things we are yeah i completely agree you need that it's it's that constant one one percent apple get better because of samsung ferrari get better because of red bull mercedes get better because of both it's that healthy competition what's the current value that you hold um that would be different if you were raised by different parents

2:15:59oh there's no ending to that is there that's um that's a phenomenal question i think um i think we are what we are our dna is but then if a different parents you've got different dna so and you're not you then so i suppose that sort of self self cancels itself in that sense or if you were you wear who you are and then you change you were say adopted you you were changed you changed parents and you grew up yeah i'm just i suppose like in a different sphere yeah it's almost like what are the values that you took from your parents that have been instrumental in again back to the three qualities in life you have to have i think to be a success the first one is work is is character second one is um your work ethic and the third one is your not just your intellect but your yeah your work ethic thing is interesting us is i think you said your work is your holiday on our last podcast i love that and it's something it's something i've i've referenced a lot in in building hungry over the last couple of years i think we spoke just when I'd gone full time on it.

2:17:08And I was listening to something yesterday and the guy said, almost founders complaining that it's really hard and it's founders work 80 hour weeks so they don't have to work 40 hour weeks. And it's just a succinct way of basically saying you want to work 80 hours a week, but you could work 40 hours a week in Lloyd's in London and want to fucking, you know, and then, and also, so there's that part to it. And I think that's what you work so much because it's like a holiday. Then if you had a guy called Paul Graham, who did the Y Combinator, big kind of tech Silicon Valley guy, writer, writes lucidly well, very clear, punchy.

2:17:47But he's got a thing of saying, if you actually look at it, and there's 8 billion people in the world, and I think, I don't know, I don't have how he got to these numbers on me now, it's in one of his essays. he reckons only about 400 000 people actually find the thing they want to do and make their passion their their profession so i think actually being wildly grateful that you get to do this thing and your work is your holiday because it is so easy when you're in this oh my god it's so hard being a founder it's so hard that we got delisted it's so hard it's like fucking go and work and stack the shelves in tesco instead of complaining about tesco i think it's a really interesting lens um to explore uh no it is that that that is it that that that is it and have all those guys have they all got adhd and are they bipolar and and they must have because they must have something that drives them that makes them do this because it is so much work it's like so absorbing it's um it's like everybody wants to become an entrepreneur they all want to be a builder they all want to do it until they're actually in it and the next thing is that they're that there's so few people that want to give that want to it depends it's a balance between how hungry you want success and how how much you're prepared to sacrifice to get it and how hard you're prepared to work with with would you have given away all your sort of money and material possessions for to have more of a clean like balanced mind retrospectively yeah i think knowledge is worth more than money knowledge is worth but i mean in terms of that bipolar up and down no i think without that you won't have you you wouldn't have your yin and yang exactly so if you're a boring person that vibrated not there's anything wrong with it but if you didn't have bipolar or or adhd or any of these or you didn't have dyslexia and you were a probably a normal person should we say i don't know where all this is going to come out but it's going to come out somewhere so if you frequent like this every day is it up a little bit one day and down a little bit the next week like this or if you're up here or you're down here if if you're down here the lower you get the lows the higher it makes your highs because it's like a roller coaster the more it charges you that you want to get out of that low if you're in a low you so desperately want to get out of it how do you know and the high is so much fun that when you're going down again you say let's have some more of that so when you're going down to the low again yeah that's what i'm going to ask you so how's how do you think the low has been instrumental in in the brand building oh everything everything because i think i've managed it by by trying to find success so success to me is trying to find that way where you can make things work and success is not guaranteed success is is is it's so difficult to find it and then sometimes it doesn't last long or it you know it's it's it's a really that's a fantastic question because it's how back to those people you mentioned you know they would have been seeking that they wouldn't be here all the time people look at a lot of guys like whether it's elon master gates to whoever they think they're not up here all the time you have to everybody talks about you have to have the failures you have to have the lows to have the highs not everything in life is a success that's what i love about what's her name she does a podcast with um how to fail by elizabeth day is it yeah she's amazing yeah and she's made a fantastic stories out of that out of failure comes success and we've all had failures and if you look at most juniors you think they've only i've had a lot more failures than i've had successes i've had hardly any successes compared to my failures and my failures you know is is is what you learn to get your successes and and not and the other thing i love about entrepreneurship is i think doyle said this with dollar shaves was was the wonderful thing about an entrepreneur is and i always thought entrepreneur is an awful word until i heard doyle describing it and he's an entrepreneur somebody who can once something goes bad or you've got a bad deal you've got to learn to bury it and you've got to get rid of it and you've got to move on you mustn't let it come with you if it drags on with you it'll tow you down so you've got to learn to learn from your fail fast fall fast and like perry says you've got to fail fast get that out of the way and use that to succeed and use that to try and succeed because success isn't guaranteed success is only there if if you're lucky i love that i love that way you're i love the way you're describing that low is almost you're using that as almost a launch pad to go that's your that's your momentum momentum because when you're falling the virtuous cycle momentum equals magic magic equals momentum and vice versa so the magic's on the way up yes and it has to go down to go back up and that's the momentum it's that kind of that is actually equaling that which is getting the snowball going exactly which is super fascinating what is what do you believe is a universal truth but it's actually just a norm a norm to this unique culture we're in um

2:23:14i think the fact that there is no there are no rules i think that i think we have to learn we have to learn for ourselves there's no there's no there's no there's no there's no book of rule there's there's no book of rules there's no um everybody thinks in life that there's a proper way to do to do to do things in the universe they think there's a wicked witch in the world or there's something somewhere there's some everybody thinks there's a a way of doing things but there's not it's it's for you to find out everybody you talk to everybody you talk to with a and i don't i'm not really that happy with the entrepreneur thing because i think it's almost got i think a builders bill we had this conversation last time exactly and i love romanticized to they are yeah yeah there's the people who just drop on they buy businesses probably pull them apart or do different things but a builder is somebody who who has the imagination and the foresight to build something from scratch and to and if it doesn't work is the builder is looking for the way to put it together to make it a success so i think builders uh yeah a builder is i saw a picture on your instagram i obviously do a little bit of a stalk of the cologne cathedral yeah what and one of my fascinations i think you find this in entrepreneur i write a lot and i find it in writing is or like yes i think people use the word awesome without actually realizing what it means like or sum and the word or really i i think brands and or is synonymous with magic with secret sauce but what was in terms of the building this is where i'm going to this is what was the awe that kind of pulled you into that and it took 600 years to build that cathedral yeah three things in my life i've seen the first thing was and all fairly recently as well but i think um probably in the last two years as well cologne cathedral when you actually see it and you go inside not all cathedrals have a power but cologne cathedral has such a sort of catholic but it has such massive power in it when you go in and when you realize in the space of time if you stand in the middle of clone cathedral and you think this took 600 years to build how wide it takes so long what they need to get some jcb diggers but but just to comprehend 600 years the other one is the taj mahal that's what only that only took 16 years that was nothing to build a taj but every elephant every marble stone didn't wasn't local it came from about a thousand miles away every marble stone came on an elephant so if you think how many marble stones there was and the Taj that was built by a guy had 14 sons three of his sons tried to kill him one succeeded in the end um but then why do they be sorry this sounds so dumb but like why did they build the Taj Mahal like well it was just his palace his house and is that now was he what the king of India or something like that yeah and we know he was just a noble guy but he wanted to build a very noble guy but then he wanted to build one for his his wife across the river as well that thus you can just see the base of it but you could you could you could you could read about clone cathedral you could read about the taj mahal you could read about the tiger's nest in bhutan but the tiger's nest and that was the third that's what i went to do recently was when i went to look for the buddhas and i went to go and find the answers um and it's a massive hike to get up there and especially to get the mountains up above it but it's it's how they built those things in the days and how they got all the materials up there and they made it but all the romance and the magic behind it as well it was actually a tiger's nest and there's a cave where the tiger was and there's the the whole buddhism thing when you go and see it without me sounding like i've met you know a pair of cod or something it's quite it's quite exactly it's quite inspiring to go and see those things and again you have to go and see it to believe it because you can get the numbers it's like beijing anybody can tell you how big beijing is but if you can't land and you've got to be in a plane and fly around it's not like flying around london you don't fly around the whole of london you fly around a little part of beijing or a few little and it's like so big you have to see you have to physically see that that there's a link to believe to believe a link 9 11 you've got a ground zero just i went there not long a few months after it happened when i first started tyrell's and i couldn't believe this when you see it you see on the tv and it's But then when you actually go and see it in real life and you look at it, that's...

2:27:37There's a link here to brand building. So to experience the awe-some, you have to go... Thinking big and... You have to go and see it. And see it is basically being in it. And you know what we were talking about earlier, about being in the trenches. I think if you want to create an awe-some brand, you have to be in it. Like you seeing the Cologne Cathedral, you seeing the Taj Mahal, you seeing the tiger's nest at all moments of awe. But you have to fucking see it. you can't go on google images to believe the work if you built things yourself yeah to believe the involved in building it the sheer and in the days when they didn't have they didn't have anything we had today it was all done by by sort of it's crazy i think i think seeing things like that and one of my my other passions at the minute is um maximalism versus minimalism so in architecture food um the way we write the way we communicate we've all moved from maximalism and probably the the greatest delicious example of maximalism is something like the cologne cathedral yeah all the old books all the old seeing is believing yeah you're much richer texture and depth to them whereas now if we look at minimalism so you've got you know minimalist homes it's all these you If you go down some of these rivers, you've got those Hoffhouse fucking things.

2:29:01Because of the word processor and LinkedIn. They can build them in, what, two or three days? Yeah, well, LinkedIn and ChatGBT were moving to this minimalism, whereas everything you're reading now, almost post-Hemingway, is super short. We've lost long sentences and big words, which is not necessarily bad. There's wrong and right in both of this. In terms of the word processor made email communication, which is amazing. again it's no wrong or right but it's like we've moved from this delicious maximalism to minimalism you also see it in brands there's a thing i saw the other day of all the designer logos from burberry to yves saint lorraine whatever you say it um have all moved i think i think that they're local in the 1900s or early 1900s uh yeah about 100 years ago to now even google they've all lost that kind of richness and texture and i think when you go and see something like that there's there's a it puts into perspective yeah it gives it a perspective yeah and i think it's uh that seeing stuff like that can be all inspiring and can uh yeah it just adds a level of level to things but i i thought would say with the birth of tyrols i had the idea in october 2021 and then by april 21 21 2000 so if we if we revert this to tyrell's when i had the idea of like of doing getting things done i had the idea in 2001 in october by april 2002 i had a fully functional built i'd emptied the shed of potatoes i built a factory and i had a fully functional brand with four flavors on the market selling so i still look up ask myself today how did i do that in six months with no google i had to go and sneak into factories and go to america to go and find the the machines and how to do it and i think and i couldn't i don't know how i did it when i look back today and we talk about mobile phones and google and everything you have today but i did that and i still question how i just managed to go and make it so simple the operation of going to find the people to build it for me to do it to actually get it done in that time like today you couldn't even build a factory in six months let alone put all the kit in it and build a brand and get your packets and get there you know make lots of problems with it massive problems i bought a machine for nuts and bolts and every fifth packet had a hole in it we had to throw it away and all the usual problems but it was just incredible how did that and then when you do and then when i take it to those other things i just mentioned like seeing the taj and that's not that's like nothing at all do you know i mean it's a drop in the ocean so it makes you it makes you put things into perspective i think that's a massive uh thing on mental health as well it is when you see something like that you realize how one finite your time here is yes like it's just so fleeting so fuck it enjoy it and that thing's been around for 600 years it's gonna be around for another 600 years and like your moment is so fleeting so just it really i think having magnetism and maximalism makes you realize how tiny you are and i think that's a real um and it's your own ego trip versus what you actually want to achieve out of it in the end of it and also i think the other thing is this with the stoics is they talk about how like i think marcus aurelius talks about how whatever problem you're going through someone it may have a slightly different flavour has been through it before.

2:32:35Yeah. This too shall pass. This too, yes. That's probably the best Doe line for mental, you know, because when you're all suffering and you're all, this too shall pass. How often do you snap in and out of the highs and lows now? Because who was I listening to? Someone talking about almost not being able to mitigate when it bubbles up and when it doesn't bubble up. It's almost like you wake up and it's either there or it's not. The darkness, yeah. The monkeys, the monkey mind. the monkey mind controlling it how do you kind of say before it was 10 days looking at 10 days say it was on off on off on off you know say we were to look at a month how often does it crop up and crop that go up out of the office roller coaster go up and down up and down I think it depends what I'm doing okay well I am so so and that's physically because the best thing I think you should do when you're building a brand which I'm not which I'm very guilty of not doing is to make yourself redundant and that is probably the biggest problem i've had with trying to find management and people and their biggest mistake of the average person that wants to get into management is you must never be afraid to take on anybody better than yourself that's what you've been afraid of no i've not i've always been lucky for somebody i want to be made redundant i'd love people to come into a business to make me redundant so i can go on and do so there's always this thing about micromanaging people and how to leave people to it and to are you the sort of founder who would go in um because i i would definitely i've got founder itis which is whereby so i've now got a little team it's still a little team doing the podcasts and i'm giving them more agency with kind of writing some of the content yeah but i will flip out and be like that's not in the right tone of voice or like that's not how it should be said and then it's but then i'm trying to retract back and be like fuck me like he's this guy hasn't been in the business for long you know and it's i'm guilty of that and i think it's it's like letting go and it's it's physically empowering people to do a job and and to leave them leave them alone to get on with it i think it's um it's because if you work for something that's what you'd want if you'd work for something you'd want somebody to say this is the job you wouldn't want to be micromanaged every hour or so you'd want to be allowed to get on with it and do your job and so that's the secret to management i think is to is to find find find individuals who want to find people that are better than themselves they're always looking and that again is probably going into the wrong territory here talking about this but that again is where it's a good thing to be bipolar or have because if you look at microsoft and these companies out this is what they're looking for they're looking for minds that can actually think outside the box they're not looking for the they're looking for people who can who are looking for solutions we all want solution finders we don't want people that keep coming up with problems we want to find solutions to those problems so how and you've got to have the mind to think big enough or think outside the box to find the solution to that as well and that's why i think if you spend too much of your life in a big company being restricted you can never break out so i think the whole builder thing needs to start quite young when you never see the the boring side of it about being restricted you'd never want nobody's ever want to be in a job where they're watching the clock for the end of the day to come this is what i'm saying founders work 80 hour weeks they don't have to work 40 hour weeks i've done that where i've literally watched the clock and i was going i think i was like 19 doing data input i was like oh my god this is just this is horrendous I can't do this and I think it's yeah that's why you know so I work incredibly hard on this but but it's coming from a place of gratitude because I'm like it doesn't feel at work you know and it feels like a holiday a few more things then we'll wrap this up mate but the um you've gone to you you read a lot of books and I'd love to know I think we were talking last time about there was a book that you were like reading in in ibiza and you just threw off into the water it's called letting go yeah that was it it's hilarious yeah you literally what are some other books that have really got you wet your whistle kind of pulled at your curiosity recently i don't know i think the more it's being inspired but then it's it's going back to the greats like shoe dog phil nikes books like that there's just nothing to beat that is there i don't i think it's just so so difficult to find a story to beat he's got the best quote which is goes i was running away from a monster and running down a monster in that book and i think that's the perfect example of yeah of of challenger brands i suppose with you potentially it's like running away from the bipolar but running towards the dream of like and this is such a fantastic subject because once it's going and it's a success whether it's elon musk you know gates whoever it is once your ball's rolling your ball's rolling how fast it rolls is but to me it's still getting that ball rolling so i love looking at new startups where it's a clever idea you talked about grazier with the olive oil that is yeah what's some of the most that is just simple genius that is to sell an everyday product and what is the success of a brand what's it how do you spell it grazier Yeah, Grazia.

2:38:02It's after a town in Spain, isn't it? What are some of the most interesting food and drink businesses at the minute, in your opinion? I think Amelia with Bold Beans. Yeah. I've always thought there's room for a posh baked beans. I think she's doing a phenomenal job with that. Do you know her well? Yeah, I think she's brilliant. And then we've got quite a few little startups. I think she's doing an amazing job with that. I think Roz from Borough Broth. I think she's a fantastic girl, just like Amelia. They're doing things on their own. And they're looking for answers and they're finding out how to grow it.

2:38:34So is Broth really good for you? Phenomenal now, yeah. And Ross, there's lots of brands. There's three or four brands out there. And there's some brands that, but Ross is really got the, she wears a heart on her sleeve and she talks about the story. So as a founder business, I'd put her, yeah, she's just, you know, she just laughs and jokes about all the problems and everything. She's a great talker, a great, great person. um yes it's people that are fine genuinely finding the magic so i'd say those two at the moment are doing an amazing job because they're they're just so motivated you know that they both be done genuinely doing over 80 hours a week more and they're just making it happen they're they're looking for it finding the magic and um and making it happen and then what would you say yeah because Do you invest in a lot of brands or not really?

2:39:25A little bit. I always take an interest in, and then there's, you know, we've seen a lot of great things. We've seen things like Rubies with the ketchup, you know. You've seen Jack and Alex with Dash. There's a lot of great startups, and they're more than startups now, and they're going and they're running. And what they say the average company lasts for, what, seven years, isn't it, at the moment? It's less than that. It's down to six. and i think the interesting thing is the last six years we've seen more companies built more new brands come to market i think i was talking to pearl fisher or somebody a few years ago and they were just saying it's like victorian times there are so many people starting up now that's why i think food and drink to if you go to sell a house now or and maybe not so house because you can't work in finance but you know 10 15 years ago it was all the rage to go and say you worked at rbs or yeah the big banks whereas now you get probably as a millennial you get more gravitas and kind of i don't know the hip is probably i sound like a fucking granddad saying that hip but like um you get more yeah kudos if you say i've got my own food and drink business but i think this is what we're talking about in our first conversation is it's like how many people are buying into the romanticism of having a food and drink business so they can put it on linkedin and actually you know whereas actually go in and this is what i said if you reframed it if you were to line up loads of people and say right you can put your hand up and say i'm going to be an entrepreneur everyone will put their hand up yeah like you know but if you have asked to say right who wants to be a builder when you think of building you think of building a fucking brick house yeah it's not romantic no no one will put their hand up but actually and how many people would actually give 80 hours a week would give up all their life savings would give that their relationship with there everybody to put the business there aren't many it's a really lonely yeah how have you navigated that like the the friendships relationships versus pouring your soul into that because i think that again a lot of all of this is balance and nuance it is so have you what's been the detriment and what have you learned from i suppose each tyrols to to chase to willy's like yeah it comes as a price that's the price that um what's the price it's it's just you can only do so many things as a time it's how it absorbs you and takes and takes your time and takes your takes your um it absorbs you doesn't it absorbs so much out of you it's it takes a lot of understanding from everybody around it to to how much is involved i guess to to get it going that's that's why i just said that if you my advice to anybody if they get one success is to stick with it it's don't i don't know why i went all over but then you've got to give more and i think you should again go back to forgiving yourself you should be kind to yourself because the amount of founders and i listen to a lot of these podcasts who get they sell their first business and they think i'm i've got the divine right to do it again and they flop it was the second album isn't it it's the one hit wonder yeah it's like what happened to s club seven but it almost gets like addictive then you've got to try and do something better yeah and it almost i'm kind of at this moment now with with the potentially doing the second podcast because it's like do i want to do i need to do that is it a distraction do i do more of this and it's but it is that kind of it's it's tricky because but i think you do it the way you do it you're very genuine so what you're talking about we're not talking about um corporatizing it too much well that's what i there was a big corporate who wanted to potentially buy hungry and they were like oh you've got to just do basically cut it down to 45 minutes take out the swearing and i'm just like it's not me so i'm not never going to do that like what's the like that is literally the most pointless thing in my mind but it's it's it's interesting um so yeah how did you yeah what did you learn from each in terms of it absorbing that's that's a fantastic point and so if i was going to if i was going to take the positives out of it yeah if you said i traveled a lot with till so as soon as i built till the first year i was on a plane i'd never i was a busy farm potato farmer i'd probably been on a plane once a year to go on holiday some of places you went to if that i did 40 flights in the first year so i went all around the world and i was um not just uh as soon as i started to was i wanted to export it straight away i found about the uk ti and the and the uk trade and industry was were paying people to go to different parts of the world so they'd actually pay you they sorted all i went on one last year with um to india and it's just amazing to how they'll fix it all up for you so you do these shows and events and you can meet, but you meet the whole culture.

2:44:21It's not just trade. It's actually meeting the culture through the government as well. What I find fascinating is you understand your culture more by immersing yourself in other cultures. Yeah, I try and look from the outside. So what are some of the cultures that you immerse yourself in on those 40 flights that taught you more about our culture? I think the first thing when I started to, I was being a humble potato farmer, just getting on a plane to flying to and from. And did I tell you that story? I went out there to go and buy the kit. and i went in this factory and they wouldn't tell me anything about it so i was in in uh in new york and i had this packet of crisps and i was just having a visit in the plaza meeting somebody in there and there was a packet of crisps and it got this guy called ken potter on it said call me with his number so i called him and he said yeah don't miss miss the plane come and see me he said i'll get you sorted out i'll show you where to buy your cookers and things from and it was like the american spirit and he introduced me to the sort of amish mennonite guys that built all the fries and things of tyrrels yeah well they were sort of all the sort of german settlers around new holland it's just left of philadelphia it's where all the guys wear black and they don't have tractors they have horses and they do um have you watched that harrison ford film the fugitive it's where he goes and hides but it's um it's it was just what was interesting about that was was that gave me the taste for so tyrols you could say did the export put any value onto although places like monoprix in france was one of our best customers they just sell millions monoprix probably the waitrose of france if you like yeah and then um with the distillery you know i made a point of doing every country or well all key 40 countries and i did it with tyrols i'm doing it now with with willies i've got a thing in a couple of weeks going to australia to go and um with the government thing then as well to go and where they take you around and they you know but yeah what was what were some of those cultures that really like the first the first thing is a mirror going to america as a humble potato farmer going to build this brand in this factory that to get so inspired by the way the americans were so simple because this one factory we went to see they'd been in business for a hundred years and they just come up with their first barbecue flavor they just making like barbecue chips and they were still cooking them in beef shortening and things and what it taught me that first trip it's as i said just after 9 11 it taught me the americans are nothing like us i thought they'd be just like us i was writing i was writing about this this morning so i basically said i went because i kind of i said los angeles is not lancashire was the kind of the crude way of putting it but the easiest way to understand this is same product yeah completely different you know the tv program the office you know the one with ricky gervais is the english one the american with steve carell yeah it's the same premise completely different different shows different humor different humor human tumor humans it's yeah i think that's i think people look at an american we think we're so similar but we're so no we're totally different and then and that just shows you that the fashion sense is my mind and then and then in the food industry there's expo west a show there every year i'm going with perry next year in la yeah and try and do that and that's a phenomenal show and that is because you've got silicon valley so you've got silicon valley style with and then you've got the film industry so in one place in the world you've got the two key industries that are going to be anything that's trending so if it's avocados kombucha there's gt dave that makes is the kombucha billionaire now that lives there and any trend that starts off is is in la so whatever it is and the whole thing from smashed avocados on sourdough bread you know in most boutique hotels will be serving it now to whatever you're having kefir it all starts in la so it would be the key point to new food trends probably as the world develops even in melbourne and places like that what are your thoughts in terms of the mental health stuff um on like all these new nootropics and the kind of the microdosing of um mushrooms mushrooms psilocybin fantastic so i've got amazing he's got a business called high and dry yeah had mental health uh i said have mental i think we all go through with fluxes right but he's done done a guy interview the other week as well actually got a brand called non-alcohol-free wine they are ayahuasca one of those ceremonies have you ever tried any of those things where do you think that market's going in terms of not just i mean full throttles ayahuasca then probably mushrooms then more of these well five years ago six years ago the key take-homes from um expo west first of all was mushrooms mushrooms had just started mushroom teas yep so that was like five or six years ago now it's massively trending women-owned business you know for the whole equality thing for the whole balance and then other things like plant-based making snack bars and foods out of insects and all of these all of this um and that's that and at the same show um was things like cbd that was just coming you know so the whole sort of cbd revolution with canopy growers and that was just sort of started five years out there then five years ago we've had covid so probably more than that probably six years ago that show was um 18 18 or 19 so so what's what's really interesting is is that's where and if you get out there you get to see it you're looking at it from the outside sometimes too much information can be dangerous but the point was we're having a conversation earlier as well was where how about travel and expanding your mind like going to the tiger's nest or going to see the taj or even going to see an importer distributor in cologne every every time i've traveled i haven't i've done it with the business so every time i've been if i was going to cologne cathedral is to go and see our german um importer you know what i mean if i go to the tiger's nest it was all part of going to katmandu to meet some guys and then to go up there to you know to talk about the whole buckwheat thing and there so yeah i think the founders the founder starting a business is much as as much a quest if we're looking at this through the hero's journey joseph campbell right yeah it is much a quest in terms of helping people through a better product uh which helps them but it's also uh invariably a quest of self you know you can use your business as a vehicle to on your own quest whether that's you going to katmandu or you know the cologne cathedral you you learn that 40 countries is is as much as well chases self-discovery and and growth as it is the business growth and it's the mind but the key thing i've learned from it is you said right in the last 20 years since you started tyrols have did that put any value onto tyrols um traveling chase distillery being in 40 countries in bars in across the whole world and all the key bars from hong kong singapore shanghai you know to munich um did that put any value into the business and i don't know if it probably did actually because the value of those businesses wouldn't have been greatly affected by that so the physical value of the company being there didn't but for me the person the builder trying to put it together to go and see all those cultures and to look at the brand see what's going on because if i hadn't sold tyrells i was on the verge of buying a vacuum fryer so and we just got ready just to buy so if i hadn't sold tyrells i spent another four million on this vacuum frying line what's a vacuum fry so you fry your chips and things under a vacuum so instead of having acrylamides you keep the oil temperature down it's like boiling a kettle on a mountain basically that it boils at a low temperature so you can reduce the fat by half you can fry things like beetroots and even carrots and beef tomatoes anything you could fry and that was going to be like half fat a lot low fatter um and and again it was sort of great pioneering staff but you need the business big enough and strong enough and financially struck to be able to go and get into a category like that so that came about from my traveling so it's all ifs and buts and maybes but when i look back at the brand now and i go and see say tyrell's now in somewhere in corsica in a monoprix and it's still got a massive section in there that's still quite a warm i remember the first meeting with monoprix so it's still it still resonates you know that it's it's it's it's building relationships i love education which you cannot get through business books and well now probably podcasts i think different inputs equal different outputs yeah um read the same books as everyone else you create the same content as everyone else that's why i call it i call saying to perry the bland brandemic the blandemic yes all brands look the same with every brand's looking the same so you have this holistic 40 flight deep rich learnings from that time and as you say i think you there's often something you can see is literal impact on the business which is okay we're in these countries it's it's on the pnl this is you know this country brings an x and that may not have been big and you said does it make any difference but i think there's a richer learning and that's why i said the growth of the founder runs in parallel with the growth of the brand if you could boil those learnings down into like one or two or three principles what would they be from that kind of gallivanting globe that globe gallivanting so if i was going to reduce them down yeah one is the world's a big place and there's a lot of people out there and it's a very sobering thing as i said to go and look at those places and to and to learn all this different fusion of cultures and how to deal with it's like different customers countries are the same you've got to get in their mindset you've got to see where they are first for you can sell to them so so and the most important thing then of that to take home from that i think for myself personally if i said for my journey of selling a brand and starting off again selling a brand starting again is would i have changed the last 20 years to travel all those thousands of flights not none of them on holiday everything was was business it's been a it's been a phenomenal ride to go and see those countries not as a tourist as business to forming relationships and partners with importers to retailers to even farmers so now i'm traveling now i'm not just going to like australia to meet uh our importer distributor and uh different retailers but i'll actually want to go and see a couple of regenerative farmers as well so it adds so would i have changed the last 20 years um doing all those thousands of flights traveling to all corners for my own personal selfishness no i've learned so much i probably learned too much and it's probably cluttered my mind with with too many things because because every time you do something it's a totally different subject from the snacks market to the spirits market to the you know to the whole vinegar and fermented foods market it's it's a complete abstract it's a different thing so but it's it's just so back to that subject about people it's trying to find people that would want i would have thought there's there'd be more people that would want to come and join and and come and do that but most people only want to join when the company is is is bigger do you know what i mean then risk it to start with at the very beginning there are very very few people that will want to come and what country took you by the most surprise and what do you learn from it always always been america i think america other than america other than america second one is um probably australia is melbourne melbourne is the most like a hotbed for melbourne melbourne is phenomenal what's the most impressive thing i was doing a food show the other day with somebody on a on a cook show and it was the most interesting thing with melbourne is the culture because they don't have a historic culture it's like a part of you've got chinese you've got french you've got italian you've got korean you've got all these different influences in melbourne it's just there's a place in melbourne called the city wine store and if you're into wines and into sort of different food they make you know there's kiev out of lamb and different things just the whole balance and like smoking and smoking meats and the whole sort of street food that was like 10 years ago in melbourne was like standard fixed practice you know big smokers outside of um restaurants where they're smoking and they're the meats and it's it's it's incredible place melbourne is so so um it's so on top of it i'd say it would have been la but i'd say melbourne now and melbourne's a lot more natural it's not so it's not so paid it's it's a very melbourne's still the only city you can probably drive in the middle and park in most places on sort of brunswick street and places where you can go and what do you mean as in like you can just you can just sort of drive in apparently to oh it's big it's like the most impressive place in melbourne was the casino it's apparently the only casino one of the only ones with a morgue in it where they there's like a main road going in and a main road going out so it's pretty big it's a how big compared to london like it's a big it's a it's a it's a big it'd be it would be similar but it'd be quite a bit bigger because it's spread out over a lot bigger area but it's just a very chic place it's not like sydney would be like london sydney is very business orientated very fast from my but then melbourne is it's just if you're into if you're into marketing or art and design and they've got loads of brands out there they've got who gives a crap yeah i'd be the founder of that simon griffiths melbourne yeah uh non my mates aaron yeah i was telling you about he's got a brand based out of there um uh what's the other one aesop there's yeah you're going to aesop shop in melbourne and it is just with all the core and it's it's it's really inspiring it's a phenomenal place to go and see um well i've absolutely loved that i think we can keep i could talk to you for hours but i think um you've got something in there yeah i've got loads it's one of my favorites we've done and uh yeah super grateful i really appreciate that thanks fantastic thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on linkedin search dan pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much