A Decade Of Addiction, A Silent Retreat And Starting Over | With Hector Hughes

0:00I can be also driven by this like feeling of not being enough. And so I think for me, it's just changing the fuel that everything we do in this world comes from a place of fear or a place of love. And I think most of what happens in the startup world comes from a place of fear.

0:22There was always this need to numb myself, whether it was with my phone or work or drink or drugs or whatever it might be. not feeling like enough and so we feel like we have to overcompensate by running us into the ground and it's just like with a problem you're trying to solve so for us it's how do we actually get people to spend three days offline face what's really there and that could be like our deepest darkest traumas it could be the things we're not admitting to ourselves about our job our partner whatever it might be for the first time in my life i just had this feeling that i had everything I needed to be happy and I didn't need to get it from some external place.

1:02Olly Fawcett:Hector welcome to What It Takes, how are you? Oli great to be here, I feel instantly calm it's a beautiful studio you've got here, lots of plants. We try, we try to make it a warm environment for you, you know like one of your caverns. How's the summer been for you? Enjoying the heat, enjoying the busyness? I love the heat yeah I know there's a fair amount of complaining when it gets too hot in the uk but i think life is just better when it's when the sun is out um i love this time of year it's a great time of year for us generally like winter is tougher summer is better running an off-grid cabin business because the weather's more unpredictable in the winter and people just generally obviously want to be out in the countryside more in the summer so good time of year for that it's also wimbledon's just finished as a football tournament on i think london is at its best when all of that is going on you forget how good a city is when those things all happening at once now as you mentioned i mean you built an interesting business for the last six years which we're going to speak a lot about today but before we do i mean unplugged your main business is is really focused on like reconnection health i would say and so many you know positive factors of life but was that always who you were as a kid or were you a little bit more traditional chaos creativity you know what was life like for you growing up good question uh i think i think a lot of the the let's say the the positive side of unplugged and the uh good for mental health and health and all these kind of things is a lot that came from a place of just trying to fix that in myself i think i've always been a very optimistic person positive person uh but i think if i'm being frank that often covered up maybe what was really going on i think i've i've done a lot of work later in life i mean i'm only 32 now but later in my life uh looking back at just some of the dynamics going on so i think as a teenager young adult like i did always have this dissatisfaction i'm sure that's not uncommon amongst entrepreneurs and uh and yeah there was always a need to there was always this need to numb myself whether it was with my phone or work or drink or drugs or whatever it might be like i addiction has played quite a big part in my life to be honest i had a quite a complicated relationship with substances for mostly alcohol but for from 15 to 25 um and generally there was just a real dissatisfaction and i think it was always quite socially conscious to be honest i was always quite as a kid like concerned about what other people thought of me thinking about whether i fitted in all of these kind of things i think when i got into drinking and going out like that was always a way of fitting in and um it almost became oh it did become a big part of my identity and so i basically entered my early 20s uh and that was the chaos like a lot of going out a lot of chaos and uh i was just really like i always had this very uh glass half full attitude that my life would always magically work itself out and so i was never hard working or anything like that because i just thought that someday everything would just fall into my lap and then as i came into my early 20s uh the reality started to diverge from that a little bit very nearly failed my second year of university ended up scraping through with a reasonable enough degree um but yeah life just wasn't perhaps going the way i wanted it to be going and i would find the more i'd pull away from that life of drinking going out the the more that would escalate as well and so i think in my early 20s i was i was looking for ways to change my situation uh like i to be honest i felt trapped by the life i was living very consumed by what other people thought and started to get into reading meditation those both played huge parts of my story and through that i started to see a way towards a more positive life i think to be honest um and then it all reached a bit of a head when i was 25 i just had this big life rebrand burnt myself out was working for a startup at the time yeah uh just ran myself into the ground and then the recommendation of friend went off to a silent retreat in the himalayas which was this buddhist temple on top of a mountain i remember when he first recommended it i laughed it off and i thought i can't go and do that what would the guys at work think but eventually i just thought i'll just get over myself and go and do it and i did it and uh it was it was life changing very cliche but came back from that and quit my job a week later uh started unplugged i went sober a month after that so i just had all these big life changes in the course of about two months um so that's really where unplugged came from it came from to some extent i wanted to go and escape to a cabin and lock my phone in the box and just get away from it all and uh and i think realized that perhaps that could be beneficial for other people too during that 10 years of 20 15 to 25 10 years of i think chaos as you said it was did you realize you were in it when it was going on could you see kind of like the way you were behaving obviously you were you were conscious through it but could you recognize the kind of path you were going down no i don't think it's ever that obvious at the time it's only obvious looking back and it's so normalized like drinking is such a big part of british culture yeah um and it became such a big identity thing for me like it was uh because it was also went hand in hand with like the most popular i was as a kid was when i was drinking the most and yeah like that became a way of fitting in and uh so it never occurred to me that it wasn't normal if that makes sense and i always had a slightly abnormal relationship with with alcohol like i would always be the one who took it too fast there was this more more more attitude i've actually done some addiction recovery in the last year or so it's been very transformational uh it's almost like the next rebrand after the one back in 2019 and that's just really been amazing for just understanding just how like driven by fear i've always been for example i would have said prior to the last year that i was not a fearful person that i was a brave person uh but actually i wasn't brave i was just reckless you know i was always the one who could take it too far i was always the one who took big risks took made the gamble all that all that kind of thing and i think there's a lot of what's driven me as an entrepreneur um and actually i'm learning to sit with that because i think what i did for two decades is i suppressed that fear i i basically have unpacked a bit of this in therapy and i think as a eight nine ten year old i was quite emotional i remember crying quite a bit and then at some point i learned the lesson of i just need to bury that all away and whatever happens just give off this aura that all is well and so that that became my mantra from my early teens really like whatever was going on in the world around me all as well and just tried to develop this equanimity uh because that's how i coped and the problem with that is that then as life happens and things happen you just these things just get buried and buried and buried away and uh and then they accumulate and what would happen then is is in my drinking days is i take it too far wake up feel some shame uh and i just bury it all away laugh about it with friends and go again and so it just had this decade of things building up and building up and building up and so what then happened in uh 2019 when i started the business is i actually got quite ill a few months afterwards so i stopped drinking and then about four or five months afterwards i started to get these weird auto immune issues so i started to get this like burning sensation that my skin would go red i'd feel yeah yeah and it would last for seven just two hours keep me up during the night uh couldn't figure out what it was i was living a very healthy life at that point was eating very healthy he was in a very meditating a lot and a really chilled headspace yeah so i was feeling good but then then this this thing would just come on spend a year seeing an allergy clinic it wasn't allergies but they gave me all these antihistamines which would keep it away but every time i stopped it would come back then i saw a chinese doctor for a year which was a bit of a pantomime because he couldn't speak in english i couldn't speak any cantonese so just turn off every two weeks and we laugh and smile at each other and do some acupuncture and then he'd give me these 14 bags of twigs and leaves uh and and every day i'd have to brew one of these into a potion basically for two hours um so yeah my girlfriend at the time uh put up with the house smelling like chinese medicine for uh weeks and weeks um so so i i think that must have had anti-histaminic properties because that had a similar effect right and then after another year so there's two years at this point i started got a lot worse and moved with my partner then up to epping forest and started to rough and hung over every day um but you were this is when you're sober was sober yeah and every day i would just feel rough in 23 24 um and work was challenging and my whole focus each day was just turn up and grip my teeth and just put on a positive presence for the team and the people around me and i eventually found out that was due to mold poisoning which is yeah yeah and the more you look into that like it's actually far more common than is that we think do you know chris williams that yeah it's exactly is that what you have to do that yeah yeah really yeah and there's something about i mean i've gone into this a lot since and actually uh people like gabble mate talk a lot about how uh suppressed emotions and traumas compound these chronic issues right and chris williamson how he lives his life was quite similar to how i was living my life then which is like very optimized yes you know everything is very strict and tight and and the problem with that as it adds a strain to some extent so this cult of optimization uh fundamentally is just not how we are talking about at the moment as well aren't they 100 so i think it's really not good for your long-term health and i think it makes you much more susceptible to things like this uh and so so yeah through that experience just led me to unpack a lot of what i was talking about earlier which is all of these suppressed emotions and traumas and all of these kind of things so that that sent me on a fascinating journey uh and actually realized how just just on some spiritual level i think i've always been quite chilled naturally like if you met me four or five years ago you would think i was very chilled like meditate a lot all this kind of thing but there's always been some torment on some spiritual level and so actually the last year has been a big year of of um just working on that which has been how did you recover some mold poisoning yeah how did you recover from that uh so it's a long and awkward thing to recover from and complicated i think i saw chris's video where he documented like a six-month journey of like yeah moving out he was doing like i mean he obviously went pretty hard and if you did the same thing he was doing some trial stuff and like it looked fucking intense yeah and it also wasn't working right like i think this is the big thing so a lot of it is for me now is i tried all the things i threw a lot of money at it ran myself into the ground financially tried every therapy imaginable peptide therapy ozone therapy all the things all the supplements uh and actually in the last year or so the approach has just been to just chill out more really yeah which for a founder is hard right i think hard yeah and the natural stresses and strains of running a business i think are really not successful not helpful for healing uh but being in nature more being offline more like all of these things is just actually chilling out because the body can heal itself but i think it's when we when we just overwhelm our systems which living in london working as a founder like all of these things can really really dial up everything in as part of the system so that's been the big thing for me in the last year or so and it's there have been times when it's been easy there are times when it hasn't so we've been through a lot of challenging times business-wise there's been lots of fundraising and various things which has added a lot of stress and and so um i'm actually in a period now where i could do with i'm actually going to next week just go and spending a couple of weeks out in the countryside somewhere and just chill out and just deregulate my system a little bit how do you know that you're getting close to the close the line um so so i as i said for two decades was very emotionally suppressed and right could not was not in touch with my body at all and as part of the last year or so and digging into all of this a lot of that has just been learning to just like sit and just feel what's what's going on you can really feel it like if we actually sit and listen to our body the signs are there and i think it's so easy to numb ourselves and just ignore what signals the body's telling us whether that's with caffeine or work or adrenaline or whatever it is yeah like there's just this sense of being on especially as a founder especially when there's exciting stuff happening you can just go go go go go and it's actually usually when we slow down that everything starts to catch up with us so yeah i mean the big thing for me is just learning to tune into what my body's telling me and it's very confronting i did about a year of somatic therapy which is somatic is like into the body and that was really difficult for me i'm a huge fan of therapy generally and i really enjoy talking therapy because my coping mechanism has always been i can spend all day intellectualizing these things and uh talking around issues and all this kind of stuff but actually sitting and feeling what's going on my body is hugely confronting because uh i've been so disconnected from that for so many years and again it's like i think when when we develop one way of coping and lose touch with our body then a lot of that is just that's what's keeping us safe you know it's almost like you don't want to open that box so i think there's a lot of research around people who have sustained a lot of trauma early in life and they just can't face that.

14:33They can't connect with their body. So the way that they cope and manage with life is to completely disassociate with that. And so I think just to some degree, there's a bit of that that's been going on. So the last year has been the long and painful process of just learning to chill out and sit with myself.

14:50Olly Fawcett:That 10-year period where you were really going through it. Yeah. What's your advice to someone who can recognize that in someone else that they see? so i feel like 15 to 25 is very important years and you were on the side of it where you're going through it is there advice or guidance you would give to an individual who can see their friend their partner their relative going through that that process of almost destruction do you know what they can do to to help that situation yeah for sure i mean it's it's really difficult because it has to come from the person but like there's lots of um organizations out there in the addiction recovery space uh that do really work and i think a lot of the a lot of those the basis for them is that people who've gone through the same thing and got well like they're always going to be more credible to someone who's going through that same thing because they can they can emphasize so i think it's difficult because when people are really going through it if the people closest to them in their life try and flag it to them they feel victimized they feel blamed you know you don't understand me all of this kind of thing and so i think uh yeah what i would say is just reach out to anyone you might know who's been through that and could talk to them uh because i mean as i said having gone through that in the last year or so and and spending a lot of time in those communities that one you can hear people will tell their story of years and years and years of carnage and then they heard one thing from one person and just something shifted inside them uh so i think yeah what i would say is just be there for them don't give up on them and and um uh yeah just just try and put them in touch with people who've gone through that and come out the other side do you have i mean we're we're not too much of a dissimilar age but the generation behind us you know the individuals that are 17 18 going to uni in september whatever might be i feel like they're gonna have such a different time than what i didn't go to university but like what our generation did in terms of the drinking the drugs the partying the atmosphere you must have also seen this without unplugged in terms of the age demographic must be very different if you built this 10 years ago it'd be completely different right what is your perception on the kind of i guess the brilliant opportunity or the positive more positive environment that the next generation are going to go through in their in their early years yeah it's a good question i think this is the thing like it at each generation there are pros and there are cons and so i think um like fundamentally they live a more online life now and that comes with weaknesses and it comes with strengths so i think it's just a very different existence um but i think we are starting to see a move towards just a more conscientious way of living like things like people moving back to religion which i actually think is uh very healthy for society i mean religion is obviously incredibly polarizing has a very complex and uh and polarizing history but it's also great for giving people meaning and community and all of these kind of things which i think to some extent i think that's the that's the gap now because i mean when when we were growing up basically all community was through drink and going out and all these things and and it's been interesting for me moving away from that life is is to just understand like what does life look like now and and and to be honest it took a long time to just start to develop that community side of things i i definitely had the tendency to isolate and uh try and fix myself and all of these kind of things which i think can be very unhealthy and again it comes back to this idea of like optimizing and fixing and it just becomes this uh yeah it it puts you out of whack and out of balance and i think there's a lot to be said for just maintaining balance in in life and sometimes uh if you really get stuff wrong it can it can send you a lot in the the other direction so so yeah i think uh there will be many many positives coming out of this generation um i think there's been a big move to re-understand things like meaning and community uh there is a big move in that generation to spend more time offline for example so so yeah i think we're we're going to see some really positive things come out of it for sure yeah you mentioned part of your burnout happened when you're at a startup was that your first professional job yes yeah tell me about those times yeah it was a lot of fun to be honest i i joined out of university i actually i did a master degree so i'd go into finance applied to a few grad schemes no one offered me a job and a friend of mine said why don't you go work at a startup for a year and then you can can reapply in a year and i thought why not applied to 20 startups one of them offered me a job which was in sales it was a startup called nobody pos so it was ipad point of sale systems to be going to a restaurant or cafe and these are an ipad exactly it's i-in stuff i-in stuff and i was the second employee on the commercial side and my now co-founder ben was the first employee so we met in my job interview uh and it was he interviewed you he came so the the founder was interviewing me and he came in to speak to me so that's how he was my boss at one point so yeah we we worked together for a couple years which was a lot of fun uh so we went from four of us around a table in east london with a four or five person tech team out in uruguay to over the next three years was 70 or 80 people globally at peak we had offices in you had the uk australia us and uruguay so it was chaos we actually did an international dispension at some point and closed the australian us office but it was uh it was an amazing experience i did a year in sales then wasn't great at that tried to quit and they said look why don't you run product for a year wasn't much better why did they keep you um i don't know i mean i was rubbish at sales so they're kind of in for my selling ability but the uh i think just a positive presence and said bright things occasionally so um uh they yeah put me in charge of product for a year which was fun went out spent some time a year ago the tech team out there uh and then i started helping the marketing team out with some numbers and spreadsheets uh and stepped into running growth which i did for the last year so really good experience working all across the business uh it was as i said chaos there was one summer when we had an over 100 staff turnover in london so over 100 yeah yeah and there'll be people coming and going two weeks later and it was just carnage um but yeah amazing experience like bright guys running a company lots of things they got right lots of things they didn't get right so lots of great lessons around uh culture and product and And yeah, just all of the things that actually make a startup tick.

21:40So I came out of that feeling like I hadn't gained any proper experience because you think you need to go and get the qualification, do the thing. But actually, in hindsight, just amazing schooling and all the intangibles like dealing with uncertainty and managing the complexities of startup life and the trials and tribulations. and do you think that's the best lesson for those looking to be a founder or an entrepreneur is to actually do it as a number two or number three i think the best way to do it is to do it as number one like if you want to be a founder the best way to practice that is to go and be a founder um but i think is yeah i think as a if you're not ready to do that for whatever reason then being in the startup environment it just normalizes it as well like if you're if you're working directly with the founders it meant that after three years there i didn't never really i didn't know much about startups it never really occurred to me to go and be a startup founder yeah um and after three years there it just normalized it so it was just very easy to make that jump myself so yeah i think we are so susceptible to what is going on around us and people really under appreciate that what your normal every day and how you're working and how you spend your time like that massively shapes your view of the world and if you're going to spend five years as a lawyer and your day-to-day is uh understanding the details and crossing the t's and dotting the i's and legal contracts then that's going to give you a view of the world like my my parents are both lawyers um and uh i hope you won't mind me saying this but me and my dad will uh he's they're both incredibly helpful uh for me running unplugged but get at him first he'll yeah he'll have he'll have such a different perspective to a given situation yeah uh for me and be thinking about all these things that could possibly go wrong because that's our lawyers see the world and i'll be i'll take completely opposite approach and the answer is probably somewhere in the middle uh so it's very useful having him as a um or both of them as a sounding board but i think it's just really interesting to see how what we do every day really does shape the way we see the world.

23:48Olly Fawcett:You burn out at the end of that time. Do you think it was partly to do with the work you were doing as well? I know you had some stuff going on personally, but jumping around like that, not many people, I mean, I've employed a lot of people in my companies, right? Yeah. Jumping around like that in a startup environment is intense. Like, you know, moving from sales to product to marketing as in a quite scaling business, leading to then the burnout piece. Was that influencing that or was that your own thing? um it was one of many factors yeah i think the the lifestyle of going out and escalating nights out all that kind of thing definitely contributed there was just a real dissatisfaction with life generally like i think my undealt with issues definitely contributed to that but then also for sure like it felt like a very unsustainable time at the startup yeah i was running growth not particularly successfully either so and we were going into a series a or attempted to raise a series a and so there was just a lot of pressure and it just felt it felt very unsustainable behind the scenes so that that definitely contributes um and then also but i think i think the biggest thing is what i've noticed in myself is that when i run myself into the ground and fundamentally like busy myself whether it's with work or other things yeah it always comes from a place of insecurity like it comes from a place of i feel bad because i haven't i'm failing at the thing i need to be doing whether it's running growth at a startup or closing the funding round or whatever it is and so the insecurity i mean makes me busy to overcompensate so i feel better about myself is that insecurity purely coming from internally yeah i think that's where insecurity comes from Like, I think it's that if you are completely secure in yourself, then you don't run yourself into the ground.

25:41And so I would say I would perhaps propose that all burnout basically comes from just this, like, not feeling like enough. And so we feel like we have to overcompensate by running us into the ground. And a lot of people obviously get swept up in toxic work environments and things like that, I think, really accelerate burnout. and then generally some people are more successful to it than others uh but yeah myself i think it was just it was a all of it it was just all of that together um and fundamentally compounded with the fact i was just numbing myself you know i i just was not spending any time sitting with my feelings so it can be a double-edged sword being having this let's call it a stoic personality type which is that on the surface i was always calm unflappable uh but then all of these things were just almost building up like a pressure cooker inside and that all comes to a head at

26:40Olly Fawcett:some point yeah there's someone that's been through it do you do you feel that burnout is overused as a as a phrase i think it's just it's just a it's just a phrase uh i think it's a useful phrase like it's a word words are labels yeah uh it's not like i didn't have a breakdown i didn't run myself to the ground i probably could have kept going for a while longer i just happened to this silent retreat yeah arrived in front of me so i think it can like many words it can it can cover lots of different things uh i think we're probably all we're probably all a little bit burnout maybe all is a bit broad but i think it's it's actually probably way more prevalent than than we think like because the word itself burnout is very uh dramatic yeah we imagine us flaming out and collapsing and all of that whereas i think i think all of us are a bit jaded uh live if you if you're living this i think the most ambitious people are often the ones who run themselves to the ground often the most fearful.

27:47Olly Fawcett:And yeah, there is something about the life we live that is just so opposite of how we were built to live. We're built to live in little tribes and spend our days hunting and gathering and sitting around chilling. And we now live these lives where we're commuting in on the morning and spending all day bombarded with information, thousands of emails messages uh interacting with thousands of people yeah uh and i i just think that we've normalized being just always a little bit burnt out like our systems are not how they should be and and i think the way to see that is if you speak to anyone who's gone and spent a month completely offline somewhere then the change they report is completely profound and the reason behind that is what they have done is they have returned to what it is to be human and i mean what we're providing three days offline in three days you notice a huge difference the first day you're a bit more anxious and then you start you start to access this deep sense of calm and that is how humans are built to operate like we're not built to walk around with this low level stress and anxiety that we've normalized today uh so i think that we are all a little bit out of whack if we're living this 21st century high octane life and that's fine as as you said earlier like society has moved on and this is the world we live in now but i think the lesson in there is we can all get back to that place of calm and and i think it's a it's a very valuable thing to experience do you think you mentioned fear a little while ago do you think there's a lot of fear about actually exploring that calmness a hundred percent because i'm i'm fearful of it yeah it's a fear of very like sitting with ourselves yeah yeah because all we are doing all day long is distracting ourselves uh because it's uncomfortable it's uncomfortable to yeah sit with ourselves and experience what what actually comes up and it takes courage and i think the big learning for me in the last year is i've started to because that's what a lot of my last year has been is like learning to face the deepest darkest parts of myself and yeah courage is not the absence of fear it's feeling the fear and doing it anyway yeah and i think if we can to actually have courage to go and do the right things in the world we first need to have the courage to to face ourselves but it's it's tricky yeah because also i think i mean referring back to individuals who are highly ambitious whether it be founders athletes chefs whatever you know people who want things from their life or career i know we all want things but i've got you know expectations of where they want to get to yeah the idea of like taking a few days whenever the competition isn't that for me is probably the thing that sticks in my head the most and i think that for me almost feels like uh that feels like the reason why i would like you know i mean in terms of why i'd be fearful of i don't chill out ever like it's just not a thing i haven't done since 2013 i've gone through little burnouts and bigger things but i am annoyingly able to tell myself to just get back on the horse like that's just the thing that i've done which is really really bad like yeah fully aware i've been in therapy for a long time i'm all over the bits and pieces and i would also love to get your perspective on it because you must have met so many people going through this and yourself have gone through things but i think there's like this addiction to the to the chase right that's what i think a lot of you know founders i meet that people have on this show the slowing down thing feels like someone's gonna beat me does that kind of make sense 100 % 100 % there's lots of things to unpack there yeah I think first of all is the the idea that taking some time off you know someone's going to beat us yeah uh I think for the most part is flawed like in the jobs that we do now it's not about it's not a race of who can put in the most hours fundamentally if you're let's just assume that we are competing with with other people I'm going to challenge that later on but let's assume we are uh as a founder as you know i have spent periods of doing completely the wrong things and telling the company completely the wrong thing for two years yeah and then one day suddenly i have a complete realization yeah exactly that we've been barking up completely the wrong tree for the last two years uh that's the game when you're a founder it's like understanding what you're doing as you know like you can have these insights there's also the many decisions you need to make on a daily thing uh but so much of it is just understanding the game you're playing uh and and and really synthesizing what's important and yeah and managing to keep it simple through all of that i think that is a lot of what it takes to really build a big success.

32:59And I think you never hear about people having their best ideas at the end of an 18-hour workday. No, there's no activity. Yeah, exactly. I was reading my latest obsession. I got a little bit obsessed with quantum mechanics, Kevin Lonsky, for random reasons.

33:17Olly Fawcett:Quantum mechanics? Yeah, two of the... It was a fascinating subject. Two of the biggest breakthroughs in quantum mechanics, which you might have heard of. One is Schrodinger, Schrodinger's cat. and the other one is heisenberg's uncertainty principle and we don't need to go into how exactly they work first of all because i will do a terrible job of uh explaining and don't fully understand them myself but um both of those happened heisenberg was 23 24 i mean she went on to be the the lead scientist for the nazis a bit of a darker second half his career but he came up with this idea that laid the foundation for basically the uh yeah i mean this has been biggest advancement in science in the last 100 years.

33:57So you had Newtonian physics and then this has been the next frontier basically. And that came when he was on this island called Heigoland or Helgoland off the coast of Germany, a tiny little island. And he was there on his own and just had this massive insight. And the other one was a guy called Erwin Schrödinger. I think that happened when he was up a mountain in the Alps or something like that. So you hear that if you look back through human history, science is interesting because science is very based around these these insights and these eureka moments so to speak uh and always always always it comes when people are switched off and i have found myself because i do practice what i preach that i will make more progress in three days offline not that that's the point of the three days offline that i will in three months sat at a desk banging my head against the wall so i think i think that's one point is challenge the assumption of uh does the time is the time off actually going to lead lead us to be behind but i think the other more important point is if if you're if you're running 100 meters and at the olympics every four years you know you're going to be against two or three people and it's you versus them yeah uh then that is a that is a zero-sum game in the sense that one of you is going to get the gold medal yeah and i can understand in that case uh that yeah that one might be preoccupied with what the others are doing but you really see with athletes like they rest you know yeah you saying ball is not he's not hitting every day like they'll obviously go through very intense periods of training but they really know how to rest as well founders and company buildings i think that there's far less like we don't need to be competing as as much it's really a mindset so peter thiel famously says don't compete and uh there's a there's a great book called um i think it's called infinite and finite games or something like that by a guy called james cass and uh you don't need to read the first 45 pages or so on but he basically introduces the idea of a finite game and an infinite game and a finite game is a game where you're competing against someone else you win or lose so there's a there is an outcome uh all the other players are competitors and there's a defined set of rules and an infinite game is where you're playing to play there's no winners no losers everyone else is a collaborator and these are just two ways of seeing the world and if you think that you're playing an infinite game you're right and if you think you're playing a finite game you're right and there is a sense of i i did uh i did some public speaking once i think called toastmasters over a year and a half and there was a competition in that and there was various competitions and i i did one one day and spoke to woman after she said how did you do and they said oh i came forth so it didn't go very well and she said hector you're only competing with yourself and that has always stuck with me because it doesn't matter like we spend so much time trying to compare with other people and actually so much of it is just about how we can be the best version of ourselves um and i think when we let go of that idea that everyone else is out to get us and beat us and it's very binary then yeah the world just opens up and becomes a friendlier place and and then it's makes much more sense to go and rest because i think the other thing is that if we think we're competing then we're much more likely to end up in a race to the bottom with someone so we're much more likely to end up trying to match

37:23Olly Fawcett:features slash price all of this kind of thing yeah and actually if you just have this mindset instead of fixating on the capacity you fixate on the customer and it's just like well the problem you're trying to solve so for us it's how do we actually get people to spend three days offline because we believe that when that happens magical things happen that's all i really care about like if there are other people in the wider cabin space who do things that might help us get to that goal then we'll borrow those things but never are we like hey this company over here has done this we don't want to be behind this company so we need to go and do that because then you just end up building something like everyone else and and you end up competing and so i think there's a lot of and that's where it comes back to resting and getting away because you just end up thinking much more from first principles like if you spend all of your time focused on competitors then it's very hard to build something unique um and if you spend all of your time up mountains offline it's very hard not to build something unique do you think most people don't realize probably how burnt out and exhausted they are 100 yeah and what i would say they can't even think about it yeah what i would say to to test that is go and spend three or four days offline whether you don't have to our cabins just go somewhere preferably out in nature because that's where we're built to be and just go and try and spend three days offline i know it's scary uh and i think you'll feel a huge difference and like that is just the most powerful way of testing that when you went to the temple did you feel it 100 like what was that how long were you there for i was there for 10 days and what do you remember the first couple of days yeah the first couple days sucked i remember the first day was terrible because we had to sit cross-legged on a meditation cushion and up until that point i'd spent my whole life slouched in a chair or a sofa as we do in the west i can't cross my legs i know exactly exactly no neither can i i was super unflexible and uh so the first day was just agony like sitting for seven or eight hours cross-legged um and so i was just completely consumed with that yeah it was it was that was about four hours meditating about four hours learning buddhist philosophy wow uh so that was really hard and then when that starts to go you start to start to get more peace but then go through all sorts of other things like a lot of like mental discomfort and there's just this long process as we start to get comfortable with the discomfort because what we have the way we've designed our lives today is to just completely avoid discomfort so everything is about being as frictionless as possible if we feel slightly bored we'll reach our phone and start scrolling if we feel slightly hungry we'll go and have a snack yeah everything is just designed for novelty and pleasure at the easiest possible touch of a button and so it is painful to start to undo that and actually the way we've designed our cabins is to introduce friction back into people's lives you've got to grind your own coffee you have to light your own fire and so it's really about helping slow people down wow in the first couple of days of being at the temple did you think about Ben and Altaut um well it was in northern india in the himalayas so that kept me a bit accountable if it was down the road in the cotspots around yeah yeah exactly exactly so i don't know i think i was so ready for it and so done at that point that i was pretty bought in and the other thing is i had the the added social proof and social pressure of a friend of mine had recommended it and he'd done it and he'd got through it so it was a bit of a like well look if i yeah exactly exactly no but it's also like if someone's recommended you go and do something yeah the people pleaser of me like didn't want to bail out on on day one so coming back to the you can't imagine you came back home straight away afterwards but were you a completely changed person coming back or rewired yes no yeah yeah there was a big rewiring though so it was a profound change i think the biggest thing was for the first time in my life i just had this feeling that I had everything I needed to be happy and I didn't need to get it from some external place because as I said I my life up until that point was so governed by what other people thought of me and so there was just this deep self-assurance that I really got in uh in 10 days and yeah you know my story hasn't been that that has just been a constant ever since I never had a problem again but yeah there was just this amazing glow and definitely something uh shifted in me for good after that and so i actually came back with no intention of quitting my job and i had to come straight back because rebecca leadership quarterly planning meeting and we're trying to raise the series a and two days after i got back it fell through and we closed the u.s office we closed the australian office that night uh and i kept my job but it got less interesting overnight uh and it was only because i'd had that experience that it was a bit of a perfect storm uh so then the idea popped into my head for unplugged i'd read a book earlier in the year around digital minimalism i'd heard about some cabin concerts i had a conversation with ben my now co-founder and told him about this and we spoke about how there's so much stigma around retreats and meditation and so much the benefit is just getting people offline and into nature so it was just this perfect storm but because i had that sense of it doesn't really matter what anyone else thinks i can just go out and do this like that was really empowering to so it was actually a very easy step to take so yeah if i hadn't done that retreat i never would have quit my job and started a company what about ben was he sold in pretty quickly he was yeah he uh he's not again he's not the kind of guy who would go and do a retreat right uh so he comes to it from the other side like i think he would describe himself as anti-woo-woo anti-what woo-woo yeah uh but that has been a great part of our partnership together because he comes at it from a completely different angle and fundamentally we always go on very well we we stay good friends who'd left the startup at that point and i think there are uh we had the same values when it comes to work of just keeping simple like none of the crap that you get and the i think people could just over engineer things and complicated things and have so much fluff.

43:55And so we always just had a very similar way of seeing things. And I think a deep professional respect for each other as well, like very different skill sets. But that's really important as well, because similar to a romantic relationship, right? I think you really need to really respect the person you're doing it with, because otherwise when you go through the trials and tribulations, you need to have each other's back. And yeah, yeah we always have which has been great because at times as a company i mean as founders you're you're at each stage you're both making it up and have never been through it before and so there's a very steep learning curve and you need to be able to support each other through that um so that that's been a fantastic relationship yeah were you worried going into launching a business around your past being coming up again no no uh i mean my past was so buried within me yeah i didn't think about it yeah and it just this business has always felt so right because i feel so passionately uh in the value of this and so there was always just this deep feeling that this was necessary in the world and so yeah i've never once questioned whether this is the right thing to be doing uh and sometimes you just have to surrender and trust the universe and i don't know this this it just always felt there was just this huge pull towards doing this yeah

45:20Olly Fawcett:so you i mean you guys go all in pretty quickly right you're quitting jobs you're like let's start from here what's week one where do you start with building a business like this yeah so i actually went out to uh go and stay with other cabin concepts there was one in belgium which has she's since gone under uh stayed there and then flew to the us and there's a company out there which has since sold to marriott so stayed with both those in the first week just like we knew nothing about cabins we knew nothing about any of this um but what did you know about in building it you knew about the detoxing side of it right it's not really i mean i don't i've done one silent retreat but yeah i knew that spending multiple days offline was very valuable yeah i grew up in countryside so did ben so we knew the countryside is great yeah um everything else we just made up we knew a bit about startups from oh we knew we knew a decent amount of startups from running the startup yes uh but i think what's interesting is around that time so probably about in in that next year after we got started on it lots of different teams working on similar companies emerged right and they all of them failed to get off the ground and i think one of the reasons behind that is they each had like strong expertise in one of the areas because there's a few areas you need to touch it you need to touch the land site finding side of things the consumer brand side of things that running a hospitality business uh the assets themselves building cabins um designing cabins all that kind of thing and what you had i think was teams who were architects already or they had the property background or they had built big consumer brands uh and what me and ben had to our advantage was none of those skills and so i think because we were beginners in all of them we just had to yeah we had to go and figure them all out whereas i think people came in with a sense of we got this because we're already architects and it's just really all of those areas are really difficult and throw up all of their individual uh problems and so i think we had a forced humility because we knew nothing uh and just this naive optimism that we could go and figure out and so it's persevered yeah it's it's super necessary and and also it's worth saying like it runs you into a lot of trouble later on like i've i've always been irrationally optimistic and that's great for getting it off the ground but it's been a disaster other times because um you know you can't be irrationally optimistic when you're financial planning for example yeah what was your biggest challenge you ran into in the earlier days i think i think the biggest thing is is went into it with just this very naive and arrogant approach of like we're not going to build this business to investors for investors despite the fact that it's a very captain's business because cabins cost money and so we went into a business where we would need tens or even hundreds of millions over the next however many years with zero uh interest or approach for how we were going to get that money it was just like well look other startups go and do funding around so i'm sure we'll just do that um and that has that has been very humbling and and it took a very very long time to just learn to think about it from first principles because again it's just like all these other startups this tech startup is doing funding this way yeah so there's like a right way to do funding you need to go and talk to vcs and install of this and that's just horribly unsuitable for what we're doing and so that was a very steep learning curve was there any part of your and ben's relationship that changed as you launched um that's a good question i don't think so i don't think so i mean it's changed a little bit over the years but also not that much like our roles have obviously changed um and i think we've both grown as people uh as founders but yeah it's the it it was always very consistent to be honest like we've always had a i think we probably weren't great at giving each other's feedback uh so and we over indexed on the like of just having each other's back no matter what and so maybe there were things that we could have solved earlier on if we've been a bit more direct with each other um but yeah i mean it was just we're just in the trenches together you know i really felt like that do you think you could do it by yourself no no i think some people are good i mean hold a gun to my head probably but i just if you give me a piece the way i've always i'm quite dyslexic and at school if you you know i was always pretty rubbish at anything apart from maths i've got twin sister who was amazing at everything apart from maths so we were very yin and yang uh and that's that's kind that's coming to my if i look at all the jobs i did prior to unplugged the feedback i always got was like you did just enough but i remember a chef saying that to me while I was working in the kitchen.

50:07It's like you do just enough to get by but no more. And so I've always had this like slightly half-arsed approach to work which I maybe shouldn't say but it's done now. And so if you give me a piece of work to do like I'll do an okay job with it but like probably not great. But the benefit of that I have a very easy time working with other people because i have a lot of trust for other people mostly because well look i know i wouldn't do a very good job of it so so i'm very forgiving and supportive and all these things uh and so so i i do think i work well with others so i just wouldn't be a good like some founders are just great at learning all the tools smashing out product design blah blah blah blah doing all this stuff and it's just not my skill set to be honest so i do think i'm well suited to the job wedding now uh but yeah if you actually you know if i was the one who had to go and like set up the marketing campaigns and write all the emails and do all that i just wouldn't do a good job with it so if i was yeah as i said i found out it would not suit me like the honesty

51:18Olly Fawcett:i mean we've been speaking about unplugged but we haven't actually really explained business so maybe let's do that for context for those listening um the purpose of unplugged yeah for sure so he came back from the retreat with and and just found it crazy how rare and hard it is for people to just go and spend time offline in nature like you have these spiritual retreats these high-end retreats and there's also accommodation in nature but there's nothing in the middle so the whole goal with unplugged is can we actually get you to spend three days offline in nature and we do that with digital detoxes at cabins in the countryside so we have cabins tiny houses uh out in the british countryside predominantly we've got a few out in spain but predominantly uk that people can book for three days they get their lock their phone in a box we give them a map a nokia and a polaroid camera and leave them to it a nokia a nokia retro nokia yeah what's the phone for uh if they need to contact us right so they can text us on that or they're texting on those things is difficult or call us uh if there's an emergency yeah exactly exactly So it's really about removing all the excuses people might have for using their phone.

52:26So there's a map in case you need to get around. There's a camera so you can take pictures. And that indicates you need to call the local restaurant or emergency or contact us for any reason.

52:37Olly Fawcett:Yeah. And that's what it's there to do. Yeah. And I mean, you're now to what, 50 locations? Yeah. Plus? What's been the biggest thing of... I mean, I find it interesting for you guys. I've obviously seen the business grow over the last couple of years from your LinkedIn's and the brand and that sort of thing. What do you think has been the biggest way to market something that no one can really talk about? Because it's an experience. Like, how have you managed to get people and convince the people you said before the challenge has been getting them to come, getting them to be there? How have you as a brand managed to do that?

53:07Yeah, for sure. So there's a few different things. One big learning from the startup before is I, as I said, ran growth for the last year quite unsuccessfully. and i just spend lots of time as i said you know give me a job to do i'll do a half-assed job of it so i would do things like we would spend loads of time conversion rate optimization on the website all this kind of thing and fundamentally we missed the elephant in the room which was we were trying to be everything to everyone and the positioning of the product was completely messed up yeah and so everything i was trying to do further downstream than that was a complete waste of time uh and so what we realized is like what you are marketing massively impacts the ability to market it and so right from the start i think one of the things we've really focused on with unplugged is how do we create something that when people hear about it or they try it uh instead of going

54:01Olly Fawcett:away and telling one person they go away until 20 people yeah so even the fact that we have cabins in nature where you lock your phone in the box if we had just cabins in the countryside you might tell someone uh and it also like it's also about how the how you make people feel so the emotional reaction you can evoke in people and if i say to you you're going to go and spend three days offline in the cabin sorry three days in the cabin you might feel something if i say you're going to go spend three days in the cabin we're going to take your phone off you you're going to feel a lot more you're either going to be like no way that sounds terrible we'll get me there right now but it's going to make you feel something and i think there's so much noise these days that to really stand out from the noise that you need to be you need to make people feel something you need to be interesting you need to be talked about it's everything we do is like how do we actually stand out and bring something up in people is there is there quite common misconceptions about what unplugged is do you think uh not anymore i think the other thing that we've really really focused on as a company across the business is actually our one values we had four we did the whole company values things we thought that was something we needed to do tell me a little bit more about your opinion on that first uh well i see the value but i think so i'll tell you what the values are and then that goes into my opinion on that yeah they were something like um i can't remember what they were and we came up with four and i launched them and no one really did them and after a while it was like this is ridiculous and one of them was keep it simple and after a while i was like that's really the only one that matters so we got rid of the other three and now we have one company value which is keep it simple and i just think that as companies grow everything tends towards complexity and complexity compounds yeah so the more things you do and that's why values are there right because as the company grows and you have more people you need to communicate effectively the personality of the company and how you want to do things you know like jeff jeff bezos did an amazing job of just instilling in everyone amazon uh that it was like about getting the best possible value for the customers everything from having uh using doors for people's desks just this frugality that then yeah went into everything so you get the best possible price for the customers and i think the issue with that is that people people like to to grow because that almost becomes the sign of progress and so i think hiring is such a vanity metric and so rather than solve for as the company gets more complex how do we spread the message of who we are yeah i'd much rather solve for like how do we stop the company from getting complex so that we don't need to spread the message and why did you get rid of the rest of the values because you just thought it was getting worse because it's just noise and and like fundamentally then you have to do this whole thing of like how do we instill the values and like all these like values sessions and like you can it can just become this whole other thing yeah and actually the more things you talk about it's like it's like metrics if you're tracking metrics in the business the more you track the less you're actually tracking you know if we're optimizing 10 different metrics we're not really optimizing anything yeah so we try and do that i mean in marketing we we have one metric that we really look at and obviously has like one or two occupancy yeah cabin occupancy in operations it's like customer rating um it's kind of it it's like cleanliness percentage but like it's very simple yeah like we we track all the other metrics and i think it's useful to have them there so that when you need to go into them you can exactly yeah you're not just talking about those 25 metrics every day 100 yeah and i think there's just such a tendency in companies generally to just over complicate everything and as companies grow they naturally everything gets more complicated more systems get put in place more processes get put in place and so i see my job as just uncomplicating everything as much as possible yeah so if we can frequently go through and just like throw out a lot of the things that aren't necessary yeah that are necessary yeah exactly exactly it's a lot over the long run yeah and i think it's a it's a stronger rather than like how do we do all these metric all these values i think it's strong so it sends a stronger message to be like well let's just focus we just do this one because the others are all kind of downstream of that the others around like assume the best so be kind to people like build something special all this kind of stuff and actually if you can keep it simple then these nice things emerge do you think sometimes company values are companies trying to change potentially bad hires 100 and they're also trying to project cover over like bad founders like there's a lot of like if a founder for example is nefarious then they'll do some bullshit value about uh you know being kind to cover up for that right so i think there's a lot of like papering over the reality i think company i mean we've had company values in like so many different formats i think it's one of those hard things as a founder or entrepreneur where you're like fundamentally if you're a founder of their business under 100 people i imagine that you're as a founder you are still the company like is it i'm a bit of a believer of that 100 you know your opinions your values how you operate is the company like you know if you are pretty direct with feedback or if you're pretty shouty or whatever that's going to be in your culture like you're going to struggle to go against everyone else not wanting that or you know what i mean like these these kind of fundamentals i think it's interesting in what you're saying of terms of like the personality values of like being kind and those things it's like if you want a really lovey-dovey kind environment that's like exactly what you want as a founder to to operate in which we all want in some in some formats like you've got to hire for that in it is a value i think you can't be quite like yeah you know let's say you know chefs and kitchens they're known for being shouty environments super direct you know it sounds that you worked in one you know that that's the environment there you can't be you know have times to be uber polite about everything every single time just get what i'm saying it's like 100 % these values just throw things off i think hiring is where it's really important yeah and obviously if there's only a few of you it's easier just to do that from gut feel right like you gut feel whether that person fits in so if there's less than 10 people in the company then you maybe don't need to codify it so much but if you're 30 to 40 people and you're hiring quite aggressively um then yeah i can understand why having being able to to screen against certain values is really important but the other thing is like i think i think startups just tend to over complicate things because it's like well this is something we might need to do one day so we should do it now and actually there's a huge mirror in keeping it as simple as possible for as long as possible and yeah sure google needs to have company values so they can decide what the 45th thousands person that they hire is going to be like um but your three-person star hub maybe doesn't oh it's quite true it is quite true so we're talking about misconceptions that people have i mean one thing you guys do brilliantly is talk about all the relationships that you've managed to execute um over the years like is that just before we touch on that because i don't want to hear some stories there do you think there is uh often misconceptions about what people think their stays are going to be what they think the experience is going to be or do you think you do a good job of explaining pretty much this is what's going to happen uh i think i think because it is so emotionally complicated as we were talking about earlier because it does bring up a strong reaction in people then i think it is inevitably quite surprising uh because everyone reacts differently yeah and fundamentally it's one of those where you have to go through it to really understand it like you can hear we get as i'm sure you know like there are lots of rave reviews online that we have ironically lots of people going and posting about it on social media so you hear a lot about what the stays are like but i think it's a very different to go and experience that yourself uh and so i think it's one of those where it's hard to it's hard to put words to unless you can actually go and do it yeah and those uh experiences i mentioned you've had like people have had pretty life-changing decisions made out the back of three days before you maybe tell me your favorite one or maybe an interesting one that you guys have had actually having an impact on people's life as a business how do you look at that um i mean it's obviously amazing and it's it's i think i mean i've really looked at like why i do what i do in the last few years and fundamentally i think where i'm currently at in life is like the goal now is just to be of service to others like i think i spent and actually ironically i think there was a large part of getting into a plug that wasn't that because i've always had this deep conviction of this is needed in the world and we're going to spread some good and like that's always been there but then also there's this huge like need to show the world i'm special this founder chip on the shoulder um and i think that has is is a lot of what's driven me but i think it's always felt very right for that reason like we've always felt that this is a good thing to be putting out into the world um and i think it's nice in the way that it came from that to start with it's obviously like amazing it really helps the culture and it really helps attracting talent and all that kind of stuff So I think the people in the team and myself, like it's very fulfilling.

1:03:51It's great when you meet someone and they're like, well, this, that actually changed my life. And so it's great. It's yeah, it feels very right. Like it feels very aligned. Like I said earlier, no part of me ever wanders from doing the right thing. Whereas I have other friends who run fintech businesses and part of them are like, well, you know, I just don't know if, I don't know if this is what I want to do the rest of my life. And so there's a real simplicity that comes with that. But yeah, but it's easy within that to get caught up in that narrative when actually what's driving me day to day is different.

1:04:27And like I said, there's a huge amount of ego tied up with being a founder. And it's just learning to decouple the two. And like I said, I have lived my life from a place of fear fundamentally. uh and the the first we're only six years in but the first five years of unplugged it came from a huge place of like there was a huge i don't know fear of failure fear of uh what other people would think like this need to prove i'm special and i think it's learning that just because it can be true that i can really believe in what we're doing and a lot of the right reasons are there and i can be also driven by this like feeling of not being enough and so think for me it's just changing the fuel that everything we do in this world comes from a place of fear or a place of love and i think most of what happens in the startup world comes from a place of fear and for me going forward it's about just tapping into doing it for a place of love more and from that place it's like how do you do something how do you how you actually in service of other people and that could be everything from the customers but also to the team and the employees and the people i work with because the other thing i think you see massively in startups is uh the ends justifies any means and because people have a worthy mission they feel like they can treat everyone around them like like crap and so i think there's also like each day it's like how do i just turn off and be there for the team and be there for our partners and the customers and all that kind of stuff and it's just having this view of just turning up and being a helpful person as well and that obviously extends beyond business as well and just understand like balance just also being there for my family and my dad got diagnosed with cancer two or three months ago and sure i'm sorry i appreciate that but the the prognosis isn't too bad so all right i'm sure he's got many years to live but it just there have been times in the startup journey when i've just like really not been there for my family because i've been self-obsessed with caught up in the ego of being a founder uh and so there is just this like as i do this work and unpack these parts of myself there's just a chilling out of just like it's okay to just show up and be a good helpful person each day yeah i don't need to go and change the world

1:06:39Olly Fawcett:does that make it harder when you want to push forward though no no i actually think the opposite i think ironically i suspect i'll build a bigger business as a result not that's the goal necessarily uh but i think this like need to be successful has slowed us down a lot to be honest really yeah yeah like there have been times when uh for example fundraising has been a big thing over the years where uh big periods of just not raising enough and uh not raising enough cash in the room yeah yeah like not kicking the can far enough down the road not asking for help like all these kind of things there's a very fear-based all coming in this place of insecurity um and actually just having the humility to like ask for help and just do a proper job and be diligent and chill out so there's been the sense of like trying to rush this actually slowed us down if that makes sense um and you know trying to do everything myself and solve everything myself and so yeah I think I'm trying to just learn this increasing humility of just I don't know taking each day as it comes and chilling out and I do think things just seem to be going a bit smoother with that attitude and this is when i get right every day uh but yeah there's something about this need for control that founders have like a big part of addiction recovery is like uh the attitude that i'm not in control you know it's having a relationship with a higher power something great that yourself you just turn off each day uh and yeah still trying to control everything can just take life as it comes a bit more do you think there's baby steps for founders that they can take to get to where you're at smaller things 100 100 it's it's so um it's so dependent on the individual and and the the patterns and dynamics so i'd hate to say yeah just do this thing or do this thing because the truth is that where i'm at first of all is take it with a pinch of salt because everyone's different you might not want to be wearing that but uh like it's been a very long and painful and uh challenging journey with lots of thrills and spills and so it's not just like hey take the supplement and you start taking creatine and and everything's gonna change and yeah i mean one thing i would say that that was has obviously been a huge part of my journey and i do think really helps is just go and spend periods of time offline every now and again and just stop and take a break and give yourself that space because what we found from unplugged but also myself is like you don't solve all your problems in three days offline but what it does do is it gives you the space to see what those problems are and begin to face them and i mean my journey has been basically a decade of just facing the problems of the past and yeah and learning to process them yeah and some of the also we said before some of the people have been in the uh in the cabins have come out and made decisions to divorce separate like i know you guys talk about it a lot in a in a marketing sense which is i think is fair play but those decisions are getting made in in very quick periods of time and how frequently does that actually happen it's so hard to say but we hear about it quite a lot really i won't name names but one of the team went with a partner the other day and and came back in the relationship so uh it does happen a lot why do you think it happens because what's happening there well it comes back to this fundamentally we spend so much of our lives numbing ourselves and not facing up to the reality yeah and so many relationships there will be this just like feeling that you're not quite right for each other but neither of you having the courage to say anything about it and so you just end up not facing that issue and distracting yourself with you might sit there both scrolling through tiktok in the evening or watching netflix or whatever it is and what happens when you go and spend three days offline is you have to confront those things and so there's an interesting phenomenon uh which i've had with a now x in the past which is it's happened to you as well uh we didn't break up afterwards but i went with the next and there's this phenomenon of like a day one blow up effectively so sometimes on day one you can you can have a real like flaming round had that happen with a partner and actually when that passes that's very bonding pulls you together because often these things can just be stewing yeah and we don't face them and they need the space to come out and what we find happens is is that can then give you the clarity to realize that you're not right for each other which is also great and for me that's a success story so a friend of mine uh who i spoke to recently told me that he stayed twice at an unplugged cabin now and the first time he stayed was with an now ex-partner and uh that was three and a half four years ago and he said that was the trip during that stay they realized that they weren't married for each other and he's now married with a child four years later to a new partner um and it was it was only because that was during that experience they had the courage to call it off and so i think that's it i think courage is courage is a word i didn't really use before this year and so obviously unplug came from one place and we started it and all of these things but actually as i've started to unpack all of these things and face these parts myself like it's it's a word i use much more and it's about having the courage to face what's really there and that could be like our deepest darkest traumas it could be the things we're not admitting to ourselves about our job our partner whatever it might be but it's about stopping distracting yourself and having the courage to to face what's really there do you think you guys probably are talking about those stories do you think it puts people off from going no i don't so and and i don't think that's an issue if it does because people come when they're ready to come yeah maybe it does but that would just be because there's a lot of fear there and they're not ready to to do that yet but then when they're more ready to even start to think about facing that thing maybe they'll come and stay with us but yeah i mean look we're just here to i don't know we're here to spread some good in the world and i think uh like that's the truth of it and so i would much rather build something that we can just go and be so authentic about in public and just go and speak about exactly as it is and i do the same with my story as well like i love coming on podcasts because i spend zero time thinking about what i should say and how i should come across and the approach is that i'll just go and be as honest as i can and hopefully that's helpful to someone because you never know what someone might relate with like i can come and present and tell you that hey i'm amazing at doing all the work and you know everything's been a fucking breeze or whatever it might be or yeah exactly um or i could just come and just just lay it all out and i had some great got some great advice about just speaking generally before and it's it would be honest and try to be helpful i think it's great advice for life as well as i that's all we can do i could think about like how should we present or what it is and all we could just be honest and and try to be helpful is what we try and do as a company as well how does all that stuff for you translate into you being a leader i mean i've changed a lot as a leader in the last year for sure yeah so i've always been uh like very hands-off as a leader um like laid back probably to a fault agreeable probably to a fault but also supportive uh so i think i've always i've always been a big people pleaser and actually it's amazing how in the addiction recovery that people pleasing and addiction go hand in hand yeah because they both come from this place of not being enough like when you're people pleasing it's like i am not enough unless this person likes me and so so that's been the big change this year is i've learned to be less of a people pleaser yeah and that can be little things just like i would think i need to message someone to chase something chase them about something and then previously i'd be like oh no i don't want to bother them and now i'm like that it doesn't matter i just need to to send the message even if it's a bit uncomfortable or say the thing say the thing in the meeting rather than uh don't say it because you don't want to make someone else uncomfortable or whatever it is um it's a hard balance though isn't it it is a hard balance but like i'm on the one extreme of that where like another founder's on the other extreme and there's no right or wrong i'm not like a better founder a better leader than that side but i'm that side and so i'd always like massive empath massive people pleaser yeah um and so the danger of me like upsetting someone or whatever is very low because it's just not my communication style see i'm the complete opposite exactly and so so both of us probably need to come a bit into a bit more into center yeah yeah you know where it's hard isn't it because it's like especially now with the way that and for six years you guys have probably gone through different environments yeah what people want from work and the way you want to be communicated to and those like elements but it's interesting hearing you speak about it because i can see how you're probably like i probably probably as a company need i need to be pushing a little bit more i need to make sure we're in the right direction but i'm probably like i probably need to understand people a little bit more you know i mean it's like a it's hard for sure but then it's also like understanding like where it's coming from like when i'm and it's just being honest with yourself because when i'm saying to myself don't send that message because it'll make me uncomfortable like is that actually it's the right thing to not send the message or is it the like the fear in me or like they're not feeling like enough in me so i think it's just solving for that yeah and like my style will end up being my style but it's just making sure that it's coming from a place of love rather than a place of fear because the kind thing to do to someone is to give them the honest feedback yeah i've let people in the team down previous company and and in this one by like not giving them the feedback because i was trying to be nice when actually the kind thing to do would have been to give them the feedback yeah and the other thing is i think you have to lean into who you are as a leader like if we're different stars if i tried to run the company like you and you tried to run it like me like we'd do a terrible job because it's just not who we are as people and as you say like the founder is the personality yeah and i don't think there's a right way to run a company like for example i run a company in completely opposite way to elon musk he's obviously a far more accomplished founder than me but uh he's done an amazing job with a very certain style if i tried to do that style it wouldn't work i would be i would do a terrible job with it because it's not how i am as a person so i think you have to lean into your strengths but then also be aware of where that's holding you back and for me that was people pleasing and it's still you know it's still something i'm improving at but i'm definitely getting better i take it people have left the team right uh yeah we've had one person leave at the end of last year um it's probably i mean we're not a big team we're a couple of people we we managed out weren't quite right yeah but how did you look at that with your people pleasing side of things was someone leaving yeah uh so so it was one of those where like as the team grew the role changed right and it was over the the year before she left it we were having quite a lot of conversations around it and it was always like didn't seem quite right so it was it was something where we had quite an open dialogue over that year and it just made sense and she ended up taking the step to leave in the end but i think it was best for everyone and she had a another calling she wanted to go and pursue so it was a very positive experience um and but yeah i mean that people pleasing is like firing is harder than people leaving because uh yeah you're upsetting people if they go and leave with their own choice that's fine um but yeah firing people again have had to do that a couple of times and as a people pleaser that's hard but it's also it's less hard if i'm not living from a place of fear and just understanding that like that is what it is i think firing people is hard because it always comes from a place of it can come from a place of that i've got something wrong i've failed here yeah you know yeah um and i think that's what we find hard about it you know if it's just like very objective and it is what it is then it's less hard and so i think but that's just just part of being a founder uh and there's there's lots of just like again learning to have the courage to face the reality and do the things that need to be done so important you mentioned a lot obviously the addiction side of things addiction is very common in founders yes um i would class myself as an addict and i had experiences myself i've had to be cautious and careful of um made decisions in our life which meant i've never gone near you know drugs terrified of neurophine haven't had a parasite in 10 years like that kind of stuff um but i'm like addicted to weird things i got very addicted to work for a period of time um get addicted to food types and that you know just stuff and i don't recognize that myself and done level of testing what i think is interesting i've never met someone who's been through an addiction recovery for like in for addiction or overall right is what you went went through what's the kind of biggest thing you realize now where you can actually identify or someone can identify themselves that they've probably got an addicted personality that isn't an online test or like a self-diagnosis from a google search like the things that you can recognize from your place now that you can go oh that's a sign that's that's where you need to be cautious uh yeah it's one of those after going through it it's just kind of obvious and i would say most founders have it to some degree uh there is i heard the other day the phrase um what was it restless irritable and discontent restless irritable and discontent yeah right so if you have any of those yeah you would say as a personality type then yeah it's probably speaks true that one exactly yeah exactly as a founder yeah we're often restless we're often discontent we may not be irritable um and i think there's just this like impatience it's really a lack of contentment it's like trying to get our validation from elsewhere yeah like i would say that is the biggest thing yeah like if you're trying to get your validation from work or a relationship or whatever it might be it's this it's this it's also the sense of more more more like i think that that for me was the biggest thing like i always had this attitude of like needing more more more whether it was um gambling or drink or work or whatever it might be uh like more is never enough and i think that comes from a system out of whack and it comes from fear yeah and it comes from if you dig down far enough this feeling of like i am not enough unless i am not enough unless i have an attractive girlfriend i am not enough unless yeah i achieve career success um and yeah there's a phrase in additional recovery of filling the hole in the soul and i think that's a big part of it and another phrase is spiritually bankrupt i think before this year i thought spiritual was a bit of a dirty word like i didn't really didn't really mean anything to me yeah and i think uh they talk a lot in additional recovery about self-obsession and self-obsession is not thinking too much of yourself or too little of yourself but too often of yourself and i think it's found as we're always thinking about ourself and how things are going to go and how the company's going to play out and how people are going to see us and actually spiritual how i've come to understand it now for me it's just like being connected to something greater than yourself and that can be a god it can be nature it can be the universe it can be a group of people but fundamentally it's being part of the whole rather than this inward focused on the individual.

1:22:54And I think that is just a better way to live. I think as founders, really as humans, we're trying to get away from pain and get towards pleasures to some extent. And we're all really trying to find happiness. And I've said this to people before and they've been like, no, that's wrong. The definition of happiness is X, Y, Z, but we're all really trying to be happy. We're trying to find peace. And I think on some level as a founder speaking from my own experience we have this narrative to ourselves that if i can only go and get all this recognition or this success then i will be happy then i will be at peace and i think that is a fool's errand and actually i love the story about the mexican fisherman you know there's a man fishing and a mexican beach and a mba comes up to him and and says well well you know you're doing all this work fishing but did you know that if you hired a couple of boats then they could do the fishing for you and then they could grow more and more and then you could get a whole fleet and and then he said well and then what and he's like then when you have the whole fleet you can go and go to the next port and do the same thing there and he's like and then what and then they go on this extravagant story and he says and then you can spend all day fishing and he says that's what i already do and there's an extent of like we're chasing this yeah uh when really we have everything we need to be happy and so i think um a lot of just like learning to actually spend time in the present because what i realized in the last year is i spent all of my time in the future or on some level in the past but i think there's founders who spend a lot of time in the future and actually very little time in the present day and in the moment you know if i'm walking to work or sat on a bus i'm probably thinking about some work thing or this thing that's going to happen later today or like the next thing you know and you just you wish away a life that way

1:24:40Olly Fawcett:oh and i've had years where i've just been like don't know what i've even thought about this year a hundred percent like you know i'm just so focused on the next thing the next thing i think i call it the founder's curse yeah the yeah like the the theory of just never living today constantly thinking about the next thing goldbed of syndrome type stuff like i think i've met so many founders people on this show who you know they'll talk about on the show or after the show like it's the curse of being a founder because you're just always thinking about what's next what's next what's next and you just don't enjoy anything you're like you're not really enjoying the thing that you said two years ago to make you happy is you know these are all cliches but they are so true and it's so hard to get around them as well it's crazy 100 um well look man we're running out of time but i mean i was expecting to talk a lot about cabins divorces and like building a business today but i feel like i've actually learned way more about how you approach a hard job and you know one of the hardest jobs in the game really outside of nhs our nurses no offense um but it's not easy what you're doing and i think that i can now understand a lot of why unplugged has found so much success if you're one half of it to be respectful to ben um and the mission you guys are on so with that in mind what what is what is next for for unplugged yeah well look i i think a couple of things need to be true at the same time one is that this has to succeed no matter what and i you know the goal with unplugged is really to move society in a different direction yeah it feels like all the momentum in society uh is towards spending more time online you look around on the tube nowadays and everyone's just face down their screens and just by us existing we start a conversation get people thinking around what their relationship is their phones and obviously if we can get them to come and do this then it really helps make that change and so yeah the goal with unplugged is really to become culturally synonymous so that uh you know it is to switching off what uber is to getting around yeah that that's really the goal to really get ingrained in the culture and just help move society in a different direction the flip side of that is like based on everything i just said is for me it's just the surrender and living each day and what will be will be fucking love it man thanks so much for coming on the show i appreciate your honesty and transparency as well because it takes a lot to do that and uh congrats man because you've been on a journey from the sounds of it but i love what you guys are doing um i haven't been yet i'm building up to it i'm sure i'll get there i'll text you on the Nokia when I'm there and we'll go from there.

1:27:02Olly Fawcett:Um, but yeah, mate, best of luck and send my best to your dad as well. I hope he has a speedy recovery. All right, dude. Thanks so much. Lots of love, man.