EPISODE OVERVIEW

Duration: Approximately 45 minutes

Best For: Trapped entrepreneurs who keep throwing money at marketing that does not work, while sacrificing their health and family time

Key Outcome: Understand why traditional marketing fails and discover a human-centred approach that lets you work smarter, not harder

He built three businesses and ran 120 million tests. Then he discovered the one thing everyone gets wrong about connecting with customers.

THE BOTTOM LINE

You have probably felt it. That sinking feeling when another marketing campaign falls flat. Another chunk of your budget vanishes into thin air while you are still answering emails at 5am. Martin Lucas spent a decade obsessing over a single question that affects every trapped entrepreneur: why do 98.81% of ads get completely ignored? Not clicked and abandoned. Completely invisible. The answer has nothing to do with spending more money or working harder. It comes down to something we have all forgotten how to do, which is actually understand other humans. Martin has worked with over 100 global brands, published five books, and built an AI system that consistently outperforms industry benchmarks by 76% or more. The thing is, his real insight is simpler and more powerful. Until you understand how people actually make decisions, until you grasp the emotional intelligence behind every customer relationship, you will keep burning time and money you do not have.

WHY THIS EPISODE MATTERS TO YOU

You will discover why working harder on marketing actually pushes customers away, and what to do instead that takes less of your time

You will learn the connection between your own stress levels and the quality of decisions you make for your business

You will understand why the customer data you are collecting might be telling you lies about what people actually want

You will hear the real cost of ignoring wellness and self-awareness as a business owner, from someone who learned this the hard way

KEY INSIGHTS YOU CAN IMPLEMENT TODAY

The 98% Problem: Nearly all marketing gets ignored because businesses treat customers as data points rather than humans with emotions. When you shift to understanding how your audience actually feels about your brand, not just what they buy, you stop wasting money on messages that never land. That means more revenue from less effort.

Relationships Follow Neural Pathways: Your customers form relationships with your brand using the same brain pathways as friendship. Martin explains why treating a loyal customer as "lapsed" just because they have not bought recently can destroy that friendship forever. Stop the desperate discount emails that push your best people away.

Process Automation Before Shiny Objects: The real opportunity in AI is not doing ten times more content. It is automating the processes you hate so you have time to bring more human connection into your business. The entrepreneurs who understand this are the ones who will escape the trap.

Wellness Is Not Optional: When you are anxious, your thinking narrows. Your decisions get worse. Your results suffer. Martin and Roy both share how breath work, meditation, and understanding your own mind creates space for better business outcomes. Twenty minutes in the morning can give you 20% of your energy back.

Listen To Understand, Not To Answer: In a world of polarised opinions and shortened attention spans, the skill of actually hearing what others say has become rare and valuable. This applies to your customers, your team, and your family. The trapped entrepreneur who learns to listen properly stops being the bottleneck.

GOLDEN QUOTES WORTH REMEMBERING

"98.81% of ads get ignored. Not looked at and not clicked. Completely ignored. And that has only shifted 0.04% despite all our technology." - Martin Lucas

"We go into entrepreneurship for freedom and we build ourselves a cage." - Roy Castleman

"Wellness and everything that people fight in a busy world is actually a solution to create a less busy world." - Martin Lucas

"Positive versus negative energy is literally a choice. It is just how we perceive life." - Martin Lucas

"Understand yourself. Understand what self confidence is and research what it is you think you want to do before you start it." - Martin Lucas

QUICK NAVIGATION FOR BUSY LEADERS

00:00 - Introduction: Why understanding humans matters more than any technology

04:30 - The 98% Problem: Why nearly all marketing gets completely ignored

09:15 - Emotional Intelligence: The most undervalued part of business relationships

15:40 - Building AI That Actually Understands: 120 million tests and what they revealed

22:00 - Process Automation: Why you should fix what is broken before scaling it

28:30 - The Entrepreneurial Cage: How freedom seekers trap themselves

35:00 - Wellness and Decision Making: The link between your health and your business results

40:15 - Breath Work and Mental Clarity: Practical techniques you can start today

44:00 - Conclusion: The one thing every entrepreneur should understand before anything else

GUEST SPOTLIGHT

Name: Martin Lucas

Bio: Martin is a three-time entrepreneur and author of five books who has spent over a decade understanding why humans fail to understand each other. His company Gap In The Matrix has completed 120 million tests across 3,000 projects with over 100 global brands, consistently achieving results 76% above industry benchmarks. His background combines mathematical logic with deep expertise in human behaviour and decision-making.

Connect with Martin:

Website: www.gapinthematrix.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-lucas-3b8a7931b/

YOUR NEXT ACTIONS

This Week: Audit your last five customer communications. Ask yourself honestly whether they speak to how your customers feel, or just what you want to sell them. One shift in perspective can change your results immediately.

This Month: Identify three processes in your business that you hate doing but keep doing anyway. These are your first automation candidates. Removing them gives you time back for what actually matters.

This Quarter: Commit to a morning wellness routine, even if it is just ten minutes. Track how your decision-making quality and energy levels change. The data will convince you to keep going.

EPISODE RESOURCES

Books mentioned:

Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed

Becoming Supernatural by Dr Joe Dispenza

Techniques discussed:

Wim Hof breathing method

Box breathing (7 seconds in, hold, 7 seconds out, hold)

Dr. Pepper Rule for decision making (What is the worst that can happen?)

Business frameworks:

EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System)

90 (Business Operating System)

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READY TO ESCAPE THE TRAP?

Take the Freedom Score Quiz: https://scoreapp.atpbos.com/

Discover how trapped you are in your business and get your personalised roadmap to freedom in under 5 minutes.

Book a Free Strategy Session: https://www.atpbos.com/contact

Let us discuss how to build a business that works WITHOUT you.

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CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST, ROY CASTLEMAN

Roy is the founder of All The Power Limited and creator of Elevate360, a business coaching system for entrepreneurs ready to scale without burnout. As a certified Wim Hof Method Instructor and the UK's first certified BOS UP coach, Roy combines AI automation, wellness practices, and business operating systems to help trapped entrepreneurs reclaim their freedom.

Website: www.atpbos.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roycastleman/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@allthepowerltd

Hey, Pam Leavers, how are you doing today? I'm here

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with Martin Luther and Martin is an ex veteran. He's

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worked in all sorts of interesting places, including Google and

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a range of other things. He's also an entrepreneur, he's

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built three companies and he's busy working on something very

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interesting. But I'll let Martin explain a bit more. Thanks,

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Ro. It's exciting to be on. So, yeah, as you

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mentioned, my background, to use my mum's language, I had

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a real job in my twenties, became self employed at

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the end of my twenties. I've had three businesses, I've

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published five books. But the common thing about everything I've

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always done is trying to understand why humans do what

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they do. So my skill is mathematical logic, which is

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problem solving, but I've always applied it to the mathematics

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of humans, of thought, of doing behavior. That's what my

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passion is. What was your real job? I worked in

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telecoms, a lot of conferencing in collaboration and Microsoft Teams

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back in the day and WebEx before Cisco bought it,

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that type of stuff. Lots of group communications. There's still

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a human heartbeat to it. Yeah. And then I always

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love asking this question. You started out, you were in

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the 9 to 5, real job kind of shit. Yeah.

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I've been there as well. And you had that decision

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in your mind. I want to be. I've got a

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problem that I've seen in the world and I can

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go out and solve it. And you decided to take

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that step into the entrepreneurial world. Tell me about that.

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What was the first business you started and why? So

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I started the sales training, sales psychology business. So I

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kept running into a. I left large enterprise because I

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was the problem. Right. And that typical launch of a

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new way. I didn't want to keep getting told what

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to do. I kept finding gaps in what I thought

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was opportunity, in the way stuff was done. So I

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started out by doing sales training and sales psychology and

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growth type activities for businesses. That was the first business

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that I did. And then the second one was build

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a social network that nobody's heard of. So that was

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my learning lesson. And then the third one was what

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I'm doing now, gaping the Matrix. And that's so important.

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Rob, we were just talking before and we are, you

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know, the summation of all the lessons we've learned, aren't

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we? Yeah. Thus is wisdom not anything more than revision.

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Revisionist history is like you've got to, if you're open

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to learn by your mistakes. I believe there's more value

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in mistakes and certainly trying than there is in focusing

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too much on. On what worked, in my opinion. Have

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you ever read Matthew Ed's book Black Box Thinking? Yes.

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Yeah. I really love that. And I often irritate the

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people around me because I'm like, okay, bring me the

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failure, because the failure is where I learn. Yeah. I

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was working in an IT company in 1997, and I

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worked there for five years before I started my first

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IT company in 2002. And I learned more about what

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not to do in that five years than I ever

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could have learned in school. Yeah. What lessons have you

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come away with that can be informative in your journey,

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so to speak? Biggest one is what I've done over

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the past decade after. Plus 20 years of theories and

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experimentation before that. But the past 10 years really doubling

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down on it is trying to understand why don't humans

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understand each other right? Such a simple basis. I love

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this. Yeah. But like, when I started in 2015, there's

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only been a.04% shift in this stat. 98.81% of ads

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get ignored. And I don't mean looked at and not

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clicked or clicked and not bought. Completely ignored. That's Google

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Display, Facebook Programmatic, and that has only shifted 0.04%. So

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this idea that technology and we can't keep up with

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everything and automation and all those different things, are there

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more tools in the world? Absolutely. Is the 10,000 more

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noise because of AI in 2025 than there was a

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year ago? 100%. But the reality is that nothing is

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really shifting in that much because we still don't understand

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each other. And it's not just advertising. It's every experience.

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It's the same type of challenge. So that's a thing

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that's always fascinated me because I've also had to learn

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what I don't know about myself and what I didn't

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know about to other humans. It's almost like you have

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to go through a grieving process to then be reborn

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to understand how others think and operate. I love that.

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One of the big lessons that I learned with AI

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is a communication one. I stopped using ChatGPT when it

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came out. And, you know, I was like, okay, this

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is going to be great. And I'd talk to it,

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I'd say what I needed to say with it, and

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it would give me basically shit back. And slowly but

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surely I got to understand that actually I was not

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communicating correctly. I wasn't being clear, I wasn't being concise,

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I wasn't Being very definitive about what I wanted. And

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it taught me the process of going through this has

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actually taught me how to communicate better with my loved

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ones and my family and my staff. And I think.

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So that communication piece is super important. What do you

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think are the main challenges with people communicating at the

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moment? I think it's a fundamental issue that's always been

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there since the very dawn of humanity, which is we

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don't listen. And that is getting even harder in an

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oversaturated world where my wife and I can barely decide

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a TV show to watch and then we put it

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on, we're only watching it for five or 10 minutes

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and that's not been us. Right. But this is what

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happens when your brain's getting compounded in so much stuff

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and so much short form stuff that you have less

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focus for that. It comes back to the ability to

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listen. And an example of that is that I can't

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watch something. I can't listen to a TV show. Right.

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So if that has been diminished in the modern world,

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it's even more difficult to take the time to actually

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hear what others are saying. So it's always been listening,

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but now it's even getting more difficult for me. Yeah,

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we listen to answer, don't we? We don't listen to

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understand. Yeah, it's a great example because we're in such

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a polarized world. If you look at politics and how

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divided things are now, it's much more polarized. Right. So

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we want to hear more of an echo chamber. We

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want to hear more of what we believe to already

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be the case, what we believe to be the truth,

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what we believe to be our reality. So that compounds

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and gets worse and worse. And it's not that I'm

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anti tech or anything digital at all. I'm just saying

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that there's cause and effect causing listening and, or want

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to listen to to be taken away even further. And

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that's one of the other challenges with AI that I

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found. And this, yeah, leads me into it and for

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sure, yeah, AI is generated on the human experience. The

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large language models as we look at them today, this

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is how humans are. Therefore this is how I'm going

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to be. Right. And it's learning along those lines. And

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AI, general language, large language models are just yes man.

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They will tell you what you want to hear to

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the point you'll talk a bit about hallucinations and things.

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And I'm super interested to hear about that. But I

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go to ChatGPT and I say ChatGPT, I've got this

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great idea. I'm going to start a car dealership on

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this road full of car dealerships. And it's going to

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be great because I give it some cool context. ChatGPT

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will come back to me and say, yeah, that's a

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great idea. Let's build out the program for you. Let's

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build out the plan. But if I go back into

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ChatGPT now, I want you to be my critical thinking

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partner. I want you to analyze the actual market correctly.

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I want you to analyze what I'm missing here. I

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get a totally different answer. And people are not understanding

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that. And then they go and try these things, they

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go and try this north clay and suddenly it's not,

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but okay, nothing's working. Why is it chatgpt told me

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it'll work. We have to keep our thought leadership. We

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have to actually use the tool in the right way.

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And I think this is part of what you're doing

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is the work that you've done to create your new

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AI model. Let's just talk about your new company. And

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you were telling me some amazing figures about the last

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10 years worth of work that came in. Give us

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some of those. Yeah. So I began by, as I

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said, the problem statement of why don't humans understand humans,

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right? And then I had two problem statements underneath. It

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was, how does the decision making work? Like, how does

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it work in the brain? How do we process in

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information? How does all that work? And the other part

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was what is emotional intelligence? Because emotional intelligence is the

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most under, misunderstood, undervalued part of the human experience. Because

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it's literally how you're reading my micro expressions. 70% of

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communication comes from the expressions that we make. Whether you're

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understanding how I feel, taking the time to do it,

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that's the type of listening, right? It's like my understanding

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of you if you think about your consumer experience. And

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the problem I wanted to solve is you could have

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a brand that you absolutely love, but all it's doing

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is sending you discounts or sending you products that you're

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not interested in, or a product you are interested in,

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but you've already got it, right? So we're in a

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world where this idea of automation and data science and

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AI data and stuff like that is completely flawed. So

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to answer your question about the stats, right, we've done

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120 million tests, 3,000 projects, over 100 global brands that

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we've worked with, and we've always managed to hit a

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minimum of 76% above the industry for marketing metrics. KPIs,

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saving money, making money, all of that. And the reason

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being is that we understand the context of the people

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that you're serving and what's relevant to them. And that

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also means that you might be a person, that you've

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got a brand that you love, but you only shop

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with them once every three months. If you're not appealing

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online to that brand, they panic, they classify you as

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a lapsed customer and you could be the biggest vip,

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most dedicated customer. And then they start sending you discounts

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and end up pushing you further away. That's the biggest

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problem that we're solving is like this assumption that a

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data and purchase is a truth about how a customer

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feels about you or their Persona. You were talking there

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about emotional intelligence. Let's dig into that a little bit

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more because that's an interesting. Yeah, some of the stuff

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you're talking about there, nlp, Del Carnegie, all of these

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type of things. I've done a fair amount of that.

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Yeah. And so how would you classify emotional intelligence in

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the work that you do? So emotional intelligence is very

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much about how we feel. Right. So if I'm a

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consumer, how do I feel about a brand? I've got

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a relationship with a brand. And what's really cool is

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one of the things that we figured out is that

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a relationship that you have with a brand and its

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products has the same neural pathways as friendship. Literally the

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same. Right. So how do you feel about a brand?

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So if you think of a brand like I always,

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I give Diesel as an example. Right. Used to love

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them, stopped buying from the. Completely. Couldn't explain to you

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why. Just realized years later, that's a typical example. I

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lost my relationship with them, I stopped wanting to hang

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out with them. I can't tell you why. We're not

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friends, we're just not friends anymore. Right. That's a big

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part about emotional intelligence. You can understand the person's relationship

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to your brand. You know, what to serve them, where

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to hang out with them, what to give them, what

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not to give them. So it becomes a nice two

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way thing. It's a relationship, that's what emotional intelligence is.

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Now you built out this entirely new AI system. Yeah.

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You are telling me you'll come in online today, which

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is super exciting that we're speaking today and yeah, I'm

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very excited to see what the next stages are. Tell

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us a little bit more about that. Tell us a

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bit more about what you're working on, how you're doing

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it. Yeah. So the thing for me was That I

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didn't start out with trying to do something I started

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10 years ago. Right. So I wasn't trying to build

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AI versus today's area. I was trying to build software

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that understood how different people made decisions so you could

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serve them differently. Right. In any type of market and

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scenario. And fast forward to today, we've built our own

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AI system. But unlike large language models, which are really

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accelerated text systems, right. They select the best text, as

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you said, based on the art of the prompt. How

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specific I communicate is going to be what it's going

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to select. Unfortunately, as you said, it is set up

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to be a bit too cowtailed. So it's going to

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give you more of a positive affirmation no matter what

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you're asking. Right. But it's doing a text selection service.

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What we've done instead is said if we can understand

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each person's context, we know what's relevant to them. Therefore

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we know what to write to them about, what call

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to action to give them, what the timing should be,

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what product or service to offer them. And all those

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things mean that you're treating people the way that they

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want to be treated. And it's no, there's no invasive

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data, no third party data. Like at the end of

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the day, right, if I'm selling you sunglasses, why do

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I have to care that you're looking at blue cars?

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That was my whole thing was like I didn't like

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invasive data. But it doesn't work. All this cookie stuff

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doesn't work. Are you going to get 98.81% of ads?

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Ignore. So that's, that's ultimately what it comes down to.

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It's, it's an AI system that understands context and relevance

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and therefore knows specifically how to write. Using emotions, using

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psychology, using the right types of products, the right selection,

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the right timing. It's kind of like the fable of

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what marketing's always been selling itself as, but about an

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individual. And if I'm honest, real. Sounds

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amazing. Let's go back a bit because I want to

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dig into your entrepreneurial journey and some of the things

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that are close to mark and yeah, firstly just general

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AI. Yeah, I get the feeling, and this might be

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wrong, that you're irritated and stepping away from it, but

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do you still use it in your day to day?

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Are you still using AI automation like this or are

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you building your own? We've got our own automation within

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our system. We still plug into all the major large

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language models because it helps us learn what they don't

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know. Right. Because they're continuous large data models that

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they're training. But the word intelligence has been falsified

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in what current artificial intelligence is. Right. Because if it

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was intelligent, it would be able to take your question,

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reason with it and understand what you want. Right. Instead,

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it's getting 52% of its answers from Reddit. Right. Which

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means it's like search back in the day, but it's

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got no. Like it's all well and good having the

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search algorithm. Right. The ranking system, page ranking system that

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Google created. Right. That's great for search. What's different is

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when a human's putting in something about how they feel,

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something they need, something about market, something about their audience,

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and they're getting a answer, not an answer that's gone

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through any kind of reasoning, consideration through checks or anything

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like that. Right. That's my challenge about AI today. And

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what do you see the place? Such an open, massive

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market that's really influencing almost every aspect of our life

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at the moment. Yeah, yeah. So, for example, after this

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podcast, I'll take this podcast, I'll dump it into my

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workflow and it'll go all the way through to the

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launch. So for me, it's super important to actually look

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at the problem you're trying to solve in business and

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then automate that in the best way possible. Such a

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big challenge with this is that business owners don't necessarily

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know what the problems are. Secondly, they don't know what

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their SOPs are, they don't know what their standard operating

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procedures are. Especially if you've got 10 or 15 people,

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you've just started out, or you've been going for a

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while, you'll be doing the things that you like doing

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the most, and you'll be ignoring the things that you

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don't really like doing and hope they'll go away. And

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this is where the business operating systems. Have you heard

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of EOS or 90 or all these kind of tools?

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You know, that's one of the things I search in,

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is a business operating system from 90. And it's so

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interesting to me how so many big companies, 5, 10,

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15. Not big, 5, 10, 15 million owned companies don't

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even have the business operating system worked out and understanding

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where they're going. And I think the amalgamation of AI

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with a business operating system can really help you get

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much more clarity in what you're doing. And for me,

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I was running three IT companies, two IT companies at

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once, and I got the opportunity to acquire the first

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one I worked for, and I just didn't have the

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time. I was doing 15 hours a day, every day,

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seven days a week, and really pushing forward. And that's

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okay. In a growth phase. I know we just spoke

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about that. But companies, we birth a company, right? So

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companies are a baby. We have an idea, we're gonna.

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We're gonna help the world, we're gonna solve the problems,

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and we birth the company. And as we birth this

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company, first of all goes through the first stages where

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it keeps you up all night for sure, right? Yeah.

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And then it goes to the next stage where it's

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the terrible twos and you don't know what to do

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with it. Then it goes up to, you know, early

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teens. And you really have to understand who wants to

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be. It wants to be free, but it isn't, you

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know, you have to keep control. I think so many

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business owners get stuck in that teenage era where they

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have to be there to hold the hand of the

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company, otherwise it doesn't do the job. And for me,

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a business operating system takes it to the next level

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where you can go and travel, you can take two

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weeks off, you can do, you know what, what you

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want to do in life. And I live that life

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now. Right. I've just been in Egypt for two weeks

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and been in France. I'm now in the US and

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working remotely is great. It allows us to do a

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bunch of things. But having the confidence that my company

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set up and running properly is so important. How have

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you found that process through your multiple businesses? Yeah, I

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think it's a great thing because there's a clear delineation,

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right. Where you've got something that is a fixed process

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that you can and should automate. That's what people are

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generally not doing, which is pretty exactly what you said,

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what they should be doing. They should be focusing on

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that. Why didn't they not? Because it doesn't look like

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growth, it doesn't look fun, it doesn't look shiny. It's

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not the CEO that I've found in a lot of

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enterprises and in small businesses saying AI's here, we should

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do 10 times the amount of content. Nobody's saying, well,

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the content we're doing is not working. So if we

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do 10 times the amount of it, what difference does

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it make when you focus on those processes? That's where

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automation work. Right. On the other side, as I mentioned,

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with the shiny stars, there's a difference between process automation

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and agentic AI. And agentic AI is the next thing

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that people are getting excited about. But it's Got the

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same fail points as traditional AR does right now. Because

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even though a process automation is. You do these things,

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right? I need you to do these things, send this

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invoice, do this. Right. It's straightforward, there is no gaps

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with that. Right. Whereas agentic looks the same, but what

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is AI following the same steps, but per what you

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said earlier, in the same way that you can ask

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a question in a slightly different way, MIT has already

364

proven that the same issue exists in Agentic AI, where

365

it starts making mistakes after the seventh or eighth month,

366

it starts doing things inconsistently. But focusing on that process

367

stuff, you could argue, why didn't we do that in

368

the software days before AI came? It's the same issue.

369

It's like we're not doing ourselves any favor to take

370

away the stuff we don't like, which is crazy. But

371

the vast majority of people that I know that whether

372

they're running businesses, senior leadership, whatever it is, they spend

373

the vast majority of their time doing stuff they don't

374

like. And also stuff that's got nothing to do with

375

their job, admins, expenses, all that kind of stuff. Yeah,

376

I think that's, to me, that's the power of AI

377

as it stands at the moment, right. Git can automate

378

all this kind of stuff, much as we could have

379

done years ago. However, there's that missing link in the

380

middle, right. You need to understand your business and you

381

need to understand those processes. I think when you start

382

a business, you start and you hire Mary, your friend,

383

and you hire John and you hire Bob and you

384

get them in because you like them and they're good

385

in one area, so you give them that area to

386

do and they do okay. But that's not their full

387

job. So they start doing other stuff and, and as

388

they're doing the other stuff, you lose track of what

389

they're doing. One of the things in the Boss Up.

390

Boss up is the coaching thing that I do. One

391

of the things in the Boss up is knowing what

392

the roles and responsibilities are, you know, because as an

393

entrepreneur, I will do everything. I've always prided myself in

394

doing everything on a company and being able to do

395

everything. I don't do it all very well, but I

396

know how to do it all. And then I'll ask

397

somebody else to do it, right? And when I ask

398

somebody else to do it, I. I'm sitting there saying,

399

okay, just go and do this. But I don't give

400

them very clear roles and responsibilities. I don't give them

401

the SOPs for everything. I don't give it to them

402

in such a clear way that there's no possible way

403

for them to actually get it. So I'm failing initially

404

as a business owner because I've not given the role

405

to the person correctly. And then the person doesn't necessarily

406

understand the role. So they're not understanding the role, they're

407

not doing it correctly. And I'm looking at them and

408

saying, what's wrong with you? Yeah, it's not them, it's

409

me. Yeah, it's the same core. Right. It's the same

410

core issue. If you think about it, how well you

411

do adult communicate to AI, Right? It's the same way

412

that you lead people, the same way you put in

413

processes or not. Right. But the scary thing is, like,

414

you can put the same thing into AI twice. You

415

get the positive response, even though one is much more

416

depth and one's light per the example you gave. You

417

can get the same thing as a leader. Go and

418

do this, go and do this in detail. You get

419

the same positive response. You think it's working. One of

420

them gets you a very successful outcome, the other one

421

doesn't. That's where humans trick themselves. It comes back to

422

communication, listening to how we communicate and so forth. 100%.

423

100%. And yeah, this journey of discovering ourselves is so

424

important, right? Yeah. This journey of actually understanding our own

425

failings, accepting them, acknowledging them and saying, listen, I'm actually

426

not very good at that. I need to go and

427

learn some more. I need to go and understand a

428

bit more about this. And what I typically do is

429

I discover business owners are generally overstressed. They're massively overstressed.

430

They don't have time. And so few people are actually

431

engaging in AI because of this reason of they put

432

some things in there and they've got some rubbish out.

433

So it's okay. So let's think about this. Let me

434

give you some time back. So I'll typically start. And

435

I said, what are your top three problems at the

436

moment? Yeah, I'll take those top three problems and let's

437

solve those. Let's solve those under the structure of bos.

438

Now, once I've sold those, now they've got some time,

439

then I want to flip into the next piece. Then

440

I get them to work on their wellness because I

441

don't know where you are on your journey, but for

442

me, wellness is the main thing for you to succeed

443

properly as a business owner. Yeah. If your mental state

444

is good, if your physical state is good, if you're

445

not worrying about the future, not worrying about the past,

446

then today you can actually make profit. If your mental

447

state isn't good and you're worrying about these things, you

448

give away your energy to the future, give away your

449

energy to the past, and you spend 40% of your

450

day doing what you need to and 60% worrying. So

451

how have you managed this? What's your routine for wellness?

452

What's your routine for making sure your mind is always

453

in top form? The science side of it again, what

454

I've learned over the past decade is so much about

455

self because you can't model how the brain thinks without

456

understanding it from your own perspective. And I've come across

457

a thing that is, I call it polar opposites. Right?

458

But basically in for every good there is a bad,

459

right? So in the same way, if you're feeling anxious,

460

it narrows your thinking, therefore it narrows your decision making,

461

it narrows the results that you get, right? Whereas when

462

you're feeling calm and relaxed, you're not anxious, your mind's

463

open, you can deal with things a lot easier, you

464

can process more information, you find more success. So wellness

465

and everything that people fight in a busy world is

466

actually a solution to create a less busy world. But

467

there'll be things that have time for it. You know

468

what I mean? It's the self fulfilling prophecy. And that's

469

been a hard thing for me because I've got a

470

busy mind and I want to be busy. So learning

471

how to give away control is one of the biggest

472

human issues. Right? Is as you said, we can have

473

a very successful business, but it doesn't grow beyond a

474

certain point. Or we recruit many versions of ourselves, which

475

doesn't help because they're just many versions of us. And

476

then we end up saying I can do it better

477

than what you're doing, so I'll just take over again.

478

And they just don't increase beyond the stuff that we're

479

not good at. So it's all combinations of that. Wellness

480

and self awareness are very much the keys to entrepreneurship

481

in my opinion. They're a key to happy life. And

482

one follows the other like that. Infinity loop and one

483

some of the things in 2021 I started doing Wim

484

Hof. And Wim Hof is cold exposure and breath work.

485

And I'd never looked at wellness before this, right? Yeah.

486

Got myself into. I'd bought an adventure center and this

487

adventure center was everything I wanted. I had the three

488

IT companies and I bought the adventure center so had

489

indoor skydiving and indoor surfing, farming And a junk off

490

of 130 foot tower. There was a repeller and a

491

gym and it was just, it was everything that I

492

could have wanted. And then Covid hit, right? And that

493

was just a journey into the depths of my soul.

494

And as an entrepreneur, I had this inane belief, the

495

total belief that I could actually solve any problem. You

496

know, I've always been able to solve any problem, but

497

I couldn't solve it closing us down. So I just

498

threw money at it. Threw money at it. I lost

499

millions of pounds. I ended up getting up one morning

500

at four in the morning, climbing up the 130 foot

501

tower, getting ready to jump off. And I sat up

502

there and luckily I'd been doing the WIM HOF work

503

before this. So I started doing some breath work when

504

I was up there. And that breath work, just the

505

three rounds of breath work, was enough to quiet my

506

mind, to get me to say, actually, I don't need

507

to do this. I can take the next step tomorrow.

508

And then the second thing was something from Dale Carnegie

509

I learned accepting the worst case scenario. So now in

510

my mind, the worst case scenario was going bankrupt. So

511

I was like, okay, so I'm bankrupt. Yeah. And you

512

know, when I actually truly accepted that, the weight just

513

lifted, right? It just lifted. And I went down. I

514

signed up for a WIM HOF course and paid for

515

it with the last bit of money I had for

516

the instructor's course. And I called my mom up and

517

I said, listen, I might need a place to stay.

518

Come and stay in your spare room because it's all

519

going wrong every day. I just did the maximum amount

520

of work I could every day to make it better.

521

So now we come back three or four years later

522

and I've got a totally different life, which was awesome,

523

Loving what I'm doing. And that piece of not understanding

524

the tools that are there, the breath work, the meditation,

525

the cold exposure, what are the things that we can

526

do ourselves as business owners, as entrepreneurs that don't take

527

a huge amount of time? I get up early in

528

the morning, I'm an early riser this morning. I got

529

up, I did my breath work, I did my meditation,

530

20 minutes of breath work, half an hour meditation, a

531

little bit of PT jump in my ice bath. It

532

takes me an hour. And I'm ready for the day.

533

I'm ready for the day. I wipe away all those

534

emotions from yesterday and I give myself clarity today. And

535

I think that's such a missing piece in what entrepreneurs

536

have today. They don't put themselves first and give themselves

537

the best opportunity. Yeah, no, I completely agree with you.

538

I've got two versions straight back at you that I

539

do. One is, I call it the Dr. Pepper rule

540

because they used to have a tagline of what's the

541

worst that can happen? So that's my version of that,

542

is what's the worst that can happen? And I've trained

543

myself over the years for that. So now it's not

544

a negative anymore. It's actually a positive energy situation, which

545

is a big thing about the dynamics, about decision making

546

and how you feel about things and how you interpret

547

things in terms of the glass half filled, the glass

548

half empty. We are what we think. So when we

549

put in more positive energy based on a scenario, the

550

better we feel, the more that we can control it

551

in the best possible way. Positive versus negative energy is

552

literally a choice. It's just how we perceive life. And

553

then the thing that I've learned for breathing, so in

554

line with what you're speaking about, I'm agreeing with that.

555

First of all, there's a thing that you can do

556

really short term, which the military do, the SES do,

557

which is called box breathing, where you breathe in for

558

seven seconds, you hold it, and then you breathe out

559

for seven seconds, you hold it. And what that actually

560

does is it resets your nervous system, so it actually

561

brings you down. I'm agreeing with you about meditation and

562

putting a lot of time into breathing first thing in

563

the morning, things like that. But if you're caught in

564

a moment, box breathing allows you just to reset so

565

you can just see reality and just give yourself a

566

break as well. So I'm in complete humanity. Yeah. And,

567

yeah, the thing that I. Have you tried Wim Hof

568

breathing? No. Maybe I'll share some of that with you.

569

It's. It's an. It's. It's such a powerful tool. It

570

was initially tumor breathing, and then Worm came along and

571

he changed it, changed it up and made it a

572

bit more of today. I love shortcuts. I love shortcuts

573

in the journey. Yeah. And the two shortcuts that I

574

found the most useful, I could not meditate. My mind

575

is too busy. Right. Yeah, my mind's just crazy busy.

576

But. And now. Yeah. Then I started Wim Hof breathing

577

and then I started meditating. And after 20 minutes of

578

Wim Hof breathing, my mind is clear. That 20 minutes

579

I don't think much of. And then I'm able to

580

meditate. And I've been doing Joe Dispenza's work. I don't

581

know if you know his work, if you don't know

582

his work, go and have a look at Becoming Supernaturals.

583

It's a book of his. So powerful because he's actually

584

doing the science behind it. Right. It's not the way.

585

Go and sit down the mountain and lock yourself in

586

the cave. He's actually saying, if you meditate, this is

587

how you meditate. This is why you meditate. This is

588

how the cells move. This is the vibration that you're

589

talking. This is how the energy works. And I just

590

found it fascinating. I've been to four of his retreats

591

so far in the last couple of years and I'm

592

going to another one in February. And what this allows

593

me to do by stacking these tools that I've got

594

that work for me, and not everyone's going to resonate

595

with everything for sure by stacking these tools that work

596

for me, I can just be the best person that

597

I can be today and let me enjoy my life.

598

I can live the life I love. And I think

599

so many times we get in. Why do we become

600

entrepreneur? That's the question. Why did you become an entrepreneur?

601

Apart from being unemployable, which I agree. I'm not either,

602

but it's that in itself, right? Like I didn't want

603

to answer to somebody else. I wanted to feel that.

604

That sense of freedom. But I think what we. Freedom,

605

freedom, right. We then steal it from ourselves because we

606

box ourselves in with busyness, with this perception, with not

607

enough money, not enough concrete, like that kind of stuff,

608

right? So we become our own enemies or frenemies of

609

the thing we set out to do in the first

610

place. That's the risk, I think, right? Yeah. We go

611

into it for freedom and we build ourselves a cage,

612

you know. Hey, you know, you go, yeah, we. Totally

613

build ourselves a cage. And then we lock ourselves in

614

and we make these walls. And they don't need to

615

be there. They really don't need to be there. If

616

you do everything in the correct way, they don't need

617

to be there at all. And yeah, I'm lucky. I'm

618

so grateful for the life I'm living at the moment.

619

Partially. I don't value money as much. What I mean

620

by that is I would rather go and spend two

621

weeks free diving in Egypt with dolphins than have that

622

money in the bank. I can't. I used to pride

623

myself on seeing where the world was going to be

624

in five years time. Yeah. And seeing being able to

625

plan and structure on that. Honestly, now, with the current

626

state of the world, I have no idea where it's

627

going to be in three months. So this idea of

628

live your life today, right? This is all we've got.

629

Yeah, I was just a little story. I was 19

630

years old in South Africa. I had an argument with

631

my wife, or my future wife, my girlfriend at that

632

point, and I decided to just leave. So I hitchhiked

633

out from where we were and I was just leaving

634

home. I didn't know where I was going. I was

635

just put a testosterone and always you are at 19.

636

And I was hitchhiking on the motorway and I got

637

to the top of this hill called Fields Hill, literally

638

hitching and I heard this noise behind me, turned around

639

and as Mercedes Benz, the driver had fallen asleep at

640

the wheel and pulled across the road. He hit my

641

shin, broke my leg in two places. My foot fell

642

off, you know, I went through the wind sphere and

643

as you can see here, I went over, flipped around

644

the mirror, the side mirror, and then of course thrown

645

into the road and I lay there still conscious. I

646

lay there with cars zipping past me and there's two

647

amazing. Stop. They saw the whole thing and they pulled

648

me onto the white line and stood, put my head

649

in my feet so that the cars wouldn't hit me.

650

And as I was laying there, all I regretted was

651

what I hadn't done, not what I had done. Right.

652

Just what a blessing at 19 years old to be

653

able to come out of that and say, you know

654

what, I've got today to do the things I want

655

to do. And since then I've done two and a

656

half thousand stardives. I've done 700 scuba dives, I've done

657

free diving all around the world. I've jumped into traditional

658

units and those aren't things for everybody. But the point

659

is, maybe it's going and telling your mummy lover, maybe

660

it's going and spending time with your family. You don't

661

have a huge amount of anything else. You've only got

662

now. And we lose sight of the important things when

663

we start running a business and it starts owning us.

664

Yeah, I agree. I in line with what you were

665

saying about I love to find out the shortcut, the

666

logic of how something works, right? What's behind the stylus?

667

What's the truth of it? Right? And the thing that

668

I'm working on, away from the business side. So, like

669

just pure academic passion, study, like what I've always done

670

my whole life is like, what's the energy of life.

671

And what I mean by that is what we can

672

actually manage. Right. So your perception, luckily enough when you

673

were 19 or perhaps does you have you were raised

674

or who you were, nature, nurture, all that kind of

675

stuff. Your perception was, was what can I do? Not

676

what I mean what have I done right, what can

677

I do? What am I missing out on? And that

678

literally for me is like the energy of life and

679

how the physics of decision making works and how energy

680

comes into the body is very much that classic phrase

681

of perception is reality. The more you could manage how

682

you perceive something, the more positive energy comes into your

683

system. The more positive energy you've got, the more healthy

684

your decision making becomes. The healthier decision making comes, the

685

more positive energy. You see what I mean? It becomes

686

its own self fulfilling most beautiful thing. That means that

687

you're positively controlling the energy of life. Not, not I'm

688

pretending to be the happiest person in the world. It's

689

more that balance and contentment. You get me 100%. And

690

there's so many things now. I'm going to go a

691

little bit off script now because I love what you're

692

saying there. One of the things that started coming to

693

me when I started doing Wim Hof workshops so you

694

imagine there's 30 people laying in a room and we're

695

doing breathwork and I started perceiving the energy of the

696

room. I could walk to the person that's going to

697

go and try next with Wim HOF breathing. And a

698

lot of people have four or five people on every

699

session will have an emotional release. Right. Because we move

700

things and that's just really drawn me down this path

701

of what is energy. We are not just meat, we're

702

energy. And Spencer talks about this a lot and I've

703

actually been doing quite a lot of work with psilocybin

704

recently. It's fascinating. It really is fascinating and

705

just how this opens you up and lets you rewire

706

your brain, do things that you never thought would be

707

possible before. It takes all those blocks and moves them

708

away. And this is an area that I'm going to

709

be going into a bit more and understanding a bit

710

more and learning about a bit more. And you know,

711

so much, so much of what we do, we get

712

stuck in now. We get stuck in actually we don't

713

get stuck in now. We get stuck in the past.

714

Right? Yeah, we get locked into the past of these

715

emotions. So yeah, I think energy is. Yeah, you can

716

ruin that positive energy 100% yeah, it comes back to

717

what. I said about the. I love people too, that

718

listen to this, have a takeaway route. This polar opposite

719

stuff, right? So positive and negative energy is just how

720

we perceive things. The biggest issue similar to this, of

721

why humans find it difficult to be content and to

722

be present, is that the human brain is either thinking

723

about the past or worrying about the future. It's actually

724

against its nature to sit with the now, right? It

725

wants to be thinking about one or the other way,

726

whereas actually what you want is balance. It comes back

727

to the same thing. And the other thing to be

728

aware of for people is like, we can get, we're

729

addictive creatures by nature, right? And we can get addicted

730

to negative as much as we can get addicted to

731

positive, right? Even in abusive, horrible, negative situations,

732

we get a chemical relief that means that we can

733

get addicted to that as much as we could get

734

addicted to having a happy, joyful life. Now, obviously one

735

serves you a lot better than the other, but if

736

you're not in control of it, you're not in control

737

of your choices. I call it choice architecture. So what

738

do you want to be addicted to? Stuff you enjoy

739

or stuff that you don't? Because you're going to get

740

addicted to one or the other. And to that point,

741

your mind and your body or your mind is very

742

much an engine to save energy. Yes. Yeah. So it's

743

a prediction engine to save energy. And as you're saying,

744

we have the sympathetic mode and the parasympathetic mode. And

745

the parasympathetic mode is your rest and digest. The sympathetic

746

mode is I'm being chased by a saber toothless, I

747

need to deal. And the parasympathetic mode allows us to

748

be creative. And this is where the work happens, this

749

is where growth happens. This is all these things. And

750

the sympathetic mode, we're just flat and flat. We're just

751

getting out of the situation now. And to your point,

752

one of the things that I've learned, the human mind

753

is so powerful, unlike anything else in the animal kingdom

754

because we have a thought and we don't know whether

755

we end the activity or whether we're having a thought.

756

The mind can't tell the difference. So you go out

757

and you get almost run over by a car to

758

use a point and you have that. The chemicals that

759

are released from your mind into your body are there

760

to protect you. It's adrenaline. It's all those things that

761

something like a thousand chemicals get released when something like

762

that happens and they go into your System. Right. And

763

they go into your system. When they're in your system,

764

you feel a bit better. So you're a step up

765

from what that situation might be. It's giving you the

766

thing. But then you just have a thought about that

767

thing again. You go home and you think about it

768

again and you have those chemicals again. And you keep

769

thinking about it and you have those chemicals. And to

770

your point, that's where the addition starts happening. You know,

771

your body's okay. If I keep thinking about it, I'm

772

going to keep on getting these chemicals and it's going

773

to make me feel a little bit better because I'm

774

worried about that thing. And it's understanding those blocks and

775

understanding what's happening there that's so important. And because there

776

are chemicals coming into the body, those chemicals are layering

777

on top of each other, on top of themselves, and

778

they come down and they sit in your fashion. And

779

the breath work actually allows you to cure some of

780

those chemicals. And for me, the breath work is this

781

ability every morning to come in and to wipe out

782

the chemicals from yesterday. And it really, it feels like

783

that. It really feels like that. I've got 15, 20

784

business owner clients, probably a lot more than that, actually.

785

I teach breathwork at Cranfield University to high performing business

786

owners. Oh yeah. It's fascinating to see these people come

787

in with no concept of how powerful breath work actually

788

is and leave thinking, wow, I actually feel totally different

789

from what I did before. Yeah, just 20 minutes a

790

day, just 20 minutes a day of this breath work

791

can make such a difference. If you can get 20%

792

of your energy and your focus back in the day,

793

would that be worth it? And by doing 20 minutes

794

in the morning, that can do it. I'll share it

795

with you afterwards. So, yeah, 100% agree. If we understand

796

our mind, if we understand how it works, and we

797

understand when we're good and when we're not so good,

798

when we're productive and not so productive, then we can

799

use it. We can actually move forward. Yeah, I agree.

800

And then taking it back to the tech side, until

801

AI understands what you just said, it's not intelligent. I

802

don't think AI is going to be intelligent. I believe

803

the opportunity with AI is a different one than a

804

lot of people are seeing. I believe that if we

805

can automate those things that need to be automated and

806

that gives us more time and we can then bring

807

more human into the organization, those are the organizations that

808

are going to take an entire leap forward to what

809

you're building. If we can actually bring the human back

810

because the human's gone away through Covid, through all these

811

things we've been through, we're getting more disconnected and more

812

disconnected. If we can get that connection back, then we're

813

going to stand out. And the problem being that unless

814

you use AI, unless you use the automations, unless you

815

do the run of the more basic tasks that you

816

don't need to do by automation, you're not going to

817

have the time to be more human. Exactly, exactly. I

818

couldn't agree with you more. I believe that more and

819

more you're going to see whether humans are aware of

820

it or not. They're going to start pushing for more

821

human to human connection, more real is why podcasts, I

822

believe are taking off and taken off even further than

823

what they were. Because you can't, that people are trying

824

to. But you can't fake it. You can't fake an

825

interaction like this. You can't fake the tone, you can't

826

fake the emotional context of it. It's not as preloaded

827

as everything else. So that's where I think people start

828

pushing more towards. Obviously if it's more short form they'll

829

be happier because you can't think and can't listen. You

830

know, these longer ones get a little bit challenging for

831

them so we'll cut them down into small pieces. What's

832

the next steps? You know, let's think about wrapping up

833

now. What's the next steps for you? And yeah, I'd

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love to come, I'd love for you to come back

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on again in a few months time and you know,

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when you're up and running and just give us an

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update of how it's going. But what are your next

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steps? I'd love to do that. So thank you. First

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of all, the reality is that now that once the

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engine goes fully online, which is still hard for me

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to believe, right? 120 million tests, 10 years of work.

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Once it's online I can then start putting out self

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serve platforms to the world. And my belief is that

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people don't want general bots, they want something that serves

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a purpose, right? Solving a process. Or I'm on here

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because I need writing or I'm on here because I

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need to understand my audience so it's less about everyone,

848

not the layman generally doesn't want to understand. Using this

849

word in front of this word completely changes the outcome.

850

Right. They want to get the output of the problem

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they're trying to solve with a little bit of free

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text. Right? That's what I believe. Let's see, in three

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months, I'll know whether I'm right or not. So I'll

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be able to tell you and be honest about it.

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Right. See what I've learned. What lessons are there? Looking

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forward to it. One last question. Anybody going onto this

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entrepreneurial journey, what would you tell them? Understand yourself.

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Understand what self confidence is and research what it is

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you think you want to do before you start it.

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Thank you very much for joining me. Martin and I

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will put all your details below so people can get

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a hold of you, and we look forward to seeing

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you again in the near future. Thank you.