THE DIARY OF A CEO WITH STEVEN BARTLETTHOSTED BYDOAC
A few years ago I was a broke, university dropout, at 18 I built an industry leading social media marketing company, and at 27 I resigned as CEO. At 28 I co-founded Flight Story – a marketing and communications company, and thirdweb - a software platform, making it easy to build web3 applications. I then launched private equity fund, Flight Fund, to accelerate the next generation of European unicorns. During this time I decided to launch 'The Diary Of A CEO' podcast with the simple mission of providing an unfiltered journey into the remarkable stories and untold dimensions of the world’s most influential people, experts and thinkers. Thank you for listening.
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Liked any of the videos we've posted. If you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this episode. Gary. Steven. Good to see you back. Throw me off. It's good. I know. Do you? I see. I knew I'd do your game off there. Steven, great to be back, man. It really is. If someone's just clicked on this podcast Mhmm. And they're wondering why they should stay and listen, You're gonna direct the conversation. I'm gonna go where you wanna go. I'm gonna follow my curiosity and ask questions. But what are they gonna get from this conversation today if you are at the driving wheel? Just data on how to live a healthier, happier, longer life, and maybe answers to some of the most, pesky health related challenges that they're having. And I and when I say pesky health related challenges, I mean, everybody has these little tiny anchors off their stern. Right? Weight gain, water retention, brain fog, lack of focus and concentration, poor waking energy, lack of deep sleep, And it's shocking how many of these conditions have a common repository. I mean, they like the hub of the wheel where they all meet. All these individual spokes come together at the common hub of methylation, and they and and methylation is essentially nutrient deficiencies in the human body. And I don't usually start off with this analogy, but I'll start off with an analogy. When I was in grad school, first of all, I'm a human biologist, not a physician. I my undergraduate degrees are in biology, my postgraduate degrees are in human biology, but when I was in my second 4 years of of grad school getting a human biology degree, I had to I had to take all these plant botany courses, which I hated because I was like, I wanted to study, like, anatomy and physiology in human beings when I'm studying algae, and and but the one thing that stood out to me about plant physiology was, let's say you have a a palm leaf that's rotting in a palm tree, and you call a true arborist, a true botanist, Out to your out.
That number 1 Yes. Was McDonald's Coffee. That's not surprising. That's that's kind of what I would have expected McDonald's to taste like. And it was that cup of coffee cost us £1.30. So I put it the cheapest thing here. I feel like McDonald's are aiming at the kind of cheaper end. Okay. Your assessment there was probably fair. You did originally give it a 2 out of 10. I'd I feel not bad about that, but it's fine. There you go. So, number 2, you talked about being sort of a bitterness to it and an independent, like a A little bit more acidity in this tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality, certainly the number 1. That is an independent local coffee shop. Yep. And that cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald's 1. And about £3 per cup. Let's move on to number 3. Okay. Very different taste. For me, it's more akin to number 1 than anything else. Like, it's, again, it's a darker roast. It's got a bit more body to it. It feels fuller, a bit little bit richer, a bit earthy, but at the same time for me. It's fuller, isn't it? There's It is a little bit full. And that's The first one was quite watery. Yeah. And that's in part gonna be how it's made in part, how it's roasted in part, you know, where it's from. Price wise, I wouldn't expect it to be much more than the McDonald's, if I'm honest, that that tastes again like a, yeah, like a a reasonably commercial grade coffee. I wouldn't say it tastes bad, rose a little dark. Yeah. It's another kind of the 343 actually, this is something about the there's a sort of earthiness that I don't enjoy in coffee. So people really like earthy flavors. I really don't, and that's just a preference thing. So that is Costa Coffee. I'm just letting you go. Number 4.
Of this building over here. And so to hear that you applied at nineteen years old, I was like, oh, I didn't know teenagers could apply. Yeah. No. I I was eighteen years old when I joined the navy, and I joined on a contract that got me sent to seal training, and it took a year to get through, so I was nineteen when I finished that up. But there is there's always debates about Well, don't you want someone that's more experienced? And I actually loved the fact that I was basically raised in the seal teams. It was just awesome. It was an awesome way to grow up. It was an awesome way to spend those those years of your life. Learning the trade that you wanted to learn. And so I I thought it was awesome, and I think it worked out pretty well. There is a usually, the the the percentage of people that make it through seal training is about 20%. People that are under the age of twenty it goes down to about 5%. So, yeah, I was one of those, like, small percentage of people that are very young, but still make it through. And what what is the characteristics that they're ultimately testing with the design of that training? What are they testing for? Will you keep going? In the face of whatever. Well, they they call the, 1 of the week's hell week, don't they? So they try and simulate hell by the sounds of it. Yeah. They try and simulate hell. It's it's they actually were trying to simulate combat initially. When they created that week, they wanted to take as much combat simulation from World War 2 at the time and put it into a very compressed schedule so they could create these frogmen to go overseas and conduct operations. Because World War 2 was going on. And so they needed to compress the training cycle so they compressed a bunch of that combat simulation into it's about five and a half days. No sleep, lots of physical activity, lots of stress, lots of pain, and lots of people quit. How many people quit? In that particular week.
You've got. They're not jealous of how you got it. No comedians are jealous of how I got it. No one sits there and goes, oh, I wish I could sit for 10 hours of downright jokes. They think I wanna play that venue or I'd I'd love to have that Netflix special, but they don't sit there going, well, what pathology would you need in your head to write that many one liners and to care that much about it? Who would you have to be to do that? And we're all chasing something. Right? I think we're chasing impostor syndrome. I think impostor syndrome's got a bad reputation and it's great. You should feel it every 18 months. As you level up, you should feel like, do I belong here? Right? I I This show is much bigger than it was when I was last on. Congratulations, you. Why is it bigger? Well, because you pushed yourself and you worked harder. Right? And now, sometimes you feel like, oh, my God, I'm interviewing this person. Great. Don't feel comfortable. Lovely. As soon as you start to feel comfortable, you need to push yourself a little bit further. There's a great story my friend told me. It's a very name droppy story. Do you mind? Good. Alright. Brandon Flowers told me this story. So he's filming a video with Lou Reed, like, 10 years ago. They did a song with Lou Reed, which is pretty cool for the killers. And they're filming this video. When they're backstage, they're in the they're in the, the the green room. And Lou Reed's there. He's got leather trousers on. He's got a leather jacket and a vest. He's got mirrored sunglasses. He's Lou Reed. And he looks in the mirror, and Brandon sort of sees him just like checking himself out. And Lou Reed just goes, I wish I was that guy. Lou Reed's got impostor syndrome, and he's Lou Reed. There's nothing the matter with it. You know, a guy that's been a rock star and a legend for 40 years is still feeling that thing of light going, I don't feel like I'm that guy. Great. That's how you should feel. So if you haven't felt impostor syndrome in the last 12, 18 months, you think there's something probably What? Push yourself a little bit hard? I mean, it depends. It depends what you wanna do. You can have an easy life. Some people, you know, work to live. Some people live
Do anything, that's when you're gonna get yourself into trouble. What a powerful quote. And I think just paying attention to that, that's the natural humility that goes into it, and it's not false humility. It's not like, oh, I you know, false humility is like, I I I didn't do any of this. I just got lucky. That's all false humility. I think real humility is, like, I built this through hard work and I made some good decisions, but I'm just a I'm just a guy. I'm as fallible as anybody else. I think that's it's it's not just important. I think that's critical to any amount of sustainable success. You taught me that the price you pay to be wealthy is the volatility you have to incur along the way. It's kind of how I think about it in my head. That's the cost of a mission. To being what? To being wealthy and to To be to any levels of success is putting up with an enduring unknowns and volatility and booms and busts and then other bullshit that you put up with in the investing market and in your career and in your relationships. There's always a cost. For anything good in life, there's a cost that you have to pay. Like, of course. Nothing's free like that. But most of the costs that you pay are not they don't have a price tag that you can just measure very cleanly. Like, the cost of doing well and investing is putting up with volatility. The cost of a successful career might be long hours where you are pulled away from your family. The cost of a relationship is like always needing to sacrifice and compromise for the other person. Nothing is ever free. And so much of the success in life is just identifying what the cost is and being willing to pay it. Because for all of those things I just laid out, investing, career, relationships, the cost of admission is worth it. Putting up with the volatility is worth it over time. Because if you can put up with the stock market falling 30%, if you could just say, ah, it's not that big a deal. I'm just gonna hold tight. 10 years from now, the cost is well worth doing that. It'll be rich. If if you can put up with the compromise that takes to have a successful relationship, by and large, that's gonna be a cost that's worth paying. Because you know, like, so much of what matters in life is just the relationships that you have. And once you identify the
