This latest episode peels back the curtain on Simon's life—an odyssey marked by a dyslexic childhood and the loss of his mother to cancer. These pivotal moments not only shaped his character but also propelled him toward innovating the tangled world of healthcare. Simon walks us through the inception of HypaIQ and its mission to streamline the way medical professionals capture their critical insights.
Venturing into the startup arena without a background in software development could easily deter the bravest of souls, yet Simon's tale is a testament to perseverance. Simon stresses the importance of a balanced lifestyle for maintaining clarity and purpose amid the high stakes of entrepreneurship. His journey serves as a powerful reminder that complexity can often be best addressed with simple, elegant solutions.
You can connect with Simon via his LinkedIn profile or by visiting the HypaIQ website.
This latest episode peels back the curtain on Simon's life—an odyssey marked by a dyslexic childhood and the loss of his mother to cancer. These pivotal moments not only shaped his character but also propelled him toward innovating the tangled world of healthcare. Simon walks us through the inception of HypaIQ and its mission to streamline the way medical professionals capture their critical insights.
Venturing into the startup arena without a background in software development could easily deter the bravest of souls, yet Simon's tale is a testament to perseverance. Simon stresses the importance of a balanced lifestyle for maintaining clarity and purpose amid the high stakes of entrepreneurship. His journey serves as a powerful reminder that complexity can often be best addressed with simple, elegant solutions.
You can connect with Simon via his LinkedIn profile or by visiting the HypaIQ website.
If we can't learn how to run properly and we can't be taught at school something as basic as running, it sort of raises quite a lot of questions about everything, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And everything we are taught in school and everything we are not taught about school, I often think about most of the biggest things in life how to buy a house, how to fall in love, how to grieve at a funeral are never taught in schools. It's just something that escapes our scholastic system. Simon is the CEO and founder of Hyper IQ.
Speaker 1:If you're a startup founder and you're getting on a bit, you are going to be vulnerable to heart disease and heart attacks. So unless you take it seriously to look after yourself, you are for sure heading for trouble. And so just get out, live your life. You'll feel better, prouder, more motivated for that process.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, it's Greg Sheehan. Welcome to my podcast, where you will hear from a range of guests, including those from the startup world and those that have had incredibly interesting lives and some stories to tell. I would really appreciate it if you could hit the follow button and share this amongst your friends, but, as you know, time is limited, so let's get on with it and hear from our next guest. You know time is limited, so let's get on with it and hear from our next guest. My guest today is Simon Currie. Simon is the CEO and founder of Hyper IQ and he will tell us a little bit about what Hyper IQ is all about as we get into it. It's late in the evening UK time and early morning New Zealand time as we do this recording, so both of us are bringing our best game for this podcast. I know, just in looking at Simon's background, it's going to be a really interesting conversation. Simon, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Great to be here, Greg. I've listened to some of your podcasts and you display a remarkable level of emotional intelligence and general engagement.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's very kind. That's very, very kind of you. That's extremely kind. I need to tell my aging parents that I'm doing okay these days, despite, maybe, how I got started at school. Simon, I'd love to start this episode talking a bit about your journey before you got started with HyperIQ, and how did you get started into what ultimately became what you're doing now? Where did you get started into what ultimately became what you're doing now? Where did you get started in your career.
Speaker 1:I'll give you a sort of brief synopsis, including a bit of my childhood, I suppose the first significant medical event in my life, because I'm in health class there's always a connection the age of 16 weeks my mother somehow managed to die of cancer. Oh wow. And it sort of has a link to my career, because 55 years later or so I introduced what did eventually become the leading cancer system in Europe. We were the reseller of it, so we didn't invent it, but that seems that whole particular challenge, the medical challenge of cancer, seems to have cropped up in some strange ways throughout my life. But just a little bit about my unremarkable educational life, which was strangely inconsistent.
Speaker 1:I'm dyslexic and at my age dyslexia was, you know, a bit like a disability. You know, actually I've learned it's a superpower, absolutely. I was incredibly inconsistent. So I came, always came, bottom of all the classes in the term work and then had the most extraordinary exam results and the most extreme of that was being near the bottom of the bottom. Physics set that 200 people in the year and coming just before what we call over here O levels, I came top of the entire year in 200 people in physics and that sort of tells you a bit about my sort of intellect. And I was the only person that when we got to A levels that left with left with an Art A-level. So again, strange combination. You know there's sort of opposites there. So for most of my career it's been in healthcare, not entirely. I did import some New Zealand trimarans at one stage.
Speaker 2:I saw that.
Speaker 1:Probably the worst sailor that's ever set up a Royal Yachting Association class association, but it was a commercial necessity at that particular stage.
Speaker 1:So my career has always really been in the entrepreneurial end of life, mostly working with people I regard as very brilliant and talented, and I was the sort of suit that stuck it all together and we had something that was quite a legend in its time called British Medical Television in the 1980s and it all ended tragically.
Speaker 1:It was way before even the word startup was invented, I think. Anyhow, coming right to today and Hyper IQ, that emerged really out of the cancer project and I'd worked with another brilliant clinician and set up a micro business that still exists, actually in the Seattle area, and that was the hard coded solution and I was still very much a suit at that stage and anyhow, we parted ways. I could see it wasn't going to be a scalable relationship and I'd long had the thought that if somebody and so we had an automation engine, hard-coded with his ideas, to write medical notes and medical documents, and I would think to myself, if somebody actually worked out how to make that user-driven, then that would be a game-changer, that would wipe our business off the face of the earth, then that would be a game changer that would wipe our business off the base of the earth. Little did I realize that after leaving that project I would have those insights as to how to do it.
Speaker 2:So tell us a little bit about how you got started in that. So Hyper IQ has been around now for a few years and my understanding is it's all about removing the time taken by a medical practitioner or a doctor in the note-taking process. You're going to do a much better job of explaining what it does than I do. It'd be great for you to explain what that is and what it does.
Speaker 1:Well, in really simple, plain English, what we do is allow our users to capture their medical thinking and therefore to automate the creation of documents, and that really is all there is to it. How you achieve that is you have to come up with all sorts of innovations, in particular, an interface that allows a human being with, let's say, organic thinking and gives them the ability to take a document or their ideas and start with an editor that then lays down the logic and all the steps in that intellectual process. So our back end is highly innovative. It is where the human being meets a user interface that allows them to capture their intellectual process, and I want to put that in a really meaningful content, and I've often done this with a deck, but I've never done it on a podcast, to an audience like this. But let me try and bring that to life and actually the way I do it on a deck. I have a brilliant title sequence from a BBC documentary on the history of writing, and it starts off with talking about Gutenberg and how he's experimenting with lead alloys in the 1440s that led to the development of the printing press and how that you're thinking. How the heck does that relate to what we're doing. Well, how it relates to what we're doing. Is that actually the way we learn and share knowledge today, with all our electronics and online journals and meetings like this? It's fundamentally the same process, and what I mean by that is by talking. It's by conversation.
Speaker 1:A textbook is a description, a learning journal, of how you do a breast initial contact. One of the most intellectually complex areas of medicine is you learn that process by the same descriptive processes. When you build a piece of content in our application, it is fundamentally a different process because you are digitizing how you think and that's what then drives the automation and creation of language. And how does that relate to the practicalities of medicine? Let me try and use it with an appalling the appalling from a medical context piece of thinking, but I think it will illustrate the point.
Speaker 1:If we take a gp and for some crazy reason that would probably be very silly we wanted him to do a breast initial consult, it would probably take him Intellectually there are thousands of components to a breast initial consult it would probably take him. It takes 15 years to train an oncologist, so I would think it would take him a couple of years to be retrained to do that 40-minute consultation With Hyper-IQ, particularly if he was a user, he could download that and, as I say, this would be a really bad idea. It'd probably be a good idea to look over it and understand all the components, but he could actually apply that, ask the 40 or 50 questions he needs to do with the patient, go through all the examinations and produce all the patient. Go through all the examinations and produce all the documentation, including customised patient advice, referral letters, all in a blink of an eye at the end of that process the following day.
Speaker 2:And does it also aggregate the crowd. So does it bring collective intelligence from other similarly trained professions or professionals.
Speaker 1:Yes, in a way that GitHub and Amazon Bookstore does, in that people can review, rate and download content. Now we're at the MVP stage. We're just about, in the next three months, to release this product. So collective intelligence in this context would be without the friction and the steps involved, shall we say, in scientific publishing, which are quite onerous is that people can freely publish their content on the platform. They can then download it and they can then review and rate and share their thoughts on it. So in this sense, collective intelligence is then taking that piece of content, you can then adapt it. We can track those changes, those branches that are made to it in much the same way that happens in GitHub. So does that answer the question?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think so. So people that are contributing content what's in it for them? If they're contributing their own content for the greater good, are they doing it altruistically, or is there some sort of commercial benefit for them in doing that?
Speaker 1:Great question and I hope both. The reason why I've sort of put the conditionality in it is that for much of the time in sort of developing the platform in a sense altruistic that word yes altruistically.
Speaker 2:It's a tough one. It is a tough one.
Speaker 1:There is a self-interest in that, in much the same way that in computer coding. The open source movement benefits and shares the collective intelligence and the testing and the sharing of content. But in fact I was. Youtube would be a lesser product if there wasn't a monetization element because it allows people to invest in the content and I think much of our content can be built in half a day or three days or a week or so. But if you take something as intellectually complex as a breast initial consult, that's probably a man year of work and that probably sounds like a very big cliff to climb. But the good news is that that breaks down into 20 or 30 components. So you have things like reviewer systems, physical examination, family history, and those components can be shared. So if the patient is, let's say, overweight, you might have a set of questions and that module that deals with that condition can then be used by a cardiologist. So collective intelligence has a lot of different parameters to it, I would say and it's interesting to me.
Speaker 2:So you've spent essentially decades in the, I guess, the medical intelligence, medical information, medical knowledge space, and then you start HyperIQ. You obviously know a lot about it, but are you a software developer? Is that something that you were trained in? Or did you then start hiring or working with people that could cut code for you?
Speaker 1:Great question. I regret to say I'm not a software developer. When the mobile revolution arrived, I was using pretty crummy products from various people well before the iPhone, but I sort of realized that there was going to be a mobile user interface revolution. So I listened to every podcast on this earth when that was all taking place and downloaded every possible app. So I sort of rode the knowledge curve. The cutting edge of the mobile revolution is really where I got a lot of my technical education.
Speaker 1:But one of the reasons why actually most of the reasons why it's taken a lot of time to bring us to market is we live in Europe and not Silicon Valley, and raising anything, any money for new ideas is pretty tough and there's a lot of friction. But we did have substantial challenges with the technology stack and we had to rebuild it from scratch about four years ago and at that stage I was able to find a very brilliant software engineer, a chap called David Weston. He's got almost no social profile actually he's a real nerd and very, very focused. But he's built enormous platforms and worked and led big teams 11 patents to his name, worked seven days a week, 24 hours a day and suddenly there was very astute at judging personalities, said to us well, if you two can work together because you're polo opposites, it would be a very powerful combination. And we survived and were smiling.
Speaker 2:And so as you got started and he started cutting code et cetera, how were you building the product? Were you iterating it and talking to customers early on, or did you have such a good sort of domain knowledge that you didn't really need to? You were able to just keep telling him what to keep building you know domain knowledge that you didn't really need to.
Speaker 1:You were able to just keep telling him what to keep building. Embarrassingly, you probably picked up that I've got a big LinkedIn first connections. So the importance of building which are mostly clinicians, building a community of potential users has been always of paramount importance. But when you're doing something that's genuinely radical and hasn't been done before, it's very difficult, I think, to say we've got this crazy idea. What do you think of it? That had a lot of confirmation. I remember presenting to actually they were more like property developers than medical entrepreneurs, but I did present to the healthcare division of Ross Childs at some early stage in this project and they said it was sort of a compliment and a sarky comment all combined. They said this sounds like walking on water and sort of, if you can do it, that would be miraculous.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say do you think it is easier? You're doing something that is be miraculous. I was just going to say do you think it is easier? You're doing something that is quite disruptive. Does it make it challenging to do something disruptive when you've actually got a tremendous amount of knowledge in the space? You know you've almost got the bias of knowledge, which sometimes can hold disruption back because you're coming at it from a position of you know years and years and years of knowledge, as opposed to solving a problem coming at it from the outside, if you like. Does that make it trickier, having all that knowledge, or do you think it does make it?
Speaker 1:easier. It's an interesting comment and it's a well-made comment. Failings of startups and founders like myself is that, despite the fact that we're all claiming to be at the cutting edge, we're so often very institutionalized by our own ideas and prejudices. So anything but open-minded, I think, for my sins. People that know know me would say I probably don't fall into that description. I've got a very fluid mind that can see lots of possibilities. There's constantly evolving. I would say it's probably a slightly presumptuous statement. I'm happy to for somebody to tell me I'm talking rubbish. So we've had plenty of challenges, but I don't think that was one of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and interestingly, as you say, if you like, your superpower is your mind and your ability to have these, almost the polymath capability of somebody who can see the world quite analytically but also can see the world in a kind of artistic and patterns basis. Has that been a tremendous help to you, as you've done? Startups, that ability to just think outside the square.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I'm constantly thinking. I'm gobsmacked by how institutionalized human beings are and how we're stuck in our own little microcosms. I've got quite a cool statement. I wish I could remember it fluently, but on my Twitter account or Facebook I think I got something like like to solve big problems with simple ideas with simple ideas. And when you look at life and we've got these huge challenges like climate change and health and people being overweight, well, one of the very simple solutions to that and congestion. I live in North I don't know if you know south of London, north Surrey, not far from Heathrow, and it's one big traffic jam all the time. Well, there's a simple solution to that Build cycleways. Do what the Dutch do. We become healthier, we spend more time outside and you know, for most of us, cycling is probably the first basis where we're going to get to fly. You know it's liberating and miraculously cheap and you know it's the fastest way around London.
Speaker 2:And I noticed too, actually picking up on the cycling and on the on the physical exercise angle I noticed in some of your social profiles you talk about you love to run in the rain, swim in the cold and cycle through mud. Is this something that you do almost as an antidote to startup life and something that perhaps just keeps the mind sharp and allows you to escape? What's the driver for that?
Speaker 1:Great question. Yes, that's at all levels. And let me just sort of expand on that In part. When I realized I was going to be a rather old founder and I realized the stress and the risks involved around that mine's 69, my father had his first infarction at 59 and I could feel, you know, heart disease. You know I could feel blood pressure coming on I suddenly realized well, it was death or exercise. That was pretty, that was pretty motivating the guns, my temple.
Speaker 2:Yes. Death or exercise, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:But you're quite right. You know there is something. I don't know if there's any biological science that supports this, but you know, particularly actually on a bicycle it was probably a bit less than with running, but on a bicycle I do find it a very. For safety reasons I wouldn't wear headphones on a bicycle. I don't wear headphones when I run, but I do find it very intellectually, because I always have some. You know, I'm always listening to podcasts or doing something when I'm at home and I'm not working. So I think it's part of the intellectual freedom that you get from that.
Speaker 2:And what advice would you have for older founders? Because there are a lot of people who would be, let's say, in their mid-60s, who are not wanting to retire. So here in New Zealand we have a retirement age of 65, if you want to take that up with the government, but obviously there's no compulsion to do that. But there's a lot of people in their mid-60s, have got good health and are planning on living for another 20 or 30 years and want to be active. Have you got advice for those that are thinking of starting a business or maybe are in the early stages about being an older founder?
Speaker 1:Well, I think, a piece of general advice to people. You know, as they, let's say, pass 50 or 60 is, and we're all in different physical conditions, but believe in yourself. You know, I remember I suspected my 40s, thinking I'd never run a game. You know I'd cycle and I took a lot of exercise even at that stage. But, um, it is amazing, liberating, and you feel so proud of yourself and I think I'm pretty sure somebody's gonna, if they haven't already done, done it. Come up with some research, because there's definitely a link between how the brain works and your level of balance as you get older. And you know, as soon as I get aware of those sorts of things, I start taking doing exercises. That corrects all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:I seem to remember the british sunday times. He's got endless articles about you. You know, we've got this piece of research and how all your muscles wither away when you get to start being over 50 and you end up by looking like this is a paunchy person with skinny arms and legs. Well, you know, that's a load of bollocks. You're going to have to work on it, but why wouldn't you? And if you're a startup founder and you're getting on a bit, you are going to be vulnerable to heart disease and heart attacks. So unless you take it seriously to look after yourself, you are for sure heading for trouble. And so just get out and live your life. You'll feel better, prouder, more motivated for that process.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think the statistics actually support you on that also, in that the most successful founders are typically ones that are actually doing it a little bit later in life. They've had a bit more experience, they know how to lead people, they've got a bit of pattern recognition for solving problems. Now so, yeah, certainly, if you're listening to this and you are a little bit older, now is your time. It's always your time. So, simon, what's the toughest thing you've ever had to endure on the startup journey Not necessarily just in HyperIQ, but in the journey of being a founder, which you've done successfully a number of times? What's been the hardest part of the journey so far?
Speaker 1:That's an interesting question. I've got a brilliant partner. She took us over to I'll come to answering your question. She took us over on a storytelling course to to create a few years back and we had to tell some story. My particular story was I'm going to tell you about part of my life, a time in my life where everything hung by a thread and then the thread broke and I'd invested a huge amount of time and effort into this cancer project, the second bit of it, which was after we'd established the American software business that became very successful. I then worked on this hard-coded solution and I won't go into the personalities not least the chap that I work with is now dead and I'm not into the sort of politics of popularism by being cruel to people, absolutely but I'd spent everything that I had, including my shirt, on being the suit and his partner, as a result of one email. I think you can probably tell from my career what I've told you. I'm not a quitter, very definitely not.
Speaker 1:And that email, I looked at it for a couple of hours. It came in about six o'clock on a dark and stormy night it's something like November time and the rain was rattling on the panes and all that, and I had a sort of integrity moment and I felt much to my surprise, you know, if somebody asked me this question one hour before this event occurred and I read this particular email that I would change my entire direction and abandon the project that I'd been working on all this time. That was a pretty challenging moment and Hyper-IQ hadn't been invented at that stage. It became invented within three months of that and I suddenly thought I suddenly had the insights that led to the concept of micro IQ. Yeah, that was a pretty uncomfortable time.
Speaker 2:How did you cope with it? And you know, obviously you've probably endured trials prior to this. Was there a way that you were able to cope with it? Did you eventually step away after a couple of hours of looking at it and go for a walk? Did you ruminate on it? Did you handle it well, do you think, or was it actually?
Speaker 1:In a funny way, nobody's ever asked that question before, so it's a great question to ask. Actually, well, I've got no judgment as to whether I particularly handled it well or not, but in a sense and I think that actually partly answers your earlier question about being institutionalized I sort of rearranged the building blocks in my mind and actually, funnily enough I think I felt a huge sense of relief and I could see I had a clue how to sort of economically move forward. There were huge challenges that I faced at that particular time, but I didn't sort of have a sense that there could be a hope, a glimmer of light. As I sort of rearranged the bricks in my mind, I actually felt a sense of relief. In a sense, I think the storm clouds of catastrophe and things being very wrong with the personal interactions had been building up and suddenly there was a set of facts that forced me to address that and see the world in a completely different, from a different perspective.
Speaker 2:And did that energize you? After that Then you're like okay, you know, once you got past the shock of this or the processing of what you had to do and the rearranging the bricks at whatever point did you then feel almost a sense of energy that this is now an opportunity to go and do something different yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1:And as to how that's on the sort of graph of energy levels you know, like I have on my garment watch, you know quite how that plotted I'm not sure, but I certainly started to work on an escape route and and there were several steps in that sort of revelation of how I could uh, instead of being you know, I used to call myself a suit, and I used to. Although people that know me these days particularly I'm highly creative, I think, because I was working with very smart people that judged themselves as creatively brilliant I always knew I had to sort of pay down my own personal creativity because they found that very uncomfortable and a threat. So when I sort of escaped from calling myself a suit and became a genuine technical founder in quite a profound way, yeah, that's got to be cool, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. You then get started on HyperIQ and you get coding and developing. Have you needed to raise outside capital at all as part of this process?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's been a journey, and I'll be completely transparent about all the facts. It's the only way I can. Really, I think it's when you get old, you just can't live with it. You can't be bothered not to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's too complicated.
Speaker 1:I know there are certain well-known people that seem to be able to live in a different facts of the world.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:But I think when you're in business, you have to deal with reality. So we did actually quite successfully. So there's been two generations of this product one under the name velociant, which we have shut down, that as a business, and and what caused that? And that did raise 400 000 pounds ish, and what led to the end of that was that I was again without mentioning games I was introduced to a decent set of people as technical partners and, you know, handled the relationship well. But they they built a technology stack with out-of-date code libraries and when it came to look at how we could commercialize it, we realized that in healthcare it was riddled with vulnerabilities, and so I raised this money, got pretty close to getting the miracle off the ground, then found myself stranded with a technology stack that was flawed. We did try to repair it. That wasted ever more time and the funds were running out.
Speaker 1:It was another challenging time arriving here and I think what I'm reading in America you know, sort of most startups, in fact the people that put the funding in. They did a pivot and they had big technology challenges and became a different type of business. Well, we didn't do any pivots, but they had a rich investor behind them, but I was left holding the baby. The technology stack was flawed and I couldn't raise any money to take it forward.
Speaker 1:Then, through a couple of miracles and you know friends and family I was able to string together and take an awful lot of personal risks and met this CTO. And it was made clear to me by all the people around me that you know, made clear to me by all the people around me that you know I would be insane to put the money into the company that had got the failed technology stack with a bunch of investors that hadn't followed on. So the only sane way to move forward and I was very transparent In fact I looked at all sorts of ways of trying to carry some of the interests over for various tax and legal reasons and the way people can claim back money from investments. It was clear that the two had to be from an HMRC. That's our tax people point of view, that there had to be a complete clean break between the businesses. So that's when HyperIQ started. Okay.
Speaker 2:So were there some tough conversations that you then had to have with the investors in the original business to say, look, I'm sorry but I can't bring you forward into the new company and we are shutting down the old one. Or were you able to get around some of those tax issues and bring them into the new one?
Speaker 1:I was always completely open. Most of my suppliers always expected to have tough conversations and people being very angry and upset. Actually, everybody was lovely and very supportive, and this is startups and they expect there's high risk All that and I think they could see that I'd made a genuine attempt, more than a genuine attempt. I'd worked over quite a period of time to try and stitch a solution together and there were some pretty profound legal HMRC reasons why whatever I wished to do, that wasn't in anybody's interest.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And so then you get into that. You've got then the new company, and then did you raise new investment from a new set of investors?
Speaker 1:We're in a different world now to that earlier situation. Raising money I don't know if you'd agree with this, but raising money for because it's easier to build technology. Raising money for a startup People sort of assume you're going to build some sort of minimum viable product. So we have no external funding.
Speaker 2:So you bootstrap this next iteration, which is actually very impressive because we know many founders out there know how tough that is, and I'm also interested around the older tech stack. One of the things I have observed in the past is, if you get founders who are from an industry and founders who have been around an industry for a long time, they've often got contacts and software development contacts that have also been around the industry for a long time and can therefore have slightly older tech stacks. Was that your experience? You had people that were a bit older themselves building the code, or actually they were younger people but just using older sort of out-of-date tech stacks and I don't think architecturally.
Speaker 1:With the first generation product let's call it that that was particularly an issue. But the way we built this new tech stack, it's all aws and it's all and actually to get the. There are yet more tragedies. Actually that happened along the line because we outsourced a lot of the development to speed it up. Some very decent people, but their team was largely rather remarkably young team actually as well largely destroyed by COVID. So we had three developers that were young developers working on a project in a biosecure building in in india die whilst working on the project and that has presented an enormous amount of challenges that should yet further delayed the project. And my very brilliant cto, david weston, has. Then he was sort of accelerating the development and working through a young team but to get the product into the market. He's taken on a lot of the technical development and we've kept all these different relationships alive through all these difficulties.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm also now keen to sort of start talking a little bit about you personally, as opposed to the business, and the question I've got is around you know the sources of inspiration that you look for, whether it's in podcasts or in books that you like to read, whether it's even escaping and listening to music or exercising. How do you recharge? How do you get you? You get excited about what it is that you do.
Speaker 1:Great question. I would say I'm constantly listening. I've always been big on. We have a radio station I don't know if it's got over to New Zealand called Radio 4. It's a BBC radio station. I would say it's pretty eclectic, you know, and so I've always been a huge consumer of documentaries. And podcasts are really documentaries, aren't they Sort of? Actually they're better. You know, it's a shame the BBC has taken such a long time to really discover them, because what I liked about podcasts in the early days of mobile is unlike a TV show where something is presented to you in a packaged manner, particularly in the early days of mobile interfaces, and every week something was happening. You could hear the opinions being shaped around the table, and that is so much richer than a pre-packaged you know, brilliantly produced bbc documentary.
Speaker 2:Perhaps I think so, um, so I yeah it's interesting because I think you know, for millennia humans have engaged with one another through stories and we share knowledge, almost going back to where we started the show, talking about conversation and the transcribing of conversation. Actually, the creation of stories and sharing of stories, particularly in an audio manner, like an audio-only podcast, has a profound impact on our ability to listen, to think about the ideas being created. Obviously, it has that advantage with the audio-only, of being able to do other things while you're listening, whether you're exercising or cleaning the house, you know whatever it is. So that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Have you ever come across a show, bbc show called it's a history show called You're Dead?
Speaker 2:to Me. I have heard about it, but I haven't seen it oh you must.
Speaker 1:It's such an interesting format. It's got three people in it one is a comedian, one is an expert and the other is the producer, director, presenter, guy. You know the person in your role and because there's three people, it wouldn't work. You still need this sort of interview. This is doing a different job, but because it's got three people in, it's got a sort of intellectual unpredictability about it. Yes, and there are some very intelligent, very able comedians that are also very well informed on that particular subject matter. So, for example, there's a wonderful one. I think the world's most successful pirate was a Chinese lady that had 70,000 other pirates working for her somewhere around the 18th century.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting the mind starts to boggle. She clearly was that's almost, you know one of the first female global entrepreneurs. I know I actually heard a story, I read a story about madame clico so verve clico and she was probably the first truly global entrepreneur with the champagne house, obviously. So now, and in terms of podcasts, I know you, you also consume a lot of us content, do you find that also is, you know, enormously helpful?
Speaker 1:I found that a very rich learning curve. I was innately suspicious of the way we were doing things in europe and I don't know how you regard us europeans. You know old world type of stuff, but they talk about being institutionalized. We're sort of pompous and patronizing and think we know it all, and I think the European startup world has always been somewhat like that and too many government agents with money that they're wasting. And I came across this guy that you're probably aware of called jason calacanis. Yes, and I literally listened I was listening to this week in tech and and he then had the idea, you know, to sort of slightly borrow their name.
Speaker 1:It caused a bit of friction at the time, as I recall, and start up this week in startups and what I liked about it is that he went for all these horrible entities that were, oh, just pay me two thousand dollars and we'll raise money for you, and of course, it's a completely dysfunctional way of doing things. You know rich people patronizing them, and he, you know he's been incredibly successful. Seven unicorns is he up to. And then we've got, you know, bbc, you know, with a I think it's a japanese, french franchise and dragons dead. You have dragons then, yes, yeah, in new zealand, and they've got a bit better. Actually, somebody's told them to behave, but they're sort of showing off. We're the big rich people and they've got a bit better. Actually, somebody's told them to behave, but they're sort of showing off. We're the big rich people and they haven't ever had a unicorn in their bloody life. All they've done is bullying, populism, and so it's a bit like you know, throwing the Christians to the lions, whereas Jason has, you know, genuinely funded hundreds of businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and has the track record to back it up. And is there a philosophy or a mantra that you like to live by in life or that you use, you know, regularly? That's sort of an approach to how you live life.
Speaker 1:That's a good question. Integrity, I think matters. Well, I don't think I know it matters. So you know I strongly believe in integrity, being decent to people. I'm sure I fail at that all the time, but I do try and I call myself a social Christian. In other words, you know, culturally try and do the right things. But you know I don't believe all the floaty spiritual stuff yeah, it's that helps.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure I've ever answered the question, but that's me being honest well, it's a nice segue into another question, which is because you are a very intelligent guy and you see the world in quite a nice, unique way, in the way that your brain works. Is there something that you believe very strongly in in the world that actually very few people do? It might be something relatively scientific, it might be something philosophical or political. Is there something that you hold quite a strong view on but actually very few people do?
Speaker 1:I'll give you one, probably several, but I'm going to name a person in the last thousand years who's been one of the most influential people in the world. She's a woman and certainly probably been the most influential British person, english person, and therefore had quite a big influence on the rest of the world. I would say. Unfortunately, henry VIII cut her head off and Berlin, yes, I can remember the BBC, I think it was, or somebody doing a, you know the 10 Greatest Britons, and Parson with all his sort of bluster, the one with Brunel. But if you think about Anne Boleyn, two things that she achieved One was she made England or the British Protestant.
Speaker 1:That's pretty significant, huge cultural implications. British Protestant that's pretty significant, huge cultural implications. Secondly, she was the mother of, historically, our most important and influential monarch, elizabeth I, and you think of Shakespeare and the whole and the building of the English Navy. That all started. How she respected, had to work, you know, because she was a woman and she wasn't, you know, sort of confrontational in the way that men would be. Respected had to work, you know, because she was a woman and she wasn't, you know, sort of confrontational in the way that men would be. She had to work with parliament so you could say you know, it laid the foundations of democracy. And we don't even recognize her properly in history. We talk about henry the eighth because all these murder. We don't even talk about him being a corrupt fat murderer. But we completely fail to see how important somebody like Amber Leonard is.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And final question for me is there a question actually I haven't asked that you would wish that I had One that you would love to be able to answer if somebody would only ask it, that's an unexpected one, I'm tempted to say.
Speaker 1:You know, one of the things I've learned from running is why aren't we taught how to run properly? Eighty percent of people run heel strikers. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. Yes, I do. Yeah, the natural gate, you know, if you run in your bare feet, is to run on your forefoot, and that's sort of a metaphor for life. If we can't learn how to run properly and we can't be taught at school something as basic as running, it sort of raises quite a lot of questions about everything, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And everything we are taught in school and everything we are not taught about school, I often think about most of the biggest things in life how to buy a house, how to fall in love, how to grieve at a funeral are never taught in schools. They're just something that escapes our scholastic system. Look, that's kind of a funny place for us to finish today.
Speaker 2:Simon, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you. I would love to be able to sit down, I'm sure, over a wine, and chat more fully, because I think we'd have a really cool conversation. Appreciate you staying up late in the UK. If it was only a way we could flatten the earth and solve the problem of time zones, that would be wonderful. But I really do appreciate the time that you've given today. I will include ways that people can connect with you in the show notes to the episode, because I know there will be some people who would love to kind of hear a little bit more about HyperIQ and may want to connect with you personally. So I'll include those. But thank you again for your time today.
Speaker 1:Greg, it's been a huge privilege. Thank you for such perceptive and interesting insights and questions. Thanks, Simon.