Russ Cook

At 17, 18, the only jobs I could get was cleaning jobs.

It was minimum wage, scrubbing the waitrose toilet at four in the morning.

Do you know what it actually, how it manifested was, in a lot of ways, like an arrogance.

I didn't want to listen to people that,

if I looked at someone's life and I would look at, you know, I would say this, we're a bit ashamed now, but I would look at my parents or maybe some other adults around me, some of my teachers at school and I'd go, well, I don't really want your life, so I ain't listening to you.

And I kind of just applied that logic to sort of a lot of people that I would encounter that were older.

So that kind of,

ends up leading me down quite an isolated path because I'm no longer really trying to take direction off people that I don't deem valuable enough or live in a life that I want to live.

So I'm kind of not going to listen to you.

And that kind of was a blessing and a curse.

It led me down quite a lonely path to start with.

But then once I was, you know, I was born in that sort of age where podcasts were coming through at that time and I was listening to the Joe Rogans and these type of, and I was thinking, you are living a life, oh God, so I am going to listen to this.

And that kind of was a really important start of,

kick-starting my thinking in that way.

I think it's a huge problem, yeah.

I get the sense that you were kind of in that place.

Massively, yeah.

Massively.

I think it wasn't necessarily an information problem.

We have access to an amazing amount of information now.