#11 No rules, just purpose, passion, luck & community

(00:00) Sol

No rules, no boundaries.

No mentors, no board of directors, no investment strategy, no exit strategy. Just make great work, charge a fair price, you know, and do it for good people. That was the trifecta of what we tried to build as a culture and then support people in the way that they are.

(00:30) Danny

We’re live. Sol. Sol, is going to be one of the sort of most slightly surreal conversations I’ve had because I have full disclosure. You were my next door neighbor for about 10 years. And that feels like a really important part of this for me. And I think perhaps an interesting part of the story because I grew up with you.

(00:32) Sol

Hey, Danny.

(00:59) Danny

to a large extent. I feel like perhaps there were some elements in our shared childhood. I’m not taking any credit for your journey, but just that there are some components in that journey that might have somehow permeated into where you’ve arrived. But I feel like we need to ground this in who you are, because some people will know you very well, and some people may not. Some of the people that my audience goes out to may not know you.

(01:10) Sol

you

(01:29) Danny

I know you do this a lot, but if you could give me a little bit of, I had a summary here and I just thought I’m going get it wrong. I’m going to say there’s so many things, it’s hard to get it all in. So I wondered if you could just give me a little bit of the origin story so that people that haven’t heard of you will kind of understand just quite remarkable story that you’ve had and is still going. Would you be okay to do that?

(01:51) Sol

⁓ it’s very kind of

you. Yeah, of course. I mean, I’ve been to many things where they just read out the LinkedIn and it’s really embarrassing. Or I got given an honorary doctorate this summer and they gave me a 10 minute kind of honorary thing. And I just went so, so red. Like it was embarrassingly delightful. So yeah, I’m Saul Rogers. I currently am the…

(02:08) Danny

Okay.

(02:19) Sol

Global Director of Innovation for a company called Magnopus, which is working at the intersection of creativity and technology. And we help movie makers make movies. So Lion King, Fallout, we just did The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere. We do lots of music stuff in the games industry, so we do a lot of the Fortnite music experiences, so Daft Punk recently, and Metallica, and Eminem, and Snoop Dogg.

And then we do a lot of virtual reality and augmented reality. So lot of creating the next types of things that people want. And we try and make things which are actually valuable for people’s time. But before that, if we go all the way back, before that I founded a company called Rewind, ran that for 10 years doing similar things and sold that. And so I’ve been on that founder’s journey, which has been really interesting. Before that, I ran for 10 years, I was a university professor teaching animation, visual effects, games and emerging tech.

funnily enough that’s what I ended up starting a company in. Before that I was your neighbor in Totnes and Devon and ⁓ I was you know we we had a really interesting ⁓ upbringing because Totnes is full of you know retiring hippies I always say and so living in an alternative universe is kind of interesting but if you take that one step back from me

I actually did grow up in an alternative universe. I grew up as a new age traveller for lot of my very younger years, living in a bus going between Glastonbury festivals and Greenpeace marches and, ⁓ and didn’t have a school for a long time. Didn’t start school until, you know, eight, nine, 10. And that transition from a free form ⁓ lifestyle to a conformed lifestyle was really, really tricky. ⁓

(04:09) Danny

and

(04:10) Sol

And there were lots of different things along the way. In the most laced this time though, because of the position we’ve ended up finding ourselves in with this kind of new space and there’s always this want for innovation and this always want that they understand that the creative industries is basically the heart of everything. I’ve ended up doing a bunch of advisory things. So I help big conferences. I do lots of keynotes. I did Das Metaverse conference in Germany the other day.

in the Porsche arena to like 3000 people. It was hilariously fun because I’ve never been on a stage that big nor had to be the person before me speaking in German, which was really, really interesting. And I advise the OECD on spatial computing. chair the Immersive UK support group, which is run by Innovate UK. I’ve just helped start up CoStar out of the Royal Holloway, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I get asked a lot about.

how to do the next, which is really, really fun for me. And the biggest thing is that I I had identical twin boys seven years ago and they are wild and awesome in every way. And I feel that all of this career stuff kind of pales in comparison to the realities of being a father and trying to figure out how to be a good father in this kind of changing time.

(05:24) Danny

Mm.

Thank you. That’s really, really helpful and vastly interesting. I had so many questions thinking into that. think the first one that came to mind, and I completely appreciate this, but you just said right at the start, you said how people read out LinkedIn’s and how cringe and awkward that is. guess, give it like, it’s quite phenomenal that journey that you’ve had and I’m still getting my head around it.

of, you know, I think we checked in, we sort of bump into each other, you know, five, six years or something. And I was just like, Oh my God, you know, and I think I was chatting to someone that you know, in, in talk, and I was like, have you, you seen, and I was just thinking, like, what’s that like for you? You know, like, how is that this, this degree of success that you’ve had in this journey that you’re on? How are you, what’s your relationship to it? Like, did, do you feel

(06:01) Sol

Yeah.

(06:24) Danny

Do feel, are there parts of you that feel at ease with it and parts of you that feel uncomfortable with it? like, where are you with that? Because it’s quite a unique story.

(06:33) Sol

It is and this is really poignant so it’s the right moment so I’m wrestling with that question a lot and I started ⁓ asking a lot of people their opinions and it’s turning into a book so I’ve been interviewing people on about their journey and their relationship with success so I might just derail the next 10 minutes because otherwise I’ll ruin some of the things I want to ask you.

(06:50) Danny

Hmm.

(07:02) Sol

I want to ask you just really simply, what does success mean to you personally?

(07:07) Danny

It’s something that I’ve, it’s partly been prompted by, ⁓ I’ve had a history of like comparing myself to people, know, like, typically not in the career space, actually, usually in like social spaces and, you know, friends and things like that. And it hasn’t served me that well, you know, that comparison. And to an extent, it’s happened in careers where I’ve been in a role and

somebody else has got promoted or I see someone that I used to work with, you know, has now ascended to some space. it’s funny how, say for example, sometimes I’ll do something amazing in my work. And, you know, people in the company I’m in or whatever might say a lot of things or I get very high compliments from a founder or whatever. And then I go into my social life and I remember hanging out with a friend who

is into Fajor dancing, which is a Brazilian sort of dance. And I went to her place, and we’d all go back to her place in London, you know, and it’s like really awesome, loads of Brazilians and all this. And one time I come back and I was like, you know, I just did this presentation and she’s just looking at me like, why are you talking about all this? I don’t care at all, you know, and it was really like, yeah, she doesn’t give a shit. She likes me, she’s my friend, but she doesn’t want to know about all that stuff.

(08:30) Sol

Yeah.

(08:35) Danny

And then as I had various partners over the years, you know, they didn’t particularly care about it either. Like, they cared a little bit, but they don’t want to know all the details. They don’t want to know all that stuff. And so I guess, I guess I kind of started to form like different areas of myself that I feel good about. And I started to really appreciate that. Maybe my career might go well or not go well, but that is not all of me. And there are parts of me that

might, you know, like I’ve got a boy, you know, you’ve got two kids, I’ve got a little boy, and I’ve got a partner that I really appreciate. And I have to really hold different parts of those so that I don’t drown in one and just like my career is going not going well, my whole life isn’t going well. And I try to pull apart my identity and not let wrap it around my job. Does that make sense?

(09:29) Sol

Yeah, totally it does. There’s no wrong answer. What I’ve discovered after almost a hundred interviews, there’s no wrong answer and everyone has their own definition and it all comes from their own life and their own journey. And what I’ve also found is it changes. It changes continuously. Sometimes it changes on a handbrake turn. Sometimes it changes because your child’s born. Sometimes it changes because something happens. And so…

It’s a really tricky question to wrestle with. And I think it actually gets to the core of most of the challenges we have in this day and age. Like, is it defined by us? Is it defined by someone else? Is it manipulated to make us feel in a certain way? And it’s a really tricky thing. And then it also comes from, I think there’s something interesting about that a lot of people in their life, either for a short period or for a long period, are either running away from something they don’t want.

A life they didn’t like, an upbringing they didn’t like, a childhood they didn’t like. And so they’re running away from something to achieve something else. So that’s their driving factor for success. Or they had a really good time. They had a really good childhood. Everything was fine, but they need to prove their parents or the people that brought them up, prove them. Yeah. It’s a good… All right, so go back to me. So I’ll give you the mini Ted talk and then I’ll explain where I’m at.

(10:45) Danny

Well, I’ve got to ask, where are you on that?

(10:57) Sol

The mini Ted talk is so far, my thesis is young people draw their definitions of success. If you round it out, it’s all about career and money. Anyone in their early twenties, really, if you pull apart all the anecdotal stories and all the fluff they get down to, they can measure it. And really it’s because they’re trying to build a foundation for themselves and a separation from their childhood to their adulthood. And then if you talk to older people,

They really talk about contentment. Anyone 60, 70, 80, 90, they’re talking about content with the life they had, content with the life they’ve got, what they’ve got left, their family relationships. Contentment is really what success is. And it’s not money, it’s not career, it’s not those anecdotes, it’s content. And then the people in the middle, where we are, if you really boil it down, boils down to really boring things. It’s autonomy and agency, and they’re not boring. They’re really control of time. We wanna have…

feel that the use of time that we have is valuable and purposeful and useful to either to our family, to ourselves.

(12:00) Danny

You speaking for yourself

right now, just to make like you’re saying. This is you, yeah.

(12:03) Sol

I’m in, I’m in, yeah, absolutely, I’m absolutely, yeah,

I’m absolutely in this middle loop. So I want, so for success for me is control of my time, an autonomy of how I use it, an agency of how I use it, and purposefulness of how I use I don’t want to feel it’s wasted or under-respected, or that what I’m doing doesn’t matter, in quotes. And so the time that I have with my children matters to me, the time that I have with my family matters to me, the time I have at work for things I care about matter to me.

But when you lose that feeling and you feel like you’re underappreciated or you’re underutilized or you’re in something you don’t feel you believe in, that’s not success. That’s the opposite of success. And that moment doesn’t necessarily, that’s not money. Money can come or not come, but that driving factor is really about ⁓ control and control of our time. And that’s frankly, if you really boil it down, what is success is what is the meaning of life.

That’s really what we’re coming down to. ⁓

(13:02) Danny

And are you meeting

that need?

(13:06) Sol

Yeah. am I? Yeah, it’s a good question. I am… ⁓

(13:07) Danny

in your time. Yeah, yeah.

(13:14) Sol

I’ll put it this way, so I think there’s a layer on top of that which I think is more important. No one’s successful all the time. And if you define success as happiness, which a lot of people knee-jerk to, then you’re not going to be successful a lot of the time because you’re not happy all the time. Sometimes you’re melancholy, sometimes you’re sad, sometimes you’re angry. These are all good human emotions. So you’ve got to understand that if you bracket it into something which is so clear, then it doesn’t…

allow for any of the messiness of humanity to exist. So I think there’s a layer on top of this whole arc of what is success, which is those that have never thought about it, never been given the opportunity, never had the upbringing to really think about who they are and why they are, never been through therapy, had the opportunity to really go, ⁓ why am I human? Why am I here? What do I do? And then there’s the other half, the…

the enlightened ones that have and the ones that have realized that the world we’re in you know this blinkered world or the you know we’re down fighting in the trenches or under water this is all bullshit it’s all made up by humans no smart smarter than us and we’re living in a reality and trying to survive in it but you can lift your head up and go ⁓ yeah this is ⁓ yeah I can come down here and play if I want to but it’s not me it’s not humanity it doesn’t matter

I can go and live in a year in a bus. can go and travel the world. can do anything or I can, you know, come out and do something else. Whereas there’s a big chunk of people. that’s, think that’s why, you know, I like the idea of your podcast is realizing that this group of people may have never been given the opportunity or tools or support to realize that they can change their reality, change their direction of, to something they want more. instead of being stuck in it.

they get an opportunity to change it.

(15:11) Danny

Do you feel like there’s something that like a bell ringing in my head? like, isn’t it like a place of privilege to some extent, like, you know, being able to to have therapy, being having having space, not like I think of people that might be, you know, in different, you know, like communities or like have, you know, less money and all that kind of thing. And, know, and I know, you know, our backgrounds, you know, and yours to more extent than mine, like, we didn’t have a lot of money.

I I’m going say, okay, let me say, like, I can remember, like, lunchtimes, like, you didn’t always have lunch money. Like, I think I can remember that, if that’s right, you know? And so you, I think to some extent, you can speak from this place of like, you know, what it’s like when you’re in an environment where you’re, maybe money isn’t buying lots of time, in a sense, mostly you’re a kid, you know, so I kind of wondered how privilege, where privilege comes into that, if you think it makes any difference for people who perhaps have got

(15:48) Sol

Yeah, that’s true.

(16:10) Danny

agency through money and then they’re able to create more time and therapy and all that.

(16:16) Sol

Yeah. So therapy doesn’t have to be a therapist. It can just be the people around you that support you. And then it’s the, and all knowledge is free. It’s on the internet. You can learn anything, listen to anything. This podcast will be available. And so there’s knowledge out there. What I’m talking about is the difference between those that have been given the opportunity to think about it, either in their support structure, practically, or I said, can’t say that word today.

or either through other means, that they’ve never been given the opportunity. And I think that one of the reasons why I’m thinking about writing this book is I want to allow more people to have been asked the question and think about it. Because once you have a bit of agency in your reality and you realize you can choose how you live, where you live, who you live with, and the world that you live within, the better it is. And the earlier you can learn about that, the better. At some point, we all get stuck. Mortgage, know, debt.

job, family, reality, and you get stuck in a reality that’s now on a railroad to death. And the idea of changing it is too painful, even though you might not be happy at all in what you’re stuck within. And so being able to have freedom of choice and freedom, like I said, autonomy and agency, I think is important. But you are right. Privilege is a hard thing. I feel incredibly lucky about where I am now.

you know, foundation under my family. live in a very nice area. You know, the kids are very happy. I’m a really stable place where I came from was chaotic and messy. And like you say, it was very alternative. There wasn’t any money, but I don’t remember being sad about it. I always remember being happy about it. Like, and that foundation of realizing that there is another reality that you can exist in, which is fine, if not great. And there is another reality, which is fine, if not great, but

Both are equal. The money doesn’t equal happiness or success. It depends on how you see the world around you and what you’re doing with it.

(18:23) Danny

Yeah, well, want to, want to, I want to go back to that time a little bit because I, there was something that came into my head when you were saying that about that time, you know, ⁓ back in Topness, when, you know, pre, pre-university and stuff. Like, I, I, I had a suspicion. I talked to your stepdad about this, Steve. And I had a suspicion that one of the things, one of the ingredients in your life,

(18:45) Sol

You

(18:52) Danny

that I think helped you and I think it helped you in a couple of ways. One is that it helped you professionally, but also to point to what you were just saying about happiness. You were very, very good at cultivating community. You were really, really great at it. It was, let’s go round to Sol’s house. I I would obviously go round to your house all the time because I was next door, but lots of people did. And your house was a bit like an open door.

(19:09) Sol

Hmm.

(19:20) Danny

And you didn’t, I, you know, people didn’t knock. They just go around the back and they would go into your room, which was not a particularly big room. And there would be sort of 20, 15 of us crowded around playing Street Fighter II and all that kind of thing. And it’s like, what was actually happening, I think, was a bit of a model almost that I think you replicated in certain, totally like, probably unintentionally, but you created spaces where people felt.

(19:30) Sol

Yeah.

(19:47) Danny

comfortable, safe and at home. There wasn’t a sort of hierarchy so much and it was like everybody was welcome and principally geeky people like me and some of the nerds that we always used to hang out with. And I kind of thought maybe that’s sort of what happened later for you at university and in Rewind where you were able to kind of, because I had this image of you starting Rewind

(19:59) Sol

Yeah.

(20:16) Danny

in a house, I think, and you had like a bunch of people like working in the kitchen or something. Is that am I guessing right here?

(20:23) Sol

It’s

almost correct. It was the back of my friend’s web design agency. had a small room which was next to the kitchen, so you might have seen a photograph with that. But there was just four of us there, yeah. And even before that, did, you know, I started from my bedroom with an old buddy of mine. It’s interesting to talk about community. I’ve always think there’s a through line, through line through my life around education and supporting other people in their endeavors.

So, you’re all right. did bring, there was a through line through school about community. in one end you can, so there was a through line through, so community building, teams, university, did the university like.

like student rep, found my people, end up doing American football, found another group of people, did university, did all the teaching through that, help other people with their lives, started a company, build a place where other people can have a life, have a career, et cetera, et cetera. It’s always been a through line. And then you go further back. And when I was a new age traveler, Thatcher in the early 80s made it so if you didn’t have a house,

If you didn’t have a fixed abode, you couldn’t go to school. In a kind of a way to stomp out that ⁓ free thinking idea. So my father, biological father, started the Traveller’s School Charity, which was a bus decked out with all the kit you might need and a live-in newly qualified teacher that went between Traveller sites to support kids to get the education they need. And then when they… ⁓

A national lottery started, he went for a grant and they ended up with 11 or 12 of these coaches going around. So there’s always been this idea of community from a really early age, which was the hippie commune vibe, which was the circus troupe, which was the musicians, was the band putting the thing on. There’s always been there from a really early age. And because it’s like people putting on the show and living together and supporting each other, however they are, I think that’s absolutely right.

(22:20) Danny

Mm.

(22:32) Sol

The other thing that I’ve just going through is I’ve been recently diagnosed with ADHD combined. And I see there’s this huge, when you do, ⁓ you begin to look at every childhood experience with a different lens and you start seeing things in a different lens. go like, why did I want lots of people around you? Because I felt safe with.

(22:49) Danny

I’m on a similar journey.

(23:02) Sol

community and my emotions were raw. You know, could I could easily be tipped over to be feel ⁓ negative feelings about me feel worse than anything. Whereas positive stuff is like a warm blanket. So I’ve always been looking for community for groups. I’m always looking for that stage for that round of applause to make me feel better. And then all of the yeah, yeah, you’re making you’re making support groups, you’re making community. If it’s a win win.

(23:21) Danny

You’re like a family, you’re like making families almost.

(23:30) Sol

you know, these people feel great to get together. I feel great because I brought them together.

(23:33) Danny

Yeah, yeah. And that was how I felt. It was like a, yeah, extended family for me. And I just, I’m curious moving into the early days of Rewind as well. I mean, is that how you would, how would you describe the culture that you created? you know, was it an extension of that? Or was this a different chapter?

(23:57) Sol

⁓ No, it’s same through line. ⁓ In over the majority of my employees for the first five or six years were ex-grads of mine. I knew what they knew because I taught them it. And I liked them as people. It’s like having a three-year interview process. So the culture was very much like young tech-led people trying to invent the future. No rules, no boundaries.

(24:05) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(24:22) Sol

No mentors, no board of directors, no investment strategy, no exit strategy. Just make great work, charge a fair price, you know, and do it for good people. That was the trifecta of what we tried to build as a culture and then support people in the way that they are. So I’ve, you know, I’ve realized through the university time that most of the people in my industry are, you know, neurodiverse. And so…

If you want those people to succeed, you’ve got to give them the flexibility and room to do so. If you force them into, know, ways of being that they don’t, you know, they don’t, they’re not built for, you’re just setting people up for failure. So as a culture, we’ve always had that as a through line, which I think was lucky for me. But also as a business, we were just, you know, running full speed and not really caring. Like, we’ll just give it a go and make it stuff, see what happens.

(25:15) Danny

It was about the passion

to make things rather than the business model and rather than the market, the SWOT analysis. You were coming from a passion first and then…

(25:21) Sol

Totally.

Yeah, and go back to the upbringing, like, if living in a yurt is fine, then having a business is fucking amazing. Like, what? All these people and all this stuff and I get to do these, like, every day is like an up. Even when it’s bad, it’s not that bad. Like, if you start from a ground truth of here, then everything is amazing. And so I’ve always felt that in my life is like, I wake up and have to pinch myself, like, this is amazing. This is great.

(25:36) Danny

you

Yeah.

(25:56) Sol

life is great. Yes there are stresses in it but in work, in home, in life, in friendship, if you start from a ground truth which is in a lot of people’s eyes way below what they would feel comfortable in then everything is a positive right?

(26:14) Danny

Yeah, yeah, I guess. Anyway, well, I would say the only way is up. But as you say, like, I don’t think you’re necessarily down at all. I remember being, you know, as quite a kind of happy, happy time in it. And, you know, we had a really good time is my memory of it all.

(26:23) Sol

No, I loved it.

I was a really happy kid.

Yeah, walking to school

regularly. You know, I remember you being too young to walk to school because I’d started a year or two ahead of you. And then when you’ve started the same school, then we could start walking together. And I loved that. And then, you know, all the way through that, and then you got the first like Amiga. And that gave me my first taste of like, we were always a Mac house, which had no games on it. So could come around to yours and play the Amiga, Amiga 500. And then you got the first PC.

(26:46) Danny

Yeah.

(27:02) Sol

and got the first Come On and Conquer at Christmas. And I just lived at your house for like five days, just sitting next to you playing Come On and Conquer.

(27:11) Danny

Yeah, I can remember that well, actually. It was Steve that was really your stepdad who was really into Macs. And that got me into computers a lot too, like playing with his Mac. I mean, it sounds really bizarre, but I would go round to your house sometimes and just play on your Mac. Sometimes I didn’t even talk to you. I was just playing on his Mac. Like, it was just a sort of transient house both ways in a sense that, you would come over and we would just like play computer games together and stuff like that.

(27:13) Sol

You

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

(27:41) Danny

Drawing this thread, because I think that’s an important part of it, is like the team years that we had, they were very games and entertainment and I think we were a lot about games, I think initially, and then I think Star Trek and other things came into it a bit later. So I’m curious, like 3D, where did this, because how?

(28:01) Sol

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

(28:11) Danny

How did you get in? Why 3D? You could have gone anywhere with, with, with, into the direction. Like why, why did you get into that?

(28:18) Sol

I it was… A, there was that through line of like computer art. Like my family are all artists but I’ve always said I find it hard to wield like a crayon or a paintbrush. needed… my art needs an undo key. That’s what I’ve discovered. So like technically 3D, 2D, editing, Photoshop, like whatever. Like anything on a computer I can do and I can do what I know a vision I want to create. But using one of these just never really fitted with me.

(28:34) Danny

So relate to that.

(28:47) Sol

And so I was because of having like early copies of Photoshop and realizing what you could do with that. then PlayStation one, oh no, had a, we had Mega Drive and we had a PlayStation one and 3D was just beginning to make sense back then. then Toy Story came out, 96. And I remember thinking like,

The thing that I care about you can make things which are entertaining which people enjoy and I want to go and try and do that and so I’d you know looked around all the courses in the country there’s only five at the time and applied for them and I blew up my A levels like absolutely failed them like there was I got two yeah like I got two N’s

(29:41) Danny

I remember this. You got one E. Is that right?

(29:47) Sol

whatever and it’s like nearly gradable, not quite good enough, like whatever. Like, so it absolutely like I blew up and in one say, one side I had, you know, I say, wow, I didn’t really give it that much interest, you know, young man at the time, loads of friends going out a lot, you know. Yeah. Or you could say, you know, underlying latent ADHD that wasn’t diagnosed cannot connect with

(29:50) Danny

Yeah.

That was where the energy was, wasn’t it, really?

(30:17) Sol

know, maths exams and physics exams in the same way. you know, hindsight’s 20-20, but I think that that was a massive part of it. So yeah, all the universities said no. And then one university called me back two weeks later to say, hey, you didn’t get in. I was like, yeah, you fucking rubbing it in. And they went, no, no, no, no, no, we’ve written a new course, which is 100 % 3D animation. Like no one’s on it. And your personal statement is basically the course, like synopsis.

(30:27) Danny

Mm.

(30:48) Sol

we would love you to come and be on this course. I was like, any exams? They like, 100 % coursework? I was like, yeah, I’m in. But if it wasn’t for the luck of the moment of being in the right place by putting the energy into the world of like, optimistically saying yes, who knows where I’ll be? But things have always lined up. And I think that’s, know, rounding back. You get back from the world what you give to it. If you give it positive energy, positive energy comes back. If you say yes a lot, things happen to you.

(30:50) Danny

Amazing.

(31:18) Sol

You got to, know, a friend of mine said the other day, you got to increase your surface area. And I was like, get fat. He’s like, no, like we’re just a network. He’s like, we’re a network. So the more people you help, they, that you then are spreading your impact and your interest across other people and it spreads out. So the more of a community minded person, the more helpful you are, the more positive you are, the more positive stuff has the opportunity to find you and hit you and come back to you.

And I’ve always lent into that, that optimistically I will help anyone with anything. Anyone can email me, phone me up, and I’ll say, yeah, I’ll help you out do that. Sure. Like there’s no burden, no reality.

(32:00) Danny

How did that mindset, which is just so human and warm and anybody saying anything like that, I’m like, great, this sounds like a good person. How does that intersect with a commercial, you’re a founder, you’ve got fixed rates, budgets, and you’ve got contracts that might get canceled or not and all this kind of thing. How do those two worlds intersect?

(32:11) Sol

Yeah.

A

(32:27) Danny

Can you be people’s friend and the boss at the same time? I’ve been in career roles where I’ve been a head of department or something. And then I’m trying to be people’s friends, but then people might get fired. And it’s really hard to be in those two worlds.

(32:34) Sol

Yeah.

Yeah, well if they get fired

it’s because they did something wrong. Or if they get ⁓ made redundant and that’s not your fault. ⁓ that journey is hard ⁓ but if you come from a place of transparency and authenticity and honesty, no matter how upset someone can be,

(32:50) Danny

Not always.

Yeah. Yeah.

(33:10) Sol

The reality is you haven’t had any smoke and mirrors. You’ve always been clear and frank and straight and you treated people with respect. And that’s all you can do. And yeah, if you do have to let people go, which I’ve done in the past, which sucks, is it will not have come blindsided them. They’ve known where you’re at. And even if they are upset at the time, you can say, well, I can either crash this whole plane into the side of a mountain or a few people have to jump out with parachutes so we can pull up.

(33:29) Danny

Right.

companies.

you

(33:41) Sol

And

like, do you want us all to die or do we pull up, I’m really sorry, but the company doesn’t need your, whatever the thing is, and we’ll help you land softly somewhere else. Like you do a lot of people. And at that time, some people who are more mature get it. It’s like, yeah, it’s business, it’s how it works. And other people are really upset, especially if you’ve talked about your company being, you know, the culture is a tribe or a family. You know, if you people leave that, they’re in pain. I lean into more that we’re like,

(34:05) Danny

Yeah.

(34:10) Sol

sports team like we’re coming together to play together we’re play this game together new players come on the field some players leave we’re gonna change how we’re gonna like the tactics but we’re an elite team playing together we care about each other as a team but other times you’ll play with somebody else and that’s okay like you know we are close but saying your family makes it far more emotionally painful and I think

(34:34) Danny

Yeah,

I mean, that just seems like the perfect intersection I’m talking about exactly. And I can hear how some people might interpret it in a way that it becomes their identity. We talked about earlier success, it becomes their identity, it becomes their family in quite a strong meaning. And then for other people, maybe there’s a bit of detachment to it. Sort of like, yes, this is a sports team, it’s not quite a family, and I might have to do a transfer sometimes, or maybe I’m on the bench or whatever.

(35:02) Sol

You can care, you can care deeply.

can get a tattoo, can still wear it. I used to be this person, like whatever the thing. But the family thing makes it hard. And being friends is difficult. It was more painful for me when we made redundancies, I feel, than it was for the people leaving. Because it’s like grief. Like those people can all hate me and move on. And I’ve got loss for all these people I miss, that I hired, that I love, that I care about, that I tried to support.

(35:09) Danny

Yeah. Yeah.

Really?

Hmm.

(35:31) Sol

and I feel like I let them all down. And that pain sticks with you for a lot longer. And my buddy said, I passed this on a couple of times, is you’ve got to be comfortable with those people, and I said it a minute ago, hating you for a period of time. And that’s good. They need that emotional feeling so they can go and build their next reality and get themselves stable again. And over time, most, if not all, will come back and realise that you didn’t deliberately do anything to derail their life.

(35:35) Danny

minute.

(36:00) Sol

You’re just trying to do something to keep a business alive.

(36:03) Danny

Was, I’m just thinking of that moment you talked about, you know, having to let people go. Was there any point where you felt like you just wanted to walk away and you’re done with it? Or has that never been in your mind?

(36:17) Sol

No, we’ve had ups and downs. Running a business is really, really hard. Anyone who takes a swing should be celebrated, if not supported. I mean, lot of founders. Well, the stats are staggering. ⁓ 90 % of businesses fell in the first year, and then 90 % of them fell in the next five. So if you survive five years, you’re in this time.

(36:27) Danny

whatever the outcome.

(36:43) Sol

tiny weeny percentage of companies that made it through the maelstrom of the first bit. And then from that, it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll ever, in quotes, exit or sell a business. So all these people coming in to start a business, you’re in the same business as like being an actor or a model. You’re in the business of rejection and failure. Nah, you’re basically not wrong. Oh, you’ve got the right thing. Oh, you’ve found somewhere else. Like most likely it’s a bad idea to start a business.

(37:02) Danny

You’ve got to be crazy to do it.

(37:11) Sol

If you think about it just being the end result as what you’re trying to do, like it is to build the thing and launch a rocket or whatever else. But if you think about it as just an awesome opportunity to have a go at bringing a bunch of people together to do something and learn who you are and grow who you are and increase your net sum of like intelligence or whatever, whatever, whatever. Like we all know the journey is the only point. That’s all we’ve got. So do it being a business is exactly the same thing.

starting a business is a direction of travel that may end up doing very well or may end up pivoting or may end up blowing up. You’ve just got to understand that it’s a very unlikely thing that the business you start will be successful.

(37:55) Danny

And to some extent, I’m guessing here that your passion and perhaps naivetivity at the start insulated you to an extent and also set you on a good course because you weren’t doing it for the money. You were doing it for the passion and just to see what happens, you know, as opposed to like, I’ve seen a market opportunity, you know, I’m going to set like that kind of angle. Like you had a very different angle.

(37:58) Sol

Cough

Yeah,

like what’s your five to 10 year plan? I don’t have one. The industry is changing so fast that if I tell you what’s happening in 12 months, I’m going to be lying. there’s, there’s, there is, there is the only constant is change, which is, you know, try to say what’s true. And so yes, you are right. We didn’t have any mentors. We didn’t have an investment deck. just built good stuff, built good reputation, delivered on what we said we would do, delivered on the budget we said we would do.

(38:26) Danny

gone.

(38:46) Sol

were enjoyable to work with, were trustworthy and authentic externally and internally. And that really, really worked for a long time. And finding that entrepreneurial opportunity where, can you use games technology to do film? Can you use film technology to make immersive experience? What’s virtual reality? we could do virtual reality. Like being the people that said yes and got shit done. ⁓ it just accelerated us. And you are right by not having the status quo.

(39:06) Danny

There’s a really good example. sorry, go on.

(39:15) Sol

as advisors meant we just ran at stuff and we’re excited. But when the wind went out the sales of the virtual reality industry, kind of like 2017, 18, I didn’t see how much had gone. And so the wind went, we were stagnating and we were burning our war chest and it got harder and harder and harder and harder. And by the I realized it, if we’d just gone three or four months earlier,

(39:36) Danny

Yeah.

(39:43) Sol

made some redundancies, we would have been in a much stabler place, but we just waited a bit too long. But that’s because the people I’d hired were my family, my tribe, my friends. I didn’t want to have to change who we are. I thought we were still on the upward trajectory and I didn’t see the writing on the wall.

(39:59) Danny

I wrote this down and I think this might follow from what you just said. What parts of you had to change in order to survive this journey that you’re on?

(40:08) Sol

Good question. Parts of me that had to change. ⁓ Maturity, I guess. The business acumen maturity. Realizing that all businesses are the same, end quotes. So I didn’t have a MBA. I didn’t understand business. And me and my business partner flipped a coin early and I lost. So I had to do the business and he got to do the creative. so, pretty much, yeah. Like one of us has to be technically good to deliver the stuff.

(40:30) Danny

that I have? Did you actually flip the coin?

(40:37) Sol

One of us has to run the thing and go and find what we do next. And so I’ll run the thing and find what we do next. Figure out new opportunities to new clients, new creative, new beliefs. Once they’re in, you have to figure out how to do them with the right, for everybody else. Well, I used to be good. It used to be good on the box. I can make stuff and sometimes it’s still crack out those skills. And then people would laugh at me like, you what were you doing? I can do 3d.

(40:52) Danny

Delivery,

What are you?

Yeah, like they have this thing like, you know, there was always questions of like founders, you know, like, can Steve Jobs code and all that kind of thing? Like, how good are your 3D skills? Like,

(41:15) Sol

Pretty, pretty poor now. I’m pretty sure I

could bust it out when needed to. But, um, my programming, always say like, I, I like, can program in Sol++. It’s not a real programming language, but I understand the methodologies and techniques required to make it work. So I can think through the problem. I can figure out what API’s and SDK’s might need to exist. can figure out all of the, the, the pipeline.

then people with actual technical skill will go in and fill in and do that process. So I can pretty much say for like 100 % of the visit, 100 % of the time I’ve not ever set us up for failure catastrophically by going, oh yeah, I’ve sold them this. And everyone says that’s impossible to do. Well, I think if we did like da, da, da, da, maybe if we look at that, like knowing enough to be dangerous is important.

(41:46) Danny

Yeah.

feasibility.

I, yeah, I want to, there’s a story I wonder if you can share. You have talked about it on one of your talks. I did my homework. You did something, something very interesting and this is a design podcast. And so this was very relevant. I think something happened when you did a 3D car interior for an advertising skit for Jaguar. And then you talked about how they got in the car into the, with the VR headset.

(42:16) Sol

You

Yeah.

(42:38) Danny

And suddenly, ⁓ in business terms, a new market opened up for you. But would you be able to tell that story? Because you’ll do it far better than me.

(42:50) Sol

Yeah, sure. So because we were, you know, very, very early into the virtual reality industry, you know, working with Oculus before they were bought by Facebook with Palmer Lucky and his team. The opportunity for me was that that headset and VR still to this day is one of the first new mediums that we’ve had as humans in a very, very, very long time. Everything else that we have to tell stories requires us to like

convince our audiences to have a suspension of disbelief, to believe in what we’re seeing for a moment and forget where we are. VR gives you that for free and then it looks really shitty and shiny or weird like and then you have to layer in but that absolute that I believe that what I’m seeing is real is fundamental and really exciting. So when those early days we were doing kind of you know mini marketing exercises and games and experiences

But we were beginning to see, if you could see things before they exist, and we know some teams that are working heavily in CAD, including automotive, we can take their CAD and allow them to see their vehicle in stereo, in life size, and experience their products before they’ve ever built them. And so we were talking to McLaren back then, and we’re talking to Rolls-Royce, and we’re talking to Lexus. And then we were doing this thing with Jaguar, and their new I-PACE was coming out, and they wanted to do this big experience where they launched the car using virtual reality, like,

Instead of having the silk reveal, they have like half an hour, 45 minutes of theatre with almost a hundred people in headsets, seeing, experiencing, hearing the talk, yada yada yada. But when we were developing it, he said, if we send us the CAD, we’ll drop it into our engine, we’ll get it working for you, bring your design team down. And when they put on the VR headset, was almost for the first time they’d ever tried it, to see their vehicle, life size, looking, you know, absolutely excellent.

They began to realize that their designs weren’t exactly what they wanted. When you’re looking at a 2D version is very different. It’s why the automotive industry build clays still to this day. Giant piece of clay cost a million dollars. They sculpt it by hand. that you… Yeah, the first concepts are always in clay. See, ⁓ paper first, then CAD, and then these clay sculptors build you the full size mock-up in clay. But they’re a million dollars each and you do about 10.

(44:59) Danny

They might call that clay.

I’m wow.

(45:16) Sol

usually before you start building like actual early prototypes. So if you could see that for zero cost and you can appreciate and you can look around and see the reflections, understand the form and it was like a revolution to that team. were just fundamentally like this thing is what we need for our design teams because what they did now is they’ll do hundreds

of scale mock-ups in different environments, in different lighting conditions, in different driving styles, they even simulate them these days. They’ll still make it clay at the end. And part of the clay at the end is that car design is about feel. They put gloves on and they feel the car. like, I was like, well, you can, you can, but it’s haptic is pretty shitty still. And I was like, why do need to feel the car? They went, you just do. It’s an art.

(45:58) Danny

things you can’t simulate in VR.

Yeah.

(46:09) Sol

There’s loads of science, but there’s an art here. There’s a human feeling and emotion that goes towards products and people’s buying habits. And part of that is how the car in quotes feels. I was like, fair, I get it. So yeah, was helping Jaguars see their vehicle very early using a new technology, which really, and then that took a whole business line for us for kind of automotive and CAD.

(46:23) Danny

Ha ha.

(46:36) Sol

you know, the enterprise sides of use of the technology compared to the entertainment side. And we still to this day, you know, we have those two halves of the business. There is the entertainment side, you know, media, entertainment, games, emerging immersive experiences, which is about storytelling and emotion. And then there’s the enterprise side, which is about product and execution and allowing people to do whatever they’re doing better, faster, cheaper. And both those things.

Often feeling conflict, but really they’re part of the same whole

(47:09) Danny

Yeah, yeah, mean, it’s quite, it’s remarkable. I mean, what, just to play that back, like essentially you’ve got a whole, you know, established industries that have been making cars, you know, for decades and decades. And they probably, you know, talking about clay models and stuff, okay, so they’ve got CAD, but nothing, there hasn’t been a seismic shift in how they.

how they design and develop the cars and almost by accident, you’re just kind of doing, I say just, but you’re doing like an advertising skit, you know, which is still fairly like, you know, it’s just a slightly more immersive experience than it might have been before. And suddenly there’s been this kind of shift in their thinking of like, oh my god, this is actually a design tool. This isn’t just an advertising thing. This is actually a way to design.

in a way that we hadn’t even imagined. And I think particularly you said how one of the engineers put on the VR headset and then sort of started looking at where one of the controls was in the car and wanted to move it. And you then realized he wasn’t talking about your design of the car, but he’s talking about his design of the car. And he’s actually wanting to design in real time effectively. I it’s remarkable.

(48:23) Sol

Yeah, exactly.

It’s carried on as a through line. So a couple more anecdotes on that kind of idea of how visualization, entertainment, marketing influences product. And really the separation is, it’s not a thing anymore. It’s part of it. We did, we helped do a digital twin of the world’s fair down in Dubai, like the last big expo, four square kilometers to site, 190 countries represented.

and they wanted, Her Royal Highness had a mission of saying, want to allow, I want to make it so not only the people that can afford to come here can see this, I want the world to be able to see it. So creating an experience, digital twin of it, something that ran in a massive multiplayer gaming environment where anyone could log in from anywhere and walk around the space as avatars was the mission. But as we were building into that, the Mobility Pavilion was the first thing we were kind of like getting our teeth into.

We had the same thing, we were using virtual reality to allow you to experience the space, because we were doing all the kind of screen and interactive things. And when we would have their architects and designers in headset, they started making sweeping changes to going, well, the flow doesn’t really work here. Let’s just move the lift structure across to right, because it would open up this view. So just grab the lift to move them over there. Fundamentally, the construction team are then freaking out.

Because what we’re doing, makes it work fine for the virtual. It doesn’t matter. There’s no physics or construction challenges for what we’re doing. For bringing it back to like where you pour concrete, where you put girders up, how this physically holds the roof up. Like there was always a tension between the two, but because we allowed these designers a new way of seeing their designs before they broke ground, they actually aligned far closer in the long run.

(49:45) Danny

I’m like, I like.

day.

(50:13) Sol

because of that interplay between the two. And so I think this digital twin, the simulation, the virtualization of products, spaces, experiences is like a really important part to develop the physical world. But then also because it’s so good now, it’s a flip over to the digital one. So the digital reach to the physical whatever is in quotes as important as the physical one. And it’s a business line and a commercial line, which I think is really

is going to explode over the next few years.

(50:44) Danny

You you’re a magnate, if I’m not saying it, magnate person, is that right?

(50:48) Sol

Magnopus, magnum opus, one’s greatest work.

(50:50) Danny

I can make,

and you’re kind of like right at the tip of the spear of this, of this change, right? I mean, you’re, did I read, I think I read on your LinkedIn, you were like flying over meta recently or something. you might have hanged up with Zuck, it’s still.

(51:02) Sol

Yeah, for their big conference. Well,

we’re in the same room as that. We’re working with them very closely on a whole bunch of their new technology and that’s really fun. as I was staying in my area, a friend of mine said, hey, do you want to go for a fly around the bay? I was like, not many people ask me that. Yes, of course I would like to fly around the bay. And they said, well, you want to go fly over Meta? I was like…

Yeah, sure, let’s go and have a look see what they’re setting up for the keynote later. So we kind of buzzed the campus.

(51:35) Danny

I love it. I love it. I love it because I just know, I just know you going back and I’m thinking, you know, you must be thinking this is cool, but kind of almost like, you know, maybe the people around you aren’t quite appreciating, you know, the journey and the stretch that where you come from and why this what this might mean for you.

(51:58) Sol

Don’t take it all too seriously. Be grateful for every day, whether it’s a small thing or a big thing. And don’t take anything for granted. Like I said earlier, if you enjoy walking in a forest, doesn’t involve any fucking money for that. Which I do, I really enjoy the simple things in life. I don’t need any of those things. But then the other part of it think is really interesting is that a lot of the people that you think are successful,

(52:03) Danny

Mm.

(52:28) Sol

feel they’re not. Their representation of themselves and how they hold themselves and how they compare themselves means that you know I’m a billionaire but I’m not happy unless I got two billion. It means they’re miserable. ⁓ Because they’ve set themselves a new marker of what they should or could or to achieve which makes them feel inadequate and gives them an anxiety. I think the biggest pain point for that just to build on it

(52:42) Danny

Yeah.

(52:57) Sol

is that we live in a society where we’re, that capitalism wants us to feel unsuccessful all the time. If we don’t feel like, if we didn’t feel like, hey, I know your shoes are good, but if you had this year’s model, you’d feel even better. If you had a bigger car, you’d be more successful. If your house was a little bit bigger than your neighbors, then you’d be doing really well. Like you get pushed and pushed and pushed into this consumerism approach where,

all of the advertising and all of the corporations do not want you to feel content and happy. They want you to feel almost, but wouldn’t it be better with our jacket on your back? And so you don’t get…

(53:36) Danny

think Don Draper called

it the itch, isn’t it? It’s like that itch that your life just isn’t quite right.

(53:39) Sol

Is it?

Yeah. So if we

didn’t have that itch, they wouldn’t be able to sell us more shit. So that downward pressure means that people that many of the people I talked to that I feel would be massively successful. And one of the questions is like, same as you asked me, do you feel successful in yourself? It’s because they haven’t been able to frame it in any other way than the one that’s been force fed them by media and advertising. And social media is the fucking worst. Like if ever there was advice, please everyone listening to this, delete social media off your phone.

(53:46) Danny

Yeah.

and

(54:12) Sol

You can have it on a computer, just don’t have it on the little box in your pocket.

(54:16) Danny

Well, yeah, there’s a couple of questions I thought to close on and ⁓ one of them on that point with your kids, like what kind of relationship with technology do you hope that they’ll have for your kids? how do you, what does that mean?

(54:29) Sol

healthy, a healthy relationship. ⁓

I consider it in the same way I consider I want their relationship with alcohol and drugs and anything addictive. I want it to be a healthy relationship. If you say no,

(54:44) Danny

This is coming from the man that

famously was sober for a long time, right?

(54:49) Sol

Yeah, I was T total till I was 22, yeah, 21, 22. I finished university. It just wasn’t my thing through school. And in one lens you say, well, hippie alternative parents who drunk and smoke a lot, like, I didn’t want to be like them. I was rebelling. And the other side, you could say a kid with ADHD doesn’t need alcohol to be excited about the world. In fact, they’re pretty fucking excited about the world.

(55:13) Danny

Yeah. Already ready to

go. Yeah.

(55:17) Sol

You need anything.

I always said, I was like, you see me, do you want me to be drunk? Like I’m good. Like I’ve got plenty of energy. So there’s a, so yeah, it depends what lens you look at it. so yeah, so kids, yeah, health, health, healthy. And I think moderation and everything in moderation, even moderation, like I think there’s a, there’s an opportunity for us to talk to kids in the same way you will talk to them about.

(55:24) Danny

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So to that question, what relationship with technology do you hope that they’ll have?

(55:47) Sol

what alcohol is, where it comes from, why it’s fun, where you should drink it, why if you have too much of it, you’ll have the same, we’ll have the same effect with technology, you know, open, honest, connected, you know, these are the risks and opportunities. This is why it’s good. This is why it’s not good. I do think there’s going to be this pushback against, ⁓ social media, probably the biggest part, you could call it technology, but the social media being that it’s going to be considered in the same way we talk about tobacco now.

Like, so you can, about 10, 20 years, you could smoke everywhere. You could smoke around kids in a locked car all the time. You could smoke on a plane. You could smoke 80 a day. Like, and we’re gonna have the same thing, like you could get social media on your phone for as much as you wanted, like more than three hours a day on average. And our young people could do it all the time when they were six. Like, it’s madness.

(56:23) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

(56:46) Sol

There was a period of time when smoking was fine too and big tobacco didn’t want things to change and big tech doesn’t want things to change. So it’s, it feels like that same energy is coming through at the moment. And there’s a bunch of us that know it’s dangerous, you know, for, for addictive natures. it’s the smartest people in the world aren’t trying to cure cancer. They’re at big tech firms trying to build AI at the moment. So we’ve got to remember. No. So.

(57:10) Danny

and they probably don’t let their kids on phones.

(57:14) Sol

You know, I’m going for a phone free childhood. Trying to not give them a smartphone until they’re at least 14. I’m to try and keep them off social media until they’re 16, follow what the Australians are doing. And I don’t want them to be non-digital natives. So I have given them a games console. It’s a Nintendo Wii from 15 years ago with two DVDs, just Mario Kart and Mario Brothers. That’s all you need. It’s not connected to the internet because it’s so fricking old. There’s controllers, but it’s…

(57:35) Danny

What you say? ⁓

Yeah.

(57:43) Sol

Together, socially, all the games are multiplayer. We have one iPad in the family which has some educational games that we get out on long journeys. No TV before school, little bit after school. Like, I’m just trying to slow it down. It’s gonna come like a wave, and let alone I’m in the industry which is part of the problem making this.

(58:04) Danny

Yes,

it has to be said. You talked about commercial and advertising and tech and all that and you’re also driving it in that direction. There seems like a slight contradiction there.

(58:16) Sol

Yeah.

Well, we’re trying to make stuff that makes people’s lives better. And better is a broad term. What does better really mean? You know, does it let them earn lots of money that lets them employ lots of people, lets them see their kids more often, lets them play, lets them sit, like be entertained, them feel, let them cry, let them laugh. Like there’s loads of different ways of skinning that cat, but really it comes from that truth of place of trying to make things which is valuable. And I’ve said this before, but I think as an industry,

(58:25) Danny

Yes.

(58:48) Sol

And I finished one recently going like, you know, that classic, how long have I got left to live diagram, number of days, number of weeks left. I’ve got 3,338 weeks left to live. That’s it. You know, if I get to 80. So what do I want to do with that time? How do I want to utilize that time? What do I want to deliver with that time? You know, it’s important and having flexibility and freedom and autonomy to use that time wisely and purposefully is the key to success. But as an industry.

We, and I said this at a visual effects conference recently, that we as an industry need to make things which are valuable for people’s time. So if I make a movie, it has to be a fucking good movie. I’m gonna steal three hours of someone’s humanity from them that they can’t make something, they can’t go for a walk with their wife, they can’t play with their kids, they can’t invent the future. They’re engaging with the thing I made. We know we’re in an attention economy, right? And so if we’re gonna make something, we’ve got to be able to stand by and go,

that is worth someone’s time. And I think we have a challenge in the linear industry, movies and TV shows, where the streamers and the buffet approach of how we consume has broken that model. So a friend of mine made the recent Star Wars show, it’s 12 episodes long. So 12 hours of someone’s life is lost. They could have made one movie, which was three hours long. I loved it by the way, but like three hours of my life or 12 hours of my life.

(59:49) Danny

Mm, no.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there’s a real theme of mortality, yeah.

(1:00:18) Sol

Nine hours has

been taken not for quality, not for commercial success, but because the streaming platform is measured by the amount of time you watch. That’s what they’re going, the amount of time you engage with their platform. Because you didn’t buy anything, just, 20 pound a month, you get everything. Where in the old days, you bought something, it was good because you felt it was a good value exchange. So going back to ticketing and sales is really important.

(1:00:47) Danny

Yeah, I keep hearing I’ve heard you mentioned time in this conversation and I’ve heard you mentioned time in other conversations. It’s this like, I and this sense of finiteness and mortality like it seems like there’s this it’s it’s it’s on your mind. I mean, don’t look old at all. I don’t know how you’ve achieved that.

(1:01:05) Sol

Yeah, it’s not morbid. I mean, it’s always…

kale smoothies and yoga every day. No, none of that. ⁓ so there’s, it is finite. And I think one of humanity’s evolutionary tricks is to make us not be able to be able to ignore the fact that we’ve only got a finite amount of time. Even when you really think about it within a few minutes, it’s been pushed so far out your brain that you get excited about whatever the thing you’re doing is. And if you really thought like, it doesn’t matter. My time is so short on this planet.

compared to the length of like the Earth’s existence or the universe existence. It’s just too big a thought. But I think there’s nothing wrong with really appreciating how rare and special time is and trying to get back control of what you do with it. And that’s why I said about the purposefulness of autonomy in the middle of our lives gets really, really important. And at the end it’s about contentment because you haven’t got much time left. But I remember being…

17 and we’d driven to some nightclubs in Torquay like a little there was like three or four five six cars and you were probably there we’re all wearing like rainbow colored shirts like there was a red one a green one a orange one of like we all had little shirts on had a really good night pardon

(1:02:29) Danny

late 90s. It

was the late 90s, it made sense then.

(1:02:34) Sol

Yeah, yeah. We drove all the way back to Tontes and we parked up on the, Outlook and it must’ve been maybe one or two in the morning and everyone was sitting on the car bonnets or hanging out and someone said, yeah, I’m tired. I’m going to head home. And I remember distinctly saying, why? Like this is, this is the best time of our life. We will never have this moment again. Why do you want to like stop having this moment to go back? And it’s so im…

and it’s stuck with me. I’m always feeling like because it’s finite make the most of it. Make the most of every moment you have and try and fight the things that kind of steal your time away from you.

(1:03:15) Danny

So I think that’s a really good point for us to end on. that’s, yeah, thank you. It’s quite, yeah, quite introspective. I’m going to have to process some of this conversation. ⁓ yeah, it’s been such a wonderful conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. And, you know, on multiple levels, I’m getting to catch up with an old friend and also hearing your story, which I was really curious about. yeah, thanks. Thank you for coming on and sharing your journey.

(1:03:24) Sol

You

My absolute pleasure Danny, thanks for having me.

(1:03:46) Danny

Awesome. Thanks,