Parallel Entrepreneur with Mark Cleveland

Accumulation of knowledge,
experience, and education.

We all have that superpower.
The question becomes:

How much do you get on your
journey

through this life of ours to then

leverage into other things?

Well, you walked across China,

and then you walked across China

again. Like, who does that?
Why did you do that?

"The Chinese wouldn't let me out."

What would you say to your
younger self?

Nothing.
Not going to tell you anything.

You've got to figure it out,
because that's the fun part.

You know what the regrets are?

What you didn't do.
You know what you never regret?

It's the thing that you did do
that turned out to be a

catastrophe or a really weird thing,

but at least it's a story.
I've got plenty of those.

Welcome back to
The Parallel Entrepreneur.

Some guests you introduce
with a list of accomplishments.

In this episode,
Ian Adamson—

his accomplishments are so extensive,

the list would start to feel
like its own endurance event.

So we'll spare you
the full rundown.

Check it out in the show notes.
The CV—

the résumé—will blow you away.
But what I can tell you

is that today's guest

has moved seamlessly between
engineering, elite sports,

television production,
product innovation,

and global competition

leadership—the entire landscape.

From working with brands like Nike

to helping shape the future of
obstacle and multisport racing

at an international level.

It's a career that doesn't
follow a straight line,

and that's exactly what makes
it so interesting.

There's a lot more behind that story,

so stick around and discover some more.
I'd just like to say,

welcome, Ian Adamson, to
The Parallel Entrepreneur, brother.

My first question

is really around
how you manage energy.

Give the audience

a sense of what you're trying
to accomplish today,

and then I'm interested to hear you weave

into how you manage your energy
levels and productivity

on this multiple-paralleling
thing that you're doing.

It's not

multitasking,
which I actually don't believe in.

It's multi-switching.

Your ability to concentrate
on something

and focus on it,

uh,

to the exclusion of everything

else allows you to do
something really well.

I don't believe it's possible,

certainly not for me...

opinions for a legal case and then

get distracted by my phone pinging

about something in Olympic sport.
It just won't work.

So, I have an ability

which has its own challenges,
to switch everything off,

focus on that one thing,

and then, when I'm done with
that one thing, immediately

switch to the next thing,
which could be completely

unrelated.

The energy part is interesting because

I think most humans probably require
some level of

downtime. Let's call it a quiet

space where you can think about
other things or just

kind of let your mind

go blank-ish, or not think about

whatever the job at hand is.

For me, it's manual labour.

I love building stuff, so,
fortunately, it does

kind of get into

my actual work in Olympic sport,
where I'm

often out working on events,

obstacles, and Ninja Warrior
kind of stuff.

So, that's me with my hands.

Most recently, my wife and I got
really into saunas.

So, in the last couple of months,
I built two saunas.

Really nice ones—

the kind you'd expect to find
in a Western

hotel spa.

With all the bells and whistles,

and for me, that would be

switching off in the evening.

I'd switch off my "chair job"
and switch into building a sauna.

And for me, that includes

opening up walls in the house
to run

240-volt electrical,

and then trenching for

conduit to get to the solar

stuff, right? So that's manual
labour—framing,

everything

you would do to build a house,
which I can do, by the way.

I've actually built houses,
so I can actually do that.

That's the engineering side.

That's my engineering

brain going, "Oh, this is great.
Now I get to wield a hammer,

dig a hole, connect some electrical

things, hopefully not
blow myself up."

And that's, you know,

this other part of
energy management.

Where does the energy go?
The energy could be

physical, mental,

emotional, or spiritual,

and for me, downtime comes from
switching

between things.

Switching from, say,
concentrating on Olympic sport

to legal forensic work,
to building a sauna.

or riding my mountain bike.

There you go. I call that context

switching. I think it's a superpower of parallel

entrepreneurs. Let's just delve in for a minute into

your accomplishments—

your gold medals, your world champion

status in different sports. I'd like to help

set the stage by asking the question:

How many medals have you had

around your neck, and which one are you most proud of?

I have three X Games medals—

gold, silver, and bronze in the X Games.

That was in the beginning of

my career as a professional multisport athlete with Nike.

That involved

many events, mostly multidisciplinary sports.

At the time, adventure racing

was a big deal as a televised,

big broadcast, big-money sport

that lasted until about 2006,
which is when I retired.

So, that was one of a swag of

world championship wins. I think

our team won about 30 over that period.

I won 23 medals, including 11 gold,

during that time. How does training

for an athletic event in your career, and

building media and entertainment strategies around it,

and then trying to build an international Olympic

alignment around this becoming a new Olympic sport—

those three things are an astonishing

set of accomplishments

that seem almost routine for you, Ian.

But there must be a superpower

that you've uncovered. What do you think it is?

The ability to absorb information

and use it for some purpose.

If you look at the formal

education system, that's part of it. We go to

kindergarten, elementary school, grade school—

it goes on and on, right?

The further you go, the more you accumulate.

Now, that's the academic side.

But accumulation of knowledge,

experience, and education

is exactly what you're describing.

We all have that superpower.
The question becomes:

How much do you get on your journey

through this life of ours to then

leverage into other things, which makes it easier?

Another example

I think many people appreciate is language.

Understanding one language, or speaking a language

fluently,

as a kid—or learning multiple languages as a kid—

makes it much, much easier to learn more languages.

And the Pope—Pope Leo, I believe—
speaks 12 languages fluently.

I've heard him speak

French, and I couldn't tell
he wasn't French.

Not that I understand

French that well, but I'm listening
to the guy thinking,

"That's extraordinary
that he can do that."

On the other hand,

he's dedicated his entire life

to doing exactly that,

which is what you're asking about.
He did it.

Leonardo da Vinci did it.
Michelangelo did it.

It's not that

they were extraordinary people,

although they became extraordinary.

We can all do that.

We can all be extraordinary,

should we choose to do it.

I think most people just don't
have the will

or

the desire. And that's not wrong.

Maybe you like sitting on a beach

drinking Mai Tais. If that's your goal,

then do it. You've achieved it.

That's just

not my goal.

So, little Ian Adamson,

at seven years old,

was looking through the

Guinness Book of World Records, trying
to find interesting, challenging things,

and then you set yourself a goal

of becoming a Guinness World Record holder.

Yeah.

You asked about Olympic sport.

It all ties together,

by the way. All these things we do—

you do it, I do it.

I've seen

your remarkable career
through many things,

and they're all complementary.

Whether it's

making socks or running

a hobby store—

whatever it is,

all of that matters,

because all of it

becomes part of you.

You are

the sum of your experiences.

If those experiences include

knowledge and education,

then the sum of who you are

includes a lot of valuable things.

Ian, you're the President

of the international governing body

for obstacle sports...

Big vision—what's been
your biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge with, uh...

building an international
multisport federation,

which is technically building
a sport—or sports—

is dealing with people.

But I think that's the same
in any business.

It's the people.

Humans can be terrible people,

and there can be lots of challenges
around people management.

People management.

We believe—without hard data—

there are at least
20 million people doing

obstacle sports

around the world,
in about 140 countries.

So, building an international
organization is

a bit like the United Nations.
Each country

has a national governing body.

That national governing

body is then a member of the
international governing body.

The international governing body

then manages all of that,

and it's a scalable system.
Directly within

the federation system,

it's about 800 people.
That's not insignificant.

I'd guess that's a medium-sized
company by most standards.

A medium-sized,
small multinational.

But now, as of today,
it's been formally announced,

I am the Chair of the
Obstacle Commission

for World Pentathlon.

On March 15 this year,
our organization

voted to dissolve itself
as we integrate

into

World Pentathlon and the
Olympic Movement.

So all of our sports
are being aggregated into one

international multisport
organization,

which is World Pentathlon
Multisport.

That organization has been part
of the Olympic Movement

for 100 years.
It was created by

Baron Pierre de Coubertin,

who created the modern Olympics,
so it's a really interesting history.

to house the most complete athlete, or identify

the most complete athlete. The story goes that

he based it on a courier on a battlefield, taking

a message from one general to

another general on the other side.

So, he would run out of the tent, grab a random horse,

gallop across the battlefield,

use his pistol to defend himself,

run out of bullets, draw his sword, and his horse

would get shot out from under him.

He'd then have to swim across the river and run away.

So those are the five disciplines:
shooting, fencing, running,

swimming, and riding.

So, you've also produced a lot of television content,

starting with

adventure racing, right? And then moving into

American Ninja Warrior.

I went to the set and met
Travis McDaniel, the owner.

He passed away tragically from cancer, but

Travis and I had a chat,

and I did what we often do in television

for impossible projects, which is to say,

"Hey,

this hasn't happened yet,

but let's just say, hypothetically,

we managed to get an event into the Olympic Games.

Would you be interested in collaborating
to get there?"

And Travis was like,
"Yeah, that sounds great."

We've stuck together ever since, and the current—

or rather, the most recent CEO—
was actually on my board

for World Obstacle.
I had to keep people close.

on my board. Joe would call me
every now and again,

and he'd say,
"I've got this new event.

It's fantastic.
It's called the Death Race."

"That sounds great, Joe.
That's a great idea...

...until it happens."
"I know, right?" And it's still going.

The Death Race
is still going.

So I said,
"That sounds great, Joe."

Then, by 2009 or 2010,

he had started Spartan Race.

Same thing. He'd say,
"Hey, Ian,

I've got this. This is going
to be the best one yet.

This is going to be amazing."

So he started Spartan Race,
and I was like,

"Yeah, whatever, Joe."
Not really interested.

It's huge.
It's unbelievable, right?

It became maybe the biggest

endurance event producer
in the world.

They have more people doing
their events

in one year, in one country,

than Ironman does
worldwide.

That's how big they are.
They're massive.

And here's your answer,
right?

You get something out of the blue,
and you go,

"That sounds great.
Let's do it. It's an adventure."

Exactly.

Exactly.

I think that’s a common thread in
our conversation:

some unknown, unexpected thing will
always put an opportunity in front

of you, and you get to say yes or

no. I think a

lot of people say no to a lot of

stuff they should just be

saying yes to. You know what the
regrets are? What you didn’t

do. For sure. It’s

like, “Duh, I wish I’d done that.”
You know what

you never regret?

The thing that you did do that
turned out

to be a catastrophe

or a really weird thing. At least
it’s a story.

I’ve got plenty of those. Yeah. With
some

of our experiences, most of them are
failures. But that’s the

truth. People go, “Oh, you did

all this stuff. It looks amazing.”
And it’s like, “Yeah, what

you haven’t seen, and

what I don’t really talk about,

is all the stuff that went wrong.”
Right, because

most of it

goes wrong most of the time. You
just

have to accept it and roll with

it. The attitude, for me anyway, is:
“Okay, that didn’t

go as expected.” That’s usually what
actually happens. It didn’t go

as expected. But you know what?

That was a really, really good
lesson, and next

time I’m going to do it better,
because

I just learned how not to do it. Now

I know a much better

way to do it.

Or, if it didn’t go as

expected, there’s an opportunity
that was better

than you’d hoped. Exactly. This
whole thing is about whoever

said, “You’re the sum of your
experiences.” We

are the sum of our experiences.

And if the journey is

an unexpected one, and it is the
journey, because what

else are you going to enjoy? If

you don’t enjoy the

journey, which is life, you may as
well

not live. So enjoy whatever you’re
doing.

I

asked you a

question in one of our many catch-up
calls,

because on the podcast I’ll ask,

“Knowing what you know

now, with all these

experiences, what would you say to
your younger self?”

Nothing. Nothing at all? You

feel like you’d walk up to

your younger self and say, “Hey,
dude, nothing”? Yep.

No. I’m not going to

tell you anything. You’ve got to

figure it out, because that’s the
fun part.

You had a lot

of experiences in China, and I think
one of them that

still leaves my jaw dropped

is when you walked across China,

and then you walked across China
again. I mean,

who does

that? Why did you do that? I had
taken

a year off in 1983 after high

school to travel and

sail. That was a sailing thing. I
did two years of

school, then went back out for
another year. But it

was more than a year, because
Australia’s school

year, like most school years, is
actually about

15 months. So I had a bit of time

to poke about. I flew to Hong Kong,
then took

the ferry over to Macau

and went into China. At that time,
you were officially

allowed to visit, I think,

Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and
maybe some

tourist spots. That was it. You had
this

sort of permit thing, a little paper
book that allowed

you to go places. But when I was

younger, I looked quite

Chinese, so I just bought local
clothing

and took off. I ended up going

out to Kashgar, far western China.

I started out on a steam train,
ended

up getting out there, and then tried

to cross into Pakistan.

Pakistan was a Commonwealth country,
so

at the time, with an Australian
passport,

I did not need a

visa for Pakistan. But

the Chinese wouldn’t let me out
because they said, “You need a

visa for Pakistan.” I said, “I don’t
need a visa. I’m

a Commonwealth citizen.” They

said, “You do need

a visa.” I finally went back to
Beijing. This was

like the second crossing

back to Beijing. I went to the
Pakistan

embassy and camped out there for a
week trying

to convince them I needed a

visa, which I didn’t. They didn’t
want

to give me one because they

said, “You’re a Commonwealth
citizen. You

don’t need a visa.” I finally
convinced them,

so they gave up and said, “Okay,
here’s your visa stamp.”

I got the visa, went back to Kashgar
— that

was my third crossing in China — and
then

I was standing at the border to
Pakistan.

It’s no man’s

land. It’s like 100 kilometres of no
man’s land. I was

standing there in a high-altitude
desert. There

was nothing there. There was
actually a sentry with

a little pillbox, a boom gate in

a vast empty space, and his rifle.
That was it. I

thought, “Okay, now what do I do?”
In the far distance,

as I was standing there, this little
cloud of

dust appeared and got bigger and
bigger. Then there

was a white Toyota Land Cruiser with
a

whole bunch of French journalists.
They said, “We’re the first people
to

cross the Karakoram to

Kashgar and into China in

100 years.” I said, “You are from
south

to north. I’m going to be first to
do it from

north to south. Can I use

your car?” They said, “No problem.
We’re out of here.”

So I jumped in

their vehicle with a friend of

mine and we went south. We believe
we

were the first

people to have done it in

100 years, on 19

May 1986. Then I got

really sick, and there’s a whole
other story

around that. But that was part of my
tooling around on foot

in 1986. When you decide you’re
going

to do something,

what’s the next step for you?

How do you break problems

and challenges down into winnable
parts? I switch my

brain to the engineering side. I

go into project-management mode, and
that means creating

a schedule with goals, dates

and action items. Sometimes it’s
mental; mostly,

I put it out in the

calendar. But everybody, I

think, has to have some kind of way
to reach

down deep and pull in that extra
ounce of motivation, whatever

that is, in order to

accomplish and overcome some
significant challenge. What

would be an example of that from
your experience? The motivation

while we were racing changed over

time. In the early

days, it was to see if

we could finish. It started as fun

and new and exciting. Then it became
professional

and exhausting. Then the races
became, “How can we

make

this enjoyable?” So it would be:
“Let’s just get ahead of

the other teams as far as we
possibly

can, then sit down

and look at the view.” That’s what

it ended up

being, because at that point it was
coming full circle. What

made this

great to start with? It’s an amazing
place. It’s beautiful.

It’s this pristine forest. It’s

gorgeous. There are jumping whales
in the Arctic

Circle and rainbows. That was the
fun stuff. I

just wanted to do

that. I didn’t want the other stuff.
I just

wanted that stuff. We talked about
the experiences

you’ve had, and I’m gathering this
sense that it’s not just

that you know what to do, but that
you know

how to

handle the unexpected. Is

your experience knowing what to do
most

important, or is your experience
knowing

how to handle the unexpected most
important? Let’s say

you have a fine

arts degree, but you end up being

a TV producer. It doesn’t matter
what the degree

was. What you learned

at school was how to

learn. That’s ultimately what it
was.

Most people going to school have no
idea what they want

to be at the end. They probably
switch

majors twice. I guess

it’s not uncommon. Why? Because
we’re finding our way.

School is a journey, and that

journey teaches you all

sorts of stuff that you need later.

So go to school. Why? What

do I do? It doesn’t matter.

I’m not going to

tell you what to do. That’s like my
former

self. Would I tell my former self
what to

do

at school? Hell no. Go figure it

out. Do something and figure it

out. I remember you teaching me

about running barefoot and the
mechanics of running. I was

training for some triathlons at the
time, and

you were saying it’s impossible to
run with bad running mechanics

if you’re barefoot. My

mind was short-circuiting. I put
some Swiftwick socks

on and went out and started running
barefoot,

which was actually spectacular.

It was very, very weird. It’s crazy
weird for

people who wear shoes, and

most humans on Earth

really don’t, by the

way. If you’re wealthy

enough to afford them, you do.
That’s a whole other conversation.

You should have Mark

Cucuzzella on this, Mark. I’m sure
you

know Mark.

You built stuff for him. We went
through that

whole compression thing with Mark.

That’s right. Developing the
compression socks, which I still

use. They’re spectacular, by the
way. We were

trying to develop

the world’s best compression sock,
and they arguably were.

I still use them. I still

have them. I only use those ones.
They last forever. They

were medical-grade compression
socks. When I retired from the
company, leadership

ultimately decided to abandon

that particular initiative. What I
find

in my own professional life is that

I’m going to push the edges, push

the boundaries, and try to

figure out why something cannot be
done. I don’t have

preconceived notions about

why something I don’t know how to do
can’t be

done. So

I’m going to go figure it out.

I wanted to make a medical-grade

compression sock that was not going

to wear out. Boy, we got some
balloon-toe

stuff going. You and I

were like, “We literally innovated
in that

space.” But then the company decided
to

stay focused in a different

area, and we were never successful.
Actually, that’s a

failure of mine. We had the world’s
best medical compression sock,

and I priced it

too low. This is a lesson. I priced
it too

low. The market thought that a great

medical compression sock

had to cost $80, and

I thought that was ridiculous
because

it should be about $35 or $40, and
we

could produce it profitably for
that. If you’ll

remember, we were out there building
the world’s

best sock, and at $40 a pair, people

didn’t buy them. The medical
community didn’t buy

it because of preconceived notions
about price points

and value. Market forces have come
to

bear, because I was in the pharmacy
at the

local hospital just the other day,
and

they have racks of medical
compression socks now which are

at a reasonable

price — the price you had

originally. You were too far ahead
of the game. I

mean, this is a common problem:
being too early.

Lia suffers from the same thing.
She’s

always too early. Her business

suffers a bit

because she was too early into the
business. The good thing

is she got the patent, so that’s not
too early. She

did it with online fitness
programming. When I first met

her in 2004, we went down

to a studio of a friend of

ours in Denver to

produce a Fit Tip

of the Day: fitness workout videos
for

mobile devices. Motorola said, “It’s
never

going to happen.” AT&T said, “Nope,

not a chance. No one’s

ever going to do that. No one will

ever look at a phone and do a
fitness workout or have

anything to do with that. It’s just
a

stupid idea.” Lo and behold, that’s
probably the

only thing people do

now, because it’s right here.
Whether

it’s on your spin cycle

or whatever, it’s going to be on a

tablet. It’s going to be right in
your face.

Lia had produced a whole series of
these things. We were

the crash-test dummies. We were the
cast in

it. It was good. Fit Tip of the Day.
But

the same thing: too early. People
were like, “No, people

aren’t going to do that.” Until
someone does. We don’t

really know what we want until
someone shows us what’s

possible, and then many people, most
consumers, have

their eyes opened. It’s

not like you’re looking at

a market and everybody wants this,
so you’re going

to deliver it. It’s more like, “I’m
going

to create this, and the

market exists, but the timing is
off, or

the capital formation is off, or the

reason we fail is

that we don’t have the right team.”
What

do you think the antidote is? You
just

keep after it, or then what? Yeah,
you do

keep after it and apply

pressure. Constant pressure. I

call it just applying constant
pressure. Inevitably, you are not
the

first —

maybe not even the best — but if
you’re the guy

who applies constant pressure,
that’s the one that’s going to
stick.

Here’s a parallel for you on this
exact topic.

In the 1890s, there

were four Olympic Games.

There was an American one, a French
one,

a Greek one and

a British one. The Hellenic Games, I
think,

are still going. The one that we
know

today has its own

history, but you get to write the

history if you’re the winner.

You have a hard time

finding these other Olympic Games,
and one of them

was around for at least 60 years
before

what we know today as the modern

Olympics. Baron Pierre

de Coubertin, the founder of modern
pentathlon and the

founder of the modern

Olympics, won. That’s the one we
know.

The only games we know today

are the ones

we know because he won. He was
smart.

He went to Rugby School

in England to learn how to do sport,
because

Rugby School in England — the

British, really — invented modern
sport as we know it.

All the football codes came

from Rugby School in

England: American football,
Australian football, rugby union,
rugby league

and soccer. They all came from

Rugby School in England.

So did the modern Olympics,
ultimately, because

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was an
educator

and he understood school and
education. He

went to

Rugby School. Over the gate to this
day is

“Faster, Higher, Stronger” — Citius,
Altius, Fortius.

It’s on the gate to this

day and has been there since Baron
Pierre

de Coubertin went there. That’s

the Olympic motto. So Rugby

School has a lot to answer for.

These games died out in competition
with one another

until there was an emerging winner.
They were

all there at the same time. It’s

kind of like humanity. Our species
walked

the Earth at the

same time as the Cro-Magnon

— or wait, no,

Neanderthals. I think there’s

fossil evidence that Neanderthals
were walking and

existing on Earth at the

same time as what we

would consider modern humans.

Bigger, stronger, smarter, but

not more successful. There’s a
difference. What’s the secret? It
really goes

back to the title of

this show, which is

Parallel Entrepreneur. I think what
humans can

do quite well is that they have

a capacity to do things in

parallel. If you are

single-minded, single-focus — bright
light, narrow focus

— you can get something done really

well, but you might fall off a cliff
doing it

because you’re not paying attention
to what’s

around you. What humans have a
capacity to do, not

that they always do it,

is to have awareness of other stuff.
Some

people do it

way better than others. Survival

studies show, I think based on
airplane crashes,

that about 10% of humans

will probably survive when something
unusual

happens. I would probably class

you in that.

You would be that person, because
you’re thinking outside

the box. You’re thinking, “What

else is going on?” That’s curious.
Most people aren’t

like that. They’re stuck to their
phone, or they’re single-focus.

They’re not paralleling it. They
don’t have

the awareness of

the other stuff. If you don’t have
that awareness, you’re

probably going to fail

if something really goes wrong,
because you didn’t realise there was

an exit on your

left three steps back. In a plane,
you might be like this:

do you know where the exit

is? I pay attention to the exits. I

absolutely do. Exactly. In front,

behind. Not only that,

you know the people around the exit.

The exit on the left has a big guy
in the

middle. I’m not going to go to that

one. The exit on the right has

a couple of kids. Help

them out and then

go out that one. It’s

kind of like that. I guess the

military calls it situational
awareness. I think some

people innately have that.

You also know the

semi-trailer in the right

lane coming at you from behind. If

you

don’t know that and you’re driving,

you’re an idiot, because

that’s what’s going to get you. But
most

people are like this: they just
focus on the road, tunnel

vision down the road. Terrible idea.
There’s a certain numbness

that I think we

can observe. I find when

I talk to people about

paralleling and parallel
entrepreneurship — my careers
overlapping, my

companies overlapping, some of them
being obviously

synergistic and some of them not
obviously synergistic,

from short-sea shipping to sock
manufacturing — they’re

all opportunities to learn

for me. They were all

things that interested me, and I
never thought I

couldn’t do it. But I

do

hear, when I start talking to people
who don’t make

the show, that they’re not the

right fit. Why? Because they’re
great entrepreneurs, but they

really just think they can only
focus

on one thing

and that’s what’s going to make

them

successful. I’m sure it does in most

of those cases. No question, they’re
successful. But there is some

form of self-limiting

belief there. I want to pull on that

thread in this world of parallel
entrepreneurs. From

the outside, it would be, “Oh,
you’re really successful

doing stuff.” From the

inside, it would be, “Yeah, parallel

entrepreneur. That makes complete
sense to me.” Lia won

Entrepreneur of the Year for EY,
some major award

for Ernst & Young, a few years

ago. Then she got to go

to the EY annual

shindig over in Palm

Springs or Palm Desert, which is
astonishing. The way

it works

is that the top couple of

hundred people in the world

— leaders in their

fields, in innovation and startups —

get to be

those people. It’s not the Fortune
500. It’s the

cream of the

crop. It’s the top of the top. Every
single person there

has this parallel entrepreneur
mindset. They use many

different terms to describe

it, but every conversation is going
to be

like this conversation, for days.
It’s exhausting because it’s so
engaging

and incredibly insightful. You leave
and you

need a year to recover because you

learned so much in

such a short time and made

so many connections. You can also
see how

it’s so perpetuating, because

every conversation ends with an
unexpected outcome: “Oh, you do
Olympic

sport? Oh, you

do this? We should do this, and

I do that.” It’s exactly

what you want and expect,

but also unexpected at the same

time. The expectation is that every

conversation will be fascinating and
there will be an unexpected

outcome. Everyone knows it, and

everyone’s there for that. Ernst &
Young, which a lot of

people don’t know, is one of the top
four accounting

firms in the world. Their success is
not only that

they’re an accounting firm,

which they are staggeringly good at,
it’s that

they are connectors. They

don’t ask for anything, ever. They
are

not promoting themselves at all.

They don’t need to, by

the way, because they’re that good.

Being associated with EY at any
level is a big

deal. It’s like having a PhD

from Harvard, or whatever you want.
It’s

like, “Oh, you’re

an EY alum? Let’s have a chat.” My
friend Brandon shared

a piece of advice recently: dress

so that if someone

dressed up as you

for a costume party,

everyone would know it was you. Now,

that’s not entirely

about clothing. That’s about
identity,

about showing up fully.

My wife, Jenny, and I are leaning in
on

this concept,

both in our personal lives and now
in

a little startup we call Happy
Overall. We’re making

overalls. Each one is made

to order as a wearable canvas for
art: overalls that

are comfortable, durable and
expressive. We’re

sourcing soft 100% cotton. We’re

partnering with designers and with

local seamstresses who love the
artistry of a

well-crafted piece of

clothing. We’re launching in summer
of 2026, so

check out happyoverall.com to see
pics and

see if anything resonates with you.
Fully you, and

it’ll happen every

time you reach for them. If you want

to be part of

the first run, join our waitlist

at happyoverall.com. I was watching
a show. When I

can’t sleep, I watch

something odd with Neil deGrasse
Tyson, or something

on YouTube that is research

and is going to

expand my mind because I’m

curious. I started watching
something the other night

about sperm whales and the AI
decoding of their

language: 9,000 recordings and how
they set

up the audio, almost like

a TV production. They showed

how they went about laying out

the sonar and the audio recording

devices, and how they placed them

on the pod —

the female leader, the male

leader and the kids — and how they
were

able to triangulate in

order to know which whale was

talking to which whale. They made
the assumption that they could

figure it out, and then they had

this massive amount

of data. The conclusion fascinated
me:

they are speaking a fully developed
language with vowels.

They’re addressing

one another and communicating in the
same way

that humans communicate,

and they’ve developed this over
their

own millions of millennia.

We just think they’re clicks, but in
fact we’re wrong.

It’s a complete language that we

can decode and communicate with.
Now, have

you seen a whale that would coach
you on

where to stay, straighten up your
sailboat and

fly right? Strangely, cetaceans
sometimes do

assist humans on craft. In fact, I
think there was something

in the news recently about a whale
or a

dolphin or something that helped
someone. It’s

not uncommon. I’ve seen it before,
and that actually

doesn’t surprise me. That

clicking thing — the Maasai language

has clicks, so it’s not that

different from whales. How did that
develop? Who knows? That’s probably

not a connection. It’s a random
coincidence. That

brings up AI. I imagine AI had a
hand in

that because it would be able to

process that data quickly.

Yes, it’s about data processing. I’m
not really

into AI that much. I’m not allowed
to

use it for legal work

for lots of reasons, but it’s

fascinating. Lia paid a

company to predict how

many uses are in an

eyelash container. These little
tubes don’t have much liquid,

but you don’t need much. We were

questioning it, and then

Lia said, “Hey, let’s just have some
coffee

and do

the evaluation ourselves.” So we got
a bunch of

the containers of eyelash and
eyebrow serums

and started measuring uses. The
company had

done it on paper towels. They got
the little

wiper out, which is like a spoolie
brush you

use for mascara, and they were
wiping

it on paper. Lia said, “Well, that’s

not accurate because it’s not an

eyebrow.” So we did

it on our eyebrows. We spent a
morning

going through hundreds and hundreds
of uses

of these things to create the data
to see

if it was correct.

We scratched the hell out of our
eyebrows

because the little spoolie brushes
are kind of abrasive. Then our

eyebrows went

crazy, because when you scratch into
them and

expose blood vessels,

now the stuff is going right into
your system. That’s a

really good way to get the stuff
active.

We found that out later. That was
incidental. What

ended up happening was we had a
notepad

and we were writing by hand in
columns:

time, amount, weight. We had

a little microgram weighing scale,
so we’d weigh things and write it

down. We did

this for a whole morning, and by the
end,

we had thousands of

recordings. Then Lia took a picture
with her

phone. She has one

of the commercial-level AI
programmes, just

for her. She took a picture and
said, “Now what do

we do?” I said,

“Well, you want to run a

statistical analysis. Get the
standard

deviation, the mean, the mode, the
average, the

variation, and predict what it’s
going to do.” Basically, do all

the stuff we do

as engineers. I was there doing it

by hand just to check it, with

my calculator, old-school, pressing
buttons and writing things on a
piece

of paper.

AI did it in about 30 seconds. Then
Lia said, “Oh,

I’m putting it into a format that’s
acceptable by the regulatory

authorities in the United States and

in Europe.” This thing spat it

out so fast. I sat

there for an hour checking it, and
it was on the

money. I went,

“Holy shit, this is good.” It was so

much work.

I didn’t even run all of the stats.

I did a few basic things.

I didn’t do

the standard deviations, but

I did some of the basic stuff just

to check it. It was on the money.

It was just amazing. That’s been

my experience, although

lately, unfortunately, some of my
AI-centric projects feel like
there’s just

constant context rot. Keeping

it framed in and remembering the
progress we’ve

made to this point feels like it

always wants to start over again.

I’ve been focusing on accountability
and isolation,

and on how

to make sure I’m building upon a
previous

factual success.

Like that hour you spent trying to
validate the numbers —

it was right on. If

you kept doing that analysis, would
it get

less accurate over time? It’s been

frustrating and enlightening at the

same time for me. That conversation
about

AI — and I didn’t think

we were going to go there, but lots

of us

do today — my observation is that I
think we’re afraid

of the discovery. I think the pace
of

discovery is going to completely
surprise us.

If we want to learn, we’re going

to learn a whole lot really quickly,

really fast, in a

society that sort of likes things

not to be so

fast: “Slow down, junior.” I’m not
so concerned about the

job-loss kind of stuff as I am

about how we absorb new facts and
new

discoveries. Things like whales
communicating in full

sentence structure and addressing
one

another the way you and I

are right now on this podcast

— is that going to blow some
people’s perspective, or

are they just going to ignore it and

move on as if they’ve got blinders

on? It feels like

a huge opportunity for discovery and
curiosity to really

take root with humanity. I’m not
afraid

of it. I’m frustrated by some of the
learning curves

I still have to overcome, but it’s

exciting. It’s a

very

exciting time. The thing I find

exciting about it is that it’s
unexpected. We don’t know.

We can’t predict it. It’s moving
quickly.

That’s fun. I love progress. I see

the spectrum of mindsets in things
like construction.

Behind our place in California,

they’re building housing for
academics. It’s about

100 homes on a big, nice piece of

property that the university owns.
Some of

the neighbours are like, “This is a
disgrace. We

can’t have this progress. This is
going to

wreck the neighbourhood.” There’s
that NIMBY thing. I

look at it and go, “This is

fantastic. This is really
interesting.

I love how they’ve figured out the
traffic on this. I

like the process.” I

like change. I don’t like the fact
that we’re overpopulated by

80% of the humans on the planet,

but that’s another discussion.
People keep saying we need more
money

and more

people to create more money. It’s a
death spiral. I

hear that a lot from economists: “We
need higher birth

rates so we can generate more people

to pay for more people, to get more
people.”

It’s a terrible idea. What they’re
actually

saying is there will never be enough
people

to pay for the

people who are here, so you just

can’t keep making more

people. It causes all the

problems we have. It’s fighting for
space.

It’s all about humans fighting for
stuff,

and that’s a terrible idea. Japan is

doing just fine, and their
population is

declining, so do that. Quality

of life might be a better focus,
right?

Quality

of life. We can’t support this. We
have exceeded the ability

of the planet to support humans.

We exceeded the ability of the
planet to support

humans decades ago. Why do we not
believe that?

Who is feeding us this line of shit?
It’s

money. It’s all about the

money. Look at the idea

that you need a

higher birth rate to have more

people to

create more money to support the
people.

No. That’s an absolutely disastrous
idea. That’s a false

premise and one that is completely
flawed. There’s

nothing valid or rational about that
at

all. We’ve talked a lot about
adventure today,

and recently this trip taken around
the moon was

an imagination-capturing moment in
time. It reminded me

that those astronauts are athletes.
They’ve been

training for 4

Gs and more for a long

time. What perspective do you have

on the athleticism of

our astronaut population? Everyone
should

train to be an astronaut, and then
we’d

be way better

off. Astronauts are mentally,
physically

and emotionally

capable and competent humans. That’s
what we need. We need those people.

We want less thoughtless, mindless

robots and more thoughtful

people. I’m told that if you look
down at the Earth

and see the blue marble,

it completely changes you,

which I believe. Being

on the ocean is

the same. When you cross an ocean
slowly on

a little boat, you get a completely
different

perspective of the planet, and then
you realise how

incredibly large, delicate and
complex it is.

Maybe this is the last thing I’ll
say. In

1974, a gentleman sailed from Sydney

to Tokyo on a little sailboat and

wrote a book

about it. The book was about sea
life,

the birds, the whales,

the fish and the abundance of the
oceans. Many decades

later, I’m going to say 2004, he

repeated the journey. The thing he
wrote

about the wildlife was

that there was none: no whales, no
schools of

fish, no birds, didn’t catch
anything. Nothing. It was a

desert. I’ve seen it in person. I
was sailing in

the late 70s and the 80s, and my
memory

was the same. It didn’t take

long. In 2013, 30 years after I’d
been on the

Great Barrier Reef, I went back and
went sailing again to

places I thought I knew. I had my

wife and a couple of

friends, and we went out and said,
“We’re

going

to go to

the outer reef off Cairns, and it’s
the most

amazing thing you’ll ever

see in your life. It’s
indescribable.” I’ve actually dived

off Port Douglas and done the Great
Barrier Reef, which

was

astonishing to me. It’s been the
benchmark. That was 35 years

ago. Back

then, it was astonishing. In 2013,
10 or 12 years

ago, I couldn’t recognise it. It was
a desert:

a white, bleached, dead

desert of death. Now 80% of the
largest organism

that’s ever grown on the

world is dead. That’s just the tip
of the

iceberg, because that’s one of the
foundational pieces

of the entire ecosystem of the
oceans,

and it’s basically dead now.

That was in 2013, and that was

when I really paid attention to what

the hell we were doing, because

I was seeing it. I had sort of

been seeing it over time: “These
reefs don’t look

so great. This reef

doesn’t look

so great.” That was from Malaysia,
the Philippines, Indonesia,

the Mediterranean — all over

the world. I’d been seeing little
bits

and pieces and wondering why

it didn’t look so great. I thought,
“This

reef isn’t so good,” or,

“That island isn’t so good.” Turns

out, it’s the entire

ocean. The entire ocean has been
completely decimated. What are we

going to do about this?

What should we be

teaching ourselves from this lesson
called a dying ocean? Well,

to get rid of

the humans would be a start. We’re
the problem.

What we’re doing is

the problem. Being here is

the problem. It’s one reason we
don’t have kids.

Not the primary reason, but one of
them. We

could have had a

kid, I suppose, but bringing a human
into a

place already overpopulated with
humans is

a bad idea. Not that biological
drive isn’t going

to drive more humans to have more
humans, but there are

ways to do it properly. We do

not need 8 billion people,

or soon 9 billion,

on the planet. One billion is
plenty. That’s

sustainable. Every

biologist will tell you the same
thing. Every real scientist

will tell you the same thing. I grew
up

with parents who were

biologists, so we were schooled in
this before

it was a thing. They saw the signs.
They

saw what was happening in the

70s and 80s. But

now we know. Science is

so slow in confirming because you
have to disprove your

theories. People don’t know this,
but

you have to

try to disprove your ideas. That’s
good

science. Good engineering is the
same thing.

I have to prove that I’m wrong. I’m
going to

do everything I can to

prove this is wrong. Most people are
trying to validate why

they think it’s right,

and that’s a terrible thing to do,
because

it’s confirmation

bias. You say, “I’ve created this
thing. It’s the

best thing in the world. It’s
amazing.”

That’s a terrible idea.

If I build an obstacle for obstacle

racing, which I do a

lot of, I’m trying to figure out how
it

can be wrong, how it can break, how
it

can create a problem, or how it can

be dangerous. Most people don’t

look at it that

way. You are really focused on
safety. I am, especially because

my day

job as a legal forensic expert

is about risk, identifying risks,
hazards and dangerous conditions.

I get this answer a lot: “This

obstacle is fine because we’ve

never seen something happen on it.”
It’s

like, how many times have people
used it?

How many users do you have? They’ll
say, “We’ve

been using this for three years,

and we’ve had hundreds or thousands
of

people on it.” I’m thinking six,
seven,

eight Sigma would be better. Six
Sigma is one

in a million, and one

in a million is

still a bad idea when you

get to a million, because something

is going to happen. What if

you get to 10 million? What

if you

get to 100 million? In obstacle
racing, we’re

way over 100 million obstacle
completions. You

have to start thinking in eight
Sigma numbers. Do you ever

want a death? No. If

you have 100 million people

doing something, and one person
could die, do you want that

to happen on your watch? It’s

going to happen. That’s what I’m

doing. Most people say, “I’ve

been doing this for 10 years and
I’ve never

seen it, so it must be

okay.” No, it’s

absolutely not okay. You’re looking
at it wrong.

That’s the same

logic. I had an opportunity to sit
with an

FAA administrator once, and they
talked about the

level of perfection required

for flight to be safe. It wasn’t six

Sigma. It wasn’t eight

Sigma. It was a big number. People
don’t really

appreciate all the thought that goes

into safety at scale in massive
systems. I

never really thought about

how many hundreds of millions of
people are participating

in obstacle sports until

this conversation. Put a number on

it. The way I

look at the numbers

for safety is obstacle completions.
Use

Spartan Race as an example.

Let’s say they have

400,000 finishes a year — people

finishing an event — and on average
they’re

going through 30 obstacles. Do

the math. That’s 12 million obstacle

completions a year, and they’ve been
doing it for

over 10 years. That’s

120 million obstacle completions.
When you get to

numbers like that,

the data you have is significant.
That’s

good data. The standard deviations
are low. The

averages are good. You start to
understand what can happen. We

work very closely with Spartan. Joe
is

a friend of mine. He’s

the owner, and Giles is the CEO.
He’s

on my board, so we work

constantly together and have these
exact discussions. Giles and I

will be in meetings

where we hear things like, “But
we’ve

never seen anything happen.” We’ll
be in a group

of people who maybe have had

thousands, maybe even tens of

thousands of obstacle completions,
and Giles and I look at each

other and go, “Not 120 million.”
It’s a

different number. We’re talking
about different

things here. My job —

my now job, my future

ex-president job — is partly that.
It’s to help

guide some of the things that matter
for people.

It’s about the humans.

What’s going to hurt someone? We

need to address that. What’s going
to excite

someone? We need to do that

too. What’s going to motivate
someone? The fundamental

premise of this whole

thing, which is a good thing for
everyone, is

sort of the Olympic purpose.

The Olympics is a movement. Most
people don’t

know that. It’s the Olympic
movement. It’s not a

company, not an event, not

a games. It’s

a movement. The purpose of the
movement, paraphrasing it, is

to make better humans through sport.
If you

do that, you

actually make a better planet,
because a

better human is going to be

doing things. A better

human is going to be looking after

everything, including the planet.

In my world, making better humans
through sport has a

wider implication. The good

thing about the Olympic movement is
that it’s

big. Five billion people

will be watching the Games, maybe
six

billion will be watching LA. That’s
most of the human

population. You can influence a lot

of people by doing

good things. People get

motivated during a Games. You
remember from Torino. It’s an
incredible

experience. It’s like, “This is
amazing. We should do this every

year.” Paris was incredible. LA is

going to be as good

in a different way, and maybe better
in other ways. We

have this platform to do

amazing things and make better
people. If

we make better people, we make a
better planet. That’s

why sport matters, and that’s why I
find sport

incredibly useful for creating

a legacy of good. That’s a

bigger question: what do you do at
the end? We

know what the destination is, but
what

happens after that? We’re

gone. What happens now? If

we can leave a legacy for good, we
did something.

We changed something. Do something.

Don’t do nothing. We

have

to do something. I think the
question is also how

we experience being. Just doing
something isn’t always

enough. Sometimes we have to be
better, which

could mean doing less, changing
less, consuming less, thinking

about how to produce better

humans in educational systems

and physically improving our world.
I

like that legacy. Let’s do that.
Let’s do

more of that. Let’s do it, and let’s
remember the humans.

Eighty percent of humans have not
enough of

anything: not enough food, not
enough stuff, not enough

shelter, not enough water, not

enough anything. Eighty percent of
our population —

when I say “us,”

I mean us as a species — most of our

species are destitute and have
terrible conditions. We are

the ones who have the

opportunity to help make that
difference. They do not. They cannot

get enough water. They’re walking
eight miles a day

to get water,

and not enough of it. We don’t have

to do that. I

can walk one foot, turn my tap on
and

get drinking water that I can shower
in, which is a

stupid thing to do, by the way. We
shower

in drinking water. How crazy is
that?

Wow. I guess I haven’t given it any
thought, which

is part of the purpose of a
conversation like

this: to cause us

to think. I can’t tell you how happy
I am

to get on a conversation

with you. This has been a great
conversation about

life, performance, dedication,

curiosity, the Olympics, the
movement that makes

better humans and

your

part in it. I’m grateful

that there are people like you
communicating, collaborating and

building a better world. Thank you.
All of us.

Thank you,

Mark. Hey, thanks for listening to
The Parallel

Entrepreneur, and thank you to

our sponsors, partners and the
amazing team

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