How To Embrace Vulnerability, Imposter Syndrome and Self-Doubt - Rupy Aujla, The Doctors Kitchen
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Hey friends and welcome back to Deep Dive. My name is Ali and in each episode I speak to entrepreneurs, authors, creators and other inspiring people about how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools that can help us along our shared journey of living healthier, happier, more productive lives. My guest this week is Dr. Rupi Ojla, an NHS medical doctor, entrepreneur and podcaster whose life changed when he suffered a serious heart condition at the age of

while working busy shifts as a hospital doctor. But with the power of nutritional changes and lifestyle, he was actually able to reverse his condition. And because he was then keen to share the medicinal effects of eating well and living well, Rupi started an Instagram page called The Doctor's Kitchen, which soon gained a ton of popularity and evolved into a podcast, into a website, into a blog, an app,

multiple best-selling books, multiple TV appearances, the whole shebang. In the conversation, me and Rupi talk about a lot of different things, including his early days working as a doctor and how he realized this thing around like how food is actually the ultimate form of medicine, arguably. We talk about stuff like burnout and how to avoid it when you're working busy shifts and also trying to do stuff

on the side. We talk about Rupi's transition from doctor through to entrepreneur, what it's like being a celebrity, and we spend a bunch of time talking about food and how we can optimize our diet and our lifestyles for health and longevity. I absolutely love the conversation. And we also did a second half of the conversation where Rupi interviews me on his own podcast. So that'll be linked down below in the show notes and in the video description if you want to check out his podcast. So yeah, I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Dr. Rupi from The Doctor's Kitchen.

All right, Rupi, thank you so much for coming on. Welcome to the show. My pleasure. My pleasure, man. So, I mean, a question that I found myself starting a lot of these conversations with is like, it's like, you know, you're...

You're a GP. You have written a bunch of best-selling cookbooks. You've got your face all over them. You've been interviewed on TV. You're kind of like a celebrity in the world of doctor cooking kind of intersection. How the hell do we get here? It's weird, isn't it? That word celebrity that comes up. Some of my parents' friends came around a couple of months ago and they were like, you're a celebrity. I was like, I don't see myself like that at all. And it kind of conjured the question as to what is celebrity and what is...

What's the new celebrity? Because I look at you and I think you're a celebrity. Oh, I think of you as more of a celebrity because you're on traditional media. On traditional media. And you have books. And you have your face on books. And it's weird because traditional media is dying a very slow death, I think, anyway. I don't think it's going to be like radio. I think we're all going to be transitioning to

things like YouTube and other paid sort of streams as well, especially now that YouTube has got a premium feature, which I think is great. It removes the ads and stuff. Game-changing. Game-changing. So productive. To not have to sit through those ads. Yeah, totally. Anytime I see someone else watching YouTube, I'm like, why are you sitting through ads? Just pay the 10 quid a month, man. Come on. Whatever. Yeah, how did we get here? How did we get here? Yeah, so by no fault of my own. It was never the intention to do...

traditional media was never my intention to write a book or anything. It just kind of all came at me rather than me being intentional and manifesting it myself. You know, I never wrote down, oh, I want X, Y, Z to happen in the next three, four or five years. I literally came out this whole thing by trying to solve a problem.

that I had as a general practitioner myself. And that was based on my own personal health story. But it was really trying to get my patients interested in healthy eating and actually showing them how they can cook healthy meals at home themselves. And I thought the easiest way to scale that is to start a social media account, start a YouTube account where I put some recipes up there. And just instead of me writing down recipes for them, scrambling at the end of my clinic to do that, I'm

you know, having clinics that were running late and late. I just thought I'll just do that. And that was really the idea behind the doctor's kitchen. And when I started back in 2015, I,

It was very rare for a doctor to get on and talk about nutritional medicine and the health benefits of food and talk about nutrition in general, because as you know, we're not really taught that at medical school. We had like two lectures on it in first year and nothing ever since then. Exactly. And unfortunately, painfully, it's very similar right now as well. But we're trying to change that. And within like six months, I think I got approached by an agent. I only had about three or four thousand followers on Instagram at that point. And then six months after that, I had a book deal.

oh wow and that's how quickly it occurred it was it was a very strange period of my life um and it it happened very very fast um yeah so i've got so many questions about that like i want to put a bit a bit of a a bookmark there and let's rewind back to for example like school and medical school yeah what what were you like in in school and medical school um and

And sort of looking back, are there any dots that you could connect to be like, oh, yeah, it was inevitable that I'd become a food celebrity? Or was it completely out of the blue? Yeah. Yeah. So school-wise, I grew up in East London. I was born in Barking. We moved quite early to Essex. And that's where I had most of my secondary education. Oh, whereabouts in Essex? In Chigwell. So we moved to Redbridge and then we moved to Chigwell. No way. Which school did you go to? I went to Bancroft. No way. Yeah. Oh, I've got a friend who went there. I taught a BMAT course there. No.

And I went to Westcliff because we lived in Essex as well. Westcliff? Yeah. That's so weird. Who knew? I didn't even ask you about that on the podcast that we just did. Yeah.

So we basically kind of grew up around the same area. Yeah. So as you know, it's a, I mean, how old are you? 27? Yeah. So I'm 36. So 10 years apart. It was a bit different. There weren't as many Asians around. Now I think it's a bigger community. It's a very brown area. But back then it was fairly sort of standard Caucasian English area. But I loved it. I think it was great. You know, school was great.

Was a real defining point, I think, for me growing as a person like I wasn't a very confident person during secondary school. It wasn't to the latter years after GCSE when I made the decision to go into medicine that I grew in confidence a bit. How did you?

Growing confidence. I think it's because I kind of got some direction as to where I wanted to go. Up until the point of age 15 and 16, I was just trying to get A's for the sake of getting A's. Yeah, a little help at some point further down the line. Exactly. And it was ingrained in me from both my parents to like, you know, just...

do well at school and figuring out. And actually my parents never wanted me to do medicine. They actually tried to dissuade me from doing it, which is very unusual for Asian parents. Both my parents are Punjabi. My dad spent most of his life in Punjab. And my mum grew up in England as well, in East London. So yeah, it was a bit unusual for them to dissuade me, but they had doctor friends themselves and they were like, it's very hard, long hours, you don't get paid as much.

go start a business or do something in that sort of sphere. It's quite a Punjabi way of thinking from what I hear. Yeah, yeah. Very entrepreneurial. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the entrepreneurial streak for sure. So when I decided to go into medicine, that was like, I have a direction in my life. And that's sort of like,

got me through those formative years because I think up until that point I didn't really have an idea of what I wanted to do. And I think having some direction is really important, like that sense of purpose. Yeah. How did you figure out that you wanted to do medicine? So it was actually my mum who got ill when I was 11 or 12. So she started suffering from random attacks of anaphylaxis. Oh. Which...

I mean, your audience knows, you know, worst form of allergy, throat closes, lose your blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera. So when I was 11, she took me into the living room and she gave me an EpiPen and she said, I need you to take the lid off and I need you to inject me with this EpiPen in my thigh right now.

And I remember taking this EpiPen and I was like, oh my God, like, all right, fine. I did it and I pushed it and you get that little click and the needle goes through and whatever. And that was a dummy EpiPen. So my mom was actually giving me a task to do because she was like, if...

this ever happens, you know what to do in that scenario. You go into mummy's bag, you grab the EpiPen and you inject me only if there's no one else around. And so that sort of memory was sort of in my, in my head. And around 15, 16, I went and did some work experience with some medic friends of ours. And that, that's when I sort of connected the dots. And I was like, okay, that experience, 11, 12 years got me interested in

in science and medicine and, you know, looking after people and that experience within work experience, age 15, 16. And that's what gave me direction. Ah, that's what I want to do. That's, that's where I'm heading. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. So you then kind of have, it sounds like having, having that direction of like, okay, I'm going to go for this medical school thing. Yeah. You said it kind of made you more confident. Yeah. How did I do that? I think,

Having a direction as to where you want to go, what you want to be, definitely gave me a lot more confidence. Like I could see, I could crystallize that vision of what I will look like after I leave medicine. And what...

I saw when I did work experience was a friend of ours who was a GP. He just had this lovely warm rapport with all of his patients. I was sat there, you know, in the corner, typical sort of work experience kid, not really saying much and stuff. And he was there like hugging his patients and they were all like big smiles and stuff. And he was a Punjabi guy with a big turban and like a real big personality as well. And that like I wanted to be that guy.

at that point in my life anyway, I wanted to be that guy. I wanted to, you know, instill that sort of love and connection with people. And that's, that's what gave me confidence as to why I was doing what I was doing, why I was studying medicine and, you know, working long hours and trying to go for the A's and A stars and all the rest of it. That's what gave me a lot more confidence. And then, you know, speaking to, to other medics and going through the whole interview process, um,

that as you know they wanted you to be a well-rounded individual they wanted you to be this you know person that wasn't just someone who was a bookworm but someone who actually did you know Duke of Edinburgh and all these extracurricular activities and and that kind of gave me a lot more confidence something that I didn't really have before um I think I just grew as a person as well you know teenage years are a bit strange and you didn't really have as an Asian kid surrounded by a lot of

kids that weren't didn't look like me I kind of felt a bit lost you know I didn't speak Punjabi I still don't speak Hindi um I spoke English but then I wasn't like my English friends and then I started listening to like Nitin Sawney and and Talbin Singh and I was like okay this is kind of who I am I'm sort of lost in two generations and I don't really have that and so that was kind of what gave me a bit more confidence going forward that I I felt a bit of connection it was a I don't know if you you're old enough to remember like Jay Sean when he came out with his music yeah

Yeah, so it was around the same time. And I was like, Asians can be cool. They can be like R&B singers, they can do all these other things. So that was kind of inspiring at that time as well.

Yeah. How much of the kind of desire to do medicine was part of the Asians can be cool thing, do you reckon? We're going to take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor for this episode, who is Brilliant. I've been using Brilliant for the last few years, and they're a fantastic interactive platform with online courses in maths, science and computer science. My personal favorites are the computer science courses. I think they're absolutely fantastic. And when I was initially applying to med school, I was actually torn between applying to medicine and applying to computer science. And I ended up going with medicine in the end, which I really don't regret.

but there's a big part of me that really wanted to continue learning the stuff around computer science, continuing to understand how coding works. And the courses on Brilliant have given me that foundation in computer science, which I didn't have before. The courses are really fun, engaging and interactive. And the way they teach you stuff is based on very first principles thinking. Like they'll teach you a concept and then they'll take you through interactive exercises to actually help solidify your understanding of that concept.

And it's pretty cool because they're always updating the library with new courses. For example, there's one they've just released called Everyday Maths, which is kind of like a visual exploration of the maths that we use in everyday life, like, for example, fractions and percentages and putting them in a context that makes it very understandable and certainly very different to the kind of boring way that I was taught maths when I was in school. The courses and lessons are particularly good if you have a busy life with lots of stuff going on because they really teach you the stuff in bite sized chunks. So you can always return to a course at a later date if you don't have time to do it in one sitting.

If any of that stands up your street, then do head over to brilliant.org forward slash deep dive. And the first 200 people to hit that link, which is also going to be in the video description and in the show notes, will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much to Brilliant for sponsoring this episode. I think it was pretty genuine, actually, because I didn't have that parental pressure, like you must do medicine or you must do law or all this kind of stuff. For me, it came pretty intuitively that that was what I wanted to do. So I didn't really get that

Yeah, I didn't get that push like a like a lot of other Asian kids might have had and so yeah for me at least it was like This is what I really want to do. So it's quite comfortable going into medicine Okay, and then so you got into med school. What was that like over that five six year period that was pie? I loved it because you know, even though my parents are pretty relaxed and stuff I don't think they were particularly stereotypically strict

Going and living in London. I went to Imperial College lived on campus met a whole bunch of new friends, you know going out middle of the week and stuff and

Turning up late for lectures, you know learning all this really cool stuff getting involved in the university. That was amazing That was great. And I look at those years and I just think that Those are really what me and I've got like some my closest friends who are still people that I met my first year of university And they're still like the tightest friends that I have so that was a great experience and it's sort of ingrained in everything nice, and so

Like when I, when, when people ask about, ask me about my university years, you know, I, I was doing the sort of entrepreneurial content-y thing from fairly early on. Yeah. It sounds like you had a more kind of normal university experience. Like you weren't actively weird. No, no, I wasn't actively, I wouldn't call you weird. I would say that you were like probably ahead of the game, but I don't think I had that entrepreneurial streak in me from,

early on. I never really was like chasing the hustle. I was having deep and meaningful conversations with my mates at like two in the morning. Uh, I was being exposed to a different side of culture. Like I never used to go out like clubbing or anything like that during my teens, like a lot of my other friends were doing. I was at home hitting the books. And so really I had that freedom to explore what it was like being, you know, an independent individual living in London. And that's, I really appreciate that because I think it's,

If I dove straight into, you know, working as hard outside of the lectures as I was, you know, you know, in lectures, then I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the experience as much. And I would have felt like I would have lost out on something personally. Anyway, that was my that would be my my intuition. But who knows?

Yeah, I think that's an experience that a few people I know have had who did really well and spent a lot of time working where they feel at the end of it like,

what was the point almost? Like you're still in the same foundational hospital as everyone else. And everyone else seems to have had these like, you know, genuinely interesting experiences at university. Whereas if you're kind of continuing to hit the books because that's the game you were playing in school, then it can be unsatisfying for some people. Obviously not for everyone. Some people freaking love it and that's fine. People are living their best life. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was always in that sort of like

or second to bottom quartile of medicine throughout. And like that didn't phase me as much as,

it would have other people. I mean, I went to Imperial and I'm sure that similar experience with you, you're dealing with a lot of alpha type people who are just there to win. And I didn't have that drive medicine. I knew I just wanted to be a really good doctor. And if you think about my aspirations going into medicine, it was inspired by a general practitioner who, you know, isn't that sort of stereotypical alpha person. He was a surgeon and you're a surgeon or someone who you'd find at a tertiary hospital. It's, you

Yeah, it was a very much relaxed opinion I had about medicine. And even so, midway through medicine, my intercalated BSE was in management. So I think I must have had, I haven't really thought about this too much, but I must have had some inklings towards entrepreneurship at some point during my medical school. Because doing management where we learn about

marketing, accounting, all the different elements that make up our NHS health system that I really appreciated because it gave me a much clearer understanding about the healthcare system that we work in and how that compares to others. That was really pivotal for me. And that's when I started thinking about things outside medicine, but I didn't have the confidence to execute on anything else.

What do you mean you didn't have the confidence? So I didn't start a side hustle. I didn't start a secondary company on the side. I didn't get into making my own website. I might have had ideas, but I didn't have the confidence to go and chase them. Because I read the...

We were talking about it earlier. The four-hour work week. The four-hour work week. So I read the four-hour work week at the same time. And, you know, armed with that knowledge, some people go and do it straight away, right? So someone like yourself, you read that book, you were inspired, boom, you executed on it. Me, I was inspired, but I was like, not for me. Maybe I'll do this at some point in the future. Excuse, excuse, excuse. And so at that point in my life, I didn't have the drive to do that. Yeah.

Do you do you regret anything about your time in med school? The only thing I regret is not not it sounds pretty fickle, but like not doing more sport and

Because when you... I mean, I did a little bit of sport. I played hockey and stuff. But I had the opportunity to do so much more. And when you're a real adult and you've got like a job and you've got to go in and stuff, you can't do any of that stuff. Like you just can't. And so that opportunity of like having play and having time to do all these things, that's the only regret I really have about medicine. I don't regret like starting my own side hustle. I don't regret like...

not going out enough because I think I did a lot of that stuff. I had a really nice community of people that I loved. I lived out every year. You know, I did an integrated degree that was aside from the norm. You know, it was a very, um,

group of people that we had in that management course. There were only about 30, 40 people and everyone was bouncing ideas of each other. So there isn't an element that I really regret about medicine. Do you have any regrets about medicine? Not really. No. I mean, I had a great time. I thought it was super fun. Yeah. I thought my balance of work versus other things was pretty solid. The only things I regret was, you know, I had a bit of a...

a breakup with someone where I was, I, I handled it in a way that I could, I could have done better. It's, you know, things like that where I was accidentally mean to someone without meaning to be mean to them. And then, yeah, you know, just stuff and stuff like that. I think like listening to your story is interesting because I think when I, the, the impression I get amongst people who watch or listen to my stuff is that, um,

I mean, and this is somewhat understandable, like people who have normal jobs, like someone who's working as a junior doctor or their first time job as a consultant, but someone in their 20s or even 30s who has a normal job who didn't do the hustle, tech, bro, productivity, entrepreneur thing from the age of 12. It's like,

it can often seem as if, well, I guess if I want to have side hustles, I had to do it from the age of 13. I had to have done something at university. And you were very much not that person. You were just like, I just want to be a GP, want to have a good time, want to go out to nightclubs at two o'clock in the morning. And at the time I was like, I've got to make my website, screw the nightclubs. But it's cool that you had such a kind of non-entrepreneurially sort of early...

early days. So then you graduate med school, you become a junior doctor. And then you kind of, it sounded like you went through that and became a fully fledged GP at the end of it. - Yeah, yeah. But a big thing that happened to me was I became a patient.

So three months into the job, I was working at Basildon Hospital. So big DGH is a wicked place to work. You know, I had loads of friends. We were living there as well on campus. But obviously, as you know, stressful job, night shifts, really long corridors, you know, running to cardiac arrest. And so it was, yeah, it was a nightmare. And I started suffering with atrial fibrillation episodes. So, yeah.

for the listeners, a regular heartbeat up to 200 beats per minute, lasting anywhere between 12, 48 hours a time. And that was sort of the point at which I realized I was a lot more vulnerable to illness than my peers. And

I don't want to give an impression I was a big drinker or anything like that. I wasn't a smoker, didn't have a weight issue or nothing like that. Definitely wasn't taking drugs. No matter how many times I've asked by different cardiologists and physiologists, do you take drugs? No, I don't take drugs. It was very unusual for a 24 year old to have these episodes with no known triggers. And I would just flip into these episodes two or three times a week whilst I was working. And I remember the first time I had it, I was admitted to MAU and I was wheeled along the corridor and

And I had my shirt on and stuff, not my shirt. I had a gown on. I was hooked up to a cardiac monitor and all the rest of it. And that point when I was wheeled into the ward along that corridor, I felt so embarrassed and I had no idea what it was like.

to experience that very simple action of just being wheeled from one ward to another ward. And I never forget that experience of being a patient. And that was really pivotal for me because we can all empathize with patients as much as possible. You know, we're taught communication skills and all this, you know, biopsychosocial stuff, but at the end of it, if you haven't experienced it yourself,

it's very hard to understand what that was. And so that was a really big turning point for me. And then, and that's also, I guess, what led me down the whole nutrition lifestyle and health optimization path. - How was that a turning point? We are gonna take a little quick break from the podcast to introduce the sponsor of this podcast, which is CuriosityStream. If you haven't heard by now, CuriosityStreams is the world's leading documentary streaming subscription platform founded by John Hendricks, who's the founder of the Discovery Channel

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and that is only available on Nebula. You won't find it anywhere else. So if you enjoy the sorts of conversations we have on Deep Dive, you might like to see, you know, a whole year before we started this podcast properly, once the pandemic stopped, what sort of conversations I was having with people on Zoom. I've also got a series of videos on Nebula called Workflow, which is where I deep dive into some of my favorite productivity tools. And on Nebula, you also get early ad-free access to my videos and videos from a bunch of other creators that you might be familiar with, like Thomas Frank and Tom Scott and Legal Eagle and Lindsay Ellis. And the really cool thing is that because CuriosityStream loves supporting independent creators,

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So head over to curiositystream.com forward slash deep dive to get the bundle deal. So thank you CuriosityStream for sponsoring this episode. So I went and saw a number of different cardiologists, some of whom are best in Europe, if not the world. I had electrophysiology studies. I had all the investigations you can imagine. I was going to have an ablation.

Which is a relatively simple procedure. It was sold to me as curative, although now we know it's not as effective as we'd like it to be. But it's where you burn an area around the pulmonary vein to stop misfiring cells. I had all the studies to demonstrate that it was AF, not something else like a re-entry pathway or a different type of SVT. And

I was going to have this ablation. I was going to have warfarin for a couple of months to preempt it and stuff. To thin the blood. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. There were some other procedures, I think, at the time, like cryo version, which doesn't require warfarinization. But anyway, I was going to have warfarin. And I remember my girlfriend at the time dragged me down because I was dragging my feet with this whole thing.

and she dragged me down to the anti-coag clinic. I was like, you're gonna start warfarin right today. And anyway, long story short, my mum was the person that said to me, you really should optimize your diet and lifestyle. Give it six months if you've got time.

before you entertain doing something quite drastic like an ablation. And in her mind, someone's going into her son's heart and burning a hole in it. That was literally how she described it, which technically is what happened, but it's not as drastic as that. So anyway, to appease her, I thought, okay, I'll do this diet and lifestyle stuff. I'll speak to my cardiologist first.

and make sure I'm not putting myself at risk, but ultimately I'm gonna have this ablation. What she's saying is so stupid.

And so I was on flecainide as and when, which is an antiarrhythmic drug. I was on brisoprolol, antihypertensive medication as well. And what happened over that six month to 12 month period is I just started optimizing very small things at a time. So out went cereals in the morning and then in came like leftovers from like before. Were you like fat at the time or what? No, I wasn't fat or anything. I've always been fairly lean. Okay. But I was eating a lot of refined foods.

and carbohydrates. Uh, it was, you can't, when someone looks at my diet back then, they'll just say it's a normal diet for a junior doctor. It's cereal with maybe a little bit of juice. Uh,

If I'm feeling healthy, maybe some frozen berries on top. And it would be like a soggy sandwich from the hostel canteen or whatever slot they were serving. It would be something probably taken at like 7 or 8 p.m. on the way back from work because we don't have any time to cook.

It just was a normal way of eating. Yeah, that's pretty normal.

and resulted in me having a heart issue that's the only way i can really conceptualize as to why this was happening because when i optimize all those different things it went away and i appreciate there's lots of other well i just like went away yeah yeah after or not immediately after about a year of optimizing things slowly but slowly so what i would be fastidious at would be tracking when i was having these af episodes and so you know be it tuesday uh

at work 3:00 PM lasted X number of hours. And then the next day it'd be like, oh, Friday came in last about four hours. And I'd also look at triggers before what was I doing that morning? Had I worked out, had I gone for a run? Had I had any coffee? I didn't drink coffee at the time. What things had I eaten before? What kind of state, what was my sleep like? All those different things. I was looking at it pretty vaguely to just get some accountability as to what might be going on. And so

after looking at all these different things and changing a few things in my diet bit by bit out went cereals out when like sandwiches at lunchtime in came like me bringing tupperware i was labeled tupperware boy by my consultant at the time of respiratory medicine it was you'd always you know take the piss at me which is great you know it was all like all banter yeah um and then yeah just all those different elements and then i started getting into like

stress reduction, meditation. I'd been taught how to meditate by my parents when I was a teenager. And so that kind of came into play again. And then when I wasn't doing night shifts, I was trying to tuck myself into bed a little bit earlier. And instead of just doing like running, I was a keen runner at the time, I would do things like yoga and mobility and flow and all these things that sound a bit woo-woo, but I thought of sort of just started getting into it from the very little research that I did at the time. And yeah, after a year and a half, I noticed like,

AF episode went from one a week and one over two weeks and then one a month. And then I remember vividly, I was like, it's been three months. I haven't had, I haven't had an episode. I went to see my cardiologist. I was seeing two at the time. And they said, look, sometimes AF can go through a period of like where it just goes away and it will come back. But,

it's likely to come back so just be aware of that and then i went to a year and then a couple of years and then you know it's been over 10 years now and i still i still see my cardiologist i still have like checkups and all the rest of it but i went away and so that that was my introduction into a how on earth is this possible like what why would that make a difference and b why when we taught this kind of stuff if it is effective then

Even though it's anecdotal. Yeah, we should really be looking further at this and actually when I did a bit of research I realized like, you know There's things that we can do for things like type 2 diabetes the things that I'm seeing every day Obesity obviously is the most obvious one cardiovascular disease dementia and then you know, the more research you do the bigger you realize that there's this huge amount of literature that we've just been sitting on we haven't really been put into practice and

And so that was how I got into it, I guess. Wow. Yeah. That sounds pretty magical where you literally just sort of track your AF episodes and be like, oh, it turns out that when I actually get good sleep and when I meditate to get less stressed, I have fewer of these episodes. What the...

What the hell? Yeah. Because I guess to my mind, it's like, oh yeah, sleep, health, this kind of stuff. It's all kind of a long-term type thing. Yeah. I'll sort it out at some point. But we don't really, and we were talking about this in the previous interview as well, we don't really think like that long-term about stuff. Yeah.

So I guess for you, you had that very clear feedback loop of like, oh shit, this stuff actually works. Yeah, this is the thing we were talking about because a lot of the things that I talk about within the diet and lifestyle space, people are thinking, oh, that's to prevent me getting fat and overweight and type 2 diabetes when I'm 45, 50, 55. You don't really have that immediate feedback as to, I need to start doing this now to optimize my health, to improve my longevity and also to perform my performance right now.

We don't really have that sort of connection. And because I had that immediate feedback with my own condition and my threshold for illness is a lot lower than other people of the same age group. That's kind of what propelled me forward. Yeah. So I guess, you

I'm trying to think of what the equivalent would be. It's like if, for example, I could wear an arrow ring or something that would tell me your performance today was 85%. And I'd be like, oh, it turns out that when I don't eat KFC, my performance goes to 90%. That would be great. It's just we don't really have a metric like that. Unless you have a health condition where you've literally got a metric you can track. Exactly. And what I was doing, I guess, back in 2009 now, was pretty analog. It was just me writing down things on my phone or notepad. Yeah.

what was happening and when it was happening and what things had done before and that was it whereas now, you know, we're moving into a space where

It doesn't have to be as analog as that and everything can be automated. So, you know, somewhere in our ring, I've actually worn one for about three years. I know, for example, that if I eat too late, I go to sleep straight after eating. It disrupts my deep sleep and I have much lower deep sleep than I have REM sleep. And that will impact how I perform the next day. Interesting. So I used to wear an hour ring for about six months and I found I would never act on the data because I would look at the number in the morning, be like readiness level 73.

I mean, okay. 64 would be like, yeah, well, I know I only got three hours of sleep last night. So obviously that's obvious. Yeah. But I didn't quite, the only things I've kind of anecdotally noticed are when I drink caffeine, like if I find myself unable to sleep, I think, did I have a coffee like at 5pm? Oh crap. Yeah, I did. Did I have a Diet Coke at like 10pm? Yes, I did. Okay, cool. Maybe that's a problem. But I've stopped doing that. Yeah. Yeah.

But beyond that, I don't really have other data points where I can track that number. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting what you said about caffeine because I've just done a 30-day caffeine-free sort of fast. And I love coffee. I absolutely love coffee. I love the ritual, the aroma, everything.

So I take coffee out of my diet for probably once a year for 30 days. And I was tracking, I was looking quite carefully at my aura ring this time around and my deep and REM sleep was so much more improved.

And I usually only drink caffeine before 12 p.m. as well. I'm not one of these people that has a 3 p.m. So I'm pretty sensitive to caffeine, as I've realized. And so now that I've gone back to drinking regular coffee again, I'm going to be having it even earlier. And I know anecdotally over the last 10 days since I've started that again, my sleep's a lot better. So the thing is, I'm of that...

I'm of that way of like trying to optimize everything. Exactly. Tracking those different things. And that appeals to me, but it might not appeal to a lot of other people listening or watching to this. It depends on like what their intrinsic drivers are. Yeah. I mean, it definitely appeals to me. I actually was...

recently ordered the latest Aura ring and I just haven't, haven't sent them my sizing. It's just been, I've just been on the bedside table for the last like two months. I've got the new one as well. It's really good. It looks like the fancy one. Yeah. The issue is, so I went, I went for the kind of like that black color as well. But anytime my mom sees me moving,

Me with it. She basically has a stroke. She's like, oh my God, why are you wearing jewelry? It's really bad. Oh, really? As you can tell, I don't wear anything. I don't wear a watch. I don't wear a necklace or anything. I've joked with my fiance that what she needs to do instead of getting me a ring is just getting me an aura ring for my ring finger. Oh, nice. That'll be good. She's not on board with it.

You should not have bought that. No, that's a shame. So we were talking about Aura Ink, tracking stuff, having those metrics, and then being able to sort of optimize your lifestyle based on that. I want to ask you a lot more about those specific things, but let's, if we go kind of back to the story then. So you had, you realized the impact that these different things

health and like yoga meditation type changes were genuinely having on your life as evidenced by the fact that your atrial fibrillation episodes were reducing in frequency um so at that point most people would be like all right cool it's a thing i've sorted my diet out yeah what happened next what happened next yeah so i started having more open honest conversations with patients about it um so i started gp training i moved down to brighton one of the best things i ever did

I was actually, that was a mini failure actually. So I was actually trying to stay in London because my girlfriend at the time was living in London. And when I didn't get into London, I almost considered taking a full year out actually and just doing something different. I'm really glad I didn't, but went to Brighton, started GP training and I got known, I got a bit of a reputation as being that GP who would talk to the patients about nutrition and

And then like my clinic started getting longer and longer. And as a trainee, you get like 20, 25 minutes. And so I'd use the whole 25 minutes and then it would go over and then I started writing down recipes. I realized I didn't answer your question earlier about

how I got into food and my whole family are all foodies. So we'd always have the food channel on, on the TV when we were growing up and stuff, which Saturday kitchen for years. Like I love Saturday kitchen is like my favorite show for the, for the American audience is basically a cooking show. And it's really popular. I think Dave Grohl is going to be on this Saturday as well. Like it's just one of those iconic BBC shows. So,

So we'd always have that. And when I was at med school, I lived in a house which was really experimental with food. And it wasn't necessarily healthy food. It was like, you know, barbecue or pastas or steak sandwiches and herb blends and all that kind of stuff. So I've always been into food from that. You already had that kind of background in food stuff. Yeah. While I was doing coding, you were doing cooking. Yeah, exactly. Nice. Sort of the same thing. So, yeah, I would always have that ability to...

reflect what someone wanted to eat and

with little tweaks and hacks that could make it slightly healthier for them. So I remember chatting to a guy about his breakfast routine and he had, you know, he was on the verge of type two diabetes. It was classed as metabolic syndrome. And so we, I started talking to him about oats and like, you know, changing up his oats and adding a few spices and pumpkin seeds and while those might be healthy and he like, he just eyes lit up. I remember that moment because I started having more conversations

with people from different backgrounds, Jamaican background, Korean background, Sri Lankan background, all these different elements. And they would tell me about their food that they would eat. The Sri Lankan guy, I remember I learned about cashew curry for the first time from this guy who had IBD. And I was like, okay, well, maybe we could,

tweak this and add some green peas or like what kind of green vegetables do you like or how do we get more fiber when you die all that different stuff and again like people just lie up it wasn't me just saying you need to eat better you need to get saturated fat out of your diet you need to make sure you don't have too much sugar here is a healthy plate with a kale salad on it it wasn't that it was like making it super interesting and something they felt that they really wanted to try out themselves and giving and empowering them to do it and that's sort of where i found my purpose um

And that's where I got the idea for the doctor's kitchen. It was really early. It was like back in 2012, I think. But I didn't do anything about it. So at this point, you're a GP trainer. You're having your 25-minute consultations, which is like two and a half times longer than a normal GP would have because they have 10 minutes. And you're like, you're finding yourself giving people lifestyle advice. But instead of just doing the thing that I would do in that case, which is be like, hey, you know, you should probably eat healthier.

I'm like, how? I'll let you know when I find out, you know, maybe order a pookie bowl from delivery rather than just a, you know, a fried chicken. You were actually like writing down recipes based on your previous sort of, uh, sort of tacit knowledge of the cooking world from like a decade of consuming Saturday night, Saturday morning kitchen or whatever that thing was. Yeah. That's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was like, I,

I mean, I've got like a huge collection of cookbooks. I've learned from obviously the greats like Jamie Oliver, Nigella, Nigel Slater. These guys like understand flavor super well. And I was able to apply that knowledge to what I was doing in clinic. It was a bit of a surreal feeling, actually. And I mean, I guess now with hindsight, you can say that I was molding

my passion with, with work. And I was turning my, my work into, you know, something that I found quite playful rather than just going through the,

Algorithms and choosing. Okay. This is the medication you need and you know being a sort of robot that was kind of where I found a lot of like the colorful elements of medicine that was perhaps feeding the referral to dermatology, but at the same time you're like Have you considered all the nutrition things you could do for your skin? Yeah, absolutely. I'm like no I haven't really but if you tell me that I'll figure it out Yeah, absolutely. And like, you know, it was never as like a sold as a panacea. I

It was never really like, oh, well, I could give you this drug, but really it should be improving your diet. It was always like, no, it's an and, not a like either. And I think that's really important whenever I speak to people, even on a public scale now about food, because there is this sort of pervasive myth that it's like, oh, okay, well, you're either on the woo-woo side where you're giving people nutraceuticals and green powders and all the rest of it and trying to cure cancer with like some erroneous herbs.

Or, you know, you're just doing pharmaceuticals and stuff. And actually, I think we need to take that real blended approach to nutritional medicine, which is now garnering a lot of sort of mainstream interest. Can we do a collab video on my channel where you teach me some weeknight recipes? Yeah, man, let's do it. That are like healthy and productive. Because my problem right now is like, I go home and I'm like...

the paradox of choice. I could go to Tesco or Waitrose on the way home and then I have to figure out what the hell am I going to buy? Broccoli, beans, carrots, prasley, all the vegetables. Like what am I going to use as my carb? Should I just get some oven chips? Oh, should I get roast potatoes, Yorkshire fillings, rice? I don't know. And then it's like the protein. Should I go for salmon? Should I get some kind of meat? Should I get some kind of chicken? Like what's the deal with that? And it's just like, you know what? Screw this. I value my time at X amounts, X dollars per hour. It's quicker and cheaper and easier to get a Deliveroo. Therefore, let me just do that and I'll spend that time. I don't know.

in theory, working on my book, but in fact, actually just watching YouTube videos. And I ended up just in the takeaway cycle because like, well, it's just too hard to... And...

I just, I don't have a system for it. I don't have a process. And I think I'm quite a sort of default kind of guy that if I could just have the same recipe and just have that on repeat every other day, my life would be a lot better where I would know exactly what I need to have in my pantry, exactly what to buy in the supermarket. But I don't right now. And so it's just delivery is the path of least resistance. Yeah, no, I get you. And you're not,

You're not unique in that conundrum as well. I think a lot of people fall into that pattern of not having a default and not having a backup plan. Actually, one of the things I always talk about in my talks is making sure you have a backup meal because it happens to everyone. Like when I'm coming back from a late shift at like 8 p.m.,

And I'm there like scrolling through Deliveroo as well. And I'm thinking, you know, maybe I should just get one of these things. And to be fair to some of the delivery companies, they do have healthy options. Not that we go for them at that time in the evening. But I always say you've got to have a backup meal. You've got to have like a meal you can make in 10 minutes, which uses store-covered ingredients. You don't have to go to a supermarket to go get it. Frozen items, a few spices, herbs, pastes.

and some nutrition as ingredients that you actually enjoy as well, not something that you're forcing yourself down. For me, it's this like whole grain pesto pasta, which I have with peas and like a whole bunch of other like herbs and spices. And I can make it in 10 minutes with my eyes closed. It's so easy. And I know that I've always got that as a backup when I'm feeling peckish and that kind of stuff.

But yes, for a collab video, I'd love to do something like that because I think instilling principles of healthy eating rather than specific recipes. I know that we're saying this in front of my cookbooks and stuff, but like, I think that's the way to get people out of the conundrum. Yeah. The other thing I would say is, uh, I'm not puritanical about this kind of stuff. I don't think that we need to necessarily in this lifestyle that we will have to

to be able to cook every single meal from scratch every day. Uh, I think there are lots of other healthier options. And I think in the, if I, if I forecast in the future, what I think is going to happen is we cook for pleasure and hopefully I can demonstrate to people that cooking is like a, you know, meditative thing and something that you can actually enjoy and it's pleasurable and you share with friends and all the rest of it. But also in a, in a world where we're trying to optimize every element of our lifestyle, we will have, uh,

greenhouses that surround every city in the world, which demo, uh, growing optimized ingredients, which are, you know, phytochemical rich as well as nutrient rich. And then that will be delivered to a ghost kitchen, which is cooked probably using robots. And then that's delivered to us using automated delivery systems. And that's probably one of the ways in which we're going to dig ourselves out of the hole where we have a very unhealthy environment today.

That's what I think is going to be the future. And I don't want to fight against that because I think I'd be a bit of a Luddite if I was trying to preach to everyone, you need to cook from home every single day. And, you know, it's just against the pace of change. But I do think...

the art of cooking, the love of cooking should not really be lost in the same way, you know, we're surrounded by books right now, even though we have Kindles. There is something about it. There's something intuitive, something that is hard-coded in our evolution to love the art of cooking. And I don't think we should really lose that. So hopefully I can do that for you. Yeah, that'd be so fun. It's only recently that I've realized that cooking is actually fun. And weirdly, the mental model that made me realize this was,

I was playing Horizon Zero Dawn on the PlayStation. And I was like, you know, to get some of the equipment to upgrade your satchels, you have to go out and like kill rabbits and stuff like in the wildlife. It's like, you know, this robot apocalyptic type game, but you have to kill the occasional rabbit to get the boar skin or whatever. And I was like, huh, this reminds me of back in the day when I was playing World of Warcraft where you would level up your cooking skill and you'd build like a campfire and you would turn your boar meat into this cool thing. I was like...

That was kind of fun. It kind of felt good to be cooking this virtual meat and virtual veg in a game. I was like, wait a minute.

I could do this in real life. What the hell? Absolutely game-changing. That was like a mind-blowing moment for me that I had a few months ago when I had COVID and I was playing Horizon 3D for like 10 days straight. I didn't normally play PlayStation. And then I was like, all right, you know what? New year's resolution. Let's take this cooking thing seriously. So then I went out and bought... I actually have them over here. You know, Le Crusade does this Harry Potter signature edition. No way. I didn't know that. So I got like two Dutch ovens and a cast iron pan and like a bunch of spatulas and stuff.

And then I got super excited about cooking because now I had the gear, which I'd spent like a stupid amount of money on because it had Harry Potter on it. I'm going to show you how to make the most use of those pans for sure. Because those are similar pans to the ones that are, they're not Harry Potter pans.

branded but those are the same pants that i have and i i make so much use out of you i feel like you're about to embark on like your own four-hour body uh book with like tim ferris like you know how he like i've read that book as well i think it was the four-hour body of the four-hour cook something like that chef yeah four-hour chef that's it yeah i've read that book it is incredible like the detail this guy goes into is amazing and i feel like you're at the start of this journey like

people are probably going to be watching this. How does this guy not know who Yotamad Lange is? But I reckon, you know, give it like a year's time. Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. I'm excited for you, man. Nice. Yeah. No, this is going to be fun. So many questions on the cooking front. I do also have it in my bucket list that I want to do like a fishing weekend trip where we actually fish and cook and stuff. Lovely.

that we should do that as a collab we can vlog it as well we can bring friends along that'd be fun if there's someone who does fishing like nodding yeah that would be that'd be so if anyone's listening to this who hosts fishing trips and stuff in the uk then uh drop us an email yeah and we would be very very interested so loads of questions about the food thing which i will put a little bookmark in let's go back to your gp you're doing the recipes okay

And then you go to Australia after you've done your GP training? I like leave. So I passed all my GP exams really early because I was super keen. And then the GP surgery I was working at, lovely. But they were like, oh, we've pretty much got a salary GP now because he's done with the exam. So let's put him on 10 minute consults. And so I was basically working full time as a GP pretty much four and a half, five days a week.

That's quite hard. Yeah, seeing like... A lot of people I don't think have an appreciation for GPs in general, even within medicine, I think. I think people who know, know how difficult it is being a GP. Like one minute you're dealing with like a child's ear infection. Next minute you're dealing with someone with depression. Next minute you're breaking bad news about cancer diagnosis. Next minute, you know, you're doing something, you know, it's just...

you're flipping gears all morning and all afternoon. And you're seeing anywhere between 20 patients in the morning, plus the prescriptions, plus the phone calls, plus the home visits. And I was working in a rural area where, um,

In rural Britain, they just don't like numbers on houses. They just have like names like the farm and it's on like a two kilometer stretch of road and you're just driving up and down to find this lovely little old lady that needs her warfarin checked and all the rest of it. So it was a very stressful time in my life and I really burnt out.

at the end of that and so I just thought to myself I need to just get out and I had a few friends of mine that were living and working in Australia and they were just raved about it and I just I called up and I was like I want to do an A&E job I love A&E I don't want to do clinic at this point um and I just went out there and I absolutely loved it it was

Really game-changing for me and my clinical career But also it gave me the space to think a bit more about the doctor's kitchen idea that I had years ago and that's ultimately where I Launched as well when I was in Australia. Okay, if we just just a word So we wanted to pick up on something you say so you said that the working were working this sort of GP lifestyle meant that you got quite burnt out Yeah What's that like being burnt out? It is

It's where you go home at like 7, 7.30 PM and you've got friends who you haven't seen for a while and you just can't be bothered and you're not excited about seeing them even though you really should be because it's been weeks or whatever. It's where you lose the empathy

that is so required in medicine as well. And I felt that slipping away and that wasn't a good position to be in, you know, sort of like what we were talking before when you've got to do something for a patient and instead of you having the mindset of this is a privilege to work for people in the most vulnerable state, it's like,

I've got to do this and this is my job and I have to do this. And there's another thing to tick off the list. And that's never really the way I really wanted to feel within medicine. Um, obviously you can't be happy, joy, joy, the whole time in medicine, you're always going to have good and bad days and that's just normal. But when it becomes persistent and insidious throughout your whole week, that was kind of like, I need to, I need to take a break from this. And I had the sort of foresight

and the privilege and opportunity to even do that. You know, a lot of people don't have the opportunity. And a lot of my friends, for example, were supporting families and they had mortgages and they had all these other, you know, um, pressures on them financially. I was independent and I had the opportunity to go away and I was like, I owe it to myself and I owe it to my friends who can't do this to go out. And that's, that's sort of what was the push for me to go abroad.

But yeah, the burnout was not a nice place. And I'm thankful. I don't think I've really had that since in some ways, like obviously during the pandemic and stuff. But I think because there was that sort of like collective energy from everyone being in the same bucket, I kind of like push you through. I think it's pandering out now, which is why you're seeing loads of people leave in droves. But yeah, that was, yeah, it wasn't a nice position to be in. Have you ever been in that?

I don't think so. No? Because people do talk about burnout as like being a thing. And I'm always kind of curious, like, what does that feel like? Yeah. Because I kind of said to a friend of mine at one point, like, I don't think I've ever been burnt out. She was like, you probably have, but you just don't realize it. I was like, oh, okay, fine. What does it mean to be burnt out? Yeah. I don't think I have. Do you have the ability to compartmentalize? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

because there's a really good podcast called how to take over the world okay um you should definitely check it out so they they they examine uh different leaders across

across time and history. It's usually people who have passed away, but you'll find more recent leaders like Steve Jobs. I think they did Putin as one. And one of the recurrent themes that I've noticed, and actually the host notices as well, is the ability to compartmentalize different issues. So Napoleon was able to put things in one drawer, shut it, and then open another one without really thinking about the last drawer that he's closed. Yeah.

I'm learning that skill now, but I definitely didn't have that when I was working as a, as a GP. And I think perhaps that's maybe the reason why you haven't experienced it. Um, but certainly, you know, my, my, my inability to focus on one thing at a time is probably why I, I got burnt out and it kind of spilled out into my personal life. Right. Yeah. Spilled out into your personal life. Meaning? So, uh,

relationships, not really working out, not being there for my friends, not having the energy to do stuff with the doctor's kitchen, for example, putting things off, not being there for my family, all those different pressures. I think that's kind of like, yeah, how it played out for me. Yeah.

Do you think that was inevitable given the schedule you were on? Or do you think there's stuff that you could have done at the time to kind of mitigate those kind of personal spillover effects? Oh, yeah, definitely. I think certainly now, given what I do with all the different strands to the business and how I haven't really outsourced much, you know, running the podcast, writing the books, doing the recipes, starting the app, running the tech team, doing the customer service, doing the charity stuff, all that kind of stuff. I've

I'm able to flick, I'm still learning this as a skill, but I'm able to flick from different roles and positions.

relatively easier easily compared to how it was before. And also having a partner who's pretty regimented about, look, it's 6:30 PM. You can't be on your computer that late at night. And you haven't spoken to me for eight hours. That kind of keeps me on the straight and narrow as well. So much. You're very thankful that I got someone who can understand the grind and the, you know, the, the sort of need to, to be there and hustle, but also,

he knows when i need a bit of rigidity to like be like you need to stop this and i need to pull you away so at this point we're in australia you're working in um the emergency department yeah and you're sort of mulling over this idea of doctor's kitchen like what what is the idea in your mind in like the early days

The early days was literally to be that GP who was inspiring people to eat well and giving a bit of the evidence base behind it. So using research, fun, delicious recipes to get people changing their behavior such that it looks after the health long term. Okay.

And so it was always that combination of flavor and function that I always want to instill in any video I did and any recipe and all that kind of stuff. And so when I started, I had in my mind that all those patients that I was seeing back in general practice and even the ones that I was seeing in A&E as well, because a lot of people don't realize, people think of A&E as just like we see broken bones and heart attacks and the rest of it. And whilst that does happen,

you have a lot of time with patients who are coming in with, with niggles and pains and lacerations or, you know, the, the product of chronic conditions that are lifelong. Um, and you know, I'd be chatting to them about this kind of stuff as well. And it was, I had the idea of like, you know, starting the Instagram, I had a wix.com website as well that I never published and like a whole bunch of YouTube videos that I had up there, like ready to just press play. Um,

And it wasn't until I spoke to one of my senior consultants about it. And I was like, look, I think I'm going to do this nutrition thing. And they were really forward thinking and I really respected her. And she was like, you just got to do that. Sounds like an awesome idea. You just got to do it. And so, yeah, that was the, that was the push for me to hit play and all that kind of stuff. So did you start filming these videos when you were in Australia? Yeah, I did. And where did the name Doctor's Kitchen come from? It's

It just came out of nowhere. And the intention was never to build like a brand around it. It was just Doctor's Kitchen. I just had this idea. Yeah. It'll be a website, Instagram page, YouTube channel. Was that what you were thinking at the time, like 2015, 16? Yeah, that was it. It was just a website, Instagram. I didn't know how to use hashtags. I remember I posted my first picture and I posted it to my personal Facebook profile as well.

And immediately I clicked play on it. And then I was taking a flight to Japan for six days. Sydney to Japan is very, very close. Eight hours. And...

It's because I was running away from the reaction of my friends. I thought everyone's going to think I'm so stupid. Like, you know, this is, it was like a real cringe worthy moment for me back then. I was so scared about what the reaction was going to be. So I actually, yeah, I clicked play and then I jumped on a plane to Japan and then I got all these messages from people and like, that's amazing. That's so cool. And like, why are we scared? I was just scared at the time, dude. Like, you know, a GP talking about food as medicine, like,

back then when the wellness industry wasn't as established as in as now like seven years later it's it it would have been seen i at least i thought it would have been interpreted as a bit cavalier oh yeah well like you want a qualified nutritionist therefore how dare you talk about food kind of yeah that kind of vibe but also like just generally like

getting in front of a camera and being a doctor on YouTube and Instagram and being that kind of person. Sometimes it does feel like that. I don't know if this was your experience when you first got on because I remember hearing that, I think you did like 80 odd videos before the one that really kicked everything off. But...

Yeah. Yeah. I always I was never really into social media at the time. I wasn't like, you know, someone who followed Joe Wicks and all these other people. I found out about them after I joined myself. I hadn't really done much research in that perspective. I just knew what I wanted to talk about. So it came came from a place of like just genuinely wanting to put out good content out there.

Were you worried about what your doctor friends would think? Absolutely. That you're peddling that, oh, I'm the doctor. And you're like, oh, I'm just a recently qualified GP. And like, what the hell do I know about anything? Absolutely. Absolutely. That was definitely... And it's still to this day, if I'm being honest, there is a shred of that whenever I talk about what I do. And, you know, despite...

completing a master's in nutritional medicine, doing all this analysis, having researchers on my team and all that kind of stuff. Like I still get all that kind of stuff. I still get that like little voice in my head saying, you don't really know what you're talking about because I guess maybe you've experienced this as well by doing so much research in your various domains. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. And that, you know, for someone who,

doesn't really want to be misleading people or anything. The scary thing is like, what if people find out how much I, how little I know, like always that in the back of my mind, I'm not a researcher that spends like day in, day out in a lab reading papers all day long. Like I've got a whole bunch of other things to do and you'll never have, I'll never have, I have to, I've got better at working through this myself.

I'm never going to know enough to completely get rid of my imposter syndrome. I just have to sit well with how I am right now and do the things that I know are helping people as much as possible and just be happy with that. Because otherwise it's, you know, you just stop making content. Yeah.

Yeah, this is the thing I hear from like once my channel started to go well while I was still working, people would be like, oh, you know, like I had a friend who was an obstetrics registrar. And, you know, he and his wife had recently gone through the whole process. And he was like, you know, there's a lot of misinformation out there. You know, it would be cool to do a book as an obstetrics registrar about what it was like being sort of going through the process of the patient, educating young mothers about young mothers to be about what the process is going to be like.

But he was like, oh, but I can't do it now. I need to wait until I'm a consultant because then I'll be qualified. I was like, when you're a consultant, are you really going to think that? Or are you going to think, oh, I'm a new consultant. I need to wait until I've got a diploma in reproductive medicine and I've been a professor for 20 years before I think that. And even in that position, you're probably going to think I'm not the world's most qualified person to talk about this. Therefore, I can't talk about it.

And I think in medicine, there is a lot of credentialism, credentialization that goes on where it's like, we feel this internally. We feel our friends are going to judge us for it. Maybe some of them do judge us for it. Be like, how dare you talk about nutrition without a PhD in nutritional medicine masters? Anyone get a master's through that. It's just a one year thing. PhD is where it's really like, we have this thing where we need another badge, another, another certificate.

to be allowed to do a thing. - Absolutely. - And I just try my best to be like, look, you don't need any qualifications. You're being a guide. You're not being a guru. It's all good. - Yeah, absolutely. Like what you've just described there has happened to so many of my colleagues who haven't got to that consultancy status. And then when they get to that consultancy, I've spoken to so many different consultants.

who some of whom have actually been on the podcast and asked for, you know, the, you know, Oh, I didn't really, I don't, I didn't think I said this right. Or I feel like I'm too young a consultant to say these things. So I'd rather not do it. And that's fine. That's, you know, I'm not going to push anything, but,

It's a story I hear very often and it's not just with the medicine. So I'm actually going to call someone out here as one of my good friends, a guy called Jay, who is a serial entrepreneur. He's raised millions of pounds. He has a number of different tech companies under his belt and he really wants to put out content about conscious entrepreneurship, right?

He's super qualified to talk about it. He's been in the game for well over a decade and he just can't get over the edge. He just can't start with his first piece of content to start the wheels in motion because there's something holding him back. I'm not qualified enough. I've only been in the game for a couple of years. I haven't raised as much money as this person. So I think that sort of credentialism is.

Credentialism, I'm saying that wrong, but the way that we just made up. That, I think, holds a lot of people back beyond medicine as well. I remember when I was first starting my YouTuber course, which we started sort of October 2020, and it has now become by far, that has been a ridiculously profitable decision. But I remember having a Zoom call with two internet friends of mine who also run courses and saying to them,

you know, I don't really feel I can do a course teaching people how to be YouTubers. Like I've only got 1.2 million subscribers and they were just like, are you hearing yourself right now? I was like, I mean, I've only got 1.2 million subscribers. Like why would anyone sign up to a YouTube course for me? Like what the hell do I know? Like,

Talk to the guy who's got 20 million subscribers. And they were like, you have no idea what you just said. How dumb that sounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it happens everywhere. It happens to the best of us, I think. You know, we downplay our own achievements. And it's like, if you don't take a moment to actually reflect on what you've achieved, then...

You'll never really be happy always chasing that next thing. I actually wrote in the Acknowledgements of my third book. I wrote something that might be perceived as narcissistic, but it's really trying to kick myself into The gear of like taking pause looking back at what I've achieved up to this point even though on the day-to-day I don't really think it's a big thing or whatever I walk around like oh I'm a Sunday Times best seller yada yada like I Wrote like take a moment to enjoy this this present

I can't remember exactly what I said, but it was along the lines of you're doing a good thing, keep going and believe in yourself and that's it. And I think I have to remind myself of that every day. I actually have an affirmation that I read every single day to that effect because it's very easily lost in this world where we can constantly comparing ourselves to someone who has more followers or more achievements or whatever the accolades that we compare ourselves by.

And it's become more prevalent, I guess, in this social media driven world. - Do you find that affirmation helps?

Yeah, massively. The affirmation is kind of based on a thread that I read from Melanie Perkins, the founder of Canva. So Canva is amazing. She's Australian, isn't she? Yeah, she's Australian. Yeah, yeah. Their offices are in Sydney. And her founder story is amazing. She did it on How I Built This. Oh, I've heard that's a good episode. Oh, it's a really good episode. For anyone that's like...

thinking about funding and the barriers that you need to get through, man, she hustled for three years trying to get funding. And now, you know, obviously, you know, she's bringing the power of design to billions of people worldwide, but she wrote this thread on LinkedIn and the thread was basically her entire journey, step-by-step of everything. I read the whole thing. And one of the elements was, they got one of their rejections.

And she wrote a note to herself, which was, Melanie, you're doing a really hard thing. You'll get through it and you will build a massively wealthy, productive company that you've always dreamed of, yada, yada, yada, yada. And I've basically written myself a version of that to keep myself in the straight and narrow, you know, reminding myself of you're doing a hard thing.

but you're going to get through it. And it's about 95% persistence and consistency is key to getting through anything. And so, you know, you're going to have up and down days, but if you just remind yourself of the affirmation, it's been good for me thus far. I've only been doing it for about a year or so. That's quite a long time. Yeah, right. We have to find affirmations for about two days and it gave up. Yeah.

So you're up thinking. Yeah, I do gratitude. I've done gratitude for a long time. That's been pretty game changing for me. I actually shared it on Instagram for 700 days every day. I would, I've been doing it for a lot longer than that, but I thought to inspire my audience, I would do 15 days of three things I'm grateful for every single day. And it could be something like, you know, I got a beautiful coffee or someone smiled at me in the park or yada yada. And then I went from 15 to 30 to 60 to 700 plus days. Yeah. Yeah. Every single day. Yeah.

One thing that strikes me is that like, so from the outside, like you seem to kind of have it all in that, you know, you've got three cookbooks, Sunday Times bestseller, like ridiculously cool Instagram page, YouTube channel. You're doing this cool stuff. You've got the background as a GP. You've got the credentials to prove it. You've got more books on the way, I'm sure. You've got this new app that you've just launched. Like, why do you need an affirmation saying, bro, it's going to be okay. You're doing a hard thing. I think...

It's a good question. I think it's easy to look at the veneer of what we put out on social media and not really let people into how much of a shit show the backside is, you know? Because if people saw what my morning was like, you know, it's just like constant pandemonium. Starting a tech company is probably one of the hardest things I've ever done.

because it's bootstrapped, we're not funded and creating a scalable product that is well designed and works functions well and all that kind of stuff requires a lot of effort and a lot of quality assurance and all that kind of stuff. And I'm basically doing all that kind of stuff at the moment and I'm learning to love it and I've got that mindset.

But man, it is every day there is a problem every day. There is something that I'm trying to figure out every day. I'm having pangs of anxiety about whether this is a good investment of well over 100K. You know, all these different

Things are constantly chipping away at my confidence level. So what you might see on the outside as a guy with all the qualifications and books and and all this thing going well for him is actually just a sort of hologram or like a Mirage of actually what the reality is and

You know, I think there's different ways of describing to myself what my day is like. Like the very vernacular that we use about how we describe our day, like, oh, I'm busy or, you know, it's a pandemonium, like I've just said behind the scenes, I think basically leads to what the reality becomes in your mind at least. And so I have to get into the habit of actually telling myself it's okay, it's okay. And that's where the affirmations come in.

That resonates so much. Like I have found myself using that kind of terminology. Like anytime I find myself thinking of using the word busy, I have like a allergic reaction. Yeah. I don't do that, but still like, and so I don't say it externally, but still internally, I, you know, sometimes get to the end of the day and be like, damn, that was a pretty mental day, but it was pretty cool. And then I was like, hang on.

Why? Like the reason I left medicine was to not to have like a fairly stress-free, free life where I don't have to worry about life and death decisions. And yet sometimes it feels as if within the team, within the business, like, oh my God, we have to get this video out. Otherwise like the world's going to end. Yeah. Yeah. We can just relax, take a step back, chill the fuck out. It's all good. Yeah. I have to remind myself of that. And then when I realized, oh shit, I need to remind myself of that. I really need to remind the team of that. They're just going to be going off of my energy, which if by default, it's like,

you know, let's go, let's go, let's go. You know, everyone is going to sort of fall into that, fall into step with that. And it takes a little bit of like, take a step back. This is actually pretty cool. It's pretty fricking weird that you can have a business that just makes videos, makes silly internet videos and, you know, does reasonably well. Like let's, let's enjoy this. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting, I'd love to get your perspective on that actually, because as someone with a large team or a larger team than me anyway, um,

how your energy is perceived by others is probably gonna have a ramifications on you know how everyone's feeling in the culture as well within that and I have to remind myself of that as well because even when I speak to Karen who runs my life she's always whenever we have a course is like she always asked me this thing I've only just realized it now how are you doing like I

Are you feeling okay? How is your, it's always with the expectation that I'm super stressed and I'm really busy. And like, she's there, she's very motherly. She like calms me down. She's like an anti-anxiety pill for me. Every time I talk to her afterwards, I just feel so much lighter. But I think I have to remind myself of that because I'm probably having a,

Slightly negative impact on the way she perceives everything going on as well. Whereas in reality, you're right Well, you know messing around with fruits and vegetables talking about the health benefits and putting out some colorful content. Yeah Yeah, I remember yesterday, you know We were having having discussion with one of the team members about you know We're launching a new cohort of our youtuber Academy and there was one specific like type of event We were running but I was a bit like why we're doing this. It seems like a bad idea and

And I think just sort of my energy was, it was definitely just basically being a massive dick about it and just be like, what the hell's going on here? Kind of vibes. And then it took another team member in the room to be like, hey, it's all right. We can have the conversation, but it doesn't have to be like this. Where it's just like my default way of, I think, communicating is very just like,

kind of straight in yeah and that's just really bad and i was thinking about it afterwards i was like wow that was just really bad yeah why was i why was i talking like that it's not the end of the world yeah we've still got a whole month to go and even if we didn't like what the hell we're doing a freaking zoom course teaching people how to be youtubers like this is this is not life and death i don't need to be a dick about it yeah and it's just i think

It's that that that room reminder sometimes it needs a reminder from someone else that hey the way that you're acting is having this impact on other people Stop that. Yeah. Yeah, otherwise, it's just like it's so easy Just be in our own heads and not realize the impact we're having on others. I think yeah, absolutely I think so and

I think like our frenetic behavior can definitely impact culture at a wider scale in an organization. But it's good that you've got like some insight into that because a lot of people don't get to that until like years and years later when they realize, oh, I've been a dick to everyone for like five years. And that's why no one sends me a Christmas card. Yeah. Yeah. I need to need to be reminded of that more often. Yeah.

It sort of feels like we're following the chronology, but then we're going off. So right now you're on the flight to Japan and you posted your first thing where you're like, I am a doctor and here is a recipe for how to be healthier. And you're really like, oh my God, all my medic friends are going to cringe at this. Yeah. And then you land in Japan. What happens next? So I immediately met up with some of my friends. It was like,

I was basically there because I made the last minute decision to just get the hell out of Sydney whilst I just needed to be out of my head whilst I press play and everything. And the reaction was amazing. I got like...

so many text messages from friends and even a parody video of my introduction to the intro to the YouTube already within like like 12 or 14 hours that already made a parody video some of my friends and it was if you've seen like one of the first videos ever put it's the doctor's kitchen on a on a blackboard and then I add fruits and vegetables to it and stuff and

So they did the same thing with a piece of paper, the doctor's kitchen and putting like wine and like, you know, like burgers and all this kind of stuff around it. And then doing the theme tune, but they're literally doing it, miming it like that instead of actual like the ukulele music. So, so yeah, it was a really good reaction. And it was, again, speaking to some of my senior consultants when I got back,

saying, I saw your video and I was like, I really loved it. I think it's great. I think what you're doing is awesome. You should definitely continue all that kind of stuff. And it was that sort of early support that allowed me to really push on and carry on. And like, you know, I don't think I've ever had any viral moments or anything, but I

just the consistency of like getting good feedback from people and growing on this medium. And, you know, that, that instantaneous feedback I think was, was really pivotal on me continuing to do what I wanted to do. And I never thought about leaving medicine at that point or, you know, moving on from medicine. I mean, I really, really,

done that over the last month or so but i never saw it as like a book or you know media career anything like that that was never really the intention it only really was inserted after things kind of came at me and i was reacting to them rather than being proactive about it i'm learning to be a bit more proactive now because i've sort of been dragged along this journey and and early over the last year or so am i really trying to take it by you know

what's that analogy yeah by the horns yeah yeah i don't know if you've had that as well like

When you started doing videos, I guess things would have like pulls you along in terms of like brand deals or Collaborations and all that kind of stuff But now it seems like you're being quite intentional about what you want to do in terms of yeah I think because I had run a business previously and I know the mistakes running that and read the books about it I mean like I would really wish I'd read this five years ago but it wouldn't have applied to me five years ago because

you know, a book called The E-Myth Revisited. I don't know if you've come across that. It will change your life. Really? 100% guarantee. It will change your life. It changed my life in 2019 when I read it. Being like, oh my God. It's basically about delegation and why it's so hard. Yeah. And it just like sounds like a simple thing. And I know that when I started SixMed, the courses company, I was not ready to receive that message because I was in the mind of, I'll do everything myself. I do a better job than anyone else of doing the thing that I'm doing because A, B, C, D, E.

And then six years later I was like, damn, I really wish I delegated more. Oh my God. That sounds like I need to read that book right now. Have you got a business coach? I do in and out actually. Yeah. So she's had a bit of a break, but I had one at the start of last year, monthly for about six or seven months. Nice. Really pivotal. Yeah. Really was just like milestone driven, you know, like we only checked in once a month and,

And everything was... Yeah, that was really good. That was kind of what led me to building the app and actually sticking to a schedule because of her. Yeah, having a coach is game-changing. I discovered the whole coaching thing in like 2020. And so I had a bunch of different coaches like weekly. So if you're in the market for another one, I can recommend you to a guy I know who's also left medicine. Yeah, really? He was a Cambridge medic a few years ago who now does business coaching-y stuff. Yeah, sweet. And really helps out with... Yeah, please do. Yeah, I'd love that. I'll do an intro afterwards. But yeah, it was...

Yeah, so I think when I was approaching the YouTube channel stuff, I already had that experience of well failing but like, you know, failing upwards and building a business and sort of making sure that as I went along with the courses company to the point that when the YouTube channel started to do well and I started to think in terms of it being a business. I still had loads to learn like reading the e-myth, reading books like Traction, like half the books here are business books that are just sort of books about leadership and management and things like that where it felt like

Every time I was reading a new book. I was like, oh my god, like it's it's as if this person has been inside my soul That knows what problems I'm currently having. Yeah, I'm like this is not surprising because like businesses have been solving these problems for like bring 200 years Yeah, there is like literature on this and like I'm a freaking medic Like I should know that there is literature and guidelines about all of the things I'm struggling with Yeah, it's like we hired 15 people before I first before I read a book about hiring I was like damn I wish I'd read that on day one. Oh, I just like yeah, why why am I making shit up like this?

there is BMJ best practice. There is up to date. Like this is a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so it's discovering that world of,

I definitely need to read that book because I'm in that position right now where I feel like I can't delegate because I know how to do the customer service. I really want to instill confidence in them and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that sounds pivotal because I think that's going to be a massive blocker to scaling if you can't delegate appropriately. Yeah, learning that the hard way. So I'm definitely going to take you off on that. So you started posting videos on Instagram and YouTube under this framework?

Doctor's kitchen thing. Yeah, and it sounds like you sort of thought about the branding and music and stuff in the early days. Yeah What happened next? So I Was working alongside doing all that kind of stuff So it was like, you know ad hoc posting all that kind of stuff I did like a few restaurant reviews and all that and yeah, you know just enjoy most Instagram or all in Instagram pretty much Yeah, mostly the YouTube stuff was like tutorials and a few recipe videos and stuff, but I found that

even early on, even today, the need to constantly video and then edit and then put it out. I was never able to hit a consistent posting schedule, even today.

The only things I consistently post on now are things like Facebook, Instagram, a bit of Twitter, but my podcast as well. It's probably the most rigorous in terms of putting something out every single... It's mostly like Instagram. How much effort were you putting into these Instagram posts and videos and things? Probably putting in quite a bit of effort because I would make a new recipe every time. I would write it down. I would also add it to the website. There was a big collection of janky looking videos on the old website that have now been taken down. We've got

got them professionally shot as we have for the app and stuff but yeah it was a lot of that in the early days it was pretty analog and so like so you'd you'd be working in most department then in the evenings and weekends you'd be hustling to get these recipes out and get these videos done yeah and the good thing about working in australia is that they have different working arrangements than they do in the uk right so i was working like four days on four days off which sounds like

the dream for a lot of people over here in the UK. And anytime you did overtime that should pay you over time as well. It's just like the thing, it's just very normal over there. Um, and that gave me a lot of time to, to actually put into the Instagram stuff. And so if I didn't have that opportunity and I didn't have that time, I probably wouldn't have been able to consistently post and build up that audience and interrupt the community and all that kind of stuff. And I think also there is some, like, as you might've found as well,

There is some...

in being the doc who also does the doc stuff and then does recipes as well. That's always been like, you know, the intrinsic proposition. So yeah, that was really useful in the early days. - Okay, and so like normally in the early days of stuff, there's, you know, it's, you're putting a lot of stuff out there and you're not getting like immediate traction. What was that experience like for you? Like putting all this effort into stuff, like was it like going viral immediately or like,

What were the numbers looking like? It was pretty slow. So, like, I think I only hit 1,000 subscribers, like, three or four months in. Oh, you were posting for, like, four months on Instagram. Yeah, yeah. For not even getting to 1,000 followers. No, no, definitely not. No, no, no. It wasn't immediate at all. And then, like, you know, like 2,000 and 3,000. Are we talking, like, daily posting or weekly posting? I was posting probably once every two or three days. It was pretty ad hoc. And to be fair, like, even now it's not as...

as consistent as it should be. Like, yeah, I'm really bad at social media. And yeah, like I remember having the first, cause I, so I was in Sydney until March, 2016. And then when I got back, I almost immediately got approached by a literary agent and

- Off the back of a few thousand Instagram followers. - Literally three or 4,000. That was it. Yeah, that was it at that time. And when I got my book deal, I think I was literally on five or 6,000. I wasn't a big influencer at the time, no way. So they saw something beyond the number of followers. They saw the value. They saw the proposition of a doctor who knows what he's talking about, talking about nutrition, has got an interesting personal story. They saw all these different bits.

The brand was like also, I guess, attractive to them. But now actually in future books, we're moving a bit away from the brand and moving more towards Dr. Rupi as a sort of cooking personality. Oh, okay. Rather than... And that's like an intentional decision because...

Um, as we might talk about later with cookbooks, most people buy into personal brands when it comes to cooking. Yeah. Like Jamie and Nigella and stuff. Exactly. Rather than a brand brand. Yeah, exactly. So you'll, you'll notice like Jamie moved away from the Naked Chef, which is how he actually started. He was known as the Naked Chef. Now he's Jamie Oliver. And the same thing could be said of a few other people. Yotam has always been like Yotam and Nottingham. That's always been the brand, but that's very much personally him. Um,

So yeah, that's sort of the direction that we're going in as well with Dr. Rubio. I'm still gonna keep Doctor's Kitchen for the other stuff as well. So I think that's like, it means that I can express what the Doctor's Kitchen stands for with different ambassadors and personalities across different geographical locations. So I'm not inherently tied to it.

The way I look at it is what I'm trying to create is like what Andy Puddicombe has done for Headspace. Andy Puddicombe is the founder of Headspace and the guy who started it and the guy who narrates all of it. But people know Headspace more than they know Andy Puddicombe. Yeah, I'd never heard of him. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of what I want to do with The Doctor's Kitchen. Yeah, the people in the UK and parts of Australia and America might know Dr. Rupi. Yeah. But I want them to know Doctor's Kitchen a bit more. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I think...

Yeah, this is something that I've heard from a lot of creators. I think there is this sort of progression

in terms of autonomy. So when you're working as a doctor, you have basically no autonomy. You're kind of being told what to do, especially as a junior. And so then the next step is to kind of do your own thing under your own brand. So someone like me, where it's like, oh, now I have the autonomy to do kind of do what I want. But then you realize when you're at the stage where you can do what you want, the problem is that it's so tied to my personal brand. And that actually removes autonomy because now I can't

just well I could but like I feel like I can't just like fly to I don't know wherever and just hang out with friends because we have a video event deadline and it's my personal channel it needs to have stuff so then the next level of autonomy up is building a brand like the part time brand that does not have my name in it where my name

pushes it initially, but it's not so intrinsically tied to it that it becomes impossible to sort of separate the two things out. Yeah. It sounds like you kind of started out with the brand and now you're branching out into the personal thing, but still benefiting from the benefit of the brand, i.e. the autonomy and the fact that you don't have to be front and center all the time. Exactly. Yeah. Because what I've realized is that it is as great as it is and as amazing as to have this feedback and like interaction with people and

It can detract from the grand division of what I'm trying to do, which is scale up, you know, healthy eating for millions of people around the world. You know, I can't be a singular person doing that. It has to be under an umbrella. I'm happy doing all the other stuff like, you know, with cookbooks and stuff, because that's not necessarily me having to post every single week. And, you know, the podcast I do really out of like the love of doing the podcast. I really enjoy that.

but I don't want to be tied to it where it becomes something that you, you have to work toward and you're doing it because you have to, rather than you want to. If you see what I mean, I know what you mean. It's an interesting conundrum that creators are in. I think that I've come from a personal brand, um, and branching out going forward, isn't it? Yeah.

definitely so so you had 6 000 followers on instagram at the time you got you got a literary agent approaching you for a book deal yeah what what was that like that was really surreal when i got back into the uk uh it was like literally i started working as a salaried doctor so you know regular gp surgery doing a bit of out of hours on the side as well doing a few courses and all that kind of stuff so still keeping the medical side of things going um

and then a literary agent coming out of nowhere who you know was referred to me probably because someone who was a big fitness influencer referred uh them to me and said oh i followed this guy he puts out really good content you should check it out they checked it out they saw this is pretty cool and you know i see the trajectory of where this is going and that's where we had the initial conversation it was just over coffee and i was kind of like blown away because i was

I was literally going to a late shift that day and I just have a coffee and I think it was like, so house or somewhere. I was like, this is fancy. And you know, this is a different world to what I'm used to. And also it was kind of, you know, I've only been doing it for like six or seven months at the time. What, why would they, you know, 5,000 followers or whatever I was on? It was, it was very, yeah, it was, it was surreal that time. And then, you know, the conversations with, with different publishers and what happened was, um,

called a preempt so the publisher basically preempted it going to auction where you know there's a proposal that's delivered and then like whatever so the proposal actually went to them initially and they bid on it and yeah the rest is history really which publisher was that Harper Collins it was Thornton's imprint and it was her name was Carolyn she's since moved from Harper but she was like really forward thinking she really saw it and it

It was so strange because I went to the News UK building, 15th or 16th floor, all glass building, looking out into the shard. There's little old me walking in. And on the big TV screen, they've got images of me and my YouTube channel and like my Instagram and some of the recipes and all that kind of stuff. And it was...

they were trying to sell them to me, themselves to me. And I was like, this should be the other way around. This is so weird. Like why are you trying, big office, Harper Collins, whatever. Yeah, that was very strange.

But they really saw, they really painted out this vision of what the brand should be and what they could do with the recipes and the type of people that wanted involved and that kind of stuff. They really had a vision for it. And so when I would talk about like, I was dragged in this direction, I wasn't dragged kicking the street, obviously I was loving the journey, but I never really had thought about what the next milestones are after book one, book two, et cetera. It's only until recently that I've actually figured that out.

That must have been like a really cool experience. It was a very cool experience, very surreal. And at the same time, I don't know if you've had the experience with your mom, but my parents are like, yeah, okay, this is cool. But like, you know, stick to medicine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even today, like, you know, my dad's always asking about,

how work was and stuff. I mean, they know I'm on a sabbatical now, but like, you know, like, oh, when you're going, when you're going back to the hospital, I'm not, I'm not going back straight away. I'm taking some time. I want to focus on these things first. You know, it's, it is kind of jarring every time I get that. Yeah. I mean, I've been having those conversations multiple times a week for the last like four years. So you're in good company here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's an Asian thing as well. You know, the status that's,

that's inherent in being a doctor in the community is very hard to be yeah i sometimes think about like i i think i wonder if it's less about the status and like my my theory on this is like you know with my mom for example she doesn't actually care about status and i'm sure your parents don't directly either but it's like in in their generation medicine and solid job is the path to the good life yeah where actually and for even people working in tech right

tech right now like it's such a different thing than it was in our parents generation yeah and so you know working at ibm and working away for 40 years and getting the company car and the health insurance and stuff was the path to the good life that is not the path to the good life anymore yeah and so i think our parents are probably still in that mindset where a solid job is actually the thing to optimize for because they have our own best interests out yeah absolutely and i think yeah you're right i don't i think it's like um they wouldn't label it as status yeah but it's

It's definitely connected to happiness, I guess, you know, because you've got stability and consistency and you're doing ultimately a good thing, you know, but not many vocations can really say that about their day to day. Do you get the sense that from your parents or from other people that you have left behind the noble thing of saving lives to be just another one of those influencers that writes cookbooks? Yeah.

in a small way, I think probably not as harsh as that. But yeah, I think there is an element of that. However, I've obviously done a lot of thinking around this in terms of what is the amount of effective altruism, I guess you could call it, that you can conjure up using your profession. And I think

On a one-to-one basis, it's a lot more literal and it's a lot more, it's tangible in that I'm having a direct impact on this person by giving them my time, prescribing, giving them a plan, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas when you're doing something across a screen, you don't really understand what the tangible impacts are.

And how do you measure that impact? One of the reasons why I'm starting in the tech world, because I want to be able to actually measure the impact that we're having tangibly on people's health using different metrics eventually. And unless you get those lovely,

and texts and voice notes from fans like, your recipes have really helped me out. This is my story. And I'm blessed to have had many of those. You don't really get that one-on-one connection. You don't get that like thank you card. So I think that's definitely one of the elements of it. But I...

my family and my parents are pretty understanding about the magnitude of the impact. And the reason why is because some of the friends have started benefiting from my content and they're calling them. It's like, yeah, I've done Ruby's stuff. And like, you know, my sugar levels are improved and like, you know, my cholesterol is down. I've lost weight. And like all our friends are losing weight. You know, there are tangible impacts that they're seeing. Like he hasn't met them. And isn't that amazing? The fact that you can have

an impact on people that you've never even met. Weird. Yeah. So if someone had told you kind of when you were doing GP training, for example, this was going to be how it would end up. Yeah.

Definitely not. I would have thought I would have left medicine along before I did any of this kind of stuff. Actually, I, when I was doing management, uh, I had a buddy of mine who actually left straight after doing F2 and worked for a bunch of biotech companies, San Fran now moved to New York and he's loving life. Um, and so I was amongst a community of people that were already thinking about what life was like after medicine. Um,

But yeah, no, I wouldn't have thought I would have been doing this when I was GP training. No way. There's definitely not. That wasn't that. It wasn't the intention to TV and programs and all that kind of jazz. So when you're getting kind of approached by a publisher like this to do a cookbook, what does that look like? Like what dream are they selling you? Yeah. So they're selling... So it was a one book deal, my initial book deal. They're selling...

positioning, when they're going to be launching, what the competitor titles are, what their aspirations are for the brand going forward, how they're investing in you in more than just one book, even though they're only giving you one book deal because they want to de-risk it to themselves.

but also the resources that they're throwing at you as well. So photography, prop stylists, copy editing, testing, all this different stuff. There's a whole army of people that never get really seen in the context

cookbook making process that costs a lot of money as well so it's it's no wonder people don't do more self-published professional cookbooks anyway loads of ebooks and that kind of stuff but yeah like

Why? It costs a lot. So... To my mind, it seems that Recipe, decent photos, long 85mm zoom lens, f1.4 sorted. Yeah, yeah. I guess there's more to it than that. There's a lot, yeah. So, I mean, even like where we're sitting right now, you know, we're surrounded by certain lights and cables and cameras and all that kind of stuff. We have...

on a cookbook shoot, you have not just a food stylist, but you have a prop stylist as well. A food stylist. You have a food stylist and a prop stylist and a sous chef and a camera person. And then their hand as well. You have all different types of angles that you shoot from. There's like a story to be told. And there are very subtle things that I only learned about when I actually went to the food shoot about how the whole book has a particular aesthetic to

And, you know, I used to think this is just like you said, like top down, you know, that's about it. But, you know, in the first couple of books, there were little edges, like little stylist elements that tell a story, the whole thing. On the book that you're looking through at the moment, I was very much trying to give the impression of simplicity. So that's why most of the recipes are top down.

And show you the indulgent aspects of eating. And also like, you know...

they they minimize the clutter so if you look at the the first couple of books there's loads of like soda water on the side and there's like scattering of parsley everywhere they've got like you know folded napkins i was like no i want i want to get rid of all that and i want to tell this kind of story so yeah that the persian style brown lanterns is sort of that's the the way i wanted the whole book to appear so yeah pointing at the camera and

That's like, this is so good. Yeah. It's weird because even that, that's a paper back, right? The hardbacks are more expensive and then they also have an image per recipe. This has got 80 images, I believe, whereas the hardbacks will have like, hopefully an image per recipe and that's like the dream. But that costs a lot because they've got to get printing costs. You've got to get paper costs. You've got to get all these different things. So everything kind of,

everything is like compounded into to one everything that goes into making that book is is super expensive okay so for example i'm just curious here so you've got this image yeah which is like this super sick looking sorry for people on the audio you should watch this on youtube yeah you'll you'll see that is is this like a real dish that you cooked or is it like a fake food or no no let's cook it or like yeah no so so when you see like uh i

image of like an M&S chocolate cake or a McDonald's a lot of that is staged a lot of that is fake everything that we've shot in all the books is always real it's cooked there I oversee everything like do you cook it yourself or do you no no no I don't cook anything yeah there's like professional cooks cooking because they have to be like an assembly line because we're doing like sometimes eight nine recipes in a day okay and you

you know, they're like professional chefs. And they're following your recipe. They're following my recipe to the state. No, I'm not on my bedroom. To the, to the, like the, the detail they're following every single recipe. And, and,

What people don't realize is that I'm so busy, like involved in like how it's being shot and looking at the draft image and like maybe getting my hand in there or something like that. The food's being cooked at the same time. So this is literally like an assembly line. And it happens over the course of about a week as well. So these things are like,

And I guess they're also like testing the recipes to make sure that it's actually one tablespoon of olive oil rather than 18 or whatever. Yeah. So usually ideally what should happen is you create the recipes and then I work with a recipe tester who then tests all the recipes. And then they go back to me and I review the changes and make sure, you know, they're in line with my nutrition principles and all the rest of it.

What we've done on the next book actually, which I haven't talked about yet is we actually crowdsourced loads of recipe testers from my newsletter list. So I went to, I looked at on MailChimp, you can look at your like most engaged subscribers. So I looked at my most engaged subscribers and there were about 10,000 people who open it like, you know, more than four or five times in the last like three months, let's say. So engaged subscriber. And so I sent an email out to them saying, look,

I need some foodie testers. Here's a Google form. If you're interested, then fill out this form and then we'll send you a single recipe for you to test in your own time. You fill out a questionnaire, you take images of it. We might use the images in the back of the book to, you know, make a nice collage and stuff. And your name is worth, you want to be in the acknowledgements. And we got something like 1500 responses to that. Nice. Yeah. And then we ended up sending, so...

So we also had to take their dietries as well. So you can imagine this is an organizational nightmare. So we got all the dietries. We had to match all the hundred recipes that I'd created and also gone through the tests and then give each recipe to specific people based on their dietries and needs and likes and dislikes.

And then they feel like that. And then I read over 900 responses in a big Excel form of all the pain points, all the issues that they might've had, all their feedback rating, would they make this recipe again? All these questions. And that's going to go into the next book. Um, so each recipe has been tested in a real actual kitchen 10 times. Wow.

And from all over the world, dude. We had people from like Nepal, Australia, rural France, Canada, America, like everywhere. Like people, because obviously the newsletter is, you know, they get it everywhere. So yeah, it was insane. Amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. What, so...

I'm not sure if you're allowed to share your own numbers, but like what are the economics generally of cookbook publishing? What sort of ballpark advances do people get? Like how much they sell for? What are the royalties like? I'm very curious to understand what this process is. Yeah, yeah. So I'll give an example of my first book. And I don't usually talk about this stuff, so I'm happy to talk candidly about it. So the ballpark for advances for cookbooks range anywhere between...

20 grand to over 200 250 grand wow um it can be huge for my first book i i got a really good offer it was 75 grand considering that's not much social media following really good yeah not much social media following no traction and book

books, nothing like that. And was that like international or just UK or what was that? It was a worldwide. Okay. Yeah. So worldwide rights. So for people listening, you know, uh, that you can separate the markets into UK and Australasia and, uh, America and Europe and all that kind of stuff. So there's worldwide rights.

And then also you can separate it further out into like TV rights as well. So whether they have TV rights as well. So let's say that someone picked up the doctor's kitchen and then turned it into a TV show that was tied to the book, very much like what Jamie Oliver does or Nigella, you know, are those going to be separate? Do you have a royalty bonus when you get a TV show? And that, that bonus, I, I'm not actually too sure. It could be probably in the tens of thousands, if not more.

And then there's a royalty share as well. And so that can be like 10%, but that depends on a threshold and that threshold can be up and down. My threshold was super high. It was like 80,000 copies. And so mine hasn't started paying until like,

from the first book until like two years ago because we've since sold over 100 000 copies of book one but you know obviously the 80 000 threshold was super high so they're like de-risking it to themselves because creating a book like that costs like a ton of money um wow so yeah that's that's the basic economics of of a cookbook so so the so the idea is that um

So you would get the advance and then you earn out of the advance through royalty payments. And then at some point you start getting royalty checks once you've earned out your advance. Exactly. And it sounds like you've now earned out your advance. Yeah. So you get quarterly royalty checks? Yeah, I'll get quarterly royalty checks from Harper. Okay. And yeah, the funny thing is I've since become BAT registered and I want to go into the business and that's the whole thing. But yeah, that's basically how it works. Nice. And so is it a sustainable full-time living to be a cookbook author?

Very broad question. Yeah, very important question. It depends on what your standard of living is. Okay. So I think if you're the kind of person that can churn out and has the opportunity to churn out a cookbook a year and can... Yeah, it's a lot of work. And...

can demonstrate sales of a cookbook a year, then yes, I think it could be if you're happy with something around 60K a year, let's say. Wow. Yeah. That's...

tiny compared to what i yeah so you're saying every year yeah make make a cookbook from scratch and demonstrate the ability to sell it yeah are we talking like hundreds of copies thousands of copies tens of thousands like oh i would say like a good uh a good performing cookbook would be 30 to 40 000 copies yeah i would say that oh shit yeah yeah it's a lot a lot and so it's

It's no wonder you see the same chefs in the sort of top sellers list, right? You have great chefs, Jamie, Nigella, Nadia, Hussein, Rick Stein. These are really tried and tested chefs that people love and adore. And so breaking into that market is very hard. So if you look at what Joe Ricks has done or who are the slimming, the two people who slimming?

pinch of nom they've done phenomenally well they sold hundreds of that if not millions of books you've got rookmanee uh aya who sold the roasting to another really good oh you would love that that's a great book yeah it's sick yeah a friend gave it to me as a gift he was like rookmanee's books are fantastic she sold over a million copies across her series of books and they're with good reason they're amazing she was actually on my bbc show uh as well um

Yeah, if you can get... There's only a few people who actually go into that level of scale. Most people do a cookbook and then they'll never do another one because they either didn't sell as much or it just didn't work out for them. So even... Is just the publishing business enough to be a full-time living? No, no. You need to do side hustling things as well. Oh yeah, all the... I think like having a cookbook is...

a really nice business card because it allows you to do other things like, you know, you get to do a bit of TV shows, you do some of the live cooking events. It has opened the doors for me doing like

collaborations with catering companies where I designed a lot of the menus for buildings across the UK. So I've got a collaboration with a company called Gather and Gather, and they do all the professional catering for over 200 buildings in the UK, including like Sky, Lloyd's, TSB, Vodafone. So they've got big, big kitchens.

And they have my recipes like every single week that I've designed quarterly for them that are like, you know, nutritionally balanced and they have the story and all the rest of it. And I'll do some like corporate speaking events for them as well. So I think it's a really good business card to get your foot in the door and it demonstrates a bit of authority. But if you can demonstrate like sales of like more than 40, 50, 60,000, that gets you a lot more, I believe. Okay.

Okay. So I guess like, yeah, this is similar to like, I've spoken to a bunch of other like nonfiction authors, like generally nonfiction self-help slash business authors who are like,

Yeah, it's really hard to survive just off the back of royalties and advances from books unless you are a James Clear or a Mark Manson who sold a million copies plus. And at that point, you're in the sort of upper echelons. Exactly. But kind of until that point, you still need to hustle and do courses and corporate speaking and this, that and the other. Totally, yeah. It sounds like it's similar in the food genre. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And people like...

again, have this idea of like, oh, he's got a cookbook and he's a Sunday Times bestseller and like he gets to go on TV and stuff and they equate that with wealth. Yeah, like in my head, you're making millions without doing anything because it's all passive income from the book sales. No. But presumably I'm a little bit off with that. No, no, you're off with that, massively off. But I think what it's allowed me to do is build a foundation, a trustworthy foundation to...

Jump off into loads of other activities that actually I really want to do like I love doing books don't be wrong I love the feel of cookbooks myself and the whole process and like that week is amazing and you know We're about to do like a photo shoot with one of Jamie Oliver's Photographers and stuff so like the opportunity that cookbooks has given me is amazing And I know they're being used you can like read the Amazon reviews and stuff people love them but

it's not a sustainable income unless you're willing to, you know, live on quite a, well, I wouldn't say it's a small salary, but it's like, you know,

With everything else that you have to do to maintain this brand, it goes very, very quickly. And I haven't even talked about agency fees as well, because that full advance is cut by... Like 20%, 15%. Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah. It's like industry standard. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So let's say I wanted to make a cookbook. Yeah. And I get a deal for making a cookbook.

and, and then let's say I'm, you know, they're like, Oh, Ali's kitchen, the cookbook is, is on Saturday kitchen. Yeah. Whatever the show is called. Yeah. Would they pay me for appearing on Saturday kitchen? Uh,

uh so how does that work so if you're doing a appearance so i've done appearances in like this morning and a few other so when you're doing an appearance they don't pay you for a guest contributor but if you are being a guest contributor i mean it's minimal it's like 200 400 pounds something like that to just appear um and you think about the logistics of it you know it's like quite a few hours of your time it's like half a day um so you know all that stuff it

It doesn't really make ends meet unless you're going there and you're promoting your book. You know, when I did like a this morning promotion, I think for the first time, we must have sold like three or 4,000 books in like half a day just by appearing. That's interesting. Yeah. Because like in the sort of business non-self-help genre-

terrestrial TV is pointless and it's all about podcast appearances. Yeah. And I guess in the cooking genre, that's actually an area in which people do translate and convert into sales. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it depends on the audience. So like what I, same thing when I did Saturday kitchen again, it went straight to number one on Amazon because that's a book buying audience. They're super engaged. They see the recipes, they immediately go and buy it. Whereas if you're listening to me on a podcast, I,

unless you're like, unless I've described so beautifully the recipes that you can make from my book, it's not really going to translate into something. Whereas if you were to do a thing about how you sort of, how to build a part-time brand while being a doctor and stuff, and you tell the story of that on a podcast, some people, the podcast listeners are like, oh, hello, that's interesting. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The number of like business books that I've bought immediately on Audible or something, like, you know, after listening to what I pause that, or like I listened to My First Million quite a bit. Oh, good, I love it.

I love that podcast. But I've actually had to take a break from it because... Too consistent. Too many episodes. Too consistent. I can't listen to these 100 episodes. I know. Yeah, totally. I started listening to the backlog over Christmas because I ran out. But actually, what I've realized is because they give so many ideas, it's actually detracting from what I need to focus on right now, which is the business and my side hustle. Yeah.

or hustle or whatever you want to call it. And so I've actually had to take a break from my first million because it's just too much content, but multiple times I've listened to that. And like Sam pars, like name check, Robert green, obviously, you know, 48 pounds or 50 pounds or whatever it's called. Um,

And a whole bunch of other books I've paused and that clicked. I'm like one click by. Yeah, I've definitely got that more audible. Yeah. I find with podcasts, it's almost like peaks and troughs. So like, for example, in 2019, I was listening to hundreds of podcasts that year, especially while I was traveling back and forth an hour each way to work. Yeah. And then it was like all of those ideas from the podcasts.

In a way, then there was a two-year period of putting them into practice. And now I'm getting back into podcasts in the last week. So I've been listening to my first million and a couple of episodes of Two Parents, having not heard a podcast for like a year or two at this point. Wow, a year? Yeah. I went completely off podcasts as the business was growing and as I was like, actually, business audiobooks are the thing I need in my life right now. Whereas now with the podcast, I find that the conversational is really great and you get a lot of ideas. But when you're in execution mode,

need to be executing and learning about the specific thing. And then is it sort of like divergence and convergence? Yeah. Like divergence of ideas that you get from podcasts and then convergence when you're like, right, this is my angle. I know I'm making an app. I'm going to listen to all of the audio books around how to build an app and how to scale a tech startup. Yeah. That's a, that's a really good point. That's basically the situation that I'm in. And in fact, the last audio book I read, I listened to was, uh, inspired, uh,

And that's basically all about product teams and what the structure of that looks like. Because as a non-tech founder, I need to know what does an engineer do? What does the designers do? How do you create a coherent system such that you can actually scale a company and know who you're hiring as well? So yeah, taking a break from podcasts has actually been pretty good for me because I was an avid podcaster. I still sort of am, but I will come back to it at some point. Why the app?

- Why the app? - What is the deal with the app? I've just downloaded the app and I'm gonna stop following the recipes on the app, but what's the rationale there? - So I've wanted to do an app for years, right? So ever since I, two years ago, brought in a bunch of followers to investigate what the barriers to healthy eating were for them, I had this idea of creating an application or a web-based platform where I could teach people how to cook well every single day and keep them on the straight and narrow.

And that has kind of morphed into a recipe planning app that you can download on your phone and links with supermarkets. So you can actually order the ingredients with one click. Yeah. You can't do that right now. Okay. One day. But that's sort of the product roadmap. Okay. And I've got a whole bunch of other ideas as well that I'll chat about very, very briefly. But

The app has been in the back of my mind the whole time because I really wanted to create the headspace for healthy eating and really enable the brand to span beyond what I can do in the UK and actually have an impact going forward. And so, yeah, the process of building it has been crazy because

we're not just another recipe app we enable people to filter the recipes according to health goals and so me and the research team look through a whole bunch of research and you can find out our process for refining all this research on the website and we look at the dietary patterns and the ingredients that align with things like skin health mental health in terms of nutritional psychiatry brain health like a whole bunch of different health goals

and even inflammation using the dietary inflammatory index as well.

And then you're allowed to filter according to your dietary preferences, as well as your allergens and intolerances and dislikes. And then you get a library of all these different ingredients such that you don't have to think about what you need to do with the Brussels sprouts that you see in Tesco's or whatever. You have loads of ideas with step-by-step images of everything so you can cook well every day. The product roadmap is really to create something like a Spotify playlist that delivers you ingredients

delivers you recipes that actually you want to intuitively cook based on your preferences and what you've liked before. And then also that one click ability to get the ingredients. But also I think in the future, which is what I think I described on this podcast, I can't remember is the other one that we recorded, but basically where you have ghost kitchens creating the recipes for you and delivering it such as nutritionally balanced for you. We also want to have wearables indicating what you should be eating as well based on things like

or ring data, exercise data, continuous glucose monitoring data, microbiota data as well. So that's all the stuff in the future, but we're starting with a very simple recipe app, which is the doctor's kitchen app. You can get on a Apple store and it's just an Apple store at the moment because

I'm bootstrapping it. And that, I mean, that is a whole podcast in itself, I guess, in terms of like how you fund everything, because everything that I've channeled from the books that led to the podcast, that's led to corporate speaking events, all that has been channeled into creating this app. So I'm basically channeling,

putting everything on red. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I think definitely in that part too, I want to explore the economics of building an app and what it's like building out the product team, what it's like outsourcing stuff, what it's like working with agencies. I think that's so interesting. I think a lot of people have this dream of like, oh, I'd like to build an app someday. And I get so many medics that come to me and be like,

hey, you know, I really want to build an app. And I'm always like, oh, are you sure about that? Yeah, yeah. And especially like non-technical founders. Oh, it's fine. I can come up with the idea. I can do the mock-ups. I'll just hire someone and be like, hey, how much does it even cost to hire someone? Is it a lot of money? But like, what? Surely it's, you know, a few thousand dollars I can hire someone in Bangladesh. Like,

Have you ever tried? It's not that easy. All this stuff around building an app that I'm sure you're now familiar with. Totally, yeah. And if you skimp out on the cost as well, it'll come back to bite you as well. So I learned that and then, yeah. There's a whole podcast episode. I'd love to hear your opinions on that as well. As a non-tech founder, I'm learning a lot of things the hard way, but I feel like I'm going along this educational process where I could perhaps teach other people as well. Have you heard the hard thing about hard things?

No. Oh, amazing audiobook. It's by Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz. Oh, yes, Ben Horowitz. Yeah, which is all about the struggles of building a tech company. It's sick. Definitely something that I need to listen to. So the E-Myth Revisited will change your life. Hard thing about hard things is quite nice. It won't change your life. Are you thinking of hiring any people full-time recently in the near future? Yeah, yeah, very much so. Okay.

I have tons of recommendations. Okay, cool. It's going to be great. And I'll introduce my business coach as well. Yeah. If there's a good fit. Definitely, man. I feel like this has been like a business therapy session. It's brilliant. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on. My pleasure, man. We're going to do a collab where you're going to teach me healthy weeknight meals. 100%. Download the app. The app is safe. We'll put links to the books, the apps. And thank you for gifting us

this little lovely doctor's kitchen 321 book and yeah it's been great having you on appreciate it man yeah my pleasure all right so that's it for this week's episode of deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the itunes store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full hd or 4k on youtube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that

That'd be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.