Today I'm going to talk with the Happy Pair. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long-chef? That is the question on this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Row Man Podcast. I kind of wish we had a press record like 60 seconds ago when the lads were fumbling around with the loyce trying to make themselves look handsome. Make us look like a big deal after me. Lads use our big deal, yes our big deal. Uh, let's I want to join. Let's see if there's a lamp in case you're wondering. And you can actually, the lads are selling this home setup. They have as well where they will come into your house and design your Zoom studio to the same level of professionalism. That's it. Let's, let's join you back to all those years ago. When the idea of a veg shop popped into your head, Talk us back to start a pre-ambulted up because you were very different people back then. Yeah, so you don't need to. Okay, cool. Like we grew up in a little bit of a time called Greystone. Some of you might be familiar. Some of you may not. And we grew up playing a lot of sport we're two identical twins. Busy lives, love sport, love, you know, as we became teenagers and kind of into the late teenagers, loved getting pissed, chasing women, went to an old boys school, load a rugby. That was kind of happening. Went to, weren't really sure what we were interested in beyond getting drunk and chasing women. So it was like, let's go to college. Great. What do we study? No idea. Business. Great. Do you want to open up media degrees in business and then then... And then, right at the end of the line, game was just going to be more women than college than there is in old boys school. I had the same experience myself as well. Yeah, and I think part of it, like we grew up in a family of four boys, all our family was always we went to all boys school, we played rugby, played a lot of men. So it was very macho. So excuse the one side it's slant on it all, but the plot does change. And when we were in college, we were kind of sold the idea of the American dream that money makes you happy and materialism is if you want true. And I think being highly competitive males, you know, that it's excelled in sports, obviously the new sport was business. We're going to be millionaires, Steve, we're going to be billionaires. This is it. And then at the end of college, we both didn't, we both felt like an emptiness or something. We didn't really believe it. And Steve says, right, Dave, I'm going away. You can't come with me. I'm going away traveling and I'm not coming back until I'm happy. Anyone off to Canada to go obvious, no board and structure amongst many of them. Well, I just went on a journey and didn't know where I was going to go and just wanted to take it day by day and explore the facets of life and look beyond my own social conditioning and see where I have some more meaning. What's the talk you become an investment partner at one point? Yeah, yeah, I remember when I finished college I was thinking, maybe I'd be an investment bank because I'd make a million before I'm 30 easier and then I can go if you want to be interested. Whereas it was on this journey kind of, you can retrospectively entitle the journey of self discovery. So when kind of experimenting like from tree planting to northern Canada where we where we get a helicopter to work with Christians to hitchhike and den around Nevada, going to Burning Man 20 years ago to stay in unpolly amorous communities, to meditations, et cetera, to whatever, just exploring the multi-fast sort of, I guess, ideas around life and to see where I fit and where I thought most happiest. And at the same time, I'd gone off to say, Africa to go be a golf pro. Yeah, you were a scratch golfer. Yes, we were really into golf as well. And then I'd played back for a few months and then realized, geez, it's really lonely. Like, there must be more again. So I've been like, Steve, I went to off on this quest, in a sense, to find more meaning. And then one day back in 2003, Steve Cousins says, I got this idea. Do I like start a health revolution?
Because we both gone from, as Dean said, meathead jocks, like hot blooded jocks that were all into drinking beer, eating burgers, dips, points, and really that classical jock. And then we came back, like, through that journey, we ended up becoming vegan and giving up alcohol, getting into yoga and meditation. And like, you know, we had a huge change in how we were our behaviors. And then Steve calls me up and he says, do you wanna like start this vegetable shop? And we left us these jocks that were doing modeling and we were quintessential, you know, yeah, quintessential kind of Donnie Brooke jocks come with Whitlow, like North Whitlow. And then we came back because these long hair tippy vegans that were 24 year olds that were starting a vegetable shop that had a ban and a smell to cabbage, and people thought we were selling drugs in the back, because we were such stinking. They're just so happy with our vegetables. Yeah, and it was such an ironic kind of thing because people from our small town thought, oh, the labs there, they're really going to race, as they went to college, and they're really good at sport. And then here we were, we came back and we started the vegetable shop, and it really didn't fit with the previous idea of what we should be looking at. We're just starting seeing yourself differently, because this is something that we talk about to athletes all the time. If you see it all the time, you're a lingo programming where people try and lose weight or they try and quit smoke and you probably have a friend who's tried to quit smoke and say, oh, I've tried to quit. But you know what they say, he wants a smoker, always a smoker, and his identity is still a smoker. So we work really hard with athletes to try and get them to see themselves as an athlete because you've got certain habits where in your and athletes. You don't sit around pounding Doritos and drinking beer all day. You're thinking about the next session. How did you make that shift from thinking about yourselves as the Gordon Gekko of Greystones to this sort of hippie free loving the journey from materialism to spirituality. I think it's something that's always there. It was just I guess we were too busy caught up in our the life that we were told and we told that we had to live. And it was only as identical twins as as we separate and put ourselves in different environments that it gave us the opportunity to question, and kind of understand, who do I want to be now that I'm not an identical twin, and I'm not like, it's like, maybe I'll be a hippie for a while and see if that's like, maybe I'll be like, as soon as into like vegetables. I bought a drum up one stage as I taught. Maybe I want to be one of those people that go around more than gem base, and then you realize, I'm not that person. And then whatever way, I think over time, your perspective, maybe I was just gonna say that most people's life has an inertia, that you are a certain person because of all the people around you see that see you as this person and they validate, oh yes, you are such and such a person and it's only when you get to go away for a couple of years or period of time and you can reflect on who you, who genuinely you feel like you are in this moment and then when you come back, you can actually re-friend and re-establish new relationships. And when we did come back, we obviously, all our old friends really didn't wanna be friends with us anymore because we used to go drink and go to the pub and go play rugby, whereas we came back and here we were, we wanted to swim in the sea and do yoga and talk about lentils. And they were really went in for a little way to find new friends completely. And that makes it easy in a sense that you're almost like starting again. Did you have a vision for this whole thing? I suppose for some of our American viewers or our former viewers, the 10 people in the world that don't actually know who you two lads are. The lads look like scruffy de-sheveled hippies, but I can't even keep track of what you wise are up to these days. There's cafes popping up all over the place, super-valuing misses us bringing home a happy pair of dinners, there's cookbooks, there's TV shows, there's Jamie Oliver collaborations. Did you have a vision starting out or is this like we need to figure out how to make a few quid to pay the rent selling vegetables?
And I just think it's so part of everything. We've embraced it and haven't maybe when you start your own business, you realize you become an expert problem solver because there's just so many problems and so many failures on a daily basis that you're you become so used to failure, you're much more useful failure than success. I know the people mistakenly might think you're, geez, you're successful. And it's like, no, I'm just a bit of an expert with failure. And that's the reality of it. I'm really comfortable with failure. I don't get upset with failure because it happens day in and day out. And you know, that's like, I thought it was nice when this might be very cliche, but the whole idea that a failure is only a failure when you forget to reflect and learn from it. Because ultimately a failure is it's life's lesson to teach you just how to recalibrate. And with the recalibration, you have that learned experience and suddenly you make success. And success is only the bit there, the compounding of all these failures. And I always loved Thomas Edison's one I think it was that he took him, Xtempts to reach the light bulb and he said well I didn't see one of them as failures. I saw each one of them as a step in the journey to getting the light bulb and I think that perspective is very different, a bit like the person who cycles the Tour de France in the world record time. They didn't do it the first time it took them 20 years of consistent hard work to get to this result. And there's been, like as Michael Jordan's, you know, I think if you saw his documentary, which seems credible, and he talks about that, you know, people think that he made so many shots, but he says I miss way more times than I made, because just people, you know, seem to remember that thing. And YouTube boys were a leprechaun of Pop-led rugby, and you're still super at Lelek-Joshen from your social and on your crazy handstands. You're still well able to hand yourself. What sort of an edge has the vegan lifestyle given you? Or why are you such a strong proponent to it? I was actually vegan for a year. I raced pro cycling for years of vegan. Yeah, so are there many pro cyclists as vegans? There is quite a few, yeah, it's getting more and more popular. Yeah, well, I think from a sporting perspective, the holy grail of athletic performance has been able to recover quicker because then you can train more and keep training the muscles and conditioning the muscles and what's essential to that is having more oxygen in your bloodstream. And a plant-based diet is like it's so full of water like it's 80 to 90 percent water, water H2O, it's really high in oxygen. So it's really enhancing your capacity to recover which is obviously optimal for any kind of athletic performance. So from that perspective, it really is beneficial. And also it's like most people nine out of 10 people don't get enough fiber and the fiber you only get fruit and veg and 70% immune system comes from your your gush which which all your macromech cereal live on fiber because steamed ones to say something and no I was just gonna say like we've learned to long white like out that our main message isn't about kind of encouraging people to be vegan or vegetarian it's to get people to eat more whole foods. So it's like I could eat a vegan diet and eat dark chocolate french fries and add a vegan, yay! But in terms of my own personal health, the main thing is to eat whole foods. So the distinction between whole foods and refined foods, for those who don't know, whole foods being like unrefined foods that you find in nature. That's a whole food such as lentils, nuts, seeds, beans, legumes, fruit vegetables, but refined food might be croissants, coffee, white breads, whatever, etc. So it's just to try to get the majority of the calories whole food because if you look at the Blue Zones where there are five areas in the planet. Both the Blue Zones talk about loads on this. Yeah, so 95% of their diet is whole food but they're not necessarily vegan or vegetarian. So I think it's to move beyond the titles in the sense of the duality of you're a vegan and you're not a vegan and I'm a holy vegan and you're just a stupid vegan. I think it's more about we're all trying to do our best. We're all going to die one day and I think research is pretty clear that the more health foods you can eat, the more beneficial it is to your health.
But it's not an older nothing thing. Yeah, and that's good. I think it's nice to move away from that almost like a religious fundamentalism around vegan. I raced in the US for years of vegan, but I wasn't a vegan for any sort of moral or ethical objection. I was looking to minimize inflammation and trying to prove recovery. So if I went to a friend's barbecue, like I'd have a steak or I'd have a burger to a very odd time. But like you'd be abused like I taught you were a vegan. I was like whatever I want to be like you don't have to put me in a narrow little box so you know how to describe me and know how to interact with me. Yeah I think that's so true and that's I think people love you know we all love putting people in boxes and that's the thing in terms of diets that it's become quite religious so I think it's about as you very well said that it's just giving yourself the freedom to eat what you feel like. Obviously, as Dean said, the more whole foods you can eat, the better. Let's finish up on this one, because I know when I'm thinking YouTube lads, I don't really think of two lads who are vegan. I'm more think of as cliche, it is two humans who are very well connected to their surroundings, are very mindful of food, their putting in activity, connection to the land, and morning routine seem to be big in the happy prayer world. Talk to us about that morning routine and the importance you'll add to place on it. Yeah, so I guess we for years have had a very strong morning routine and part of it is swimming in the sea at sunrise, which sounds stupid. Like we never planned to be daily sea swimmers. Oh, actually I had Clara Walsh on the summit yesterday and she was asking after you guys. Oh, she's brilliant. She's in Egypt at the mountain today. Yeah. I don't know. I'm so... But yeah, for the last six years we've swam every morning at sunrise all year round and it sounds like a crazy thing to do but it's something so primal of getting into the sea, this embracing this cold sea at sunrise. We literally see the sunrise when it actually isn't a cloudy but it connects with the elements, with the seasons, with the air temperature. Like it's an incredible thing. Yeah, we do with a bunch of people so that's an incredible thing. And then obviously most mornings we will try and do yoga, we'll do ham stands, we'll go for a run, we'll meditate, we do, well, you know, we try all sorts of different things. But I think the bit that makes it most sustainable for us is the sense of community around it, that we become the combination of the people that we spend most time with. And I guess in modern day society, we're becoming more kind of needing connection more than ever because it's something that the digital A's, we kind of think it's the exact same, Whereas you can't beat the face-to-face connection, the ability to chat, to laugh, to share a problem. Just to, so as much as our morning routine is exercise, swimming, and training, and that's everything. It's all in a group, like with training, there might be five or 10 of us, depending on if Chrome is happening or not. But pre-coron, there was always a bunch of us with training in the morning, we'd meditate, and then you go to the beach, and it could be 10 to 50 or to 100 people, and you're interacting, you're meeting people, And by the time the day started at nine o'clock or eight o'clock, eight thirty, you know, you've had like a party near you, you've just had your full up, you've trained, you've swam the sea, you've had so much social interactions that any else that happens to the bonus. I go back to bed after. You feel like they're born, you know. And I think the richest part is the humans. I think you touched on the blue zones already, but that's another one of the commonalities in the blue zones. It's that social connection and sense of just connectedness among people. like you touched on the digital edge there like we've you know 15,000 or you lots I don't know there are a million followers but still some people are very lonely despite all those followers they have especially in COVID here. Yeah yeah I can see more important there and I guess this like I think it comes back to if people are feeling lonely I think the first thing is to start saying a lot here like you know I think the very first thing is acknowledging that the most basic need that we have as humans is our physiological need the most basic one is to connect with the humans.