When

you have these moments in your office where you look at the birds, how long do you do it for?

It'd be 15 minutes. And every day? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Several times a day? No, just when it feels like. And I often, I play music a lot. I play music every morning in the office, which I blast on speakers across the executive floor. What do you play?

Whatever.

I walk to work part of the way every morning and part of the way home. And it's whatever I feel coming in.

Like classical or rock and roll?

All. I mean, the day we're announcing, I was stepping down as CEO as a sort of a pun, a joke on myself. I played, I think it was Amy Winehouse's, you know, I forget the exact title, You're Not So Good or You're No Good. a way you know just a reminder and then I played uh Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass uh which is fabulous you know horns and trumpets uh Tijuana taxi very uplifting and then I played um a song by uh the band uh Fun because I thought what you know I'm gonna pick and it was Carry On so it's kind of like firstly a little humbling followed by a very uplifting song that we actually played at my father's funeral uh this tijuana brass followed by carry on move forward so it's so it can be opera um i played some jazz uh last week um i'll play anything hip-hop, some Australian

music, you know. This processing of the stress in the organization and kind of, I mean, you internalize it in a way on behalf of the organization. Was that mainly during the financial crisis or is it all from other? Because I had to puke sometimes during the financial crisis too. very very tough yeah do you think people underestimate the stress of having these positions oh

yeah they don't people have no idea and it's not their fault i had no idea yeah because the analogy i've used a few times when i was a kid growing up in australia we'd go to the beach every summer for three weeks. And it was fantastic. And I remember standing there once and asking my dad, why do the waves never stop? And he started explaining, title is an engineer. And I realized the job was like the waves always coming at you. They never stop because it's global and, you know, it's 24 hours, seven days. The only time business really stops for me is from sort of noon Saturday to noon Sunday because pretty much everywhere around the world is closed in that time frame. And what do you do then? Well, I swim a lot. I play golf. I used to play a lot of tennis. I row on my rowing machine. I read books. I see friends. I go out to dinners. I'm not a sort of New York socialite personality, but I occasionally have to go and do stuff like that. But pretty low key. I mean, a lot of walking, a lot of hiking and just pretty out in nature. But the way to stop the ocean, you can never stop the ocean. So the way to stop the ocean constantly being at you is to turn your back to it.

If

you stand there watching the ocean coming in and feel this is endless, then physically turn around so you can't see it anymore. You can see a field. Changes your mindset. It calms you. And that was my metaphor for how I had to treat this job. I had to be able to turn my back to it. In other words, shut off my mind. And I have a little pond at the back of my beach house, which has different birds at different times of year come and make it their home. And right now we have a family of swans. Oh,

beautiful.

With about 17 ducks are also on the pond. And it is absolutely glorious to get up in the morning, open the big curtain from my bedroom, which looks over the pond and see these elegant swans floating around. And that's me turning my back on work. I'm not looking at emails.