Justin: Hi, David. Thanks for joining me. Very gracious of you to be here on your own show.

David: Hello, there. Thanks for having me.

Justin: Oh, absolutely. So let’s start with the big milestone: ten years of Lexicon? Yeah. Crazy. Your baby is growing up. What are you most proud of when you look back at the journey so far?

David: So ten years, it’s gone in the blink of an eye to be honest. It’s hard to even think about the things that have happened, right. COVID happened right in the middle of that, for example. So just being here after ten years is the number one achievement. Most companies don’t last that long. Most startups fail in the first year. So getting to ten years in a decent position, that’s the proudest thing, first of all.

Second is what we’ve built. We’ve cultivated a great team. We’re here in the studio that we built with a team that we have. Heyo, I’m very proud of that. You know, I don’t have kids. So this is like my family almost. So I’m proud to see them thrive.

Obviously on top of that, the work we do for our clients. We’re genuinely partners for our clients, and we’ve seen them have successes and grow as a direct result of the work that we do. So I’m always delighted when they have success and when we do great work for them, and when they’re able to turn that into business. We’ve won a few awards along the way, which.

Justin: Yeah, mostly you winning Expat Entrepreneur of the Year twice.

David: Yeah, but it’s nice to get some external recognition.

Justin: We did win Best Small Business last year at TIBA.

David: We did indeed. And honestly, one of the things I’m most proud of is your development, young Justin.

Justin: Oh, well. Okay. I didn’t know this was coming. And now I’m gonna get very embarrassed, but go ahead. Please, please do tell everyone how amazing I am.

David: It’s been great to see, you know, you came in here six years ago-ish. Yeah, exactly. And each year you’ve been given more responsibilities and more challenges, and you’ve always thrived and developed on top of that. So yeah, it’s great to see you where you are today as our Creative Director, running the team, delighting clients. So, great work.

Justin: Oh well thank you. It’s been a long, exciting journey. Really, when I started out we were mainly… you’ll probably get into this later, but we were mostly a writing company, so I was a copywriter doing, you know, 10,000 words a week about sit-stand desks and L pipes and motorcycle engines. So now, being the Creative Director, working very closely with our key clients on their marketing strategy and the implementation of that, overseeing the talented team that we have here, it’s been quite a journey.

And I’ll echo what you say, I’m very proud to work at Lexicon when I see the fantastic work that we do, in particular the stuff that the video guys do. OhmJay behind the camera right now, when I see his videos, I go, that’s right, my fingerprints are on that. Okay, that was more of a comment from me, but yeah, ten years.

David: Following up on that, though, I think also the the evolution of the service line too, because the industry marketing, digital changes all the time. In the last ten years, ten new platforms have come out, all sorts of different technologies. And we’ve been lucky or fortunate or whatever.

Justin: Probably a bit of both.

David: To be able to ride every wave and to be where we are now. We’ve evolved a long way from just a writing company to a storytelling company, which obviously is the core of writing, but we’ve been able to turn that kind of core idea of what storytelling means to its full extent. So when you’re managing a branding campaign or a website or a video production or an animation, it really is storytelling at its purest form.

So yeah, I’m proud of the evolution of the company as a whole, and I’m proud of the luck that we’ve had, I guess.

Justin: Yeah. Well, I mean, you mentioned the kind of surfing analogy we’ve managed to ride the waves instead of being engulfed by them, but obviously it hasn’t been smooth surfing the entire way. I can certainly attest to that. I mean, obviously every business faces challenges. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the biggest hurdles that Lexicon had to overcome and how we got through these challenges?

David: Sure. Well, I think if you were to just explain the details of the company, we would face the same challenges as any company would. I founded it on my own without any experience of running a company, very much writing, creative without the operational side of things.

So if you just say any company that has that, you can almost predict what problems come next. We were very lucky again early on because as we got started, Facebook for Business was very new and LinkedIn marketing was very new.

Justin: That’s funny to think that LinkedIn was new when you started the business.

David: Yeah. So no one was an expert in it. So immediately, we went from 0 to 100 because we were almost the only game in town. As a result, we grew really quickly, which is a poison pill basically because we kept adding services and we kept developing our service lines, employing people, but we really didn’t have the processes in place to be a 50-people company.

So growing too quickly, making bad hires, and not having the right operational processes in place in the first five years, probably. These are the biggest mistakes that I made. Or these were the biggest hurdles to overcome. We overcame them, but my god, it was a steep learning curve.

Justin: Okay, should we break down these into individual pieces like you talked about bad hires. Maybe give us a little bit more dirt on that.

David: Yeah. So I had never hired, I had hired at KPMG, but as part of a collective with the HR department and all these other checks and balances and reference checks.

Processes. Processes, yeah. But once I started hiring people, it was kind of instinct plus what I could see. So I made, and especially expat hires, to be honest. I hired a lot of terrible expats. I admit that now, because maybe competence early on, I couldn’t really determine exactly what competence looked like.

Justin: Yeah, fluent English does not necessarily equal competence, hard work, diligence, all these things.

David: Exactly. A well written resume a charming personality. And I kind of had this naive perspective that, oh, I kind of came from that kind of area, so that means they’ll be like me. That means they’ll work hard, that means they’ll make effort.

But my god, we had some of the biggest jokers you could ever imagine at the company for a few years. I mentioned it before, but like looking at your project management tool every day, it’s like you’ve got hundreds of tasks to do across the month, and you handle it like a champ. You get it done.

Justin: Sometimes a little bit of complaining, I’ll be honest, but I get through it.

David: I had this one guy and he had like seven tasks to do in that week, so it’d be like a 500-word press release, maybe like 200-word SEO writing or whatever.

Justin: And that’s a tough week. One task per day.

David: One task per day, yeah. And he was like, oh my god, I can’t handle seven tasks at the same time. It’s like bro, you have 40 hours. This is not a freelance job. You’re getting paid for the whole month.

So stuff like that. There was a lot of things. And I remember we had this one guy who claimed to be a multinational sales expert who could build the sales process and all that kind of stuff, and we brought him in, and I think those kinds of people can get away with that kind of claim if they’re in a big company, they can just get lost in the shuffle.

Justin: They can hide.

David: Yeah, because we’re small, like, we’re like, okay, show us what you got.

Justin: Yeah. Where’s the international sales?

David: Yeah. Where’s our pipeline? Where’s the process? Even giving leads that couldn’t be closed. So yeah, there was a really terrible experience of going through all that.

David: Just bad hire after bad hire. So obviously now when we’re hiring people, it’s not just the interview, it’s not just the resume. It’s multiple interviews, resume portfolio and a test. Yeah. And even then it doesn’t work out sometimes. But at least we, the team we have have all been here on average four years plus I think so. Yeah.

Justin: Yeah I mean that’s what I was going to say is, thankfully, we don’t really have to hire that many people because the key players on the team at least have been here for a long time and we’ve developed them and they’ve developed themselves really into where we need them to be. So it’s like we don’t really have to worry too much about the unknown, but when we do, at least there’s a bit of a process in place. Yeah.

David: And that all came to a head pretty much because like I think you just started before Covid, right?

Justin: Yeah.

David: I mean, things kind of still worked. Like, we had a big team with 50 people, multiple departments, but it held together because we had that spark. We were a startup. Everyone was excited. We could pull everyone in the boardroom, pull something together, and it worked. So we had that I won’t say love, because love is not the right word, but teamwork, certainly. Creativity, certainly. And what we lacked in operational process, we could make up by just being together. Yeah. Once we once Covid hit, it wasn’t Covid that screwed us up. It was the fact that we lost that ability to pull ourselves into the boardroom.

Justin: Because you can’t fit 50 people in the boardroom.

David: And so once Covid hit, it wasn’t that the business went down. It actually went up. But it was we lost the kind of core of what we were at that point because we didn’t have those processes. Once that Covid wave struck, we weren’t really equipped to rebound from it. So as a result, we were able to, over the course of the years after, really focus on what we do best, which is our personal branding, LinkedIn management services, our video production, our studio stuff. We’re experts at these things. We’re 10 out of 10. I can guarantee if we do these things, they’re going to be awesome. We have the processes. We have the experience. We have the talent. So it’s really a case of you’ve got to have the right people in the right seats. And it’s much easier to do that when you’ve got 10 or 15 people. When you’re 50, it’s so hard to manage as a small business.

Justin: Yeah for sure. And focusing on the core really like not letting these kind of ancillary service lines get in the way of what we’re really trying to do here, and that’s tell stories for our clients.

David: Exactly. I think we’ll come back to AI later, but so far it’s not been a hurdle. It’s been awesome. It’s been a fun challenge. Like we people are always talking about how AI is going to replace certain industries. It’s really not I don’t think. It’s going to just allow professionals to be even better. Like our video team can now make Hollywood-level animations, animation team can make Pixar style animations. We can research every paper ever written in an hour and put together a great report. So yeah, so far AI has not been a detriment. It’s been a massive.

Justin: Yeah. And I think it perfectly coincided with us kind of refocusing on our core, maybe trimming down the team a little bit. It just means that the key people on the team now have access to these tools that makes them much more efficient. All this kind of grunt work that maybe a junior employee would have to do, and that I’d have to check very thoroughly and proofread every single word and then send it back. All of that is kind of skipped now, so we’re definitely much more efficient.

So you mentioned that LinkedIn was brand new when you started the company. Coming to the present day here, you’ve just published the CEO’s Guide to LinkedIn in 2025. So what’s changed in how leaders should be showing up on LinkedIn and what still holds true from 5 to 10 years ago when you started the company?

David: So first of all, I wrote this report because it really was just a way to share best practice. And we got a lot of inquiries and a lot of questions. And not every person, how to say this nicely, can afford, I guess, to hire an agency to do their LinkedIn for them. That’s a fair way to say it. So this is a way to kind of just give that back. So if you can read this report, you can pretty much get started on your own. Maybe you’re not gonna have the best videos, but you’ll be able to build an audience, start posting, develop your tone of voice. So it was a way to help people get started. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, please do, comment below.

In terms of what’s changed, so social media really isn’t that old as we said, right. Facebook’s not 20 years old yet. LinkedIn is about 14 years old, I think. But when I was working at KPMG, personal branding or thought Leadership was getting an article in the Bangkok Post, that was what an op ed was. That was what those things meant.

Justin: Old school PR.

David: Exactly, and that’s not that long ago. That’s 15 years ago or so. Whereas we know every single day of the week, our clients are publishing thought leadership all the time. That’s what’s changed, is that it’s not this one article a year or two articles a year that’s really, seriously, boringly written in the Bangkok Post. It’s interesting content, it’s snippets, it’s infographics, it’s animations, it’s videos, it’s podcast studio, and it’s all linking back to this core piece of thought leadership.

So it’s not just… You get multiple touch points with these people and people want to connect with other humans. Like Lexicon logo, it looks nice, but it doesn’t have any character. You and I hopefully do. So if you see our content or you engage with us or you watch this video, you’re like, okay, I want to talk to these guys. I want to work with these guys. These guys know what they’re talking about. So that’s what changed is the distance between the audience and the individuals got a lot closer. And the individuals also got more prominence not ahead of the brand, but along with the brand. It’s a symbiotic relationship where they’re helping each other.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s also kind of a matter of practicing what we preach, right? We tell our clients all the time that this is best practice, give away help for free. And then for those that, as you said, can’t afford you, at least they can learn something. And then, you know, it’s really just showing that you can be a helpful guide to your potential customers.

David: Yeah. And, like, even our first ever client came from LinkedIn. I don’t know if you even knew.

Justin: Oh, no I didn’t, yeah. Before my time. But interesting.

David: Yeah. Like, literally our first ever client, so like nine years ago, ten years ago. I knew early on that we were writing company. So one of the first articles I ever wrote was, like, “Copywriting for the Hospitality Sector.” Something like that. And then the guy from the Banyan Tree, who I connected to on LinkedIn saw that and invited us, me and Steve, down to the Banyan Tree in Phuket for four days. And each night they gave us a better room. Every room was a pool villa. And then we ended up with, like, the Saudi Prince Room. Nice! That was our first client. So I was like, oh my god.

Justin: This is going to be easy.

David: So easy this stuff. We never got that again. Never hit those heights again. So even then, LinkedIn was always a great way to communicate directly with the audience, and that is only going to get more true over time. The key is there’s so much, and we’ll talk about this I’m sure, there’s so much AI content that you really have to stand out by being authentic. You have to say things that actually matter. You have to share your real expertise, and you have to speak in a language that’s not robotic.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, you have to be human. Okay, well, let’s talk a little bit more about AI. How do you see it changing the way brands and companies approach telling their stories and marketing themselves? And then what risks do you see in relying too heavily on AI?

David: So we use AI as we discussed already, right. It’s a great way to enhance what’s already good. The problem is that you and I maybe have a unique perspective on this because we’re both professional writers, like by trade: journalist, journalist, proper copywriter in the old days. So if you were not a writer before and you couldn’t put a sentence together and you couldn’t conjugate your verbs, all of a sudden you can put together sentences that are sentences, say, oh my god, I can write. So you’ve gone from a 3 out of 10. To a 6 out of 10, which is nice.

But all of a sudden the whole world is 6 out of 10. They all think they can write or publishing content, but most of it is so empty or repetitive. Everyone’s using the same tool, asking the same prompts, so everything looks the same. So AI is awesome if you’re an expert, I think. And if you’re a very small startup with no budget, it’s a great way to take the first step. But expert insights still matter.

Justin: Yeah, you still need some meat. Because if you ask ChatGPT: Okay, give me a thought leadership piece on LinkedIn in 2025. It’s not going to churn out what you’ve just recently published. There’s not going to be any steak, it’s just going to be a lot of rice.

David: Yeah. ChatGPT, please write me 10-year highlights of my time at Lexicon.

Justin: Right, yeah. It can’t do that. It doesn’t have the inputs.

David: And it’s the same thing for any business. If you’re an HR director or CEO or whatever industry you’re in, you’ve actually got lessons that you’ve learned. You’ve really got insights, you’ve got client problems you’ve solved, ones you couldn’t solve. That’s what you should be sharing. And AI can help you to develop that, but if you’re not actually putting any value in, then you’re going to get less.

Justin: Sure, well garbage in, garbage out, right? Value in value out.

David: We can’t swear on this one.

Justin: I think, yeah, just to add on to that. I mean, there’s obviously many different kinds of ways that you can tell your story, like video content like this. And that’s something at least not yet that AI absolutely can’t replicate. And I think some of the best content that our clients put out and that our video team obviously edits and we write the captions and we help with outlines and all of that, but it’s literally them speaking on camera extemporaneously about subject matter in which they’re actually experts. And there’s just no replacing that because it just genuinely shows, okay, these people really know what they’re talking about.

David: Exactly. Yeah. And that’s, I think, really the key trend for the next year or two years, whatever it might be, because everyone, 10 million people have that same content. So your voice, literally your voice, your face and your real opinions. Like it’s okay to say some controversial things like just keep it the right side of the line, but you’re going to have opinions on things you don’t like and failings in your industry that you want to comment on. Do it. Do it in a way that’s provocative, that’s interesting. Yeah. But use your own voice. That’s really the key, because when everyone sounds the same, a unique voice is a point of differentiation.

Justin: Yeah. For sure. I almost think if somebody just didn’t use ChatGPT and wrote a caption littered with typos, you’d be like, all right, well, at least that’s authentic.

David: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the worst thing, is the captions, right? They all look the same with the emojis, and it’s “this table is not just a table, it’s the future of science” or whatever.

Justin: What I get annoyed with, though, is—we’re off track here—but what I get annoyed with is when it does things that are good that I used to do and still do now and then go, wait a minute. And then people are going to think it’s AI and it’s like, no, no, it learned this from me. Yeah, I started this.

David: You like the em dash, right?

Justin: Yeah. I don’t use it anymore. I use the en dash now just because it’s kind of a dead giveaway. So you mentioned AI, obviously a major trend. What else is coming next? I mean, you’ve always kind of had an eye for this. What trends should business leaders be on the lookout for as we move towards 2026 and beyond?

David: So I’d assumed that we were, in terms of marketing, like one of the safer agencies because what we do is physical and it’s personal. I thought that, like, ad agencies would be going out of business because algorithms can just do that easily. But I was chatting to an agency owner just last week, and he was saying that exactly what we’re saying basically is that no, no, like what companies are going to do is slim down their marketing teams. They don’t want to bring anything in-house, so they still want that specialist expert. But now the specialist expert’s going to give them better results because they’re using AI. So they’re optimizing everything even better. They could test things in real time.

So the trend that’s been coming for a while, and Grant Thornton talks about it constantly, right, is that the future is focus on your core, outsource the rest. And I think that’s applicable to any industry. Like everything is going to get more competitive because everyone’s going to be leaner. Everyone’s going to be more innovative, and everyone’s going to be able to do more R&D in their specific area because they’ve got more firepower, they’ve got more horsepower.

So, yeah, I think the key trend for every business—and for us also—is just focus on the core. Outsource the rest, because life’s easier. Like when we were 50 people, it was a nightmare. I can’t imagine if you’re trying to manage an HR team and an R&D team and an L&D team and all these services that you don’t even understand. If you make widgets, make widgets. Let us do your marketing. Let someone else do your recruitment. That’s the future.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So what’s next for Lexicon? What can we expect from the next chapter, from our second decade?

David: It’s really kind of more of the same. Like it’s now we’ve had ten years of building up what we do. It’s a case of just doubling down on getting even better. So we’re in the process of refurbishing the studio. So we’re going to have 100 plus different studio setups available. We’re going to keep pushing things forward with what we can do with AI.

But one of the things that I’ve been surprised by is that we said—or I said—five years ago writing is dead, even before AI, as a service, because people just didn’t value it, and theoretically they should value it even less now, but somehow it’s one of our major growth areas: thought leadership, white papers. Because when everything can be done short form easily with AI, there’s way more value in the long form.

So I think we’re going to increasingly be at the top table with our clients. We’ll have a seat at the board, if not on the board, where we are able to help turn their business strategy into actionable marketing output. So increasingly, we will become a greater strategic partner, helping our clients to execute on their marketing strategies that we also develop. So it’s a very exciting time for us and I think for any agency business, what you need to be doing is moving with the value chain. You need to be increasingly helping companies at a strategic level because that’s where stickiness happens.

Justin: Yeah. I mean grunt work can already be taken care of. It’s really that high-level partnership is where the future lies.

Okay, so that’s all of the serious stuff out of the way. This will be a fun one. So obviously, at Lexicon, we’re always talking about storytelling. We’ve talked about many of our own favorite storytellers on our other show, Lexicon Late Night, which you can check on the screen there. So this will be interesting. You’ll have to pick. Let’s just, let’s keep it at under five. I was going to say one, but I don’t think you’ll be able to do that. So here’s the final question, which you always ask when you’re the host: Who are your favorite storytellers and why?

David: It’s a difficult one. Only five?

Justin: Five maximum.

David: Okay, fine.

Justin: I won’t count. So.

David: So some of these we’ve covered already. But, you know, we built that series, Lexicon Late Night, because we’re both super passionate about storytelling. And it’s not just Shakespeare, right? Storytelling comes in many forms. And I think for me, George Orwell is probably always number one.

Justin: Yeah. That’s probably my favorite Lexicon Late Night episode that we’ve ever done.

David: Not just because of his writing, but just, as a person, he is like the ultimate inspiration. You know, he walked the talk. He was willing to suffer for his art.

Justin: Yeah, he got shot in the throat.

David: Yeah, in the Spanish Civil War.

So as a person to, like, aspire to, the wind was blowing all over the place in his era, right? It was Spanish Civil War, Second World War, communism, fascism, Nazism, all that stuff happening, propaganda, everything. People pushing him in many directions. He stayed steadfast. He never changed. He didn’t care who was telling him what to do. He had a really strong sense of what’s right and wrong, and he just stayed on that path. He was like, I’ll be rich. I’ll be not rich. I’ll be homeless. I’ll be not, I don’t care. I have to tell the truth. And to me that’s the most honorable thing.

Justin: Yeah, I mean, we mentioned this in the actual episode about George Orwell, but as the late Christopher Hitchens said, he got the three big questions of the 20th century right: imperialism, fascism and communism. So just for a writer to have that level of moral clarity is why he’s one of the best storytellers of all time.

David: Yeah. Growing up, obviously it was the fictional books that did it for me. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s the lesser known stuff. It’s Homage to Catalonia, it’s Road to Wigan Pier, it’s Burmese Days—like this stuff. Burmese Days is still semi-fictional, but it’s just those lessons in how to be a good person. It’s almost Zen in a way.

Justin: Yeah. Well, timeless as well, for sure. Okay. Well, there’s one—only four to go.

David: Yes. So the second one is a bit more silly: South Park, which we covered in great depth. Again, if you don’t know the South Park guys, you just think it’s just silly, obscene ridiculousness, which it is. But again, those are guys that—they’re steadfast. Winds blow all over the place for 25 years. They just always call out whatever’s stupid on any side on any issue. They just have a really strong sense of—again, and maybe it’s a morality, I’m not sure. But they are able to address serious topics with incredible humor. I think that they’re genuine, brilliant artists. Not those kind of artists, but artists as storytellers.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Check out the clip that we had on, instead of just ‘and, and, and’, ‘but and therefore’.

David: Yeah. And also, like, they just refused to ever budge. And they’re so rich and successful, they’re billionaires.

Justin: Right, that no one can really tell them what to do because the formula works.

David: And it kind of goes against everything that you’re supposed to do, right? Like, don’t offend Scientology. Don’t offend these people or those people. Don’t make enemies with the left or the right, or the Christians or the whatever.

Justin: Unless you make enemies of everyone.

David: Which is what they do, right? So they have no friends theoretically. But because of that, everyone knows they’re principled. So people actually love them and they become successful. There’s probably lessons there for politicians to learn.

Justin: Yeah, sure. Kamala Harris. Well, it’s a bit late now for you, but she should have watched more South Park.

David: She’ll be back. So yeah, South Park definitely—and long may they reign.

Justin: Absolutely. Okay, well there’s two. Do you want to do three more?

David: I’ll do two more. I’ll try and keep it concise. So Albert Camus.

Justin: Okay. I’m not super familiar with him.

David: Albert Camus. He’s an existentialist. You know, there’s a whole philosophy there, from Kierkegaard to Dostoyevsky and beyond. But, yeah, this is going to… I’m not sure if this could ever be a clip, because I’m about to say the word ‘suicide’.

Justin: Okay, we’ll not put it in the banner title.

David: But he opens up his—not really a novelist, it’s more of an essay—The Myth of Sisyphus.

Justin: Okay, yeah. That’s one of your favorite analogies, by the way. Whenever there’s a challenging task that we need to revise over and over again and never seems to finish.

David: Yeah. And he says, like in the opening paragraph, I think that the only question that must be answered is whether you should kill yourself today.

Justin: And hopefully the answer is no.

David: Well that’s his whole point is that, like, no matter how bad things get, you always have that out. Therefore you’re always in control of your life. And no matter how bad things get, no matter how shitty things get, no matter what happens to you, you can still choose. So like knowing that you can choose, choose something else. You can take action. You can choose. That’s pure existentialism. It’s like, don’t—it’s not nihilism, it’s hope.

Justin: Yeah. Very dark self-help.

David: Yeah, because that’s what existentialism is. It’s like the universe is ultimately meaningless. We’re alone. It’s absurd. The state of humanity—where these beings long for meaning in a meaningless universe, which is funny. It’s absurd. But as a result of that, all bets are off. Like, you can be whatever you want to be. You can do whatever you want to do. That’s empowering. So I love reading his books because of that tone. Like, he’s not a nihilist by any means. He really is full of hope and optimism. But, yeah, that’s Albert Camus.

Justin: Okay, well, I’ll have to check him out. I’m aware of him. I just haven’t really read much of his stuff. And, I will be not taking option one. I’ll be showing up to work on Monday.

David: Always take option two. And the final one is Socrates.

Justin: Okay. Going way back?

David: Yeah. Way back. Yeah, old school, OG. So 2500 years ago, Ancient Greece. So I think all four of them—now I think about it—they have a common thread. They’re all iconoclastic. They all kind of suffer for their art, except for guys who make a lot of money. But they all kind of just stay where they are.

I’m sure you know the story of Socrates, right? He was an older guy in Athens, and the state tried to—or did—execute him because he was accused of blasphemy and misleading the youth because he annoyed the people, the powerful people in the city. He was a gadfly, they called it. He was told he was the wisest man in Athens, and he didn’t believe it because he said, I know nothing. I’m an idiot.

Justin: And therein lies the wisdom.

David: Yeah. So he went around to all the powerful people in Athens, and he went to the judge and was like, what is justice? And he was like, well, you know, it’s whatever the law book says. He’s like, yeah, but what is it like? What’s it at court?

Justin: I could see why they got annoyed with him.

David: Exactly. Yeah, so everyone was like this guy.

Justin: Yeah, right.

David: So they put him on trial for ultimately trumped up charges because he was annoying everybody, the powerful people. So ultimately, he was found guilty, and he had two choices. One was—so in the Athenian court, it was like a stadium. You had the judges here and you had like 400 jurors of the people and they chose. The judge gives you a penalty and you give yourself a penalty and a jury decides which one is apt.

Justin: Okay.

David: So the judges want it to be a bit harsh with the guy. So like okay, death penalty. So like kind of come nearer to that than nothing.

Justin: I can think of many options for what I would propose as my penalty.

David: What he said is: for all the good I’ve done for Athens, the unexplored life is not worth living, so what I deserve is a reward. Give me the same privileges you would give to an Olympic gold medalist. Give me a home on the hills. Give me gold. Give me the finest of wines.

Justin: Yeah. Come on, meet us halfway, at least.

David: So he gets sentenced to death, and even then they’re like, we’re gonna leave the door open. Like, just, you know, just go to a different city and it’s like, nah, nah, nah, I’m gonna ride this out. Because truth is more important, my legacy will live on. Because I always told the truth and then that’s the end of him.

So that’s kind of a sad story. He was 80. He was on the way out anyway. But all of those people, they kind of—they go against the grain. They tell stories and they use it to affect change. But generally the storytellers, the really good ones, they run up against trouble. Jesus, for example.

Justin: Sure.

David: I don’t want to get to that one. But the people who tell stories that actually matter generally get destroyed—except the South Park guys who leveraged that to succeed.

Justin: Yeah. Okay. Well great. From Socrates to South Park there. Definitely some lessons in there for everyone, including business leaders.

Okay, so I already know the answer to this, but this concludes this episode of Bangkok Thought Leaders. Just to wrap things up, David, can you tell the folks at home where they can reach you?

David: Reach me on LinkedIn: David Norcross or lexiconthai.com

Justin: All right. Great. Well thank you, David.

David: Thank you.

Justin: This was fun.

Both: Cheers.