We call walking barefoot "earthing" and playing games "competitive socialising." Why I think the AI era is actually the age of the human.

Here’s the thought that’s been bothering me for a long time. Being human used to be first nature. Second nature was something we learned so well it felt like a natural extension of ourselves. But are we sliding into some kind of third nature? Some days it feels like it. We’re coming up with all these “technical” terms for what it is do normal human things. It’s like we’ve gone full robot explanation for becoming a human again. (And yes, you’ll see, I’m part of the problem!)

Here’s the nagging question I needed to answer: when did walking barefoot get its own brand name? Turns out it was a cable-TV technician called Clint Ober who coined it in the '90s. Once you hear that, it makes a horrible kind of sense: the man grounded wires all day, so why not ground a human? He decided our shoes were "insulating" us from the planet and, instead of just taking them off, built a mat with a cord so you could touch grass without leaving your bed. He took what my nan gave me for free, go outside, get the ground beneath your feet, get some fresh air, and turned it into "earthing," now with a white paper and a checkout. There's real research behind it (a widely cited paper reckons barefoot contact may dampen inflammation), so I'm not tossing it out, but sit with that one. "Digital detox" is just not being on your phone or, if we go deeper, it’s actually just living (on planet earth). And my favourite, "being present." You mean… listening? To a human? In a room? We've built an entire wellness vocabulary for things a golden retriever does for free.

And I can’t mock any of it, because we named ours too at Ballers Clubhouse.“Competitive socialising.” That’s our category, the phrase my longterm business partner Stephen Wools used on stage in London at the Publican Awards, in a room with the people who more or less built the modern version of it. It’s a real, world-class industry and we’re proud to be near the front of it. But strip the varnish off the term and you know what competitive socialising actually is? It’s playing games. It’s wanting to beat your mates, in a fun way. The most instinctive human thing there is, the thing every kid does before the world trains it out of them, handed a tidy two-word label so adults feel allowed to do it again.

A while back a CEO pulled me aside and told me, half-serious, that a night his team had at one of our venues was a big part of why he still had his CFO and his head of sales that year, two people he’d have hated to lose. Then he grinned and said the single greatest thing I’d done for his bottom line all year was probably letting his CFO beat me at darts.

I’ll take it, he said. I got beaten at darts, and it turns out it is my unexpected retention strategy.

I won’t oversell this: I’m not going to promise your revenue jumps if your team throws some darts or slides down a few shuffleboard pucks late into the night. But the CEO wasn’t really joking, and the research backs him. BetterUp found employees with a strong sense of belonging show a 56% jump in job performance and a 50% drop in turnover risk. Gallup finds people with a best friend at work are up to seven times as engaged. Leaders already know connection drives performance and keeps people. What they struggle with is doing it. That’s the gap we live in: we don’t sell games, we take the heavy lifting off your plate so the human bit can actually happen.