Interview with Claude Press

Long-form text, July 2025

The Fuck It Bucket: How Oliver Christen-Drew Lost Everything and Found His Philosophy

There’s a phrase Oliver Christen-Drew uses when life hands you something too broken to fix: “Chuck it in the fuck it bucket.” It sounds flippant. It isn’t.

Oli, as everyone calls him, is fifty-two, Swiss-born, and has lived on three continents. He’s been a competitive handball athlete, a touring musician, an associate professor of psychology, a yoga instructor, and for the last fifteen years, one of the most respected figures in global freediving education. He speaks four languages, holds two master’s degrees, and currently splits his time between the East Coast of the United States, Switzerland, and Indonesia—or what’s left of his connection to Indonesia, anyway.

Because Indonesia is where everything fell apart.

In 2020, while the world locked down and borders closed, Oli was stranded in the United States, unable to return to Bali, where he had built Freedive Flow Indonesia from scratch—a school that had become globally respected for its rigorous approach to freediving education. His Dutch business partner, who also owned the property, used that moment of absence to rip up their contract. Courts sided with the partner. Oli lost everything he had built there.

What followed was depression.

“It was my biggest misfortune,” he says quietly. “It threw me into depression. But in the end, it was a moment of learning. And moving on.”

Oli’s philosophy about people is built on what he calls the eighty-four percent theorem—a framework he absorbed from years of psychology, spiritual literature, and hard-won experience. The idea is simple: eight percent of people are genuinely good, principled, and trustworthy. Another eight percent are, as he puts it plainly, “human scum.” And the eighty-four percent in the middle? They’re just living their lives, not particularly heroic or villainous, following whoever has the clearest message.

“If they get manipulated by some narcissist,” he says, “then we have to have better messaging than the narcissist.”

The lesson he drew from Indonesia wasn’t to become harder or more cynical. It was to stop wasting energy on the eight percent at the wrong end of the scale. Don’t fight them. Don’t try to convince them. Work with everyone else, show up with clarity and honesty, and when something is too broken to fix—chuck it.

“I don’t pick the fight,” he says. “If it’s not my circus, then it’s not my monkeys.”

Today, Oli serves as Director of Continued Education and Chair of the Movement Board at Molchanovs, the world’s leading freediving education system. He works with international teams spread across Hungary, Indonesia, Taiwan, Russia, and the United States. And after fourteen years of working across cultures, he’s arrived at a conclusion that surprised even him: the fundamentals don’t change.

“Trust, reliability, drive, motivation—it doesn’t matter if you’re working with someone from Asia, Germany, Russia, or America,” he says. “The rules are the same everywhere.”

In a world obsessed with cultural difference and geopolitical friction, Oli finds this quietly radical. Even now, as the United States stumbles on the world stage and old alliances fracture, he sees his international teams pulling together with the same basic human ingredients they always have.

The freediving world is small. Its community, Oli explains, is naturally self-correcting. Bad actors don’t last long because there’s nowhere to hide and not enough money to make betrayal worth it. It’s a community built on relationships, on trust, on the shared experience of descending into the silence of deep water and coming back up.

Maybe that’s why it suits him so well.

Because Oliver Christen-Drew has spent a lifetime learning the same lesson in different forms—in music, academia, business, and love. That the people who matter are the ones who show up without a hidden agenda. That you can’t convince everyone, and you shouldn’t try. That sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is recognize when something is broken beyond repair, let it go completely, and move forward.

Chuck it in the fuck it bucket. And move on.

Oliver Christen-Drew is Director of Training and Education at Molchanovs and founder of Freedive Flow. He can be reached at info@freediveflow.com