The Exchanges

Q What do you think Elon Musk would say about mistakes?

A They're an absolutely vital part of long-term success. If you stack up a few of the kind of aphorisms that you hear him say a lot of times, he's actually encouraging these small failures. He's mandating small failures because that's how you find the limits of what works. Um, you don't know if you have something really an elegant design until you've taken away more things than you need to. You see what breaks, then you add back the essential, right? He says, if you're not adding back 10% of what you removed, you're not removing enough. So you have this clutter, you have mess, you have over engineering, you have redundancy, and it's only when you push things with something to the point of breaking it that you learn what's really vital. Um, he also says in hiring, he's asking for people like, what problem did you solve and what mistakes did you make along the way to solving it? What walls did you have to bounce off? He wants to work with people who understand how to make a mistake and iterate because reality is the ultimate teacher. And so the organizations are designed to Iterate quickly, move fast, uh, fail almost intentionally, and then learn from that failure as quickly as humanly possible.

AI assessment note: “They're an absolutely vital part of long-term success.”

Q I call them like low people businesses, you know, vending machines, laundromats, car washes, RV parks, all of them have like a version of the business that could be low people. Then they have a very high people version of it. You own a bunch of RV parks and got into it. How did you get into that business? Break down the economics of it. What's most interesting about it?

A Yeah. So, and I've done both ends of that. Um, small RV parks with no employees and large RV parks with a lot of employees. So I was buying single family homes back in college. Um, and then I moved to Texas and I met some guys that were, they owned hundreds of single family homes, but they had just been introduced to mobile home and RV parks. And they basically said, Chris, you've got to look at this. Instead of having 12 homes across a Metroplex in two hours, you can have 12 homes All on the same two acres. And each one of them is more profitable than those. And it costs like a third as much as all of the single family homes. So you have the efficiencies of them being all right there. Uh, it's the lowest form of affordable housing. So it's recession resistant and they're easier to manage and you don't have to maintain the unit. The tenant owns the unit. So you just own the land. So I'm like, why do people even buy single family homes? Like, I don't understand. Is this like the world's best kept secret? And so we partnered up and we started buying these small RV and mobile home parks across Texas and Oklahoma, 10 to 70 pad sites, no amenities, mostly long-term tenants, um, and where the tenants own either the RV or the mobile home, and we just maintain the infrastructure. Um, and we did that for two and a half, three years.

AI assessment note: “we partnered up and we started buying these small RV and mobile home parks”

Q maybe not what you want them to do, um, and you've maybe even talked to them about it before, but you kind of can't get them to see your side. You don't know how to point out that what they're doing is not correct, or You feel that it's not correct. Like, how do you expose that bad behavior and communicate it in a way that they could hear it?

A Well, first to that challenge, one of the biggest problems is that you might be the only person who recognized that there is a problem. So you have to be the person bringing the conversation and then overthinking holds us back. And then the conversation almost seems irrelevant because we've overthought it so much that the behavior has passed far in the, in, in the rear view mirror. So first of all, we have to just give ourselves a shot clock for action. So when I see a problem, I say, okay, Kwame, yeah, you, you're about to start overthinking this. You're not going to do that now. You got 24 hours to respond. That, that's what I tell myself. So it's first, it's an internal negotiation. That's the first thing. Then how we actually start the conversation, I like to use the framework of situation, impact, invitation. So situation, I'll describe the situation using naked facts. So facts that are stripped of all interpretation, judgment, or opinion. So no matter who you are, what you think, You can say, yeah, that is what happened. Then impact. What did, what impact did it have on me? I'm going to personalize it, not globalize it. Because if I globalize it, then they could say, no, it didn't have that impact. No, I'm going to talk about me. And then invitation. When can we talk about it now, now or later? So let's say the person is constantly turning in reports late and it's making …

AI assessment note: “I like to use the framework of situation, impact, invitation.”

Q Because I remember the first time it happened to me, not to his extent, but it, it felt visceral. Like almost like a, you know, when you get an adrenal spike and you can feel it, you get tingly. Is that true? Does our brain process things that happen to us online as if it is in person and threatening?

A For sure. So what happens is that you see something, it, it stimulates your optic nerve, is processed for what you're reading online with the, in the occipital lobe of your brain, sending a signal to your amygdala, which is the, the fear and anger, part of the limbic system of the brain, stimulating a signal that goes through the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland in your brain, Then sending a signal to your adrenal glands, which sit above your kidneys, which will start to spit out, uh, epinephrine, um, uh, adrenaline, and this happens in 74 milliseconds. Then, if you're in that zone, 20 minutes later, you get cortisol coming in behind it, which is supposed to keep you in a hypervigilant state, so that you can actually stay ahead of the cheetah that wants to come and eat you, or whatever it happens to be. Now, in this case, it's stupid nonsense, aka Twitter. And, but, but your brain is still registering it as, as if it's actually a predator, meaning that you've still got the, this adrenaline that, that set you up for hypervigilance, and then the cortisol, which is keeping you awake, and by the way, also suppressing your immune system, because you don't want to be worrying about other little things when you need to be super vigilant about these particular predators, and that's when you can't sleep, because you're not supposed to be able to sleep, when you might get eaten, and, …

AI assessment note: “your brain is still registering it as, as if it's actually a predator”

Q Yeah, I agree. I also find it shocking how big the endowments of the universities are at the same time that we have education costs for universities going up so high and sort of like a declining ROI that kids are getting from universities. What do you think about it? Because you're, you're not quiet about the things that you don't like about universities while also working in one.

A Well, my industry is arguably the most, one of the most corrupt, maybe with the exception of social media or, you know, I, I work in a corrupt industry. People aren't under the impression that we're nice people with our Labradors, watching PBS every night, and we're noble people. We're like everybody else. We, Academics and administrators wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and ask themselves the same question, and that is, how do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we found the ultimate business strategy, and that's to sequester the majority of public from the freshman class and artificially constrain the, the freshman seat. So Harvard, fifty-four billion dollars in endowment. It's grown its endowment 4000% in the last 30 or 40 years, up forty-fold. It's grown its freshman class size four percent. So it admits 1500 kids on 55,000 applicants. It has the resources. It could let in 15,000 and not sacrifice any quality, but they decide to artificially constrain it because they're, if to a certain extent homeowners and people who already have college degrees, Have figured out that this LVMH rejectionist exclusionary strategy is the best way to entrench the incumbents. So if I already have a college degree and I already have a house, I love it when UCLA is impossible to get into. How many people do you say kind of proudly or jokingly say, I would …

AI assessment note: “Harvard, fifty-four billion dollars in endowment. It's grown its endowment 4000%”

Q You know, and I, I think it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on, is this the worst time to be in American politics?

A No. It's not. Uh, it's, it's bad. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's cheery and wonderful. But, uh, even in the lifetimes of people who are around today, like me, It's been worse. You know, the sixties and seventies were terrible. We were deeply divided as a country over the issue of race. We have a bigot running for president in 1968 who wins five states, and in 1972 he runs for the Democratic nomination and runs 1.8% behind the ultimate winner, Eugene, excuse me, George McGovern in the, in the popular vote. Um, we have the peaceful protests, mostly peaceful protests of the 19 fifties give way in the 19 sixties to violence. It begins in 1964 and, uh, excuse me, 1963 with the major riots in big cities, uh, Harlem. 1964 and 65 more riots, including Watts. Seven days, the center of our great American city is burning. In 1967, it's called The Long Hot Summer. 100, over a 140 American cities are racked with huge protests over the, over race. In April of 1968, Martin Luther King is assassinated, gunned down in front of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, and over a 140 American cities burst into flames within a matter of hours, and 47 Americans die. And, um, we have political violence. November, 1963, the president of the United States is assassinated in Dallas. April of, of, um, 68, Martin Luther King is gunned down. Six weeks later, Robert Kennedy senior is gunned down in, uh, the…

AI assessment note: “No. It's not. Uh, it's, it's bad... It's been worse.”

Q Didn't you also try to buy Greenland at some point and get shut down?

A Yeah. Yeah. So this, so I was, I was doing a couple of different experiments there, but I saw how Trump had tweeted. He wants to buy Greenland and the prime minister of Denmark, for some reason tweeted back. It's not for sale. And I'm like, what the hell just happened here? Did a president United States just offer to buy a country on Twitter and then Denmark, which is this tiny little country, they said no. What do they have to do with Greenland? So it kind of forced me to research what, you know, why anybody would want Greenland. It turns out Greenland and China are the only places you could find all these rare earth minerals, and so I figured, and I wanted to experiment with my writing a little bit, so I did an article in the form of a Kickstarter. I made a Kickstarter to buy Greenland, and they kicked me off, but then Indiegogo, I think, let me do it, And I started raising, like, thousands of dollars. It was an interesting way to write about why I would want to do it, and you could become a duke if you can give me a hundred dollars, and we'll get a holiday after you if you give a thousand dollars, and you get an acre if you give more, and, and so on. And so, so they started making, raising thousands of dollars, but then Indiegogo shut it down because they said, look, we know you're just joking around. We don't want to pay back the, uh, um, you know, we're eating the American…

AI assessment note: “I made a Kickstarter to buy Greenland, and they kicked me off”

Q You were born and raised in the same city and even stayed there for college. Can you talk a little bit about that?

A Yeah. So I grew up in Boise, Idaho, actually about 45 minutes outside of town, up in the mountains. Uh, I was homeschooled Graduated super early. Uh, went to college when I was 15 at Boise State. Dropped out when I was 17. Started my first business. I expanded from there. I've traveled a bunch. I think I've probably gone to 25, 30 countries, somewhere in there. Um, but I have never been away from Boise for more than six weeks at a time. I got, you know, I've done a bunch of, like, five weeks in South Africa, four weeks in Europe, five weeks in Thailand, like some of those things. But it's always been with the home base in Boise, and so now I have a little farm here, and yeah, my wife and three kids, and you know, we live like 10 minutes from downtown. You know, I'll be on the road tomorrow and, ah, all next week, but it's always back to Boise.

AI assessment note: “I grew up in Boise, Idaho... went to college when I was 15 at Boise State”

Q Younger Pueblo, exactly. Like, what, what do you say when, when that fear comes of like, is this good enough? Should I put this out? Are there words you repeat to yourself?

A I mean, there's an experience that I go back to. You know, I, um, I think about my, uh, editor, uh, Matthew Benjamin, and he really taught me some critical things about, about writing and the writing process. When I was putting together Lighter, my first nonfiction book, um, he had to tell me the hard truth. He was like, Diego, it's never going to be perfect. We, we, you know, when there's a, there's a process called After putting in the manuscript, it's called copy editing, and you, you and a group of people will constantly read the book over and over and over again to get all the mistakes out, to make sure that there's a, a clear grammatical framework that the way that you use a, a semi-colon in the first chapter is the way you use a semi-colon in a temp chapter. And he had to tell me, he was like, hey, it's n, there are still gonna be mistakes after us reading this book dozens of times. And that gave me so much freedom. So now when I put something out, I know that one piece, one post, is not going to make or break anything. Anything. It's a, it's a long game of stamina. Well, where it will accumulate into something bigger over time. So if one thing fails, it doesn't matter at all. And if anything, when I try to, especially if I'm releasing an essay, I try to get it to 80%. If it feels like it's 80% of the way there, it's good enough, and if it's good enough and people really…

AI assessment note: “I know that one piece, one post, is not going to make or break anything.”

Q is, maybe you should set up a life that you don't escape from. Very poignant, especially today when for a lot of people that is possible, you know, that, especially in the US, it's pretty possible. And you open up with a parable about a man named Alexander and the Knot, and I thought there was a lot of similarity between the two. So would you mind telling that story?

A So they call him Alexander the Great. I think when he was 17, knowing he added the great part, he was with Alexander. And there was a legend in a small town in Turkey that, uh, there was an ox cart that was tied with a very complicated knot to the edge of town. And it was said that whoever could come and untie this knot would become the ruler of all of Europe. And, uh, Alexander showed up, and there's a myth about it that's not true, which is that he took out a sword, cut it in half, and said, there's no knot. That's not really what the story was. The story was this. He showed up, he heard the story, he saw the complicated knot, and he said, wait, there's a wooden post in the middle of it. If I just pull this post out, the knot sort of takes care of itself. Because it had entwined itself and was concealing the real problem. Pull out the post and the knot gets fixed. That doesn't mean it's easy. It takes a lot of practice to realize where's the post, where's the entanglement, where's the thing I'm going to pull out. But we're surrounded by knots. There are all these people who want us to be mildly unhappy. There are all these people who want us to measure the wrong things and buy solace in the form of a bottle or a fast food or whatever it is. That's good for them to make us reasonably unhappy all the time. But when you see where the post is, and you see where the nod is, you ca…

AI assessment note: “there was an ox cart that was tied with a very complicated knot”

Q kind of famous saying, um, that quantity always beats quality, that you should just do more, and maybe you don't have the life that you want because you're not doing as much as it takes to get there. What do you believe? Should someone, if they want to achieve greatness, is the answer that you just need to do more, or is it you have to do more better things?

A It just depends on what your personal goal is, right? So, Take the Birkin, right? Hermes, they sell a fraction of the amount of handbags that Chanel does or Louis Vuitton or Gucci, but their valuation is just as strong and Birkins consistently grow up, go up in price every year. And their whole philosophy is sure they could mass produce the Birkin bag if they wanted to, but instead They hire hand tailors that specialize in this craft and take so much time on each handbag that they care more about the quality. And so, right. It just depends on what your goal is. Do you want to be sort of this premier mom and pop steakhouse that is really well respected and you have a very comfortable living, or do you want to be Morton's or do you want to be McDonald's? Right. They all kind of sell a similar thing, but they have different kinds of lifestyles and different kinds of prestige associated with them. For me, it really came down to my goal was to make impact. I wanted people to watch my videos and say, wow, that helped me get to a better place in my life or not give up on my dreams or help resolve, help me get out of depression or anxiety, right? Like. Um, so for me, it was really important to reach the masses because it's a mission driven company. And so when I was starting, I was doing one, three minute video a week. And I remember we were on a group call. We were a four person team …

AI assessment note: “It just depends on what your personal goal is, right?”

Q I know. What do you think has been the biggest sacrifice you've ever had to make in your business?

A The biggest sacrifice I've ever had to make in my business was the toll it took on my relationship when I was just starting out. I just thought that because I was trying to improve the life of my wife and my kids that that made every decision. Okay. So I skipped out on the date nights. I skipped out on the dinners. I skipped out on the school plays. And then I came to realize that what is success? If I can't even spend time with my own family. And so even though I may not take a hundred percent of the opportunities that I get today, even if I can go for 80% of them or 70%, but still have a life and show up for my wife and kids to me, that's worthwhile. And I'll tell you a quick story as to what helped me realize that there was a day I was working in my office and my five-year-old daughter came in and said, daddy, Play with me. And I said, daddy's busy working right now. And so my daughter left, she went into the kitchen. I could just tell from the look on her face that she was really disappointed. So that guilt was eating at me. Eventually I get up, I go to the kitchen and I say, sweetheart, you see this big house that we live in? And she says, yeah. I said, well, that's why daddy has to work so hard. Okay. She nodded her head. I could tell she wasn't really happy with that answer. So I go back to my office. I start working again. And a couple minutes later, my daughter comes i…

AI assessment note: “The biggest sacrifice I've ever had to make in my business was the toll”

Q So what do you say to yourself when you don't want to keep working hard and you kind of want to give up? What's your inner monologue?

A I have this trick. So I'm a big runner. I run every day, and I try to do a long run at least once a week, like, 10, 15 miles. And people often say, oh, you must love running. And I freaking hate running. There are many days where I didn't want to run, but I've never had a day where I don't feel better after I run. Somewhere during the run, I want to quit. I'm sore. I'm tired. This hurts. I'm old. And I, so I'm running fast and I slow down. I never walk, but I'm barely running. And then I say to myself, are you a loser? Are you a quitter? And the minute in my mind I say that, I keep going. I will, my legs will fall off before I stop. But I, my mind is like, don't say it, don't say it. It'll be easier to just stop. And I think for me, it comes from a greater purpose. So why did I start? Why did you start the journey? And going back to your original question, most people don't succeed because they have easy flippant goals. Why do you want to start a business, Cody? Oh, I want to be a millionaire. Okay, well, that's interesting. Why do you want to be a millionaire? Well, it'd be nice, like, I wanted to make money to justify my parents' sacrifice for my life. My parents came here at 37 years old, no money, left jail, came on a boat with one suitcase to a country they knew nobody and had no money. So what am I going to do with my life? Just get by? Like, like I'm the only kid. I felt…

AI assessment note: “And then I say to myself, are you a loser? Are you a quitter?”

Q Yeah. What else do you think shows up on like every broke person's account? That's like immediate standard.

A You have your Klarna's, your firm's, even PayPal paying for, which honestly, personal favorite of mine. I've used it. I'm good with it. I'll use it today. I don't need to, but I mean, it could be nice splitting just a payment in four. That's fine. But what you start seeing is when people get on Klarna, they feel like they have access to money and then they finance it like anything else. And a Klarna loan immediately gets you up to like 35%, where even like the highest credit cards, we're talking 30%. So it's one of the worst things that I see on people's finances today that is getting way too normalized is using those Klarna's and affirms.

AI assessment note: “You have your Klarna's, your firm's, even PayPal paying for”

Q a differentiation. And I'm curious if somebody out there right now is like, I want to infuse a little soul into my personal brand. I want to infuse a little uniqueness. What are the things that you're like, here are a few thoughts or tips for somebody who doesn't want to die in the sea of sameness? Could be aesthetic, or it could be verbal, or it could be written.

A Number one, the easiest thing that you can do to insert a little soul is to say, what are cliches that everyone in my space is already saying? And just make a long list. What are phrases, expressions, and then what you do, and this is like from advertising copywriting, Take a common phrase, a cliche, and then do something with it. So you'll take a phrase and you just flip it a little bit. So that expression, here's an example, it's from The Economist magazine, some of the best copywriting in the world. Something like the expression of great minds think alike. We've all heard it. If I said it, you're like, yeah, and then what? So they just took that expression, changed it just a little bit by changing the order of the words. Great minds like a think. And it's enough for you to be like, what? And years before he was involved in politics, they had this line that says, Trump, Donald. Beat the man in his game. Because this is a magazine for tycoons and entrepreneurs and intellectuals. So they had so many lines in there, I'm like, wow. So find what the cliches are, look at them, stare at them, and play with them, stretch them, bend them, change the order, change the word, make it rhyme with something else, and then you now have an asset. That people will then refer to you, and when we're building brands, we don't just think about building your brand, we build worlds. The more assets …

AI assessment note: “the easiest thing that you can do to insert a little soul is to say”

Q I just love, like the amount I torture myself is next level. You need to have some kind of rage demon in your skull that drives you, or I am wired for war. I mean, they just make you want to just pound your chest and tag your spreadsheet, you know, as I do. But like, what do you think are the craziest stories of Elon going into hardcore mode?

A Uh, these insane surges that he does, um, sometimes warranted, sometimes unwarranted, but there's, there's many, many stories, and a lot of them are small, but it sets the culture. There's one about the, uh, building dome for Starship. They'd spent months trying to, like, weld a dome for Starship that fit over the, this, like, uh, stainless steel cone that was gonna go over the top of the rocket, and they hadn't gotten it done for months, and he just showed up at the site, was like, we're gonna have a dome done by Dodd. Cancel everything. You're not going fucking home. Stay here. And they're like, well, we don't have this, this thing that we need. And he's like, improvise, grab that thing over there, measure it out, approximate it. Like, and they failed, but they had a dome done by nine AM instead of dawn. And so, you know, a, 12 hours later, they solved this thing that had been unsolved for months. And whether that was the bottleneck at any given time, probably not. Um, but those stories add up and they propagate through the culture. Um, you know, he famously stacked Starship, like, months before it was even close to launch, and it wasn't because it needed to be done, it wasn't because it was a bottleneck, but he said now people started sharing photos of this absolutely behemoth rocket, and it started to feel more real and become this thing, and so it seemed right. Um, but the…

AI assessment note: “There's one about the, uh, building dome for Starship.”

Q Are those the four, or is there anything else that, like, if you want to make more money, you should absolutely do?

A Ah, I mean, another good one is bring solutions or propose solutions. The last thing I would probably add to your short list is, If I have a problem that I'm not sure how to solve or that needs your approval because we're going to spend money, make the case. Don't just come and say, oh, Cody, would you pick between A and B? But instead, look, say we face A and B. It's a debate in the team. Here's the advantages of A. Here's the advantages of B. I recommend, but you tell me because in the end, it's your money. And what I'm doing there is making it super easy for you, but still letting you make the choice. Now, If you're a really strong lieutenant, if you got, if I have a great relationship with you, I might be so bold. This is like playing the advanced level of the game to say, Hey Cody, we looked at A and B and I know how you think. And so I've gone ahead because of these reasons and made the call A. It is still reversible. If you disagree, call me back, but otherwise just know we're already running. And at this point you're like, this person is magic. They're doing what I would do for the reasons I would do it. And making me money, and all I have to do is like, well, nothing actually, right? Just read the email and collect the check. That's, that's where you're trying to get to. But that takes a relationship where I, where you and I have enough trust that I can make decisions …

AI assessment note: “another good one is bring solutions or propose solutions.”

Q So how do you tell who is going to be an A player who is not?

A Oh, I wish I could do it perfectly, because of course I've mis-hired people. The biggest thing we've learned to look at, and with leaders you can do this more because they have some sort of track record, is almost always looking what they have done predicts what they are going to do. So how much can you dig into that? My favorite trick for figuring out A players is everybody knows to give three references if you ask. My trick was I would call a reference and say, Hey, who else knows this person that I could call? And that way I would get out of their list of chosen references because they know somebody else who knows them. They'd be like, Oh, well, Cody worked with him. And then I would call you and you're not expecting a call. You haven't agreed to give a reference, but I'd say, I am considering hiring, you know, whatever Mark Smith, uh, I know you worked with Mark. Would you give me a little bit of insight? And usually you'd be the one if you're like, Mark is awesome, whereas you're like, well, I could talk about Mark. That was my real way to tell who was an A player, is, is what, what were people who weren't sort of the listed references gonna say about them, plus what were their accomplishments?

AI assessment note: “My favorite trick for figuring out A players is everybody knows to give three references”

Q What do you think a good buffer is? Is it like 25 to 30% more than you think?

A I would say it depends on the product. It depends on the thing. Like, for example, like comic books. I think we might sell more comic books than anybody else in the world. Like, all the independent comic companies launch on Kickstarter. Uh, comic books, like, that's, like, when you're launching comics, it's like, that's a very, like, straightforward thing. Like, there's very well-known manufacturers, publishing, et cetera, et cetera. So, Like, there's a little less risk. Also, it's lightweight. It's, like, not heavy shipping costs. So, like, maybe you only need to, like, have a 10 to 15% buffer. But if you're talking about, like, heavy hardware that you're shipping from China and, like, all these things, you might want to have a bigger buffer of, like, 25, 30%.

AI assessment note: “maybe you only need to, like, have a 10 to 15% buffer.”

Q How has your mindset changed or stayed the same on the way we work? You know, I know you've said previously remote work is really not very helpful for you or healthy. Do you still think that's true?

A Well, I got, I got, I got in trouble because I, I overstated my argument. What I meant to say was When I look at my own career, I would not be where I am today if in my twenties and thirties I was working remotely. I went into the office every day in my twenties at the Washington Post, and I sat within You know, 10 feet of some of the greatest journalists of my generation. And that experience was in, of incalculable importance in teaching me what I'm doing. And if I was at home, I would have gotten none of it. Um, if I was at home, I would have missed the kind of serendipitous learning opportunities. I would have missed the kind of assignments that come just because you're around. Hey, this just happened. Somebody looks up and sees me. Gladwell, go do it. Unbelievable opportunity, right? If I'm at home, and they, they see somebody else, right? It's that kind of, Bob Woodward, the greatest investigative reporter of the 20th century, was 10 feet from me when I started as a twenty-two-year-old at the, twenty-three-year-old at the Washington Post. And I, I would spend hours just listening to him, just, just listening and watching him, listening to him on the telephone. It's like a graduate school seminar in how to ask questions, in how to Convince sources to do what you want them to do, how to, you know, I mean, on and on. I was just, I had a woman next to me, woman, Kathleen Day, …

AI assessment note: “I got in trouble because I, I overstated my argument. What I meant to say”

Q Okay, I want to end on two more. One is she sells. You've taught, like, tens of thousands of ladies by now how to sell. What's your secret tips? Like, if I have, if I'm a she sells girl by Shelby, and I'm listening today, what are the secret tips for sales that you're like, my girls get this, nobody else does?

A I love that. So remember how I talked about the environmental closing door-to-door sales, where I'm like, you have to move someone? You can do the same thing over Zoom, and I never talk about that on social media, because I don't want anybody else to use it, because sales tricks, it's like, you teach it for a couple years, and then everybody starts doing it, and you have to come up with something different, right? So that's kind of one that I gatekeep that y'all can have, but I was thinking, I was like, environmental closing works so well in in-person, when you just move people, because it breaks The frame of being a salesperson, and now you're a helper. I was like, how do we do that over Zoom when we're just stuck in a box? Well, the answer is, you'd be like, oh, sorry, I need to plug in my phone really quick. Oh, I need to go get water. Oh, someone's at my door really quick. This is when you find yourself in a position where someone keeps saying no, no, no, no, no. Because they start associating the physical surroundings with their no. So you can kind of restart the conversation by being like, hold on, I need to go put my dogs in the room. I'll come back in like two minutes. Because what does this person do? You don't ask, you just tell them. What do they do? They open up their phone. They start scrolling. They maybe check their email. They just forget about how hard you are …

AI assessment note: “You can do the same thing over Zoom, and I never talk about that”

Q And is that true? Like, if we pay more attention to luck, or if you pay more attention to luck, could you in fact be luckier?

A That's absolutely what the research shows, and, and the study that, that really demonstrate this, they took, ah, two groups of people. One were self-identified lucky people, people who call themselves, hey, I tend to be pretty lucky, and people who said, no, I tend to be pretty unlucky in life. And they gave them a very simple task. The task was to look through the newspaper and simply count the number of images in the newspaper. And they said, if you do that, we'll give you 250 dollars as soon as you finish. Finish as quickly as possible. The unlucky people, again, self-identified unlucky people, finished in two and a half minutes. The lucky people finished in about 11 seconds. Why? Because when they flipped to page two, one of those images said, there are 43 images in this paper, collect your prize. So the unlucky people didn't even see the ad. Again, their reality was different. Their beliefs didn't let them see the totality of information. That eleven million bits of information, that bit of information didn't even get in. Whereas the lucky people, ah, bingo. And they went to collect their prize. Right? And so this is a classic hallmark trait of entrepreneurs. What, what, uh, Walter Isaacson called about Steve Jobs, he called it the reality distortion field. That entrepreneurs do, successful entrepreneurs, have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They ca…

AI assessment note: “That's absolutely what the research shows, and, and the study that, that really demonstrate this”

Q Can you talk about what daily habits you put into place so you train your brain to find luck?

A Sure. So this is called entrepreneurial alertness, that you can literally create your own luck, and so there's a few things you can do, and these are traits common among entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs, it's funny, don't understand why everybody doesn't do this, but they're very common traits. So one of them is stretching beyond your comfort zone, and we can do this in all kinds of small ways. I think one of the best is to talk to people, right? You spread your luck surface area when you just talk to folks. I, on the flight here, uh, I, I just came from Barcelona. Talked for an hour and a half in the galleyway of, of the, the flight, right, where, you know, people buy the restrooms where they give out drinks. Talked to this lady for an hour and a half. Now we're friends, and we're, we're keeping in touch. Just, but I don't know what's going to come out of that, but That's something that I think before doing this research, I would not have done, and now I'm very open to. So, pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Another thing we do is to express extreme amounts of gratitude. That you increase your entrepreneurial alertness when you become attuned to ways to thank people in your life. That even the small, Tina Selig taught me this at Stanford. She will, she has a big old stack of these thank you cards that she just whips off, you know, as soon as she can write, hey, thanks…

AI assessment note: “one of them is stretching beyond your comfort zone... Another thing we do is to express”

Q Yeah, I agree. I also find it shocking how big the endowments of the universities are at the same time that we have education costs for universities going up so high and sort of like a declining ROI that kids are getting from universities. What do you think about it? Because you're, you're not quiet about the things that you don't like about universities while also working in one.

A Well, my industry is arguably the most, one of the most corrupt, maybe with the exception of social media, or, you know, I, I work in a corrupt industry. People are under the impression that we're nice people with our Labradors, watching PBS every night, and we're noble people. We're like everybody else. We, Academics and administrators wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and ask themselves the same question, and that is, how do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we found the ultimate business strategy, and that's to sequester the majority of public from the freshman class and artificially constrain the freshman seat. So Harvard, fifty-four billion dollars in endowment, It's grown its endowment 4000% in the last 30 or 40 years, up forty-fold. It's grown its freshman class size four percent. So it admits 1500 kids on 55,000 applicants. It has the resources. It could let in 15,000 and not sacrifice any quality, but they decide to artificially constrain it because they're, if, to a certain extent, homeowners and people who already have college degrees, Have figured out that this LVMH rejectionist exclusionary strategy is the best way to entrench the incumbents. So if I already have a college degree and I already have a house, I love it when UCLA is impossible to get into it. How many people do you say kind of proudly or jokingly say, I would ne…

AI assessment note: “So Harvard, fifty-four billion dollars in endowment, It's grown its endowment 4000%”

Q You actually told A couple stories I really loved in the book. One about Ronald Reed and Richard Foscone. Can you tell us about them?

A Ronald Reed, I, I've never met either of these people. Uh, Ronald Reed was a guy who was a, uh, he was a gas station janitor. Uh, no, I'm sorry, a gas station attendant and a janitor at a mall. Just as humble, low-key, or dare I say, like, low-class, poor kind of person that, that, that you would ever meet. And when he died, he ended up leaving millions and millions of dollars to charity. And people were like, what? Like, this guy's mopping the floors and pumping gas. Like, where in the world did he get all this money? And it turned out that he took what tiny dollars he could save from his minimum wage job, and he bought stocks that he held for, like, 50 years, and turned into millions of dollars and gave it away. But he's, he, he could not have been a more ordinary kind of person. Richard is, could not be more polar opposite. He's born into, born into wealth and went to Ivy League schools and worked on Wall Street and worked his way up to senior leadership on Wall Street, made tens of millions of dollars, and very Soon, not that long after Ronald Reed died, he filed for personal bankruptcy and blew himself up with debt and leverage. He had a house in Florida that had multiple elevators and like a swimming pool that you could stand on top, like all these crazy things, all heavily levered. Financial crisis hits. Boom. He's out. He's bankrupt. And I use that juxtaposition to be l…

AI assessment note: “Ronald Reed was a guy who was a, uh, he was a gas station”

Q Yeah, tell me about the business. How much money did you start it with, and what happened?

A 500 bucks. I broke my, well not broke, I tore my Achilles tendon. I was a tennis player in college. I was on crutches. So all of a sudden I couldn't carry my laundry to the laundry facility, which is in the bottom of the dormitory. So my laundry is piling up. I can't carry them down. My roommate's kind of giving me a hard time. We go home for Thanksgiving. His dad was an entrepreneur. I didn't know what the word entrepreneur was at this point, right? My dad's a doctor. My grandfather's a doctor. My uncle's a doctor. My aunt's a nurse. Like they're my whole family's medical and his dad, we were talking about the fact that I couldn't do my laundry. And he said, well, you should just have Someone, you know, come and pick it up. And I was like, I looked in the yellow pages, and this is how old I am, right? So I looked in the yellow pages.

AI assessment note: “500 bucks. I broke my, well not broke, I tore my Achilles tendon.”

Q So what do you do now? Like, if you're feeling down, not even going all the way back, but if you're feeling down or you want to feel re-inspired, what do you turn to? What activities, what books, what readings, what quotes?

A So, okay, this is silly, but one of the things I'm doing right now, and it's not silly, it's just, it's just, I don't, I don't know how people respond to this. I like this. Yeah, I know you're gonna like this. So, about two months ago, I started using AI therapy. Now, a lot of people ask Chad DDP mental health stuff, but there's this app called Sonia. Sonia.ai, and I met the founder at a mental health conference, and he was giving a presentation and explaining how it works and how it's, you know, built on the LLMs, but they've basically taken, you know, every therapist, every case study, every book ever written, put it in there and tried to design. And they call it emotional support. I think for legal reasons, they call it emotional support instead of AI therapy, but it's AI therapy. And so, and so anyways, I was like, well, I've done a lot of therapy. I mean, I mean, if anyone's done therapy, I mean, I've done a lot of therapy. And one of the things that's really a bummer with therapy is if I have a panic attack, it doesn't happen at two o'clock on a Thursday, two o'clock on a Thursday. It happens at four fucking in the morning. And my therapist, I don't care how much money you have, no therapist is answering your call at four o'clock in the morning. And so I was like, wow. I could, because I still struggle with anxiety. I still have these issues that come up, and especially w…

AI assessment note: “about two months ago, I started using AI therapy. Now, a lot of people”

Q Yeah. Do you have a philosophy on old money versus new money?

A Absolutely. I think the difference is social capital, and I'll explain. So basically, when I was young, my parents, like, were not consuming content. They were literally just working and trying to survive. And so when I would go to school on the Monday and people would be like, oh my god, the Ravens, they won this week. I'd be like, the Ravens, what is that? Like, I didn't know what the football team was. Or they'd be like, yeah, you know, like, my favorite Fan, like, the Beatles. I'd be like, the Beatles? Like, what is that? And it was always like, even as I got older, it was like, have you seen this movie? Like, no, I have not seen that movie. Sorry, my Chinese-speaking parents have not shown me the greatest 100 movies of, you know, our time. Like, I did not have those unspoken things that made you cool. And I thought, when I finally got to Wall Street, when I had gotten, you know, that great education and gotten to this Private zone that I was finally in the club. I wasn't even on the same block as the club. And so, unfortunately, I learned a lot more lingo there. So when guys would say, yeah, this weekend we're heading out east. East of where? That's code, by the way, for the Hamptons. Um, or it was something along the lines of, you know, when we ski, and Zermatt, and we go to Zestad, and there's Courchevel. Like, I didn't even know how to spell these words, much less knew …

AI assessment note: “I think the difference is social capital, and I'll explain.”

Q time, I just need to take care of it. And so, it's like this, the same thing. It's so good. Okay, what about, I want to talk a little bit about, you talked about things that you hate, and that's how you choose what to do. What if somebody hates budgeting? Like, what do you do if you're a person that hates budgeting, but you know you have to save?

A It's a reframe. I think budgeting needs to get a new PR team, because budgeting, I feel like, is so looked down upon. It's like, Budgeting is going to tell me no. Budgeting is the reason I can't do anything. No. Budgeting is the reason you can go out with your girlfriends for drinks and not worry when the bill comes that your, your card's going to be declined. Budgeting is the reason you can afford to go on that vacation and not be like, hmm, is this pina colada going to set me over the edge? Like, budgeting is the reason why you get to have the experiences you want out of your life. And so I think first, we got to reframe. But second, if we're going to be practical here, I like a finger to the wind budgeting strategy, which is just the 5030 20. So your take home pay, 50% of it goes towards needs. I'm talking housing, I'm talking utilities, transportation, if you got to use it to get to and from work, basic groceries. 30% goes towards the wants. So this is dining out, entertainment, seeing friends, getting drinks, whatever. And then 20%, I always say, is taking care of future you. And that covers all things like saving, debt, Pay down, investing, all those things. And the hope is that over time, this isn't going to stay 50, 30, 20 forever. The hope is that, you know, as you make more money, as your investments start generating more income for you, the 50 and the 30 become a sma…

AI assessment note: “It's a reframe... But second, if we're going to be practical here”

Q Mmm, let's do that. I love it. What does this mean?

A Ok, so if you're driving your car, don't do this. But if you are seated somewhere safe, close your eyes for a second and imagine your perfect year. You get to live where you live. You get to travel wherever you want to travel. Maybe you're helping out, you know, kids. Maybe you have a pet that you want to have. You can have a shopping budget, all of those things. Now ask yourself, realistically, and don't lie, how much would that one year cost you? Then we take that number. You can whip out your handy dandy iPhone calculator. You divide that number by 0.04. That is representative of four percent, and the reason we use that is because four percent represents an incredibly conservative return on your investments, so this is what you can decently get right now from a high-yield savings account, which is effectively risk-free, so we're pretty confident you can get this return. The number that you get that you've now just calculated is what you would want to have invested And at that point, you could tell your boss, fuck you and quit, because your investments would be able to sponsor your lifestyle, and you could have that lifestyle into perpetuity, never eating into that nest egg, because how much that nest egg would earn you every year would cover your expenses.

AI assessment note: “The number that you get that you've now just calculated is what you would want”