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0:00:33 This isn’t your grandpa’s finance podcast.
0:00:37 It’s Vivian too, your rich BFF and host of the net worth and chill podcast.
0:00:42 This is money talk that’s actually fun, actually relatable, and will actually make you money.
0:00:45 I’m breaking down investments, side hustles, and wealth strategies.
0:00:46 No boring spreadsheets.
0:00:49 Just real talk that’ll have you leveling up your financial game.
0:00:51 With amazing guests like Glenda Baker.
0:00:54 There’s never been any house that I’ve sold in the last 32 years.
0:00:57 That’s not worth more today than it was the day that I sold it.
0:01:00 This is a money podcast that you’ll actually want to listen to.
0:01:03 Follow net worth and chill wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:01:04 Your bank account will thank you later.
0:01:08 Scott, why are there so few unicorns in Europe?
0:01:10 Yeah, wow, we’re going to need a bigger boat.
0:01:12 I get asked that a lot here.
0:01:14 One, it starts with immigrants.
0:01:17 And that is the example I use on an asset in London
0:01:21 is that my father in Glasgow and my mother in London,
0:01:24 in their, you know, like when they were 19 and 23,
0:01:27 left and took a chance to come to America.
0:01:35 So risk taking a crazy idea that willing to kind of give up a good career
0:01:38 or great prospects and take a chance on a crazy idea
0:01:39 that might become crazy genius.
0:01:42 We just have more of that secret sauce than anyone in the world.
0:01:45 We have the best universities in the world.
0:01:50 I’ve said often that you can’t find a $50 billion plus company in tech
0:01:54 that isn’t a bike ride from a world-class engineering university.
0:01:55 And we have most of them.
0:02:01 You have more kind of hardball full-body contact competition
0:02:06 where the government ops for a lack of regulation
0:02:08 and capitalism over regulation.
0:02:13 We have a much greater risk appetite.
0:02:19 There’s $5 million in venture capital for every one startup in the United States.
0:02:22 And there’s $1 million for every startup in Europe.
0:02:26 And there’s five times as many entrepreneurs per capita in the United States.
0:02:29 So we’re more risk aggressive.
0:02:31 We have stronger IP.
0:02:32 We have more capital.
0:02:38 And it just kind of all adds up to what is an ecosystem
0:02:41 where there’s been more wealth created in the last 24 months
0:02:45 in a seven-mile radius of SFO International because of AI
0:02:47 than in the last 10 years in Europe.
0:02:52 These are big, big issues baked into the DNA of America.
0:02:54 And I don’t quite frankly,
0:02:57 I don’t see anything really changing in the short or the medium term.
0:03:03 Welcome to First Time Founders.
0:03:05 I’m Ed Elson.
0:03:08 The European startup scene is struggling.
0:03:13 Last year, Europe produced only seven new unicorns.
0:03:16 Meanwhile, America made 71.
0:03:20 My next guest, however, is a rare success story.
0:03:22 Born and raised in Germany,
0:03:26 he is one of the few Europeans who is leading the world in software and technology.
0:03:30 His company, valued at $13 billion,
0:03:33 is the second most valuable startup in Europe.
0:03:35 What does the company do?
0:03:38 Something called process mining.
0:03:40 And we’ll get to what that actually is in a moment.
0:03:44 This is my conversation with Alex Rinker,
0:03:46 co-founder and co-CEO of Solonis.
0:03:49 [Music]
0:03:50 Welcome, Alex.
0:03:50 Thank you for joining me.
0:03:51 Thanks for having me.
0:03:53 You came in from New York, right?
0:03:54 You’re around.
0:03:55 Came on the subway.
0:03:56 On the subway, exactly.
0:03:58 So we’ve got a lot to get into,
0:04:04 but I want to just start off with what Solonis actually is and what it does.
0:04:08 So Solonis is a process mining company.
0:04:10 And what does that mean exactly?
0:04:15 So basically, big companies hire you to do an x-ray,
0:04:17 essentially, of all of their business processes.
0:04:22 Yeah, it could be manufacturing processes or compliance processes,
0:04:25 or financial reporting processes, et cetera.
0:04:27 Any process that has multiple moving parts,
0:04:33 you come in, you visualize the process, you do that with data,
0:04:36 and you identify all of the inefficiencies in that process.
0:04:38 Have I gotten anything wrong?
0:04:40 Yeah, I think that’s where we started.
0:04:44 And we’ve built a lot more around it.
0:04:46 We call it a process intelligence platform.
0:04:48 So it doesn’t just mine the process.
0:04:50 It gives you real-time insights in it.
0:04:53 It flags when things are going wrong.
0:04:55 It helps you orchestrate and optimize processes.
0:04:57 But you captured the essence of it, 100%.
0:05:02 And it turns out that this is process mining or process intelligence,
0:05:05 a highly valuable business.
0:05:08 So you’ve worked with more than a third of the Fortune Global 500.
0:05:12 You have unlocked more than $5 billion in value for your customers.
0:05:15 And your company is now worth, or at least at its latest valuation,
0:05:20 $13 billion, which makes it the second most valuable company in Europe.
0:05:29 So my first question to you, what drew you to processes and process mining,
0:05:34 and how did you know that this was going to be such a big business opportunity?
0:05:39 So when we started, we really, it started, we got fascinated by the technology.
0:05:44 You know, we were all students at university and we didn’t know much about business processes.
0:05:49 And in some ways, when I look back, I’m happy how little we knew,
0:05:50 because we were pretty naive.
0:05:54 But one thing we didn’t know, so first we got fascinated with the technology.
0:05:57 And then we talked to some prospective clients and some, you know,
0:06:00 the university at these businesses that you could cooperate with.
0:06:04 And there was all sorts of programs at the university to work with businesses.
0:06:10 And we very quickly found out that processes are one of the most horizontal opportunities.
0:06:14 Right. They really are the fabric that run every business.
0:06:15 Yeah.
0:06:19 Right. The way you sell, I mean, the way you produce this podcast is a process.
0:06:22 Everything a business does can be described and expressed as a process.
0:06:27 So when we look at a company, whether it’s a bank or an automotive company,
0:06:29 or, you know, packaged consumer goods,
0:06:34 we look at it as a collection of interwoven and inactive processes.
0:06:36 I guess what I’d love to know a bit more about from you
0:06:41 is why companies have such a hard time with their processes.
0:06:46 Like, how is it that a company can get to a point where they,
0:06:51 they don’t even understand their own business or how their own business works.
0:06:55 And they need to hire someone like you to come in and tell them,
0:06:56 this is how your business works.
0:06:58 Like, how does a company get to that point?
0:07:00 So I have two stories about this.
0:07:01 Right. When is the story how it happened?
0:07:03 And then the story how we found out about it.
0:07:06 So the first is the story how it happened is very simple.
0:07:09 So my grandfather, you know, he was a farmer,
0:07:13 and he grew up as a farmer and then he had a potato trading business.
0:07:16 He just passed away at 96 years old.
0:07:17 So, you know, he got pretty old.
0:07:21 So back in the day, you could see the whole process, right?
0:07:23 You would go there, you could see how the potatoes coming,
0:07:25 trucks coming in, everything being sorted, it’s going out.
0:07:29 You know, and if there was an issue, you could see it and quickly fix it.
0:07:32 But then obviously companies grew much, much bigger than that.
0:07:35 And you had ERP systems, you know, people said,
0:07:39 hey, we want to digitize our processes in ERP systems.
0:07:44 In many ways, these ERP systems, our processes had to fit these systems.
0:07:47 So we had to like fit our processes into these systems,
0:07:49 which generated quite a bit of friction.
0:07:52 And then you had more and more systems come along.
0:07:55 So it doesn’t just stay with the ERP system, like SAP and Oracle.
0:08:00 You had CIM coming along, you had the cloud revolution, you know.
0:08:01 So you had CIM systems coming along.
0:08:06 And you had a lot of cloud applications, HR, IT service management.
0:08:09 So over time, we added more and more systems.
0:08:13 This really happened from the, you know, in the last 50 years,
0:08:16 you know, sort of from the 70s, 80s, all the way to today.
0:08:20 And now companies have, you know, they have an ERP system.
0:08:26 And I think on average, big companies over 250 core systems that operate
0:08:30 the different parts of their business, supply chain, HR, finance,
0:08:34 you know, inventory, warehouse management, you know, all sorts of processes.
0:08:36 Banks, I mean, when I talk to our big banking clients,
0:08:39 they have thousands, they’re even more complex.
0:08:45 And in many ways, our processes had to sort of be stitched together
0:08:46 across all these systems.
0:08:48 And then you have changing products, you have globalization,
0:08:49 you have acquisitions.
0:08:52 So over time, these businesses tend to get quite complex
0:08:54 and you can’t see the process anymore because it’s in systems,
0:08:56 not like with my grandfather, we could see it.
0:09:00 And in many ways, we also had to change our organizations,
0:09:02 our processes to accommodate the way these systems were set up.
0:09:05 So companies have a huge opportunity.
0:09:08 We say that every process out there is waiting to be optimized.
0:09:09 Yeah.
0:09:13 And now with AI coming in, you’re going to have a huge wave
0:09:15 of what we call process re-engineering.
0:09:19 Because you want to reimagine your processes in the age of AI
0:09:21 and we can talk about how we think it’s going to play out
0:09:23 and how we see it playing out.
0:09:26 The story of how we found out about it is also quite interesting.
0:09:30 So when we started, we actually thought the same as you.
0:09:33 We thought, well, process mining is kind of an interesting technology,
0:09:35 but that’s a little bit boring.
0:09:36 We’re excited about processes.
0:09:40 But we said, well, but if we could simulate processes,
0:09:41 so if we could basically take the mining
0:09:44 and then build simulation models where people then could say,
0:09:48 hey, if I hire like five people here, or if I automate this,
0:09:49 you know, how does it change?
0:09:53 And we built a simulation product that was based on process mining.
0:09:54 We took that to market.
0:09:57 It didn’t work because it was way ahead of its time.
0:10:00 So we were about ready to give up until someone said,
0:10:03 you know, we explained how technology works.
0:10:05 And they said, well, this process visibility part,
0:10:06 that’s really interesting, right?
0:10:07 That’s where I would like to start.
0:10:08 Right.
0:10:10 And even though we do way more today, it’s like,
0:10:12 we really found out, and there was a home run,
0:10:15 that people need that x-ray of understanding exactly
0:10:17 how their processes operate.
0:10:20 What’s like the worst process you’ve ever seen?
0:10:24 Like you go to a client and you look at how they do anything,
0:10:26 whatever it is, and you’re like, oh my God,
0:10:28 this is the slowest, most inefficient,
0:10:29 most ridiculous process I’ve ever seen.
0:10:32 You don’t have to name them by name.
0:10:36 So often, very successful companies,
0:10:37 it’s very high margin,
0:10:39 actually don’t have very efficient processes, right?
0:10:40 So you have that.
0:10:42 I mean, we’ve seen crazy stories.
0:10:46 One of our clients found out that they paid hundreds of millions
0:10:48 worth of invoices twice.
0:10:50 Okay.
0:10:52 By the way, a lot of clients do that.
0:10:54 Usually it’s more than millions to tens of millions,
0:10:55 what you can save.
0:10:57 But one, it’s in the hundreds.
0:10:58 It happens in every company.
0:11:02 If you don’t have a system, you get an invoice,
0:11:04 someone gets a copy, maybe it gets into the system
0:11:06 with slightly different data.
0:11:09 You’re from the UK, so the date format is different in the US.
0:11:11 So people type it the wrong way,
0:11:12 and someone gets in the system twice,
0:11:14 system thinks it’s two invoices, gets paid twice.
0:11:19 So that’s just one example of a process that’s ridiculous.
0:11:21 But it happens.
0:11:22 We see a lot of friction,
0:11:24 or where companies really pay attention
0:11:26 is friction in customer-facing processes.
0:11:30 Like, if it takes you days to book an order,
0:11:32 we had one client once
0:11:34 that was in a complex business to be fair,
0:11:37 but they on average changed the date
0:11:39 that they confirmed to the customer 13 times.
0:11:40 Wow.
0:11:41 So imagine that, right?
0:11:43 I mean, they were very successful companies.
0:11:44 So their products were so unique that customers
0:11:46 would put up with it.
0:11:47 We helped them fix it.
0:11:50 But imagine on Amazon, you get on average 13 emails.
0:11:51 It’s like, “No, we’re not coming on Monday,
0:11:52 we’re coming Tuesday.”
0:11:52 You sometimes get those emails,
0:11:54 but you don’t get them 13 times on average.
0:11:59 You know, we have lots of customers that shipped products,
0:12:00 but never invoiced them, right?
0:12:02 So they had revenue leakage
0:12:04 because they shipped products that they never invoiced.
0:12:08 We have lots of customers that negotiate contracts
0:12:09 with their suppliers,
0:12:12 but then they actually don’t take advantage of them.
0:12:13 So they buy off of prices
0:12:15 that actually higher than what they negotiated.
0:12:16 Yeah.
0:12:19 So it’s like, you know, it’s a really exciting space
0:12:20 because you can see the impact.
0:12:21 And what’s particularly exciting,
0:12:24 you know, we do projects with Northwestern Medicine.
0:12:26 They are looking at, you know,
0:12:28 as patients go through the imaging,
0:12:31 like a mammography or other imaging techniques,
0:12:32 how long is the wait time?
0:12:33 How can we cut that cycle time down?
0:12:36 How can we make sure that we get it right the first time?
0:12:38 What do the drop-off rates look like, right?
0:12:41 How can we release patients out of the hospital
0:12:43 faster? How can we move them through faster?
0:12:44 So they started with in-finance and procurement,
0:12:47 but they moved into the core medical operations.
0:12:49 We have customers with a lot of government customers.
0:12:51 Now we’re talking about government efficiency.
0:12:56 So, you know, we saved the state of Oklahoma,
0:12:59 for example, I helped them as they came in and said,
0:13:01 “We want to really understand how are we spending money
0:13:04 and where’s money, taxpayer money going out the door?”
0:13:06 And they were able to save taxpayer dollars
0:13:08 and get more transparency into that process.
0:13:11 So we work with increasing amount of government agency
0:13:14 and we’re excited about how we can, you know,
0:13:17 make sure that government takes better care of taxpayer money.
0:13:22 So there is, you know, no shortage of opportunities.
0:13:26 Ten years ago, this is probably the most boring concept ever,
0:13:28 but suddenly it’s very exciting to people.
0:13:32 And I think a lot of it is because of the renewed interest
0:13:35 in government waste and just the fact that people are so upset
0:13:37 about the idea that we don’t have transparency
0:13:39 into how our government really works.
0:13:41 We don’t know where our money really goes.
0:13:44 And now we’ve got Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
0:13:46 heading up the Department of Government Efficiency,
0:13:49 which is like the biggest thing in the news right now
0:13:51 when it comes to government.
0:13:53 So you’re kind of at the forefront of that.
0:13:57 Do you think you’d ever work with Doge,
0:13:58 the Department of Government Efficiency?
0:14:03 Is that kind of like the sort of golden use case for Salonis?
0:14:04 Well, we hope so, right?
0:14:05 And it’s not just Doge.
0:14:07 Doge is really facilitating it.
0:14:10 It’s the agencies on the federal level, the states,
0:14:12 and it’s really governments around the world
0:14:16 that I think have a very strong interest.
0:14:20 I mean, with high inflation, with increasing debt,
0:14:21 I think everybody has an interest
0:14:24 to make sure that government money is spent transparently,
0:14:27 efficiently, the same way businesses do.
0:14:29 I think everybody can get more efficient.
0:14:32 It’s the same way that humans always get better.
0:14:35 And the starting points are different for sure,
0:14:38 but often actually the best organizations,
0:14:42 you know, if you want to get better,
0:14:43 if you’re already good,
0:14:45 you need the best and most sophisticated systems, right?
0:14:47 So it’s not that I would say
0:14:48 we work with inefficient companies,
0:14:50 we work with everybody.
0:14:53 And I think that everybody has an opportunity to get better.
0:14:55 So you’ve seen how these processes work.
0:14:58 You’ve probably seen more inefficiencies
0:15:00 than basically anyone in the world.
0:15:00 Yes.
0:15:05 So I feel like you are well positioned to take a good guess
0:15:09 at what is inefficient in the government right now.
0:15:12 I know you haven’t done an x-ray of it,
0:15:16 but if you were to do an audit of the US government,
0:15:18 what would you think are the big problems
0:15:20 that need to be streamlined right now?
0:15:22 Well, I think one, you know,
0:15:24 because you also want to drive impact quickly, right?
0:15:25 So if you want to drive impact quickly,
0:15:27 the first thing you focus on is where money goes out of the door.
0:15:28 Yeah.
0:15:29 Right? So you look at procurement,
0:15:32 you look at invoicing, you look at the controls around that,
0:15:34 all the money flows that go out of the door,
0:15:37 how can we make them more transparent, right?
0:15:43 Where do we maybe have things that we don’t intend to happen like that,
0:15:44 where is potential fraud happening?
0:15:46 How can we increase the accountability of that?
0:15:48 And that’s a complex thing because, you know,
0:15:51 on the federal level and then even on the state level,
0:15:52 you have multiple payment systems.
0:15:54 You have like, you know, hundreds of billions
0:15:56 going out of the door of the government every year.
0:15:58 So I think that’s where I would probably start.
0:15:58 Yeah.
0:16:00 But then you can get into everything else.
0:16:02 I mean, you can get into labor efficiency,
0:16:06 you can get into the efficiency of the core processes of servicing,
0:16:11 you know, the citizens really, in every single department, right?
0:16:16 So you can get into really the corporations of these agencies
0:16:19 that provide these services, right?
0:16:19 Yeah.
0:16:23 Whether it’s you pick up your new driver’s license or you hand in your tax return or,
0:16:27 you know, you can imagine the kind of use cases, right?
0:16:29 As a citizen, you can really go anywhere.
0:16:39 We’ll be right back.
0:16:47 Why do so many of us get happiness wrong?
0:16:49 And how can we start to get it right?
0:16:54 I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about positive emotion on all the time,
0:16:54 right?
0:16:58 Often very high arousal, positive emotion, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
0:17:00 I’m Preet Bharara.
0:17:03 And this week, Dr. Laurie Santos joins me on my podcast,
0:17:07 Stay Tuned with Preet, to discuss the science behind happiness.
0:17:11 We explore job crafting, the parenting paradox, the arrival fallacy,
0:17:15 and why acts of kindness might be the simplest path to fulfillment.
0:17:18 The episode is out now.
0:17:23 Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
0:17:31 We’re back with First Time Founders.
0:17:35 What would you say makes a good process?
0:17:37 I think about this a lot in my work.
0:17:42 I mean, I don’t have massive payment system processes,
0:17:45 but, you know, we write scripts and we work as a team
0:17:47 and we got to figure out how we produce this podcast.
0:17:52 And I find that there are often just processes I just don’t like.
0:17:56 Like they just feel awkward, slow, they irritate me,
0:18:00 but I’m never fully sure how to address that.
0:18:02 Like, you know, sometimes I’ll just be like,
0:18:06 “Oh, let’s have a meeting and like figure out how to make this better.”
0:18:09 But then even that makes it worse because then we start nitpicking everything
0:18:11 and it takes like an hour to have the meeting.
0:18:13 And then it’s like, it’s even worse.
0:18:17 So I guess from your perspective, what is a reliable way
0:18:20 to make a process within an organization better?
0:18:23 It’s a lifestyle that you have to embed.
0:18:30 I think what some people think, it’s like they’re too on and off about it, right?
0:18:33 So you should point like, “Let’s get a meeting, fix this process,
0:18:35 and then never talk about it again.”
0:18:36 That usually doesn’t work.
0:18:39 It’s more about how do you get 1% better every week.
0:18:43 So, you know, one of the things I always tell our teams is,
0:18:44 you know, we’re really selling a lifestyle
0:18:47 and the lifestyle is called continuous operational improvement.
0:18:50 How do you get better all the time?
0:18:51 How do you find these increments?
0:18:56 It’s like there’s little changes that add up to really ultimately a revolution, right?
0:18:58 That’s really how you have to think about it.
0:19:03 And you know, the one thing that, who really figured this out initially
0:19:06 where the, you know, the whole culture of the Toyota Quality Management System,
0:19:10 Kaizen, and optimizing manufacturing processes.
0:19:14 Because manufacturing processes is like, you need perfect quality.
0:19:15 It’s very expensive if you screw something up.
0:19:18 Like if you have a car and you’re missing one little screw.
0:19:21 The whole production line stops.
0:19:28 Okay? So, you know, those companies invented this Kaizen lifestyle, right?
0:19:31 And that’s really not from a technology standpoint,
0:19:33 but culturally what we are evangelizing.
0:19:38 And when you think about it, now with AI, that is exactly what companies need.
0:19:40 Every company needs to embrace this.
0:19:43 I’m like 100% convinced because the way AI is going to manifest,
0:19:46 you’re not going to have this like one AI system.
0:19:49 You’re going to have lots of agents in your processes.
0:19:52 So a company is going to have, I don’t know,
0:19:55 100,000 employees and 100,000 agents, right?
0:20:01 And these agents are going to automate little processes and things and tasks
0:20:04 so that ultimately the whole organization is much more efficient.
0:20:07 You know, one person is going to have way, way more impact
0:20:08 and it’s going to do way more.
0:20:11 And in order to do this, if you think of each of this agent,
0:20:13 it’s a small process change, right?
0:20:16 And you’re not going to do that overnight.
0:20:20 And you’re not going to do this with one big bang or one year sprint.
0:20:24 You’re going to do this by implementing this tool set,
0:20:27 educating the organization to really promoting this as a lifestyle
0:20:30 where people are constantly automating, constantly optimizing,
0:20:33 constantly embedding AI into what they do.
0:20:37 And then two, three years later, they’re going to be way more efficient than before.
0:20:38 That’s how it’s going to work.
0:20:40 Are you doing that within your own company as well?
0:20:45 Are you employing AI agents to automate the processes within Solonis itself?
0:20:48 We have a big Solonis for Solonis program
0:20:50 and that’s exactly how we approach it, right?
0:20:53 How do we get better every day, right?
0:20:56 Like how do we make our customer experience better?
0:20:57 How do we make our customer onboarding better?
0:21:00 How do we make our customer support better?
0:21:01 How do we really embed those?
0:21:04 Supposedly for us, it’s changing because we’re growing so fast
0:21:08 and we have grown so fast that sometimes you take the eye of the ball
0:21:10 even though you are the process company,
0:21:12 you take the eye of the ball.
0:21:14 So it’s something we constantly remind ourselves and go back to.
0:21:17 I feel like this could be an entire sector or a department.
0:21:21 Like I feel like we’re going to see like chief process officers or something, right?
0:21:25 We already see this that organizations are moving from like very functional organizations.
0:21:29 Like think about like the process of getting a lead,
0:21:34 converting it into an opportunity, selling your product,
0:21:38 shipping your product, maybe manufacturing it and then billing it.
0:21:39 It’s called lead to cash, okay?
0:21:40 It’s a very important process.
0:21:45 So today you have like a sales development team, you have a sales team,
0:21:49 you have an engineering team, you have a post sales team,
0:21:51 you have deployments, you have invoicing.
0:21:54 So it’s like seven different departments or so that are involved in this.
0:21:59 And what we see already is that people are embedding process owners.
0:22:02 So chief process owners or you know,
0:22:04 call them different ways, enterprise process owners.
0:22:06 And for end-to-end processes.
0:22:08 So what already a lot of companies are doing
0:22:11 is that they’re moving from a very functional structure
0:22:13 to more of a process-centric structure of the organization.
0:22:16 And AI can automate more of those process tasks.
0:22:18 That makes a lot more sense, right?
0:22:20 So that you can really look at this end-to-end
0:22:22 and say, what’s our customer experience?
0:22:23 End-to-end.
0:22:27 Because if you know, I send them the wrong invoice
0:22:29 or I provision the thing that they haven’t bought,
0:22:32 like that’s those breakpoints really hurt the customer experience, right?
0:22:35 Customer experience is an outcome of a process,
0:22:36 it’s not just your product.
0:22:40 So we see already that companies are sort of pivoting the arc charts
0:22:42 towards more of these process-centric structures.
0:22:47 Hearing you talk about this, you sound both your accent,
0:22:49 but also your philosophy, very German.
0:22:56 You do, I mean, the attention to detail,
0:23:01 the obsession with order, process, structure,
0:23:04 it does not feel, you’re not like an American cowboy,
0:23:06 you’re like an attention to detailed German.
0:23:09 And I want to talk about that,
0:23:11 or I’d like for you to talk about that,
0:23:13 because we’ve been talking about this a little bit on our podcast,
0:23:18 where in Germany, there is a dearth of entrepreneurship,
0:23:21 but that’s also true of Europe in general.
0:23:23 And I’m just going to go through a couple of stats here.
0:23:27 There are 760 unicorns in the US,
0:23:30 and there are only 130 unicorns in Europe.
0:23:32 Salonis is the second largest of all of those.
0:23:35 On a per capita basis,
0:23:38 the US has 13 times more unicorns than Europe.
0:23:41 And when we look at the US stock market,
0:23:44 the US stock market is now three times larger
0:23:46 than the European stock market.
0:23:49 And back in 2010, it was only one and a half times larger.
0:23:50 So the gap is growing.
0:23:54 Why do you think Europe is struggling so much
0:23:59 to build new successful companies such as Salonis?
0:24:03 I think the primary reason is the venture capital infrastructure.
0:24:05 I think it’s gotten a lot better,
0:24:09 but the structure around risk capital in the US
0:24:11 is absolutely phenomenal.
0:24:16 In the US, companies that have a 10% chance of working out
0:24:20 can raise $30 million seed rounds.
0:24:21 Correct.
0:24:22 Right, think about that.
0:24:24 So people are willing to give a team
0:24:26 that doesn’t even have a product yet,
0:24:27 $30 million.
0:24:31 And maybe it has a 1% chance of working.
0:24:32 Right.
0:24:35 But there’s so much capital that goes into technology
0:24:38 and emerging companies that sort of on the whole,
0:24:39 that system works, right?
0:24:42 At least some people are more successful than others,
0:24:45 but on a whole, that’s an incredible infrastructure
0:24:46 that doesn’t exist in Europe.
0:24:49 In Europe, you have an increasing amount of venture capital.
0:24:50 But for example, when we started,
0:24:53 we bootstrapped for almost six years.
0:24:54 Yeah.
0:24:55 With no funding.
0:24:57 And part of that because there wasn’t
0:25:00 enterprise-oriented venture capital infrastructure,
0:25:02 and the few VCs that were there said,
0:25:05 “Oh, early 20s, you’re too young to start a B2B business.”
0:25:06 Thank you.
0:25:09 And then we were fine bootstrapping,
0:25:11 but that doesn’t work for every company.
0:25:14 So I think that that is the primary reason.
0:25:16 I think there are other reasons, obviously,
0:25:19 you have a huge domestic market, so that helps.
0:25:21 I think you have a very entrepreneurial culture,
0:25:23 a very good culture on failure.
0:25:26 But look, people talk about the entrepreneurial culture in the U.S.
0:25:30 I mean, companies were started in Europe, right?
0:25:33 BMW was started in Germany, right?
0:25:35 There was an entrepreneur there that wasn’t afraid of failing.
0:25:38 And it’s like, I think that the cultural differences
0:25:41 are not the biggest deal.
0:25:43 I think there’s tremendous amount of entrepreneurial history
0:25:44 and heritage in Europe,
0:25:47 and tremendous amount of great talent.
0:25:50 You have a pretty strong education system.
0:25:52 I think the top European schools are just as good
0:25:54 as the top U.S. schools.
0:25:57 I think, and you can actually say that in Europe,
0:25:59 education is more affordable, more accessible for people.
0:26:03 So I think that the infrastructure around education,
0:26:05 the talent in Europe is actually quite phenomenal.
0:26:08 Could certainly be improved a lot,
0:26:09 but I think that’s not the primary reason.
0:26:11 I think the primary reason is that
0:26:15 the venture capital infrastructure is so much less developed.
0:26:18 And for technology companies in particular,
0:26:20 you need capital, right?
0:26:21 It’s a capital-intensive business.
0:26:24 Now with AIs even, in some ways, more capital-intensive.
0:26:26 And I think that’s the biggest gap.
0:26:28 And obviously, because we didn’t have that,
0:26:34 you then have the issue that a lot of, you know,
0:26:35 you are really behind.
0:26:38 So for example, out of Salonis,
0:26:40 you know, I get calls every month
0:26:42 from former Salonis who is starting a company.
0:26:46 I just actually put an angel check into one of them.
0:26:48 And there’s great companies there, right?
0:26:50 I know many of them will work out, right?
0:26:54 But that obviously these successes feed the next successes.
0:26:56 And because we didn’t have that as much of that,
0:26:59 you know, the US gets further and further ahead.
0:27:03 I am bullish on Europe from an entrepreneurial ecosystem
0:27:04 because of the talent.
0:27:06 Quality of life is very high.
0:27:07 I think people want to live there.
0:27:09 I think people from all over the world
0:27:11 still a very attractive place.
0:27:13 So I think Europe has a lot of opportunities.
0:27:15 If Europe is able to use them,
0:27:16 I think there’s a lot ahead.
0:27:19 But I would say the capital infrastructure is the main gap.
0:27:23 I feel like another way to say this is America’s rich.
0:27:27 And the reason I bring that up is because
0:27:30 those guys who are down to put in a $30 million check
0:27:36 for a company that has maybe a one to five percent chance of success,
0:27:38 I feel like the only guys who can do that
0:27:42 are the mega mega billionaires or the mega funds
0:27:45 who can make these bets.
0:27:47 And I’m starting to think maybe it’s just
0:27:50 we’re like a little too comfortable in America.
0:27:52 I think America’s rich for sure.
0:27:53 But Europe is actually also quite rich.
0:27:57 So for example, in Germany, there’s a lot of wealth.
0:28:01 But that wealth isn’t going into risk capital.
0:28:01 Right.
0:28:04 So for example, if you have a pension in the US,
0:28:06 there’s a high likelihood that a portion of that
0:28:08 goes into the top VC funds.
0:28:11 If you ask like the top VC funds who are your investors,
0:28:13 they will say it’s a pension fund.
0:28:14 The teachers, yeah.
0:28:14 Yeah, exactly.
0:28:15 It teaches pension, right?
0:28:16 Right.
0:28:19 In Germany, that actually used to be forbidden.
0:28:22 Pension funds couldn’t invest in risk capital.
0:28:22 Right.
0:28:24 Now they can like a very small percentage.
0:28:28 I think there’s some changes, but it’s a whole different scale.
0:28:32 So actually Europe historically was, you know,
0:28:34 I think we’re falling behind more and more.
0:28:36 But there’s a lot of wealth in Europe
0:28:39 that could be directed towards risk asset classes that just hasn’t.
0:28:42 There are two starts about Germany’s economy,
0:28:43 which I find really interesting.
0:28:45 And I think kind of illustrate your point.
0:28:48 The first is public infrastructure spending,
0:28:51 which is two and a half percent of GDP,
0:28:53 which is one of the lowest rates in the world.
0:28:56 And the second is the debt to GDP ratio, which is 60%,
0:29:00 which is significantly lower than the rest of the G7,
0:29:02 certainly way lower than the US.
0:29:06 And I feel like that is a good illustration
0:29:08 of where Germans heads are at,
0:29:10 which is they’re very afraid of spending
0:29:12 and also very afraid of debt.
0:29:16 And it does paint this overall economic picture of like,
0:29:19 they’re just not willing to take risks.
0:29:22 And I feel like that’s sort of reflected in the VC environment,
0:29:25 where it feels like the entire setup of the German economy is like,
0:29:28 we’re afraid that something might break.
0:29:30 So we want to play it really, really safe.
0:29:33 We’re not going to go out and over leverage ourselves.
0:29:36 And maybe we’re not going to go out
0:29:39 and make bets on young companies that might not succeed.
0:29:40 That’s what everybody says.
0:29:41 I don’t know if I totally agree.
0:29:45 I think when you think about the founder’s epoch in Europe
0:29:48 and particularly Germany, there was a tremendous amount of risk taking.
0:29:50 You look at Siemens, you look at BMW, you look at BSF.
0:29:52 A lot of those companies actually got started
0:29:55 within a reasonably short time window.
0:30:02 So it’s not that like the cultural heritage is totally risk avoiding.
0:30:05 Certainly there’s a different culture around risk,
0:30:08 which starts not necessarily all bad, right?
0:30:11 I mean, some of the good US companies, they took risks,
0:30:15 but they were also built on solid principles of entrepreneurship.
0:30:17 So I wouldn’t expect Germany to have been the leader
0:30:19 in the early days of the crypto industry or something like that.
0:30:20 That is certainly true.
0:30:22 There’s a more conservative mindset.
0:30:24 But if you think about deep technology,
0:30:25 where you need to make long-term bets,
0:30:28 you need to have an engineering-driven mindset,
0:30:31 I think that Germany actually has a great heritage on that.
0:30:33 And there is a lot of risk taking.
0:30:38 I think that the system didn’t enable it.
0:30:40 Like if you say, “Hey, we can’t invest any of our pensions
0:30:41 in the venture capital.”
0:30:43 How would you expect the venture capital industry to work?
0:30:48 So it’s not that there’s like 80 something million people
0:30:50 that are afraid to take risks.
0:30:54 I think there’s a system that didn’t encourage people
0:30:59 to invest money into ventures and technology ventures.
0:31:03 And I think that is the primary challenge.
0:31:05 I mean, SAP was bootstrapped too, right?
0:31:06 And it’s been a long time ago.
0:31:09 Obviously, that was a different time, right?
0:31:10 Venture capital wasn’t the thing then.
0:31:16 But still, I mean, that was the last German big technology company
0:31:18 that went public and went on to be successful.
0:31:22 And there hasn’t been any really big successes since.
0:31:23 Yeah.
0:31:26 It’s like SAP and then a bunch of core companies basically, right?
0:31:27 Yeah, exactly.
0:31:29 And I mean, the car companies got started way, way earlier, right?
0:31:30 Right.
0:31:34 So, you know, hopefully that changes.
0:31:40 But I think the culture and attitude also has strength.
0:31:41 I don’t think that’s the main reason.
0:31:45 I think the system is to blame in other European countries too.
0:31:48 I want to talk about how you built this company.
0:31:50 So you started the company in 2011.
0:31:53 As you mentioned, you spent the first five years bootstrapping.
0:31:55 So you did not raise any outside funding.
0:31:58 Briefly walk us through how you bootstrapped.
0:32:02 And I’d love to know if you would do it again, given the choice.
0:32:05 You know, it was a pretty intense period.
0:32:10 Like you have to be pretty hardcore to which we had $12,500 when we started.
0:32:16 You actually have to form a limited liability company in Germany
0:32:17 to guarantee $25,000.
0:32:20 So we had to promise another $12,500.
0:32:21 But you only have to put up half of it.
0:32:23 So the other half at that time–
0:32:25 Is that the same in America?
0:32:27 No, you can start with $1.
0:32:28 They’ve changed the system in Germany.
0:32:29 You can also start it with that.
0:32:31 By the way, that’s another great example
0:32:32 of what we were just talking about.
0:32:33 Exactly, that’s fair.
0:32:36 In the US, it’s like 500 bucks for the lawyers or whatever.
0:32:40 And you’ve got a Delaware, Ingo, whatever you want.
0:32:40 So you’re right.
0:32:43 So we had $12,500.
0:32:47 And we literally we slept in the car.
0:32:52 We drove around in an old Opel that was my co-phoners.
0:32:53 And we pitched clients.
0:32:55 The good thing of it was it really enforced focus
0:32:56 on the customer.
0:33:01 Because if clients were willing to sign up for salons,
0:33:04 we wouldn’t have any revenue to pay employees
0:33:04 and build the business.
0:33:06 We sent out handwritten letters to people
0:33:10 because we figured out if they get a regular letter,
0:33:11 the assistant throws it away.
0:33:12 But if they get a handwritten letter,
0:33:17 it could be the grandmother or husband or wife or whatever.
0:33:19 So those letters actually got opened.
0:33:22 And when you got a letter from us, it was a great gift
0:33:23 because you got a voucher for free demo.
0:33:25 How generous was that?
0:33:28 So some people actually filled out the voucher
0:33:30 and got a free demo from us.
0:33:33 And we really, I think in the early days,
0:33:36 just really focused on our customers, signing up customers
0:33:39 and then continuously building and iterating on the product
0:33:41 to make those customers happy and grow with us.
0:33:43 And the good news is in our business,
0:33:45 which is focused on enterprise,
0:33:50 you can, if you lend 100 customers, that’s a lot, right?
0:33:52 Whereas, and you get bigger contracts.
0:33:54 So you can actually work in that mode.
0:33:56 I think if you start a consumer business,
0:33:58 so it’s very hard to bootstrap that.
0:34:00 It’s been done, but it’s much, much harder, right?
0:34:02 Because you don’t get these bigger contracts
0:34:04 from your customers.
0:34:06 And then in 2016, we decided,
0:34:08 hey, we really want to take on the US market.
0:34:11 It was actually, a lot of European companies,
0:34:13 when they start in Germany and then go to France,
0:34:14 and then they go to Spain,
0:34:17 and then they go to wherever, UK or whatever.
0:34:19 We said, well, if we’re going international,
0:34:20 we’re going on to the US.
0:34:23 Obviously, then we also went into other countries in Europe,
0:34:24 but we said the first market,
0:34:27 we’re really going to take on as the US market.
0:34:30 So we went to the US and started the business here.
0:34:33 And we figured out it might make sense
0:34:35 to raise some venture funding to do that.
0:34:38 So we raised venture funding partly for the funding
0:34:39 and partly because of the network
0:34:41 that we could get through those VCs.
0:34:43 Yeah, I just want to go through the fundraising.
0:34:46 So you raised 28 million in your first round in 2016,
0:34:49 two years later, 50 million in your Series B,
0:34:52 a year after that, 290 million,
0:34:56 and then later you raised a billion in your Series D.
0:34:59 So you’re kind of a prolific fundraiser at this point.
0:35:03 Is there anything you’ve learned about fundraising?
0:35:04 I mean, you’ve experienced both sides.
0:35:07 I mean, you bootstrapped, you built the business,
0:35:08 and then you went out there
0:35:12 and you did the elevator pitch and raised a bunch of money.
0:35:15 What are some of the learnings that you’ve taken away
0:35:16 about fundraising?
0:35:18 What makes a really good fundraiser?
0:35:21 One thing that’s really important is to have alignment
0:35:24 with your investors on what the journey looks like,
0:35:26 what you want to do, find the right investors
0:35:30 that are really not just excited about the business opportunity
0:35:32 but also excited about the impact that you can create.
0:35:34 We say we make processes work for people,
0:35:36 for companies, and for the planet.
0:35:38 And that’s a really important mission, right?
0:35:40 I mean, I think I’m converting you
0:35:43 into a process evangelist a little bit here, I hope so at least.
0:35:45 And because you realize how important this is, right?
0:35:47 It’s patients in the hospitals.
0:35:48 It’s customer experience.
0:35:50 It’s citizens and their services.
0:35:52 It’s the work that people do every day.
0:35:53 You get frustrated.
0:35:54 Imagine how frustrated you would get
0:35:57 if you were in a higher transactional environment.
0:35:59 I get frustrated cooking breakfast in the morning.
0:36:01 Exactly, you know, you get frustrated with processes.
0:36:05 Imagine if you had to run a UPS logistics hub
0:36:06 or something like that, right?
0:36:08 I’ll stick to talking on a microphone, yeah.
0:36:10 Exactly, but you know, it’s…
0:36:12 So I think you want people excited about what you do
0:36:15 and really bought into whatever your plan is for the future.
0:36:17 And then I think you need to explain your story
0:36:19 in a way that investors can adjust, right?
0:36:21 So you need to talk to investors differently
0:36:22 than you talk to customers.
0:36:23 It’s a different audience.
0:36:26 Then I think you need to also make sure
0:36:29 that you bring your customer proof points, right?
0:36:31 I think that investors are, first of all,
0:36:32 they’re going to call your customers, right?
0:36:34 So that’s clear.
0:36:38 And then you need to really make sure that you have alignment
0:36:41 and set, create the right setup.
0:36:42 I think that’s extremely important.
0:36:43 It’s not just about the money you raise.
0:36:45 It’s a lot about the setup you create
0:36:49 that allows you to really go and be successful afterwards.
0:36:52 We’ll be right back.
0:37:06 We’re back with First Time Founders.
0:37:10 I love the way you say how it’s like, it’s a different audience.
0:37:12 If the customers are one audience,
0:37:14 the investors are another audience.
0:37:19 And I feel like that encapsulates well
0:37:22 how building a company is in a lot of ways like a performance.
0:37:24 Like your job is to kind of put on,
0:37:26 I mean, the handwritten letters,
0:37:28 you’re going to put on a show for the customers
0:37:32 and demonstrate, you know, I know what you like.
0:37:35 You know, I know you want someone who’s taking care
0:37:38 and taking the time out of their day to write this thing.
0:37:43 And we need to know if you see being a CEO as that,
0:37:46 because we talk a lot about that on our podcast.
0:37:50 The way, you know, you’re presenting an image
0:37:52 and you’ve got to spend a lot of time thinking,
0:37:57 you know, what kind of story does the audience want to hear?
0:38:00 Is that something you think about a lot?
0:38:04 I used to think about it more than I do, actually.
0:38:08 I think that the most important thing is that you’re authentic.
0:38:10 And people really feel that.
0:38:14 So I think you need to think about the impact you want to create
0:38:18 and the type of change you want to drive and the mission you have.
0:38:20 And then you need to obviously communicate that
0:38:23 in a simple way that people can understand.
0:38:26 So you can’t, you know, if you’re very technical,
0:38:28 then often people have the tendency to be too technically certain.
0:38:30 So you have to work on storytelling.
0:38:30 Yeah.
0:38:32 But I don’t think it’s a performance.
0:38:35 I think it’s something that you’re really passionate about.
0:38:38 And that you really believe in.
0:38:41 And then, you know, as an actor,
0:38:44 I don’t have to necessarily believe in, you know,
0:38:46 if I’m a good actor, I can play any role, right?
0:38:47 Right.
0:38:52 But so in a way, it’s really a mission where you say,
0:38:56 “Hey, I really have this belief and I’m going to gather
0:38:59 more and more people with me on this journey.”
0:39:01 And that’s why I think it’s so exciting about Salonis
0:39:04 for customers that really embed Salonis into the operations.
0:39:05 They get so much better.
0:39:07 I talked about some of those examples.
0:39:12 And they embrace this as a lifestyle, right?
0:39:15 They suddenly don’t just think about their P&L statement.
0:39:16 They think about their process health
0:39:18 and how they can optimize their processes.
0:39:21 How do these outcomes affect customers?
0:39:23 How do these outcomes affect financial outcomes?
0:39:25 How do these outcomes affect our employees?
0:39:29 So it’s a, we are changing the way companies run and operate.
0:39:33 And I think that the, you know, when you attract people,
0:39:36 I mean a lot, a big part of the CEO is recruiting, right?
0:39:38 You want to attract people that are aligned with that.
0:39:44 You know, you want to attract missionaries, not mercenaries, okay?
0:39:46 You want to attract people that are going to wake up in the morning
0:39:48 and be passionate about this, right?
0:39:50 So in a way, you evangelize, right?
0:39:54 And I think as a startup founder, you’re always evangelizing.
0:39:57 You’re always communicating and expanding,
0:39:59 but you need to do it not to put on a show,
0:40:01 but because of what’s in your heart,
0:40:03 what you really believe, right?
0:40:04 And what gets you excited.
0:40:08 You also don’t do it from a purely financial perspective.
0:40:10 Of course, financial is important
0:40:12 and it’s important to make all your stakeholders successful,
0:40:14 your investors, your employees, et cetera.
0:40:16 But that’s not enough, right?
0:40:17 You need to have a bigger mission that you really believe.
0:40:19 And I think that otherwise you’re just not going to persevere.
0:40:22 It’s very hard to start a company and to be successful.
0:40:24 You’re not of a thousand companies that start.
0:40:25 Maybe one is successful.
0:40:27 I don’t know the exact numbers, but you know, it’s not, not a lot.
0:40:31 And I think it’s not because the thousands were bad ideas.
0:40:33 There’s probably a few hundred bad ideas,
0:40:35 but there’s also a few hundred good ones.
0:40:38 But it’s the perseverance you have, really sticking with it
0:40:42 and waking up every day and doing it, right?
0:40:45 And I think that starts with passion and belief.
0:40:48 Yeah, it’s basically like who can last the longest
0:40:49 at a certain point.
0:40:52 I feel like if you’re only in it for the money,
0:40:55 it’s just so much harder to wake up every morning
0:40:56 and try really hard.
0:40:59 I mean, maybe for some people that is just so motivating
0:41:00 that it’s possible.
0:41:01 Hundred percent.
0:41:04 And I think also if that passion and impact is missing,
0:41:08 I think people reflect too much about themselves, right?
0:41:10 I’m going to get caught.
0:41:14 Yeah, I’m going to get, you know, I’m going to do this or that.
0:41:16 You know, I’m going to be on the newspaper or whatever.
0:41:19 I think that’s usually not the right motivation, right?
0:41:21 So I think, and again, it’s hard to be authentic
0:41:23 if you don’t believe something people will find out.
0:41:26 So I think that this vision orientation is very important
0:41:28 when you start a company.
0:41:32 You went from three employees to now 3,000 employees.
0:41:36 You’ve gone through the whole scaling process.
0:41:41 How did your management style change as the company grew?
0:41:44 I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for founders.
0:41:51 You have to basically change yourself completely at least three times.
0:41:57 So when you start, you basically, you are in like block and tackling mode.
0:42:02 You know, you know, every detail, you know, you have to have extreme attention to detail.
0:42:05 You probably can’t afford very experienced people,
0:42:08 but you also have a lot of control, right?
0:42:11 And then you have to become a manager, right?
0:42:12 So you have to manage people.
0:42:13 You have to put team together.
0:42:14 You have to think about an org charge.
0:42:16 You have to, and that’s definitely a transformation.
0:42:24 And then at some point you have to move from being a leader to being a leader of leaders
0:42:26 and then ultimately to being an executive.
0:42:31 And what that means is that you have to abstract from the details.
0:42:36 You have to find a few very simple things you’re going to focus on.
0:42:41 Like you can’t lead an organization of 3,000 people with details, right?
0:42:45 You are like we in every year, we have three priorities or something that may fall, right?
0:42:47 So it’s very, very simple.
0:42:49 You need to communicate a lot.
0:42:53 Again, from a standpoint of authenticity, but you have to communicate a lot.
0:42:57 And you have to really create a team that is aligned with where you want to go.
0:43:02 And then that team executes and they lead their leaders, right?
0:43:05 And you have to really make sure that you empower an organization,
0:43:08 that you are not just trying to manage every detail.
0:43:12 Certainly, you know, if you, and there’s some CEOs that handle it differently,
0:43:14 but certainly if you have a company that’s complex,
0:43:17 I think if you have, you know, very few products,
0:43:21 you might be able to like go into a lot of details sort of.
0:43:24 But if you have like a complex platform, right?
0:43:25 And you want to get broader and broader,
0:43:27 you need to create a culture where people are empowered,
0:43:30 where people can make their own decisions, where people can go fast.
0:43:33 And I think that that is another transformation.
0:43:36 So, you know, you have to really change yourself quite a bit,
0:43:37 I think in that journey.
0:43:39 And I think that’s why a lot of founders actually fail.
0:43:43 I think that’s where I fail in terms of management is just delegating to people.
0:43:45 I find it really hard to do.
0:43:47 How did you manage that?
0:43:49 Especially when you’re just starting out,
0:43:51 like what was the point where you’re like,
0:43:54 okay, I’m going to trust this gigantic process,
0:43:58 even as the guy who obsesses over processes,
0:43:59 I’m just going to give this to this person,
0:44:01 and I’m going to delegate and I trust them to get it done.
0:44:04 At some point, it gets so much that you have to learn.
0:44:04 You can’t trust.
0:44:07 You know, the thing is, I think this transformation,
0:44:10 like if you can’t delegate, you’re not going to get very far, right?
0:44:11 You need to delegate.
0:44:16 The thing is, when you make this change from a leader to a leader of leaders,
0:44:18 an executive, it’s a little different.
0:44:22 Like before, you can run around at the office and you have a microphone like this one.
0:44:23 And you say something in the microphone, it happens.
0:44:26 Because everyone knows you have 300 people.
0:44:28 Everyone knows you, people are still closed.
0:44:30 And as a founder, you say, hey, we should build this product,
0:44:30 or we should do this.
0:44:32 And somehow it happens, right?
0:44:33 So I called the founder microphone.
0:44:35 Company gets bigger, you have more locations,
0:44:36 more people, more senior people.
0:44:40 You’re like, test, test.
0:44:41 You know, this thing doesn’t work anymore.
0:44:46 So then you have to think about org chart structures, leaders of leaders,
0:44:48 you know, how to inspire people around simple priorities.
0:44:51 And then you have to elevate yourself and just say, those details,
0:44:54 I’m going to let my team handle them, I’m not going to get involved.
0:44:56 You know, we have to have a failure culture.
0:44:57 If people screw up, that’s fine, right?
0:44:58 Obviously not too badly, please.
0:45:02 But you know, it’s, and I think there’s, you know, some founders,
0:45:05 they read these stories from Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,
0:45:07 and you know, how they basically have Steve Jobs,
0:45:10 like debugs, you know, a button on an iPhone or something like that.
0:45:13 And I think, you know, when I talk to founders,
0:45:15 I always say, be careful with that, right?
0:45:18 Because first of all, likely you’re not Steve Jobs.
0:45:21 I mean, he was like a once, you know, under generation type of genius.
0:45:27 And then secondly, Apple, he was so good at product management and design
0:45:31 and so visionary that he could create the most valuable company in the world,
0:45:33 or one of the most valuable company in the world,
0:45:36 with basically like a handful of products, right?
0:45:40 You think about the ratio of like products to market cap for Apple.
0:45:43 It’s extremely, right, very, very low.
0:45:46 So most companies don’t work that way, right?
0:45:49 So if you compare Steve Jobs management style to Jeff Bezos,
0:45:54 I mean, Jeff Bezos, Amazon is like, he’s a systems thinker, right?
0:45:58 He says, you know, I don’t actually work very hard.
0:46:00 Like he’s basically, I work from nine to five, you know?
0:46:04 But he created systems and people and accountable structures
0:46:07 that were so good that people could make their own,
0:46:10 and Amazon could be in all these businesses, right?
0:46:15 So it’s a very different model of a company that has a very different needs,
0:46:16 a very different leadership style.
0:46:20 So if, you know, some founders, they run around like many Steve Jobs,
0:46:22 and sometimes I’m a little bit, I’m like, be careful.
0:46:24 That works for Steve Jobs because he was Steve Jobs,
0:46:29 and because Apple created a business model around just having few products
0:46:30 that are absolutely brilliant.
0:46:32 I feel like we glorify these people.
0:46:35 We glorify Steve Jobs, glorify Elon Musk.
0:46:36 And I feel like there’s this founder culture,
0:46:39 especially with the founder mode thing happening,
0:46:44 where we glorify people who are kind of crazy, a little irrational,
0:46:47 they shout at people, we need to do this.
0:46:48 We can’t get it done in time.
0:46:49 We’ll do it anyway.
0:46:50 I don’t care.
0:46:53 Just sort of like, bull in a china shop.
0:46:56 But it’s like, I feel like we don’t respect or have enough time,
0:47:00 or air time for all of the people that make that happen,
0:47:03 who are like, actually very organized with their time,
0:47:08 very calm, very rational, sort of the more Bezos types
0:47:10 who actually build those systems and make it all possible.
0:47:11 Yeah, I think exactly.
0:47:15 I think that there’s different styles that work for different situations.
0:47:17 I think when you talk about founder mode,
0:47:19 of course as a founder, you need to be intense.
0:47:21 If you’re not intense, you’re not going to start a company.
0:47:23 Of course, you need to be very ambitious.
0:47:29 Of course, you need to sometimes think against the crowd and set ambitious goals.
0:47:32 Of course, you can’t accept mediocrity.
0:47:34 So there are elements there that are very correct,
0:47:38 but there’s other elements like this complete micro management mode.
0:47:41 Again, Elon Musk, the bandwidth of the guys is incredible.
0:47:42 We can agree.
0:47:45 But his company is like, he really dives deep,
0:47:47 and he builds these individual products that change the world.
0:47:50 But that style doesn’t work for every company.
0:47:53 I don’t think it would have worked for Amazon.
0:47:54 Would it have worked for Solonis?
0:47:54 Probably not.
0:47:55 I don’t think so.
0:48:00 So if Elon Musk was interested to give us a management coach,
0:48:01 I wouldn’t mind.
0:48:04 I’m just saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
0:48:09 But my point is, I think that some founders run around like this, glorify this,
0:48:13 applied blindly to their companies and think they are mini Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
0:48:14 And I don’t think that always works.
0:48:19 So I think you need to really ideally collect some different viewpoints
0:48:24 and then form your own independent principles first mindset of what style,
0:48:25 what organizations will work for my company.
0:48:29 And one of the things I talk about is people talk about product market fit.
0:48:33 Someone once mentioned to me, you really need to think about product market people fit.
0:48:35 And I was like, that’s interesting.
0:48:38 So that’s actually a really good point, right?
0:48:42 You have to create a people in an organization that fit your product and your market.
0:48:43 Oh yeah.
0:48:46 So I think that that also looks different for every company.
0:48:48 I’m going to start to wrap us up here.
0:48:52 And I’d like to hear more about processes in your personal life.
0:48:58 Because you’ve built a company basically predicated on studying processes.
0:49:02 So I’d just love to know what role do processes play in your personal life?
0:49:04 Do you have any personal processes?
0:49:08 Morning routine, workout routine, whatever it is.
0:49:12 I have a workout routine that I follow three, four times a week.
0:49:14 I’m pretty disciplined about that.
0:49:19 But other than that, honestly, I’m not like too much of a process guy in my personal life.
0:49:21 I try to leave that to the business.
0:49:25 So what I hate is I hate to do, think about the same thing five times.
0:49:29 So I’m a lazy guy, I’m a mathematician, mathematicians are lazy.
0:49:34 So I try to think about, I don’t like to think about what I wear every day.
0:49:38 So I have like 10 t-shirts and for most, for many occasions, that’s enough.
0:49:39 That’s the process.
0:49:45 But I wouldn’t say I’m like hugely process centric in my personal life.
0:49:48 Well, I feel like wearing the same thing every day is pretty process centric.
0:49:50 Well, it’s not every day.
0:49:51 I always try to have a template.
0:49:57 Yeah, I don’t go to the closet and think like, okay, what are we going to do today?
0:50:00 I try to have like some structure there.
0:50:06 But I’m also a wanderer, like I have a lot of different interests.
0:50:09 Like every week looks different from a personal standpoint.
0:50:12 So it’s not that I follow like the same playbook every day.
0:50:18 I guess what I’m getting at is it feels like I have found in my personal life or just in my life
0:50:24 that if I can figure out a way to automate something or do it so habitually
0:50:29 that I no longer have to think about it and I can just go like kind of on automatic mode,
0:50:30 it makes the rest of my life a lot easier.
0:50:31 Oh yeah, I love that.
0:50:36 I mean, I love that if something just works, you know, you have like, you know, you have this problem.
0:50:38 I cook the same meal every week now.
0:50:42 And like I’m just like, oh yeah, I just make like a bolognese.
0:50:46 And I just like put in a giant pot and I’m like, okay, I’m just going to do this every week.
0:50:50 And this way I can like just not think about this anymore.
0:50:55 And I can just get on with the rest of my life back to me as a start at the Salonis lifestyle.
0:50:58 And it gives you this feeling of like this sigh of relief right there.
0:50:59 I didn’t have to think about that.
0:51:00 Yeah, exactly.
0:51:02 And you have free up some mental capacity for something else.
0:51:09 You know, look, I think that then hopefully gives you some room for creativity and doing
0:51:11 things that are not very process oriented.
0:51:12 But yeah, I agree.
0:51:14 I think it’s nice if things work.
0:51:17 Thank you for taking the time.
0:51:22 What would be your number one piece of advice to I would say entrepreneurs,
0:51:25 but maybe let’s make it a little more open just anyone listening to this podcast.
0:51:31 I think what’s really, really important is that you commit to your passions.
0:51:39 You know, when I decided to study math, I had no idea, you know, what I wanted to do with it.
0:51:43 You know, after my undergrad, I had, I wanted to study neuroscience.
0:51:47 I had the opportunity to do Salonis and then was really passionate about that.
0:51:48 So I jumped on it.
0:51:52 I didn’t have any clarity whether this would work out or something like that.
0:51:55 You know, I was really always glad looking back that I did it.
0:51:59 Now I’m like, maybe neuroscience was a great area to get into, you know, with all the AI.
0:52:00 But just kidding.
0:52:08 But you know, I just think like when you love to do something, you are best at it.
0:52:11 And you’ve got to try to find that and you’ve got to fight for that.
0:52:16 I think obviously, you know, not every day is going to be, you know, the best here of your life.
0:52:19 But I think that as a principle, that’s extremely important.
0:52:22 And to your point, AI is going to hopefully help with that.
0:52:28 This is going to unleash productivity for everybody that will be, can be distributed.
0:52:33 But I think really, especially in your work life, finding something that you really enjoy,
0:52:38 I think is incredibly important and something that people need to commit to.
0:52:43 I think people are still too focused on what how will others perceive this, you know,
0:52:48 what will be, what is the chess game of my next four career moves, you know, and that stuff.
0:52:54 I think that following what you really believe and finding that and searching for that,
0:52:57 I think ultimately leads to better outcomes.
0:52:58 Alex, thank you.
0:52:59 This was great.
0:53:05 Alex Rinker is the co-founder and co-CEO of Solonus, a process mining and process intelligence company.
0:53:07 This was wonderful.
0:53:08 Thank you very much.
0:53:09 Really excited.
0:53:09 Awesome.
0:53:15 Our producer is Claire Miller.
0:53:17 Our associate producer is Alison Weiss.
0:53:20 And our engineer is Benjamin Spencer.
0:53:23 Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:53:26 Tune in tomorrow for ProfG Markets.
0:53:47 , you.
0:53:50 (upbeat music)
0:53:53 (upbeat music)

0:00:06 -Hey, whatcha doin’? -Programming our thermostat to 17 degrees when we’re out at work or asleep.
0:00:12 We’re taking control of our energy use this winter with some easy energy saving tips I got from Fortis, B.C.
0:00:16 Ooh, conserve energy and save money? Maybe to buy those matching winter jackets?
0:00:21 Uh, no. We’re also getting that whole matching outfit thing under control.
0:00:27 Discover low and no-cost energy saving tips at fortisbc.com/energysavingtips.
0:00:31 -Matching Jacksuits? -Please, no.
0:00:33 This isn’t your Grandpa’s Finance podcast.
0:00:37 It’s Vivian too, your rich BFF and host of the Net Worth & Chill podcast.
0:00:42 This is money talk that’s actually fun, actually relatable and will actually make you money.
0:00:45 I’m breaking down investments, side hustles and wealth strategies.
0:00:49 No boring spreadsheets, just real talk that’ll have you leveling up your financial game.
0:00:51 With amazing guests like Glenda Baker.
0:00:54 There’s never been any house that I’ve sold in the last 32 years.
0:00:57 It’s not worth more today than it was the day that I sold it.
0:01:00 This is a money podcast that you’ll actually want to listen to.
0:01:02 Follow Net Worth & Chill wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:01:04 Your bank account will thank you later.
0:01:09 I’m Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
0:01:12 The best way to predict the future is to make it.
0:01:17 2025 Predictions, as read by George Hahn.
0:01:24 Predictions are a terrible business.
0:01:29 If you get it right, the events leading up to the prediction render it less bold.
0:01:36 If you get it wrong, you’ll be reminded of your gaffe 10,000 times a day, like on Twitter.
0:01:41 The purpose isn’t really to be right, in fact, but to catalyze a conversation.
0:01:44 Every year we make predictions.
0:01:46 We start by holding ourselves accountable.
0:01:52 To see a report card of our 2024 predictions, check out the written version of No Mercy,
0:01:54 No Malice at ProfGalloway.com.
0:02:00 For you listeners, here are our predictions for 2025.
0:02:03 Prediction number one.
0:02:06 Power couple, open video.
0:02:14 Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, investors have added a staggering 8.2 trillion
0:02:21 dollars to the market valuations of tech’s big six firms. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta,
0:02:22 Microsoft, and Nvidia.
0:02:28 For context, the 2024 federal budget was $6.8 trillion.
0:02:36 Companies that referenced AI during their earnings calls registered a 12% increase on
0:02:42 average in performance compared to a 9% increase for those that didn’t mention it.
0:02:47 The AI ecosystem is settling into three layers.
0:02:51 Applications, like Duolingo, Netflix, and Tesla.
0:02:56 AI models, like Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenAI.
0:03:02 And infrastructure, like AWS, Google Cloud, or Nvidia.
0:03:05 Two companies dominate.
0:03:12 OpenAI has doubled its annualized revenue to $3.4 billion.
0:03:14 In the past six months.
0:03:21 And its ChatGPT accounts for 56% of premium LLM subscriptions.
0:03:23 I.e. people pulling out their credit cards.
0:03:31 Over the past 12 months, Nvidia has reported $96 billion in revenue.
0:03:34 Four times its 2022 total.
0:03:39 I look at peer reviewed research to evaluate whether a technology is enduring.
0:03:47 Nvidia chips are cited in 19 times more research than those of its competitors combined.
0:03:53 For two companies to dominate a technology this early is extraordinary.
0:04:01 Prediction number two, the AI company of 2025, Meta.
0:04:07 No business is better positioned to register progress in AI than Meta.
0:04:13 Nine out of 10 internet users, excluding China, are active on Meta platforms.
0:04:20 The company has access to more unique human language data, i.e. raw training data,
0:04:24 than Google search, Reddit, Wikipedia, and X combined.
0:04:32 In terms of compute, Meta has purchased more Nvidia Hopper GPUs, advanced AI hardware,
0:04:40 than any US company other than Microsoft, giving it unmatched AI training and deployment capacity.
0:04:47 Prediction number three, Palindrome, service as a software.
0:04:52 So far, the benefits of AI have accrued to existing players.
0:04:59 The next set of winners will be firms that capitalize on service as a software.
0:05:06 i.e. taking human intensive services and putting a thick layer of AI on top to scale with less labor.
0:05:12 This is a fancy way of saying there will be more consumer facing AI applications.
0:05:18 The real cabbage, however, is in routinizing back office functions like accounting,
0:05:21 compliance, customer service, etc.
0:05:29 Prediction number four, technology of 2025, nuclear.
0:05:33 AI’s choke point is energy.
0:05:39 A chat GPT query demands 10 times the energy of a Google query.
0:05:49 The majority of the 10 most valuable companies in 1980 and 2024 were, are, in energy and tech.
0:05:57 However, the construction of acres of data centers and the energy investments needed to power them
0:05:58 reflected deeper convergence.
0:06:05 AI is accelerating big techs transformation from an industry that sells computers
0:06:07 into an industry that sells compute.
0:06:12 In a knowledge economy, compute is energy.
0:06:19 Wind and solar are great, but they lack the scale and reliability of nuclear power.
0:06:29 One nuclear reactor produces the equivalent of 800 wind turbines or 8.5 million solar panels.
0:06:32 Nuclear is also carbon free.
0:06:37 48% of the clean energy in the U.S. comes from nuclear.
0:06:42 Nuclear power may be the worst managed brand in history.
0:06:47 Every energy source has trade offs in emissions and externalities.
0:06:51 I believe nuclear energy represents the best trade.
0:06:58 If you gathered all the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. in the last 60 years,
0:07:02 it would occupy only 10 yards of a football field.
0:07:06 Note, do not go anywhere near that field.
0:07:12 Prediction number five, get used to it, drones.
0:07:21 Radar, jet engines, nuclear power, GPS, and blood banks were all developed during wartime.
0:07:27 There’s something about war and the potential loss of a civilization that inspires creativity.
0:07:35 At the outset of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s defense budget and standing army were 10 times
0:07:38 and five times the size of Ukraine’s respectively.
0:07:44 Drones are the premier technological innovation birthed by the conflict.
0:07:51 Drones provide constant surveillance capabilities and enable precision strikes
0:07:53 at a fraction of traditional costs.
0:07:59 A successful drone strike can yield a 100,000% return.
0:08:07 For example, $400 drones routinely destroy $4 million tanks.
0:08:17 3D printing, AI, and micro cameras have converged to shape the latest David versus Goliath sequel.
0:08:24 Using drones for last mile delivery of contracts and commuters, search and rescue missions,
0:08:31 and monitoring and maintenance in manufacturing and agriculture should reap substantial gains.
0:08:41 Prediction number six, Musk bids for Warner Brothers Discovery, CNN, or another iconic media firm.
0:08:47 The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon is addicted to ketamine.
0:08:54 I believe that’s the delivery mechanism, but the nicotine, where his real addiction resides,
0:09:00 is attention. For 10% of his net worth, $44 billion for Twitter,
0:09:05 he can impose himself on all of us nearly all the fucking time.
0:09:11 Question, if he’s going to come undone, can he do it like the rest of us? In private?
0:09:19 Anyway, Warner Brothers Discovery has a market cap of $26 billion plus debt.
0:09:23 If the idea sounds outrageous, it isn’t.
0:09:31 John Stanky, CEO of AT&T, put a condition on the sale of WBD that it had to be a
0:09:37 single class of stock to get the greatest price and net the company a takeover premium.
0:09:44 In the words of Gordon Gekko, WBD is breakable, i.e. it can be acquired.
0:09:52 After his fallout with Trump and the public’s increasing fatigue, Jesus make it him just go away.
0:09:56 Threatens to push him out of the spotlight,
0:10:01 Elon will force himself back into the news cycle by again becoming the news.
0:10:09 He could also buy MSNBC as unlike MSNBC, he does have a sense of humor.
0:10:16 Prediction number seven, investment opportunity, emerging markets.
0:10:23 The S&P 500 outperformed Vanguard’s all-world XUS index ETF
0:10:32 plus 56% to plus 23% respectively from 2023 through 2024.
0:10:38 Historically, when U.S. equities fall, emerging markets rise.
0:10:46 These cycles typically last about a decade. I believe we’re overdue for a course correction.
0:10:52 The U.S. stock market now makes up 50% of the total market cap globally.
0:11:00 When stocks get this expensive, returns go down and capital looks for greater returns elsewhere.
0:11:06 Since 1989, emerging markets have typically outperformed developed markets
0:11:13 by 27% after a Fed rate cut. Demographics are destiny.
0:11:19 The growth in working age populations favors India, Indonesia, and other developing nations.
0:11:25 The share of institutional capital invested in the markets is at a cyclical low.
0:11:34 A reversion to the mean would represent inflows of $910 billion to emerging markets.
0:11:43 The X factor is Trump. He’s called for a 10% to 20% tariff on all imports
0:11:51 and a 60% to 100% tariff on goods from China. I don’t believe he’ll follow through though,
0:11:58 as tariff is Latin for tax. At the first hint of inflation, alarm bells will
0:12:04 sound and the adults in the administration looking at the bond market will respond crisply
0:12:10 and force the administration to slow their roll. And Republicans in Congress will find
0:12:17 their backbones when they realize that 90% of the presents under the Christmas tree come from China
0:12:21 and their dear leader is, post 2026, a lame duck.
0:12:28 Prediction #8 Platform YouTube
0:12:33 Netflix didn’t win the streaming wars. YouTube did.
0:12:40 Last year, YouTube, which spends $0 on content (it shares revenue with creators instead of paying
0:12:48 them), became the first streaming platform to reach 10% of all television viewing. 81% of
0:12:56 GenAlpha viewers said they watched YouTube recently, compared to 62% who said they watched a subscription
0:13:05 streaming service, and 44% who said they watched TikTok. In the US and UK, one-third of kids aged
0:13:14 8 to 12 said YouTube was their number one career choice. Movistar didn’t even make the list.
0:13:22 Also, YouTube is the number one podcast platform, adding a tailwind no other streamer has.
0:13:30 If Alphabet were forced to spin off YouTube, the company would likely be worth half a trillion
0:13:35 dollars, versus Netflix’s market cap of $350 billion.
0:13:43 Prediction #9 Media Podcasts
0:13:50 I’m talking my own book here, but I’ve been in the podcasting business for almost a decade,
0:13:57 and this is the first time I’ve called it the media of the year. The only ad-supported medium
0:14:06 growing as fast as meta, TikTok, Alphabet, and Reddit is podcasting. Of the estimated 3.2 million
0:14:14 pods, 600,000 put out content each week, and I estimate only 600 are economically viable.
0:14:23 This is a striking concentration of power, with the top 10 pods commanding 35% of the listenership.
0:14:32 Kamala Harris would have needed to appear on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC three hours every night
0:14:39 during prime time for two weeks to reach as many people as Donald Trump did going on Joe Rogan.
0:14:45 Podcasts’ share of attention is well ahead of their share of ad revenue.
0:14:52 This delta will close. Since the election, our pods have seen a 30% increase in revenue.
0:15:00 My prediction is that pods’ ad revenue will grow by 20+% in 2025.
0:15:07 Listenership will continue to grow as well, and the ARPU, like those of meta and Alphabet,
0:15:13 will increase dramatically as advertisers discover this is where young, successful consumers have
0:15:24 been hiding. Prediction number 10. IPO, Sheehan. Disclosure, I’m an investor.
0:15:33 One-third of Gen Z consumers say they’re addicted to fast fashion. Traditional retailers release
0:15:39 100 new styles a week. Fast fashion retailers put out 100 styles per day.
0:15:49 Sheehan pushes out 7,000 styles per day. Its operations are remarkably asset-light,
0:15:54 as Sheehan is an IP business that doesn’t own any factories, trucks, or stores.
0:16:02 Instead, its software tracks activity on the site, sends orders to factories based on their
0:16:09 ability to calibrate demand, and then puts in motion the transportation. Also, there are
0:16:16 effectively no returns. The Achilles heel of any retail business. As the products are so cheap,
0:16:21 people don’t go through the hassle of sending them back. Similar to other asset-light winners
0:16:29 like Airbnb, NVIDIA, or Uber, Sheehan’s revenue per employee dwarfs that of the incumbents.
0:16:40 Prediction number 11. Business trend, M&A. A historic amount of cash is on the sidelines.
0:16:47 Since 2003, private equity’s dry powder, i.e. the committed capital not yet allocated,
0:16:58 increased 8X to $4 trillion. Corporate cash holdings total $4.1 trillion. Context,
0:17:08 U.S. GDP is around $27 trillion. The average closing time for U.S. deal makers in 2022
0:17:19 was 161 days, a 14% increase since 2018. For deals exceeding $10 billion in value,
0:17:28 closing times have surged by 66% to an average of 323 days. Over the past four years,
0:17:34 Lena Kahn has been an aggressive antitrust enforcer, and the Biden administration has
0:17:41 published 209 economically significant regulations, more than any president since Reagan.
0:17:49 The lesson? Elections have consequences. Setting aside whatever grievances Trump
0:17:54 may hold against specific tech and media companies, the perception is that his
0:18:00 administration will likely be more friendly to M&A. Some predictions regarding who will be on top
0:18:10 of some big transactions? Comcast, Uber, and, see above, Musk. Also, I believe someone will take
0:18:19 Intel and/or Boeing private. Prediction number 12. Tech movement, banning phones.
0:18:27 When we look back on this age, the thing we’ll regret most is letting our kids become addicts.
0:18:33 The substance is social media. The delivery mechanism is the phone.
0:18:45 On a typical day, a teen receives 237 notifications. One study found that 97% of kids
0:18:51 use their phone during school hours for a median of about 43 minutes per day.
0:18:59 Think about that. Basically, every teen in America misses 10% of school every day.
0:19:06 Giving students unrestricted access to phones has been a great move, said no teacher ever.
0:19:14 Banning them in school is a return to sanity. The good news, 18 states have passed laws
0:19:19 restricting the use of phones in school, and roughly three-quarters of schools
0:19:25 have policies restricting their use in the classroom. Better news? Our response,
0:19:36 while slow, is bipartisan. Best news? Test scores have improved by 6% in schools that have banned phones.
0:19:48 Prediction number 13. Chemical testosterone. Women are ascendant, something to celebrate,
0:19:55 while young men are struggling. There has never been a cohort that’s fallen further
0:20:04 faster than young men living in Western democracies. The percentage of young men aged 20 to 24,
0:20:11 who are neither in school nor working, has tripled since 1980. Workforce participation
0:20:19 among men has fallen below 90%, while median hourly wages are $3 less per hour adjusted for
0:20:29 inflation than they were in 1970. This is deadly. Over the past 20 years, America’s incremental
0:20:38 deaths of despair totaled 414,000, exceeding the 407,000 Americans killed in World War II.
0:20:47 It’s also a mating crisis, as women traditionally mate horizontally and up socioeconomically,
0:20:55 whereas men mate horizontally and down. When the pool of horizontal and up young men shrinks,
0:21:01 there are fewer mating opportunities. And without the guardrails of a relationship,
0:21:10 young men behave as if they have no guardrails. Families feel this. I believe the 2024 election
0:21:15 was about struggling young people, especially struggling young men. If your son is in the
0:21:21 basement vaping and playing video games, you don’t really care about trans rights or Ukraine,
0:21:28 you just want change, i.e. chaos and disruption. The Trump campaign saw this and flew into the
0:21:38 manisphere with coarse language, crypto, Rogan, UFC, and Hulk Hogan. Trump gained 15% with young men,
0:21:46 the biggest pivot from Democrats to Republicans of any age group. Another big shift was among women
0:21:55 aged 45 to 64. I believe those are the mothers of struggling young men. America elected President
0:22:03 T. The T stands for testosterone. The election was supposed to be a referendum on women’s rights.
0:22:17 It was instead a referendum on failing young men. Prediction number 14. 2025 will be a great year
0:22:26 for you. How do I know this? A, I don’t. However, I do really hope your year is full of prosperity
0:22:33 and time with loved ones. I’ve read that if you write down a goal, it’s 40% more likely to happen.
0:22:40 And I’ve done this. See two sentences ago. So we have that going for us.
0:22:56 Life is so rich.

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0:01:28 (upbeat music)
0:01:41 Welcome to the final Prop G episode of 2024.
0:01:42 Can you believe that?
0:01:44 2025, really?
0:01:46 In today’s episode, we’re taking a look back
0:01:47 at some of our favorite conversations
0:01:48 throughout the past year.
0:01:50 We’ve been fortunate enough to have some
0:01:51 of the world’s leading experts
0:01:53 on all sorts of interesting topics,
0:01:55 including geopolitics, psychology, wellness,
0:01:56 and tech.
0:01:58 Let’s bust right into it.
0:02:00 So, an immediate Buster Rundo.
0:02:03 First up, we have a clip from Admiral James Stavridis,
0:02:05 a retired four-star US naval officer.
0:02:08 I’m a big fan of the admirals.
0:02:10 And 2024 certainly won’t be the last time
0:02:11 you’ll hear from him on this show.
0:02:14 Back in February, we discussed the state of global affairs
0:02:17 and what we can do about the fragmentation of the US.
0:02:18 Let’s have a listen.
0:02:23 We need to do more to incentivize and celebrate
0:02:25 the idea of service.
0:02:29 And by the way, this is not confined to the armed forces.
0:02:32 There are a lot of ways to serve this country.
0:02:35 And we need high-quality people who are diplomats,
0:02:39 CIA officers, peace corps volunteers,
0:02:43 Teach for America, Volunteer for America,
0:02:46 our police, firefighters, EMT.
0:02:49 There are a lot of ways to serve the country.
0:02:53 I think we are underweight in incentivizing that
0:02:56 with taxes, educational benefits.
0:02:59 But above all, we are underweight these days
0:03:03 in celebrating it, particularly the non-military.
0:03:06 We do a reasonably good job these days
0:03:08 with thank you for your service.
0:03:10 We ought to broaden that whole concept
0:03:15 and create more of an idea of what it means to be a citizen
0:03:17 and what are the positive incentives
0:03:18 that can come out of this.
0:03:21 Business can help at this.
0:03:23 Again, that was Admiral James DeVaritas,
0:03:24 a frequent guest on the pod
0:03:28 and one of the leading experts in geopolitics.
0:03:30 Next up, we have a clip from Bradley Tusk,
0:03:32 a venture capitalist, political strategist,
0:03:33 philanthropist and writer.
0:03:35 We discussed a number of topics,
0:03:36 including the state of politics
0:03:39 and why the public is fundamentally unhappy.
0:03:43 – Look, I think that we may be entering a world
0:03:48 of one term, presidents, governors, mayors,
0:03:51 because the public is fundamentally unhappy, right?
0:03:53 So a few things.
0:03:56 One is social media, I would argue,
0:03:58 is basically the unhappiness machine.
0:03:59 It does two things.
0:04:00 It forces you to compare your life
0:04:02 to someone’s a fictional life.
0:04:04 So you feel inadequate immediately
0:04:06 and then it shows you everything bad happening
0:04:08 everywhere in the world all at once,
0:04:10 compounded by the views of a million idiots.
0:04:12 So you feel bad about your own life,
0:04:13 you feel bad about yourself.
0:04:15 Then the next step is existential risk.
0:04:16 So when you and I were kids,
0:04:18 there was one major existential risk,
0:04:19 which was nuclear war.
0:04:20 That risk still remains.
0:04:21 It’s probably worse right now
0:04:23 because the proliferation of nukes is getting there
0:04:25 and eventually Iran’s gonna have it.
0:04:26 North Korea has it.
0:04:29 But that you lay on top of that climate change,
0:04:31 the risk of a real serious pandemic.
0:04:34 I mean, COVID had a major impact,
0:04:35 but while it’s highly transmissible,
0:04:37 it wasn’t that lethal.
0:04:39 But I am sure that a version of COVID
0:04:42 that is much more lethal exists in a lab in China
0:04:45 or the US or Russia or Israel or the UK or somewhere,
0:04:47 or more likely all of them.
0:04:48 And so the risk of any of those getting out.
0:04:50 And then with AI, I’m a believer in AI,
0:04:52 but none of us too early for any of us
0:04:54 to really know yet what it’s gonna be.
0:04:55 So the amount of existential risk
0:04:57 has increased significantly.
0:04:59 – That was Bradley Tusk,
0:05:01 a former deputy governor of Illinois
0:05:02 and campaign manager for Michael Bloomberg,
0:05:04 among many other things.
0:05:07 Next up, we have a clip from our good friend,
0:05:09 Jonathan Haidt, colleague at NYU,
0:05:11 who has taken the world by storm this year
0:05:13 with his book, “The Anxious Generation,”
0:05:15 how the great rewiring of childhood
0:05:18 is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
0:05:19 If you listen to this podcast,
0:05:22 you know, I’m an enormous fan of Professor Haidt’s
0:05:24 and his work surrounding the effects of social media
0:05:26 on young people’s mental health.
0:05:28 Here’s the clip.
0:05:29 – The solutions that I propose
0:05:31 are all things we can do together
0:05:34 to liberate our kids from the social action problems.
0:05:36 Very briefly, four steps, four norms.
0:05:38 No smartphone before high school.
0:05:39 Just give them a flip phone.
0:05:41 The millennials were fine with flip phones.
0:05:44 Two is no social media till 16.
0:05:47 Social media is just not suitable for minors, frankly.
0:05:49 It certainly isn’t suitable in early puberty.
0:05:51 Let them get most of the way through puberty
0:05:53 before you invite them to stick their head in a toilet bowl
0:05:56 and flush every day forever and ever.
0:05:58 Third norm is phone-free schools.
0:06:02 The phone is the greatest distraction device ever invented.
0:06:03 Kids text during class.
0:06:05 They watch videos during class.
0:06:06 They watch porn during class.
0:06:10 It’s completely insane that there are schools in this country,
0:06:12 namely most of them, almost all of them,
0:06:14 that allow kids to keep their phones in their pockets
0:06:15 during the day.
0:06:16 And they just say, “Don’t take it out during class,”
0:06:18 but they do take it out during class.
0:06:21 And the fourth norm is far more free play,
0:06:23 independence, and responsibility in the real world.
0:06:24 This is the harder word
0:06:26 because we have to overcome our own anxieties.
0:06:28 But if we’re gonna take away the phones
0:06:30 from, especially in middle school,
0:06:33 if we’re gonna reduce their time on screens,
0:06:34 we have to give them something to do.
0:06:36 And the healthiest thing they can do
0:06:40 is hang out, play with each other, unsupervised.
0:06:43 Let them learn how to work out conflicts
0:06:45 and choose activities.
0:06:48 If we do those, I am confident that we would see
0:06:50 these lines, these incredibly surging lines
0:06:52 of anxiety and depression, they just go up, up, up.
0:06:55 They never go down since 2012.
0:06:57 If we do these four things, I’m pretty confident
0:06:59 we’re gonna see those lines come down.
0:07:01 We’re gonna actually reverse the mental health epidemic.
0:07:05 – That was Total Gangster, Jonathan Haidt,
0:07:08 a professor of ethical leadership and bestselling author.
0:07:10 Moving along, we have a clip from another gangster.
0:07:13 This one in geopolitics, one of our favorites,
0:07:14 Fried Zakaria.
0:07:16 We discussed with Farid his latest book,
0:07:18 “Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash”
0:07:20 from 1600 to the present,
0:07:22 the effects of the industrial evolution
0:07:24 and modern geopolitics as a whole.
0:07:28 – The nature of the digital revolution,
0:07:30 if we can just call it that for a moment,
0:07:34 is that it has created a whole new economy
0:07:38 and a whole new mental world for us.
0:07:42 Mark Andreessen’s famous blog post where he talks
0:07:44 about software eating the world.
0:07:45 Gets it exactly right.
0:07:49 The world used to be run, it was a world of atoms.
0:07:52 And what happened is the digital revolution came
0:07:54 and it created a world of bits and bytes
0:07:57 that now control those atoms.
0:07:59 So actually the internal combustion engine
0:08:01 is kind of irrelevant now.
0:08:04 What a car is becoming is software on wheels.
0:08:06 And it’s the software that controls that.
0:08:08 And now what’s going to happen is,
0:08:11 you’re going to have AI that controls the software.
0:08:13 And those things become paramount.
0:08:15 And the point I’m trying to make in the book
0:08:18 is not so much about the economic effect.
0:08:21 It’s the sort of social and psychological consequences
0:08:24 of these changes, which you know and care a lot about.
0:08:27 It is mind-blowing in every way to think about that.
0:08:30 You know, human beings have never had the power
0:08:33 to multiply their minds
0:08:35 the way that AI is going to be able to allow them to do.
0:08:37 What does that do to our conceptions
0:08:39 of who we are as human beings?
0:08:42 – That was Fareed Zakaria, a close friend of the pod
0:08:45 and host of CNN’s flagship international fair show,
0:08:47 Fareed Zakaria GPS.
0:08:49 Now let’s listen to a clip of our episode
0:08:52 with Matthew Hussie, a leading dating expert
0:08:53 and author of the book, Love Life.
0:08:55 How to raise your standards, find your person
0:08:57 and live happily no matter what.
0:09:01 – For so many people I would argue universally
0:09:05 whatever form it comes in, we are looking for love.
0:09:09 We want that feeling of having a mate.
0:09:12 We want that feeling of being attractive
0:09:14 to the people we’re trying to attract.
0:09:16 We want to feel fulfilled in our love lives.
0:09:21 So that desire to find that becomes so,
0:09:24 in some cases, anxiously driven,
0:09:27 especially when time is running out
0:09:28 or it feels like time is running out.
0:09:31 That’s true from on a very literal level
0:09:33 for everyone who’s looking for a family
0:09:36 of their own biologically and for women more than men,
0:09:40 although for men too, more than a lot of them realize.
0:09:44 That fear of time running out amplifies this feeling of,
0:09:46 God, I have this really important position
0:09:47 that I want to fill in my life.
0:09:52 I’m trying to fill the position of my life partner.
0:09:55 And we get so obsessed with how important it is
0:09:58 to fill that position that the moment we go on a date
0:10:02 and we see even the faintest hope that this person
0:10:06 could represent a candidate for that position.
0:10:07 Which, by the way, Scott,
0:10:11 normally is not based on any deeper character traits
0:10:14 ’cause how many of people’s deeper character traits
0:10:17 can we really ascertain on a one-hour first date?
0:10:20 – Next up, we have Jesse Itzler,
0:10:22 a serial entrepreneur, best-selling author,
0:10:25 and part owner of The Atlantic Hawks,
0:10:27 and ultra marathon runner.
0:10:29 We had a great conversation about success,
0:10:32 fitness, and maintaining balance.
0:10:33 – I’ve been super lucky
0:10:36 and probably way more lucky than good,
0:10:38 but I’ve put myself in situations
0:10:40 where I can attract that luck.
0:10:42 I used to come home, Scott, from like,
0:10:43 you know, when I walk into Marquis Gen,
0:10:45 I’d be like, I got a sale last night.
0:10:47 We had a bell, I would ring the bell.
0:10:48 They’d be like, “What do you mean?
0:10:51 “You had the bar, same bar I was at.”
0:10:53 I’m like, “Yeah, but you left it 11 o’clock.”
0:10:56 I stayed till two and I got the sale.
0:10:59 Oh, you’re so lucky, the guy came, I was,
0:11:02 I’m not lucky, I put myself in that situation.
0:11:04 You know, luck doesn’t happen Sunday night
0:11:07 watching the Kardashians on your couch.
0:11:09 It happens when you put yourself in an environment
0:11:13 where the universe can reward you for deep near,
0:11:14 and then you have to be good at what you do
0:11:16 and take advantage of it.
0:11:20 So my 20s and 30s were built around
0:11:23 putting myself in environments where I could get lucky.
0:11:29 Next up is our conversation with Simon Sinek,
0:11:32 a world-renowned author, motivational speaker and friend.
0:11:35 He shares his wisdom surrounding leadership and mentorship.
0:11:37 Here’s a clip.
0:11:41 – I mean, first of all, I don’t believe leaders are the one.
0:11:43 I think that some people have an education
0:11:44 when they’re younger, they have a coach,
0:11:46 they have a parent, they have a guardian,
0:11:49 somebody in their life, a teacher who does something right.
0:11:52 They model themselves after that person
0:11:53 and they seem to learn it younger,
0:11:55 or they have some trials and tribulations
0:11:57 and they learn to overcome and rely on other people,
0:11:58 whatever it is.
0:12:00 But even some of the great leaders that we admire
0:12:03 if you look back, whether it’s Steve Jobs or Mahatma Gandhi,
0:12:06 like, you see that they were learning
0:12:08 and they didn’t get it right a lot of the time,
0:12:11 especially when they were younger, they learned those skills.
0:12:14 Young people, for me fundamentally,
0:12:15 the single best thing a young person can do
0:12:18 is really learn to be a friend.
0:12:22 – That was Simon Sinek, author of the books “Start With Why,”
0:12:25 “The Infinite Game,” and “Find Your Why.”
0:12:27 Up next, our conversation with Andrew Huberman.
0:12:30 Andrew is the host of the Huberman Lab Podcast
0:12:32 and a professor in the Department of Neurobiology
0:12:33 at Stanford University.
0:12:37 He shared his insights on all things physiological health.
0:12:42 – Optimization is something that we have to think about
0:12:43 on a day-to-day basis.
0:12:47 So it is true, I did rounds of sauna and cold this morning.
0:12:50 You know, I did, I got up really early,
0:12:51 a friend came over, I haven’t seen a while ago,
0:12:54 earlier than I would have liked and did sauna and cold.
0:12:55 And I did train yesterday.
0:12:58 But there are days, you know, I miss days, you know,
0:13:01 and it happens and, you know, life.
0:13:03 So I don’t want to give the impression
0:13:07 that my entire life is geared around protocols
0:13:08 to the point where I don’t do other things.
0:13:10 I went out to dinner with friends last night,
0:13:12 you know, I experienced stress in life,
0:13:14 we could talk about that, like anyone else.
0:13:19 So I would say this, figure out the minimum amount
0:13:21 of alcohol that you’re happy to drink
0:13:25 that makes you feel, you know, like you’re living life.
0:13:27 So maybe that’s a drink a night, maybe that’s two weeks,
0:13:30 maybe that’s stacking a few more toward the weekend,
0:13:32 whatever’s gonna work there.
0:13:34 And provided that your sleep is good,
0:13:36 meaning that we know it’s gonna disrupt
0:13:37 your sleep architecture somewhat,
0:13:39 but provided that you don’t have
0:13:41 excessive daytime sleepiness,
0:13:44 provided that you are not getting an increased frequency
0:13:47 of colds and flus, you’re accomplishing your work,
0:13:49 I would say you’re doing great.
0:13:52 Especially as you know, you’re visibly fit.
0:13:55 If you can do the three cardio vascular training sessions
0:13:57 and the two earth, this is the training sessions
0:14:01 that I just described without, you know, dissolving
0:14:04 into a pile of cells on the floor afterwards,
0:14:07 you know, even when you’re doing a 85% intensity
0:14:09 or let’s say 85% intensity of what you could do,
0:14:11 you’re doing great, you’re doing great.
0:14:14 – Fun fact, that was our most listened to episode
0:14:16 of the year, obviously, at Huberman Lab
0:14:18 is one of the 10 biggest podcasts in the world
0:14:22 and Andrew is having a huge impact.
0:14:24 Anyways, next up is a clip from our episode
0:14:25 with Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson,
0:14:28 a marine biologist, policy expert, writer,
0:14:32 and co-founder of the non-profit Think Tank Urban Ocean Lab.
0:14:36 – I personally don’t think any of this has to be political.
0:14:41 Like, we all actually want a good future for our children
0:14:45 and there’s polling that shows that the biggest motivator
0:14:49 for people to act on climate is love for future generations.
0:14:53 It’s actually not profit, which I found to be surprising.
0:14:55 It’s not any number of other things.
0:14:57 It really is like, I want to leave a better world
0:14:59 for my children and the biggest thing
0:15:02 that can convince conservative men
0:15:06 to care more about climate change is their daughters
0:15:09 saying, you’re setting our future on fire and I’m scared.
0:15:12 And that sort of instinct to protect our daughters,
0:15:15 our children kicks in in this way
0:15:18 that’s actually beneficial for the planet.
0:15:20 So there’s a lot of certainly like psychology
0:15:24 and economics and politics and policy, et cetera,
0:15:26 and culture all at play here.
0:15:29 – That was Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson,
0:15:31 author of the new book, What If We Get It Right?
0:15:34 Visions of Climate Futures.
0:15:35 Moving along, we have a clip from our interview
0:15:38 with Rory Stewart, the former UK Secretary of State
0:15:39 for International Development
0:15:42 and co-host of The Rest Is Politics.
0:15:46 Liberal democracies haven’t been delivering
0:15:47 well enough for people.
0:15:52 I mean, that for about 200 years from the early 1800s,
0:15:55 it, we could tell a story where we convinced ourselves
0:15:57 that democracies were naturally more prosperous
0:15:59 and as people became more prosperous,
0:16:01 they became more democratic.
0:16:04 And partly because of the rise of China,
0:16:06 but partly because the success
0:16:07 of other authoritarian regimes.
0:16:12 We’ve broken the link in which democracies
0:16:13 are not necessarily delivering for people.
0:16:15 And in certain years, it feels as though
0:16:18 non-democratic states are delivering quite effectively.
0:16:19 So that’s one problem.
0:16:22 I think second, and that is a big problem
0:16:25 because I think the reason why people buy into democracy
0:16:28 is not only because they believe in human rights
0:16:29 and liberal values, it’s also because
0:16:31 it was making them wealthier.
0:16:36 I think the second threat is, I’m afraid, social media.
0:16:40 I think it’s not a coincidence that the rise
0:16:42 of social media from 2003, four onwards
0:16:46 and its explosion with the Arab Spring in 2010, 2011
0:16:48 is part of the story of the rise of populism
0:16:50 and the rise of authoritarianism
0:16:52 because I think it, those are algorithms
0:16:56 that drive people into polarized states.
0:16:59 And I think they are, have been extremely bad
0:17:02 for the key bits of democratic discourse
0:17:06 in particular, compromise, meeting in the middle,
0:17:08 explaining, having a shared frame of reference.
0:17:13 – That was Rory Stewart and his thoughts on modern democracy.
0:17:15 And last but not least, let’s have a listen
0:17:17 to our episode with Angela Duckworth,
0:17:19 a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
0:17:22 and the author of The New York Times bestseller, GRIT,
0:17:24 The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
0:17:27 Angela shared the attributes of gritty people
0:17:29 and tips for raising resilient children.
0:17:33 – I think GRIT is forged in a crucible,
0:17:36 half of which is challenge.
0:17:37 I mean, what is challenge?
0:17:39 Challenge is being asked to do something
0:17:41 you cannot yet do, right?
0:17:43 You know, 2,000 meters instead of 800,
0:17:45 like whatever it is, right?
0:17:46 I can’t do it.
0:17:49 The challenges exceed my resources or my abilities.
0:17:51 So I think that is half of it.
0:17:52 But, you know, when Nietzsche said
0:17:55 “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,”
0:17:58 I mean, it does make you wonder, like, when you look around
0:18:03 and it does actually kill or seriously wound a lot of people.
0:18:06 And I think that’s because the other half of the crucible
0:18:09 and you can agree or disagree with me
0:18:11 is some kind of support.
0:18:16 Like, where does that inner self-talk come from
0:18:19 that says, you know, I’ll show you, right?
0:18:21 Because I think if there was one phrase
0:18:22 that I have heard over and over again
0:18:25 in interviews of the grittiest people,
0:18:29 it’s that when they describe confronting a major challenge,
0:18:32 especially when they’re doubted, right?
0:18:36 And someone else tells them, like, well, you can’t do this.
0:18:40 You know, there is this rage, this, like, voice that says,
0:18:41 I’ll show you.
0:18:45 And my theory is that being in one challenging situation
0:18:49 after another is not enough to give you the voice that says,
0:18:50 I’ll show you.
0:18:52 Somewhere, there has to be support.
0:18:54 Somewhere, there has to be a–
0:18:57 you know, like, I can’t remember Rocky’s coach,
0:18:58 like the guy with the, you know, the–
0:19:00 Burgess Meredith.
0:19:01 Exactly.
0:19:02 Right?
0:19:04 Sailor, you know, like the beanie on.
0:19:07 Like, I think I’ve seen it too often, you know,
0:19:09 that people who are in challenging situations
0:19:12 without support, you know, are not the ones to get up again,
0:19:15 dust themselves off, like, learn something, you know,
0:19:18 come back stronger than they were before.
0:19:21 All right, that’s a wrap on 2024.
0:19:25 Adios, Bente, Bente, Cuatro, 2024.
0:19:27 Jesus Christ, really?
0:19:27 It’s gone.
0:19:30 A big thank you to–
0:19:33 wait for it– you, our listeners,
0:19:35 for a great year.
0:19:39 This has been our best year ever on a number of dimensions.
0:19:41 But also, it’s been a rewarding year on a lot of levels.
0:19:43 A lot of nice people.
0:19:44 We’re paying our people well.
0:19:46 They’re doing well.
0:19:47 We’re growing.
0:19:49 Our people seem to appreciate our work.
0:19:50 I feel as if we’re having an impact.
0:19:52 I see people on the street, and they come up.
0:19:55 They’re super nice, made a bunch of new friends
0:19:56 because of the pod.
0:19:59 Anyways, emotional, psychological, economic reward,
0:20:01 having an impact, having purpose.
0:20:03 And it’s because people give us a shot.
0:20:04 People listen to us.
0:20:06 People provide us with thoughtful, civil feedback.
0:20:07 We get it wrong all the time.
0:20:10 I get it wrong more often than all the time.
0:20:12 And people are always generous with us.
0:20:15 And it’s very much appreciate not only your listenership
0:20:18 but your engagement and for the people who come up and say hi.
0:20:21 A special shout out is just wonderful for me.
0:20:22 It’s one of the nicest things that happens to me
0:20:24 on a regular basis.
0:20:25 Best to you and yours.
0:20:26 Thank you so much.
0:20:29 And here’s to a great 2024 and hoping for an even more
0:20:31 prosperous and healthy 2025.
0:20:34 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:20:38 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:20:41 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:20:44 (gentle music)
0:20:54 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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0:00:26 In, knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire.
0:00:29 Start caring for your home with confidence.
0:00:32 Download Thumbtack today.
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0:01:34 Today’s number, 22%.
0:01:37 That’s how much Bible sales grew this year in contrast to the overall book market
0:01:38 that barely grew one percent.
0:01:41 True story, sometimes I masturbate while reading the Bible.
0:01:44 I call it my “come to Jesus” moment.
0:01:57 Welcome to PropG Markets.
0:02:00 Today, oh wait, today we’re doing something different.
0:02:01 What’s going on today, Ed?
0:02:03 Today we’re doing an “Alls me anything” episode, Scott,
0:02:06 and we’ve got our producer, Claire, back in the studio.
0:02:11 And she’s going to be asking us some listener questions from Instagram and Reddit and YouTube.
0:02:14 So thank you to everyone who sent in those questions.
0:02:17 Claire, welcome back to the studio.
0:02:18 Very nice to be here.
0:02:19 Thank you.
0:02:21 Scott, are you ready for your first question?
0:02:22 Let on me.
0:02:24 We haven’t seen these yet.
0:02:25 All right.
0:02:27 This was the most popular question on Reddit.
0:02:33 The people are dying to know, how much did your birthday party cost?
0:02:38 I think it cost about a quarter of a million dollars.
0:02:40 Give us a breakdown.
0:02:43 Well, we took over a hotel, the Five Farms.
0:02:45 We reserved it two years before.
0:02:49 I think that, the honest answer is I don’t really know.
0:02:52 But I imagine that it was like 45 or 50 rooms.
0:02:54 We had it for two nights.
0:02:56 I don’t know, that was probably 100 grand.
0:02:58 The food was probably another 50 or 70 grand.
0:03:02 Plus things like axe throwing and kilt rental and all that shit.
0:03:04 Yeah, I’d put it at a quarter of a million bucks.
0:03:06 Do you think that was worth it?
0:03:07 Good value?
0:03:14 Oh, look, to have all your friends in one place and celebrate the passage of time as you sit around and wait for the ask answer.
0:03:16 Always put it so elegantly.
0:03:17 You know my approach to this.
0:03:19 If you got it, spend it or give it away.
0:03:27 I can’t think of a much better way to spend your money than bringing 95 of your friends together to celebrate me.
0:03:31 So yeah, I don’t regret that at all.
0:03:33 I thought it was a great way to spend money.
0:03:35 All right, next question is related.
0:03:39 Scott, you frequently reference the friendship crisis among men.
0:03:46 What’s been the most effective friendship maintenance strategy you’ve used to maintain close friendships since childhood?
0:03:49 Well, now it’s texting, just little things.
0:03:52 But my go-to is I do a lot of guy’s trips.
0:03:54 I do a lot of trips with friends.
0:03:57 And now that I have money, I invite friends with me.
0:04:00 And I literally share my calendar with everybody and say, let’s get together.
0:04:02 And I take a ton of time.
0:04:04 I didn’t vacation a lot when I was your age.
0:04:10 So now I have a ton of– I purposely, whenever I accept a speaking gig, I stay a day.
0:04:12 I get there a day early or stay a day late.
0:04:16 And so it’s a place I want to be or I don’t do it unless it’s a lot of money.
0:04:21 And I’ll try and find a friend who will come meet me or I’ll go somewhere and meet them.
0:04:24 But I would say trips and texting.
0:04:29 Next question. Where did your UK accent come from?
0:04:31 Genuinely curious.
0:04:32 Thank you.
0:04:38 I think people are actually confused about this part of your life, including Scott.
0:04:41 So let’s hear–
0:04:42 Different.
0:04:44 Scott just doesn’t care.
0:04:46 Let’s hear your origin story.
0:04:47 Where were you born?
0:04:48 Where did you grow up?
0:04:50 And where did the accent come from?
0:04:53 Yeah, so I was born and raised in London.
0:04:55 So that’s where the accent comes from.
0:04:58 The weird part is that both my parents are American.
0:05:05 And they came to London probably 30 years ago before I was born.
0:05:06 They moved there for work.
0:05:09 But they’re both originally from Atlanta, Georgia.
0:05:12 So they have American accents.
0:05:15 And then me and my sisters all have English accents.
0:05:18 And so people ask me why that is.
0:05:19 I don’t really know.
0:05:22 I guess because I went to school from a really young age
0:05:27 and I adopted the same accent as my friends at school.
0:05:28 I would assume that’s it.
0:05:35 But I left England when I was 14 to go to boarding school in America.
0:05:37 And then I stayed in America for college.
0:05:38 And now I’m here.
0:05:40 Scott, any follow-up questions?
0:05:41 I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.
0:05:45 I fell asleep about a minute ago.
0:05:46 Well, let me get this.
0:05:49 You have an English accent because you were raised in England.
0:05:50 That’s right.
0:05:52 I think the accent adds 10 perceived IQ points.
0:05:54 Ed, what do you think, Claire?
0:05:57 Well, we all already know that.
0:06:00 I do think he’s putting it on a little bit.
0:06:06 Didn’t your friends from home like kind of tease you
0:06:08 when you started to get a bit of an American accent?
0:06:09 They tease me right now.
0:06:11 They think my accent right now is American.
0:06:12 Really?
0:06:14 They say I have an American twang.
0:06:17 So when I go back home, I sound even more English.
0:06:22 But yeah, look, it’s a hard life, people thinking that I’m a phony.
0:06:23 But what can you do?
0:06:27 My father has a really nice Scottish accent.
0:06:30 And, you know, kind of the first time you observe nuance when you’re a kid,
0:06:33 I remember thinking, why do people find my dad so fascinating?
0:06:35 Like, what he’s saying is not that interesting.
0:06:37 And I figured out it’s that accent.
0:06:39 And Ed, I’m not kidding, you have–
0:06:42 This reflects very poorly on me, just so we’re clear.
0:06:44 You got to lean into every advantage.
0:06:47 I lean into my, like, Brad put, like, good looks.
0:06:52 You– Ed literally spit his coffee out.
0:06:54 So I shouldn’t have laughed that hard.
0:06:56 Spittake.
0:06:58 I think you have a fantastic accent.
0:07:01 Your accent is– I think it’s really strong.
0:07:04 What’s interesting is my mom did really well in school,
0:07:08 and she had what felt like a kind of a refined English accent,
0:07:11 somewhat of yours, and some of her siblings
0:07:14 who went to different schools have just an accent
0:07:16 that’s not what I would call aspirational.
0:07:18 Sometimes it’s a little bit hard to listen to.
0:07:21 It’s just strange how– and it sets such a tone,
0:07:24 and they’re all really bright, or I find them bright.
0:07:29 It’s just so interesting how your perception of someone is obviously–
0:07:32 supposedly guys, their perception of someone is very visual,
0:07:35 and women, their perception of someone is based on their ears.
0:07:40 And you immediately, with that accent, come off as very educated and interesting.
0:07:43 It’s a great accent to have.
0:07:45 I love this. Let’s keep going.
0:07:48 Somehow this podcast wouldn’t be making any money if you were like,
0:07:51 “Viva asks a question. Scott, any predictions?”
0:07:54 It just wouldn’t work.
0:07:56 Okay, I have a related question.
0:08:01 Do you think you’d be more successful if you weren’t bald?
0:08:03 Oh, no. It’s the opposite.
0:08:07 When I was– believe it or not, my hair used to be my best feature.
0:08:10 I thought it’s a low bar, but in graduate school, I had a ponytail.
0:08:13 I wrote a skateboard to school, and I had a ponytail.
0:08:15 And I started– I remember the exact moment.
0:08:17 I remember reading my finance book and thinking,
0:08:19 “I don’t remember underlining this.”
0:08:22 I’m like, “Oh my God, those aren’t underlines. It’s my hair.”
0:08:27 And my hair was like– my hair basically decided it was a fire on my head
0:08:30 and needed to escape as quickly as possible.
0:08:34 I went from having share-like hair to being yield-brinner
0:08:36 and it felt like three weeks.
0:08:40 And it was so distressing that I decided I was living in San Francisco.
0:08:43 I think I was in my early 30s, maybe even younger.
0:08:45 And I said, “I’m just going to shave it all off.”
0:08:48 I had taken a vacation with my ex, and she said,
0:08:50 “I’m so sick of you talking about this. Just shave it off.”
0:08:54 And she bought a clipper, and she actually– she sat me down,
0:08:58 and we had– we split a bottle of wine, and she shaved my head with a blade.
0:09:02 It was actually a really, like, bonding, intimate, sort of erotic experience.
0:09:06 Yeah, the bottle of wine was very interesting. I like that.
0:09:10 It’s not a great idea to have your ex-wife with a blade in her hand after a bottle of wine, but–
0:09:12 I’m pretty sure this is a James Bond scene.
0:09:14 That’s right. With money penny.
0:09:16 It’s also a porn scene.
0:09:22 I went back to San Francisco, and I shaved my head sort of before it was cool,
0:09:24 and I think it actually helped me raise money.
0:09:33 I think kind of that sort of look and being a credentialed young man in your 30s
0:09:35 who had some credibility in a graduate degree from Berkeley
0:09:39 and kind of a background attack in 1990, San Francisco,
0:09:41 meant you could raise a shit ton of money.
0:09:43 And I think my haircut actually helped.
0:09:48 I think my– one, it’s freed up– I think about time management a lot.
0:09:51 I probably spend 10 minutes a day on my hair, so think about it.
0:09:55 That’s approximately 25 hours a year that I get back.
0:09:59 And also, I just like– I really enjoy it.
0:10:03 Having ed-like hair or cler-like hair is the best.
0:10:08 Having no hair is a close second because it’s efficient and easy.
0:10:14 It’s the in-between that sucks because it represents a loss of youth, a loss of masculinity,
0:10:16 and it’s devastating when it starts happening.
0:10:18 It was really a source of stress for me.
0:10:21 So, but wow, I wish I’d done it sooner.
0:10:24 Shaving my head was just such a unlock for me.
0:10:26 And I actually think it’s helped me professionally.
0:10:29 Follow-up question for Ed, this one’s for me.
0:10:32 If his dick was bigger, would he be more secure?
0:10:34 Sorry.
0:10:35 Claire, don’t ask that.
0:10:37 That’s totally inappropriate.
0:10:40 Jesus, that is totally inappropriate.
0:10:42 I think you’ll like this question.
0:10:43 Okay.
0:10:46 Did you buzz your hair before or after you met Scott?
0:10:47 Be honest.
0:10:51 It was after I’d met him, it was before I started working for him.
0:10:54 But I did it with my roommate in college.
0:10:56 I see the comment in your question.
0:10:58 “How am I copying Scott?”
0:11:01 I think he wants to look like Daddy.
0:11:02 That’s right.
0:11:07 No, I did it with my roommate because we had just submitted our theses and we were like,
0:11:10 “Fuck it, this would be kind of fun if we both just shaved our heads.”
0:11:16 And then I found out that I really liked it for all the time management reasons that Scott described.
0:11:19 And I also kind of just liked the way it looks.
0:11:21 I just, I don’t know, I just really liked it.
0:11:23 So I decided to keep it.
0:11:27 And I don’t know, I think it works from a branding perspective for me and Scott.
0:11:30 The fact that I look like Scott’s son a little bit, that’s what people say.
0:11:32 I think that plays in our favor.
0:11:34 You did it with your roommate after submitting your theses.
0:11:37 Ed, there are easier ways to come out.
0:11:40 We’re going to hear about that one.
0:11:42 We’re going to hear about that one.
0:11:49 I don’t think people know that you also had share like hair in college and you got it off.
0:11:51 Yeah, really long curly hair.
0:11:52 Really?
0:11:53 Yeah.
0:11:54 Look how dreamy Ed was.
0:11:57 If I had Ed’s looks, I’d be prime minister by this point in my life.
0:11:58 Look at him.
0:12:00 Handsome, got the English accent.
0:12:03 He’s making a good 30, 35K a year on a podcast.
0:12:05 He’s a fucking player.
0:12:06 Player.
0:12:08 Player came to play.
0:12:11 People are speculating about your salary on Reddit.
0:12:12 Did you see that?
0:12:13 Oh my gosh.
0:12:16 How much did your birthday cost, bitch?
0:12:19 Okay, let’s move on.
0:12:25 Scott, this question was a response to the art of spending episode, which we put out recently.
0:12:28 And it’s something I’ve wondered about as well.
0:12:33 So you shared that your dad wasn’t generous to you and your mom.
0:12:40 And you have also shared in other episodes that you help your dad financially in his old age.
0:12:46 How did you get over the disappointment of him not being generous to you and find a way
0:12:47 to be generous to him?
0:12:49 It’s a really thoughtful question.
0:12:53 And it goes to what has been one of the biggest unlocks in my life.
0:12:57 And that is I used to approach relationships naturally.
0:13:00 And I think most people do naturally as kind of a transaction.
0:13:06 Am I getting as much out of this friendship as I’m giving in a romantic relationship?
0:13:09 And my partner is good to me as I am to her.
0:13:12 In a business relationship, am I getting as much from my business partner?
0:13:14 Am I adding more value?
0:13:17 If I am, then I should have more equity or more compensation.
0:13:19 I was constantly keeping score.
0:13:23 And it was a real recipe for disappointment and frustration and straining relationships
0:13:30 because you’ll naturally inflate your own contribution of relationships and diminish other people’s.
0:13:35 And what was an unlock for me, and I used to approach my relationship with my father that way.
0:13:39 And that is I was a good son, but I would occasionally get upset.
0:13:41 I remember not talking to my dad for a few months.
0:13:44 We used to always, you know, we would talk every week because I thought, you know,
0:13:48 I just went back to these ugly moments as a child and some of the things you referenced.
0:13:51 And I would just get very resentful for him, even in my 30s and 40s.
0:13:57 And somewhere in my early 40s, I decided the unlock is to decide what kind of friend,
0:14:00 what kind of boyfriend, what kind of spouse, what kind of son you want to be.
0:14:03 And then ignore what you’re getting back.
0:14:06 And the reality is I wanted to be a generous, loving son.
0:14:08 And that’s, so that’s how I started behaving.
0:14:10 And I put the scorecard away.
0:14:18 And also I forgave my father because I think the, the litmus test of any dad or the kind of evolutionary box
0:14:22 you need to check is to be better to your son than your father was to you.
0:14:26 And I found out later in life that my father had been physically abused by his father,
0:14:30 that his, my grandfather used to come home drunk and physically abuse him.
0:14:32 And my dad was not very sophisticated.
0:14:36 He wasn’t a great dad, but he was much better to me than his father was to him.
0:14:43 He tried and, you know, it just makes me feel good to feel like I am being a generous, loving son.
0:14:45 And I think about this a lot.
0:14:50 The key in relationships is not to have the bullshit transactional mentality I had or scorecard.
0:14:54 The key is to achieve a surplus value in all your relationships.
0:14:59 So if you’re being a better spouse, if you’re being a better daughter, then your mom was to you when you were a kid.
0:15:02 That means you win. That means that you’re here for a reason.
0:15:04 Here’s a question for both of you.
0:15:18 How are you going to compete in the hemisphere without falling into the weird, conspiratorial, non-fact-based, self-help, contrarian trap that’s captured countless other bros?
0:15:20 How do you not become Tate?
0:15:22 Scott, we’ll start with you.
0:15:27 What are your thoughts on how you and Ed can avoid that fate on Prophety Markets?
0:15:30 Because you’re pushing it, Scott.
0:15:43 We’re critical thinkers. We read. We are curious, but suspect the stuff and try to use information to learn as opposed to sanctify your beliefs.
0:15:49 One of the things I love about this medium is I think people go to cable news to sanctify their religious and political views.
0:15:57 I do think people come to podcasts with an open heart and one of the things I love about humor is that I think it softens the beach.
0:16:05 I think if you can make someone laugh for a brief moment, you soften their gray matter and they’re more open to new ideas or new opinions, which might be dangerous.
0:16:09 I don’t think I’m a likely candidate for falling into some sort of conspiracy.
0:16:11 I do think I’m in a bit of a bubble.
0:16:18 I read a lot of media that’s produced by urban liberals, which is the majority of media, and so it’s good for me to step out.
0:16:24 I purposely read some stuff that’s a little bit more conservative to try and get a different viewpoint.
0:16:33 And one of the things I really appreciate about you guys encouraged me to go on the podcast with Theo Vaughn is it just gave me a little bit of a different worldview.
0:16:38 I remember thinking it’s like a zebra talking to a lion. We’re just such different people.
0:16:44 Maybe I should be more worried, but I think we’re critical thinkers.
0:16:50 Ed, what’s going to stop you from going red pill weird or I don’t know.
0:16:55 I’m not worried about this at all just because that’s just not who we are.
0:17:07 The idea of a podcast where you talk about eating red meat and escaping the matrix and getting into dropshipping, none of that stuff interests me.
0:17:10 Or makes me think that that’s worth talking about.
0:17:15 And our job is to figure out what actually interests us and what engages us.
0:17:18 And it’s just none of that stuff is interesting to me.
0:17:25 So I’m really not worried about devolving into a manosphere podcast personally.
0:17:30 I mean, I think to Scott’s point, we need to be aware of any bubbles we might live in.
0:17:39 And I think the solution to that is just a very, very broad media diet, trying to amass as many different opinions as possible.
0:17:41 It’s very important that we have our finger on the pulse.
0:17:47 But I think if we’re in danger of going any direction, it’s not red pill tape manosphere.
0:17:50 And you do do your research, which goes into that.
0:17:54 So one of the questions was what is your research process like.
0:18:02 So before every podcast, about 24 hours before the podcast, we all meet as a team and we have a team of analysts and producers.
0:18:07 And, you know, it’s about seven of us who get on this call and we talk about what we want to talk about.
0:18:11 And then we decide with Scott, you know, this is going to be the stories.
0:18:15 And then I spend the next 24 hours just obsessively researching all of those topics.
0:18:17 I start with Google.
0:18:19 I use AI as well.
0:18:22 I use a finance tool called Rogo.
0:18:24 I use chat GBT.
0:18:31 I think if there’s anything I’ve learned about the research process from doing this podcast, it’s the most important thing.
0:18:39 And I think this applies to all research is trying to figure out what is the so what of anything that you’re reading.
0:18:44 And that’s kind of hard to do these days because there are just millions of different articles about all of these events.
0:18:48 And they’re filled with really, really useless information.
0:18:52 And that’s especially true in earnings reports and 10 Qs.
0:18:59 You know, I’ll read like an entire 10 Q in preparation and I’ll learn maybe one thing from it.
0:19:01 But that’s sort of what you have to do.
0:19:03 To me, it’s all about synthesizing.
0:19:07 OK, what is the why do I actually care about this?
0:19:13 Like, what is the takeaway from this gigantic document that is filled with all these numbers and a lot of bullshit?
0:19:19 What could affect my life or what could be interesting to someone else’s life?
0:19:21 What is the so what here?
0:19:29 And we’ve got to give a big shout out to Mia Silverio and Jessica Lang, too, who informed basically everything we do.
0:19:35 There are researchers and they do a lot at this company, but they’re very focused on Prophety Market.
0:19:37 So thank you to both of them.
0:19:40 All right, here’s another for both of you.
0:19:46 How are you guys doing with the parasocial relationships that you’re setting up with listeners?
0:19:52 Does it feel hard to relate to strangers who are kind of also not strangers?
0:19:56 And has it changed the way you approach your daily life?
0:19:58 Scott, we’ll start with you.
0:20:00 It’s one of the nicest things in my life.
0:20:03 Like, everybody wants to be on a stage where people who don’t know you are applauding for you.
0:20:07 And I try to remember that with my boys and my partner.
0:20:20 I try to make sure that it’s not just always all about me that we find venues and ways to celebrate their achievements and put them on a stage in front of other people, you know, such that they get their own applause.
0:20:31 But when people come up to me on the street and say, I like your work, one of the things I think such a shame is that these large language models aren’t crawling the real world.
0:20:38 Because in general, what I find is online, there’s a lot of really awful, vile, aggressive course content.
0:20:41 In person, my experience is that people are wonderful.
0:20:47 And I don’t know if it’s because they think, oh, I might, you know, be friends with this person.
0:20:48 I might have sex with them.
0:20:49 I might get into a fight with them.
0:21:02 There’s just a general guardrails that encourage you to be nice to people in what is the medium where the majority of our time in a modern society has been communicating that as in person.
0:21:05 But when people come up to me and they’re always nice.
0:21:07 And even when they disagree, they come and say, I didn’t like your take on this.
0:21:09 We have a civil conversation.
0:21:10 I love it.
0:21:13 Occasionally, I’ll be in a rush and I don’t have time.
0:21:26 The only part that’s hard is we’re now getting, or I’m getting 30 to 50 emails a day from people with really thoughtful questions who want to have a conversation, especially young men who want mentoring or just want to jump on the phone.
0:21:27 And I just don’t have the time.
0:21:29 That’s kind of disappointing and frustrating.
0:21:34 But in terms of people coming up and being nice and impressed, I love it.
0:21:35 I don’t.
0:21:40 And when people complain about it, I mean, you don’t want to be famous for the wrong reasons.
0:21:44 You don’t want to be Michael Cohen or I’ve always felt for Monica Lewinsky.
0:21:47 I’ve always thought she would give anything just to have her anonymity back.
0:21:52 She’s this really lovely, intelligent woman and she’s famous for the wrong reasons.
0:21:58 And it’s what everyone thinks they think, you know, they immediately have an impression of her before they even get to know her.
0:22:02 But to have people come up to you and be nice to you because they like your work.
0:22:03 It’s wonderful.
0:22:06 It’s just you inherit all of these friends.
0:22:07 It’s validating.
0:22:09 Yeah, I absolutely love it.
0:22:16 And if I got sick of it, you know, remind me that all I need to do is go dark for a couple of months and I’ll give a flying fuck who I am.
0:22:19 I don’t get, I don’t get anyone complaining about it.
0:22:20 I love it.
0:22:23 So Ed, this is a newer phenomenon for you.
0:22:28 So how has it been to start getting recognized by people on the street?
0:22:36 Very strange at first, but ultimately I land where Scott is where it’s just, I really enjoy it and I find it extremely rewarding.
0:22:49 I feel like you couldn’t really ask for more in a job than for people to come up to you and recognize and affirm that they are enjoying your work.
0:22:55 Like that’s just not something that a lot of people get to enjoy.
0:22:59 And so, you know, to me, it’s like an affirmation that I’m doing my job right.
0:23:09 I mean, I think the biggest fear in media, if you work in media, isn’t that people don’t take you seriously or they don’t like you.
0:23:12 Like the biggest fear is like that no one’s listening to you.
0:23:14 Like that’s the, that’s, that’s the concern.
0:23:20 And so to have someone come up and say like, hey, like I heard what you said about this and it made me think about this.
0:23:27 And it’s like, I couldn’t, I couldn’t ask for much more in terms of professional reward.
0:23:30 So yeah, I land completely where Scott is.
0:23:32 I really, I really like it.
0:23:35 Here’s one that I’m going to take.
0:23:40 This is kind of the only affirmation that I get from our listeners.
0:23:43 It’s to do with the music.
0:23:48 The most frequently asked question I get is about the music on the show.
0:23:58 People want to know what is that cool Spanish song that plays before one of the podcasts and what’s the outro song used at the end of Prophetic Market.
0:24:02 So the cool Spanish song is called 1977.
0:24:05 It’s by Anna Tijoux.
0:24:11 And the reason it’s the intro song is because Scott heard it on an episode of Breaking Bad.
0:24:13 Is that right?
0:24:14 I think so.
0:24:17 That’s what, yeah, that’s, that’s the legend.
0:24:18 That’s exactly right.
0:24:21 And the outro song is called Lifetimes.
0:24:28 I don’t know who sings it because she’s not credited, but the composers are Benedict Lambden and Nathaniel Pern.
0:24:30 This is not a huge song.
0:24:32 It has fewer than 2000 streams on YouTube.
0:24:34 You can find it on Spotify too.
0:24:43 But the music on this show is largely inspired by a trip that Ed, Caroline and Mia and I took to Tulum.
0:24:49 In 2022, which Scott sent us on.
0:24:57 And one night we were at this place called Tree House to this day, the best dinner I’ve ever had.
0:25:05 And afterwards there were some DJs and we were dancing in the sand under the stars, under the palm trees.
0:25:17 And they played Donna Summers, I Feel Love. And I just remember feeling a huge amount of gratitude for how much fun we got to have together.
0:25:23 And so choosing the music for this show, I wanted to kind of capture that energy.
0:25:28 And I wanted to find the song that captured Donna’s energy as well.
0:25:36 This song is no Donna Summer, but I think it’s pretty close and it does make me happy to hear it every time I finish an episode.
0:25:38 Because it reminds me of that night.
0:25:43 Yeah, I can’t wait to get to the song at the end.
0:25:45 I didn’t know that. That’s really nice.
0:25:50 We’ll be right back.
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0:27:45 We’re back with Proficy Markets.
0:27:47 Here’s one for both of you.
0:27:54 Do you have tips on improving storytelling, taking classes, joining groups, anything?
0:27:56 Ed, we’ll start with you.
0:28:02 The best lesson on storytelling in my view came from the creators of South Park.
0:28:05 The names of Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
0:28:15 And they have a rule when they’re sort of storyboarding each episode and they’re sort of outlining the beats of the episode and it applies to all storytelling.
0:28:26 And that is the words and then if those words appear between your beats, then you’ve screwed up.
0:28:34 Like the idea of having a story where it’s like this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened.
0:28:35 That’s not a story.
0:28:38 That’s just a sequence of things happening.
0:28:49 So what you have to do and what they do is they replace and then with one of these two words, either therefore or but.
0:28:55 So the difference then is, you know, you’ve got a story.
0:29:02 This happened, therefore this happened, but this happened, therefore this happened.
0:29:03 And that’s a story.
0:29:11 And I think that’s a really useful rule in terms of sort of what I was saying before about trying to arrive to a point.
0:29:14 And I think it applies to business news as well.
0:29:23 Like the idea of me coming on this podcast and being like, you know, sales were down and then margins were up and then profits were up.
0:29:26 That’s I don’t register anything from that.
0:29:31 But sales were down, but margins were up, therefore profits were up.
0:29:32 That’s different.
0:29:34 That’s telling a story right there.
0:29:43 And so I think if you’re trying to understand how can I convey my storytelling better, get rid of all the ands and get rid of all the thens and start using more butts.
0:29:44 And therefore.
0:29:46 Scott, any other storytelling tips?
0:29:47 Some of it is just genetic.
0:29:49 It’s like any other talent.
0:29:51 I’ve always thought we’re talking about my dad.
0:29:54 My dad could captivate a room and a really good twist of phrase.
0:29:56 And I think I got some of that from him.
0:30:01 So I was blessed with some, I don’t know.
0:30:04 Or I’ve always been able to speak fairly well.
0:30:06 Speak fairly well too.
0:30:12 Anyways, but where it starts from me and maybe it’s different for other people is that I think to be a great storyteller.
0:30:15 It’s really important or a good basis to be able to write well.
0:30:17 The hardest thing I do is writing.
0:30:21 And right now it’s Thursday and I got to get No Mercy No Mouse out tomorrow.
0:30:28 It’s the hardest thing I do is writing books and No Mercy because the written word to do it well requires excellence.
0:30:33 You know, we can fuck up or have fragments or not think through and just the kind of the banter and get through it.
0:30:40 Ed used to work on No Mercy No Mouse and you got out of that as quickly as you could because it’s hard because it’s hard.
0:30:45 So if you can write well, I think that’s the base for storytelling.
0:30:53 So I committed to becoming a decent writer not a young age, but and then I would say the rest is a couple of the key components.
0:30:59 Pick the medium you want to be a great storyteller and you want to be a great writer, great on Instagram, great visually, great with PowerPoint.
0:31:01 There’s a lot of different mediums.
0:31:06 And then put a metric on it and say I want to be in the top 1%.
0:31:08 For me, I want to be a decathlete.
0:31:14 I want to be the top 1% of speaking, of writing books, of writing newsletters, of podcasting.
0:31:19 And I think if I can do that, I’ll be a decathlete in the world of storytelling.
0:31:23 And I put specific metrics on it in terms of dollar volume or what I charge for speaking.
0:31:37 And also, I have an unfair advantage in that is for 22 years, I sat in front of, stood in front of 60 to 300 people twice a week for, or four times a week for an hour and a half telling them a story and trying to engage them.
0:31:42 And they were paying me/NYU a lot of money to listen to this story.
0:31:46 And so they came with that real expectations.
0:31:48 And that was just a tremendous training.
0:31:58 So in this, this pitch to Netflix that we did for this original scripted series working on Rosamund Pike, who’s going to play the lead read a scene.
0:32:04 And she’s just so captivating her voice, the way she puts herself in the character.
0:32:07 I thought, God, that’s just such a gift.
0:32:14 And you were just, I remember seeing the folks at Netflix, the creative execs on the line, I could just tell them like, oh, we’ve sold it, they’re going to buy it.
0:32:16 They’ll pay anything for this thing.
0:32:20 Because she just was the character and she was just so captivating, we’re just so drawn to her.
0:32:22 And I thought, how much of that is learned?
0:32:24 How much of it is genetic?
0:32:30 But anyways, I’m blessed in that I get tons of practice over the last two plus decades.
0:32:40 Also, as a consultant, I got a ton of experience in front of boards and CEOs trying to tell a story and then convince them to pay me a half a million dollars for another story in three months.
0:32:55 Just to add on to that though, Scott, like I feel like what you do that is different from most professors and also was true in your consulting career is I feel like everything that you say you treat as though it is entertainment.
0:33:03 Like I’ve had a lot of professors when I was at Princeton who they don’t think of it as a show and they don’t think of it as a story.
0:33:08 It’s like, you know, here’s a series of facts and here’s what you need to know.
0:33:12 And you got to read the textbook and then we’re going to have a quiz on it and that’s sort of how it goes.
0:33:16 But I feel like and I don’t know if this is intentional or just natural from your end.
0:33:27 But I also think of that story you told about when you were at L2 and you were presenting to some brand and first up was McKinsey and next up was L2.
0:33:33 And the McKinsey presentation ended and you were like, wow, that was the most boring thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
0:33:43 And that’s something that I have learned from you in my work is that I try to think in all of my work and I think it’s underrated in all aspects of life.
0:33:48 Like is this actually interesting and entertaining?
0:33:53 Like why would I put this giant research report together if it’s just going to bore you out of your mind?
0:33:55 Who wants to read that?
0:33:58 And I feel like you take that to another level.
0:34:00 So follow up question for me.
0:34:01 Do you agree with that?
0:34:03 And is that intentional?
0:34:17 Look, Alex Karp, Donald Trump, MassVote the Motoran, the best professor, the most highly rated professor is one best professor of 190 of us at NYU for seven out of the last eight years.
0:34:19 They’re all entertainers.
0:34:26 They take humor, they take storytelling and they use it to soften the beach such that the point they’re trying to get across.
0:34:27 Everyone has screens.
0:34:28 Everyone’s skeptical.
0:34:30 People don’t trust each other.
0:34:31 People get bored easily.
0:34:32 They get distracted.
0:34:34 So you need to soften the beach.
0:34:37 And the way you soften the beach is you keep them engaged through entertainment.
0:34:39 Now, some people are just so brilliant.
0:34:43 You know, Yvall Harari, his stuff is just so factual.
0:34:45 But even then it’s sort of a story.
0:34:49 He’s a bit of a, yeah, entertainment.
0:34:51 Think about the people who break through in the news.
0:34:59 They just have a way of writing and they have metaphors and analogies and terms of phrase that just kind of surprise and delight you.
0:35:01 I’ve always used humor.
0:35:03 It goes back to when I was very young.
0:35:05 I was not attractive.
0:35:09 I was one of those kids that went through this crazy growth spurt.
0:35:16 So I was sort of, by the time I was 13, 5, 10, 120 pounds and I had bad acne and I was very insecure.
0:35:21 And my only means of establishing social capital was humor.
0:35:28 And I’m going to date myself, but the only award I’ve ever received is I was voted most comical in Steve Martin in my school poll.
0:35:29 That’s a good award.
0:35:40 But I’ve always used humor and comedy as a means of trying to establish relationships and keep my students engaged and my clients sort of, I know that guy’s kind of interesting.
0:35:45 I find that some of the greatest social commentators of our time soften the beach with humor or so.
0:35:47 But they don’t teach that in school.
0:35:54 I guess that’s what I find so interesting is that’s sort of been one of my big takeaways probably because we’re entertaining because we’re on a podcast.
0:35:59 But like schools should teach that, you know, you should learn that in college.
0:36:05 Like if you’re going to walk into a job interview, yeah, you want to know all of your facts and you want to make sure you get everything right.
0:36:11 But the most important thing is that you offer the interviewer a good time.
0:36:14 And the way you can do that is by being entertaining.
0:36:17 Say things that sort of capture their imagination.
0:36:19 Say things that aren’t boring.
0:36:24 I feel like that’s such an underrated asset and we should be taught it more in schools.
0:36:27 So I’m giving you your credit for teaching me that.
0:36:32 The only pushback I would offer is that at the end of the day, you want to be yourself.
0:36:34 And some people just aren’t funny.
0:36:37 And when they try to be funny and they’re not, it just falls flat.
0:36:41 I think of myself as funny and provocative and sometimes my shit falls flat.
0:36:42 I just go too far and it just-
0:36:44 No, it always lands.
0:36:46 Cringe, right?
0:36:55 But there are some professors and some communicators that are just so chock full of facts and so well rehearsed and so competent.
0:36:58 You guys are too young to remember the show Welcome Back Cotter.
0:37:03 But he was trying to help this fellow teacher and he was trying to convince her that she needs to be funny and she just couldn’t do it.
0:37:04 That was just wasn’t her.
0:37:09 So I would say early on, you just want to figure out what is my gift around storytelling?
0:37:11 What are my mediums and then lean into those advantages?
0:37:17 I think the question that people should be asking in all of their work is, is this something that I would want to consume?
0:37:24 So I’m not saying like you have to be funny or you have to be, you know, really emotionally thoughtful.
0:37:25 Do whatever you want to do.
0:37:29 But ultimately the answer to, is this something that I would consume?
0:37:31 Is this a story I would want to hear?
0:37:33 Is this a report I would want to read?
0:37:34 The answer must be yes.
0:37:36 Another one for both of you.
0:37:39 What should be your goal in your late 20s?
0:37:40 I feel lost.
0:37:43 I work in consulting, but I find it very unfulfilling.
0:37:47 I feel like it’s time to make a drastic change, but I don’t know what.
0:37:53 I don’t know if I’m built for a conventional career, but I’ve been on a conventional path my whole life.
0:37:54 So it’s all I know.
0:37:56 Ed, we’ll go to you first.
0:37:59 Well, first off, I relate to that question.
0:38:01 I felt that way during college.
0:38:04 So I feel you.
0:38:07 I can offer what I did to get out of that.
0:38:09 Cause I no longer feel that way.
0:38:11 I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
0:38:20 And this really worked for me, which is I just wrote up a list of people who I admire and whose lives I wanted to emulate in some way.
0:38:24 And I think I’ve said this before, but Scott was on that list.
0:38:31 And so what I would recommend is make that list of people and I would say do it within reason.
0:38:35 Like don’t choose like Lionel Messi, like people whose lives you could actually live.
0:38:37 Impressive, but not that impressive.
0:38:39 Exactly.
0:38:42 And go see if you can try to work for them.
0:38:44 That’s what I did.
0:38:47 See if you can figure out a way to get connected to them.
0:38:49 Do it again in a reasonable way.
0:38:56 Don’t be aggressive or obnoxious, but see if you can figure out a way to go work for those people.
0:39:06 And if you can’t do that, I think the thing that you want to do is look at the list and think about what traits all of those people have in common.
0:39:08 Like I think that it’s just, it’s very hard.
0:39:10 This question of what do I want to do?
0:39:14 We all ask it’s very hard to just visualize what you want.
0:39:19 And it’s so much easier when we have examples of people that we can sort of go off of.
0:39:23 Like it’s the same as like, you know, trying to draw a picture from scratch.
0:39:32 Like it’s very hard to do, but if you have like the object in front of you, we have like a stencil, you can sort of work your way into that.
0:39:34 And so for me, that was Scott.
0:39:43 Like I don’t, I’m not trying to be Scott, but there are parts about Scott and what he’s done that I really like that I just think are great.
0:39:49 And having that there and being able to sort of use it as like a tracing paper.
0:39:53 You know, I’ll change this thing here and I’ll emulate this thing here.
0:39:55 I just think that that’s a really useful way to do it.
0:39:58 So make a list of people and start there.
0:39:59 Scott.
0:40:02 The first thing I’d want to say to this young man is to forgive yourself.
0:40:08 And that is if you’re in your mid to late twenties and not entirely sure what you’re going to do professionally or with the rest of your life.
0:40:10 That’s kind of exactly where you should be.
0:40:14 And some people do grow up with a vision and they execute against that vision.
0:40:16 Most successful people have not.
0:40:19 When I was nine years old, I thought it was going to be a baseball player.
0:40:24 I was the pitcher for the California State Junior League for, you know, nine year olds.
0:40:27 And then I found out I wasn’t going to be an athlete.
0:40:34 And then when I was 17 and a freshman at UCLA, I decided it was going to be a pediatrician and chemistry disavowed me of that notion.
0:40:40 And then when I was 22, I thought it was going to be an investment banker because I landed a job at Morgan Stanley, which everybody wanted and I got.
0:40:43 And then I found out I hated it and I wasn’t very good at it.
0:40:52 And then when I was in business school, I thought that I might be, you know, go to work for a health care consultancy.
0:40:59 And I turned down the offer and decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I started a strategy firm, which kind of didn’t make any sense.
0:41:04 And then I decided I really wanted to teach, you know, at the age of 40, I kind of didn’t know what I wanted to do.
0:41:06 I was teaching, but I wasn’t making enough money.
0:41:09 I thought I was going to be rich because of red envelope and that didn’t work out.
0:41:16 So I kind of woke up and I’m like, I’m teaching, making not nearly enough money to live in Manhattan and then to kind of reinvent myself in my early 40s.
0:41:22 But don’t be too hot on yourself because the majority of people who tell you they know exactly what they want are lying to you and themselves.
0:41:26 It’s if you’re in business school, it means you don’t know what you want to do.
0:41:27 Otherwise you’d be doing it.
0:41:29 The first essay is a lie.
0:41:30 What do you want to do?
0:41:34 And we all pretend I said I wanted to start an information system software company.
0:41:36 I didn’t know what information systems is.
0:41:39 If you’re smart and know what you want to do, you don’t need business school.
0:41:41 Business school is for the elite and the aimless.
0:41:44 And the majority of us throughout 20s are aimless.
0:41:46 And that’s okay.
0:41:47 You want to be workshopping.
0:41:50 You want to be talking to people, trying new things.
0:41:53 But along the way, you’re investing in relationships.
0:41:54 You’re trying to save money.
0:42:00 You’re trying to join platforms that will increase your credibility and your currency in the marketplace.
0:42:08 And always be checking in with people who can give you a fairly sober view of your professional prospects and what to do.
0:42:11 I hear, you know, this is boasting, but it’s true.
0:42:18 I hear from some of the most impressive people in the world that are like partners making millions of dollars.
0:42:20 They’re like, what should I do next?
0:42:21 I don’t love this.
0:42:22 This is what I want to do the rest.
0:42:23 What should I do next?
0:42:24 Should I teach?
0:42:25 Should I start my own fund?
0:42:28 It’s really hard to read the label from the inside of the bottle.
0:42:33 Have other people talk to them transparently about what you like and don’t like so that they can give you their viewpoint.
0:42:39 But as long as you’re one foot in front of the other and realize this young man is kind of where he should be right now.
0:42:41 Okay, we’ll be right back. Stay with us.
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0:44:22 We’re back with Prof. G. Markets.
0:44:24 Ed, this takes us to our next question.
0:44:29 We’re going to begin to wrap up here, but what are your long-term professional goals?
0:44:31 It’s Scott leaning in.
0:44:39 So, I genuinely don’t think about the long-term that much.
0:44:44 But, therefore, I’ve been waiting the whole pod to say that.
0:44:53 I spend most of my time thinking about the short and medium term and what I want to do there.
0:44:57 And what I want to do in the short and medium term is to make this podcast amazing.
0:45:02 That’s my goal. I want this to be the best podcast in the world.
0:45:04 I want it to be number one.
0:45:06 I think it can be.
0:45:10 I think what we have is honestly really good and pretty unique.
0:45:18 And so that’s what I spend basically all of my career time doing is thinking about how can I make the podcast even better.
0:45:26 My view is that if I do that, because I feel inspired by this right now, the long-term stuff is just going to figure itself out.
0:45:29 I don’t know what this is going to exactly lead me to.
0:45:31 And people are always asking, “What’s next?”
0:45:33 I don’t really know what’s next.
0:45:41 But I do know that if I really, really crush it with this and if we create an amazing podcast, whatever is next is going to be pretty good.
0:45:43 So, that is sort of the way I think about it.
0:45:51 If there’s things that I definitely want, I definitely want to be making a lot of money.
0:45:55 That’s important to me. I don’t want to compromise on that.
0:46:08 I think that I probably want to be economically independent at some point, where as in paying myself, I don’t think that’s anytime soon.
0:46:12 But I don’t know why I want that, but I think that that is something I want.
0:46:16 I feel like there’s something kind of empowering about that, the ability to pay yourself.
0:46:19 But yeah, I don’t think about it.
0:46:22 I really don’t think about the long-term too much right now.
0:46:33 At the moment, while things are going well, I don’t see that much value in trying to be any one type of thing.
0:46:36 I think things are going well and that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.
0:46:38 Yeah, I’m 100% with you on that.
0:46:40 Scott, do you have any reaction?
0:46:46 If you’re in something that seems to be going fairly well, think, “How can I be in the top 1% if not the top 0.1%?”
0:46:54 Already, there’s 600,000 podcasts. I think Prop G Markets right now or Prop G is a top 100 podcast.
0:46:58 So we’re already in the top 0.6 or 0.06%.
0:47:04 And excellence, artisanship, mastery of something will make you passionate about it.
0:47:08 Being near the best or being really good at something makes you passionate about it.
0:47:15 Because the accoutrements and the self-esteem and the rewards and the camaraderie from being great at something make you passionate about it.
0:47:23 So if you’re fortunate to find something you’re really good at and could maybe be great, maybe in the top 1% in the world,
0:47:31 as long as it’s not a vanity industry where you have to be in the top 0.1%, is, I think, a really good aim.
0:47:33 My goals are different at this point.
0:47:44 I want to be the most influential thought leader in the history of business such that I can shape a better, more democratic America that has more prosperity for more people.
0:47:46 I’m very focused on struggling young men.
0:47:52 And at the same time, I want to make a lot of money and I want to build a lot of economic security for other people around me.
0:47:56 My goals are pretty big at this point.
0:48:06 And then at the same time, deepen my relationships with the people who are close to me because I sacrifice that a lot trying to get some level of economic security.
0:48:16 My very first conversation with you, Scott, where we spoke on the phone, which was a huge moment for me, but I think you said recently you don’t remember it.
0:48:18 My very first conversation with you.
0:48:21 At the end of the call, I asked you that question.
0:48:23 I want to know what your long-term goals were.
0:48:31 And you said that you wanted to be the most influential thought leader in the history of business or you want to be the governor of Florida.
0:48:33 That was your answer.
0:48:34 One of the two.
0:48:35 What changed?
0:48:41 I learned more about politics and also I realized I don’t really like people and it’s interesting.
0:48:48 If you make any amount of money and you have name recognition, people will approach you about being a candidate for something.
0:48:53 And what you realize is once you get past your narcissism, you can have a lot.
0:48:58 I think at this point with such an intransigent government and so much gridlock.
0:49:05 I mean, I think Ed at this point has as much influence on a lot of levels as a lot of congressmen or congresspeople, I should say.
0:49:09 I think we can have a lot of influence from outside of the tent around issues.
0:49:22 One of my things I’m working on is to try and pull together a group of podcasters who are moderate or center left or center right and start promoting each other’s pods and to start thinking about candidates that we want to promote.
0:49:26 Because I feel as if the right has weaponized this medium very effectively.
0:49:36 And I think we need our counter offensive against that and we need to build each other up and maybe put some infrastructure around videos and then start thinking about great candidates who are more moderate.
0:49:41 But I actually think that in a weird way, we have more influence than many elected officials.
0:49:42 All right.
0:49:45 This final question is for you, Scott.
0:49:50 It’s a two part question with a fascinating twist, which I absolutely love.
0:49:52 I’ll start with the first part.
0:49:58 My question relates to how Scott views his development and investment into Ed.
0:50:06 Ed has developed a strong brand and authoritative position largely due to his position on ProfG Markets.
0:50:10 He has been paid to speak at events where his views are valued.
0:50:20 So question number one, did Scott consciously know he would be giving Ed a platform to develop a brand when he hired him and gave him the co-host role?
0:50:30 Well, I would say the same thing to Ed that my best friend’s father said to me when I was at L2, this is someone who was really important to me, who was a real role model.
0:50:44 A guy named Paul Fine, this like handsome guy who married my friend, Adam’s mother, and he was just this quiet, strong man who always had the most ridiculously cool cars as his career progressed from a 240Z to a Porsche 911 to a Ferrari.
0:50:46 And I just really looked up to this guy.
0:50:48 And it was a nice moment for me.
0:50:57 He came to L2 and it was one of those days where clients were in the conference rooms and the place was just pumping and I would stop by a desk and I would say, what are you working on?
0:51:02 And the analysts would show Paul, we were comparing Instagram engagement between Adidas and Nike.
0:51:08 It was just something out of like a bad movie on what it’s like to work for a hip New York firm.
0:51:10 And it was my firm.
0:51:19 And we’re walking out and I could just tell the guy was so blown away and we got to the elevator and he turns to me and he’s like, I got to be honest, Scott, I didn’t see it.
0:51:22 And that’s how I feel about Ed.
0:51:27 When I hired Ed, the reason I hired Ed wasn’t because I was impressed.
0:51:32 It was because I get fooled in interviews all the time and Joanna Colson, you got to hire this kid.
0:51:37 He’s my son’s best friend and our good friend and he’s just such an impressive kid.
0:51:39 That’s how I like to hire people.
0:51:45 I don’t know if you remember this, Claire, but we tried out several people to be the co-host.
0:51:47 Oh, I definitely remember.
0:51:51 And I didn’t know that Ed was going to win and we were going to choose Ed.
0:51:57 As a matter of fact, I think we had a bit of a bias against Ed because we thought two white guys talking to each other on a podcast.
0:52:02 That’s just not, you know, that’s the definition of a podcast at this point.
0:52:13 So Ed’s development and growth and the way the market loves him and the fact that he works so hard and he often times brings more insight to these topics than I do.
0:52:18 Because quite frankly, he just works harder than I do on this stuff and he brings a fresher view.
0:52:19 It’s super exciting.
0:52:27 It’s nice to see, you’re going to see as you get older and you start managing people, these really wonderful paternal and maternal instincts come out.
0:52:29 It’s really nice to see people succeed.
0:52:37 It’s nice, A, you benefit from it yourself personally and professionally, but it’s nice to see young people doing well.
0:52:40 It feels really, it feels really nice.
0:52:46 So, and also as I think about, you know, I don’t know if you know, you know this, but I just turned 50.
0:52:51 And I think in terms of building an enterprise and a succession plan, we have to build other voices.
0:52:56 And so I’m really excited that Ed’s kind of developed his own brand.
0:53:06 I’m trying to do the same thing with Jess over at Raging Moderates, but I am surprised and infinitely pleased at how well Ed is doing.
0:53:08 It’s just a ton of fun to watch.
0:53:11 And not only that, the team, it feels like the team is chilling.
0:53:17 It feels like the show’s doing well, the production quality, the notes, you know, it just all feels very good.
0:53:23 And you’re going to see, you’re both managing people now or starting to manage people.
0:53:29 When they do really well, it’s very exciting, especially once you have recognized some of that success.
0:53:36 It’s, yeah, like I said, it tickles these paternal and maternal sensors that feel really nice.
0:53:37 All right.
0:53:38 Very nice.
0:53:41 So here’s the kicker, question number two.
0:53:58 If Scott was not as financially secure as he is now, would he view that he would be owed any long-term revenue or royalty for Ed’s career due to the platform Scott has given him to launch his brand?
0:54:00 No.
0:54:05 It’s like, do I owe NYU money?
0:54:10 NYU’s been a bigger platform for me than I’ve been for Ed or you, Claire.
0:54:12 I don’t know about that.
0:54:13 Go ahead.
0:54:17 If I didn’t have a professor in front of my name, I think they just say that guy’s obnoxious.
0:54:21 The way I summarize my career is I went to some friends’ birthdays party.
0:54:24 All my friends from college were all turning 60 at the same time.
0:54:26 So I’m going to all these birthday parties.
0:54:28 And my friend, Mike Brookes, said the funniest thing.
0:54:32 He said, can you believe Galloway gets paid to express all of his opinions?
0:54:35 He’s like, back in college, we just called that annoying.
0:54:38 He just wouldn’t shut the fuck up about everything.
0:54:40 You had a view on everything.
0:54:44 He’s like, what did you have like a view on back in college?
0:54:46 Do you care about business?
0:54:49 What hot takes were you coming up with as a college student?
0:54:53 So my hot take in college was I was the only Democrat.
0:54:55 They were all total Reagan’s sick of fans.
0:54:58 And I was like, I had a Mondale sign in my fraternity room.
0:55:00 And I’m pretty sure that was the only wind.
0:55:02 That sounded annoying.
0:55:05 And I was telling everyone why Mondale was our man.
0:55:09 And I had a lot of views on everything as you can imagine.
0:55:12 But my friends are like, we just called that annoying.
0:55:14 And now he makes a bunch of money.
0:55:19 So no, the platform will be loyal to each other.
0:55:21 We’ll help each other out the rest of our careers.
0:55:23 But no, no one knows me anything.
0:55:25 Not at all.
0:55:28 We’ve all the great thing about capitalism.
0:55:31 The butcher and the baker don’t give each other bread and meat
0:55:33 for ethical reasons.
0:55:34 They do it because it benefits them.
0:55:37 This is a relationship where we all benefit.
0:55:40 And at some point you guys will go on to bigger things.
0:55:44 And at some point I’ll go on to Aspen and the Ass Cancer.
0:55:46 And we’ll all catch up.
0:55:48 And we’ll all remember our days finally together.
0:55:49 And that’s that.
0:55:52 I really hope you don’t get Ass Cancer.
0:55:55 Really, the amount of times it’s like you’re wishing for it.
0:55:56 It’s crazy.
0:55:58 He’s spoken it into existence.
0:55:59 You’re right.
0:56:00 I’m not going to get it.
0:56:04 No, neither Ed nor Claire nor anyone here owes me anything.
0:56:06 I hope we stay involved in each other’s lives
0:56:07 because I find it rewarding.
0:56:11 Some of my closer friends or people that I build companies with.
0:56:14 But no, neither of you are going to owe me anything.
0:56:15 All right.
0:56:18 Well, the listener says kudos to Scott for an excellent hire
0:56:21 and to give a young individual a platform to succeed.
0:56:24 And congratulations to Ed for taking the opportunity
0:56:26 and doing so well.
0:56:27 That’s very nice.
0:56:28 Thank you for saying that.
0:56:29 And same to you, Claire.
0:56:30 Oh, thank you.
0:56:31 Appreciate it.
0:56:33 Exactly.
0:56:35 This episode was produced by Claire Miller
0:56:37 and engineer by Benjamin Spencer.
0:56:39 Our associate producer is Alison Weiss.
0:56:41 Mia Silverio is our research lead.
0:56:43 Jessica Lange is our research associate.
0:56:44 Drew Bars is a technical director.
0:56:47 And Catherine Dillon is our executive producer.
0:56:49 Thank you for listening to ProfG Markets
0:56:51 from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:56:52 All year long,
0:56:55 we’ll be back in the new year with our predictions for 2025,
0:56:57 only on ProfG Markets.
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0:01:03 In 100 meters, turn right. Actually, no. Turn left.
0:01:05 There’s some awesome new breakfast wraps at McDonald’s.
0:01:06 Really?
0:01:10 Yeah. There’s the sausage bacon and egg, a crispy seasoned chicken one.
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0:01:14 They sound amazing.
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0:01:32 What sector boasts the strongest brands in the world?
0:01:41 Tobacco? Universities? Tech companies? No, the strongest brands in the world are people.
0:01:54 People are the new brands by Ed Elson as read by George Hahn.
0:01:58 Scott’s away this week on a safari.
0:02:03 I’m not sure what a ProfG safari looks like, but it likely involves
0:02:08 tinted camps with fine china, zikapa, and remote NAD treatments.
0:02:12 In his absence, I’m keeping the lights on.
0:02:16 Yes, me, Ed Elson, Scott’s 25-year-old co-host on ProfG Markets.
0:02:20 I get paid to make Scott appear younger and more relevant,
0:02:22 i.e. keep him abreast of trends in business and tech,
0:02:27 plus wardrobe advice. The guy dresses like an aging skateboarder.
0:02:32 This week, I’m sharing my thoughts on a long-brewing trend that came to a head in 2024.
0:02:40 It’s simple. America has fallen out of love with brands and in love with people.
0:02:44 This is evident in every corner of American life,
0:02:47 from politics and business to technology and media.
0:02:50 People are the new brands.
0:02:57 Some context. What I lack in age and wisdom I make up for in screen time.
0:03:01 I spend almost seven hours scrolling the internet yesterday.
0:03:05 Average for me, below average for my generation.
0:03:10 I am a product of the greatest digital transformation in history,
0:03:16 and the erosion of traditional brand value is happening downstream of this transformation.
0:03:22 Scott concurs. Where our views differ, however, is that while he believes
0:03:28 digitally enabled products and services have replaced brands, I believe people have.
0:03:36 First, some numbers. Gen Z spends an average of 109 days per year looking at a screen.
0:03:44 80% of our waking hours are spent consuming information, up from 40% in 1980.
0:03:51 We see 208 ads per hour, 10 times more than our parents did at our age.
0:03:57 As a result, we are more anxious, distracted, and depressed than any generation in history.
0:04:01 We all know this, but do not comprehend it.
0:04:05 Like frogs in boiling water, we’ve been slow cooked by screens.
0:04:10 The most important number is 12%.
0:04:18 That’s the share of Americans who say they have zero close friends, up from 3% in 1990.
0:04:22 Meanwhile, half the country says they’re struggling with loneliness.
0:04:26 These numbers took off when Apple put computers in our pockets,
0:04:28 and they’ve been climbing ever since.
0:04:35 There is an epidemic of loneliness in our country that extends far beyond the lives of Gen Z.
0:04:42 We’ve underestimated its impact. Loneliness touches everything from the media we consume
0:04:46 and the products we buy to the relationships we don’t form.
0:04:53 When we reflect on the winners and losers in 2024, we will bucket them into two categories,
0:04:57 those who capitalized on loneliness and those who didn’t.
0:05:02 Moreover, we’ll realize that in this society of lonely people,
0:05:07 we find a lot more to love in a person than a brand.
0:05:15 Meta naturally insists the loneliness epidemic has nothing to do with social media.
0:05:18 Common sense suggests otherwise.
0:05:24 We now spend 70% less time with our friends than we did a decade ago.
0:05:29 There is no question, the phone has replaced our friends.
0:05:33 Research shows our bodies are not okay with this.
0:05:38 Loneliness has a neurochemical impact similar to that of hunger,
0:05:41 in that it activates the same parts of the brain.
0:05:46 The longer we go without social interaction, the more we crave it.
0:05:51 Interacting with other people is not a human desire, but a human need.
0:05:56 For the past decade, we’ve starved ourselves of this essential nutrient.
0:06:02 The implication is simple. Whether they know it or not,
0:06:04 near everyone you know is craving a friend.
0:06:09 The best visualization of this subconscious craving is the Internet,
0:06:13 which has been overrun by billions of people in search of other people.
0:06:20 TikTok is an endless stream, not of landscapes or products or experiences, but people.
0:06:25 Same for YouTube, where the highest performing videos are those with thumbnails
0:06:27 featuring a giant human face.
0:06:31 Meanwhile on Instagram, pictures with human faces
0:06:35 are 38% more likely to get a like than those without.
0:06:39 The algorithm is the truest reflection of our cravings,
0:06:42 and the algorithm has been very clear.
0:06:45 We crave people most.
0:06:52 For lonely people, however, simply seeing someone is not enough.
0:06:56 What we really want is to know them, to understand them,
0:07:00 to be familiar with the intimate details of their life and for them to understand us.
0:07:03 In other words, we want a friend.
0:07:09 Many have watched in confusion the extraordinary rise of online influencers,
0:07:14 people who make millions posting videos of their daily coffee routine or workout regimen.
0:07:18 Much of this can be explained by our chronic lack of friends.
0:07:25 Research shows Gen Z views their favorite influencers in the same way they view their friends.
0:07:30 We know what clothes they wear, what food they eat, and what brands they buy.
0:07:34 This has radically transformed the retail economy,
0:07:40 so much so that 40% of us now consult an influencer before we make a purchase.
0:07:47 The technical term for this phenomenon is “parasocial relationship.”
0:07:54 Per the Tech and Science Dictionary, “A relationship a person imagines having
0:07:57 with another person whom they do not actually know.”
0:08:04 Parasocial is mostly used in reference to Instagram and TikTok,
0:08:06 but I believe our parasocial relationships affect everything.
0:08:12 If I had to describe 2024 in one word, it would be parasocial.
0:08:15 This is evident in my industry, podcasting.
0:08:21 Joe Rogan has become more influential than the world’s largest news networks.
0:08:28 His podcast gets three times more downloads than the average primetime viewership of CNN
0:08:31 and MSNBC combined.
0:08:37 Many have misdiagnosed this tectonic shift as a left versus right phenomenon,
0:08:42 i.e. CNN is woke or liberal, Joe Rogan is anti-woke, conservative.
0:08:47 In the context of loneliness, however, that’s a red herring.
0:08:55 The key distinction between CNN and Joe Rogan is that one is a brand and the other is a person.
0:09:03 This distinction is embedded in everything from the name, CNN versus Joe Rogan, to the logo,
0:09:09 red letters versus a face, to the product, the news versus normal conversation.
0:09:14 In a world of chronic loneliness, the person is more compelling.
0:09:17 It’s no accident the name of our pod is Prof. G.
0:09:26 One might argue that Abby Phillip is a person, but this neglects the intimate nature of podcasting
0:09:31 as a medium. Abby Phillip reads off a teleprompter, wears makeup in a suit,
0:09:34 and sits in a multi-million dollar production studio.
0:09:40 Rogan wears a t-shirt and talks with his buddies in a room that looks like a converted garage.
0:09:46 For millions of Americans, Rogan isn’t a newscaster or even a celebrity, he’s a friend.
0:09:51 And you will find this dynamic at all the top podcasts in America.
0:09:57 Side note, I surveyed 10 friends on their preference between Abby Phillip versus Joe Rogan,
0:10:00 none of them knew who Abby Phillip was.
0:10:06 Hollywood is suffering at the hands of the same trend.
0:10:12 The 2024 Academy Award for Dumbest Purchase goes to Larry Ellison’s son David,
0:10:17 who after getting caught up in a bidding war with the children of two other billionaires,
0:10:20 spent $8 billion on Paramount Global.
0:10:26 Every character in this transaction suffered from Hollywood derangement syndrome,
0:10:30 believing the Paramount brand still holds any cultural currency.
0:10:32 It doesn’t.
0:10:37 Meanwhile, they didn’t comprehend that Hollywood is up against the same unbeatable
0:10:40 enemy that cable news faces. People.
0:10:48 The individual who’s levied the greatest damage in Hollywood
0:10:53 is YouTuber MrBeast, whose portfolio includes hits like,
0:10:59 “I survived seven days in an abandoned city and I built 100 houses and gave them away.”
0:11:05 MrBeast has mastered the art of the parasocial relationship.
0:11:09 Put simply, he’s a friend who gets up to interesting stuff.
0:11:15 Last year, MrBeast racked up more than one billion hours of viewing time,
0:11:18 more than any of the top shows on Netflix.
0:11:23 He’s one of the millions of YouTubers swinging the pendulum of power away
0:11:26 from brands and toward individual people.
0:11:29 This trend has been well documented.
0:11:32 Search the creator economy.
0:11:39 But it was ratified this year when analysts valued YouTube at $455 billion.
0:11:47 That’s 20% more valuable than Netflix and more than twice as valuable as Disney.
0:11:51 Streaming or AI didn’t take down Hollywood.
0:11:52 People did.
0:11:58 As with podcasting, this presidential election was also less
0:12:01 about left versus right than it was about people versus brands.
0:12:06 No one understood this better than Donald Trump,
0:12:11 who doubled down on his parasocial relationship with millions of Americans
0:12:14 while actively disassociating from the Republican brand.
0:12:18 It was the ultimate people over brand strategy.
0:12:23 What drove this home for me was a leaked video of Trump
0:12:26 watching the Democratic National Convention with his team.
0:12:30 “Too many thank yous,” he says about Harris’ speech.
0:12:32 “Is she crazy?”
0:12:35 At first it looks like a watch party.
0:12:36 Then the tone changes.
0:12:39 “Get that out right away,” he orders.
0:12:42 A staffer types out his exact words,
0:12:45 then blasts them across social media channels.
0:12:49 Throughout the rest of the speech, Trump live dictates his thoughts.
0:12:55 She’s talking about how great San Francisco was before she destroyed it.
0:12:57 With each thought, another tweet.
0:12:59 “A lot of talk about childhood.
0:13:01 We’ve got to get to the border.
0:13:04 Inflation in crime.”
0:13:07 “Say, Cindy’s out.
0:13:10 The things of which she complains, the things of which she complains.”
0:13:16 The team’s job is to publish anything and everything that pops up into his head.
0:13:18 No edits or cuts, just the raw Trump.
0:13:22 Call it narcissism or flooding the zone with shit,
0:13:29 but what’s most striking is Trump’s determination to livestream his persona to his followers.
0:13:33 He’s so determined, he hired someone to type out his thoughts.
0:13:39 Think of the millions of lonely people watching that convention craving Trump’s live commentary,
0:13:41 perhaps because they share his politics,
0:13:45 but almost certainly because they want his friendship.
0:13:52 Now compare this to the Harris strategy of carefully written speeches and manicured interviews.
0:13:58 The Harris team managed its candidate the same way a corporation manages its brand.
0:14:01 Every detail was consumer tested.
0:14:03 Every message board approved.
0:14:09 By November 5, it was clear that the candidate was not Kamala Harris, but the Democratic Party.
0:14:14 She had become a brand, not a person, and the person won.
0:14:19 The corporate world has started to wake up to the power of the person,
0:14:22 but the movement was started years ago by Elon Musk.
0:14:27 From the beginning, Musk knew he was Tesla’s greatest commercial.
0:14:30 This is why the company never ran ads.
0:14:37 Instead, like Trump, he plastered himself everywhere, at every conference and on every network.
0:14:42 His tweeting frequency went from mildly obsessive to clinically insane.
0:14:48 He quickly amassed nearly 200 million Twitter followers, then bought the platform.
0:14:53 People wonder how Tesla commands evaluation premium 10 times greater than its peers
0:14:57 while spending only four ad dollars per vehicle sold.
0:15:00 The answer is Elon Musk.
0:15:05 Other companies have picked up where Elon left off, most notably Metta.
0:15:10 Metta’s worst rebrand happened three years ago when the company tried to wash away its sins
0:15:13 by switching from Facebook to Metta.
0:15:16 It didn’t work and brand trust tanked.
0:15:23 Its best rebrand, however, came this year when Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward
0:15:29 coat and tie wearing Senate hearing prop to gold chain donning T-Pain-loving Jiu Jitsu fighter.
0:15:35 In addition to leaning into his personality, Zuckerberg has made himself more public.
0:15:42 He posted 71 Instagrams this year, documenting everything from Taylor Swift concerts to UFC
0:15:49 fights. In 2021, he posted just 29 times, mostly product announcements.
0:15:55 The extent to which the Zuck has put himself on display this year is astounding,
0:15:58 but more important, effective.
0:16:06 Since the rebrand, Zuckerberg’s favorability score among what was once his most hostile cohort,
0:16:15 18 to 34 year olds, has increased 73%. This is what it means to choose person over brand.
0:16:24 Honorable mentions go to Spotify and Shopify. I’ve spoken before about the need for CEOs to
0:16:30 ditch highly polished press releases and embrace TikTok instead. In line with my belief that
0:16:36 people are greater than brands, TikToks show us who is running the company in a way press releases
0:16:43 can’t. This is starting to happen. Spotify’s Q2 earnings update this year came in the form
0:16:51 of a short selfie video filmed by CEO Daniel Ek. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein did the
0:17:01 same. Memo to CEOs. This is the way to do it. Brands and logos and press releases do not resonate
0:17:07 with us anymore. We are interested in your people, who they are, what they care about,
0:17:15 and what they have to say, not your brand. The most overvalued firm in tech, Palantir,
0:17:23 isn’t a tech company, but a CEO, Alex Karp masking as a public company. The premise of my
0:17:29 argument is more important than the argument itself. We have become a society of lonely people
0:17:36 and our loneliness is permeating everything we do. This is a harrowing truth and I’m grateful
0:17:42 that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has lent the issue the gravity it deserves by declaring it a
0:17:50 national epidemic. I remind you that more than one in 10 Americans today have no close friends.
0:18:01 Single person households now make up 29% of all households up from 13% in 1960. We are more socially
0:18:06 isolated than ever before. These are important facts for businesses to know if they’re to
0:18:12 understand their customers, but they’re also important facts in and of themselves.
0:18:20 It’s the holidays, which means cheesy movies and trite truisms. I personally find myself
0:18:26 increasingly confident that these movies and truisms are correct. This Christmas I’ll be
0:18:31 watching It’s a Wonderful Life and I look forward to Clarence’s always timely reminder to George
0:18:38 Bailey at the end of the film. Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.
0:18:50 Happy holidays, Ed. Life is so rich.
0:19:00 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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0:00:48 – Hamburglar, why are you calling?
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0:01:53 – Episode 329, 329 is the area
0:01:56 of belonging to the Hudson Valley region of New York.
0:02:00 In 1929, the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA,
0:02:02 opened a New York City true story.
0:02:04 I posed nude for my art class.
0:02:06 Problem was, they didn’t ask me.
0:02:11 – Go, go, go!
0:02:14 (upbeat music)
0:02:22 – Welcome to the 329th episode of the Prop G Pod,
0:02:23 the Dugs on Vacation.
0:02:26 That’s right, I’m in a field running.
0:02:28 So in place of our regular schedule programming,
0:02:30 we’re sharing a conversation with Daniel Pink,
0:02:32 the author of various bestselling books,
0:02:35 including The Power of Regret and When,
0:02:37 as well as the number one New York Times bestseller,
0:02:39 Drive, and To Sell Is Human.
0:02:42 We discuss with Daniel Regret, human motivation,
0:02:45 and his Washington Post column, Why Not?
0:02:48 He’s a great storyteller, interesting concepts.
0:02:50 It’s kind of, it’s like if Ted exploded
0:02:53 or if Ted was personified, I think it’d be Daniel Pink.
0:02:58 Anyways, with that, here’s our conversation with Daniel Pink.
0:02:59 – So let’s press right into it.
0:03:03 You wrote a book about regret, The Power of Regret.
0:03:05 You said that the advice you give us
0:03:08 to stay positive, look ahead, and never dwell on the past,
0:03:10 which is harmful, why?
0:03:13 – Because we have completely misunderstood
0:03:15 this emotion of regret.
0:03:16 We’ve been told, as you mentioned,
0:03:19 that we should be positive all the time, never be negative,
0:03:20 we should look forward, not back,
0:03:22 and that’s bad advice, it goes against the science.
0:03:24 It will, what the science tells us is that
0:03:29 if we don’t ignore regrets, and don’t wallow in our regrets,
0:03:32 but confront them, think about them, look them in the eye,
0:03:33 it’s a transformative emotion.
0:03:35 It helps us in a variety of ways.
0:03:37 – Well, that makes sense.
0:03:41 I don’t, my struggle is, I make mistakes every day,
0:03:44 and I can’t forget myself, and I don’t know if that’s regret,
0:03:47 but where does regret become unhealthy
0:03:48 in a source of depression
0:03:49 where you can never get out of the past?
0:03:51 – Well, I mean, there’s a big difference,
0:03:52 so when it’s a source of depression,
0:03:53 that’s a medical issue.
0:03:56 What I’m writing about here, I’m not a doctor,
0:04:00 so I can’t opine on the medical dimensions of it.
0:04:01 Essentially what we should be doing,
0:04:03 and I think there is some relation,
0:04:06 and how the scientific ways to deal with regret
0:04:10 are actually very similar to cognitive behavior therapy,
0:04:13 which is essentially not looking at your emotions
0:04:17 as who you are, but as something that is going on,
0:04:18 as something that is going on in your life,
0:04:20 that is to examine them,
0:04:22 and so when you’re talking about reckoning with regret,
0:04:26 one of the first steps is something called self-compassion,
0:04:29 and self-compassion is in some ways a triangulation
0:04:32 between self-esteem and self-flagellation.
0:04:35 We tend to believe that lacerating self-criticism
0:04:38 is the way to get us to perform better,
0:04:39 and there’s no evidence of that.
0:04:41 There’s also very little evidence
0:04:43 that kind of constantly patting yourself on the back
0:04:44 and boosting your self-esteem is good.
0:04:47 What seems to be good is the work that Kristin Neff
0:04:49 has done at University of Texas on self-compassion,
0:04:51 which is essentially treating yourself with kindness
0:04:55 rather than contempt, recognizing that mistakes,
0:04:57 setbacks, or regrets are part of life,
0:04:59 and then using that as a stepstone
0:05:01 to thinking about your regrets.
0:05:04 One of the things we see in the research on self-compassion
0:05:06 is that people have a very, many people,
0:05:07 particularly high achieving people,
0:05:09 have a very difficult, they talk to themselves
0:05:11 in ways they would never talk to anybody else.
0:05:14 So if I were probably to harness your self-talk, all right,
0:05:17 we were to use those headphones you’re wearing now
0:05:20 and create this magical thing that allows me
0:05:22 to hear what you’re saying to yourself,
0:05:24 especially in the face of a mistake.
0:05:26 It would probably be brutal.
0:05:27 It would probably be lacerating.
0:05:29 It would probably be cruel.
0:05:31 And chances are you wouldn’t say that to somebody else.
0:05:33 And so what the research on self-compassion tells us
0:05:35 is don’t treat yourself better than anybody else,
0:05:37 but don’t treat yourself worse than anybody else
0:05:39 because it’s not effective.
0:05:41 – So all this just makes all sorts of sense, right?
0:05:44 I’ve always said that one of my things,
0:05:47 it’s like three of my last five new year’s resolutions
0:05:49 have been to forgive myself.
0:05:52 What is the actual cognitive behavior of the exercise
0:05:54 is to get better than this?
0:05:56 You logically, it is impossible rationally,
0:05:58 logically not to agree with you.
0:06:00 What are the actual behavioral modification techniques
0:06:01 for getting there?
0:06:02 – I’ll give you an example, okay?
0:06:04 ‘Cause this goes to some of the other ways
0:06:06 that we deal with regret.
0:06:09 What seems to be a very effective technique
0:06:11 on a whole range of things
0:06:13 is what’s known as self-distancing.
0:06:17 There’s a psychological phenomenon known as
0:06:20 Solomon’s paradox, which is that we human beings
0:06:21 are pretty good at solving problems,
0:06:23 but we tend to stink at solving our own problems
0:06:25 ’cause we’re too close to them.
0:06:28 So a way to be more compassionate to yourself
0:06:30 is to say what you would say to someone
0:06:33 who is telling you what you’re telling yourself.
0:06:35 So if you had a friend who was telling themselves,
0:06:37 you’re an idiot, you’re an imposter,
0:06:39 you don’t deserve to be here, you’re worthless.
0:06:41 What would you say to that person?
0:06:45 I mean, what would you say to that person?
0:06:47 – You’d say for God’s sake, stop it
0:06:51 and list off some positive metrics.
0:06:53 – That’s the kind of thing they can say to yourself.
0:06:55 There are other great self-distancing techniques.
0:06:57 There’s one of the best decision-making
0:07:01 self-distancing techniques is when you’re stuck on a decision
0:07:04 is to ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do?
0:07:08 That’s a great, very specific, practical tip.
0:07:10 In a business setting, you can use
0:07:11 the old Andy Grove technique,
0:07:14 where he said when he faced a tough decision
0:07:16 back when he was the CEO of Intel,
0:07:19 he would ask himself, if I were replaced tomorrow,
0:07:21 what would my successor do?
0:07:22 And he almost always knew.
0:07:25 And so the idea here in the research on self-distancing
0:07:29 is that when we tackle our own problems, our own issues,
0:07:31 we tend to look at them like scuba divers.
0:07:33 And what we should be doing is looking at them
0:07:36 like oceanographers, getting above them.
0:07:37 And there are ways to do that.
0:07:39 There’s research showing that actually
0:07:41 you can improve your performance.
0:07:43 If you want to talk about self-talk,
0:07:46 you can improve your performance by talking to yourself
0:07:49 in the second person or the third person.
0:07:50 Instead of asking yourself, what should I do?
0:07:51 Say, what should you do?
0:07:53 Or better, what should Scott do?
0:07:55 – In an effort to understand the difference between
0:07:57 unproductive and productive regret,
0:08:00 have you been able to reverse engineer,
0:08:01 productive or unproductive regret
0:08:04 of any sort of identity or experience, gender,
0:08:07 the way you were raised, your approach to life?
0:08:08 – Not really.
0:08:11 I can answer that question in two different ways.
0:08:12 Number one is that for this book,
0:08:14 what I did is I did two things.
0:08:17 I did the largest public opinion survey ever conducted
0:08:19 on American attitudes about regret.
0:08:23 Trying to identify whether there were demographic differences
0:08:26 in how people experience regret or what they regretted.
0:08:29 So looking at everything from race, from education level,
0:08:32 even things like introversion, extraversion,
0:08:34 belief in God, et cetera, et cetera.
0:08:36 The one demographic difference that came out
0:08:41 in this public opinion research had to do with age.
0:08:45 And what it showed is that people in their 20s
0:08:49 had about equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction.
0:08:51 That is in the architecture of regret.
0:08:52 You can regret something you did,
0:08:54 you can regret something you didn’t do.
0:08:56 People in their 20s had roughly equal numbers
0:08:58 of regrets of action and inaction.
0:09:02 But as people age, the inaction regrets take over.
0:09:06 When you get to be in your 40s, certainly 50s, 60s, 70s,
0:09:08 inaction regrets, outnumber action regrets
0:09:10 by three and a half, four to one.
0:09:13 So that’s a big difference in the content
0:09:15 of what people regret.
0:09:16 But when you look at things like,
0:09:18 do men and women have different regrets?
0:09:21 There’s some evidence, there’s modest evidence
0:09:22 showing some differences.
0:09:25 In my research, I saw a tiny little bit,
0:09:26 not that much on race.
0:09:28 A little bit on education level.
0:09:33 I found that people with large amounts of formal education
0:09:35 actually had more career regrets
0:09:37 than people with less formal education,
0:09:39 which sort of is superficially surprising,
0:09:41 but perfectly understandable
0:09:43 because if you have more education,
0:09:44 you have more opportunities,
0:09:46 which means you have more opportunities foregone.
0:09:48 And so the demographic differences
0:09:51 in what people regret were not massive.
0:09:54 Now, I also did a piece of qualitative research
0:09:56 where we collected regrets from 26,000 people
0:09:58 around the world.
0:10:00 And there I found that around the world,
0:10:03 people seem to have the same four core regrets.
0:10:07 They go deeper than simply a regret about a career,
0:10:09 a regret about romance, a regret about health,
0:10:11 a regret about finance,
0:10:15 go deeper than those surface domains of life.
0:10:16 – Are these the four you’re talking about in your book,
0:10:18 “Foundation, Boldness, Moral, and Connection?”
0:10:19 Can you say more about those?
0:10:20 – Sure, sure.
0:10:23 So again, we have this pretty remarkable database
0:10:27 of regrets from 134 countries.
0:10:30 The survey was up in Chinese, it was up in Spanish,
0:10:31 and obviously it was up in English.
0:10:34 And the four regrets that people around the world
0:10:37 seem to have are exactly, as you say, foundation regrets.
0:10:40 Small decisions people make early in life
0:10:42 that accumulate to terrible consequences later in life.
0:10:46 I spent too much and saved too little, and now I’m broke.
0:10:47 I didn’t exercise or eat right,
0:10:49 and now I’m profoundly out of shape.
0:10:51 So that’s a foundation regret.
0:10:54 Boldness regret is a very big category of regret.
0:10:56 You’re at a juncture in your life and you have two choices.
0:10:59 You can play it safe, or you can take the chance.
0:11:03 And overwhelmingly, when people don’t take the chance,
0:11:04 they regret it.
0:11:04 Now, that’s not true for everybody.
0:11:06 There are plenty of people who take a chance
0:11:08 and it goes south on them and they regret it.
0:11:12 But they are massively outnumbered
0:11:14 by people who didn’t take the chance.
0:11:16 And again, what’s interesting here
0:11:18 is that it doesn’t matter the domain.
0:11:20 So I have hundreds of people who regret
0:11:22 not asking somebody out on a date.
0:11:24 Hundreds of people who regret not traveling,
0:11:26 not starting a business, not doing something
0:11:28 that required a little bit more boldness
0:11:31 than they were willing to offer up at the time.
0:11:34 Third category, moral regrets.
0:11:35 Another time when you have a choice.
0:11:38 I can take the low road, I can take the high road.
0:11:40 I can do the right thing, I can do the wrong thing.
0:11:43 And overwhelmingly, most people most of the time
0:11:46 regret doing the wrong thing.
0:11:49 Because most people are decent
0:11:50 and most people want to be decent
0:11:53 and most people feel crappy when they’re not decent.
0:11:54 And the final one are connection regrets
0:11:56 which are about relationships
0:11:57 and not only romantic relationships
0:12:01 but the full spectrum of relationships in our lives.
0:12:04 So you’ve got a relationship that was intact
0:12:05 or should have been intact.
0:12:06 Say with a friend or with a sibling
0:12:10 or with a parent or whoever and it comes apart.
0:12:13 And in many cases, the way these relationships come apart
0:12:16 is unexciting and undramatic.
0:12:18 They just kind of drift apart.
0:12:20 Somebody wants to reach out.
0:12:23 They don’t because they think it’s gonna be awkward
0:12:26 and they think the other side’s not gonna care.
0:12:27 So it drifts apart even more.
0:12:29 And so those are the four regrets.
0:12:31 Foundation regrets have only had done the work.
0:12:33 Boldness regrets have only had taken the chance.
0:12:36 Moral regrets have only had done the right thing.
0:12:38 And connection regrets, if only had reached out.
0:12:41 And it’s remarkable consistency all over the world
0:12:44 in the way people talk about these regrets
0:12:46 these regrets and the content of their regrets.
0:12:48 – I love this type of research.
0:12:49 In addition to yours, I read a lot of
0:12:51 what my colleague at NYU, Adam Alter,
0:12:54 has written about palliative care and end of life.
0:12:55 And it foots to everything you’re saying.
0:12:58 The only thing we haven’t talked about
0:12:59 and it’s sort of a mix of all of them
0:13:03 or an alchemy of all of them is that people,
0:13:05 the number one regret I’ve read
0:13:07 is that people wish they’d been less hard on themselves.
0:13:09 They’d wish they’d forgiven themselves.
0:13:11 And that is one of my favorite sayings
0:13:13 that’s gotten me through a lot of hard times
0:13:15 is nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems.
0:13:17 And that when you look back on your life,
0:13:20 you won’t be as upset about the thing that happened to you.
0:13:22 You’ll be upset about how you responded to it.
0:13:23 Your thoughts?
0:13:25 – I think that’s generally right.
0:13:28 I mean, that is essentially the underlying philosophy
0:13:31 of the underlying theory of cognitive behavior therapy,
0:13:32 which is basically how you respond to it.
0:13:36 It’s also essentially an element of stoic philosophy,
0:13:39 which has become incredibly popular now.
0:13:42 And so, I mean, the other thing, I mean, also, you know,
0:13:44 I think what’s interesting about these regrets
0:13:47 is interviewing people about their regrets
0:13:50 is that when people tell you what they regret the most,
0:13:51 they’re telling you what they value the most.
0:13:54 And so, what we know from these four regrets
0:13:56 is that people value stability.
0:13:58 They value growth and learning
0:14:00 and not wasting their time on the planet.
0:14:02 They value goodness and they value love.
0:14:04 And I think that’s very consistent
0:14:07 with some of the other research we know
0:14:10 on that we have on human flourishing,
0:14:12 part of which tells us that ultimately
0:14:17 at the end of our lives, what’s gonna matter to us
0:14:20 is did we have people in our lives who loved us
0:14:21 and did we love other people?
0:14:23 Period, full stop.
0:14:24 I mean, if you look at the research,
0:14:26 if you look at the grant study at Harvard,
0:14:30 this lengthy, multi-decade, longitudinal study
0:14:33 of human flourishing, that’s what it shows.
0:14:35 And I think what’s interesting about this research
0:14:39 on regret and in general is also to your point, Scott,
0:14:42 is most decisions we make in a given day
0:14:45 don’t really matter all that much.
0:14:46 And I think this is why it’s important
0:14:48 to think about our regrets.
0:14:50 You probably made a hundred decisions yesterday
0:14:53 and it’s today and you don’t remember most of them.
0:14:56 But there are decisions and indecisions that you made,
0:14:58 that we made, human beings made,
0:15:02 each of us a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago,
0:15:04 20 years ago, that not only do we remember them
0:15:07 when we don’t remember most decisions we made yesterday,
0:15:09 not only to remember a decision or indecision
0:15:12 from 20 years ago, but it bugs us.
0:15:13 That’s a very strong signal.
0:15:14 That’s telling us something.
0:15:15 And so we have a choice.
0:15:17 We can either plug our ears and say,
0:15:19 nope, I’m gonna be positive all the time.
0:15:22 Or we can say, oh my God, I’m the worst person in the world
0:15:23 and let it topple us.
0:15:25 Or we can say, huh, that’s interesting.
0:15:27 That’s a pretty strong signal.
0:15:28 Let me listen to this signal.
0:15:30 Let me use it as data.
0:15:32 And when we do that, there’s a lot of evidence
0:15:33 showing that regret can help us
0:15:35 on a whole range of different things.
0:15:37 It can help us become better negotiators,
0:15:40 better problem solvers, avoid cognitive biases,
0:15:43 strategize better, find more meaning in life.
0:15:46 We’ll be right back.
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0:16:57 All right, I need all the procrastinators to listen up.
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0:17:54 (bell rings)
0:17:56 – Hamburglar, why are you calling?
0:17:57 – Rubble, rubble.
0:18:00 – McDonald’s has a new biggest burger called Big Arch,
0:18:03 made with two 100% Canadian beef patties,
0:18:04 a new delicious sauce,
0:18:06 and all the McDonald’s flavors you love,
0:18:08 and wait, you want me to help you get it?
0:18:09 – Rubble.
0:18:10 – Come on.
0:18:13 Compared to beef burgers on McDonald’s current menu
0:18:15 at participating restaurants in Canada.
0:18:22 – I think of you as the motivation guy.
0:18:24 I first came across your work.
0:18:26 I was excited that you were great to come on the pod
0:18:29 ’cause I remember literally 10 or 15 years ago,
0:18:33 I stumbled upon this video where you used an animation
0:18:36 to kind of brilliantly and succinctly,
0:18:39 I’m sure you know the video, it went everywhere.
0:18:42 And I feel like that was sort of an inflection point for you.
0:18:45 You became kind of owned motivation.
0:18:47 Your book drive the surprising truth
0:18:49 about what motivates us.
0:18:51 I loved the way you broke it down,
0:18:54 autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
0:18:56 Can you say more about those three pillars
0:18:58 of the motivation stool?
0:19:01 – Sure, I mean, what we know about especially motivation
0:19:05 at work is that we sort of have this head fake going on.
0:19:07 We think that a certain kind of reward,
0:19:09 what I call if then rewards,
0:19:11 are the secret to effective motivation.
0:19:12 If you do this, then you get that.
0:19:14 If you do this, then you get that.
0:19:16 And we have now 60 years of research showing us
0:19:20 that if then rewards are pretty good for simple tasks
0:19:21 with short time horizons,
0:19:24 but not that effective for complex tasks with long horizons.
0:19:26 And that for complex tasks with long horizons,
0:19:28 what we wanna do in the workplace especially
0:19:29 is pay people well.
0:19:32 And then as you say, offer them those three things.
0:19:34 Autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
0:19:37 So autonomy is, do you have some control
0:19:39 over what you do, how you do it,
0:19:41 when you do it, where you do it?
0:19:42 The mastery is, are you getting better
0:19:43 at something that matters?
0:19:46 Are you making progress in something meaningful?
0:19:48 And purpose is, do you know why you’re doing it?
0:19:50 Are you making a difference in the world?
0:19:53 Are you making a contribution in your own little terrain?
0:19:54 And those are the things
0:19:57 that actually lead to enduring motivation.
0:20:00 These if-then rewards are like,
0:20:02 it’s like, you can keep shoveling coal into the furnace,
0:20:04 but it burns up pretty quickly.
0:20:07 And but these, if these autonomy, mastery, and purpose,
0:20:11 which form sort of the trifecta of intrinsic motivation,
0:20:15 lead to enduring high performance.
0:20:18 – And what are the enemies of motivation?
0:20:20 I was default to the word now.
0:20:21 You wanna write a book, just start.
0:20:23 So many people come up to me.
0:20:25 I wanna start a podcast.
0:20:25 I wanna write a book.
0:20:27 I’m like, okay, start.
0:20:30 Other than that, I don’t know what advice to give you.
0:20:32 What are the killers of motivation?
0:20:34 – Well, I mean, there are all kinds
0:20:35 of killers of motivation.
0:20:37 I mean, part of what it, part of it is,
0:20:40 I mean, what you’re talking about in a way is procrastination,
0:20:43 which is a problem of emotional regulation.
0:20:46 They sort of have this in co-ed desire to write a book,
0:20:48 but they don’t wanna deal with the discomfort
0:20:50 of sitting down and writing the first sentence,
0:20:52 because that’s really painful.
0:20:54 And so I actually think that your advice
0:20:56 to just start is right.
0:20:58 I think what you wanna do is you wanna try to change,
0:21:00 you wanna offer people some scaffolding
0:21:01 and some structuring on that.
0:21:06 So if you wanna write a book and is set out
0:21:09 in your calendar today, 15 minutes to start writing,
0:21:11 and then do 15 minutes tomorrow,
0:21:14 and then do 15 in your calendar, 15 minutes the next day,
0:21:15 and then expand that.
0:21:18 And over and over and over, that’s how you write books.
0:21:19 I mean, I’ve written seven books.
0:21:21 You think if I were to have waited
0:21:25 until I was inspired to start writing,
0:21:26 I wouldn’t have written a word.
0:21:29 I’ve written, I was able to, I’m able to write books
0:21:30 because I care about what I’m writing,
0:21:34 but also because I show up in my office at 8.30
0:21:35 and write and do my job.
0:21:38 And then I do it the next day, and the next day,
0:21:38 and the next day.
0:21:40 And I do it even on the days
0:21:41 that I don’t feel like doing it.
0:21:43 I do it on the days,
0:21:44 especially on the days that I don’t feel like doing it.
0:21:47 It’s like the famous Julius Irving quotation.
0:21:50 It’s like being a professional is doing what you love to do
0:21:52 even on the days you don’t feel like doing it.
0:21:53 – Let’s talk about that.
0:21:54 What is your process?
0:21:56 It sounds like you go into an office,
0:21:58 but when you’re writing a book,
0:22:00 that’s kind of, I think what you’re known for,
0:22:02 what’s your process?
0:22:03 You’ve written seven books.
0:22:06 How do you, is there, could you offer anyone some structure
0:22:08 around how you get these things done?
0:22:11 – I look at writing books like a blue collar job.
0:22:13 I think of it as being a bricklayer.
0:22:16 And so what I do in terms of the actual execution
0:22:21 of the book is I’m talking to you from my garage office.
0:22:23 I live 22 steps in that direction.
0:22:24 I’m in Washington DC.
0:22:26 This is my garage office, all right?
0:22:30 Pinking World Headquarters is a converted one car garage.
0:22:32 And at 830 in the morning when I’m writing a book,
0:22:35 I come into this office and I give myself a word count.
0:22:38 It varies depending on where I am in the process,
0:22:41 but I’ll give myself a word count, 600 words, 700 words.
0:22:43 I don’t bring my phone with me in the office.
0:22:45 I don’t open up my email.
0:22:47 I don’t watch ESPN highlights.
0:22:50 I don’t do anything until I hit that number.
0:22:52 And then when I hit that number,
0:22:54 I’m liberated to do other stuff.
0:22:56 But nothing until I hit that number.
0:22:58 Some days I hit that number at 1030, 11.
0:23:00 Other days I don’t hit it ’til late in the afternoon
0:23:02 and those are crappy days.
0:23:04 But I don’t do anything until I hit that number.
0:23:06 And then I do it the next day.
0:23:09 And then I do it the next day.
0:23:12 So if you wanna have process, it’s not anything exalted.
0:23:14 It’s not like I sit in the corner over here
0:23:15 with a smoking jacket on,
0:23:19 listening for God to dictate sentences to me.
0:23:24 No, I show up in my workspace and I do my work.
0:23:27 – Your dad, my understanding is two daughters and a son.
0:23:30 What is your work on motivation and regret?
0:23:33 How does that change your approach to parenting?
0:23:36 – You know, I think I’m a pretty autonomy supportive parent
0:23:39 to use that kind of technical language.
0:23:41 So I try to support my kids autonomy.
0:23:45 So not be too directive about what they have to do.
0:23:49 Now, the underlying fact here is that,
0:23:51 I mean, we have 50 years of evidence
0:23:53 that the effect of parenting on kids,
0:23:55 especially their intellect and their personality
0:23:57 is very small.
0:24:01 So, you know, the unhappy fact of genetic research
0:24:06 for many parents is that identical twins raised apart
0:24:11 are more similar in intelligence and in personality
0:24:14 than fraternal twins raised together.
0:24:17 So, you know, arguably the most important things
0:24:19 that a parent gives a kid, in my view,
0:24:24 especially in America, are genes and a zip code.
0:24:25 If you look at the work of Raj Chetty,
0:24:27 the most important thing a parent gives a kid
0:24:28 are genes and a zip code.
0:24:31 Now, again, when we’re talking only about their outcome,
0:24:34 I mean, you know, I gave my kids genes
0:24:36 and I gave my kids a zip code,
0:24:37 but more important than anything else,
0:24:39 I love them more than anything in the world.
0:24:40 And whether that has an effect on their outcome,
0:24:44 I don’t know, but, you know, it’s what parents do.
0:24:46 But I think a lot of parents are mistaken
0:24:50 about how much control, how much effect they have
0:24:53 over who their kids become.
0:24:54 – And what about being a good partner?
0:24:56 What about being a good husband?
0:24:57 – When it comes to regret,
0:24:59 I think it’s really important to talk to your partner
0:25:02 or even your kids about your own regrets.
0:25:05 That is, a lot of times people sit with their regrets.
0:25:07 They think that somehow they’re the only one
0:25:10 who doesn’t have, who has those regrets.
0:25:13 And we have ample evidence showing
0:25:14 that writing about your regret
0:25:17 or talking about your regret, it can be quite effective
0:25:19 because it’s an unburdening, it’s a sense-making.
0:25:21 And the other mistake that we make,
0:25:23 this is true not only with our kids and with our partners,
0:25:26 but out there in the world is that we mistakenly believe
0:25:29 that when we talk about our mistakes or our scrubs
0:25:32 or our setbacks, that people will think less of us.
0:25:34 When in fact, we have some good evidence
0:25:36 that people think more of us,
0:25:37 that they admire our candor, they admire our courage.
0:25:39 So I think one thing you can do with partners
0:25:41 and with kids is talk about your regret,
0:25:42 but not in a self-ladulating way.
0:25:45 Talk, you know, say, here’s something I regret.
0:25:46 Here’s what I learned from
0:25:47 and here’s what I’m gonna do about it.
0:25:48 And that’s a good way to normalize it
0:25:50 and it’s a good way to treat regret
0:25:54 as facts, as information, as signal, as data.
0:25:55 That’s really the key.
0:25:57 – We have a lot of young people to listen to the pod.
0:26:00 And I look at, you know, I look at your life
0:26:03 and it strikes me doing something really cool,
0:26:06 really interesting, you make a good living.
0:26:08 Can you provide any advice around
0:26:10 in terms of your lived experience
0:26:12 when you were a younger man?
0:26:14 What did you do well?
0:26:15 What did you not do well?
0:26:17 If for someone out there who thinks
0:26:19 I wanna be a great storyteller
0:26:20 and make a really good living at it.
0:26:22 I wanna be Daniel Bank.
0:26:26 Like, what advice would you give to someone
0:26:27 maybe avoiding some of the mistakes
0:26:28 or maybe getting there?
0:26:29 Although you’ve gotten there pretty quickly.
0:26:31 What advice would you have for someone who says
0:26:33 I wanna be the next Daniel Bank?
0:26:36 – I would say get a better goal than that for starters.
0:26:40 Because that is, I don’t know, that is a terrible goal.
0:26:42 Being another Scott Gallagher,
0:26:45 being another ex as a terrible, awful goal.
0:26:47 I would say that with a degree of harshness.
0:26:49 I would say, you don’t wanna be the next blank,
0:26:50 you wanna be the first you.
0:26:53 Beyond that, you know, among the things that I’ve,
0:26:54 some of the things that I did right
0:26:57 and some of the things that I did wrong.
0:26:59 Among the things that I did right
0:27:03 were that at a certain point, young in my life,
0:27:04 relatively young in my life,
0:27:08 I kind of stopped caring about what people thought about me.
0:27:09 And I felt that earlier in my life,
0:27:12 I was fairly concerned about what people thought about.
0:27:12 Did they think I was cool?
0:27:13 Did they think I was smart?
0:27:15 Did they think I was accomplished and so forth?
0:27:19 And then I came to this startling revelation
0:27:20 about what people thought about me.
0:27:23 And that was, they weren’t thinking about me.
0:27:24 Nobody was thinking about me
0:27:26 ’cause everybody’s thinking about themselves.
0:27:28 And so, that was like a great liberating moment.
0:27:29 So don’t think too much.
0:27:31 Don’t think, don’t care about what other people think.
0:27:33 That’s the most important thing.
0:27:36 I’m, you know, the rest of it, I think is pretty standard.
0:27:38 It’s like, you know, if you outwork people
0:27:41 and you take more shots on goal than people,
0:27:44 than most people, you’re gonna be all right.
0:27:47 I mean, if you don’t care what people think,
0:27:48 you outwork them, other people,
0:27:52 and you take more shots on goal, you’re gonna be all right.
0:27:54 I mean, I can’t tell you how exactly it’s gonna happen,
0:27:56 but it’s gonna be all right.
0:27:58 The other thing that I would tell people is,
0:28:02 forget about planning in any kind of detailed way.
0:28:05 One of the things that I suggest that young people do
0:28:07 is that they find, it’s Scott Galloway,
0:28:09 they find someone who’s doing something cool,
0:28:11 you know, someone in their 50s or whatever,
0:28:12 who’s doing something cool,
0:28:14 who’s doing something interesting.
0:28:17 Oh my God, that’d be so great to have a pilot.
0:28:18 Oh, it’d be so great to do that.
0:28:19 And I say, talk to that person
0:28:22 and ask them how they got there.
0:28:26 And I say, I guarantee you that 49 out of 50
0:28:28 interesting accomplished people
0:28:29 answer the question like this.
0:28:32 It’s a long story.
0:28:35 Because it was failure, it was circuitous,
0:28:37 it was unplanned, there was serendipity,
0:28:40 there was good luck, there was bad luck.
0:28:44 And so, you know, if you, again, outwork,
0:28:46 take more shots on goal, don’t care what people think,
0:28:51 be generous, do great work, you’re gonna be fine, truly.
0:28:52 I mean, you really are.
0:28:54 I mean, it’s easy, you know, it’s easy to say
0:28:57 from the vantage point of someone who was 60 years old,
0:28:59 but it’s true.
0:29:02 The one thing that I didn’t do well, Scott,
0:29:06 I think I relied too heavily on myself throughout my life,
0:29:07 especially professionally.
0:29:09 And I never, like if someone says, who’s your mentor?
0:29:12 I said, I don’t have a fricking mentor.
0:29:15 I never had a great, I never had like a mentor.
0:29:17 I know, not because like people weren’t kind
0:29:20 and generous to me, it’s because I was sort of too arrogant
0:29:22 to think that I needed something like that.
0:29:24 And so, one of the things that I could have done
0:29:28 a better job on is finding mentors,
0:29:31 seeking advice from a wide range of people,
0:29:34 doing a better job of working through other people
0:29:36 rather than simply do everything on my own.
0:29:38 That’s one thing that I could get better at
0:29:40 in the next chapter of my life.
0:29:43 – We’ll be right back.
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0:32:28 You’re part of a year-long project
0:32:32 with the Washington Post opinion section called Why Not?
0:32:37 I want to talk about some of the ideas that your readers
0:32:39 responded especially strongly to.
0:32:42 The idea of paying teachers $100,000 a year,
0:32:46 you said that left turns and the busiest intersections
0:32:47 should be banned.
0:32:49 And in another column, you pose the question
0:32:51 or you suggested that on your birthday
0:32:53 you should give other people presents.
0:32:56 So pick any or all of them and say more.
0:32:58 So the column, as you mentioned, is called Why Not?
0:33:01 We take ideas that seem to be out of the realm of possibility
0:33:02 and say, well, why not?
0:33:06 So let’s pay teachers a minimum salary of $100,000 a year.
0:33:07 We’re losing too many good teachers.
0:33:09 Teachers are not respected enough.
0:33:12 So let’s put our money where our mouth is and actually
0:33:15 pay teachers a minimum salary of $100,000 a year.
0:33:18 I got an amazing amount of love and amazing amount of hate
0:33:21 from that column, which is a good sign.
0:33:22 People saying this is the greatest idea ever.
0:33:25 Other people saying, what are you talking about?
0:33:26 No teacher is worth that amount of money.
0:33:27 So that’s one.
0:33:31 The best idea, in my view, is banning left turns
0:33:33 in the busiest intersections in the busiest cities.
0:33:35 And this seems nutty.
0:33:39 But there’s a guy at Penn State, an engineer at Penn State.
0:33:41 He’s done huge numbers of papers on this.
0:33:43 And essentially, in the busiest intersections–
0:33:45 first of all, in the busiest intersections,
0:33:48 the busiest cities, we have incredible numbers
0:33:49 of collisions.
0:33:52 And actually, a shocking number of deaths and injuries
0:33:56 in those particular places, it also
0:34:02 contributes massively to pollution and climate change.
0:34:04 And so if we just ban left turns,
0:34:08 even if it requires some people to make three right turns,
0:34:10 what the evidence shows is that everybody gets
0:34:12 to where they’re going faster.
0:34:14 Because instead of accumulating these–
0:34:16 you’re stuck behind some– I live in Washington, right?
0:34:18 I’m driving up Wisconsin Avenue.
0:34:20 And there’s some schmo in front of me who’s turning left.
0:34:22 And I’m stuck waiting behind him as he
0:34:25 turns left onto Albemarle or wherever, all right?
0:34:28 But if you eliminate that all the way through,
0:34:30 people will get where they’re going faster.
0:34:31 The math on this is inexorable.
0:34:35 And also, we know that UPS, in its tracking software,
0:34:38 generally requires its drivers to make three rights
0:34:40 rather than one left because it saves massively
0:34:41 on time and on fuel.
0:34:43 And then there’s giving presents on your birthday rather
0:34:46 than receiving presents on your birthday.
0:34:48 I think it’s a nice tradition.
0:34:50 I did it on my 60th birthday basically
0:34:55 as a way to bomb my existential crisis attorney, 60.
0:34:58 And so what I did is I found 90-something people in my life
0:35:00 who I was grateful for.
0:35:03 And I created these custom pencils
0:35:05 because I love pencils, as you can see.
0:35:07 See, I’m holding a pencil right here.
0:35:11 And I gave people these set of three pink pencils
0:35:13 with a note telling them that I valued them in my life.
0:35:15 And I was glad to have them in my life.
0:35:17 It was a cool, meaningful thing to do.
0:35:22 And I sort of skated past the existential dread of that day.
0:35:23 I like that.
0:35:24 I just drank a lot.
0:35:28 So they’re not mutually exclusive.
0:35:30 There you go.
0:35:32 Here’s a pencil as a drink stirrer.
0:35:37 You’ve been in the media game mostly through books for a while.
0:35:39 I’m curious, how do you see–
0:35:41 how is the changing of the shifting media landscape?
0:35:43 You’re technically a creator.
0:35:46 I don’t know your presence on social media.
0:35:49 How has the changing media landscape
0:35:52 been good or bad for Daniel Pink?
0:35:55 And how are you adapting what you do based on changes
0:35:57 in the media landscape?
0:35:57 You know what?
0:35:58 It’s a great question, Scott.
0:36:01 And whether it’s good or bad for me, I don’t know.
0:36:05 I mean, it’s harder to contend with because what you have
0:36:07 is you have this kind of perfect storm here,
0:36:10 where the barriers to– forgive the cliche.
0:36:12 But what you have is the barriers to entry
0:36:14 are essentially zero to create stuff.
0:36:19 And then the shelves on which the stuff sits are infinite.
0:36:21 And then you have something, a device,
0:36:23 that allows you access to all that stuff.
0:36:26 And you carry it on your person all waking hours.
0:36:28 That’s a big, fricking, deal.
0:36:31 And that’s very different from when I was–
0:36:34 when I started out 25 years ago.
0:36:37 And so for me, I’m trying to–
0:36:40 I spend very little time on social media.
0:36:42 I spend very little– I just don’t like it.
0:36:43 I don’t find it interesting.
0:36:47 But I think that things like podcasts are extraordinary.
0:36:51 When I promoted my first book, I did a radio satellite tour.
0:36:56 When I promoted my last book, I did 138 podcast interviews.
0:36:59 That’s a different media landscape.
0:37:02 I think that video and TV is actually really, really
0:37:03 interesting right now.
0:37:09 So if I were to– I did a television show on a cable network
0:37:12 eight or nine years ago, I don’t think I’d do that again.
0:37:15 If I were to create a new television show,
0:37:17 I would go straight to YouTube.
0:37:18 And I think that that is–
0:37:21 I think that’s super interesting.
0:37:23 And so is it good for me?
0:37:24 Is it bad for me?
0:37:24 I don’t know.
0:37:26 But it is for me.
0:37:27 And so you have to deal.
0:37:29 But it’s been a big change, I have to say.
0:37:32 And I also think that books have changed, Scott.
0:37:36 I think that books are not–
0:37:38 I’m a writer.
0:37:41 So my muscle memory, my instinct, when I have an idea,
0:37:43 is to write a book.
0:37:46 And I am actually trying to check that impulse,
0:37:50 because that might not be the best vessel, the best expression
0:37:52 of that set of ideas, that set of arguments,
0:37:53 a set of stories.
0:37:55 It might be something in another medium.
0:37:56 So that’s how– it’s some of the ways
0:38:00 that I’m trying to adapt to this new media landscape.
0:38:02 Daniel Pink is the author of various bestselling books
0:38:05 on a range of topics, including “Human Motivation,”
0:38:07 “The Science of Timing,” and “Creativity.”
0:38:10 His books include the “New York Times” bestsellers,
0:38:12 “Power of Regret,” “A Whole New Mind,”
0:38:15 and “When,” as well as the number one “New York Times”
0:38:17 bestseller, “Drive.”
0:38:19 And “To Sell Is Human.”
0:38:22 He currently has a column with The Washington Post called
0:38:22 “Why Not?”
0:38:25 He joins us from– you’re in DC, is that right, Daniel?
0:38:26 Yes, sir.
0:38:28 So this was such a nice moment for me,
0:38:32 because I remember seeing your video and thinking,
0:38:33 I want to be like that guy.
0:38:37 I just want to do cool work that inspires people.
0:38:38 But you’re doing it now, man.
0:38:42 Well, I know, but you and others were a big part of that.
0:38:45 I just very much appreciate your work.
0:38:47 And it’s had an impact on me.
0:38:50 It’s really, quite frankly, it gave me a lot of motivation,
0:38:51 because it was inspiring.
0:38:53 So keep on trucking, my brother.
0:38:54 You’re doing a great job.
0:39:00 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Caroline
0:39:01 Shagren.
0:39:03 Drew Burroughs is our technical director.
0:39:04 Thank you for listening to “The Property Pod” from the Box
0:39:05 Media Podcast Network.
0:39:09 We will catch you on Saturday for “No Mercenome Alice,”
0:39:10 as read by George Hahn.
0:39:13 And please follow our Prop G Markets pod,
0:39:15 wherever you get your pods for new episodes
0:39:17 every Monday and Thursday.