0:00:05 There are these experiments where they trained people to experience anxiety, but as determination,
0:00:10 because exactly the same physical state could be experienced completely different.
0:00:14 And what they discovered is that at first it’s really hard, but you practice, practice, practice,
0:00:18 and then eventually becomes really automatic. So the first thing to understand is that…
0:00:21 Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a world-leading neuroscientist.
0:00:26 Her groundbreaking research reveals that emotions like anxiety and trauma are built by the brain.
0:00:28 And we have the power to control them.
0:00:34 The story is that you’re born with these innate emotion circuits, but you’re not born with the ability to control them.
0:00:34 That’s false.
0:00:39 Really what’s happening is that your brain is not reacting, it’s predicting.
0:00:46 And every action you take, every emotion you have is a combination of the remembered past, including any trauma.
0:00:52 And so you don’t have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically, faster than you can blink your eyes.
0:00:56 How does this change how we should treat trauma?
0:01:03 Sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something, not because you’re to blame, but because you’re the only person who can.
0:01:09 I mean, I had a daughter who was clinically depressed, was getting D’s in school, she wasn’t sleeping, she was miserable.
0:01:14 At first she was so resistant, but then she made the decision that she wanted to be helped.
0:01:15 And did she recover?
0:01:16 Yes, she did.
0:01:25 So if you want to change who you are, what you feel, understanding these basic operating principles is the key to living a meaningful life.
0:01:28 So what is step one to being able to make that change?
0:01:34 Quick one before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds of your time.
0:01:36 Two things I wanted to say.
0:01:40 The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.
0:01:46 It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn’t have imagined getting to this place.
0:01:50 But secondly, it’s a dream where we feel like we’re only just getting started.
0:01:58 And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.
0:01:59 Here’s a promise I’m going to make to you.
0:02:05 I’m going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
0:02:11 We’re going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we’re going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
0:02:12 Thank you.
0:02:13 Thank you so much.
0:02:14 Back to the episode.
0:02:25 Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, you have a really remarkable, twisting career journey.
0:02:35 It’s almost quite difficult to encapsulate in a particular mission or a particular summary of the journey you’ve been on and the twists and turns you’ve taken.
0:02:44 But if I were to ask you now what mission you’re on with the work that you’re currently doing, are you able to summarize that?
0:02:53 My goal is, as a science communicator, is to try to take really complicated science and present it in a way that people can use.
0:02:57 You know, maybe they use it to entertain their friends at a dinner party.
0:03:03 Maybe they use it to help their kid who’s, you know, struggling with depression.
0:03:06 That was certainly, in my case, something that I had to deal with.
0:03:14 Maybe they’re using it to improve their workplace or improve the productivity of their peeps or whatever.
0:03:19 The point being that that’s ultimately, that’s what science is for.
0:03:22 It’s for, you know, living a better life.
0:03:30 And average, everyday people without PhDs can do that if they have the right information.
0:03:47 I’m probably attempting to understand how it is that a brain like ours, that is attached to a body like ours, that is pickled in a world like ours, produces a mind.
0:03:48 What is it?
0:03:59 What is happening that allows you to have thoughts and feelings and memories and actions?
0:04:08 And somebody from another country, another culture, also has a mental life which looks nothing like yours.
0:04:29 How is it that the same kind of brain plan with the same general kind of body plan can produce such different types of minds when they are, when those brains are wired, in a sense, finish wiring themselves in cultural and physical contexts that are so widely different?
0:04:47 When you just talked about your pursuit of understanding how a brain like ours creates the mind and the reality that we have, if I’m able to understand all of that, as many people who read your book about the brain and emotions were able to understand, what is it that it offers me in my everyday life?
0:04:51 Oh my God, it offers you the opportunity to have more agency in your life.
0:04:52 What does that mean?
0:04:54 It means you have more choice.
0:04:55 It means you have more control.
0:04:58 It means that you can architect your life.
0:05:00 I mean, you can’t control everything that happens to you.
0:05:07 You can’t control every moment of feeling, but you have more control than you probably think you do.
0:05:13 Everybody has more control over what they feel and what they do than they think they do.
0:05:18 That control doesn’t look the way we expect it to.
0:05:23 It’s much harder to harness than we would like it to be.
0:05:33 Some people have more opportunities for that control than other people do, but everybody has the opportunity to have more control.
0:05:40 And, of course, the flip side is also more responsibility for the way they live their lives.
0:05:43 And I think that’s a really good thing.
0:05:52 And I think it’s a really good thing now when, you know, world events are swirling around you and you feel like, you know, you’re just being buffeted around.
0:06:04 And even within that craziness, there are opportunities to be more of an architect of your own experience and your own life.
0:06:11 I think a lot of people find that optimistic and helpful.
0:06:17 Yeah, because life can feel like we are a puppet and we are just responding to what happens around us.
0:06:19 And if it rains outside, then we’re sad.
0:06:22 If a person sends us a message, then we’re annoyed.
0:06:27 And that we’re just these sort of reactive creatures reacting to whatever happens around us.
0:06:34 But you’re telling me that if I have a greater understanding of the brain and how it works and emotions, then I can seize back some of that control and live a more intentional life.
0:06:35 Yes, exactly.
0:06:49 And I think for me, I mean, I started my career studying the nature of emotion, but really it became a flashlight into understanding how a brain works.
0:06:51 Why do we even have a brain?
0:06:53 It’s a very expensive organ.
0:07:00 That piece of meat between your ears is the most expensive, metabolically the most expensive organ you have.
0:07:03 So what’s it good for?
0:07:04 What’s its most basic function?
0:07:08 How does it work in relation to the body?
0:07:15 I think that certainly on your show, you’ve had a number of people who talk about the relationship between the brain and the body in some way.
0:07:24 But I think scientists for a long time forgot or ignored the fact that the brain is attached to a body, right?
0:07:26 Because we don’t feel all the drama.
0:07:31 Like right now, in you, in me, in all of our listeners, right?
0:07:34 We all have this, like, drama going on.
0:07:40 It’s really quite intense, and there’s a lot of going on, and none of us are aware of it, I hope.
0:07:42 If you are aware of it, I’m really sorry.
0:07:46 It probably means that something is, you know, you’re not feeling well today.
0:07:54 But it’s a good thing that we’re not aware of what’s going on inside our own bodies most of the time, because we’d never pay attention to anything outside our own skin again, right?
0:08:02 But the problem is that in science, it often begins with starting with your own subjective experience and then trying to formalize that.
0:08:05 And, I mean, if you look at any science, physics is like that, too.
0:08:10 You just have to go back several hundred years or maybe a little longer to see it.
0:08:20 And so it turns out that a lot of what you experience as properties of the world, of the way the world is, really is very rooted in your brain’s regulation of your body.
0:08:31 And so I guess I’m – I started with emotion, but it really became a much larger project to try to understand, well, what is a brain?
0:08:32 How is it structured?
0:08:34 How did it evolve?
0:08:35 How does it work?
0:08:37 What’s its most basic function?
0:08:44 And where do thoughts and feelings and actions, perceptions, what role do they play in that function?
0:08:47 So it’s a bit flipping the question, right?
0:08:50 Most people start with, what is an emotion?
0:08:51 What is a thought?
0:08:52 What is a memory?
0:08:59 They define it, and then they go looking for its physical basis in the brain or in the body.
0:09:02 That’s a pretty bankrupt perspective.
0:09:06 I mean, after a hundred years, there weren’t really good answers.
0:09:15 So we flipped it around and we said, okay, well, given that we have the kind of brain we do, what can it do?
0:09:17 What does it do?
0:09:21 And in its normal functioning, how does it produce mental events?
0:09:31 That in our culture, our thoughts and feelings and perceptions and actions, in other cultures, there are different conglomerations of features, right?
0:09:35 So for us, a thought and a thought and a feeling are super distinct.
0:09:36 We experience them as very separate.
0:09:37 We experience them as very separate.
0:09:48 In fact, really since the time of Plato, we’ve had this kind of narrative where, you know, the mind or the brain is a battleground between your thoughts and your feelings, right?
0:09:59 In for control of your actions, for control of your actions, if your thoughts win, you are a rational creature, you are a healthy creature, you are a moral creature.
0:10:11 If your instincts and your emotions win, you know, your inner beast, then you are irresponsible, you are childish, you are immoral, you are mentally ill.
0:10:13 That’s the narrative that we work in.
0:10:18 In some cultures, thoughts and feelings are not separate.
0:10:24 They are really, it’s not that you have them at the same time, it’s that they are one thing.
0:10:28 They are features of the same mental event.
0:10:33 In some cultures, your body and your mind are not separate.
0:10:39 There are no separate experiences for a physical sensation versus a mental feeling.
0:10:41 They are really one thing.
0:10:48 So our minds are not the human nature, it’s just one human nature, and there are other human natures too.
0:11:03 And we have to figure out how general brain plan, a general body plan for a neurotypical human, produces such wide variation depending on the cultural context in which it grows.
0:11:13 As it relates to neuroscience and understanding the brain and the way that we create reality, was there a eureka moment for you where you realized that most of us have it wrong?
0:11:18 Or that there’s an underlying misconception about the way that our brain creates our reality?
0:11:25 I would say, yeah, sure, there was a eureka moment, but it was a long, slow burn.
0:11:28 When I was a graduate student, I wasn’t studying emotion.
0:11:32 I was studying the self.
0:11:34 How do you think about yourself?
0:11:37 What is your self-esteem like?
0:11:39 How do you conceive of yourself?
0:11:43 This is an important topic in psychology.
0:11:53 And I was measuring emotion as an outcome variable, and the measurements weren’t, the measures weren’t working.
0:12:02 And I thought, well, I need to be able to just literally, objectively measure when someone is angry or when they’re sad or when they’re happy.
0:12:05 I don’t want to have to ask them, because they could be wrong.
0:12:12 And in that phrasing of the question, there’s a presumption, right, that there is an objective state called anger,
0:12:19 that generally most instances of anger will look the same regardless of person and context.
0:12:28 And I very quickly realized that there are no essences that anybody’s been able to discover, right?
0:12:39 So recently, in the last couple of years, researchers did a meta-analysis, which is a big statistical summary of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of experiments.
0:12:45 And what they discovered is that, and this is just in urban cultures, right?
0:12:47 We’re not even talking about remote cultures now.
0:12:53 Just in urban cultures, when someone is angry, people scowl about 35% of the time when they’re angry.
0:12:56 A scowl is like a…
0:12:58 Like a scowl, like a…
0:13:02 Right, like, you know, you knit your eyebrows, you frown, right?
0:13:03 Okay.
0:13:09 But that means 65% of the time when people are angry, they’re doing something else that’s meaningful with their face.
0:13:16 And half the time when people scowl, they’re not angry, they’re feeling something else.
0:13:18 They could be concentrating really hard.
0:13:21 You could have just told them a bad joke.
0:13:24 They could have a bad bout of gas.
0:13:27 You know, a scowl is not the expression of anger.
0:13:32 It is an expression of anger in some contexts.
0:13:36 And it’s also an expression of other states in other contexts.
0:13:47 So what this means is that, you know, there’s no really strongly reliable expression for anger that is specific to anger.
0:13:52 And the same is true for every other emotion that’s ever been studied.
0:13:56 It’s really clear that you’re in anger or sadness or pick an emotion.
0:13:59 You know, your heart rate can go up, it can go down, it can stay the same.
0:14:02 Your blood pressure can go up, it can go down, it can stay the same.
0:14:10 The physiology that is occurring in your body is related to your brain’s preparation for particular behaviors.
0:14:12 So let’s start with that then.
0:14:16 So the predictive brain is this idea that I only pretty much know from you.
0:14:17 I’d never heard it before.
0:14:21 When we say the predictive brain, what does that mean?
0:14:22 And what does it not mean?
0:14:28 So when you are living your everyday life.
0:14:28 Yeah.
0:14:29 Like right now.
0:14:30 Like right now.
0:14:39 So right now, I’m guessing that I’m saying things to you and you’re perceiving what I’m saying and then you’re reacting to it.
0:14:40 That’s how it feels to you, right?
0:14:41 Yes.
0:14:41 Okay.
0:14:43 And that’s how it feels to me too.
0:14:46 So we sense and then we react.
0:14:51 That’s the way most people experience themselves in the world.
0:14:54 That’s not actually what’s happening under the hood.
0:15:01 Really what’s happening is that the brain, your brain is not reacting, it’s predicting.
0:15:25 And what that means is if we were to stop time right now, just freeze time, your brain would be in a state and it would be remembering past experiences that are similar to this state as a way of predicting what to do next.
0:15:26 Like literally in the next moment.
0:15:28 Should your eyes move?
0:15:31 Should your heart rate go up?
0:15:32 Should your breathing change?
0:15:36 Should your blood vessels dilate or should they constrict?
0:15:39 Should you prepare to stand?
0:15:40 Right?
0:16:04 So under the hood, your brain is predicting what movements it should engage in next.
0:16:09 And as a consequence, what you will experience because of those movements.
0:16:14 So you act first and then you sense.
0:16:17 You don’t sense and then react.
0:16:21 You predict action and then you sense.
0:16:31 So give me an example which brings this to light of how my brain is predicting and then taking action.
0:16:31 Okay.
0:16:37 So right now you and I are having a conversation and I’m speaking and you’re listening.
0:17:02 And what’s really happening in your brain is that based on many gazillion repetitions of listening to language, your brain is predicting, literally predicting every single word that will come out of my.
0:17:06 Yeah.
0:17:06 Okay.
0:17:16 And how surprising would it have been if I didn’t say mouth, I said some other orifice of my body that words were coming out of.
0:17:20 That would have been pretty surprising because your brain is predicting that.
0:17:27 Your brain is always predicting and it’s correcting those predictions when they’re incorrect.
0:17:37 And, you know, I have this video that I often show when I’m giving a talk to scientists or to civilians.
0:17:50 I’m giving a talk and it creates a situation where they can predict something and they can feel that a prediction is not just this abstract kind of thought.
0:18:01 Thought it’s your brain is literally changing the firing of its own sensory neurons to anticipate incoming sensations.
0:18:09 So you start to feel these sensations before the signals actually arrive for you to perceive them.
0:18:13 You start to have the experience before the world gives you those signals.
0:18:18 I’ve read, I think it was in your book, but it might have been elsewhere about the example of being thirsty.
0:18:31 So when you drink, so say you’re super thirsty and you drink a big glass of water, when do you stop being thirsty?
0:18:32 Almost immediately.
0:18:46 But actually it takes 20 minutes for that water to be absorbed into your bloodstream and make its way to the brain to tell the brain that you are no longer in need of fluid.
0:19:01 Because across millions of opportunities, you have learned that certain movements now and certain sensory signals now will result in that mental state.
0:19:03 Or here’s another example.
0:19:06 So right now, keep your eyes on me.
0:19:07 You’re looking right at me.
0:19:17 And in your mind’s eye, I want you to imagine a Macintosh apple, like not a computer, but like an actual piece of fruit.
0:19:17 Okay.
0:19:18 Can you do it?
0:19:19 Yeah.
0:19:19 Can you see it?
0:19:20 Yeah.
0:19:22 What color is it?
0:19:22 Green.
0:19:23 Okay.
0:19:24 Does it have any red?
0:19:25 No.
0:19:26 Okay.
0:19:28 So it’s a Granny Smith apple.
0:19:28 Yeah.
0:19:29 Okay.
0:19:30 What does it taste like?
0:19:33 Like imagine, imagine grabbing it.
0:19:34 Yeah.
0:19:35 Biting into it.
0:19:37 Hearing the crunch of the apple.
0:19:39 What does it taste like?
0:19:40 It’s like sweet.
0:19:42 It’s like a little tart maybe?
0:19:43 Yeah, yeah.
0:19:43 Yeah.
0:19:44 Is it juicy?
0:19:44 It’s very juicy.
0:19:45 Yeah.
0:19:59 So if I were imaging your brain right now, what I would see is I would see changes in the signal that is related to neural activity in your visual cortex, even though there is no apple in front of you.
0:20:07 And I would see a change in activity in your auditory cortex, even though you didn’t really hear the crunch.
0:20:09 My mouth was watering as well.
0:20:10 And your mouth is watering.
0:20:24 And in fact, every time you sit down for a meal, your brain directs your saliva glands to produce more saliva to prepare you to eat and digest the food.
0:20:29 So that usually happens in advance of even sitting down to a meal.
0:20:31 That is all prediction.
0:20:37 That’s all of that is your brain preparing itself for what’s coming.
0:20:47 Because predicting and correcting is a much more efficient way to run a nervous system, really any system, than reacting to the world.
0:20:48 Here’s another example.
0:20:49 Do you drink coffee?
0:20:50 Yes.
0:20:51 Okay.
0:20:53 Do you drink coffee every day at the same time?
0:20:55 Usually, yeah.
0:20:55 Okay.
0:21:00 And are you one of these people that if you miss having coffee at that time, you get a headache?
0:21:02 I mean, it’s happened before.
0:21:03 Yes.
0:21:07 Well, I used to be a person who drank a lot of coffee.
0:21:11 And I love coffee, but I don’t drink it anymore.
0:21:12 But I loved it.
0:21:14 And I drank it always at the same time every day.
0:21:20 And if I didn’t drink it, I would get, at that time of day, I would get a massive headache.
0:21:34 And the reason why, and this is true really of every medicine you take, everything which, anything which affects your physiology, if you do it on a regular basis, your brain will come to expect it.
0:21:44 And what that means, come to expect it, is that coffee has chemicals in it that will constrict your blood vessels everywhere.
0:21:53 But in the brain, the brain is attempting to keep the blood flow pretty constant and even.
0:22:12 And so if every day at 8 o’clock in the morning, you’re drinking something that’s going to constrict your blood vessels, then at 7.55 approximately, I don’t know the exact timing, but a little bit before 8, your brain will dilate the blood vessels.
0:22:16 In preparation for that constriction, so they remain constant.
0:22:23 And if you don’t drink that substance, then you have this big dilation and you get a very, very bad headache.
0:22:32 I was just wondering then about, as you were talking, I thought you were going to talk about how sometimes when I set an alarm, I seem to wake up like five minutes before the alarm.
0:22:33 Yeah, sure.
0:22:34 That’s an example.
0:22:35 Here’s another example.
0:22:36 Exercise.
0:22:44 If you want to play tennis better, if you want to run a faster mile, what do you do?
0:22:45 Train.
0:22:46 Train.
0:22:49 And you do the same thing over and over and over and over again.
0:22:51 And you get better and faster.
0:22:53 And you burn fewer calories.
0:22:54 You get more efficient.
0:22:54 Why?
0:22:56 Because your brain is predicting really well.
0:22:59 That’s what muscle memory is.
0:23:01 It’s not literally a memory in your muscles.
0:23:03 It’s a memory in your brain.
0:23:05 Your brain is controlling your muscles.
0:23:16 And so if you practice the same set of movements over and over and over again, you just get really efficient at them because your brain is able to predict better.
0:23:33 Now, if you’re somebody who’s exercising because you want to become healthier or you want to lose weight or you, right, you don’t want to practice the same exercise over and over and over again because you will be burning fewer calories because you’re being efficient.
0:23:36 That’s the goal, right?
0:23:47 If somebody’s calling out to you every 30 seconds, a different set of movements and you can’t predict what they are, then your brain will make a prediction.
0:23:48 It’ll be wrong.
0:23:49 You’ll have to adjust.
0:23:57 And so you end up burning more calories and you end up throwing yourself out of balance, which we call allostasis.
0:24:01 So you become dysregulated and then your brain has to work to get itself back in again.
0:24:04 And so that’s a different kind of workout.
0:24:11 These two different kinds of workouts are completely predicated on the fact that sometimes you want to be able to predict better.
0:24:18 Sometimes you want to be able to disrupt yourself and get back into the pocket quickly, right?
0:24:27 So basically you’re learning how to take in prediction error, signals you didn’t predict, and adjust to them.
0:24:37 What does this say about the nature of trauma and other mental health illnesses like depression, anxiety, etc?
0:24:40 Because is this a misfiring of my predictions?
0:24:46 I say this because predictions reliant on something happening in the past and forming a pattern, like a pattern recognition system.
0:24:52 So if I grew up and there were certain patterns that are now not the case.
0:24:55 So if I grew up and every time a man walked into the room, he hit me.
0:25:01 And now when a man walks into the room and I’m 35 years old, I’m getting that same sort of prediction in my brain.
0:25:03 So I’ve got a fear of men, for example.
0:25:12 Does this somewhat explain childhood trauma and why it’s so hard to shake and why as adults we can sometimes have dysfunctional lives?
0:25:16 I would say as a general principle, yes.
0:25:21 There are a lot of, you know, the devil is in the details, right?
0:25:22 But yeah, sure.
0:25:28 So trauma is not something that happens in the world to you.
0:25:34 Everything you experience is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present.
0:25:37 So there could be an adverse event that occurs.
0:25:38 You’re in an earthquake.
0:25:41 Someone dies who’s close to you.
0:25:43 Something bad happens to you.
0:25:45 Someone hurts you in some way.
0:25:50 There could be an adverse event that is not traumatic to you.
0:25:58 Because you’re not using past experiences to make sense of it as a trauma.
0:26:14 On the other hand, something that is, could be like an everyday experience to somebody else, to you, it links to a set of memories that are very traumatic.
0:26:15 We’re very traumatic.
0:26:16 Those events were very traumatic.
0:26:18 And so to you, it is a trauma.
0:26:22 So trauma is not an objective thing in the world.
0:26:24 It’s also not all in your head.
0:26:32 It’s a, trauma is a property of the relation between what has happened to you in the past and what is occurring in the present.
0:26:33 So here’s an example.
0:26:37 There is an anthropologist who works at Emory University.
0:26:43 And she studies people in a lot of different cultures.
0:26:45 And she studies trauma in a lot of different cultures.
0:26:54 And there was this one girl that she wrote about, a case study of a girl named Maria, who was a young adolescent girl.
0:27:11 And she lived in a culture where it was more normative for men to physically, be very physical with women and girls.
0:27:16 So in our culture, we would say it’s physical abuse.
0:27:19 But in her culture, this is just what men did.
0:27:24 She didn’t experience, so her stepfather would slap her around.
0:27:26 And she didn’t like it.
0:27:28 But she didn’t show any sign of trauma.
0:27:32 The way she made sense of it was that men are just assholes.
0:27:36 It was very much a, this is not about me.
0:27:38 This is about them.
0:27:41 It’s not pleasant, but she slept okay.
0:27:44 Her grades were okay in school.
0:27:45 She had friends.
0:27:49 She didn’t have any signs of trauma at all.
0:27:52 Then she watched Oprah.
0:28:07 And she heard all of these women talk about having been the subject of physical abuse from their boyfriends or their fathers or, you know, their husbands.
0:28:21 And she recognized the similarity in the physical circumstances of these women’s descriptions and her physical circumstances.
0:28:29 And she also observed them experiencing, like, you know, symptoms of trauma.
0:28:35 And all of a sudden, she started to have difficulty sleeping.
0:28:38 And she, her grades dropped.
0:28:40 And she had trouble concentrating.
0:28:42 And she became socially withdrawn.
0:28:58 Her way of making meaning, her way of, if you think about physical movements as actions, she made different meaning of those actions.
0:29:03 And she experienced trauma where she didn’t before.
0:29:10 Now, if you’re somebody who believes that there is an objective world out there, where, you know.
0:29:11 Cause and effect.
0:29:12 Yeah.
0:29:19 That, that really there was some kind of latent trauma in her and she didn’t experience it before, but then it was like triggered.
0:29:29 And then she’d be, you could tell a whole story like that and people do tell whole stories like that, but that’s not what the best scientific evidence suggests is happening.
0:29:35 What’s happening is that the physical movements were the same.
0:29:50 The psychological experience of those movements was different because experience is a combination of the sensory present, the physical present, and the remembered past.
0:29:56 And you need both in order to have a particular kind of experience.
0:30:09 So the way to describe what happened to Maria’s trajectory was that she experienced something as an unfortunate aspect of like physical life.
0:30:13 And then it became about her.
0:30:23 It became something, not, not this person was doing something bad, but this person was doing something bad to her because of who she is.
0:30:30 And she was also shown how she should be responding to that by watching Oprah’s show and watching these other individuals responding in a certain way.
0:30:30 Right.
0:30:37 So it became about her as a person, not just about, you know, her stepfather was an asshole.
0:30:47 And if you think about it, what we do in this culture, when people go into therapy for trauma, right, is we’re attempting to actually reverse the narrative.
0:30:57 So we try to teach people that it’s not, when something traumatic happens to them, it’s, and I want to be really clear what I’m saying, right?
0:31:02 And I’m not saying that when people experience trauma, it’s their fault.
0:31:07 I’m not in any way saying they’re culpable for what’s happened to them.
0:31:20 But sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something, not because you’re to blame, but because you’re the only person who can.
0:31:23 The responsibility falls to you.
0:31:36 And so in this culture, we try to teach people who’ve experienced trauma that they can experience those physical events that happened to them in the past in some other way.
0:31:42 And when they do, they no longer feel traumatized anymore.
0:31:51 My mind’s a little bit blown for a number of different reasons, because it’s a real paradigm shift to think that we are giving meaning to the thing that happened in our past.
0:31:54 And sometimes that meaning is coming from watching other people give it meaning.
0:31:56 And we’re inheriting that meaning that…
0:31:57 Oh, yes.
0:31:58 That’s called cultural inheritance.
0:32:01 It’s like a cultural, it’s like a contagion.
0:32:08 So it turns out that, you know, there’s one kind of old evolutionary theory, right?
0:32:14 This is called the modern synthesis, where inheritance is really your genes.
0:32:24 You inherit, whatever you inherit, you inherit by your genes, and then natural selection, you know, chooses some gene patterns and not others.
0:32:27 And that’s really how inheritance works across generations.
0:32:38 Most evolutionary biologists don’t hold to that view anymore, because for the most part, there are many, many ways to inherit things.
0:32:47 And a lot of what we think of as inheritance is really more what’s called epigenetic, meaning it doesn’t really involve DNA very much.
0:32:54 And I would say, the way I like to say it is that we have the kinds of nature that requires a nurture.
0:33:01 We have the kind of genes that require experience before anything is wired into our brains.
0:33:04 And most of our characteristics work that way.
0:33:08 Very few characteristics work just by genes alone.
0:33:16 What always happens in a neurotypical brain is that you’re born with your brain incomplete, right?
0:33:22 An adult brain has, we say that it’s wired to its world.
0:33:24 That world includes its own, your own body.
0:33:30 But a baby is not a, baby’s brain is not a miniature adult brain.
0:33:35 It’s a brain that’s waiting for wiring instructions from the world and from its own body.
0:33:44 So your brain is wired for you to see out of eyes that are the exact distance of your eyes from each other.
0:33:52 If somehow, you know, magically we could transplant your brain into somebody else’s skull, you would not be able to see out of that skull.
0:33:56 You would not be able to see out of those eyes because they’re not in the right place.
0:34:06 You hear with ears, your ability to hear comes from signals that are shaped by the shape of your ear.
0:34:12 So your brain is wired to hear out of these ears, not any ears, these ears.
0:34:20 Similarly, you, as a baby, you are taught the meanings of physical signals.
0:34:23 You’re taught how to make sense of these things.
0:34:25 That’s called cultural inheritance.
0:34:34 Many things that we think of as hardwired into the brain are actually culturally inherited across generations.
0:34:39 That’s how people survive in a particular environment.
0:34:49 You know, so like in the 1800s and 1900s when explorers would go off and they would go off to Antarctica or here or there and they would very quickly die.
0:34:51 The Inuit lived there.
0:34:52 They lived perfectly fine.
0:34:55 Well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge.
0:35:01 We’re always transmitting knowledge to each other.
0:35:08 And that knowledge becomes fodder for our own predictions.
0:35:13 So your predictions don’t just come from your personal experience.
0:35:20 They also come from you watching television, you talking to guests, you reading books, watching movies.
0:35:42 Also, your brain, like most human brains, can do something really fantastic, which is you can take bits and pieces of past experience and put them together in a brand new way so that you can use the past to experience something new that you’ve never experienced before.
0:35:47 You talked a second ago about therapists try and make you think about the past differently.
0:36:00 But I do think there’s an underlying belief in our culture and society and on social media that if something happens to you, almost like this Freudian approach of if this happens to you, this is who you become.
0:36:11 And I was reading that book, The Courage to be disliked over Christmas, and it kind of changed my view on this quite profoundly in an important way because it helped me to understand.
0:36:20 I think it basically says that what happens to us doesn’t create who we use what happens to us and we apply meaning to it, which then determines the behavior we have.
0:36:37 And really interestingly in that, it means that many of the beliefs I have about myself, who I say I am, my identity, and therefore like the ways that I behave every day, whether they’re productive or unproductive, are actually just choices I’ve made to apply meaning to the past.
0:36:39 Does that make sense?
0:36:40 It completely makes sense.
0:36:54 And this is really, this is such like a profound, I don’t know if whoever’s listening now understands what I’m saying here, but we said at the start of this conversation, you go through life thinking you’re a puppet and you’re being controlled by what happened to you, who you are, your identity.
0:37:05 But actually, your identity is just this construction of meaning that you’ve given to the past to serve your purpose now, as it says in the book.
0:37:09 Yes, I would say it slightly differently, but the message is the same.
0:37:22 I think there are, in the sensory present, right, there are sights, there are sounds, there are smells, some stuff’s going on inside your own body, right?
0:37:25 And these signals are going to your brain.
0:37:29 They have no inherent psychological meaning.
0:37:30 They have no inherent emotional meaning.
0:37:32 They have no inherent mental meaning.
0:37:40 What gives them meaning is the, are your memories from the past.
0:37:43 You are creating, you are a meaning maker.
0:37:48 Meaning isn’t a set of features like a dictionary definition.
0:38:02 So meaning, the meaning of this cup isn’t that it, it’s made of metal and that, I mean, we certainly can talk about those features, but the meaning of this cup in this moment is what I do with it.
0:38:04 So it could be a vessel for drinking.
0:38:06 It could be a weapon.
0:38:09 It could be, you know, a flower holder.
0:38:12 It could be a measuring cup.
0:38:19 The meaning of the vessel is what I do with it in the moment.
0:38:20 That’s its meaning.
0:38:26 And so the meaning of the vessel isn’t in the vessel.
0:38:30 And it’s also not only in my head.
0:38:33 The meaning is the transaction.
0:38:44 It’s the relationship between this, the features of this vessel, this object, and the signals in my brain, which are creating my actions.
0:38:54 In fact, even the fact that this is a solid object, the property of solidity is not in the object.
0:39:04 It’s because I have a body of a certain type with certain features that makes me experience this as solid.
0:39:08 The solidity isn’t in me and it’s not in the object.
0:39:10 It’s in the relationship between the two.
0:39:17 That means everything, everything you experience is partly of your own making.
0:39:22 You don’t have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically.
0:39:26 It’s happening automatically now as we’re talking.
0:39:29 It’s happening faster than you can blink your eyes.
0:39:32 But it’s still happening.
0:39:52 And that means if you are partly, even though you don’t have a sense of agency, you are partly in control and also therefore responsible for the meaning that is being made.
0:40:08 And when I said at the outset of our conversation that my goal was to try to, you know, as a science communicator, was to try to explain to people that they have more control over their lives.
0:40:17 They have more control over who they are in any given moment than they think they do to give them more agency in their lives.
0:40:20 This is exactly what I mean.
0:40:25 You don’t have an enduring identity.
0:40:30 You are who you are in the moment of your action.
0:40:45 And actions are a combination of the remembered past, so stuff your brain is using to predict, that your brain is assembling super automatically and the sensory present, right?
0:40:56 So if you want to change who you are, you want to change what you feel, you want to change what your impact is on someone else, you have a couple of choices.
0:41:07 You can try to go back into the past and change the meaning of what’s happened before so that you’ll remember differently, you’ll predict differently in the future.
0:41:09 That’s what psychotherapy is.
0:41:15 That’s what, you know, heartfelt conversations at 2 o’clock in the morning are with your friends or whatever.
0:41:17 That’s really hard shit.
0:41:19 It doesn’t always work so well.
0:41:36 The other thing that you can do, though, is if you realize that whatever you experience now becomes the seeds for predictions later, then you can invest in creating new experiences quite deliberately for yourself now.
0:41:49 You can expose yourself to new ideas, you can expose yourself to people who are different than you, you can practice cultivating particular experiences like you would practice any skill.
0:42:03 And that will, any new concepts you learn, new experiences you have, in the moment, if you practice them, they become automatic predictions in the future.
0:42:08 So let me take that and try and apply it to this example of this silver cup in my hand.
0:42:20 So psychotherapy would try and go back into the past and explain to me why this actually isn’t something I should drink out of and that it could be other things.
0:42:32 Whereas what you’re saying is another approach is if I go and get some flowers right now and I put them in there, I’m creating a new prediction for the future because I’ve created a new pattern in the present of this actually being a vase for flowers.
0:42:40 And I can start to create a new pattern that silver cups like this one aren’t just for drinking out of, they are also vases for flowers.
0:42:41 Exactly.
0:42:55 Okay, so I can either go back in the past and try and convince myself that a cup isn’t a cup, or I can, in the present moment, create a new pattern, which will mean that in the future, my brain will predict next time it sees a silver cup, it won’t just think drink out of it, Steve, it’ll think pop some flowers in it.
0:43:01 Right, and remember, it’s actually, the thinking comes after the action, right?
0:43:11 So what will happen is the next time that you are approaching a table where a silver cup might be, your brain will already be starting to prepare the actions to go get the flowers.
0:43:11 Right.
0:43:17 And then you will think, oh, right, I can use this as a, oh, look, there’s a great vase, right?
0:43:27 So in your brain, it’s action, first your brain is controlling, it’s preparing the actions of the viscera, what we call viscera motor.
0:43:29 So does your heart rate need to change?
0:43:31 Do your blood vessels need to dilate?
0:43:32 Do you need to breathe differently?
0:43:39 It’s basically anticipating the needs of the body and attempting to meet those needs before they arise.
0:43:42 That supports your physical movements, right?
0:43:53 So if you’re gonna, if you’re walking over somewhere to pick up some flowers and cut the stems and whatever, that, those are all physical movements that require glucose and oxygen and shit like,
0:43:59 So all of that has to get prepared in advance, milliseconds before the actions start to be prepared.
0:44:02 So it’s not what you think determines what you feel.
0:44:10 It’s what you prepare to do determines your thoughts and your feelings and the sights and sounds and smells and sensations.
0:44:13 That’s how it really works under the hood.
0:44:17 So meaning is in terms of what you do.
0:44:26 And then as a consequence of that, meaning is a consequence, it becomes what you feel and what you think and so on.
0:44:28 So let me give you some specific examples then.
0:44:38 So if I’m scared of spiders, how would I go about overcoming that fear of spiders using route number two that you described there?
0:44:46 So one of the ways that you change to change predictions, you can’t just will yourself to change a prediction.
0:44:48 I am really afraid of bees.
0:44:53 I had a traumatic experience when I was five.
0:44:54 I’m afraid of bees.
0:44:57 I know a lot about bees.
0:44:59 I’m actually a gardener.
0:45:04 And I know a lot about the evolutionary biology of bees.
0:45:12 But when I am outside, if a bee comes around, my first reaction is to either run or to freeze.
0:45:13 Right?
0:45:14 I’m afraid of bees.
0:45:18 I could talk to myself until the cows come home.
0:45:19 It won’t matter.
0:45:20 Right?
0:45:34 So what I have to do is dose myself with prediction error, meaning I have to interact with bees in a way that changes my actions, which will change my lived experience.
0:45:37 And I can’t just do it all at once.
0:45:48 It’s not like a good idea would not be for me to say, would not have been for me to go to like somebody who has beehives and, you know, put on a suit and go work.
0:45:50 I mean, that would be like overwhelming.
0:45:50 Right?
0:45:54 So instead, maybe I don’t run.
0:45:57 Maybe I stand and watch.
0:46:00 Maybe I get closer to a bee.
0:46:13 Maybe I plant bushes and flowers that bees like a lot to bring bees to me so that I can sit and just be around them while they’re buzzing and doing their thing.
0:46:19 Maybe I deliberately let myself get stung at some point, which I did.
0:46:25 But, you know, you’re dosing yourself with your brain is making a set of predictions.
0:46:30 Those predictions, there are a set of predictions.
0:46:33 That means your brain isn’t preparing one action.
0:46:35 It’s preparing multiple actions.
0:46:40 So you need to prove to your brain that those predictions are wrong.
0:46:42 Yes, so exactly.
0:46:48 You need, you are setting up circumstances so you can prove to yourself that your predictions are wrong.
0:46:52 If you’re predicting well, you have a few action plans.
0:46:58 If you’re predicting poorly, let’s say overgeneralizing, maybe you have a hundred plans.
0:47:05 Like if there’s tremendous uncertainty, your brain doesn’t know which action plan to, so there might be many of them.
0:47:13 Sensory signals are coming into your brain from the sensory surfaces of your body, from your retinas, from your cochlea.
0:47:18 You’ve got sensory surfaces on your skin, inside your body, in your muscle cells.
0:47:19 All these signals coming to your brain.
0:47:30 They help select which prediction signal will be completed as action and lived experience.
0:47:46 Okay, so let’s say you put yourself deliberately in a situation where the incoming signals will not select any prediction because there’s too much unpredicted signal there.
0:47:47 It’s error.
0:47:52 There’s another name in psychology for taking in prediction error.
0:47:54 Exposure therapy?
0:47:54 Learning.
0:47:56 Oh, okay.
0:48:12 Yeah, exposure therapy, which is a kind of learning, all learning, all learning is you taking in prediction error, signals you didn’t predict, or there’s no signal that you did predict.
0:48:14 You predicted a signal, it’s not there.
0:48:23 So what you do is you set up situations for yourself that you will take in signals that are novel, right?
0:48:27 And this seems like an easy thing to do.
0:48:33 We, people actually sometimes seek novelty, all right?
0:48:48 But too much novelty is not necessarily a good thing all the time, particularly if, you know, you’re metabolically, it’s expensive metabolically to take in prediction error and learn something new.
0:48:59 Like the biggest costs that your brain expends energy on are moving your body, learning something new, and dealing with persistent uncertainty.
0:49:03 Those are really expensive things for us.
0:49:21 So if you’re metabolically encumbered in some way, say you’re depressed, or you have anxiety disorder, or maybe you have heart disease, or diabetes, or you’re living under chronic stress, you don’t have the spoons necessarily to take in prediction error.
0:49:23 You’re just going to go with your predictions.
0:49:24 You aren’t going to learn.
0:49:27 You aren’t going to be able to update those predictions.
0:49:28 You’re going to be stuck.
0:49:32 You’re going to be stuck in your head, right?
0:49:40 Every experience, every action, a combination of the remembered present, the remembered past, the predictions, and the sensory present.
0:49:49 But the sensory present is there just to select which remembered past you’re going to act on.
0:50:02 And sometimes, in moments of great metabolic load, the brain just goes with its own predictions and ignores what’s out there in the world.
0:50:19 I was thinking earlier on as you were speaking about this sort of social contagion where we can apply meaning to our lives and what happened to us and then consequently make ourselves sad because we see how other people on TikTok or Instagram are feeling.
0:50:24 And it made me think that you must think the world is crazy to some degree.
0:50:35 You must see social contagion in the world where suddenly everybody becomes traumatized because trauma has become almost popular, you know, to think about what happened to you and create meaning to it and then suffer that meaning.
0:50:40 But there’s other types of social contagion which are spreading through society.
0:50:42 I mean, young people are getting more and more anxious.
0:50:44 They’re getting more and more depressed.
0:50:48 We’re self-diagnosing ourselves with different illnesses and different things.
0:50:51 But now you’ve explained to me how the brain works.
0:50:55 I’m thinking, gosh, as a society, we are bonkers.
0:50:58 Well, we’re living out lies.
0:51:12 Yeah, I think, I guess the way I, I do, I do find it frustrating at times, but, but, but only because I think we are meaning makers as an animals are meaning maker.
0:51:21 We create meaning, we create meaning, we create meaning by virtue of living, like by virtue of interacting with, with things in the world, by interacting with each other.
0:51:29 Very few meanings are given that, that is that they exist independently of us.
0:51:51 And so what I find frustrating is that there’s a lot of suffering and understanding these basic operating principles of the brain will not remove all suffering, but it, it could ameliorate, it could remove some.
0:52:05 And people don’t understand that they are sometimes making their suffering worse than it has to be.
0:52:07 You pause on the word responsible.
0:52:14 Well, I want to be really clear that, again, I’m not saying people are, are to blame.
0:52:18 Culpability and responsibility are not the same thing.
0:52:21 Culpability is blame, are you blameworthy?
0:52:27 Right, you can, nobody, I’m not saying people are to blame for their own suffering.
0:52:37 I’m saying that people can be more responsible in, by taking more responsibility, they could reduce their suffering some.
0:52:43 That’s not the same thing as saying, you know, that they, that they, it’s their cause, their cause to begin with.
0:52:44 So I’ll give you an example.
0:52:45 Social contagion.
0:52:48 Contagion is an interesting word.
0:52:50 It means that you are infected by something.
0:52:53 Even a virus.
0:53:03 There are these experiments that were done 15, 20 years ago where, um, these are done by Sheldon Cohen, who is a psychoimmunologist, which means he’s a psychologist.
0:53:11 And he studies how immunology, um, that is your immune system is related to your psychological state.
0:53:16 And so what he did across a number of experiments is he took people and he sequestered them in hotel rooms.
0:53:27 And then he took the same dosage, the same concentration of virus, and he put it in every person’s nose.
0:53:31 And then he controlled how much they slept, how much they ate.
0:53:32 He measured their symptoms.
0:53:37 He, like, weighed their tissues after they blew their nose.
0:53:38 I mean, like, he did, right?
0:53:41 Just really, really, really, really careful metrics.
0:53:50 And across these experiments, somewhere between 20 to 40% of people became symptomatic with respiratory disease.
0:53:59 That means the virus is necessary, but it is not sufficient to cause illness.
0:54:06 Another necessary, but not sufficient cause is the state of each person’s immune system.
0:54:16 That is, your brain and your immune system have to be in a particular state in order for you to be infected by a virus in these experiments.
0:54:21 So the point that I’m making here is exactly the same about suffering.
0:54:24 So let’s take anxiety, for example.
0:54:36 You know, we, in a culture, we automatically make meaning of certain types of signal patterns as anxiety.
0:54:43 When there’s a lot of uncertainty, there’s an increase in norepinephrine and some chemicals in the brain.
0:54:48 That often goes with an increase in heart rate and so on.
0:54:54 And we automatically make meaning of this physical state as anxiety.
0:54:59 But exactly the same physical state could be determination.
0:55:03 It could be just pure uncertainty.
0:55:07 Again, meaning making is about action, right?
0:55:21 So when you are experiencing high arousal, even if it’s super unpleasant as determination, you do something different than if you experience it as anxiety or uncertainty.
0:55:23 So here’s an example.
0:55:26 There are people who experience test anxiety.
0:55:34 Really serious test anxiety prevents people from finishing courses or graduating from college.
0:55:45 People who graduate from college have a lifetime trajectory of earning that is hundreds of thousands of dollars more often than somebody who drops out of college.
0:55:50 So test anxiety over the test anxiety over the long run, it’s more than just a bit of discomfort.
0:55:55 You know, it has serious implications for your earning potential across your life.
0:56:08 There are these experiments that were done where they trained people to make sense of high arousal physical states, not as anxiety, but as determination.
0:56:13 And these people learned to do this.
0:56:15 First, they practice like a skill.
0:56:15 It’s like driving.
0:56:17 At first, it’s really hard.
0:56:18 You have to give a lot of effort to it.
0:56:21 But you practice, practice, practice, and then eventually it becomes really automatic.
0:56:23 And then what happens?
0:56:25 They are able to take tests.
0:56:27 They’re able to pass tests.
0:56:29 They’re able to continue taking courses and so on.
0:56:32 I watched this actually happen right in front of my eyes.
0:56:37 My daughter, when she was 12 years old, she was testing for her black belt in karate.
0:56:42 Her sensei was a 10th degree black belt.
0:56:46 This guy, 10th degree black belt is the highest you could be.
0:56:50 This guy could break a board like by looking at it.
0:56:52 He was a scary, scary dude.
0:56:56 And my daughter was like not even five feet tall when she was 12.
0:56:59 And she’s this tiny little thing.
0:57:06 And she’s got to spar with like these hulking like 15, 16, 18-year-old boys.
0:57:08 She’s got to actually spar with them.
0:57:12 And so, you know, she’s, and this is across several days.
0:57:13 She’s got to do this really.
0:57:17 And so I’m sitting there, her, you know, I’m, her dad and me were sitting there.
0:57:18 We’re watching her.
0:57:25 And so her sensei, you know, saunters up to her and he says, sweetheart, get your butterflies
0:57:26 flying in formation.
0:57:32 And I was like, that’s fucking amazing.
0:57:34 Get your butterflies flying in formation.
0:57:37 He’s not saying calm down, little girl.
0:57:39 That would actually be bad.
0:57:40 You don’t want to be calm.
0:57:42 You need that arousal.
0:57:43 It’s there for a reason.
0:57:46 It’s uncomfortable, but you need it.
0:57:48 He’s saying, use it.
0:57:55 That to me was like a perfect example of find a different meaning for that arousal.
0:58:00 And that meaning is the action that you will engage in.
0:58:07 No matter how hard it is, no matter how much it doesn’t really look like what it’s supposed
0:58:08 to, the control is there.
0:58:10 It’s there.
0:58:12 It’s not there all the time.
0:58:15 It’s harder to get, you know, yada, yada.
0:58:16 But it’s there.
0:58:21 And it means that you have more agency.
0:58:24 You have more control.
0:58:27 You’re never going to have as much control as you want.
0:58:30 It’s always going to be harder to get.
0:58:34 Your options aren’t always going to be the same.
0:58:44 But you can always find a little more control over what you do and what you experience.
0:58:48 And that’s the key to living a meaningful life.
0:58:52 Are you somewhat concerned about the world that young people are growing up in, where they’re
0:58:58 scrolling on social media and social media is telling them what certain feelings are.
0:59:02 So they are just being programmed constantly.
0:59:04 Yeah, they are.
0:59:07 To be anxious, to be depressed, to be sad.
0:59:07 Yes, they are.
0:59:08 And think about it, too.
0:59:14 Social media is pernicious uncertainty there.
0:59:22 You know, you, first of all, even when we’re sitting face to face, we have all of these cues.
0:59:23 We have all these signals.
0:59:24 I can see your face.
0:59:26 I can hear your voice.
0:59:32 Even when all this information is there, there’s still some uncertainty, right?
0:59:34 We’re not reading each other.
0:59:39 Bodily movements are not a language to be read.
0:59:42 It’s a bad metaphor, right?
0:59:43 We’re guessing.
0:59:44 We’re always guessing.
0:59:47 And we’re using a lot of signals to guess.
0:59:54 But when you’re on social media, you have very few signals.
0:59:57 There is a lot of ambiguity.
0:59:59 There is a lot of uncertainty.
1:00:09 And the only thing that you can do is fill in that uncertainty with your own guesses, which could be bad, right?
1:00:24 So people who go on TikTok and whatever are giving up, they’re like volitionally giving up their agency and they don’t know it.
1:00:24 What do you mean by that?
1:00:27 They’re choosing to be led.
1:00:30 They’re choosing to be influenced.
1:00:35 I’ll give you an example.
1:00:39 I’ve listened to podcasts about metabolism.
1:00:43 I’ve listened to podcasts about, you know, skin care.
1:00:44 I’ve listened to podcasts.
1:00:45 You know, I’m curious.
1:00:49 I’m curious about, like, what kind of information people put out there.
1:00:55 I probably turn off 90% of the—I get, like, 10 minutes into something and I will turn it off.
1:00:59 That’s what it means to be a consumer.
1:01:01 You have choice.
1:01:18 I think people are—they don’t realize that by virtue of what they do and what they don’t do, they are making choices about what will be retained in their heads that will then be used automatically later.
1:01:20 Brainwashing.
1:01:20 Brainwashing.
1:01:27 A little bit, except that you’re the one who’s—you’re choosing it.
1:01:33 You know, I’m empathic and I’m not blaming people, but they could—things could be better for them, you know?
1:01:38 I mean, I had a daughter who was clinically depressed.
1:01:44 That was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had in my life, in addition to being really tragic.
1:01:47 I mean, I can talk about it now without breaking into tears.
1:01:48 That took a long time.
1:01:52 But at first, she was so resistant.
1:01:59 Eventually, you know, she made the decision that she wanted to be helped, and then we completely changed her life.
1:02:02 But she had to make that decision.
1:02:03 I couldn’t force her to do it.
1:02:11 And I feel like, a little bit, it’s the same kind of situation now where there’s so much bullshit out there in the wellness industry.
1:02:21 There’s so much, you know, swirling around on TikTok and on other areas of social media, and not all of it is useful.
1:02:23 And some of it’s really harmful.
1:02:26 Do you mind if I pause this conversation for a moment?
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1:03:27 The advantage you have as an objective on Looker is you have a huge amount of information and knowledge which is guiding you to make better decisions.
1:03:29 But a lot of people don’t have that information and knowledge.
1:03:32 In fact, they have counter-information and knowledge.
1:03:44 So when I think about what it takes for someone to make a change in their life, whether it was your daughter or whether it’s someone else who feels like they’re stuck and they feel like they’re trapped in an algorithm or trapped in a life that they want to break out of.
1:03:53 Based on everything you know and based on the experience you had with your daughter, what is step one to being able to make that change?
1:03:58 Because I’m really curious as to what it was about your daughter that made her decide that she wanted the help.
1:04:05 Well, I think that the general answer is baby steps.
1:04:09 It rarely works to completely change everything all at once.
1:04:13 I’m not saying it never works, but it rarely works that way.
1:04:28 So, for example, you know, you could deliberately get off social media for one day a week or do something else instead with a friend.
1:04:35 Or go for a walk or just and build it into your day as a scheduled thing.
1:04:39 So that’s the other thing is that you can’t do things because you want to do them.
1:04:41 You have to force yourself to do them.
1:04:47 So, for example, I had major back surgery, major back surgery, very serious.
1:04:57 And I knew that after I had back surgery that I was going to experience sensations I had never had before.
1:05:00 Just like, you know, if you go for a filling in your tooth, right?
1:05:03 And then, you know, something’s there that wasn’t there before.
1:05:08 And then your tongue is like constantly poking at the tooth and you’re not supposed to.
1:05:12 But you do anyways because your brain is foraging for information.
1:05:14 It’s foraging for prediction error.
1:05:22 And then eventually it adjusts its predictions and then it ignores the sensations because they’re
1:05:24 not relevant, right?
1:05:28 So that was going to happen on a massive scale for me.
1:05:36 And I knew that I had made a plan before surgery to dose myself appropriately with prediction
1:05:39 error so that I would not develop chronic pain.
1:05:43 Because chronic pain is like a set of bad predictions that don’t update, right?
1:05:50 So your brain still believes that there’s tissue damage in your body when there’s no more tissue
1:05:51 damage.
1:05:55 So does that mean that pain often is just a figment of your imagination?
1:05:57 No, that’s the wrong way.
1:05:59 That is the wrong way to think about it.
1:06:06 The way to think about it is every experience, remembered past and sensory present.
1:06:09 So pain is in your head.
1:06:12 Vision is in your head.
1:06:14 Hearing is in your head.
1:06:16 You don’t hear in your ears.
1:06:18 You hear in your head, in your brain.
1:06:20 You don’t see in your eyes.
1:06:21 You need your eyes.
1:06:22 You need your ears.
1:06:27 But you don’t see in your eyes.
1:06:29 You see in your brain.
1:06:38 So pain is a combination of the, just like vision, is a combination of the remembered past and the
1:06:39 sensory present.
1:06:40 Okay.
1:06:41 Okay.
1:06:41 So it’s both.
1:06:51 So chronic pain happens when your brain was receiving signals from the body that there
1:06:52 was tissue damage.
1:06:53 No susceptive signals, they’re called.
1:06:57 And it was making sense of them as pain.
1:07:04 And when you’re recovering from an illness, that’s metabolically taxing.
1:07:11 So there’s not as much metabolic, there’s not as much of your metabolic budget devoted to
1:07:12 learning.
1:07:20 So you can be in a situation where your brain doesn’t update itself and you still experience
1:07:27 pain, even though the tissue damage is no longer there.
1:07:34 It’s just like seeing a green apple in your mind’s eye when there is no apple in front of
1:07:34 you.
1:07:42 It’s not all in, it’s not all in your head in the, in the, you know, insulting sense.
1:07:47 It’s just, it’s a normal consequence of how brains work.
1:07:51 The injury is gone, but the signal of the injury is still replaying itself.
1:07:52 Yeah, exactly.
1:07:54 Just like, it’s like a phantom limb.
1:07:56 It’s like tinnitus is also like that.
1:07:56 Oh gosh, yeah.
1:07:58 I had that for a little while.
1:07:58 Yeah.
1:08:07 So, um, so I, I tried really hard to set a schedule for myself, um, you know, um, that
1:08:13 would allow me to sort of like optimally dose myself, but with prediction error, but that
1:08:17 meant, you know, that I, I had to follow that schedule.
1:08:23 And I think if you’re committed to changing your habits, this is how you change any habit.
1:08:33 You change the context and you, um, and then you practice, you practice new, um, new behaviors.
1:08:45 So with my daughter, depression, we think about depression in our lab, um, as, um, let me back
1:08:50 up and say, your brain’s most important job really is not thinking.
1:08:53 It’s not feeling, it’s not feeling, it’s not even seeing, it’s regulating your body.
1:08:56 It’s regulating your metabolism.
1:08:59 Basically that’s your brain’s most important job.
1:09:04 Your brain’s most important job is anticipating the needs of your body and preparing to meet
1:09:05 those needs before they arise.
1:09:12 The metaphor that we use for this predictive regulation of the body, which is the formal
1:09:14 term is called allostasis.
1:09:20 Um, that’s the scientific concept, but the, but the metaphor is body budgeting.
1:09:22 It’s running a budget for your body.
1:09:24 Your brain is running a budget for your body.
1:09:25 It’s not budgeting money.
1:09:33 It’s budgeting salt and glucose and oxygen and, um, potassium and like all of the nutrients
1:09:41 and chemicals that are necessary, um, to, um, and run an energetically costly body.
1:09:44 You know, you’ve got all these really low level kind of processes.
1:09:49 You can just think of them as vital parts of, to keep yourself alive.
1:09:52 So some of your energy budget goes to that.
1:09:57 Some of your energy budget goes to repair and growth.
1:10:01 So you get, if you get taller, you need more cells.
1:10:06 When you learn something, you have to thicken up your myelin and your, your neurons.
1:10:09 You’ve got to grow more receptors and stuff.
1:10:12 That’s, you know, the kind of growth and, and repair.
1:10:16 And then the rest of it is all for anything effortful.
1:10:17 What is effortful?
1:10:20 Like work or going to the gym.
1:10:23 Dragging your ass out of bed in the morning is effortful.
1:10:23 Yeah.
1:10:26 Learning something new is effortful.
1:10:29 Dealing with uncertainty is effortful.
1:10:31 Everything we call stress.
1:10:38 Stress is just really, your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay because there’s some effort
1:10:39 involved, right?
1:10:42 Some motivated effort involved.
1:10:47 So those are the three things that make up your energy budget.
1:10:54 And the really important point, you as an organism have a fixed amount of energy that you can produce
1:10:56 in a day.
1:11:04 Meaning ATP, like these little chemicals that, these little protein things that, you know,
1:11:11 your cells use as literal energy that come from glucose and, and other things like fats and.
1:11:13 So there’s nothing I can do to increase it.
1:11:14 Well, you’re in a range.
1:11:15 Okay.
1:11:25 But there is a finite limit, upper limit for that range because you are a, because you’re a human
1:11:25 organism.
1:11:33 And you’ve got to do these three things, these vital functions, growth and repair, and then
1:11:34 everything else.
1:11:39 If you’ve got a lot of psychosocial stress going on, or you have some kind of disease that’s
1:11:47 taking up, you know, much of the budget, then you don’t have a lot of budget left for other stuff that you need to do.
1:11:50 So what your brain will attempt to do is to cut costs.
1:12:01 If you look at the symptoms of depression, they are symptoms of, that are related to cutting costs.
1:12:09 Distress, fatigue, problems concentrating, lack of sensitivity to the context that you’re in.
1:12:16 All of these things are indicative of reduced metabolic outlay.
1:12:28 And then depression also has symptoms that are related to increased costs, like 70% of people who are depressed have inflammatory problems.
1:12:40 So they have enhanced inflammatory, systemic inflammation, and your immune system is a very expensive system to run.
1:12:52 So if you have persistent and systemic inflammation, that’s like a persistent tax on your budget.
1:12:57 You’re, you know, meaning things are costing more than they necessarily need to.
1:13:02 And even, you know, like there are these really interesting studies.
1:13:07 I think they’re interesting as a scientist, as a person, I find them like slightly horrifying.
1:13:14 But, you know, like if you, within two hours of eating a meal, if you encounter stress, social stress,
1:13:20 it’s as if you ate 104 more calories than you actually ate.
1:13:28 So you’re so inefficient in metabolizing that it’s like, it’s like having eaten 104 more calories than you did.
1:13:35 And the, your, even good fats will be metabolized as if they’re bad fats.
1:13:36 And potentially stored as.
1:13:37 Yeah.
1:13:44 So if you, if you add up 104 calories at every meal for a year, that’s almost 11 pounds.
1:13:56 That means that if you are in a stressful environment and, um, for a year and you eat exactly the same thing as you ate the year before, you would gain 11 pounds.
1:14:02 In depression, we know, for example, that, um, there’s cortisol dysregulation in depression.
1:14:11 That means there’s dysregulation in, um, metabolism because cortisol is a metabolic, you know, it’s, it’s a metabolic chemical.
1:14:20 Um, people who take, uh, SSRIs, they take for depression, antidepressants are SSRIs usually, or SNRIs.
1:14:29 That means they are acting on serotonin to keep more serotonin in the, in the juncture, uh, between neurons.
1:14:31 Serotonin is a metabolic regulator.
1:14:34 Norepinephrine is a metabolic regulator.
1:14:41 These are, um, chemicals that are directly involved in your metabolism.
1:14:49 So it’s not an, a belief that depression is a metabolic, has a metabolic basis to it.
1:15:00 I think the question is, what is the elixir of all these metabolic influences that would lead somebody to, um, develop a depressive state?
1:15:14 Um, but the point, the simple point that I was making is I actually came to this idea about metabolism and depression because I was doing a shit ton of treating, trying to figure out how to help my kid.
1:15:15 What were her symptoms at that time?
1:15:20 Just if there are any parents listening right now that can relate or anybody that’s listening that can relate.
1:15:21 Yeah.
1:15:26 Oh, well, I will tell you that I’ve given this talk before, um, about depression in adolescence.
1:15:36 Adolescence is a, um, it’s like a, um, it’s like a perfect storm of metabolic, uh, vulnerability for many, many reasons.
1:15:40 You know, your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull.
1:15:44 It’s receiving signals from the body and from the world.
1:15:48 It doesn’t know what the causes of those signals are.
1:15:49 It’s receiving the effects.
1:15:52 It has to guess at the causes.
1:15:53 What are the guesses?
1:15:55 Predictions from the past, right?
1:16:00 So it doesn’t know about hormone surges immediately as they happen.
1:16:13 It, you know, it takes 20 minutes or so, or sometimes a little less, depending on where the hormonal changes are and what their origin is, for the brain to receive the signals of those changes.
1:16:16 And then it has to guess at what the causes are.
1:16:24 The narrative that’s used in psychiatry and medicine is a narrative that goes something like this.
1:16:27 It goes back to this, like your brain is a battleground, right?
1:16:35 So the idea is that, you know, you’re born, the story is that you’re born with these innate emotion circuits.
1:16:38 You’re not, you don’t have any emotion circuits.
1:16:39 You don’t have any emotion circuits actually.
1:16:42 But the narrative is you’re born with these innate emotion circuits.
1:16:46 They work, but you’re not born with the ability to control them.
1:16:48 That has to develop over time.
1:17:01 So in adolescence, the idea is that mood disorders arise because you’re, you don’t have enough cognitive control and you have too much emotion.
1:17:04 So you’ve got this unbridled emotion and that’s the problem.
1:17:09 That’s a really compelling narrative.
1:17:12 It’s just neuro bullshit.
1:17:16 Basically, there’s not a good evidence for that narrative.
1:17:18 I heard it was a chemical imbalance.
1:17:19 Yes.
1:17:31 Well, the, sometimes people talk about that chemical imbalance in terms of serotonin being a happy chemical and dopamine being the reward chemical.
1:17:36 And that’s also, that’s such a simplification that it’s not even wrong.
1:17:37 Okay.
1:17:42 Dopamine is not a reward chemical and serotonin is not a happiness chemical.
1:17:44 They’re both metabolic regulators.
1:17:53 You see increases in dopamine in some neurons during episodes of punishment.
1:18:00 And serotonin does many things in your body in many places.
1:18:20 But one of the things that it does in controlled experiments is it allows animals to spend, to forage, to engage in activity, physical activity, and learning when there is no immediate metabolic reward at the end.
1:18:22 There’s no deposit at the end.
1:18:42 So dopamine is seen more, I think, now by many neuroscientists as a chemical that is necessary for effort, whether that is a physical effort or learning something, a mental effort of learning something.
1:19:01 It’s not really specific to reward, so at first with my daughter, you know, she went from being a really exuberant, engaged, socially, very socially connected kid who, you know, she did great in school.
1:19:09 And it’s not like she had, you know, it’s not like she was a perfect kid, but she was pretty enthusiastic and pretty exuberant and had a lot of friends.
1:19:27 And then, you know, by the time she was in 10th grade, she was withdrawn, she was getting D’s in school, she couldn’t concentrate, she wasn’t sleeping, she was miserable.
1:19:30 She was really suffering, but she was miserable to be around.
1:19:35 And to be honest, at the beginning, we thought she was being lazy.
1:19:38 We thought, you know, she didn’t want to do anything.
1:19:40 She wanted to spend all this time in her room.
1:19:43 She didn’t, you know, she wanted to get rid of all of her activities.
1:19:47 And we thought, come on, man, step up.
1:19:50 Like, where are you, you know, we thought she was being lazy.
1:19:58 I mean, really, it just never occurred to me in a million years because she had no mood symptoms as a kid, like none.
1:20:02 And then all of a sudden, she just, she appeared to have no energy to do anything.
1:20:07 But to us, it looked like she was being lazy and she didn’t want to do her homework and she seemed really disengaged.
1:20:15 And it took me a while to realize, oh, no, this is something else.
1:20:20 She was having trouble remembering conversations that we had.
1:20:23 And at first I thought, oh, you’re not paying attention to me.
1:20:31 But then it seemed really clear that even in day-to-day, she couldn’t tell me what was happening in her day.
1:20:32 She just had no details.
1:20:38 That’s also a sign of depression where you lose the episodic memory of details of the day.
1:20:40 You can only talk in gists.
1:20:45 You can’t give specifics about times and places and events.
1:20:50 You just lose, you don’t retain that information long enough to be able to remember it later.
1:20:53 There’s no consolidation of that information.
1:21:04 And when she was in 10th grade, you know, she came home with Ds in school, Ds in mathematics.
1:21:08 And this is a kid who was doing fun, you know, she was doing rudimentary algebra when she was eight.
1:21:20 And we told her that we had to be, we had to have her assessed because we just didn’t know what was going on.
1:21:22 And that’s when we realized that she was clinically depressed.
1:21:28 The other thing I should say is that, you know, she had very bad menstrual cramps.
1:21:40 And so a lot of one treatment for bad menstrual cramps is to put girls on birth control pills.
1:21:46 Because it evens out the hormonal fluctuations of the month.
1:21:48 And it does actually improve menstrual cramps.
1:21:52 But it’s pretty well known now.
1:22:05 It wasn’t so much known then that there is somewhere between a 40% and 70% increase in the likelihood of major depressive episode in young women who use birth control pills.
1:22:11 If it’s a combination estrogen-progesterone pill, it’s more like 40%.
1:22:21 If it’s a progesterone-only pill, which a lot of young women take because it has fewer side effects, you have a 70% increase in major depressive episode.
1:22:26 And this is in – this first study that I read about this was in a million women.
1:22:32 And when I read that study, I remember exactly where I was.
1:22:33 It was like a flashbulb moment.
1:22:34 I read the study.
1:22:37 I called her pediatrician, my daughter’s pediatrician.
1:22:39 And I said, she’s coming off pill today.
1:22:41 Today.
1:22:43 So tell me if there’s anything.
1:22:45 Are there any side effects or can we just stop it?
1:22:49 And he’s like, well, in my opinion – and I’m like, I don’t give a shit about your opinion.
1:22:58 I have just read a study that is like – you know, it’s a large-scale epidemiological study of a million women today.
1:23:00 She’s coming off today.
1:23:03 And this was after or before she was experiencing depression?
1:23:11 This was after – it was – it was maybe a year after she was diagnosed.
1:23:21 Much later, I read – I was reading a book by Naomi Oreskes, the historian of science, and she wrote a book called Why Trust Science?
1:23:23 And it’s a wonderful book.
1:23:33 But in the book, she talks about – she gives examples of places, of phenomena where the public didn’t trust science and they should have.
1:23:34 And this is one of them.
1:23:37 Apparently, it’s been known for a really long time.
1:23:48 And I just want to point out that estrogen, progesterone, testosterone evolved as metabolic regulators.
1:24:02 I’m highlighting it because in a lot of – because in a culture that separates mental from physical, we don’t think about the role of metabolism in vision or in – even in mood.
1:24:04 That’s a really recent thing.
1:24:15 In our lab, we – one of the things we study now is the role of metabolism in really basic – really, really basic psychological phenomena.
1:24:21 Like, just as a fundamental building block of your mind, basically.
1:24:24 So, your daughter exhibits those symptoms.
1:24:33 I’m really curious to hear what conventional medicine at that point told you you should do with the daughter in that situation at that time versus what you did.
1:24:35 You have this wealth of information.
1:24:36 You have a medical background.
1:24:42 Yeah, so I should say this was – you know, this was some years ago, right?
1:24:51 So, currently, there is a kind of a revolution going on where there’s actually something called metabolic psychiatry now.
1:24:56 Back when this was – when, you know, when I was reading about this, it sounded crazy.
1:25:03 When I saw what my daughter was – that she was suffering, like, really suffering.
1:25:14 It’s really hard for me to talk about this because as I’m talking to you about this, I’m thinking, I just – I wish that I – you know, I wish that I had figured this out earlier.
1:25:30 But anyways, what we did was I found every possible route that I could think of to target her body budget, so basically target her metabolism.
1:25:48 And then we basically came up with a daily routine, which she participated in making, to see if we could put her on a different trajectory, you know?
1:25:52 And that involved everything from getting off social media.
1:25:53 Because?
1:26:02 Because, first of all, she was using, like a lot of kids do, she was using her screens late at night.
1:26:07 And at that point – and again, this was something I just happened upon, right?
1:26:17 But it – actually, at a NCI meeting, at a National Cancer Institute meeting – you know, we have retinal ganglion cells.
1:26:29 We have cells in our retina that regulate circadian rhythm, and they’re sensitive to light at the wavelengths that comes from your screen – from a screen.
1:26:39 So if you look at those screens at night, your brain thinks it’s daytime, like your circadian rhythm – you give yourself a circadian rhythm disorder, basically.
1:26:54 And it will be harder to get into a regular sleep cycle, and you need that regular sleep cycle in order for toxins to clear and in order to consolidate what you’ve learned during the day so that you can remember it later.
1:27:00 And a whole bunch of restorative things happen during deep sleep that you really need.
1:27:05 And if you can’t get enough deep sleep, that will make your budgeting problems worse, basically.
1:27:16 So we targeted her – we got her off social media – well, first of all, off screens after, you know, like 7 o’clock, 8 o’clock at night, no screens.
1:27:21 Off social media to reduce social uncertainty, social stress.
1:27:35 I got up with her at 5.30 every morning, made her breakfast, sat with her while she ate breakfast, so made sure that she was eating nutritious food, not pseudo food, like, you know, Pop-Tarts and shit like that.
1:27:41 We had to start her, like, exercising again, so she started to walk long distances.
1:27:50 She started doing Pilates, like, not Pilates on a map, but, like, Pilates with a reformer that would make anybody cry, you know?
1:27:55 Why exercise as it relates to this budget and the metabolic functions?
1:28:13 Because exercise basically – it’s like your brain – it’s like you’re throwing yourself out of metabolic balance so that the brain can learn to get itself back in.
1:28:33 Like, you’re basically improving the resilience of your physical systems is basically the way to – so she’s not – you know, she needed something more like interval training, which is what these Pilates classes were, as opposed to, you know, practicing to play tennis or whatever.
1:28:47 Something that would – where she, you know, after a certain period of time, she’d be dysregulated metabolically, and then she’d drink water and, you know, eat something healthful.
1:28:54 And then her system basically was learning to become more flexible, again, not so stuck.
1:29:03 So, again, it was, like, dosing with prediction error or, like, showing the – providing the brain with opportunity to learn that it was wrong.
1:29:14 And then omega-3s, so we took – I can’t remember the exact dose, but I dosed it out high omega-3s, low omega-6s.
1:29:24 With her doctor’s permission, we also used a baby aspirin once a day on a full stomach to reduce systemic inflammation.
1:29:34 So, before bed – I mean, before bed, we had always done, like, a cuddle, you know, like, when she was little, we would read a story or whatever.
1:29:41 And in her early adolescent years, you know, she rejected that, and then we brought it back.
1:29:51 So, an hour before bed, we would – either me or her dad, sometimes all three of us – we would read a book together, or, you know, he would read a book to us.
1:30:01 Or we would – we would sit and talk, and she would tell me, you know, all the things that were happening at school that she could remember.
1:30:05 And sometimes they were really horrible, and I just had to empathize.
1:30:07 That was really hard for me because I just wanted to fix it.
1:30:09 I just wanted to fix it.
1:30:25 And it was really – I had to really draw on my own experience as a therapist to just sit with the distress and empathize rather than say, do this, do this, do this, do this.
1:30:30 It took me a long time to learn that, and I’m still sometimes struggling with that.
1:30:31 Why was that important?
1:30:37 Because then she feels heard, and she feels understood.
1:30:40 And when you – it took me a long time to learn this.
1:30:52 When she would tell me that, you know, someone had done something terribly mean, if I did anything other than empathize, she would feel like I hadn’t heard her.
1:31:01 And social support is a major – I mean, we are the caretakers of each other’s nervous systems.
1:31:03 Humans are social animals.
1:31:04 It’s hard to believe.
1:31:15 I think in a culture like ours where we’re so individualistic, right, and it seems like a political statement or something, it doesn’t really matter what your political views are.
1:31:18 We evolve the way we evolve, man.
1:31:19 We are social animals.
1:31:22 We affect each other metabolically.
1:31:25 We can add savings, and we can add taxes.
1:31:31 And, you know, the best thing for a human nervous system is another human.
1:31:36 The worst thing for a human nervous system is another human.
1:31:37 The wrong one.
1:31:52 There are so many experiments showing such – I mean, I just saw a set of experiments from one of my former postdocs that was just amazing, where she looked at glucose metabolism in mothers and babies.
1:31:56 And I think she also did it in dating partners, if I’m not mistaken.
1:32:05 And she looked at them alone and then together, like alone during a task and then together during a task.
1:32:13 And mothers and babies that are attached well, they’re actually – their glucose metabolism is more efficient, like literally more efficient.
1:32:20 And I believe she – I believe she also showed this with dating partners, too.
1:32:34 You know, there are these studies, these old studies showing that, you know, it’s like less calorically demanding to walk up a hill with a backpack if you’re with a friend than if you’re with a stranger.
1:32:48 I mean, there’s all these really batshit crazy findings that – but if you realize that humans are literally affecting each other on a physical basis, whether they’re aware of it or not, whether they intend it or not, it’s completely irrelevant.
1:32:57 Or it’s unnecessary, I would say, to have that effect, to have the effects be there, then it starts to make sense.
1:33:15 You know, like the idea that – and again, meta-analyses show that you will live years longer, years on average, years longer if you are – if you have a social life filled with people who you trust and who trust you.
1:33:21 So is that why you got the family around just before bed?
1:33:26 Because it was regulating her nervous system, her body?
1:33:27 Yeah.
1:33:29 Sometimes she still says this to me, actually.
1:33:33 She’ll say, can you just be my friend for a minute and not my mother?
1:33:35 I’ll be like, yes, I can.
1:33:38 And then I actually have to do it, which is sometimes hard.
1:33:44 Or I will say to her, this is for parents.
1:33:52 Anybody who has an adolescent or an adult child, this is like one of my – I don’t know how I came up with this, but it’s like golden, right?
1:34:01 I say to her, can I – I’m having a mother moment where I feel the need to nag you about something.
1:34:05 And if I can just nag you for a minute about it, I won’t need to tell you again.
1:34:08 So I’m basically asking her permission.
1:34:12 Can I tell you this thing, which I really want to tell you?
1:34:19 And I know you don’t want to hear it, but you would be doing me a real kindness if you would just listen to me for a minute.
1:34:20 And I know it’s me.
1:34:20 It’s all me.
1:34:21 It’s not you.
1:34:22 It’s all on me.
1:34:23 This is me.
1:34:27 But I just – it would be better if you could just let me.
1:34:33 And most of the time she says, you know, with great forbearance, right?
1:34:35 Like, sure, mama, go ahead.
1:34:38 Sometimes she says, not today.
1:34:41 And then I actually have to listen, you know?
1:34:43 So, yeah.
1:34:46 But there were probably other things I’m not thinking of right now.
1:34:49 I’ve written them all down because a lot of people have asked me this question.
1:34:53 And what I like to say is this is – I’m not a physician.
1:34:55 I’m not a psychiatrist.
1:34:58 This is not a recommendation or recipe for your children.
1:35:02 I’m just telling you what I did as a scientist.
1:35:04 And you wrote down what you did.
1:35:05 You still have a copy of that.
1:35:08 So I can link it below for anyone that does want to read what you did.
1:35:12 Yes, but it’s – again, it’s –
1:35:14 It’s what you did for your daughter at that time.
1:35:16 Yeah, just as a person.
1:35:23 Who had read the literature, I – it’s not a – it’s not – this is not medical advice.
1:35:31 It’s – I’m really strongly – and also I should say, you can’t force your adolescent to do anything.
1:35:36 You can’t even force your kids really to do anything unless you threaten them with physical harm.
1:35:40 They have to make that choice themselves, right?
1:35:41 And did she recover?
1:35:44 Yes, she did.
1:35:56 And I think one of the reasons why she is good now, it’s not that she never has challenges with her mood, but she understands them in physical terms.
1:36:01 She doesn’t understand her mood as being a psychological problem.
1:36:10 She understands it as a symptom or a barometer of her body budget.
1:36:14 This is something I learned from your work while I was researching, which was really, really helpful to me.
1:36:18 And it’s pretty much exactly what you just said, which is sometimes I’m in a not-so-good mood.
1:36:25 And if I’m not conscious about that, then the bad mood can wreak havoc, right?
1:36:26 I can be short with people or whatever.
1:36:36 And when I was reading your work and thinking about bad or good moods through the context of this body budget, it makes you pause for a second and go, what am I missing?
1:36:39 And it makes you very conscious of what you then do.
1:36:43 It almost makes you suddenly take hold of the wheel and go, okay, so there’s a problem here.
1:36:44 It’s a physical problem.
1:36:45 I didn’t get sleep last night.
1:36:46 I haven’t eaten.
1:36:51 Whatever it might be, be really aware of what this makes you do or feel or think.
1:36:58 And the actions you need to take are maybe cancel everything you were planning today and go back to bed.
1:37:02 Well, but I think that you just put your finger on the really important thing.
1:37:05 It’s that it changes what you do next.
1:37:06 Yeah.
1:37:09 And that changes the trajectory of what happens.
1:37:13 And I think this is really – it’s not like a magic cure.
1:37:24 And again, you know, but when someone is – when you feel really distressed, you either look to the world, like what is wrong with the world, or you look to yourself.
1:37:25 What is wrong with me?
1:37:27 And really, it could be.
1:37:28 Maybe there is something wrong with the world.
1:37:30 Maybe there is something wrong with you.
1:37:35 But most likely, it’s something – there’s a body budgeting problem.
1:37:45 Even if it’s the case that there’s something wrong with the world, you’re better equipped to deal with that thing if you are managing your body budget.
1:37:51 You really do need to design your calendar as much as you possibly can in the confines of the profession you have around that body budget.
1:37:56 And for me, the big change I made two years ago – super privileged, I get that, and everyone can do it.
1:38:01 I couldn’t do it when I was working in call centers – was I implemented a rule where there’s no meetings before 11 o’clock.
1:38:07 And it just means for me that I never set an alarm, so I wake up when I’m fully recharged.
1:38:09 And it was the most profound thing.
1:38:11 I should have done this way sooner.
1:38:13 But it’s had such a big impact on my life.
1:38:19 Because you can almost guarantee that it’s very, very rare for me to be underslept, although it happens because I have to travel and stuff a lot.
1:38:21 But that really had a profound impact on my life.
1:38:23 Yeah, and I think, you know –
1:38:24 And as a leader and as a –
1:38:25 Exactly.
1:38:41 And I think, honestly, if leaders take this seriously, then the hope is that there’ll be some realization that this is also important for everybody.
1:38:48 And, you know, we have a society that is structured in a particular way, but there’s no requirement that it’s structured in this way.
1:38:58 There’s, you know, the biggest predictor of work productivity after, you know, is sleep and hydration.
1:39:02 And after you take away sleep and hydration, I think exercise is up there too.
1:39:05 You know, some of us have more choices than others, right?
1:39:21 But it’s important, I think, for people who are CEOs, who are leaders, who are business leaders, to understand that there are good business reasons.
1:39:26 There are good economic reasons to take this shit seriously.
1:39:43 Am I right in thinking that alcohol impacts your body budget and it therefore makes it harder for you to exhibit all the other behaviors and expend energy in other areas and also therefore increases the probability that you’ll be depressed?
1:39:57 So I should say that I am not an expert in the metabolism of alcohol, so I’m going to extrapolate based on what I do know.
1:40:12 And what I would say there is that sometimes people will drink alcohol like they will eat chocolate or, you know, they’re doing it for the taste or for the experience of, you know, the ambiance and experience of it, right?
1:40:16 But a lot of people end up using alcohol.
1:40:22 They might start that way or they might start because they’re doing something with friends, but then they realize that it has a mood.
1:40:25 It affects their mood.
1:40:31 Anything which affects your mood, like people talk a lot about emotion regulation, but it’s actually mood regulation.
1:40:37 Again, you know, your mood is this, these simple feelings that are with you all the time.
1:40:40 You know, your brain is always regulating your body.
1:40:46 Your body is always sending signals back to your brain, which it, out of which it makes mood.
1:40:50 So mood is a property of consciousness.
1:40:53 It’s with you always.
1:41:01 Sometimes in moments you will make sense of the signals and the mood that goes with it in terms of the outside world.
1:41:04 And that’s when you experience emotion, right?
1:41:08 Where your actions are relating the two together in terms of your mood.
1:41:12 But a lot of the time, we don’t.
1:41:16 We just experience mood as a property of consciousness.
1:41:18 You know, this is a delicious drink.
1:41:20 That guy’s an asshole.
1:41:21 You’re very trustworthy.
1:41:25 The mood is embedded in the perception of the world.
1:41:31 And when people, it’s just like actually sometimes opioids have this effect also.
1:41:39 They are, they’re mood altering, meaning they’re, they are, if they’re manipulating your mood, they are manipulating your metabolism.
1:41:49 And when people get addicted, they often get addicted because they’re regulating their mood.
1:41:53 They’re attempting to reduce their suffering.
1:42:04 The problem with, or a problem, I shouldn’t say that problem because I don’t know exactly how mood, exactly how alcohol affects metabolism.
1:42:09 My expectation is that it’s not just one, it’s not just in one way.
1:42:12 And also, I do know there are context effects, actually.
1:42:17 So you can drink exactly the same amount of alcohol and it can have different effects in different contexts.
1:42:19 That totally blew my mind when I saw that research.
1:42:34 So I’m thinking it’s not a simple relationship, but one thing I do know is that your predictions become sloppier and you don’t take in prediction error.
1:42:36 You don’t learn.
1:42:49 You won’t, you won’t update any, you know, so there, and so, and your behaviors are not necessarily well calibrated to the situation that you’re in,
1:42:52 which can have all kinds of downstream difficult problems.
1:42:59 You know, you can make things in the downstream worse for yourself and make it harder to do budgeting later.
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1:44:18 I wanted to ask you about something I heard you say.
1:44:20 And I’ve actually heard other guests on my podcast say it.
1:44:28 And I wasn’t ever sure if it was true until I heard you say it, which is that we can change our emotions by smiling.
1:44:42 Because if the brain is predicting, then presumably if I do a big smile and I go, yes, then the brain is going to predict good feelings and going to cause good feelings, et cetera, et cetera.
1:44:44 And are you going to cause me to feel nice about myself?
1:44:46 Well, yes and no.
1:44:51 I think, you know, people smile when they’re not happy, too.
1:44:53 People smile when they’re angry.
1:44:57 People smile when they’re plotting the demise of their enemy.
1:44:59 You know, people smile for all kinds.
1:45:01 People smile when they’re afraid.
1:45:04 But can I make myself happier technically by smiling?
1:45:16 The meta-analytic evidence suggests that there is a slight effect, that it’s – that there’s a small – yeah, yeah.
1:45:18 Crinkle your – crinkle.
1:45:18 There you go.
1:45:21 It’s like putting – put a pencil between your teeth.
1:45:23 No, go ahead.
1:45:23 Oh, you need that, yeah.
1:45:24 Now smile.
1:45:26 Now crinkle.
1:45:26 Okay.
1:45:28 So it’s like that.
1:45:33 And the – so what I would say is it’s a minuscule effect size.
1:45:34 Like it’s very small.
1:45:35 I do feel happier.
1:45:36 Do you?
1:45:36 Yeah.
1:45:39 But that’s because I made you do something silly maybe?
1:45:39 Maybe, yeah.
1:45:44 But anyways, the point being that it’s overblown as an effect.
1:45:55 I think there’s a small – my recollection is that the last meta-analysis I read was that there was a small effect.
1:46:00 But a small effect means it doesn’t work for everyone and it doesn’t work always.
1:46:03 It’s just really, really a very, very small effect.
1:46:08 You must have a perspective on ADHD, which has become a huge topic of conversation in society.
1:46:10 I was diagnosed with ADHD.
1:46:16 I don’t necessarily take it to mean anything because I’ve seen so many variations of ADHD in my friends.
1:46:25 But there’s been this big rise of ADHD and linked to the work that you’ve done on the brain being a predictive tool.
1:46:37 So my general response is the following, that people – there’s a rise in people self-diagnosing and in using diagnosis as an explanation
1:46:44 for behavior or for why people experience what they experience or whatever.
1:46:47 Diagnoses are not explanations of anything.
1:46:48 They’re descriptions.
1:46:51 They don’t explain anything.
1:47:00 And to treat a diagnosis like it’s an explanation is a form of essentializing, which is not a good thing.
1:47:15 It means that you’re assuming that there’s some kind of underlying, unchanging essence, which is responsible for – in fact, there is something called psychological essentialism, where you don’t even know what the essence is.
1:47:19 You just assume it’s there, you just assume it’s there, and that it’s the cause of all these symptoms.
1:47:22 But a diagnosis is just a description of symptoms.
1:47:29 And diagnoses are mostly useful for billing hours of treatment.
1:47:40 They’re not optimized for pockets, describing pockets of behavior that are, you know, or collections of behavior that tend to go together.
1:47:44 Because people sometimes think that serotonin and dopamine are the reason why someone has ADHD.
1:47:47 That’s like one of the theories that I’ve –
1:47:49 So there are multiple serotonin receptors.
1:47:51 There are multiple dopamine receptors.
1:47:53 They don’t all do the same thing.
1:47:55 Serotonin doesn’t do one thing.
1:47:57 Dopamine doesn’t do one thing.
1:48:03 It does different things in different places in the body and the brain, depending on what the receptors are.
1:48:13 And also, every resource of resilience and every symptom of difficulty has a context to it.
1:48:24 There are requirements, the way our society is structured, there are requirements for sitting and paying attention to something for long periods of time.
1:48:29 And that requirement is hidden in the background.
1:48:39 It’s there so frequently that we forget that that’s the conditional – that’s the condition upon which diagnoses are made.
1:48:47 So whatever – first of all, ADHD is not one set of symptoms.
1:48:48 It’s a variety.
1:49:01 It’s like it’s a – you know, there’s a lot of variation in the way that – you can have different symptom profiles and have the same diagnosis because it’s just descriptive and there are lots of symptoms.
1:49:08 Some of those symptoms also occur in – they overlap with other syndromes, other diagnostic clusters.
1:49:15 But the point is that they all – when you diagnose someone, it makes it sound like that’s a property of that person.
1:49:16 Yeah.
1:49:16 But it’s not.
1:49:20 It’s a property of a person in the context that they’re in.
1:49:26 And social expectation by – by any respects, like can he pay attention in school?
1:49:28 Well, right.
1:49:33 And the way that school is organized is, you know, you sit for long periods of time.
1:49:45 Well, it may be that there are other circumstances in which not holding your attention on one thing for a long period of time could be advantageous.
1:49:51 So my point is that there are very few things that are just categorically good or categorically bad.
1:49:53 There’s always a hidden condition.
1:49:53 Sure.
1:49:55 There’s always a hidden context.
1:49:59 And so I think it’s really important to foreground that context.
1:50:00 You’re not broken.
1:50:07 You’re just – your suitability to a certain context has been deemed to be – like doesn’t fit.
1:50:09 It’s not productive for that context.
1:50:19 And that may sound like weasel words or it may – you know, but it’s not because it’s important that competencies are by context.
1:50:27 And again, I would say this is not, you know, me being a bleeding heart, you know, progressive or whatever.
1:50:30 I mean, I am a bleeding heart progressive, but this is not an example of that.
1:50:32 This is an example of me being pragmatic.
1:50:39 You can regulate each other, something you talked about earlier on, which I found really, really interesting.
1:50:48 I was reading about a study where – of 25,000 people and they found that people having a heart attack were 14% more likely to survive if they were married.
1:50:51 But the other thing that I found interesting is that we regulate each other with words.
1:50:57 And I think you did a study on assessing the power of words to facilitate emotion.
1:51:01 You were – it was a study you co-authored.
1:51:27 Well, we’ve studied the power of words in many contexts, including words as invitations to make sense of – you know, so if an instance of emotion is you making meaning of what is going on inside your body in relation to the world, then you can – you invite – every time you use an emotion word, you invite people to make meaning in that way.
1:51:31 So you’ve proven, then, that certain words can calm us down?
1:51:35 Well, yes, but I wouldn’t say I’ve proven anything.
1:51:37 Scientists don’t, you know –
1:51:38 Shown, demonstrated.
1:51:41 Yeah, demonstrated in a – you know, in a context, right?
1:51:45 Like, we – you know, scientists don’t like the F word.
1:51:48 The fact – I like the other F word, but the fact.
1:51:49 Fact.
1:51:57 That’s a tough one because it means something that holds under all circumstances in all contexts, and that’s very rarely the case.
1:51:59 So – but yes, we have.
1:52:06 So – and I mean, so if you’ve done it probably a million times, you text things to people, do you not?
1:52:06 Yeah.
1:52:15 Yeah, and when you text a couple of words to your partner or your friend, you can change their heart rate.
1:52:17 You change their breathing rate.
1:52:22 You can change all kinds of chemicals, all kinds of protein synthesis just with a couple of words.
1:52:27 Again, you know, we live in a – you know, free speech is important.
1:52:31 Freedoms are important, but freedoms come with responsibilities.
1:52:39 Like it or not, we regulate each other’s nervous systems in all kinds of ways, including with words.
1:52:42 And –
1:52:43 For better or for worse.
1:52:44 For better or for worse.
1:52:45 Exactly.
1:52:47 And so –
1:52:49 You really made me think differently about stress as well, generally.
1:53:03 Because if I think about my life through the lens of this metabolic budget and stress is a burden to this budget, then if I don’t limit my stress, I’m much more likely to go over budget.
1:53:11 And if I go over budget, my immune system might be the thing that I cut the costs of or something else.
1:53:11 Right.
1:53:15 I mean, there’s good – you can’t be without stress.
1:53:16 That would mean you’d be without effort.
1:53:29 So, you know, sometimes scientists will talk about good stress and bad stress, which really just means stress that is planned and where you replenish what you spend and stress that is pernicious and you don’t.
1:53:30 Chronic stress.
1:53:32 Chronic stress or, you know.
1:53:47 So, you know, if you’re in a stressful meeting, a meeting where it’s affecting your mood, that means there’s been some metabolic impact, take into account what that means.
1:53:59 With all that you know about the brain, I wondered if you – if it’s changed your view at all on religion and God and spirituality and if there is a higher power at all.
1:54:01 The brain is such a wonderfully complex, beautiful thing.
1:54:06 You know, it’s the objective observer in 2025 looks at a brain because this is fantastic.
1:54:10 Many people then conclude that there must be a creator of that brain.
1:54:13 But also we’ve talked so much today about meaning and the point of it all.
1:54:18 So everything you’ve learned about the brain and neuroscience and psychology, has it made you believe in a God?
1:54:19 No.
1:54:23 Has it made you more atheist or agnostic?
1:54:27 I’m pretty firmly an atheist.
1:54:42 I don’t think that the wondrous complexity of nature or the brain or the nervous system requires a designer.
1:54:45 And that logic doesn’t make sense to me.
1:54:48 So this is obviously a terrible leap.
1:54:55 But do you therefore think that there’s no inherent meaning to life outside of, you know, the, like, reproduction and –
1:54:59 I’m just reading for the second time this book.
1:55:01 It’s called Open Socrates.
1:55:02 Okay.
1:55:05 And it’s a really wonderful book.
1:55:10 And I’ve learned a lot about Socratic philosophy that I didn’t know.
1:55:18 And one of the things that Socrates thought was important was asking this question of what is meaning.
1:55:23 And that you shouldn’t be asking this question in 15-minute increments.
1:55:28 You should be really asking this question about the expanse of your life.
1:55:49 And so I think, if anything, being a scientist who studies how a brain in constant conversation with a body and the other brains and bodies in our world and even the physical nature of our world,
1:56:03 How that creates lots of minds, including our very Western mind, that makes me think more about the importance of philosophy, actually.
1:56:10 Because I think philosophy is asking the same kinds of questions that religious belief tries to answer.
1:56:13 And for me, that’s a better path.
1:56:15 I think it’s a more comfortable path.
1:56:19 I’ve often been asking questions like this my whole life, actually.
1:56:22 So it makes me feel more like, what’s the point?
1:56:23 Like, what is the ultimate point?
1:56:33 I think the answer for me, the ultimate point, is to leave the world a little better than I found it.
1:56:38 It’s like the Johnny Appleseed, you know, philosophy.
1:56:45 You know, like as a scientist, scientists often, you know, a lot of us, we don’t do what we do for money.
1:56:46 Money’s not bad.
1:56:47 But we don’t do what we do for money.
1:56:49 We do it for other motivations, right?
1:56:54 To know, to be curious, to try to discover things.
1:56:59 And at some point, we start to think about, well, what’s your legacy, right?
1:57:01 Most of us are not Darwin.
1:57:04 We’re not William James.
1:57:07 We’re not, you know, Heisenberg.
1:57:10 We’re not, you know, most of us are not those people.
1:57:13 So what’s your legacy?
1:57:19 And in the end, I realized that I’ve published a lot of peer review papers.
1:57:25 When people introduce me, you know, they give some kind of like, you know, about my citation, you know, people, whatever.
1:57:32 Dr. Lisa is one of the most influential figures in the field of emotion, neuroscience, and the nature of the brain.
1:57:39 She is among the top 0.1% cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience.
1:57:42 Yeah, that’s all nice, super nice.
1:57:55 But actually, my legacy is really the people who I’ve trained, the minds that I’ve had the opportunity to engage with.
1:58:16 And if I were going to be bean counting, I might be bean counting the number of laboratories that now exist that didn’t exist before, several generations of scientists who I trained, or who, you know, and also who trained me, I mean, along the way.
1:58:23 So that’s my legacy in some ways, really, it’s the people, it’s the people, and the ideas.
1:58:48 And I would like to think, you know, when I used to do a lot of classroom teaching, I would feel like, what I told myself is, if I can change the trajectory, the outcomes of just one person in this class, just one, then I will have done my job.
1:58:57 You know, and I kind of feel that way, you know, and I kind of feel that way a little bit, sort of the same about the public, the public face of what I’m doing, right?
1:59:01 The public science education.
1:59:14 If I can help, if I can help, if something that I’ve learned or something I’ve communicated can help somebody else live a more intentional
1:59:34 life of agents with agency where they’re choosing and they’re impacting their loved ones or their children, then, then that’s my, then I’ve done my job.
1:59:35 That’s my legacy.
1:59:47 And the hard thing about that kind of a legacy, a legacy of ideas impacting people’s lives, is that you don’t ever know what your impact is.
1:59:51 But that’s part of the deal.
1:59:59 We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for.
2:00:04 Question is, how to live a life without attaining anything?
2:00:07 I have some context on this person.
2:00:12 They are a black belt, Shaolin monk.
2:00:14 So they talk a lot about identity.
2:00:15 Sure.
2:00:19 And they, and living without encumbrances and attachments and so on.
2:00:19 Right.
2:00:22 So it’s, it’s, it’s, it sounds like a very Buddhist question.
2:00:28 The problem is that I think even a Buddhist attains something, they attain enlightenment.
2:00:30 So they don’t have attachments necessarily.
2:00:31 They don’t have wealth.
2:00:32 They don’t have power.
2:00:34 They don’t, but they attain something.
2:00:36 They attain enlightenment.
2:00:40 They attain tranquility.
2:00:43 How about then how to live life without your identity?
2:00:48 Making you unhappy?
2:01:00 Well, I think it’s important to remember that you don’t really have an identity that is separate from the moment that you’re in.
2:01:02 It’s not like there’s an essence to you.
2:01:15 And what I would say is that every, everything you experience, everything you do is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present.
2:01:32 That means to change who you are, you can change what you remember or how you predict, or you can change the sensory present by literally getting up and moving somewhere else, like going for a walk.
2:01:38 Or you can change the sensory present by what you pay attention to, mindfulness, for example, right?
2:01:43 You, there are, there are some sensory signals that are front and center in your attention.
2:01:45 And there are some that are in the background lurking.
2:02:00 For example, you can, right now you’re not paying attention to some sensory signals, but the minute that I say them, point them out, you will be, like the pressure of the chair against your back and your legs.
2:02:03 Now they’re in the forefront of your attention because I just mentioned them.
2:02:08 And so what I would say is that there is no essence to who you are.
2:02:10 You are what you do.
2:02:14 In that moment, you are what you do.
2:02:18 And you can change what you do.
2:02:31 You can change what you experience, the consequence of the lived experience, which is the consequence of what you do, by what you remember and what the context is.
2:02:34 So that’s my answer.
2:02:38 If you always remember that, you will never be attached.
2:02:53 You will never crave or strive, you know, to have things and like all of these artificial things, which prop up the illusion that you are and you have an essence to you that you, that, you know, is unchanging across situations.
2:02:59 Yeah, we, I, we are very quick to fall into the trap of thinking we are what we did.
2:03:09 And that’s, I much prefer, I am what I do, because that means that I have agency to make a different decision in the moment, irrespective of what I did in the past.
2:03:11 But that’s the trap we fall into.
2:03:20 In 10 minutes time, I bet I’ll be downstairs and I’ll be back into the trap of thinking that I am Stephen Bartlett who did this thing for 32 years or did, you know.
2:03:22 Lisa, thank you.
2:03:25 Thank you so much for, thank you for everything that you do.
2:03:27 I’ve, I’ve, you’ve changed my mind in a really profound way.
2:03:29 And that’s quite hard because I sit here quite a lot.
2:03:35 So I have lots of conversations about the brain and about lots of, lots of new studies that have come out, et cetera, et cetera.
2:03:42 But you’ve completely changed my mind and made me think from, in a completely different way, which I’m really grateful for.
2:03:44 So thank you so much because that’s a gift.
2:03:48 And that’s not a gift that I always get doing this job, but it really is a gift.
2:03:51 And it’s one that I think will help me to live a better life ultimately.
2:04:07 But hopefully also for everybody that’s listening and thank you for stepping into the public communication side of your life because I was going to say it’s someone that knows what you know and that has done the work that you’ve done.
2:04:22 It is so important to the extent that I almost consider it to be like a really critical responsibility because there’s people like us that sit on these podcasts who aren’t in the laboratory, that are getting our information from social media, TikTok, or any, any odd person that says anything.
2:04:27 And it’s really, really important that people like you step out more and share what you know.
2:04:32 And thank you so much for writing these books because they are absolutely brilliant.
2:04:36 And just like you’ve changed my mind today, I think these books will change a lot of people’s lives.
2:04:38 I highly recommend this book, How Emotions Are Made.
2:04:40 I’m going to link it below, The Secret Life of the Brain.
2:04:47 And also for something a little bit shorter, but equally accessible, this book here, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
2:04:49 Thank you so much.
2:04:50 Thank you so much.
2:04:53 I’m going to let you into a little bit of a secret.
2:05:01 You’re probably going to think me and my team are a little bit weird, but I can still remember to this day when Jemima from my team posted on Slack that she changed the scent in this studio.
2:05:05 And right after she posted it, the entire office clapped in our Slack channel.
2:05:10 And this might sound crazy, but at the Diary of a CEO, this is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show.
2:05:12 And that is why the show is the way it is.
2:05:18 By understanding the power of compounding 1%, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life.
2:05:21 It isn’t about drastic transformations or quick wins.
2:05:27 It’s about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes.
2:05:32 So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary, and it’s truly beautiful.
2:05:36 Inside, there’s lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well.
2:05:37 Some interactive elements.
2:05:46 And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life.
2:05:52 So if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for your team, then head to thediary.com right now.
2:05:53 I’ll link it below.
2:05:56 This has always blown my mind a little bit.
2:06:00 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven’t yet subscribed to this show.
2:06:02 So could I ask you for a favor?
2:06:08 If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button.
2:06:15 And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I’ll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week.
2:06:20 We’ll listen to your feedback, we’ll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we’ll continue to do what we do.
2:06:21 Thank you so much.

0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:08 The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers,
0:00:13 people who are arguably the best at what they do. How do they do it? What are their influences,
0:00:19 favorite books, frameworks, lessons learned, things that you can apply to your own life?
0:00:25 And I have someone you may not have heard speak before on the podcast today, Rich Barton,
0:00:30 a close friend of Chris Saka and some other guests we’ve had. He is the co-founder and
0:00:35 co-executive chairman of Zillow, a company transforming how people buy, sell, rent,
0:00:41 and finance homes. Before Zillow, Rich founded Expedia within Microsoft in 1994 and successfully
0:00:48 spun the company off as a public company in 1999. He served as president, CEO, and board director of
0:00:53 Expedia, and later co-founded and served as non-executive chairman of Glassdoor. He has done
0:01:01 so many different companies and he has a lot of stories from the trenches, a lot that you can use
0:01:08 that is tactical and practical. He’s also super fit, super active. I would say a great father and
0:01:14 husband. He is an incredible human being, sort of full stack. And that’s part of the reason I really
0:01:20 wanted to have him on the show. We did it in person. We covered a lot of ground and I think you’re going
0:01:25 to enjoy it. I loved it. So with just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible,
0:01:31 we’ll get straight to the meat and potatoes and a wide-ranging conversation with none other than
0:01:37 Rich Barton. My first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which made everything else possible, is built around
0:01:44 the acronym and framework DEAL, D-E-A-L, define, eliminate, automate, and liberate. Now, of course,
0:01:49 after you define all the things you want, your metrics, 80-20, blah, blah, blah, then you want
0:01:54 to get rid of as much as possible, eliminate. But sometimes there are things that are a huge hassle,
0:01:59 like expense management for a lot of companies, which you can’t get rid of. They are essential
0:02:05 to your business. But today, thank God, you can automate it. And there is no better way to do that
0:02:11 than with today’s sponsor, Ramp. Ramp is a free corporate card that automates away your entire expense
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0:03:12 Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that
0:03:16 when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative,
0:03:23 creative, podcasting, writing, et cetera, before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive
0:03:29 stuff and everyone else’s agenda for my time. For me, let’s just say I’m a writer and entrepreneur.
0:03:35 I need to focus on the making to be happy. If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces
0:03:42 that are constantly churning, I end up feeling stressed out. And that is why today’s sponsor
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0:05:11 optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start
0:05:17 shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would’ve seen a perfect time. What if I did
0:05:21 the opposite? I’m a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
0:05:25 The Tim Ferriss Show.
0:05:35 I know ADQ a little bit. He’s a friend. And there was a point at which, you know, I like
0:05:41 to observe magic product things. And of course, Apple has tons. But my typical morning news setup
0:05:47 is I’m kind of doing my email and sifting through things while I drink my coffee. And I’ve got
0:05:55 my iPad set up next to it, rolling, you know, CNBC quietly on mute. And at one point, a couple
0:06:01 years ago, I moused off the left edge of the screen and it seamlessly went onto the, and
0:06:05 all of a sudden my mouse is on the iPad. And I was like, oh my God, it just decided because
0:06:08 it was the same guy logged in. It’s an extended monitor.
0:06:09 Yeah.
0:06:11 And I texted him immediately. I’m like, oh, Eddie.
0:06:21 Why do you have CNBC playing concurrently? Is that just old habits die hard? Or is it,
0:06:25 let’s see if anything cataclysmic or monumental has happened that I need to be aware of?
0:06:32 It’s my favorite source of news because business news is generally happy.
0:06:33 Yeah. Got it.
0:06:43 Just don’t wallow in the bullshit. And regular news makes me feel bad. And CNBC at best makes
0:06:49 me feel good. And most of the time is just mid, that’s fine. And I get the news. I’m interested
0:06:55 in business and companies and strategy and trends. And it is a pretty funny channel. It kind of gets
0:07:00 on repeat. You don’t need to watch it very long, but they get good interviews too. So I usually don’t
0:07:04 have the volume on, I have the closed caption scrolling. And then if something catches my
0:07:05 eye, I don’t know how to do it.
0:07:09 So let’s take a closer look then at the other screen.
0:07:09 Yeah.
0:07:11 You have your coffee.
0:07:11 Yeah.
0:07:12 Yeah.
0:07:13 What time is this?
0:07:21 Yeah. I’m a pretty early riser. 6.30 I get up usually and long before Sarah, my wife. And so
0:07:24 these hour and a half, two hours I get in the morning are nice.
0:07:25 Pristine.
0:07:29 My kids have all left the house now. There was a routine when my kids were in the house
0:07:36 that was obviously very different and really fun. I can talk about that. But now I have
0:07:44 two hours of just catch up on the stuff in my news feed, which is my inbox, my email inbox.
0:07:49 I’m kind of old school that way. And as I go through that, I’m catching up on the news on
0:07:52 my iPad. I have a smoothie every morning with lots of stuff.
0:07:53 What’s the stuff?
0:07:57 No supplement kinds of things, but lots of…
0:07:57 Cat testicles?
0:08:07 I am not one of those guys. I am not one of the longevity supplement people. But I’ll tell you
0:08:15 what’s in it. It’s about three or four ounces of oat milk, ice, an apple. It used to be a banana.
0:08:23 I’ve switched to kind of two-thirds of an apple. Pistachios, macadamias, a handful of blueberries.
0:08:29 My favorite electrolyte. I’m getting ready for my workout. It’s not very big. My favorite
0:08:31 electrolyte is Procari Sweat.
0:08:36 Yeah, the blue can, man. I had a lot of that when I lived there as an exchange student.
0:08:41 My nutritionist says, that’s the one. And I’m like, okay. I’d been taking another one,
0:08:43 using another one. She’s like, nope, this is the one.
0:08:45 Not much. A prune?
0:08:46 Prune.
0:08:47 Prune.
0:08:48 Because…
0:08:48 Keeps things moving.
0:08:53 Keeps things moving. And that’s very important. You know, young people out there don’t really
0:08:54 realize how important that is yet.
0:08:55 Yeah.
0:09:00 But as you age, you realize how that can affect your day, really. Having everything moving.
0:09:05 Here’s a little hack. I’m not really a hacky guy, but I do have a lot of quirks, I guess.
0:09:08 Hyperice. You know that company that makes the…
0:09:12 Okay. They have a thing. I think they bought a bunch of products, but there’s a back one called
0:09:14 the Venom. You must have run into that.
0:09:16 I think it heats and vibrates.
0:09:17 Yes.
0:09:18 Yeah.
0:09:25 So I actually, for my whole kind of 45 minutes of that routine at the kitchen table, you know,
0:09:30 with a lot of light coming in as soon as the sun’s up, I have it on repeat. I’m wearing that
0:09:33 Venom. Oh my God. That loosens everything up too.
0:09:37 So you mentioned before your workout. So this is all pre-workout.
0:09:44 Yeah. I need to get things going and feel settled, a little bit settled, and brain on
0:09:46 before I work out.
0:09:48 Mm-hmm. Coffee helps too.
0:09:53 Coffee helps all that. Yep. And I don’t drink a lot of coffee. Today I had a little too much
0:09:58 because I’m off time zone a little bit, but I’ll have one, maybe two cups and that’ll be the
0:09:58 caffeine for the day.
0:09:59 Yeah. Got it.
0:10:05 So I go through that and once everything’s, you know, make my ablutions and change into
0:10:07 my workout stuff.
0:10:08 Rinse your face with some holy water.
0:10:14 And pretty much every day I do a workout. I can’t really get my mind right without that.
0:10:18 All right. So we’re going to talk about the workout for people who are audio only. This
0:10:24 guy looks like a, I don’t know how you, a Marvel character meets Abercrombie and Fitch model,
0:10:29 not to mention scion of business. It’s unfair. I don’t know.
0:10:34 How I got the short straw on this genetic and habit lottery, but we’re going to talk about
0:10:41 the training because I have this working pet theory that longevity may be inversely correlated
0:10:46 with the number of things that you do for longevity. In other words, there are a few things that
0:10:53 really matter, but then there’s a long tail of things of questionable value that also have
0:11:00 unknown, uncharted side effects. So when you start throwing the kitchen sink plus plus at your body,
0:11:07 the likelihood of you heading in the wrong direction is probably higher or just as high.
0:11:12 My observation is the harder you push against something, the harder it pushes back. And I think
0:11:18 the people who are pushing really hard at the longevity and the supplement thing and the whole
0:11:23 day scheduled out lifestyle things to improve health span. Yeah. Most of that’s probably not
0:11:29 useful. Yeah. There’s some basics, you know, and maybe the most important basic is when I was younger,
0:11:34 my kids were in the house because I got up early. I was to get the kids to school parent. Yeah.
0:11:42 While Sarah became more beautiful, she stays up late and I love to cook. I’ve had several jobs as a kid
0:11:48 growing up where I was a short order chef and worked in a lot of kitchens and I love to cook. And so our
0:11:56 house is set up. We have a kitchen Island with a big bar with stools and the cooktop is on the other side.
0:12:04 And whenever the kids wandered downstairs bleary eyed, I was their short order breakfast chef and anything they
0:12:10 wanted, I would make, which was so fun. It was like the breakfast buffet with the four seasons or something.
0:12:13 Whatever they wanted. I had it. I could whip it up really, really fast because you get that skill
0:12:21 when you’re a short order chef. I have my younger boy had some kind of ADHD stuff and started taking those,
0:12:30 the meds. I can’t remember how old he was, 10, 12. And those meds make kids, it’s an appetite suppressant.
0:12:37 Oh, for sure. Okay. So maybe, you know, and I was a typical parent. Our primal urge is to feed our
0:12:42 children. That’s it. Like feed and care for our children. That is the overriding program that kind
0:12:48 of puts everything else down. And so I got to the point where I was so worried about how skinny he was
0:12:53 and he wasn’t eating the rest of the day. He was hungry in the morning and I would like make a 12 egg
0:12:59 frittata and like put potatoes in it and sausage in it. And he downed the thing. And I’m like, okay,
0:13:01 he’s good for the day.
0:13:01 Yeah.
0:13:05 The anaconda diet, just one huge meal and it works.
0:13:10 Yeah. And the punctuation on this one, aside from that, just being really quality time,
0:13:14 regardless of what kind of mood the kids were in, it was just really quality. I cherish it.
0:13:22 I took a picture most days. Okay. Totally candid. There’s no posing. I would sneak a picture
0:13:27 every day. And now I have a folder called the breakfast club on my, you know, in my picture,
0:13:34 my iPhone pictures. And I have like a thousand pictures and it’s a time series of these kids
0:13:37 growing up. It’s a virtual possession, but it’s my most prized possession.
0:13:43 all right. We’re going to double click on a bunch of things we passed over. Yeah. Let’s hop
0:13:49 for the, the entrepreneurial set listening. This is also related to more than just pure
0:13:55 entrepreneurship, but let’s see if this is dead end or if it takes us somewhere. Who was Brad Chase?
0:13:58 Brad Chase? Yeah. What impact did he have on your life?
0:14:04 He was a great guy. He was my first real boss out of college. It’s not quite right,
0:14:10 but it’s close to right. Brad was a group product manager at Microsoft. Microsoft was my,
0:14:18 you know, I’ll call it my first job out of college. It had, this is 1991. Microsoft had only about 3,000
0:14:23 people at the time. And just for reference, because I have no idea how many employees do you think they
0:14:31 have now? It’s going to be a multiple of that. Of course. 300, 400,000. Yeah. Orders of magnitude.
0:14:37 Multiple orders of magnitude. Two to three. And the product managers were kind of this elite little
0:14:43 group of really smart people. We weren’t very big. And he was my boss and we were working on MS-DOS 5,
0:14:49 which maybe I would say we’ll have to go two standard deviations at in your audience distribution curve
0:14:53 to find anybody who really knows what MS-DOS 5 was. But it was a really big operating system
0:15:02 for Microsoft at the time. And we made an upgrade. And the feature was, we broke the 640K barrier.
0:15:07 Which you’re not going to engage on the geeky stuff. But it was a really big product. And my job
0:15:15 was to create the packaging, manage the manufacturing, and figure out how to get this physical product into
0:15:21 the Egghead. Some of you will remember Egghead. Egghead was a retail software store. And to push
0:15:28 the product out into Egghead. That was my first job. And Brad was a guy who, he’s one of my mentors.
0:15:34 You know, I only worked for him for a short period of time. I was a big idea thinker. You know,
0:15:40 big risks, big bets. And he encouraged me. At a very young age, he funded me to take a really
0:15:46 big swing at something and supported me in it. And it failed miserably.
0:15:48 Is this the book project?
0:15:48 Yeah.
0:15:49 You want to tell people about it?
0:15:53 Well, I don’t know how that interesting is, other than the lesson of take big swing.
0:15:58 It is. But the details help paint a picture. People can conjure a visual in their head.
0:16:02 All right. It’s become a huge series. It’s a series for dummies. Blank for dummies.
0:16:10 Yep. And the book that the Dummies series was founded on was DOS for dummies, believe it or not.
0:16:17 It was like the best-selling book about software of all time. And I was like, I’m a young product
0:16:25 manager. I want to sell more MS-DOS 5 upgrades. And I was like, okay, we have all these software
0:16:30 retailers where people go. But the really big thing at the time, believe it or not, was Barnes & Noble
0:16:37 and Borders bookstore. Bookstore experience was huge back then. And DOS for dummies sold millions and
0:16:44 millions of copies of this book in Barnes & Noble and Borders. And so I was like, why don’t we do a
0:16:51 bundle with DOS for dummies and have that be the manual for the upgrade? Bundle it together, the book
0:16:57 and the upgrade seems reasonable and distributed through bookstores. How brilliant. Uh, and so I
0:17:03 went and met with like one of the Riggio guys at Barnes & Noble. I met with the guy who created the
0:17:08 dummies series, this guy, John. So I met with all these people. We designed the product. It was really,
0:17:16 I was, you know, feeling pretty like a big deal. Built a bunch of it at probably cost us a to 10 bucks a
0:17:22 unit. Okay. Which is a lot for cogs, right? Yeah. Cost of goods sold. I can’t remember how many we
0:17:32 built, but it was at best a C, you know, maybe a D. What was the retail price? You hit the problem.
0:17:39 The problem was people are going in to buy a $12 book and it was a $54 price tag or $49 price tag,
0:17:44 which is what the, you know, basically what the software cost it at, uh, at egghead. And it kind of
0:17:48 looked a bit too much like a book. I kind of made it look like a book. Yeah. It wasn’t the
0:17:52 greatest cover. Anyway, I kind of, I’m embarrassed about what it looks like now. I have one of course
0:17:57 as a reminder, but yeah, it was just, it was too, the shock value was too much. People didn’t realize
0:18:02 there was software in it. And so we ate, we ate a bunch. We ended up getting rid of all the inventory,
0:18:08 but it was not a success. And the amazing thing, depending on where your audience is in their careers,
0:18:16 like you work at a lot of places out there and great organizations encourage innovation,
0:18:22 encourage big idea people to take big swings and do not punish them when it doesn’t work out
0:18:28 according to plan. If that happens too many times, maybe there’s a pattern and somebody should go find
0:18:34 another job. But Brad Chase, back to Brad, sat me down. I thought I was for my review and I thought I was
0:18:40 going to, who knows, it was a 10, $20 million mistake, you know? And I was a young kid and he
0:18:47 said, I remember distinctly, he said, all right, what’s your next big idea? Amazing. That is that
0:18:53 Microsoft was and is an amazing organization because of that kind of culture. Wow. How have you,
0:19:00 if you have sort of taken that forward into companies that you’ve built or just philosophically
0:19:06 or operationally speaking, how do you encourage that? Because there must be some constraints on
0:19:11 things so that you don’t light the whole house on fire. Yeah. Right. Yeah. How do you think about
0:19:17 enabling people to innovate? You don’t want learned helplessness where they’re afraid to do anything.
0:19:20 Right. At the same time, you don’t want some rogue trader like,
0:19:22 that’s right. That’s right.
0:19:28 Pierce turns or whatever. Yeah. It’s really hard, but everything ultimately boils down to the people
0:19:35 that you hire and the people you choose to work with and the people you keep and saying your culture
0:19:43 is X, Y, Z is very different from having people who channel that, those traits that you want. And so
0:19:50 my method for doing this is to make sure we’re really diligent about finding those innovators and the
0:19:56 entrepreneurs, sometimes who the intrapreneurs, let’s call them, okay? The inside entrepreneurs and
0:20:02 protect them a little bit because sometimes they’re different and mainline corporate culture
0:20:08 sometimes rejects, often rejects the innovators and the ones who want to disrupt whatever, just rock
0:20:14 the boat a little bit. And you really do need to rock the boat to innovate. And so the leadership needs
0:20:19 to hire, cultivate, protect, and invest in those people. Yeah.
0:20:22 The foreign bodies so they don’t get rejected by the corporate immune system.
0:20:23 That’s right.
0:20:24 Which is just, it’s just natural. Yeah.
0:20:25 You know?
0:20:31 All right. So let’s come back to one thing you mentioned. You said, in effect, not totally true,
0:20:35 but let’s consider Microsoft first job out of college. What was the actual first job?
0:20:39 I was, you know, I was one of these high performance.
0:20:40 There’s a confession coming.
0:20:45 Yeah. I was just one of those kids. And, you know, I went to Stanford and was an engineer.
0:20:46 Management consulting?
0:20:47 Yeah.
0:20:47 Really?
0:20:48 Yes.
0:20:48 No.
0:20:50 Say it ain’t so rich.
0:20:55 I know, but it was funny. There’s a good story here. I mean, I don’t know if it’s a good
0:20:56 story, but we’ll tell it. Yeah.
0:21:02 Yeah. I mean, I was like a success kid. Do well. Loved that. Identified that way. And
0:21:06 so, of course, whatever the hardest job that came to interview at Stanford when I was a senior,
0:21:10 of course, that’s the job I wanted. And there was like strategic planning at Disney. There
0:21:16 was the kind of investment banking training program, analyst program. And there was like
0:21:20 the strategy management consultant. And those were like the big ones. And it was the most
0:21:24 competitive, hardest to get. So that’s how I got tracked. And I took a job as a strategy
0:21:29 consultant in Cambridge, right out of college. I knew pretty damn quickly it wasn’t for me.
0:21:31 Was it about like BCG or who was?
0:21:32 It was a spinoff of BCG.
0:21:32 Okay.
0:21:38 Called Alliance Consulting Group. Great group of people. Super smart. It was going into a
0:21:43 recession though in 1989. And so a lot of people ended up losing their jobs. However, the interesting
0:21:50 thing was one of my besties at Stanford, Nina Roberts, who was an engineer with me. We were
0:21:57 both interviewing for all the same jobs. And she didn’t get the big job. But she got this
0:22:02 little tech company in Seattle, Microsoft, which of course I knew. The companies that I really
0:22:07 loved were Microsoft, Apple. All I needed to do was buy Microsoft and Apple stock back in
0:22:12 89. That would have been, yeah, I wouldn’t be talking with you now. Microsoft, Apple, I
0:22:16 liked Patagonia. That was a brand that I identified with. Anyway, Nina got the job as a product manager
0:22:23 at Microsoft. And she went to Seattle. I went to Cambridge. And we kept in close touch. And
0:22:28 I knew pretty quickly it wasn’t for me. And she knew Microsoft was the place for me and
0:22:32 was like on the horn with me every week saying, you got to come out here. You got to come out
0:22:36 here. And so it took about a year to finally get the flight out and the job offer.
0:22:42 Why did you know it wasn’t for you? What about it wasn’t for you? Because there are some people
0:22:43 who thrive in those environments, right?
0:22:50 Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You know, a trite answer would be dressing up in a suit and tie and
0:22:55 wearing uncomfortable shoes. Wasn’t for me. I like to go barefoot. Yeah. That really wasn’t what it
0:23:01 was. You know, it kind of makes you feel important when you dress up. And I was like presenting things to
0:23:07 CEOs and stuff. And it did feel important. And I got like a really good business school education
0:23:12 in competitive strategy. You know, the Michael Porter stuff. I basically got an MBA in this one
0:23:18 year. What I discovered about myself, and I discovered it there, I probably knew it before,
0:23:22 but I hadn’t really focused on it, was I believe the world is somewhat divided. It isn’t totally
0:23:29 binary, but it’s a continuum. But it’s maybe a barbell. Clients and servers. Okay. Which is kind of
0:23:36 a geeky software architecture reference, but people get it. There are all of these industries
0:23:44 that are set up to be service provision industries, lawyers, doctors, consultants, academics. And the
0:23:51 benefit of these industries is you get to indulge your curiosity and deal with lots of different
0:23:56 clients and lots of different problems. But oftentimes with consulting, you’re not seeing things through to
0:24:04 the finished product. And it was apparent to me really quickly that I derived my jollies on the
0:24:10 other hand from being a builder and the client. I actually loved what the clients were doing more
0:24:14 than what we were doing when, when I was a consultant. So it became clear to me that I was a client. I
0:24:18 wanted to build things. I derived my jollies that way. And so I started looking and it was good to
0:24:23 discover at a pretty young age. And then I got to Microsoft and it was like, I was a kid in a candy
0:24:30 store. I never left the place. Thank God for Nina, was it? Nina. Wow. I hope she still gets a box of
0:24:40 chocolates. We’re still close. She’s great. All right. So let’s talk about then Microsoft and Expedia.
0:24:47 How does this happen? I’ll just leave it broad. Well, back to the earlier conversation we had about
0:24:53 taking big swings and intrapreneuring. The how on how this happened is that Expedia was a
0:24:59 quote, venture startup inside of Microsoft. And then it spun out and we can get to that.
0:25:04 But the real reason I even got into it and left the operating system group was that my wife, Sarah,
0:25:11 who you just saw is a doctor. And she was applying to, she was in medical school at Northwestern and was
0:25:18 applying to her residencies. She’s an OBGYN. And there’s only one residency, OBGYN residency in
0:25:25 Seattle where I lived with only six or seven residents a year and one of the most attractive
0:25:31 residencies in the country. So super competitive. We were engaged and then soon married. After that,
0:25:37 we got married pretty young. And I was like, well, she’s not going to match out here in Seattle. So
0:25:41 I’d better get ready to move to New York city or, you know, this probably would have been New York
0:25:46 city where she matched. This was during the windows 95 launch. I left the windows 95 team and I went to
0:25:54 the consumer division at Microsoft, which was kind of small. Now just, this is going to maybe sound
0:26:01 like a side quest, but when you say you moved, did you just put in a request? Like how easy is that to
0:26:01 do?
0:26:06 At great companies, it’s relatively easy, relatively easy, especially for people who are tagged as high
0:26:13 potential, but it’s still not easy. Of course, Brad, who was my boss at the time, couldn’t believe
0:26:17 we’re launching windows 95. This is going to be the biggest launch of all time in the software
0:26:22 industry. Maybe one of the biggest product launches of all time. I don’t know if you remember that.
0:26:27 It was a big deal. And about six months before we launched, I had a big job there.
0:26:33 I interviewed for jobs over in the consumer division and took on a portfolio of multimedia
0:26:39 CD-ROMs. And the reason I did this, I was interested in consumer marketing, obviously, but the reason
0:26:45 I did this was that I was going to have to leave Microsoft and I wanted to start a company and
0:26:49 it wasn’t going to be an operating system. Yeah. Okay. Like that just wasn’t going to happen
0:26:55 for reasons that, you know, we don’t need to get into, but the government made clear to Microsoft
0:26:59 at one point. So I figured it was going to be a consumer software company and I wanted to go learn
0:27:04 that. And the folks over there were fantastic. Microsoft was fantastic. And I took on a portfolio
0:27:09 of CD-ROMs. Some of you out there will not even know what that is. This is kind of basically
0:27:10 precursor to the internet.
0:27:15 It’s the thing your doctor gives you that you can’t make any use of with all your images.
0:27:20 It’s true. It’s true. And some artists, some musicians still hand out like CDs.
0:27:22 It’s the artifact that your doctor gives you.
0:27:28 It was what, it was what the last, what came in the red envelopes at Netflix.
0:27:35 Anyway, so, but these things were like Wikipedia before Wikipedia was called Encarta and it was a
0:27:41 multimedia CD-ROM. And one of them with the products in my portfolio of like rando ideas
0:27:49 was an Encarta. So an encyclopedia of travel guides. This is really good. You take a whole bookshelf,
0:27:55 a whole shelf of travel guides, cram it down onto one CD-ROM pictures, audio. Wow. What could be better
0:28:01 for travel planning? And that was one of them. And I remember going into my first product review with
0:28:06 Bill Gates and others, which was a kind of every six months, every year kind of thing that the product
0:28:13 people did. And I was used to like business plans, but billions of dollars from the operating system
0:28:18 group. And I was responsible for this thing. And I’m like, Bill, like this is tiny. The whole travel
0:28:25 book industry in the U.S. is maybe a hundred million dollars. And that’s the whole thing. And so really,
0:28:30 A, there’s not an opportunity. And B, you can’t travel with the CD-ROM. There were no like,
0:28:35 like the laptop at that point was this compact suitcase that weighed 20 pounds. I’m like,
0:28:39 that’s when you want the travel guide when you’re traveling. So even though I know it’s your idea
0:28:48 and it’s kind of fun, it’s not going to work. That said, I demoed Easy Saber on Prodigy. Prodigy was an
0:28:48 online service.
0:28:49 Oh, yeah.
0:28:58 Okay. And I was a geeky online guy. Right. And Easy Saber was a tool for travel agents to use at home
0:29:03 on Prodigy to access the airline reservation systems. Okay. So it wasn’t meant for consumers,
0:29:08 but I could get access to it on Prodigy. And I demoed that for him. He actually knew about it.
0:29:12 I demoed that for him. I’m like, this is a change of the world thing. If we can have consumers
0:29:18 be able to do this, then we can become the largest, e-commerce wasn’t a word then,
0:29:21 we could become the largest seller of travel in the world. That was my pitch and my dream.
0:29:26 The pitch further went, and fund me on the outside because I’m going to have to move to New York
0:29:30 because my wife, she’s not going to match out here. And this doesn’t want to be a Microsoft business
0:29:36 anyway. It’s travel first, software second, not software first, travel second. He agreed with all
0:29:40 that. He thought it was an awesome idea. He also liked that we could rebuild all the mainframes
0:29:45 on Windows NT, which was a different conversation. So he loved it. He greenlit it. He was my first
0:29:50 venture capitalist. He said, no, don’t go do it on the outside. Do it here. We have a great team
0:29:56 that we’ll put together. And I’m sure Sarah will match her residency at University of Washington.
0:29:58 High degree of confidence.
0:30:04 That was the end of that. She did match. I honestly, to this day, don’t know if there was any thumb on the
0:30:09 scale. I doubt he had that kind of power, but she matched. I stayed in Seattle. He had promised me
0:30:14 that he’d consider spinning it out if it got big enough. And then that’s what happened. So we spun
0:30:19 in the height of the internet bubble, which is so bubbly that people today who think we’re in a bubble
0:30:21 have no concept. I mean, you remember.
0:30:22 Oh, yeah.
0:30:22 1999.
0:30:27 I moved out right before the Thelma and Louise car went off the cliff. I mean, I moved out to
0:30:29 the Bay Area in 2000.
0:30:31 It was crazy.
0:30:32 Impeccable timing.
0:30:38 We all thought we were the smartest people in the world. We really did. And we all thought those
0:30:42 people in New York City just didn’t get it. And then there was comeuppance, but Expedia was a really
0:30:50 good business. I was working for Balmer at the time. And I asked Steve for $100 million to spend on a
0:30:55 television advertising campaign because I said, we are becoming. We can do this. We are in the pole
0:31:02 position. We can build the biggest brand and travel. And Steve laughed at me like, no, we don’t do that.
0:31:08 I said, well, dogshit.com is going public right now at a billion dollar valuation. It wasn’t quite that.
0:31:13 It was like 500 million, which seemed big at the time. Really dumb, stupid stuff in my closet.com was
0:31:19 going public. You know, put it on the web anyway. And I was like, the public markets would give us
0:31:25 a hundred million dollars and it’ll cost basically nothing. And so let’s give this a try. Let me spin
0:31:28 this thing out. It’s a good HR experiment, human resources experiment too.
0:31:32 Now just explain for folks, why does spinning something out make sense? What are the
0:31:35 advantages of doing that to them and to you?
0:31:42 Okay. I mean, the financial answer to that is unlocking value that is stuck in a company. And
0:31:46 this happens a lot. That’s kind of the most uninteresting one.
0:31:48 Unlocking value, meaning.
0:31:52 It’s not getting valued by the shareholders as being part of Microsoft.
0:31:57 Right. But if you, if you take it public or do something outside of Microsoft, all of a sudden.
0:32:01 It could attract its own investor base that we’re interested in that in particular.
0:32:05 Okay. So there’s a conglomerate discount, generally speaking, in the public markets where
0:32:12 the more stuff you have in a big company, the less the individual businesses are valued.
0:32:16 There was a period of American business history where conglomerates actually got a premium,
0:32:22 like in the GE, the Jack Welch GE days and Honeywell. And there were all these big conglomerates.
0:32:26 And then the pendulum swung the other way. Microsoft could have cared less about the financial play,
0:32:35 though. However, I pitched it mostly as an HR experiment. Microsoft was getting so big at the
0:32:42 time that people could hide out in random corners of Microsoft. And as long as Windows NT, the operating
0:32:47 system succeeded or office, Microsoft Office succeeded, they could make a lot of money off their stock
0:32:55 options. And so that’s basically a compensation accountability disconnect. Okay. And so some of
0:33:02 the best people at Microsoft, there was this field of dreams, wild opportunity outside of Microsoft,
0:33:08 even though it was the place everybody wanted to work at the time, probably still is. There were great
0:33:13 people, like I’ll just say, like me, like I would not have stayed. I would have gone out and started
0:33:17 something on the outside because the opportunity was so great. And so Steve Ballmer understood this
0:33:18 really well.
0:33:20 God, this was like a talent retention pitch.
0:33:25 Sort of. Sort of. And so he’s like, yeah, we’ll take a flyer on it. And that was great. And Greg
0:33:29 Maffei, who was the CFO at the time, he became my chairman and he was really supportive. You know,
0:33:35 he and I still work together. He’s been a great, great mentor to me. We took 150 people out of
0:33:39 Microsoft. We gave them the choice if they wanted to stay or come. All but I think two people,
0:33:45 we had 150 of us, all but two people decided to come take the adventure, give it a rip. I was 32
0:33:47 years old, 31, 32 years old.
0:33:50 Now, were you pitching those people yourself?
0:33:50 Yeah.
0:33:54 What was the pitch? Because it’s going to be different than the pitch to Ballmer, right?
0:34:02 Yeah, way different. I mean, it was, I had had this idea for a while. And so the people I recruited,
0:34:07 back to an earlier comment I made, the people that were on the team were the people who were the
0:34:13 adventurers and the ones who wanted to, who would have left. Okay. And so this was all about the
0:34:20 adventure. The hardest sell was not the people. It was the spouses. And I remember several dinners,
0:34:26 like with an S1 for those, you know, it’s an IPO document with our, our Expedia draft of the S1 lying
0:34:34 on a dinner table at Wild Ginger in Seattle with a skeptical spouse. The S1 is highlighted and like,
0:34:38 there’s annotation and I’m having to answer like, you know, those were my toughest investors.
0:34:44 Actually, it worked out really well, maybe too well because Expedia was a real business. We actually
0:34:50 were profitable and growing like crazy. I mean, obviously digital travel agent made a lot of sense.
0:34:51 Okay.
0:34:51 Yeah.
0:34:58 And so when Thelma and Louise went off the cliff, as you say, we were already public. Okay. And we’d gone to
0:35:02 the moon. The stock price had gone to the moon. We crashed back down, but we had a real business
0:35:08 and very shortly popped back up on the climb and just climbed from there. And we’re very successful.
0:35:16 Microsoft, however, crashed with Thelma and Louise and it took 17 years for Microsoft to re-achieve
0:35:22 the same stock price it had in November of 99 when we spun Expedia out. So the HR experiment kind of failed.
0:35:27 How long did it take Expedia to recover or to get back on the climb?
0:35:31 I mean, to re-achieve the all time high, probably a couple of years.
0:35:33 Yeah. But a couple versus 17.
0:35:36 Yeah. But the valuations were a bit nutty, right?
0:35:36 Yeah.
0:35:42 So it was obvious that Expedia was on the right path very quickly. And there was kind of a flight
0:35:49 to quality with internet investors, which meant find the profitable recent IPOs, which there were not
0:35:51 many and let’s invest in those. But we were one.
0:35:58 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:37:24 Maybe this is not a good question, but I have to ask, how did you learn to pitch? How did you learn
0:37:32 to pitch different stakeholders? Because you’re talking about employees, bomber, gates, spouses,
0:37:33 like that is a skill set.
0:37:35 Preston Pyshko: Persuasion.
0:37:37 Preston Pyshko: Yeah. How did you develop that?
0:37:42 Preston Pyshko: It just must’ve been an innate thing that got a lot of exercise as I was growing up.
0:37:49 Preston Pyshko: I was an engineer by degree, but never a practicing engineer. I was an engineer
0:37:52 because I liked technology. I was a geeky kid.
0:37:55 Preston Pyshko: What type of engineer initially?
0:37:59 Preston Pyshko: The story there kind of answers the question. I was an industrial engineer,
0:38:02 theoretically, but I wanted to go study in Italy my junior year.
0:38:04 Preston Pyshko: Now, industrial engineer would be like,
0:38:10 you end up going to a smart design or one of those types of companies. Or how are you thinking your path
0:38:14 Preston Pyshko: That’s not a degree anymore at Stanford. It’s called management science and
0:38:19 engineering. And then there’s a kind of a symbolic systems things. The industrial engineering degree,
0:38:24 which kind of sunsetted, was really a kind of manufacturing efficiency.
0:38:24 Preston Pyshko: I got it. Okay.
0:38:25 Preston Pyshko: I got it.
0:38:28 Preston Pyshko: Optimization, simulation,
0:38:32 lots of computer work going into the design of making things more efficient.
0:38:32 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:38:33 Preston Pyshko: Kind of like the operations,
0:38:35 Preston Pyshko: Research, finance department, other places.
0:38:36 Preston Pyshko: That’s right.
0:38:36 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:38:40 Preston Pyshko: I did it just because it was a Bachelor of Science, not a Bachelor of Arts.
0:38:45 Preston Pyshko: It was the most businessy of the engineering disciplines.
0:38:47 Preston Pyshko: At Stanford, they called it imaginary engineering,
0:38:51 because the mechanical and the electrical folks didn’t respect us.
0:38:53 Preston Pyshko: Probably deservedly.
0:38:55 Preston Pyshko: Because we were more interested in business.
0:38:56 Preston Pyshko: But anyway,
0:39:00 Preston Pyshko: I did this because I had all these other interests and skills around
0:39:03 Preston Pyshko: persuasion and people and entrepreneurialism.
0:39:05 Preston Pyshko: Already at that point, as an undergrad.
0:39:06 Preston Pyshko: Already, already.
0:39:08 Preston Pyshko: As a kid, I had all that.
0:39:10 Preston Pyshko: I probably was a good pitch person already,
0:39:13 but had a lot of support and exercise of that.
0:39:14 Preston Pyshko: You mentioned Italy in passing.
0:39:16 Preston Pyshko: So we’re going to come to Italy.
0:39:19 Preston Pyshko: But how did you get that exercise when you were younger?
0:39:21 Preston Pyshko: I went to Italy.
0:39:25 Preston Pyshko: So I got off the industrial engineering track and Stanford was awesome.
0:39:27 Preston Pyshko: I came back and I like,
0:39:29 Preston Pyshko: Well, you can’t get an accredited degree now.
0:39:29 Preston Pyshko: I’m like, I don’t care.
0:39:33 Preston Pyshko: And Nina’s dad was a professor at the time.
0:39:33 Preston Pyshko: And he said,
0:39:36 Preston Pyshko: Well, Stanford, you can self design an engineering degree.
0:39:37 Preston Pyshko: So let’s just design one for you.
0:39:39 Preston Pyshko: So we designed, I designed one.
0:39:42 Preston Pyshko: So my degree is called general engineering colon industrial economics.
0:39:46 Preston Pyshko: Anyway, unlike a lot of kids today,
0:39:50 Preston Pyshko: I worked real summer jobs, you know, my kids generally did.
0:39:52 Preston Pyshko: Actually, my kids have worked real summer jobs.
0:39:54 Preston Pyshko: So we were talking like busboy?
0:39:55 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:39:58 Preston Pyshko: I mean, my daughter, I’m thinking of what their jobs are right now.
0:40:00 Preston Pyshko: My daughter spent, you’re going to know this place.
0:40:03 Preston Pyshko: You know, after gurneys was redone, it became like this club scene.
0:40:04 Preston Pyshko: This is out in Montauk.
0:40:05 Preston Pyshko: Once it got fancied up.
0:40:06 Preston Pyshko: It got super fancied up.
0:40:08 Preston Pyshko: Took away the day passes for the locals.
0:40:20 Preston Pyshko: It was after her sophomore year in college, I think, and I’m like, honey,
0:40:22 you’ve got a place to stay out in the Hamptons.
0:40:27 Preston Pyshko: You don’t need to get on the track, the track that every smart kid is supposed
0:40:27 to take.
0:40:28 Preston Pyshko: You don’t need to do that.
0:40:30 Preston Pyshko: Why don’t you get real experience?
0:40:35 Preston Pyshko: So she came and lived in our house out in Montauk and was the – who’s the
0:40:38 person that stands at the counter when – Preston Pyshko: The hostess?
0:40:40 Preston Pyshko: The hostess at the club part of gurneys.
0:40:41 Preston Pyshko: Oh, God.
0:40:44 Preston Pyshko: Okay, where it was like $2,000 tables.
0:40:44 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, yeah.
0:40:45 Preston Pyshko: That’s quite an education.
0:40:47 Preston Pyshko: It’s an amazing human nature.
0:40:48 Preston Pyshko: Human nature job.
0:40:49 Preston Pyshko: Oh, my God.
0:40:53 Preston Pyshko: She had a crazy, successful, interesting learning experience.
0:40:54 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:40:56 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, and we had fun watching it happen.
0:40:57 Preston Pyshko: And we also got tables set.
0:41:01 Preston Pyshko: Anyway, when I was a kid, I was the ice cream man.
0:41:02 Preston Pyshko: So I ran my own ice cream business.
0:41:04 Preston Pyshko: This is in Connecticut.
0:41:06 Preston Pyshko: I went to high school in Connecticut.
0:41:10 Preston Pyshko: I learned how to do house painting as a crew member of a buddy of mine.
0:41:15 Preston Pyshko: And then after one year doing that, I was like, well, well, I can bid the jobs
0:41:17 myself, you know, and I can hire a crew.
0:41:22 Preston Pyshko: And so I had my own painting company for a couple of years, which was hugely profitable
0:41:24 Preston Pyshko: for a kid. I mean, I made a ton.
0:41:28 Preston Pyshko: I had to pay for all my expenses at college, not my tuition.
0:41:31 Preston Pyshko: My parents covered the tuition, but I had to pay all my other expenses.
0:41:37 Preston Pyshko: So making back then, I would make like $15,000 or $20,000 in summer painting.
0:41:37 Preston Pyshko: Wow.
0:41:39 Preston Pyshko: And that was a boatload of money.
0:41:39 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:41:41 Preston Pyshko: And so I had run my own businesses.
0:41:43 Preston Pyshko: Got it. All right.
0:41:44 Preston Pyshko: I knew I liked it.
0:41:46 Preston Pyshko: And why did you go to Italy at all?
0:41:51 Preston Pyshko: Why did I want to go when I was in school? I have no Italian heritage,
0:41:58 as you can probably tell. But I went to Italy and Greece when I was in high school with my Latin
0:42:06 teacher and just had these awesome kind of kid high school trips. And while I was in Italy, I literally
0:42:13 Preston Pyshko: fell in love with the whole vibe, the food, the wine, the girls, the family culture.
0:42:18 Preston Pyshko: The kind of work is not that as important, you know, and I kind of fell in love
0:42:24 Preston Pyshko: with it and kept going back. So I went to study. And then after I sold Expedia
0:42:30 to Barry Diller, we were public and Barry Diller bought it. And we had three little kids and I was
0:42:35 Preston Pyshko: leaving after Barry Diller, I wanted to give space to the next team. And I said,
0:42:40 Preston Pyshko: let’s go back to Italy. And so we moved to Florence for a year after we sold Expedia.
0:42:43 Preston Pyshko: In fact, Nina, who I was talking about before, she was living there, married to a European
0:42:49 Preston Pyshko: guy. And I’d gone to Stanford there when I was a junior and I kept in touch with the
0:42:55 Preston Pyshko: woman who ran the Stanford program, Linda. And so we kind of moved to Florence and went back
0:42:59 Preston Pyshko: to school and learned how to paint and started road biking. Anyway,
0:43:01 Preston Pyshko: so I just, I love the whole Italy vibe.
0:43:05 Preston Pyshko: Let’s take a closer look at the Barry Diller transaction.
0:43:06 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, yeah.
0:43:11 Preston Pyshko: How did that come to be? And what were the most important aspects of that deal?
0:43:16 Preston Pyshko: Could be deal structure, could be timing, could be anything. But how does that even happen?
0:43:19 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, so Expedia had been public for maybe four years
0:43:24 Preston Pyshko: and had become very successful and pretty big,
0:43:26 Preston Pyshko: you know, pretty highly valued in the market.
0:43:32 Preston Pyshko: And I think it came about, I mean, Barry was kind of interested. He was building a
0:43:35 Preston Pyshko: interactive conglomerate called IAC.
0:43:37 Preston Pyshko: IAC, right. USA Networks.
0:43:40 Preston Pyshko: I think he owns most of the popular dating apps,
0:43:42 Preston Pyshko: things like that. I mean, IAC buys a lot of stuff.
0:43:44 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, and then spun it out as Match.com.
0:43:44 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:43:49 Preston Pyshko: You know, and yeah, he was post his media career. He got into interactive
0:43:53 Preston Pyshko: media and he started buying stuff. And a guy, his kind of key corporate
0:43:59 Preston Pyshko: development strategist and all around great fricking guy who worked for
0:44:01 Preston Pyshko: him was a young guy named Dara Kazushahi.
0:44:05 Preston Pyshko: Ah, okay. Folks might recognize that, man.
0:44:07 Preston Pyshko: I may be miscrediting or giving
0:44:10 Preston Pyshko: you too much credit, Dara, but probably not.
0:44:14 Preston Pyshko: I think this was Dara’s idea was consolidate the players
0:44:18 Preston Pyshko: in the online travel space, that it was already big,
0:44:20 Preston Pyshko: but it was going to be much bigger.
0:44:25 Preston Pyshko: And Microsoft was the majority owner, but didn’t
0:44:26 Preston Pyshko: have anybody on the board.
0:44:29 Preston Pyshko: Even there, you know, 65% of the company didn’t
0:44:31 Preston Pyshko: have anybody on the board. Greg, they knew me and they trusted
0:44:34 Preston Pyshko: Greg Maffei, who had left as CFO and was running
0:44:36 Preston Pyshko: That is an unbelievable level of trust.
0:44:38 Preston Pyshko: It just didn’t matter to Microsoft, right?
0:44:38 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, I guess.
0:44:40 Preston Pyshko: Just as a percentage of the total.
0:44:43 Preston Pyshko: And at some point somebody came in, I won’t name names,
0:44:46 Preston Pyshko: somebody came in and said, “We need to focus at Microsoft.
0:44:47 Preston Pyshko: We need to get things focused.
0:44:48 Preston Pyshko: We’re too scattered.”
0:44:52 Preston Pyshko: And an easy thing to do was to take a big offer from Barry Diller.
0:44:53 Preston Pyshko: And so they did.
0:44:55 Preston Pyshko: It was a bit of a two-step deal.
0:44:58 Preston Pyshko: The IAC and Dara and Barry bought
0:45:00 Preston Pyshko: Microsoft 65%.
0:45:06 Preston Pyshko: So we were public, but captive to IAC.
0:45:08 Preston Pyshko: And Barry Diller was my chairman for a while.
0:45:09 Preston Pyshko: And then maybe eight months later,
0:45:10 Preston Pyshko: Bid for the rest of it.
0:45:13 Preston Pyshko: And consolidated it down.
0:45:17 Preston Pyshko: Or I think they kind of pushed us to buy the number two player,
0:45:19 Preston Pyshko: which was Hotels.com.
0:45:23 Preston Pyshko: And so we mashed those things together and I moved on at that point.
0:45:26 Preston Pyshko: So when in that journey, the Expedia journey,
0:45:28 Preston Pyshko: did you feel the highest high?
0:45:30 Preston Pyshko: Like, for instance, I would imagine
0:45:36 Preston Pyshko: when you are working summers and on your way through high school and college,
0:45:38 Preston Pyshko: there was probably a moment, I’m just guessing here,
0:45:44 Preston Pyshko: but when you had your first big summer with that painting gig and made $15,
0:45:48 Preston Pyshko: 20 grand, like, my God, you must have felt rich.
0:45:49 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, we went to the high lie.
0:45:50 Preston Pyshko: You know what the high lie is?
0:45:51 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:45:52 Preston Pyshko: Took the crew to the high lie.
0:45:54 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, so with the Expedia journey,
0:45:55 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:46:00 Preston Pyshko: was it the tail end with the Barry Dillard transaction?
0:46:00 Preston Pyshko: No.
0:46:00 Preston Pyshko: No.
0:46:02 Preston Pyshko: Because there’s mixed emotions there, right?
0:46:02 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:46:04 Preston Pyshko: And I didn’t control the company.
0:46:07 Preston Pyshko: I learned that henceforth I would control the companies that I started.
0:46:12 Preston Pyshko: No, I mean, that was great and it made sense and it created value.
0:46:18 Preston Pyshko: No, the highest highs were probably around the spin out and the IPO.
0:46:21 Preston Pyshko: There’s kind of a funny IPO story that my wife,
0:46:25 Preston Pyshko: Sarah, was pregnant with our first child, Will, during the roadshow.
0:46:28 Preston Pyshko: Okay, so this is November of 1999.
0:46:30 Preston Pyshko: It’s really pitching to the buy side.
0:46:31 Preston Pyshko: So it’s pitching to the mutual funds.
0:46:32 Preston Pyshko: To the mutual funds.
0:46:33 Preston Pyshko: To the investors.
0:46:33 Preston Pyshko: Okay, got it.
0:46:38 Preston Pyshko: And it used to be, I think now is a lot more on Zoom, which it should be,
0:46:42 by the way. But it was a rite of passage back then for companies going public and a lot more
0:46:51 companies went public then. And it was 15 cities over three weeks, five meetings a day, six meetings a day,
0:46:57 Preston Pyshko: Chartered private plane with banker team and CFO and CEO zipping around the country.
0:47:05 Preston Pyshko: Okay, exhausting and exhilarating and repetitive and kind of boring, also really fun.
0:47:10 Preston Pyshko: Anyway, so Sarah was pregnant and she wasn’t due until December, but we had been on the road
0:47:15 for two and a half weeks already. We’d filled the book 30 times over, which means we had a lot more demand.
0:47:19 Preston Pyshko: We knew the offering was going to be successful. These were back in the days when the offerings
0:47:23 Preston Pyshko: were a little bit managed to the advantage of the inside banker people. But anyway,
0:47:27 that’s a different story. So it was going to work. The IPO was going to work. And I called the red show
0:47:35 off a day early. I flew back to Seattle exhausted. I get in bed at like one in the morning after getting
0:47:41 home. Sarah’s super pregnant. I get a tap on the shoulder at 3:00 a.m.
0:47:48 Preston Pyshko: And she said, she’s an OB, so she knows what’s going on. Although that’s not always the
0:47:56 case, but she knows what’s going on. And she said to me, “Honey, this is like IPO day. If our baby is
0:48:01 born on the IPO day, do I really have to name him Expedia?” Which is what I promised the team.
0:48:12 And then we went to the hospital and while the IPO was happening, my son was being born. My oldest was
0:48:14 being born. And so that was actually the high point right there.
0:48:19 Preston Pyshko: Wow. All right. Now we’re tracking the path. So now you’re
0:48:25 painting a vase of fruit in Florence, living the life of a…
0:48:29 Preston Pyshko: Naked. It was a naked woman. It was life, it was life drawing.
0:48:30 Preston Pyshko: There we go. All right.
0:48:31 Preston Pyshko: Charcoal life drawing.
0:48:34 Preston Pyshko: Yeah. There we go. All right. Charcoal, charcoal drawing of naked
0:48:36 lady, changing poses every 10 minutes.
0:48:38 Preston Pyshko: What could be a better way to learn art?
0:48:40 Preston Pyshko: What a lovely way to learn art.
0:48:41 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:48:44 Preston Pyshko: And living the life of a refined gentleman.
0:48:45 Preston Pyshko: Mm-hmm.
0:48:47 Preston Pyshko: Pasta and wine and culture and road biking.
0:48:47 Preston Pyshko: Road biking.
0:48:49 Preston Pyshko: Little cap, maybe.
0:48:55 Preston Pyshko: Little cap, of course, no helmet. Taking Italian classes in the morning.
0:48:58 Preston Pyshko: Yeah, yeah. So here and there. Sounds like a great life.
0:48:58 Preston Pyshko: It was fun.
0:49:02 Preston Pyshko: So how the hell does Zillow happen?
0:49:02 Preston Pyshko: Yeah.
0:49:06 Preston Pyshko: Do you start getting fidgety? I mean, what happens there?
0:49:09 Preston Pyshko: Yeah. I was still pretty young. So probably,
0:49:19 I was three, I was like 35, 36. And I was hoping art, music, thought I might write books, whatever.
0:49:21 Preston Pyshko: You know, find the next chapter.
0:49:22 Preston Pyshko: Mm-hmm.
0:49:26 Preston Pyshko: Because I really didn’t need to, I had enough to take care of myself for the rest of
0:49:33 my life. But something I discovered, I was still on a few boards, including the IAC board, which had
0:49:40 bought Expedia and Netflix, where I’d been on the board since like 2000. And still, I’m still on that
0:49:46 board and a couple others. So I was still involved in the business world from a kind of long,
0:49:51 in a long distance way. Though I had an amazing time learning experience, I didn’t find my next
0:49:58 calling. And I was still really curious about the business world and what was going on. So I knew
0:50:02 that I had, we weren’t going to stay in Italy. We were going to move back and I was going to do
0:50:09 something else, which is great to learn. And we did. Did it in Florence for a little over a year.
0:50:13 We spent a few months skiing with the family, which was really fun in the mountains.
0:50:17 Pyshko: And you came to the US. I am going on a hunting expedition. Did you
0:50:19 already have an inkling of what you were going to do?
0:50:23 Pyshko: A little bit. I didn’t know if I really had another startup in me,
0:50:32 because I knew how much work it was. And I adjusted my life to prioritize some things I
0:50:40 hadn’t prioritized when I was younger, like living well and family and body and mind. And I was very
0:50:45 curious in all kinds of different things. So the venture capital opportunity was available to me
0:50:50 to go be a GP at a venture capital firm. And I was kind of headed in that direction.
0:50:56 And then my Zillow co-founder, Lloyd Frank, who was a guy I went to Stanford with and did Expedia with.
0:51:03 Pyshko: He was still at Expedia and he got fired by our good friend, Eric, who was running Expedia at
0:51:06 the time. Probably for good reason. Awesome guy. Really smart.
0:51:09 Pyshko: I won’t follow up on that.
0:51:10 Pyshko: We don’t need to.
0:51:12 Pyshko: Let that one go. Pyshko: It’s a fun story.
0:51:15 Pyshko: But Lloyd, so Lloyd got fired and Lloyd’s like,
0:51:20 “Wait, wait, wait, don’t move to California. Let’s just sit in an office and brainstorm for a while.”
0:51:26 Pyshko: And so we did. We did. And we went through a bunch of ideas. He went off on one
0:51:31 that was kind of Dropbox before Dropbox. It was obvious that the kind of cloud storage thing was
0:51:36 going to be huge. And I said, “Go figure that out. See what it costs.” And so he disappeared
0:51:40 for a couple of weeks. So we were kind of sharing an office. And he came back and he’s like, “Yeah,
0:51:44 100% this is going to work, but there’s going to be no profit. There’s no profit. Like there’s going
0:51:47 to be Microsoft and Google are going to give this away.” Pyshko: Where were you guys brainstorming?
0:51:51 Pyshko: We were brainstorming and his dad, his dad was a stockbroker. He had an extra
0:51:54 couple of rooms in his office and he just gave them to us. Pyshko: New York City?
0:51:56 Pyshko: No, no. This is Seattle. Pyshko: Oh, Seattle.
0:51:58 Pyshko: Seattle. Pyshko: Okay, got it, got it. Pyshko: Yeah, yeah. So we’re in Seattle.
0:52:02 Because we didn’t sell our house in Seattle. When we moved to Italy, we’d moved back to our house. But we were
0:52:07 looking for a new house. We were going to maybe move to California or something in Seattle. Our
0:52:13 family was getting bigger. And so we went through a series of ideas. And then at one point I said,
0:52:21 “Hey, back when we started Expedia, we also wrote a plan for an electronic stockbroker, matchmaking
0:52:28 service, all the classified categories basically, and all the kind of agent categories were all obvious
0:52:33 that we were on a little team of people researching big ideas inside of Microsoft. How would the web
0:52:39 change industry?” And so we had all these plans. Expedia was one of the ideas. There was basically
0:52:45 to create a digital real estate marketplace. And I dusted that off and I said, “Hey, what about that?
0:52:51 I mean, you’re looking for a house right now. It’s really freaking hard. This is 2003. And I can’t
0:52:59 get the price of a home online. I can’t even get the address.” Because the industry had been very good
0:53:01 at defending their special data.
0:53:02 Making it opaque.
0:53:07 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we were the power to the people guys. We were the guys who freed all that
0:53:12 information for the regular traveler. And we were like, “Well, it wants to be power to the people
0:53:19 here too, right?” And we couldn’t believe that it hadn’t changed. And so that was the dawn of Zillow.
0:53:24 Yeah. So he convinced me not to move. And I said, “Well, I’ll be CEO, but I’m not going to work that hard.”
0:53:30 He’s like, “Don’t worry. I’ll do it. Just be CEO. I need you to be CEO, because you have to raise money and stuff.”
0:53:31 All this trick in the book.
0:53:37 So maybe I am a four-hour work with CAC kind of guy. I said, “Look, I don’t want to do it full-time.
0:53:42 You can use my name.” Of course, he was like, “Yeah, sure. Whatever. You can do whatever you
0:53:43 want, Rich.” Knowing I’d be sucked in.
0:53:44 Let the line out.
0:53:46 He totally managed me.
0:53:50 Yeah, I think I’m in charge now. Lloyd was in charge.
0:53:54 So when you say you’re brainstorming, there’s an entire universe of possibilities.
0:53:55 Yeah.
0:54:00 What constraints or criteria are you applying to that brainstorming? What are you looking for?
0:54:08 I think most great idea is that there’s just a big, obvious problem. I like consumer stuff.
0:54:12 And so that means the way I interface with the world, the way we all interface with the world,
0:54:18 is rife with problems. And all those problems are business opportunities. And when you see a particularly
0:54:25 big, “Oh my God, why is it this way?” Those are probably the bigger opportunities. And it’s almost
0:54:33 as simple as that. We identified this big dislocation. We knew 100% that there would be a leading digital
0:54:35 real estate marketplace in the US.
0:54:36 At some point.
0:54:36 At some point.
0:54:37 There’s an inevitability.
0:54:43 Inevitability. And business model? Who knows? Who cares? It’s a giant. It’s a big
0:54:50 pond. And so my business criteria for doing stuff is, is it a big pond? And are there good fishermen?
0:54:54 Right. Because the travel CD-ROM wasn’t big enough.
0:54:55 It’s not a small pond.
0:54:59 100 million. That’s the entire market. Plus, you’re not going to carry a briefcase
0:55:04 that you’re doing weight training with inadvertently.
0:55:06 Problems.
0:55:11 A lot of entrepreneurs make this mistake of identifying a really big problem.
0:55:13 But it is just a small opportunity.
0:55:20 And then there are ones where, I know Bill Gurley was on the pod a couple of years ago,
0:55:23 talking about the Uber thing, the insight. You were involved there a little bit.
0:55:28 I was one of the first three advisors when it was called Uber Cab LLC. Yeah.
0:55:30 Way back in the day. Yeah.
0:55:32 And for people who didn’t pick up, Dara.
0:55:34 Oh, sorry. Dara’s the CEO.
0:55:35 Current CEO of Uber.
0:55:40 He was the CEO of Expedia after, you know, two after I left as well.
0:55:46 Anyway, a lot of people make the mistake, is what I was going to say, of identifying a real
0:55:51 problem, but it’s just too small. Uber kind of, to some people, a lot of people looked too small
0:55:56 because it was a black car, TAM, the total addressable market. But the insight that you
0:56:04 and Gurley and Travis and I guess J-Cal and others had was that actually, no, it was going to,
0:56:10 it was going to take not just the black car market, but taxi, transportation, and then ultimately more.
0:56:12 It can expand the total addressable market.
0:56:12 That’s right.
0:56:13 Right.
0:56:14 Car ownership.
0:56:14 Yeah.
0:56:20 Just transportation, you know, and of course, obviously it’s beautifully played out that way.
0:56:22 It took a little while to see, but it’s, yeah, amazing.
0:56:29 Anyway, so big pond, good fishermen, after identifying the big problem. And I guess that was the guiding
0:56:35 thing here. I knew, Lloyd and I knew there would be a digital real estate marketplace. We didn’t
0:56:40 know what the business would be. We didn’t know what, how we were going to play. And we started
0:56:46 poking at ideas for attracting audience with software. And we made a couple of big mistakes
0:56:49 before we landed on the solution. Yeah.
0:56:54 What were some of the big mistakes and how costly, how risky were they?
0:56:58 Pretty small venture numbers at that point. And Lloyd and I were funding it ourselves. You know,
0:57:05 we put the first 5 million bucks total in with a couple of friends. So costly, but not that costly.
0:57:06 But the first idea we were-
0:57:10 Side note also what Garrett Camp did with Uber early on.
0:57:11 He did too. He wrote, yeah, I didn’t realize that.
0:57:15 Yeah. There was self funding for a while. It wasn’t expensive. Yeah.
0:57:20 It wasn’t overly expensive. But it’s a good way to go as a second time founder or a non first time
0:57:25 founder, if you actually have some resources. And because you end up with more of the company down
0:57:26 the road. Yeah.
0:57:32 You know, I love Gurley. We’re really close. But what, by the time Gurley or the venture capitalists
0:57:36 come in, you know, if they’re writing the first check, they’re going to end up with a big chunk of
0:57:41 the company, which is great, especially if you get somebody like Bill. Okay. But we were able to do it
0:57:49 ourselves. We were enamored of Google. Everyone was at the time. The magic business model that they
0:57:56 sort of discovered or innovated, iterated on that came from another company was the AdWords,
0:57:59 the digital auction-based marketplace.
0:58:01 You say it came from another company.
0:58:01 Yeah.
0:58:02 I might not know that wrinkle.
0:58:03 Yeah, it did.
0:58:04 It did.
0:58:06 Meaning they acquired something or they-
0:58:09 I’m thinking, what’s the guy’s name who did the startup incubator factory? Gross?
0:58:11 Oh, Bill Gross?
0:58:11 Yeah.
0:58:14 Yeah, it was, I mean, I may be getting this wrong.
0:58:15 Am I making this idea lab?
0:58:16 Am I making it?
0:58:20 He did idea lab. There was a lot of companies kind of sort of spun out of that. But one of
0:58:25 them was a search engine whose name I’m forgetting. We can, you know, look it up later.
0:58:26 We’ll put it in the show notes. Yeah.
0:58:30 And, but it was, the whole basis of the search engine was AdWords.
0:58:31 AdWords.
0:58:32 Oh, wow.
0:58:36 And so did Google acquire that or are they just being a better mousetrap?
0:58:38 I think the latter, but I’m not an expert.
0:58:40 Regardless, I don’t want to speak out of turn.
0:58:42 We’ll put the story in the show notes.
0:58:49 Okay, right. There’s a good story there, I’m sure. Why I brought it up was we were enamored
0:58:57 of auctions. Auctions have huge geek appeal for mathy idealists. And we were like, well,
0:59:02 obviously the US housing market should be at auction. And that’s the most efficient mechanism
0:59:07 for price discovery. Okay. Which of course it is. And we were like, okay, so that’s our
0:59:14 business. We’re going to auction homes. And what we learned trying to auction a home that
0:59:21 our buddy Gordon got us kind of on consignment was that, well, two things. One, to have an auction
0:59:28 work, you kind of need a real time liquid market. Okay. Duh. Okay. So you need all the bidders
0:59:32 there at the same time. Okay. Well, the housing market doesn’t work that way. It’s just, you know,
0:59:36 it’s a, it’s a, it’s a long period of time. You want to show it to a lot of bidders. You know,
0:59:43 that, that didn’t work. The second thing, which is obvious is until all those innovators out there,
0:59:50 if you have to educate your customer on how to buy the thing that you’re doing, if it’s like a radically
0:59:55 new way to do it, you know, from decades or hundreds of years of ingrained human behavior,
1:00:01 it’s a pretty heavy lift. It’s got to be super duper simple, obvious, and 10 times better than
1:00:08 the current way. And just, we didn’t check any of those boxes, but in pursuit of price discovery,
1:00:15 we found the Zestimate, which was our killer feature. And the visual on the Zestimate that’s
1:00:20 in my head that kind of popped in, in our collective heads on the home auction web experiment
1:00:30 was a real time estimated value algorithmically driven as your Google map zooming over neighborhoods,
1:00:35 looking. We wanted prices on every roof because everything should have a price.
1:00:40 And the timing of that is pretty wild, right? And it’s just like how things line up. Cause I,
1:00:44 I mean, how long had the aerial view been around prior to you guys?
1:00:44 Short.
1:00:45 It was short.
1:00:47 Short. And there was no iPhone. There were no smartphones,
1:00:52 but it was obvious. Like I was like, Whoa. And then I also had in my head,
1:01:00 homes are for home American homeowners, oftentimes their largest asset and the bulk of their wealth.
1:01:03 And people care a lot about it. Yeah.
1:01:08 So I knew they wanted to know the value. I knew that was catnip. Okay.
1:01:13 I knew I, in my gut, I knew that was, we did the team knew it was candy and I’m like, Oh, it’s an
1:01:20 investment. And so let’s plot the Zestimate, the home value, like a stock chart. And so the aerial
1:01:26 view with the numbers, any home’s value laid out like a stock chart. Those were the two things.
1:01:29 And when we discovered that we were kind of off to the races.
1:01:36 Okay. So at the time, was it just rentable infrastructure, AWS, you get it going, you launch
1:01:40 and it’s up to the right, just a nice, smooth rocket launch. Is that what happened?
1:01:42 AWS didn’t exist.
1:01:54 No, dude, man, this was like server in a closet. Yeah. This was server in a closet.
1:01:59 You forbade Christmas lights or something like you’re like preserving electricity and compute
1:02:00 power and all this stuff.
1:02:02 I don’t remember that. I don’t remember.
1:02:02 All right. Got it.
1:02:04 But David, our things of lore.
1:02:09 David Baitel, who was our CTO at the time and still is, and was CTO at Expedia with me too.
1:02:14 He may have told that story somewhere, so it may actually be right. Yeah, I believe. I remember
1:02:20 our launch blog post with Garrett, who worked for David, like doing the, what’s the professor in?
1:02:23 It’s Doc from Back to the Future.
1:02:25 3.2 gigawatts, whatever.
1:02:31 Because we launched and millions of people showed up because Walt Mossberg, who was,
1:02:35 who’s the equivalent? Is there any equivalent of Walt Mossberg now? No.
1:02:38 It’s like the Oprah of tech at the time, right?
1:02:43 I mean, God. And Walt loved it. And Walt published. And millions of people came on day
1:02:50 one. And of course, the server in the closet tipped over for a while. And it was painful. But Amy
1:02:55 Butinsky, who was running our marketing at the time, said, “Don’t worry, we’ll make lemonade out of
1:03:01 lemons.” And the headline the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle was, “House porn site Zillow
1:03:06 launches and falls over because it’s so popular.” Or something like that.
1:03:09 And she’s like, “Yeah, that’s going to be good press.”
1:03:16 Anyway, I’m a big believer in the product being the most important part of the marketing mix,
1:03:17 if that makes sense to you.
1:03:23 Gurley actually challenged us when we launched. He was on the board. Benchmark and TCV were our A-round
1:03:30 funders. And he was on the board at the time. And we had had kind of a spend advertising dollars
1:03:34 mindset at Expedia because we really needed to grow exposure to the brand. And Gurley said,
1:03:39 “Well, what if we didn’t have any marketing budget?” And that launched. We were like, “No way,
1:03:44 you can’t do that.” But that made us think a lot more creatively about the features that we built,
1:03:50 the way we built them, and then the way we PR communicated them. And I’ve since developed a
1:03:57 pretty good playbook around, I guess, what I would call provocation marketing. When you have really
1:04:01 provocative feature that you know people are going to feel emotional about one way or the other,
1:04:04 and they’re going to talk about it, you’re on to something.
1:04:08 What are some aspects of that toolkit or the playbook?
1:04:14 Yeah. I mean, having data, having a stream of data that people are interested in at Glassdoor,
1:04:20 which I did with Bob Homan, who was at Expedia with me as well. Glassdoor is another example of that.
1:04:25 When you have constantly changing data that people are interested in,
1:04:31 you can almost think about feeding that data to hungry consumers in a Bloomberg-like way.
1:04:39 And so the playbook that Amy kind of put together was building a PR data distribution
1:04:45 infrastructure down to the local. Amy was our marketing chief at Zillow. She’s still on the board
1:04:50 today. And she was really creative about recognizing that there’s an infinite news hole for housing data
1:04:58 at local newspaper level once upon a time. And if you could wire that up to just feed, constantly feed,
1:05:05 the endless appetite. Housing is just an important topic, right? And there’s always space in the paper
1:05:11 for a story on housing and changing prices. And so we set up a mechanism to feed that data, which was a
1:05:17 terrific brand builder for us rather than spending ad money. And then just having this estimate be so
1:05:23 provocative, like high school boyfriend’s house, philanthropist development team that are trying
1:05:28 trying to figure out who’s a good target, you know, whatever, like it’s a lot of applications.
1:05:29 Lots of applications.
1:05:34 I know you had a lot of fans. I think the Arizona attorney general was a fan.
1:05:36 That’s a deep cut. Wow.
1:05:42 No, but this is of interest to me because there is opposition also.
1:05:42 Oh, yeah.
1:05:48 Right? And my God, I mean, the number of, I don’t think they were actual ulcers,
1:05:53 but just the rollercoaster ride that I was also on with Uber from a regulatory,
1:06:00 mobbed up local fill in the blank perspective. It was just nonstop battles. And that was just part
1:06:01 of the deal, right?
1:06:03 And actually part of the playbook.
1:06:03 Yeah.
1:06:06 Honestly, it’s the same provocation marketing.
1:06:08 It’s the exact same thing. It’s exactly the same.
1:06:09 Yeah. So what happened with you guys?
1:06:14 Yeah. I mean, you know, we were provocative to some of the industry players who were big lobbyists.
1:06:15 Yeah.
1:06:17 You know, the taxi commission in Uber’s case.
1:06:17 Yeah.
1:06:21 In our case, a lot of the real estate professional associations.
1:06:22 They were not.
1:06:22 A lot of voters.
1:06:23 They were not, they were not thrilled.
1:06:26 They’re not thrilled or they think they’re not thrilled.
1:06:29 They don’t realize till later that it’s could be helpful, but, but whatever.
1:06:30 Yes.
1:06:35 They were initially provoked to nobody, no industry that’s likes to change.
1:06:37 Most people don’t like change.
1:06:41 I’m one of the people that loves change, but a lot of people, most people don’t.
1:06:43 And so we were seen as a, we were seen.
1:06:46 You may like change when you’re the instigator of the change.
1:06:48 Well, that’s, you know, awesome.
1:06:52 It leaves me more open to change coming from the outside too, though.
1:06:57 I do believe, I do believe, and I, and I, and I, I mean, obviously this is just human nature.
1:06:58 Yeah.
1:07:04 But yeah, but the equivalent of the taxi commission in the Uber case was these real estate professionals
1:07:07 and a lot of places we had them lobbying to have us outlawed.
1:07:09 They’re not licensed.
1:07:11 How can they make an appraisal?
1:07:13 You know, whatever, whatever thing they’re going to make up.
1:07:16 We knew we’re on really strong legal ground.
1:07:23 And so we weren’t so worried about that, but the strategy for combating that resistance
1:07:33 was literally probably the same thing you guys did at Uber, which was, we knew the legislators,
1:07:40 state legislators, not to mention federal legislators, were big fans of the site and the service.
1:07:41 Yeah.
1:07:42 Okay.
1:07:49 And so all we had to do was make sure we just activated that latent love for the product
1:07:54 itself and made it obvious that this way is the future way.
1:07:58 And the lobbyists got nowhere and it was overcome.
1:07:58 Yeah.
1:08:05 In the case of Uber, I don’t want to make this overly about Uber, but also turns out when people
1:08:09 have something that is incredibly convenient and useful, they do not want it taken away.
1:08:10 No.
1:08:17 And if elected officials like the service or are even ambivalent about the service, they
1:08:18 do love getting reelected.
1:08:24 And man, oh man, if there are a lot of your constituents using that app and you take it
1:08:27 away, they’re not going to be super happy about it.
1:08:29 Power to the people, baby.
1:08:34 I mean, like you build magic stuff for masses of consumers that they want to talk about with
1:08:38 their friends unprompted on the sidelines of the soccer game or what have you.
1:08:39 Have you tried Uber?
1:08:40 Have you tried Zillow?
1:08:41 Have you tried Expedia?
1:08:42 Whatever.
1:08:46 It’s like, you’re definitely onto something and having popular support as we’re learning
1:08:53 politically right now is having big populist support is ultimately where the power is derived.
1:08:55 So sometimes you can go too far.
1:08:57 We don’t need to talk about that, but of course you can go too far.
1:09:02 And in fact, it may be that you need to go too far to establish where the frontier is.
1:09:08 All right, well, I can’t not take the bait on that one.
1:09:09 What does going too far look like?
1:09:12 I was thinking specifically Uber.
1:09:13 Oh, all right.
1:09:18 Yeah, but because it did, you know, in some cities, municipalities or Airbnb.
1:09:20 Airbnb, you can push too hard.
1:09:28 You can push too hard and learn some lessons about how much leash you’re going to be given
1:09:29 by the popular support.
1:09:29 Yeah.
1:09:34 Because it does tip into a point where like with Airbnb, you know, this is not a story.
1:09:38 I know this guy’s a little bit, but it’s not a story I’m intimately familiar with, nor was I
1:09:40 an early investor or anything.
1:09:46 But, you know, they did piss off some homeowners, you know, in certain cities, not just the hotel owners.
1:09:46 Yeah.
1:09:52 And, you know, so they found the line and I think they managed it really, really well
1:09:54 because they lead from the heart.
1:09:59 You know, I think other companies may have not obviously led from the heart and had a difficulty.
1:10:02 At Zillow, our job was a little easier.
1:10:08 Also with those battles, I remember there were early on a number of locations that were
1:10:10 incredibly important.
1:10:10 Yeah.
1:10:14 Not just from a ride volume perspective, but from a precedent setting perspective.
1:10:15 Yeah.
1:10:21 So if you win a few of those precedent setting battles, then you don’t necessarily have to
1:10:23 do like a full frontal assault on the next.
1:10:24 That’s right.
1:10:27 10 locations because people have gotten the message.
1:10:30 You can be a little more diplomatic about it, which people figure out over time.
1:10:33 But then there’s the next country and then whatever.
1:10:34 Anyway, there’s always something.
1:10:38 But provocation marketing with a heart.
1:10:43 With the end consumer’s best interests in mind, that’s a winner.
1:10:46 So if you were teaching a class, maybe you already have.
1:10:47 I have no idea.
1:10:49 Related to provocation marketing.
1:10:49 Yeah.
1:10:50 All right.
1:10:50 There you go.
1:10:51 You get to choose.
1:10:54 You can go back to your alma mater, wherever it might be.
1:10:54 You’re teaching a class.
1:10:55 Yeah.
1:10:59 What would other elements of the class be?
1:11:03 Other resources, principles, anything at all?
1:11:07 While I try to figure out a structure here on the flat, to give a couple of other examples
1:11:09 of stuff that I’ve been involved with.
1:11:14 So I co-founded Glassdoor, which many people out there may know.
1:11:21 And our provocation data marketing feature was how much money do people make?
1:11:22 Okay.
1:11:29 Not individuals, but the product manager at XYZ company or the developer or the customer service
1:11:30 representative.
1:11:36 And our model was, we knew that salaries was kind of a little bit taboo for a lot of people.
1:11:38 So it was inherently secret and provocative.
1:11:48 And then Robert Homan, who is my co-founder and the team, they had a data collection problem
1:11:51 because it was ultimately user-generated content.
1:11:57 People would need to share their salaries in a way that we believed in order to get enough
1:12:01 data to provide anything interesting to everybody else.
1:12:08 And so their innovation, after kind of hand-cranking it with survey, their innovation was give to get.
1:12:11 You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.
1:12:13 Very good.
1:12:14 That’s very clever.
1:12:15 Very clever.
1:12:18 And say, “Hey, I’ll give you a little taste, but if you want to see any more data,
1:12:22 you’ve got to share your salary and your title and your company, we promise you’ll be anonymous.
1:12:24 And do a company review.”
1:12:30 How many people screwed that up were the only person in that position?
1:12:31 I guess it has to be logic.
1:12:32 And we had protocols for that.
1:12:32 Okay.
1:12:36 We did have protocols for that, but it worked really.
1:12:40 And we also then solicited feedback on what it’s like to work at the company.
1:12:43 And, you know, CEOs are kind of public figures.
1:12:46 So, okay, we’re going to let you review the CEO performance.
1:12:51 And we knew all those things would provoke.
1:12:53 We knew some CEOs would go crazy, you know.
1:12:57 So there’s another example while I’m formulating a framework.
1:13:01 Another one is with another former Expedia guy, Mark Britton.
1:13:07 We founded a company called Avo, which was in the legal space.
1:13:12 And we decided to rate attorneys, systematically rate attorneys.
1:13:14 This had never happened before.
1:13:16 It was just kind of like trip advisor for attorneys.
1:13:18 You need to kind of trip advisor for anything, right?
1:13:23 These are business models that are well-trodden now, but these were kind of innovative back in the day.
1:13:28 And, of course, we were going to get sued because we were rating attorneys.
1:13:30 Yeah.
1:13:32 Definitely a great way to kick the hornet’s nest.
1:13:39 Some investors, when we were raising money, I remember traveling around, you know, doing the Sand Hill Shuffle with Mark.
1:13:43 And, you know, I remember some people saying, well, is this legal?
1:13:45 You’re going to get, can you rate people?
1:13:46 You know, you’re going to get sued.
1:13:48 You know, I’m not going to invest.
1:13:51 And we were like, yeah, we’re going to get sued.
1:13:53 You know, did you see Die Hard?
1:14:04 You remember Die Hard where the German terrorist leader is waiting for the last lock to open and he needs the power to go down in order to be able to get the bearer bombs out of the Nakatomi Plaza safe?
1:14:05 Yeah.
1:14:05 Okay.
1:14:09 And the people are like, how is he going to get the power to go down?
1:14:13 And he’s like, he said, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll give you the FBI.
1:14:14 And they came in on those things.
1:14:17 And the FBI, the playbook said, all right, cut the power.
1:14:23 Anyway, that was exactly the launch strategy.
1:14:25 Yvonne was like, here come the suits.
1:14:26 I’ll give you the FBI.
1:14:29 Anyways, perfect because it created all kinds of noise.
1:14:31 I’m struggling with the structure.
1:14:32 Let’s go with the lawsuits.
1:14:32 All right.
1:14:35 So the Sand Hill Shuffle, for people who don’t get that reference.
1:14:50 So Sand Hill Road, if you could imagine going to like, this is not going to be the best comparison, but you go to like Kuwait and there’s a shopping mall with like Balenciaga and like Prada and all the fanciest brands, all the aspirational brands.
1:14:55 Well, if there were such a place, but it was all the highest end venture capitalists, that would be Sand Hill Road.
1:15:00 And now it’s more distributed, but still it’s a thing, right?
1:15:00 Oh, yeah.
1:15:05 If you go stay at the Rosewood and you’re right around the corner, that’s got its own stories.
1:15:05 That’s a strange place.
1:15:06 Fantastic.
1:15:07 Fantastic.
1:15:08 Love that.
1:15:08 Love that part.
1:15:13 And then you have, you name it, right?
1:15:14 Everybody’s there.
1:15:16 All the big players.
1:15:18 And so that’s the Sand Hill Shuffle.
1:15:21 So why not be afraid of lawsuits?
1:15:26 What did you guys know that the guys who said, I’m not going to touch that with a 10-foot pole?
1:15:35 Well, the founder CEO, Mark Britton, was my general counsel at Expedia, and he worked Securities Exchange Commission prior to that.
1:15:36 He was a real attorney.
1:15:41 And the way we did it, we were 100% convinced of our legal grounds.
1:15:42 Yeah.
1:15:46 And so people could still just consume so much energy, right?
1:15:46 No doubt.
1:15:50 So we raised money to deal with that, but we knew it was going to be pretty cheap lawsuits.
1:15:54 And we could provide the legal, most of the legal billing ourselves anyway.
1:15:57 And so it would be cheaper than hiring some fancy firm.
1:15:59 We were convinced.
1:16:03 And, you know, after we won the first few suits, you know, they lost steam.
1:16:05 The lawyers lost steam on suing.
1:16:11 So it caused some venture capitalists to not do it, but the more kind of disruptive-oriented folks were like, yeah, great.
1:16:12 So what happened with that?
1:16:14 It did pretty well.
1:16:14 It did pretty well.
1:16:15 We had trouble.
1:16:21 So in a kind of TripAdvisor for legal sort of way, it did really well.
1:16:32 Ultimately, these kind of TripAdvisor-y digital middlemen who were kind of SEO on one side, collecting Google search traffic on one side and trying to monetize leads on the other.
1:16:37 You know, as time wore on, a lot of those business models got somewhat disintermediated.
1:16:47 And so the protection against that is usually to go down into the workflow of the transactions of the industry, which is, say, what we’ve done at Zillow or what Expedia does.
1:16:50 So could you explain that just one more time and maybe an example would be helpful?
1:16:52 So let’s just say there’s a TripAdvisor for X.
1:16:56 Like you said, they’re kind of harvesting traffic on the SEO side.
1:16:59 So their pages are engineered in such a way.
1:16:59 That’s right.
1:17:07 Maybe also using ad spend to drive traffic to these reviews, which are then monetized on some level.
1:17:08 That’s right.
1:17:12 Some people can’t see, but by selling those leads out the other side of the marketplace.
1:17:12 Right.
1:17:14 So literally a lead middleman.
1:17:15 Got it.
1:17:15 Yeah.
1:17:16 Lead middleman.
1:17:17 How would they get disintermediated?
1:17:27 Well, Michael Porter, Five Forces, would say, look, if you have an over-dependency on any supply of customers, you’re strategically exposed for obvious reasons.
1:17:31 If you have an over-dependency on any supplier, you’re strategically exposed.
1:17:40 And so business strategy 101 says diversify your sources of customers and your sources of supply so that nobody gets too much leverage over you.
1:17:43 Also, it’s like a single point of failure, right?
1:17:44 Absolutely.
1:17:47 Oop, factory went down because of X, Y, Z.
1:17:48 That’s a problem.
1:17:53 We’re dealing with that right now in the country because COVID discovered that we had lots of supply chain single points of failure.
1:17:55 Anyway, we don’t need to sidetrack on that.
1:18:06 So in that example, if you’re primarily getting your traffic from Google, paid or free, you’re developing a serious dependency on Google.
1:18:13 And Google, of course, in its own search for increased value, starts looking vertical, which means down into your business.
1:18:19 And so people probably noticed over the years that Google started doing reviews and then they did their own mess.
1:18:21 So they’re doing their Yelp reviews and their TripAdvisor reviews.
1:18:28 And then they started doing airline schedules and hotel bookings and restaurant reservations and, and, and.
1:18:38 And so when the big guy that you’re getting all your customers from starts taking a more than passing interest in your business model because they want to capture more value, you better figure out something else.
1:18:39 Yeah.
1:18:39 Okay.
1:18:46 So strategically speaking, my defense against that in my digital marketplaces has been twofold.
1:18:50 One, build a giant brand that customers know and love.
1:18:55 And therefore most of your traffic and customers comes directly to your app and sites.
1:18:56 Okay.
1:18:59 You have to have a brand to do that in order to have power.
1:19:16 And then two, look down your funnel and look into the workflow of the business you’re in, be it travel or real estate or legal or jobs, you know, through for the verticals that I’ve done stuff in and make sure you become digitally integral to the workflow.
1:19:18 You’re building tools for the industry.
1:19:22 Ultimately, maybe even doing the transactions.
1:19:23 Okay.
1:19:29 And having a platform for the transactions and that in a nutshell is what Zillow’s long-term strategy is.
1:19:39 We’re basically building a super app, a one-stop shop application for anybody who’s renting or buying soup to nuts, everything integrated, all the professionals plug in and workflow.
1:19:41 And that we have a big brand.
1:19:45 We source almost all of our customers directly, not all, but most.
1:19:50 And we’re embedded in the workflow, solving real customer problems.
1:19:52 And the business is great and growing.
1:19:53 All right.
1:19:55 So I haven’t forgotten about the provocation marketing class.
1:20:00 However, I think this is a great place to buy you some more time and talk about naming.
1:20:01 Okay.
1:20:01 Oh.
1:20:03 How do you name companies?
1:20:04 You saw that blog post.
1:20:08 I played around with blogging like all of us.
1:20:12 You know, it really stuck with some and it didn’t with others.
1:20:14 I probably only had like 10 posts on my blog.
1:20:19 But one of them was naming because I’ve had a lot of fun naming companies.
1:20:21 And I gave advice on naming.
1:20:26 And I think the title of the post, the site it’s on is called hopperanddropper.com, which
1:20:29 is a fly fishing term, but which is nobody’s gone to.
1:20:30 So I only had 20 visitors.
1:20:31 Tim being one.
1:20:32 Lucky 21.
1:20:37 I have a few rules about naming.
1:20:45 First, when you’re trying to brand a company, if you’re building a consumer brand, especially you have kind of two broad ways you can go.
1:20:47 The easy way and the hard way.
1:20:53 And I’ll forgive the four-hour work week and the four-hour body, you know, but I’ll tell you that there are no shortcuts.
1:20:56 You take the shortcut to the long road, my coach Jimmy says.
1:20:57 Yeah.
1:21:04 Anyway, the easy way is if you’re building a travel site to call it hotels.com, airline tickets.com, you know, you name it.
1:21:07 Every category has a literal word.com.
1:21:10 And the advantages to that are it’s easy to explain to people what you do.
1:21:11 Yeah.
1:21:17 And the disadvantages to that are you don’t own any brand of equity because you can’t own a word that previously exists.
1:21:20 And so you’re non-distinct and non-distinctive.
1:21:25 There’s an in-between way, which is to use an existing word, but make a new application of it.
1:21:27 Apple, computer, Amazon.com.
1:21:29 And that’s viable.
1:21:33 But you have to build a new definition for that word, which those companies obviously did successfully.
1:21:39 The hard way and the best way, I think, for consumers is to make up a word.
1:21:45 Make up a word, which is super hard because you have to tell people what the word means.
1:21:46 You have to define it for them.
1:21:49 But once you do, you own that word.
1:21:52 The definition of that word is yours and only yours.
1:21:57 And so I like the hard path because I like building brands.
1:22:02 And with provocation marketing, I think I can get a big audience early, which begins to familiarize people with the brand.
1:22:07 So I was confident in my ability to, my and my team’s really ability to do that.
1:22:09 Okay, so now when you’re making up a word, what do you do?
1:22:10 And I think this is what you’re referring to.
1:22:12 Okay, so high point Scrabble letters.
1:22:13 Do you play Scrabble?
1:22:16 It’s been a minute, but yes, I’ve played Scrabble.
1:22:20 Okay, you know that there are different point numbers on each letter as you play Scrabble.
1:22:23 And do you remember what the high point ones are?
1:22:24 I don’t.
1:22:24 Okay.
1:22:28 Their Z is 10.
1:22:29 X is 10.
1:22:31 That’s the highest points you can get.
1:22:33 A, E, I, O, U are 1.
1:22:34 Here’s why.
1:22:35 Q is 10 too.
1:22:36 Here’s why.
1:22:40 Z, X, and Q are super rare letters.
1:22:42 A, E, I, O, U are super common.
1:22:46 And so rule number one is pick the super rare letters.
1:22:49 And pick them because they’re very distinctive.
1:22:51 They jump off a page when you read.
1:22:53 They stick in people’s brains in a way that’s not crowded.
1:22:58 So all my stuff has Zs and Xs and some Qs actually too.
1:23:02 Rule number two, fewer syllables is better than more.
1:23:03 I kind of learned this lesson with Expedia.
1:23:06 Expedia was too many syllables.
1:23:08 It’s worked out fine.
1:23:09 We’ve overcome that.
1:23:11 The company’s overcome that now.
1:23:13 But it was, in hindsight, it was a lot.
1:23:19 I liked it because of rule number three, which is it was evocative of positive things, speed, expedition.
1:23:25 So it said adventure and speed, and that all felt good in that word.
1:23:26 But fewer syllables.
1:23:32 I think two syllables is the sweet spot because I also want it to be a good dog name.
1:23:37 So if the word could be a good dog name, you’re on to something like you can call for it.
1:23:38 Zillow.
1:23:41 Anyway, another one is it can be turned into a verb pretty easily.
1:23:43 So pick a word that can be turned into a verb.
1:23:48 So it probably, the dog name and verb probably means it ends in a vowel sound.
1:23:53 And then the last one is people, double letters and palindromes are good too.
1:23:55 So anything that is unique, a unique word form.
1:23:58 Double letters, people remember, they jump off the page.
1:24:03 And palindromes are words that are the same forward and backward spelled, right?
1:24:05 So just interesting, interesting words.
1:24:05 Yeah.
1:24:06 Anyway, that’s my handbook.
1:24:09 Palindrome, like my friend Mike Kim back in the day.
1:24:12 I was struggling to think of one.
1:24:13 I couldn’t pull one on the fly.
1:24:13 Well done.
1:24:14 Taco Cat.
1:24:16 It’s a good game.
1:24:17 So you’re in the game space.
1:24:19 It’s the name of Taco Cat.
1:24:22 That is a funny game, isn’t it?
1:24:22 Yeah.
1:24:22 It’s so stupid.
1:24:24 It’s so fun.
1:24:24 It’s so good.
1:24:27 So I’m thinking of double letters.
1:24:29 So there are names.
1:24:30 Expedia had.
1:24:31 X.
1:24:32 Has an X.
1:24:36 Good connotation with pre-existing words or concepts.
1:24:36 Yep.
1:24:38 Maybe one syllable too long.
1:24:40 Then you got Zillow.
1:24:41 Zillow, that’s a sweet spot.
1:24:42 Kind of named it.
1:24:45 I’m imagining this Labrador Retriever, right?
1:24:46 Yeah.
1:24:47 And starts with a Z.
1:24:49 Like how many words start with a Z?
1:24:50 That’s great.
1:24:51 And two double letters, LLs.
1:24:52 Soft ending.
1:24:57 Double letter, but I’m not sure because I am not up to speed with my Scrabble.
1:24:57 Glassdoor.
1:25:01 Glassdoor in the mid, you know, in the middle.
1:25:05 It was pretty evocative of having people peer is transparency.
1:25:07 Power to the people and transparency is a big thing.
1:25:12 And we really liked kind of looking in through the glass door inside of a company.
1:25:17 Two syllables, not a great dog word, you know, but two double letters.
1:25:19 So it kind of jumps off the page.
1:25:21 It’s an interesting looking word.
1:25:24 I would say we get a kind of a B on that.
1:25:27 But Robert did a very good job with marketing that.
1:25:27 So.
1:25:28 All right.
1:25:32 So if you need more time, I’m not going to forget about it.
1:25:35 The provocation marketing curriculum.
1:25:35 Yeah.
1:25:38 And it could just be one seminar.
1:25:39 It doesn’t have to be ongoing.
1:25:42 Just if that complicates the envisioning process.
1:25:48 Find a seven deadly sin zone, something that is emotionally core to us, okay?
1:25:52 That you know is going to incite an emotional response.
1:25:53 All right.
1:25:54 Okay.
1:25:56 So some topic that people are emotional about.
1:26:06 And then go address some sacred cow, you know, some taboo or sacred cow in that space.
1:26:11 Most of the ideas that you could probably think of with that outline would be really negative.
1:26:14 And then get rid of all those.
1:26:18 Because I do believe a cheap way to get attention is to scare people.
1:26:19 Okay.
1:26:20 But I think it’s cheap.
1:26:23 It’s a cheap way to lead is to scare people.
1:26:25 Effective, but cheap.
1:26:30 And it doesn’t make people feel good to be scared.
1:26:37 So if you’re building a brand and a service, you want people to be provoked, but feel good.
1:26:39 Or tickled.
1:26:40 Or entertained.
1:26:41 You know.
1:26:44 And so that is where I would head with the seminar.
1:26:48 And then we end up brainstorming about getting people’s ideas for that.
1:26:50 Let’s touch on briefly.
1:26:51 Mention Bill Gurley.
1:26:52 Of course, famous venture capitalist.
1:26:54 He’s been on the show.
1:26:55 Brilliant guy.
1:26:56 Also quite hilarious.
1:26:57 And local.
1:26:58 And local.
1:26:58 Hey, Bill.
1:26:59 Yeah.
1:26:59 Yeah.
1:27:01 He’s right down a couple of blocks from where we’re sitting right now.
1:27:07 You have spent time at Benchmark Capital, which way back in the day, I mentioned this to Bill,
1:27:12 when I first moved to Silicon Valley, a book was recommended to me called E-Boys.
1:27:13 Oh, yeah.
1:27:14 Way back in the day.
1:27:18 And putting aside how Bill Mayer may or may not feel about it, we didn’t really get into it.
1:27:25 I’m sure there’s lots of stuff that could stand some fact-checking, but it was incredibly inspirational and so entertaining.
1:27:27 I mean, this was the heyday, right?
1:27:30 I mean, this was just rocket ships everywhere.
1:27:31 So fun to read.
1:27:35 So you’ve spent time at and with Benchmark.
1:27:39 What led you to that?
1:27:43 Was that kind of biding time until you figured out which next big swing to take?
1:27:44 What was the motivation?
1:27:54 And then also, what did you learn there or what came into greater resolution or clarity while you were there?
1:27:54 Yeah, okay.
1:28:02 So as we chatted about before, when I was coming with my family back from sabbatical,
1:28:10 I’m a big believer in the sabbatical in Italy and was considering the next career move,
1:28:16 I got to know first Bruce Dunleavy at Benchmark and then Bill and the other guys.
1:28:25 I did read E-Boys then too, which was romantic kind of in a weird way, but for business geeks like me and you maybe, romantic.
1:28:31 And I also knew that I had a personality that did want to have my fingers in a lot of stuff.
1:28:33 You did.
1:28:33 I did.
1:28:34 I knew that.
1:28:37 I liked to do lots of things and I wanted to do lots of things and I could do lots of things.
1:28:39 I could think about lots of things.
1:28:47 And so in the course of trying to figure out prior to Zillow, trying to figure out what to do, I got to know those guys really well.
1:28:50 You know, they invited me to a bunch of stuff to sit in on stuff.
1:28:51 I knew I would be good at that.
1:28:53 I knew I liked doing that.
1:28:59 And then a condition with Lloyd Frank of doing the Zillow thing and taking the CEO title, I said,
1:29:02 look, you know, I’m going to do a bunch of other things too.
1:29:05 I’m going to start more companies and I’m going to do the venture capital thing.
1:29:06 And he’s like, oh, good.
1:29:06 No problem.
1:29:19 And so as a way to keep myself stimulated and seeing lots of stuff and get down to the valley, I was in Seattle, which was not really a venture pop-ed at the time.
1:29:20 Cloud computing hadn’t happened yet.
1:29:25 We did have Amazon, Expedia, and Microsoft, but, you know.
1:29:28 And so the action on the cutting edge was down in the valley.
1:29:31 I had some boards I was on down there as well.
1:29:42 And so I took the venture partner job with Benchmark, which is a pretty ill-defined position, as a way to keep me going to the valley and keep me in the flow of the latest stuff.
1:29:43 And I really loved that.
1:29:47 I do believe that ended up benefiting all the other stuff I was doing as well.
1:29:50 I really loved that, you know, love that team.
1:29:51 I love that team to this day.
1:29:53 How did it benefit the other things?
1:29:59 Was it just seeing around corners, kind of getting an idea of what’s coming before most other people have a chance to?
1:29:59 Yeah.
1:30:02 And thinking of new ideas for companies too.
1:30:09 But I’m a big believer, there are some companies that hold on to their people and say, you can’t go do other things.
1:30:10 Don’t sit on other boards.
1:30:15 I really like executives that are on my teams to have another board.
1:30:18 And if you love it, set it free.
1:30:23 If you’re scared about losing people and you’re being too retentive, that means you’re too insular, probably.
1:30:26 And you got to give to get.
1:30:34 If you give time and get interested in other business models, you help them, but you end up learning a bunch of stuff for your own company.
1:30:37 I’ve learned so much from sitting on the board of Netflix that I’ve imported to my other companies.
1:30:42 Can you explain, just for folks who may not be familiar, what does it mean to sit on a board?
1:30:44 What does that actually mean?
1:30:47 It depends board to board, I’m sure, on responsibilities and expectations.
1:30:54 But along with that, you must have lots of requests to join X, Y, or Z boards.
1:30:57 How do you choose the boards to be a part of?
1:31:07 What it means to sit on a board is when a company’s private, it means help the CEO and the leadership team build the company.
1:31:18 So it’s really being an advisor and a coach and somebody with a lot of business building experience to help pick the right strategy.
1:31:23 You’re not running anything, but you’re basically coaching the entrepreneurs who oftentimes are less experienced.
1:31:26 Sometimes not, but oftentimes less experienced.
1:31:32 And I would always recommend assembling a board of people with real experience who are going to be engaged.
1:31:33 And so it’s a company building exercise.
1:31:39 And then when fundraising, it’s time to fundraise, can totally help with the next fundraising, can help with recruiting.
1:31:43 One of the very best at this is, I mean, there’s so many good ones.
1:31:48 Bill is really good, as you’ve seen in the Uber case, at really helping build companies.
1:31:49 Okay.
1:31:51 And a public company is a little different.
1:31:54 Yeah, I had one thing, and I’ve never been on a board.
1:31:54 Really?
1:31:57 Yeah, no, I’ve dodged it, I guess, in a sense.
1:31:59 So you have a negative impression?
1:32:00 No, no, it’s not a negative impression.
1:32:02 You dodged it.
1:32:06 Well, I feel like, yeah, dodge is a strong verb to use.
1:32:08 That was a missile coming at you, and you-
1:32:19 I have felt like I, at the time when these opportunities have come up, that I did not have clear criteria, and I don’t want to commit to things reactively.
1:32:20 Yeah, okay.
1:32:21 Which is part of the reason why I’m asking you.
1:32:21 Okay, got it.
1:32:31 And also, it seems like, and definitely correct me if I’m wrong, but another responsibility of a board is to fire leadership if it comes down to that.
1:32:41 So it can be better roses and looking forward to the future and a lot of good things, but it’s also, it also comes with responsibilities to handle the tough times.
1:32:46 And that’s probably the most, especially for a public company, those are the most important times, too.
1:32:50 But when you’re company building as a private company, it’s a little less important.
1:32:51 Yeah.
1:32:52 That’s good context.
1:32:56 But it’s something that I’ve been, I’m not necessarily reconsidering because I’ve-
1:32:56 I think you should.
1:32:57 I think you’d be good.
1:32:58 Okay, tell me.
1:32:59 Well, you’re a coach.
1:33:00 Yeah.
1:33:01 That’s all it is.
1:33:02 Okay.
1:33:04 I mean, it’s what it primarily is.
1:33:09 You’re instinctively a coach, and you have a lot of experience sets, and you look for far analogies.
1:33:14 You look for, oh, this situation here is a lot like this other situation, and that makes you a good communicator.
1:33:17 And that is oftentimes what good coaching is.
1:33:25 I kind of in, I shouldn’t say inadvertently, because it’s not inadvertent, but informally do that already, right?
1:33:28 With a lot of the founders that I’m involved with.
1:33:29 Which is fine, too.
1:33:29 Yeah.
1:33:35 But it’s that same, in the best of circumstances, it is that same way on a board.
1:33:35 Mm-hmm.
1:33:36 Okay?
1:33:44 And those are the only boards that I’m involved with, is those that are really there to coach and give advice.
1:33:51 Sometimes, oftentimes, in a public company, when you get into the public markets, where your responsibilities are a little different.
1:33:51 Yeah.
1:33:55 You have these hardcore responsibilities to represent shareholders.
1:34:00 And the only real power you have is kind of capital allocation a little bit, and who is the CEO?
1:34:04 Capital allocation, meaning how do they spend their funds?
1:34:10 Raising money, raising money, spending money, usually not to the budgetary, but big, big acquisitions, whatever.
1:34:16 Big changes in the cap table, in the balance sheet, that will affect shareholders.
1:34:16 Yeah.
1:34:16 Okay.
1:34:17 Got it.
1:34:32 Oftentimes, public companies, depending on their age, usually as they get older, they stop acting like a private board, where it’s really about the strategy and coaching and helping and building, and then becomes more about institutional shareholder services, rates, directors.
1:34:33 What is that?
1:34:34 Oh, wow.
1:34:34 Yeah.
1:34:35 Okay.
1:34:38 So, they’re like, the lawyer’s competing to have good ratings on AVO.
1:34:39 Kind of.
1:34:40 Okay.
1:34:40 Kind of.
1:34:41 And then when a board-
1:34:42 This is something I haven’t heard anything about.
1:34:53 If a board tips into, let’s call them professional directors, who are really worried about their board director reputation, it becomes more about them and process and CYA.
1:34:55 Cover your ass.
1:34:55 Yeah.
1:34:57 Because you only get sued, whatever.
1:34:58 If you don’t look bad, whatever.
1:35:00 Versus, let’s build a company.
1:35:01 Yeah, that doesn’t sound fun.
1:35:04 I’ve really actually never had a board tip into that.
1:35:10 I’ve had some boards devolve into finger pointing and what have you, but in the private space, right?
1:35:10 Yeah.
1:35:16 So, I’m on a few public boards, but they’re all really their strategy and how can we grow and
1:35:18 how can we help you and how’s the team doing?
1:35:24 And so, if I don’t get a good ISS rating, which I have some of the worst there are out there.
1:35:25 Really, I do.
1:35:26 Wait, wait, wait.
1:35:28 Who actually determines the rating?
1:35:34 I don’t really know the process and I don’t really give a rip, but some survey, it’s going to stick up job, these things.
1:35:37 They stick up job.
1:35:39 They rate, give us what we want or else.
1:35:41 Look, it’s like bond ratings or whatever.
1:35:47 These ratings firms, they do ratings and then they sell consulting services to the customers.
1:35:48 It’s just a classic.
1:35:58 And mutual funds and ETFs, whatever, hire them and they can’t track every company, so they look at the ratings and how we should vote on the proxy issue and blah, blah, blah.
1:36:05 Anyway, I’ve got very low ratings for lots of nonsensical reasons, but I don’t care.
1:36:05 Yeah, yeah.
1:36:06 Okay.
1:36:14 I personally don’t care, but a board that’s full of directors who really do care is not as fun.
1:36:17 Framework for you, which you asked.
1:36:24 So, Greg Maffay, who’s on my board at Zillow and who I’ve worked with for a long time, I mentioned already, and Jay Hogue kind of gave me the same advice.
1:36:26 Jay’s another venture capitalist who I work a lot with.
1:36:27 We’re on boards together.
1:36:34 A good construct that Greg told me early in my career was, is it local?
1:36:35 Is it fun?
1:36:36 Is it lucrative?
1:36:38 Yeah.
1:36:39 It’s a good place to start.
1:36:41 Those are good starting points.
1:36:45 So, you can zoom now a little bit, but you really don’t want to spend your life traveling.
1:36:53 So, that’s another thing that put me on the sidelines is I knew a few people who, they just seemed like traveling salesmen in a sense.
1:36:58 It was like George Clooney from up in the air when he was just traveling around a different city area.
1:37:00 You know, every other week.
1:37:01 Soul crushing.
1:37:01 Yeah.
1:37:02 It’s not quite that way.
1:37:03 Yeah.
1:37:09 I mean, so local is, Greg, when he laid it out for him, he’s like, it’s got to be two out of three at least.
1:37:11 If it can be all three, trifecta score.
1:37:14 And lucrative meaning potentially lucrative.
1:37:16 Like, the business is, you would buy the stock.
1:37:17 Right.
1:37:17 As a gross stock.
1:37:18 You know, so.
1:37:24 And this is as good a point as any, to just explain the, I guess, compensation structure.
1:37:25 How does it work?
1:37:26 You get an equity grant.
1:37:28 You have options to invest over time.
1:37:31 And I suppose it depends on the state of the, and stage of the company.
1:37:33 But.
1:37:36 Private companies often are not compensated because you’re the venture capitalist.
1:37:37 Right.
1:37:37 Okay.
1:37:38 So you’re the funder.
1:37:42 So you’re doing it because you’ve already, you already own a chunk of the company.
1:37:42 Yep.
1:37:43 So that’s your compensation.
1:37:47 And most startups, most private companies can’t afford to pay.
1:37:52 Now, the late stage startups, the forever startups now, like I’m sure Stripe directors make a lot of money.
1:38:00 Public companies, you know, it’s really just like salary bands based on the size of the company.
1:38:09 I mean, it’s like for most kind of mid-cap public companies, I would guess it’s $200,000 to $350,000 a year.
1:38:16 Most companies for big meetings, committee meetings, whatever, not a huge chunk of time, you know, so it’s nice.
1:38:20 And then usually they enable the directors to choose if they want it.
1:38:25 And some part has to be in stock and some could be in cash, you know.
1:38:27 Anyway, I don’t have a ton of experience with those.
1:38:31 So fun, local, lucrative.
1:38:32 Potentially lucrative.
1:38:32 Potentially lucrative.
1:38:37 And fun has got to be like, it’s a proxy for maybe it’s a cool company, whatever, that’s fun.
1:38:39 But really it’s the boardroom dynamic.
1:38:48 You look around the table and at the leadership team and are these interesting, is it a collegial, everybody’s rowing together in the same boat kind of situation?
1:38:56 Or is it a, we got old factions fighting and these guys want that and these ones want that and like, you know, run away.
1:38:57 Less Game of Thrones.
1:38:58 Yeah, exactly.
1:38:59 Like no fun.
1:39:00 No fun.
1:39:01 All right.
1:39:05 So we’re drinking our carbonated Japanese citrus.
1:39:05 Yeah.
1:39:07 Yuzu coconut water.
1:39:11 Feeling very well hydrated and infused.
1:39:22 And that is as smooth slash awkward a segue as possible to do a callback to something you mentioned earlier, which was da-da-da-da-da.
1:39:31 And then I started paying attention to things I had neglected before that and da-da-da-da, including health and body, things like that.
1:39:34 So when did that happen?
1:39:44 Was it a gradual development of wellness habits, self-care, or was there a reckoning at some point?
1:39:44 What happened?
1:39:55 Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people, it’s a health reckoning for them or for somebody else that kind of shocks them into, you know, and maybe an overlay of general age.
1:39:58 You know, the substrate is age.
1:40:03 And ultimately, everybody probably figures this out.
1:40:03 Yeah.
1:40:04 Some later, sooner than others.
1:40:06 What is your age now?
1:40:06 I have no idea.
1:40:07 I can’t tell.
1:40:07 I’m 57.
1:40:08 Okay, God.
1:40:09 Yeah.
1:40:09 Wow.
1:40:10 Yeah.
1:40:12 You really held on to the youthful glow.
1:40:13 Yeah, right.
1:40:14 Everything’s falling apart.
1:40:15 Look at me.
1:40:15 Oh, God.
1:40:18 American history acts as of 10 years ago.
1:40:21 And then it’s just the crow’s feet are turning into crow’s legs.
1:40:26 But you seem to be very active.
1:40:26 I am.
1:40:29 And for me, it was that same thing.
1:40:30 It was a catalyst.
1:40:32 It was a pretty sudden external catalyst.
1:40:37 Not my health, but my wife’s and children’s.
1:40:41 And so I have three kids, Will, Josie, and Russell.
1:40:42 And Josie and Russell are twins.
1:40:47 And twin pregnancies are high risk.
1:40:47 Yep.
1:40:48 Definitionally.
1:41:01 And so I was age maybe 35, 34, running Expedia as a really young public company CEO.
1:41:09 The company’s doing great, but I had to deal with stuff like 9-11 during the travel business.
1:41:18 And I had been a pretty, like, not quite sleep under the desk, but kind of work all the time kind of guy for a long time.
1:41:19 Because I love my work.
1:41:20 Whatever.
1:41:24 Like, we all kind of, we socialized with Microsoft people and then Expedia people.
1:41:25 And we just lived, this was our lives.
1:41:27 We talked about it, we talked about it, we talked about it at dinner.
1:41:29 So I was pretty neglectful.
1:41:40 While I was a weekend warrior type basketball player and tennis player and snowboarder, I didn’t yet realize that I had to maintain myself in order to be able to do those things.
1:41:44 So I was just working too hard, working all the time.
1:41:48 When Sarah was pregnant with Josie and Russell, she went into labor really early.
1:41:50 We were on our way up to Whistler.
1:42:02 And she was, for those who understand these things, I think she was 27 weeks pregnant out of a 40-week typical gestation period, which is very early.
1:42:05 That’s not very, very early, but it’s danger early.
1:42:09 And so we were driving on our way.
1:42:10 So I was like, I think something’s going on.
1:42:12 Let’s go stop by the hospital.
1:42:16 So we stopped by the hospital just so her OB could check her out.
1:42:22 And she was partially dilated and just some small contractions.
1:42:25 And Sarah thought nothing of it.
1:42:26 The shoemaker’s kids have no shoes.
1:42:31 Sarah’s like, oh, fine, I’ll just keep the seat reclined as we drive up to Whistler.
1:42:37 And her doctor, Edith, said, not only are you not going up to Whistler, you’re not going home.
1:42:40 You are going to be admitted to the hospital.
1:42:41 We’re going to put you on muscle relaxants.
1:42:50 So that began a kind of a six-week, very scary period of my life and her life, where she was in the hospital making sure that the babies didn’t get born.
1:42:54 I was taking care of my three-year-old, Will.
1:42:57 And then everything turned out great.
1:43:01 She carried them to 35 weeks or something, 36 weeks.
1:43:02 The kids were perfect.
1:43:04 The birth was a little hard.
1:43:05 The kids were perfect.
1:43:06 And it all worked out.
1:43:16 But in the course of that period of time, it got me to reassess my life and how I led my life and what my priorities were and how I needed to take care of myself mentally and physically.
1:43:21 I kind of had the realization that for sustainability, I was going to have to start doing a bunch of things.
1:43:26 If I wanted to do the things I love to do for the long term, I was going to have to really build my foundation.
1:43:29 I decided to quit my job at that point, too.
1:43:31 I was still CEO.
1:43:33 IAC had just acquired the company.
1:43:37 And I made the decision at that point, but that this lifestyle was not.
1:43:39 I didn’t need it.
1:43:39 Needed a change.
1:43:45 And what were some of the changes?
1:43:46 Like, how did you layer things in?
1:43:48 Did you boil the ocean all at once?
1:43:50 And I was like, all right, here are the 12 new things I’m starting.
1:43:52 Did you layer it in?
1:43:56 And would you have done anything differently?
1:43:58 I started just exploring things.
1:44:03 The big change was we moved to Italy six months later or maybe eight months later.
1:44:07 And I developed a whole new set of things I did when we were living in Italy.
1:44:12 I took up road biking, which is a very Italian, a social Italian thing to do, which was great.
1:44:13 It was great for making friends, too.
1:44:17 But I had a period of time after that where I was in Seattle.
1:44:23 And I started, you know, I remember the first real class kind of thing I’d ever done was hot yoga.
1:44:25 And I was like, wow, this is amazing.
1:44:27 I feel incredible after I come out of that class.
1:44:33 And it’s, you know, strength and some conditioning, I guess, and really interesting and kind of a mental thing, too.
1:44:35 And I started doing that.
1:44:42 And then I didn’t hire a trainer until much later, but I eventually got there.
1:44:45 I didn’t lift weights for a long, long time.
1:44:47 I was more just kind of running.
1:44:48 I took up running.
1:44:49 I ran a couple of marathons.
1:44:53 You know, I discovered my body was not built for, my joints were not built for,
1:44:53 for marathons.
1:44:55 Anyway, I did a bunch of things, Tim.
1:45:05 Recognizing that I felt better when my body felt better and my mind felt better when my body felt better.
1:45:16 And it’s just built over time to the age I am now where, like, the physiology of what’s happening to my body and my bone density and my muscle mass at my age.
1:45:25 It’s like, I’m, like, continually been ramping up how much I do, A, because it makes me feel good, but B, because I’m, you know, just age-wise deteriorating.
1:45:28 And if I want to snowboard, I’ve snowboarded 35 days this year.
1:45:30 And it’s been amazing.
1:45:34 And, like, if I want to keep doing stuff like that, I’ve got to be strong.
1:45:39 So what does the current regimen look like, generally speaking?
1:45:45 I’m sure there are exceptions, and maybe you travel or go to various places, but what does the general regimen look like?
1:45:49 Probably a couple hours total of Zone 2-y type stuff.
1:45:52 You know, bike, rowing, maybe tread.
1:45:57 My knees kind of are not great running, but the treadmill, a softer treadmill works.
1:45:59 But the Peloton is my favorite one there.
1:46:05 And then weightlifting, different body parts, maybe four times a week.
1:46:08 And then a lot of just play stuff.
1:46:09 What kind of play?
1:46:12 A lot of snowboarding and play sports.
1:46:13 I play tennis.
1:46:15 I like to do a lot of stuff.
1:46:16 With my body and the world.
1:46:18 How do you fit that in?
1:46:20 I mean, you’ve got a lot going on.
1:46:21 You like building.
1:46:28 You continually, as our mutual friend Chris Saka, has in one of his suggested topics for exploration.
1:46:30 Since I asked him.
1:46:32 Like, you continually put yourself back in the arena.
1:46:33 Yeah.
1:46:34 Right?
1:46:34 As a builder.
1:46:35 Yeah.
1:46:38 You are on several boards.
1:46:40 I mean, there are demands.
1:46:42 I’m sure there’s a lot of inbound that you say no to.
1:46:44 How do you think about the self-care?
1:46:46 Is it sort of the first thing that you block?
1:46:46 Yeah.
1:46:47 And then that’s it.
1:46:54 For me now, priority wise, that is, I mean, my family and my health is essential to my family’s health, too.
1:46:57 So, my family and my health and my state of mind.
1:46:59 But I am not operating.
1:47:07 About seven, eight months ago, after my second or third stint as CEO at Zillow, I kind of kicked myself back upstairs.
1:47:11 And so, I’m no longer the day-to-day CEO, which is terrific.
1:47:12 It’s helped.
1:47:17 But I’ve always been the guy who my joke was, I’m very much a delegator.
1:47:21 I’m very much a pick great people and then give them lots of space.
1:47:33 And actually, a leadership development technique I often coach is for a senior leader or middle management type leader, I encourage them to really take a vacation and disappear.
1:47:38 And most people think that’s going to be harmful to their business or their career.
1:47:44 And what I try to coach them on is, no, that is actually the way you develop your leaders.
1:47:46 One of the ways you develop your leaders.
1:47:52 Because if you’re really disconnected, you’re on a surf trip in Indonesia and you have zero connectivity.
1:47:54 For how long would you recommend?
1:47:54 For two weeks.
1:47:54 Yeah.
1:47:55 Okay?
1:47:58 Do it for two weeks and be disconnected.
1:48:02 And your teams are going to have to figure out how to deal with stuff that’s important.
1:48:09 And they’re going to have to create systems and policies and rules ahead of time that will outlive the surf trip.
1:48:10 That’s true.
1:48:16 But from a leadership perspective, sometimes the real leader of an organization is not necessarily the one with the title.
1:48:24 And when somebody’s really disconnected, the senior leader is disconnected, leadership is sort of an emergent property.
1:48:25 Okay?
1:48:26 And it kind of emerges.
1:48:32 So this is a long way of saying, I kind of have always felt that way about my universe, too.
1:48:42 I believe the most secure people are willing to let go and roll the dice on the other people and answer the question, who is your successor?
1:48:44 If you were hit by a bus, who would take over?
1:48:45 Okay?
1:48:54 And the less secure people, the more insecure people, put themselves in a position where they seem indispensable to senior management and couldn’t possibly leave.
1:48:54 Okay?
1:48:55 That person is not promotable.
1:49:03 The person who has cultivated leaders under them, that person is totally promotable, even though that person is more expendable, too.
1:49:03 Yeah.
1:49:04 Right?
1:49:05 And so it’s that fine thing.
1:49:08 Long-winded way of me saying, I’ve always had a lot of things going on.
1:49:14 My joke was, you know, if I’m doing my job really, really perfectly, I can be on my surfboard.
1:49:15 Okay?
1:49:20 And nobody knows when you don’t show up to work if you have eight jobs.
1:49:24 Everybody always thinks you’re working on the other thing.
1:49:27 I’m being glib, and it gets a little bit of a chuckle.
1:49:32 But I am a seriously leverage-oriented person.
1:49:33 So it’s not that hard.
1:49:34 Yeah.
1:49:42 What are other ways that you identify opportunities for leverage or think about leverage?
1:49:53 In a life context, it is just surrounding yourself with great people who care, who have skills and who care about whatever the mission is, be it building a business or building a family.
1:50:04 Like, Sarah is amazingly smart and capable and cares, and, like, the stuff that she’s in charge of is going to happen well.
1:50:09 You know, that’s an unbelievable feature to have in a partner as you’re looking for a partner.
1:50:13 And, you know, lots of stuff matters in finding a partner.
1:50:15 But, like, it’s really a partnership.
1:50:18 If you guys are going to have a baby, that’s a business of sorts.
1:50:19 You know?
1:50:22 I think it’s mostly about picking the right people.
1:50:33 Any recommendations for people who are hiring folks they have not known for a long period of time?
1:50:36 Any recommendations for the hiring process?
1:50:39 Because a lot of people interview well who don’t necessarily perform well.
1:50:40 They know what to say.
1:50:43 And reference checks often are conflicted.
1:50:48 I’ve had the worst luck with taking reference checks at face value.
1:50:50 There’s some ways to kind of work with that.
1:50:50 Yeah.
1:50:52 Two things, I would say.
1:50:56 One is my favorite section of the resume, I guess now LinkedIn.
1:51:02 It’s not really a section on LinkedIn, but it’s always in the very bottom, which is the interests.
1:51:19 I want to get somebody, if in an interview situation, talking about their interests and why they put them there and then just asking them basic questions and watching whether or not they have any passion.
1:51:21 You know, to see a real spark.
1:51:27 You know, because if they put it there, that is what they’re interested in and they’d better be able to light up on it.
1:51:31 When I was earlier in my career, I would always make up business cases around some interest.
1:51:34 You know, how big is the ski industry because you put skiing, whatever.
1:51:36 You know, and that was always a fun stepping off point.
1:51:39 So finding people’s passion.
1:51:41 I want to find people who are passionate people.
1:51:47 And then the second thing is get used to pulling the pitcher off the mound quickly.
1:51:49 Firing someone.
1:51:49 Yep.
1:51:50 Okay.
1:51:52 It’s hard when you’re early in your career.
1:51:54 It’s not as hard later.
1:51:58 All of my mistakes as a leader have been leaving.
1:52:04 Almost all of them have been leaving the pitcher on the mound too long, hoping that the arm would get better.
1:52:09 What have you learned in terms of process for firing?
1:52:14 Any approach, go-to phrases, rules?
1:52:17 If you’ve got someone, you’re going on your two-week surf trip.
1:52:25 There’s someone below you who is going to fill that leadership void and he or she is going to have to fire someone.
1:52:31 And they’re like, hey boss, I don’t want to bother you, but this is something I haven’t done before.
1:52:32 Give me some advice.
1:52:33 Yeah.
1:52:35 Don’t do it via text.
1:52:37 Be an upstanding person.
1:52:38 You know, have some courage.
1:52:40 You got to be face-to-face.
1:52:42 But it’s actually not that hard.
1:52:51 My advice would be, look, if you’re not happy with the performance of this person, I guarantee you the person isn’t happy either.
1:52:57 Therefore, you can increase love in the world by releasing that person to find where that person belongs.
1:52:59 That person belongs somewhere else.
1:53:01 That person’s going to be happy somewhere.
1:53:03 Help that person find that somewhere.
1:53:07 But you’re going to be happier when you release that person.
1:53:08 That person’s going to be happier too.
1:53:16 And so, if you make it a partnership, if you make it a joint decision effectively, or at least align, get the interests aligned, which it almost always is.
1:53:17 It’s not as hard.
1:53:21 And when you do that, you naturally are being human.
1:53:25 If you’re looking for shared alignment, that means you care.
1:53:27 That means you’re showing heart.
1:53:31 And having heart in this situation is really important.
1:53:37 And then in terms of the delivery, the conversation, any tips on how to manage that?
1:53:41 You do have to be ready for a lot of stuff to come up.
1:53:47 And as the person in the power, holding power in this situation, you have to wear it.
1:53:54 You have to understand and be sympathetic and non-argumentative in order to get people on the same page.
1:53:59 Oftentimes, just like in life with anything, people really do need to get it out and be heard.
1:54:01 And that’s great.
1:54:02 That’s great.
1:54:08 And then asking advice on the way out, too, like for voluntary or involuntary termination.
1:54:09 Sometimes it’s hazy, right?
1:54:09 You know?
1:54:18 And soliciting information on the way out for yourself and the organization is often appreciated and often revealing, too.
1:54:19 So, that’s good.
1:54:20 Exit interview.
1:54:26 Exit interview is important in as casual a setting as you can make, as you can muster.
1:54:32 I believe the entrance, the one month post-start, is a really great time to get observations.
1:54:33 From new people, too.
1:54:35 They haven’t been fully indoctrinated yet.
1:54:38 And they probably are good consultants right then.
1:54:42 So, random question.
1:54:43 I don’t know.
1:54:44 You could be covered in tattoos.
1:54:47 But what is the story of this tattoo?
1:54:48 Family.
1:54:49 All right.
1:54:50 Five of us in the family.
1:54:52 Things we love.
1:54:54 So, it looks at a quick glance.
1:54:55 It looks like a snowflake.
1:54:56 But those are trees.
1:54:58 It’s made up of five trees.
1:55:00 It’s a snowflake in total shape.
1:55:03 And it’s a starfish in the negative space.
1:55:04 Uh-huh.
1:55:13 My daughter, Josie, when she was 16, which is too young to get a tattoo, asked Sarah if she
1:55:14 could get a tattoo.
1:55:18 Or asked her more specifically, would she get a tattoo with her?
1:55:21 And Sarah’s like, well, you met Sarah.
1:55:22 Like, sure.
1:55:26 And she’s like, and then brought it to me.
1:55:28 And I was like, okay, let’s design one as a family.
1:55:29 Yeah.
1:55:30 No Wile E. Coyote.
1:55:35 The first versions, you know those on the back of a minivan, the family of five with
1:55:37 the stick figure mom and stick figure.
1:55:38 That was what Josie drew.
1:55:39 V1.
1:55:41 Josie’s very creative.
1:55:42 You’re creative, honey.
1:55:44 But it was funny.
1:55:45 That was the first version.
1:55:49 And we were sharing different versions and iterating.
1:55:55 And at some point, Sarah said, maybe we should bring this artist friend, Joe Park, into this.
1:55:56 And he’d never designed a tattoo.
1:55:58 We brought him, and he was super psyched to do it.
1:56:03 So then he led the creative iterations, and we ended up with this.
1:56:04 They look exactly the same, but they’re not.
1:56:05 They’re all unique.
1:56:08 They form a cohesive whole.
1:56:08 Oh, the trees, you’re saying?
1:56:09 The trees are unique, too.
1:56:10 Mm-hmm.
1:56:11 So, anyway.
1:56:12 I dig it.
1:56:12 Yeah.
1:56:13 I love it.
1:56:17 I was the only one who got it in a really visible place, and everybody else got jealous,
1:56:20 because I like to be able to look at it and remember my family.
1:56:24 And we did this maybe five, six, seven years ago.
1:56:26 I thought we’d get more.
1:56:29 Sarah’s gotten two more tattoos, but I haven’t gotten any more.
1:56:32 You know, I think tattoos are, you don’t have any?
1:56:32 Do you have some?
1:56:33 I don’t.
1:56:35 It’s a, very few people have one.
1:56:37 Yeah.
1:56:43 I have been, I’ve been considering getting my first, which is in some ways kind of similar.
1:56:47 It’d actually be in very similar location right here with my dog’s paw prints.
1:56:51 It’s hard for me to imagine regretting that.
1:56:51 You won’t.
1:56:52 Yeah, I don’t think I will.
1:56:53 Yeah.
1:56:53 Yeah.
1:56:53 Yeah.
1:56:55 So.
1:57:00 We, uh, interestingly, our older boy, Will, was of age to get a tattoo.
1:57:02 He was 18, I think, at the time, maybe 19.
1:57:07 But the twins, it wasn’t legal to get one in Washington state or most states.
1:57:13 And so Josie was actually going to high school for a year in Spain at the time, and Spain didn’t have that restriction.
1:57:15 So she got the design and got it, got it in Spain.
1:57:19 And we have that house in Montana, and Montana doesn’t have any restrictions.
1:57:26 So on the way to go skiing one time, Russell, you know, went to some sketchy place in Bozeman and got the tattoo.
1:57:28 So we got them all, we all got them in different places.
1:57:29 It’s funny.
1:57:42 Any other, uh, I mean, I guess getting a tattoo is not necessarily a recommendation you’re making, but any thoughts for, let’s just say there are people listening who are type A or otherwise builders,
1:57:55 builders who can sometimes be consumed, perhaps, by the scale and scope of what they’re doing or hope to do, and they’re planning on kids or they have very young kids.
1:57:57 What would your recommendations be to those people?
1:58:04 For the planning on the kind of constant delayers, which there are a lot of, you know, maybe some right here.
1:58:08 There are a lot of out there, okay?
1:58:18 And I think the fundamental logic is, this is an important thing, and I don’t have enough time right now, and so I’ll wait till it’s a better time.
1:58:22 There’s never a better time.
1:58:24 There’s never a good time.
1:58:27 So point number one is, it’s not going to get better.
1:58:28 It’s not going to feel better.
1:58:33 And then point number two is, we’re built for this.
1:58:51 We are the successful evolutionary product of a lot of people who figured this out, which means we have a lot of encoded knowledge about how to do this and how to deal from our bodies and our minds and our relationships and even just how we parent.
1:58:52 It’s encoded.
1:58:53 A lot of it is encoded.
1:58:54 So it’s, you know what?
1:58:57 It’s probably going to work pretty well.
1:58:59 And so, I don’t know if I’d call myself a birther.
1:59:03 I’m an encourager of, like, let’s have more babies.
1:59:12 And I’m a really big believer in how it’s such an important part of our own mental health to have, at least for me, to have children.
1:59:23 And from a growth perspective, and it kind of, as we get older, our ego focus naturally, the diameter of our ego sphere gets broader and broader, and children just blow it way out.
1:59:30 And that is really a positive for most people, to realize that their needs and wants are trivial.
1:59:32 You know, I think that’s a positive.
1:59:34 So anyway, I encourage it.
1:59:39 Yeah, for me, it’s not a bad timing, looking for better timing thing.
1:59:49 It’s more of a navigating the bizarre aspects of modern dating, being in my public slash semi-public position.
1:59:57 And as someone who’s already, for a lot of good reasons, slow to trust, getting to a point where I feel like I can pull the trigger.
2:00:01 I think that’s solvable, but it’s not trivial.
2:00:03 I never had to deal with that, but I totally.
2:00:05 How old were you guys when you met?
2:00:07 22.
2:00:08 Wow.
2:00:09 Yeah.
2:00:10 Good for you.
2:00:11 In a pub in Cambridge, Mass.
2:00:12 Look at that.
2:00:13 Yeah.
2:00:14 Maybe that’s my next move.
2:00:14 No.
2:00:16 Go pub crawling, Cambridge.
2:00:17 It’s hard, though.
2:00:20 I totally get what you’re saying.
2:00:21 It’s hard.
2:00:35 For the people with young kids and balancing things, I guess I would just always advise to don’t wait for an external catalyst to make sure you’re prioritizing your family life and your personal health.
2:00:45 Because a lot of people out there are not doing that, and eventually it comes home to roost one way or another, you know, and the sooner you can kind of keep things in perspective.
2:00:47 It’s kind of a confidence game in general.
2:00:49 It’s a courage and confidence game in general.
2:00:59 If you have high confidence in your abilities, there is no better time for at least, you know, the kinds of jobs in the sit at a desk, use a computer type jobs.
2:01:07 There’s no better time in the history of the world to be able to have a good balance between having work and life interweave.
2:01:13 I’m a huge believer in what I call cloud HQ, cloud headquarters at Zillow post-pandemic.
2:01:24 I was a huge believer in office culture before that, but the pandemic opened my eyes to just how much more inclusive the cloud headquartered the Matt Mullenweg.
2:01:29 Matt was very, you know, he was very influential on me early in the pandemic.
2:01:39 You know, I had him blue jeans zoom in to an early company meeting early in COVID and lay out his game plan for the distributed corporation.
2:01:41 Yeah, for people who don’t know, yeah.
2:01:42 Super helpful.
2:01:54 Yeah, Matt Mullenweg, generally associated with WordPress, founder and CEO of Automatic, spelled M-A-T-T-I-C, and pioneer of distributed workforces.
2:02:06 And as a design principle from the outset has built that company to be distributed and therefore was very anti-fragile when COVID came along.
2:02:09 And there were some other standout examples.
2:02:11 I mean, Shopify did really well also.
2:02:12 But you’re right.
2:02:27 I think if this can’t lend itself, I mean, modern technology and the options available to some type of balance or the option to pull different levers where it would have been far difficult even 10 years ago.
2:02:27 Yeah.
2:02:31 But we can generalize and say it’s been great for moms, but it’s more than just moms.
2:02:49 But it has enabled really smart, very experienced moms who may have historically decided to take the off-ramp into primarily momhood rather than primarily climbing the corporate ladder or just executive leadership path.
2:02:50 It’s enabled them to come back.
2:03:04 And likewise now, for a father, as long as the company doesn’t get angry when they see you in your car on the Zoom because you’re at a dentist appointment for your kid or something.
2:03:11 As long as that doesn’t make the CEO get angry, because that’s not the way I did it when I came up and look how great I turned out.
2:03:13 I’ve got to do it this way.
2:03:16 It’s like I kind of chuckle when I listen to all that.
2:03:19 I’m like, you people, open your minds.
2:03:21 This opens doors.
2:03:23 This doesn’t close doors.
2:03:23 Yeah.
2:03:25 So let me ask a couple of quick questions.
2:03:39 They don’t need to have quick answers, but just as we start to land the plane, what books have you either gifted a lot to other people or re-read yourself?
2:03:40 Either one.
2:03:50 I am not your typical person, probably sitting in the seat and that maybe I am not a nonfiction business book.
2:03:52 Sorry, Tim.
2:03:53 Oh, that’s okay.
2:03:53 Yeah.
2:03:55 I tend not to read that stuff.
2:04:00 The older I get, I occasionally will read a biography now, but they mean more now the older you get.
2:04:07 But I am fully a, I’m a big reader and it’s fiction and generally good fiction.
2:04:08 Although I do have, you know.
2:04:09 Cheap thrills.
2:04:11 Yeah, yeah, I do.
2:04:11 I do.
2:04:14 I really love beautiful, beautiful fiction.
2:04:21 I dabble, I’ve always dabbled in the kind of science fiction, magical realism stuff as well.
2:04:33 I believe for me at least escape from the cranked up quick twitch, always on alert operational stuff that business people go with.
2:04:34 Yeah, exactly.
2:04:35 To get my brain, my monkey brain.
2:04:36 Okay.
2:04:45 And to get my monkey brain to relax escaping into a fiction novel for me is just a fantastic release.
2:04:51 So, with all that said, what stuff do I like and that I’ve gifted?
2:04:53 Recently, I gifted The Oceans and the Stars.
2:04:54 Do you know Mark Halperin?
2:04:55 Oh, no.
2:04:56 Okay.
2:05:02 He’s a guy who’s a little older than I am and writes characters that are just about in my phase of life.
2:05:05 Like a beautiful, luscious prose writer.
2:05:06 Really smart.
2:05:11 Wrote Soldier of the Great War and A Winter’s Tale and Freddy and Frederica.
2:05:13 I don’t know if you’ve heard of any of these books.
2:05:15 There’s a little bit of magic in them.
2:05:17 Magic is a prime character in all these books.
2:05:26 It’s this luscious prose and epic stories of war and romance and exploration and relationships.
2:05:29 And this latest one is I highly recommend.
2:05:38 It’s a kind of on the edge of retirement, just under admiral or like a low-level admiral in the U.S. Navy
2:05:42 who almost becomes head of the DOD but doesn’t get it because he speaks his mind.
2:05:47 And then he gets commissioned as a rebuke on this new, weird ship.
2:05:48 And I’ll just say that.
2:05:54 And that’s a setup for him taking this really more fast attack destroyer into the Middle East.
2:05:56 And he’s kind of a war guy.
2:05:57 He’s a vet.
2:06:05 And he’s a pretty engaged political kind of, I call him an offensive realist in the John Mearsheimer mold.
2:06:07 Kind of hawkish, would be perceived as hawkish.
2:06:09 You know, believes in strong defense.
2:06:10 The protagonist.
2:06:12 This is the author.
2:06:12 I got it.
2:06:13 Mark Halperin.
2:06:14 This is his mindset.
2:06:24 So that manifests in basically romantic stories of heroic war efforts, which is, you know, I’m a boy.
2:06:24 I like that stuff.
2:06:28 I recommend Oceans and Stars is great.
2:06:34 The only one of his that I probably reread is A Winter’s Tale, which was my first one I ever read by him.
2:06:41 It’s just a beautiful, beautiful story of early 20th century life near New York City and upstate New York.
2:06:42 You might actually like it.
2:06:43 I might dig it.
2:06:48 I read Last of the Mohicans just to take a walk through that area and that time period.
2:06:49 Authors I like.
2:06:51 I like Haruki Murakami.
2:06:51 Yeah.
2:06:52 Kind of magic.
2:06:57 Neil Stevenson is like, some people don’t like his latest book, Polo Ston.
2:07:00 I don’t know if he’s the one who wrote Snow Crash.
2:07:00 Oh, yeah.
2:07:05 I had pizza with him in Seattle with a couple of other guys.
2:07:12 And I was like, wait, you do Victorian era calisthenics with, oh, and you make swords?
2:07:13 Wait, what?
2:07:14 I mean, lots of.
2:07:15 And he’s got the beard.
2:07:16 Oh, amazing beard.
2:07:17 Yeah.
2:07:19 I actually kind of like froze up when I met him.
2:07:23 It doesn’t happen to me very often, but he’s kind of a hero.
2:07:24 And he’s in Seattle.
2:07:24 He’s in.
2:07:25 Yeah, he’s right there.
2:07:26 Yeah, he’s right there.
2:07:28 So I see him occasionally at our sushi place.
2:07:30 I’m like, I get scared.
2:07:35 But his latest, Polo Ston, I highly recommend.
2:07:36 Okay, I haven’t read it yet.
2:07:39 Some people are giving me grief for it.
2:07:43 It’s, you know, authors when they get successful late in the night.
2:07:44 7,000 pages?
2:07:45 Well, it’s long.
2:07:46 A lot of his stuff is long, but it’s not that long.
2:07:49 It’s not like Cryptonomicon or something.
2:07:50 Which I loved.
2:07:51 Which me too.
2:07:51 Me too.
2:07:57 But authors, as they get successful, sometimes they have too much power over their editors.
2:07:59 And so they get a little self-indulgent, you know?
2:08:03 Which, for me, with a beautiful prose writer, I’m like, take me along.
2:08:03 Fine.
2:08:05 I will indulge your self-indulgence.
2:08:06 And I don’t mind it.
2:08:12 But this one takes 100 to 150 pages to break into, but then it just goes.
2:08:12 Then it rips.
2:08:13 Then it rips.
2:08:13 Yeah.
2:08:15 So anyway, I highly write.
2:08:16 And it’s going to be a trilogy.
2:08:18 And so it’s only the first one.
2:08:19 So I’m like, you know, I can’t wait.
2:08:22 Anyway, I love, you can tell, I love to read fiction.
2:08:29 And do you lean these days, if you’re gifting, have you gifted those books that you mentioned?
2:08:33 I have gifted Oceans and Stars, but I’m such a Kindle person.
2:08:35 So many of us are digital readers now.
2:08:36 It’s kind of hard to gift.
2:08:37 Yeah, it is.
2:08:39 It’s more, you know, group chat.
2:08:39 Yeah.
2:08:41 You know, book group, group chat.
2:08:44 That’s how most of the book discovery happens for me now.
2:08:47 Have you read any of Ted Chang’s stuff?
2:08:48 Uh-uh.
2:08:49 Oh, man.
2:08:49 Who is it?
2:08:50 Who is it?
2:08:53 Okay, so Ted, C-H-I-A-N-G.
2:08:54 Okay.
2:08:58 He has, last I checked, he has two collections of short stories.
2:09:02 There is one, which I always script the title of.
2:09:09 It’s like stories of your life and other stories, something like that.
2:09:09 Okay.
2:09:17 And one of those short stories was the basis for the movie Arrival with Jeremy Renner.
2:09:17 Amazing movie.
2:09:20 So one of his short stories was the basis for that.
2:09:24 And then I read that collection, and pretty much everyone who read it was just like,
2:09:26 I don’t understand how this guy does this.
2:09:31 And if they happen to be writers, they’re also just like, sad clown tear.
2:09:35 You know, it’s like, how does someone even begin to create something like this?
2:09:40 His second collection came out, Exhalation, and I didn’t want to buy it because I didn’t
2:09:40 want to be disappointed.
2:09:42 I was like, there’s just no way, right?
2:09:44 Like, that first one was Appetite for Destruction.
2:09:45 Like, yeah, you can’t do that twice.
2:09:50 And then the second was just unbelievably good.
2:09:50 All right.
2:09:57 And not all of them will hit necessarily, but the ones that hit are just incredible.
2:09:58 And he has-
2:10:00 And they’re like one night read short story, a collection of one night reads.
2:10:03 I would say a lot of them are one night reads.
2:10:05 Some of them end up being a little bit longer.
2:10:11 But he, along with other writers too, Kenneth Liu, I think is L-I-U.
2:10:16 He has the paper Menagerie, which was actually gifted to me by Matt Mullenweg, blends or alternates
2:10:22 in a sense between sci-fi and fantasy in this really compelling way.
2:10:27 So you get these like little ginger snacks in between your pieces of sushi.
2:10:29 That sounds right up my alley.
2:10:29 Resets.
2:10:31 So highly, highly recommend.
2:10:37 And I think for the longest time, he wasn’t, maybe he still isn’t a full-time writer.
2:10:40 That’s the part that really got me where it’s like, okay, he writes technical manuals for
2:10:41 A, B, or C.
2:10:44 And then in his spare time, he wins Hugo and Nebula Awards.
2:10:46 It’s just like, oh, come on.
2:10:46 Amazing.
2:10:47 Yeah.
2:10:51 There’s hope for, I always kind of wished I became a writer.
2:10:53 I like to write, but I’m not that good.
2:10:55 And I’ve never dedicated time to it.
2:10:58 But in that vein, this guy Amor Tolles, do you know him?
2:10:59 Oh, so good.
2:11:00 I’ve only read-
2:11:01 He was a banker.
2:11:01 I know.
2:11:02 Finance.
2:11:03 Well, that’s another one.
2:11:05 Until he was like 40.
2:11:06 No, I know.
2:11:12 I read, the only thing I’ve read of his is Lincoln Highway, which, I mean, it is such a page
2:11:12 turner.
2:11:14 It’s so beautifully architected.
2:11:21 And I read that, and I, through someone named Hugh Howey, shook hands with Amor very
2:11:21 briefly at a restaurant.
2:11:23 We happened to bump into each other.
2:11:26 And I found out about the finance background.
2:11:27 I was like, you gotta be kidding me.
2:11:27 I know.
2:11:28 You gotta be kidding me.
2:11:29 I learned that.
2:11:30 He was on somebody’s pod.
2:11:33 He gave a great pod when Lincoln Highway came out.
2:11:34 Yeah.
2:11:36 To somebody who cracks open artists.
2:11:37 It might have been like Brian.
2:11:38 Oh, Coppelman.
2:11:39 It might have been Coppelman.
2:11:39 Yeah.
2:11:40 Very well could have been Coppelman.
2:11:42 Who gets to artists, right?
2:11:45 Yes, who, by the way, for people who don’t know, a quick bit of trivia.
2:11:52 So, Brian Coppelman, co-creator of Billions and co-writer of Rounders and all these movies
2:11:59 and TV shows and so on, also discovered Tracy Chapman as a musician back in his A&R days.
2:11:59 Really?
2:12:00 Yeah.
2:12:01 Isn’t that wild?
2:12:03 He’s a talented guy.
2:12:06 So, it wouldn’t surprise me if A&R was on that show.
2:12:06 Yeah.
2:12:08 He was on there and got him to crack up.
2:12:11 And then, he was kind of surprised by Brian’s questions, I think.
2:12:13 And didn’t know Brian.
2:12:15 And all this stuff came out.
2:12:15 Yeah.
2:12:16 You know.
2:12:17 Amazing.
2:12:18 All right.
2:12:20 This is the billboard question.
2:12:23 If you could put anything on a billboard.
2:12:24 Message.
2:12:25 Quote.
2:12:25 Yeah.
2:12:30 Blinder, anything at all, obviously metaphorically, just to get something in front of a lot of
2:12:30 people.
2:12:33 You asked this, so I did think about it a little bit.
2:12:33 Yeah.
2:12:38 And my initial response that I latched onto came from that movie Bowfinger.
2:12:40 I don’t know if you ever saw Bowfinger.
2:12:40 No.
2:12:41 It’s a cult classic.
2:12:41 Okay.
2:12:44 And a lot of you people out there haven’t seen it, but I highly recommend it.
2:12:47 It’s Eddie Murphy Tour de Force.
2:12:48 Okay.
2:12:50 And Steve Martin and Heather Graham.
2:12:52 It’s super quirky.
2:12:57 Eddie Murphy plays two roles in it, which he did for a while in lots of movies.
2:13:05 And he plays, one of his roles, he plays a paranoid Hollywood celebrity who thinks and
2:13:10 in fact is being followed by people who are making a movie about him with him starring it
2:13:10 unbeknownst to him.
2:13:11 That’s the setup.
2:13:13 Steve Martin’s directing.
2:13:17 And he gets super, he’s already a paranoid guy, but he gets super paranoid.
2:13:19 It’s like, people are following me.
2:13:25 And he goes to a thing that, I don’t know what kind of culty LA religion it’s representing,
2:13:27 but it’s called Mindhead.
2:13:32 And he goes in and he has his first counseling with the high priest of Mindhead.
2:13:35 And the religion is based on three happy premises.
2:13:39 I’m not going to remember them all, but happy premise number one was something like,
2:13:43 there is no giant foot in the sky about to step on me.
2:13:44 Okay.
2:13:46 This is like a mantra you have to repeat.
2:13:50 The third one is my favorite and that was what I was going to put on the billboard.
2:13:55 And that is, even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.
2:13:57 Okay.
2:13:59 That goes on my billboard.
2:14:05 That or my favorite Burning Man bar ever was, had that giant neon sign on top of this kind
2:14:10 of cozy geodesic dome playing groovy music decorated as an aquarium.
2:14:11 Anybody out there?
2:14:14 It’s like, it was at Burning Man a while ago and it hasn’t come back.
2:14:15 It was our favorite spot.
2:14:18 And the sign said, don’t panic.
2:14:21 We’ll say more.
2:14:22 That’s it.
2:14:23 Don’t panic.
2:14:24 So that’s on the billboard.
2:14:24 Don’t panic.
2:14:25 Don’t panic.
2:14:32 I think a lot of my job as a leader explicitly or naturally or otherwise is to naturally bring
2:14:36 people off of their high, high beta, high swings, high mood swings.
2:14:42 People have a tendency to, towards fear and panic and almost always it’s going to be just
2:14:43 fine.
2:14:45 And when it’s not, it doesn’t matter anyway.
2:14:46 Right.
2:14:46 Okay.
2:14:54 And it can cause a lot of a happier life and a calmer community and a better, healthier
2:15:00 community and family if everybody just takes a little breath before getting scared, you
2:15:04 know, or getting crazy or sending a text or whatever.
2:15:06 Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.
2:15:09 Is that basically related to the don’t panic?
2:15:09 Yes, I think so.
2:15:11 I think that led me to the don’t panic.
2:15:11 I think so.
2:15:16 And I’m not saying I actually, I don’t move through the world feeling as if I might
2:15:16 ignite.
2:15:17 I really don’t.
2:15:24 But I think a lot of people, especially in the modern newsfeed, iPhone, TikTok, Twitter
2:15:26 world do feel that way.
2:15:26 Yeah.
2:15:28 And so it’s even more important.
2:15:31 It’s why meditation is on the rise.
2:15:33 It’s why we’re looking for escapes.
2:15:39 We’re looking to give our brains and bodies just a break from the constant barrage.
2:15:42 And it’s causing mental health problems we all are familiar with.
2:15:43 You know, and I think that’s part of it.
2:15:46 It’s just too easy to get mad or scared or outraged or whatever.
2:15:51 Go take a rafting trip for a week, you know, that’s disconnected.
2:15:52 That’s going to be on the rise.
2:15:53 Those are growth businesses, right?
2:15:57 People sheltering from the digital storm.
2:15:58 Hailstorm of doom.
2:15:59 Right, exactly.
2:16:02 It’s so unhealthy, you know?
2:16:03 Have you taken any sabbaticals since Italy?
2:16:05 Oh, yeah.
2:16:07 I mean, I’ve had multiple retirements.
2:16:12 Now, are those failed retirements or did those have an end point where you’re like,
2:16:15 I’m going to take a year and then I’m going to dust off my gloves and get back in the room?
2:16:18 The Italy one was a failed one, although I suspected I was really young, right?
2:16:20 The others, no.
2:16:21 It’s just been sabbaticals.
2:16:22 How long are they typically?
2:16:31 You know, the Italy one was the longest one, but I’ve kind of built shelter into our family’s routine now.
2:16:36 So it’s just a part of the normal cycle of the seasons, you know?
2:16:41 And a really key component of that is not always achievable, especially now.
2:16:46 Starlink and traveling Starlink and Starlink at my surf camp and Starlink on my Airstream.
2:16:51 Like, it’s harder and harder to disconnect, but disconnection is really a key part of it, I think.
2:16:56 I think disconnection, the behavior you observe when people are disconnected, like with my family, when we do,
2:17:00 we rafted the Grand Canyon this year with a big group of friends and family.
2:17:08 And when you watch the younger people, it’s very unsettling for the first only like three or four hours.
2:17:14 And then when they realize it’s over, it’s total mean reversion to human behavior.
2:17:22 Playing games, doing crafts, taking a hike, you know, painting a picture, you know, it’s totally beautiful what happens.
2:17:24 And everybody is happy.
2:17:29 Well, you can’t not be happy making a friendship bracelet or playing Taco Cat.
2:17:31 What do we, I don’t want to give that away.
2:17:33 I don’t want to give your game away.
2:17:34 Oh, no, you didn’t.
2:17:38 But you can’t not be happy when you’re doing that and not looking at your phone.
2:17:39 Yeah.
2:17:40 Highly encouraged.
2:17:41 Rich.
2:17:42 Tim.
2:17:43 So nice to see you, man.
2:17:44 It’s great to see you.
2:17:45 We’ve covered a lot of ground.
2:17:46 That was fun.
2:17:46 Wow.
2:17:54 Where, if people want to learn more things about Rich, should they be visitor 22 to your blog?
2:17:55 No, I don’t think so.
2:17:57 I think the blog is totally vestigial.
2:17:59 It’s an appendix that needs to be removed.
2:18:01 Hopper and dropper.
2:18:01 Yeah.
2:18:01 No.
2:18:03 Yeah, no, man.
2:18:04 I don’t, you know.
2:18:07 The writing thing, I’ve had a lot of offers to do that with.
2:18:13 I’ve just never felt like I enjoyed reading any of those, you know, business guy ego books, you know.
2:18:18 I just don’t find them very interesting and I don’t want to be one of those kind of jerk-offs, you know.
2:18:24 Maybe do a writer’s retreat or an MFA, compressed MFA and take a stab at fiction.
2:18:25 Just saying.
2:18:30 Even if you never publish anything, it’s a good muscle to train for a bit and just to play with it.
2:18:33 I’m doing more creative things deliberately now and it feels good.
2:18:33 Yeah.
2:18:40 Like I took a Procreate painting on my iPad during COVID and it’s so, I’m so, I feel so good.
2:18:48 And I like catch myself going back and looking at my works and I should, like I’d be at a party and I’ll show people what I painted.
2:18:48 Yeah.
2:18:51 And it’s not good, but it makes me feel good.
2:18:53 I did exactly the same thing during COVID.
2:18:54 Procreate.
2:18:57 And you go through these tutorials, there’s something very soothing about it.
2:18:58 Oh, that Australian gal.
2:18:59 Yeah.
2:19:01 Oh, who I think works at Procreate.
2:19:01 Oh, so many.
2:19:02 Who gives the tutorials.
2:19:03 She’s so awesome.
2:19:05 Yeah, so many good ones.
2:19:08 Is there anything you would like to say?
2:19:13 Any closing comments, formal public complaints you’d like to lodge?
2:19:15 No, no.
2:19:17 I guess I should just, I should thank you.
2:19:18 You perform a good service.
2:19:25 You provide a good service for a lot of people with this pod and with your books, you know, and certain people need it more than others.
2:19:28 And I don’t think, I really don’t think people are looking for shortcuts.
2:19:30 That may have been where you started a little bit.
2:19:30 Yeah.
2:19:39 I really just think people are just looking to lead better, happier, slightly more efficient lives.
2:19:40 Improving lives.
2:19:42 They want to improve themselves.
2:19:44 And you really help people do that.
2:19:49 And the diversity of the guests that you bring on this pod is really inspiring.
2:19:50 So, yeah, it’s great.
2:19:51 Thank you.
2:19:51 Thanks, man.
2:19:52 It’s great to be here.
2:19:52 Yeah.
2:19:53 Awesome to have you.
2:19:58 Everybody listening, we’re going to include everything we talked about in the show notes.
2:20:00 Tim.blog slash podcast.
2:20:02 If you search Barton, that’s going to be the only Barton.
2:20:04 So you’ll find this episode.
2:20:11 And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself.
2:20:13 And as always, thanks for tuning in.
2:20:15 Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
2:20:18 Just one more thing before you take off.
2:20:20 And that is Five Bullet Friday.
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2:20:57 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.
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