Guy Kawasaki - Chief Evangelist at Canva | Are You A Remarkable Person?

Are you telling me you making five million bucks on this podcast? Yeah, more or less. I say, well, shit, why am I writing a book? You should write a book when you have something to say, not to help you get to another level of income or whatever. The probability of me writing atomic habits or in search of excellence or rich dad or poor dad or one-minute manager is pretty low. So is it worth you don't care if the content is going to be evergreen or not? If it's important enough, then it is evergreen. Many billionaires, in my personal opinion, who have written books? It's all ghost written. I don't think Elon Musk wakes up and says, how can I pay back society? So you walk in the bookstore and there's thousands of books. Why is anybody going to pick up my book? Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot has been a huge supporter of the show for over three years now and I'm a big fan of HubSpot because not only do they support the show, but they support entrepreneurs, they support founders. And obviously, building businesses, working with entrepreneurs has been a huge part of my career. And building is never easy. HubSpot is not only tools and technology that supports entrepreneurs, but they also offer tons of resources and discounts. But first, what is HubSpot if you've never used it before? It is the platform that unites your entire front office from marketing to sales to support. It's a platform that streamlines your support tickets, it generates more leads, it increases your sales. It is the platform that scales right alongside you. Don't even get me started on the educational articles, industry reports, the videos, tips, templates, literally everything startup founders need to help scale. HubSpot for startups has it all. Building a business is tough, maybe make it a little bit easier on yourself. Visit HubSpot.com slash startups to see how much you can save and see how much you can learn. I know that you used to speak like 90% of the year. You were traveling to different hotels and whatnot. Outside of the fact that you don't have to or was that the main impetus for starting a podcast was it the fact that you want to just stay at home and talk as opposed to travel and talk? You know, that is a very astute observation that only a podcaster can make. So what happened was I had a book that was coming out called Wise Guy. And I was on these, you know, this book tour where I go to podcasters and I record in their studio. And so one day I'm talking to this guy and I say, so what's your business model? He says, oh, I sell an ad at the beginning in the middle and at the end. And I say, well, let's do charge for this. He goes, ah, 25 at the start, 15 in the middle and 10 at the end. So like, I'm not at my math major, but I can add up 25, 15 and 10 in my brain. I come out with 50 and I said, so you tell me you make 50 grand per episode. And you do 52 episodes because actually I do two episodes a week. So I do 104 episodes. As I see, you tell me, are you telling me you making five million bucks on his podcast? And he said, you're more or less, I said, well, shit, why am I writing a book? Like, I got to write a book. It takes four years. I got a big for an advance. And then from the time I write the book to the time it comes out is one year. And then on the first day that the book comes out, I find out there's all these mistakes and I cannot fix it. And then, you know, in that year, imagine if you wrote a book right before the pandemic and you said something like, well, the key to raising money is face-to-face meetings. And then the pandemic happens like, oh, I guess that book doesn't work anymore. So anyway, so I'm telling you, that's a very astute observation. You know what's interesting? I always wondered because I'm a podcaster first and now I'm trying to write a book as like the brand building play, right? You want to have all the different mediums. You want to be on social, you podcast, but I always found it interesting because the book writing process is such a long-winded process. It seems like to write something evergreen, there's a little bit of luck in there too. Thank you. A lot. Because you've written how many books now? Sixteen. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to go off the rails and talk about writing? We could do whatever. Actually, it will actually dovetail into like the book, the most recent book. I think it's interesting because you've done it so much. Okay. I have this discussion quite often with people about books. So I think that you should approach a book as an end in itself. That is, you have something to say so you want to write a book, which is very different than saying the book is a means to an end. And when you say a book is a means to an end to build your brand, to build your image, to position you as a visionary, you know, increase your speaking fees or consulting, whatever. I think it perverts the process. So what you should do is you should write a book when you have something to say, not because you want it to help you get to another level of income or whatever. So that's thought number one. And I think thought number two is, I read some amazing number that there's hundreds of thousands of new books every year. And on average, they sell about, I don't know, 5,000 copies. So you've got to say to yourself, you know, the probability of me writing atomic habits or in search of excellence or rich dad, poor dad or one-minute manager is pretty low. So is it worth, you know, let's say you sell 5,000 copies, you make two bucks each, just 10 grand. Is it worth that? That's not even the, not even the advance. It's not even the advance. If you're going to make 10,000 bucks off, it's now your publisher is pissed off too. Yeah, so writing a book is not as obvious a method as people might think. But when you do it, I mean, how do you think through content? So you don't care. You don't care if the content is going to be evergreen or not. It's something that is problem in your life. And it's a thought that you have and you bring it to the world. And you hope that it hits. Like more or less the strategy, if it's like, if it's important enough and, and impactful enough in your day to day, then the thesis is it impacts a lot of other people. Well, I would make the case that if it's important enough, then it is evergreen, right? Um, so like I said, I mean, I think it starts with you have something to say that people should hear. And it, I think a very good test for you or not, I'm not trying to pick on you, but a very good test where it got stuck on me. So you picked on me about my camera set up already. You pick, you're just, you're just a bully. So no, I'm just kidding. Keep it up. Keep it. I'm trying to add value to your podcast. What? I know you are. I know. Okay, so if you're listening, I'm not picking on you now. If you're, if you're listening and you think you want to write a book, you have to ask yourself a very rough question, which is, pretend you walk into a bookstore if there are any more bookstores. So you walk in the bookstore and there's thousands of books. Most of them are sticking in like that. So you can only go like that to read them. There's some on the table. There's some near the cash register. And you have to ask yourself, why is anybody going to pick up my book? If you're Michelle Obama, I understand that. St.C. Abrams, I understand that. You know, Tom Brady, I understand that. But Joe Blow, from Blow Consulting, who is built a $2 million consulting business and has decided to position himself as an executive coach. So he has written a book called The Blow Way. And it's published by Blow Rests. Why is anybody going to pick up Joe Blow's book? That's the question you need to ask yourself. You know what's interesting? How do you tell people nicely that think they're more important than they actually are? Are you using me of telling you? No, I'm not accusing you. I'm saying that it's a real issue sometimes when people are building a brand. I think that they come from the perspective of, I've done cool shit. And people need to hear about it. And this is actually a personal brand lesson. People don't really care until they care. But how do you get them across that line? Okay. This is an unexpected podcast as ever. I love it. But I think that the desire to build the brand, while it is understandable and even necessary, I think that the way people go about it is wrong. And to pull this into my book, you know, you want to build the brand or you want to be remarkable. So it's not a thing where you wake up one morning you say, shit, today is the day I'm going to start building my brand or shit. Today is the day I'm going to start being remarkable. I think the order is you make a difference. You make a great product, you make a great service. And if you make a great product or you make a great service, that's going to build your brand. So a brand comes after not before. And to take an extreme example, I give you two extreme examples. I guarantee you that Jane Goodall and Steve Jobs never in their lives walk up and said, you know, Jane, you need to build the Jane Goodall brand. Sure, you've done research with chimps and stuff, but you need to be a Jane Goodall brand. And I would be astounded if Steve Jobs ever said, how do I build the Steve Jobs brand? What they did is, you know, Jane Goodalls created this great body of knowledge. Steve Jobs created these great devices. And when you do that, the brand follows. So I guess I'm saying that if you want to build the brand, do good shit and the brand will come. I love this. I think the people miss that. And I do want to eventually speak about the book you wrote, because I think it's very important. And I think listen, all of this speaks to the type of individual that's going to read the book and the message they're going to take from it, because there's so many people, even the name of your podcast, like remarkable people, it speaks to an individual that has achieved excellence. And I think that in today's day and age, so many people, again, are focusing on being perceived as excellent or remarkable before they even do the work. I think it's a social media problem. I think it's a comparison problem. I think it's a keeping up with the Joneses problem at an exceptional level that I historically have never seen before. So I think that it's a smart lesson to take away. But also, I mean, let's go into what is a remarkable person in your mind. You've spoken to, I think, 200 plus of them on your show. Give me the rundown of remarkable. Well, first of all, my podcast and my book is like remarkable people. It's not rich people and it's not famous people. It's remarkable people. And I am saying, think remarkable, not think rich, not think famous. So what I'm getting at is that the way you achieve this level of remarkable ability is you make a difference that you change the world. Now, I'm not saying that everybody listening has to be a Steve Jobs or a Jane Goodall. Because then I could only sell two copies of my book. Maybe not even two because Jane and Steve don't need my book. Oh, especially if you're dead. But anyway, so what I'm saying is, you know, what my book does, my book is not a self-help book in the sense of this is how to optimize your Instagram post and this is how to optimize TikTok. And this is how to get published in, you know, Harvard Business Review. This book is about how do I grow? How do I apply grit? And then how do I be gracious? And so if you do those things, if you grow and you work hard, it increases the probability of making a difference. And if you make a difference, you're going to be remarkable. So you don't have to be Steve Jobs or Jane Goodall. You can be remarkable by helping one classroom, one person. You know, there are people in my book and in my podcast that there's a woman who got diagnosed with ALS. Typically you die after two years with ALS. She decided when she was diagnosed that she was going to run a marathon in all 50 states. And she's done it. So is that Steve Jobs? Is that Jane Goodall? Is she a trillionaire? Is she a billionaire? Have you ever heard of her? No, but that is a remarkable accomplishment. And I swear I have, I have in my podcast kind of focused, not on purpose, but I have so many people who are stuck into the United States by coyotes across the US, Mexico border. I have people who served 22 years for a murder charge. I have homeless people who were beaten by their parents. I have people who have both parents were crack addicts and now they're professors. You know, that's the kind of people that I talk about in my book. It's not all Jane Goodall and Steve Jobs. No, it is people that have again gone through these incredible remarkable sort of life events and come out in a very meaningful way on the other side. But yeah, the three distinct sections, categories, seasons of somebody's life, growth, grit, grace, outside of the fact that it sounds great. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's through very good words. Maybe break those down a little bit more as to why each one of those is more important. Okay. Yeah. So we have to start with, with, with growths. And growth is Carol Duac. You know, she's the mother of the growth mindset. And her writing had a huge influence on me that her writing is that you, you can grow. You know, you're born with a certain set of skills and talents, but you could increase that. And it's very important that you keep growing. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck. So there's the growth mindset. The grit mindset is, you know, life doesn't owe you anything. You have got to work hard. You have got to show up every day. You have got to gut it out. And then the third stage is grace. And the reason why I believe that is because at the end of your life, there's this French concept called noblesse oblige. And it means that, you know, the nobility have an obligation to the rest of society. I think that's too elitist because it implies that, you know, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and Prince or King Charles, they're the nobility, so they should help the poor people. I think more important is to do the concept of success oblige, which is when you are successful, you have an obligation to help society and help other people, help younger people, help less fortunate people, and the door that you walked in through. You should keep that door open if not make it bigger. You have a moral obligation to do that. Do you feel that we do that well? Is the society or are we hurting in that department? Ah, that's an interesting question. You know, I don't have the ability to give you like this, really. Scientifically not valid. Just your opinion, I'm curious. Well, I think it's generally true. Yes. Take Jimmy Carter, for example, right? And I hate to admit this, take even Bill Gates. Now, on the other hand, can you imagine when Elon Musk is in his 60s? Hey, hard to remember how he's going to now. Is he already 60? I don't think so. Let's just say that he's going to be hard to mention. No, no, no, no, no. Jimmy Carter in the same sentence. Yes. Yeah. I understand where you're coming from. But, so with Jimmy Carter, it's pure altruism. It's pure altruism. I would say that it's just to play devil's advocate. Could Jimmy Carter build things that Elon could, for example, is the most effective way to give back towards altruism and philanthropy? Or is it to give back via innovation and creation? Let's be honest. I don't think, by the way, I'm not arguing with you, Elon Musk is not Jimmy Carter. You could argue with me. Let's be honest. I don't think Elon Musk wakes up and says, how can I pay back society? I'm making an electric car. Ah. I'll bore tunnels in Las Vegas. Ah. I make solar panels that look like roof tiles. Ah. I'll make reusable rockets. Ah. I'll enable satellite internet connection. No. God bless him. I mean, Elon Musk has created some of the greatest innovations ever. But hard to imagine that it was because he wanted to give back to society. Now, it may be that, you know, I can't tell you Steve Jobs was thinking about giving back to society when he invented Macintosh. But I was there, and I'm telling you, we really wanted to improve people's lives. And so, you know, part of the problem with interpreting what other people have done is you really don't know what was going through their mind when they did it. And people change, right? So, you know, maybe Elon Musk in his 70s and 80s is going to be an entirely different person. Who knows? You know, this is a whole, this is a very interesting conversation. And I can't divert too much from what I actually want to pull out of you, but just quick thought. Future of capitalism should be ethical conscious capitalism where you give back. That should be the, that should be where we go. I always find it interesting because the path there is difficult for me to see because the people that are the most ambitious and the most aggressive seem to end up building the biggest things. And they don't usually do it from a place of ethical capitalism. It seems to be a personality that drives revenue versus the personality that would, if they had a billion dollar organization, what could they do with it? Okay, so one of the principles that I use in the book, I learned from a guy named Dan Simons. And if you remember, he's the guy who did the video of the invisible gorilla. The invisible gorilla video shows two groups of students, some dressed in black t-shirts, some in white. And the black t-shirt students are tossing around a ball. And so the subjects are told how many times the black teen passes the beach ball. And then in the middle of this video, another student dressed in a gorilla suit walks in, you know, goes, and then walks out. And apparently only 50% of the people noticed the gorilla. So that's what Dan Simons is famous for. So anyway, so he has this theory that you should always ask what's missing when presented with stories. And I'll give you a really good example of this. So let's say you hear the story that Elon, not Elon, that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg did not finish college. Okay? So you hear that story, and Peter Tiel and all these people are saying, see, there's proof, there's proof, those three trillionaires, they never finish college, you don't need college. Well, when you hear something like that, you need to ask, what's missing? So you're only hearing about the people who are successful without college. You need to hear about the people who are successful with college. You also need to hear about the people who are unsuccessful without college and unsuccessful with college. So there's like, you know, it's a two by two matrix. You're only hearing about these three outliers who didn't have a college degree, but were successful. And what Dan Simons and his team did is they did research in like 2005 or something. And they examined the background of all the CEOs of unicorns, okay? And every one of those CEOs of unicorns had a college degree. So this concept of, oh, I should quit school because Elon Musk, I mean, God, keep saying Elon, I got Elon on the brain. I should quit school. I don't need to go to college because Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg did it that way. Is incomplete thinking. You should also look at the other cases where people with college degrees succeeded. Eddie, if you think about it, when people say you don't need to go college, I cite you these three examples. Those three examples span about 30 or 40 years, right? So in 30 or 40 years, you can only cherry pick three or four examples. That, that might tell you something. Meanwhile, every see over unicorn has a college degree. That should also tell you something. So what it says is humans, we are prone to biases in a very, very, very significant way. So much so that it can ruin your life if you aren't careful because you could just drop out. I mean, you could drop out, you could pursue something and you may not be the right mind for, or you may not understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur, drop out of college and you realize it, hey, I don't want to be working 100 hour weeks. This is not, this is not for me. So it's not easy. But this brings me, so to your point, then my own bias is driving my opinion of can we achieve ethical capitalism? Because I don't have the information and the stories of the people that are driving it. Okay, here's my thought on that. So, there's two kinds of discussions here. One is, as a society, can we achieve ethical capitalism? Which means that a predominance of companies are operating under this, you know, halo of ethical capitalism. That's kind of what your question is. But I would make the point that, yes, in a perfect world, ethical capitalism would predominate. But let's say that you were convinced that that's just a pipe dream, it cannot happen. I would make the case that, you know what, all you can do is all you can do. So maybe 99.9% of companies will not be ethical capitalism. But yours is going to be. So maybe the best thing you can do and what you should do is you be the shining star and you be the ethical capitalist. Even though statistically you're a tiny part of the world. That's a beautiful view to look at, to look at life through. Because if everybody did that, then we would live in a better world. If everybody looked at it, yeah, I love that. Let's tie this back. Let's tie this back. I just find an interesting topic and we went there. Let's tie this back to some of the thoughts that you put into this book, into this work. Because this is, again, I think that there is a line here between that specific lens that you look at the world through and becoming remarkable. And becoming the person of value and a person that builds something worth building and a person that lives a life worth living and a person that optimizes not just for wealth or fame. But for accomplishment and achievement and value and these things that I think are lost on people when they first start out. They look for money, they look for, they look for influence, but they don't focus on the KPIs that actually matter. Well, I would make the argument that the most important KPI. And I learned this from Peter Drucker, which is the name most of your audience won't recognize because he was, he was, he was the mother or the actually, he was the father of management writing Peter Drucker. And he said the purpose of a company. Well, first I'll tell you what he didn't say. He did not say that the purpose of a company was to increase the wealth of its employees, founders or of shareholders. Okay. He said the purpose of a company is to create customers. Now, that may take innovation, it may take great execution, it may take, you know, who knows there's all kinds of ways to create customers, but that's what companies do. And if you create customers, everything else falls into place, right, the revenue, the brand, the, you know, all the good stuff, but that Apple created customers where there were none before because people used a computer called Macintosh that they never would have used the computer before. So the job of an entrepreneur is to create a customer. Now, you know, I have a tech bias, but I mean, to take an extreme example, if you're starting a sushi bar, your, your job is to create customers, people who love raw fish. How do you do that? How do you create customers? What is this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a cheap question because you have so many years of experience. And this is what you've done for Apple, for Canva, I think from Mercedes, you're an evangelist. You create customers to a degree, along with a lot of other people and systems of support and processes. But if just at a very high level, what is the tool or the strategy or the idea of creating a customer? Well, believe it or not, I can explain this. You've been good at explaining everything else. This is not like new. You're very, you're very good at this podcast thing. Um, I'm used to, I'm used to be on the other end where I asked the hard question, not answer them, you know what I'm saying? So you're still right up and listen. You kind of couch that question is at a high level. I don't live at a high level. I live at a low level. I live, you know, boots on the ground. And so I'll give you some boots on the groundways to think of how to create products or services that create customers. So number one technique is you go and see. So you actually go and see what people are doing, what people need. This is very different than you read reports or you're looking at your, you know, your benchmarks or you're looking at the executive summary or your, you know, your feedback mechanism. You actually go and see how people are using a Chrysler minivan. So you can make a better Toyota Sienna. Right. Now that's one level. You go and see. Secondly, you go and be, which is even better. Because now instead of watching how a family of four with two baby strollers and two baby seats and two baby bags are trying to drive around in a sedan. Now you go and be. So now you go and figure out, okay, I'm going to go buy a minivan and I'm going to see what it's like to have two strollers, two baby seats, two baby bags. I'm going to be the customer that I want to appeal to and create. That's that's theory number one theory number two compliments that which is many people, they are trying to do something that they're good at. They like helps their brand, you know, whatever, all that stuff. So they're working forward. You can do this. I can do this. I love it. That's what I'm going to do. Now I'm going to make people buy that. I would say that a better method is instead of working forward from what you can and like to do, you should work backwards from what people need. So to take a negative example, maybe you're really good at making chemicals and putting them on film or paper. So you're codec and you just kick in the ass in analog photography. You're good at making chemicals. Right. It's lucrative. You're you're the industry standard blah blah blah. So now you just keep making film. Now if you were working backwards from the customer, you ask yourself, well, why are people buying our film? Why are people making codec slides? And you would come to the conclusion that they're trying to preserve these precious moments in their lives, graduations, games, you know, whatever. So people are we're in the business of helping people preserve special moments. If you take that attitude, then it would not matter how you preserve those moments. And so codec should have embraced digital photography. They should have figured out, you know, we're in the preserve special moments business. It's much better to preserve a special moment using a sensor than film that you take to a drugstore that you wait a week and then you get 36 exposures back and 36 are under exposed or overexposed and shit that precious moment is gone. Right. It's much better to look at the bad. Ah, cut the moment. Yeah, baby. In fact, I can host it right now. The irony of this story is that codec in 1975, it invented the first digital camera. Like wrapped your mind around that digital camera was invented by codec. I mean, if that's not a WTH moment, I don't know what is right now to be fair if your codec and 1975 and this engineer says, Hey, I figured out a way people don't need to buy film. You can kind of understand why they might not exactly, you know, embrace his invention. And let's face it, you know, the first, the first digital camera probably weighed 10 pounds, you know, it was like 100 pixels and yeah, I mean, never like a lot of challenges, but still, you know, why is codec gone. And we're all using sonies and cannons and Nikons, you know, today, you, when you wrote this book, there's sort of two things I want to pull out of this. First of all, I know for a fact that you, you don't like when people forget codec, that's an enterprise example. When people starting businesses follow their passions, because I think I think that I've heard you say this before, it's really bad advice tell somebody to go follow your passion. But there's another thought involved in this in comment on both, because you start the book with the think different campaign that Apple ran in 97 and thinking different probably also ties into the fact that the way you built something is not about following a passion. It's about reverse engineering something that maybe only you see that you can solve for. I don't know if that's if that's a fair. Through line to those two ideas, but I think there's something there, because if you didn't think different, then you would follow your passion and you do what everyone else is doing and you do what the market's doing. And you probably have a hard time doing it to be a very messy space to get involved in. Okay, this is a deep topic. So everybody hears, follow your passion, follow your passion, find your passion, do your passion. And I think that that sets you up for failure, because it implies that everybody has this one particular calling and you know, add an extreme. It's like, oh, you're 22 years old. You haven't found your passion yet. What kind of underachiever are you, right? And so ideally, you would find your passion before you have to write your college application essay, which is total bullshit. Well, most of those essays are all bullshit. Each chat GPT is generating them. So it's easier to generate the bullshit. Well, you don't have to always a nice question in the bullshit. So what I'm saying is give yourself a break. Okay. I think you should just pursue your interests, which is different. It's a much lower bar than action. Action implies that it's, you know, you found your calling and life. I'm 69 years old. I found my calling and life maybe three or four times, you know, and it's not that easy. And so what I think you should do is when you have an itch, scratch it. It may be photography. It may be the viola. It may be surfing. It may be podcasting. It may be writing. You know, you're going to have all these interests. Scratch them. Scratch them. Scratch them until you decide that you don't like it. And then if you're lucky over the course of your lifetime, you may discover something you truly want to dig deep and dedicate your life to. But to use a dating analogy, if somebody told you, oh, you're 22 years old, you haven't found a man or woman of your dreams yet. What's wrong with you? Well, what I'm advocating is if you go out in the world and you say, I'm going to find the person that I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. That's my goal. What you should do instead is you should pursue people who you find interesting. It's like sampling theory. Do a lot of sound. I'm not advocating. You know, being loose. I just say you should pursue a lot of interesting people until you find the one that you want to settle down with. But to say that, you know, you got to go find your passion. Go from point A to point B. I think you're setting yourself up there. You know, using you as like as a case study or an example, people listening to this would look at you and say, you know, guy is successful. He's had a great career. Do you think that you found something that you can say is a passion because you scratched a lot of itches in your life with the different things you've taken on. So has it just has there been one or has it just been success at a multitude of things that you like to do. Okay, so first of all, I want to burst a bubble. It's not like I sat down with my life coach back when I was young and we decided the arc of my life. So basically, I've gone from one interest that became passion to another. It started with Macintosh, right, was so with Macintosh. I thought I thought Macintosh. When I first saw Macbeth and Mac right, the scales were removed from my eyes. It was a religious experience. The only two or three other religious experiences in my life have been like the first time I played hockey, the first time I surfed and the first time I met my wife. So, you know, doesn't happen that often. So, you know, as you go along and then so first there was Macintosh. And then I got to tell you, you know, canva became a passion and to use more sports analogies. I discovered basketball and then I started playing tennis and then I started ice hockey at 44 and then I started surfing at 60. Okay, so just using the sports metaphor, I found passion four times, but it was because I tried a lot of other stuff. And so I, I actually am okay. So now fast forward till today. Writing books has been a passion. You don't write 16 books because you hate it. And I think even more important now, I discovered podcasting and I discovered podcasting about four years ago. And I'm telling you, I was born for podcasting. I was made for podcasting because podcasting to eat, it requires several things. First, you need access to people and the kind of podcasting I'm talking about is like what we're doing, which is a guess. So number one, you need access to people, not necessary that you know them, but they have to know of you. Luckily, because of my Macintosh work, many people know of me. So when I asked them to be on my podcast and most all the time, they say, oh, yeah, you know, I use the Macintosh. I knew all about you. I'd be loved to get on your show. That's a huge advantage, right? So now you got to have access to the Jane Goodles of the world. The second thing is once you have access, you got to know what the hell to ask Jane Goodle. All right. And then the third thing is you not only have to have access and you have to know what to ask. You got to have the balls to ask it. Yeah, it's true. It's stressful. It's very stressful. Yes, it's very stressful. So I just been fortunate to do three things lined up for me. And so podcasting, like I'll tell you something. So I have done about 200 episodes of my podcast. I think roughly 100 or 100 or so were sponsored, okay? But for the last two years or something, I'm operating my podcast at a total loss. I don't have sponsors. I don't have an advertiser. I just, I just do it out of pure love and OCD-ness. And, you know, I, I think my podcast is the best work that I've ever done and it will not be appreciated until I die. Not, not that I want to try that experiment. But, but, you know, I saw a lot of people, a lot of people say you need to use a Venn diagram. And the Venn diagram is what you love to do, what you're good at, and what you can make money at, right? And when you control those three circles, you look at what's in the middle. That's what you should do. Well, that's, that's your, what is that? Is that the concept of Ikigai? Well, I can't tell you that I love the concept of Ikigai, but I think our Western minds has perverted that concept because the concept that you've got to love it, you've got to be good at it, and you've got to make money at it. I think is a bastardization of the concept of Ikigai. Now, don't get me wrong, okay? I may be Japanese, but I was born and raised in Hawaii. It's not like I've been spending 20 years of, you know, my life in Japan, and I'm a Buddhist monk, and I like, you know, I'm a whole shinto scene and all that, alright? I'm a, I'm a freaking American as Eric Trump. So, and you're a little bit kidding. I'm talking to, I know it. First of all, I never met a Canadian I didn't like. Seriously, I cannot sit at about Americans, but anyway, so, okay, if you want my definition of Ikigai, it's kind of the opposite. So, many people believe, Ikigai, what you're good at, what you love to do, and what you can make money. My definition of Ikigai is, it's something that you do, even if you're not good at it, even if you, you know, you can't make money at it, and even if you're not good, so you're not, wait, that's it, right? So, you're not good at it. You can't make money at it, but you still love to do it. That's your Ikigai. That's the Ikigai test, and I'll give you a related concept. So, I interviewed Mark Manson, the guy who wrote the subtle art of giving a FUCK, right? And, or not giving. And, he, in our interview, he gave me this, like, really, brilliant insight, and he basically said, um, you're going to know when you found your passion or your true love or your Ikigai, when it involves shit sandwiches. And, these shit sandwiches, everybody looks at you and says, that is a shit sandwich. There's no way I'm going to do that, but you love the shit sandwich. And, I got to tell you, when, when you find yourself doing something that involves shit sandwiches that everybody else tell you, you're nuts, you probably found your Ikigai. I just want to take a second and give a shout out to HubSpot and the HubSpot Podcast Network. That's who brings you this show every single week. If you love success story, you'll love some other great podcasts in the HubSpot Podcast Network, like Creator Science. It's one of my personal favorites. It's hosted by Jay Claus. Creator Science goes behind the scenes of today's top creators. They do interviews and Jay explores how creators like Tim Urban, James Clear, Tori Dunlap, Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. And, honestly, by learning how these creators make a living with their art and their creativity, Creator Science really helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. This is where I go from my playbook on how to learn from the best creators. Listen to Creator Science wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think that that is the secret to doing something that you can eventually turn into a business, this empire, whatever, or is that just something that should stay as a hobby? Because I believe, I personally believe that when you find that thing, if you do it for 10 to 15 years and you build feedback loops and you iterate and you incorporate learnings, you will eventually be a level of significant success. You may not be the point of one percent, but you're not going to be bad. You can't, I mean, if you're shit after 10 years, that's a serious concern. You got it through. Listen, this is... This is a very... believe it or not, this question you asked has moral implications. Because the easy answer would be for these influencer thought leaders, executive coaches, writing books. The easy answer is yes, you should pursue your passions, even if you cannot make money at it and do what you love and the money will come. I cannot tell you that I truly believe I should say something like that. I am very lucky. Don't get me wrong, so the fact that I can operate a podcast for two years with no income from it is because I'm lucky. It's because I can afford to do this, not everybody can afford to do this. So it would be superficial if not downright evil for me to tell people, oh yeah, go do something for two years that you cannot make money at it and just trust that the people someday will pay you. That's... I think that's irresponsible. So what if you can say that understand that will take you five years and set your life up so that if possible you can maintain it. I think the expectation is that because I agree with you, it's you can't set false expectation. Right, so I mean, if listen, you got to eat, right, you got to put food on the table, you got certain things you got to do. So it may be that you got to do that during the day, but at night you do your podcasting or at night you make samurai swords or at night, you know, you make the best case ideas in California. Or do you write a book, who am I to tell you that, right? So I love that path, but the concept that you know, hey, quit your job, burn your bridges and go focus on writing your book. I'm not going to tell you that. I think that, you know, that's that's like that's bad advice. That's toxic. Yeah, bad advice. That's bad. You got responsibilities. Let's be real here. You got responsibilities. You know, one of the things that you you did mention, you referred to Steve Jobs commencement quote about connecting the dots looking backwards, which I think is, you know, that's a very famous quote is very famous clip. But so this is a two part question and as a podcaster, you probably already hate me for saying that. So the first part is, have you looked back and connected the dots looking backwards in your life? Does it make sense? But then the more important question is, is there a way to predict the dots looking forward? The answer to the first question is yes, the answer to the second question is no. Look, as I look, okay, here, I'll do Steve Jobs on steroids, commencement address, I'll connect the dots for you, okay? So I was born and raised in Kalihi Valley in Honolulu, Hawaii or district in Hawaii. I was in a public school system elementary school. Sixth grade teacher tells my parents, your son has too much potential, get him out of the public school system, put him in private school, get him college, prepare a patient, go to college, he has too much potential. Thank you God, she said that. Thank you God again that my parents listened to her. Thank you God that my parents were willing to sacrifice to put me in that school. So I get in that school. Now, I don't know why I did it. I don't know how the hell I got in. I'm so old that back then, being Asian American, you were an oppressed minority, so you got into places that you couldn't get into now. So somehow somebody made a mistake at Stanford and they admitted me. So now I wanted to go to Occidental because I could have played football there, but my father said, son, if I'm paying all this money, you're going to Stanford, you ain't going to pick your school by where you can play football. Otherwise, go to UH, just free. Okay, dad, Stanford, it is. So I go to Stanford. As Stanford, for the rest of your life, you get to say you went to Stanford and that's a proxy. I'm not saying it's always justified, but when you tell people you went to Stanford, at least in Silicon Valley, it's a proxy for, oh, the guy must be smart. Now, I'm sure there are a lot of dumb people who went to Stanford. Maybe I was one of them, but let's just the way the world works. You say you went to Stanford. You get instant credit. While at Stanford, I happened to meet a guy from Phoenix, Arizona. And I love cars. This is a whole nother story. I fed cars because when I was in high school, somebody gave me a ride in his 911 and I got in that car and I said, holy shit, guy, this is why you need to study hard. And then also in high school, you know, I lived in a lower middle class place. I got a rob twice on the bus. I got hijacked. So I also sit to myself, guy, you know, you need to study hard because you don't want to live in some place that you get hijacked and rob and you're driving a shitty car. So that was my motivation. So anyway, I get to Stanford. I love cars. I meet this other kid. He loves cars. We instantly become friends. Except he was rich. And so, you know, I remember once, I think for Thanksgiving, I went to his house in Phoenix and his father pricks us up in his frickin Rolls Royce. Oh, he's right. He's like he's doing well. Coming from Cully, he valid. As let's just say that there weren't too many Rolls Royces around there. So I get in this Rolls Royce and they take me to their house and their backyard is the Arizona built more golf course. Like, holy shit, my hand is exploding. I just wrote a Rolls Royce that these guys live on a frickin golf course in Hawaii. The equivalent is like the Wildlife Country Club. And let's just say I did not live close to the Wildlife Country Club. Anyway. So then, so then I meet this guy, become friends. Years later, he hires me into Apple as the second software evangelist. I become well known and successful because of my work at Stanford. Excuse me in the Apple on the Macintosh years later. I get a email from someone who runs TEDx Palo Alto. She says, you don't know who I am, but I know who you are because I use the Macintosh. And I have Jane Goodall coming to give a TEDx talk and I need a moderator and I want you to moderate this panel. I mean, not this panel, this fireside conversations you and Jane. Holy shit, you know, I had a paid speech schedule, I canceled that cost me a lot of money to interview Jane Goodall on stage. So I interview Jane Goodall on stage. We become friends. She becomes my first guest on my podcast. And you as a podcaster, you understand that whenever you are asked to be on a podcast or you ask people, first question in your mind is who else has been on this clown's podcast? What ice? When I ask people and they say, well, who else has been on your podcast guy? And I say, oh, you may have heard of some of them. It's Jane Goodall, Markard Adwood, Stacey Abrams, Bobchelle Deaney, Steve Lawsnia, Stephen Wolfram, Angela Duckworth, Katie Milkman, that's the kind of people I have a lot of podcasts. And, you know, if you feel that you're above them, then okay, you know, whatever is that you know other. Okay, so we're getting back to the Steve Jobs story. So now I'm telling you I'm looking back and I'm saying the reason why I got Jane. Oh, and by the way, Jane Goodall wrote the forward for this book, think remarkable. Okay. I heard her at inbound last year. She's a remarkable speaker. Now over the year before rather. Very, very good. So I'm looking back and connecting the dots that I'm telling you that the reason why Jane Goodall was the first guess on my podcast and wrote the forward for my book is because a sixth grade teacher 30 something years ago, told my parents to take me out of the public school system. That's connecting the dots. Now the second part of your question is, well, can you predict the dots so you, you know, you optimize your path. And I will tell you that I with total certainly certainty believed that it is not possible to do that because you know, if I hadn't along the path, I went to law school for two weeks and I couldn't stand it so I dropped out. Had I not dropped out, I probably would not be in tech, right? I mean, there's so many things that you think it's the end of the world, but looking back, you say, thank God I didn't do that. I mean, I'll give you another great example. And if I had discovered surfing when I was living in Hawaii as a kid, I would not be on your podcast today because I probably would not have written 16 books because surfing is not an addictive sport. Oh, you know, thank you God that I never took up surfing in Hawaii when I was a kid. Yeah, I think it's impossible to predict the dots. It's very interesting when you when you trace that, but I love that you've traced that back to. I think that it gives you this massive amount of confidence. Like you said, that even the worst situations and the most stressful things in your life, they always play a part in the end story. No matter what, seriously, no matter what. You know, I often talk to young college graduates and they're so worried about picking the perfect first job, right? And, you know, their idea is I'm going to pick this perfect first job working for McKinsey or working for Goldman Sachs or I'm going to be, you know, employee number five of the next Google or whatever, right? You know, hello, you got blessed if you think that's true, but let's take the worst case example that your first job out of college, you went to Stanford, you measured in biochemistry. And your first job is a scientist at Theranos, right? So you're on the Theranos staff. Yeah. And your freaking CEO is saying, yeah, we got this magic machine. You give me one drop of blood. I could tell you everything that's wrong with your. But you think you think you're killing it. You think your career set. You're like, this is going to be an end. This is huge. Right. Yeah. Everything's going right. Right. I work for Theranos. We have two secretaries of state on our board of directors. We have the BCs on our board of directors. We have, you know, all these people and we're our CEOs on the cover of Fortune magazine, the hottest CEO in America, the next coming of Steve Jobs, blah, blah, blah. Oh my God. Oh my God. You know, I have, I have, you know, I have threaded the needle. And then Theranos implodes like it has now. So you picked the worst job in the world, thinking that you picked the best job in the world. I will make the case that probably working for Theranos, unless you went to jail anyway. Assuming you didn't go to jail and you work for Theranos, that might be one of the best experiences you ever had. Because you would learn about arrogance. You would learn about stupidity. You would worry about this. You would learn about dishonesty. You would learn about, you know, you have to ask yourself. Why did all these secretaries of state and all these really famous people joined this board? It's because they assumed that because she went to Stanford or because, you know, the other person joined because whatever that they're all proxies for quality. So yeah, it's the bandwagon effect. So if nothing else, if you worked at Theranos, you sure so should have learned that the bandwagon effect is a very dangerous thing. But you could also take away the inverse of that lesson, which is you understand how to leverage certain things to get what you want, which is fine if you're doing it in an ethical moral way. There's ways to build a business based on your, you know, where you went to school or what you've accomplished or the people that you know that can help you get there quicker. It's just you, you have to have some actual substance behind what you're trying to build, not a Theranos situation. But yeah, I would, I would say the good discussion of this is that you do whatever it takes to get your foot in the door. It may be the proxy that you went to Stanford. It may be that, you know, your father is Bill Gates. It may be any of these things. But I think one of the harsh realities in life is once you're in the door. Nobody gives a shit if your father is Bill Gates, nobody gives a shit if you went to Stanford, if you went to Harvard, if you worked at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, nobody gives a shit at that point. You either deliver or you don't, so you have to understand that. And, and, and actually deliver and don't lie when you can't deliver. That's the biggest takeaway. You raise money, you better build that shit. You, you know, you don't, yeah, that's the biggest issue. That's the biggest issue is that the money comes, the investment comes, and then the execution doesn't come. I was, I was, you know what I was just watching? I was just watching, we'll try and keep this evergreen as possible. This show will be over a while. The show that I'm referring to, the Bitcoin show on Netflix. Have you seen that yet? Basically they raised something like, I don't know, it was like 40, 50 million for some, for some crypto project, and they just never built the thing. I mean, with 40, 50 million, you could build the thing. Normally you can, that's a lot of money. You would think, I mean, listen, we could, we could, we could spit a lot of time on crypto. That's something that my limited brain just cannot understand why anybody would get involved with crypto. I mean, it's. Well, it's not because of the technology for probably 95% of people, it's because there's a get rich quick component. Well, yeah, and, and, um, like, like, sometimes I like have this auto body experience. It's like, if I sit to you, Scott, I want you to invest in this. Let me describe it. There's this mysterious Japanese guy that no one can quite identify. Who invented this? And this is a currency that's not backed by anything, not that any currency really is backed by anything. And he promises that there's only going to be, I don't know, whatever the number is, six million of these things ever. And you have to build these huge server farms to calculate and create these things so much so that, you know, you need to build these things were powers cheap and it, you know, it's huge consumption of electrical power. And then you're going to be rich because of it. And to me, the whole concept of this cyber currency. Okay, so, you know, when you, when you talk to seemingly intelligent people about it and they say, well, um, Bitcoin is a great hedge against inflation and typical currencies today. They're controlled by dark money and they, they, they, they jimmy the system and it's subject to inflation. But Bitcoin's not like that because it's like digital and nobody can screw with it. And like, what the hell are you talking about? Everybody in the business is going to jail. I mean, like, what, what, what part of this? Look, the whole investment thesis of Bitcoin is, they're people stupider than me. That's a bad investment. These, anyway, it is anyways. I just, I was all the potential Bitcoin readers of my book. It's okay. There's other ones. There's other people that can pick it up. I have two more thoughts to pull out of this. Is that okay? There's two more things that I wanted to pull out first. I wanted to talk about impostor syndrome. Yeah. Um, because I, it's, it's, it's brought up in the book. It's something that impacts everyone. Um, I want you to speak about your own experience with it. I want to speak about thoughts on it. And then I thought you brought a really interesting point about why it impacts women because I literally had this conversation with somebody. Uh, about three hours ago, this woman sold her company for, it was a nine figure exit. It's a notable brand. So that's over a hundred million. And she still has a impostor syndrome. Please help us and her. You don't know her. Maybe one day you will. But she's a good friend. But please help us understand why it impacts women to such a degree and how to get, how to solve for them. Well, um, my, my observation, having interviewed 200 remarkable people, is that impostor syndrome is primarily a problem for women. Like, I can honestly tell you, no man has ever come on my show and said, I have impostor syndrome. When I was named CEO or when I was appointed to the board or what I, you know, achieve all this great success, I really questioned whether I deserved it and whether I would be exposed. That conversation has never occurred. So a lot of it is just about the shitty way that males treat women and society treats with. They're, they're operating from a, you know, a disadvantage. And so, and the women who had impostor syndrome, I mean, I go into great detail about how, you know, like, document your accomplishments. And, and not necessarily to put them out, but you document your accomplishments for your own mind, you look at it and you say, okay, yeah, I wrote down this and this and this. Holy shit. I really did do good stuff. Right. And, and then, you know, you need to surround yourself with people who are supportive, who understand what you're going through. And, and they, they tell you that, you know, you need to believe, I mean, what wake up, honey, I mean, if you're kidding, so you're coming for a hundred million dollars, what are you worried about? These dickheads are telling you that you shouldn't be a CEO or a board member. Like what? Be reasonable. It's a big issue. I think it's the circles that you surround yourself with because that was one example. I have another friend who was a, again, like a Forbes, whatever, I think 30 under 30, she sold her company was, it was another different person less. And she thought after she sold her company, she would be invited into deals and she would have access to, you know, these great VC opportunities for these awesome companies that are usually backroom deals like Google and, you know, their seed round or something like that. And nobody would put anything in front of her to the point where she actually started a private equity firm herself. And she just iced out of a lot of conversations. So there's an issue. There's a big issue because that type of behavior, then reinforces that I'm not good enough. Um, I don't know what to say. I mean, I think what you said is absolutely true. And it's just unfortunate. Really. It is. And it's suboptimal. It's certainly not ethical capitalism. At least of a lot of people's potential. And it's basically because men are insecure. Seriously. Yeah, I know. It really is. I mean, it comes down to that like, I don't know how else to put it. Man, are you ever had? Did you ever have? Did you ever have imposter syndrome when you took on anything in your career at all, even at a young, young age when you're higher to Apple, or you're like, I, this apple, I'm, I'm, I'm better than Apple. They're, they're blessed to have me. Well, what? Well, I have never thought any places blessed to have me. Uh, cannot tell you I ever had really serious imposter syndrome. And you know, there's a lot to unpack here, but, um, well, first of all, I've never been the CEO of a billion dollar company. I've never been on the board of directors of, you know, a fortune 500 company. So I was never in the position where I said, holy shit, I'm on the board of directors of Procter and Gamble. Do I deserve to be here? Because I never been on the board of directors of Procter and Gamble. So one way to prove the, uh, one way to solve the imposter syndrome is you just not put in positions of high stack. Maybe you discount, but you're, but you're discounting your own success too. When a braille like Canva or Mercedes, these are not, these are not like mom and pop brick and mortar $5 million. But I think like if, if you said guy, you have a choice, you can either have imposter syndrome or you can have entitlement syndrome. Guess what? It's much better to have an imposter syndrome and wonder if you deserve it than have entitlement situation syndrome and say, of course I deserve it. In fact, I deserve more. I think I think most guys have entitlement syndrome. I think so too. I think that's it. That's it's a sad truth that I think that that's what allows them to take the risks and the chances in their career because they feel they deserve it. Yeah, um, I don't know, but it's not an easy thing to solve for. It's just, it's just a matter of, it's a matter of surrounding yourself at the right people. That's really it. Well, I'll give you a, and your listeners are real. And you're the one who said you wanted the hard questions. These are the hard questions people are solving. I can ask the easy questions. I can ask what Steve Jobs was like. But I'm going to give you a real good tip about imposter syndrome. I had to first tell you a story that you might think is unrelated. So Johnny, you're very, very good. She's in the book. He even gave me a blur. Yeah. Julia Cameron has this fictional negative friend called Nigel. So Nigel, do you know Julia Cameron is the art of my way? I don't. Okay. She wrote a book called The Artist Way, like 20 million copies sold. She is the mother of creativity. Julia Cameron. Okay. So she has this fictional negative friend called Nigel. And Nigel says, oh, you know, your writing isn't that good. You're speaking is not the good. You're not really helping people. You know, this draft sucks, whatever, whatever. This is an imaginary friend. And one of the ways I think she uses Nigel is she has compartmentalized negativity and imposter syndrome into Nigel. She kind of have sectioned him off in her life. And I think there's a tip there that if you have imposter syndrome, first you realize that there is this thing called imposter syndrome. So you're not alone. It's not like every other blowhard in the world isn't thinking this. Like lots of people think this. So number one, it's common. It's so common. My God. It's a syndrome. You don't get to be a syndrome if only one person has it. Right? Stockholm syndrome. A lot of people got it. I think. Anyway. So number one is, ah. This is a real thing. It's called a syndrome. So that's number one. And number two, I think if you can label it, then you can reduce its impact on your brain. Because you can say, oh, you know, I was appointed to the board of directors of Procter and Gamble. I went in the room and I looked around and there's the seal of Nike. And there's the seal of Mercedes-Benz. And there's the, you know, Nobel Prize winner. There's a Carthor award fellow. You know, and I got an imposter syndrome when I became appointed to the board of Procter and Gamble. But I think what you can say is, you say first, huh? Imposter syndrome is a thing. And then you say, then I think you can trivialize it more. And you can say, ah. That's just the imposter syndrome. I can just, you know, I can just put it in a box and say, ah, label it. Imposter syndrome. Oh, yeah. Next. I love it. Address it, though. Really address it. Like face it, basically. Well, you should also, in a sense, you should thank God that you say, you know what? I got an imposter syndrome. I'm not sure I deserve this. But that's a lot better than having entitlement syndrome, where I'm the asshole who thinks I deserve this and more. That's harder to fix. I want to, I want to give you just, just give you the floor to speak about the book very briefly, because we spoke all the things we spoke about today are pulled from the book. So these are all different concepts ideas. Most of them anyways. Most, I say like 80%. It'd be 85%. I try it. I wouldn't know what you're an easy person to talk to. I could talk to you about anything for a long time. That's an issue. Not really. We're podcasters. But I mean, when we're trying to get some points in, it is an issue. I'm going to say, you know, I got to tell you, man, we are separated birth, kindred spirits because I know we are. Now seriously, because often when I have an author on my podcast, I do this at the end too. I say, listen, I give you the floor. Go ahead. Pimper book. Yeah. And I thought I was an innovator. Shit. I got an imposter, stage role with you. Oh, no, no, no. It was a great mind. That's it. I'll just, I'll just stick with that. Listen. Okay. Who's his book for? Who's reading this book? And also, I need to ask you about AI in a second. Is that actually very interesting as well? But who's his book for? Ask me the question. Different. Ask me. What's this book about? How is that? That's, that's a, that's a more vanilla version of the same fun. Whatever. It's your show. What it was. Look at that. I can tell you a funny story. Man. Your, your listeners are going to say, man, that guy, he's like all over the map. Like, what's wrong with him? Um, no. So, look at it. This is a legendary story. And the story is that at a press conference with Tom Clancy announcing his new book. Hopefully your audience knows who Tom Clancy is between Peter Drucker and Tom Clancy. I mean, I know all these people. Listen, I think it's an older audience. It's like. Okay. Good. You know, so they don't eat Tom Clancy. So, some reporter asked Tom Clancy, what's your book about? And you know what his answer was? It's about 20 bucks. 20. So, wait. Wait. Wait. What was the question? I forgot the question. No. The question was, what's the, I said, who is this book for? And then you said, ask me what's the books about? Okay. I knew there was a related question. This book is for anybody with 25 bucks. Um, this book, I think the most obvious path is a parent or teacher or coach. Is buying this for a young person who is searching for direction. And like, let's take the parent case. The parent case is, I've been telling my son, I've been telling my daughter, you know, don't just focus on one thing, do a lot of sampling, you know, pursue your interests. Don't worry about, you know, getting too deep too quick or I've been telling my son or daughter, you know what? You, you, you can't just like show up at 9 a.m. Leave at 4 p.m. Ask for 50 percent, you know, raise and always want remote work. You got to show some grit. You got to do the shit that nobody else wants if you want to get ahead and light. But my kids don't listen to me. So read this freaking book for crying out loud and listen to guy because you're not listening to me. That's use case number one. Um, but if you buying it for yourself, I think it will help you add clarity to techniques and directions for your life. And, and, you know, I just want to make this something perfectly clear that this is not the gospel according to guy. Okay. This book reflects interviews with 200 remarkable people like truly remarkable people. And I'm telling you, it's not just Jane Goodall and Steve was the act. It's also like I said, people who have served 22 years for murder sentence. The two are now one of the hardest artists, one of the hottest artists on the East Coast. There's a lot of very interesting stories in this. And so it's, this is not the gospel according to guy. This is guys analysis of what has made people remarkable so that you can be remarkable too. That's what this book is about. If you had to tell people out of all the interviews, step one on how to become remarkable, what would that step be? Step number one is embrace the growth mindset that you can do more, you can learn more, you can be more. And there's also a flip side to the growth mindset that very few people embrace and it's this. The growth mindset is not only about people who are learning more and better and ever too. It's also part of the fixed mindset is I am really good at physics. And I don't want to risk my reputation or self-image by trying surfing. That's a fixed mindset too, right? So a lot of the problem with the fixed mindset is oh honey, you're so great at physics. Why don't you try surfing or why don't you try poetry or why don't you try East Asian history? I say no, no, no, no, no, I'm a physics prodigy. I'm not going to risk my reputation. And that's a bad thing too. So I'm not, it's not just saying, hey, you're a loser, you don't have a growth mindset. That's not it at all. It's like everybody should have a growth mindset. And if you don't have that, it's going to be very hard to make a difference and to be remarkable. That's the universal, that's the universal truth that you've probably found across every single person. Well, then, and the second universal truth, you know, I mean, that's why I organized a book, not just that I love tricolins and alliteration. But there's growth and everybody I met who's remarkable had grit. And everybody I met who is, who is remarkable has grace. And I'll tell you something, there is just as a, just a tooled my point. There is not one hedge fund or private equity manager in the book or on my podcast. And think about that for a second. I don't think there's any billionaires on my podcast. If, if, if, if the only private equity hedge fund kind of guy that I would have on my podcast is Warren Buffett. That's it. I don't care. I don't care if you can get the president of MIT or Penn or Harvard fire that don't make you remarkable. How do you measure, how do you measure grace in your life? Oh, I think you, you measure grace in your life by trying to help the next generation. Or he said leave the door wider than, then you found it. I mean, if it's a door, make it into a sliding door. Make it into a garage door, make it into something. I love this. One thing I thought was very interesting because you used AI, right, for this book. Oh, yeah. So I thought that was interesting that you brought that up because I think that I think that you know it's interest. I think a lot of people will start using AI for writing. I don't think many will actually admit it because it's new. It's taboo. It's, it's, it's uncomfortable right now to leverage this tool. I don't know. I feel like it's, I, I use it as a valuable tool. Like I think it's, it's incredible. It takes everything I know and it, it reduces the time and the friction to create good work. And I still need to add a human touch to it. It's fine. But I think that every time you add a new technology, people look at it as cheating for the first little bit. Well, start using it themselves. Okay. This is, man, I love your questions. I don't say that to everybody. I appreciate it. Okay. First of all, I just talked to myself. I'm interested in. That's really it. It's a very easy formula. Well, you know, I, I, I purposely acknowledged in my book that I used. I used chat GBT. I use Claude. I use Bard. And for writing, I also use QuillBlock. So I use four, four applications. Right. And first of all, I wanted to be transparent. That, you know, I'm not going to tell you that I, it is all written by me and all that. Although it kind of is, but the way I use AI is, I think of it as a. Outstanding research assistant available 24 by seven for $20 a month. Who can come up with answers in 30 seconds? Like, holy shit. I mean, okay. So I'll give you some examples. So one of my concepts that I learned is that lots of remarkable people. They made major career shifts. Right. So Jane Goodall studied biology her whole life. Roy Yamaguchi, the chef. He was cooking his whole life. But there are some people who made major changes going from prisoner to professor, for example. So I was searching for examples of cases where people made major career shifts. So I asked chat GBT who has made major career shifts and achieve success. And chat GBT puts up six examples. One of them is Julia Child. Julia Child is the French chef, right? So this is something that I learned writing the book. Julia Child until she was in her mid 30s work for the OSS, which is the precursor to the CIA. So basically, Julia Child was kind of a spook. I didn't say I didn't know that about her. Yeah. So Julia Child was a spook. She marries another spook in the OSS. They move to Paris. She gets exposed to French cooking. That's how Julia Child went from spook to chef. I would have never found that out. Is that cheating to ask chat GBT? I don't think so. Now with chat GBT, you also got to make sure that, you know, this is a fact. So luckily, I have Madison GPT and Madison GPT, I tell her. Madison, chat GBT said Julia Child worked for the OSS. You got to verify that for me because I'm putting it in the book. So a human checks these things. So that's one way as a research assistant. I also use it. I put like blocks of text in it. And I say, you know, look for errors. I also say make it shorter or an other tactical uses. So before there was Roger's the source. And then there was the source dot com. But I think the beauty of chat GBT is that it's. You can make it look not just for a synonym, one word for another word. But you can make it like a synonym kind of a concept where I say, um. Let's say I want to talk about, you know, I use the phrase jump to the next curve for innovation. You go from ice harvesting to ice factory to refrigerator. You go from bio folder to steel case folder to virtual folder to, you know, cloud storage. Hey, curve jumps, right? So you go to chat GBT and you say, give me other terms or jumping curves. And it comes up with six different things. I could have never thought of that. And so why is that cheating? I think that chat GBT and barred and flawed and quill bought have made me a better writer. There's no doubt in my mind I am a better writer because of them. I guess what people try and figure out is. Where does the machine input replace the human input to the point where passing off the work is your own is no longer ethical. That's, I think that's the question, but that's the hard, that's a hard line to draw in the sand. I don't know what it is. And as more people use it, like for example, it'll get to the point where you can say like, right, right, you know, write an article on this subject. And it could probably write it with better references quicker, more accuracy, better verbiage than a human writer. Probably not far. So, so first of all, even when I use it, well, I never, I never use it. Well, I certainly didn't say chat GPT write me a 200 page book about how to be remarkable. I swear to God, I did not do that. You know, no billionaire is going to get me in trouble by finding that I did it that way. I did not do it. Bill is on a little bit of a rampage right now. So, so I definitely did not do it that way, but I think that it improves you. You can also, I do a lot of editing, even after it spits out stuff at me. And as I say, to find similar concepts, um, boy, and you know what, I mean, like let's take the extreme example. Oh, you cannot use chat GPT to write your college app, okay? So, yeah, that's heinous, you know, billionaires are screaming about it. You know, you cannot use chat GPT to write your college app. Of course, your kids had a $250 an hour college app to do whatever. Yeah, for your kid, right? Like what's worse? You know, I actually found that funny because any billionaire, not listen, not any, not every billionaire. Many billionaires in my personal opinion who have written books, it's all ghost written. Yeah, absolutely. This is what, this is what happens. You're on a Zoom and you have a ghost writer and you're telling your life story and the person writes a book. And that's a ghost writer and that's right. That's what I meant. I mean, there's some great writers out there, but not every billionaire is a great writer. None of them all. Oh, it just higher people. Wait, so, how is that any worse? Oh, I'm not sure. How is that any better? It's the same. Yeah, it's the same. It's the same. And, you know, like, okay, continue on this example. Let's say that you, hey, you say to college, you say to chat to BT, hey, you know, give me an example of an application letter for why I want to go to Stanford. And it writes you this letter. And, you know, you, you, it says, of course, world class, professors and it says great location and, you know, whatever, whatever. But it comes up with a fifth reason that you never thought of. So you put that in your application. Is that not legitimate? No, I'm not saying just copy and paste. I'm saying, huh, chat to BT came up with an idea that, you know, I never, it never even occurred to me. What's wrong with that? And I can tell you, chat to BT came up with ideas for my book that never occurred to me. So if you're listening to this, what I'm telling you is I did. I used every weapon at my disposal to write the best book for you. And I think that's the standard you should hold any author to. That, you know, if you want to say, okay, just give me the best book that you could do yourself. Or give me the best book possible. That's what you should be asking. Give me the best book possible. Because I don't care if I'm become remarkable because you asked chat to BT or you did it all yourself. I just want to be remarkable. Okay, I got a goal. I know. Let's get into my surfing time. I know. I know. Okay, let's finish this up. Where should people, it's been a long podcast. I appreciate that. There's a lot of fun. Where should people connect with you? Where do you want to send people? You have DaikawaSaki.com. Where should they get the book? It's coming out in March. Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm with Wiley. And Wiley is a great publisher. They don't have the book everywhere. Obviously, Amazon. And that's fine. You know, finding your book is not going to be hard. There is guy call Sochi.com. But let me put it to you this way. If you seriously want to be remarkable. And you cannot find the book. You're not going to be remarkable because on a scale of challenges, finding my book in March is trivial compared to what it takes to be remarkable. You know what? I don't want to do anything else. I want to end on that. I think that's the best way to sign off.