Next Level Pros - #46: Naveen Jain: Founder Of Viome, World Class Innovator, Philanthropist

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Get ready for a mind-expanding conversation with self-made billionaire and tech empire builder, Naveen Jain. This episode is a goldmine of ideas! Learn all about the power of asking the right questions, and the potential of new technologies to improve human health. We pull back the curtain on Mr. Jain's company, Viome, revealing its mission to understand and tackle the onset of chronic diseases. You'll get a front-row seat as we explore how asking "Why this? Why now? Why me?" before launching any venture can lead to success and profits. We'll also talk about Naveen's unique perspective on work-life balance, and the importance of integrating the two, rather than trying to balance them.Mr. Jain concludes the episode with a few gems on self-love, finding purpose, and the power of cross-subject learning.  Don't miss this opportunity to hear directly from one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs of our time. So, tune in for this episode brimming with valuable insights and lessons that are bound to inspire and propel your journey ahead. HIGHLIGHTS "Making money is a byproduct of doing things that improve people's lives." "Every culture has these stories around this that things that look bad turn out to be really, really good." "So it's for every day when you wake up, ask yourself what can I do today that will improve other people's lives? And if you keep doing it, one day you will find you created a massive empire." TIMESTAMPS 00:00: Introduction08:36: The Power of Asking Why14:16: Exponential Technology and the Microbiome25:39: Personalized Supplements for Improved Health29:42: Lessons and Perspectives as a Founder35:32: Embracing Self-Love and Finding Purpose40:56: Finding Balance Between Work and Life55:15: The Power of Cross-Subject Learning 🚀 Join my community - Founder Acceleration https://www.founderacceleration.com 🤯 Apply for our next Mastermind https://www.thefoundermastermind.com ⛳️ Golf with Chris https://www.golfwithchris.com 🎤 Watch my latest Podcast Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-founder-podcast/id1687030281 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1e0cL2vI1JAtQrojSOA7D2?si=dc252f8540ee4b05 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@thefounderspodcast

Before you start any company, any project, any relationship, ask yourself three questions. Why this? Why now? Why me? Yo, yo, yo, yo. Welcome to another episode of the Founder Podcast. Today, I am joined by Mr. Naveen Jain. Naveen is a self-made billionaire. He came to the United States with holes in his sneakers and built an incredible tech empire. He is the co-founder of Vioam, the co-founder of a company called Moon Express. They were actually the first private company to receive government approval to send a robotic spacecraft to the moon. We're definitely going to have to talk about that. Based on my research, he's the author of four books. He was one of Microsoft's first 50 employees and just has an incredible story.

Welcome to the show, Naveen. Chris, first of all, an honor to be here. I've only written one book, but who's counting? I think I was one of the early employees. I'm not sure it's 50, but who's counting either? Yeah, that was the one thing I wasn't sure of. I wasn't sure on the books, but I'm excited to have you. So Naveen, you've lived a great life. You've had a lot of success. Tell us about what's getting you out of bed in the morning right now. Well, first of all, everyone who's listening to it, when they wake up in the morning and they're not jumping out of the bed, they should quit what they're doing because that's not their calling.

To me, if any one of you, any one of us are working on things that bring us true joy, something that we wake up in the morning and you feel that you're doing God's work. How could you possibly lie in the bed? So to me, I get up at 4 a.m. every morning and I jump out of the bed. So what is making me jumping out of the bed, Chris, is, you know, I'm working with this company called Vile. And with the fundamental belief that we started seven years ago was, what if we can understand what changes in the human body at the onset of these chronic diseases? We call them depression, obesity, diabetes, anxiety, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, or even aging. Why do we have to age? Why do we have to develop a cancer? What if we can find exactly what's happening?

We can prevent it. We can stop the progression of it. And if we get really lucky, we can outright reverse them. And that's fundamentally what we set out to do. And I'm just so glad where we are seven years later, we are actually a step closer. Every single day, we get a step closer to our mission that's so awesome that's so awesome so so tell me about biome like like what what is it exactly that you guys do because that sounds like an awesome mission i'm a i'm a big time like doing everything to improve my health improve my my life right i i do i do do all the tracking where the aura ring, I, I actually have this, this little thing that called a lumen. It measures like the CO2 in, in all these different things. So tell us, tell us about like, what is exactly that, that helps you accomplish that?

So first of all, the things that you're doing, none of them, nothing is wrong with them, except that they are just very basic. I mean, it's like really looking at the basic phenotype of what's going on, but you don't understand what is causing it, why it is happening, right? So you say, oh, I'm producing a lot of carbon. Why? What is going on in my body? So fundamentally, anytime you start a company, you ask yourself three questions. And I'm going to apply that to YOM because I don't want this to be an information for YOM. So I'm going to give the things about how you go find the moonshot. How do you go build something that could change the way people live their lives?

So before you start any company, any project, any relationship, ask yourself three questions. Why this? Why now? Why me? Right. And these questions actually allow you to start thinking about what it is you're trying to do. The first question is, why this? And, you know, the question you need to be asking is, God forbid, I am actually successful in solving the problem that I set out to solve.

Would it help a billion people live a better life? Right. And then the second question is, and the reason, by the way, you ask that question is very simple, is that it's not that you have to be a philanthropic person and that's the reason you want to improve a billion people's lives. It is an extremely selfish, capitalistic thing to do because anytime you can build any product, any service that improves the life of a billion people, you can create a $100 billion company. But you don't wake up in the morning saying, hey, I want to create a $100 billion company. What do I do? Making money is a byproduct of doing things that improve people's lives.

Amen. Amen. Let me just pause you there. Like that is the most important thing. It's the thing that I preach to our founder group, the people that follow the show. Like making money is simply a byproduct, not the focus, not the result. Like you go and you get results and you so happen to make money

because you solve so many problems and you created so much value. So thank you for sharing that. Keep going. Yeah, so that's the first part. So it's for every day when you wake up, ask yourself, what can I do today that will improve other people's lives?

And if you keep doing it, one day you will find you have created a massive empire that's worth a lot of money. Now, second part of the second question you ask is why now? And why now is what had changed in the last couple of years, but more importantly, what do you expect to change in the next three to five years that will allow you to solve this problem at scale in three to five years? And this problem could not have been solved five years ago. And the reason you do that is to see, are you actually using yesterday's technology to solve tomorrow's problem? Or you're really intercepting tomorrow's technology to solve tomorrow's problem, right? That means are you taking advantage of the technology that are actually exponentially growing, intercepting them?

Yes, you can use them today, but they are price prohibitive. But you know in the next three to five years, they're going to absolutely plummet in price. So price performance is on your side, and you can go build a company now because by the time you're ready to scale it will all be there for you the third thing is and in the part of the second question i can go into more detail it really is about when you want to look at solving a big problem you actually break them down and saying what are the sub problems that have to be solved for you to be able to solve this big problem right and and that's how you take an audacious idea and you break it down i want to live on galaxy x i don't care what the galaxy x is and you say oh great you don't say you know what the fuck we're never going to get there we're never going to happen right. We're never going to happen. You simply say, what has to happen? And when you start to simply ask what has to happen for this to happen, then you simply say,

okay, we have to be able to leave Earth orbit. Got it. Number one. Number two, go from Earth orbit to Galaxy X. Got it. Land on Galaxy X. Got it. And to be able to find a way to live there, there are only four problems. And now all we have to do is what problem has been solved, what needs to be solved, and then you suddenly start to say, you know, it doesn't look like a problem that can be solved. So, and the last part is the most important question you ask yourself, which is what questions are you asking that are different from what everyone else in the industry is asking?

Because the questions you ask is the problem you solve. It's that simple, right? And I'm going to, first of all, give you a couple of examples of it. And then I'm going to come back and apply this to VIO. Because I want people to know this is not some theoretical abstract framework. You can apply that to everything you do. So let me give you some of the examples of really crazy things that most people will say that is crazy idea. So you say, I want to solve a world hunger problem.

Just get it out there. I want to solve a world hunger problem. All right. And if you ask most people, they say, oh, that means I got to be able to distribute the food evenly, you know, reduce the spoilage of the food, change the way that, you know, how the food is grown. And everybody's going to have these ideas of how every expert thinks where the problem is. What if you were to ask a different question says why do we eat food simply asking the question why do we eat food it says oh we eat food because we need energy and we eat food because we need

nutrition what are the different ways can you get energy but plants get energy from photosynthesis there are bacteria that grow in the radioactive nuclear waste. That means they have figured out how to protect its DNA from radiation and use the radiation as a source of energy. Can we take genetic material from these bacteria, use CRISPR in vivo to modify our cells, and boom, now we have all the energy in the world we want, right? And just simply asking a question about why do we eat food? You have 10 different ways of solving the problem that you never would have thought about it. Right? I love that. I love that. So this is all in regards to the question, why now? Right?

Why? No, why me? Oh, why me? Got it. Got it. Got it. So just to recap, there's the three questions. I took notes here. So we got the why this, why now, why me? That's the basic framework starting any idea. So that's awesome. Keep going. Yeah. So why me? Now, let's give one more example.

Then I'm going to come back and apply this to why. So why asking? Because this to me is the crux of every founder. They need to ask, why me me what is my hypothesis that's different from everyone else right and that's the reason i'm spending so much time on it because this is how every founder needs to be asking why what is it that i'm doing that's different from everyone else right now let's take another big problem climate change hey can i solve climate change right and everyone in the industry is

going to say, oh, you need to get electric cars and you need to get rid of the fossil fuels. These are all, I'm not suggesting they're bad ways to solve the problem. No one says, hey, this climate change happens because we have massive amount of carbon that we are emitting into the atmosphere. Great. Where is this carbon coming from? And I'm not suggesting that humans haven't caused the problem, by the way. So I don't want people to think that this guy is a climate denier. I'm not. Before humans came along, nature used to emit about 90% of all the carbon, about 600 billion tons.

That came from volcanoes, forest fires. It came from decomposition. And it was all equally balanced because plants would actually absorb it and everything was fine. As humans came along, now we have electric cars we have factories and all that stuff that has added 10 percent more that has caused the imbalance we could be saying hey we caused this 10 percent and we got to get out of 10 percent that's one way of looking at it we did it is we caused that we got to get rid of it or we could be saying we are effing humans why not attack the 90 percent that nature does and even if i make 10 percent impact on it i solve all the problems that humans created right so can i stop the volcanoes

from erupting what people say are you seriously kidding me well ask yourself why do volcanoes erupt because there is a tremendous amount of pressure that gets built. Is there any way to reduce the pressure, like a pressure cooker, release the pressure slowly, slowly, so volcanoes never erupt? Can we stop the forest fires that cause trillions of dollars of damage? And, you know, lightning strikes and then we have forest fires. If we're going to have, you know, 100,000 low-orbit satellites mapping every inch of every area every second, can we program them to detect the earliest possible fire and extinguish it?

And boom, you know you have actually gotten rid of all the forest fires. Point is, simply asking these crazy questions, you are now looking at solving a problem that people think only can be solved by gathering fossil fuel. And just for the people, by the way, who get really enamored by the fossil fuel, just to be very clear, I don't think most people know where fossil fuel is used. It is not the car's voice. It is, you know, most fossil fuel used is making steel. So think about it. Every time you're looking at a building, it's steel. It is fertilizer. It is cement. It is plastic. So yes, you cannot just get rid of fossil fuel by having electric cars. That is not how you're going to get that, right? So anyway, just to give you an idea that these audacious, massive problems, you can think about them

completely differently. I love it. I love it. Just having that outside the box, different angle thinking, like that is like true entrepreneurship because, I mean, for thousands of years, right, people have approached things the same exact way over and over again without asking these outside questions. And so that's phenomenal. Great advice. So Chris, now let me apply this to YOM, because that's where we started out with scientists who didn't want you to think that I'm not answering that question.

No, you're great. So at YOM, we said, why this? And we said, God, you know, what if we can understand exactly what is changing in the human body at the onset of these diseases, we can actually prevent them. And would it help a billion people live a better life? The answer is 8 billion, because every one of us is going to die from aging or some other disease. So if we can prevent it,

we can actually help 8 billion people live a better life. Checkmark that. Next thing is, why now? And we say, look, there is rarely a time in the human history where this confluence of these things, confluence of the technology is coming together. And to solve this problem, three things have to happen. You have to be able to digitize the human body. You have to be able to process massive amount of data once you digitize the human body. And the third is you have to be able to now use AI to make sense of what's going on. And we said, all right, let's look at it.

The cost of digitization seven years ago was about $1,200. And, you know, it is extremely high. But we looked at this stuff and said, look, it has come down from $1 million to $100,000 to $1,200 in the next three years. It'll come down to $100. Today, we sit here and it's down to about $12. When we really thought we were 10 times optimistic, we were actually 10 times pessimistic. And that's the power of exponential technology is that we think we are actually linearly looking at the thing and exponential technology says,

well, you're 10 times, so you've got to be 100x, not just 10x. Same thing happened when we processed the thing. We said, look, we don't want to have access to a supercomputer. Can we use cloud computing? So we fired it up. Cloud computing cost us $47 to process a sample. We all scratch our head.

That's a lot of money. And we said, look, it used to be $400, $500. It's down to $47. In the next three years, cost of computing is coming down. Cost of storage is coming down. Cost of everything is coming down. This thing should be down to $10. Today, we sit here at $1.50.

Now, the point is it just is plummeting. And everyone agreed that AI is going to be so powerful, you don't have to worry about it. So we say, time is now. Let's launch. Now, the third part was the most important part. Why me?

And this is the crux of the problem. We noticed that everyone in the industry was asking the same wrong question. Everyone said, hey, we need to know about the human DNA, the genes. Once we know the DNA, once we know the genes, we know the software for the human body. We can solve this problem. I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. And I keep thinking, wait a sec, guys.

Your DNA, you're born with, but it never changes. So if you do my DNA test today and I gain 200 pounds, you do my DNA test again, it's the same DNA. Now I become diabetic. My DNA is still the same. I get now depression, same DNA. I get Alzheimer's, same DNA. I get Alzheimer's, same DNA. I get heart disease.

My DNA is the same. And then I die. You do my DNA test 100 years after I die. It's still the same DNA. If DNA can't even tell you you're dead or alive, how will it ever tell you you're becoming healthier or sicker? And to me, that was fundamentally a problem there. Looking at DNA will never tell you, am I becoming healthier or am I becoming sicker?

Now, I said, look, I don't know, but there is a place I can learn. So I went to Khan Academy. What happens to the DNA? It says it makes RNA. I'm thinking, holy shit, let's just go measure RNA. RNA is what you call gene expression. Just to be clear, this is how I understood finally, that every part of our body is same DNA, identical DNA. So my hair has the same DNA as my skin, my eyes, my nose, my heart, my kidney, my lung, my nails, my fingers all have

the same DNA. Comes from the same cell, right? Now, why is it I don't have the eyes growing on my fingers and the nails growing on my head? Same DNA. Well, the answer is when some genes are overexpressed, some genes are underexpressed, they become I. Some genes, different genes are expressed, they become nail. Different genes are expressed, they become here. So essentially your DNA is like an alphabet. RNA is the story you write. So yes, what story are you writing is what matters. So my question was, can we actually measure RNA?

Now, interesting thing is, Chris, is everyone told me, are you crazy? No one has, you can't measure RNA. No one can do that. And I'm thinking, let's set that aside for a while. But if we could do that, would that solve the problem? And people say, kind of. What do you mean, kind of?

I thought I just solved one hunger problem here. And they say, well, not quite. Because 99% of all the genes that are expressed in our body don't come from our mom and dad. It's like, really? So where are they coming from? Well, they come from these hundred trillion microbes that live in our gut, in our mouth, all over us. I'm thinking, all right, let's just go look at them then. And people say, well, everyone now. So if you Google today, every disease, Parkinson's and microbiome,

Alzheimer's and microbiome, cancer and microbiome, you will see it doesn't matter what disease, there is a microbiome that's involved in that. And my first reaction was, holy cow, everybody believes the microbiome is so important. There are tens of companies doing microbiome testing, and this problem is not getting solved what am i missing i must be the biggest moron here right and it occurred to me

that they are all asking the same wrong question even today by the way every microbiome company wants to tell you what organisms live in your gut you have that, you know, whatever you want to call them, bacteroidetes. You have fermicutes, right? You have lactobacillus, like whatever. And my question was, wait a sec.

Knowing these organisms can't be the flip. It's like if they are anything like human being, a same person can do a good, something good in one environment and something bad in another environment. So what really matters is, are they doing good behavior, bad behavior, not who they

are, but what they are producing is what matters. So if we can focus on what they are producing, we can see how they are interacting with the human host, the immune system, then we can figure out what is causing the problem. So we are going to focus on not what organisms are there. We're going to focus on what they are producing and we can solve this problem. And that's literally how we're going to solve this problem and what our why be was. Now, the next thing was, how the hell do you do that? And I went around, look at NASA, JPL.

I went to Houston, NASA, you know, NASA, Houston, Stanford, MIT. I went to Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore. And I finally, I was at Los Alamos National Lab. You watch the movie Oppenheimer. You know what the Los Alamos National Lab is famous for, right? No. Come on, Chris. I haven't seen the what the Los Alamos National Lab is famous for, right? No. Come on, Chris. I haven't seen the movie. Los Alamos National Lab. When you think of that, you don't think of atomic bomb, do you?

So atomic bomb was developed at Los Alamos National Lab. It was called Manhattan Project. Wasn't done in Manhattan. It was done in Los Alamos. You know, the crazy thing, I don't know if you knew this, but where I live in Eastern Washington was part of the Manhattan Project. Hanford was where they developed the plutonium for it to be able to – yeah. There you have it, brother. So the point was this is a place where when you want to get something seriously for the national defense, this is when you want to get something seriously for the national defense that's where

you go to so here i am and i'm now talking to all the scientists asking them i want to solve this problem and one of the scientists says we can absolutely do that it's like are you crazy i've so far nobody has told me how it works so i asked, what project are you working on? And the guy looks at me in an absolutely autistic way. And he said, what's your security clearance level? And before I could answer him and he said, don't worry answering me because even if you told me you work for CIA, you don't have a security clearance level for me to tell you what project I'm working on. Wow. And my first reaction was, bush. And I said, you know, I don't need to know what project you're working on. Can you tell me I'm a you? Let me tell you, I'm a US citizen. I get you. Can you tell me exactly how you do it? He said, of course I can. And I simply write down everything he tells me how he does it. And I went back to Lawrence Berkeley and I said, guys, I think I

figured it out. Really? You figured it out? Yep. I figured it out. How you do that? Well, first you do this, then you do this, then you do this, and then you do this. And the guy looks at me and said, well, if you can do that, you definitely got this figured out. This will work. And I'm thinking, holy cow. So I think I have a solution. All I have to do is get my hands on this tech. And it took me six months to get an exclusive license, and I hired the person who was working on it, and now he became my chief science officer. Hired the head of IBM Watson to do my AI work. So he had all the researchers working for him.

Now, to answer your question that you asked me, a short question. So tell me, what the hell does YM do? So I gave you all this story without even telling you what we do. So here is what we do now. You go to YM.com and you order a kit. It looks something like this. A full body intelligence. You get them at home.

You send us a spit of your saliva. You fingerprint yourself and drop us four drops of blood and touch off your stool. And you send that to us. In return, what we give you is everything that's happening in your body. We give you your biological age.

So for example, as you mentioned, I'm 64 years old and my biological age is now down to 52. Now imagine when I'm 70 years old, my biological age could be down to 40 and my wife thinks she married a young man and that's all she needs to do. She doesn't need to shift him, change a man. She just needs to make sure that I keep getting younger. Now, it tells me my cognitive age. It tells me my heart, cardiac age. It gives me my gut health, my oral health.

It gives me everything. And you say, no, no, that's too high level. Tell me about, tell me more. Here's your gum health. Here's your dental decay. Here is your bad breath. Here is your digestive efficiency. Well, no, no, no, no no no no talk nerdy to me

here's your lps production here's your sulfide production here's your uric acid production here is your flagellar assembly and we just give you everything right and they say okay okay okay but what do i do now glad you asked we actually then tell you hey Chris, we noticed that you have very high sulfide production in your gut causing a lot of inflammation. You should not eat broccoli right now and cabbage because they have very high sulfate is going to cause more inflammation. And by the way, your uric acid production is really, really high. I hope you're not eating avocado because it's going to end up into gut.

Don't eat spinach right now because your oxalates are not being metabolized you're going to end up getting a kidney stone so we literally tell you don't eat these foods and here is why eat these foods and here is why and then we tell you hey you also have a lot of nutritional deficiency you should take 22 milligram of elderberry every day take 29 milligram of berberine every day take 79 milligram of amylase every day so we literally go through every vitamin mineral herbs food extracts digestive enzymes amino acids peptides and then we go a step further we actually make the capsule for you with that powder, only with that ingredient in that quantity,

and we ship it to you, right? Customized directly for you. Man, sign me up. Man, that is awesome. These are made for me. And notice that here's the interesting part. Most people in supplement tell you expiration date. It says manufactured on so this came to me 10 days ago they make every month for me

just what you need nothing that you don't that's awesome these are my probiotics and prebiotics i get them every month these are my oral lozenges i get them every month just made for me i don't know how does the camera works now we are launching a personalized toothpaste for your mouth literally you break it down for am and pm you get a separate for am separate for pm designed for you right now why do we that? So that your body is now into homeostasis. And my first question was, does it work? So we did three separate studies. The first thing was, do you feel better?

So we asked our customers, by the way, we have now analyzed over 600,000 plus samples, right? So we asked our customers, do you feel better? 86% of the people told us that, hey, at least one of the symptoms in six months, they got better. 74% of the people told us the thing that they came to buy Viome for, that particular thing got better. Wow, you feel better, but do you really get better?

So we did the thing we said okay can we actually measure all the thing we talked about your sulfide production your lps production does it get better and it turns out every single score improved with the people who were taking our supplements we went and say does your oral health get better? Literally all 12 oral health scores get better. Like, wow, that's amazing. Now, you know, you feel better. I know biologically you get better, but does your doctor think you got better? So we said, let's go look at the damn thing. So we now analyze your HbA1c for your diabetes, got 30% better. We analyzed your PHQ-9 for depression, got 40% better. We looked at GAD-7 for anxiety, got 32% better. We analyzed your IBS-SSF for your stomach ache, constipation, diarrhea, 40% better.

I'm thinking, holy cow. So this is actually delivering what it's supposed to do. Now, now, now you can imagine every day, we get hundreds of people telling us how their life had changed and how we are making difference in their lives. So now you can see the reason why I jump out of the bed every morning. Yeah, that's that is so amazing. Like, you know, I, as I shared with you at the beginning of the podcast, like I'm obsessed with any type of biohacking, you know, whether it's whether it's my insulin levels you know all these different things on such a regular basis like the fact that you guys have taken a way to completely analyze the body and be able to have a recommendation and provide that in a custom way like that's pretty freaking phenomenal nice and that's really the thing is like yeah suppose i'll curse

thank you yeah congratulations on building such an amazing business because this is something that every single person in the world, as you talked about, when you're analyzing a business, can it change billions of lives? Obviously, this is something right up that alley. Thank you, brother. Yeah, that's exciting. Now, let's change the subject, brother.

Let's talk about a you know this podcast is a founder podcast you know what other things as you know this is not my first you have done this many many yeah yeah i want to i want to know your story naveen so tell me tell me like uh where did you grow up obviously you're an immigrant to to the u.s like what was it like coming to the U.S. and getting, you know, getting your feet established underneath you? Well, you know, let me just switch slightly because I don't want to talk about myself. I want to talk about the lessons I learned in life. And because to me, that's more important because I want people who are listening to it to get the most out of the

time we have together here. So, you know, interesting thing about being a founder is that you're going to find that there are going to be ups and downs in your life. And the thing that I want everyone who's listening to it to know that you should expect them to happen and you should accept them when they happen, right? So you just know that if you are going to be a founder, the first thing is that tells you you're alive. And the only way you know you're alive because you have a heartbeat. What does a heartbeat look like? It goes up and down and up and down, up and down.

When it's smooth, you're dead. So if you find yourself living a smooth life, you have chosen to live a life of a dead person. That's not the life worth living. Founders don't live a life of a dead person. They live a life that is full of life. And that means it's up and down. I love that.

You got to have the ups and downs in order to be alive. That's one of the best comparisons I've ever heard. And when you are down, all you know, you have to hunker down and know the next beat is going to be up. And when you are on top of that beat, never become too arrogant because always remember, winter is coming and winter shall come. It always does. So that to me is the lesson as a founder has always been is to remember these ups and downs. They are part of life.

And anytime you face yourself facing a decision to make, it's a problem that you think is just a tough problem to solve. There are a couple of ways to think about that. The thing that looks almost like a life and death today, and even the thing that looks is so bad right now, that if this happened, this is so bad. A decade from now, you're going to look back at it and think like, what am I stressing about, right?

A lot of us, we are young, we got to break up and your girlfriend, you know, you break up with your girlfriend. You think, oh my God, that's the end of my life. This is just the worst thing that can happen. And a decade from later, you look back and say, what a nightmare I avoided. I finally found out what I actually like. But that is literally applies to almost everything in business, everything in life is that things that look so terrible. And by the way, every culture has these stories around this, that things that look bad turn out to be really, really good.

I know in Indian culture, there is a story about a king and his council. They go out on a hunting trip, and the king falls down and breaks his hand, and the council looks at him and says, oh, so glad that happened. You should be happy about it. And the king is like so angry and thinking, what kind of a moron do you have to be? I just broke my hand, and you're telling me, oh, it's great. It just happened, right? He takes that counsel, goes back and puts him in underground prison and say, that's where you belong.

And then next week he goes out hunting by himself. And he's hunting now and he gets found by tribal people. And they find him, they take him to the king and say, we're going to sacrifice him for the God. We just found this person. And they're getting ready to sacrifice. And the priest comes in and he said, you have to let him go. Let him go. Why?

He's broken. You don't sacrifice a broken man to the God. You only sacrifice a complete man. He's a broken arm. You can't sacrifice him. And they let him go. So now he goes back and goes back to the council and said, thank you. Thank you for saving my life.

I want to, you know, thank you. And then he releases him and he turns around and say, King, thank you for saving my life. And he said, what do you mean? I put you in the prison. How did I save your life? He said, if I was with you, I would have been the one who would have been sacrificed. Oh, that's great. That is a great story.

So the point I'm trying to make is that in life, the things when they look really bad, just, you know, just let it be. So what I figured out, my lessons have been Chris is that there are only two types of things in this world and things that are out of my control. And I simply take a deep breath and I say, well, it is what it is. It will be what will be and I will be fine. And I just literally let go.

And there are things that are in my control. In that case, I do the best humanly possible everything I can do. I know I am the best at it and I did the best I can. And it is what it is and it will be what will be and I will be fine. And that really is what you do. And when you do that, all the stress in life just completely melts away. I think that's such strong advice because for the listeners, each one of us have so many events that happen in our life that are completely

out of our control. And it's really about the response. I love the equation E plus R equals O, event plus response equals outcome. Ultimately, the number one thing that we can control is our mindset, is our response to whatever it is, the event. And I love the saying that you're bringing up. It is what it is. It will be what it will be and I'm fine, right? Just removing you from the situation, responding in a way that ultimately controls the outcome. So that's an awesome, awesome piece of advice. Thank you, brother. Other thing that, you know, is really is,

you know, looking at from this whole Eastern philosophy is that I always believe the universe is my friend. That means everything that's happening, I don't care if it's good or bad, it is for my good, right? So I look at the world and say, if universe is my friend, every single thing that's happening is for my good. And that changes the whole perspective on how you look at the world.

And if you love yourself today, and that is the main thing, you've got to just fall in love with yourself. And when I say fall in love with yourself, I don't mean to be self-conceited. I don't mean to be, you know, really becoming a self-arrogant. You know, idea of self-love is I love myself so much that I'm willing to pursue my dreams despite everyone in the world telling me that I don't they need my their approvals I don't need someone else's approval to pursue my dreams that self-love to me that I don't care what the world wants me to do I'm going to do what I want to do and that's my self-love the day you fall in love with yourself is the day the world will fall in love with you, right? And if you love yourself, then everything that happened until now has made you who you

are. That means if people ask you, what would you change if you could change anything in your life? The answer should always be nothing. Because if I change anything in my life, I would become a different person. And if I love the way who I am, why would I want to ever change it? Absolutely. I love that. So the day that you fall in love with yourself is the day that the world will fall in love with you. I think that's so important. Like too often we question our

ourselves. Like we're trying to be someone who we're not we're trying to you know mimic what our favorite influencer our friend is doing somebody that we think is in a better position than ourselves versus accepting who we are loving ourselves loving our traits loving that the universe is developing the world for me and that's when people really start to say, man, that Chris Lee or that Naveen Jain is someone that's different. And I sure love him for it. It's pretty awesome. Amazing. Amazing brother. You know, I think the thing that you just mentioned about, um, the concept that I was going to riff on, um, and, you know, to get lost, the chain of thoughts was that as we are living our own lives, do we find the purpose that we are living for?

Every one of us has to find something that you're willing to die for and then live for it. And that concept, to me, is so fundamental that you have to know what are you willing to give up your life for and then live your life as if that is the purpose you're going to be living for. Or other way is to ask yourself, if you had billions of dollars, you had loving family, you had everything you wanted in your life, what would you do? And if you do that today, you will get everything else that you want, right? Yeah, I mean, that I actually, I don't remember where I received that advice. But it is the best advice that I've ever received in my life, right? Like,

just act as if you already have and then choose your day what you would do in that in that moment. And yeah, you naturally attract all the incredible things. That's awesome. I mean, probably if we have a few minutes, we have 15 minutes or so left here. So let's just see if we can. The other topic that I find as founder that most of our colleagues end up regretting is

we spend so much of our time working and building our company that are we really being good parents being good husbands right really about that finding that balance between work and life so let me tell you something the fact if you're looking for balance you have already lost the battle and here is. When only time you can balance things are the things that they cannot live together. They are mutually exclusive. So you balance the things because they can't live together. One goes up, one has to go down, right? What I found in life is work and life are continuum. In that continuum, there is never a balance. There are going to be days there is more a balance. There are going to be days there is more

of one and there are going to be days there are going to be more of other. There will never be a balance. If you find a balance, then you suck at both. That's it. I love that. I love that. And what are some best practices that have helped you make that a continuum between work and life and family and everything. Yeah. So part of it is really integrating your life and work as one. That means to me, I do things that are fundamental to who I am. So that means if your spouse is trying to change you to become something that you are not, then there is a fundamental problem you have if your spouse is trying to change you to become something that you are not, then there is a fundamental problem you have with your spouse. You need to deal with that in a different way.

But the point is, if you are authentic to yourself, that really drives you pleasure and joy in what you do, then you bring that joy back at home because they feel that joy. When you do things that stress you, you come home with that stress and that stresses your relationship. And the second part of this is just really important is parenting. And this is probably the best advice I can give you. And let me give you a little bit of reference. And then I'm going to give you the advice here. I have three children.

My oldest is 33. He went to Wharton and he's now building his second unicorn. He runs a company called BILT, B-I-L-T, BILT Rewards. That company, he started during COVID. And just last year, after eight months of starting a company, he raised 150 million in this market where no one can raise money at 1.5 billion pre-money valuation the company is now valued at 5 billion and he's processing over 20 billion dollars in transaction

it less than two year old company right and I'll tell you come back how back, how we got to do what he does, right? He's looking at a massive problem where he saw that all of his classmates thought they were wasting money paying rent. And he says, what if rent can be rewarding? And that simple concept, can rent be rewarding? He said, every dollar you spend on rent, what if you can earn a point and you can use just like card, one-to-one point on any airlines, any hotel, any place, and you earn point. And the landlord gets the full money, no credit card fees, no nothing. And by doing that, he's able to now build this massive company around $660 billion that I spent on rent that no one has ever monetized. And he's the first one to be able to monetize that, right?

Now, our daughter went to Stanford. She's a Stanford STEM fellow, Stanford Mayfield fellow. She started a company called Abby, E-V-V-Y. So anyone listening to it, it's a women's health company, Evie.com. They basically fundamentally are understanding why women are actually taking the same drug and it doesn't work for them. Why are they diagnosed with the problems as men are? It turns out that she found until 1993, women weren't allowed to be in clinical research. They were too complex objects. That means the drug that we take today,

they have never been tested on women. And she said, I got to solve this problem. So literally using AI to solve the problem of women's health. So if you're not a woman who's listening to it, you must have your sister, mother your spouse go do go do the abbey test and find out why how can you help your significant other your daughter your mom your spouse to actually be better now that when that girl is just taking the world by storm became a number one women's health company and she just started two years ago during COVID.

Our youngest one also went to Stanford. He's a Schwarzman scholar, right? And he started a company and now he's working with Valen where he's fundamentally changing the home mortgage, how the people are paying the mortgage, taking the biggest pain points that people have and solving them, right? Now, how did all these three kids turn out to be such great entrepreneurs? And now you could, as you probably know, I grew up poor

and I came to this country with nothing. And it's easy for people to say, hey, you have a hunger in you and you're able to go out and use that hunger to build a company. These kids grew up in an extremely affluent family and we never lied to them. I remember early days when we made a lot of money and my wife said, you know, maybe you should live in a small home and we can tell the kids that we are really poor. And I said, sweetie, one day the kids are going to be able to learn to read and they're going to figure out that he's not good. I still remember my daughter was in a, I think kindergarten school. And one day he comes to me and said, dad, all my friends keep telling me that you're rich. You're not rich.

The point was we never lied to them. We told them, look, you never have to work for a day for a living. But your self-worth will never come from what you own. It will come from what you create. And if you haven't created anything, you're still a parasite on humanity. Man, let me just recap that. That is so powerful. Your self-worth will never come from what you own. It comes from what you create. And this is a principle that I've always believed and I've preached over. True joy comes from creation. And man, thank you for capitalizing on that principle. And the second thing we told

them was that your success will never be measured by how much money you have in the bank. Your success can only be measured by how many lives you actually improve while you're still alive, right? So continue to focus on improving people's life and that's how you're going to measure your success in life. And humility is a sign of success. If you still have any arrogance left in you, that means you're still trying to prove something to yourself or someone else. And that is not success. Success comes when you let go of arrogance and just let the humility be your sign of success. So awesome. So awesome. So you've really, so obviously teaching them these principles allowed them to be able

to go and create value on their own. So tell me about, how did you handle that in your like day-to-day work when you were going and working 50, 60 hours? How were they able to see that?

Yeah, so that's really interesting. So the other part of the thing was how you made them think. So our whole goal was, like any parent or a teacher, our job is not to take the kids to the water and make them drink. Our job was to make them thirsty.

How do you make someone thirsty? Intellectual curiosity is the thirst. If you can give someone intellectual curiosity, you made them so thirsty, they will for the rest of their life, they will always learn, they will find their own water and they will drink. If you can teach them, what if it was possible? What if this could be done and you keep thinking oh my god what if i could do this what would it take for this to happen right once you make them curious they never stop learning and that is really the biggest thing we did was creating them with intellectual curiosity every time they say oh this cannot cannot be done. Imagine if it could be done. What would

that world look like? What would it take for this to be done, right? And you start to make everything they say, oh, okay, looks like it can be done actually. And that's the reason. And another thing is kids don't do what you tell them. They do what they watch you do. So let me repeat it. Kids don't do what you tell them to do. They do what they watch you do. So if I told them money doesn't matter and that makes a lot of money. The first company, my first company became wildly successful. Kids were under 10 years old. What if I said to them, oh my God, I'm going to sit at home, spend time with the children,

and that is how I'm going to spend a lot of the time with the children because they need me. Now imagine what the kids will see. Dad made a lot of money. When I go to school, he's sitting on the sofa watching CNBC. I come back from school, my dad sits on the sofa watching CNBC. And then he tells me, go to your room, finish your homework. Hard work is what it takes. Work hard. And he's sitting on the sofa. I'm thinking, I want to grow up just like my dad, sit on the sofa and watch NBC.

Instead, what the dad did, didn't care. He started the second company. He started the third company. Dad says, now we're going to go to the moon. Kid says, dad, you're crazy. No private company has ever done that. Are you crazy? Just go retire.

Now, we're going to go do that. Show them how it can be done. Dad goes crazy. I'm 58. Dad says, I'm going to start a healthcare company. them how it can be done. Dad goes crazy. I'm 58. Dad says I'm going to start a health care company. Dad, health care? What do you know about health care? You know you.

You're going to get bloodied. You will never be able to do that. It's the time to rise into sunset. You're 58. Go retire. Oh, looks like to me I haven't taught you much yet. So let me show you how this is done. And then now when I'm doing this, our kids are looking and saying, that is damn crazy.

And he's not even that smart. He is a moron. If he can do this, let me show them how to fix the damn rent problem. Let me show them how to fix women's health problem. Let me show them how to do this. That has always been like one of the biggest realizations for me as an entrepreneur when somebody who i don't think is very smart is actually doing something amazing it gives me a lot of confidence so it sounds like you did that for your kids yes because remember the kids always think it doesn't matter how good great their parents are in the kids mind the parents are complete morons right

uh i love that i love that man such power such powerful lessons just the fact that you know kids don't do what we say they do what we do right they they see the example they see that's what's going on they see that our joy comes from the creation, from questioning, from looking at what's possible, from, you know, thinking that, hey, I can go to the moon or I can I can fix health care and change a billion people's lives. Like like that is such a vote of confidence to your children and all the people around you. And so thank you for sharing those incredible principles. What else would you say are just principles that have distinguished you from the rest? Well, I think since we have the last few minutes, let's just leave the last words here. I would say that every one of us, we should learn to dream so big that people think you're

absolutely crazy. So when you tell someone what your dreams are, and they don't tell you they are crazy enough, then you're not thinking big. So think so big when you tell someone what your dreams are. They think that's absolutely a crazy idea. And second thing will be never, ever be afraid to fail. You only fail in life when you give up. Everything else is just a pivot, right? Every idea that does not work is simply a stepping stone to a different idea and a bigger idea. And I believe it was Thomas Edison who said, hey, I didn't fail a thousand times in discovering

light bulb. I figured out the thousand ways it doesn't work. So it allowed me to find a way to actually did work. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing those beautiful principles, for sharing your incredible knowledge, for being such an example of an incredible founder. Last, last words of advice. Just a couple, a couple of things.

What would you say, what are a couple foundational books that have changed your life and helped you on your founder path? Well, you know, I read three or four books every month. And it's really about different subjects. There was Clayton Christensen book that I really enjoyed, How Will You Measure Your Life? And it was just a phenomenal book about how will you measure your life? You know, wisdom of yogi, you can never, ever, you

know, not read that book from a spirituality perspective. And I read the book on from, you know, simulation hypothesis to about, you know, story of the human body. There's really about not a subject that I don't love reading about. So I'm always reading on every single subject, you know, thousand brains, how does your human body works to how does the human brain works? And I think as a founder,

the best thing you can do is to learn about as many different subjects as possible, because every subject you learn gives you some set of knowledge that you can apply in a completely different way in your business. It gives you a different way of thinking. So I think just read as many books in a different subject, not in the same industry that you are in because that'll allow you to bring in a completely different perspective to your business. I couldn't have said so better myself. Thank you, Naveen. Thank you for your

time. We know it's extremely valuable. Until next time.