The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 472: Jimmy Soni - An Indispensable Guide To Innovation, Curiosity, & Leadership (The Founders)

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

Text Hawk to 66866 for Mindful Monday... A carefully curated email sent to you every Monday to help you start your week right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12      https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Jimmy Soni is an award-winning author. His book, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, won the 2017 Neumann Prize, awarded by the British Society for the History of Mathematics for the best book on the history of mathematics for a general audience, and the Middleton Prize by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His book, Jane's Carousel, completed with the late Jane Walentas, captured one woman's remarkable twenty-five-year journey to restore a beloved carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Jimmy's most recent book is called, The Founders - The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.  Notes: "Your life will be shaped by the things you create, and the people you make them with. We tend to sweat the former. We don't worry enough about the latter." The founders and earliest employees of PayPal pushed and prodded and demanded better of one another. Instead of "Acknowledgements" to end his book, Jimmy titled the section "Debts" "A debt is deeper than an Acknowledgement." Envy the optimist, not the genius. There's real power in optimism. The world is built by optimists. Look for the silver things. Have belief. Be the type of person that believes in themselves and others… Optimism builds confidence in yourself and others. Be an optimist. Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan – The fact that Phil told the best player in the world… "We aren't going to win a championship if you keep playing that way. You have to buy into the triangle offense." It shows the value of a friend (or a coach) telling you the truth in order to help you (and the team) get better. "Walter Isaacson made me believe in its (the book) importance and potential. At the very end, he provided the kind of advice that can only come from someone who has spent years laboring in the same fields. Peter Thiel refined Max Levchin's thinking... He made him better. Ask, "Have you thought about it this way?" Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi Kobe Bryant was an incredible learning machine. His insatiable curiosity made him better. You can become curious about anything. Mr. Beast spent hours every day on Skype with his friends talking about how to grow a YouTube channel. We live in a moment were you can connect with others who are passionate about the same topics you are. With the internet, you can connect with anyone. Qualities of the leaders who created PayPal: It was so hard. They all experienced failure and bounced back. Highly intelligent. Hard-working. They worked 7 days a week. There was no work-life balance. They weren't just resilient, they were fast-moving. Life Advice: What looks like expertise on the outside is generally messiness on the inside. Leadership in Solitude. There are benefits to spending some time by yourself. Ask – The people who make things happen are willing to ASK. Steve Jobs to Bill Hewlitt. Elon Musk to Dr. Peter Nicholson. Those "asks" changed the trajectory of their lives. Who knows, maybe your next ASK will change yours… Claude Shannon, Bell Laboratories, renowned as an incredible hub of innovation…  whose work in the 1930s and '40s earned him the title of "father of the information age." Geniuses have a unique way of engaging with the world, and if you spend enough time examining their habits, you discover the behaviors behind their brilliance.

Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk, to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. A great one. Jimmy Soni is the best-selling author of many books. His book,

A Mind at Play, how Claude Shannon invented the information age, won the 2017. Newman Prize awarded by the British Society for the History of Mathematics. His most recent book, which is so good, is called The Founders, the Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. During this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the importance of friendships and how to surround yourself with the type of people who will make you better. And then how to become a learning machine and why it's such an important skill to develop. And then Jimmy shares the difference between people who dream about doing big things and those who actually do them.

This one is so good. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Jimmy Sonie. Jimmy, it's great to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, man. Well, Ryan, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. So I like to start with love. I know you've listened some, so you may have picked up on this.

And I found it interesting. The first thing I do with books, Jimmy, is I go to the back. In the back section, most people call them acknowledgments. I noticed that you called it debts, which is interesting. So I'm going to focus more on, I would think, is the person who may be the most important person in your life. and I believe that is your daughter. And there's some fatherly advice that you give to her that I think not only is good for her, but could be good for a lot of people.

And I don't expect you to memorize your book, so I will read it, and I'd love to have you expand on it. Is that cool? Absolutely. You said, your life will be shaped by the things you create and the people you make them with. We tend to sweat the former. We don't worry enough about the latter. I love that. Love it, man. That's why we're starting with it. Can you share more about that piece of advice you shared with your daughter and why you decided to include that in the debt section of your book?

Yeah, it's great. I'm so glad you picked up on it. And it's funny. You're the first person to point out that I did not call that section the acknowledgments and then I actually called the debts. So I'll do the half story on why it's called debts and then I'll do the story for my daughter. So one of my favorite writers is Robert Caro. And he is like if there's like if there's an OG in my field, right, he's the OG. Like he's been doing historical biography for his entire life. He takes a decade to do his books and they are world class. like they are masterclasses in leadership and politics and power.

You know, he's most famous for his work on a book called The Power Broker. He has also written lengthy biographies of Lyndon Johnson, multi-part, you know, things on Lyndon Johnson. So I was floating through the Power Broker because it sort of sets a standard for like the work I do. And I noticed that at the end, he had called his acknowledgement's debts. So I shamelessly ripped that off. and rewrote my thing. But I started to think about it as I was doing it. And I realized that like a debt is deeper than an acknowledgement.

An acknowledgement is somebody you say, you give a high five to or you think. A debt is actually saying to the people that you write about, hey, I owe you for the thing you did to make this book possible. And I think given that you read it, like I had a bunch of people. This book, you know, came of came into being in the middle of a pandemic. I had I my edit my initial editor passed away she was an older editor that was at simon and she's her name was alice mayhew she was a giant so i had all these people that i felt like like just to acknowledge them would have been underselling actually like how important they were and i needed to call it full on debts then the other thing is i just thought it was cool to like shamelessly rip off robert

carrow um i may i may steal that just so you know yeah no feel free no i love i think you know the the cool thing about it and this is like sort of speaks to i don't know book publishing but probably everything i had thought that there was some like committee or some like rules around like what you're allowed to call stuff and what you're allowed to do with books like i seriously thought somebody like there's some wizard right like some wizard of os figures and no no no no we call that a knowledge here sir not deads and then when i did it and nobody said no i was like oh there are no rules i can do whatever i want so that's that's the backstory the specific passage you point out So I have this funny situation, right, where I wrote this book basically, like, from the time my daughter was born to now.

And my daughter has no context for me trying to explain to her what the PayPal story is or why it matters or any of that, right? She sort of thinks it's like faintly hilarious. And she'd prefer if this was a children's book, not a narrative nonfiction book, right? She's told me this, by the way. She was like, it should have more pictures. Was her only editorial feedback? Always, dude. That's always the feedback from the kids.

Like, this is boring. This is boring. I need to see some pictures. I'm like, I killed myself with this. Why are you so ungrateful? I gave you life. So fast forward. And I'm thinking to myself, like, okay, if this book is successful, it will last for a long time. It'll be hopefully on shelves for when she's older.

And what could I do that's kind of like half clever? And I was like, well, what if I buried a message in a bottle at the very end so that if she reads it, she'll get the message, right? And then I thought that I thought about the fact that I wasn't writing a book of lessons, right? This is not a book where you like, I don't say what the lessons are. I'm sure readers have picked up on them. In fact, I know they have. But I wanted like the little bit of room to give her a lesson. And the lesson that I, one of the lessons, one of many that I took from the PayPal story is you have these sort of two things, two big forces in your professional life in particular.

One is like the things you work on. And then the other is the people that you make them with. And even if you're an author writing a book alone, you are working with other people. to bring that book to life, right? That can even just be your readers who are helping you. And I had this thought in my head around like, you know, there's that line that's often like rephrased and rephrase in different ways, but it's like you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. We have this interesting thing where we think a lot about who those people are interpersonally, like who are my, like who's my spouse or partner, who are, you know, that, like that.

You do spend a lot of time with your professional colleagues and you spend a lot of time with the people who you do work with, and whether you mean to or not, they leave an imprint on you. And I wanted her to understand that the choice of who those people are, meaning the people that you're doing the work with, is just as important as the work itself, right? Because you're actually always, you're always learning by osmosis, and humans are imitation machines, right? And so we're always kind of like looking at how someone does something and then sort of faintly imitating it along the way. And I just, I had that thought about the PayPal group because you look at the group of people that's in this particular universe, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sachs, and so on. I mean, there are 200 plus of these sorts of people.

And it's so clear that they learn from one another, right? Good lessons, bad lessons, and otherwise. And I just got this sense of like, as a dad writer, you only get kind of like one chance to like do one of these little messages to your kid. And I was like, look, if I wanted to understand anything, it's that. actually the most important people in your life will be the people who love you enough to say what you're just an idiot, right? Like you totally got this wrong. We're like, hey, this is totally bad.

So it's not actually necessarily the people who make you feel good all the time. We have friends that we enjoy hanging out with. How many of our friends are the people who are willing to look us in the face and say, you're dead wrong about this and it's going to cost you dearly? I found what was interesting about the PayPal group is that there was this. and people who read the book will probably pick it up, they had this level of like bracing honesty that was a part of the culture.

It was not always pleasant. I would say it often like it may have crossed the line more than a few times. There were definitely some moments that you probably, these people look back on and were like, yeah, I could have handled it differently. But there was this, it was almost like a rigor around like if someone said something wrong,

you weren't out of line if you called out their idea and tried to improve it. And I found that like, as I started to study that and think about it a lot, I was like, wow, I have to make sure that the people in my life that I prioritize are those people. And then more importantly, I want my daughter to like get this message because it's really important. And I sort of freely admit in that section, I was like, I'm not sure I can do that for you, right? I told her in that I wrote it in there. I said, I'm not sure that I can play this role for you because I think there are lessons I love, I, there are lessons that I love you too much to teach you. But what she needs are people who

can do that kind of gut check for her. And that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, we, we look for people who make us comfortable. How many people do we have in our lives who make us, like, productively uncomfortable? Wow. It's a great prompt. It's a great question to ask yourself right now as a takeaway. How many, because I'm starting, I'm like getting thought bubbles in my head right now, thinking of, of naming those people, who are those ones.

And you know what? The ones who have this kind of combination of competence and warmth and, and, you know, they love me enough to be honest. I would share that. I think that is a, that is how you show love in a way. So that's how definitely you could show love to me. Is you love me enough to not take, the selfish act is just to kind of let me go and make mistakes.

But when you know and you realize it and you care enough to say, hey dude, you messed up, here's why, and here are some, maybe some ideas, you know, part of that, I think part of your Foxhole friends that they're the ones who are willing to do that for you And hopefully we can be that for them as well. They're just worth, there's not an amount to even put on it. They're worth everything, I think, when it comes to people to have in your life. And it's, and it's, by the way, it's, I think super hard to find them.

Because if you think about how friendships form, right, like often it's by accident, like especially when you're young, it's kind of like whoever you live by or whoever you happen to be in your second grade classroom with, right? Right. So it's totally random. And then as you mature, a lot of those friendships stay, some of them leave. But it's not like when we're looking for friends, we're looking for brutal honesty, right? Think about it.

Like, you don't go into a situation. You're like, I need to find the most brutally honest people here and make friends of them, right? But if you look at people who are really successful and you start to think about what makes them successful, you know, some significant part of it is someone saying, hey, the way you've been doing this is completely wrong. Let me give an example that has nothing to do with technology or PayPal that actually made me think about this more. So I think some portion of your listeners have probably watched the Last Dance, which was this epic series on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. And if you haven't seen it, I really recommend you do even if you don't like sports. It's amazing.

One of the things that happens in there is that Jordan is an exceptional individual athlete and an exceptional individual scorer. He can put up huge numbers every game. But the Bulls continue to lose. And he's sort of winning all the individual scoring titles, but they're losing games, right? And so Phil Jackson, who's the coach, has to kind of convince and coax and demonstrate the effectiveness of what's called the triangle offense, which is a structure that enables him to be successful because it opens up opportunities for other people. Now, imagine what it's like to be Phil Jackson and have to tell the greatest player to ever play the game that he's been doing it wrong and that actually he's the reason or part of the reason why the team isn't performing what it could be to the level it could be. I think of that as like a difficult act, but a necessary one for the Bulls to become the dynasty

that we remember them as today. But it wouldn't have happened if Phil had said, well, I'm not going to be mean to Michael Jordan. Right. That wasn't going to happen. And I, you know, the more I thought about it, there are a few of my friends who, whether they know it or not, they play this role for me and I play this role for them. And that's a total blessing. And I freely admit, like some of that happened completely by accident.

but our friendship is also formed in that direction, meaning like I will call them and they will tell me the truth and do it with compassion. And I think they expect that on the back end as well. It's a very interesting way to think about friendship. And it was like actually one of the things I took from the whole PayPal story. I think as you, Tim Urban, I'm sure you like Tim Urban stuff, right, way, all great writers love Tim Urban.

But when you, I've read almost everything he's written, which is a lot, but it's because he's that good. He wrote a post about developing friendships later in life and why it's hard. And I think one of the things that I took from it that I found to be true is doing hard things together. And James Clearer has also written about us. Doing hard things together is another way. And that's why within good cultures at companies, I've seen this happen where friendships are built because they've, worked on difficult problems and they've found ways to make it happen by bouncing ideas off

of each other, disagreeing from time to time, being willing to say, you know what, I actually think of it over here. And I don't think what you're saying is accurate. Here's why. And there's this constructive dialogue. And I've been witness to this some from time to time. And I found that friendships have been built through doing hard things together, learning together, breaking bread together. than after those kind of meeting sessions. You know what I mean? And I think that is also another way to develop is because I think it forms out of respect. You see their output and what they're able to do and the way they think.

And in my mind, I say, I'm attracted to that. Male or female, whatever. I'm talking friends here. I'm attracted to that line of thinking and that way of being. I want to be around that person. And they say, I'm attracted to that. I want to be around that person. And all of a sudden, you're friends.

So I think that's also another way that that works. I think, you know, I think there is something to that. It's also, it's like almost like a growth orientation to our friendships, right? Like we take a growth orientation. I'm sure that's a language that's pretty familiar to your listeners and to you. We take a growth orientation to ourselves, right? So we'll want to put up more reps today than we did yesterday or add more weight today than we did yesterday or write more words or record more podcasts. But the question is, are our friends doing that same thing for us? And I'm sort of smiling as I say it because I'm realizing like, like I'm in the fortunate position if I actually do with friends that do that, but there's a specific kind of friendship that produces that. And it is not always the same as like the friends that you hadn't, you know, from way back when, right? And I'm not, by the way, there's no like judgment here. Like you can have friends where the whole point of the friendship is just to hang out or to go do whatever it is you do together. But I find that particularly, and this is probably true for you too, like the older you get,

you sort of look for those people where somehow, and sometimes it's like magical, like, how do they find a way to call you out, but still maintain like the sanctity of the friendship? Yeah. And I found this, by the way, this is like what I found, you know, between and among some of the PayPal, not always, but often between and among the PayPal people. The best example, actually, is Peter Thiel and Max Lefchin. There's a quality in their interactions from the beginning where people, you know, Peter refines Max's thinking.

He doesn't yell at him. It's not him screaming and saying, I'm the CEO, you're the CTO, you have to do what I say. It's more of a like, almost like he'll ask a question. And the going down the path of the question is what leads Max to a better answer about something. And I have this friend, Lauren, who does this for me sometimes. Like, I'll be on some tear about something. And she'll just, all she does, it's like a slight little, well, have you thought about it this way?

Like maybe you could just go in this direction and then things. And then like I see the wisdom in that. But I think that has to be a thing that friends actually commit to. Not maybe not like with a piece of paper or like a docu sign. Like it's not it's not bad formal. But there's a way in which it's like, oh, I'm not just here to like make Ryan happy. I'm here to make Ryan better. That's different.

That's like that to me is actually a standard of friendship that we can aspire to and achieve. I think the character. Characteristic of curiosity is one of the most attractive characteristics in a person. And I also think it's a commonality among leaders who sustain excellence over an extended period of time. I find I'm personally drawn to people who have this genuine intellectual curiosity and no fear of aggressively pursuing that. You know what I mean? And in a way, I am like, I want to hop on that train. I want to go alongside you versus kind of like, I'm good.

I got to figure it out. I'm okay here. I got a good gig. I'm just going to go and kind of clock it and clock out and cruise. With that said, there's nothing wrong with that. I just think for me personally and Jimmy and I sense you're similar and I'm guessing all the PayPal people are too, that that's just probably not a person for me. And that's okay.

Right. And they probably wouldn't like me either, you know, because they're questioning everything. So I think like that this curiosity and this this wonder and this desire to learn and grow and improve and really aggressively chase that down to me is I just it's intoxicating. I really enjoy people like that. Yeah. You know who has it and we don't even have to tell them about it as kids. Yeah. It's actually kids.

I mean, you find it all the time. Like I can want my daughter can find like this is funny yesterday. she found like chopsticks like we had like ordered food and she found these chopsticks and she pulled them out and like I think asked me like 12 questions about chopsticks right and most of my answer is like I have no idea. I'm like can we please stop because I'm really tired. But there's a like who is that curious about chopsticks right? It actually is to me you know it's funny you say this because I think of it as one of the common features of excellent people. So if you were going to connect one documentary I just mentioned the last dance with another that I love.

which is Giro Dreams of Sushi, right? Like, I actually think there's more in common between Michael Jordan and Jiro than people would imagine. One of the foundational things that has to be true is that they're both intensely curious about the thing that they do very, very well. And getting better at it. And like, oh, actually, the other thing that it called to mind for me,

you know, there's this, there's one way to tell the Kobe Bryant story, which is he was an exceptional basketball player. The other way to tell the Kobe Bryant story is that he was an unbelievable learning machine who was as interested in learning from like any source that he could find as he was from learning from other basketball players. There's this amazing talk that Dwayne the Rock Johnson gave in the L.A. Lakers locker room. It's called like Genius Talks. They put it up online. Anybody can see it. And it's like a two or three part video. At the beginning, the general manager or whoever, the coach of the Lakers comes out and says, we started this because,

Kobe Bryant once called me and said, can you set me up with Heath Ledger? And like the GM or whatever was like, I mean, I'm sure I can, but like, could you explain why? And he said, because I want to understand how he got so locked into the role of the Joker when he was doing the Batman movie. And anybody that like read some of the backstory understood, like Heath Ledger basically became the Joker for a period, right? Like, I mean, journal as the Joker. It was like method acting, but to a whole different degree. And you think, just take a step back and think about that. One of the greatest basketball players of all time is interested in Heath Ledger's depiction of the Joker

because he saw it as like this incredible moment of focus and wanted to learn from that. And the follow on is that now the L.A. Lakers host Genius Talks where they invite everybody and anybody to come and do this stuff so that they can learn from a broad array of people, not just other athletes. In some ways it would make sense if you had, I don't know, Tom Brady come and talk to the Lakers, right? It is like totally different to think about like Kobe and Heath Ledger having dinner because Kobe just wanted to like mine this dude's focus, right? And understand it. I like you am drawn to that, to that kind of curiosity. I think of it as as you said, like an attractive quality in a person. If they're that, I don't actually care what they're curious about.

But if they're that intensely curious about something, I want to know what the, you know, I want to know what the secret sauce is. Is this a quality that you think people like Kobe are born with or can it be developed? I'm thinking the reason I asked this, Jimmy, is because there may be someone who's like, I don't, I'm not that curious right now. I need to, but it sounds like this could help me and they need to develop that. And that may be a weird way of putting it, but you get what I'm saying. What's the way is Kobe just born that way or was it developed? And for, others, what is the way to develop this outside of just saying like, oh, I guess I don't have it or I do?

Because I think the world's really messy and it's very gray. And I don't think there's one side or the other on almost anything. There's usually something through in the middle. So what's your thought process on developing curiosity as well as this nature versus nurture conversation? Oh, I mean, this is a fantastic, fantastic question. And I'm going to approximate an answer. And then let's just like riff and see what develops, right? Okay. The thought I have is, so in the Kobe case, there's a particular thing he's trying to be the best in the world at or improve at. And it's basketball. And his view, and I think I've heard stories in addition to the one about Heath Ledger, other stories like this, he'll basically go and like, quote, you know, go to school on anyone who's excellent at something to see if there's something that he could learn that he could adapt for the game of basketball. So it isn't just like curiosity for the sake of navel gazing or curiosity for the sake of like sounding, you know,

clever at cocktail parties. What he's trying to do is like learn something to apply it, right? Learn something so that he can bring it into his domain, right? So maybe that's like one principle. One principle is you should try to have some applicability to your curiosity because it makes it more tangible for you, right? Like if I read a book and I'm just reading it for pleasure, fine. I read plenty of books for pleasure. But it's a different focus and intensity and like process if I'm reading it to like apply it to something in my life. Right. That's kind of one. Yeah. The second thing, and maybe this is like taking it a bit too far, but I don't think it is, you know, you can become curious about anything, right? So the other thing is like I feel like sometimes people have this judgment that they walk around with.

They're like, I can't be curious about this TV show because TV isn't a good use of time and it's not appropriate or it's not like what my friends do or it's not like, quote unquote, what the teachers would want at school. but a great example of this is Mr. Beast on YouTube. Mr. Beast from a very young age, from the age of 13 or 14 or whatever, was like endlessly curious about YouTube and how YouTube worked as a platform. Fast forward, I think he has the biggest presence on that particular platform of anyone in the world.

He spoke about it with such passion on the Joe Rogan podcast and other places. And you get the sense that like his curiosity, is just about like the mechanics of how people access online video on YouTube. And that is okay. And it's done really, really well for him. I would imagine that anyone listening, they may say to themselves, but I'm not curious about like Shakespeare. Fine. You are clearly curious about something, right? Whatever it is. And the place to start is not necessarily to pick up a big book that you don't want to read and aren't going to read. The place to start might be

a Wikipedia page. Then you go down to the links at the end of the Wikipedia page. You read the articles on those links on the Wikipedia page. You find your way to YouTube. You find your way to Vimeo. Then maybe there's a documentary on Netflix. I think that we have to remove the judgment from two things. One, what people get curious about should be their own sort of thing, man, like nerd out on whatever you want. I don't care. I think it's just cool when people nerd out on stuff. The second is be okay with sources that other people are like, oh, well, that's not X, Y, or Z, meaning it's okay to learn via YouTube or learn via this or that just as long as you're kind of following this to the kind of next level, right? It's one of the things that helped me.

Like one of the things that helped me with the PayPal book was there were some books written about PayPal on the internet in 1990s. But honestly, like a lot of the best stuff was just YouTube videos where David Sachs or Elon or Max was being interviewed. and I just watched hours and hours and hours of those. And you can learn a hell of a lot that way. And my thought, so that's kind of two principles. The last one about curiosity in particular is kind of like to get the initial spark. One of the things that's important to me is just not setting the bar super high, right? It's like one thing to say to yourself like, okay, I really like, I don't know,

underwater basket weaving. So I'm going to watch an hour's worth of like video. about underwater basket weaving every day, every night, for seven days a week, for a year, and I'll be an expert. Like, that might work if you're like David Goggins, you know, and you have like superhuman levels of discipline and, you know, intensity and whatever. For the rest of us mere mortals, like, it's probably more realistic to say to yourself, I want to do this thing for 15 minutes and I'll do it for a consistent enough time and then

reevaluate 90 days, right? Meaning like, I don't think it's worth setting the bar super high at the beginning or setting goals that you just know you're never going to meet. This is like a classic, like, New Year's resolution problem, right? Curiosity is the same way. It's a muscle. Like, you can get engaged in something and then maybe 90 days later realize like, oh, actually, this is like a total waste of time.

I don't want to do this anymore, right? I'm not, you have to find the right balance there. But I think not pretending like you're going to be Einstein in 90 days is generally a pretty good way to like learn about something without feeling pressure or like weird stress about it. Two things. Okay. I'll love it. the Mr. Beast.

So I listened to the same interview. Back to your advice to your daughter. He would get on Skype all the time. Remember he told this story. He'd get on Skype for hours and hours on end daily with the other people who were curious about YouTube and they would deconstruct and talk about the makings of great videos and the thumbnails you use and just about everything it means to be a great YouTuber. long before he became, which Mr. Beast now,

the number one guy on YouTube. And it was, you could hear the passion in his voice that he was doing exactly what he wanted to do. He's like, what is like, 12, 13, 14 years old on Skype all day with these other guys who also are curious about YouTube. So it's again about surrounding yourself with those people where you can bounce ideas.

They're colliding, right? You're forcing these collisions. I think that's one big thing, okay? And because we're going to move to the book here in a second. We've been hinting at the book, but we haven't got into it. The second, and I don't remember if I read this in your book or not, there's a Dave Grohl quote. Is that from your book? Do you quote him about guilty pleasures or did I read that in a different book to say, hey.

I think that might have been in a different book, but I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah, he said basically there's no such thing as guilty pleasures. There's just pleasures. You know, and I think when you said, who cares what you're curious about? There's no such thing as a guilty pleasure. There's pleasure. So like follow it and don't apologize for it. I think that's the second part of that, which I really identify with that you talked about when it comes to following your curiosity.

It's just like that quote on how to teach kids to read or how to teach a love of reading because I'm currently doing this. And it's hard. And it's read what you love until you love to read. And so finding the books or the articles or just whatever to get into the hands. of your children so that they just oh wow that was a good book oh oh you know like they have those aha feelings like wait books open up a whole another world oh my goodness i had no idea the books i was forced to read at school when i hated them and that's why they don't have a love of reading and i think that's part of this helping people figure out what they're curious about it can then

open up all these different doors so and you made a you made an important point and i want to hit on it before we transition to other things. So it's a crucial point, which is this. We live in the one moment in human history where any passion you have, you actually have in most developed countries, right, with internet access, you have the ability to connect with other people

who are insanely passionate about it. That's never been true before. The amount of work like people would have had to do to find other people who are, super into a video game or a style of calligraphy or like a specific kind of architecture. It would have been insane, right? You would have had to like honest, honestly going to spend years of your life just tracking people down. Now, five minutes plus an email address. And you are literally connected with affinity groups or other people who love the specific

thing that you love. That is insane, man. I mean, that's the craziest thing ever. And the reason I mentioned it is because it actually ties directly into this. There's this. one really specific moment in the book. And I had to trim it down a lot, but I want to give some sense, some context for the story, right? There's this car crash that happens in the middle of the book. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel crash in a McLaren F1. A McLaren F1 is this insane supercar, and it's this incredible feat of automotive engineering. And Elon buys it after his first startup exit. This is not just someone buying like a fancy car once they have a little bit of money. He and many, many others believed that the McLaren's creation was like one of the greatest moments in car history.

The only reason I could actually understand what it meant is I found this guy. I went to all these McLaren forums and there are huge forums from like the 90s that are packed with commentary about the McLaren. And I found this one person who was like, he was like the guy who had all the answers, right? And like his name was Eric. He went by actually like a little name. And I, pieced together a bunch of clues found a Facebook profile for him that I thought was him. And I sent him a message out of the blue. And I said, hey, listen, this is really random. But are you this guy, you know, something, something 95? Are you the McLaren expert? Because I'm writing this section about McLaren's, and it involves Elon Musk, and you posted about his car. And you seem to have like kept the encyclopedia

for where all these cars are and stuff. And he wrote back. And we jumped on the phone that night. and he gave me a two and a half hour seminar about the McLaren F1. Here's what's truly crazy about Eric. Eric does not own a McLaren F1. He's like the world's expert and like big important people with a lot of money, contact him to like talk about the car, but he doesn't own one. He's just super insanely passionate about the McLaren F1

and the engineering involved in it. You can find, and he found his community of people, right, his tribe of like McLaren aficionados, you have the ability to do that now. So whatever your particular interest is, like, it is highly likely that you could do a Reddit search and find a subreddit that's like devoted to your thing, right? Whatever it is, that is one of the greatest gifts that I think we too often take for granted. You can like find your people now, whatever your interest happens to be.

Let me happen with you for me. I see your book. That's exactly right. to your book. I did a quick search. I got your website. I happened to find an email address. I sent a cold email and 15 minutes later, we're becoming best friends. And I think that's like the way that this thing can work. And it all happened in the course of less than one day. And by the way, I would say that that's actually another curiosity lesson or curiosity principle is like even sending one note or like asking somebody for their time, if it's something you're excited about and they were

excited about is you'd be like astonished. I mean, you get a better than 50% response rate if you just do that, right? Because people want to talk about the things that they're crazy about and like really passionate about. You just have to ask and most people don't ask, right? Like I have this I have the thing that I often will like immediately drop a line to an author who I, where I've just read their book and I will just find a way to contact them. And if I can't contact them, I'll just contact the publisher and send a note to their editor and say, hey, I really enjoyed this. Would love to connect with so and so, right? And like, maybe I don't get a response.

Maybe I don't. I don't actually really care. I mean, like, it's a good act anyway. But my sense is that that's another great way to develop your curiosity is if you are interested in something, find the person that can, like, actually explain it to you or do it or like have that same shared affinity. It's so easy. It's like you're sort of, we're like leaving money on the table if we're not money, but

leaving passion on the table if we don't do that, right, especially with like all the tools we have. Have you seen the Steve Jobs frequency counter video with Bill Hewlett? No. Okay. I'll send it to you, but real quick, I've told the story before. Steve Jobs is 12 years old. And he wants to build what I guess is called a frequency counter, don't even notice. And he needs parts for it, though.

He doesn't have them. He looks up Bill Hewlett. Yes, that Hewlett. He looks up his phone number. in the actual phone book that they used to make. And he called the number and it was Bill Hewlett's house. His number was still listed. Bill answers the phone.

Hi, I'm Steve Jobs. Mr. Hewlett, I'm 12 years old and I want to build a frequency counter. I was wondering if I could get some spare parts from you. And Bill loved kind of the gumption of this 12 year old says, of course, you can. In fact, come in and I'll give him to you. He came in, they had a conversation, and all of a sudden he actually gave Steve. a job and Steve, Steve Jobs a job, he gave him a job working there and Steve Jobs says,

and I was in heaven. And then he ends the video. He ends the video basically with what you just said. The difference between people who make things happen and those who don't is that they're willing to ask. They're willing to get rejected. They're willing to fail. The dreamers are like, nah, it's probably not worth it or I don't want to do it or I'm afraid they'll say no or I don't want to be embarrassed and then the doers just ask and yes of course you get rejected of course you get ignored of course nothing happens sometimes when you do that but other times you do make a connection you do build some sort of relationship and i think that's just an amazing lesson i've learned firsthand doing this podcast that it never ever would have happened without the willingness to get

rejected and ignored tons of times especially at the beginning now not as much but still happens sometimes. And I think that's a big lesson that I learn and try to share with people is like, who cares? Like you have too much ego into it. If you're worried about failure or being ignored or rejection, just move on. Just go to the next one. I think every no is a not yet and it's getting me closer to a yes. And I think that's the way to approach asking questions to people. By the way, it's one of my one of the stories that I loved most that's often overlooked today. It's almost the exact carbon copy of the story you just told about Steve Jobs, but it's for Elon Musk. I kick off my section about Elon in the book by talking about him reaching out to someone

he read about in a newspaper. His name is Dr. Peter Nicholson. He reads about the scientist slash political person, policy person slash just general amazing thinker named Peter Nicholson. He reads an article about him. And Elon and his brother Kimball don't know anybody in Canada. So they've been doing cold calling, right? He gets the newspaper reporter who wrote the article to give him Dr. Nicholson's number, then calls Dr. Nicholson and essentially sort of like insinuates like, I want to meet with you. And like my brother and I want to meet with you because we think you're just very, very cool and I'm interested in what you're interested in. And Dr. Nicholson basically says, like, you know, I was working at a bank. I didn't have people call me out of the blue like this.

He agrees to have lunch with them. Out of that lunch comes a job offer for Elon to work at Scotia Bank with Dr. Nicholson. They are still in touch and friends to this day. That is a 40, 40 year relationship slash friendship that emerged from a cold call by Elon Musk to a guy he thought was interesting and they're still in touch to this day. And Dr. Nicholson said, he's like, you know, I, the gumption of a kid reaching out was like basically a freshman in college to ask me for a job when he doesn't know me from Adam. He's like, I kind of thought it was just like pretty amazing. Someone would do that and I agreed to meet with them not knowing what would happen. And it's how Elon gets his first ever internship in college, and it leads to him thinking about the banking

system differently. Now, all that other stuff came later. The lesson for people in general is, like, you don't really know the value of a note like that or a call like that until you go through with it. And I, you know, and it's one of these things like it can be really uncomfortable people, especially people who are introverts. Like, I'm not the most, like, that's not the easiest thing for me to do. But I do make it a habit to reach out to people. And in some ways, I expect to be rejected. I expect for people to close a door on my face or expect people to say, I'm going to delete this or archive this note or, hey, this is spam, right? If I have that expectation, any responses are upside, right? Like, it's actually great if someone responds, but it's not the end of the world if they

don't because I kind of want to do it anyway. I find that this is one of the most important habits that people can build, right? It's just that willingness to do the outreach. Yep. I remember early in my podcast, I emailed Seth Godin. Seth is pretty notorious from responding to people. people. I think he's very good about being good to his fans. And I, you know, I did the normal cold out. My cold emails probably weren't as good, but they were good enough to land some people, you know, they were the Gary V's and stuff like that of the world early on. And Seth said, I think I was like 10, 10 to 15 episodes in at the time, at least that were published, email me back when you have a huge show in 75 episodes. So I put it on the calendar. I did the math

of when the 75th would come out. Obviously, I wasn't even close to that point when there was 10, 15 episodes and emailed him the day the 75th episode came out and sent him the link to the episode and said Seth we're at 75 responded to that exact note too so obviously saved it and I said we're at 75 let's go and to his credit he was like absolutely and we booked it like that day and then we re-recorded it shortly thereafter and we since had him on a few times so like those things those things like you don't know the potential chain of events you're creating like the Elon Musk one with with with Dr. Nicholson is such a great one when it comes to these that that's the encouragement. That's the practical application.

That's the action anybody could take is when you think about that. My thing, too, is I like the way you approach this with reading. If I read something and I love it, there is a 100% chance I'm emailing the person who wrote it. Now, I don't always get a response. I will find a way to get in touch with them, though, or at least to make sure I get a message sent their way. And I'm amazed that that that's not a normal thing. I think that that should be more normal because that's how we spread ideas. That's how we connect with people is the way, it's say, oh, I love how you think about that.

I loved what you shared in regards to this topic. I'm curious to learn more about it. Yeah. I'll give you an example that literally just popped to mind because it just happened in my neck of the woods with a situation that's completely different, right? There's a young boy who lives a couple doors down for me who plays with my daughter. And he's like 10 years old. And his name is Joey. And he loves Hamilton, the musical.

And he's like, they had it memorized. And so my understanding of the story is that he basically took time to, like, write Lin-Manuel Miranda a fan letter, right? And told him that, like, he is, like, really passionate about musicals. And he's working on a musical over-dardar. And, like, you know, sent it in the same sort of spirit that anybody sends, like, a note to whoever, right? And those are a note to Santa.

You're not expecting Santa to right back, you know? And a couple days ago, about a week ago, he burst. into our living room and he has like the biggest smile on his face you could ever imagine and he is holding a note back from Lynn Manuel Miranda and it's this it's this small card it's like on formal stationary and Lynn Manuel Miranda Miranda has written this note and then signed it she's very gracious right but like you really never know when someone will take the time to respond and for him like it's a real credit to to Lynn Manuel Miranda and Miranda that he's like taking the time to write back to a 10-year-old, that's epic and awesome in its own way. But even more amazing is that,

Joey, like, wrote this note fully expecting a response at some point and would, like, check the mailbox every day to see if you responded and stuff. And I think we lose that. We feel like, oh, it's like beyond us or we can't do it or whatever. And I don't know, man, I think that that's, like, it's the easiest way to stoke your curiosity is to close the kind of like Kevin Bacon degrees between you and the person or things you're curious about is to say, okay, I love this how am i going to like actually close that gap and some of it by the way is like being respectful and learning everything you can so that when you approach or write you're doing it from an informed place some of it is like luck but a lot of it is just actually having the gumption to like

write to you know to cold call dr nicholson and ask for a job if you're elon or to cold call you know bill hewlett and say i need these parts right it's so good speaking of of elon and Peter Thiel and Max Levchen and these guys who are what went on to be called the PayPal Mafia. It only took me 50 minutes, by the way, to formally introduce your book, Jimmy. So here we are. No, we've been hinting it at it the whole time. The book's the founders is is insane. I wouldn't have cold emailed Jimmy if I didn't think everybody should read this book.

But it's called the founders. But anyway, what was it about these people who started this business? because I actually, like I've heard Max's name. I was, I loved learning more about him. I've heard of Peter Thiel and the things he's on. Obviously, everybody knows Elon, and there are more people involved. But what was it about this group and this company and this time that made you so curious that you were going to interview 275 people and five years worth of work, I believe, was what went into this? What was it about it that said, yeah, I got to do this.

I'm just too curious about this. Yeah, it's It look, it was a number of things, right? I had done a couple of books before this, and once you do a couple of books, you always have in the back of your mind, you're always fishing. You're actually always like searching for a book idea, right? Or like looking for something that could be a book. Especially if like me, you have the, like I've written about different things.

And so I have the flexibility. being able to say, like, if I like an idea or I think something should exist, like, I just want to go and do it. So I'm always like, I'm always searching. I had done a book on Claude Shannon who worked at a place called Bell Labs. Bell Labs is this like, it's the, it's one of the great collections of talent in the 20th century, technological and engineering talent. And so what I started to do was I just went and thought about what are other places where that many talented people have been at one place at one time and created interesting things.

And so there's a bunch of companies that fit that mold, right? And someone had done books on all of them. There were a bunch of just like, like random things in the world, you know, concentrations. But I found that with PayPal, I was, I was kind of surprised that no one had done this already. Like, I went and I sort of Googled. I looked for other stories and I looked for other books. And I read the Elon biography and I read Peter Keel's book zero to one. I had read, I had some of Reed Hoffman's books, but found that, like, in each case, PayPal was like a sliver of the experience, but it wasn't the whole thing, right? So there's a chapter about PayPal in Ashley Vance's book about Elon. There are stories from PayPal in Peter's book zero to one.

And there are obviously stories in Reed's books and other places, but no one had really done the kind of end-to-end, like, hey, like, here's what happened. And I don't know. I just had the idea. I was like, well, if I could get like a few of the. them to participate, how epic would it be to talk about, to talk to not about the things they're doing now, which can be very sensitive or controversial, or they just aren't ready to talk about it, but to actually talk to them about like this thing that happened like way in the past for them anyway and what it might, what effect it might have had. The other thing that's interesting

about it is it's not like I was writing, like I was writing about a company that's still in existence today, meaning what they built actually stood the test of time, right? And, And so it, like, it might have been a different story if you're trying to tell like the Steve Jobs narrative and like the Apple two failed and like Apple wasn't successful. Right. Like, like there'd be an open question about why you were telling that story. PayPal was successful as a company. It's still around today. Owns Venmo is massive.

So I was like, all right. So things stood the test of time. I just, I also had the, the, the feeling, the instinct that because they became many of them, wealthy and famous, that, that, that. The best stuff about this period basically got forgotten or like, you know, kind of like discarded because when you're launching rockets or you're creating Palantir or you are, you know, doing like you're if you're like if you're doing, if you're building LinkedIn, a weird question to be asked. Just like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Tell me about PayPal, you know, like, it's actually like not the question people would think to ask. In some ways, it's actually like, funny enough, it's like actually weird because there's so many other questions that are urgent that are interesting. But I had this sense that I was like, you know, they never, this is a time in their lives when they weren't the people they are today. They're not, they weren't rich. They were flying coach, right? They weren't flying private. Like it's like, it's a whole different period in their lives. And it's when they were all getting their start. And I had a feeling. I was like, that was one thesis. The other thesis was there's a ton of

people who have never had a chance to share their PayPal story. That was also the other part of it. I was like, everyone's going to focus on the big names. No one's going to focus on the people who just, for whatever reason, didn't get press, whether they didn't want press, or they're just like, they didn't, they chose not to participate, or they just were never asked about this experience. So that was kind of the welter of motivations. I mean, it was never one. If you do a book, there's never one reason why you do it.

You're not like, oh, this thing happened. I mean, maybe for some people. But for me, it was a mix of just a kind of serendipity, stumbling onto the Wikipedia entry for the PayPal Mafia. looking at other books that have been written and just getting us feeling like, there's a lot of gold to be mined here and no one's done the mining. What, so part of the reason why it hasn't been told is because of, as you mentioned,

the fact that they've pretty much all of the names have gone on to do amazing things, start these, these crazy companies like LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, first money in at Facebook for Peter Thiel. There's, There's so much going on with many of them. YouTube, Yelp, Yammer, Palantir. It goes on.

Amazing, yeah. What do you think, and I know this is kind of like what the book's about, but what was it about this core group that not only led them to do what they did at PayPal and to get that going, but then that they're the type of people that went on to start all of these amazing companies. I mean, it's, I don't know if this is ever anything like this. ever happened before it to this magnitude where this this core small group of people were all together at the same place on the same team then went out and basically started their own all-star

teams you don't have LinkedIn and SpaceX and Tesla and Palantate all these companies YouTube without also building your own all-star team what is it about this group these people that they had that enabled them to do this yeah it's um You know, it's sort of this funny thing of like, I spend 500 pages trying to answer the question. It's not the easiest question. I know because it's the whole book. No, but I can run through some of the bullet points, right? I mean, a big part of it is definitely the fact that they were successful at PayPal, but that it was hard,

gave them a sense that you could do technology entrepreneurship and it wasn't going to result in pets.com or any of the other failures from the dot-com bubble bursting. You know, to sort of go back in the time machine, like people, some of your listeners might remember, like there was a period when the internet was could do no wrong. That ran right up until the year 2000. Then the dot com bubble burst and like 80% of the value from the NASDAQ disappeared. And you all of a sudden, the internet could do no right. Everyone was like, oh, that was a fad. You know, that internet thing.

That was like, that was great. But we're going to get back to bricks and mortar. Right. So you have this weird whipsaw effect of between 1995 and 1990. the internet is all anything can talk about and it's making people millionaires overnight. Then 2000 starts and all of a sudden the internet is like actually the blame for the failure of the market is laid at the feet of these sort of high flying dot coms. PayPal is launched in 1999, but it grows in 2000, 2001 and 2002 as that kind of bloodletting is happening in Silicon Valley. They emerge from that experience, not as cynics, but as, you know, as, as, as, as optimists about the future of the internet because their internet company didn't go on.

Right. Like, they, they had the experience of this is going to be brutally hard, but it's totally doable. That is different than many of the people who, like, were their contemporaries who went through experiences that were very different. So that is definitely part of it. Like, it sort of feels tautological or, like, kind of circular to say, like, they're successful because they were successful. successful, but that is actually a part of it. They succeeded with things like YouTube because they had seen that you could build a flexible, universal platform that could apply in many different places in the world of payments. You could think about how that would be practical

in the world of video, right? So that's kind of one thing. The second thing is this was a team of interesting people in their own right. The people they selected for were highly intelligent. they were competitive. They worked really, really, really hard. So there was a pre-selection, I would say, of people that were probably, you know, you could argue going to be successful in whatever it is they did. And we have some evidence for that because the things that they went on to do, in many cases, became really successful.

And they had nothing to do with technology entrepreneurship. One of the people I interviewed is Silicon Valley's leading professional magician. And Daniel Chan has established quite a, you know, a trackbreaker for himself. as a magician, as a performer, you know, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, and he is an alum, albeit he spent a short tenure there, but he's an alum of this group, right? You have people who, David Sachs, his first effort after PayPal is not technology. It's film. He goes and produces a film called Thank You for Smoking.

And it is nominated for two Golden Globes. You know, you have people like Elon who moved from Internet land where he was in Zip 2 and PayPal was in the Internet. he goes into rockets, right, rocket engineering, which is hugely risky. But many of the principles sort of, and that kind of, that thing come from his experiences doing internet businesses. So you have this like pre-selection of a group of people who are like probably like industrious enough and intelligent enough to do, be successful wherever they are. There, I would say there are two or three other factors. Another thing that I noticed is that we, we have this tendency to like think that hard work is a is maybe something that should be like um like we we use terms like work

life balance and and i think that there's something admirable about like iterating in the in the direction of balance and like you know kind of like maybe sanding off some of like the worst things that can happen when you work too hard but just to be clear like you can't tell the pay-fail story without talking about a seven-day-a-week culture and it wasn't always positive And there are definitely some things, some ways in which, like, our work culture has refined itself to be better. But this was also a team that had the willingness to actually put the hours in to be successful. And I had somebody who wrote me a note about the book. He is not involved in the story, but had read the story and wrote to me and said, you know, I'm glad.

He said something to the effective. I'm glad you didn't run away from writing about the hours and the difficulty and the strife. Because whenever he's like, whenever I tweet about it, I get a lot of, like, hate. directed my way because people like, oh, you're just celebrating hustle culture or you're celebrating overwork. But he said, no, like, if you're a startup and you're going up against better capitalized competitors who are established companies, you have a really high hurdle to overcome to be successful. And that simply and often takes like a ton of elbow grease, right? So that's like kind of thing number three. Thing number four is it wasn't just an intelligent team or a hardworking

team. It was a fast moving team. One of the things that is interesting about their particular culture is that they moved more quickly than other players in the space to attack problems. They even moved more quickly than some of the people who worked at eBay, which is the auction platform where PayPal first has a lot of success. So it was like, there's this line from like James Carville, who was like Bill Clinton's campaign manager in 1990, whatever. And he's like speed kills, right? That's like there was one of their big mantras was like speed kills. I would apply that in this situation that like actually one of the things that PayPal made it successful, they made its people successful. They learned the value of responding quickly,

of moving quickly and of just like having a kind of intensity where you were like that it was never, nothing was ever done or you couldn't wait to get to do things, right? That is, those are decisions. People make decisions to do that, right? There's a lot of. things in the book. And again, some of these are things people probably shouldn't do. But there are features that cut across this group of people so that if you are developing YouTube and all of a sudden, MySpace is giving you grief because you're trying to embed your videos in MySpace and the people at MySpace are like, no, no, no, that's not happening. You know that being aggressive and getting MySpace users to complain to MySpace about being able

to embed YouTube videos is actually something that can make you successful. And that's exactly how it played out at PayPal as well. They got eBay users to complain to eBay when eBay would monkey with PayPal buttons. And YouTube's founders, who are PayPal alumni, got MySpace users to complain about MySpace when they monkeyed around with YouTube videos. There are common threads that extend to everything these people developed after. The bias for action. And I found that in addition to curiosity and other qualities you mentioned,

that action-oriented people starting before they're fully ready. because you're never fully ready. Just think about your time as a dad. Like when your daughter's born, you're not ready. You had to become ready and you're still working on it, just like I am. We all are. But you're never fully ready, so you have to go. You have to go first.

You learn by doing, I think, is one of the, is a hallmark too of people who get things done. They understand that part of the way you learn is to actually, actually do it. Man, Jimmy, this is so good at flew by. I didn't really fully know where we. you'd focus, but I love kind of where it came out. One more question for you, man, is I think people probably look at your career and think, I'd love to do something like that or make it happen in ways that you've made it happen, especially at such a young age. When you think of somebody who's just a little bit earlier in their career, maybe they're a recent college graduate,

what are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person? Oh, man. I need to be the recipient of that advice, not the, not the giver of it. And so I attach that disclaimer like, you know, take this all with a big grain of salt. Boy, it's a big question. And I'm happy to do a part two discussion with you because I feel like there's so many threads we could pull on. The interesting thing is you partially answered this and the advice to your daughter, right? The who, as Jim Collins might say and did say to me, right? Like he's put himself in positions to be struck by who luck love that line right that he said and i think that that part of it is um so critical when it comes to whatever it is you're choosing to do like

in your debt section there's a ton of names that you mentioned in there that have helped you get this because whether it's a book or it's a company or whatever it may be be it's a team effort i mean the the whole aspect of this is why i don't like the phrase self-made billionaire because i've never met somebody who's self-made right we are all community made and i get like he he or she did not inherit it i understand that's why they use the phrase but it's just not true we're community-made people and i think that's something to really think about so i hope i bought you a little bit of time to think by sharing something that was great it was so well done and now i'm I'm curious to hear if there's, I know you have a quick mind if there's some more things

you're thinking about. You know, it may, it sort of makes me, like all advice is also contextual, right? So it's sort of advice being given to the person at the particular time and life where they're at and the particular place that they're at. But I would say that in doing some of the work that I've done and on books and things, there's kind of a few principles that always apply for me now that I wouldn't have known when I started. the first is generally what looks like expertise from the outside is actually really messy on the

inside. And so that's that's a good principle because then nothing becomes closed off to you, right? Like you can kind of look at somebody and feel like, oh, well, they're an expert or they're this or or they're that. And it turns out like they actually like have no idea what they're doing either. It's actually astonishing a number of people who, like, you see, like, maybe they're on TV, but, like, they're struggling with, like, I don't know, like paying their bills on time or something, right? Like, there's this weird disconnect of you tend to put these people on Mount Rushmore in your mind. And then it turns out, like, actually, like, there's no factual basis for that. But that's not a reason to critique or criticize them.

I don't mean that in a mean that should be inspiring because. Yeah, it makes you feel better. Yeah, it means you can get. there, right? Like, you can plausibly get there or find a way, right? That's kind of one thing. The second is, I would say, like, there's this great op-ed that was run in the financial times, like this is past week or last week. And it was something, the headline of something like envy the optimist, not the genius. And it was like a meditation on the idea of optimism, right? And I actually think that particularly now, like in our era, 22, post-pandemic, all the things

going on in the world, like, you, you, there is real power to, day in optimism in a way they're like almost wasn't in arrows past because if you're an optimist, you're almost increasingly in the minority. I have conversations with friends and they'll say, like they'll do a litany of like all the bad things that are happening in the world that happened that day on Twitter. And 0.0% of those things actually affected their day to day lives, right? And like I said that sort of in jest, but I'm actually not joking too much. I think that optimism in general is like a good orientation because what it leads you to try to do is like actually look for silver linings, right? The worst things in the world is going to happen to you,

and you can find a way out. And I would say that's actually a good entrepreneurial principle, too. Like a lot of what PayPal did was find silver linings where other companies face clouds. And you have this, you can be laughed at if you're an optimist, but it's actually like really hard to become, to have like a bad life, I think, if you like spend your life trying to be optimistic, because you end up actually forcing yourself to look for the upside and everything, right? So I would say that it's actually like that that is a that's probably good life advice. I mean, try to be optimistic. It sounds cliche except that it's like a cliche that conceals a lot of power because you end up actually being the person in the room who gets things done and who moves things forward and is always looking for a path.

Right. I would say the last, the last kind of it's not life advice so much as, you know, there's a lot to be said for being. being okay with time alone. And I say this because like there's a bunch of like writing about, like I wrote about it, like the power of teams or the power of these clusters of individuals and stuff. I want to kind of go a little bit in the other direction and say a lot of the time that I spend working on books is like early in the mornings, totally alone, not with other people. there's a really wonderful essay called like leadership and solitude that I that's by a writer, a professor.

And it's, I think he delivered it as like a speech for West Point graduates. And the point of the essay was getting these people to think like leadership is about the team, but it really actually does in some cases come down to like the time you spend alone kind of with your own thoughts and like being okay with that, those moments. I think social media, I'm not as like strongly pro or strongly con social media as a lot of people are. I think it's like just like anything else like it has good sides and bad sides. But I do think that one of the things that it tends to do is actually like it tends to keep us away from our own thinking about things. And a lot of my happiest moments of the last five and a half years were sitting in a room by myself looking at old PayPal emails and just thinking about how to make them come to life on the page and like how to actually like, just, and knowing that is actually really good because it means like time by myself is never time

alone, right? It's actually just like the greatest time ever. I get to like nerd out on this thing. I think solitude is super underrated. And I don't mean it in like a thorough way. You don't need to like go to a cabin for three years. You need to live your life. But I think we all would probably benefit from like ghosting a little bit more and actually just being okay, like hanging out by ourselves, doing interesting things that are interesting to us, not interesting because the world says they're interesting, just because we're interested in them. I love it, man.

The book is called The Founders, the story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley. You know, these, there's a section about Elon Musk and how when somebody walked into his bedroom one day, he had like a million of these biographies and stories of leaders in history. This is one of those books, right?

I know in the debt section, you mentioned the editor who passed away and saying, like, this is going to be a backlist book. And I know talking in the book industry, a backlist book is one that probably continues to sell more and more each year on into infinity. And I think the founders is one of those books because it's entertaining, which books have to be, I think, nowadays. And maybe all the time. But it's informative because you're learning about a story, which I'm just fascinated by. But there's also a lot of practical application, even though I'm not sure if you meant for that when you thought of the idea. You really just wanted to tell the story of PayPal. And so I think those three things are really important in a book because they check all the boxes of keeping your attention, earning each turn of the page, which authors need to do.

And I think about that as I'm writing. And so I highly recommend it and just tell people to get it. And Jimmy, certainly, man, I'm glad that I sent that note to you. And now we've got to talk. Because I'm certain this will not be the last time. And I certainly would love to continue our day. dialogue as we both progress, man. Yeah, no, look, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this and to read the book.

And in some ways, like you said, this is, your podcast is like a living testament to everything we just talked about, right? Yeah. Right. So I appreciate you and everything you've done to bring this to life. And I'm glad you stuck with Seth's challenge and went past the 75 episodes because that's, that's awesome. Yeah. Love it, man.

Well, thanks again, man. And obviously, we'll be talking soon. Okay. Great. see you well i think that one could have gone on for another few hours i am fascinated by the way jimmy thinks as well as how kind and warm he is certainly super competent um and knows his stuff and you could tell he loves what he does and i uh really enjoy being around people like jimmy a few takeaways from my notes envy the optimist not the genius there is a

a real power in optimism. The world is built by optimists. Look for the silver linings and things. Have belief. Be the type of person that believes in themselves and others. Optimism, I think, builds confidence, both in yourself and it could bring others along with you and help build confidence in them. Let's surround ourselves with optimists and be one as well. Then Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan, the fact that Phil told the best player in the world, hey, we aren't going to win a championship if you keep playing this way. You have to buy into the triangle offense. It shows the value of a great friend, or in this case a coach, who he was both a friend and a coach. It shows the value of that person telling you the truth in order to help you

and the team get better. And then the power of asking. The people who make things happen are willing to ask. Steve Jobs to Bill Hewlett, Elon Musk, the Dr. Peter Nicholson, and there's many others. Those ask changed the trajectory of their lives. And who knows? Maybe your next ask will change yours. Once again, I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did.

I would be so grateful if you would spread the message by telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Jimmy Soni. I think Jimmy will help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you continue to write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars on Apple Podcast, you continually give me. me the opportunity to follow my curiosity with great rigor and do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much.

Talk who soon. Can't wait.