The Pomp Podcast - Kamal Ravikant, Author & Investor: The Ultimate Self-Love Guide

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

Kamal Ravikant is the best selling author of the book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. He is also an Army veteran and an early stage technology investor. In this conversation, Kamal and Anthony discuss everything from his writing process, to what he looks for in early stage investments, and even spend time debating the current media landscape and how various technology platforms fit in. CRYPTO.COM-----The only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users and download the Crypto.com app today to earn $50 USD using the code ‘pomp2020’ when you sign up for one of their MCO Visa Cards.  TAXBIT-----Refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Kamal Ravikant is the bestselling author of the book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. He is also an army veteran and an early stage technology investor. But most of all, he's one of the most kind and genuine humans that I know. In this conversation, we talk about everything from his writing process to what he looks for in early stage investments, and even spend time debating the current media landscape and how various technology platforms fit in. This episode covers a lot, and I really enjoyed talking to Kamal for such a long time,

so I hope you enjoy it. But before we get into the episode, I want to talk about the two sponsors that made this episode possible. The first is Crypto.com. They've been longtime supporters of the podcast and are doing great work. They're a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. They have a vision to put cryptocurrency in every wallet, which is frankly why we're all here. The Crypto.com app offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well-designed user experience, and high security.

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let's keep going in the crypto world now lastly don't forget off the chain is not just a podcast every morning i wake my ass up and i write a daily newsletter for 40 000 investors analyzing bitcoin blockchain and cryptocurrency if you want to subscribe and read what i'm thinking head on over to offthechain.substack.com, offthechain.substack.com, and you can subscribe today and join 40,000 other investors who read whatever's on my mind every morning. Again, offthechain.substack.com. Now, let's get into this episode with Kamal. It's one of my favorites of all time, and I hope you enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely

their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm sitting here with Kamal. We got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about, but he's probably one of more thoughtful, wide-ranging people that I know. We've known each other for a couple years now.

So I'm just excited to hang out and talk. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me, man. How did we first meet? That's a great question. Because we were both, the connection was we were both in the army. Yes. And I remember joking at the time that you and I were probably the only people in the crypto investing space who were actually once in the

military, who had actually served. Like, at our level. I'd never met anybody else. Yes. and there's one other person who never talks about being in the military. Who's a pretty decently well-known Silicon Valley investor, but I feel bad. I can't like out them, but,

but it's somebody you wouldn't expect. Okay. Right. Um, so, uh, all right, you've done a whole bunch of stuff.

Let's just start from the very beginning, like growing up. And then how do you get to the military? Like what? Simple, man. You walk into recruiters. No,

no, no, no. Happily take you, man. And that's how you get in the military. Sometimes they even pay you to do it. What's the process there and kind of how do you grow up and what's that story?

Well, growing up was, you know, single mom, two kids. My brother and I basically raised ourselves in libraries. And I graduated high school, got the hell out of there. It was in Jamaica, Queens, which is where rap came from. It kind of gives you an idea of the kind of place it was. you know wrapped it didn't come from uh joy and bliss you know and went to college for a year had a full ride after a year i was like this uh no and i went i walked in recruiter's office i signed up and i just finished a year and i was i think a week or two later i was in a

plane to atlanta georgia a guy in atlanta put me on a bus and took me to fort benning and shaved my head and that was that story all right before we get into uh good fort benning In the summer, let me tell you. In Georgia. What was the fascination with the library? Like why that being a place where when you look back, you say that's where you grew up. Well, that's where mom could leave us where we were safe.

I also grew up on books, love books, you know, books were my refuge as a child. I was always reading. And while you're in the library, I'm assuming that you're not like, hey, what book do they want us to read for school? it's much more how do you want to spend your time and and kind of read the things that you find interesting yeah i think we my brother and i grew up like reading everything we could you know that was just our thing yeah and it's fun it's funny because uh so many parents try to get their kids

they try to force their kids to read and then you're like no like we enjoyed it it sounds like like you guys just wanted to go do that how does that happen um i don't know you're in a library what are you going to do yeah you know you don't have the internet you don't have video games what are you going to do yeah yeah it wonder it makes me wonder is there something about putting somebody in an environment where they only have one option right and is that different between a kid's kind of development and if you do the same thing with an adult you know do they just walk out like did you guys are you guys ever sitting there like you know what not today like we're leaving or is it just mom said to sit here and so we're gonna read because that's the thing to do here i guess i mean

it's worth trying you lock someone up in a room full of books what are they gonna do eventually you know you know you get bored you'll you'll find a way to pass the time that's fair um fort benning is not a place that many people would think one somebody who grew up around reading books in a library wants to go and two uh most people don't want to voluntarily go in the heat in the infantry training, right? It was infantry, yeah. It wasn't the most thought-out decision. It was more like, I want to do this.

I was in college for a year. Bored out of my mind. You know, the usual, like, doing, I mean, I had a great GPA and everything, but I was like, there's got to be more than this. And I also, like, I wanted to, I felt like I wanted to serve my country. I had this thing.

I was like, I just want to do this. and one day I just went to all the different recruiters and I knew I wanted to finish my education. That I knew, but I knew I didn't want to do it then. So the Army offered me the most for the GI Bill and then they were like, yeah, but if you join the infantry, the special ones, if you would really, oh yeah, you're going to have a blast.

Join the infantry. We're going to give you this much more. At that point, you're like, wow, that much more for college. Okay. So I signed up and then I was like, And on top of it, if you join the Mountain Infantry for today, just today's sale, you'll get this much extra for college. I was like, sweet, sign me up. So I ended up in the 10th Mountain as an infantry soldier.

So for those that don't understand military advertising, the military does a great job of having a very high correlation between nobody wants to do a job. Let's make it seem really, really exciting. and so the more exciting the more they sell something it's really just because they have quotas on the back end and not a lot of people want to go do that and so they start with the commercials that hey you could jump out of a plane you can walk up the mountain we'll teach you to shoot well all that kind of stuff so then eventually when that doesn't work then they just literally start well we'll pay for your college we'll do that and they start offering incentives and then if it gets really really bad then they literally just say we'll give you a signing bonus

like oh yeah i got a signing bonus too did you get one okay yeah yeah i think there was some shortage or something at the time whatever i don't remember this was very popular so when i signed up for the army in march of 2006 was right around the whole surge and all this kind of stuff and they were just like literally nobody wants to do this right so i remember talking to the recruiter and him being like pretty much like there's two lists there's the list of like you can go do this stuff and it was all the like really technical training things that like was very obvious there's a job when you get out so hey you want to be a uh uav you know uh driver pilot sure we'll train you up how to do that very obvious when you leave the military uh there's a

job waiting for you at some private company and there's another list and it's all the dangerous shit that had no use in the civilian world like bomb defusal and you want to know the one job that was on that list that uh actually had an application outside of the military that i just found at the time confused afterwards i remember being like wow that makes a lot of sense uh truck driver because of all of the roadside bombs and so people had realized hey if i sit inside of a base and i you know fly uabs or i'm the accountant or i do all these other kind of jobs i'm pretty safe if i'm in the military if i'm in the infantry or i'm diffusing bombs or i'm driving the truck like those all have like very similar um kind of danger

levels to them and so it was you know a bunch of those kind of combat type roles and then truck driving i wouldn't you know i never would have thought of truck driving as a combat role but i guess yeah when you get especially in iraq right where all those yeah yeah so all right so you get the 10th mountain uh for those that don't know uh the word mountain means something um and so you guys are uh light infantry what was that whole experience like what'd you take away from uh from military? What did I take away from the military? Um, look, as an 18 year old kid, it was, um, it was the best thing I could have done for myself. Yeah. Like it was, you get challenged and you get, you realize you can pretty much step up to anything. You know,

you don't get, you don't learn that in college. You know, you, you can drift to college and do just fine if you want to. You can't drift through bootcamp, you know, you can't drift through infantry training you know you can't you got to step up so for me i think it was that training part that transition from civilian to soldier that i um that i'm grateful for you know the um that i really look back and it was very very formative it was um i'm proud of it and i'm grateful for it you know it's you you think about tribal societies right and i've talked about this before like they have this thing where like when you go from become a boy to a man you know So there's almost like a rite of passage, a testing.

So then you welcome back in the tribe. And there's something special there. You know, you step up and you realize, like, okay, I'm going into a different phase of my life. More is required of me, and I'm able to meet that challenge physically, mentally, emotionally. We don't have that in our society except for, like, the military, maybe some sports. You know, sports, yeah, military, yes. Outside of that, not much. where you challenge you come out okay i am different like i am i i have gone through that

fire right and i have walked with that fire and i've come through it and i'm forged differently and it's how much of that's adversity versus training right like hey you just went did something that's hard so not the actual like building back up but the breaking down because ultimately what they do in basic training is they break you down and they build you back up kind of how they want with certain disciplines etc i always think about those are two different things right now they string them together very nicely and as you come out of that process all the benefits you're talking about but can you pinpoint whether it's the breaking down process or the building backup process that you think is more important there i think it's honestly just a

challenging every day through the breaking down and the building up you you don't have a day off you know there's no day you thought boy today's a good day no no load management that you see in professional sports today no but like so i think it's more like being challenged you know and you just learn you just step up step up and they it's not like they make the challenges easier it's like they make them harder right and i think that's what it was yeah one of the things uh that really sticks out in my head from basic training did you guys ever um they would go in the mornings on these runs and they never told you how far you were going to run right it would uh for us at least it was like there's a a group a b group and a c group and you generally knew like the a

group was the fastest b group was a little bit slower and c group was the slowest uh and we would start running and it wasn't like you know we're not running 20 miles we're either gonna run a mile two miles five miles whatever it is but the whole idea of like you don't know how far you're gonna go and you're just with a bunch of people and there's some guy leading you and it's just go I always thought like it's so different than the way society runs because it's always what's the task somebody tells you a task and the people go execute that one task but you don't have to go past kind of the finish line that's already laid out in front of you whereas with this it was completely

blind to you it's just we're gonna run until we tell you to stop and like again it wasn't crazy but it was just done unknown ends up like hardening your mind of like yeah you're right you're gonna run forever you just do it you kind of go in that zone i'm just whatever it is i'm just gonna do it you're right i remember that i've forgotten about that it's that's very very interesting right because then you do you stop being task driven and you just become like kind of like okay i'm just gonna do it yeah the the other thing um in basic training to me that i walk away from which seems to be a a misconception is like everyone's like oh the military there's no ingenuity there's no innovation there's no um kind of you as an individual having

to uh make your own decisions etc everyone thinks the military is come on you're a private you know second class i'm going to tell you what to do today and when i say move your right foot you move your right foot okay and i move your left foot and it's very kind of rigid but actually like once you get through the process you realize like it's really not true right there's structure but within that structure most of the best soldiers are people who are presented a problem and they can figure out how to solve that problem within the structure that they're given did you take any of that away or look look problem solving on the fly is what building startups is that's you know like i mean like i i don't think my you know the military trained me for building

startups but looking back like that kind of experience you know like i always say like look if i was to be hiring people um you know i would be hiring for veterans and especially like veterans who've been through shit because they're gonna they're not gonna complain about the hours or this or that like the stuff you know they just used to solving problems and building a startup is nothing but daily solving problems all right you know we're gonna dig yeah yeah we can just jump right into this one yeah one of the things that uh is funny to me is this whole concept of work-life balance it's not funny because it's wrong it's just the society's approach to taking one solution and trying to say this is the solution for everybody

it kind of makes more sense to me of like why don't you just work as much as you need to to accomplish what you want and so for you that's five hours a week great for me if that's 120 hours great but the one size fits all type solution just doesn't make a lot of sense to me it doesn't i mean it it doesn't work you know it's that's you know what's interesting is i find um you know i find some of my peers you know like who've done very very well talk about work-life balance and and how you shouldn't work this much, whatever. But I also remember how they made their money. They didn't have work-life balance.

The ones who've done very, very well, they've all been obsessed. I think it almost takes that level of obsession to do that well. You have to sacrifice a lot. You have to make choices, right? And I think work-life balance is almost like afterwards. Okay, now I can sit back and kind of like ruminate and think, you know, think what's important.

But work like, it's, I don't know, it gets thrown around a lot. It's more of these days a corporate word than, you know, my world has always been startups. Been like small teams building stuff and working really hard to get stuff done. Yeah, you used the word obsession. We're recording this about a week after Kobe Bryant just died in a helicopter accident. And so, Plin and I spent a bunch of time going back and kind of reading different things he had said. We watched a documentary that he made, et cetera. And one of the key themes throughout almost every single piece of content, interview, et cetera, that he did was talk about obsession.

On that level, you got to be. You don't get there by accident. You don't get there by talent. talent will only get you so far because they're you're going to come against other opponents with talent that that obsession is what gets you great at your craft yeah yeah in one of the interviews uh i mean it blew me away he goes i had a 40 inch vertical i didn't have 45 i had a 40 inch vertical and he was saying it as if like 45 inch vertical was uh you know the standard and he had a uh he couldn't jump very high i was sitting there thinking i i might know one person in the

world who's got a 40 inch vertical right like an incredible athleticism just as a kind of a standard or natural athleticism that he had but he's looking at it ahead and saying there's somebody in the world who could jump 45 inches right and so since i can't do that i have to be obsessed with all of these little details in the game so that i can compete against that person yeah you look at the grids in any field man like they they have it it comes down to craft it comes on and just hammering and chiseling at your craft every day you know or at least like in for periods at a time um and that's something i've seen people and you know people write to me about writing and this and that i'm like well right how do you want to you know like it's you

gotta be you gotta really care about the craft you gotta like write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and edit and rewrite and write rewrite that's where the real writing is right same thing with him like i think with kobe what i remember reading a quote by where he said like when he got to the nba he was really surprised to see that a lot of people there took it as a job he was like i thought they'd be like me but that's all it was that's all they had right and he's like it was a job for them and it really surprised me that it was an actual job yeah you know well that's why he got where he is how much of that he was yeah because what he said uh as part of that was hey that's when i decided i'm different than these guys right and i want to be one of the

greatest ever and what it makes you think is do you have to have the aspirations of the greatest ever at whatever your craft is and then it backs into okay now you're obsessed to get there right and so you have that obsessive nature or can you actually be obsessed with the craft and not have some kind of end goal in mind like does the goal pull you to be obsessed and you're driving towards something or are you kind of blind and no i think you have to care about the thing i mean he loved the game you gotta love the game you know like i don't think you get to that point and like he could get to that point if he didn't love playing right um so that's where if you love something and that's your thing you're gonna work hard to get better at it yeah that's just the nature of

the thing how does that manifest in founders right because founders are unique in that if you're a basketball player you play basketball right you got to dribble you got to shoot you got to do all this kind of stuff there's skills that go into performing in the game when you're a founder there's the business you're in right so you can learn more about the industry and kind of your competitors and kind of what you're doing there but there's also skills as a founder hiring leading writing you know all this kind of stuff where does that obsession manifest itself in the best founders that you've seen well you know a lot of that stuff uh no one's taught you just kind of learn as you go along right it's not like uh you don't you don't really learn that in school

you know like definitely not you don't you know people think they can go to school and learn and start startups you know like i remember originally when i started i would i like some of the best people i worked for i mean worked with or had worked for me never had the schooling but man where they're talented where they're stupidly talented where does that come from they cared they i mean like you know these are the guys like building computers when they were kids you know made their first video game when they were you know when they weren't even they were in junior high you know the ones who fiddle around and have and care and they just get deeper and deeper into it but for founders um what if they have here's what i found the best ones

are obsessed about a problem they want to solve that's ultimately what it is you yeah you care not because it's the hot space not because that's where the money's this this year is investing they genuinely care like they're obsessed about it you know like those are always um usually been like the best investments you know if i talk amongst my peers and just look at my record like some of my very best investments you knew like this person was i was thinking one in particular like i had my first meeting with this guy i was like man he was born to build this really yeah he like this guy was at one point living out of his car trying to you know try to work on this and stuff like it wasn't like because it was the cool thing to do you know or because like hey you

know this there's an opportunity here like he was going to do it whether he made money on it or not This was a problem he wanted to solve. And sure enough, it ended up doing very well. I didn't think it would, honestly, because it was such a long shot. But because he cared so much, he got the right people involved. Leadership is also about inspiring passion in others. And if you can inspire passion in other talented people and their form around you, okay, that's something to watch out for.

right so okay so you nailed on a couple of things and this idea of obsession being applied to building a company one of the things that's been disappointing for me as i've invested in 100 plus companies at this point right that's a lot it's a lot but the ones that don't work out you usually find out pretty quickly yeah right it's that j curve yeah and the reason why you find out pretty quickly in my experience i don't want to say the founders quit but that obsessive nature that that passion for every single obstacle that gets in my way i'm going to run through the wall and it's not going to matter that wasn't there right that's what it takes yeah you know very i mean how many business success stories are really like start boom exit you know there's some

i actually know some but even there you you find the the crinkles in the path right it's literally what makes them get up every day and go face that beast to face that dragon yeah right and so you have to care you have to care that what's beyond that dragon eventually it tires you out otherwise you also talked about uh the people who are most passionate and obsessed get other people around them that talented but also they elicit more passion out of those folks yeah that's what good leaders do how do you think about the difference between the founder right so the person who this is my idea i was born to build this etc and then those first couple of hires right and one of the things i've been thinking more about is a lot of times those first couple of hires they're fit in

one or two categories either they're also missionaries right and so they're hey i believe just as much as you believe and i want to come help you build this etc or they're very mercenary like and meaning that i'm a gun for hire right and you tell me to run i'm gonna run you tell me to shoot i'm going to shoot but when things get tough they tend to be a little bit higher risk takers because they're willing to join an early stage sharp whatever but it's still not that that kind of missionary type thing like the founder is there any trends that you've seen in all the investments you've made of who which bucket those kind of first hires tend to turn out better uh honestly no um i'll tell you i'll think of my experience and what i've built stuff

um not the mercenary ones it's the ones that care yeah yeah i'm just just going through experience and stuff i've built with companies honestly like if i invest i don't get metal that much in that you know i'll be like paying attention to who the hires are you know i just like look i'm here to help call me when you need it you know so i don't really pay attention to it's it's the founders job who they want to build it with we were talking earlier about this idea of uh when people first start investing i was uh culprit number one of this you want to invest and then be helpful and what you quickly realize is the companies that need all of your help are probably not the best companies right like the founders who are going to be successful with

or without you are actually the deals that you want to be in because they're going to be successful right um yeah the only time i get really involved is if i'm advising a company you know that's different because that's a different role right but investment and like we said in the elevator you know investors don't build a company yeah they don't elaborate on that i mean they just don't i mean i'm always laugh when you know i see investors take credit for oh you know and i helps this company that's exited you give them a check a lot of people write checks does not make you a company builder it makes you a check writer you know let's be honest right and a lot of it's luck you got lucky with that check too right um you ever seen anyone tweet about all the checks they

wrote that didn't work out usually not right true true yeah yeah um yeah it's it's the people it's the founders it's the team it's the people in the you know in the trenches that build a company it's not the ones that check in once a month oh tell me what's going on let me give you some of my advice let me give you some valuable advice on what to do and then run away and you know uh it even if the advice is great it's the people that are building that build that are responsible for the success it's um this is applicable both in the situation you're talking about with investors and companies but also in life more generally uh i started to think about advice differently When people ask for advice, most people will say, you should do X, right?

And it's very kind of directive, and here's my personal opinion about your situation. Go do this. And what you find out, again, is that person that you're giving the advice to probably has more context. They may or may not agree with you, and giving a directive-type piece of advice doesn't allow them any leeway between making their own decisions, et cetera. And so they're not really invested in the decision many times. instead when people ask for advice now what i say is well let me tell you people that i know who have been in that situation kind of the evaluation that they made the decision they made how it worked out by the way i don't know what you should do but like here's a bunch more data points like

what do you want to do and in the company side they can go to a bunch of people and do that but in life what i found is like people kind of already know the answers or know what they want to do they're really looking for validation right it's not advice it's validation that they're looking for yeah i'm not much of a giving life advice guy you know which is kind of interesting coming given the books i write but the books i write from my experience all i can do is share my experience that's it you know life advice we're looking at everyone through the filters of our perception filters of our biases so it's not really i don't think there's ever great advice there's just people's filters and um yeah i i i don't really ask people for advice yeah uh why

did you start writing the books like what was the the first book in terms of what was kind of the genesis of it well you know one thing i was doing when i was building startups was actually i was obsessively writing on the weekends and nights when i had time when i whenever i was free i was training myself to write literary fiction i wanted to write literary fiction novels why i just loved them i did i loved i was a huge hemingway fan and i just like wanted to write clear simple stories i just wanted to tell stories so this wasn't like something that came out of nowhere um lock a kid in the library and not only will you read he might write he might write too funny enough right and and so like i spent years doing it you know talk about obsession right and year and sending

sending manuscripts and collecting rejection letters because i didn't study in college college i studied economics and biology you know i think uh like none of those teach you creative writing um and in some ways i think that that actually turned out to be good because i didn't learn a style you know i didn't have training so i could actually go and just break things and try things and come up with my own and eventually found Hemingway I fell in love with his clear simple prose and like okay this is the I don't want to write like him but I want to write what what he was trying to do like never a word that you can't understand never a word that you you have a problem spelling and take a complex subject take a complex emotion but put in a clear

simple sentence that it just makes you feel it then you succeed it which is actually really really really hard the simpler you dig get something you know any in any craft to get its simplicity is the ultimate sophistication right who said that carl leggerfield um is the hardest thing to do and so i worked for years and writing and sending in manuscripts and collecting rejection letters until they became better and better until they became uh you know from type you know, basic forest standard to a hand note on the letter to like a phone call to in-person meetings, you know, to all that. And then, but the books I've gotten known for, the books I've written are now all the self-help genre, funny enough, you know, and I never set out to be that

guy. I'm not a self-help guy. Like, look, we're doers, right? Like I don't sit around and, I mean, I do think a lot about life, but I want practical stuff. I want things that work. You know, the whole startup mentality is give me something practical. I don't want theory, right? But those two ideas are connected, right? In terms of, I forget who says, I would have made it shorter, but I ran out of time, right? Kind of that obsession of how do you make it as clear as possible?

uh and then the practical actionable stuff on the building side actually by having very clear simple practical language that writing makes things actionable right yeah like there's a connection between those yeah in fact if you see a writer use a lot of big words they're hiding it's easier to do that and sounds smart but you don't walk away changed my thing is always like okay, you read this book. A month later, what's the effect on you? Are you better? If not, it failed. You know, that's, I hold these things to a high bar, right? And so the, funny enough, I never set out to write these kind of books. I was going to write, you know, literary novels, and I was going to win a National Book Award. That's what I wanted, right? And like those kind, that kind of

stuff and instead I had built this company and fully funded it myself for years and then I ran out of money so I took funding it was doing well and the whole thing blew up and I lost everything and like everything and you know it was it was also very humiliating and I kind of fell apart along with it and and the depth of like a um like a really dark depression um which i've met you know you lose everything everything falls apart and everything it's kind of normal looking back um because your identity is tied to the your identity is tied to what you were doing right and it's not that the company fails you know you failed you know 90 something percent that startups fail you know but you forget that when you're in it right uh you go into these

things forgetting that the odds are significantly against you you know and math works and math and math does work and especially because when you are doing well and then the tide just turns you know and there's nothing you could do except just go swamp by it and things happen in the market that we had no control over you know like market shift and that's that's the way she wrote right but I fell apart with it and in that time period I came, I decided something in me was like

look I'm going to get out of this and how am I going to get out of this and I sat down and wrote a vow to myself and then I set out to live that vow and it was a vow about changing my internal it was a vow to love myself but really it was a vow by mindset by changing my internal mindset

and then the practical side of me set out to how to do it didn't read any books on it didn't trust books on it Um, cause you know, let's be honest, most of those books are just full of platitudes, you know, that maybe make you give you a panacea and make you feel better in the moment. But where's the practical thing that will actually shift me on the inside. And so set out to do it and, and kind of figured it out for myself. You know, I was the only subject I was just working

on myself and, and it worked and, um, and it worked really well. And, um, so I started sharing with friends you know like i was like you know i was kind of like a new convert you know like um and uh it worked for them because it was so simple and easy and practical and it was all internal work that anyone can do uh because we're all the human mind and um so then some convinced me to actually write down a book a little book um so i so without thinking anything would come out of it i wrote it down as a little book um put it out on amazon self-publish it because i committed i would and the book was called love yourself like your life depends on it and it took off and it became one of amazon success stories and this was in 2012 so now here let's talk about

a little bit about obsession and writing right so i did something that people weren't doing in the by writing books in the last chapter i put in here's my email address feel free to send me an email because i didn't expect to sell any copies i was basically i've written it and i was going to give it to friends to help them and that was it right and literally self-published it like no marketing nothing like nothing i thought actually i thought i was going to be a big laughingstock in silicon valley right and guess what i started getting emails i got a lot of emails a lot of emails and that book came out 2012 and now it's 2020 but let's go back a year so like seven years of emails we're talking i don't know we're talking a lot a lot of emails um and i respond to basically

most of them unless people are like just rude or you know just wasting your time if they're thoughtful i'll always respond and um what are they writing about like what are they it's amazing like how you know sharing how the like the book impacted i've got lots of emails about how the book saved their life saved the life of a loved one how uh it's changing their lives for the first time they have self-esteem confidence you know because all this stuff comes from from the same same reservoir uh from the same hole we're trying to fill and um and also because i was just sharing my story but what i wrote it was in a very practical way i wrote that and this is what i did step by step and this is how to replicate it you know which no one had done in this space

at least that I'd come across and but so here we have these thousands of emails here's also another thing I would get questions over seven years you start to see there's a pattern in the questions and you start to realize yeah you know what I really held back

because I didn't expect this to go anywhere I was just writing like a brief basically what I wrote was a primer but not the full thing and I was like look given the success of the book and I realized I need to put this book out to the world in a bigger way because it's already getting spreading all over the world but it's only available in English

and Amazon and people are translating it and just putting it online and putting their name on it and it's like Jesus it's on Weibo all of a sudden I'm like but look if the book's got to spread then I gotta give it the whole thing so then I sat down and spent a year working on it

and all those years of starting to be a literary fiction writer right i never ended up writing literary fiction i've written a novel since then other books since then but but what it did was it taught me the craft you know it taught me the craft so that when i'd been life gave me this opportunity i was able to apply the craft if i didn't have the craft i wouldn't have written a book that would have been the successful you know it's written to be so simple that any anyone can apply it right and so i did the same i sat down and spent about a

year just going through the questions like how do i answer these but doing a way that's not just a q a like write an actual book and i worked very hard on it and gave it everything and uh i mean that's a level of obsession that i didn't even know i had and um you know sold it to harper one who's uh you know like probably the top publisher in the self-help space and uh you know because they and i had choices of publishers i was meeting and they got it they were like okay we get what you're doing we're not going to screw with it you know like we're not going to try to make it like a regular self-help book but they tried once i sold it to them and i completely pushed back i was like no i mean i was like thinking i'm gonna call my attorney and like cancel this contract

but like no then when i pushed back explain why i was like look i had the benefit of something you don't i have like tens of thousands what ten thousand emails from readers telling me what worked for them i have the data you know i know what they what they're asking for i know what they need i know where i failed in the original book i know where i need to step up and so they trusted me and i worked very hard on it and uh that just came out a few weeks ago and sure enough i'm getting emails from people who had the original version they're like yeah i needed this you know i didn't even know i needed this version but like i needed this um and so now the now the questions are resolved like i gave it all so now i can say okay i've written this book this

this book is done um it's been a long journey um but you know and it takes that kind of obsession you know because why expand on a book that's already successful because i knew that i hadn't given it my all so i had to go back and do it what's the process like the difference in the process between writing it and self-publishing it on amazon versus with the publisher like Not that like, oh, the publisher does a revision or edits it, et cetera, but when you're approaching writing it, it's very different to write a book from the beginning, from scratch, where you're saying, I want to create a practical book that documents what I did. I want to share that with other people. Go. You write it yourself and you self-publish it.

It's a whole other thing to say, okay, now I've got a publisher. They may or may not try to change what I want to write, et cetera. I also have a successful book, a very successful book that's already been out there for a while. right and so uh i've already put some of these ideas out in the world and then i've got all these questions that people had etc and so you're almost like taking multiple different inputs to produce something did you find that actually no what i did was i i mean i took all the questions because that's i'm in the end you're writing for the reader but i stuck to my vision use those to have a vision for what i was going to put out and even with the publisher which is why i went to

HarperOne. I was very clear when they sent me edits. I was like, Kamal would probably turn down 90% of those suggestions. And they would come back and they would agree. They're like, okay, now I see. And I would explain to them why. I'm like, look, you're used to self-help people who write books. I'm a writer who's writing a self-help book. There's a big difference, right? But it was very interesting. At the end, the editor told me she learned a lot by actually watching me go through the process and rewriting and rewriting this book she learned you know because like most self-help books aren't written by writers people who are trained to be writers they're written by people who want to be self-help people you know who are writing a book to get a

brand out right you know like it's so there's a difference right what you're describing is very similar in business as well right there's a there's kind of common knowledge or commonly accepted practices for building a company or writing a book right they're two different industries two different um activities but there's been a bunch of people have written books but people started companies and if you go talk to 20 people in each industry they'll tell you well you know a self-help book is written abcdef whatever company you know first you got to do this then you do this this whatever the people who don't follow those uh kind of well-worn paths one of two things happens you get greatness or you get complete that's it that but that's

That's the game changers, right? And I like those odds. I like the binary odds, actually. Look, that's venture investing in a nutshell. It's binary odds, right? The exit will go to zero. That simple. Same thing here.

And you've got to really trust your gut. You've really got to believe in what you've got. You've really got to care. Otherwise, you're not going to do that. Yeah. I've talked about it on a podcast before, but when I went out to Silicon Valley in 2014, I knew one person.

i'd met him on twitter before uh and uh i dm'd him and i said hey i'm here uh you're the only person i know can i come see you and i frankly didn't know anything really about him that much other than we talked a couple times uh and i also didn't really know what i wanted to get out of the conversation um but as i was leaving i said to him i said you know i'm a young guy what's your best advice for me and he without hesitation as if he had told this to 10 000 people who'd come to his office before he said i got two things for you one keep your personal burn rate as low as possible because it gives you the opportunity to take on high risk opportunities right so you can go join that startup you don't need a 150 000 salary etc and two he said you will be more

rewarded here in silicon valley by having massive uh taking massive swings and failing than you will by having small success yeah and i remember walking out and it was so counterintuitive the The first one made sense, but the second one was so counterintuitive. That's what makes Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. Which is why you see other countries trying to recreate it. But they don't have that mentality. You think it's a mentality thing?

It's a culture, it's a mindset. It's been that way for decades. So like even the investors think that way, then the new crop coming up think that way. So it just gets baked and baked more into it. Like most places, if you fail, you won't be able to raise money again. Silicon Valley, no.

I mean, as long as it was a good bet. As long as you're not an idiot about it, yeah. Well, not an idiot, but it didn't fail because of you. Things fail because of a billion reasons, right? Or succeed because of a billion reasons. Yeah, people, most biggest success stories are multiple founders, and it's usually the second or third one.

Is that true in writing? where people write something and their first, second, third attempt at writing something is either not successful or doesn't have a lot of success and then they produce kind of a great hit later on? I don't know, man. It's all over the map. I don't know either. With art, it's different.

You don't, you know, sometimes it can be your first. I don't know. I mean, because do you count all the countless hours, the 10,000 hours of what they wrote but didn't publish? You know? So it's harder to put it, say, there. I don't know. I think it's varied.

You know, the Hemingway did say, like, the worst thing for a young writer was early success. Because then you get caught into, like, trying to recreate that in that way versus taking the risk, you know, like, that made you get that success. One of the things that you obviously write about in the books but also you just described in your process is this idea that like trusting your gut and having the self-confidence to say, I don't know if I'm right or not, but I want to do what I want to do. And I always think of this principle as like if I'm going to fail, I want to fail my way because if I fail, then I know that that's the way I wanted to do it. But if I do it some other way that somebody else tells you, et cetera, and I fail, now I'm going to be left wondering, well, did I fail because I did the wrong thing or did I fail because I didn't do what I wanted to do? Like how much of that process? Actually, I've noticed a lot of the best founders, they think they're right. They have that level.

They have that vision. They may not be, but they think they're right and they're going to work. they um so like for example with this book um you know i could have gone many ways with the publisher and i stuck with my vision you know and because i knew i was right you know and in the end you when you're creating something when you're doing something that's all you got is your vision for it you know and all you can do is the best version of that yeah you know but it's a little different in building companies in the sense of like if i'm building a software uh product and you're writing a book right i can create a first version i can show it to some people i can iterate

and kind of over let's say a year all of a sudden i've pretty dialed it in in terms of this is what the people at least that i've shown it to this is what they want right and i can do that from a data standpoint i can do it from talking to the users etc books are a little different in that you kind of write and write and write and then there's this big you know reveal and it either works or it doesn't right there's not a lot of like iterations between the writer and the audience so there's iterations in terms of the writer and the publisher the editor etc but how do you think about like serving what that reader wants without necessarily having that iterative feedback from them in the process that's where it comes um like in the end you write for the reader but you

you can't like go out and ask people what do you want me to write about of course you know it's like the homer simpson carth episode right and for the everyman but if you get enough feedback you start to listen to it you know um you know in the end you gotta have a vision for what what is the best version what you want to put out you know you're like i also you want to write what you'd want to read i wrote what would help me you know i read my own book it helps me you know um my book is a book i would read and i would pass along yeah you know so that's another thing you know it gets at this idea of um you ever meet somebody and they're doing all the right things but something tells you they're doing it because they think that's what they're supposed to be

doing sure right i for whatever reason when i see those people i feel bad right and it's a thing where i'm like you're going through the right motions but it's very obvious that this is not actually contrived but it's kind of orchestrated and you one even if you are end up being successful you're not going to have the enjoyment of that process because you just did what you thought you're supposed to do not because you wanted to do it and two if you don't actually kind of believe it you're unlikely to be successful at the end and i don't ever know how to handle the situation because you can't say you're doing the wrong thing because technically they are kind of doing the right stuff but it's it just feels very uh manipulated or orchestrated and so it's i don't

know it's just something that i've identified but i don't know what to do with it when i see it any any thoughts or ideas there i mean not much you can do pretty good to change the person I mean, you really, you know, people are who they are. Yeah. You roll with it. Yeah. It's true. What areas are you excited about on the technology side other than crypto?

I'm not excited about crypto. I mean, like, look, you're talking about crypto, man. Most of it is, excuse my language, a shit show, you know. We knew that, most of us in it, right? But there's some great stuff in there that, you know, reminds me the whole, reminded me of the dot-com boom, right? It was like most of the companies that came out were shit shows, should not have been public companies, right? Should not have raised the money they did.

But there was a frenzy. Crypto was a global frenzy and there was anyone could have put money in. So imagine what will happen. You'll get a lot of shysters, right? But in that, I mean, really, that's what happened. I'm laughing at your use of the word shyster. You're being nice. Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, what happens is a new technology comes through. and gets known in the mainstream. And then when the bust happens, and these things always happen that way, then it's the ones who care who start building stuff. The ones who care. When it's in the bear markets, the ones who build in the bear markets are the good ones,

not in the bull markets. And you start seeing the useful stuff start to come out. And that's what's happening there, and that'll show up in time. As far as investing otherwise, I've taken a bit of a break just for personal reasons you know my first my funds fully deployed my raise another fund but let's take a break you know now I'm just kind of like keeping an eye on things watching what people are

investing in I'm advising some companies any areas from like the technology side that you think are interesting but don't see people talking about it's a good question um honestly no because i've pulled back i'm just more like an observation mode you know it's more like learning uh seeing what's going on which i think is actually healthy you know because if you're if you're deploying capital you look at things differently you look opportunistically versus if you're not deploying capital you're looking at observing and um you're calmer about it and you start to see the patterns and what you want to get involved and that's kind of phase i'm in right now yeah one of the things i think you said to me uh previously and you'll

correct me if i have misremembering this um is i think we were talking about uh there's a lot of not a lot but there's some investors who are very uh prescriptive in their investing so they say here's an industry i believe that this is a problem somebody's going to create x solution i'm going to go find a company that's building x right and they go and they try to find that invest there's another strategy of let me go find great founders they'll tell me what they want to work on they'll explain why it's important etc and then i'll back them but they're the experts in that field i don't necessarily have an opinion as to what they're doing you fall more in the latter than the the former why gravitate towards that and more kind of the the founder being the

expert etc versus you know you being the the genius on the hill yeah uh because i do seed and see that you're betting on people. But I don't do it across the board. I don't invest in like, you know, I'm not investing in farm product, farming technology or agriculture because I know nothing about it or oil wells or even like pharma or whatever.

I'm doing it in tech. I know tech. You know, I'm smart enough in tech that I can look at something and see what the opportunities and if I don't know the tech part as well, I know enough people in tech who are the best at what they do that i can run it by so i have that advantage there so

and seed you're betting on people you know you're not betting on it's like when someone tries to give me a projections like a or or like spreadsheets and a seed round like what are you doing it's a waste of your time waste of my time these are all made up numbers you know just sit down and just let's just have a my favorite one is just conversations about what they're what they're building what they want to build you know that's it that's that's why i end up writing a you know sending a wire on um it's more fun that way too when you bet on people you know um an industry uh if i just do one industry alone i guess i do tech but tech is so big that you're covering a lot right um because i've seen opportunities you know because if let's say if i was thinking

at one point i was going to do a fund that was focused on ar and vr okay and there was a lot of interest in funding that fund but i decided not to do it because i realized first of all vrs it was still far out uh the tech needed more years um it wasn't the right time to be investing and that's probably still true yeah right it's still it's getting better with things like oculus etc but it still feels that's at least five years ar is what's gonna take off you think okay so you're in the camp of ar comes before vr oh yeah i don't disagree but that that's yeah just because the technology is easier and and it's so easy like an apple i think it's going to have something out with ar maybe out in two years uh within two years and that'll change the game you know um so here's

a uh theory that i have which is you've seen all these uh photo editing applications right the ability to put stickers the ability to put um photoshop type items etc into them is really kind of like static ar yeah right yeah and so the things that kind of look like toys and play etc today there's almost like this transition between okay we have reality then you get kind of that static ar then you get more of like the ar where hey you can actually have a video and put stuff in then maybe even get more like live real ar so like i can actually have the google glass or whatever type thing and then eventually you get the fully immersive vr type stuff but whether that's right or not there's some transition from where we are today to like full

vr the thing i keep going back on is like that stuff takes time like i think people say like oh of course vr is going to be a thing but then they snap their fingers and like why isn't it here yet well i mean the tech is actually hard because it's it's interesting with vr it's actually the brain uh the brain like um the most vr experiences your mind you kind of your mind can't handle it more than 30 minutes like there's something about the it's your mind it screws with your mind like this is not reality people get headaches and all these things there's things they're working out they're working out they will work them out one of the things for the longest time was you can see your hands and your mind gets screwed up about that right so now they've

overcome that right but so now you just have two hands floating yeah two floaty hands you know but the brain you know is like trying to process this this version of reality it's no this is not reality and trying to be try to function in it it's gonna screw with it right so that takes time that they didn't expect that but ar you don't have that problem but going back to the reason why i was talking about it was i decided not to do it because there was so much opportunity like crypto what's happening and these other things are happening if you just do a very focused fund that better be your obsession you better be obsessed about arvr and i wasn't right i'm more about it's more about for me it's like look i understand tech i've been in it i'm pretty smart

about it i know the right people um i can get in great deals so i like betting on people you know it's it's it's a great thing to bet on people and they go on to build something that ends up being massive it's kind of fun to watch it's fun to when they call you for help and you help them you know and it's fun just to be a you know that way to be involved that's one of the reasons why i still i'm not investing i'm advising some companies because you you know when you have experience you have a ceo calls you the issue you had they're having and you solve it for them in like a couple of minutes versus it would have taken them a month right that's fun you know but that comes from experience you talked about knowing the right people right and this is

something that um we've never talked about but i'm interested in your insight uh i think it was either brent bish or patrick o'shaughnessy was on twitter and they were business look one of the most defensible moats in business and investing is relationships right it's one of the things you can't automate away you can't you know build some product whatever i know you really well you trust me or you don't yeah right you and i've done deals together because we trust each other actually like hey i'm doing this you want to be at it because yeah well and so but out of that if you go into meeting somebody with like the intentionality of like i want to establish a relationship because i'm going to come back and do a deal with you later you end up not trusting that person they

can kind of see through it like you know what i mean like it's very um counterintuitive i think in the sense of you got to genuinely care about people right you got to genuinely like somebody you got to generally want to spend time with people you have to provide a lot of value in conversation that they have to provide back i mean it's a very kind of time intensive thing that's a transactional relationship right and there are those in business um i usually shy away from them i just want to invest in good people it's funny a lot of my friends tend to do that i wonder i think it's called self-selection but it's like i want to invest in good people with good people you know like that's it it's very it's simple it's not rocket science man investing

is not rocket science yeah well and the other piece of investing i think that often uh especially early in like people who are just starting out investing they have the idea that it's a binary outcome right and so what they go into thinking is this is going to work or this is not going to work but actually the investment decision many of the best investors i know they're looking at it on the spectrum or a probability standpoint right so yes there's a binary outcome but when i invest I don't want to invest in the person that's got a 5% chance of succeeding. I'd love to invest in somebody who's got a 20% chance of succeeding. And 5% to 20% both sound like, oh, shit, that's probably not going to work, right?

But that's a pretty big gap in the startup world because they've done it before or they've got some, like, deep industry knowledge. They've got a certain team. You know, there's all these things that can kind of move that percentage or probability up. What I don't know is if there's actually a way to quantify it, right? So I'm using numbers, but those are my fingers sticking in the air. And I think those are the right numbers. Bingo. Right.

Yeah. I mean, like there's this criteria we all have, right? Like, you know, one of my key criteria is who the other backer, who the other investors, you know, call them door openers. Are they who the door, not the door kickers, as you and I previously said, but the door openers, right? Because I've seen personally, like, hey, this guy's on the board of Facebook. And guess what? The company's invested. Facebook keeps on buying.

Huh. Go figure. You know, like I've seen those patterns, right? So like, I like to see it. So I want to see who else is involved and also know who's, I, you know, I know who's helpful, who's not and what their, what their real record is. So I always, that's actually one of my main criteria is I look at who the other investors are. There's deals I'll pass on, I like, but I don't, if I don't know the investors, like at least one of the investors well, and I trust their judgment, I want to invest in it. So this brings up a very controversial topic because I think the consensus thought is, at least over the last 10 years, has been very founder-friendly. I don't care who else is in the deal.

I'm an original thinker. I don't need to wait on everybody else. I can just invest. Go through the whole list of all the things that fall in the founder-friendly bucket. i think there's a resurgence coming back of the other type of buckets right and not necessarily being at uh adversarial to founders but this belief that no it actually does matter who else invests right yeah you're talking about here yeah because just being early money is not founder friendly because you find a friendly someone who also helps the founders when the thing's going up

and when the thing's going down right and those tend to be more um that's a specific kind of investor. I would rather, like, for me, it's always been like, look, I want to be the dumbest guy in that group putting a check in, really. maybe we should use an iPhone are you sure all right so I forgot where I was you're talking about founder friendly goes up goes down still hell yeah yeah so I think it's actually you know you guys when you're an investor or an entrepreneur you you put on very different hats i've been in both right and you realize that um uh you you look at these things differently and you gotta as an investor you're trying to maximize

your returns right and you may fall in love with the investment you may love the founder you may love what they're doing but you may think this is not a good investment so you won't invest you know so it's it's very very different hats and so you gotta have your criteria right certain criteria you got to have certain criteria you stick to and um you know one of so i one of mine is actually i look at the other investors and that's not the i won't just go in because of certain other investors but it's actually um but there's deals i will turn down because of the other investors one way to think about it is the other people around the table on the investing side are part of the team right you're underwriting the team and the team is not

just the employees or the founders it's those other people on the board or the other investors around they're going to make introductions right they're going to open the doors they're going to help on acquisitions they're going to help in recruiting right all this kind of stuff yeah i mean but sometimes you know talented founders need none of that right so this is this is like a weighing game this is there's no it's an art you know i get these emails all the time you know we've created an ai platform that'll that'll you know simplify your investing decision you know sign up now i'm like you okay great you know if you got a massive fund that's algorithmically trading startup stuff maybe that would work but this is when you're betting on seedsters you're

literally betting on people that's all it is it's um it's one of these things that simple idea takes a really long time to understand you think so it's like bitcoin ready this is my whole theory on bitcoin yeah what is bitcoin everyone is out overthinking it because it's so simple huh same thing with investing early stage investing comes down to backing the best people everything else is intellectual olympics to make people feel like they're smarter yeah two and twenty yeah yeah right but at the end of the day it's finding really talented people that are going to be successful without you and convincing them that they should take your money over the next guy right or girl bitcoin is very similar in that it's such a simple idea

there's separation of state money and it has a very certain monetary policy so either it works or doesn't very binary outcome in my opinion everything else is just noise around it because people are basically bored right they're sitting there and they're analyzing this data point that data point this and that and all it doesn't matter it either works or it doesn't it's very binary it's just like a venture investment happens to be liquid but that doesn't matter and all of the kind of people spinning their wheels around it are doing it out of board more than anything else or you know trying to be smart yeah well yeah exactly there's like if you believe that bitcoin is going to be valuable in the future it is likely to be much

more valuable than it is today right so kind of in that binary outcome it's got very asymmetry on the upside but you as an investor then have to do the one thing that humans suck at doing which is have patience because it's just going to take time and so what do you people do they sit there and they well what about this what about that well here's the latest you know fear mongering here's the latest bullish case whatever and they just spin their wheels over and over and over again and when people ask me what's the most important thing for bitcoin to be successful i always just say time just let it ride its core like it's done fine for 11 years let it keep going early stage investing same thing and i think this all goes back to what you said earlier about the

way that you write it's when people have an idea in order to put it into a book if they don't really understand it they use big words because they think those big words lead to the reader thinking they're smart but what ends up happening is the reader very quickly can tell if they're sophisticated the person who writes with the simplest language and is kind of the most blunt about the idea one has mastery but two that's where the most value comes from and so that's true in writing that's true in investing and that's true in bitcoin as well yeah good parallels right what um what's the thing like look any um the best um best people make it look easy you know when you're watching a truly great athlete you're watching it you know they make

it look easy they make it look so natural you know you're watching a great fighter they make it look easy they make it look natural yeah um but that's the ultimate uh you know that is the ultimate expression of all the hard work and all the sophistication is to get to a point where it looks easy is there one writer and one investor that you think is one of those greats that make it look easy but you or we all know that there's a bunch of hard work that goes into it that when you think of like hey here's one of the greats that come to mind well look Hemingway but he doesn't make it look easy you know like holy shit that man could write but he was a he was a craftsman man um poetry you know you look at poetry that's real poetry is is is now talk about

distillation of ideas and concepts human truths down to just a few words you know that's that's real um look investors i don't know how to say they make it look easy like uh i mean i know investors with amazing track records uh they just find you know after a while they find their um what they're what they're good at and they just stick with that and just get better and better at it like some might be good at people some might be good at this some might be good at that some might be good at sniffing out tech you know they find what their thing is and then they just like focus on that not all of them are just betting on people some are like we'll find the right tech and then the people are all with it you know yeah um i forget the exact numbers uh

so somebody on twitter will correct me um but it's like i think it's sequoia's first fund they had like nine investments in it and 70 80 90 of the capital that came back that made it a very well-performing fund worth based on two companies those two companies they incubated internally Wow right and so this whole idea of venture capital or they're one of the earliest venture capital funds but actually they incubated two of the companies that's interesting right now there's two pieces of that one the companies were successful so obviously that you know kudos them but two is they most likely I'm assuming owned a bigger larger

Disproportionate portion of it, yeah, yeah. Disproportionate portion of it, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I bring that up because not everyone does it the same way, right? And if you compare the very best like true venture capital firms where they're just investing regardless of the stage and somebody like a YC, right, who two different models but they both can be successful. And it really is just like people doing what they think is the right thing to do. It really is, man. It really, really is. you have your thing you stick you know you go out and give it your best and you iterate you know

um and anything um as you said i've been writing right you don't publish your first draft people don't see all the drafts you go through you iterate the hell out of it you know until you get to a point okay this is the product i'm putting out yeah how do you think about um i'll say media but maybe that's not the the correct term but just society's moving into this like more shorter term attention span you know you've got twitter you've got things like tiktok etc now you've got books that are becoming more popular as audiobooks than written books and oh audiobooks are saving publishing like for love you think that they're saving publishing yeah i mean i have publishers tell me that like audiobooks are doing so well and think about the marginal

cost of an audiobook versus you know digital download versus you know a paper book right they make more they charge just as much right it was and and audiobooks are a resurgence actually in publishing and and i had my publisher tell me that they can tell a book is really hitting it with their um with the audience when the audiobook does better than all the other uh editions and they called me and they said like look we have good news your audiobook is really outperforming other editions and that's actually good news uh because of the profit margin associated with it No, it's a trend they've noticed and the ones that end up doing well over time

that the audio book leads. Really? Yeah, that was interesting to me. Yeah, I would not guess that. Yeah. It's interesting to think about because do you think that changes the way that people write?

Depends. The way I write is my own unique style. I write almost like you would hear me speaking. Like my cadence and my sentence structure is written that way so for me to read it was um i mean doing an audiobook is actually really hard to read your own book why because it's not like you just sit here in like a podcast and you talk you're going sentence by sentence there's a producer there there's an engineer there there's probably like another producer there and they stop you make and go repeat this that you know

you'll add ums and this and that or you'll be a pauses that there'll be like a little sound so you know to read a book well you'll be in the studio for days morning till evening reading and your mouth gets really dry and you're just like you're what about your cadence you can't just read fast at one point and slow on the other point and you got to have emotion and rhythm you know and you've really got to feel it um i you know it's but people love it man i'm getting like um like really great messages about the audiobook you just made me think if your unique style is writing the way you talk do you sit down and write and what you're actually typing or writing is the first creation or do you actually talk and do a recording voice notes

when i say that right like i talk it's not that it's like there's a rhythm to it there's a rhythm a speech to it i don't do i i write i sit in front of a blank page and i write so kevin hart has a documentary on netflix uh plena sitting here in the room with us and she'll correct me uh and if i remember it was a book where he started to write the book but he would whenever he had an idea he would record on his phone on voice notes yeah he was in joe rogan and shared that too oh is that okay yeah so basically he would record the voice notes and then like i'm assuming he didn't write the book right like he got turned into a book later but it was really interesting that i always thought of you write a book then you go in the and through the process you described of like

then you record the audio book it's almost actually like he recorded the audio it got turned into a book and then maybe even got turned into an audio book after well i think he recorded the thoughts yeah the ideation of it yeah the thoughts don't equal the the product the thoughts are the the theme but then you gotta write the thing right which is different how do you write it in a way that it's accent it gets across it's easy to read it's easy to you know take in that's still the work i don't know you find that's the hardest part it's just a part of it it's a part of doing just one part yeah yeah um i've played around with recording um thoughts uh but because i'm a writer but i've trained myself enough that i can sit from a blank page of my you know like

it's actually easy for me to bang them out there and then play with it i can move things around i can edit i can write pages and just take one line and create something out of that one line yeah i am i think a lot we're talking a little bit before about this like uh passive listening um that's going on and i think airpods have had a huge part of that etc um but the content that people create i don't think we'll identify that it's changing but it starts to change yeah as you were talking well you were talking about like the attention span right like the me everything is getting shorter and shorter which i'm finding really interesting like for example when the first version came out right um i got so many emails like right away this one came out i'm

getting the emails but i'm getting more significantly more is instagram stories people like reaching out to me using instagram stories about how much the book means to them or how it's changing their lives and this one which is really i find kind of interesting but also bizarre because the instagram story disappears right yeah so if i didn't like open instagram that day i wouldn't have seen it right so they come because i see a lot in my a lot in my instagram box there's like primary general and then i think the other and other i'll open it and they'll be like all these people you know mention you in a story but when i click on it's expired so i can't see what they said to me because then you know unless i get to it in time you mean you

don't walk around with your phone glued to your uh to your hand i do but like i try social media such as suck you know time suck that i try not to i had someone reach out to me this guy um and he He was like, hey, your book really helped me. I read it twice. I was like, hey, thank you, whatever. And started hammering me that he's following me. Why am I not following him? And, like, really started hammering me.

Like, the guy had a lot of his, like, something like, I don't know, 90,000 followers. And I don't know why. I think he was insulted. I was like, look, man, I just, it's not my thing, man. Look, I follow only my friends, you know, or maybe except for a couple of people I really admire, right? And I don't want to say I don't admire you. I just don't know you, man. But he was, like, really just going back and forth.

And then I could see he unfollowed me because, you know, I was like, I actually took the time to explain to him, look, man, I only follow close friends. That's what one thing I do do is when people follow me, I go check out their page. I'm always very curious who these human beings are, you know, who the people are who follow me. Because they follow me because of my books, right? But I found that really strange. An adult. This wasn't like a millennial, you know, like a teenager or whatever. this was an adult getting really upset that i kept on hammering abby like to not to follow him

so probably about to get myself in trouble here uh but there's a um there's a group of people who uh they usually come out of like the consulting marketing type world where it's not authentic remember what i told you about uh people going through motions because they feel like they're orchestra like that's what they're supposed to do so there's a couple people i'm thinking of immediately for obvious reasons i'm not gonna say who they are but oh come on say who they are they they do a lot of different things and they're the ones who they've got the 50 hashtags and they've got you know i mean they're doing all this stuff and it's all the things that they're supposed to do if they want to grow an online audience they want to you know build a following

all this kind of stuff but because either it's the motions that they're focused on and not the quality of the content or there's a lack of authenticity they usually have no it's like ghost town and it's a reminder to me like even with the podcast right i do a podcast i want as many people to listen as possible and we can do all sorts of things to try to increase the visibility or listeners, all that kind of stuff. Know what the number one thing to do? Record quality conversations. You know, content is, in the end,

it's the content is king. You know, like, I was talking with my brother about it. He was like, look, when he did, I think, Tim Ferriss' original, you know, people worry about the right mic and this and when he did, when he was in Tim Ferriss' pocket, he said, yeah, I was in my AirPods. Yeah, just online, on my AirPods.

He said, like, look, and I was like, yeah, content, and it's a very well downloaded episode, and it's just content is king. In the end, people forget that, right? It's true. But that's actually something I've been noticing, and I'm like, it's really interesting. So people contacting me are talking about

the book by Instagram Stories, which are ephemeral, which disappear. That's something I haven't seen before, right? And I wonder. These are more like adults, or? These are all adults. Yeah, okay. Yeah, which is really interesting, right?

So I wonder where that's going, this content that comes and disappears, right? I was talking to this one guy who runs an agency in L.A. He represents TikTok stars. So now this is, you could say, like, the guy spends time there. He's like, yeah, you know, and the talent this and the talent that. Dude, your talent's a 15-year-old who poses in their underwear and dances with bears, you know, with teddy bears. Yeah, you're not talking about The Rock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, like, how he calls it, like, yeah, and the talent will do this and then the talent will do that. You know, like, it's. So my niece is. But then he's referring to people who have like 11 million, 16 million followers on TikTok. And you go look at their account and what they're doing. It's like this short content that's brief moments of dopamine hits that doesn't do anything for you. And I wonder where this is going.

This has got to evolve. All these things do. but like these non-stop dopamine hits but that don't give you usually in life the way dopamine hits was structured there's growth that comes from it there's something involved in growth there's no growth there's no learning that's happening here that's what i wonder about so you get these dopamine hits without the learning so then you're just gonna be addicted to dopamine that's what you're gonna need but okay so two things on this one is uh i've got a brother who's 23 conversations throughout his friends and now my brothers and i uh texting group chat

the memes drive the conversation so all of the short videos the viral stuff like all this kind of stuff that is the culture and it took me a while to understand but like um uh what is it martian uh marshall mccluhan who says uh the medium is the message like the memes the message and uh i didn't fully appreciate this until uh the recent um what we call it disagreement with iran so we kill somebody they shoot rockets right all this like serious stuff's going on if you went on instagram on pretty much anyone under the age of 35 right every single account was posting we're going to world war three but they weren't like hey the president united states on this date has declared we're going to war it wasn't like a like a news broadcast it was meme after

meme after meme of when world war three draft happens and it's a guy like you know nope turning and running away right and like all these like stupid little memes to the point where uh polina has a cousin who lives in bulgaria and he dm'd us and he says why is my instagram filled with world war three memes right he's not involved he didn't know he's you know 17 years old whatever he is and what i started to understand is like that's how these kids communicate right is they they don't write they don't chat it's all through this like very kind of visual audio and video based uh kind of short content and so like if you asked a kid right now it's actually an exercise i did my brother which was he'll be embarrassed by this i said

do you know how to write not like write a book but like take a pen and physically write i was giving a hard time and he was like yeah i do but my hand gets tired think about that for a second literally he doesn't write ever i don't ever write actually we don't none of us do it really do we yeah and so he was like yeah but if i write for two like my hand gets tired and he started to think about like society's changing right and that doesn't matter for six months or a year or five years but over 50 years i mean look it's not a there's you know humans evolve so it's not a bad thing they'll they'll figure things out i just this ephemeral content though i wonder with these dopamine hits um that without the growth involved what it is what does that lead to right that's

where i think is going to be interesting um so i don't know what one other trend for you that you reminded me of um that i'm still trying to understand but uh right now i'm fascinated by so uh you mentioned tiktok stars there's two exactly what you described there are two um girls that are sisters that are probably 13 and 15 that went viral on tiktok and i don't have tiktok so i could care less didn't know whatever all of a sudden i see an older guy who's a dad on instagram somebody dm'd me a photo he posted he's got a lot of followers who's this guy come to find out he's the father of the two girls and so when the girls went viral on tiktok at 13 and 15 they then told their parents to get tiktok accounts so the mom and dad have tiktok accounts

and then they would bring the parents into their videos and tag their parents the dad has one million followers on tiktok on instagram he's got a couple hundred thousand right and you start to realize and he's like into it right i mean he's he like is enjoying the fact that like it's like family affair but you start to realize like that's basically what the kardashians do with their tv show now you're just getting a replay of it on tiktok or instagram or wherever but now you're gonna have these like famous social media families not just you know you go viral now you're famous the kids are telling their parents to get on the platforms and it's just this weird thing that i don't fully understand yet what do you think's gonna i mean like tiktok's a phenomenon

right um what do you think is going to happen there because like instagram you can understand that like i mean in the end these are companies they're built by companies these are not built by uh you know non-profit well-meaning socialist people you know who want good for the world they're built by hardcore capitalists right and so how does something like tiktok uh instagram you can understand that people will you can it's easy to create a following and then sell from there you know if you make whatever you're known for you can just people make good livings of instagram and it was always known that would happen it was always it was easy to make that that leap what do you think about tiktok though i've been trying to figure that out like how do

you how will that one of the ways they're monetizing is for example like this guy i met he's a talent agent so people pay the talent you know a lot of the content actually turns out people with big followings is paid for so i can't i can't say what the product is because i think they'd be upset but there's a a well-known game um that uh is popular in the younger demographic and recently uh i sat down with one of the guys and he said they saw this huge spike like a very obvious something happened they went to all the platforms they couldn't find they couldn't figure it out couldn't figure it out right and they're you know early 30s or so somebody that knows somebody knows somebody says oh there was a kid who made a tiktok getting in the car walking in

the store going to the aisle grabbing the game going to the register at home playing the game i don't have followers that one viral video on tiktok there was no link to click on there was no you know uh click here to buy none of that stuff but the association and the awareness of the product people then went that followed that person online and uh sales spiked and so it's like very hard to engineer very very hard to measure not hard to engineer hard to measure no because As I learned from this guy, people pay for this. Oh, if you pay. Yeah, yeah.

If you just go to somebody who's got a big audience and say, I'll pay you money, go do this. And they have people representing them, it turns out. All these kids. Oh, yeah. With big followings. So here's an idea for you. The sports stars of tomorrow are actually going to be the social media stars. So take the top 20 recruits coming out in basketball this year.

I don't know the exact numbers. I bet you five to ten of them went viral at some point in their high school career, and that's what built the buzz, and it translates into they'll go to the best schools, et cetera. And so if you're a parent, right, and I play college football, what you would do is you would basically hope to God that the high school had a video of the games. then they would either just give you the game tapes and you could just mail them to schools or you would basically sit down and try to cut them up into a highlight tape right this is before all these online platforms and everything right literally they were recording on vhs's but you would send it directly to that one school and hope that school liked it and they call you and you kind of go this process now there's a kid in the stands who's got a camera who takes a video

of some kid dunking or running for a touchdown or whatever next you know it goes viral they tag the kid and that's how these kids are getting discovered is they're becoming social media phenomenons that translates into success yeah it's worse yeah tiktok's fascinating man it's because it is a new just this growth um do you have one i i mean i open i look i'm in tech you know i i if something's taking off i always go check it out i have an account you know i played around with it uh more like seeing what the i want to understand the product do you think it's sustainable like as a platform meaning uh we've seen a lot of platforms come there's hype and they dissipate you think that this one is it becomes the facebook's twitter's instagrams

that are around i don't think i don't think that's the right analogy i think this is something different why uh facebook is still um it was a social network but it was still more of an existing paradigm right and and even instagram was a social network built around photos uh instagram was the only real threat to facebook which is why facebook bought them right uh seriously it was the only real social social network that was becoming a threat and one of the smartest decisions ever made um mark's the greatest m&a he really is man it's impressive that's when you have when you have a founder of a vision who who owns and who has control they will go dude make what's up what he gave up for that which seems brilliant now right at the time 20 billion dollars or whatever

it was that seemed insane look at the time from instagram a billion dollars seemed insane right um he bought both of those for 21 billion that's it that's it funny right like compared to what they're worth today it's funny money um yeah so i don't know but tiktok i think it's a different paradigm i don't know i haven't spent enough time i know gary v's really bullish on it and that guy's got a good nose for stuff underrated as for as much i think shit as people give him because of he's so out there and you know creates all this content etc if you look at his track record he's one of the real legitimate guys yeah he's got a very good nose for what the where things are going trends and stuff yeah yeah he's got a very sharp nose

for that yeah how do you evaluate something like a tiktok when you're looking at it from uh is it real is it not like just like what's that process so you get an account you kind of play around with it whatever and then do you spend more time thinking like introvertedly or do you go and talk to much people i'll talk to people like i went and talked to this guy who runs a marketing agency for actually some of the big accounts like the super bowl and whatever when they when they're doing stuff on tiktok you know i'm like what are they doing and so forth to understand what's going on and what the growth is and he's like look man engagement and all this stuff on instagram is going down tiktok is just going up you know so um it's a different kind of

engagement it's a very very different so you can't compare apples to oranges there it's a very different kind of engagement that um you know you know the founder of vine you know that twitter bought which twitter's just great at destroying products you know and they had a real chance with vine to create something like the original tiktok there on top of the twitter platform and users right that's what they had um that guy's come out with a new version of vine which is what like five second or 12 second loops or whatever uh you're talking about bite and uh i think it's six seconds if i remember correctly because tiktok i think is one minute and bite is six we sound like we're like like old people oh did you hear about this tiktok thing that the kids

are playing with well at some point i think it's one minute and six seconds is the difference between the two at some point you know you want to be on top of everything that's going on if you're an investor right and also i'm fascinated by it um and but i'm not someone who like spends a lot of time like building a social media following i'm terrible at it you know people find me like i don't like um our friend is like oh yeah i'll get you in this group and all of us are you know like we we push each other's things up and we've gotten like now hundreds of thousand followers i'm like no that's a lot of work to get followers you know like i'd rather just people find me if they're interested they'll find me quality wins yeah then you'll look at my engagement

versus theirs it's funny they may have like 10x as many followers i have or 100x engagement is similar yeah it's kind of funny right and you'd rather have those what was it as who's kelly something kelly said you need a thousand true fans kevin kelly um i don't know who that is uh but paul graham says you need uh a hundred people who love your product or company not a thousand people who kind of like you so similar sentiment yeah you need true fan you'd rather have true fans right who'll spread your word um especially how the social platforms are built right is uh the engagement drives the virality of something and so that's really important um what um what's the biggest thing that you're excited about over the next 12 months tech writing anything honestly

that's a great cushion and the answer is i don't know i'm kind of in an observation phase observing myself observing life it's actually a fantastic answer it is it's honest you know people come in if i ask them that question they bullshit me that's funny right like you you genuinely don't know right yeah genuinely don't know all right before we finish up i talked to everyone about aliens uh-huh believer or non-believer not I'm agnostic and it's

okay why well I kind of don't care that's a very unique position to take so why don't you care because

does it affect my life if the alien show my doorstep tomorrow affects my life then I will care okay you know but

until they do it's fun like that Bob Lazar thing was fun to watch unbelievable and that Joe Rogan episode and just that documentary was fun

makes you go huh that sounds pretty credible wouldn't that be cool that's my response is like wouldn't that be cool but i'm not gonna sit there bet either way so uh there's this guy who um i had come on the podcast he's like one of these like ancient alien guys so like i always describe the ancient alien theory as like i buy the science of like the first 80 and then they describe well that scientific anomaly that occurred aliens did it yeah they lose me on that part but he came on the podcast and he and uh one thing he said to me um that's just seared in my brain and probably will never leave it's kind of like a good book you take it away you never forget it he said humans every human has the same two questions at some point in their life are we here alone and what

happens when i die and i thought that was a really interesting way there's another one there's another why am i here why am i here that's i would say we all go through that do you have an answer no do you think i've had different answers different points in my life do you think it's possible to get one answer yeah i don't i mean look people find faith a lot of people do it through faith you know um some people there is no purpose you know so people do this the whole thing is an illusion i've studied with mystics i um i was in nepal last year uh in mustang valley which was this part of nepal was just opened up and studied with the bond who are the mystics of tibetan buddhism i mean oh geez they've been around for 16 000 years they were there before buddhism got

to tibet and their whole thing is about awakening from the illusion and i studied with them their practices um and they literally believe like this you know one of them looked me straight in the eyes i was asking why he was going to go in a cave and i went saw the cave literally in a cliff in the himalayas but nothing in darkness for like months we're building food and just meditate in a wall and i'm like why are you going to do it and he looked me in the eyes and he said because dreams are illusion and this is an illusion and i want to break free you know it's fucking crazy yeah yeah i mean but that's their thing right not ours but that's their thing yeah and by the way i mean crazy in a positive way yeah like that he's so smart in

order to like oh yeah he was he was brilliant he was um his title was geshi which is professor so like very well trained in their monasteries and uh but this is part of the training right and so so for them it's it's like this whole thing is a dream this whole thing doesn't exist there's only consciousness this is just consciousness expiring itself you know and you look at the other mystics you look at christian mystics sufi mystics you look at Jewish mystics you look at any tradition you go to the mystics which are which are always the ones that

the nut jobs the outsiders but they're the ones they end up like then kind of co-opting their what they say and making mainstream and that becomes religion often they all say the same thing they literally all say the same thing that I've come across which is like this whole thing's an illusion

it's the matrix I was going to say they're like the non-tech version of the simulation theory the simulation the hologram theory everything that's just that's been around forever man like that's been around for as long as man's been around like that like that they're like this this thing's an illusion and the mind is um the mind is the thing that generates it and and different philosophies try to approach it differently and and the east they want to break free of it right in the western

like you go down to more like the judeo-christian whatever they're they're like how can i use this to make my life better but the underlying theory is the same this whole thing's an illusion so that's a very interesting one like what is this whole thing just like waves off the ocean that come and go but the ocean's still there but the wave's gone but the waves has it really gone well it it brings the whole conversation full circle in that it does whether it's well whether it's the military whether it's you sitting in a library as a kid right whether it's um building companies writing whatever it's all mindset i mean ultimately just what you described in the east first the west perspective on the same theory or the same like application

it's just mindset what are you optimizing for right and the way that i think about this is it goes back to the idea that every your mind is more powerful than you'll ever understand right and i tweeted um earlier this week there's a uh i think it was an article and in the article the cover photo was one part of a fruit fly's brain and they have successfully mapped not the whole brain one part of a fruit fly's brain they have all the connections all stuff it is the most complex thing you've ever seen and they're talking about a fruit fly and it's you know 20 of the brain whatever well when you move up to a human brain there's zero chance during our lifetime we'll ever understand it and so it's just what do you want to like what what mindset

do you want to put your brain into your body follows your actions follow right all of these things follow that but like you're ultimately in control which probably scares the shit out of people hey what do you think we're like you answer that question why are we here i i don't think that there's an answer like in the sense of if you ask the same person five times different points in life yeah they all have different answers and also if you take i got four brothers five kids who all grew up in the same environment very similar did things on a daily basis whatever and you all ask us we would all have different answers and so it's not a what were you taught type thing etc i really think it is uh what's the answer for me today there's also another question

many people have asked at some point in their lifetime um you know shakespeare was the one who put it really well to be or not to be you know people when they go through shit you know people of a lot of people have been in that point some people have actually gone beyond that point you know right yeah i'm sure you have friends i have friends you know who've that's another one that that's a very human one may not phrase it that way but i tend to find um you ever go to a store and uh when you there and you look at a product and there's all the shiny ones and there's the one that obviously spent through some she got dropped it you know whatever like you can just tell it's different right i always think about that with people a lot of times when you meet

people the people that stick out to me are the people that they don't tell you and you don't know but you can tell they've been through shit because they tend to be calmer they tend to be more rational a lot of times they tend to be happier actually right like they have all of these things that it's not taught in a school whatever it's just they've been through challenges and they come out stronger because of it yeah in the end ends up being a choice you know who you're going to be through that you know and i talked about that a lot in the book and when i share my own experience it's like you know we have a two we have and look i've been guilty of it so i can speak from it like you have two choices as an adult in situations you're either

going to be the victim of this story you're going to be the hero of this story same story your choice and that creates the narrative and that actually is what creates the resulting story. That's a choice. That's a mindset and you know

people one can choose to do either. We're ending on that. That was perfect. Where can people find the book? Oh it's

you know Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On it's a really special book I hope you get it. It's on any bookstore Amazon, Barnes & Noble

independent bookstores wherever fine books are sold Audible you name it. I've had a lot of people come on here and talk about their books and I've never said this, but I actually highly recommend people go get this book.

Thank you, man. Of course that doesn't actually mean shit in the world, but legitimately I think it's a good book. People should go get it. So, all right guys, thanks so much for listening to this.

Thank you so much for your time and we'll have to do this again for sure. I would love it. This was fun. Hey everyone, pop here. If you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review

simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain