The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs

Episode Date: November 19, 2014

In this episode, I talk to my old friend Nick Ganju about ping pong, poker, hit songs, and tackling my most feared subject: math. He makes the complex seem simple, which is a rare gift. Nick is the founder and CTO of ZocDoc. As CTO, he is responsible for overseeing all software development. It's a huge job for one of the fastest-growing startups in the US, and he's repeatedly proven himself to be a master teacher.All show notes, links, resources for this episode can be found on www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Enjoy! - Tim***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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How do they do what they do? What are the tools and tricks and tactics that they use that you can use as well? And in this episode, I try to dissect the mind of Nick Ganju, who I've known for a very, very long time, since graduating from college, basically. He is the CTO of ZocDoc and has raised more than $95 million in venture capital as of June 2003 or so, and they have more than 6 million users per month. And although Nick would hate for me to describe it this way, imagine open table for doctors. Although it fixes much more than that, many other broken aspects of quality healthcare. And in this episode, we geek out on math, which I'm phobic of. I've had a lifetime fear of mathematics. So we geek out on how to tackle numeracy, if you're not comfortable with math, poker, ping pong, how to write a hit song,

and the philosophical implications of Monsters, Inc., one of my favorite movies, certainly, among many other things. It is not too dense. That's the whole idea, to try to demystify and disarm things that are intimidating. And Nick has just an incredible capacity for simplifying what appears to be the very, very difficult.

So I had a blast with this. I hope you do as well. So please meet Nick Ganju. Hello, everybody. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode and edition of The Tim Ferriss Show. Today is a rare treat because I have an old friend of mine who's got all sorts of dirt on me and knows all the skeletons in the closet. Nick Ganju. Nick, how are you? I'm great. How are you doing?

I'm doing very well. And you're in New York City at the moment? Yeah, that's right. I'm in Manhattan. So the beginning, I suppose, goes back some ways. We initially met, it must have been in 2000. Is that right? Yeah, I think so. I think you were looking for an apartment. And I had an extra bedroom that I was renting out. And if I remember correctly, I didn't make the cut. this was this was at the height of the dot-com boom at uh at at a point where i suppose it was

right at the top of the roller coaster in a lot of ways and housing was just next to impossible not unlike what it's like right now and i guess it must it must have been craigslist uh casual encounters or i'm the kidding. The rental section. And we met up and didn't end up becoming roommates, but ended up becoming friends and playing a lot of pool. And it was amusing to me to read your official bio for the first time yesterday to try to get some additional context. So you ended up being the Bay Area billiards champion. Is this right? Yeah. Yeah. It was like a, uh, one of those leagues that you, you joined and, uh, ended up being the champion that year. I played a lot of pool in college. And then since we were both just

out of college, I, uh, I had, uh, you know, still retained all that skill. If you played me right now, I'd probably be really rough. And the, we're going to dig into some of the other very varied, eclectic sort of Dos Equis skills that you seem to have, like table tennis and sort of deconstruct why that is. Also get into the music. But for those people who aren't familiar with you, and we can certainly get into the professional stuff, but where did you grow up? What did your parents do? Maybe you can give us some background. Sure, sure. I grew up in Chicago, in the west suburbs of Chicago. My parents were both doctors, so nice, comfortable upbringing. I was very fortunate in that way. I went to undergrad, majored in computer science, finished in 1998, worked in Austin, Texas

at a company called Trilogy for a year, but then decided that the dot-com boom of the time was just way too hot for me to be working at a larger company. So like all the gold hunters of history, I moved out west to California for the gold rush of 1999, I guess you could call it, and tried my luck at a couple startups there. And you ended up then, I suppose, bringing us to the current day co-founding ZocDoc. And what is the current state of ZocDoc? How many employees do you have? Maybe you can give us some

stats. Yeah, sure. We are currently about 500 to 600 employees employees and over 6 million people visit ZocDoc each month to search for a doctor. And, you know, to give a little background, ZocDoc is a site where you can come, you can search for a doctor and you can see reviews, you can see photos and you can book an appointment right online. So in the way that you can book everything else online these days, we're trying to bring an appointment right online. So in the way that you can book everything else online these days, we're trying to bring doctor appointment booking online. Now, for those people who haven't used the site, would it be fair to just as an imperfect analogy, say that it's similar to, it's a more refined open table plus a bunch of other extra benefits for doctors that it has that sort of ease of use or more? Yeah, certainly.

Certainly it has that open table aspect where you can book appointments online. Of course, it also has the Yelp aspect where you can see reviews and you can see photos. And you can also now check in, which means you can fill out your medical history forms online before you get to the doctor's office. So that medical form is now pre-filled. And as you visit subsequent doctors, you don't have to refill a medical form. So we're slowly adding more and more features that make that process as painless as possible. So one of the topics that I wanted to talk about comes to mind when I call to my memory the first visit to the ZocDoc offices. And we've spent a lot of time together. We've had plenty of wine together,

played a lot of pool together. And I've always been fascinated by your ability to not just test assumptions, but also cut through a lot of the fuzzy thinking to hard numbers and analytics and the displays that you had at ZocDoc, the real-time displays of numbers and metrics, I think were a great sort of external representation for me of your mind. And many people probably do not know that one of the reasons I went to, I chose to go to Princeton undergrad, which by the way, those people who are listening, who might be applying to colleges, I was told by my guidance counselor, I would not get into talk about encouragement. And I think this is actually going to be relevant to our conversation

later. You have to look at incentives because, uh, economics ultimately is the study of incentives and how people respond to them. And what guidance counselors, even at very good schools want to be able to say is 90% of my students got into their first choice. The easiest way to do that is to make sure that their first choices are mediocre.

Um, so the, but, uh, the, one of the draws for Princeton was it was one of the few schools in the top group I was considering that did not have a math requirement. And I had a horrible experience in 10th grade with a math teacher. And this might seem strange to folks, but she was a female math teacher who I think

had just been really put through the ringer to get to where she was. And she was really, really kind of belligerent towards a handful of boys in the class. And it turned me off to math completely from that point forward. In contrast, my brother had the exact opposite experience in 10th grade, had a wonderful teacher, and he went on to major in math and pursue a PhD in statistics. So I'd be curious to hear the origins of your interest in computer science and also sort of your general thinking on these types of skills. I know that's broad, but a lot of people like myself feared that it's something innate. It's completely innate.

You either have it or you don't. So maybe you could sort of rewind the clock and talk about your experience with getting comfortable with this type of thing. Yeah, sure. So in terms of the computer science, you know, I started the way that many computer nerds start, which is I started programming at an early age, like nine or 10 years old on my Apple IIc and just trying to make games, right? Like we had those games, you know, we had the Atari 2600 and we had i had some simple games on my apple uh and you know i was like i want to try to do this so i you know i bought a book on basic programming and i tried to make a couple games i tried to reproduce uh

the the game from war games that if you remember that oh sure of course yeah with matt broderick uh so i tried to make i tried to uh reconstruct that game, which the game in that movie is called Global Thermonuclear War. And it's a pretty violent game. And I tried to recreate it with my nine-year-old brain trying to deconstruct where to deploy nuclear missiles. And, uh, I actually, I was actually working on it at school in grade school and my, my principal walked into the computer lab and, uh, I got in big trouble because I was, I was making a game called global thermonuclear war in fourth grade. And so, um, but, uh, you know, but that, that was the, like the genesis of my, my interest. And then, uh, in, uh, in, in high school we had these programmable calculators, uh, andators, and I started writing games on the calculator and giving it to all my friends. In the way that misguided nerds are, at age 15 I thought I would get a lot of girls this way.

And it turns out that writing Tetris on your calculator does not actually win you the cheerleaders. But that was my best strategy at that time. Suffice to say, I was single for high school. And so my guidance counselor kind of saw these kind of things too and recommended to me that that i you know that i go and and major in computer engineering or computer science uh and that was something that was not even really apparent to me that that that was a whole major and stuff and of course this is in the 90s and you couldn't just google things uh and so it's just information it was almost like uh you know

a revelation to me that you could just go and do this as a profession. And there's actually formal training. You can actually go to a four-year college and get a computer science degree. So that was great. And so I went to the University of Illinois, which is sort of a top five computer science school. It kind of flirts in and out of there.

Some years it's number four, and some years it's number seven or whatever. That's tough to hear. Didn't Marc Andreessen develop Mosaic there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andreessen is from there. Max Levchin from PayPal is from there. A bunch of sort of illustrious current Silicon Valley moguls are from there. So, yeah, it's a good school.

And I certainly really, really fell in love with computer science when I, when I did those four years and kind of knew that I, that's what I wanted to do as a profession. What, what made you fall in love with it there? And what do you think makes it a good, what makes it a top five program aside from maybe the selection bias and having really good applicants over time start to select it yeah yeah and certainly that's you know certainly every school has that sort of self fulfilling prophecy when you start to get that you gain traction and all the best kids want to go to your school um but i think that they uh are very uh vigilant about keeping the computer science

curriculum current uh and so you can see and i had i can see, and I had a couple friends that had gone to different schools at that time and also majored in computer science. And I was learning Java at the time, which was the hot new thing. This is like 1996 or something. And we already had courses in Java, and my friends were still learning stuff in C. And so I think that the new schools are – the best schools are very diligent about keeping the curriculum up to date, especially in computer science. As we all know, the industry and the technology's changing so quickly, I think this is part of what's so intimidating to a lot of folks, whether they're just trying to get by and want to be employable or they are hoping to invest in technology companies, which is a very dangerous game to play, I think, for a lot of reasons, but, uh, the, how much past a certain point, uh, because I, I recognize for instance, it's easy for me to look at learning natural languages, which I assumed I was bad at learning up until 15 or 16.

And I can destroy a lot of myths and old wives tales about that. So when someone says to me, Oh my God, I'm too old to learn a language. It would take me my entire lifetime takes decades to become fluent, blah, blah, blah. I can, I can very easily dismantle those and get people excited about learning a language, even if they're, you know, 30, 40, whatever it might be with computer science and math. Uh, I have a lot of insecurities and I I can do very basic stuff, but never to calculus. You know, I got up to pre-cal. And how coachable are these things? And how valuable is it to try to become more comfortable

with sort of the quantified side of life? At a later point, right just turned 37, it's one of these things that dogs me as an insecurity, much in a way that not being able to swim dogged me until I was 30. But maybe you could comment on that. Sure, sure. I think there's certain fields of math that are extremely important and just become more and more relevant every day. And you see like this kind of, you know, like the big data sort of, I hate to use buzzwords, but that, you know, that sort of trend that is, you know, has come into favor in the last few years, which is a very real thing.

Despite the buzzwords, you know, there's a lot of sort of information to be gleaned and improvements in our society to be had from, you know, from statistical analysis. So, you know, statistics and probability and statistics are things that are just going to become bigger and bigger parts of our world. You know, in terms of calculus, I don't think, I think if anything, calculus is sort of diminishing because that sort of field of math was more applicable when you didn't have a giant computer on every desktop, giant in terms of processing power, to crunch the crap out of numbers. And a lot of things that were, I'm trying to make it like layman's, a lot of things

that were closed form solutions, which means they got solved through these sort of complex equations that you see with lots of weird symbols in them. Now computers can just sort of brute force crank out the answers to them. And in a better way too, because you can more closely mirror reality with a computer than you can with a closed-form solution like a calculus equation.

And so I don't think, you know, it's not a big deal if most people don't know calculus, but there's fields of math which are certainly helpful in understanding. What would those areas be? And I suppose just to jump right into it, you know, if you were, this conversation is inspired for those people listening partially because we sat down at the ZocDoc offices to talk about, um, encryption. And, uh, I remember I was, I would be, I'd become really fascinated by encryption and, uh, ciphers and code breaking because of a science fiction, I suppose you could call a

science fiction book, uh, called, uh, Cryptonomicon. And so we started talking about encryption and you got up and, and walked me through the basic principles of encryption, uh, and feel free to correct me or provide some details if I'm missing them. But as it applies in a lot of computer science, then we went out to dinner that night and sat down with a bunch of really impressive CTOs and guys who've been VPs of engineering. And we talked about encryption and it just blew my mind that something that I felt so utterly out of my depth with a few hours earlier, I was able to actually cogently listen to discourse about in a few hours.

And that really encouraged me, but it's been hard for me to determine how do I walk out? And I mean, I know you're a good friend of mine, but you're also busy. So mentor. Um, yeah. So how, how should somebody, how should somebody in, in a fun or interesting way develop some of these skills? Right. Because, uh, you'd look at, I remember this and this is such a simple thing, but it kind of blew my mind when, uh, the probabilities are, if we look at probabilities, humans are so bad sort of intrinsically, it seems at working with probabilities. And if you have,

let's say a birth, if you have a big party and people bump into each other and they have the same birthday party, you know, our birthday date, they're sort of astonished, right? They're like,

Oh my God, what are the chances? It's like one in a million. And I'm just, and I'm just looking at this description here on Wikipedia of the, the birthday problem or the birthday paradox. And you know, the probability obviously reaches a hundred when the number of people reaches 367, because there are, you know, whatever we extrapolate from 365 days a year, but you get to 50% probability with just 23 people. And it's just, it's so hard for people to grasp that so well to be to be well let me refine it a little bit to be to state it really precisely it's not

that uh one of those people one of those 23 people uh could go and ask the other 22 and odds are would find the same birthday right it's that any two of those 23 people have the same birthday. Does that make sense? It's a little bit different, but it actually, I think that's where the misconception comes in is that, you know, you kind of take from it like, wow, if I walked around and asked 22 people, like there's a 50% chance that I'd have the same birthday as one of them, which is not the right way to think about it. Right. And the devil's in the details, right? With those subtleties. I mean, massive miscalculations, even by very smart, experienced people, right? You look at something like long-term capital management, right? They build this massively sophisticated system that

doesn't take into account that somebody else could have a similar machine that would then sort of trigger this crazy back and forth that would end sort of trigger trigger this uh crazy back and forth uh that would end in catastrophe right so yeah um if somebody feels as i do right that they they want to be more comfortable with this type of thing but they're not are there any particular approaches or books or anything like that that you would recommend yeah i think i think that uh people get intimidated because they you know they sort of look online, and Wikipedia especially does this. You go and you're like, what is expected value or something? And you look at it, and Wikipedia immediately gives you these Greek symbols on the first – and everyone's seen that, right?

Like the first paragraph. It's in the first line of the Berkeley problem. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah, exactly. And it's like – and that serves the – that even intimid, you know, I think I know a fair bit about math. But like, you if the number becomes six, if the number is six, I pay you a dollar. And the number is one through five, you pay me a dollar.

Now, would you play that game? No, I would not play that game. Right, so you wouldn't play that game. And so it's intuition right now now let's let's change the game and say that uh if if uh if a six comes up i pay you a thousand dollars and if one through five each come up uh you have to pay me one dollar yes i'll play that game right so you play that game right so now the question is at which point at what point should you play or not play it, right? Would you play it at $3? That's very Shakespearean.

No, play it not, yes. To play or not to play. If a six was $3, if I paid you $3 when a six showed up, would you play that game? Right. Probably not. I have to start doing calculations here. Sure. But that's the genesis of it, right? The genesis of it is, right. The genesis of all math really is, is you starting from these common sense or these real world problems and saying,

okay, well, you know, how do I understand this problem? Uh, you know, my intuition says I, I, I wouldn't play it, uh, if I only want a dollar when I hit six and I't play it if I only won a dollar when I hit six, and I would play it if I won $1,000 when I played six. Would I do it at $10? Would I do it at $3? So start from there, and we can walk through this problem. A simple way to think about this problem is let's assume in six rolls you get one of each right like let's say we roll it six times and you get one one one two one three one four one five and one six right so you know for the three dollars it's it's right you you would lose five dollars for each of one through five right and then you would win three

dollars when you rolled a six right so you would make three dollars and you would lose five dollars so you'd be at negative two negative two dollars yep right and so uh you know so you can start to see at which point you you would break even which is five i'll i'll i'll cheat and give you the answer um but you know at five dollars you would break even exactly right if i paid you five dollars every time a six showed up right then you would lose five dollars for each dealer rules and then and then you would win five dollars when you got the six i'm tracking you i'm tracking you so far i'm not as dumb as i look actually i'm a bit dumber than i look but that's a different story and so right but but then that's the genesis of it right so now let's roll two die yeah right and like what are the odds of getting uh you know two sixes uh right so the odds are that you know each one has a one in

six chance of getting a six each die has a one in six chance of getting a six and you multiply those together and the odds of getting two sixes are one in 36 and 36 yep yeah and so now right so now you now you can do the game again right would i pay you how much should i pay you if you get a 36 how much should i pay you if you get two six? How much should I pay you if you get two sixes, I should say? And it just goes from there. It just gets more and more complex. And then Blackjack, then, is just more of the same thing. It's just a more complex version of the same thing.

And so if you start simple and understand the conceptual underpinnings and then just work your way up from there, I think that sort of every field of math can just be broken down that way. You just start simple and not get intimidated by all these Greek symbols. that sparked my interest in exploring some of this was my experience in television. When I was filming the Tim Ferriss experiment, the future of which is TBD, for those people listening and wondering, it's the entire division at Turner that produced it was fired, basically shut down, and it's sitting on a shelf. So I've been battling to try to rescue that for months. Suffice to say, keep an eye out. I may need some public support to get that done.

But the episodes included, at one point, going to Vegas and being trained by a really fascinating guy named Phil Gordon, who has a CS background, who's taken home millions of dollars in winnings as a professional poker player. And he had a week to train me to go heads up, one-on-one against professional poker players. And so you can imagine that week was a lot of this type of conversation. And he would ask me these very, very basic probability questions. And I would just have this like, like stoned Labrador retriever response with no words coming out of my face. And he'd just be like, you're kidding me. Right. But we're up to the point where he was able to give me matrices for deciding in a very binary way. Like, do you, do you folder, do you raise?

Right. And then it started, I started memorizing these sets of rules folder, do you raise, right? And then it started, it, I started memorizing these sets of rules and it made it fun, right? It gave it a context so that I wasn't grappling with, uh, some of these questions in a vacuum. Um, the, the, what, what are, and I know one of the books you recommended to me was, uh, how to measure anything. And, um, so some of it I found very interesting. Of course, when we were not too long ago hanging out at the pool and brainstorming stuff like this and talking about investing,

you were able to throw an extra element into the conversation, which was, well, if you have a 30% probability of doing X or a 70% probability of doing Y, if the person giving you that information only tells the truth 60% of the time, then what? How does that affect the outcomes? Are there any other books or even just games or methods for making this a fun process for people, right? Because the, the, the idea that I could spend a week learning poker and, uh, be able to play with, without getting my total face ripped off, um, you know, probably 70% of the recreational players out there pretty easily is huge ROI, right? That's massive.

Yeah, that's great. What else comes to mind? What other books would you recommend to people or resources? Yeah, I love poker as well. I think poker is a great example of math, of a combination of math and sort of emotional intelligence also coming into play. But poker is a great sort of reflection of all the stuff we've been talking about. Of course, the books – I've recently read a great book, which is called How Not to Be Wrong, The Power of Mathematical Thinking. And this book by a guy named Jordan Ellenberg is exactly what we're talking about.

It's written for an audience of people that have historically been intimidated by math or just thought, gee, I'm not good at math. It introduces things in a very simple way and then works up to more complex concepts in the way that we just broke down probability with this dice game. And so that's a great book, and I hope it does well, and I hope it alleviates some of this sort of intimidation that people have. And does this – I know that we also chatted at one point about your classes. There might be a better term for them, but internally at ZocDoc, trying to help poor liberal arts majors like me become better at goal setting and things along those lines. So I know you're a fan of what is often referred to as smart goals. Would you mind talking about how you set goals or how you suggest people set goals and common problems with or common mistakes that people make? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that,

you know, the easiest example is that people, so smart goals means specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. And so it's sort of a framework to help you pick goals that you can objectively hit or miss. So measurable means I'm going to lose exactly 10 pounds or at least 10 pounds in the next two months or three months. And, uh, you know, and then you can objectively decide at the end, uh, whether or not you've lost 10 pounds, right. As opposed to saying, I'm just going to lose weight. And then you don't, you don't really know whether, you know, what kind of goal and you don't, it doesn't work psychologically, right. You're just like, Oh, I'm just sort of vaguely losing weight. Uh, and you know, putting that writing down that goal and literally putting it on wall actually gives you something to strive towards.

But then the next problem after that – so the first problem is just setting objective goals. Instead of just saying, let's try to accomplish X. Let's just try to get more people using ZocDoc. As opposed to, let's get 10 million more people to use ZocDoc. Are different goals, just, just psychologically speaking. And then, you know, and then, and then at review time, it's, it's, uh, it's easy to see whether you did it or not. But then the next problem after that is that, uh, you know, people just say, uh, yeah, that sounds like a good number. Let's get a million more people to use it or

whatever. Uh, and, but there's's no basis in in how they're going to get to that million right and so uh you know and the analogy i like to use is uh you know when they tried to put the first man in space or the first man on the moon uh you know they didn't just say like okay let's get in the rocket and and like burn the rocket as hard as we can and maybe we'll get into space right like they they did all the math behind it. Right. They were like, gravity pulls us this much and we,

you know, we have to take this much weight up. And so then we need this much fuel, uh, but this much fuel then adds this much weight also to the, to the rocket. So, uh,

so that causes its own set of problems. And then there's wind resistance and everything. Right. And they did all the math to figure out how to get themselves into space. But I feel like in business and in life, people just say, I'm just going to add this much or I'm just going to

create this much more, X percent more of whatever is going to happen. They haven't really done the underlying math. I think I'm guilty of that too. Definitely. Because you're constantly told as a non-quant comfortable person, like, you got to think big. And some people are like, okay, great.

Like, I'm going to build a billion-dollar company. And then, you know what I mean? Right. Sure. Yeah. That's a good example, right? Like, if you want to build a billion-dollar company, what do you need to do? Like, right, what kind of revenue do you need to justify or what kind of earnings do you need to justify being a billion dollars? And then, you know, what sort of markets or what

sort of opportunities are available to, that would create that much earnings. And then how are you going to get there? Right. You can't just say like, let's just build a billion dollar company. And so, uh, I mean, it's good to have that goal, but then you need a plan to, to execute as well. And I think that, uh, uh you know one of the big uh improvements that that we've done operationally is is you know what i call business cases and what it's what it's the math of how you're going to get there right and the example i use uh which was sort of just a fun example was um uh was we use that monsters inc so monster. So Monster is a recurring kind of theme at ZocDoc. So the monsters from Monsters, Inc.

I'm blanking on their names now, but those characters from that movie. I want to call one of them Elmo, but it's not the right name. It's Mike Wachowski or something? Man, I can't believe I'm blanking. Sounds good enough. Oh, it's Sully. It's Sully and Mike Wachowski or something. Anyway, right, so, you know, any team member that crushes it that week, we give them one of the stuffed animals and they're the monster of the week and stuff.

So it's this sort of recurring theme. But, you know, one of the – my example that I used was they have – right, they have these doors to children's bedrooms where they go and they, and they make them, they used to scare them, but now they make them laugh or whatever. James P. Sully Sullivan and Mike Wazowski. Mike Wazowski. That was pretty close. That was close.

They go into these children's bedrooms and they make them laugh and that generates electricity for the city that they live in, Monstropolis, which is the name of the city. And so, right, like let's say, you know, one day they're like short on electricity. And so the first thing, right, like the first, like so then the CEO of Monstropolis or CEO of Monsters, Inc. is like, let's generate more electricity. And then a bad, you know, a bad way to do it would be like, let's just try to generate more, right? And a good way to do it would like let's just try to generate more right and a good way to do it be like let's generate one more like one gigawatt more right and then it's like okay one gigawatt great how do we get there right and then well okay so each door

generates you know a megawatt uh you know each door that you you manufacture to a new child's bedroom like generates one megawatt. And so you need to generate 1,000 more doors. You need to manufacture 1,000 more doors to get this one gigawatt. So then how do you make 1,000 more doors? Well, you need 100 door manufacturers that each make 10. And then you try to do that, but then you realize there's like a 10% defect rate, right? And so it's like sort of building up from there and understanding the math behind it and then understanding if that's realistic. Can I have 100 doormakers or whatever I just said?

Is it realistic to hire that many that quickly in one month or whatever? But really breaking down the plan and multiplying these numbers through to get to the goal is really the difference there between success and failure. And it's not complicated math. It's just I need 1,000 doors. So I need 100 door manufacturers that can each make 10 doors in a month, and then I'll have 1,000 doors. And so none of it's calculus or any of this other stuff, but it is rigorous in terms of you have to be able to – when you break it down to the individual components, those things have to be executable, right? Can I actually get 100 door makers, and does each of them actually make 10 doors a month and et cetera. And the, uh, how do you then translate that to say weekly check-ins or monthly check-ins? How do,

how do you, how do people who take, who do this case study, uh, who've set a quantifiable, objectively measurable goal, uh, who've set a quantifiable, objectively measurable goal, then ensure that they're on track or at least check in to see if they're on track or not. How frequently is that done?

And how do people improve the odds of hitting those goals? Once they've set it down on paper and taken, say, a sort of – they've accepted and agreed that, yes, we need to understand sort of the different numbers that underpin this goal and the assumptions we're making. How do you encourage them to keep on track? How often are they checking in or having someone else check in on them? How does that work? Yeah, sure. So the goals are set quarterly. So every three months they have, you know, they set this goal. So going back to this Monsters, Inc. example, that would be a three-month goal would be the, you know, we're going to generate one more, one extra gigawatt of power. And then they have to, right? And then each week they're going to follow the numbers that were the breakdown of this plan. So they say, how many door manufacturers did I actually hire this week? And how many doors

did they actually manufacture this week? And then you start to get confidence around those numbers. You start to see, oh, crap, I can't hire 100 doormakers in a month. It's actually going to take me two, three months to hire 100. But I can hire 30 in the first month, and they're each going to contribute 10 doors. So I'll at least have 300 doors in the first month or whatever, right? And then you learn something new. You learn that, oh, 10% of the doors are defective. So it's actually not 300 doors generated in the first month. It's 270 doors generated in the first month. And so then you add a new line in your business case here that is going to subtract 10% from your finished product of doors.

And over time, you generate a really solid understanding of that game, of whichever initiative it is that you're planning uh as you add lines and as you refine the numbers uh for each each line and then so basically you start to fill in the actuals and you look at their deviation from your you know from your projections when you started yeah from your base assumptions uh which is something that uh you know i'm i'm constantly astonished. I do this in a very Fred Flintstone sort of knuckle-dragging kind of way. But if I look at just as a group, for instance, investors, angel investors or people who are doing early-stage investments,

they form a thesis, they go out and raise a bunch of money, and then they never modify. It's kind of like the parody of George W. Bush that Stephen Colbert did at one point where he gave an address at like the Republican National Convention or something. And he said, you know, I love, you know, it was a paraphrase, obviously,

but he's like, I stand behind a president who no matter what happens on Wednesday, he still holds the same belief on Thursday that he did on Tuesday. Yeah, he was making fun of it because they branded John Kerry as a flip-flopper. That's what it was. And it's sort of the mark of intelligence

to learn from your mistakes and change your attitudes of things. And so they were sort of Colbert was ribbing Bush for branding Kerry as a flip-flopper. Yeah, I'm not sure that worked out exactly as I expected. So when you were a kid, just to really not entirely shift gears because it's closely related.

Actually, before I go there, do you have all of your employees trained on Excel? Is that what that means when they're inputting these values so that things automatically update? Yeah, this is done in Excel. Each column is a month. And so you can see time progressing, going to the right. And then each row will be one of these things. So again, with this Monsters, Inc., it's how many door manufacturers I have, how many do they make in a month? What's the defect rate, et cetera. Uh, and then as a month like turns into reality, you, you feel you, you overwrite the projected assumptions with the, uh, with the, with the actuals. But what I think in general, like what I'm saying sounds really

simple. Um, but, but people don't do it. People just don't do it. Yeah. You know, in general at, in, you know, lots of companies that I visited or, or like you said, like smaller startups that I, that I help out with, uh, in an advisory role, they just don't do these things. And if you think about the number of projects that fail in business and then the amount of research or forethought that goes into them, in general, that's way, way off. And to go back to probability, even if you think there's a 90% chance of something succeeding and a 10% chance of failing, well, then it's worth it to spend 10% of the time ahead of time to see if it's going to work. And so what that means is if you're starting a 10-week project, you spend a week to research it. And people don't do that, right? Not at all. People spend two hours thinking about it and they go, that'd be a great idea. And then they hop off and do it for 10 weeks, right?

Yeah. Just to put that in perspective, that means if it's a 10-year project, that you could justify a year in doing due diligence, which is totally entirely not the case, obviously, in the vast majority of instances. Yeah. Or budget, right? If it's a $100 million project, you should spend $10 million just researching it. If you think there's a 10% chance it's going to fail. And more than 10% of projects actually fail, right?

So if you think there's a 25% chance that it fails, you spend twenty five million dollars researching a hundred million dollar project. This is assuming way, way, way under what even a ballpark estimate would say that the amount of forethought should go into it. Do you hire people who have pre-existing Excel experience? I do not, for instance. I mean, I can read an Excel document, but if I have to create macros and so on, I couldn't createexisting Excel experience. I do not, for instance. I mean, I can read an Excel document, but if I have to create macros and so on, I couldn't create an Excel spreadsheet that functions to save my life. How do you train someone to, do you do it all internally? Do you have a certain course you recommend, anything like that? Yeah, we do it all internally. And then again, like macros are just way way way ahead of anything we're doing

right just getting a standard Excel sheet working just you know just call it 10 rows and 10 columns is fine and then and you can build up from there as you learn more and you get more comfortable but you know again you know this is going back to that attitude again

saying like I can't do macros and I can't do like V lookups and I can't do macros and I can't do VLOOKUPs and I can't do pivot tables. Yeah, I can't do those either. But basic Excel is none of that. Basic Excel is I have 10 door manufacturers or whatever, 100 door manufacturers, and I'm making 10 doors. And you multiply those two cells together and you get 1,000. And that's how you should start. You should start, right?

You should start with just the one row. So like, let's start with just the one row of like, I'm going to make a thousand doors. And so it's just like literally one cell that says a thousand. And then you say, okay, well, what's the math behind that? And so then you say, okay, well, I need a hundred manufacturers that are each going to make 10 doors. So you make two new cells and you say, you know,, you put 100 in one cell and 10 in the other cell, and then the third cell that used to just say 1,000, you change that to be the product of those other two cells.

So you say that that third cell equals the first cell times the second cell. So now if you change the numbers in the number of door manufacturers you have, the 1,000 will automatically shift. And then you say, okay, well, why do I have this many door manufacturers? Why do I think I have 100 door manufacturers? And it's like, oh, because I'm going to hire 50 this month and 50 next month. And so now that 100, instead of just being 100, is the sum of two other cells that each say 50.

And so you just work backwards from there. You just take each cell and break it down into its sub components uh and pretty soon you have a working excel document and it doesn't need to be more complex than that and that's right and that's a great start and you'll do that for a while and then you'll be comfortable with that and then you'll be like what is it what is this pivot table nonsense that everyone's talking about is it actually useful uh and then you'll go into pivot tables and right but but nobody that you know nobody in the history of excel no matter what kind of computer genius they were like started day one and was like how do i make macros work or how do i make pivot tables work right they all started this way it's just the

excel and you know that's like the big sort of uh secret of mathematicians in general is that you know everybody started from one plus one equals two and built their way up um and it's just the you know it's just each step is not a big step once you understand the previous step yeah there's a gentleman i believe his name is keith devlin out of stanford who's uh very good at at speaking to this topic and i always find myself sort of nodding and agreeing with him after every essay I read or interview I hear. And then once I sort of look at the possibility of delving into numbers, then I get cold sweats, which I need to get over. Let me change gears just a little bit and ask, sort of fill in the picture of of who nick ganju is and i and uh

the the first is do you have a a favorite book or a book that you've given most as a gift uh yeah i mean it depends in which context so you could you could give a couple sure sure uh so in uh for my software engineers i love a book called Don't Make Me Think, which is a book about usability and making software and user interfaces that are friendly to people. And often you see these software engineers where they kind of scoff, and everyone's encountered this guy. It's an IT guy or a software engineer that scoffs at the novice user. They say, ha, ha, ha, this guy doesn't know how to use this thing.

This guy doesn't know how to use Photoshop. He's so dumb, or he doesn't know how to make his network. He doesn't know how to connect his computer to the network, and he's so dumb. And that attitude is something that needs to vanish. And if you look at successful companies like Apple, where things just work, none of the engineers have that attitude. They have the attitude of, a bad software company has the attitude of, if somebody doesn't know how to use something, it's their fault because that user is dumb. And a good software company has the attitude of, if they don't know how to use something, it's our fault because we did not make the software intuitive enough, right? And we didn't make it simple enough for people to use. And, you know, you see Apple is a shining example

of that where they really go out of their way and do extra work. You know, the engineers do immense amounts of extra work to make it easy and simple for the user. And they're rewarded in the market. And so the book that I love, which helps reinforce that sort of culture, that user-friendly culture here at ZocDoc, is a book called Don't Make Me Think, which is a book on usability. And it's sort of a simple book. It's like 100 to 150 pages. Lots of, you know, illustrations about like, you know, good user interfaces and bad user interfaces.

And it's, so it's kind of an easy read, but it is a treatise on why we should make usable interfaces. And not just how we should make them, like, you know, what sort of, you know, user interface sort of patterns work or don't work, but also why we should do that. And this is the reason, right? I mean, think about ZocTalk, right? If you go to the homepage, people discovering us for the first time, they go to the homepage and if it's

complicated, they're just going to leave. And if it's simple, they're going to stay and book an appointment. And so it's all very well and nice of us to scoff about, you know, ha ha ha, that user didn't know how to use our homepage and we can be haughty and scoff about it, but then we just didn't get that appointment, right? It's our, it's our job to get people to book appointments. And so, right, there's no, there's no room for being haughty about that. Like we need to make it accessible to everybody. Yeah. As a side note, the best, just to choose something that, that people are also often afraid of, learning languages, the best language the students right off the bat was don't worry, don't be nervous. Don't try hard because if you, if you don't learn, it's my, it's my fault,

not yours. It's the job of the teacher to make sure that you learn. So he sort of took the exact same approach with language learning and unburdened the student to make it the responsibility of the teacher to make it easy. Uh, which is think, partially why he was so spectacularly successful. So it just goes to show. And he could get people up to basic speaking in all the romance languages in about eight hours of class time. It's really amazing. So what other books outside of Don't Make Me, do you give most as a gift or recommend most? And then how to measure anything, which is what we talked about before, which is about being outcome-based and getting these measurable outcomes, saying I'm going to lose 10 pounds as opposed to just saying,

oh, I'm going to try to lose weight. And this is a great book because people often complain that they can't measure something, right? Like, how many people like our site? Do people really like our website? Well, how do you measure that? Well, it's measurable, right? You can do a survey. You can ask people.

You can just look at conversion rates, how many people actually do something on your website as opposed to just look at it and run away. And so this book, I found, is quite informative on how to think about measuring things that you might have thought were intangible historically. And it also goes into these kind of ideas about why it's valuable to measure something. So going back to what I was saying about if there's a 10% chance of something failing, well, then you should spend 10% of your time like, uh, before doing it, you know, deciding if it's going to fail or not. And, um, uh, and so really getting that discipline about, about doing, you know, doing enough forethought and like sort of reflection upfront, uh, is another big sort of, you know, theme of this book.

I thought the confidence interval aspect was really fascinating as well. Not something that I've thought enough about. Um, and just, you know, if you're 90% confident that something is going to happen or that something is correct, what does that actually mean? You know, people throw that around, like how certain are you? I'm 75% certain. Like how did, how should that be reflected in your actions and preparation and so on right right right uh yeah i thought it was really really fascinating um do you have a what is your favorite documentary or movie or favorites and these don't have to be highbrow it could be legally blonde oh i don't know uh i really like forrest gump a lot. I don't know if that's a common one or a cheesy one.

What do you like about it? Well, it's sort of obvious symbolism, but in the beginning there's a feather floating around. In the end, there's a feather floating around, and he kind of floats around. I forgot the exact story but like i think he's like running oh i know he like there's a football field and he kind of runs through it because he's running he's fleeing from something yeah he runs bash on everybody so then they kind of like oh my god we got to get that guy to play football and then he plays football and then he goes to college because he plays football at the end of college like some uh uh army recruiter just

hands him a flyer just at random and says like you should join the army he's like okay i'll join the army and so he's just kind of floating around on the wind there and i think it's um it's a good sort of uh lesson where you know where you don't take yourself too seriously right like it's like you're you're gonna just like things are gonna happen and the more you you stress out about, like, life is not going exactly the way I planned, the more unhappy you're going to make yourself. Which is not to say you shouldn't try to do things. But, you know, you should certainly try to shape your life and all this. But, you know, don't take it too seriously or don't stress out too much when things don't go exactly how you

planned. So how, I would love to hear maybe a concrete example from your life, because from all outward, um, indications, I mean, you've done exceptionally well with ZocDoc and elsewhere. How do you choose how much to plan versus, uh,

sort of allow to, to, to bend to serendipity. Because you do a bunch of other things that we haven't gotten into yet. But the music, you take very, very seriously. We're going to talk about ping pong now that you mentioned Forrest Gump. But let's use ping pong as an example. Maybe you can explain the ping pong as an example. Let's tell, maybe you can explain the ping pong phenomenon or your experience with ping pong.

Sure, sure. This goes back to what you were saying about older people wanting to learn something. I play guitar and people say, well, I wish I had started guitar when I was a kid so i could play and i said well i started when i was 28 and so you know uh still young but not you know i wasn't like a 10 year old and and ping pong uh i learned when i was when i was 36 and i'm 38 now uh and i thought that would be uh it's another interesting thing it's really i think people limit themselves as to they think they learn, or it's almost like an excuse to not have to try to learn something, right? Oh, I'm 36, like I can't learn ping pong now. I'm too old.

And it's just, it kind of makes it easy to say, it's easy to not try to double down and actually learn something because you can just kind of cast it off and say, oh, I'm too old to learn new things. Right. kind of cast it off and say oh i'm too old to learn new things right um but the story of the ping pong was that we got uh uh we purchased two or three ping pong tables for my office uh uh two years ago and uh and i was the worst player i had never played ping pong in my life i'd played like five times in my whole life and and i was the worst player uh out of everybody and and everybody was laughing and they were like ha ha ha because you know it's always fun to like to screw with the boss right so so so right so the boss sucks at ping pong ha ha we're all beating the boss ping pong and so i got i got you know i i got a little i got motivated let's say i got motivated that's a good adjective

and i and i you know and i threw down the gauntlet and I said, okay, I'm going to beat everybody here. I'm going to beat everybody at this company in 30 days. Okay, so you proclaimed this. I proclaimed it out loud. And I photoshopped the Highlander. I don't know if you remember that movie. Of course, there gonna be only one like yeah so like you know there's a sword he's like there's a photo of him with the sword in the air and the lightning is striking the sword

and i replaced the sword of the ping pong paddle and lightning is striking the ping pong paddle and i wrote there could be only one and uh but you know but uh i practiced and practiced. And in 30 days, I had beaten all but two people at the company. And then, you know, because this is like the long tail of, right? Like at the end of the bell curve, there's going to be people that are exceptionally good. But, and getting mathy again, I know. But I don't know. It's just like, I mean, it's like, you know, Facebook and Peter Thiel's portfolio, right? There's just sort of like a power law. Yeah, law yeah yeah exactly the last two people are going to be monsters

yeah yeah yeah and so but then in another 30 days i beat those two people and so in six i said in 30 days i'll beat everybody but in 60 days uh i beat everybody but two people in 30 days and then 60 days i beat everybody um how did you how did you go about learning it? When you sat down, you're like, okay, now I run the risk of humiliating myself if I don't make this happen. When you sat down to plan it out, how did you do it? Yeah. So first of all, that's an interesting sort of way to put it. It never occurred to me to say like, oh, I'm humiliating myself if i didn't do this and maybe that's like a sort of uh mentality that's uh you know maybe that's like illustrative of the mentality right i wasn't uh it it until you said that now like two years later it never crossed my mind that uh like the humiliation of defeat or how humiliating that would be um and so

you know maybe you know it's just it it's more constructive to just think about, to focus on the positive of when you're going to win and not fret about the downside. So when you were fantasizing about gloating over the employees in the company, how did you sit down to to to plan it out or what okay so what was the method because i actually want to get good at ping pong so i'm sure sure sure so the first thing was and by far the most important thing was uh i went to the ping pong uh uh like like uh parlor by my house and took lessons. Right. And so,

right. And that was, and then when I, at the end, when, when, uh, so I take,

I was taking lessons once a week from there and I, you know, and that of course just, just catapulted me in, in my skill level. Um, but, uh,

and what would happen was at the third or fourth week, uh, uh, one of my, uh, coworkers came into that ping pong parlor and saw me taking lessons and spilled to the entire company that I had been taking lessons. And which I thought was another interesting sort of, you know, reflection on life, which is, you know, people are like, oh, you didn't say you were going to do that thing. Right.

And I was like, I didn't say what I was going to do or what I wasn't going to do. Other than beat all your asses. I said I was going to beat everybody. When we started ZocDoc, people said the same thing. People said, oh, you'll never get... There's practice management software that exists out there. They said, you'll never

be able to integrate to these third-party practice management systems because they're too antiquated. They're not going to release a new version and some of the companies are not even developing those things anymore. And we just went and reverse engineered some of the existing ones just by literally getting copies of the software and deconstructing the file structure and really reverse engineering it. And we got it working.

And all of a sudden, ZocDoc started working. All these antiquated softwares were effectively communicating with us. And then those naysayers were like, oh, you didn't say you were going to do that. We thought you had to strike up partnerships with all these software companies. You didn't say you were just going to get the software and reverse engineer it. And it's like, well, I didn't say I was or I wasn't, but if you're thinking so inside the box and then when somebody thinks outside the box

and gets something done, you should learn from it. You should be like, oh, that's slick. You shouldn't be like, oh, you didn't say you were going to do that. That's not fair. And that's another sort of illustration of like i'd say you know positive attitudes versus negative attitudes but you know so i took these lessons so i took these ping pong lessons and then they go oh you didn't say you're gonna do that and you know then they started saying oh only you can afford lessons the guy the guy that came and found me in the

ping pong place was like uh he he ran into me at the bar of there was a there's a bar in this ping pong parlor and he said yeah not everyone can afford the lessons and i was like he's like, he ran to me at the bar. There's a bar in this ping pong parlor. And he said, yeah, not everyone can afford the lessons. And I was like, how much did you spend on these drinks? And he had bought a round of drinks for four or five of his friends. And he was like, this is $40. And I was like, the ping pong lesson I just took is $35. And I'm not drinking.

And I haven't bought any drinks. So I'm going to come out of this ping pong place spending less than you have. The first thing I did was that and started with proper form and then practiced a lot when people weren't around. How did you practice when people weren't around? I'm just going to cheat here, I guess. What are some of the most common mistakes that people make playing ping pong? Just like the randos who have a couple of beers and grab a ping pong table. When you watch it, what makes you cringe?

What are you like, ah, if they only knew the basics, they should do this and not do that. Yeah, yeah. Number one is the grip. So a lot of people just hold it atrociously. Just hold the ping pong paddle and you know whatever way they first they're first inclined to do it um and you know the general way there's a couple like schools of hold of holding it but the general way you're supposed to do it is uh it's called the handshake and so you sort of extend your hand like you're

having a handshake you know you're about to shake somebody's hand and then you you put the the handle in that way sort of hard to explain. I think I get it. So your four fingers, not your thumb, then are extended kind of diagonally across the back, the flat portion as opposed to the handle of one of the paddles? Yeah. I mean, you don't want to cover a large portion of the paddle with your hand because then your backhand will just – it'll hit your fingers. Right. But yeah, that's essentially the right idea. Okay.

People can Google it though, the handshake. Yeah yeah handshake method and then and the handshake grip and then the uh the other thing is people just don't uh have any conception of of how big a big how big a role spin is in the game and so it's a it's a very light ball and spin has immense effect on the ball and so you know your normal like looping forehand is supposed to have a lot of top spin on it and so every ball should have spin on it and you know depending on what you're trying to do if you're trying to slice it if you're trying to side spin if you're trying to top spin um if you're just hitting it flat then you're sort of uh forsaking an opportunity to do something you with it that would screw up your opponent. And so

learning how to hit the ball with spin is I'd say the second biggest thing. Cool. Do you have any morning or evening rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like? That's an interesting question. I suppose I don't really have any rituals i just get up and and get ready and go to work uh you know i i think that you do

brush your teeth though every morning i do brush my teeth as long as on the days i remember i brush no i i think that uh uh i'm very fortunate in that in that every day has a different set of challenges. And I kind of have the whole company is part of the stuff that I'm concerned with. So let me rephrase then because I'm going to push a little. I bet you do have patterns at least, whether it's weekly or daily. And I'm just curious, what of those patterns contribute to your sort of effectiveness or just output or lower your stress, right? I mean, so music is part of your life, but are there things you do, say on a weekly basis, like one day a week or twice a week or whatever it might be that you think allow you to be a high-functioning

person without your sort of having to be put in a mental institution every once in a while to de-stress? Yeah, certainly. I guess I don't really – I've never really thought about it in those terms. I don't – I'm such a negative person. I'm not. No, it's like an illustration maybe that I'm not

like, maybe not self-aware that like today I need to, you know, today I should do something to de-stress because my stress levels are, are high. And, and certainly I do get, you know, uh, to, you know, there are certainly are days when the stress levels are high and I don't think I am self-aware enough to like, to have like, okay, today I should meditate or whatever. But, you know, I certainly read a lot. You know, I think I try to, like, rid myself of cognitive biases. It's something that is an extremely nerdy thing to say. Yeah, could you explain to people, for those people who may not be familiar, what that means? Yeah, sure.

Or give an example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a huge slew of, you know, what a psychologist would call cognitive biases that humans have. And what they are are things that make, you reason, it makes them averse to something that they shouldn't be averse to or irrationally evaluate things. And so I'll give you an example. We can go back to gambling again. Let's use the same example. die and each time we lost each time it was one through five you lost a dollar and if it was six you won you know ten dollars then you would play that game uh right because over time you would you would be uh positive but uh if each if each time assuming i have the bankroll yeah correct yeah

assuming you have the bankroll but let's say each time that uh you rolled that die, instead of each roll losing $1, 1 through 5 losing $1 and 6 gaining $10, let's say that each of 1 through 5 you lost $10,000 and then with a 6 you won $100,000. Now would you play that game? It turns out that most people wouldn't play that game, even though the numbers are the same, because the fear of losing that much money is sort of

insurmountable. And so people have these, even though you should play that game, right? And a large business would play that game. And even a rational actor would play that game. And so people have, so that's a cognitive bias called loss aversion, right? Like losing $100, you feel more bad for losing $100 than you feel good when you win $100. Right, yeah. The sunken cost fallacy, a close cousin, right? So you have people who hold on to an investment just because they have – it's gone down a certain amount. Yeah, yeah. have it's gone down a certain amount yeah yeah yeah my favorite story of of sunk cost is uh is there's this uh tennis this tennis club where um where you can rent uh where the outdoor courts

are free but the indoor courts you have to rent and you have to rent them ahead of time you have to rent them like three weeks ahead of time and you just pay like 50 bucks for for the court for an hour or whatever and uh and this is real case. I forgot where it was. But in like March or April, and the outdoor courts are generally considered to be far more pleasurable because you're outside and it's warm and whatever, sunny. And the indoor courts are, you know,

these uncomfortable like white lights or whatever. And so what happens is in April, it'll be a beautiful sunny day and the people will be playing on the indoor courts and the outdoor courts are empty and you say well why are you playing on the indoor court uh you should go play outside and they're like well we've already paid for the indoor court right like we already we paid for it last week so now we're going to go to the indoor court we're going to play and you're like but the outdoor court is far nicer and it's empty why don't you go play there right and they

go well no because we've paid for this one right And so it's a sunk cost fallacy, right? And this is a cognitive bias, right? You should do the thing that is most, like, you know, you should play tennis on the most pleasurable court then. It doesn't matter if you paid 50 bucks a week ago for the less pleasurable court. If the nicer court is open right now, you should play on the nicer court. So I should mention for folks, as imperfect as Wikipedia might be, if you search list of cognitive biases, don't search cognitive bias. Search list of cognitive biases. There's a long list of these types of cognitive biases. And there are also a lot of books that explore this, like Think Twice.

But there's sort of two approaches here, right? Or two ways that you can minimize the damage of cognitive biases or extract value from them, right? The first is correcting those cognitive biases, or at least becoming aware of them. The second is harnessing your inherent cognitive biases for something positive, right? So for instance, there are cases where experiments have been done with, say, gym memberships. And so having someone pay on a monthly basis for gym membership is not nearly as effective as, say, having them overpay in advance and then giving them a refund of X amount for each Y number of times they go to the gym, uh, and sort of harnessing that type of prepayment and loss aversion and sunken cost, uh, to, to incentivize somebody to do

something positive they wouldn't otherwise do. Um, so it's, uh, anyway, this, this is also something that I like to nerd out about. So yeah. Yeah. What's, what's, what's a behavioral, what's a cognitive bias that you, that you overcame or something that you're currently working on? Anything in particular? Uh, yeah, sure. I mean, I think all of these things were things that, uh, all these things are things that are very innate in everybody. Uh, and so I think, you know, I, I, at some point I did have sunk cost fallacy. At some point i did have uh loss aversion and these kind of things um let me see what's a big one that i think another big one that everyone has is anchoring and i certainly had that before which is uh you know in a negotiation where uh when it's not clear like what the price for something should be uh you should

you should just throw out a huge number. Like, like, okay. Like what you said, like you want me to be, if you wanted me to be your, your mentor,

right. Your math mentor. Right. And so what should an hourly rate be between you and me? Like I have, like I have no idea. Like I, I don't,

I've never taught like, you know, for, for, uh, you know, for a living. And,

uh, so we'd have no idea. You and I. So in that silent moment when, when you and i are like what do you think the price should be uh i'm gonna blurt out a thousand dollars an hour that's what i'm gonna say right and it's not because i think i deserve that it's because now i've anchored the conversation saying a huge number like that uh has like blown away your like you know it's destroyed

like your brain i've just destroyed your brain. It's not hard. It's not hard. And so now when we settle on a final number, it's going to be much higher than it would have been otherwise. And that's just a cognitive bias. And now, like you said, you use these to your advantage. This is a situation in which I can use that to my advantage. Especially because I suck at math on top of that. Yeah. So right, where is the final – if I hadn't done that, the final price might have been $25 an hour.

And since I threw out that huge number, it's like screwed up your brain now. And the final price is instead going to be $40 an hour because I've done this anchoring thing. And so that's a great one for all you listeners out there. If you're about to go into a negotiation, try this out. It only works when there's not a preset sort of reference point. If you're like, I'm going to sell you my used Toyota, and how much should it be? A ballpark should be five grand. I can't be like, a hundred grand. It just sounds stupid and rude.

So it only works really when there's not a good expectation from either party. That is a good point, though, that negotiating is a fantastic way. That's probably the most systematic way that I've tried to address my own self-defeating instincts would be another way to look at biases, right? So The Secrets of Power Negotiating is a great book. The audio is even better. Getting Past No, I think, is a fantastic book. Better than Getting to Yes. Have you read any particular books on negotiating? Actually, yeah. The first book that came to mind for me was Getting to Yes.

Oh, Getting to Yes. Okay. But I love Getting to Yes, and I love a lot of important things that people misunderstand. And I've just furthered that with the example I just said, was that not all negotiation is a zero-sum game. I think Getting to Yes is a great exposition of that. Yep. Yeah. No, I think you'd enjoy getting past no.

It was actually written after getting to yes by one of the co-authors of getting to yes. When you think of the word successful or hear the word successful, who's the first person that comes to mind and why? I think I'd say Bill Gates. Maybe that's a cliche, sort of obvious answer. Depends on the reasons you give, I guess. Yeah, he's in tech, right? He is slash was a computer nerd. I'm a computer nerd. I'm a computer nerd. He built an immense and one of the greatest software companies, greatest technology companies ever, and something that I aspire to do.

And then not only that, but then sort of the second chapter of his life, he's now gone and done all this great philanthropy. And it's something that I would love to follow in his footsteps on that when retirement time comes for me, is to go and give back and do these philanthropic efforts. If you were to follow Bill Gates' path in a lot of those respects that you just mentioned, what are the things about Bill Gates that if you could opt out of emulating, you would opt out of emulating? I don't know. I guess that is a tough one.

I guess you could see he was very rough on his own employees within Microsoft. And I think that at a younger age, I was also very abrupt and sort of susceptible to bouts of anger and whatever. And I think I've come a long way at this company

to be a lot nicer. I had a couple of startups in my 20s, and I think I was very sort of mercurial in those startups. But by the time I had started ZocDoc, I had sort of ironed all that out, and it's much better to be a nice person when you're managing things. I like mercurial. That's a good adjective. It makes me think of a comedian named Jim Gaffigan. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. But he said, yeah, you know, I wish I were – I think he said at some point, I'm paraphrasing, but he's like, yeah, you know, if you're a Latin guy or woman and you're really angry, people say, wow, it's just that Latin temper.

And he's like, but if I behave that way, people just say, wow, that guy's a dick. But mercurial, I like that choice. It's just my Indian passion coming through. Yeah, Indian passion. Exactly. I don't know what to – I can't pull off Scandinavian passion. It doesn't usually get accepted. So on the flip side, what's the first face that comes to mind when you think punchable?

Oh, Jesus. I don't know. I can't. I don't know. Come on. It doesn't have to be a real person. I'll give you an out. I don't know. Maybe the Jersey Shore people.

Right. out uh i don't know maybe the jersey shore people uh right or the you know the sort of people that are uh you know famous for for being famous yeah like not not the people that are you know have actually contributed built stuff yeah and build stuff yeah um what's the uh what are the most frequently played albums or artists on your iPhone or computer? Well, I love the Beatles a lot. And I think that the more I listen to them, the more complexity and sort of stuff you discover as you listen to their stuff over and over, which is great, right? A lot of pop songs are just really simple. And the first time you hear it, you've heard everything there is to hear um but you know and the Beatles early stuff was like that like it was really simple and kind of about like chasing girls and stuff um and then

later on they they got really really sophisticated and and uh you know there's a lot of lovely complexity to the music and as you know I'm a you know, I play music myself, and I understand quite a bit about music theory, which is, again, getting sort of mathematical, but really understanding why things sound good and why this chord sounds great here and this kind of stuff is all, once again, math. And not complicated math, simple math, but I love music theory, and those guys were the kings of that. What would be two or three tracks that you would suggest people listen to to explore that? Let me see.

If you find – let me think. I like Across the Universe a lot. So if you find, like, you can even see, like, which, once you understand music theory, you can even see, like, which ones were written by whom. And so you can see, like, Paul McCartney always plays this, he always puts the four minor in his songs, and that's sort of a music theory term. But he's a big fan of putting the four minor in his songs and that's sort of a music theory term but he's a big fan of putting the four minor in his writing

and so you can when you hear a four minor come up you're like I bet this one was written by McCartney and then you go look and so I like Across the Universe which does have a four minor in it I like I like Something. I think it's by George Harrison. Let me see. What are some other good ones?

Certainly the more psychedelic ones, like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is great. I Am the Walrus is great. There's really no end to the list. If you had a thousand people, non-musicians, people who listen to music, but have never played an instrument and you wanted to get them hooked on learning more about music and potentially playing music.

Yeah. What would you have them read, watch, listen, whether it's an instrument or otherwise? I mean, you are in large part responsible for getting me interested in hand drumming, right? But I'm not sure if that's the best gateway drug for people with music. But what would you have them listen to or buy or play with or do? If you had a thousand people and you had like a million dollars on the line, I'm not sure what the minimal threshold is for you to to make it i'll do a business case and say i can train this many people no yeah um uh i think that uh probably the guitar is the easiest because interesting i wouldn't have guessed that why yeah because i think well for a couple reasons

it's not it's probably not the easiest to uh to play in terms of like i mean you know it's kind of hard to hold a chord and obviously with a piano, you can just plunk the keys. But, um, but the second you get over the hump of learning three or four chords on guitar, uh, you're off to the races, right? Because you can learn, you can play so many pop songs, uh, with just three or four chords on guitar. And, uh, so within a few weeks you can already start playing uh you know simple songs and and then like twist and shout for example to go back to the beatles is is just three chords three easy chords uh and so you can play twist and shout and you know in a week or two really well and then and then what you do is as you learn each new song uh pick a song with one extra chord in it right so so this next song has the same three chords as twist and shout but one minor chord in it and so

now right so now you're learning that new song you're leveraging right 75% you already know because it's the other three chords and you're only picking up one new chord and so then as as you play you know as you pick new songs just add one new chord each time on your repertoire grows of songs you know and the repertoire of chords you know and the repertoire of chords you know also grows uh and it makes right and so it's really easy to get into that groove where it's fun to play because you're playing songs that everybody likes um and it doesn't feel like you know work or or rehearsal or practice it's just you know each one i just

have to practice one new chord uh and over time you you know, over the course of a year, you'll learn a ton of songs. Ned, as a couple of resources for folks potentially, one is just Googling Axis of Awesome, who I think, I don't know if you've seen this. It does an amazing example of showing with three or four chords how you can play almost every pop song you've ever heard. That chord progression is called one, five, six, four. Uh,

and, uh, well, there you go. People could just Google that. So chord progression, one, five,

six, four. That's in the music theory notation. It'd be one, five, six, four. And then,

and they play like a hundred different songs. Uh, and it's really hilarious. Yeah. They're, they're amazing. Uh, are there any,

for someone to add one chord at a time without having to manually figure it out themselves and kind of reinvent the wheel, is there any particular approach that you would suggest in doing that? Any way that you would Google for that to figure it out or a YouTube approach or teachers? I mean, there's an extreme wealth of online diagrams and YouTube videos about how to do these things. So, you know, what would you search for to whittle it down?

I think it's a paradox of choice challenge for a lot of people. Yeah, I don't know, really. I guess it's not like for the basic chords. It's it's really like any anything will do uh you know for example a d major chord it's just you know it's three of your fingers your index middle and fourth finger uh and then you have to put them on the bottom three strings of the of the guitar on the second fret third fret and second fret and so you just have to you know it's just that right it's not more complicated than that there's no like specific uh you know specific form that you have to do when you approach the guitar or whatever.

You just got to slam your three fingers down on those three frets, on those three strings, and you'll play a D chord. And so at that level, you just need to know which fingers to put on which strings where. And it's not an intense sort of form exercise or anything. Cool. All right, last question for now in this installment. If you could give your 20-year-old self advice at this point in retrospect, what would it be? And it doesn't have to be one thing. Oh, man.

Or just 20-year-olds in general. It could be you, yourself, but it could be in general. Sure. I mean, I guess it would go back to these. So I'd say certainly when you're young, do the things, do the entrepreneurial things, because those are the things that will get you, right? You'll learn the most by far. And so I did, like I said, I did two startups in my 20s and they were, you know, neither one was a great hit. Uh, but, um, but the amount I learned in, you know, one year of doing a startup was like doing, you know, it was like seven years of working at a, at a, at a, you know, at a big company.

And so, you know, when you're young and, you know, you just finished college or whatever, and you've got this, uh, you know, you've got this freedom and you're not encumbered with, uh, you know, uh, you know, with a spouse and kids that you have to pay for. And you can live on ramen noodles and all this stuff. That's the time to go and take this entrepreneurial risk. If you spend five years doing it, you will have learned like 35 years worth of career progression and life skills in those five years of just risking and failing and risking and failing. So even if it's a total flop, the person that you come out at the end of it as is far ahead of if you just gone and worked at a big company. So on that point, I lied about the last question. This is one more. For people who are graduating now or their next gig? I know it's

a highly personal thing, but let's, let's just say people graduating, uh, college in the near future for the sake of simplicity. Yeah. I mean, it's just like figure out a market need, like anything that you have in your day to day world, uh, you know, that, that sucks. Like what is, you know, is it hard to find parking? Is a movie theater dirty? And just try to solve that problem. I think that's a great way to get started. You'll learn a lot. You'll do something.

You'll create a website where it shows you which movie theaters are dirty and you'll realize, wow, there's no revenue from this website. I can't make any money telling people what movie theaters are dirty. But then that's a learning by itself. And you come away from that and you're like, okay, I need to think about things with actual revenue opportunities. And you'll do that iterative process and you'll flop a bunch.

But that's fine. That's the learning process and it's the school of hard knocks uh and you're going to learn a ton just doing that kind of stuff awesome well nick i think uh this is this is a great place to stop for now i'm sure we'll have uh a round two in person with uh some food and some wine but that's great a lot of fun where can people learn more about uh you or zoc doc where would you like people to check in person with some food and some wine. That's great. A lot of fun, a lot of fun. Where can people learn more about you or ZocDoc? Where would you like people to check what you're up to out? Certainly, I'm on the About Us page of ZocDoc.

But more importantly, if you need a doctor, it really is the best place to find a doctor. So ZocDoc, Z-O-C-D-O-C.com. For myself, I don't have any about, I don't have a shrine to me on the web anywhere. So I've got a LinkedIn page. You can find me on the LinkedIn page, I suppose. But ZocDoc is my pride and joy, so go there. Awesome.

All right, well, I'm going to cut my teeth on some ping pong, and we may have to have a showdown next time we get together. Balls of Fury style. Awesome, man. Well, thanks very much, and I will talk to you soon. Awesome. Thanks a lot. All right, buddy. Bye-bye.

Bye. Bye.