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#36_ Theres Always A Third Door · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: It's great to see you. Thanks for thanks for coming
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: out to do this. Man, I'm really excited for you.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: This has been a long time coming. I think I
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: said to you like six or seven years. See, like
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: the very beginning of the podcast, I was like, well,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: let me know when the book's done, and you know,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: come and tell me about it. And I was like,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: I wonder if that guy's ever going to finish that book.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: Every time we've seen each other, you're like, so, how's it,
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: how's it going, Alex? Was I that dire? No, that
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: one came off to me because inside, for me, I
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: was I was drowning, you know, because it's been seven years.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: I can't believe you've been working on this book for
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: seven years. So just to kind of lay the foundation
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: for this, I remember this is how we sort of
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: first connected and met. My editor on Finding Ultra at
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Crown is an amazing guy called Rick Oregan, who we
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: can talk about because he deserves to be recognized. And
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: I was having a phone conversation with him. I can't
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: even remember whether Finding Ultra had even come out yet,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Like it it was probably sometime in twenty twelve, and
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: he's like, hey, I'm working on this book with this
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: young guy. He's really cool. I think he'd really like him,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: like I want to I want to connect you guys
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: like he is going to be a really cool book.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: And that's when your name first came up and we
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: had lunch. I can't remember when that was, but a.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: Long time ago.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you told me your story, which I thought
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: was amazing in this book that you were working on.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: And then we would bump into each other once or
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: twice a year and I'd be like, how's the book going?
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: And you know what's funny is that I know other
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: people who get stuck in this kind of situation where
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: they're working on a book and it gets protracted and
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: a lot of them don't end up finishing it. So
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: I was like, I wonder if maybe he's never going
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: to finish this book, Like you know what's going to
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: happen here, you know, so here we are, it's coming
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: out in Jane. God, I'm proud of you. I feel
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: very emotionally invested in this journey that you've been on.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: So it's really cool though, And thank you for all
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: the encouragement along the way.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great. I mean, we so Rick Corgan was
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: your editor on this book. And just so people understand,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: like when I first pitched Finding Ultra, like when you
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: when you write a book, you write a proposal. I'm
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: sure you did. You did this as well, right, And
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: then and then my book agent sent it out to
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: a couple publishing houses and she was very tempered with me.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: She's like, listen, you really got to thread the needle here.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: You have a good story, but like you know, it's
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: really tough out there, and like, you know, I'm gonna
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: do my best, but I'm just not sure. And then
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: we got a bite with Crown. She's like, we got
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: a call with Crown and it was my very first
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: like pitch over the phone. I'd never done anything like
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: that before. And he's like, you're gonna have like ten
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: minutes or five minutes on the phone with this guy,
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: like you got to sell yourself. So we did this
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: call and I remember I was like that the Calabasis Commons,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: it's like outdoor mother here and the service was not
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: very good and I had to I like hid behind
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: a bush, like do this call, like make sure there
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: wasn't any kind of like noise, and I was like
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: crouched down and did this call, and it went well
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: and he ended up like bidding on the book. He
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: really wanted the book, and we ended up selling Finding
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: Ultra to Crown and I remember saying to my book agent,
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: I'm going to bring this around to you. Don't worry.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: I remember saying to my book agent. Yeah, but this
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: guy Rick Horgan, like he's not actually going to be
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: my editor, right, Like they're going to sign me some
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: kind of junior person. Because this guy, Rick Horgan, who
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: I later found out I would have panicked on the
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: phone had I known this during the call, had like edited,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: you know, Hillary Clinton's biography, like he was the editor,
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: you know. And I was like, yeah, I'm like, this
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: guy's way too senior and important to be interested in
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: what I'm doing, you know. I was like, no, no, no,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: he's going to be your editor. And we had this
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: amazing collaboration and I learned so much about the art
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: of writing and storytelling, and he really pushed me, and
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: I remember at one point he said to me, he goes, listen,
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: here's the little secret, dirty little secret about New York
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: editors and the publishing industry. Editors don't really edit because
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: they have too many books. So you have this romantic
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: idea that you're going to have this amazing relationship with
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: this editor and you're going to be on the phone
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: with him at midnight having these conversations about philosophy, and
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: it's like it doesn't work that way. And he was
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: basically saying, like, I don't have time to really even
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: read everything that's coming across my desk that I'm responsible for.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: But I really like your story and I really want
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: to help you, and I want to make this book
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: the best that it can be. And he really did
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: roll up his sleeves and he really helped the book
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: become the book that it became, like I couldn't have
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: done it without him, and I'm just forever grateful to him.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: And so I'm interested first, and I would imagine you
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: had a similar relationship with him.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: You nailed it when I first met Rick. So I've
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: been through three different because I've been working on this
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: for seven years and turnover in the publishing industry is
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: very high. Now I've gone through three different.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Editors, right, because he left Crown.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: He left Crown, but he was my original editor, right,
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: And the thing Rick did that changed my life, and
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: I really mean that is when I had originally started
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: this book. It was a book about in my head.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: You know, I'm this eighteen year old kid. I'm gonna
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: go interview all these people who I admire figure out
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: how they launched their careers. And each chapter is a
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: different person, you know. Chapter one is Bill Gates, chapter
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: two is Warren Buffett. And that was my thinking about.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: So it took two years until I got the deal
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: with Crown, and then a year into the deal, Rick
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: calls me into his office and You're gonna appreciate this.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: He calls me into his office and he has that
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: like gruff New York voice, right, and he's like, Alex,
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: what's the goal of this book? You have to understand
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: this is a year into me working with it.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: What do you mean.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: It's a very strange question again, and he's like, what's
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: the what's the goal? Is it to change people's lives
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: or to inform them? And I'm like, well, that's clearly
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: a leading question. Yeah, I want to try to change lives.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: And he goes, well, the book you're writing isn't going
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: to do that. And I'm like, we've been working together
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: for a year, how are you bringing this up just
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: now and he's like, well, I have a son your age,
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: you wouldn't have listened. And essentially what he told me
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: is that if you look at any magazine, Q and A,
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: you know, there might be great information in there, but
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: it's never changed a life. But if you look at
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: all the stories, and we actually talked about this in
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: our first lunch, I don't know if you remember, but
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: the stories that change lives are this same story arc.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: You know, there's this person who everyone can relate to,
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: and as you know, she or he goes on this
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: journey and evolves, so does the reader, and that's how
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: you change someone's life.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: And I do remember having that conversation with you, and
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: I think that's one of the reasons why he suggested
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: that you read Finding Ultra because one of the things
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: that was sort of core and key. I mean, look,
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: my book is about my story. It's different than your book.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: But I think what he was trying to convey to
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: you is you have to get people emotionally invested in
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: what you're doing here. And if it's too drive it's
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: just informational, you're never going to have that connection. So
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: people aren't going to be as engaged with the material
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: as they could be. They need to see it through
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: your eyes and your experience. So to the extent that
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: you can invest yourself in this story and make your
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: journey core to that narrative, the better off you're going
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: to be in that quest to transform lives. And you
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: accomplished that. I mean, that's ultimately what you ended up
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: doing in this.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: Book, right, And it took me really like at least three months,
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: because I think when we had first spoken, I was
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: in that three month period of like awkwardness of not
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: knowing if I was going to follow Rick's advice or not,
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: because I had spent years saying I was not going
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: to even use my name in the book, like this
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: wasn't about me at all. And what Rick had to,
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: you know, drill in my textbook essentially, and he helped
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: me realize, Look, it's not about you. Literally, you're a
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: conduit for the reader, and that's how the book is now, right.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: You have to be a cipher, you have to be
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: a stand in for the audience exact. Yeah cool, So
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: let's uh, let's talk about how it all came together.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, your story is so crazy, Like how old
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: were you when I first met you.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: When I first saw something like that, I had just
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: turned twenty when you and I first met, you were
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: just you were just turned So i'd been working on
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: the book for about two years, right.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: All right, So backing it up from there, let's go
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: all all the way back. You grew up in Los Angeles,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: h huh, Iranian Jews. Your grandfather was living in Iran. Like,
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: I love this story about your grandfather because I think
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: that I feel like you're you share a lot of
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: DNA with him, and I feel like that part of
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: your story kind of informs your ethos and perspective on
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: business and life.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: So and it's so funny because I didn't know this
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: story until much later in my life, when I was
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: a kid who was sort of kept secret from us.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: To fully understand who I am, you actually have to
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: go back, like you said to you know, ninety years ago,
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: when my grandfather was born, and he was born in
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: Persia and Iran. He was the youngest of six siblings,
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: so five older siblings boy, four girls, and then him.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: And when my grandfather was three years old, his father
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: passed away. And the thing you have to know about
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: Iran at that time is that women weren't really allowed
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: to work, shows up to the men in the family
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: to provide. Thankfully, there was an older brother and he
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: was about eighteen, so he started working and taking care
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: of the family. And then two years after that the
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: older brother dies, so now the only male left in
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: the family is the five year old child, my grandpa.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: But the mom, thankfully, was very wise and she said, look,
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: you're going to school and I'll find ways to make
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: ends meet. So she's selling, you know, her wedding ring,
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: she's selling the voss and the living room. She's just
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: making things work barely, you know, putting food on the table.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: And by the time my grandpa was about eight or nine,
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: he realized this isn't very sustainable. So he was flipping
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: through the newspaper one day and I think it might
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: have been the classified section. He sees a order from
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: the Iranian government asking for paint dinner for a government building.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: And he's like nine years old, and I think he
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: was like an apprentice at a local shop, so he
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: knew like what a you know, an assertion order is,
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: so he he like gets out the bid and he
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: just but because he's nine, he doesn't know how much
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: the cost of these things are. He fills it out
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: and sends it in and because he gave a low bid,
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: he he won the contract because they don't know that
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: he's nine, no nowhere on the pharma lood. You know,
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: his handwady must have been fine. So you know, he
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: wins this bid and he's nine years old, has no
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: idea what to do. So he, you know, goes to
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: the bizarre and has this you know, family friend who
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: has paint thinner, and he's you know, gets the paint
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: thinner from this guy and gives it to the government,
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: makes a profit. And he even remembers like buying like
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: pistachios on the way home and it was like this
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: big bag of pistachios and he was like the happiest
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: day of his life. A couple of weeks later, he's
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: in geometry class and he's in like elementary school, right,
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: and the police show up in his class and they
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: pull him out of class and they say the paint
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: inner you gave us is expired and if you don't
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: get us new paint thinner, you're gonna have a serious problem.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: And especially when you're a Jew and Iran, when the
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: police are saying you have a serious problem.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: They're literally going to arrest and in prison.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: And the nine naresn't this ship and it's yeah, it's
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: so wild because what he ends up doing is he
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: goes back to that family friend and says, hey, the
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: paint thinner you gave me is expiring, and he goes,
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: that's your problem, not mine. So now my grandpa has
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: to go. You know, this young little Jewish boy in
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: this you know, bizarre and Tehran ends up finding another
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: paint thinner dealer, uses his profits to buy that paint thinner,
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: gives it to the government and is home free. But
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: that sort of sets him on this track of, you know,
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: doing more orders for the government, and he starts getting
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: better at it and better at it. In the meantime,
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: he's getting his you know, PhD in chemistry, and by
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: age fifty he had done really well for himself. He
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: had one of the tallest buildings in the you know,
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: nation's capital, you know, working on the top floor, and
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: at age fifty he had four kids, my mom included,
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: and right around then the Iranian Revolution happens, and they
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: did something very ingenious, very cruel, Bavarian genius, which is
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: before the revolution literally started the sort of created this
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: list of influential Jews that they needed to take out
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: to make it much easier to have the revolution, and
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: my grandpa was on that list unknowingly. So he's in
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: his office one day, and it's still crazy to hear
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: him tell the story because he doesn't do it often.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: But to my understanding, you know, loads of men with
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: like you know, masks over their head break in through
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: the ground floor and surround the building and go up
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: all the staircases to the point where he knew, like
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: through a telephone system that they were coming, and he
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: had like thirty seconds, but all the staircases were covered.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: And oh, there's one part of the story that's crazy,
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: which is he got his passport and like threw it
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: into an air and air conditioning vent and told his assistant,
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: who is Muslim, Look, they're not going to get you.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: They're only here to get me, like recover my passport
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: in case I find a way out. And you know,
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: my grandpa gets captured at gunpoint. They put like a
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: bag over his head and take him to this compound,
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: which is essentially an execution compound. And even to this day,
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: when I ask him about the scariest time. He's been
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: through a lot. And when I ask him about the
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: scariest time in his life, he said he was there
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: because every night you would hear gunshots and a different
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: person who's being held doesn't come back. So you figure
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: out very it's not like they're reading you, Miranda Rights,
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: you're just now there.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So you're just you're counting down until you're the
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: person who's picked.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, my grandpa is trying to find
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: a way out of this thing. He's trying to you know,
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: talk his way out off for bribes like nothing. And
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: soon enough, over the speaker they call his name and
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: they put a bag over head and you know, walk
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: him down this corridor and when the bag comes off,
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: he's out of the compound. One of the guards had
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: taken the bribe, and my grandpa, you know, escapes heron
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: during the revolution, makes it to America as a refugee.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Wow, and.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: Sadly actually has to go back to where he was
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: fifty years ago, you know, with nothing, having to rebuild
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: a life, except this time he has a wife and
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: four kids, so.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: He brings it. He's able to bring his family. Yeah.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: And so that's how your parents.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: So that's how my mom, my mom came here as
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: a teenager through the revolution. So my grandpa again just
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: I think twelve failed businesses in America before he started
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: this random Spectra photometer company, and you know, has rebuilt
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: his life. But what that story really shows me is
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: that it's just this incredible story of possibility, which is
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: he started out in this unbelievable dire situation, build himself
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: up and was taken to the darkest place that I
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: can't even understand, and was able to come out the
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: other end. So that's really what I.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Resilience, the perseverance. But also like this guy, I mean,
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: what he was doing in elementary school, like that's just
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: built into the fabric of his DNA is like a
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: little Gary V. Hustler, like you know, right out of
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: the womb. And I see, I see aspects of that,
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: elements of that in your in your path.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: I appreciate that too.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: What I mean, like, I think you're you're carrying part
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: of your grandfather with you. I mean, is he's still around.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: You're the craziest thing. He's still around. He's ninety two
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: and still goes to the office. He doesn't know another
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: way to live. Yeah, he's never taken a vacation. It's wild.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Well, I would imagine part of that is, you know,
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: when you've suffered to the extent that he has and
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: lost it, like there's a connection holding onto it or
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: continuing to grow something that's probably a little bit more
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: deep than we can understand.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what he's been through is, like you said, it's
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: very hard to understand.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: Right, So your parents really grow up in the United States,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: or this is so your grandfather was on your mom's side.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is my mom's dad. My dad came
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: when he was about nineteen, and my mom came when
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: she was about you know, ten, and they met here
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: and it's you know, I can't fathom what life would
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: have been like if I went through what they went
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: through as teenagers, you know, leaving your entire every And
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: they didn't come here thinking they were refugees. They came
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: here thinking they were coming for a two month vacation
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: as the riots calmed down back at home, and then
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: they would go back. They had all their stuff, They're like, oh, yeah,
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: just pack a day bag, we'll be back in a
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: month or so. And they just never been home ever since.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Right, Right, right, So how does that in form like
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: their worldview, and how does that worldview triple down into
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: the expectations placed on the young Alex Benigen.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: Well, so how that affected their worldview, whether they knew
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: it or not. Was I grew up in a family
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: where like fear was in the walls, and understandably not
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: to an eight year old Alex, I'm just like, why
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: won't my mom let me sleep over at a friend's house?
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Why won't my mom like let me go on a
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: field trip, like without her physically driving? Like it was crazy,
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: Like even school trips were giant debates in my family
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: because there was just this tremendous amount of trauma that
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: my parents have gone through.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and a betrayal of trust to be safe, who
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: to trust? You know, you're gonna get on a bus
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: and go across town.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: Right with the school, the government funded school. And of course,
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: like as a kid, I had no.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: What are you talking about?
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: I'm like, we're just going to Yosemite. Let us go,
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: And they're like with my younger sister, my mom was
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: my my mom followed the bus. I've never told anybody this,
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: but you know, it's a testament to my mom's love
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: and also to the trauma they went through.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but she came over at ten. Does she remember
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: what her dad went through? Or is that as namory
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: that she can't.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: It's in your blood, you know, when you're And there's
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: a certain amount of shame too with it, because when
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: I was growing up, I would look in family photo
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: albums and see my grandpa wasn't in pictures for like
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: a year period or two year period, and I would
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: ask where he was and they would say to donnishkabude,
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: which means he was at the university. It wasn't until
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: I was eighteen I found out he was actually right,
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: it actually no. So it was almost this like skeleton
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: in my family's closet that my grandpa was held to
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: be ex.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: Hard to understand why that would create shame, though it
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: certainly wasn't, you know, by any fault of his.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: You you have to spend more time with Persian because everything
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: creates shame. It's like, oh, the way I poured my water,
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: it's very shameful.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: Hang your head low exactly, all right. So so you
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: come out of the womb though, and they're like, this
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: kid's going to be a.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: Doctor because again, I exactly, I came out of the womb.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: My mom cradles me in her arms and stamps empty
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: on my ass and sends me on my way. And
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: that's what happens when you're the son of you know,
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: these Persian Jewish immigrants where And I have a bunch
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: of friends who I grew up with who went through
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: the same thing because and this is something my grandma
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: would tell me. In a revolution, they can take your money,
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: they can take your possessions, but they can't take away
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: what you know. And if you're a doctor and you
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: can save people, no one can take that away from you.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: So me being a doctor as a kid, wasn't this
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: like amazing fun fantasy. It was like and it was
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: a very focused, cemented life track. I wore scrubs to
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: school for Halloween. I went to pre med summer camp
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: at high school, and by the time I got to college,
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: I was like the pre med of premets. And it
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: wasn't until the first month where I was living in
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: the dorms that I wasn't surrounded by my parents, my grandparents,
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: and this weird phenomenon happened. All these things that in
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: my entire childhood were my identity started sucking the life
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: out of me. I remember looking at this like towering
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: stack of biology books feeling like they were like dementors,
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: totally sucking the soul. And at first I assumed, maybe
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: I'm just being lazy, And that's when I started to wonder, well,
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: what if I'm not on my path? What if I'm
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: on a path somebody placed me on and I'm just
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: rolling down and thus into It's like this life crisis
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: of it wasn't about switching age or as much as
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: it was changing my identity.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: Right, And prior to that, I would imagine you didn't
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: spend a lot of time really contemplating what makes you
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: happy or what would be fulfilling for you or.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: I don't like those questions. But yeah, there's question of
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: happiness and an immigrant family, yeah.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: I mean my my, you know, my rearing is very
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: different than yours. But you know, I can relate to
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: that like I was, you know, in a somewhat analogous situation.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: And it took me a lot longer, that kind of
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: dawning epiphany that we had much earlier, But I understand
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: on some level, you know what that's like, and and
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: and you know, coming up in this family where shame
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: was very much a part of the the sort of uh,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: you know, family, it's not a part imagine the like,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: is there anything more shame provoking than confronting the fact
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: that you may not want to pursue this path that
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: you've been on your whole life? And what would that
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: look like? Uh, you know, in terms of communicating that
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: your parents.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: Oh my god. It was terrifying because when I first
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: started even questioning what I wanted to do with my
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: life going through that life crisis, I couldn't tell my
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: parents I was even questioning it. So it's almost like
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: I was living this double life where my mom would
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: call me and ask how my pre med classes were going.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, it's great. Then I would like hang
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: up on her and like sneak the for our work
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: Week under my like blanket and read it.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: Were you still enrolled in the pre med classes or
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: had you? Yeah? Of course, but you're just you know,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: checked out.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's so funny because a part of me
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: thought I was being a slacker, but in hindsight, I was,
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: Like I said, I was like sneaking the for our
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: work Week into class and reading it So I was
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: working hard just on these other things because the questions
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: that evolved naturally were, Okay, not only do I not
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: know what I want to do with my life, how
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: did all these people who I love up to how
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: did they do it? You know? How did Bill Gates
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: when he was a sophomore in college nineteen years old,
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: nobody knew his name self soft out of his dorm
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: room or had it Spielberg when he was rejected from
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: film school, become the youngest director in Hollywood history. So
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: I thought, all right, before I figure out what I
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: am going to do, let me just get some base
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: knowledge so I can figure it out. So I just
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: went to the library and just ripped through these biographies
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: and business books and self help books. But eventually I
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: was left empty handed. And that's when this naive eighteen
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: year old thinking kicked in, and I thought, well, if
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: no one's going to write the book I'm dreaming of reading,
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: why not just write it myself?
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: Right? And you're ATCR are you a freshman?
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: And it doesn't. Really. It's like the perfect caliber of
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: naive where I'm dumb enough to not know anything, but
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: I also like have resources in the sense that like
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: I'm in a dorm room with a computer in a
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: lot of free time, So it's like the perfect combination.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, naive days underestimated. Like there's nothing like the power
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: of not really knowing what you're getting into. Like look
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: back now seven years later, Like had you known, Okay,
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: this is gonna be a seven year adventure, you know,
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: like with all of these pitfalls and valleys, you would
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: have never undertaken it if you really understood what it entailed.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's I like think about this all the
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: time that while there's like tremendous value in being an
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: expert in a field, you know, you have connections, you
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: have all this knowledge and expertise, one of the biggest
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: you know, advantages of being naive and being an amateur
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: is you're not limited in the way an expert is
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: because an expert sees the world through a lens of
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: limitation because they know how things work. But it you know,
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: someone who's naive sees it the a world a possibility
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: and that is incredibly powerful.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I can understand how at that time you
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: would think, well, how hard can it be, Like I'm
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: just going to go find all these people that are
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: super awesome, and I'm gonna you know, interview them and
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: they're going to be happy to sit down with.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: Bill Gates helps kids all the time, you know, why
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: would we help me?
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: That was my thinking.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: But the idea was from the very beginning, like this
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: is going to be a book. I'm going to write
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: a book.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: My thinking was, you know, I was smart enough to
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: know Bill Gates won't do an interview for a blog.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: Right, because if you're writing a book, you're legit. And
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: this is the book, like, this is a book you
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: wish had been available in the library that would that
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: would convey all the secrets and the wisdom to a
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: young person about how to answer that question what should
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: I do with my life?
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah? It was is that correct at its core at
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: that time, especially, it was less about an age and
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: more about a stage when someone's starting out. It doesn't
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: matter if it's you know, they're starting out from college
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: or they're an executive switching industries. When you're just starting
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: out and no one wants to take your calls, no
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: one wants to take your meetings, how do you find
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: a way to break through? Because that was my problem
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: and I didn't want a book just focused on business
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: or just focus on entertainment. I wanted a book that
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: covered every industry. So what ended up happening is me
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: and my best friends one night and you actually know
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: one of them, Kevin Heckkatt.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: You know we're all eighteen. I call them up. I'm like, guys,
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: you know I need your help because I didn't know
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: what really the definition of success was, so I didn't
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: know who to interview, and I don't really believe in
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: these like Forbes one hundred lists. So I was like, guys,
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: if we can create our dream university, who would be
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: our professors? And then that made it really easy. You know,
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: Bill Gates would teach business, Lady Gaga music, Steve Wosney
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: have computer science, Jane Goodall's science, My Angelou poetry, you know,
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: Pitt Bull can teach Latin American studies. Like you know,
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: we're just dumb eighteen year old kids, right, Okay, And
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: we created this dream list and I wrote it on
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: a note card and I put in my wallet and
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: I was like, you know, how hard could it be?
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: That I assumed would be the easy part. The hard
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: part I figured was getting money to fund the journey?
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Right, How you can to do this. I mean, was
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: the idea that you would stop out of college or
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: you were going to try to right they were in college.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's still a looming conversation with the parents
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: that's out there, that's got to be causing you some strain.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: All of this was like my secret double life at
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: this point. My parents didn't know any of this was happening.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: That's why even with the money thing, I couldn't like
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: talk to them in brainstorm how to make it happen.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: And I had to figure it out for myself because
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: I was buried in student loan dead. I was all
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: out of our MITZVA cash. So they had to be
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: a way to make some quick money. So two nights
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: before final exams, I'm in the library and I'm doing
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: what everyone's doing in the library, I'm on Facebook. And
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: so I'm there and I'm on Facebook and I see
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: someone's posting tickets to the prices right, and it's filming
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: the next day. And the first I know, this sounds
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: like preposterous, but the first thought was what if I
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: go on this show and win some money to fund
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: this dream? You know, not my brightest moment, but I
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: had a bigger problem. You know. I'd never seen a
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: full episode of the show before. I'd seen bits and
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: pieces growing up. I'd never seen a full episode, plus
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: at finals in two days, and I told myself it
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: was a horrible idea and not to do it. I
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: don't know if you've ever had one of those times
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: where like, this horrible idea keeps.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: You have a stupid idea of it, you can't shake it.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: Exactly, So I had the stupid idea, I can shake it,
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: and I remember, because I needed to focus on studying,
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: I didn't have much time because finals were in two days.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: I opened my spiral notebook to make a best and
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: worst case scenario list to prove to myself as a
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: bad idea. So I remember, like so vividly. I'm sitting
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: in this corner table in the library, and I'm like,
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: best and worst case scenarios, you know, worst case scenarios
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: fail finals, get kicked out of pre med, lose financial aid.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: Mom hates me, no, mom stops talking to me. You know,
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: look fat on TV. There are like twenty cons and
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: the only pro was maybe maybe win enough money to
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: fund this dream. And it felt almost as if someone
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: had tied a rope around my gut and was pulling
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: in a direction. So you know, that night I decided
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: to do the logical thing and pull an all nighter
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: to study. But I didn't study for finals. I studied
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: how to hack the prices?
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: Right? All right? Well, first of all, why not just
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: go on the price is right after finals?
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: Dude? I had the tickets. I had one chance to do. Okay,
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: I didn't know how to get tickets. I just right
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: they fell into my lap.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: I see, And how do you hack the price?
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: That's your inner parent right now looking at me like
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: you idiot?
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know the price is right, isn't going anywhere.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: It's been around for a while. Oh my god, how
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: do you so? All right, so how do you hack
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: the prices? Right? Like? What's the secret?
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: So they may could look completely random? You know, Alex,
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: come on down as if they like puld your name
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: out of a hat. During my all night or of research,
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: I learned there's actually a system to it. It wasn't
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: just luck.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: There's like blog posts out there people who are.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: Like it wasn't even a blog post. It was like
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two message boards with like the fiftieth comment
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: like I was, You're deep. I was like on the
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: twenty third oh of Google, Right, I'm like super deep
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: in this. And it's around three am where I find
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: out there's a producer who interviews every single person in
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: the audience. And I then I started, you know, researching
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: everything about the producer, and I learned, you know, what
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: his name was, where he was born, where he went
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: to college. I essentially knew what he ate for breakfast
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: that morning. And then I found out something even crazier,
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: Because you know, I would assume a lot of people
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: know about the producer. I then found out there's also
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: an undercover producer who's planted in the audience who can
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: firm or denies the main producers selection. So while some
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: people might know that, you know, you have a one
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: minute interview with a producer, no one knows that your
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: four hours waiting in line is an interview in and
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: of itself.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: Right, So this person sizing everybody up, trying to figure
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: out who's going to be the best guess to get picked. Right.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: So I the second I get to the CBS studio
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: a lot the morning of the prices, right, I just
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: you know, I don't know who the undercover producer. Is
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: I just assume everyone's the undercover producer, you know. So
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: I'm like dancing with the security guards, I'm flirting with
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: old ladies. I'm breakdancing and I don't know how to
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: break dance, and I'm waiting in line, and eventually it's
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: my turn to meet the producer. And you know, I
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: knew all about him. I knew, you know that he
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: had a clipboard, but it was never in his hands.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: The assistant sitting behind him, you know, maybe twenty feet away,
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: has the clipboard. And if he really likes you, he'll
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: keep talking and if he wants you on the show,
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: he'll turn around wink and she'll put like put your name,
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: you do that. I knew that going so I knew
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: like what I had to accomplish. I knew it wasn't
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: just him like shaking my hand and saying good luck.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: I knew I had to see the physical check, right.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: So I get there and I'm standing right in front
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: of him and he's like, you know, he has a rhythm.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: He's like, what's your name? Where you're from?
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: What do you do?
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: And I go, Hey, I'm Alex, I'm I'm eighteen, I'm
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: a freshman in college. I'm a pre med and he goes, whoa, whoa, whoa,
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: you're pre med. You probably spend a lot of time studying.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: How do you have time to watch the price is right?
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: And I go, oh, is that where? I am like, no,
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: I don't even get a pity laugh, Like you're giving
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: me more of a laugh than I got, So I
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: don't even get a pity laugh. And I can see
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: his eyes wandering, and like quickly, I knew I had
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: to do something. And in one of those business books
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: I had read, and I think it was like a
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: Tony Robbins book, it said human contact speeds up a relationship.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: So I had an idea. I needed to touch Stan.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: So I go to the producer stand. I'm like Stan, like,
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: come over here. I want to make a handshake with you.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: And he, you know, is very hesitanting and I'm like,
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: come on, come on. He comes over. I teach him
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: how to pound it and blow it up, and you know,
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: he laughs and he's like, oh, you're gonna do great,
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: good luck and starts walking away. You know, it doesn't
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: turn around strike too, doesn't. The assistant is right, and
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: the on the clipboard and This is like one of
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: those moments where you can see your entire dream like
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: right in front of you and see it walking away,
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: almost like slipping through your hands like sand. And the
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: worst part was that you know you didn't even have
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: a chance to fully prove yourself. So I don't know
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: what got into me, but I started yelling at the
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: top of my lungs. Stand like the whole audience shoots
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: their head around, like, are what's going on? And Stan
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: runs over like they think I'm having a seizure. He's like,
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: are you okay? What's happening? And now I have no
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: idea what I'm gonna say, so I'm just looking at him.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: He's gonna get tossed out for being a lunatic.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: But my thinking was, you know what's already gone. Yeah,
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: what's the point of staying right. I'm not on the
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: show at this point, so I might as well go
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: all the way in. So I'm looking at him. He's
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: looking at me, and this guy's like, you know, typical
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: Hollywood like turtle turtleneck, you know, red scarf even though
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: it's seventy degrees like, and I I just look at
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: him and I'm like, you're a scarf, and now I
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: like really don't know what I'm going to say next,
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: and you know, it's dead silent, like there's so much
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: tension right now.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: Like let's watch this guy just burying his grave right now.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: So I end up just looking at Stan with like
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: all the confidence I can and I just say the
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: only thing I can think. I'm like, I'm an avid
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: scarf collector. I have three hundred and sixty two pairs
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: in my dorm room and I'm missing that one. Where
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: did you get it? And I'm like freaking out And
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: he starts cracking up because I think he realized what
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: I was actually trying to do, and he like gives
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: me his garf. He's cracking. He's like, look, you need
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: this more than I do. He turns around, winks, and
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: this assistant makes.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: A work on the checkboard and you know you're in
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: I know, and man, that's so bananas.
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: Like it's like.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: It's not like you gave him the secret to the
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: universe or like part some wisdom that was undeniable that
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: made him. You just you just kind of like threw
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: a ninny. I mean that was like a hail Mary.
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know what that was.
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: The book Journey is pretty much me desperately throwing hail
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: mary's and missing nine out of ten. But the one
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: that makes it is like the craziest shit ever.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: But I think you know behind that is your willingness
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: to throw hail mary's. Like you're you have like look,
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: you have gump shin, you have hustle, you got you
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: have charisma of personality. I would imagine your grandfather must
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: have seen this in you. Did he identify you as
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: some kind of kindred spirit even though you were on
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: this empy with Jack.
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: You know. Funny enough, that's actually why he doubled down
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: so much on me becoming a doctor, because he didn't
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: want me to live and suffer the way he had
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: to as an entrepreneur.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: It was almost like he saw too much of himself
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: and you and wanted something different for you.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: That's crazy and ever thought of that.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So all right, so you get on the show
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: and like you win dig right, like what you win
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: like a sailboat or something.
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: I end up. Yeah, So the way the hacking of
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: the show worked, it was less Einstein and more for
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: a scump, and I ended up winning the whole showcase showdown,
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: winning a sailboat selling the sailboat, and that's how I
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: funded the book. And the sailboat I sold for like
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: twenty thousand dollars, which for a broke college student is
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: like a million bucks. Yeah, you know, my most expensive
• 37:53
  Speaker 2: expense is like Chipotle with guacamal. So you know, I'm
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: feeling like a billionaire. And I used that money to
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: on the journey. And you know, it took two years,
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: but I eventually got to Gates. It took three years
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: to get to Lady Gaga, and you know, like you said,
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: seven years later, the book is just finally finished.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: Right, And so you take this money, do you end
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: up stopping out of school or are you still a
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: student while you're doing this?
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: So I'm still a student because you know, I love
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: college and my I had some awareness of just how
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: much my parents had sacrificed for me to be in school.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: I remember, so when I got into college, my mom
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: said I couldn't go because we couldn't afford it, and
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: she really really insisted on me going to a community
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: college that was less expensive. But I remember my dad,
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: you know, the night before the deadline enrollment date, the
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: day you have to either confirm or deny and my
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: mom was like one hundred percent against me going, and
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: I remember through the walls hearing my dad, like my
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: dad never cried like a funeral, just never would cry.
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: The first time I had ever heard him cry in
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: the house and my life was that night, pretty much
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: telling my mom he wud do whatever it takes and
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: I had to go, and my mom said yes. So
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: I understood that how much my parents had given to
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: help make this impossible. So dropping out wasn't even on
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: the radar. But what ended up happening is now that
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: I had won the prices right, I was like Gung
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: co on making this mission come together. And to me,
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: the holy grail of interviews was Bill Gates, because when
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: I was eighteen, I thought, you know, if anyone had
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: the answers to the universe, that had to be Bill Gates.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: So I spent a whole year trying to get in
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: contact with Gates's office.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: And part of that is to legit amize this project
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: not only to yourself but to your parents, and to
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: kind of solidify that this is a real.
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: Thing, maybe subconsciously, like I wouldn't be surprised if that
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: was going on in my subconscious what I was thinking
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: at the time was and you know, this might sound
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: like a naive idea to some people, but to me,
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: I really believe it, which is, I just really believe
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: that if all these people come together, you know, not
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: for press, not to promote anything, but really just to
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: share their best wisdom with the next generation young people
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: can do so much more.
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a that's an altruistic pitch. That's a pitch
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: that's hard to turn down if you're somebody like Bill Gates.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: That was that was my thought. Was to my surprise,
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: Bill Gates doesn't do interviews with eighteen year old Collins. So,
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: you know, I spend a year getting in contact with
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: Gates' office, and finally, at you know, a year to it,
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: I'm nineteen, I get an on the phone if Gates
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: is chief of staff and we're on the phone, and
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: you know, you talked about the what was it? The
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: calabass is smart where you're on the phone of Crown.
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: So I have a similar story where I'm in a
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: CVS parking lot holding an ice cream cone when my
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: phone rings and I see like the Seattle area code,
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: and I knew who was I like, pick up the
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: phone and on the line it's Bill Gates's chief of
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: staff who like it's like Melinda Bill in this guy right,
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: like they run it's crazy. And he's like, so you
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: want to interview Bill? Huh, it's very I'm like, yeah,
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: it's my biggest stream. I'm the nineteen I'm like, it's
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: my biggest dream. And he's like, look, I love what
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: you're doing. I love that you're doing this to help others.
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: And I'm like thinking, I'm, you know, ninety five percent
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: there and he's like, but the thing is, we don't
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: really do interviews like this. He's like, especially you know,
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: with someone with a book that doesn't have a publisher.
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: And he's like, look, if you can go get a
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: publishing deal from you know, either Penguin or Random House
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: and go build more momentum, call me back click so
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: that then you know, now you have a mission. So
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: now well I was torn. A part of me was
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: like my head in my hands. But a few days
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: later I was like, okay, fine, he told me what
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: I needed. I what's the what the fuck is Random House?
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: Like I had no idea, Like how hard could that be?
• 42:32
  Speaker 2: So I then go on this eight month journey of
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: you know, getting rejected every single day trying to get
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: this publishing deal because I was a nineteen year old
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: kid trying to write a business book.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: And right, I mean, like just it's let's just take
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: a step back and like analyze the preposterous nature of that.
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: And I'm going stuff, and I'm like, god.
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: Your your biggest business achievement is like hacking prices?
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: Right, And the funny thing is too you know, maybe
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: if I had interviews lined up, it would be a
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: better thing. But I remember my book proposal. It was
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: like interviews that I'm very likely to get. I couldn't
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: even say, like this is the interviews were honest.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: Most people aren't. So so I would imagine you put
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: a proposal together, I mean, how did you get it
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: in front of Rick Rgan and sell them on the
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: idea of doing this book with you?
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: So what I had learned over so at this point,
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: I'm about a year into my journey, and you know,
• 43:29
  Speaker 2: I'm reading every business biography and I'm getting like some
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: good interviews. I'm interviewing Tim Faerre is some you know,
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: there's some there's some early traction. And one thing I
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: had learned is that and Tim Ferriss actually gave me
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: this in my interview with him. He gave me this
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: cold email template where he launched his career by emailing
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: VIPs and CEOs, and he gave me this cold email
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: template that gave me sort of this like amazing too.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you want me to go into it,
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: but he gives me this tool that I then use
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: to email about thirty different New York Times bestselling authors
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: asking for their advice on how to get a book deal.
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: And the overwhelming advice I got from all of them.
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: They gave me a lot of you know, tactics, but
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: the biggest thing was the number one thing to getting
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: you know, if you're unknown, the number one thing to
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: getting a big publisher is a big agent. You know,
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: no big agent, no big publisher. So my thinking was
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: no big agent, no big no Bill Gates. So that
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: eight months journey was really about getting the agent. And
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: once I got the agent, and you know, I was
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: rejected by dozens and dozens of it's just crazy. But
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: when I finally got the publishing deal, well this is
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: a month before I got the publishing deal. I got
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: the agent and she had told me, look, Alex, you
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: know we're not going to go to the publishers during
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: Christmas time. That's you know crazy. We can either go
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: next month or we can wait for the spring. It's
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: up to you. And I knew It's already been a
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: like almost a year since I spoke to Bill Gates,
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: Chiefa's staff, and I was like, look, I can't wait anymore,
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: like he's probably already forgotten about me. I need to
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: make this happen. The only problem was my junior year
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: of college is starting the next week, and I knew,
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: you know, trying to finish my proposal in a month
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: was hard enough to begin with, doing it while balancing
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: school was impossible. And that's when I had to make,
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: at the time the hardest decision of my life between
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: moving forward on my dream but turning back on my
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: parents' sacrifice in their dreams.
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: So how'd that conversation go?
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: A conversation is a very generous way of So what's
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: crazy is when I started on my book, even before
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: I even talked about leaving college. You know, my grandparents
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: and my parents sort of sniffed this was coming. So
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: my Grandma, who you know, I love dearly. I was
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: just on the phone with her thirty minutes ago, an
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: hour ago. She was like, fine, want you want to
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: write this book, you know, in your part time. Fine,
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: but you're not going to become one of those, you know,
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: crazy American kids who drops out of college and travels
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: the world to find himself. You know, she had seen
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: the movies. She's like, begu Juna man, swear on my
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: life that you'll graduate undergrad and get your masters, and
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: only then will I support what you're doing.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: I like how she threw a master's degree.
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: Oh my slid that in there too, Oh my god.
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: And it was no negotiable too, because she understood that,
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: you know, in America these days, an undergrad doesn't have
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: the guarantees that used to. And I was like, fine, fine,
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: I promise, and she goes, no, bigou Juna man, which
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: literally means, I swear on your life. It's the strongest
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: promise in the world. So fast forward a year later,
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: when I'm talking about leaving school, this Juna man promise
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: is looming overhead. So I had a problem because I
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: don't want to I don't want to break my grandma's promise.
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: I didn't want to ruin, you know, my mom's dreams.
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: So I call my mentor who I know, you know,
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: Elliott Bisno, and I tell him, Elliott, this is I
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: don't know what to do. How can I choose between
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: my family? Because you know, family is the most important,
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: But at what point do I stop living for them
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: and start living for myself? And he's like, I don't
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: understand the problem. And I'm like, well, dude, I the
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: only way I can get this publishing deal and get
• 47:56
  Speaker 2: to Bill Kates is if I drop out of school.
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: And he goes, whoaa whoa you are no dropping out
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: of school? And I was like what and he's like, look, no,
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: one smart actually drops out of school. Go, you know,
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: do your research and you'll see what I'm saying. And
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: he hangs up and I'm like what is he talking about?
• 48:19
  Speaker 2: And he ends up sending me on this you know
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: mini like twenty four hour quest where I started ripping
• 48:26
  Speaker 2: through Zuckerberg and Bill Gates's biographies and I finally found
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: out what Elliott was talking about. When Zuckerberg had started
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: you know, the Facebook, that summer he was working on
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: a full time. He went to go meet with Peter
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: Teal to get a half million dollar investment, and Teal
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: goes to Zuckerberg, You're gonna drop out of school, right.
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: Zuckerberg's like not a chance. Teale's like, oh okay, let's
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: see what happens. And even when school was starting Zuckerberg's
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: Bill didn't want to drop out. It was only his friend,
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: Dustin Moskovitz, who was like, look, man, will barely survive.
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: You know if we did this full time, Let's take
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: one semester off and see what happens. Then I looked
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: at Bill Gates's story and I realized he did the
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: same thing. He took one semester off to work on Microsoft,
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: and when it wasn't working out, he actually went back
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: to Harvard, which no one talks about.
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know that, Yeah.
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: No one. No one talks about this. That Bill Everan
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: calls you know Bill Gates dropped out of college and
• 49:35
  Speaker 2: you know, threw his middle finger in the sky. No,
• 49:38
  Speaker 2: he actually went back to school when things weren't working
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: out as well as he wanted. So I called Elliet
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: back up and he's like, bingo, yeah, don't drop out.
• 49:47
  Speaker 2: Take one semester off and it doesn't work. You didn't
• 49:50
  Speaker 2: break your grandma's promise. So I feel like I just
• 49:53
  Speaker 2: discovered the secret to life. So I like drive to
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: my college campus, I ask for like this leave of absence,
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: which says I have a seven year window, and I
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: drive home to tell my parents the good news.
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: This is not good news.
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: Literally. I remember my mom yelling my son will not
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: be a college just you know, she's going hysterical. And
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: for weeks I'm just going back and forth with them,
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: and at the end I had to come to terms with,
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: although my mom might be right, although this might be
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: the biggest mistake of my life. I'd rather be eighty
• 50:35
  Speaker 2: years old and know that I tried than eighty years
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: old and no I had failed.
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the bigger issue here is that divining
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: line between living your life for somebody else and living
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: it for yourself with the understanding that you know that
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: this is your true north. You know it's after a
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: year or so into this project, I think you had
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: paid your due's enough to know like, Okay, this is
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: the path for me. And that's tough as a young person.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: It's tough for anybody in any situation to have to
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: wrestle with that.
• 51:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you want to know the craziest thing that happened
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: on that day. So it's the day to turn in
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: the leave absence form and I finally wait until the
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: final day to you know, sign the form. There's like
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: two hours left until the deadline. I'm going to go
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: drive to campus. At my parents' house, I have the
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: green form, I fold it up in my pocket and
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: I hear the doorbell ring, so, you know, I grab
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: my car keys and I walked towards the door and
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: I turned the knob and I open it up, and
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: standing on the front step is my grandma, you know,
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: just tears streaming down her face. And still to this day,
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: I'll never forget what that felt like.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: And how's it now?
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: Ah? I love her, She's.
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like, yeah, half the time I
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: run into you at this event or that event, you're
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: with like twenty family members. So I figured, I feel
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: like it all worked out.
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: We actually have a picture with me and you, Cal
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: and my parents at one of Q shows.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: Oh it's Cal on that picture too.
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: I didn't. I don't think you guys knew each other yet.
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: No, you know, it's funny, and I want to talk
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: about call in a minute. But I just ran into
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: Cal like a week ago.
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: Where was it?
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: I was down at Dodger Stadium to do this the
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: Spartan thing, the spart Yeah, so Joe Desenna, who you
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: know is the Spartan dude. There was a Spartan event
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: at Dodger Stadium and up in one of the skyboxes
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: he was doing podcast interviews and like video interviews, and
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: so he's like, come down. Like I'd never met Joe
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: in person. He's like, come down, like, let's you know,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: come on my show. Which was great, you know, we
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: had a great time, totally cool. And then he's like, hey,
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: I'm also I'm doing this documentary thing I'm trying to
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: He's like, I'm taking this guy and I'm putting this
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: guy through cases, you know, I'm trying to get him fit,
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to sort out his diet, and like he
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: just the guy's not listening.
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: He's like, I'm having.
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: Such a hard time. He goes, will you talk to him? Him?
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: Before you know, well, first of all, like almost say
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: who it was, He's like, will you talk to him?
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: Like we're doing this, maybe we'll film you a little bit,
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: like we'll have a little interaction. I was like, yeah,
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: whatever you want. So we got onto the parking lot
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: and I'm with your film camera and Joe and like,
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: you know, there's a cinematographer there and like and we
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: walk up and Joe introduced and he's like, hey, this
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: is this is Cal. He's like I'm Cal, and I'm
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: like like, oh, Cal Fussman, Like I Cal doesn't know
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: who I am. But I was like, yeah, I know,
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: I know who you are, Like cool, nice to meet you.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: And he's wearing the Fedora hat with the Spartan like
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: the Spartan bandana on his fedora.
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: Oh my god.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: And uh and I'm like yeah, here from Joe, like
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: you're you're you're resisting.
• 53:53
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: So we get into this weird conversation and the bizarre
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: thing is that I feel like we were we were
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: like ships in the night like whatever Cal was saying whatever,
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: We were just missing each other. And I look at
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: Joe and I go, you got your hands full with
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: this Cal, Like I don't I don't know if I
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: can help you.
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: I I love Cal. At the same time, everything you
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: just said makes I can see that happening.
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And I hope it's okay that I told that story.
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: No, that's like very secreting, Like no, he would probably
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: say the same story too, because it's so next time
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: you see Cal, I'm gonna call as soon as we're
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: doing I'm gonna call him home and tell him that.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: But what's wait To bring it back around to your story,
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: like Cal becomes we should probably explain who Cal is
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: and how he kind of came into your equation.
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: So this is probably the most miraculous coincidence that happened
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: on the whole journey, and there were a lot of
• 54:49
  Speaker 2: miraculous coincidences. This was a few years into the journey
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: and I had just spent eight months trying to you know,
• 54:59
  Speaker 2: track down one buffet, writing him letters, and I was
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: just getting rejected at every turn, to the point where
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: at the end of the eight months, I was completely depleted,
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: you know, just all the life is beat out of me.
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: And one of my best friends, Corwin, was you know,
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: trying to get my spirits up, and he's like, come on,
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: let's go, let's grab a bite to eat. So we
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: go to this grocery store and we grab sandwiches and
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: we're you know, sitting on the on the sidewalk, and
• 55:27
  Speaker 2: you know, I'm just venting to my friend, you know,
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: and I'm telling him, Man, I don't know what the
• 55:33
  Speaker 2: point of this is. I don't know how I'm going
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: to do this. And he's like, come on, you gotta,
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: you gotta interview. You know, you gotta have some interviews
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: lined up. And I'm like, I got nothing, and he's like,
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: come on, you gotta you got to figure something out. Like, dude,
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: do you know what, even if I had interviews like
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: I would probably fuck him up. You know, look what
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: happened in the last one. And he's as we're complaining
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: about how hard interviewing is, this car pulls up right
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: in front of me. The door opens, and outwalks Larry King.
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: And I don't know if you want me to go
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: into the whole story.
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: No last story. I know the story, but like it's
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: a great story. So I think it really it It
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: creates the foundation for everything that follows. Like I think
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: it's I think it's, you know, uh, an integral part
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: of the whole book because I think, and we can
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: get into this later, but just to kind of like
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: define it now, I think the value of the book
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: is much more the journey that you go on to
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: create the book than it is the wisdom imparted by
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: these people that you ultimately end up talking to, and yes,
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: they're providing these insights and that has tremendous value. But
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: you're learning experientially through this and you're answering your own questions.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: You know, the book is called the Third Door, and
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: you can explain why that is, but ultimately, you know,
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: you're finding the third door all the way through, in
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: every opportunity to try to make this happen. So it's
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: almost like you're you know, the solutions that you're looking for,
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: you're practicing along the way, and it's a process of
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: just coming into an understanding of that as you go.
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: Thank you man, That's it feels really good to hear.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: So back to the story.
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: Okay, back to me just harassing Larry King. So you know,
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: his car pulls up, he walks out. But and it's
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: weird because I know I sound like this extroverted person
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: who's like down too many red bulls, but I'm really
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: very shy and introverted, and I grew up with a
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: tremendous fear of rejection and failure. So as Larry King
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: opens that car door, I'm like paralyzed and I almost
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: call I call the feeling the Lynch and he's literally
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: walking right in front of me, right past me, and
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: goes through the storre sliding windows. And I can't say
• 58:07
  Speaker 2: a thing. And my best friend Corwin like nudge me.
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: He's like, dude, what what the fuck? Like, why don't
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: you say something? And this is where the flinch gets
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: very good. I start explaining all the good reasons why
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: I shouldn't have said anything. I don't want to bother him.
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: He's like, dude, come on, and you know, I'm like, look,
• 58:28
  Speaker 2: he's already in the grocery store. I can't find him.
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: He's like, dude, he's eighty years old. How far could
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: he have gone?
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: Right? And you're complaining about how this isn't working out,
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: and then God just delivers like this dream, you know,
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: interviewee right in front of.
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: You exactly so, just to not be embarrassed in front
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: of my friend, I very reluctantly get up. I walk.
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: I walked through the stores, you know, sliding glass windows,
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: and I look around the bakery section, No Larry. So
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: I jog over to the produce section, you know, fruits, vegetables,
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: No Larry, and that's when I remember I had spent
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: or no Larry had parked in the loading zone, which
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: meant he was leaving any minute now. So that like
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: bolt of adrenaline and the fear of you know, failing again,
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: you know, overtakes me and I start sprinting through this
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: grocery store, going down every aisle. No Larry, no Larry,
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: No Larry, no Larry, no Larry. You know, I cut
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: down the frozen food section. You know, I'm dodging old
• 59:29
  Speaker 2: ladies like I'm you know, swerving around cans of tuna fish.
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: No Larry, so he has to be at the checkout counter.
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: So no Larry, no Larry, No Larry, no Larry. And
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: at this point I want to, you know, kick myself
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: because it was, like you said, it was right in
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: front of me, and I blew it. So I'm walking
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: out of the parking lot and I'm looking down at
• 59:54
  Speaker 2: my feet and I lift my gaze and right there,
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: twenty feet in front of me is Larry King. And
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: similar to that stand story I told you about how
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 2: the price is right, this feeling like overtakes me and
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: I just I'm trying to project, but I think all
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: of this, you know, pent up anger and energy inside
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: of me combusted and I accidentally shout mister King in
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: the echo. It was an indoor parking lot, so it echoed,
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: and literally, I'll never forget the look on Larry King's
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: the poor guy. He's had like quadruple bypass surgery. He
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: like jumps up like this, his shoulders arch up, and
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: he turns his head around slowly, like like every wrinkle
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: in his face, you know, sprung back his eyebrows to
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: his hairline, you know, as if he's seeing the grim Reaper.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: So he you know, starts, you know, heading towards his car.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: As quickly as possible to get out of here.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: And I'm thinking, like shit, I'm too deep in this
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: to stop now, so I like run after him, like
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 2: mister King, mister King, Alex, I'm you know, I'm twenty
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: years old. I've always wanted to stay hi. And he's like, okay, Hi,
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: and he goes off faster, and we're finally now in
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 2: front of his car. He's like putting his groceries in
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: the trunk. He opens the driver door, and I just go, wait,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: mister King, can I can I go to breakfast with you?
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: And his look of confusion, my god, and you know
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: he's about to say no, but he looks around at
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: the sidewalk and sees there's about like ten people watching
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: this go down.
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: Right, so he better behave him.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 2: So he literally just like shrugs, and it's like okay, okay,
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: I'm like, oh my god, thank you, thank you so much.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: I a great I'll see you tomorrow. And he like
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: gets in the car and closes the door, and I go, wait,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: mister King, what time? And he looks at me and
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: starts the engine on this car. You can definitely hear me.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: I'm like, mister King, what time? He like puts the
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: car to drive. I'm now standing like in front of
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: the car, waving my arms in front of the windshield.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: Mister King one time, and he just looks him and
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: he's like nine o'clock and just speeds off. And the
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: next morning.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: You're like a celebrity's worst night there. I hopefully I'm
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: like having a little more death approach to it. I mean,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: that's just like sheer desperation.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 2: Look, that's what happens when you drop out of school
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 2: and lie to your grandma and put it all on
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 2: the line. You do some crazy stuff to try to
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: make it work. And so I go to Larry King's restaurant,
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: and I show up there nine o'clock and there he
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 2: is sitting in the corner booth with his friends. And
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 2: you know, I had a little bit of self awareness
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 2: at this point where I knew.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: Right, we're talking about Nate Nile's right there. He still
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: go there.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: Every morning he goes, he goes to he has like
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: a schedule where every week there's a there's an every
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 2: day of the If you name of the day of
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 2: the week, I can say where he's at, right, So, right,
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: that makes me sound normal.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: You know a little bit too much about this, all right,
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: go ahead, Okay.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: So I get there and I was a bit embarrassed
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: by how I had acted the day prior, so I
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: was trying to be a lot calmer. So although there
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: was an open seat, I didn't sit down. I'm just like, hey,
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: mister King, good morning. And he goes, you know, sort
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 2: of waves me away. So I'm like, all right, he
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: wants some time alone with his friends. So I sit
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: at the table next to him, waiting to be called over.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 2: And ten minutes passes, thirty minutes pass an hour passes,
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 2: and finally he stands up and he's walking towards me,
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: and I can like feel my cheeks lifting, and then
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: he walks right past me and heads for the exit,
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 2: and I just like wave my hand. I'm like king,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 2: mister King, and he goes, what is a kid? What
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 2: do you walk? And at this point I'm just like,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 2: I have no energy, and I'm just like, honestly, I
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 2: just wanted some advice on how to interview people. And
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: this smile like spreads across his face, almost as if
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 2: to say, why didn't you say so?
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: What do you think he thought you were trying to do?
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 2: In HW he deals with a lot of crazy people,
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: anyone of his caliber, especially someone as approachable as Larry
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 2: because you have to understand he when he was at CNN,
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 2: he was, if not the one of the most recognizable
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: faces on earth.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: He also doesn't hide from the public like you said,
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: he's out, you know, right, like if you want to,
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: if you want to find him, you can find him.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: Like he doesn't ensconce himself in his house like he's
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: out in the public. So he's probably getting.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: Rolled up on quite a bit, right, especially by crazy kids.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: I was like in a urinal next to him after
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: years ago.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, he loves going to the movies. Yeah, anyway, go ahead,
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: I have a funny movie story with him later. So
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: he's like, you know, he smiles, and he ends up,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 2: you know, putting a hand on my shoulder and giving me,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: you know, this one minute monologue of the best interview
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: advice I'd ever heard. And at the end of this monologue,
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: he goes, he like looks up almost as if he's
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: like debating something in his mind, and he looks at
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 2: me in the eyes and like puts a finger in
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: my face and goes, all right, kid, tomorrow eight forty five,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 2: see yeah, here, And I show up the next morning
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 2: at eight forty five. He calls me over to his table.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 2: I sit down. He asks me, like, what are you
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 2: even trying to interview for? And I tell him about
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: the book and he's like, all right, I'm in. And
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 2: over the course of the past few years, I've been
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: at breakfast with him about fifty times. Wow. And this
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: all comes full circle because the next thing that happens
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: at the table is we start talking about the book
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 2: on that first morning of breakfast, or now this is
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: the second morning. This is my first morning at the table,
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: and I'm telling him about my dream and he goes,
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 2: I got someone you want. I want you to meet. Hey, Cal,
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 2: and this younger guy who's, you know, in his late fifties,
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: because everyone else at the tables in their eighties. It's
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 2: younger guy in a Fedora. Turns around and Larry goes,
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 2: you have a minute, and you know it sort of
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: sends me off with Cal, and Cal I learned. Larry
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: tells me that his name is Cal Fussman, and he is,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: you know, the writer of Esquire Magazines what I've learned
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 2: to call him. And he's interviewed Muhammad Ali, Nikhil Gorbachev,
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 2: George Klune, you know, every person who's defined culture the
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 2: past fifty years. And Cal's in New York Times best
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: selling author. And Cal and I end up for what's
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 2: supposed to be a minute conversation. We talked for three
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: hours and that conversation turns into another conversation the next day,
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: and Cal and I, you know, create this relationship where
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: he realizes how much help I need because I have
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 2: this big, lofty dream of writing a book that changes
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 2: people's lives, yet I have zero writing experience. And Cal
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: was working in the magazine industry when it was shrinking
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: at a very scary rate. And he didn't know he
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: didn't even know how to create a Twitter account, forget
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 2: about how to tweet. He didnt even know where the.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: Laws full analog.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 2: So we sort of create this relationshiphere. I start helping
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: him with his you know, his you know, create a
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: Twitter account. I make a website for him, and he
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: starts teaching me how to like write a sentence and
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 2: like again, like a miracle. While the Larry situation feels
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: like a miracle, what cal did for me was a miracle.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: And he sat down with me over the past almost
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 2: four years every you know, every week, at least three
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: times a week, for about three hours at a time,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: looking over my chapters and teaching me how to write.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: That's amazing And that's why do you think he was
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: willing to invest so much of his energy in you?
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: The obvious number one is he's so kind and you know,
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 2: you can't you can't fake it. You're either you have
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: that hard or you don't. I got that. I actually
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 2: this guy who I met, he's really smart guy. He
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 2: was used to be a VP of Golden Sacks, and
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 2: I asked him because he was giving me a lot
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: of advice too. I asked him, like, how do you
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 2: choose like which people to mentor you have such little time?
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 2: And he has this theory, which I think is really
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 2: brilliant about why someone chooses to mentor someone subconsciously, because
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 2: it's never really a conscious decision when you give of
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: yourself in that way. And he said, someone mentors you
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: for three reasons. One and they're all subconscious reasons. One
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 2: they see some of themself in you. Two, they want
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 2: to help you be more like them. Whether it's because
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: they have a special expertise they want to help you with,
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 2: but they want to help you and they feel they
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 2: can't help you be more like them. The third one
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 2: is the most interesting. They want to be more like you,
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 2: And that's sort of confusing. But what he explained to
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 2: me is like, you know, if someone's a you know,
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: seventy year old CEO, sometimes the thing they need most
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 2: in their life is nineteen year old enthusiasm about their
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: company because they're so you know, lackluster at that point.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: Right right, No, I totally get that. I totally get that,
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: and just not really knowing that much about your relationship
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: with cal and the dynamic, you know, it's clear to
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: see how you were able to bring that to him,
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: because I've watched his career change in a very dramatic
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: way just in the last couple of years, from you know,
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: James Beard Award winning a magazine writer to a guy
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: who's now like very well known in the digital universe.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: You know, he's got Crazy Jim Ferris's podcast, like twice,
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: I think and three times now. I saw him speak
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: at the Shine, and I know our mutual friend Kevin
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: is now his manager, and I believe you're the one
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: who introduced him to Elliott and then he became a
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: speaker at Summit, and so now he's like this guy
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: who has, you know, like this whole life and career
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: that he could not have conceptualized prior to meeting you.
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: Cal. I always mess with him because I like to
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 2: remind him. By the way, Cal's Twitter is fantastic. He
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 2: puts out all these great quotes and he gets tons
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 2: of retweets. But I always joke with him because in
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 2: our first conversation, I asked him if he has a
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: Twitter account, and he laughed in my face and said,
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: Twitter is my kryptonite. And he like literally laughed in
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 2: my face. And he's just done so well, and you know,
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 2: all credit goes to him. But like you said, he
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 2: you know, his podcast is incredible. His his speeches bring
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 2: people to tears. He has a newsletter now it's just
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: night and day. And I'm just so proud of him.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 2: And he's like family to me. His goddaughter, his daughter
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 2: is now my goddaughter. You know, I had her bomitz
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 2: fi like when I've been lit a candle and it's
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 2: been one of the biggest honors of my life.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: Super cool. And and what was it that he like,
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: what's the main thing that you learned from him about writing?
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: Oh? Wow, I can you know. I have this fantasy
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 2: of one day, you know, after the book launch, teaching
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 2: like a you know, a ten hour course of what
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: Cal taught me over four years. And because I can
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 2: give you, like I'll give you three things just off
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 2: the top of my head that are the biggest things, though,
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 2: but I could give a whole It's like my dream
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: to pay it forward because what he gave me was
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 2: life changing. Number one is Oh man, it's crazy because
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: when I first sat down with Cal, I don't think
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 2: I've ever told this publicly. In our first conversation, he said,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: Twitter's my kryptonite, and I said something even more preposterous.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: He asked me, well, my plans were out of how
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 2: to write the book, and I said, I can't believe them.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 2: I said, Cal, I've read a lot of statistics and
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 2: blog posts and I know that with a business book,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 2: and I'm writing a business book, ninety percent of people
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: don't read past the first chapter. So I'm not too worried.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: And he looked at me like, that's like the worst,
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 2: Like a real writer, right, it is his profession. He's
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: an artist. So Cal taught me how to do the opposite,
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 2: which is how to write a book where ninety percent
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: read the final sentence. And there's three ways to do it. Well,
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of ways, but there are the three
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 2: main things you taught me. Number one is every single
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: chapter you cannot have an exception, needs to have tension.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 2: Every single one. I thought I could get away with, like,
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: you know, the first chapter having some tension, the middle chapter,
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 2: and the fund every it does matter, and that is
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: really hard. My issue was if I was writing a
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 2: fiction book, Cal's advice would have been very much easier
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 2: to implement because it was a nonfiction book and I
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 2: had to write about some of the look. Some of
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: the chapters were my stories and I could tell them,
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: But some of the chapters were me and Bell Gates
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 2: sitting in an office for an hour with an audio
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 2: recorder and Bill also recorded. His team was smart enough
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 2: to also record it. So I can't even change a
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 2: word of what was said in there.
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but what you can do is describe what was
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: happening with you emotionally, because I feel tension just hearing that, Like, Okay,
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: you're a kid. You walk into this office. There's a
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: whole team of people. They're recording it on their end.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: What are they going to do? What's their agenda? Like?
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: How am I going to navigate that? Like, you know,
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: my palms can get sweaty just hearing about that. There's
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: a lot to work with there. Yeah.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm so happy that you're a brilliant writer the show.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 2: But that's cal had a big job teach me that.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 2: Of you know, every chapter needs tension, So that's number one.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 2: And actually there's this great thing from I don't know
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 2: if you've ever seen Masterclass's online course. They're incredible, and
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: there's an error. It's like HBO for an online course,
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 2: glad Glad one. But the one that I recommend to
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: any creative writer, filmmaker, anyone is that Aaron Sorkin one,
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: And he, in a perfect sentence, says, what the key
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 2: is to tension? And Count taught me this too. He says,
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 2: you need an very strong intention and very very very
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 2: crazy obstacles because you can have all these crazy obstacles,
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 2: but if there's not an intention, like if I don't
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 2: do X, why will happen? Like you can do a
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 2: movie consequences steaks, And that's what Cal taught me.
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: You need to have steaks, right, So then you're like,
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: just to extend the analogy of the Bill Gates interview,
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: what are the stakes? Like, Okay, so he doesn't want
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: to talk to me, or the interview doesn't go well,
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: Like what's the worst thing that could happen? Like it's
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: hard to come up with like stakes that are super high.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 2: Well, what Cal is so good at is because he's
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 2: one of the best interviewers on earth. He would help me.
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 2: He would ask me questions almost like a therapist that
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 2: would pull the answers out of me that I didn't
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 2: even know, Like he would like I would write the
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 2: first draft of the bill. So the bill Gates chapter,
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 2: for example, that was the hardest chapter right by far.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 2: That took one hundred and thirty four edits, and that's
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 2: before I sent it to Crown, mean drafts, that's like
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 2: it's said, and that's before I sent it to Crown.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: And then once I got to Crown, I went through
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 2: probably another like thirty to the final ones, so it's
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: probably about one hundred and sixty at this point, and
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: then proofreading probably it's probbably well.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: Meanwhile, I'm like on my phone looking at your Instagram
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: and you're like sitting down to rewrite this chapter again.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: I go, this guy's just afraid. I'm like, this guy
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: is paralyzed because he's so afraid of sharing what he's
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: written that he thinks the solution is to rewrite it again.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: My I was like, is this guy ever gonna like?
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: It's just thing? So cals not knowing that is really
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: going on.
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 2: So that was what was going on behind the scenes,
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: and call and I made a promise. He was too.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: He's like, look, this is your book. I'm not going
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 2: to write a word of it, so you can't have
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 2: that expectation. But the one thing I'll promise you is
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 2: that if you send me something, I'll read it and
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 2: I'll let you know when it's good enough to move
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 2: on to the next chapter. I was like, great, Now,
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 2: to my surprise, like with Bill Gates, it's like one
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 2: hundred and thirty four you know drafts for me to calgo,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 2: all right, fine, move on.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 2: So some of the things, okay, so we have ten.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 2: That's what Kyle taught. The second thing is their needs
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 2: needs needs to be a grip. And that was the
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 2: hardest thing for me to understand. And what he means
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 2: by that is every chapter and every story you can't
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 2: just you know, throw it out. So there's a chapter
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 2: where I go to meet Mark Zuckerberg and it ends
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 2: up being a disaster because security comes and they think
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: I'm an impostor and they threaten to call the police,
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 2: and it's this whole crazy story. But I'll tell you,
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 2: for example, the opening of that chapter is the founder
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 2: of ted One's told me, I live my life by
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: two mantras. One if you don't ask, you don't get,
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 2: and two most things don't work out. And that created
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 2: this grip, or some people might call it a frame
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 2: to almost and there's a sense of confidence that you know,
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 2: someone like Cal has overwriting that you really have to
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 2: grab it, like you know, a slab of clay and
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 2: hold grip it in your hands and throw it down
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 2: on the table, as opposed to just sort of being
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 2: like it was a bright summer day when I got
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 2: the email from Mark Zuckerberg. Right, the story owns you.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 2: You need to own the story. So that's number two
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: is grip it. And number three, which is a very
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 2: practical one. And again why the book took so long
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 2: to write this is the attention of detail Cal forced me,
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 2: thankfully to have with the writing of this book. Every sentence,
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 2: he said, you need to treat like a restaurant. And
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 2: every sentence, by the way, this is in this book
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 2: is about eighty thousand words, so we're looking at about
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: eight thousand sentences, right, maybe more, maybe less. And he goes,
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 2: think of that like a restaurant. The first word is
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: the may or d it invites you in. And then
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 2: the pacing of that center, hints needs to depend on
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 2: what the mood is of the customer. Is it a
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 2: straight through course, is it fast food? Then you can't
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: have commas in that sentence, is it an a course
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 2: meal like very extravagant. Then you can use commas in
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: a semi call it maybe an m debt, and you
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 2: have this elegance to it. And then the final word
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 2: is dessert. And if you can have the best may
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 2: or d the best courses, but if the dessert is
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 2: too salty, it's the worst restaurant you've ever been too.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: So every sentence of the book, you know, starting at
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 2: the first word, no one will believe the amount cow
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 2: and I obsessed to it. The first word we debated
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 2: for months and we decided the best word is right
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: ri I g h T right. And the first word
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 2: of the whole book, the whole book. The opening sentence
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 2: is right this way and that sets off the whole
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 2: tone of the book. And the final sentence, Oh my god,
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 2: that was weeks of brainstorming because it had to be
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: the perfect sentence. And what's the word that you end
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: an entire story, you know on, and it's the word home.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: It's beautiful. Thanks so of all the people that you interviewed,
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: all the wisdom that you collected.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 2: I don't know why we're laughing.
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: The most impactful was the guy who helped you write
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: the book, it seems like to you personally.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: Cal Yeah, it's crazy because I set off on this
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 2: journey to learn from Bill Gates and to learn from
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: Buffett and to learn from Spielberg. And while I did
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: learn so much from them, and what they taught me,
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: you know, changed me forever. The greatest and most valuable
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 2: thing that happened on this journey was both Cal Fusman
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 2: and Elliott Busino being like family.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about Elliott for a minute. I mean,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: this guy will become your mentor sort of right.
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: In this is my bed, and I'll see this on
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 2: this podcast. I want to plant my flag in the ground.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 2: In twenty years, he will be one of the most
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: you know, impactful names in business. The only reason no
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: one knows him right now is because he's purposely, by design,
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 2: tried to avoid all, you know, public opinion and attention.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: But I can I can see that. I mean, I
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: love Elliott and his wife, you know, Julie, and I
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: have become close with them, and I think the world
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: of him, and I think what he's built is so extraordinary,
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: you know, it's so extraordinary that like I can't wrap
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: my head around it, Like it doesn't make sense. And
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: maybe a good way to kind of launch into this
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: part of it is like I first became are of
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: like these summit people many years ago, long time ago.
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: A friend, a yoga teacher, called up Julie and said, Hey,
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: I'm supposed to go teach this class at this house
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: these people. I can't do it. I gotta go out
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: of toime. We just fill in for me. And Julie
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: wasn't like really a yoga teacher at that time, but
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: as a favor to a friend, she said, sure, and
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: here's the address, go to this. She goes to this house.
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: It's like, I don't know, fifteen people now there in Malibu.
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: This is many years ago. I mean this had to
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: be two thousand and two or something, a long time ago.
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: She comes back from that experience and she's like, you
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: don't know who these people.
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 2: Were, and like it was kind of weird.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: Like it's like a house and it's sort of like
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: a commune and I and I taught yoga to these
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: people and they're all like so engaged and like friendly
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: and present and so much so that it like weirded
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: me out, Like I'm like, what has happened? Like I
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: don't know what these people are doing, but there's something
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: going on here, you know. And then I think it
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: was a couple months later where there was like a
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: double page ad and Vanity Fair and they're all like
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: walking down the beach together and she's like, those are
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: the people I taught you. And that was my first
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: introduction to what some it is. And then I started
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: to learn about what they were doing. And you know,
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: I've now been to Eden, these people like Elliott, you know,
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: at with Elliott at the Helm, this group bought a
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: mountain in Utah and they're creating this community and they
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: host these annual events or bi annual events where they
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: bring incredible speakers in.
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 2: And Bezos was the one of the best speeches I've
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 2: ever seen in mind.
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: And they cultivate this community around ideas and I think
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: it's truly remarkable. And I think Elliott is somebody whose
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: heart is in this amazing place and the team that
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: he's built is incredible. It's disheartening when you read press
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: and they don't get it or it gets missed sort of.
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: You know, they're portrayed in a way that is different
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: than I think is what then what is real? But
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: I have nothing but the utmost respect for Elliott.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 2: And what he's created and it's mind blowing.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: And how he came into your life is a crazy story.
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 2: Oh my, Well, it's funny because we sort of touched
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 2: on that moment a little when I was sharing when
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 2: I was in that CVS parking lot on the front
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 2: of Bill Gates, a chief of staff. He said two things, right,
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 2: get a book deal and go build momentum. So you know,
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 2: I had some thoughts on how to get that book
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 2: deal or figure it out.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: But the word.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 2: Momentum, like what the I'm nineteen, I'm like, what the
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 2: fuck is momentum? And I remember going back to my
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 2: room that night and just like literally my head in
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 2: my hands, like momentum and I'm just sitting there like
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 2: rocking in my chair, and I don't know how this happened,
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 2: but you know, sometimes like just thoughts flurry in your
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 2: mind when you're just in a panic. So I'm just
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 2: thinking like momentum, Like if I'm only like five percent
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: of there for Bill Gates, i must be at like
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 2: negative twenty percent with you know, Bill Clinton or Richard Branson.
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 2: And I'm like, wait, LITL Clinton, Richard Branson. Didn't someone
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 2: tell me last summer that Richard Branson was on this
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 2: like cruise ship or something. It's almost to like procrastinate.
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 2: I take out my computer and I google like Bill Clinton,
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 2: Richard Brandson, cruise ship, and this article pops up and
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 2: it's on Fast Company and it is like Summit Series
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 2: takes the high Seas with a cruise ship packed with
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 2: Richard Branson, Gary Vaynerchuk, the Roots as the House, banned
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 2: by the Pool, Blake Mikosky leading shark tagging, Tim Ferriss
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 2: canoeing Like it's just I was like, what the fuck
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 2: is this right? It sounds like this like, you know,
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 2: entrepreneur's dream. And I'm reading this article and it's like
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 2: Elliott Bisno, the founder and CEO of Summit Series with
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 2: many companies to his name, is twenty six years old,
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 2: and I'm like, what twenty six is like my cousin's age,
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: Like how is that possible? I thought you had to
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 2: be like this big ceo. So I just start Google.
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 2: I Google Elliott Bisno and I'm just ripping through it,
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: going down this rabbit hole, and you know, I miss
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 2: like two meals without noticing, and I'm just clicking and clicking.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 2: And a weird thing about him is that there was
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 2: a lot of articles that mentioned him, but none of
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 2: that actually said what he did. So it's almost like
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 2: I was this detective trying to piece it together. It's
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 2: part of the whole mystique, right, I learned later it's
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 2: by design. And it's almost like googling the guy from
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 2: cash Me if you can. You think you're onto something,
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 2: and then you get thrown off and some googling and googling,
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 2: and by the end, I'm like, if there's one person
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 2: on earth, who can you know teach me about momentum
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 2: and show me what I need to do to get
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 2: to Bill Gates, it has to be this sky. And
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 2: I remember this night very vividly. I closed my eyes
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 2: and said a prayer, and then I opened my journal
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 2: and at the top road dream Mentors, and I underlined it,
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 2: and on the first line I wrote Elliott Business. And
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 2: a couple weeks later, I was again studying for an
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: accounting final, this time and I couldn't stop thinking about
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 2: what it would be like to instead of be learning
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 2: from Elliott. So again I can't focus on finals. So
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 2: I just a'm like, all right, let me get it
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 2: out of my head and out of my system. So
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 2: open my computer. I start writing this email for Elliott,
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: but I ended up spending three hours writing what I
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 2: think is like the perfect email. I use the Tim
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 2: Ferriss cold email template. I email Elliot. I sent it off,
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 2: and literally the next morning he goes, great, email, what
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 2: are you doing Thursday? And I look at my calendar
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 2: and Thursday is my accounting final. So I say the
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 2: only thing that I can. I'm completely free free. What
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 2: do you have in mind?
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: And just to kind of put a put a punctuation
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: mark on this, your greatest skill might be finding all
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: these people's emails.
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 2: So like, there are surprisingly a lot of very effective systems.
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 2: But do you know what's crazy? Actually this is wild.
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: It was easier for me to find Bill Gates's email
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 2: address than it was to find Elliott's.
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: Wow, So when you email Bill Gates, you are actually
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: emailing Bill Gates. You weren't like emailing an assistant or something.
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 2: No, But with people of this caliber, they have assistants
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: who read their stuff and filter out the junk. So
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 2: what's left in his inbox is stuff for him. And
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 2: so I got intercepted. Really quickly.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: Anyway. Yeah, all right, so somehow you get Elliott's through
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: some kind of cyber thing. I don't know.
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: Well for Elliott's, actually, I can tell you the way
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 2: I did it for him, because I remember I couldn't
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 2: with all my methods. It didn't work. So with him,
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 2: I was like, all right, I'm just gonna pick you know,
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 2: ten of the likely things that might be, and I
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: just guess.
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: I literally guessed it.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 2: I put them all in the BCC field and one
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 2: of them was there. I got nine bouncebacks and one
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 2: didn't bounce back.
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: That's smart.
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 2: So he ended up responding, and you know, so I
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 2: say I'm completely free, and he says, great, meet me
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 2: at this hotel. I'm there for this conference in Long Beach.
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 2: And before you come, like, read a chapter of this book.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 2: And this is like my dream mentor so if he
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 2: says read a chapter, I'm reading the whole book, right,
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: So I read the whole book. I don't say from
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 2: my accounting book. It is unbelievable book. It's called When
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 2: I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead by Jerry Wintrump.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 2: Unbelievable book. And for anyone who's like an entrepreneur on
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 2: their hustle, like this is one of the greatest empressarios
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 2: of the twentieth century. And I go, I think, all right,
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 2: it's not a big deal. Elliot's going to meet with
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 2: me for fifteen minutes. My accounting final isn't until noon.
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 2: It's only the hotel is only an hour away from school.
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 2: I can still make it on time. What ends up
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 2: happening is I show up the morning of you know,
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 2: eight am. I get there early. Elliott walks in right
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 2: on time. Our fifteen minute meeting turns into four hours.
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 2: And it turns out that we're meeting at the Weston
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 2: Hotel in Long Beach during TED, which is the main
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 2: lodging of the TED conference. So I'm sitting at this
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 2: breakfast room with you know everyone, you know. Larry Page
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 2: is sitting five feet away, and then over there's Tony Shade,
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 2: then over there is Ried Hoffman, and I'm nineteen, and
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 2: I'm like what It's literally like the Wizard of Oz,
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 2: right from black and white to color. And my four
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 2: hour meeting with Elliott turned into an entire summer traveling
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 2: the world with him to now him being one of
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 2: my best friends.
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: That's amazing. What do you think you said or impressed
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: upon him in that meeting that that clicked with him?
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 2: I think, and you know, there's no way to know
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 2: for sure, but I think when it comes to having
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 2: a mentor, they can only help you as much as
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 2: you're willing to help yourself. So I knew that everything
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 2: Elliott would advise me to do, I'm going to go,
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 2: you know ten x. So you know, he says, hey,
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 2: can you read this chapter before me? I'm gonna read
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 2: the whole book. He says, hey, I remember when we
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 2: had first met, like I didn't have any you know,
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 2: I was nineteen. I didn't have like a debit card
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 2: or a credit card or anything. And he is like,
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 2: you fucking idiot, Like how do you expect to be
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 2: traveling around without? So, you know, the next morning I
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 2: opened up, like, you know, I just did everything he advised,
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 2: you know, to the tenth degree. And what you know,
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 2: my theory is that when someone like yourself or like Elliott,
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 2: who you know, has very limited time, if you're going
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 2: to invest in a young person, you want to make
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 2: sure there's some you know, in addition to doing it
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 2: out of the kindness of your heart, you want to
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 2: make sure there's an ROI that the advice you're giving
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 2: is actually going somewhere. And with Elliott, everything he told me,
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 2: you know, I ran with it, and you know, it
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 2: started small and it got bigger and bigger and bigger
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 2: to the point where it's not not only a mental relationship.
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 2: He he was standing on my dad's bedside when he
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 2: took his final breath. So he's very much like family.
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: Wow, that's amazing, you know, I think it's pretty rare.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, you have cal Fussman and and Elliott as
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: like you know, on your speed dial this as this kid,
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: I mean your I think your talent really is your
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: people skills, you know, your ability to connect with other
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: human beings. And I appreciate that, and I know that
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: that's been the history of our relationship. And I don't
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: know how much of that is teachable versus just the
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: way you're baked. Hmmm.
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 2: So first of all, I appreciate that I've thought a
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 2: lot about you know, what things I can pull out
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 2: that I've learned along the way, and you know, I've
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 2: made a ton of mistake. So while my relationship with
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 2: you know you or Elliott or Cala is great. You know,
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 2: there's some relationships that I completely fucked up on, you know,
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 2: to the point where I'm like blacklisted from some people's.
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 2: Well it might be on Elliot's medal on black listed
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 2: from some people's.
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: Just like this crazy guy I just won't stop emailing me.
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 2: So with So like Warren Buffett, for example, I spent,
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 2: like I told her, I spent this eight month quest,
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 2: you know, trying to track him down. And I spent
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 2: literally eight full months. It wasn't part time. You have
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 2: to understand. Every morning, waking up, I'd put in my
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 2: headphones at six am, run down the sidewalk imagining Warren
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 2: Buffet was at the end as I'm doing my sprints,
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 2: like obsessive, and I would write handwritten letters to him
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 2: that I would take weeks editing, and I'd handwrite these
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 2: letters and mail it to him, and he would actually
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 2: handwrite some responses back. So is this like very awkward
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 2: pen pals? Thank you Alex, Thank you Alex. Go away?
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 2: He was much But that was essentially what it said.
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 2: And I just got every week calling Buffet's assistant, week
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 2: after week after week, and it almost felt like I
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 2: was in this you know, boxing, you know, World Championship
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 2: with you know, this young kid who's never picked up
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 2: boxing gloves versus you know, Floyd Mayweather. And I'm just
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 2: getting pounded in the guy punched in the face. You know,
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 2: I'm bloody, I'm spitting up blood. You know, my insides
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 2: are bruise, and you know, each rejection felt like I'm
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 2: just getting pounded. And by the end of these eight months,
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: you know, I had flown to Omaha, I had sent
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 2: so stupidly Buffet a shoe to try. You know, I
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 2: did all these crazy things were at the end of
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 2: the eight months, you son him a shoe. Oh, this
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 2: is a very embarrassing. Sorry. We So someone who was
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 2: advising me, who had said he worked for Buffett, was like,
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 2: trust me on this. They'll think it's funny. And I
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 2: was like, are you sure I can go? And it's
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 2: a whole another it was fire. It was a giant missfire.
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 2: But pretty much I kept pounding because I just believed
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 2: every business book says persistence is the key to success.
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 2: So I thought the more I pounded on the door,
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 2: the sooner.
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: Oh breaks down into that. But ultimately you end up
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: bum rushing his shareholders meeting, right, correct.
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 2: So I ended up get tossed out. Oh my okay,
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 2: so for that what ended up happening was you know,
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 2: after this eight months Buffett's assistant, you know, she knew me.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 2: She I had sent her flowers again, right, yeah, she
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 2: knew who I was, and she, I think, felt bad
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 2: for me. And she goes, look, I know Warren. I
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 2: know he's not gonna say yes. So why don't you
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 2: know as my guest, you come to the shareholders meeting?
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 2: And I was like, oh my god, I thank you
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 2: so much. Do you think I can bring some friends?
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 2: She's like, of course, So she sends me six tickets,
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 2: and when I'm on the phone with her, I'm like, hey,
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 2: her name is Debbie. I'm like, hey, Debbie, isn't it
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 2: true that people at the shareholders meeting and the audience
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 2: can ask Warren Buffett questions? And she goes, Alex, Alex,
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 2: I know what you're trying to do, but it's just
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 2: not possible. There's thirty thousand people there and only thirty
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 2: asked questions. Your odds are one in a thousand. I
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 2: wouldn't get your hopes up. But Debbie doesn't know I'm
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 2: the king of hopes up and.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: You're also the guy who figured this out with the
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: price is Right, So it's not like to fly your
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: price is right tactics to So what's.
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 2: Funny is it actually was very similar to the prices
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 2: right in the sense that it's advertised as this lottery
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 2: luck system, but there's a system and the odds aren't
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 2: exactly the same. Me and my you know five childhood
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 2: best friends, you know again, Kevin is with me. We
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 2: go there. We end up finding a loophole in Buffet's
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 2: lottery system, and out of the six of us, although
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 2: the odds were one in one thousand, four got winning
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 2: lottery tickets. And that's how I asked Buffett my questions.
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 2: And the question was so there was four different questions.
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 2: One was about raising a fund, another one was about
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 2: negotiating skills, another one was about you know, value investing.
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 2: Another one was about how he focuses his time.
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 1: But like straight up questions, you didn't get up and
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: say hey it's Alex No.
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 2: No. My thinking was, look, you know, I have, let's
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 2: say twenty questions. I wanted to ask him in an interview.
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 2: All right, let me take the top four and ask
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 2: him if I'm thirty thousand people. What ended up happening is,
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 2: you know, Buffett, I think caught on to what was happening,
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 2: and by the time my fourth friend went up, the
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 2: spotlight turned on. Buffett saw my fourth friend and goes, well,
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 2: this is a great time to end the shareholders meeting.
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 2: Thank you for coming. And you know, who knows what
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 2: if he knew what he was doing, but it was
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 2: a very crazy this in my friend as he started
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 2: asking the question, the microphone got cut.
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 3: Off, right, So Debbie's like, but you sent him this right?
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 3: Tell me that you sent him my book. I haven't
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 3: sent me, so could you not have sent this to him?
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: With a note saying like, I think.
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 2: He'll fall into his hands eventually. I don't want to
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 2: like rub it in his face. But what ended up
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: happening after the shareholders meeting was I ended up interviewing
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 2: Bill Gates. And the interview with Gates went so well
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 2: that his office was like, look, how can we help
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 2: this mission? And I was like, well, I still really
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 2: would like to sit down with Warren Buffett, and they
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 2: go easy. They contact Buffett's office and I'll never know
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 2: what was said, but I do know that Gates, this
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 2: guy that essentially what my assumption is. They're like, we
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 2: know all about Alex, We're not doing this right. And
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 2: Gates's office send me an email like very terse, please
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 2: no more contact of Buffett's office. Thanks whoa. And they're like,
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: my buddy, You're like, they're right, We're so. I was like,
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 2: oh my god. And what I learned Finally I learned
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 2: my lesson that there's a such thing as over persistence.
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 2: You know, you can bang on a door so much
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 2: that they'll call the police. And no business book talks
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 2: about that. No one talks about the dangers of over persistence.
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 2: And I realized I had dug myself into such a
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: deep hole that even Bill Gates cann pull me out.
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah you need I mean that level of you need.
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: You need EQ, you need emotional intelligence to be able
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: to read those cues and understand where those are. Well,
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: like exuberance got the best of you with that one.
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: I think, yeah, good lesson to learn. So in in
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: the in the wake of all of these people, you know,
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: Lady Gaga, Spielberg, Maya, Angelo Wozniak, just got Alba Pitbull,
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: I was like, I'm too old, I understand that one.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 2: It was a good interview, so we don't.
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: Have time to talk about all these people. But is
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: there I guess my question is like what is the
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: through line, Like what is the consistent you know, piece
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: of advice or what is it that that unites all
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: of these people that you talked to, if you could
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: like condense that down into some wisdom that the person
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: who's listening to this or's going to read this book
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: is going to take away with them.
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 2: When I had started out on the journey, I was
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 2: very cognizant of I'm not looking for this, you know,
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 2: one silver bullet. You know, we've all seen those tech
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 2: talks or those business books, you know, the one key
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 2: to success, and I sort of roll my eyes. What
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: ended up happening was as I went on the journey,
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 2: you know, do these interviews and on that outside, you know,
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 2: Bill Gates and Maya Angelou could not be more different,
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 2: right Like my Angelou grew up in rural Stampson, Arkansas. Gates,
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 2: you know, a wealthy suburban Seattle to a rich lawyer.
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 2: And you know, I just kept doing these interviews, and
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 2: about like seventy percent of the way into them, I
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 2: started realizing that almost like a good musical album. There
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 2: was like a common melody to every interview, and the
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 2: analogy that came to me, because I was, you know,
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 2: twenty one at the time, was that it's sort of
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 2: like getting into a nightclub. So what I realized is life,
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 2: business and success. It's just like a nightclub. There's always
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 2: three ways in. There's the first door, the main entrance
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 2: where the line curves around the block, and that's where
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 2: ninety nine percent of people wait in line hoping to
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 2: get in. You know, you're just standing there with your resume.
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 2: There's this second door, the vip entrance, where the billionaires
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 2: and the celebrities go through, and school and society have
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 2: this way of making you feel like those are the
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 2: only two ways in. You're either born into it or
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 2: you wait your turn like everybody else. But what I've learned,
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 2: and what you know very well, is that there's always
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 2: always the third door, and it's the door where you
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 2: jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 2: the door a hundred times, crack open the window, go
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 2: through the kitchen. There's always away in And it doesn't
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 2: matter if that's how Gates sold this first piece of
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: software or how Lady Gaga got her first record deal.
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 2: They all took the third door. So that's not only
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 2: the title of the book and the thesis of the book,
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 2: but that's really the energy I'm trying to inject into
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 2: the next generation.
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: It's it's another way of saying, you have to think
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: creatively and out of the box. Like there's always there's
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: always a sele that's not immediately self evident. If you're
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: willing to experiment and explore and you know, be unconventional
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: in your.
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 2: And grab life by the collar, you know, roll up
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 2: your sleeves, get messy, get dirty, there's always always a way.
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: But I would say this to you, young Alex Benian.
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: Not everybody is cut out to go through that third door.
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: Some people are are just wired to you know, they're
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: they're better off in line waiting to go through the
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: front door.
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 2: What I've learned is that, and something that I had
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 2: to learn along the way is that taking the third
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 2: door isn't always about you know, yelling stan your scarf.
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 2: You know that that's what worked for me. You can
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 2: look at Chilu for example. He's one of the most
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 2: fascinating people I ever interviewed in my life.
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: He grew up in as his Chinese right.
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he grew up in a village outside of Shanghai, China,
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 2: with no running water, no electricity. People were so poor
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: that they walked around with deformities from malnutrition. For every
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 2: you know, we think our education systems bad. In America,
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 2: for every three hundred students, there was one school teacher.
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 2: So those are the circumstances he was born into. And
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 2: he's you know, very quiet. You know, he was smart,
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 2: so he worked very hard and by age twenty seven,
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 2: he was making the most money he had ever made
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 2: in his life, seven dollars a month. Fast forward twenty
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 2: years later and he's a president of Microsoft, and his
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 2: story is and you know, throughout the book, there's a
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 2: lot of people who, you know, aren't these extroverts, who
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 2: are very introverted, who are very quiet, who do like
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 2: to stay in line. But the third door isn't about
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 2: you know, being wild and loud or you know, being
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 2: crazy and creative. It's about doing whatever it takes to
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 2: find a way and taking your life in your hands
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 2: and making sure that you're going to do everything you
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 2: possibly can to make it happen.
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: First, you got to figure out what that is. Yeah,
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: you know that's the struggle you went through. You know,
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: I can't help but listen to you and try to
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: think how that relates to my own life experience. And
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: of course, you know, I struggled for a long time
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm sitting here with you today only because
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: I had to figure out my version of the third door,
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: which was a door into a room that you know,
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: I don't know that there were too many people in.
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: You know, It's like, it's not like I'm trying to
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: break into a room where there's a bunch of people
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: already there. It's like I'm trying to find a path
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: to something that I don't even know exit, Like there's
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: no temp it for it, like learning as you go.
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: But I think I always bring it back to that
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: internal journey of like trying to really figure out what
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: it is that I'm trying to express in the most
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: honest way possible, so that before you start trying to
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: break down the third door, you want to make sure
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: it's the right third door. Yeah. Absolutely, So how do
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: you think you figured that out for yourself?
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 2: Well, Elliott told me this great quote once. He said,
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 2: sometimes going down the wrong path leads to the right one.
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 2: And I think that's very true. But that's only if
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 2: you're paying attention and you're listening. For me, when I
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 2: started with this book, it was never to be an author.
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 2: It was, you know, I wanted to find out this information,
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 2: share with my generation, and move on to what I
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 2: actually want to do with my life. For me, as
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 2: this journey has unraveled, I've realized that in many ways
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 2: it's so closely tied to what I feel my purpose is.
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 2: And again I didn't. It's not this overnight realization. I'll
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 2: tell you this story that I heard once. It's this
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 2: woman she's teaching in Baltimore for Teach for America in
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 2: this really you know, tough school, and she's teaching you know,
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 2: young kids, you know, eight years old, and you know,
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 2: it's just they're in a really tough neighborhood. So she
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 2: decides one day she's not going to do the math lesson.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 2: She's going to, I think, you know, grab some paper
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 2: and some crayons and help them write and draw their
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 2: biggest dream in life. So she passed out the paper
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 2: and the kids are running and you know, coloring and
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 2: everyone's having a lot of fun. And then there's this
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 2: one kid in the back who like is frozen, and
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 2: she's watching him, and about halfway through he has this
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 2: idea starts calling a picture, and at the end of
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 2: the lesson, you know, she collects the papers and at
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 2: the end of the day she's flipping through them and
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 2: sees that he drew a pizza delivery man. And she
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 2: calls the mother that night because she was concerned, and
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 2: the mother wasn't surprised. The mom said, the only man
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 2: in his life who's not on drugs or in jail
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 2: is his uncle, who delivers pizza. And what that story
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 2: showed me is that young people will always strive for
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 2: the highest branch they see possible. It's our jobs as
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 2: society to illuminate those branches. And in many ways, when
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 2: I had started this book, you know, we talked about
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 2: how I wanted it to be, you know, very informational,
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 2: like you know q in DA's. And while there's still
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 2: a ton of practical and tactical lessons and tools in
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 2: the book, I've learned that you can give someone all
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 2: the best tools and knowledge in the world and their
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 2: life can still feel stuck. But if you change what
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 2: someone believes is possible, they'll never be the same, and
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 2: that's very much one of my purpose is with this book.
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe that that's a good purpose to have.
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 2: Thanks Matt.
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: You know, I think what's interesting about you. You know,
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: one of the things we kind of didn't even get to,
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: we glossed over is the fact that, like, you know,
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: part of your story is that at nineteen, you become
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 1: this venture capital. If you get hired by a VC firm,
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: you're like the world's youngest venture capitalist. It gets a
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: lot of press. There's articles about you and like fortune
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: and stuff like that. You make the Forbes like thirty
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: under thirty. My question for you is, I mean, ultimately
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: you made this choice to like not do that anymore
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: so that you could finish this book. I would imagine
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: there were a couple people who told you, that's crazy
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: that you had this burgeoning career as a successful venture capitalist,
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: Like why did you How did you make that decision
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 1: to walk away from that?
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 2: So the book is actually what led me to the
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 2: VC job. And when I first joined the VC firm,
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 2: and there are incredible people. They knew from day one
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 2: when I started working with them that the book was
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 2: my number one priority, So it wasn't really this like
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 2: shocker plot twist as much as them saying, you know,
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 2: thank you for all you've done. It feels like now
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 2: it's a good because it got to the point where
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 2: you know, my book was always my number one thing,
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 2: and something can be your number one taking eighty percent
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 2: of your time, but it sort of becomes unfair to
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 2: that number two. So I still love Venture and I
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 2: think it's fascinating, and my time with Alseolf Luis Partners
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 2: was incredible. But to me, it was a very obvious
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 2: decision of my heart is this book, my heart is
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 2: this mission, and Venture was this great opportunity along the way, right.
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: And what's really insane about how this is unfolding is
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: that you're going off and like giving keynotes at Nike, IBM,
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: Apple Harvard, and essentially, from what I can tell, this
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: keynote is all about like the third door, this book,
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: which is hasn't even come out yet, Like, okay, let's
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: say the book comes out, it does huge. Then you
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: go to talk to Apple, It's like, how are you like,
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: as somebody who's like, you know, been doing this for
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: a little while, I'm like, I haven't spoken it Apple
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: or IBM or your heart, like, how are you doing this?
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: What's going on?
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 2: How can I learn?
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: Like will you be my mentor.
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 2: You're way too smart for that. It's crazy because when
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 2: I was I think I was maybe nine. I was
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 2: twenty when I got my first like corporate speaking engagement.
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 2: It was with Nike. And you know, I had like
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 2: talked a little before about the book that they're all
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 2: free things, like a startup thing or this entrepreneur thing.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: It's the two year promotional tour for the book, which
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: turned a.
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 2: Seven year promotional tour for the book. What's been very
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 2: fascinating to me is, you know, I started out writing
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 2: this book really initially just with my friends in mind.
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 2: You know, we're going through this life crisis. We don't
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 2: know what we want to do with our lives, we
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 2: don't know how to break through. I'm going to write
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 2: this for us. And I had mentioned this slightly before,
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 2: which is I learned that the book is less about
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 2: a specific age than a stage. And I learned that
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 2: through corporate speaking, where these big corporations would reach out
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 2: to me, which I you know, it wasn't like I
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 2: was pounding the phones for corporate gigs because I was
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 2: pounding the phones trying to get to Bill Gates. My
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 2: focus was on finishing this book. What I realized is
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 2: that there's tremendous value in not only stories that inspire
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 2: risk taking, but also someone coming in to help break
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 2: down the science of it. And that's what I've been
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 2: doing with a lot of these big corporations, which is
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 2: going in and really decoding the art of risk taking
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 2: for them, you know, breaking down the steps, also telling
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 2: the crazy stories along the way. And obviously I think
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 2: it's going to be a lot more fun when they
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 2: can actually hold the book, you know, starting starting now.
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 2: But over the past few years these keynotes have been
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 2: even surprising to me of how well they've gone, because
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 2: I didn't understand because I worked in a big corporation,
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 2: how hungry they are for that kind of energy and
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 2: that kind of insight. Because we've talked about it. Sometimes
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 2: it gets very you know linear there where there's a
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 2: lot of bureaucracy and innovation only happens with risk taking.
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 2: And I didn't know this at the time, but this
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 2: book in many ways is an entire study on risk taking.
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 2: You know, how Bill Gates dropped out of school and
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 2: started Microsoft. You know how spieover you know, snuck onto
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 2: the Universal lot to become the youngest direct all these
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 2: crazy stories in the end, well your.
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: Story, you know, right right, which is your own risk
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: taking adventure and journey to this right point.
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 2: Or in my mom's words, how I made her life
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 2: a hell for the past few years. But they're good now, right, Yeah, all.
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: Right, we got to wrap this up, but I don't
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: want to end it without I think a good place
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: to kind of land the plane is to talk talk
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: a little bit about your relationship with your dad who
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: passed away this past year. And you know, I know
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: you're somebody who's very close to your family, so I'm
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: interested in, you know how that process of letting go
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: and kind of being there when he was passing, how
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: that's informed your perspective on your career, your life, ambition,
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: what's important and what's not.
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 2: It was, you know, it goes without saying, the hardest
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 2: thing I've ever gone through my life, not only the
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 2: dying process, but there's something it's there's something very life
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 2: altering to see the person who gave you life like
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 2: in front of you taking his final breath, and what
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 2: I've learned is what matters in the end. It's weird
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 2: to almost like couch this into the story of what
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 2: we're just talking about, because I when I was starting out,
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 2: I think it was this like subconscious belief that at
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 2: the end of life, you know, if you really succeed,
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 2: if you do it really well, there's almost this like
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 2: trophy at the end, and if you do very poorly,
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 2: you know, you get punished. And you know, my dad
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 2: had paying credit cancer for fourteen months, or he probably
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 2: had it for longer, but from when we found out
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 2: of his diagnosis to when he passed, it was a
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 2: fourteen month period, whereas pretty much fourteen months of me
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 2: sitting with death every single day, you know, going with
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 2: my dad to the chemo, a ward, sitting down at
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 2: the hospice, people reading on grief and grieving. You know. Really, yeah,
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 2: I'm the who told my dad he had three months
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 2: to live. When you spend that much time with death,
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 2: you learn how to live and you find out what
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 2: matters in the end. You know, for the final about Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 2: sent for the final five days of my dad's life,
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 2: he had no access to anything that today, like if
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 2: he was alive, he would count as giving him pleasure.
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 2: You know, food, he loved food. He couldn't eat, he
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 2: couldn't drink, He couldn't talk. My dad would love to talk.
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 2: He loved to go out there. He couldn't do that.
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 2: He couldn't he loved to, like watch TV. He couldn't
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 2: open his eyes. He had no access to money, possessions,
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 2: literally every material pleasure was gone for those final five days.
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 2: And I remember the day he first slipped into his
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: coma where I was at Elliott's apartment. It was a
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 2: Wednesday morning, and I got a call from my dad's
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 2: doctor saying she had just visited him at home and
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 2: it looked like he had just a couple of days
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 2: left to live. And though it's very hard to describe
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 2: what that feeling is, because it's not like a cognitive moment,
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 2: it's not a you're not thinking of, like, all right,
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 2: what to do, it becomes and although you know that
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 2: call was coming at some point, it's one of those
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 2: things that once you hear and like everything changes. So
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 2: I called my sister who lived not too far away.
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 2: I like picked her up in the car. We went
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 2: to go visit my dad at my parents' house and
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 2: we get in there and I see my dad and
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 2: my mom and my dad's caregiver because he was on
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 2: hospice in the living room. But my dad, it visibly
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 2: did not look the same I had seen him, you know,
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 2: a day earlier, two days earlier, where he was moving
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 2: around and talking and he was very still in his skin,
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 2: head yellowed, and his breathing was very labored. And I
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 2: remember like trying to, you know, touch his hand and
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 2: see if he was resting, and definitely wasn't resting. And
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 2: I remember sitting on the counch with my sister looking
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 2: at my dad and you know, realizing he's slipping into
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 2: a coma. And a few minutes later, my dad's caregiver
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 2: said it was like time for him take his pain medication,
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 2: because with pain credit cancer was very painful. It's literally
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 2: like imagine like a football growing inside of your abdomen,
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 2: so all those nerve endings are being squeezed. So I
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 2: knew if he didn't take his pain medication, and he
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 2: had slipped into the coma very rapidly, so there wasn't
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 2: time to get like an IV in him or something
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 2: because he was at home on hospice, so he had
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 2: to take this pain medication so that you know, the
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 2: caregiver's trying to give it to him, and she's saying, David,
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 2: please open your mouth, and he's unresponsive, and you know,
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 2: she's asking over and over and over again, and I'm
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 2: really panicked. And then my mom stands up and she
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 2: like kicks off her shoes and grabs the pill in
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 2: her hand and like kneels down on the floor. And
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 2: I remember like seeing her. I'm sitting on the couch
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 2: and she's kneeling down and she puts her hand on
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 2: my dad's hand, and the second she opened her mouth
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 2: asking him to open his mouth, his mouth opened seamlessly.
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 2: She took the pill and swallowed it very easily. And
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 2: I remember just sobbing in that moment, not out of sadness,
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 2: because I wasn't solving when I saw him in the coma.
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 2: I was scared when I saw in the coma, but
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 2: in that moment, I was sobbing out of like the
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 2: beauty of it. And what I had learned that day
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 2: is that and I remember writing that down that night,
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 2: was that like at the end of life, when you
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 2: don't have, you know, access to money or possessions. All
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 2: you have is your breath, your heart beat, in your
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 2: connection to those you love. And that's, you know, probably
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 2: the biggest lesson my dad's ever taught me.
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: And how have you carried that into how you live
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: your life now?
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 2: You know, if my dad didn't pass, And this sounds weird,
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 2: because I am, you know, working as hard as I
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 2: can on this book launch because I care about it
• 2:04:10
  Speaker 2: so much, but I would probably be doing it and
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 2: being a lot more tightly wound and probably miserable because
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 2: what I learned is that, look, I want this, look,
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 2: this is this book is my dream. You know, I
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: spent seven years on it. I wanted to, you know,
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 2: do as best as possibly can and touch as many
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 2: lives as possibly can. But I also I saw the end.
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 2: I know what, when I'm dying, it doesn't matter if
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 2: I'm a best selling author, it doesn't And truthfully, it
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 2: doesn't even matter how many lies I've touched. While that
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 2: does matter to me personally, in the end, what matters
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 2: is if the ones you love are like sitting behind you,
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 2: beside you, and it's shifted the priority to the point
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 2: where you know, again, if my dad hadn't passed, you know,
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 2: Mother's Days this month and Father's Days next month. Like
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 2: I probably would have been, like, guys, I can I
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 2: got to stay at the office. It's a no brainer
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 2: for me to take the entire day off. Forget about
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 2: having a Mother's Day breakfast. It's a mother's a day,
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 2: and it's helped re prioritize in a very major way
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 2: that no no lesson from Bill Gates ever could have
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 2: given me.
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I'm just sitting here thinking, well, this
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: is the most powerful you know lesson that you've learned
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: in this seven year exploration.
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's crazy he passed away as soon as
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 2: the book was done, Like.
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: And he was he had his wits about him enough
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: to know what you were doing and everything.
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think that's a good place to end at,
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: my friend.
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 2: Thank you man, I appreciate it.
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's powerful. I'm super proud of you. You stuck
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: with it. The book is amazing. They did an incredible
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: job and I think it does have the potential to
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: impact a lot of people. So I can't wait to
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: see it out in the wild. I want to see
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: it in the airport next time, in the airport, and
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: and anything I can do to help you, man, it
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: means a lot. Yeah, much love, Alex.
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 2: Thank you. Cool.
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: So the Third Door you can pick it up wherever
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 1: you buy find books, independent booksellers, Amazon, all those good places.
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: Are you doing any talks that are open to the
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: public or book signings or any Yeah.
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, It's on my book website. So it's Third Door
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 2: book dot com th hi r D third doorbook dot com. Yeah,
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 2: all the tour stuff's on there.
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: Are you doing like a full tour or you're doing
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: a multi city kind of thing. You're gonna do that?
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, cool, it's gonna be really fun.
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: Awesome man. All right, we'll come back and we'll talk
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 1: some more.
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 2: Thank you, man, this was really really enjoyable. I appreciate that.
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: Cool beast.
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 2: Sample sample of a sample of