Building A 100+ Year Legacy + Peter Thiel’s Fellowship + Bomb Hiring Questions

23:50That's my call to action. I'm going to put up a Google Doc, figuring out what are my actual rules and who am I looking for and how to apply. I'll put it in the show notes of this thing. I'm just going to make an open doc. Anybody can read and submit to. And I'm going to think of a name because I think the name matters. And I'm also going to, I'm going to treat it like a franchise. So every campus will have like the same naming convention and then we'll share the learning. So if you're the kid at Northwestern, you're going to be able to, and some kid at Duke comes up with a good distribution idea.

24:16We're just going to make one group chat where all the people are sharing what's working and what's not. And I'm really curious to see what happens. And to me, this is my version of the lemonade stand. It's like the slightly superior lemonade stand type of business that I think would be great. I wish I had done this in college. so i'll take my bow because i have successfully potentially rather proven that this idea might be one of the bigger ones that we've ever talked about it's it actually is quite exciting even like well you're talking ten ten thousand dollars and a newspaper which is like a silly thing but it's awesome like that's awesome and that's kind of the point with this is like these things when you repackage charity or whatever you want to call this into a game, it kind of makes it exciting.

25:01It makes it fun. It makes it cool. Yeah. What's the name for this sort of action philanthropy, right? It's like, it's not charity for the completely impoverished, but you are giving people both inspiration, maybe capital and an excuse to go and better their lives or improve their lives, live up to their potential, like take the next step. Is there a name for this where it's not starving kids in Africa, but it is kind of broke college kids who now have something to get excited about. What would you, is there a name for something like that? I got to think about it, but in my head, I've been calling it incentivized philanthropy.

25:33That's too much of a mouthful. Right. So we have to think about it. What this really comes down to is just a slight differing incentivization has like massive difference in the outcome versus just giving versus no, only one of you are going to get this and you all got to get after it. So there's a few versions of this, by the way, that I've thought about in the past. One, so when the Teal Fellowship came out, I thought it was genius. Peter Thiel basically had this point of view that universities are a bubble and that they have this halo, this umbrella, where you can never criticize a university.

26:07College, what? Education. It's the most important thing for our kids. How dare you? I thought it was crazy when I heard about it. He's like, education might be the fifth thing that they do. And he called it, he said, education is a bundle. And I forgot what he bundled it as, but he was like, it's an insurance policy for the parent. You make sure your kid gets this degree because that is a, my kid's not going to fall through the cracks of society. insurance. And then it's a filtering process. So he's like, for companies, they don't care what you learned at Harvard. But if Harvard did a good job filtering, then I already know I'm picking from the smarter end of the crop when it comes to hiring.

26:38So it's a filtering bundle. It's a social piece. That's part of the bundle. Then there's the education component. That's part of the bundle. And he had like five or six things that he's like, together, those are all part of it. He's like, what's going to happen is people are going to unbundle the bundle. And so what he did was, he came out and said, I think universities are such a waste that if you're a high potential person, I will come out with the Teal Fellowship. I will pay you 120 grand, I think it was, to drop out of college. And if you're in college, I will pay you to drop out. And Peter Teal, for all of his very unsmooth, uncharismatic ways of speaking, the guy's kind of a master of communication.

27:16If you just don't make him speak, give a talk and you're not looking at the The poetry of it. If you read an article about his presentation and see the quotes, it's the best. It's the best. And he, by the way, Peter Dill literally has speechwriters. So when he has a point, he'll go on tour and he'll give his speech. Universities are a bubble. And it's not that he just said that off the cuff. It's like he has a point of view that actually the universities, there's something going on with them. And it's there's sort of a weird thing going on. That's what he does. And then the speechwriters are like, so are you saying that universities are a bubble?

27:55Yeah. Nailed it. Cool headline. All right. Right. What's the subhead? Right. And so he gets it basically workshopped himself and his team. And then he literally goes on tour. He's done this a couple of times. He did it with the zero to one thing, which is that. And he does. He uses a provocative statement. So he says universities are bubble. Something that he knows is going to basically it's a head turner. You're saying it's a taboo thing. MBA students have negative impacts on new companies. Yeah, or he'll say, by the time the MBAs are in, the alpha is gone, right? Like once the MBAs are flooding into a space, the opportunity is gone.

28:27But the bigger one that he did was when he did his book, Zero to One, he went on tour. Instead of saying, buy my book, I'm Peter Thiel. I've had a great business success. I've shared some of my lessons. Was it competition is bad? Competition is for losers. Yeah, okay. And he's like, oh, this idea in capitalism that competition, it brings out the best in us. No, competition is for losers. He said, the only goal of a business is shoot for Monopoly. Ooh, Monopoly, I thought that's illegal. Literally, you get broken up if you're a monopoly. And he's like, exactly. So he finds the head-turning thing.

28:53And when he has it, he builds a pretty convincing case. So he did this with the Teal Fellowship. And he paid kids to drop out of school. Like, wow, what's the worst influence you could have on my child is convincing them to drop out of school, drop out of their education. How many kids a year do it? Do you know? I remember I hosted them at my office, I think the first or second year of the Teal Fellowship. And there was like 20 kids in it-ish. There's like so so his 19 year olds or 18 year olds were like at my office and I was like, hey, who are you guys? What are you doing? They're like, oh, we don't know.

29:25It was super disorganized, by the way. And Peter Thiel was not there. All right. So I apply. I apply. And one of Peter Thiel's team members selects however many people you said, six or eight people. They wire you the money. And they just said, do they say come back to me with three months with a thing? No, no. You at the time. I don't know what it is now. But at the time you get accepted. You would drop out. They give you the money. you would come to San Francisco and you would participate in the batch. And so you would live there. I don't know if you live together, but they were all, I mean, they all showed up in my office.

29:53So they were definitely there for at least a period of time. I'm not sure if it was the whole program or what, but it was pretty open-ended and it was long. Does a hundred grand go towards starting your company or is it a hundred thousand dollars plus three months of rent? It's a two-year, a hundred thousand dollar grant for young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom. Nice. 20 or 30 people per year, you've got to be 22 or younger to do it. You'll need to drop out in order to have it. You don't have to move to San Francisco and an idea is enough. That was the idea of it.

30:20It's been going for 10 years now. So here's some of the notable recipients. So the CEO and founder of Dylan Field of Figma, which is a$50 billion company, I think. Is it tens of billions of companies? Then there's Oyo Rooms, which was like a hotel style startup out of India that also was worth many, many billions. There's Austin Russell, the guy who created Luminar Technologies, which I think he'd became the youngest billionaire ever. It was like self-driving technology. And then of course, the founder of Ethereum, which is a, who knows, hundreds of billions of dollars value creation thing. Then there's the founder of Loom.

30:57I didn't know that, which was a startup that was acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. Josh Browder from Do Not Pay, which I love. And then there's other things that I don't even know about because maybe they're not for profit, but there's a guy who created a software to detect Parkinson's disease. And then there's a handful of recipients like that where maybe they're behind the scenes doing amazing stuff. So I guess that's been a very... He probably didn't do it for money, but if he wanted to, there was a return on it, but there was definitely a return on like, I encouraged value creation.

31:28Oh yeah, if even one of those, if just Ethereum had come out of it, I mean, smashing success. If just Figma had come out of it, smashing success, right? So those are like the two PowerLaw winners of the thing. By the way, go to muskfoundation.org because I just saw that Elon Musk was the biggest donor He donated, I think,$2 million to that Vesuvian Challenge. So Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman put up$250K. And the Musk Foundation put up$2 million. Describe what you see. All right. So muskfoundation.org. It's a website with no design. It's a blank piece of paper with five bullet points. And it says, Musk Foundation.

32:04Grants are made in support of renewable energy, human space exploration, pediatric research, science and engineering education, development of artificial intelligence to benefit humanity that's it it's like a hello world page yeah yeah it's basically a hundred words bullet pointed on a white piece of paper and this is one of the like extreme like you know money talks wealth whispers things yeah i call it um sexy indifference like that's what we're gonna call this where you want people to know that you don't care, but you also want them to know that you don't care because you're cool. So I'm going to call it sexy indifference.

32:46It's the homeless billionaire paradox, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The difference between a homeless man and a billionaire at face value is so small. In San Francisco, you will not be able to tell the difference, right? And the takeaway being, sometimes you could just be sexy and different in the very beginning and you become successful. Like you could just like, but so we're gonna call it sexy indifference. I saw a LinkedIn the other day that was no profile photo, one line bio, one job experience, 26 years owner. And I was like, here's a man who's going to leave a lot of money for his children. I can tell you that right now.

33:21I don't know anything about this company name. Never heard of this guy. I can tell you right now, this guy's going to leave a lot of money to his children. You don't get 26 years owner, no profile photo LinkedIn. That's such a high signal thing to do. or at worst he owns a really nice lake house or again he's broke he's homeless we don't know actually he could go either way but it's one way or the other by the way I bought the Peter Thiel shirt from the Joe Rogan podcast I'm going to wear it next week on the pod it was like a$120 shirt right the all white mesh knit Peter Thiel shirt from Saxon's Avenue I'm just teasing it right now subscribe on YouTube and you'll get to see me wearing that.

34:04I don't think it's made for hairy people. Mesh usually is not a great choice for us, but I think my IQ will go up like six or seven points if I wear that. Yeah, you're going to look like human Velcro with all these little threads sticking out.

34:22I saw people talking about his shirt. I thought it was pretty funny. He also had the Nazi haircut, which is like totally in, which is like you do like a high fade and he looked good yeah he looked good I thought he looked great he looked great but other than that he seems to be on like kind of a bit of a rejuvenation kick well I mean he's like 56 he's alright he can look 56 but he looks great he looks a little bit younger than 56 but if you've heard of cool contests like this or even a cool name for what this is called tweet at me. I'm at the Sam Par because this stuff is very fascinating to me.

35:03And I'm trying to understand like the economics of it because I think I might actually do it. All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me i got to visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why i use it for all of my companies and so do 200 ,000 other startup founders and so if you're looking to level up your banking head to mercury.com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N-A, and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.

35:58So are you going 50-50 with me on the MFM scholarship? I'm not willing to commit to that yet. I hear it, but I'm trying to do it. Look, I'm a slower person than you. I'm thinking like the par family, like where is it going to go? Oh, dude, the par four? Use a golf pun? Yeah, I got to figure out something. What did you call it? Par four? Yeah, the par four. but you i can't decide if you want to go cheeky or like extra serious like when you look at the nobel peace prize like they're wearing like those like the suits with the tails you know what i mean well you know how it is you're you know what you're gonna do you're gonna go cheeky on the front end deadly serious on the execution i feel like that's you i think that's what we might do but i i like i told we had the conversation with like uh with my wife i'm like i i because like we actually have to sign documents and i'm like should we do something like this and what are we gonna do what are you what are we gonna right now i'm i'm dude i was i'm obsessed with like single motherhood because like have you ever has your wife like whenever you gotta like be a single parent for the day like when your wife's gone or whatever i'm like this is impossible yeah it's impossible it's not i'm like how do you it actually can't be done um so that's my yeah so i'm like how if you're a single mother how do you get ahead like you know if you want to like it so it's like a cycle so anyway i'm i'm like obsessed at that problem right now i'm trying to figure out how we could contribute to making those people's lives better.

37:20All right, what do you want to do? I'll give you a simple, useful lesson learned from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Okay. Somebody asked Elon about hiring. They go, Elon, do you interview people still? And when you interview them for hiring, what do you ask them? How does Elon Musk filter for great talent? Have you ever seen what he said? No, well, I've heard one thing where he says, if I'm talking to someone and I'm like, you know, every once in a while, like 45 seconds in, you can be like, oh, this is a bad match. He's like, I just act on that. So like 60 seconds in, I'll just be like, hey, I don't want to talk anymore.

37:54And he just walks away. It's like his version of like getting a haircut with headphones in. Yeah, let me just... He's like, no. So what he said was, tell me about the toughest problems you've dealt with and how you dealt with those at your last company or project. He goes, I like this question because it filters out candidates who haven't actually done anything. And you can ask them very detailed questions about it and they will know the answer. Whereas the person who was not actually responsible for doing the thing won't know the details. And so it's a very quick filtering mechanism. Other questions that came from other people.

38:25So Steve Jobs used to ask, why are you here? And so he's like, I want to understand their motivation. Why are you here for this interview? Why this company? Why this job? Why you? Is the most important thing that Steve Jobs said. I know that Jeff Bezos asked a question about, do you consider yourself a lucky person? I was going to say, I interviewed with Joe Gebbia, the founder of Airbnb. And he was like the last person. It's just 15 minutes. And the only question he asked me was on a scale of one to 10, how lucky are you? And what'd you say? I said, I'm a nine. I go, I'm lucky for a variety of reasons.

39:01And I explained them. And then I said, I don't know if it's luck or what it is, but I seem to get my way a lot. And I go, why'd you ask that? And he said, well, because if luck's real, I want to be around lucky people. And even if it's not real, I want to be around people who tend to get their way. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, all right, I guess that's good. So Dan Rose, who worked for Bezos in the early days, I think like 1999 to 2006. He's a fun person to read about. Yeah, he's a good follow on Twitter as well, because he shares some good personal stories from the Bezos era. It'll be like in 99, we were struggling with this and we were sitting at our office.

39:38And he's sitting in the stairwell because we didn't have time to make desks. It's like, oh, nice. So he goes, Jeff Bezos' favorite interview question was, are you a lucky person? It was a great way to filter for optimists and people who manifest success. He goes, if you're a successful, optimistic person, the humble leader, right answer for this starts with, I'm the luckiest person on earth. I've worked really hard to get where I am, but a lot of things had to go right for me and I've taken full advantage of my luck. That's essentially like not the exact words, but that is the crux of what you want them to say, which is I've worked really hard, but it took a tremendous amount of luck.

40:08And I take advantage of lucky breaks when they present themselves to me. And he goes, sorting for optimistic people is a good proxy for leadership, potential and likelihood of success. Perceiving yourself as lucky is a proxy for optimism. Basically, people will always tell you they're optimistic about things, but they won't always say that they're lucky. So it's kind of like a stealth question to get at the optimism thing. Because the humility part is also important. It's easy to filter out false humility. Humble brags are very obvious when you ask follow-up questions. He goes, this isn't the only question, but it's a conversation starter and opens the door to someone's personality beyond their resume.

40:40There's two wrong answers. Number one, no, I've never really gotten lucky, but I've been able to overcome and outwork all the bad things that happened to me. And no, I never needed luck because I'm better, smarter, stronger, faster than everybody else. And there's a third answer, which is like, no, I've been pretty unlucky. in which case it's like I don't want to be around unlucky people yeah like I don't want to be around you yeah and that's what Joe that's what Joe told me he was like if you're really lucky you're either luck's real in which case I want to be around you or you just make it work and if you're say a one or two you're either unlucky if luck's real I don't want to be around that shit either or you just think you're a victim and I don't want to be around that so that's how he explained it to me and I thought it was weird by the way I thought it was weird at the time looking back I think it was better I actually interviewed also at Google years ago.

41:27They asked me like, how many days would it take you to like clean the windows on like a skyscraper or something like that? And I didn't like that question. I hated that question. One thing that interview questions, another way to think about them is they're meant to filter out certain people and they're meant to pull in other people, right? So a great interview question will not just assess the person, they will either attract or repel the wrong cultural fit. And so I think one of the Google things is like part of the reason I would hate that question is part of the reason they don't want to hire me, right?

41:59Like they want basically puzzle solving nerds. And I heard this put really well. So Max Levchin, I think was the one, the creator of PayPal, he was talking about this. He goes, when I got acquired by Google, I was like, how do they retain smart people here? Because they're trying to hire the most brilliant people on earth. And then they're telling them, go like tweak the knob on Google AdSense. Like go get us like a little edge. It's like, not only is that soulless, but it is like literally like almost the definition of a cog in the machine and he goes the way they keep those people around is he's like literally in the bathrooms they would have like really hard puzzles on the stalls and he's like they would give people like a crazy like they had 20 time which was like 20 time just go work on whatever the hell you want he's like they would have puzzles on the walls in the stall he's like because the actual work that we needed you to do would never like it's not like mission driven enough it's not hard enough to like intellectually stimulate you So they had all these other ways of intellectually stimulate you and to coddle you like, we'll do your laundry, we'll feed you, we'll nurse you, we'll need a bath, go ahead, there's sponge bath over there on the right.

43:01They would do everything they could to keep talent there. And one of the things that he talked about was like, you know, the PayPal mafia is probably the most successful early group of people to come together in Silicon Valley, right? They basically created, you know, they had Elon, they had Peter Thiel, they had Max Levchin, they went on to create like, I don't know, 10 plus billion dollar companies out of the like, first 15 people there. Yeah, like the smallest things of the PayPal mafia was like Yelp. Yeah, exactly. Like the guy at Yelp is like, you know, sitting at the kids' table at their reunion.

43:33No offense, Jeremy. He's a good dude. So the thing with PayPal was they treated it, they go, we're trying to create a cult. They go, the idea of diversity is not what you want at a startup. Now, you couldn't really say this today, but they're on the record of saying this a long time ago, which is that you want a certain type of person because that breeds a certain type of culture. So you, you know, pick the culture and then you only want to attract people that are going to like reinforce that culture. And you want to like immediately like repel otherwise smart people who would dilute that culture.

44:02And so for him, I remember there was a famous one, which was they were interviewing an engineer and the guy said, you know, they're like, what do you like to do outside of work? And he's like, oh, I love playing basketball. And they match is like, I don't want to hire this guy. Like what? Cause he plays basketball. He's like, I've never met a great engineer who loves, who says he loves to play pickup hoops. He's like, great engineers have other hobbies. And he's like, even if we're wrong, it's the thing that Monish said on the podcast. Monish Pabrai said when he met Warren Buffett, he goes, Warren, you're a great judge of people.

44:31How do you do it, man? How did you get your people radar so good? He goes, I don't think I have a good people radar. He goes, what I have is a very tight filter. He goes, so if you take me to a cocktail party and you let me talk to 100 people for five minutes each, in that five minutes, I could probably take the worst five or seven people. And I'll tell you, these people are lousy. Don't hire them. And the best five or seven people, I could probably tell you them. He's like, and then the other 85, 90 people, I don't know. I couldn't make a judgment on them in five minutes. It wasn't obvious to me.

45:01So I put them all in the no pile. He goes, well, isn't that like a little harsh? There might be some great people in there. He goes, yeah, but the cost of bringing a not great person into my circle of life is so high. The cost of discarding somebody who might be great is nothing. It's so low comparatively. He's like, so I am willing to be a very harsh grader of people, meaning you're either obviously in or I put you in the too hard to tell bucket and I just lump you in with all the obvious no's. And that was a non-obvious insight from Warren Buffett. There are freaks like Peter Thiel or Marcus Zuckerberg who kind of nailed that harshness early on.

45:38And then there's normal people like me, and I'm sure you were like this, where you find like a 22-year-old and like, I don't know, maybe they're promising. Maybe they were nervous at that interview maybe they were this maybe they were this and it feels good to give the underdog a shot oftentimes that narrative isn't it doesn't end the way that you'd like it to end uh like the like the people who that underdog narrative has worked have worked for me it's someone like step smith where let's hypothetically say she didn't do well in the interview but she was so awesome because i saw her blog and i'm like this person's like quirky and interesting hypothetical there as if anybody's gonna believe that was a hypothetical Well, no, what I mean is like, I think she, I don't remember the interview.

46:19I think she did great. But like I was into her because I just read her, like, because I read her blog. I'm like, oh, you have some type of it factor. Now, maybe I wasn't sure how that it factor could be deployed or used to my benefit or whether it's like, like if it was going to be used, like if she was actually going to like just become the best at like blogging or if she's going to become the best business woman, I'm not sure. But there was some type of like kernel of like fire. There was a fire where I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to harness, like a new harness, whatever. But there was something there whereas I've hired a lot of people who didn't exactly have that.

46:50They didn't have a fire there, but I was like, maybe it's there. And I make these stupid decisions and it doesn't work because you want to be a good person or whatever. And it doesn't work. What's that phrase? No good deed goes unpunished. That's how it felt with a lot of my hiring decisions. Yeah, you don't want to face the confrontation of it. You don't want to admit that you were wrong. You don't want to go back to square one and try to find somebody again. You don't want to admit to your team that you were wrong on this. There's a whole bunch of very understandable reasons why we make this mistake.

47:23Did I tell you how much trouble I got in at Twitch? A lot of the maybes ended up being maybes. Like a lot of the maybe people ended up being like, eh. Like it was, they were eh. I don't know. It was just eh. Yeah. Yeah. It always stayed in eh. All right. Sorry. What were you saying? I got in a lot of trouble at Twitch because when I was there, I tweeted out something that was very true for me and I think it's true. but the COO and others didn't like it. I said something to the effect of, you always know in the first two weeks if someone's going to be great. Great people are great right off the bat.

47:52They show you greatness in the first two or three weeks. I've never seen or rarely ever will you ever see somebody who turns out to be great that just was eh in the first two, three weeks. And they yelled at you? Yeah, they were like, that's not, I mean, different people start at different paces and that's not, basically they were kind of, they took it as almost like, that's too harsh and somehow it was like seen as like not diverse like oh there's a group of people who are slower to acclimate who yelled at you HR did our COO responded to the tweet and was like I do not like you know stand by this in fact blah blah blah since then I've seen a bunch of other people say the exact same thing a bunch of other like successful people say the same thing so it kind of in some ways validated this like opinion how do you first hand experience I had which was that the great people show greatness very early on.

48:41First two weeks, I tend to know if this person is going to be a winner. Now, that doesn't mean that somebody can't be a solid contributor that had a slow first couple weeks, but they're never the ones who are great. And great is all I'm really looking for, right? The Warren Buffett, be a harsh grader. That is some of the best advice you can get. How do you spell because that would be your reply to them, just a fart noise. It's like when they reply to you like you're not supposed to do that. It's like, come on. I just said my point exactly. And then they're like, what? that's a ridiculous thing to think because the company was probably founded on that principle particularly i don't know emmet but i've seen his interviews he seems like a particular like pretty hardcore for sure i imagine he was like that early on and so that company was probably founded with that principle in mind we have this all the time in my my team uh so ben who's my business partner we uh we will have some interaction with somebody and he'll be like so what do you think of how that's going with that person?

49:38Like maybe it's a company we invested in and then we like talk to the CEO and then we're like, I don't really know exactly kind of why. Like they've been really slow to take action or they were saying all kinds of weird stuff that didn't make any sense. Or we hire somebody junior and then he's like, how's it going with what's so-and-so so far? And it's like, dude, if you have to ask, you know, right? Like that's the first principles. You have to ask, you know, and I'll say something pretty harsh. I'll be like, well, I don't know. We talked about doing these three things and then those three things haven't happened and there's been no update on them in a week.

50:09So I don't know. How do you think it's going, Ben? And he's like, yeah. And he'll usually say something because one of the great things about Ben is Ben has a generous interpretation of almost everybody. Like his wife will yell at him and he'll be like, I mean, maybe I could have been a little more present. That's his first reaction. You know, she had a hard day. Most people get to that, but their first reaction is somewhat, well, that's unfair. That doesn't make any sense. You did this, blah, blah, blah. right people get defensive whatever he doesn't really do that he doesn't blame he gives a generous interpretation of people which is why i think everybody loves ben but at the same time in a company like it's a really harsh hard way to run a company because sometimes i've been like so do you think we should be making excuses for like do you think like great people just like have all these excuses and reasons why they're not just like being great right now or are they just great in spite of circumstances it's like obviously great people are great in spite of circumstances versus people are bogged down in the 10 maybe reasons why they're struggling right now.

51:09And so I'm definitely, but that attitude that has served me in the workplace doesn't serve me outside of the workplace because having a generous interpretation for people outside of work is a really awesome trait. As a leader in a company, it tends to actually not work so well. in the same way that democracy is great. Democracy inside a company where everybody gets a vote on what we're doing is not a great way to build a company. Like companies are benevolent dictatorships when they win. And you have to be comfortable being a benevolent dictator there, but benevolent dictator might not work in other areas of your life.

51:44Yeah, and that's why a lot of the most successful people are fucking assholes. You have to be the... Four times divorced or whatever. Yeah, it's because what makes you great at one thing can make you shitty on another thing. All right, I enjoyed that conversation. Is that the pod? That's the pod. That's the pod.

52:06Sam, how many diapers are you changing per day right now? Personally? Which are DPD, yeah. Up until recently, it was... Here comes a lie, by the way. At least one a day. Divide by two. Now it's one every three days. Every three days. Wow. That is pretty incredible. Well, we have a nanny. How happy are you with a nanny? Very. You know, a nanny tends to be a nanny for the whole family. So like she does our laundry. She'll cook a little bit. She'll clean. I usually work at the kitchen table with headphones in. And so I'm always present. Like every 30 minutes, I take my headphones out and I go and play.

52:40So the nanny, my goal was done. Make sure my child does not have a Jamaican accent.

52:48You threw a curveball in at the end there. What? But your goal was for your kid to not have a Jamaican accent? Like I didn't want someone else to do all of the raising of my child. You know what I mean? Oh, you did a copywriting move there. That was nice. Yeah. So if my kids, if Naomi ever says, Jamon, I'm going to be like, shit, I need to be involved. Yeah, I've been, I'm working too hard.

53:24All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. The reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive, and you can tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

53:52It's an entrepreneur. You can tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency, well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

54:17For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.