Matt Smith: Rethinking College with “The Preparation”

26:33So, yeah, Doug is the most interesting man in the world. And, you know, one of the things that by living an interesting life, doing interesting things, having interesting skill set, it opens up that alone the reputation of that opens up opportunities for you you know and so building a reputation as somebody who's competent and also virtuous i mean is you can it opens doors that no college degree could do that's for sure so in this four-year plan of which max is halfway through and it's divided into cycles of three months a cycle what are the things that maxim your son is now doing and has done.

27:12Okay. Well, he got his, so I have to say, first of all, we did not have this clear structure when he started. You know, it was very, you got to understand this was made through experimentation where we finally came up with a very clear cycle structure. So it's not as clean for him, especially in the first, I'd say nine months as it would be for somebody who's starting off today. It was a real breakthrough when we came up with this simple idea of the cycles. It seems simple now, but it was, but anyway, so he, the first thing he did is he got his EMT license and, you know, basically it makes him so he, if someone has an injury, he can help.

27:47I mean, he could work on an ambulance, you know, he could do that work. Not to say that's what he wants to do, but it's a real skill. I mean, having someone around who knows what to do when something terrible happens is a godsend. And so he's got those skills and he actually then parlayed those skills. So, he spent the following summer actually fighting wildfires in Oregon as an EMT, making$600 a day. Oh, my gosh. When I was in the Army at that age, and I think my take-home pay for a month was that much. I know the dollar has disintegrated since then, but still, I mean, it was shocking. So, the program we talk about, learning how to fly, that's extremely expensive.

28:28It's the most expensive cycle of all of them in here for sure the entire cost of the program when we add it all up it's basically the cost of one year at a prestigious university you know that that's basically the cost of it but it's not something it's something that you can work your way through you can not let you know unlike college today you can't work your way through college you can work your way through this and i think you know max's weird example of this just this one thing with emt the opportunity he got to do with the wildfires i mean there were people he worked with that that literally is the only job they have.

29:00They work during the summer doing that and then they just screw around for the rest of the year because they make enough money during the summers. So he's done that. He worked as an apprentice to a gaucho on our cattle ranch for three months, learning everything from all the nasty work working with the cattle, all the good work working with cattle, shoeing horses, taking care of all the animals, doing all of that stuff. That was one of the things he did during the cycle and did he kind of put yourself put himself in your hands and said look dad i'm gonna tell i'm gonna just do what you tell me to do like did he rebel at all and say oh i want to go to new york city and meet girls or anything like that he didn't but but if he it was uh you know coming up with the cycles was like a collaborative process with him you know i mean i wanted it to work for him and but it's not like he was excited to do the emt thing because it's like why what's the point you know why would i really even want to do that but i'll tell you he's quite proud of his skills from the government now that he's done it you know and i think that's the way this is the way all most young people have no idea what they want to do and they think that they're going to figure it out when they go to college you know and maybe they yeah they get cornered and they ended up having to pick a major eventually but they still don't know what they really want to do and so knowing that what we try and do is give them the clear structure of here's what you can do and it will benefit you if you do these things you will walk away far better off and and certainly as they get further along especially adapting it i think make can make a lot of sense you know to you know if they want to specialize in another area there's another area that have a passion for it makes sense to pursue but you know most people don't most kids don't really have like this passion for something already to start with you know they're basically they're looking they're searching they're trying to find the thing to be excited about and so what they need to do is do get out there in the world and engage with it you know and really intensely and when they do they'll start to learn what they love and what they hate you know and what they're more curious about and then they have the opportunity to pursue those things and so what are some of the other things in the in these three-month cycles well we've got one where you go to this shelter institute which is in the northeast and you learn how to design and build a home in three weeks and which is a that's great i mean i wish i had that i mean i every one of these i wish i had okay i have a hard time plugging things into the you know outlet let alone figure out anything that's actually involved in building a house yeah and when you have contractors come over and you know you never even know are they like are they ripping you off or what like you don't even know what's happening right yeah because you You just have no knowledge of the space at all.

31:49You just kind of have to trust and hope that it's going to work out okay. I mean, the other day there was a contractor and he needed to come in and find the air conditioning. And I had no idea. And my wife was somewhere in the house. I had no idea where my wife was. And he just kept asking my questions. Well, could it be in this room? Could it be in this room? And finally, I literally said to me, okay, can you please introduce me to the man of the house? And I had to find my wife to get him started. So I don't know anything. I understand. My wife kind of runs the household here too, so I understand.

32:22You know, so I, yeah, so that's one of them. There's one of them, the one he's doing next actually is the entrepreneurship cycle that which starts at the beginning of next month. And so he's going to, what he's actually, the business he's going to do is a precision agriculture business using drones here in Uruguay. You know, we live in a place that's good for it. He's not here. I mean, he's here about half the time because he's off doing other things the rest of the time. but he's going to be here for this next quarter. And essentially, it's actually pretty amazing what you can do with these things because you do this like multi-spectral mapping of the land and you can define what areas need more nitrogen and what the pastures, which should be seeded and which not.

33:05And it can be, you scan it with the drones and then you deliver it with the drones. So instead of tractors, it's amazing actually. So how will he get customers? well there are lots of local ranchers around us for him to go to and the value proposition is really pretty easy to sell so but certainly this is something he's gonna have to overcome like actually going out and selling yeah this himself and selling it in spanish which he had to learn and he learned along the way is one of the things in the cycles so so yeah it's gonna be a good experience for him i mean we'll see he three months is a it's a really short time to kind of you know get to get a customer and make a sale and get something that could turn into something bigger if you devoted more time to it but the process he'll have to go through will you know coming up with the concept of the business figuring out a way to generate customers and delivering a product crunching that into three months it can be done and in that process there's all kinds of learning that takes place whether the business ends up being something he carries on or not.

34:11This is probably the one area of all the cycles where I do have some experience. And I think three months is an ideal time. Like if he doesn't figure it out in the three months, probably not a good business idea for him. So like you should be able to, particularly for a service oriented business, which this is, if you can't get a customer in for your service in three months, it's not for you. Exactly. It's not going to happen. I agree. I mean, I'm a serial entrepreneur like you. So I felt exactly the same way about it. I mean, this is easy. You can, you know, So you have to, and even if you choose poorly and you fail, you will learn a lot by trying.

34:45You'll learn a lot. I mean, I've failed plenty of times. You have some wins, you have some losses. That's how it goes. So, okay, so there's entrepreneurship. Do you want to describe some of the other cycles? Yeah, I'll give you a couple more. So the one he's doing after that is he's going to go to Thailand and he's going to study Muay Thai for three months. There are two, one school, it's got two different locations, one on the beach, one in the mountains in Chiang Mai. And it's a pretty intense thing. It's a pretty intense school where he lives there, but he'll have time to do other stuff while he's there as well.

35:18And of course, there's still baked in academic stuff that he'll be doing and reading stuff that he'll be doing during that time period as well. But all these cycles have themes. And this is an important part of the whole thing I think I should explain, is that we tried as much as possible to tie the academic part to the theme of the overall cycle. and the reading that you're doing so that they made sense together. Because, you know, the way we typically learn in school is they give you all these disparate facts, you know, and it's like, it's just a memorization thing, you know, and if you have great memory, like, you can kind of maybe piece most of these still together, but you still don't really understand the timelines of history, and, you know, it's kind of vague.

36:02But when you do things under a theme, you learn things in this theme, you kind of form a latticework that allows you to start to build real knowledge and understanding of how all these things connect together. So as much as possible, we tried to tie the academics and the reading all within the cycle theme. So, and of course, there's plenty of like elective stuff, room where they can add their own things and we give them options, you know, plenty of options they can choose from for that. But yeah, and one other one is a cooking school. There's one of my favorite cities in the world is Florence and they have this great cooking school there.

36:36You go, they teach you how to cook great Italian for a month. And I should say the anchor courses often are not three months, three months, like the building a house thing is three weeks. So, but each cycle has one major anchor activity in it. Sometimes they're shorter than others. So this cooking school for one month, you live there in Florence. You have mandatory Italian classes along the way, of course. I mean, as part of the school, as part of the requirement, and you learn to cook. And I think Doug believes you ought to be able to cook a few good meals. I mean, it's something someone should be able to do.

37:17So plus the experience. I mean, part of this thing is we don't have any rite of passage in our culture. We don't really have a, there's no hero's journey. you see all these young men that feel so lost today. It's because they've never had anything that says where they go from being a boy to a man, you know? And part of that is seeing the world, but with a purpose. You know, it's not just about going and wandering and backpacking around Europe or Southeast Asia, which there's nothing wrong with that. You don't have any problem with that. But when you go with a purpose and you come back with skills and you come back different, it's a totally different experience.

38:11I mean, I'm so jealous of your son because it's, and you're right to call it the hero's journey because what I've told recently to my stepson is that when you're making a decision, part of you has to wonder, out of all the biographies you've read, is the sort of decision that someone would make if 30 years later, someone is going to write a biography of you. And just going to like college with another 30 million kids or however many, that's not going to be a special, unique decision that differentiates you. And like you say, just memorizing a bunch of facts in textbooks and even writing some essays about those facts, those aren't going to be the way a biography is going to start about you.

38:57but the kind of thing your son is doing or anybody who follows this the preparation these are stories this is what makes someone you know a hero is by learning these skills i can't do any of these things i can't cook i can't build a house i can't save a life i i can't i don't speak spanish i can't speak any other languages and i can't fight so just as every cycle you mentioned except entrepreneurship well the activities there's other activities that's not a cycle but it's one of the activities in there that we encourage people to do. So you're damn good at that. Well, chess is good because it's a microcosm of learning something very hard.

39:37Like chess is a very hard game to be good at. And you have to learn in a very structured way, a lot of information and you have to learn how to learn. Like you said, you can't just memorize it. You have to learn the ideas of it to be good. And you have to learn kind of on both sides of the brain. You have to be able to calculate things on one side of the brain and you have to think in terms of ideas on the other side of your brain. So it's very difficult. So I like it for that. But like, for instance, if your son was time traveled a thousand years into the past, or let's even say 50, like he ended up in 1000 AD in England, he could probably survive and I can't.

40:13Like he could probably have skills that are useful in 1000 AD. I don't know if I just ended up in 1000 AD, they would kill me instantly i'm useless like if you were put into 1000 ad in england what would you be able to do you can't build a light bulb you can't give them electricity i can't do that yeah what can you do yeah that's a great point that's a great point and you know and here's the other i think equally important question we are right now going through something akin to the industrial revolution where the future is going to be so vastly different than what you know you and I have grown up with AI and what's happening with that.

40:54What will you do then? You know, so many, I mean, I just read, there were three articles last week in the mainstream media and the Wall Street Journal. One of them at least was in the Wall Street Journal, another one in the New York Times, talking about all these recent college grads in computer science, actually, who can't get a job. I mean, they're offered a job at Chipotle, you know? I mean, it's crazy. I mean, Google and Microsoft are firing thousands of programmers because AI is really great at coding now. Yeah. To use the metaphor of the, I guess it was technically the second industrial revolution, when it really hit America, white-collar jobs today are the equivalent of the small-scale farmer in the 1880s.

41:35I mean, the vast majority of the population, 57 or so percent, was the farmers. And now it's white-collar jobs. and today 1 % of people are farmers. And I think white collar jobs are going to be wiped away faster than people can imagine because of AI. And most of the jobs that you look at, I mean, Microsoft put out saying these are the top 40 most at risk, you know, just the other day, you might've seen that. But the list is long. And actually the most common degree in America is actually business administration. I don't know if you knew that, but that's a useless degree. With AI, it is vastly more useless, vastly.

42:18And so those people are going to be in serious trouble. I mean, the people who are in college now are going to have real trouble. The people who recently graduated are experiencing some of that trouble. The world is going to be different a decade from now. And the question is, are you going to be the kind of person who can survive in that world as well? Just like going back to 1100, I think this question is, that's more pressing. You know, certainly being able to build a house is a good, you know, is a good, but it's really about being, having a whole stack of skills that are applicable across the spectrum of things that need to be done.

42:58Because, you know, we're going to have, everybody is so super specialized now and everything, right? The thing about this, about being super specialized is that it makes it easy for automation. once a job is specialized, automation can do it. But being what I would consider an expert generalist, and you've got a lot of knowledge, you've got a broad knowledge about a lot of things, that you'll still be useful to tie these things together, to tie the specialization together that will be automated through AI. Well, also the benefit of learning semi-deeply a lot of things gives you an ability, again, to learn how to learn.

43:41So, you know, learning how to be an EMT is very different than learning how to cook. And yet there are, you start to develop this muscle of adapting from one learning environment to another. And that meta learning how to learn is very valuable. In college, all the learning is very structured. It's very the same. It's like, read this book, hear this lecture, take this test, repeat. So that's, you don't really learn how to learn. You just learn that method. And whether it's, we don't know yet if it's a good method or not, no research has ever been done. And so what he's doing, even if he forgets how to cook some recipe, he's building this ability and this courageousness to step into a new environment and face the challenges and learn new things.

44:23And that's so valuable in this environment we're going into. He doesn't necessarily need to learn, oh, how to do the best prompts on chat GPT because that's gonna change. That's irrelevant. But learning how to go into an environment and conquer it is important. And you simply don't learn that in college. And it's a sad thing because people in college think you do. Yeah, you do not. You really don't. I mean, I think college is a, you know, I'm a dropout. So, you know, I can't say I, you know, I know from personal experience, the whole thing, what it's all like. I only went for, you know, I dropped out after three semesters.

45:03But basically what I saw when I was there was that 80 % to 90 % of the time was just hanging out. Yeah, one form or another, which is fine, I guess. But it's kind of, I had this desire just to go. I wanted to run, show me something worth pursuing, something I could, I wanted to do something. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to make something happen. And this was just, it just was like putting me on ice, I felt. And I like, it didn't work. And by the way, you will make friends wherever you go. You don't have to do it. It's not just, you don't miss out on the college experience by not being in college.

45:41This is totally my point. Like people say, oh, you go for the social experience. You mean to tell me if I sent a kid somewhere other than college, they would not make friends? Like, of course they're going to like make friends. That's what kids do. I know, it's retarded. It's one of the dumbest ideas. And it's one of these things that people just say like automatically without even thinking about it, you know, as if there's no other option. And the other thing that one major problem with college is that you're surrounded just like all of school. You're surrounded only by your peers. Yeah. And frankly, your peers are at least as dumb as you are typically.

46:14You know, they don't know anything about the world. They don't, you know, you're probably not going to pick up good habits from them. They're not going to, you know, they're not going to, well, you can have great conversations and a lot of fun with them, but they're not going to like help you in any way. in fact they lock you in to the sort of weird thinking that you kind of end up mirroring each other and i you know i think and i think this is a huge problem in our society today is that there aren't good intergenerational relationships in fact if anything there's this you know the anti-boomer crowd and the boomers and then that shit on the young people and i think that's this is so it's so crazy to me because i've always had the most important relationships in my life has always been intergenerational.

46:57They've always been that way. And one of the key reasons for that is that I could see that the people around me were fine, but they didn't have anything. They didn't have what I wanted to have. They didn't know what I wanted to know. There wasn't anything that I could... There wasn't anything to gain. There was no wisdom there, that's for sure. The relationship I have with Doug, clearly an intergenerational relationship. I mean, it's like I get to talk to Socrates like three times a week. I mean, you know what that's like? I mean, it's like it's a wonderful thing. And I've always had relationships like that.

47:34And I have relationships going the other way too, where most of my employees are millennials or younger. You know, I love those relationships. They're really good. And then, you know, with your peers, peers are your competition. And so in a way, it's like they're your buddies, but they're also like against you, especially when you get if you start trying to climb a career ladder right right it's like you're you know you gotta push them out of the way but what young people don't realize is that older people when they see somebody who's got some ambition and some drive and you know some like some integrity and desire to do stuff like we want to help them like we actually want to help you know and we like it it's natural for us and you're not going to get that from your peer group in the same way.

48:19First of all, they can't help you in the same way. And second of all, it's like, well, yeah, but what will it cost me? Because there really is real competition there. What am I costing them if only in status, if you end up being more successful than them? Those things really exist. And people who are wiser than you, more experienced, more successful, I mean, you're never going to be in competition with them. They don't look at you like that. They look at you for what you could be and give you little tests sometimes to see if that's what you might become, you know? And you build relationships with them that way.

48:56And so after these four years of three-month cycles are finished, what happens then in the preparation? What happens after you're prepared? Yeah. Well, I think it remains to be seen exactly what happens with Maxim, obviously, because he's only two years into it. He's already been given opportunities you could pursue if you wanted to, where you could make a living. But again, making a living is not the goal. The goal is to become the man you want to become. But I imagine that it'll be much like it's been for me as an entrepreneur, that you start to see the world full of opportunities and you see all the things, all the different things that you could do to make money.

49:38If you need money, it's easy. I mean, there are plenty of, I mean, I know when you do 10 ideas a day, that whole thing you were doing for a long time, write down 10 business ideas, no problem because you've learned to think about the world in that way right and so this will prepare them to look at the world in that way and i think that there will be opportunities thrown their way actually and and if so i don't worry about that at all and if nothing else they'll have they'll be certified in real skills that actually can offer them a job that they could do at any time

50:27I rarely get envious of anybody else, but I'm envious of your son's opportunities right now. Like, it's such a great thing that he's going through this. I wish I had, you know, back in the, you know, 80s, 90s, it was hard to make that kind of decision to not go to college. and I really wish I had had enough sense of myself to say, hey, this sort of, I mean, obviously you hadn't written the book, The Preparation, yet. It's just being written now. But I wish it had been there and I wish I had done something like this because I'm not regretting my life, but I think it would have been very interesting to have a background like that, to go through four years of going to cooking school in Italy, Mai Tai and boxing in Thailand, you know, working a farm and on, like all the things that he's doing now is such a, such an excellent, A, set of stories.

51:20I keep repeating that, but B, just a way to learn about life and way to kind of pass those four years that are so instrumental to becoming an adult and then really figuring out what you do. Like, I mean, most of the things I've done in my life after college had nothing to do with what I learned in college. And that's always going to be the case. Of course, yeah. But no one tells kids that. You know, they don't know. And they're really presented with only three options. Really. There's only three viable options, I think. It's like, it's a, I mean, I guess there's the dead-end job, you know, kind of option.

51:51So maybe there's four. But it's the military. It's the trade school, which like people like Mike Rowe have made a lot more, been pushing hard to make popular. And there's nothing wrong with those things. I mean, you know, they are more likely today to lead you to a economic stability than a college degree is, I think. But I don't think that they solve the core problem, which is helping you become the man you want to be. And I think that is what we are most missing. That's what I see when I see young men who are lost and I encounter them all the time. It's that. They haven't figured that out yet.

52:23They haven't started even the basic discipline of the personal code and saying, I'm just not going to do this. I'm not going to be the kind of person who does these things. I'm going to choose this way instead. They haven't even begun that process yet. and I think I didn't even consider that question until I was 30 I talk about it in the book and my personal it took tragedy for me to get to the point where I actually was like holy shit what's going on here where I started to really question that question became of key importance to me but if you get that early when you got that energy and honestly you've got no liabilities in life yet you are free to do just about anything you want It's an amazing opportunity.

53:08And I have to say, Doug is highly educated. You only went to Georgetown. I'm a college dropout. Both of us wish, like you, that we had this and did this instead. I mean, we really do. I don't regret my life at all, but it would have been a gift if I had something like this for me. Yeah, and it's such a powerful idea to reinvent those four years. You know, I think it was Naval Ravikant who told me once college, and I never fact check this, I just believe it, but he said, he was telling me colleges in the Middle Ages slash Renaissance is when they started. And every college, kids 18 to 22 would be sent to college and there were guards at the college, but the guards were facing in, meaning they didn't want the kids to escape the college.

53:59And it's because this was right after the Crusades. and look, the reason the crusades happened is they wanted to send the 18, these are the most violent demographic of any society is the kids 18 to 22 years old, the men 18 to 22 years old. So send them away for those years in the crusades or now, okay, there's no more crusades. Let's send them to college. But the guards were facing in to not let the kids out, not to protect the kids. And it's the same thing now. It's just kind of like this placeholder of what do we do with these potentially violent individuals who don't have a sense of risk yet.

54:34Oh, okay, we'll send them to college. People don't realize that's the outcome. And then you look at the past 60 years. Why, you know, you mentioned Mike Rowe, who's been on this podcast and trade schools. Why was there such a big marketing frenzy about sending your kid to college? Well, you trace the money. This is when the government started backing student loans. So everybody was making money except the kids. the student the college presidents were making huge amounts of money because they could keep raising tuitions faster than inflation it was backed by the government and the government was making money because you're paying interest to the government and so it was this giant you know marketing scam yeah and totally and now these kids are so screwed and these kids i mean basically if you factor in a little bit of opportunity cost of money you could have earned instead of going to college, just even if you just took a dead-end job, if you factor in that opportunity cost plus the cost of college, plus the likelihood that you're going to be taking on some debt and the servicing of the debt, the median cost is like$300 ,000.

55:43Oh, yeah. Which is the median net worth of an American family. Yeah, and kids don't... It's crazy. You know, kids don't develop the part of the brain that really learns how to measure risk until they're about 25 years old. So of course, sell these loans to kids. Parents have a hard time saying, don't do that. And it's just a cycle that's really bad. It's part of the reason for inflation and part of the reason for that young people now can't afford to live. Like kids can't afford to live in New York City, for instance, which is the city you want to live in if you want to work in many industries, or they can't afford to live in any major city.

56:19It's very sad now what's happening. It's terrible. These kids have gotten totally screwed and then they made it so you can't discharge the debt. so it's yeah you can't declare bankruptcy against the debt anymore nope they'll tell they'll take it out of your social security you know you don't pay your whole life it'll come out of your social security i mean there's no way out of it it's it's actually insane and it's basically you're setting yourself up for indentured servitude you really are you know you get a job you get in your career and you don't it turns out not to be what you want but at this stage once you've gone through college, you figure that out.

56:53What choices do you really have? You've got this big payment you've got to make every month for your rent that you had to go to live in the place where the job was. You got this big bill for your loans that you got to pay every month. I mean, now your choices of what you can do, you can't take risk anymore because you got to make sure you're making that monthly nut now. So you're trapped in that gig and you're stuck and you're lucky to have it at this point, you know, because they're cutting so many jobs. And that's only going to get worse, I think, with the economy and with AI. So yeah, it's crazy.

57:27And you, thank you, have done such a great job of discrediting college and it took a long time, but people were starting to wake up to it. I mean, if this book would have been published even five years ago, I do not think it would have had the same impact. But I think people are really waking up to the idea that this thing doesn't make sense anymore. The whole thing. I hope that, I hope your book's a bestseller. I'm going to send it to, I have three stepkids, two kids. I don't like to say stepkids. I have five kids. And I'm going to send this book to all of them. Even though they're all in their 20s now, they all still could use the preparation.

58:05Like, you know, I'm going to tonight write down my personal quote. I've never actually like written it down. So it's worth thinking about. And again, putting something on paper because then that helps you, it reminds you of these things that are important to you. And it's, again, it's more cemented when you write something down. I've learned that a lot. And yeah, you know, and one thing, and obviously this book was written specifically to deal with the challenge of my son at that point where he's entering college. But it's very clear to me that this is not something that has to be limited to people that are at that age.

58:42One, I think people who are younger could definitely do a lot of it. I don't know if you know, but you can get your pilot's license before you can get your driver's license. Yeah. I used to, when I was doing stand-up comedy, I used to have a joke related to the fact that rather than binge-watching, in half the time it takes to binge-watch Game of Thrones, you can get two pilot's licenses. Exactly. So it's not limited to where you have to be 18 to do it. You can do it younger. And I wish, you know, again, I wish I'd thought of these things sooner so we could have started the homeschool stuff we were doing more like this earlier, it would have been better for him.

59:17But I also think that, you know, when people, if they're a little further along and they're, and they haven't found their way yet, I still think, I think it's, I think it could be the answer for them too. You know, and I have, you know, I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day and he goes, he goes, I think it'd be good for somebody who's in a midlife crisis. And I said, well, yeah, I guess it would, you know, I mean, if you're really at that stage where you're like, I don't really know what, I really don't know what to do, you know, that, and you've never really had that rite of passage.

59:44You've never really found, you figured yourself out. Like this process, you will figure yourself out. That's really interesting. It also makes me think, you know, the word retirement is a modern word. Like people never really retired before. This could be good for someone who's entering that phase of their life where they're not doing, they're not as focused on career. Their family's grown up and out of the house. Maybe it's a good, like, I wouldn't mind, you know, in a few years going to cooking school in Italy, going to learn boxing in Thailand and working on a farm. This keeps you young, these things.

1:00:18I agree. And learning new things is really critical. And I mean, with myself, I can tell you, watching my son has inspired me to try harder and do new things. Because I have this, I guess what Buffett calls your circle of competence. These things that I'm good at, I'm known for. They're very easy for me to do. I'm better at some of them than, you know, almost anybody. But, and I tend to, you tend to stay there in that circle where you're really good. And I think that when, and I think that's a gigantic mistake. And seeing him and all the new things he's doing, it's inspired me to do new things.

1:00:56Like I started taking a Python course. I've never been programmed in my life. But I figured, why not? Why not? I'm going to learn some basic Python. I don't know. I don't know. Where is it going to go? I don't know. But I'm going to do it. You know, it's, of course, we do a lot of things. you wrote a book you wrote this book yeah i yeah i would say that's perfect too and honestly that was a you know you are a prolific writer you're a great writer it was very difficult this was it was did not come easy to me to do this and it was yeah it was quite challenging the entire thing so it's good and you know maybe because you had this new angle on like it i only have the pdf i know i'm supposed to get the book today yeah actually yeah but i can tell you spent a lot of time on interior design as well like it looks beautiful the hardback wow okay i never saw it yeah and it's big it's big because it's you know there are things that you it's there's part of it that's like a workbook okay i did what i could to make it as beautiful as possible within the limits of amazon okay yeah and there are limits you know i don't know if you've ever held any of the stripe press books but stripe actually has this separate publishing division where they do some they They published some books that I guess the guys, the founders of Stripe-like, and they're beautiful books.

1:02:10Oh, wow. I never even heard of that. Yeah, they're amazing. I'm going to try that. Just go to stripepress.com, I think, and you can see the ones that they have. And they'll have some that they'll sell on Amazon, too. But they're gorgeous books. They actually, someone gave a shit about trying to make it beautiful. And so the way I thought of it is, you know, most kids, when you give them a book, you give them, when you send anyone a book, you're sending them a burden. right it's like hey read my book you know read this book it's like you want eight or nine or ten hours of my life i mean come on but i wanted it so that when it got in their hands and really only the hardcover the full color one really does it in the same way and it's you know it's more expensive because it's expensive to make when they hold it i am convinced that they will know that they've not held a book like this before and they will start begin to flip through it and they will it might draw them in.

1:03:02You know, and you see even our weird use of these QR codes just so that, you know, it's like we talk about a news article and then they can scan it and go to the news article and they can, you know, we have different, we try to incorporate like a interactive design in it as well just so that it would make it different than anything they saw before because the content is totally different than anything they've seen before. It's an attempt to lure them in essentially by making it beautiful. Well, you've done a great job. This is a great concept. It is, it was a well done book. I'm excited about trying to think in this way for myself, like what new things I can do and to kind of, you know, teach myself skills I never thought I would learn even at this age.

1:03:43And like I said, I'm going to send this to all five of my kids and any other kids I could think of. And look, we haven't spoken in a long time, about almost nine years, 10 years. So I appreciate catching up with you and what a great way to do it. What a great book. I'm glad you came on the podcast and The Preparation by Matt Smith and Doug Casey. Doug didn't come on the podcast. I was hoping to see Doug as well. Yeah, Doug would love to come on with you. He loves you, and he would love to come on with you. So invite him specifically, yes. He would love to talk to you. Excellent. All right, I'm going to do that.

1:04:20And Matt, let's keep in touch. Thanks again for coming on the show and a great book, The Preparation.

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