The steeper path, the climb I choose, leaving comfort, nothing to lose. Through shadow trails and rocky ground. My purpose clear, my meaning found. Each step I take brings strength anew, challenges faced, resilience grew, a journey tough, but richly sweet. Where's so in life's friendly me?
SPEAKER_06It's one of the things I like so much about music. It's like you can't force that stuff. You can get in a flow if you just think about present. You know, what's the next note? Where does this want to go? And um, like so many things in life, you can apply that to other aspects of your life. You know, just try to be present. What's the next word? What's the next thought? Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I the musical journey thing. I I think one of the coolest things that I learned about playing music is not learning to play it yourself, but learning to play it with others because it requires you to be so hyper in the moment and present and to be reading the other musicians to see like where are you going next? Are you gonna change keys? Oh shit, you just changed keys. Oh my god, now I have to quickly extrapolate in my head the chord family, you know. Like, now I gotta stay with you, and you just went to B flat. Oh shit, what's in the B flat chord family? I gotta remember my formula, you know, and like all this stuff is happening in real time, you cannot wing it, yeah, right? Or you you you are completely out of key, right? And um, I love that hyper presence thing, and I think back to our work lives, you know, like at places like Microsoft where you woke up every day and every half an hour for eight to ten hours was booked with a meeting, with a thing, right? And I'm like, how did I ever I I know I didn't operate at my best, but how did I ever even operate in a world of back-to-back task switching and context switching and rapid fire doing, you know? I have opinions, yeah. Tell me.
SPEAKER_06I think it's I think it's a technology, right? It's you solve something with technology, increases reliance on it, speeds things up, it creates efficiencies, but also creates complexity and it starts this flywheel. And so you can do more, um, but you're you're you're you're put more and more into a lane. So you rely on the email, then you rely on, you know, now AI just completely blown up because it's like, you know, at the end of the day, the thing that worries me, one of the things that worries me about AI is that you know, writing, like what you just got done, this big journey, writing your book. It's I can't imagine, I can kind of imagine, but I haven't done it. You know, it's like how difficult it is to kind of focus that, create the story arc, editing, everything else. And now it's so easy. It's like, hey, I've got this problem. Let me ask ChatGPT to help me draft this. And and there's a lot of power in that, and it's good. It helps move things forward. You can kind of focus on on your comfort zone, but at some time it's just chipping away at these core skills and increasing a reliance. And so, how long is it, especially with people just coming into the industry? Yeah, right, yeah, where they didn't experience, like we did, decades of you know, the grind and trying to find creative solutions to very complicated problems of critical thinking. Um, those are the things that concern me. It's how's that how are they going to cope? I'm with you.
SPEAKER_00Um, it is like one of the reasons I was attracted to wanting to work in technology is because I saw that it's a universal truth that we get better when we build it right, in that it supports and augments humanity in some way to make our quality of life better. Right. So we had fire, and fire kept us from getting sick from foodborne disease and parasites and all that stuff that was awful, right? We had wheels which enabled us to move heavier things further than our bodies could carry. We had, you know, swords to or blades to cut things, trees, food, each other, you know, like there were always these things that were created that somehow were these big step functions that augmented humanity. And when I moved to California in 1995, I still felt like we were there. Like the PC, the Mac, the internet, it was all still kind of in the realm of let's build things that make humans better. Right? Yes. The Mac is a tool for creatives, the PC was a tool for business people to do things more efficiently, faster. And then somewhere along the way, it turned into like the crutch. And I think that's the the the place where I fell out of love with it, where it was like, now you don't need friends, we'll find them for you. You don't need to call people and talk to them, we'll just send their pictures out for them to look at them and and hit a button to say that they care about you, you know.
SPEAKER_06I I couldn't agree more. I think you know, going back to this idea that when you solve something with technology, it creates new problems, which is great for business.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_06But those problems didn't exist if you hadn't solved the the first thing with technology. So it's like email versus handwriting things. It's like you didn't have the you know the reply all issue, right? Like that that wasn't a thing. So it gives opportunity to businesses, but as this flywheel goes, I believe the problems you're solving are getting further away from supporting the human condition, giving value back to humans, which is to your point, we we all get up in the morning like, how can I solve something that's gonna help myself, but others? That's the ultimate. And I think it's getting harder, you know, especially in business, to do that. And I think that's one of the things that it's kind of taking purpose away from people, making us feel like it's harder to kind of carve out something. And that's why I'm such a big fan of creativity. It's you know, those things that come from inside you that can contribute out that you know, at least today, I mean, well, we could get into that debate. You know, there's all the AI general generation, generative AI. And and that's actually a really hot topic in music right now. Um I'm both concerned and not concerned because I I think you know, when you when you have the easy button in life, I mean this goes to the core part of your book, right? It's you know, we're wired for the couch, conserve energy, do it the easiest way that you can. Right. But that doesn't give us purpose. We need conflict, we need to overcome things, we need that friction. And so if there's an easy button to create an amazing piece of music and everybody can do it, what's the incentive? You you nobody wants to do it then. Right. Um, plus there's no incentive thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I I still think that there is again, like that we're still in the very, very early steps of this journey with AI. There is still glimmers, uh, and again, like you said, it's it's all about where did you come into AI in your personal growth journey? Yeah. I I see very helpful and useful ways that AI can be used to make you better at everything. Right? Better at writing, better at making music, better at, you know, uh managing your feelings, whatever it is. There's lots of ways to do it, but I feel like it's like a car. We don't give a kid a car at 12. All right, we don't give them a beer at 12 because it's like, you know, there's a developmental cliff in the brain that needs to be reached before that thing can be safely used by that person, right? Yeah, and I feel like AI, and I know nobody wants to hear this in Silicon Valley at all, but needs to have an age limit before you're allowed to touch it. Because in my hands and in your hands, in our 50s, where we've already developed all these muscles and skills, we can see it and go, okay, I'm gonna write a piece of writing, and I want you to look at my grammar, I want you to look at my sentence structure, I want you to um push and pull with me on my logic. You know, do I have holes in it? Um, but we already knew how to write before we used it and asked it for that. If we, you know, and then so it's like like you were saying, this AI native generation. We've had two generations now of digital natives with, you know, Gen Y, Gen Z, and now a new generation coming into this that are going to be AI natives. Right? They they haven't had the brain development. So you're giving them a car when they're like nine years old.
SPEAKER_06I think it's one of those paradoxes that exists with with AI, because it's to some degree, you know, it's training on the corpus of everything that exists. And to a big degree, you know, and when you look at big tech especially, we're being essentially programmed. You know, we're being led down a path. So if you come in before you've developed your own thinking on something, because developmental things um um doesn't mean that that thing isn't gonna be there guiding you down a path, which is you know, and I don't know how we get around that. You know, it's yeah.
SPEAKER_00I I in I think there first has to be an acknowledgement that this is a real thing, that this is an issue, that you know we have something here that we need to pay attention to and need to have a discussion about to hit the pause button on. And I don't think business right now, especially with the billions of dollars of investment that's pouring into this, that wants to see returns quickly and in large numbers, has the I don't know what the right word here is. I was gonna say the you know, the um maturity, the sense of responsibility, the perspective to say, hey y'all, we need to put the pause button on on a little bit of this stuff just before we we go past a point of no return. Yeah. If we haven't already. If we haven't already, yeah, and that's arguable.
SPEAKER_06You know, it's it's complicated, right? You know, it's it is. Um the world's moving quicker, and so it's pretty easy to um defend why from a business perspective you have to go all in. Because especially with AI, it's gener it's it's it's exponential. It's our minds can't truly even comprehend. And so it's you know, when you look at geopolitics, etc., you know, the Chinese are gonna go faster, they're gonna beat us. And so, you know, we don't fully, you know, you listen to Sam Altman, some of these leaders in in in AI, and it's like they don't truly understand how these models are evolving. And so it does make sense, I think, to pause and make sure that we think about the ethical concerns, the safety, et cetera, the contingency plans. But at the same time, you know, it's a prisoner's dilemma thing. You know, it's you know, game theory. Like if you wait, if you wait, there's potentially a bigger penalty. Existential stuff. So everybody's moving it. So I I think it comes, you know, it's it's complicated, but from a personal perspective, I I think um, you know, I just look at it as like try to be ethical, try to be reasonable. And you know, uh, we're looking at AI and the startup I'm working on for music. And um, you know, we're staying away from the generative stuff, but I think to your earlier point, there's so many things that you could leverage to help people. You know, if you can understand how uh a studio works, the equipment that you have, the people, the processes, you you could uh you know, it's not a big leap to then think we can build like an AI assistant that sits on kind of sits on your shoulder and observes things. And it's like, you know, your mic in a drum kit and you're like, oh, what what mic should I use in this and it and can access the cloud and and and tell you. Yeah. Um, those are I don't know, I get excited about that because it it helps you then stay in your creative zone and and create versus being caught up in support or complicated issues or having to rely on your memory, which my age gets harder every day.
SPEAKER_00This is that distinction though about augmentation versus replacement of of a human function or skill. And I I just feel, I mean, again, you know, uh I don't want to get into ideologies and trying to name what it is to think a certain way or not, but um I'm I I feel like you know, if I had described my outlook on on life or on being, it's as a humanist, I believe that human beings kind of are because we are humans and we are of this species, we kind of need to pay attention to like, are we doing the right thing here for us?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And making lots of money or dealing with the extension existential race against China or whatever, those are all factors. But at the end of the day, you know, you can put yourself out of existence through short-term thinking. And at the end of the day, it's like, is this augmenting or is this replacing? So, you know, like this week, I had a rough moment because um it's pretty funny. I used to work in music tech for a while, and I loved it, and I hated it all at the same time. And that's a whole big discussion on what I loved and hated about. But one of my coworkers is a senior executive at Universal Music Group. Several of my coworkers are. And they're great people who I love and respect and enjoy working with. And I saw one of them post, we just reached a settlement with UDO in our lawsuit against them to enable generative AI for music, and it's a huge win, and it's going to be amazing for everybody. And I looked at that and I was like, brother, do you really believe what you're saying? Yeah. Because I don't believe what you're saying, but you know, um, I had to stop myself from commenting at all. All I could do is hit the like button for my friend and go, good for you, you accomplished a hard thing that you cared about. But I kept asking myself, like, well, what's going on now? Like, yeah, we you have just reached an agreement to pay for this startup who is doing generative music experiments with with this technology to make machines that make music, machines that create, and you just kneecapped it, yeah, and then you claim it's a victory for artists that you ain't gonna pay any of the money to that you're you know anyway. But I don't want to get into all that stuff. But it was it was just like, you know, we don't we really don't even know what we're doing right now.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. I I think to a large degree, I'm I'm oversimplifying, but I think to a large degree in business, um, because of the explosion and complexity, dependency on technology, there's a compartmentalization. So it's disempowering for the individual. And one of the things that that does is it makes it easier to rationalize, you know, your contribution into something or enabling something that at your core maybe you don't believe. You maybe you believe like that isn't the right thing, but the ship's sailing and the thing I focused on, I can I have a clear conscience on. But it's like when you combine all those things, it results in this thing that's yeah hard to stomach.
SPEAKER_00It is hard, it is hard, but anyway, no, this that's a whole nother ball of wax. I mean, I guess while we came here today, although this is a phenomenal conversation to keep pulling on, and we will continue to. I I'm I'm interested in stories of journeys, you know. I'm interested in how we all get to where we are. I'm interested in tales of people who are walking a steeper path. And I reconnected with you recently uh after, you know, we we worked together in the 90s.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? Like back in the past. I I don't think I've seen you physically in decades, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, and it's funny because so many people from that building from I think that was building five or building seven we were in back then at Microsoft. From so many people from that DevDiv, DevTools, Developer Relations world have resurfaced in my life the past few years. Interesting. That's a whole nother conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and you know, I I've this is very cool to see happen because there's something that was going on, but we connected around a context of working in tech, right? And and then I kind of lost track of you, and you probably lost track of me, and we went off and did different things. And then this moment in time happened a week ago or two, where it was like, oh my God, there's a ton of synchronicity in in what we've done in the middle that I didn't really even understand was there.
SPEAKER_06Well, and it was thanks to your book, because it's I think you know, it's when you were kicking off your book preview, and I I came across this and I I read, you know, the direction that that breaking asphalt's going, and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is completely in line with with my personal journey, especially recently in the in the last several years.
SPEAKER_00Although my whole life's been yeah, I I feel you there.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, no, I think I'm really grateful that you wrote the book and and we we came back together because it's it's um sometimes it feels alone on that road.
SPEAKER_00Oh man, it does. And it it feels alone writing a book about something that you're not sure if many people have experienced or or or or even would find to be realistic as something to even spend time talking about. Um, because it's it sounds like such a high class problem to care about purpose, to care about what you were born to do, to care about doing more than surviving in this very difficult to survive in world. Um, and to actually take a stand and say this should be the high order bit, this should be the metric for success. So I I when I wrote it, I expect many people to say to me, yeah, that's a very privileged point of view, and it is uh unrealistic and idealistic. And I'm sure many people will or are when they read that about that. But but there are some of us who actually did catch that wave and went, hang on a second, wait, wait, wait, wait, rewind again? What is This is about what what did I do? So, because we connected on that, I found more about your story, and I would love to share some of that with the world because we need reminders of these stories that are bigger than the few examples we see of people who have achieved greatness in a very public way or who took a very you know rough path. In the book, I share examples because I wanted examples that we could all look to and relate to of people who did this, and you could connect the dots if you didn't even see it. And so, but those examples are people who many people will say they are outliers, they're the 0.001%. People like Pharrell Williams, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen King, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs. These are all people who walk the steeper path to greater goals and change the world. Absolutely. But you did too. It's just people don't know your name. So I want to share some of that story today and um talk about some of that. Uh, I'd love to learn about because we, you know, just because we work together doesn't mean we get to sit around and talk. So I'd love to know where your journey started and and how you got to the point where we met in the 90s in Seattle, Washington at Microsoft, and the hallways of a building working on developer tools software. But where are you from? Like where did your story start?
SPEAKER_06Born in Pittsburgh, about two years old. We moved to Ohio, really small town, Tiffin, Ohio. It's in northwest Ohio, it's about like 19,000 people. A great place to grow up, but very simple. I mean, it's it's still to this day, it's it feels like you're going back to the 70s, 80s when you when you go to when you go to Tiffin. Safe place to grow up. But um, I always had this this spark, you know, I wanted to kind of see the world and see what I could what I could accomplish. And uh so, you know, as soon as I I got to be 18, uh you know, went to went to college, went to college at Ohio University. And uh as we're coming up on graduation, I saw I studied business, but you know, I I had all kinds of interests. Grew up kind of playing music, a little bit into sports, um, settled on business, wanted to do finance was was was my goal when I was getting ready to graduate. So um my girlfriend, my wife now, um, Erin, we just decided we were gonna move to North Carolina when we graduated Ohio University. No jobs or anything, it's just kind of an adventure, right? Um, I think a magazine had said it was like the best place to live and work in the U.S. We're like, yeah, let's go try it. And uh before I could get an interview at uh it was gonna be Merrill Lynch. I wanted to be a financial planner. Ended up getting an interview for a sales job at a little software startup and was offered the job and I said, Yeah, well, let's see where it goes, right? So um as we do as part we need a job. Exactly. You know, as part of that, you know, my dad was in sales, and so I it was one of the reasons I took it. I think sales is it's kind of a foundational set of skills. You know, I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur as well. You know, kind of had, I know it doesn't necessarily make sense. I was gonna be a financial guy, but I also wanted to be a musician. I also wanted to, you know, create something. It's it's it's it's one of the problems with my brain. I've got all tons of interest and curiosity. So but um the sales thing was good because it's just it's foundational, helped you focus on, you know, what does a person need and translating that need and communication and everything. So in that first job, I um went through some sales training, like did Dale Carnegie, you know, how to win friends and influence people. And I really liked it. So in fact, the instructor, named Sig, asked me if I'd come back and help to, you know, assist him in in teaching the class. And the reason I raised this is because it was only like three, four months into my job, our little startup was acquired by a bigger company. And it was jolting because I remember at the time, I mean, it's like our VP of sales. I really like this guy, a guy named Jack. And of course, this new company comes in and they fire him and you know, all this, you know, deck chairs moving around. And I'm just like, what is this? Yeah. And I mentioned this to SIG, the guy that ran the sales thing. He said, Hey, I've I've got these friends that have this little tiny software startup. And the ironic piece was they made a product, it's called Sourceafe, is uh developer tools for software engineers to collaborate on it. And this product that they built actually competed with the company that had just acquired the startup that I was working with. It was like the industry standard and whatnot. Um, so long story short, um, I interviewed at this little software startup and ended up leaving, you know, the first company I was with. And six months later, I'm sitting in Redmond as a product manager for this product. So Microsoft acquired our product, and you know, it's I went from sales into product management, which was interesting because I, you know, it's like Microsoft doing the due diligence and you know of our company. And so I interviewed at Microsoft in some sales roles and everything else, and I met a guy that did what's called program management, you know all about, right? So the guy that he he helped kind of facilitate the acquisition of this company. And so he he kind of took me under his wing and started explaining, yeah, I'm I'm you know, we acquire you guys. I'm gonna work with your engineering team, which by the way, that we're talking, I think there are eight of us in this company. It's a little tiny company. Um, only two of us in sales. And so um he kind of planned the seed. He's like, would you be interested in interviewing for product management? And I'm just like, well, I don't have a fancy MBA. A lot of these guys, you know, went to some some pretty big schools and had a lot of really good experience and and um I sales, and this is just but this is part of me. It's like I can do anything, I'm gonna learn about this. And you know, um, so I interviewed and landed the landed the role, and so that's what then took us to to Redmond, to Microsoft. Um anyway, maybe pause there and yeah, that's great.
SPEAKER_00That that helps me connect the dots. So what it it feels quite typical for a lot of people in their 20s in that you know it's not necessarily super intentional, it was surfing the wave of opportunity. Um and so, you know, uh myself and many other people I speak to, we all kind of there's very few people that I talk to who are like, I wanted to be this and I became it. Yeah. What did you want to be when you were a little kid? Oh man. Probably didn't want to be a product manager.
SPEAKER_06No, I wanted to be a pilot. And then my my I had bad astigmatism, astigmatism. And um, so at some point my dad was like, yeah, it's probably not realistic. So um that that went by the wayside, and then I started following like, you know, well, music, always been into music, so I was like, maybe I could be an AR guy, you know, just looking at like with David Geffen and and all this. Um that was a good one. What kind of music was a big play?
SPEAKER_00What what music instrument did you play?
SPEAKER_06Well, I started I started in like the second grade on piano, you know, taught by uh, you know, a nun. That's amazing Sister Mary Thomas, you know, well classical and and that kind of thing. And then um around the fifth grade it's saxophone, so got into jazz and all that, and then in my rebel years, turned about 15, 16, um, electric guitar and started getting into heavier stuff, you know. Like heavy metal or like hardcore. Exactly. Well, metal and and um so yeah, I was I was a big like metal guy. And then uh when I was 16, I went to visit my uncle in New York City, and he brought me to see um, well, so the thing I wanted to see was Joe Satriani. Joe Satriani, he played on the pier, like New York City, it was amazing, but he opened up for Stevie Ray Vaughan, and dude, that was life-changing. It's like cracked your mind open. It it completely did. You know, it's just like Stevie Ray Vaughn became like and then we lost him shortly after that. Yeah, it's like what 92? But um, so yeah, I my music interests go all over the place, and music's always been a big, big part. But then um, when I chose a career thing, it's just I kind of shut down. So it's like, yeah, I've wanted to be all kinds of things, you know. That's but um entrepreneurship's also been something. It's like I have this desire to kind of look at something and say, like, you know, is where's there an opportunity or is there a problem to solve? And it just engages a part of my mind that I can't I can never scratch the itch. It's just how I'm wired kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00I this is something I think about a lot that is is very underdiscussed, which is that um most people think that this thing I talk about called alignment always manifests itself in a very specific skill that is sort of a noun that people can name. I want to be a musician, I want to be an actress, I want to be a writer, I want to be a doctor. Um and there are people who have archetypical interests and skills that are easily put into a box. There are also people who are generalists, who are problem solvers, who are natural-born communicators, storytellers, teachers, salesmen. They are people who have a skill set that they do and wield with the same beauty, grace, and fluency as a great artist would, but it's very hard to put into a box. And I think a lot of us ended up in tech for that reason, because tech, by the dynamic, fast-moving, ever-changing nature of creating not only a new thing that didn't exist before, but creating organizations that didn't exist before to build them and to maintain them and to grow them, required people who had ADHD, for lack of a better word, that you know could hold many ideas and in parallel. You do. Okay. I do have ADHD, yes. Most of the people I coach have ADHD. Interesting. And yes, and and it is so prevalent. Neurodivergence in tech is so prevalent that um it is almost the majority, in my opinion, from my experience. I I have, I would say three-quarters of the people I work with have ADHD autism or both. And it's what has enabled them to exist in a space that is tech, right? So when you say, you know, I don't want to rat hole on ADHD being something that defines you or anybody, but when you say that, you know, I wanted to be a guitar-playing pilot, spaceman, software engineer, whatever like thing, that doesn't surprise me because what I see is the core thread that runs through everything, being the actual superpower, not a single-minded or single-faceted ability. Right? So I had this moment. A friend of mine is a legendary artist, songwriter, and producer, and I was invited to one of his shows, and I was sitting backstage with him, and we were at the Greek theater in Berkeley, and the Greek had, I don't know, maybe 10,000 people full capacity show. And we're sitting backstage, and everybody is chanting, pounding the table, waiting for the band to come out to come live. And we're sitting there in the in his dressing room, and I looked at him and I said, Man, do you hear that? And he went, What, those people? I said, Yeah. I was like, That's that's so amazing. Like, I would just once in my life love to hear people stomping their feet and calling my name to do something that they're excited about. That's so amazing. And he went, Yeah, I guess it is. I hear it all the time. And I said, Yeah, that's that's that's pretty special. And he said, Yeah, I said, I'd just love to trade places with you once, just to do that. And he looked at me and he said, You know what, man? I'd love to trade places with you. And I went, shut up, don't, don't try to flatter me. And he was like, nah, I would love to. And I said, Why? He said, My whole life I've only been able to do one thing. I can play a guitar, I can write a song, I can play music. I don't have a choice. This is all I can do. My choices are limited. You're so versatile, man. You can you can do so many things, and it's taken you to so many places, and you get to work on so many interesting things. Your career is like, and all I do like every night since I was a kid, is play till my fingers bleed and go out here and give everything I can. And he was sick, he had a bad cold, and he was I was like, I don't know how you could go out there. And he pulled himself together and went out and killed it. And he was like, That's all I know how to do. I have to pull myself together like that. And in that moment, I was just like, Oh, wait a second. Sometimes not just doing one thing well is special. And I never saw myself in that light ever. I never ever looked at myself and went, the thing that's special about me is I can do a lot of things.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Right? That's a powerful story. It gives you an interesting, it gave me an interesting perspective hearing it. Because, you know, I think one of the challenges with this, you know, trying to do everything is is constant imposter syndrome. Right. And and a lot of the stuff that you talk about in your book, it's it's how do you get comfortable being uncomfortable? Because that's perpetually what you have to do in order to make progress. Because it's like, you know, you see the new shining rock and you're like, all right, diving in on that. And you know, it's you know, you go through those those phases that I'm gonna forget the scientific terms, but it's where you you you get a quick, like, oh, I can do this. And then and then you get hit in the you get punched in the face. It's like, yeah, you think you know what you're doing, but you don't. And then that takes who knows how much time, and at the expense of other things. And so then you you get the people that are saying, like, well, why are you spending your time on this thing, on this thing? You're really good at this. You started this. And I'm like, sometimes I can't explain it, but I can tell you that when I look back at my life, it's like some of the the moments I'm most proud of are because I wouldn't have even had the idea if I couldn't have combined these things that don't belong together that inspired me to go a certain direction or come up with something that's somewhat unique. And and that's something that's important to me because I think it's it's harder. Everything feels homogenized in this in this current you know, world where it's well, yeah, we won't go back to AI, but it's like the statistical probability that this is the right thing or the most efficient thing. And so then, you know, businesses and everything else, it's like that reinforces that and again gets away from the human condition because humans are messy. We make bad decisions, but that's part of the journey, and it's important, and we have to be able to make mistakes and celebrate those mistakes. And we never celebrate them, it's always about well, did you make a bunch of money or did you, you know, how anyways your GPA?
SPEAKER_00What was exactly some metric, right?
SPEAKER_06It's yeah, and and then what do we do? We do postmortems after this, and and it was just reinforces to throw out the things that in hindsight you you wish you wouldn't have done. It's like, no, no, no, time up. Like those are some of the most important parts of the journey that you know, if if you would throw out on the next cycle, whatever else, it's it's like you're again, you're homogenizing your yourself. And um, you know, again, it's there's there's so many paradoxes in life where you just like oh, yeah, oxymorons, things that's like they just don't all paradoxes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00All the way down, top to bottom, it's all paradoxes, man. That's definitely been a learning, massive learning for me. And holding holding those two truths in both hands and being okay with that is is a big part of it.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I mean, we're we're taught to write the dualistic thinking. It's the only way that you can you can kind of stay sane, especially in the formative years, you have to say this is a right, this is wrong. Because if if everything's gray, you know, it's it's it's it's hard to make sense of the worlds and build a decision framework and everything else. But I found that um you know when I learn to have, you know, be able to accept two two competing things as both potentially true, it's hard. I have to constantly remind myself, but I find it's the world's simpler, maybe. Um I have less anxiety when I can remind myself that, right? Yeah. Try not to think of try not to polarize things, think of things as truly right, wrong, good, or evil, because the people that are debating those positions, they and theirselves don't think that they're you know evil or or bad. They're gonna they're gonna be able to rationalize their position on things. And so who am I to say that they're they're wrong or that they're bad? So but then if every if everything's just you know in harmony, then that starts to, you know, how do you stay motivated, right? You have to have, you have to have, I mean, if your movie's a film or if your life is a film, like would you want to watch it, right? You need to have the villain, you need to have the guide, you need to have the overcoming things, the you know, the unexpected endings, all those things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, you have to have the hero's journey for an interesting story. Yeah, you know, there there has to be these moments of failure and redemption and loss and winning, and but you know, uh that's a whole nother question is whether life is meant to be a story or meant to be a way of being. But you know, we're gonna get real philosophical real quick. Um, you know, but coming back to the story of of where you got there, so that that's where I picked up with you in in 19 in around 1995, 1990, you know, somewhere around 95, 96. Um did you stay in software? I mean, I I think I think you were around for quite a while at Microsoft, if I recall.
SPEAKER_0612 years altogether. I had a a stint in 2000, right when the internet bubble burst, where I went to a startup, moved to North Carolina. Um wouldn't trade it for the world, but boy, you know, talk about getting punched in the face. Um went went to a software startup that is an Israeli-based company. And um save you some of the details, but essentially I went to be the VP of marketing startup. We were getting ready to IPO, you know, and um the moment I joined, you know, we moved cross-country. We had a 10-month-old at the time, you know, sold her house, yep, moved cross-country, um, started to get settled. And uh let's just say the the CEO that hired me was pushed out by a board member, took on CEO, we did not get along, and I learned some good lessons. So I was back at Microsoft seven months after I took that role. And um, you know, but to answer your question, uh yeah, I stayed at Microsoft I don't know, about 12 years, went from product management into program management and worked on some really cool things. Um, you know, embedded operating system, so the Windows CE, embedded operating system and tools, um, web services, etc. And then um 2007, I think I went to Yahoo, worked on some cool stuff there, then um went to Disney, ran game platforms for them, so still technology. We moved to Southern California, uh, and then joined Amazon. So we came back to Seattle. So I've I've like I've moved cross country seven seven times, I think. And uh yeah, I'm I'm I'm up there with you. It it sounds like it, yeah. You've yeah, but um yeah, so it was it was big tech for most of my career and then had some pretty life-altering things occur um personally. So health, health scare 2015, um, a few years before that, um some good life change. Well, they're they're both positive in the end, you know, things we go through. But um got into fitness, you know, doing triathlons and all these crazy things and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_00Let's talk about all that. Let's let's do let's double click on that. But before we get there, I want to I want to ask you a question. So did you love the tech thing? Did did it fulfill a part of you? Did you have a great time? Did you ever ask yourself, like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Like, that was a good run you had there, you know, and and you know, uh for some of us, we just stay in our jobs that we accidentally fall into, like you accidentally fell into tech, because we don't know what else to do now. And we have a resume in this particular industry, we don't know how to unwind it or back out of it, we don't have contacts in other places, so we just keep doing the thing. For others, it's like, oh, cool, this is like a jungle gym now. I'm inside of this playground, I'm just gonna go swing from branch to branch and bar to bar and find cool things that I can do with myself. What was it like for you? Was it a was it the prison of your own making or was it the jungle gym?
SPEAKER_06It was a bit of both. And um, I think that's part of the reason I I was drawn to so many different types of businesses within tech and business models and things, but I I also struggled with that because I found that you know, it was like, you know, I started in developer tools. I'm not a software engineer, you know, I learned a lot through osmosis and things, and I did enjoy, you know, working in that, but but it was it wasn't my my core passion, like thinking about new features for engineering tools or collaboration tools, um, or even like game platforms. I was a big gamer in my day, but um my job, like when I was at Disney, my team was was building infrastructure um tools for building games so that the games would be more efficient and consistent and things. And that that wasn't my passion. And and so it was it was this the this this pull. I wanted to use what I had learned to do something that I was more personally you know excited about.
SPEAKER_03Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00I get it. I I as somebody who had a similar story in that I accidentally ended up in tech, I accidentally ended up at Microsoft, um, found myself sitting in a developer tools world as a non-engineer with zero interest in it. Um I had to figure out how to turn the jungle gym in uh the prison into the jungle gym in some ways. It's like, well, I'm here. What do I do now? Let me see where I can find something interesting and shake, shake the tree. And the cool thing about working in a big place like Microsoft in the 90s was that it was hyper fast growing and the new businesses were popping up like mushrooms. So you could you you literally could stay inside the same company for 15 years and never work in the same team every year if you wanted to.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? You could just move from consumer to enterprise to developer tools to sales to marketing to whatever. I mean, like the place is huge, you know, and and so there was lots of flexibility, and that was also the downside. Because I stayed there the first time for eight and a half years, and I intended to be there no more than two. So the good thing was that I was able to stay there for eight and a half years. The bad thing was I didn't push myself into places that I could have grown more because of comfort, because the jungle gym was already there and there were some new toys to go play on every three months, every six months to distract you, you know. Yeah. So it's good and bad, right?
SPEAKER_06Exactly. Yeah, I I found some of the same things. It's it's you know, I want to go in a certain direction, but then rationalize it right or wrong. Not that there is a right or wrong, but you know, young kids or other other life decisions we made. Like now we've got a mortgage, and um and it's easy to be drawn in to that. And you know, but I found that just for me personally, just this it would build inside until I like I had to do something different and and break out of that that prison, so to speak.
SPEAKER_00And um so what broke you out? What was it was it your health scare that broke you out of the prison, or did you decide to go somewhere else and do something that broke you out?
SPEAKER_06A couple things before the health scare. Um I'd say it was it was endurance sports. You know, I was I was dude, I was working a lot, I'm sure you can appreciate.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_06And it was totally sedentary. Uh had gained weight. Um, I didn't feel good. And we had we have three boys, and uh they were young at the time, and I felt like I wasn't being a good role model. And um so long story short, I was like, I have to find a way to get fit. And I had tried running in the past, I hated it, couldn't do it, just couldn't stick with it. And we went supported. I've two sisters, and my youngest sister was doing an Iron Man down in Oceanside in California, and we went went to support her, and dude, it was visceral. You know, you show up, it's pitch black out. There's a bunch of marines, can't panel, like setting up the course, and then all of a sudden they turn on the PA. You know, so you're right next to the water, you've got all these athletes snupping their their wetsuits, putting on the goggles, and it's like a beautiful day from U2 comes out and some ACDC, and then they jump into the water, and I'm I'm like, oh, I'm doing this. I'm I am I am I don't know how, but I'm gonna do it.
SPEAKER_00And something spoke to you in that moment.
SPEAKER_06Absolutely. And and then, like you say in your book, um, I was like, scheming. I was like, you know, if I just make this a personal goal, it's never gonna happen. Right. So I bought a bunch of gear, you know, ended up buying two bikes, you know, because I bought I bought this this triathlon bike. We don't we don't have to go down this rabbit hole, but like bought a triathlon bike and then um met up with my uncle to do this this hundred-mile bike ride in Arizona, and they wouldn't allow you to have triathlon bikes. You had to have road bikes, so I had to buy a second bike. So I like invested all the time.
SPEAKER_00Is it because of the geometry of the bike or something? Or like why and safety.
SPEAKER_06So you're you're kind of in this position where if you're drafting, you know, it's it's it's tough to hit the brakes. You could have crashes, all kinds of stuff. So but a century ride is an endurance ride, so you're you've got a totally different yeah but um so yeah, that investment kind of forced me to stick with it. And and then it became almost an addiction. It was it was like, you know, I started running half marathons and doing sprint triathlons, and then um, you know, I I'm I wasn't a big athlete. And so getting back to the point, like how this helped me break out of out of jail, so to speak, was mental. It was recognizing that this inner voice been with me my entire life, spend a heck of a lot of time telling me what I couldn't do and why it didn't make sense, and it was beyond powerful. Like when you cross a finish line, and then you're faster and you're going further, yeah, and you work through these pain, you know, like where you think there's no way I can finish this, but you do it. Now your brain can't tell you you can't do that. And um, you know, one of my favorite quotes, uh I think it's Martha Beck, is how you do anything is how you do everything. Yeah, it took me a long time to realize this, but the way that that played out when it came to endurance sports is that um it made me realize that I was a better person. I was a better, you know, colleague at work, a better leader, a better follower. I mean, just all of these, it was like the rising tide raises all the boats. And so the the um the triathlon thing, this this happened during a transition. So it's like as I was leaving Microsoft to go to Yahoo, uh, I was kind of in the middle of this this journey. I had done a bunch of sprint triathlons and everything else, and decided to do a full Iron Man, which is you know, wow, it's like you're swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112, and then running a marathon all all at one day. All in one day. Yep. So I signed up for this. Um, one of my best friends. I called him up. He had never done one. Uh, but it was it was kind of this camaraderie thing. So we did a lot of training. We we would go, we I remember we'd get together like a Friday night, we're drinking too much, and and I would look at him, I'd be like, 6 a.m. Starbucks, 15 mile run. He'd be like, Yep, let's do it. I mean, just that accountability. So it's it's like it rewired our life and priorities. And it was super powerful and it was amazing, it was life-changing. And then I couldn't get enough of it. So that became kind of this foundation, and now I'm in the best shape of my life. And fast forward, I'm at Amazon, um, incredibly stressful uh position at the time, and um was grateful. I had, you know, I was in the best shape of my life and got hit with uh health scare. I got this really rare um melanoma cancer in my eye, of all things. So the upside of that is, you know, I didn't have to go through, you know, like chemotherapy, and you know, I can't imagine you know, some of the things these folks have to go through um to to recover from that. So we had to treat it, you know. I flew out to Boston and went through treatments and uh feel incredibly lucky, you know. Um there's a high mortality rate for that, but we caught it really early through blind luck. Like I just happened to go to a doctor's appointment without no symptoms. They they they saw it, we treated it, and you know that's when I had kind of this epiphany where you know this inner talk in me was like, David, you've been wanting to do your own thing for as long as you can remember. You always have a reason why it's not the right time. And so I took this problem based on what I went through, is like when I looked out at the world, sedentary disease. It's like before the pandemic, that that was the biggest health risk to this country. You know, we're wired for the couch, and now you can do everything from the couch. And how am I gonna get people off the couch? And so I decided I was gonna leave Amazon and start my own company and broke out of jail, burned the boats, so to speak, and so that that was that was a catalyst, you know.
SPEAKER_00That was a catalyst. So it was a a moment of awfulness. I'm sure it was frightening, I'm sure it turned your whole world upside down, and yet at the same time it brought incredible clarity to you.
SPEAKER_06Well said, that's exactly what it was.
SPEAKER_00I hear this far too often, and I I have no judgment for this scenario because gifts come in the strangest forms in this life. But I spend a lot of time talking to people about their paths, their careers, their lives. I work with and walk with people on their journeys as a coach. And the number of people I talk to who share a story of a health scare being the moment that they were finally able to give themselves permission to do what they had been wanting to do for so long is it's it's almost a cliche. It happens so much. I mean, I have had virtually nobody say to me, you know, a man, I woke up one day and just said, Life's too short. I have tremendous clarity and perspective. I'm not gonna do any of this anymore. I'm gonna change everything, I'm gonna shake up the whole edge of sketch of my life before it happens to me. Like, literally, I don't think I've ever met anybody who told me that. And in in my coach training, the the founder of the school that taught me about working with people as a as a coach and guide, he called this an interruption. That usually that human beings are change resistant. We are wired for status quo, as I wrote about in the book. There's a lot of research as to why this is evolutionary biology. We are wired to keep things the same because when we don't, risk comes in. And when risk comes in, when you're a hunter-gatherer living in the woods, bad things happen. Right? Really bad things happen really fast. So we are wired to avoid changing things. And most people do not change unless they have an interruption, and that's basically the metaphorical stick in the spokes of your bicycle while you're going full speed down the road and you fly over the handlebars, you know, and and eat pavement. And that is it comes in different forms, I've seen. It comes in people losing their career, it comes in people losing their partner, it comes in people losing their health. And it comes in lots of forms of loss, but it's always unseen, unanticipated, abrupt, and you end up with some pretty bad road rash afterwards, right? And then after you pick all the asphalt out and and sort of bandage yourself up, there's this sort of like, should I have been riding my bike so fast on this street? Did I even think about what I was doing? And and this clarity comes about. So there's a gift in this. Um there's a wonderful book by a guy called Shirzad Shamin, who uh was also uh is also a coach and psychology thinker who wrote a book called Positive Intelligence. Um, and this came out of a lot of work he did at Stanford trying to understand the power of positivity on growth, on performance. And they did loads of real neuroscience research, putting people under functional MRI machines, watching how their brains worked in different things. And one of the most interesting things they found in this research is that people who are able to reframe anything as a gift are some of the most high functional and successful people. And anything meaning like including their own death, including you know, anything being a gift, finding a gift in anything as opposed to finding.
SPEAKER_06Absolutely. And I think, you know, me personally, I I also think the opposite can be applied, where it's like to try to be stay humble about the accomplishments and the the positive impacts that you have in life because you recognize that you know everything is in kind of a homeostasis. It's like there is a, you know, no matter how good something is, it probably affects somebody or something in a negative way.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_06And all of the negative things have a capacity to help you in some way. And sometimes, oftentimes, I think, especially with the negative stuff, we need distance to kind of see that. But yeah, I I'm gonna have to read that book because I think that'll just reinforce a lot of my my own personal beliefs on that.
SPEAKER_00It's a great book. Um, I've used it extensively as a tool in in helping others grow, um, because it it brings real validated scientific research to something that is quite common sense or folksy, which is that people who are positive tend to do better. Um everybody's like, oh, really? Uh look at this guy, look at that guy. He brings together a lot of data. And then what stops us from being positive, there's a whole another very, very interesting part in that. And uh, he's even developed an assessment to measure your PQ. Because you know, we had IQ, the intelligence quotient, to measure your intelligence intellectually. Then Daniel Goleman had this groundbreaking book called EQ, Emotional Intelligence Quotient, and that's sort of measuring. They found out that EQ is more important than IQ. And Sheerzad's book actually brings forward a new dimension, which is PQ, which is he found out that positivity is even more important than just emotional intelligence. And so he has an assessment that you can do to see where you're at on your score. He's got some really practical tools that I use all the time with people because it is it's phenomenal, the difference it makes in just your ability to not just function, but to truly succeed. So highly recommend it. But coming back to your journey, so you got this gift of a wake-up call from the universe.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00First, in the form of hey, I'm not living the way I want to live. I'm not healthy, my body does not feel good, I'm not proud of who I am, I want to be better, I want to do something, and you found engagement, alignment, and fuel in running. And you talk about this like very casually, like, oh, and then I decided to do a couple of running, you know, Ironmans and uh some ultra marathons, but like this is serious mental and physical accomplishment. And I I know so many with in the world that we in inhabit in professional world, we are surrounded by overachievers, right? We are surrounded by people who do marathons for fun after they do theoretical math on the weekend, because they just want to constantly push themselves and prove how hardcore they are. So, like when I hear about people running marathons, it's so commonplace almost in certain circles. But most people can't even run down the street, let alone for 26 miles or 100 miles, right? So, what did you learn about yourself through that journey of going from I was out of shape and hated running, which I can fully relate to, to I did this thing? Because you're like you're you're one of many, not a lot, but of a Few people I know who later in life, meaning they weren't 18 or 25 when they started this, yeah, like went from here to here. Like 40 is a crazy time to me to start running because like I would assume that if you want to do something physically demanding like this, you don't start it at 18. I mean, I mean you don't start it at 40, you started at at 15, you know, as in track or cross country in high school, right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Well, I learned everything through it. I mean, I I'm seriously, it's I rewired a lot of my beliefs, philosophies, things through the experience and the journey. Most of it's it's I I have this thing. The race itself, the hundred miles that I ran asion or the Iron Man races, the race itself is a celebration. The all the work and all the value is the journey. And it's the people surrounding myself with. So, you know, like I'm a big fan of the book, you know, James Clear's books, Tom McCabots. Yeah, just talks about don't wait to be the thing, just be the thing in the day, just small steps every day. And uh, you know, it's one of the great things about endurance sports is you can measure it. So there's the data component. Um, you know, I I really got into the physiology of it to understand how the body reacts to things. So things that almost don't make sense, like to go faster, you know, you get more efficient, especially like with the long endurance stuff. You want to get your body really efficient at burning fat. Um, because it's always bad burning either fat, sugar, you know, it's like your fast twitch stuff, it's like you know, your carbs.
SPEAKER_00And but you only have a couple of all your glucose, all of that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06So that that glucose, which is what runs your brain as well. I mean, it'll run out. So if you you know, you're sprinting, it's like so you so to do the long stuff, you have to get really efficient at at um burning, burning um, you know, fat, etc. And um, but I I found the biggest um return, so to speak, with with with the ultra marathons. Because I think one of the traps I fell in with the triathlon stuff is it was a never enough. I always wanted to push the boundary. Like there's a big thing where it's like, you know, if you're elite, you can earn a spot in the world championships down at Kona. And I wanted to be that guy. And I had lots of setbacks. I've you know, there are entire races I missed because I when you go into it, but I like I have all kinds of other health stuff, back issues and things. And so I would get these flare-ups for you right in the middle of a training where I couldn't run at all. I'd go to PT and do chiropractors and all this stuff, and and um that was frustrating because again, I was focused on the the actual output goal, much like work, right? And so that so I saw that there was there was an unhealthy component of this.
SPEAKER_03I feel you, yeah.
SPEAKER_06This is part of what brought me to this this startup was like I want to incentivize people to take care of themselves, but find ways to make the exercise bigger than them. So we got into this thing of microphilanthropy, so you could dedicate your your fitness to particular charity, bring people in. Um but the the ultra running became part of partly a solution to this because that whole culture is not about how fast you ran 100 miles. It's what did you learn out there and how did you get there? That journey, I made some really good friendships and um some great experiences training, training for that thing.
SPEAKER_00There's a I I think there's a whole book on this, and I know many people who are runners have written books about running and how it influences their lives. Um, I'm gonna pause for a second for us because uh and I'll fix this and edit, but I I'm gonna take a quick bio break because I've been drinking tea here and we've been going for an hour and 15. Do you how much time do you have?
SPEAKER_06Whatever you whatever you need for this.
SPEAKER_00We still got a lot of ground to cover, and this is such a good conversation. I don't want to cut it short. So I'm gonna just we'll just take a quick bio break or step away, give it water, whatever you need, and then we'll come back and pick this up on the on the the lessons where we're at, because there's there's a lot of good in this.
SPEAKER_06Sounds great.
SPEAKER_00All right, I'm having fun. Just give me a minute. I'll I'm just gonna keep it rolling or just hit the mute on the mic.
SPEAKER_06I'll be back in the hearing.
SPEAKER_00I gotta unmute myself. So thanks for that. Um one of the things that I am fascinated about, largely from a personal perspective, is you mentioned the body's incremental ability to build and to rebuild. Yeah. So like a lot of people in professional world who don't work with their bodies, I have spent my whole adult life in a chair in front of a screen. Maybe I walked to a meeting, maybe I walked down the hall, maybe I walked around a campus, but largely spent my time in a chair, driving to work, being at work, coming home from work. Everything was in a chair. By the time you come home, you're exhausted. You go back to the chair. And I think a lot of people who exist in this world lose touch with their bodies and develop narratives about their bodies. And I know I live in the world of narratives as a coach, of seeing them, addressing them, changing them. And I have a personal narrative with my own body that I am just not athletic. I there was a period of time when I was young where I did not believe that. But there was a period starting in my you know mid to late 20s where that narrative came to town. It left the building, right? Because and I think, and I'm gonna blame this on Seattle a little bit, which is unfair because it's one of the healthiest places with some of the healthiest people in the world. But when I moved to Seattle, I didn't know how to live in the rain. I didn't have, I hadn't heard the Norwegian saying there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. I just knew that it was rainy and cold most of the year, and that didn't make me want to go outside and be physically active. So I became the most unhealthy I have ever been in my life during the eight years I lived in Seattle. I gained 50 pounds, I developed high blood pressure, I was on antidepressants, and I moved to Southern California and shook the funk off of me. Um and and I think it's unfair to blame it on Seattle because actually Seattle's a great place to be active and to be healthy. The Northwest is. That's why I'm making what I'm making, that's why I'm doing what I'm doing, because I have a brain. And my body is a carrier for the brain. And I I've literally heard people tell me if I could, I would just put myself in a glass jar on a wheelchair and wheel myself around because I am so uninterested in movement, and that is unhealthy as hell, right? To be so disconnected from that.
SPEAKER_06But but I, you know, uh, you're not alone, man. I that that was me for until it wasn't, you know, up until almost 40 years old. Yeah, it's you know, it's it's it's interesting, is when you look back even 50 years ago, nobody exercised. You didn't set out to exercise. You didn't need, let me say it differently. You didn't need to exercise. You got enough movement and exercise through the course of your day because of the way the world was. And now we have, you know, the most of the jobs are office jobs. You're sitting at a computer, you're sitting on your couch, entertainment, cars, multiple cars in the family.
SPEAKER_00So it's moving to the suburbs, out of the cities.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. So and and that's the other thing. It's like being an athlete, that's a choice. And often it's tied to things like you are, you want to be competitive in that particular sport. And that's not what it's about, right? It's it's we need to make it so that our bodies support our brains. We're getting enough movement because it's it's symbiotic, it's the foundation of your health. And um, you know, I I think that's why it's the biggest health issue right now. It's because we're not incentivized to go off and and and exercise and and and do these things. And it takes time away from the time for our families, other obligations. We're always competing. And what do we do? We sacrifice for others, and and and it becomes a million ways to rationalize why you shouldn't take the time to go exercise.
SPEAKER_00And um so it's brutal prioritization. I mean, I feel that squeeze all the time. It it's like um, you have so many waking hours, you're probably going to go to work for at least eight. And if you're in a profession, that's called, you know, there's there's an employment agreement that says you've got to work 40 hours a week, but there's a wink, wink, nod, nod. That's the freaking floor, not the ceiling, brother. Right? That's like exactly we we're looking for 40 hours plus plus wink, wink, nod, nod, because if you ain't doing plus plus, then you probably are not meeting expectations. And that's gonna mean you're not gonna get anything extra, and you'll probably be managed out. So there's this expectation that you're gonna put as many of your possible waking hours into work. And then if you're lucky enough to, in those 50, 60 hours a week, find a partner and have a family. Now you've got to find time to not lose that partner because you're constantly working and they become disconnected and lose the bond to you. Or if you have children to make sure you don't mess them up and ignore them and neglect them. And what's left over is so small, right? There's so few crumbs left at the end of the day to say, you know what? Now that I'm absolutely exhausted, I'm gonna go put my running shoes on and go do something that hurts, that makes me feel bad about myself, right? So, like, how how did you get how did you overcome? Did you have a friend that pulled you through this? Because like I think it's very hard for most people to self-motivate through that climb. God talk about a steeper path, man. I mean, like, yeah, the the zero to I can tell you right now, if I tried to want run one mile, I would be very uncomfortable right now. If I tried to run one mile, I would be very uncomfortable. I could do it, but I would feel like I am going to something bad's gonna happen, right? Um, yeah, and that is not good at all, right? It's not good, but at the same time, it's also not necessary for me to run one mile out of my priority stack, right? So, how did you get past that climb? Because I hear this all the time. Um, you know, uh one of my favorite podcasts to listen to and and and thinkers to that I'm influenced by is Rick Rubin, the music producer. He he weighed 300 pounds and uh developed a heart valve issue and had to have surgery. Uh that was very dangerous surgery. And um he now is very fit, very healthy, uh exercises religiously, trains with Laird Hamilton, the world-class surfer. Um, Laird Surfer. He's Rick turned his health story around, you know, so much from where he was, working at night, sleeping all day, the music business lifestyle, becoming overweight, becoming unhealthy, and becoming, you know, his life was literally threatened to now in his 60s rebuilding himself. And I look at that and I'm like, how did you know how did he do it? He he talks about those first weeks of like going to a gym or trying to run again, and and how hard they were. Yeah, you know, that makes me always look at it and go, Yeah, that is the hardest part of the journey. Or maybe it's not. What was your experience? Because I think there's other people listening to this who probably are in the same boat.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. For me, three things worked. First was a personal motivation, and I drew on lots of books. There's so many amazing stories about people that got into these endurance sports had these adventures, etc. Um, the second thing was structure. So I had a coach. Um, I was given some um some advice early on. They're like, you know, this person who's a pro-triathlete, and she recognized like I'm of this insatiable curiosity. I'm trying to, you know, pull together anything I can learn and then apply it to my training. And she said it's very dangerous. You're gonna come up with a Franken plan and you're gonna get frustrated. She said, you need one plan, pick a plan. You don't have to have a coach, but there are plenty of coach, you know, structured plans. So the couch to 5K is a canonical, like, you know, set incremental and realistic but hard goals. So run a 5K and get a 5K plan. And if you have a coach, the benefit of a coach uh is that they can they can take the emotion up. You know, it's it's hard when you're looking at the progress you're making or how you're feeling. It's good to have an objective view, just like what you do, you know, with with your coaching business. I'm sure that that's the value. You know, I hire you, you can learn a lot about me, and then do a better job than I can do when I'm emotionally caught up in something. Absolutely. Having a coach is great. And then the third piece that that helped me is the community. So one time I joined uh, you know, I've joined a team for like triathlons. Um, having those people around helps with accountability. Um, I've also had some close friends that you know I'd I'd go out and and uh train with. And I have one rule which I try to live by, which has served me pretty well. And that is if anybody ever invites me to go on a run, a bike, a hike, a walk, anything, unless I absolutely have a conflict, I'm I don't allow myself to say no. Wow. Uh my thinking on that is that you say no once, they're gonna have you know, they might not ask again. And um so it's a powerful thing, get out there with other people. And um I think all three of those things together really helps. You know, you want to stay personally motivated through stories you read. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But it does start with the spark and um the that sort of there's gotta be an internal motivation, either an interruption of, hey, I'm gonna die if I don't fix this. Uh maybe that comes in the form of a bad doctor's visit or uh a real urgent critical health moment. Um, or it comes in the form of something like you, where you look at your boys and go, I don't want to be this person. Um I want to be a different person. But it starts with a spark and then you build on top of that. And you know, yeah, I I I like that. Um and the it's an interesting thing what you said about coaching, because I I figured there was somebody in there. That's why I was asking about the did you have a friend, did you have somebody? Because you already mentioned your sister being a triathlete, but I don't know if she lived near you or not. But she does not. She's California. Okay. So you were you were on your own kind of on this journey when you decided to do it.
SPEAKER_06I was, but that's the thing. Immediately when you put it out there, the community finds you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_06So when I started the triathlons, I mentioned I was like going to Yahoo. Um, when I went down to California to support my sister, um lo and behold, there's this guy, Lawrence, uh, and another and friend of my, they both worked at Yahoo, to be clear. And Lawrence was was was doing the same triathlon. And when we got back in the office, so I was commuting from Seattle down to California every week. And it's a whole nother story, but it was great with the training. You know, I would I had a lot of time when I wasn't working, just either that or go to a hotel. So I'd go to a pool, I I'd run, and Lawrence took me under his wing. And so we'd go out at lunch and run, um swim, took me to a quarry, you know, I learned put the wetsuit on and do some open water swimming. And and he introduced me to people, and it just starts to snowball. Um, and so it's you know, I think, yeah, to your point, you you need that spark or that motivation, that thing that's gonna get you to do it. And then when you tell the world you're gonna do this, that helps with accountability.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_06Um, but it also brings people to support you. Um, you know, one of my best friends who I've done all these Iron Mans with and um in the Hundred Mile with as well, he told me some years after uh he remembers a day that I I told him, because we had been friends, you know, family friends, but I never knew he was a triathlete. And one night I told him, Oh, yeah, I decided to do traffants. And he was super supportive, but he told me he's like, I didn't think there's Any way that you were gonna follow through on this.
SPEAKER_00Successfully do it.
SPEAKER_06Um yeah. I think I lost like 40, 40 plus pounds just in the in the first nine months of the this whole journey. But Carrie ended up being uh an important part of you know the motivator. He's the one I I told you, it's like we'd be at you know, Friday night having having a glass of wine and be like, we're gonna get up at six and go run and uh and do this thing. And and there's I find that there's this oftentimes our stories, there's this good give and take, you know, Carrie uh amazing runner. You know, he ran um, I don't know if you you follow like you know, marathons and things, but like a sub-three hour uh marathon is like the holy grail. It's like big trifore, and he's one of those guys. But he's a horrible swimmer, super scared of swimming. You know, we were when we were talking about triathlons and his wife Cheryl said, Oh yeah, you know, you'll know Carrie because they have safety boat people that follow along in the water, and you just look for the safety boater and see where their eyes are, and there will be Carrie, you know, kind of flailing in the water. So he had done a bunch of sprint traffics, these are like much, much shorter, and like he kind of stayed in that in those races because he was he he didn't have any desire to do a 2.4 mile swim in open water. And um, but you know, a year of me doing sprints and and everything else, I called him up and said, I'm I'm signing up for the court d'ane Iron Man. Are you gonna do it? You gonna do it with me? And and he said, All right. And so he like that was that was huge for him because he was scared to death of swimming.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_06And um, there was that whole journey that we went through. He ended up the way he overcame that because he finished Court d'Alane and then went on to do a bunch of additional um full course Ironmans. And the way that he overcame that was he decided he was going to do his own personal Iron Man. Um so he he set the course and everything else. And this particular Iron Man let him do laps in a in a small lake, still added up to 2.4 miles. Um, and then family came out and you know, supported it. And it was, it was he made t-shirts the whole thing. You know, he was like, I'm gonna do this. And that was inspiring to me, and it was a way that we could keep each other kind of you know overcoming obstacles, you know, breaking asphalt, right?
SPEAKER_00It's yes, sir. Yeah. Wow. So cool, man. So many lessons from that. So the the this experience of entering into this world of understanding yourself at a different level, understanding your mind and your body at a different level, and also learning like I would argue that there was alignment in this for you, meaning that you saw something when you saw that race course for the first time. You you the the energy, the music, the excitement, the there's something in there that just went, it spoke to you. It spoke to you at a visceral level. Yeah. And that was the spark. And then thankfully, your body caught up to your motivation. Like you had the ability to develop this body to do this. Because if you were all fast twitch muscle, you wouldn't be doing 100-mile ultra marathons or ironmans because your body had the hardware to keep up with what you wanted to do. So this was a form of alignment for you. Um, and that propelled you forward. Now, did you achieve world record status and win all the things and all that? No, because there were limits to some of that, and maybe it maybe there were, maybe they weren't. Maybe it was there was no ROI for you to become that person, so you didn't do it, or maybe it was enough for you, or maybe your body couldn't actually compete at that level, no matter how hard you pushed it, because your genetics weren't that. Because when we're talking about these levels of extreme sports, your body matters, your genetics matter, right? Uh, you know, your your anaerobic uh respiratory system, you know, matters, your your muscle composure composition matters, the you know, your feet matter, right? So like this is micro optimizations that lead to being the world's best at anything, right? But if you were to then apply that towards your career, so you you say you have this moment where it's like, wow, I'm capable of doing amazing things. And then you got the wake-up call that, hey, by the way, you're you're mortal like the rest of us. You something could happen that could cause you to lose your life. And you dodge that bullet. What happened after that for you with waking up every day in the morning and saying, okay, how am I gonna make money?
SPEAKER_06Wow. Well, I'll I'll say too, after the health scare, it it to it still took me a couple years to build the courage to actually leave the cage and and leave Amazon. It was almost like it was three years, actually. Yeah, so um once I left, um, you know, the moan motivation was I'm gonna, you know, I thought I I thought I knew exactly how start this company, that I'd I'd raise money, you know, it would just all fall into place. And you kind of had mentioned I burned the boats. I don't mean that I burned bridges with anybody, but I quickly found that all of the time I spent in corporate America, um, it didn't serve a lot of the needs you have in this for a startup. And so I had to relearn, I had to unlearn a bunch of things. And I was combining, you know, we only have so many matches every day to burn. And so trying to get a startup off the ground was was taking a bunch of my time, obviously. Um, but I decided at the same time, I'm gonna go run a hundred miles and I'm gonna document that part of the journey. And it's kind of related to this fitness startup, and I'm gonna document it all. So now I'm gonna become a YouTuber, I'm gonna learn how to do you know, YouTube, and um quickly figured out that wasn't smart. I was trying to do too much and I wasn't doing well on anything.
SPEAKER_01Got it.
SPEAKER_06Um, I don't know if I'm answering your question.
SPEAKER_00Um well, I mean, it sounds like that you you had a moment where you were ready to go bet on you. Where you were ready to go bet on you, and you had to learn what it looked like to do that, you know, because your context was being an employee, and then you decided to become an entrepreneur and you had to bet on you, and you had to figure out how to do the thing by yourself, right? The training wheels have been taken off, the infrastructure was no longer there. So that that's a I think that's also a very common part of the journey is that when we one of my favorite sayings that a friend of mine, I don't know if he got this from somebody else or if he came up with it, but my friend Joel um said uh his favorite saying is embrace the suck. Learn to suck at something new. He always tells me, learn to suck at something new. And it's very hard in your 40s or older to learn to suck at something new, to get everything wrong, to flail, to thrash, to bump into the walls and be clumsy to be a beginner again. And and I hear a little bit of that lesson there is that you were sucking at something new, and that was part of the journey.
SPEAKER_06I was. And yeah, it kind of came together because it's like I tried to create these line, you know, these clear lanes and goals. So at one point I calculated, so I signed up for this that that 100 mile course, and I realized I had 200 days until the race. So I set a goal, I said I'm gonna launch my company and complete this this 100-mile race, and I'm gonna document along the way. And fast forward, completed the race, and I had two fears on the race side. Uh, one was getting injured, history of injury, and the second was getting lost. I I was that kid that everybody kind of joked about, especially my family. They're like, you have a terrible sense of direction. And I accepted that. And there's a lesson here. I'll come back to. So those are my two fears going into this race. And those two fears manifest in the race. Um late at night, um, super cold. I've got my pacer and his wife, the my pacer's wife was also in the race, and she got hung up in this place. So we we we come up, we're climbing this mountains in the middle of night, super cold. And um I decided to stay with them there. You know, she was she was waiting there, you know, around this, around this fire. And I was like, my inner voice was like, dude, you need to keep moving. You need to keep moving. You have a lot of miles left. And my pacer, I was like, he was like, Well, I'll go with you. And I said, No, no, no, you need to stay here with your wife. Um, and then they're gonna continue on, you know, later. Um, but I rationalized in my mind, like, well, if I set out without my pacer, it's pitch black, cold month, I'm gonna get lost and I might not finish. So I'm gonna wait here. And too much time went by. And so it was risking my race. So I just said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go. And so I overcame that fear, but it did almost derail. And then with about five miles to go in this race, um, I somehow got lost and I realized I'm not on the race course. And I started to panic because it we were running out of time. Like you had 30, I think 34 hours or 35 hours to complete this thing, and um I was coming up on it, so I panicked and I started sprinting, like the endorphins are going and everything else. I found my way back on the course, and as I slowed down, I realized my calf was on fire. I had I had done like two, you know, grade two tears in my in my calf. So it's like as the endorphin stuff were leaving my body, I'm limping. And that last two miles took me forever. But I finished and I didn't launch the company. So for two weeks, I could I could barely walk, you know, and so I was on my couch literally, and figure. So for two weeks, I'm just thinking like, you know, like what I trained to do in corporate America. Like, let's do a post mortem. Like, okay, you finished your main goal on the running, you didn't, you didn't meet your goal with the company. Why? What did you learn? Are there lessons that you know kind of could be shared, etc.? And so I wrote, you know, for like a day or two, and I remember I'm trapped there, right? I can't if I wasn't hurt, I would have started life again. But now I'm I'm like, I can't get out of my there's more here, I've got to go deeper. So I started doing just ruminating and writing and journaling and just epiphany after epiphany existential stuff. Um just to kind of summarize this on the running side, my big takeaways were that if you accept something, like if you accept you have poor sense of direction, um that's who you are. So this is a longer story, but this is the thing I was saying about narrative to sign up for exactly. And so to fight that narrative, I signed up for a 200-mile ultra marathon. And part of the training for that, and so for a 200-mile, like the aid stations are much, much further apart. You have to be able to navigate and know maps, like like know where you're going. So I incorporated that in my training program. So my long runs, I uh got in this habit of I'm plotting a course, a new course, like on a trails I haven't run before. And then I'm gonna find my way through that. The other thing was um, I, you know, again, part of the reflection is I was training for Zion, I was running with my my good friend Carrie, who knows those mountains. And so what did we do? Anytime we ran together, I'm like, where are we going today? You know, and and Carrie would lead. And so I flipped it. So now anytime I would go out and run with friends, I would kind of grab that if offered. You know, I'd be like, Yeah, I'll lead. I'll take that. And um, so it's I'll make sure we get home soon. Yeah, so it's recognizing that it's in your power to be who you want to be, and you just need to first believe that you can, and then build a plan for that, and then on the business side, um, you know, a lot of self-reflection about um am I doing this for the right reasons and and everything else. I decided it was, and I moved moved forward. That business didn't end up working out, but now here I am. I'm working on another new startup now in the music space. And I learned everything I learned uh with with that fitness startup and uh microphilanthropy, because it is actually two companies. I started a nonprofit and a tech startup. Uh there's a whole set of lessons there about um you know rules I wouldn't break again or won't break again um when building a startup. They it may be a good reason for some of these rules. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But that's the joy of it is that you did it, you tried, yeah, you learned, you didn't stay stuck, you didn't sit still. And and I see, again, you know, the my own confirmation bias, but I can't help but see it everywhere. Once you see a truth, you can't unsee it. I see this alignment coming back. What are the two things that you have bet on yourself with? The two things that are the most burning passions for you running, exercise, competing, fitness, and music. Two very strong themes in your life that power oops, power and pivot you into this new direction, creating something on your own. Right? And that that to me I can't help but believe that you will keep iterating on this the same way you iterated on your body and on your mind to be able to run a 200-mile race, you will continue to iterate on this with other work you're doing in your life to get there. Because this is not work, this is joy. Yeah. That that is there. So tell me about what you're what you're building now. What's the what's the second act in post-corporate life work gonna look like to mention music?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, working on a startup called Audira. And you know, just to set this up, you know, over the pandemic, I found a lot this this happened to a lot of people. Um, over the pandemic, I took the opportunity to re-engage with music. And up until this point, I'd mostly, you know, played an instrument, never focused on songwriting, certainly not recording and producing. Um, but with these digital audio workstations, so software, it's basically digitized these analog studios. So the barrier to entry now, it's like non-existent. And I didn't know a lot of this world existed. Just I was clueless. And so when I got exposed to it, I was like immediately like diving in both feet and looking at you know, what are the challenges as I'm coming up to speed on this? And it's kind of interesting. It's like life does a full circle. When I mentioned the startup I was at that was acquired by Microsoft, it was collaboration software. Basically, think about it as like the the precursor to GitHub for if people, you know, I don't know how much of your audience knows developer tools, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's a tool to let programmers work together on a single project and control what they are building so that they don't step all over each other and erase each other's work and create errors and exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06And so one of the first things I saw when I was getting into the music was wow, they don't have these tools uh for collaboration. They help people collaborate to bring it together. And on top of that, so much of what goes into the music is not captured anywhere. So it it's limiting for the creative. Um, you know, it's probably less limiting when you're when you're a world-class producer and you've got your you've got your lane, you know, you know what you're doing. But there's, you know, with the democratization of making music now, you've got millions and millions of potential bedroom producers that are trying to get their bearings. Like, how do I combine gear? What gear do I need? Um, and all the way to the consumer. Like, consumers wondering, like, like, imagine if we had like more of like an IMDB for music, you know, to where I could learn about what gear, like what instruments was used in this production? Who was a producer? Who was the engineer? What kinds of techniques did they use to get that sound? Yes. Um, Adira.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Oh, it's and yeah, it's you know, it's like there's there's so many uh, you know, technical challenges and things, things that get in your way of again the creative process. And so um interesting, about a year ago, a friend of mine from Microsoft, we were catching up. I was telling him how big into music now, and he's like, Oh, I need to introduce you to this guy. Um he's he's a Grammy award-winning guitarist, um, audio engineer. Uh, he was in Nashville, LA, all these places, and and he had started a company called Patrat. And essentially they they focused on serving like professional audio engineers. Um, because when you're using all this analog gear, it's still analog. So, how do you capture all the settings and configurations and document all of that um to archive it? And so that that was their gig and starting to digitize that, bring it, bring it to the desktop. So, anyways, we met and what was supposed to be a 30-minute conversation turned into a five-hour conversation, and we were both just riffing on it. Like that, oh my gosh, there's so many problems and opportunities, and both of our backgrounds are so complementary. Um, because one of the problems I encountered was I have all these ideas, but very little network. So I couldn't validate them. I didn't know if my ideas were good or bad, or in between. And so overnight, this guy, Chris Henning, um became a close friend. And now we're, you know, co founders in Audira, just super early stages. You know, we spent the summer prototyping. Building some proof of concepts and getting ready to launch this community where we want to bring people in and help tell the stories behind the music. And as we collect and centralize all that data. So it's like leveraging my skills from like Amazon. At Amazon, I one of the things I did was um worked on what we call browse. So it's part of the search org. But it's like, how do you create a taxonomy, an ontology? Think of it as like an information architecture to organize tens of millions of products. And music's very similar. You know, we're one of the things that's going to be the foundation of our company is to build an ontology for music. So organizing the gear, how it's configured, um, the talent, the processes, having a digital version of this so you can you can track what pieces of software you have access to, how they're combined together to create a piece of music. Um, and it just opens up tons of opportunities for the ecosystem. So, you know, again, I I think my one of my biggest challenges is I've got to just temper my enthusiasm, focus on, you know, kind of that proverbial beach head, right?
SPEAKER_00Solve one problem, attract funding, grow, and get the product market fit with what's going on. See where it goes. So yeah.
SPEAKER_06Exactly. Yeah, yeah. That was the biggest lesson I learned from my my first thing. It was um, I think if I could I I think the reason shift it was shift fitness, my my last company, and then this nonprofit. Um if I could point to one thing I would do do differently now in hindsight, was focus on one problem. You know, I encountered the thing, was it a fitness app or is it a is it like a charity app? And I'd be like, it's both, and this is how it works together. And then I'd lose people because they they couldn't see through that. Um they needed to have that single point of reference.
SPEAKER_00So that's a whole nother show on building products that work for people. But yeah, I I feel you on that lesson, and I think it's uh it's a life, it's a life lesson too. It's it's the value of focusing on one problem and working it through to completion before we take on 10 others is is actually a life lesson, not just a business lesson. So, you know, it's um there's a lot of depth to poking on that one. So now you've done this, you've you've learned, you've done one thing, you learned things, you're pivoting to a new thing, you're you're trying to create and bring something new to the world again. Do you love it? Is this something that you uh find hard to do?
SPEAKER_06I I mean sure there's but that's the point. That's the point. If it wasn't hard, it's not worthy of my right, and I wouldn't change it. Yeah, it's like I'm I absolutely love what I'm doing and um excited to see where it goes.
SPEAKER_00Could anybody ever bring you back to your old life again? No, no, that tells me something, and yeah, it's no chance. No chance. I can relate. Uh the reason I asked that question is that um a couple of weeks ago somebody asked me, hey, um, how do I know? Is there like a good test or question I could ask myself to know whether I'm doing the thing I should be doing, whether I'm aligned in my work or my life? And it was actually something I had never thought about. Is there a single question or a single metric for this idea of alignment? And I thought about it for a minute and I said, actually, there is a single question. Does work feel like work? And they were like, huh. I said, because I can tell you work doesn't feel like work for me anymore. Work feels like breathing, it feels like living, it feels like fun, it feels like engagement, it feels there is effort involved. Don't get me wrong, there is effort, there are challenges, there are difficulties, but welcome to being alive. The the difference is the inertia, the inertia that you feel to spin up your ability to show up every day and work. And I spend a lot of time with people in my life, in my family, with my friend group, with my clients, who literally the showing up is half the is 80% of the battle, right? People say that, oh, showing up is is half the battle. No. Showing up, if showing up is the bar, we got our priorities all wrong, right? Like, because that means something's that's a real canary in the coal mine thing for me. Like, oh, I showed up today. I'm like, yeah, I breathed today, my heart beat today. Am I proud of myself for that? That's table stakes, right? If showing up is an accomplishment because of the inertia you are carrying to exist, because the people you work with don't make you happy or or worse, or toxic or harmful, if the work you're doing is not interesting, if you're confused as to what's expected of you or feel out of control in terms of your ability to influence outcomes, you know, that's that's not a life well lived. You're not going to be successful when showing up requires this much effort, right? So I love for you, I'm very happy for you. I'm I'm I'm ecstatic for you that you are at a place in your journey where it's you you wouldn't go back because you see that that the inertia is so high. Now, there's a whole bunch of practicalities about getting here, right? You had to make some good decisions along the way to be able to do so, right? You had to be able to financially exist in a world that you were trying to create something new in, right? So I don't want to oversimplify this, but most of the people who I speak with and listen to are professionals who have been earning at a reasonable amount of you know mid to high incomes, and and they you know have the ability if they choose to do something other than what they are doing, but they don't, they still don't. And on the flip side, I see people like you know, if we look at the greats of tech, uh the one of the first times I noticed alignment was when back when we were at Microsoft, actually. And I'm sure you had the same experience. You go back home to the place where you came from, and people are like, Wow, you got a job at Microsoft, that's amazing. Have you met Bill Gates? And I was able to say, Yeah, I've been in the room with him a few times, I've been to some reviews, I've done some keynotes with him, and you know, he's not my my best friend or anything, but I've I've been around him. Like, what's he like? He was the richest man in the world at the time, remember? He was the like he was a god, yeah, right? He was a god, he was changing this the face of humanity, and people said, you know, there's gotta be something special about him. And the answer I always gave them was he is the biggest nerd I have ever met in my life. And they're like, that's a shitty thing to say about that man, and I'm like, no, that's why he is the richest man in the world, because he is literally the biggest nerd I've ever met in my life. He is born to do what he is doing. He finds immense joy and satisfaction in everything he does. Like, I've never met somebody who was so competitive, so intelligent, so eager to learn, so eager to push people hard, so eager to fight, so eager to create, to dream, to push. I mean, like, and he was already rich as hell. Most people, if you ask them, you know, like if you won the lottery tomorrow, would you stay in your job? 98% of them that I'd ask that question to, they say, Oh, hell no, I'd be out. You ask Bill that, he had already won the lottery. He's still staying in this job. Yeah. Right? Bill is still grinding every day. Absolutely. I know people who a friend of mine worked for him at Breakthrough Energy at his new energy company, right? This is 30 years on from when we worked with him. And he's like still doing the same stuff. He's still walking around with an LL being bag full of books, he's still grinding and insatiably curious and pushing himself and traveling and meeting with people and trying to crack the code. Right? So, like, Bill is Bill because he was born to do what he's doing. And I can't help but think that if you and I get a little bit closer to that, we're gonna end up being the best versions of ourselves. We may not be the richest men in the world, we probably won't be, but we may be the richest version of ourselves.
SPEAKER_06Couldn't agree more. I have no desire to ever retire. You know, it's same. It's I always want to be doing something to learn, to develop, to explore. Um, you know, I hope I get to a point where I just uh I don't have to care about money. Like that's definitely not the case right now. But and it and it causes me stress and anxiety. You know, it's it's definitely I made some pretty big trade-offs. Um you bet. Uh in sacrifice. Because you're right. I mean, it's I I feel very grateful that I have the opportunity to do this based upon you know the the compensation I had prior, but um I I couldn't be doing this because I didn't I didn't succeed with my first startup. Right. And you know, I could have, and lots of people said, just go back to corporate, go back to corporate. Yeah, and you know, we had some long talks with my wife, and we've made some trade-offs. You know, we sold our house, um sold off things that don't matter, you know, a lot of cars and things, and and and so the anxiety melted away a little bit, and uh I think it was a good trade-off.
SPEAKER_00But um yeah, we we don't always get to have our cake and eat it too, and um trade-offs are a big are an important thing to be prepared for when you decide to walk on the steeper path, because uh we we most of us don't get to have our cake and eat it too. And um that it I almost think it's impossible, yeah.
SPEAKER_06It's it's like you know, you can see where I'm going, right? It's yeah, if we had tons and tons of tons of money in the bank and really didn't have to work, I might just be like I'd probably be making music, but I wouldn't be necessarily working on a startup. I mean, it's not a right or wrong thing, it's just that where you are, the conditions all serve, you know, a particular path. And if you change a major variable, like you get your proverbial cake and you can eat it. Well, it's like, well, what's the motivation to eat it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_00I don't want to pick on that. I get it. That the whole point about like if you had the resources, you may not try to do something bigger. And I don't want to pick on this man because he's an important and good man, but Bill's co-founder, Paul Allen. So Paul loved music as much or more than we did. Paul really loved music, and Paul was very, very rich. And uh I didn't really realize this, but when I was working in the the music business, um, I was at the studio of another artist, producer, songwriter, guy who's been around for a long time, and and he kept talking about his friend Paul. And I was like, My friend Paul, my friend Paul's taking us here, my friend Paul's doing this, we're gonna do this with my friend Paul. And I'm like, which Paul? Paul McCartney? And he's like, because he actually was friends with people like Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. And I was just like, he's like, no, Paul Allen. And I was like, Paul Allen, the Microsoft guy? And he's like, Yeah, he's like, Yeah, he he's got his own 757, and we're all gonna go to Italy next week. And um, me and Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan and this and that, we're all gonna I'm like, What are you talking about? Like, he's like, Yeah, well, he's flying us all to Italy to this to this estate he has, and we're all gonna go play with him. I'm like, he's paying you money to go play with him in Italy, and he has it on his own plane, and he was like, Yeah, he just wants to jam, he just wants to play music with us. He pays for it all. And I was like, that's crazy. I didn't know you could buy your way into jamming with Nick Jagger and Bob Dylan, but you know, I guess everybody's like, hey man, you got a rich friend who wants to bowl, you know, he's he's gonna do it. But I was blown away at that. And then I found out he had this yacht with a recording. I knew he had this big yacht because he had it in Seattle, anchored there, like more there.
SPEAKER_06I remember that.
SPEAKER_00And on the yacht was like a $10 million recording studio. I didn't know this. And he was Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, he had a recording studio in that yacht, and he would invite all these artists to come and record with him. I just want to know where that music is. I want to know like what happened. Like, was any of it any good? Like, yeah.
SPEAKER_06One of my favorite jazz albums of all time, Oscar Peterson, for all my friends, it was like four CD set, and it was a similar thing. It was like I think of Baron or something in Germany. And and he hired Oscar and and I think it was a trio of them to come in and he just and record this this music, and he wanted to, you know, participate in it, and he but he funded it, and it's it was just amazing. And it's you know, that that stuff kind of fascinates me, you know.
SPEAKER_00It's it is, it's amazing, and then at the same time, well, the reason I brought the story up was not to just name drop, but like Paul had all these resources and loved music. Did he build a music startup? Yeah, did he solve any problems with that music? Right, no, I mean, I no disrespect, the man deserves to live the life he worked hard, but like it sounds like he just had a lot of fun playing rock star. And maybe that's what he needed. Yep, right? He didn't live very long, he passed away, you know, a few years ago, he battled cancer. Yeah, you know, maybe that's what he needed.
SPEAKER_06But um yeah, that reinforced it's exactly my thought. It's it's you know, if you have a bunch of resources or things that take pressure off of a particular direction, then it decreases the likelihood you take that particular direction. So I think it it's good to have constraints. Creativity builds consuming. One of the main absolutely, yeah. I'm sorry, the other way around. There's so many strengths groups.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. No, this is good, man. Um so so you know, just to kind of wrap the conversation, because we've been talking a long time, but um if I could give you a magic wand or a genie with three wishes, what would be the perfect outcome from this work? For your life, for the world, for yourself. Stream a little bit.
SPEAKER_06I want to have a legacy and help people tap into their own purpose, tap into their creativity, their health, um, find their path, you know, and if I can play some part in that, kind of indirectly, you know, the benefits of software and building systems, I can scale it. I that would be that would be my wish is is to build something that helps people in this modern time, you know, where we're inundated with technology and it's hard to find purpose and and help them look inward and join communities to express themselves in ways that they find meaningful and can contribute to others.
SPEAKER_00I love it. You just took the first step towards it happening by saying it out loud. Oh my god, chill. I appreciate that. Get the chills, but you did. That's that's gonna make it happen. You know, um nothing comes forward if we don't ask for it, if we don't state it out loud, if we don't step into that, you know. Um I'll get all woo-woo for a second here, but the you know, the there's a million gazillions of quantum possibilities for every moment of our lives. And they cannot emerge if we do not speak them out loud, if we do not take action towards those possibilities, if we do not step onto the path with an action, right? So when you speak it out loud, you've just opened a portal for that to come true. Some people call it manifestation. I just call it you know, um putting yourself in situations where possibility can happen. Yeah, love it. I appreciate you, man. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk. I feel like we could talk for four hours and keep going, and I'm sure we'll talk more in the future. Likewise. But I just wanted thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing your journey, um, everything that went with it, and I want to hear where it goes. We we should check in again and uh do do another one of these and see what's happened with the new baby you're incubating right now. And I can't wait to see, both as a musician and creator, but also as um a person who wants to tell these stories. Can't wait to see where it goes.
SPEAKER_06I appreciate it, Learn.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thanks for making the time.
SPEAKER_06Thanks for having me, man.
SPEAKER_00You're welcome.
SPEAKER_06Absolutely. All right.
SPEAKER_02Nothing to lose, two shadow trails, and rocky ground. Each step I take brings strength and food. Challenge is face of these weeks.