Lightning round

`1:37:23`

With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Let's do it. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? The first one is this book here, so Several Short Sentences About Writing. Do you know this book? I love that book. I have it on my coffee table. When anyone ever asks me, what book do you recommend on writing? It's this one, Several Short Sentences About Writing. I can never pronounce his last name, but Verlyn Klinkenborg, I believe is his name, although I might be bastardizing that. But it's an extraordinarily good book about writing and it's all about the sentence, beautifully written, fun to read, really great. The other one is pretty much anything by Derek Sivers, but specifically, Hell Yeah Or No.

`1:38:09`

I recommend this book to everybody. It's really had a big effect on me and David, specifically. We use this term, hell or no, all the time internally. Is this a hell yeah or no? It really clarifies a lot of things. And the last one is this design book, which is interesting. There's a few different versions of it. The one I have handy, it's called Home-made: Contemporary RussianFolk Artifacts. And what this book is, it's a collection of... it's a beautiful book. It's very simple. Basically, every spread is a person, a story, and a thing that they had to make because they didn't have anything. They couldn't buy what they needed. They didn't have what they needed. So this example here is a guy put a hole in a spoon to make bubbles for his kid, to blow

`1:38:59`

bubbles, large bubbles. This is a TV antenna made out of forks, and it's just like, getting back to the scrappiness, I admire this kind of ingenuity among or over pretty much anything. And I think that this book is full. There's a couple hundred pages. They have a couple different editions of this, but I love this one a lot. Look at this one. This guy had to make a door handle. I mean, in America, we're like, go get a door handle at Home Depot. This guy didn't have a door handle, so he made it out of a plastic, looks like a gallon oil can or some water thing, and nailed it to a book, which nailed it to a door. Amazing. And this is also why I've always loved... I know this isn't very lightning, sorry but I've always loved looking at jailhouse creations

`1:39:49`

and tools and how people make weapons out of combs and pens. It's just, I find this like, I have nothing, I need something, I can use my human brain to figure out how to make it. I think that scrappiness is beautiful. Yeah, I was just going to say it speaks clearly to your scrappy mentality. And what is that book called again? This one's called Home-made: Contemporary RussianFolk Artifacts. And there's also an Eastern European one and there's another one too, but Home-made. What an awesome, unusual selection. Okay, next question. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show? I don't watch TV. I rarely get a chance to see movies these days. I really thoroughly enjoyed Oppenheimer though. I mean, I went to the theater to see it, and seeing that in the theater was really special,

`1:40:37`

but I just love the movie, is fantastic. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you are interviewing to hire? I think we actually went over this one a little bit, which was, I'm always curious about what else... if you had more time, what would you do with this idea? Another one is, whose work do you admire? So it's not so much about what you can do, but what are other people doing that you think is great? I find that, that really illuminates what kind of pulse they have on the world and what they're looking at and what inspires them and what they think is good. So I like that question. In that second question, what do you look for? Is it someone that you also admire? Ultimately, in the moment, I don't care who it is. It's more about, tell me why. So someone will say, I like so-and-so, I'm like, why do you like them?

`1:41:25`

What are they doing that you think is interesting? This is kind of the thing I tend to always ask, which is, why do you think that that's interesting? I'm always trying to get behind the words and understand where this is coming from because people can prepare answers and they can sound great. But it's like, well, what's behind that? Where are you going with that? Why? What's the genesis of this? That's what I'm always after. And so whether or not I agree with the work or whatever, in the end, it plays a part to some degree but I'm more interested in, how did you get there? Is there a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love? Yes, although it's more of a category. I bought an old car, and I've fallen back in love with stick shifts.

`1:42:17`

I learned how to stick, and then I basically have had automatic cars for many years and I got back into sticks. And now it's even deeper than that. I got back into the old analog driving experience and how wonderful it is to feel attached to the machine that you're using, that you turn the wheel and it turns it rod and it turns the wheels, and that your leg muscle actually is what's breaking the car, to some degree. There's something about that direct feel that really surprised me. It surprised me how much is missing in modern cars and it actually... I like to draw these parallels because this is how I see the world.

`1:43:02`

It reminded me of our business, actually. I think we have a very stick shift business. We have a very direct business. Everything's very, very tight, very straightforward. There are not a lot of layers of abstractions. There are not a lot of things in the middle between the work we do and the way it feels, and I think of large businesses as automatic transmissions and modern cars where you just... everything's simulated. You don't really know what the road feels like. You can't really feel it in the steering wheel, or maybe there's some fake feel in there now. The brakes are just sending a command to a computer to squeeze the pads. The transmission is like, you don't control it, it just does its own thing. And there's a beauty in that too, but there's also a disconnect that I forgot about until

`1:43:47`

I got back into driving the old car, which is harder to drive and noisier and bumpier and creakier, but there's a real directness to it that's really special, and I think it's actually a good way to look at business and to remind yourself that staying as connected to the thing that you're doing as possible has a lot of value. That's an awesome metaphor. Next question, do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat yourself, share with folks, find useful in work or in life? And I don't always live up to it, but basically, it's worry less. There's a great Tom Petty lyric. I can't remember which song it's in, but I think it's on Wildflowers on the album. Most of the things you worry about never happened anyway.

`1:44:35`

And it's just so true. I find myself worrying about all sorts of things that don't matter and never happen, and then you're like, God, I spent three days worrying about that, or I went to this appointment and it was fine. The amount of worry, and it's just all in your head, and it's all about anticipating the future that hasn't happened yet, and I try to tell myself that, and I try to tell others that in business. I try to tell myself that in life and in business, but also, I tell others that in business, what if people don't like... I don't know. You'll find out. Worry less about it. It probably isn't going to be a big deal anyway. So that's what I would say. Worry less. Worry less. Final question, I was going to ask you this before you mentioned this, but you said you're writing a new book, potentially, are you able to share what this new book might be about?

`1:45:22`

We haven't started writing it. I can tell you, or I'm thinking about it, and it's going to revolve around the idea of gut and intuition in business and decision-making. I don't really know exactly how they all play in here in a book, but I think we need to celebrate gut and intuition more in business. And most business books are not about that. They're about the opposite in many ways. Whatever, you can't improve what you can't measure, or whatever these things are. And I think that's true in a lot of realms, like medicine, you can look at your biomarkers and you can do things. I don't think things are quite as direct in business, and I think that intuition and gut is something to be celebrated. So I think what we're probably going to end up doing is looking at all the ways we use intuition and gut to make decisions at work, whether it's hiring or product decisions or

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policy decisions or whatever it is. Maybe break down some of those decisions in the past, perhaps, or talk about things on a day-to-day basis about how we employ those tools to move forward. So that's roughly the idea. It's very loose right now but hopefully, we can tighten it up and that's what I'd love to focus on that next. That's an awesome topic for a book. I was thinking Worry Less could also be an awesome title for a book, if that's another topic- That'd be a great title for a book-... to go down. Yeah, that would be. I'm reading Charlie Munger's Poor Charlie Almanack right now. Oh, beautiful. There's a whole thing around the way we misjudge and make mistakes with our psychology, just like a heuristic [inaudible 01:46:50]. Human misjudgment. Exactly. And I feel like that would be a part of this story of gut instinct are often right, but

`1:46:57`

here's ways that we are often wrong, so maybe that's something to think about. Yeah, it's funny. I had one opportunity to meet with Charlie Munger. Oh, wow. It was on a Zoom call, and it was four of us, and we got an hour with him. Wow. This was a few years ago. And I only asked him one question. I was mostly just a student listening to other people's questions. I said, what's your take on doing something well that you know nothing about? Essentially, is there power in being completely ignorant about something? I didn't add this but I've often found myself more creative when I don't know how to do something versus like, well, this is how you're supposed to do it, so you fall into this pattern. And I really loved his answer, which was, "I would just...

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trust your instinct on that," which is like, a lot of great things happen because you don't know how to do them. In fact, a lot of innovations happen because you don't know how other people do them, and all you have is your gut. All you have is your intuition. All you have is how you feel about the thing. You don't have evidence, you don't have other examples to follow. You don't have a list of what to do. You just do. And I'm paraphrasing here. But it gave me a lot of confidence and hope to continue to follow our gut. And maybe this is, ultimately, in a way, what was the seed for this book perhaps, although I hadn't really thought about that until now. But it's a beautiful thing to read and to listen to him speak.

`1:48:27`

I love it. Jason, we covered everything I was hoping we'd cover. Thank you so much for making the time for this. Two final questions. Folks want to follow up and maybe ask more questions. How can they reach you if they can? And then how can listeners be useful to you? So you can hit me up on X, Jason Fried, F-R-I-E-D. I'm on LinkedIn as well, and you can also email me directly, just Jason@hey, H-E-Y.com. So hit me up there. How can people help me? I mean, if you like what we're doing, spread the word. We don't really spend any money on advertising and marketing. We've explored a little bit here and there but most of our growth has been organic, and it's just word of mouth. So if you like what we're doing, tell people about it because it really helps us out. Amazing. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Lenny. It was great.

`1:49:13`

Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenny'spodcast.com. See you in the next episode.