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?