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Hey there friends, this is how I write and I'm your host David Perell.
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My guest today is Jimmy Soni, who's an author and a speechwriter, and he is obsessed with innovation, endurance, and creativity.
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And in this conversation, Jimmy explains how he writes like an athlete, and also the practical ways that he beats writer's block.
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Jimmy and I totally hit it off when we both realized just how inspired we are by the biographer Robert Caro.
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And Jimmy actually told me that whenever he's writing, he asks himself, "What would Caro do if he was approaching this story?"
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This episode stands out for Jimmy's deep deep passion for the writing process.
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Okay, enough for this intro.
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It's time to rock, and good luck finding a better person to talk about the writing process with than Jimmy Soni.
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One of the gold mines in this book is your comments on notes and sources at the end.
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And one of the things that I found really interesting was this idea about writing a book upwards versus downwards. Mhm. Talk about that.
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It's more of an admission of like who I am more than I get necessarily an approach to writing a book. But it maybe it's both.
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There are some writers who are experts in the field.
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They know everything or close to everything about a given field, and they they're trying to take like this incredible thing they have in their mind, like that level of expertise, and distill it down for other people.
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And I think I described it once as like they're straining to be decipherable.
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They're actually trying to make other people sort of see the vision that's in their mind.
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That's one way to write a book, right?
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You're sort of like writing it downward.
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That's my description for it. Mhm.
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The way to write it upward is if you are if you are me, like a a better than average charlatan, who ventures into a field, knows nothing, and the the goal is to take the reader along the learning journey with me because I know nothing and I'm not an expert.
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And that's a different kind of writing.
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It's a different kind of thinking.
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And like for me, I think, you know, that's always how I want to approach books.
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It it's the the pleasure to what like find me, like the pleasure of finding things out.
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I want that to be a part of the things I write because I'm always like I didn't know about PayPal before I wrote a book about PayPal.
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I didn't know about Claude Shannon before I wrote a book about Claude Shannon.
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But in some ways, that's great because my reader doesn't know anything either.
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So, if there's like terms of art or terminology, I have to make it reasonable and readable for people.
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So, you're saying you didn't know anything about these these subjects.
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At what point does an idea become now I'm writing a book about it, right?
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Like with the Claude Shannon book, you discuss a conversation that you had with a friend, and you say that friend, like it was just a small thing, but he mentioned it and you were like, that sort of led me down the path.
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Like at what point do you commit to it?
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How do you know the time is right?
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Let's get really practical. Yeah. I have a Google Doc.
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And the Google Doc is books I should write someday.
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And it is about like five page, thousands of pages, what are we Well, here's what it is.
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So, it's five pages, but if anybody were to look at it, like you would think that this person belongs like in an institution because the ideas are all over the place.
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Like if I see something, my first instinct in a lot of cases is I'll see something that I'm interested in, and I'll go on Amazon to buy a book.
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And usually you can find a book and I'll just buy it, right?
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It's a person, it's a building, it's a thing, it's whatever.
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You find it, you buy the book.
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If I can't find it, I will just park these things in the books I should write someday list, and then I will occasionally just come back to that and start to think about well, am I the right person to do this?
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Does the world need a book like this?
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Is this going to be interesting to spend years and years of my life on?
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With the books I've with I've done, the way I always describe it to friends is there's generally like an empty space on a bookshelf.
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And I am not going to do I'm not like a good I'm not a person who wants to do copycat books.
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I don't want to do like my version of, you know, X, right?
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I want to find an ability to actually like scratch out new pages, stuff new material that people don't know. Yeah.
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So, I'm always looking for where that spot.
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Like I can I literally is like the meta it's a metaphor, but it's a I can often see the space on the bookshelf.
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Like I'll see the two books that would be like on either side of the book I need to write.
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And then once I see that, if someone else does it, great. Like I that's fantastic.
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I would, you know, in some ways prefer that.
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But most of the time if I don't see someone huh?
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Being a writer is just that bad, yeah.
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Most of the time if I can't if I can't see somebody, I have to take it to it's like logical extreme.
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So, I have to sort of like write what I think it would be, do a proposal, see if I can get somebody to like bite on it.
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That's how I approach it is looking for the empty space on the bookshelf.
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I think about this a lot.
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Like when is a piece when does it have what it needs?
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Like the the core concept.
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And I felt this with my Peter Thiel piece.
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Like it was just obvious.
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Peter Thiel, somebody who people are interested in.
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I felt like I had a unique insight that like a lot of people had read Zero to One, and then the the sort of secret was that Zero to One was based off of memetic theory from René Girard, who was his professor at Stanford.
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But then what I realized was if you then follow it again, you end up in that Zero to One is a business book based off of Christianity. Mhm.
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And I was like, "Wow, that's that's really interesting." Yeah.
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But I think that what you're going for is is is this interesting mix of you're writing books where to use that Feynman quote, it's the pleasure of finding things out, but at the same time, it's like finding knowing that the topic has the right shape to be interesting.
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So, talk about how in the PayPal book, like let's walk through the dynamics of like what made this the right time to write about the PayPal book? What were we missing? Talk about that. It's interesting.
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I'm I'm going to do a a half beat before I answer the question directly.
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It what you just said is spot on in a number of ways with respect to like your piece filling it's like somebody should have done it already, right?
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It it is the way I think about it now, and maybe this is cuz I'm still sort of like, you know, baking on the fumes of the PayPal book, but it's an entrepreneurial way to think about writing in in the truest sense, which is like you'll, you know, you'll sort of have an idea of like somebody should really do this thing, right?
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Somebody, like this this sort of amorphous somebody should really do X.
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And then you decide like, "No, I'm going to I'm going to do that and see where it goes."
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That's a business instinct, right?
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It's it's actually a it's a it's a decision to see something in the world and say, "You know, that could be done better."
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Like like buggies horse and buggies are great, but somebody should really automate this, right?
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Uh traveling on the road is great, but we should really be able to fly, Mhm. right?
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Like there's no PayPal book in the world, somebody should really write that book.
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There's no there's no piece about Peter Thiel's religion, somebody should really write that piece.
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And then you just decide that you're going to be that person, right?
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And then there's like a a million other steps from that to finishing, but a lot of my thinking about ideas is I don't want to be the person that just like does the sequel to the sequel to the sequel of the first book you wrote, right?
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Um and there's a lot of that now in Hollywood and everything is a copy.
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And I I really do try to think about am I going to be able at the end of the years that I spent on a book cuz they each one takes between four and six years.
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Have will I have contributed something new?
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Will somebody opening be opening this up and say, "Oh, I I saw this in some other place."
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Or will they be able to say, "Wow, this was fresh.
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Like woah, this this actually illuminated something."
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That's what I'm going for, and it's like a high bar, which is why I'm super careful these these days about the things that I want to do.
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With PayPal, to dive really deep into it, you know, these are some of the most covered people on the planet.
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There's not Elon can't go on vacation without it being a subject of great interest, right?
7:54
You know, Peter gives one speech and the world like covers it from every possible angle and it's there's almost like a Talmudic exegesis every time he talks, right?
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Max Levchin runs a public company. He's on CNBC, right?
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He's he's So, so I was dealing with people who get coverage. Here's what I saw.
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Everyone was focused on the things that they did now today, the more contemporary things, but no one had really gone back and and asked them, "Well, hold on.
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Like all of you worked at one place at one time.
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How come no one did the book on that period?
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Like the 1998 to 2002 creation?"
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And I just kept like I went on Amazon, I bought every I bought Zero to One, I bought the PayPal Wars, I bought other books about these people, I bought Ashley Vance's book about Elon Musk. I bought everything.
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I bought all of Reid Hoffman's books.
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I read them all, and still I got the the sense that there was something here that was undercooked, underexplored.
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And I knew I was like, "Look, if I poke around at this enough, there's going to be stories here that other people haven't captured, and they deserve to be captured."
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I also got the sense that this was a formative time in these people's lives.
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It was a fun time in their lives, and it was culturally really significant with the dot-com bubble and the the dot-com rise and the dot-com bubble bursting.
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So, I just I had a few ingredients there that were key, but the big the one of the big things was these are the most like they're they're written about and talked about so much, but how come no one has gone back and asked them how they got their start?
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One of the things that I've grown to admire about your process is just how intensely you research.
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And so, let's start off with this idea that you were sharing with me, something that you picked up from Robert Caro, something you admire about him.
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Like often when people think of, "Okay, I need to research."
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Like, "Okay, let's go interview the main figures.
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Elon, Thiel, all these sorts of people."
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But you have this appreciation, this respect for some of the forgotten people, the people who maybe only spent 12 minutes with these people, but it was the the crucial time, the crucial place.
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Yeah, so some of this is going to come come out as therapy, David.
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Like it's Well, it's group conversation.
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I was going to say I was like I'm sort of recovering from the insanity of the last 6 years of doing this book, but my my my theory of the case is the following.
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Um When you when you get to the level that some of the people that I wrote about are at, a lot of what you say ends up either being a little rehearsed or you've said the same talking points from the same script so many times and it's it's muscle memory.
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You just know how to answer the question, right?
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Like if somebody asked you like how did you create write a passage?
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You've got your you know Yeah.
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That raises the bar for somebody like me.
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It means I've got to like ask better questions.
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It means I've got to peer a little bit deeper.
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It also means that the most interesting stuff generally is going to come from people who don't ordinarily get the chance to be interviewed or who don't seek it out or who avoid it entirely.
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And if you can get those people to speak to you, they don't have the experience of repeating themselves 15 times on the TechCrunch stage and they'll give you the best nuggets there are, right?
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So rather than speaking abstractions, I'll give you a specific example.
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In one of the early documents that was shared with me about the creation of PayPal, there was a cap table, a list of investors in one of the early iterations of the company.
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And there were some familiar names on there, right?
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And then there was this name on there that I had not seen in any other context.
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His name was Ed Bogas, b o g a s.
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And I I was like, that's interesting.
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I haven't seen this The other names, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Ken Howery, you know those names.
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I was like, Ed, who's Ed?
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So I like went on to Google and Ed was a musician and a chess player living in San Francisco.
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And so I'm thinking to myself like wait, like he's not an investor, he's not like a general partner at, you know, Sequoia Capital or something. He's like a music guy.
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He And I at first I thought I had the wrong Ed Bogas.
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So then I By the way, I might be mispronouncing his name. I honestly don't know.
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This is like shows you how long I'm a little bit random how this process is.
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So I I like Googled enough that I found a phone number with a San Francisco zip area code and I called it up and I left a message.
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And I think the message was something like, um hi, my name is Jimmy.
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Uh Ed, I think you're the right Ed.
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I saw your name on a document connected to Confinity, one of the pre-predecessor companies to PayPal.
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I think you were an investor.
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And I was wondering about that period.
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I'm trying to contact everybody I can and if you could give me like a few minutes of your time, I'd really appreciate it.
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Like left it there, didn't think anything of it because I hadn't heard his name come up 20 million times.
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I get a call back a little while later and it's it's Ed.
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And I ended up interviewing him.
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And from that interview came a nugget that spoke volumes.
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When Peter Thiel was raising money for the company that became PayPal, he was also playing a lot of competitive chess in California. Yeah.
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And one of the people that he played against was Ed Bogas.
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And he and Ed I guess developed like a chess bond, a friendship.
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And Ed was one of the people that he reached out to for seed capital for PayPal.
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Not because he was connected in tech, not because of anything other than he knew Ed and he thought he might be into it.
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And he shows up at Ed's house and Ed told me the story.
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He said, yeah, Peter like said I'm raising money for this company.
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I have this guy Max I'm working with and he's And And what Ed said to me is the way the level of competitiveness that Peter had on the chess boards convinced me that whatever they were going to do, it was going to be successful.
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So I went into the back, I got a checkbook and I wrote him a check and I gave it to him right then and there.
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And I I was like, that's that's incredible.
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And he said And he And he even said to me, he's like, it's not something I do regularly.
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He's like, it's not something I'm not a angel investor, but I had just seen how intense he was on the boards and I could tell that if he wanted this company to be successful, he would work night and day to make it happen.
13:54
That that anecdote has a bunch of different lessons embedded in it.
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It has a bunch of different characteristics in it that make the story come to life, but you would not get that anecdote from Peter Thiel. Right?
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Too much has happened in Peter's life.
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There's too many big decisions, little decisions.
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There's too much noise, right?
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From the PayPal years to now.
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He may never remember Ed Bogas.
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If I asked him about Ed, he might not remember, but Ed will remember investing in that early iteration of that company and told the story with real delight and with a kind of randomness that I couldn't have captured any other way.
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I can't make up that story, right?
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It's It's It's like sort of crazy.
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You find those stories when you interview people who are not on the front pages.
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And I think if you're at least for this kind of book, it's tempting to just spend a lot of time with the big figures and the the famous faces because it's because they are who they are, but it's more valuable to speak to people who didn't get the limelight because they actually share the most interesting stuff.
14:52
Here The other way I like to put it is like people think the most interesting stuff in the company happens in the boardroom, but we all know that's not actually true, right?
14:58
Like the the the actual substance of making something work happens at all levels and you have to speak to people who, you know, joined the company for like a hot second, who answer customer service calls, who fight fraud and who are the CEO and CTO.
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That's the That's my big sort of theory of the case is is that you will find these great stories when you find Ed.
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Like you find Ed and he calls you back and you you're off to the races.
15:23
How in the world are you managing all this information? A lot of coffee? No.
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Um The The honest answer is, you know, I have Is this another Google Doc that you're just filling out boom boom boom?
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you you nailed it actually.
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Um I don't want to act like I had a process coming into this that I had built and then I just applied a framework and that's exactly how it was supposed to go.
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You build processes as you do projects. You know this.
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It's It's not a There's nobody who set out to do anything who has the map figured out.
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And even in this case, I didn't have the map figured out, but to speak to the question of like in managing the interview information, I'm This is peak peak nerd, right? But there is a system.
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Google Sheets is where the the names, the dates and the links to files are.
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All my files are stored in the cloud because I'm paranoid about those files being lost. Yep.
16:16
The audio I'd always like have almost two copies of the audio, right?
16:20
They'd live sort of in the cloud and then like on a on a thumb drive. Otter AI transcriptions?
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Otter AI transcription, which is the best for my money, the best transcription service cuz you pay a flat fee and you don't have to pay per minute.
16:33
It's amazing and it gives you exactly what you need. The UX is really good.
16:37
And then what I would do is I would I would have sort of like if if I'm looking at the columns, right?
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The columns for the interviewees.
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I had my the name, the date, my notes for the interview, the file of the interview, my notes after the interview.
16:49
I always do a thing where like after I interview anybody, I would sort of like free write and just like like just do impressions and like stuff that, you know, it popped immediately to mind.
16:59
talking about this because one of the things I really struggle with as uh as a note taker is underestimating the vividness Yeah.
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of an experience when you're there and how fast memory decays. Yes.
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So how do you push yourself to do that and to say the things that seem so obvious that they're not even worth writing in the moment, but then you look back on 2 years later and you're like, oh my goodness, I'm so happy I wrote that down. Yeah.
17:24
So So Oh man, this is this is the best.
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I get to talk to you about all the things that everybody in my life does not want to hear about anymore.
17:32
Um So here's here's what I would do.
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One really important safeguard is making sure that you are recording the interview itself, so you're not worried about remembering every detail. Now, that that's key.
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It seems sort of obvious, but I'll speak about it the importance of it because it matters a lot.
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Actually affects my whole process.
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Um You You don't want to depend on memory, so you record the interview, but you also don't want to record the interview in a way that's obtrusive, right?
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So I never I'll I'll give you something specific.
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I never had in my hands, I would never hold the phone and I would never have a laptop.
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I only had a pad of notebook paper or pieces of paper with my questions on them because I wanted the technology be taken out of the equation.
18:15
Technology was too distracting for me, but if I had a phone on the table between us, I knew that system was capturing everything needed, right?
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I was never going to need a backup for that.
18:24
What I would do after key interviews is two things.
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One, I'd open up a Google Doc and it was basically called like post interview.
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So like let's say it's Reid Hoffman.
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I'd do like post Reid Hoffman interview and I would just sit and I would just type everything that stood out to me for like a minute or two.
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Then I would actually turn the voice recorder off for the interview, but turn the voice recorder on again to do a new file, meaning my voice recording software on my iPhone, and I would record all the impressions that I had of it, right? Right.
18:49
So I remember after I interviewed Elon, I did like 2 minutes of like, here's what it felt like, here's what it was, here's some things I remembered.
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And I would just sort of like do that to capture it all and then after that I could like have the adrenaline crash and like kind of calm myself down.
19:04
what you said after interviewing Elon?
19:07
See, I don't have to remember cuz it's recorded, but Touche.
19:10
I remember what I remember was one, I remember saying, wow, he really spent a lot of time with me despite not like having a lot to do, you know, this guy runs two companies and it has a big life and has a family and wow, wasn't that amazing?
19:21
Like he really wanted to dive in.
19:23
The second thing is I remember thinking to myself, this is not somebody who is speaking from a script.
19:27
He every question I gave him, you know, it's clear he'd answered some of them before, but it was also clear in the moment that he would think about ways to say them differently or like actually pause to process.
19:39
So he is thinking on the spot.
19:41
There's not so He's not He's not There's no ventriloquist.
19:43
He's not a ventriloquist dummy, right?
19:44
Nobody's like feeding him lines.
19:45
He's literally thinking in the moment.
19:48
I remember being like, wow, that's That's because most people at his level don't do that.
19:52
They're very scripted, highly scripted cuz there's a lot of stuff on the line. They have risks.
19:55
People come at them all day, right? Yeah.
19:58
Jim Cramer is like shouting at them all day. That was number two.
20:02
Number three, I remember remarking to myself on how casual it all was.
20:05
We sat in his living room.
20:08
We ate food during the interview.
20:08
It was a Saturday afternoon catch-up, you know?
20:13
I remember thinking, "Wow, this was I just did not feel the it did not feel like we were on stage.
20:19
It felt like I was talking to him and just we were riffing, you know?
20:23
And I remember commenting on that.
20:25
But the way that I captured those memories after each interview was just audio and a little bit of Google Doc work because my fingers might remember different things than my voice does.
20:33
And so I would just like I'll give you an example of something that didn't make it into the book.
20:38
One of my interviews with Peter Thiel, we were talking about the market cap of and the success of PayPal relative to big competitors like Visa and MasterCard.
20:48
And there's a gap in the interview transcript.
20:50
And the only way that I would have remembered this is by doing the after-the-fact stuff.
20:56
I asked him, I said, you know, it was something like, "What do you What do you How do you think you guys outflanked these other companies?"
21:00
And And then I mentioned something about the market cap.
21:03
And midway through my interview with him, he pulls out his phone and goes, "Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me check."
21:10
He was checking PayPal's contemporary value against the value of its competitors.
21:15
And it was the funniest situation to me because I'm thinking to myself, like, "You guys won.
21:19
Like you you've won in every way you can win. You outflanked them. You went public.
21:24
And yet, your competitive drive is so strong.
21:28
It is It is so deep that that you have to look right now to see if you're still winning, right?"
21:32
And I I I I found it endearing.
21:35
I I sort of thought of it as like this is how Michael Jordan plays basketball or this is how, you know, David Goggins runs ultramarathons.
21:41
Like for Peter Thiel, PayPal must be dominant even today.
21:44
You know, I just want to I just want to stop you right there because I think that there This is slightly separate from writing, but I think that it's a really important observation.
21:53
People don't think of great business people as professional athletes.
21:59
In terms of their dedication, their rigor, their intensity, their insanity, they are just as good at their job.
22:08
Someone like Elon, someone like Peter Thiel, as Michael Jordan is at basketball. Yep.
22:12
But you can't see it in the same way. Right.
22:15
And so a lot of these things, I think once you apply the professional athlete model, Yeah.
22:19
they become quite obvious.
22:19
Let's bring it back to what we're talking about.
22:22
I treat my writing process like an athlete.
22:26
And I draw almost all my metaphors about writing from sports.
22:28
Um I would grew up in the '90s in suburban Chicago.
22:33
So the Bulls were a big part of my life. Yeah.
22:35
And then Last Dance debuts and you get to see into the mind of somebody like Michael Jordan who is that competitive and that driven and that willing to work and sacrifice what he did to win. Yeah.
22:43
And I think a lot about People think of writing as a creative activity and part of it certainly is.
22:52
If you start to think of your writing process as an athlete, you treat it very, very differently. Right? You You You do reps. You do sets.
22:58
You think about recovery.
23:00
You think about training.
23:01
You think about discipline.
23:03
You think about time management.
23:03
You think about energy management.
23:04
Those are like a lot of them athletic concepts.
23:06
So I think about writing actually is like an athletic process, but you're 100% right that the the true titans in business really do That's why there's a lot of crossover sports analogies, things like that.
23:17
But back to the the So to put the button on the thing, the only way I remembered that that Peter had looked up the market caps was cuz I noted it to myself after like, "How nuts is it?
23:28
How cool is it that the competition the competitive drive and the fire burns so brightly that 20 years later, he's like in mid-interview and is pausing me to look up to make sure that PayPal is still winning." I was blown away.
23:43
I was like, "That's That's awesome."
23:45
I was like, "That's That's amazing."
23:47
That's the That was one of the coolest things.
23:48
And by the way, never made it into the book cuz I just didn't feel like it fit.
23:51
There were other examples of competitiveness.
23:52
But I remember in the moment knowing that I would have forgotten that because there was no going to be no audio record of it.
24:00
He wasn't voicing out loud what he was saying.
24:02
He just did it on his phone. It was an interruption.
24:04
But it was an interruption that I was able to capture.
24:07
And I remember just thinking it was really emblematic of him and and of parts of the story.
24:10
So you have 15 days of recorded audio.
24:14
And you have confinity alerts set for every single time that that word is mentioned.
24:22
So you find something you're like, "Okay, I just need to write this down."
24:26
Where does that thing go?
24:28
So I'll walk you through every painstaking part of the process because because it is it is the part of it that nobody sees.
24:37
It's the part of it that's hard to appreciate when you're holding the finished book in your hands.
24:39
So I wrote raw material that totaled around 470,000 words.
24:45
So the book is book is about 60,000 words.
24:46
So that's about eight average books.
24:49
And this book is a clocks in at around 170. Okay.
24:51
And So I basically cut out 300,000 words of writing that I did that's not ever going to make it into the book. Yep.
24:59
My process begins with Scrivener.
25:01
So Scrivener, some of your you know, listeners and people watching will know it's an amazing It's sort of like It's like It's like somebody sent Microsoft Word to the gym for 5 years, right?
25:12
And like Microsoft Word just got super souped-up.
25:14
But it's an amazing process It's an amazing piece of software for people who are writing longer books or longer projects in general. Yep.
25:22
And there's a few little UX tweaks that they did that make it really user-friendly for me, mentally really user-friendly.
25:28
They have like a little word tracker.
25:29
And if you hit your word count for the day, it goes from red to green.
25:32
And for psychologically for me, that was like a big thing was I would set a word count and I would try to hit it during the early stages of the book.
25:39
That is where I dumped all of the raw material for the book itself.
25:41
Part of the the other UX thing they do really well is they allow you to organize information on the left in a series of folders.
25:48
And seeing the folders side by side with the written text really helped me because my book is chronological.
25:53
So I had folders for 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002.
26:00
Everything had to fit into one of those folders, right?
26:02
Or the intro or conclusion folders.
26:03
And I would basically like you could tell by the like the thickness of the number of entries in a folder whether I had done enough homework on a given period.
26:11
And I knew I was like, "Oh, I'm like undercooked on 2001.
26:16
Like I sort of phoned it in, buddy.
26:18
You got to go back and keep going."
26:19
But basically I dumped everything in there.
26:21
My actual writing writing, meaning taking raw material and refining it into something readable, happens in Google Docs.
26:27
And so there's a bunch of reasons for that.
26:32
One is that Google Docs is in the cloud, so I can sort of avoid the paranoia of like losing my laptop or losing the file.
26:37
I'm insane about backups.
26:37
I think you may This may be true for you.
26:40
I came of age in like the blue screen of death era of computing.
26:43
And so I always have the memory of like losing a document because a computer short-circuited.
26:49
my mom would always say, you know, "Finish paragraph and then you go Apple save, Apple save, Apple save."
26:53
Cuz remember you used to have to save an actual document.
26:56
Otherwise you'd literally lose it.
26:57
We have this now where I write my newsletter um through the browser.
27:02
And if I'm writing it on an airplane or something, it won't like the cache won't refresh or something and I'll lose it.
27:09
And I don't know what it is, but there's something about losing something that you've written that is an anger that hits at your core that is like no it is a very particular kind of anger that I don't have anywhere else in my life.
27:23
I would rather like go to the dentist.
27:25
Like it's like it it's the worst pain, right?
27:27
Because you've done the work.
27:28
You've sort of summoned up every ounce of like will and skill and whatever to to sit and do it and then it's gone.
27:34
To avoid that, I write in Google Docs.
27:36
Google Docs for me is everything is run out of like a this this PayPal master Google Sheets document, which has chapters on the left and versions across the top. Hmm.
27:47
Every chapter in this book went through 13 Google Docs iterations and then five PDF iterations.
27:54
So roughly, actually more than five.
27:58
Uh so like around 17 or 18 revisions for every chapter in the book.
28:00
And the Google Sheets is where I can I just know, "Okay, I'm done with chapter four.
28:07
Let's move on to chapter five."
28:07
And part of it is satisfaction.
28:09
I got a lot of satisfaction when I was able to copy and paste the Google Docs link for a chapter into the Google Sheets bubble.
28:17
And then And I would look at it and I would sit there and feel like, "That's great. I finished the chapter."
28:20
And then move on to the next.
28:21
And so that's the process.
28:24
And it's a mix of, you know, as I just talked about, it's a mix of psychology, tricks you play with yourself to get the writing out.
28:28
It's a mix of of redundancy system so that you don't lose what you've done.
28:33
And then a way to make sure that it's all organized so you're not going crazy.
28:37
Your question is is a is a really It hits home really personally to me because the thing about having a lot of information is that this book could be written 17 different ways.
28:48
My way isn't necessarily the only way, but cataloging and organizing information is a big part of writing and it's why I have like very specific systems I've built to do this book.
28:55
Um a lot of it again is is a mix of Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Scrivener. That's step one, right? Step two is this.
29:06
I don't start a chapter by sitting down and like writing chapter one on top of Google Doc and then just like banging it out.
29:12
What I do instead, which is much easier and much lower stakes, is I go to my 1998 folder in Scrivener.
29:17
I look at all my little entries and I copy and paste them.
29:22
And the copying pasting is the most satisfying feeling because I copy and paste maybe what, 9,000 words of text for a chapter?
29:29
And I know that chapter is not going to be 9,000 words.
29:32
It's probably going to be closer to 5,500.
29:33
But I have so much there.
29:33
And it's like it's so nice.
29:36
Look at how much work I did.
29:38
I did 9,000 words worth of work.
29:40
Once I've copied and pasted, I know I can take that clay and shape it into the chapter I want.
29:45
But, that's how I avoid the demon of the blinking cursor, the blank page.
29:51
I'm not doing anything other than dumping a bunch of stuff in a Scrivener, copying and pasting over to Google Docs, and then I shape, and I formulate, and I play.
30:00
And that's like where some of the more fun stuff happens.
30:05
But, if you if I were starting with a blank piece of paper, I mean, I'd go crazy. Yeah.
30:09
No, though I'm already crazy as maybe people could tell, but I would it would be very hard to jog the words out.
30:15
I think it's Michelangelo who has this line about a statue that your job as a sculptor is to chisel the stone and to find the statue that's already within it.
30:31
And I like that metaphor because it takes writing from a process of creation to a process of subtraction and refinement and reduction.
30:41
And that I Deya helps a lot of people.
30:45
That's a much better metaphor than the one I would often use, which is like every chapter in this book is like a a a sauce reduction.
30:51
It's like I took a bunch of stuff, I put it in in a big boiling pot, and I waited until it was all reduced down to its essence.
30:57
That's how I would think about it intellectually. Yeah.
31:00
Um I I think that fear is a big part, overcoming fear, overcoming the psychology of anxiety is a big part of writing for a lot of people.
31:10
I think there may be some people I know like superheroes who aren't afraid when they sit down to write. What are you afraid of? What am I not afraid of? Right?
31:19
Um you're you're a I'm a nerdy kid who grew up in the Midwest who played a lot of video games and had immigrant parents.
31:25
I'm afraid of everything, you know?
31:26
It's like anxiety's a big part of my life. But, Huh.
31:29
but what you do if you're for me, what works well is finding ways to fight the anxiety is actually also a way to be productive and creative.
31:36
Let me give you a couple specific examples.
31:39
One of my favorite things and bless them for doing this that Google Docs did that helped me a lot is voice typing.
31:46
Their voice typing, if you go to tools and you press voice typing I've never used this.
31:50
Oh, I'm about to save you years of your life.
31:55
I, like a lot of people, you many people have may have writer's block, they may not get they won't get speaker's block, they can talk, right? Totally, yeah.
32:01
So, what I would do is I if I was stuck is I would actually take a I would open up Google Docs, I'd go to tools, voice typing, and I my understanding is that they built the Android voice recognition technology, they took that and they put it into Google Docs.
32:14
And so, you actually get a situation where like they're using really good tech, and the voice recognition's really good.
32:19
I'd put a manila folder on top of my computer screen, and I would activate I can I'd make sure voice typing was activated, I'd put a manila folder on top of my computer screen so I couldn't see anything, and I'd describe whatever scene I wanted to write.
32:31
Because that way, I'm just describing it.
32:33
I'm not looking at anything.
32:34
I'm not seeing how bad the language are or how many spelling errors there are, how many grammatical errors there are.
32:38
All I'm doing is saying describe you know, what the car crash was like between Elon and Peter.
32:45
I already know a lot of the facts. I've interviewed them.
32:48
There's a there's in the middle of the book there's a there's a car accident where Elon's driving a McLaren F1, Peter Thiel's a passenger, and they get into a really gnarly car crash.
32:55
The car is totaled, they both narrowly escape I mean, my sense is they both narrowly escape with their lives, and it's a pretty it's a pretty unbelievable moment, and it's sandwiched right in the middle of the book.
33:06
Man, imagine a counterfactual. They die. Yeah.
33:11
How different the world pop culture is all over the place.
33:16
Elon's the biggest figure in the world right now, That's right.
33:20
and he's close to losing him.
33:20
The funny thing is, because they survived and because both of them have this sort of like a dark ironic sense of humor, the way that section ends is that both of them cracked and I interviewed them separately about this. They both cracked jokes.
33:33
Elon's joke was it was like, well, I guess Peter won't be driving with me again.
33:36
And then Peter Peter was like, I had taken off with Elon, just not in a rocket. Yeah.
33:42
Cuz the car actually flies up.
33:42
But, back to the the sort of central point, right?
33:46
I would if I was thinking about that, I'd probably already done the reading, the research, and the interviewing to bring that scene to life. Yes.
33:52
But, it was easier for me to just talk it to my computer and not see the words.
33:58
And that's why Google voice typing is is a is a godsend.
34:01
I mean, it's incredible because what it does is it allows you to get just that raw material on the page and overcome the anxiety of you having to sit and type, right?
34:09
I'm I'm pretty good at sitting and typing, I can do that.
34:12
But, there are times when I get freaked out by my own material or by my own you know, insecurities about a project, and that's when Google voice typing is where it's at. That's one trick.
34:21
The other trick I use is I will often write big sections of a chapter on the phone.
34:26
The phone is one of the best one of the best techniques I've seen for getting material out when I'm stuck or when I'm editing and I need something to be sharper.
34:34
And the reason is twofold.
34:34
One, the form factor, it forces you to like tighten up all your sentences Yeah. because it's tiny.
34:40
The other is you actually have a harder time if you've turned your notifications off leaving like Google Docs on your phone or leaving a notes app on your phone.
34:51
You have to make a conscious choice to go over to another app.
34:54
On a browser, you just you press control T, and you open up another tab.
34:57
Like it's like my favorite thing in the world to do, right?
34:59
So, I have a million tabs open at any given time.
35:03
That tab opening process, you have to defeat that.
35:05
The way I defeat that frequently is I would wake up, and instead of writing on my computer, I would write on my phone, and I would like open up like the chapter four.
35:11
And I would just go through, and I'd be like, okay, I have more to say here, yeah, tuck nip and tuck here.
35:16
I did a lot of my best editing on the phone.
35:18
Uh and it it just the the changing in the form factor forces you to write a little differently, and it just takes some of the fear away cuz you cuz also it's like it's almost like texting a friend. Totally, totally. Yeah.
35:31
So, a lot of comments here.
35:31
So, first of all, I always do my final round of editing in my bed on Google Docs. Always. That's great.
35:38
And there's something about Google Docs, and for me reading on my phone is a little harder.
35:42
So, you're saying writing on your phone there's more friction to change.
35:46
I get so distracted when I read on my phone, and so my patience is less, and so probably that matches what a reader's patience is.
35:55
It's possible to get too obsessed with the tools and the techniques, but a lot of the tools and techniques actually like solve an important problem. Right?
36:03
Think about it this way, you can't write long paragraphs on a phone. They can't be too long.
36:08
You'll notice them right away if they're too long.
36:11
And you know, your reader will get will notice them and get annoyed by them if you have said the same thing 14 ways, right? Mhm.
36:20
That annoyance, you're more likely to pick that up on your phone than on a computer, right?
36:24
Let me let's go a step further.
36:27
I don't have any evidence for this, but somebody should really run the study of whether it's different if you're writing through your thumbs as opposed to writing through your index finger and other fingers.
36:34
You only use your thumb on a space bar on a keyboard, but you use your thumb as your primary typing mechanism on a phone. on a phone.
36:42
Now, is it possible that there's some phone a thumb brain connection that's different than the index finger, and and maybe not, maybe I'm overplaying it, but I suspect that the amount of texting we all do, the amount of personality we all try to inject into our phones is different than the personality we inject when we're sitting at our computer. So, totally agree.
37:01
And I I wouldn't follow the thumb route, but what I would follow is the posture route. Ah.
37:07
And so, when you're sitting at a computer, you're generally sitting up, you're in sort of an office chair. Right.
37:14
When you're sitting on your phone, you're generally on the couch, slouching over or in bed, Yeah.
37:17
and I think that there's the mind-body connection is strong enough that there there would be a kind of casualness and a sort of um unblockage that you would have from being on your phone versus the computer.
37:34
One of my favorite writers, one of the writers I most admire is Michael Lewis. Mhm.
37:37
And his books are just they're just legendary, and he has a way with words that, you know, I'll never achieve cuz I didn't grow up sitting on New Orleans' porches listening to people tell stories, right?
37:47
Um I grew up with like broken English and and all the rest, right?
37:49
Um he has this story he tells about how he got his process started when he was writing.
37:56
He would write letters to friends about adventures he was having while he was in London doing like a graduate degree.
38:03
And the letters started to like be funny and make the rounds, and and would be a passed around his friends, I gather, or something like that.
38:11
And the the same I think is true when you are writing on a phone as opposed to writing on a computer because you have an informality, a casualness, right?
38:21
And and I I do think that like that listening to him cuz what he would to say then is like that affected how I wrote my books.
38:29
Because I would think about like, well, what if I'm just telling this to a friend of mine?
38:32
Like, how do I make how do I make it funny?
38:34
How do I make this person laugh? Yeah.
38:35
That I think is different.
38:35
The biggest thing I would say is like many people listening everybody writes.
38:40
Some people probably want to write professionally, but they feel like the sitting at a computer and writing is like really intimidating. It is. I I get it.
38:47
I live with that fear every day.
38:49
Every day I'm still afraid of it. Yeah.
38:52
You can overcome that fear through strategy, and one of the ways to overcome the fear is voice typing in Google Docs. Yeah.
38:59
One of the ways to overcome the fear is using a phone and just using your using that form factor if that's what works for you.
39:05
You have to come up with these strategies.
39:06
It's the only way to manage that you know, people have come up with a bunch of different names for it, imposter syndrome, the resistance, whatever.
39:12
I I think it's not it's something more writers should be talking more about because people want to make writing seem like this sort of glamorous high-flying thing when really it's it many much of it is getting the words on the page, but overcoming fear, distraction, doubt. Yeah.
39:31
You know, one of the things I do with voice typing cuz I use a lot of that, always with Otter, is I'll sequence it a couple times.
39:36
So, what I'll do is I'll first draft is I'll say, I can voice type for as long as I want.
39:44
Okay, so I get the story out.
39:44
And then I say, "Okay, now I got to say the same thing and I have a 2-minute timer." Yeah.
39:49
And then I say, "Now I got to say the same thing in 45 seconds."
39:50
And so what it does is voice just forces compression. Yeah.
39:55
And what's funny is that humans are very good at compressing things in speech relative to typing.
40:02
And the example here is if you give somebody Uh uh a piece and you say, "Okay, so this is five pages.
40:12
Now compress it into one page or half a page."
40:14
That's really hard for people.
40:17
They'll say, "How do I do that?
40:18
We're missing out on all these sorts of things."
40:21
Now, if you were to say, "Okay, you just told the story in 5 minutes.
40:24
Now you got to do it in 30 seconds."
40:26
There's something about speech and the ability for people to compress their language that's just totally intuitive for people. Right.
40:33
And that's like the essence of of a lot of great writing is is that level of compression.
40:38
Look, I compressed 470,000 words into 170,000 words.
40:42
I I this is like an area, you know, where I I think a lot about decisions.
40:46
I think a lot about subtraction.
40:48
I think about a lot a lot about what to cut and what to keep, what details to bring to the fore and which ones to avoid, right? How do you know? How do you know?
40:56
It's a very good question. So okay.
41:02
Some of it is you read a lot. Right?
41:05
The best writers I know are avid readers.
41:08
It seems kind of obvious except that it's not actually that obvious.
41:12
A lot of my writing is standing on the shoulder of people who I really really really admire or whose work has just blown my hair back.
41:21
Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit and Unbroken.
41:25
I I just I marvel at her.
41:25
I marvel at her actually as a person.
41:27
She has chronic fatigue syndrome and she still manages to write these incredibly insanely detailed books.
41:36
And she's tired essentially 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Like not tired.
41:41
Tired is underselling it.
41:41
Chronic fatigue syndrome is like debilitating. Like she can't move.
41:44
There are some days she can't move.
41:46
And yet two like her two books are just extraordinary monuments of research.
41:49
And by the way, like I complain about like getting on a flight to have to go to like meet somebody to do an interview and I'm tired and whatever.
41:57
And she is in bed deciding if she has enough energy to move her arms and is like trying to finish a book, right?
42:04
So I've no reason to complain.
42:05
But a lot of my my my kind of like how do you know what to keep and what to cut is I study other books.
42:09
Like I'm meticulous about like looking at books I admire that might be cousin to my book and then just breaking them down.
42:18
So it like, you know, we're in the we're in the therapy confession mode.
42:23
The book that I read, I mean I must have been 16 or 17 times all the way through, was The Everything Store by Brad Stone. Mhm.
42:30
And as a little actually as it's like a little scary.
42:32
My friends told me never to admit this, but whatever.
42:36
They don't They don't like hearing about this, so anyway, you do.
42:37
There's tick marks in the back of my very very broken copy of The Everything Store.
42:41
And it has a tick mark for every time I read it all the way through.
42:45
And I knew that I wanted to do the PayPal story which would be new but with the same level of quality and readability that The Everything Store had.
42:54
Because Brad Stone's book was remarkable.
42:56
It was really a good look at a balanced look at Bezos's psychology, the creation of Amazon, the like heyday of the internet back in that era, as well as just like a bunch of great stories from the early days.
43:08
And I was like, "That's what I want to do." Yeah.
43:11
So I didn't just read the book, I obsessed over it.
43:13
Before I would start writing PayPal every morning for probably 3 and 1/2 years, I would spend 10 minutes, exactly 10 minutes, reading The Everything Store.
43:22
My friends would like ask me like, "Why the same book over and over again?
43:24
It's like the It's like it's not the Bible."
43:25
And I was like, "Well, it is to me."
43:27
But also it gave me what I what I thought of as like a running start.
43:30
So I'd read it and I'd like read some section and then all of a sudden like I'd be like, "Okay, now I got to go do what Brad did. I'm just Brad.
43:38
I'm just Brad but for PayPal, right?"
43:40
And I would I would obsess over the questions he asked.
43:43
So I'll give a specific example.
43:45
I do a long riff on where the name PayPal came from.
43:48
And I did do a lot of research to actually figure it out.
43:51
It's not like a name that immediately jumps to mind, right?
43:52
I knew to go down that line of questioning because there's a bunch of pages in The Everything Store where Brad explores where the name Amazon came from.
44:04
And about the fact that like Bezos still owns one of the previous names of the company. One of the relentless. com. I love that story.
44:10
He thought about calling it Relentless.
44:11
He still if you go to relentless.
44:12
com today, it's a redirects you back to Amazon.
44:14
He had thought about Cadabra Incorporated.
44:16
That was the original name of the company.
44:17
And I remember thinking like, "Wow, how cool is it that Brad Stone went back and like had the thought of like, where does the name come from?"
44:24
And I knew I was like, "That question.
44:27
I need to take that question to its nth degree for PayPal." So I did.
44:30
And I just found everybody who could give me any bit of information about the name.
44:34
I found PowerPoint slides. I the whole thing. It's all in the book.
44:37
But the point is reading over and over and over again something that you admire teaches you not the answers but the questions.
44:45
It teaches you, "Huh, interesting.
44:47
Here's Here's how a personal detail about Jeff Bezos mixes into a business book.
44:53
So how do I make a personal detail about, I don't know, Max Levchin work in a business book, right? Oh, Brad already did it.
45:00
I just have to study and understand and really dive in.
45:04
So that's one that's answer your question like how do you know what to keep and what to cut?
45:07
You can develop taste through rigor.
45:09
You can develop taste just by like reading the same thing over and over and over again if it's the high water mark, the model for what you're trying to do.
45:17
And that's like one of the tricks.
45:20
The other trick is to have a really good editor. You know, I was blessed.
45:23
I had two really good editors at Simon & Schuster and they would ask question They would say like, "Do you mean you think this is right?
45:30
Do you think you maybe you're overplaying this?" That kind of thing.
45:33
The third we you know, piece of it is you you apply the Apple model to a book or to any piece of writing.
45:41
Apple's big thing for many years or like one of the big things that was a Steve Jobs philosophy was like surprise and delight, right?
45:46
That these project that the that his products are maybe it's him, maybe it's not.
45:50
I don't know if I have the reference right.
45:51
But he always said that like that that people should be delighted when they open up Apple packaging.
45:55
So he was like obsessed over the packaging itself.
45:59
Like what it felt like to actually open the box, to take the thing out, to have every part of that UX be really good. Books have a UX.
46:06
a Apple package upstairs that I haven't thrown away cuz it's so beautiful.
46:08
It's on my desk and everything from the pair of AirPods I just bought is displayed right there.
46:15
I just don't want to throw it away. Yeah.
46:16
You can apply the same motif to writing.
46:20
You have an obligation if you're writing something that's, you know, 400 plus pages to be surprising and delightful.
46:27
You want a gem on every page or on every other page, especially if it's about people like Elon Musk that are just like covered to death, right?
46:33
And so I would often think about that.
46:35
Like, have I left the reader here with something that's going to like make them smile, make them laugh, make them think, right?
46:42
And I was very consciously trying to do that.
46:44
But that, by the way, is what leads you to cut so much cuz I would read something and be like, "Ah, that's stale. That's boring. That's dumb.
46:50
Like that's been But it's played out.
46:51
Nobody Everybody's already said that.
46:54
14 people before me said that.
46:56
There's no point there, right?"
46:57
But it also leads you to like fun little things, right?
47:00
So I'll give you another example. This one's fun.
47:03
There was a moment in the book where Elon closes the big financing round for x. com. x.
47:10
com is the predecessor company to PayPal.
47:12
And he's closed this big round of funding from Sequoia Capital.
47:14
And I have to figure out how to get the reader from that moment to the next section.
47:21
And and the next section deals with the fact that even though Sequoia had invested something like $5 million, they're really just investing in Elon.
47:28
They were ideas, but there wasn't really a fully formed product yet.
47:30
And and I remember thinking like, "How am I going to make this like It's like funding.
47:33
You know, it's like closing a round.
47:35
It's not the most fun thing.
47:36
Like how am I going to make somebody laugh?"
47:37
And I remember somewhere in my mind I remembered, "Oh yeah, funding secured."
47:43
Because there was that funding secured tweet.
47:45
And obviously like caused him a lot of drama and whatever.
47:47
But I remember thinking like, "How funny would it be if I did funding secured?
47:50
But what exactly had Sequoia Capital invested in?"
47:55
And that was how I transitioned that page.
47:56
And there might be five people in the world who get that joke or who see it for what it is or But but I got it and it made me surprised and it made me laugh.
48:04
So I was like, "This is going to make other people laugh, too, right?"
48:07
I think a lot about the surprise and delight piece, which also drills you down to like cut this, keep this, do funding secured instead of just asking the question, "But what had Sequoia Capital invested in?" Such a boring question.
48:21
But doing funding secured, it's like It's like an inside joke, but it's a hilarious inside joke. And I had so much fun.
48:26
Every time I read it even now, I'm like I was like I laugh at my own jokes, right?
48:30
Which may be a little pathetic, but it works.
48:31
You know, Raymond Chandler, the the the novelist, he wrote on a typewriter and his rule was that every page something important had to happen. That was his thing.
48:40
So if he went a page and nothing happened, scrap the page, rewrite it. Yeah.
48:45
Not everybody's going to be writing book-length material, but the obligation of good writing is the same, right?
48:50
It's like to have humor and voice and warmth and surprise.
48:55
And these are things that like Why is warmth important in writing?
49:00
It doesn't matter in all writing, right?
49:01
So there's some journalistic writing that's more investigative, right?
49:02
Like if you're writing about Theranos, you don't need to be warm.
49:05
You need to You need to stick to the facts and be almost almost dry to a fault.
49:09
Like you need to just tell people what happened.
49:10
But I I think that if you're trying to tell a story where there are characters, like especially characters that have specific personality types and you want the reader to feel like they're in their heads, right?
49:21
So warmth matters because it it if you're going for warm words, this is sort of in that William Zinsser on writing well, right?
49:29
It's one of my favorite books about writing.
49:30
And he talks about warmth.
49:31
Warmth is a is the quality for him of specific word choice, Right?
49:38
So, he writes about something like how how the word soft has a feel to it. Like soft, right?
49:42
Is is different than smooth, right? Like like Yeah.
49:48
Yeah, a lot of reading happens in the ear, right?
49:49
And so, we I I I'm often thinking about warmth as like the quality of Like what does it mean when somebody sees a certain word and like how's that going to sound to them?
49:58
Are they going to feel like this is they're being beaten over the head or they're going to feel like, "Oh, they're in this story with me.
50:03
They're with They're with There's the Elon Musk that I was interviewing at the height of his powers, right?
50:09
Richest person in the world.
50:13
But the person I was writing about was the Elon Musk at 19 and 20 years old when he's leaving college, has no idea what to do with his life or some idea but doesn't really know quite how to get there and he's figuring it out and has all the same anxieties I did when I graduated college.
50:27
What am I going to do with my life?
50:28
How am I going to make it meaningful?
50:30
What are the things I care about?
50:31
How do I align what I care about with making money?
50:33
All those same questions.
50:36
In order to write from a place of warmth, like in order to in order to get that across, you have to write from a place of like, man, you were just you were a kid figuring it out and let me put myself in your shoes.
50:46
You have student loan debt.
50:48
You apply to Stanford and you get a scholarship to do a PhD program.
50:54
But you also think you might want to take a job.
50:56
So, you go stand in the lobby. This is what he did.
50:57
He stood in the lobby at Netscape because he sent a letter in for a job, did not get a response.
51:03
Elon Musk did not get a letter of response from when he applied.
51:07
He goes to the lobby at Netscape and his line about it is like, "I sort of stood there and I just like hoped I could strike up a conversation with somebody, but I was too shy and too scared to talk to anybody.
51:16
So, I like after a little while, I just like I went I left the lobby and I went home."
51:19
Well, I mean, what is What an incredible thing.
51:21
This is one of the most confident, you know, risk-seeking people in the world, but he is standing in the lobby at Netscape trying to start a conversation, can't start a conversation, and is like, "Oh, all right. I think I can't do this. I'm going to go back."
51:35
Then decides to build a company, but that's a risky venture.
51:39
So, instead of dropping out of his Stanford program, he delays it for 6 months.
51:43
How can you not write about a young person's anxiety about their life choices at 19 with warmth, right?
51:47
Like why wouldn't And that's why I interviewed I found his first boss and I interviewed his first boss who gave him advice about what to do and about what he should do.
51:56
I I wanted people to get the sense of these are people that's like there's like an emotion is a human emotion.
52:02
There's fear, there's risk-taking.
52:05
I don't see how you could write that without warmth, right?
52:07
Because then then it's it's like like you could see that same story repeated in any of the people who are in my life who made those I made those choices when I was 19 and 20, right?
52:17
That's the reason to write with warmth is cuz it takes people, at least for a book like this, it takes people who are on the mountaintop and it reminds you that they they're human beings.
52:26
How did writing factor into the PayPal story?
52:29
I know they had a company newsletter, you looked at a bunch of emails. What else happened?
52:33
Writing was valued at the company.
52:35
So, one of the things that multiple people I interviewed mentioned that if you were a talented writer, it was sort of like being a talented engineer.
52:42
You were People looked at you and they marked you out as special.
52:48
Peter Thiel in particular put a high premium on clear writing and clear communication.
52:51
One of many reasons, but one key reason why he was keen to bring David Sacks onto the team is because he knew David was a clear writer.
53:00
That That's kind of like the the small way.
53:02
The the more interesting way that writing is a part of the story is there's a weekly company newsletter and I had the, you know, extraordinary opportunity to go through like hundreds of thousands of pages of email that people had kept from that era and one of the things that I found was this weekly company newsletter called the Weekly Expert and then it transitioned to being called the Weekly Pal.
53:22
So, I'm looking at the Weekly Pal, I'm reading every company newsletter, I'm seeing birthday updates, I'm seeing random 401k updates, that kind of stuff.
53:31
But then in kind of 2001, 2002, I start to see this week sort of weekly or every other week column written by David Sacks and it is the like product Q&A column.
53:41
And I remember I remember finding it and just thinking, boy, I just hit pay dirt.
53:48
What happens is one of the employees will submit a question and David will write like a 700 to 1,000 word response as an answer and they'll include it in the weekly newsletter.
53:58
So, someone asked the question, why can't PayPal service offline retailers or why why can't we partner up with Amazon?
54:08
And, you know, it's one of these things like he wants the company to understand his thinking about product, but the best way to do that is for him to write an answer and then include it so that everyone can see it and see his thinking.
54:20
And for a writer writing the story, that was just I mean, it was a goldmine because I got his thinking on everything from international expansion to this, that, the other thing.
54:27
And so, writing was a it's a big part of the the sort of meta story of the company.
54:31
I also had the fortune of seeing Peter wrote a note to the company after 9/11, which was his understanding of the terrorist attacks and like what what it meant to him, what it meant for the world, and I that's that's in the book.
54:47
Elon wrote a resignation note when he was leaving the company.
54:48
He was pushed out by in a in a sort of now famous but a coup, basically a coup.
54:53
And he wrote a long note meditating on the company, what it meant, what the next what the future would hold and he sent it to the So, that's in the book.
55:01
So, there were always moments where you see that these people actually valued the written word enormously and maybe that By the way, maybe that doesn't make him different from any other company in the world.
55:09
I suspect people are going to maybe roll their eyes and go, "All companies have weekly newsletters."
55:13
Yes, but if you look at the quality of the writing in some of these written things from the from the story that I had access to, it is really a cut above, right?
55:22
And there's written with real flair and real flourish. So, that's a part of it.
55:26
I think the most important thing is that time and again I heard from people for them for for the folks who ran PayPal, if you could write clearly, you were thinking clearly and it was a valued commodity of the company.
55:37
One of the things that I uncovered as at least I think I uncovered it as I was prepping for this was I was looking at your notes and sources from the founders.
55:51
And one of the things that you talk about is a woman named Alice Mayhew.
55:53
So, we're going to talk about her in a second. Mhm.
55:59
But one of the things that she taught you was that you should write things that stand the test of time and that seems to be something that at the very least you're very interested in.
56:07
You're You're not just asking, how do I write a book that resonates now but will resonate in a while. Mhm.
56:14
And then I sort of follow that and like, I'm going to go back to your book on Claude Shannon and the the quote at the beginning is from W. H.
56:21
Auden and it talks about test to stand the test of time.
56:28
And so, I don't know if you knew about this, but was that intentional? Did you Oh, no. It was not at all.
56:33
I never even thought about it until now.
56:35
That's like that's insane.
56:36
I mean, I'm sure it's back in my subconscious somewhere, but that's crazy. What's going on?
56:44
I'm a little like I'm a little blown away. It's sort of funny.
56:48
I think there is something about creative projects that last that actually is important as a goal you should set for yourself.
56:57
And it's probably a little maybe a little pompous.
56:59
Maybe not pompous, but maybe a little like you you want to do that with a level of humility because not everything you make is going to have like a 100-year shelf life.
57:06
Well, the quote that you use that which I think answers what you're trying to say is that it's that the certainty that the work is good and will stand the test of time.
57:14
I like that way of phrasing it.
57:16
I'm not sure that it's like what I wake up every day and think about first, right?
57:19
But it's certainly in the back of my mind.
57:23
Here's what I mean by that.
57:26
A lot of books that are written about these kinds of companies, there's a ton of gossip in them.
57:31
And gossip has about a 5-minute shelf life, right?
57:33
What Susie said that made Tom mad or what Tom did when he slipped and fell on the sidewalk and it was really embarrassing has no value for a reader in 2080.
57:47
Because really like that that those those moments tend to not be that important.
57:50
I always tried to when I was writing this book think about if it's 2080 or 2100 and someone wants to understand who Elon Musk is and how he got to where he is and what these four and a half, five years in his life meant, will they get value out of reading my book?
58:06
And I tried to find the ideas, the concepts, and the stories that were both new and interesting but that also like had longevity.
58:13
That like somebody would be like, "Huh, that helps me.
58:18
Like oh, that's really interesting, right? Like that's really cool. It's why That's fresh.
58:23
I I never thought about it that way before."
58:25
And I found that like if you have that as a filter, it actually like cuts out a lot of stuff that you might include, but it leads you to focus on, "Okay, what what was it here that's important that is going to endure?"
58:38
And it you don't get it By the way, you don't get it right all the time.
58:41
I probably get it right 95% of the time.
58:43
But the point is to think a lot, at least for me, about, you know, it's a book of history.
58:49
I really I recently read this wonderful book called A Night to Remember, which is about the sinking of the Titanic.
58:54
It's like one of the better books I've I've read in the last little while.
58:55
And I know how that story is going to end. We all do.
59:00
But I was riveted from page one to the end.
59:03
And it's because there's just an endurance about it. There's a quality.
59:08
People 100 years from now will still be reading The Power Broker by Robert Moses.
59:12
They will still be reading Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand.
59:14
I am, you know, admittedly, you have to be sort of modest, but you have to be immodest in your ambitions for a project.
59:21
And my ambition is I'm going to be long gone, dead and buried, but people are still going to read the book about PayPal to understand PayPal if that's something they're looking for.
59:31
They will still read this book to understand a little bit about Elon Musk.
59:35
And and I think that's a good goal because it also leads you to just the key important things, not the ephemera, not the nonsense, right?
59:42
It leads you to really trying to understand who are these people, what made them who they are, who are their important mentors, what are the stories about their life that are really important, really consequential.
59:53
And I would say also, how do they see themselves?
59:55
That's the other piece of it is how do they see themselves?
59:59
There's a There's a line from David McCullough that I really like about writing history where he says that it's not enough to recount the facts, you have to put the reader in the perspective of the people who didn't know how history was going to turn out. Yeah.
1:00:13
And he's talking about his book about the Brooklyn Bridge.
1:00:15
He's like, "They didn't know if the Brooklyn Bridge was going to be able to be built.
1:00:21
Like, this was a question, can we do this?
1:00:23
And now we look back at the Brooklyn Bridge and we're like, well, of course it was built.
1:00:30
Same thing with the Titanic.
1:00:32
The people on that ship, they didn't know if they were going to survive.
1:00:35
They didn't know what was going to happen.
1:00:36
They were just on a trip." Yeah.
1:00:39
And so that whether you want to call it empathy or something else, I think that that is another thing that you're striving for when you're a kind of historian.
1:00:46
And I would actually argue that for any kind of writing, it can actually lead you to a really great process.
1:00:52
So let me talk about another part of the process that we haven't touched touched on yet that might be helpful to people.
1:00:58
Um I have an insanely narrow media diet when I am in the middle of a book. Oh, that's interesting.
1:01:05
So So, people think like, "Oh, like you've got to read widely and like you've got to like know everything that's going on in the world.
1:01:12
You've got to follow every Elon update."
1:01:14
And no, actually I forbade my friends from telling me anything that was going on in the lives about the founders that was contemporary news.
1:01:20
I unsubscribed from all news-related newsletters and I actually like came late to everything that was funny and interesting.
1:01:28
So like, I found out much later secured thing you found out later.
1:01:32
Yeah, or like or like he was on SNL and I didn't know about it cuz I like had like avoided, blocked it out, not paid attention, right?
1:01:38
And I actually have this This is a principle that I think applies not just for this kind of work, but for any kind of work.
1:01:44
You have to be very careful about any and all of the media inputs if you're trying to create media outputs.
1:01:52
And so for example, like every month I will prune the newsletters I subscribe to and I'll sort of ask myself like important questions like, do I enjoy this?
1:01:58
Is it a delight to receive this?
1:02:00
Am I learning things from it?
1:02:00
Have I bought something from it?
1:02:01
Has it actually like moved me in some way?
1:02:02
But but when I'm in the middle of a book during during the founders in particular, I mean, I sort of admitted like how many times I read the everything store, but there were specific things that I was trying to do and a lot of that was cutting away everything else because you have to inhabit their world.
1:02:21
I have this friend who says, "I'm not a I'm not a method actor, I'm a method writer."
1:02:25
So I would like sort of inhabit their universe, right? Here's another example.
1:02:29
I read a story once about how in order to write about World War compellingly, Laura Hillenbrand would start the day by reading World War newspapers.
1:02:37
And so she would like read newspapers that she had bought from that era.
1:02:41
And so my version of that was there was this one blogger who like was sort of like the Tyler Cowen of the 1990s and he just had like updates every day.
1:02:50
So I printed out like 300 pages of his updates over a I don't know, 5-6 year period.
1:02:55
And I would actually start out by like reading about like Y2K.
1:03:01
And about like like, you know, the Spice Girls and like all the stuff that was happening in the 90s, right? Like rap and whatever.
1:03:07
And so I actually tried to like occupy their world before I would start to write the book.
1:03:12
And then for the rest of the day, I really tried to limit the influence of anything contemporary, anything that sort of threw me off my game.
1:03:20
And and again, it's not going to work for everyone, right?
1:03:21
But if you if you think about if you're writing something, anything, and you wrap your entire world around that piece of writing, like your inputs are there, the movies you're watching.
1:03:32
I watched a lot of like YouTube videos from the 90s.
1:03:36
I was watching a lot of like documentaries about teams.
1:03:38
So I watched The Last Dance like probably a billion times.
1:03:41
I watched The Defiant Ones, which is all about creativity and entrepreneurship.
1:03:45
I would watch movies that feature technology or Silicon Valley, but I avoided the show Silicon Valley because it was too contemporary and it was satire and I wasn't going for satire, right?
1:03:55
So I was very careful about culling the inputs so that the outputs reflected like what they might have known at the time.
1:04:03
I think that what you're saying here that is unique to the craft of writing.
1:04:12
Writing isn't the only place where this happens, but every great writer I know is very intentional about the life that they live away from the page in order to facilitate good writing.
1:04:22
How does this show up in your friendships?
1:04:24
How does this show up in you live in New York City?
1:04:27
How does this show up in the way that you interface with New York?
1:04:29
I don't interface with The honest answer is um I keep what Let me put it to you this way.
1:04:39
There's sort of book me and then there's not book me.
1:04:43
You and I are even able to have a conversation like this because I'm not writing a book right now.
1:04:47
Because the truth is if we if I was writing a book right now, I would not have scheduled this interview with you at 9:00 in the morning because the mornings are the time when it's like a super sacred time for me to just get work done.
1:04:57
And so what happens after you wake up to through writing?
1:05:00
I need to hear this real quick. Sure.
1:05:01
I I I wake up and it it's a little bit sort of like what sort of superstitious baseball players, right?
1:05:08
So I have I mean, it how how many layers of detail do we want to go into? Go into me, man.
1:05:13
Um I try not to alter a single thing in the mornings because I think of the mornings particularly because I am generally working full-time while I'm writing books.
1:05:21
And so I try to get as much of my writing done before I dive into like client work and other things.
1:05:24
And so I would wake up generally at around 4:00, 4:30 in the morning and I would like like sort of sparkling water and caffeine were big constituent part of the mornings.
1:05:37
Um and then a you know, and and let me let me actually get detailed here.
1:05:40
So I would do a very very very quick, call it a meditation, but really it was just sort of like thinking about certain things for a minute a piece.
1:05:48
Um the second minute of that was actually thinking about what the end product of the book would look like and like what it would feel like and the reaction people would have.
1:05:55
I would imagine myself holding it or imagine this magnificent studio. Exactly.
1:06:00
Sitting here not being a total weirdo.
1:06:01
Um I wear the same most of mostly the same clothes when I'm writing.
1:06:05
I just don't want anything to be out of kilter.
1:06:06
I don't want to spend an ounce of brain space.
1:06:08
So it's the same hoodie over and over same blue hoodie over and over and over again.
1:06:11
And I I've like it's like definitely seen better days.
1:06:16
Wow, you're really superstitious. Oh, yeah, very.
1:06:17
I do the lighting the same way.
1:06:19
I'll flip the lights on in the same sequence.
1:06:21
I'll get out like the sparkling water will be there.
1:06:23
It has to be cold, not warm.
1:06:24
And then I would read 10 minutes of The Everything Store and then I would dive into whatever chapter I was working on.
1:06:31
And I mean and then by the way, the the process changed depending on what the outcome was for that day, but I did not leave time for interference from the outside world.
1:06:42
Basically, what I tried to do was from 4:00 a. m.
1:06:44
to let's say around 8:00 a. m. was my time.
1:06:46
And it was going to be my time and like I was going to get this thing done and I was going to do it 7 days a week.
1:06:52
On the weekends, I had a little bit more flexibility cuz I could go from like 4:00 a. m. to 4:00 or 5:00 p. m.
1:06:56
, but it was 7 days a week, Thanksgiving, Christmas. I worked every holiday.
1:07:00
I did I worked on vacations.
1:07:00
I didn't even take vacations, honestly.
1:07:02
I took one vacation with my daughter, but I would work before she got up and do that. It sounds nuts.
1:07:07
I mean, some some people might say it's nuts, but I can also tell you that like I miss those mornings.
1:07:13
Those are the most thrilling mornings ever.
1:07:15
Um and it was a it was awful and fun at the same time.
1:07:17
You don't get that though unless you need to write.
1:07:21
And I mean need with 500 e's.
1:07:26
Why do you need to make things like this? Yeah.
1:07:32
I I don't think I'll have a complete answer cuz I think it would it would have to be you'd have to look at it I'd probably have to look at it with a little bit of distance, a little bit of critical distance to really answer the question. talking about this book.
1:07:42
I'm talking about writing. Yeah.
1:07:46
That one's a little easier. I grew up loving books.
1:07:47
I like I grew up loving I mean, love losing myself in reading.
1:07:53
Um so I fell in love with Brian Jacques. He was a writer.
1:07:55
He wrote the Mossflower and Mattimeo, Red the Redwall series.
1:07:59
It's a series of like fantasy novels for for young adults and I I would honestly like the librarians knew to not put the book out on the shelves.
1:08:07
They would just like hold it back for me at school.
1:08:09
Um The It was really funny.
1:08:13
I was thinking about this the other day, but some people might remember that Pizza Hut had this Book It program.
1:08:17
So So, there was this program where if you read a certain number of books and filled out a sheet, you'd get a free personal pan pizza Pizza Hut.
1:08:25
And this is a very big part of my childhood and I would constantly try to do that.
1:08:29
I try to like get the pizzas.
1:08:32
We had a summer reading program at my local public library when I was a kid and they gave small, you know, whatever prizes for kids who read the most books.
1:08:40
I always tried to do that.
1:08:40
And my parents like the other the other honest part of it is my parents were immigrants.
1:08:44
We didn't have like they didn't know about summer camp, they didn't know about the Boy Scouts, they didn't know about any of that stuff.
1:08:48
They knew what a library was and they knew they could take me and my brother to the library, get a spend a bunch of time there, then bring a bunch of books back and we could pass the time reading books.
1:08:56
So I grew up loving reading.
1:08:59
And then at some point, you know, what what happened is I I sort of started to think like I have some talent for this writing thing.
1:09:04
I got good grades in English.
1:09:06
And then from there, it public writing became a thing.
1:09:09
I wrote for my school papers, right?
1:09:10
And then that change writing in public?
1:09:12
How did that change what you wrote?
1:09:18
I would presume level up the quality.
1:09:20
Oh, I worked so much harder on my college columns than on my college academic work.
1:09:24
Like there's no there's not even a Your friends are going to see it.
1:09:27
Other people are going to see it.
1:09:28
If you say something stupid or misspell something or make a bad argument, you're going to hear about it from other people because college newspaper is like one of these media objects that everybody kind of at least peruses when they're doing whatever. I would sweat though.
1:09:39
I mean I sweated those columns so much, but it taught me how to be a better writer and how to not communicate for professors, but communicate for the public. Right?
1:09:50
And immediately it's like a small public, you know, you're contained at a university, but it was one of the most important things that I that I did in terms of leveling up as a writer.
1:09:57
But that's where the compulsion starts to build.
1:10:00
Then you do one book and then you do another and then you start to realize like I enjoy this.
1:10:06
I What I enjoy I think is You see You see how there's like a physicality about the book?
1:10:14
Like I don't I don't, you know, I don't do woodworking.
1:10:15
I don't I don't work with pottery, but there's a quality of knowing 6 years ago there was no Founders book and now I can physically hold the Founders book and there is something about that act of creation that lights me up.
1:10:28
I can't precisely tell you what it is, but I can tell you that I I love it and that I want to keep doing it in the same way that I don't know that like sculptors sculpt or whatever.
1:10:40
Like it's like a thing I know.
1:10:42
I'm like I want to keep doing this because I like that there was nothing and now there's a 400-page something.
1:10:47
It's very It's a It's a thrilling feeling.
1:10:48
To go back to Alice Mayhew, she's just this legendary editor.
1:10:51
Talk about her and why it's so important from a book to an essay to write the introduction at the end. Yeah.
1:11:02
It's um So to give listeners and and folks context Alice Mayhew passed away uh in 2020.
1:11:07
Um she was like the the She was a legend at Simon & Schuster, but she was a legend within book publishing.
1:11:17
There are so It's hard to even list the names of the major non-fiction authors that she mentored and edited.
1:11:21
Bob Woodward, Walter Isaacson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David Maraniss. I mean on down the line.
1:11:28
She She once bumped me for a phone call because RBG was late to a phone call they were supposed to have and she was like, "Jimmy, I'm so sorry.
1:11:36
Um need to bump your call.
1:11:36
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's not" I was like, "You can bump me.
1:11:39
Like I Like that's an honor.
1:11:41
That's like a That's incredible, right?"
1:11:43
She worked with Jimmy Carter on his book.
1:11:44
So presidents, the biggest non-fiction authors ever. And she was a legend.
1:11:48
She You know, won every award you could win, but she had ferociously high standards for writing and writers. Intense. Very intense.
1:11:55
In fact, the the joke among what we call like Alice authors, the joke is like how afraid all of us were of like the updates and the check-ins and the lunches because she was really intimidating.
1:12:05
She was like 5 ft 2 and she scared the dickens out of me. Like it was crazy.
1:12:09
You'd You'd get there and she had read every newspaper back to back cover to cover and she would launch right into some political thing and then you would say something about your book and she'd be like, "No, no, no, no, no. That's not it."
1:12:18
I made the mistake once of This was a funny mistake and this is to your specific question.
1:12:25
I wrote an intro that I thought would be the intro to the PayPal book.
1:12:30
But I sent it to her not having written the rest of the book.
1:12:34
And I get this call and she is like, "Jimmy, how dare you write the introduction to the book before you wrote the book.
1:12:41
I don't want to see this. Get it out of my face."
1:12:42
And I was like I was really scared of her.
1:12:44
Like I'm a lot younger and a lot less successful than her other big name authors.
1:12:47
I always felt like I was at the kids table, but now I really feel like I'm at the kids table.
1:12:50
And I said, "Well, Alice, like I just didn't mean to.
1:12:53
I thought this was a great story and it could kick off the book."
1:12:54
She's like, "No, no, no, no."
1:12:55
She's like, "You haven't done the work you need to do to tell me what the dimensions of the story are.
1:13:02
Save the intro for when you're completely finished and then the intro's the guide."
1:13:07
She's like, "It's the user's guide to the book.
1:13:08
You can then say to me, go here, don't go here.
1:13:10
Pay attention to this, not to this.
1:13:12
Here's what the story actually is."
1:13:14
And of course, she was 100% right.
1:13:15
I didn't know what the hell the story was going to be when I started, but after years of research, at the very end, she would ask you to write the intro.
1:13:24
Now, I don't know that that works for everybody in every situation, but it was really, really good advice for me because it let me just write the book and then come back and tell readers like, "Here's what this looks like.
1:13:36
Here's what this this thing you hold in your hands is all about."
1:13:38
What I think adds a lot of credibility to what you say when it comes to the writing process is that you only write books like this. Mhm. On nights and weekends.
1:13:53
And really early mornings. Right. or night?
1:13:55
Like this isn't even your full-time job and you were still able to this. You're a speechwriter.
1:13:59
That is so much of what you do.
1:14:03
What should writers be taking from the world of speechwriting and bringing into words on the page?
1:14:08
There are two two thoughts about that.
1:14:12
The first is the books make me better at the day job and the day job makes me better at the books. Mhm.
1:14:19
And if you are in the professional world, if you're in the modern professional world, you have to write.
1:14:24
You have to write emails.
1:14:25
You have to write text messages.
1:14:25
You have to write on Slack. Yeah.
1:14:26
So the truth is you're cross-training all the time.
1:14:28
I think of my day job as cross-training for the books and I think of books as the cross-training for the day job, right?
1:14:34
What is What is writing a a business proposal or a or or or an email to a colleague but like an act of persuasion and an act of, you know, grace or an act of apology or whatever.
1:14:45
All that stuff like also makes it into books, right?
1:14:47
So for me, the the day job is really useful cross-training.
1:14:52
I get to engage with different audiences.
1:14:54
I'm writing op-eds for different people.
1:14:55
I'm writing for business people, Hollywood people, CEOs.
1:14:59
And I'm always thinking like, "What is the audience?
1:15:01
What's your ghostwriting for them?"
1:15:02
Ghostwriting for them sometimes doing, you know, like it's mostly ghostwriting and it's a lot of like, "Oh, I have like a speech I need to give or a quarterly update to shareholders or I have an op-ed and I'm going to go do that thing."
1:15:12
And that is perfect for also like seeing their perspective, telling a story, having to weave together narratives.
1:15:20
But it's a lot of writing.
1:15:22
Like I'm doing thousands of words every day outside of the book, right?
1:15:26
Or But again, volume builds quality.
1:15:28
For me, I always thought about it like, "Oh, it's the reason Kobe Bryant would spend 5 hours in the gym like after the Lakers lost a game shooting baskets until his his hands were hurting, right?" Or whatever.
1:15:39
There's apocryphal And some Actually, it's not apocryphal.
1:15:41
There are real stories about how much time.
1:15:42
I would often think to myself like if Kobe Bryant was a writer, what would he do?
1:15:48
And I was like, "Well, he would just write a metric ton of stuff and the virtue of the ghostwriting is actually I get to do it without my own name so that I don't feel as I feel invested in the success of it, but I don't feel invested in the consequences necessarily.
1:16:01
Um in terms of what other writers can take from speechwriting, you know, I actually recommend everybody who's doing any kind of writing at some point in your organization, if an executive or somebody more senior than you has a thing that they're going to do and you know they're a little bit uncomfortable about what they're going to present.
1:16:19
It could be a wedding toast or could be an update to the board.
1:16:20
If you're a decent writer or even halfway decent, offer to do a first draft. Oh, that's great.
1:16:25
It's actually how I got started in all of this.
1:16:26
I didn't I didn't have Nobody gave me a job as a speechwriter.
1:16:28
I was working for somebody.
1:16:30
They were about to give a big speech and I just sort of put my hand up and said, "Hey, listen, you know, I've done some writing.
1:16:35
I'm happy to take a first stab at this.
1:16:36
Like I feel like, you know, I can provide a service." I did that at McKinsey.
1:16:39
We had to write a report or something and I was like, "I'll just do the first draft.
1:16:42
I'm sure it'll get you like 70% of the way there."
1:16:46
If you do that often enough, then all of a sudden you're the person that people come to and they say, "Hey, can you just like write this for me?"
1:16:50
Um it gives you practice. It gives you reps.
1:16:53
It just It actually gets you to be able to jog the words out on the page.
1:16:57
Plus, you know, I admire what you do where you write so consistently and publish so consistently.
1:17:02
I think I I I have some hang-ups around doing that for myself, but the writing for other trade-off though.
1:17:08
It makes it hard to do something like this.
1:17:10
But the writing for other people gives me the the the consistency.
1:17:14
The like that ability to jog words out.
1:17:17
I always think about it is So when I was growing up and our house would always be the cleanest when people would come over. Uh-huh.
1:17:26
And even my room would be a bit of a mess.
1:17:29
No, Mom, I'm not going to go clean that up. Right.
1:17:31
But then it's like, "David, we have guests coming over.
1:17:33
You got to go You got to You got to go make your bed."
1:17:37
And I think of writing in public in the same way. Mhm.
1:17:40
Where there's a lot of times where I'm okay having an unmade bed, you know, there's some dirty laundry on the floor. Yeah.
1:17:46
But writing in public forces me to tidy things up. Yeah.
1:17:51
And it just gives me an extra layer or two of care. Yeah.
1:17:53
And I think that one of the things that we both share that writing in public helps you do that begins as fear, but then really makes you better at your craft is just opening yourself up to criticism. Yeah.
1:18:08
You know, you see it with a book like this. Right.
1:18:11
Man, you're dealing with litigious people.
1:18:14
You're dealing with people who have a lot of money, a lot of power. Yeah.
1:18:17
And I want to hear now what was your relationship like with Benjamin Kaylin?
1:18:22
What is it like working with a fact-checker and what do they actually do for you?
1:18:26
People will look at a finished book and they make certain assumptions about how the work is done.
1:18:33
And one of the assumptions I think people make is that publishers invest in fact-checking. Mhm. They don't really. Mhm.
1:18:39
Um fact-checking I think used to be a part of publishing paid publishing back in the day, maybe, but I don't actually know enough to know.
1:18:48
Um I paid to have an outside fact-checker go through the book and essentially like beat me up for 6 months.
1:18:57
And what Ben does and and Ben's one of the best uh at least in my estimation and he's so good and he has this awful awful job.
1:19:06
And he would He jokes about it because he says his job is basically to tell authors like every screw up they've made over and over and over and over again.
1:19:16
And he does it with so much wisdom and so much grace.
1:19:18
But what a fact-checker does and this is important.
1:19:23
I think this is actually important as a writing process thing cuz there's a few people I hired to help with the book that are that anybody could could hire for whatever they're doing. One of them was Ben. He was a fact checker.
1:19:33
What he did is he'd read every chapter.
1:19:36
He'd read every chapter and before he read it, the demand was any footnote I had or any fact I had, there had to be a document in a Google Drive folder.
1:19:45
If he's reading chapter two, there has to be a Google Drive folder called chapter two.
1:19:48
And there has to be a document that confirms every single fact.
1:19:53
And then what he would do is if he could not find confirmation, he would call it out in a Word doc and say, "You didn't confirm this. Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?"
1:20:00
And he did this over and over and over again.
1:20:04
If I got a year wrong and he found research on it, he would say, "You got the year wrong. You need to fix this. Here's the document."
1:20:08
And he basically became a useful like if I like if I said a song debuted in 1992 and it was actually 1993, he was like, "You got this wrong.
1:20:17
We had to Here's the fact."
1:20:19
But more importantly, he would push me on, "You have this quote, but I listened to your interview with Elon.
1:20:23
You didn't get this quote right. He said this. How dare you?"
1:20:26
You know, he's sort of like calling me out like, "Don't say that. He didn't say that. I didn't hear this."
1:20:29
He would go through my interview transcripts and he would look for specific words Like a professional curmudgeon. Pretty much.
1:20:35
If I got one word wrong, he was like, "Don't do this.
1:20:38
Like you're going to make a big mistake here."
1:20:39
It was the most intense but the most rewarding process because he was making the book fundamentally better.
1:20:44
He was calling me to account for every decision I made editorially.
1:20:50
That is insanely powerful and I you know and I can't recommend for books like mine, fact checking matters a lot.
1:20:57
You are dealing with people who are in the public eye. You want to be careful.
1:20:59
You also by the way want to be fair.
1:21:01
Like I wanted to be fair to the people I was writing about.
1:21:04
So often what I would do is like Ben had read the whole book through beaten me up about it, right?
1:21:08
And I'd really gone through.
1:21:08
So I would often call Ben after and I would say, "All right, judgment call.
1:21:15
I want to say this in the footnote, but do you think it belongs in the core text? It's a pretty big deal.
1:21:19
There's some debate about it. It's controversial. What do you think?"
1:21:22
And he at that point had kicked the tires on the book so much that he could help me make those calls, too.
1:21:29
That was really really really valuable.
1:21:30
But I can't recommend for people who do this kind of work, I don't see how you could do it without getting a fact checker.
1:21:35
It just It costs a lot of money, but you you sort of you sleep so much better knowing someone's really gone through and just honestly torn up your prose and said, "Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Wrong this. That." I mean it was amazing.
1:21:47
And by the way, he did three rounds of that kind of editing with me and it was it was savage.
1:21:53
It was intense and it was late nights and a lot of work, but I'm so grateful.
1:21:56
People have I think a vision of writing that's that's sort of like the Henry David Thoreau.
1:22:01
You go to a cabin, you're all alone, you have a typewriter, you have a I don't know, a quilt and a cup of coffee and you pound away.
1:22:12
This book like I I wrote a section called debts cuz I owe a whole metric ton of people a ton of debts.
1:22:16
My editor Stephanie Freerick at Simon & Schuster who took over after Alice passed away was incredible.
1:22:22
Her associate editor Emily just insanely insanely on top of the whole process.
1:22:27
The people who did the art, the people who did the cover design, the people who I hired to be an extra set of eyes on a given chapter just to make sure I kind of got the texture right and made sense.
1:22:38
Books No piece of writing is done in a vacuum, at least not in my general experience, especially now.
1:22:43
And you shouldn't be shy about asking for help.
1:22:45
If you're trying to get started in writing, hire an editor.
1:22:47
Hire somebody for for not very much money that you can find online who can look at something you wrote and say, "I'd improve here, here, here and here."
1:22:56
It shouldn't be any hit to your ego and honestly, I do it.
1:22:57
I I write books and I still have people who are from the outside who I pay outside of the publisher to improve the product.
1:23:04
That is I I just It For me, it's like basic common sense.
1:23:09
If you can do that, you should. Yeah. Two things.
1:23:10
So the the the first thing is this has always been the sort of platonic ideal for Write of Passage is to have every student get a piece of feedback.
1:23:24
And what happens once you begin to get feedback is you begin to learn that you have to read your writing from the perspective of the reader and not as the writer.
1:23:37
And the way to hack this though is to really utilize conversation.
1:23:40
And I find that if I'm communicating in conversation about an idea and I'm saying, "Hey, let me tell you about this story."
1:23:51
And I'm gauging, "Okay, these are the things that you react to.
1:23:56
Okay, well now I know I can double down on those things."
1:23:58
Then the kinds of questions that you're getting in response, that's going to tell you a lot about what ideas aren't resonating.
1:24:04
And so what I try to do is I try to use conversation as a lead into my writing and do as much of my writing in conversation, at least when I need that two-way interaction so that I can get in the head of my reader.
1:24:17
Yeah, that's really that's really smart.
1:24:18
I mean I frankly I should do more of that.
1:24:20
A lot of my stuff is just in my head and then it comes out.
1:24:24
But my my version of that that I did that because we're going knee deep into process there's a person I recognize at the end of my book.
1:24:32
His name is Justin Richmond.
1:24:33
Justin's one of my friends from college.
1:24:35
He's my He's one of my best friends.
1:24:38
And I texted so many of the paragraphs I wrote to Justin in the morning and he was insanely indulgent for five and a half years reading a paragraph.
1:24:48
I mean and even just doing the little heart emoji, right?
1:24:52
Or doing the little like thumbs up or just saying like, "Yeah, it's not that interesting." It was a useful signal.
1:24:57
So what I take from what you said is you can really psych yourself out if you think that all writing emerges from your brain onto the page perfectly.
1:25:04
Actually, what it is is like a totally a team sport and you work with editors and you talk to friends and you send things out and you publish for the same reason that Michael Jordan had Phil Jackson because Michael Jordan doesn't become Michael Jordan without Phil Jackson.
1:25:18
And I always saw this this sort of constellation of people in my life as the the coaches and the trainers and the like the the people who were bringing this project to life, but that's not something that I had that special.
1:25:28
It's something that anybody can build for their writing system.
1:25:31
And it doesn't have to be somebody who's quali- It can be anyone.
1:25:35
It can be just a friend who you think is like a a friend who reads a lot of books is a great person to send like your first piece of writing cuz they'll just give you feedback and they'll do it in the way a friend would, which is with love and not looking to like, "What's this going What's going to be the ROI on this?" Right?
1:25:48
They're just going to read it and they're going to tell you what they think.
1:25:50
You could even text it to them and they'll read it over on their phone.
1:25:52
Where does research factor into your life and how are you tracking research?
1:25:56
What are you looking for as you do it?
1:25:59
I front load the research.
1:26:02
And the research depends a lot on the project.
1:26:03
For this particular project, the research was a mix of things that were already published about PayPal, interviews that the people had given that were already available on YouTube or Vimeo or wherever and then my own interviews.
1:26:15
But I tried as much as possible to like extract all those things sort of at the beginning.
1:26:21
I I do write while I'm researching, but I I would say like at the beginning it's like more research than writing.
1:26:27
And the reason is because I don't know what I'm going to say until I know what the facts are.
1:26:31
I mean I'm not I'm not a novelist, right? So I'm not making it up.
1:26:34
I'm trying to understand like, "Oh, I have this. I have this. I have this document. I have these emails. I have this interview. I've got Okay, cool."
1:26:40
Then I know what to work with and I try to install process into the research even if it's an artificial process. Here's what I mean.
1:26:50
If if you look at my to-do list like while I was knee deep in research you'd see these little tick marks and it was it was like 20 minutes read newspaper articles.
1:26:57
20 minutes read PayPal emails.
1:27:01
20 minutes contact interviewees.
1:27:03
20 minutes do the So I would build an artificial process and I would just follow it every single day.
1:27:11
And what happens is volume builds quality.
1:27:14
Like I would as soon as if you do 10 days of reading newspaper articles about that period you figure out what you're going to figure out.
1:27:21
You know, you sort of pick it up as you go along and then you make refinements along the way.
1:27:24
My thought would be in the same way you shouldn't treat writing as this big albatross you're trying to like hack your way through, just break research down into like at least for books like this.
1:27:33
Again, my disclaimers into whatever you need to do to feel confident that you're ga- gathering the information you need, right?
1:27:39
And that can be, "Hey, I'm writing a piece about you know, golf.
1:27:44
Okay, what is the thing What are the things I need to do?
1:27:47
All right, like these are the golfers.
1:27:48
Let's like 20 minutes about reading about the golfers." Yeah.
1:27:52
The challenge that I think every writer faces who has to do research for a project is some comfort with feeling like you have enough.
1:28:05
And my concern with ever taking on a research heavy project Yeah.
1:28:11
is that I will never feel like the research I've done is adequate.
1:28:16
And so the problem is the worst things when you're uh creative is when you can take something that's like a creative vice and try to turn it into a creative virtue. Yeah.
1:28:28
Cuz now you're procrastinating, but you're praising yourself up saying, "Oh, look at me.
1:28:31
I I just need to do all the research. I need to keep going." Yeah.
1:28:35
And there's there's a there's a will to say, "No, it's time to write now."
1:28:41
Yeah, so I'll tell you the two or three things that fix that.
1:28:46
At least fixed it for me.
1:28:46
I worked for a while and still count as a dear friend, an amazing coach named Lauren Zander.
1:28:52
And Lauren Zander people have heard about her because she's been on podcasts and various things and she's a coach to some of the most interesting creative people in the world.
1:28:59
And I was fortunate enough to have her as an ally throughout this book.
1:29:03
At one point Lauren identified that what I was doing was was sort of analysis paralysis, research paralysis.
1:29:10
And Lauren made me make a pact, which is that I had to write and send to her a thousand words every day.
1:29:16
And if I didn't do that, the penalty was that I had to give like $200 to some cause that I find totally totally abhorrent.
1:29:25
Next time you do that, you can just send it to me.
1:29:26
I'll give you a bank account number.
1:29:28
It would be like that would that wouldn't be painful enough, right? Okay.
1:29:31
Um but but what she identified was she said, you know, co- for one of her the big things in her in her line of work is like consequences.
1:29:41
If there weren't any consequences for overdosing on research, I could just research until the cows come home.
1:29:46
She created a consequence.
1:29:48
And the consequence was I was not going to give $200 to this to the thing.
1:29:50
And I was not going to disappoint Lauren.
1:29:53
I for something like 100 days, I sent her 1,000 words every day. And it was painful.
1:30:00
And there were Saturdays and Sundays where I definitely was like struggling.
1:30:02
There were times when like the words were not that great, but I hit every one of those days cuz there was no way. So that was one thing.
1:30:09
It's like raise the stakes. Yep.
1:30:10
Raise the stakes on consequences. Yep.
1:30:11
This is true by the way in any endeavor in life, but like it's especially true writing.
1:30:13
The second thing is I did have one thing that many people don't have, which is I had a contract and a deadline.
1:30:19
You know, so I had an infrastructure in place with Simon & Schuster where like I had a book due.
1:30:24
Now, deadlines are super flexible, famously flexible in publishing.
1:30:26
And I got a lot of leeway and there was a pandemic and everything else.
1:30:29
But you can create constraints for yourself and you should.
1:30:33
And they but they have to be real constraints with real teeth. Yes. Right? And and that does help.
1:30:37
I had to get this done because there was an outside external force forcing me to do it. Right?
1:30:44
Um one of the one of my a friend who passed away, my agent's uh late husband, Harry Lodge, was an amazing doctor.
1:30:51
He said, "Humans are best when they're in harness."
1:30:53
He that was his line for it. Is in harness.
1:30:55
He goes, "When you have a contract, you're in harness.
1:30:58
You know, you are you have a thing. You're you're driving.
1:31:00
You you don't have an abstract goal to write a book one day.
1:31:04
You have February 15th, I need to deliver X number of words, right?"
1:31:08
People should find ways to create those artificial deadlines for themselves, right?
1:31:12
I suspect that if you promise to your readers that you're going to deliver weekly, and then you don't deliver weekly, you're going to feel really really bad.
1:31:18
But it creates that constraint.
1:31:19
And so for me, that's like a big part of it is uh having consequences if I screwed up.
1:31:23
And then having a deadline and a contract where I was expected to deliver.
1:31:29
I want to ask you two quick questions, almost like a fire round.
1:31:32
But there's you've learned a lot from Walter Isaacson and Robert Caro.
1:31:39
And I want to just hear what is the number one thing you've learned from Isaacson, but let's start with the conversation that you had with him early in the process of writing this book. What did he say to you?
1:31:48
You know, he's been a great friend and mentor and I'm just a huge admirer of his work.
1:31:51
I like that he gets to dive into, you know, Da Vinci, Ben Franklin, and Steve Jobs.
1:31:55
I mean like a lot of it is just like I'm like, "Wow, those are really good topics." Like Yeah. Um but he's great.
1:32:00
He he what's nice about what's amazing about Walter is that he's very generous with his subjects, but he's very generous with people who are looking to him for writing advice.
1:32:11
And like just like advice about just like being a writer or like doing that kind of work.
1:32:14
So early on in this in the project, he may not even remember this, but I had been at some event where he was launching his book about Da Vinci. Yeah.
1:32:21
I don't know if it was Da Vinci.
1:32:24
No, it was The Innovators. It was The Innovators.
1:32:26
And I was at an event and we were talking and I was at the very early stages of this.
1:32:30
And I just, you know, we were chatting and he said, "What are you working on next after Claude Shannon?"
1:32:35
And I said, "I have this idea that like the constellation of people who made PayPal happen is a really really interesting narrative thread."
1:32:40
And and he seized on it right away and he said, "That's a He's like that's a great book idea."
1:32:45
He's like that he's like somebody should do that book.
1:32:47
And secretly what I was saying to myself was like, "Walter, like you should do that book."
1:32:50
Cuz you're way more qualified than I am. Just take it.
1:32:54
But but he was really he was so encouraging.
1:32:56
Like it's actually one of the things I find like that is under is under indexed for like under appreciated is just like how much even a little bit of a word of encouragement from somebody like him, how far that can go.
1:33:06
Like literally he him saying that like I walked out of that event, I was like, "I can do this." Strong agree. Strong agree.
1:33:13
I'm I'm shocked at how many things in my life come from very seemingly inconsequential things that people I admire have said. Yes.
1:33:24
So that that's the big thing with him is just that little bit of encouragement early on.
1:33:28
There were some technical things that we can get into if we want, but he he helped with later that were just about how do you do a book like this and not freak yourself out.
1:33:36
just dive into those quickly? Yeah.
1:33:37
My favorite thing that he did, we went on this long walk in Central Park.
1:33:42
It's like this like epic long walk about we were talking about books and writing.
1:33:45
And I was at the cusp of having this book come out.
1:33:47
I was sort of at the end stages.
1:33:48
And I was just there to like, you know, talk to someone who had written about another big controversial figure in Steve Jobs where like publishing that book was probably an anxiety-ridden process.
1:33:59
And I remember saying like, "Are there things I should be thinking about at the tail end?"
1:34:03
And he goes he go he's like, "How are your endnotes?"
1:34:06
And I I was like, "They're pretty good. I mean, I don't know. Like they're all right."
1:34:10
And he said, "No, no, no, no, no, no."
1:34:12
He's like, "You go for broke with your endnotes."
1:34:14
He goes, "Because you did all of this homework to write this book.
1:34:17
And you looked at 14 sources to confirm one fact.
1:34:19
Why wouldn't you, as he put it, be chatty with your endnotes?
1:34:23
Why wouldn't you use your endnotes as an opportunity to explain to other people how you made some of the conclusions you made?
1:34:28
He's like, 'I don't care what they say.' It's really funny.
1:34:31
He shouldn't PR shouldn't have said this, but he's like, 'I don't care what they say about page count, word limits.'
1:34:34
He's like, 'All that can be figured out.
1:34:35
Be chatty in your endnotes.
1:34:37
It's the place where you show people how much work you did to confirm a single thing.'
1:34:42
And he went and he told me the story about a Steve Jobs line I think it's like the great artist steal line or something. Yeah.
1:34:49
It turned out like that was not something that Walter had heard in just his interviews.
1:34:53
Steve Jobs had said it in other places.
1:34:54
But just so that no one thought that Walter himself had like concocted this line from an interview, Walter included like a whole section of like see also, see also, see also.
1:35:03
And he encouraged me to do the same thing.
1:35:08
That's why my endnotes are like gratuitously long and hopefully nobody ever bores themselves by reading them.
1:35:13
But the notes are long because I wanted people to see the process, to see some of the sources, to see the diversity of like I got this from here and this YouTube video and that.
1:35:20
And he was hugely helpful in even encouraging me to do that level of investing in a section that most people will just like never ever see. Hm.
1:35:31
Like it was a big deal to hear him say that cuz I was so worried about the things people would see, like the actual words, the cover, everything.
1:35:36
I had totally forgotten that there was this other obligation I had to show people my work.
1:35:42
And as you read Walter Isaacson, what is it from from from his books that you're that you're trying to bring into yours?
1:35:49
Like if you could basically, you know, it's like those drops, right?
1:35:51
You take like yesterday I was at the airport, you know, to you take the top of the straw, you put your finger on the top, you get the water, put it here.
1:35:57
Like what do you want to do with his with his writing?
1:36:00
I think anybody that's writing about or talking about a writer at his level and of his quality has to be a little bit humble in like what they're trying to emulate cuz it's sort of tough, right?
1:36:09
It's sort of like you you know, it's sort of like saying like I want to play basketball like LeBron James. Yeah.
1:36:12
Um his books are enormously readable. Yes.
1:36:18
They no one strains to get through the words.
1:36:20
He's not trying to be fancy.
1:36:20
And it's actually a really hard thing to be simple.
1:36:24
But he has this quality of being able to pull you into the story of like the creation of an Apple product or of Ben Franklin's scientific experiments or of Da Vinci's paintings.
1:36:33
And you don't feel like you are doing homework.
1:36:35
You don't feel like you're you're eating your vegetables.
1:36:38
It's actually a pleasant experience to read his books.
1:36:42
And that is always what I'm trying to go for That's the warmth. right? That is warmth. Yeah.
1:36:46
And you never you never finish a book of his and you're like, "Man, that was really hard to get through."
1:36:48
It was actually like most of his books are like very very readable, but that is so brutally hard to do.
1:36:54
That's what I'm trying to go for.
1:36:56
I think I you know, I hit the mark in some ways.
1:36:57
Maybe I didn't in others.
1:36:59
But I think if you're dealing with big figures, complex topics, including in science research and computer engineering, you have an extra obligation to write for non-engineers so that like a non-engineer will actually understand, you know, my my I wrote a whole thing in here about the debates between Microsoft and Linux and those systems.
1:37:18
Non-engineers will understand that section.
1:37:20
It will be relevant and fresh to them because I tried to do what Walter does and make it readable. Yeah.
1:37:26
Caro is one of my favorites when it comes to biography and I think that the things that I learned from him is he reads a lot of a lot of fiction. Mhm.
1:37:34
And he says that even the best nonfiction needs to be written like fiction so that it stands the test of time.
1:37:39
And then the other very tactical thing that I learned from Caro is he starts writing the book once he has the very last sentence in mind.
1:37:47
And he writes to the last sentence. Hm.
1:37:51
That's probably a smart approach. I did not do that.
1:37:53
Uh maybe to my my chagrin or or, you know, probably cost me a little while to get the book done.
1:38:00
Caro Look, Caro is in a league of his own.
1:38:03
He spends 10 years on a book. Right?
1:38:05
Um That's I I often call him like the OG.
1:38:09
Like in my field, he is he is the person who does the work at the level of quality that all of us aspire to.
1:38:17
Um what I take from him in my in in in the things I do is one, he has this line about turning over every page. Yes. Yep.
1:38:24
And so I'm a I'm nuts about that.
1:38:27
I I try to with the time I have go through as many pages of material as I can to pull as much material together and then to actually read it and try to understand it.
1:38:35
I'm going to get better at it, but I got that's an ambition is turning over every page.
1:38:40
Like really trying to go for broke.
1:38:42
It It's sort of it's sort of like if you're going to do this, why not make it as good and as intense and as, you know, as as like as big a project as you can.
1:38:52
So I tried to turn over every page.
1:38:53
The other thing that he does really really well is he interviews people who are at the periphery of a story to understand the core of the story.
1:38:59
So there's this great moment where he like he'll he or he'll he'll act it out himself.
1:39:06
He like runs through the from the capital to where LBJ lived in Washington to understand how the sun the sun, how the sun hit the dome. So, I applied that.
1:39:16
I walked the distance between 165 University Avenue and 394 University Avenue in Palo Alto a bunch of times back and forth.
1:39:24
And cuz I was trying to understand like you have one team that's in one office.
1:39:28
They don't like this team that's in the other office.
1:39:30
So, how much distance is there?
1:39:32
And what is it like to grab lunch?
1:39:32
And what's the weather like?
1:39:34
So, I would just walk back and forth.
1:39:35
And I like actually stood outside the office.
1:39:37
I tried to like let somebody let me didn't work.
1:39:40
But I tried to do all these little things to absorb the texture that he has in his books.
1:39:44
Cuz his books are just also just like a magnificent monument to detail. He captures every scrap.
1:39:48
And I you read them and I'm I'm honestly sometimes I'll just I'll laugh when I read a section because I'm just gobsmacked about how much detail there is.
1:39:58
And you know, you I hope that in some instances with with some of the the stories in this book I I reached that level. Last question.
1:40:03
At the end of the book you wrote a letter to your daughter and you say that uh she should care less about the things that she creates and more about the people that she creates them with.
1:40:15
And you go on to talk about this idea of productive discomfort.
1:40:18
And you say that that's one of the core elements of what the PayPal founders had. Yeah.
1:40:24
This tension that was actually generative.
1:40:29
Why is productive comfort so important for you?
1:40:33
But it's the last line that really just melts me.
1:40:37
You say there are lessons that I love you too much to teach you.
1:40:39
And so, let's sort of blend those two together as we wrap things up. Yeah.
1:40:44
I appreciate you picking up on this and and bringing it up.
1:40:46
It authors aren't in a book like this you have to be very careful when you introduce yourself as a character because you really shouldn't.
1:40:55
You shouldn't really ever break the fourth wall.
1:40:57
I kind of do it at the beginning.
1:40:58
But the one place you're allowed to do it with abandon with gusto is in the acknowledgements. Yeah.
1:41:03
You're allowed to do whatever.
1:41:03
In fact, reading the acknowledgements is super fun because it's actually the time when authors let their hair down and just say whatever the hell is in their mind. Yeah.
1:41:11
For me, my daughter was was born and in you know, passed her first seven years on the planet while I was doing this book.
1:41:19
So, this book was born at the same time that she was born.
1:41:21
And so, there's this interesting intermingling of the two.
1:41:25
I'd go for interviews and come back and tell her about them even if she couldn't really understand them.
1:41:28
You know, she can she can spot a Tesla from a mile away now, right?
1:41:32
Like there's like things about my life that because of this book became a part of her life too.
1:41:37
So, I felt like the the cool thing to do wasn't just to dedicate the book to her, but to sort of do the message in a bottle where like I'm allowed in this book to like write a little note that she might not see until she's much older, which I did in the acknowledgements.
1:41:49
And that the lesson that I came to from the PayPal experience, but also from my experience of writing the book is that it it's really easy to find friends who make you feel good.
1:41:56
It's much harder to find friends who make you better.
1:42:01
And one of the lessons that I learned from this book is that it wasn't that Max and Peter were were best buddies and would just hang out and be nice to each other all the time.
1:42:09
It was that Max improved Peter and that Peter improved Max.
1:42:14
It wasn't that like Elon Musk and David Sacks agreed all the time.
1:42:16
It was actually that they had like very productive disagreements and they were moving forward in the same direction.
1:42:23
And and I and again, I'm like I'm writing a note to my daughter.
1:42:25
So, I'm allowed to stretch a little bit.
1:42:25
But what I wanted to emphasize to her is I said, "I love you so much that I'm actually not going to be able to be that tough with you in some instances."
1:42:35
Meaning I can't be your coach.
1:42:37
Because I I just I love you too much.
1:42:39
There's like there's too much There's too much affection.
1:42:40
There's too much warmth and I'm not going to be able to It will hurt me to be that honest with you.
1:42:47
But I said, "You do need to find people who are going to do that for you."
1:42:51
And I in the acknowledgements I name all of these friends of mine who like just honestly helped me set my head on straight and helped me think about this project in a in an interesting way or who celebrated certain moments or who just called me out when I was wrong.
1:43:01
By the way, including Ben Kallen.
1:43:05
Like including my fact checker.
1:43:05
But look, I took some creative liberty with the acknowledgements because you're really like there this isn't a lessons book.
1:43:12
It's not how to make your own PayPal.
1:43:13
It's not how PayPal will help you live a better life.
1:43:15
It's the story of how the company came into being.
1:43:16
But I like to think that the book teaches people something and one of the things it teaches you is you ought to find people around you who can with love like call you out.
1:43:27
And I have I'm very lucky.
1:43:29
I have friends like that.
1:43:29
I have people in my life professionally who are like that.
1:43:34
I want my daughter to have those things because I saw the power of it coming out of this story, which is that this startup was not an easy place to work all the time, but it was a place where people felt like they were obligated to bring their best.
1:43:45
And so, I applied that lesson and I was like, "Venice, you should really find people who can push you to do that."
1:43:52
That's a beautiful note to end on.
1:43:54
Congratulations on the book and thanks for being here.
1:43:56
Thank you very much for having me. This was a blast.