The Speechify Founder's Rules for Life and Business — Cliff Weitzman

One of the best challenges I've ever heard. I started in the middle of the US with no phone, no computer, no money, and a $200 car from the junkyard. I was supposed to make a certain amount of money, but they end up 100 days. It took me three days to make enough money to have a phone, five days to have enough money to have a laptop. It was crazy difficult I slept in a Walmart parking lot for the first 11 days, like in a truck in a car.

A small handful of founders who are building problems that not only they have identified in the world, but are uniquely for them, truly for them. And I feel like Speechify is a product that you built for you. And then there was 60 million people in the world who are like, hey, this is wonderful. I want in on this as well. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Prime Minister of Israel.

A billionaire at a pop star all the same time. I just believe that I can do it. Like never once did it cross my mind that that was not a normal appropriate thing for me to be working towards. Clear. So good to see you first of all.

You too bad. Two days before your birthday. Yes. You've achieved a lot and you're just telling me you feel like you still have so much more to achieve. Yeah, I wouldn't say I've achieved a lot.

There's a lot more to be done. A lot to dive into here. So a lot of people I know in the world are very familiar with your products, Speechify. 60 million users, no small accomplishment, are incredibly capital efficient company, which we're going to dive into as well, and now close to 200 teammates, which is also like you've scaled an operation at size, which is very impressive thing to do. And you found us listening.

But somehow with all these traits, I feel like the most impressive thing about you actually is your life, and just the way that you live, the way that you interact with people, it's honestly been very fun to know you for the last six or seven years, and just watch how you watch how you live. And everyone I know who knows you agrees, you are a prolific storyteller in the best possible way, like a truly like incredible storyteller. So we're going to look back to the founder journey. We're going to start somewhere else today. You recently took a challenge from Mr.

Beast, a pretty incredible challenge. Drop us in day one. How did this come about? Before we got to share how we met each other, because that's a better story. So Rory and I met Orion.

We did. And if anyone doesn't know, you can like activate the map portion, and like sometimes you want to see like, you know, what's this guy about? Like who's my competition? I was like, this dude's awesome. I want to date him.

And I had a little soccer game I was organizing over the weekends, where we'd go into like a baseball batting cage and do a very, very like three on three, and I was like, this guy's like, he's a DJ Elk Road. He's like an ML engineer at Apple at the time. You were just starting your company. It's just getting going. And I was like, yo man, you want to come join our soccer game?

He was like, sure. When you started hanging out in every, we shared to find my friends. And every time I'd switch a city, Rory would be there. I, we followed the same path. We did.

It was like this like LA, like SF down at LA to London. Now we're in New York. It was in Miami for a bit. Like, yeah, it's all the best cities. But it was a great time.

It was the only time I've ever been approached by Matt on a dating app. And here we are today. It works out. And so I almost feel like there's already a lesson in this because you're the only straight guy I've ever met who would just like willingly message people, like guys on dating apps being like, hey, you seem like a great guy. And you're like, there's a networking alpha to be found in dating apps already.

And I don't even think about it as networking. I think like, I just, every person who's awesome, I want to be their friend. Like I want to, I want to learn their story. So we talked about being good at telling stories. It's just, I hunt for good stories.

I love it. I want to meet friends who have interesting adventurous lives. So I can be inspired to live adventurous lives. And then I live my life so that I can have fun adventures. Amen.

It's one of my favorite ways I've met a lifelong friend. So it's just that I love to hear. All right. So drop us back in. Mr.

Beast approaches you. Yes. And one of the best challenges I've ever heard. Walk us out. Yeah.

So basically the premise is I started in the middle of the US with no phone, no computer, no money, and a $200 car from the junkyard. And I was supposed to make a certain amount of money by the end of, originally it was by the end of 100 days. And it took me three days to make enough money to have a phone. Five days to have enough money to have a laptop. And you have a progress from there.

It was crazy difficult. I slept in a Walmart parking lot for the first 11 days, like in the trunk of the car. In the trunk. In the trunk of the car. And I would go like, essentially dumpster diving for cardboard.

Well, just a $200 car look like. So it's a car that doesn't actually function. And it like broke down multiple times during the thing is like rust everywhere. It's like essentially a totaled vehicle like 400 miles on the vehicle. Mainly, it was just a way for me to like have a place to sleep that was not dangerous.

And the most challenging thing was in the beginning, I had all these great business plan ideas. I was like, oh, I'm going to rock this. And so for the listeners understanding you, essentially you were brought back to zero dollar net worth. Nothing in the world. Just a trunk of a car.

Yeah. And Mr. Beast is like, can you make millions of dollars in 30 days? Yep. Fantastic.

I'm not allowed to talk to my family. I'm not allowed to use my name. No one can know about like any of my resume. And like don't even have a phone or a dollar. And so I was like, all right, I'm first going to like, I don't know, coach kids and gymnastics and like basketball and like I'll tutor people for the SAT.

Or it was going to be Valentine's Day, maybe like a week after I was like, okay, I'm going to go and like sell people flowers. I had a hundred different business plans. And so one of the first things that I did is I went to a flower shop and I got them to give me a couple of samples of their catalog. And I went knocking door to door and like the most expensive neighborhood in the town that I was dropped in. Nobody wanted to buy my flowers.

I was like, all right. Brutal. So I went to like a busy area. I still nobody wanted to buy. I went to a college campus.

I sold like a couple, but no one really wanted to buy my flowers. And in the end, the way I got people to buy them is I would be like, listen, like you're on the, I'll do a backflip if you buy it. Oh, she'll go back. Yeah, I'll buy it. So I realized that people were just willing to pay me to do backflips.

So I'd make like $5 for black backflips, I think. And it got really cold. And the second day, I also got really hungry because like I didn't have my food. And I at this point had a few flowers and just nobody was buying my flowers. And so in the end, I went to this bar.

I was like, all right, people are drunk. Like they'll buy flowers for girls. Finally, I'm like thirsty. I like go to a place like a bar. They're like, oh, like how many people in your group?

And I was like, oh, I'm just like waiting for some people like as I didn't know what to do. And I was like, you know what, I'm just going to ask for help. So I turned to a table next to me. I was like, a bunch of girls. I was like, hey, can I ask you guys a question?

I'm trying to save enough money to buy a phone. And I'm trying to sell these flowers. But nobody's buying these flowers. What would you say to get people to buy flowers? And like, think about it.

Smaller than the source. And then a girl at the back is like, can I buy her a flower? Yeah, like can I buy her? And then they like basically walk me around the bar and help me sell my flowers. That's amazing.

And then they're like, we're going to go to karaoke. You want to come with us? And I was like, I'd love to go to karaoke. But also more importantly, I need access to Craigslist because I'm trying to find the phone that I could buy. And so someone walked me into their like library, like email account.

And just people started to help. So the next morning I woke up and I took a big thing, a cardboard. And I wrote need friends, come say hi. And then I wrote like song $1 backlist $1. I was like, would raise it over my head.

It's true grassroots. Like as grassroots as it can be, yeah. People came and said, hi. And a lot of people thought I was going to pay them a dollar to do a backflip or pay them a dollar to sing a song. I was like, oh, well, I'm at the other way.

But tell you what, I'll do a backflip if you do a backflip. We'll call it even. And then people would still like, you know, donate money. Eventually somebody gifted me like a busted up old android. I traded it in and it just didn't work.

So eventually I took it to a pawn shop and pawned it for a guitar. Once I had a guitar, actually everything was great because I could busk and make a hundred bucks a day like playing it. I knew how to play like one and a half songs on guitar. Which one to wall and I knew James Arthur say you won't let go. Oh, wow.

Okay. Yeah. Kind of a random law. Yeah, yeah. And I knew like a bits of perfect for mentoring.

And it worked great. And eventually I went to like like this big student union area. I was like, hey, I'm trying to save enough money to buy an iPhone. And like the problem is I didn't have enough time on our computer to even like buy a used iPhone. Where would I ship it?

And I was like, listen, if anybody's got a used iPhone, I'm about to do a backflip off of this table. Just like take a story on your Snapchat and say this guy is trying to buy an iPhone here for 200 bucks. Eventually someone sold me a used iPhone. Eventually I made enough money to buy a MacBook. And then I started building an app called Talkify, the opposite of speechify.

After visiting 100 places and getting rejected, the like fifth time I went to a local gym, they agreed to hire me. But like I didn't have insurance to do PT. So I like worked the front desk and I was just a code. You're like, what is this kid doing? Why isn't it like furiously typing on his computer?

And then it fell apart. It was just like a very difficult challenge to do. Partly we had like just issues making it work. And partly it was just like fundamentally extremely difficult. So the video never happened.

We thought about doing it again with like considered a bunch of different options. But fundamentally it is really, really, really hard. I also didn't have any ID. So like without documentation, without money. No, even just without like just like no person has an easy time going from absolutely zero to finding like a good experience.

And then there's two actually most important things that I learned. The first one is the first five days, I had crazy amounts of adrenaline. I was so motivated. And I also was like nourished. And once I got the phone, I felt safe.

Because I now had Google Maps, I didn't have Google Maps before. Once I have the computer, I felt I'm good. Because like I could always sit in the back of the car. I could tether from my phone and I could code. I could work it up work.

I could do whatever. Like I had a real means of making money. Before that, I felt really real survival. And like the sixth day I just slept. Because I couldn't, I had like used up all of my energy getting the computer.

And God, like I protected that computer in my life. And I was far less motivated once I had the safety of the computer and the phone. And the other thing is maybe around day 15 of trying to do this, I felt a lot of resentment for just like setup. I was like, ah, like, you know, we were supposed to do this, but we did this and we supposed to do this and in the end, I was like, you know what? They like the project failed.

And I always take 150% responsibility for everything in my life. And I was like, what more could I have done to make this successful? And I had done a lot to make it successful. And I realized that my biggest mistake was that I wasn't grateful enough for the project and the opportunity to do what I was doing. Because if this had worked out, we could have inspired so many different people.

And I was like, yeah, I forgot to be grateful for the fact that I had this. And the thing that I had lost by day 15 was my optimism. Wow. And I would say that above, you know, I'm a person who has very high acue, like adversity quotient, I don't give up on things. But my most effective trait, I guess, powerful trait is I'm just like a huge optimist.

And I believe that I can do things that other people think they can. And when like you were a kid, you think you're a superhero. And like, I just never lost that. But I lost a lot of it during this challenge. And I think that it takes that level of delusion to believe that you could do crazy things for those things to happen.

And it actually taught me like a really important lesson for the rest of my life is actually if things are really hard, yes, try to push more and be more strategic. And first, check yourself. Am I grateful for what I'm doing? And can I be more optimistic about this? And just coach yourself to become more optimistic about it.

The other thing is like, it was a very weird project for us to be doing. Because like, you don't want to be cosplaying a homeless person. Like that's not legit. So you need to do it in a way that gives back to other people. And like you set the stage.

So in the end, we scrapped it. But yeah, learned a lot, sleeping in a Walmart parking lot for a lot of days. It's a shame because it's such an incredible premise. You know, like if I saw a thumbnail, it was like, can a millionaire go to zero dollars and get back to a million in a month? I would click that.

That's just such an incredible premise. I feel like if you had to nail it again, you could tweak a few small variables. Like maybe start from you do get to keep your ID, your social security number, and start with a laptop, but you're like locked in a hotel room or something like that. So yeah, there's like a lot of different ways that you could do that. I can't go into a crazy amount of detail for like the things that we have considered doing.

But yeah, like there's a lot that you could do. Yeah. It's so funny because you're the fourth guess in a row to use the word delusion. Oh, interesting. When describing yourself.

And I think it's becoming increasingly a trend and we've talked about a few times in the show that basically this idea that are that in order to become whatever you want to become, you actually have to have some level of total delusion about who you are in the world. A hundred percent. Everyone who became the greatest founder of all time just believes that they were from like a really young age. They were like, of course, I'm going to do that because that's what the greatest founder of all time would do. And it sounds like this fell apart when you lost that vision of yourself.

So let's go back to early cliff. Sure. And your origin stories, I think it's truly so interesting. There's only really a few, a small handful of founders who are building problems that not only they have identified in the world, but are uniquely for them, truly for them. And I feel like speechify is a product that you built for you.

And then there was 60 million people in the world who are like, hey, this is wonderful. I want in on this as well. So take us back to your childhood. What is it about you that caused you to build this product? Yeah.

So when I was a kid, I wanted to be prime minister of Israel, a billionaire, to pop star all the same time. And still could be working on it. Less interested in politics, definitely still make a lot of music. And like, I just believe that I can do it. Like never once did it cross my mind that that was not a normal, appropriate thing for me to be working towards.

And my logic was, you know, at least for two of these things, kind of need to be able to be. And even today, I just read really slow and I wanted to read fast. And when I got to university, I just couldn't read fast enough to actually keep up. So I built this PDF parser that would scan things for me. I made an iPhone app that could take pictures of books and then it would read it.

I tweaked a lot of code so that it could go really fast and I could change the speed not by like 1.25 or 1.5 increments, but like 1.1, 1.015 increments. And I set up a thing that would highlight the words for me at the same time. And that was actually training wheels to learn how to listen really fast. So the average American listens at 200, 230 words per minute. I listen to everything at 800 words per minute.

So almost four times faster than most people read. And I've listened to 100 audiobooks a year every year since I was 13, 14. And I am the person that I am today because of all the books that I read. Listen to the speechify. And even for school, I would, on top of the books, listen to another 300,000 words a week, just of different handouts and emails and papers that I was writing of my own, you know, my own things that I was making.

And there were pieces of software out there. Like first of all, 3000. It was just like very clunky and slow. Mac obviously has text to speech. Google Chrome has text to speech.

Everything has text to speech built in. It was invented in 1962. It predates the iPhone. But nothing was designed to be really good or be really fast or have high quality voices. And I just kept having to make modifications.

Now, I still make little pieces of software for myself all the time. I think I was the first time I hired a personal engineer to just make tools for me. It was maybe four years ago. That's awesome. But before that, I would just like make them all myself.

And that would have been the term personal engine. I know it's great. I don't have an EA. I don't have a personal assistant or executive assistant. But I have a personal engineer.

Like that's all I need. Obviously, now with vibe coding, that role becomes even more powerful. And your ability to buy code software yourself becomes a crazy power. 10x your output. But that has always been incredible.

And I made about 36 products when I was in college. Everything from three printed skateboard breaks to iPhones. Not that iPhone apps and websites and payment systems. And I was 36 products that I published and like people could pay for. And I was studying renewable energy engineering at the time.

And this is at Brown. At Brown, yes. And I found that and even like going to Brown, like it just required delusional optimism to believe that I'd get into an Ivy League school. And did you cross over with Emma Watson? I did not use more than five years older than me.

So I didn't know. I wish. 10 points to Gryffindor. And I do have the first chapter of Harry Potter memorized though. It's higher than English.

And I was studying renewable energy engineering. I'd worked on all these projects. And I decided that I didn't know what I wanted to work on when I graduated. I knew I didn't want to take a job at Google or Amazon or Palantir or Meta. And so I just wrote, I wrote this 30 page paper about my worldviews.

I add to it every birthday. So it's now almost 100 pages long of all the things that I believe and who I want to be. And then recently I wrote another thing called the Prometheus plan, which is all my life plan for the next 30 years. And the conclusion was above everything else. I wanted to be the person I needed the most when I was a kid.

And what I really needed was someone to do my readings for me. And this tool, I kept working on it even alongside other projects because I'd go and read the documentation for an API. And like, it would be too clunky. So I'd go like fix something about the feature. Fine.

I was like, you know, what I really want to do is just make this thing really good. I just don't know how it's going to make real money. Like the only way I'll make real money is people will pay for it. And at the time, subscriptions for software for consumers was not a really big thing. Like people only paid for iTunes.

Spotify was just popping off. But there was one thing I definitely paid for. And it was audible. And people were also playing for Netflix. And I was like, all right.

Well, I'm similar to audible. I just want to make this thing. And so I started making posts about the SLEXI and Facebook groups. And I wrote a book publicly online about my experience with the SLEXI. I'd write 500 pages, sorry, 500 words a day.

Every day. And it gave me like 30,000 followers of moms of kids with learning differences. And I released the first product, essentially for free. You could pay ahead of time if you wanted to, mail the iPhone app, started sneaking into conferences for people with learning differences, a couple of school heads offered to fly me out to their school to teach their kids how to use the speechify. And I just would always up the ante from what people expected.

So like I'd go to a conference, but I didn't have a ticket. And so there'd be like a thousand people at the event, they'd be a keynote speaker. But at lunch, I'd hop on the stage. I'd do it back. My name is Cliff.

I'd love to show you this thing I made. I'm like 21 years old. I'd plug in my computer, I'd show a speechify, and it doesn't school heads would offer to fly me out to the school to teach the kids how to use the speechify. I'd show up at the school to give a talk. And instead of leaving, I'd be like, hey, can I go help the kids install it on our computers?

And be like, yeah. So I'd go to every single class, sit in the back, see where the bugs were, and go desk by desk and fix the bugs. And then I'd like give my email and phone number out liberally. And I was like, if you have an issue, message me. And still today, people can message me all the time.

If you're listening to this and you want speechify, Cliff at speechify.com, I'll send you a discount. Like, I just want people to use the product. And the product coming from there, and it took about four and a half, five years before we had a real product benefit. But once we did, it was really good behavior in terms of user cohorts. And then I spent a lot of time learning how to grow the product and get a lot more users in hiring the rest of the team and the leadership team.

And we probably have one of the most stacked leadership teams of any startup that I know and have for a very long time. And we've just been very, very capital efficient the entire way. So that. It's very interesting listening to this week. Our audience is primarily either founders or people who are becoming founders.

And there's this common theme with all the consumer founders I taught to me, including myself, that the way you get your first users is completely unscalable. Totally. Like you're flying to dyslexia conferences. Right. I'm literally saying to people like, hey, I can solve your problems.

And as like a, you know, five, 10, 15 year founder, like that can't be scaled over decades. But you can get your first 20,000 M.A.U.s doing that. Like we got our first 20,000 M.A.U.s literally sending burritos to sorority houses. No way. And it worked.

And like, can we get to a million doing that? Absolutely not. But you get that like that first thing. And so a lot of young founders, I think, look at big companies and they go, well, whatever they did to get from 10 to 20 million users, like let's do that to get our first 10,000. It doesn't work.

Right. You have that you don't get that scalable fly. We want to go on one to one interaction to figure out how to improve your product over time. Yes. And so I think like a real lesson to everyone out there is like, do unscalable things early.

Like really unscalable things. Find your power users first, which it sounds like you were in Facebook groups, finding these power users and engaging them. But you can still do unscalable things at scale. So like a great example is I have a friend, Rory, who has a great voice. Rory's voice is now one of the most popular voices on speech.

Fine. So, you know, we have a whole team that finds voices. There's like 2,000 voices. Right, I wanted to. But when I find a good voice, I go and add it.

Like there's so many random small things. And sometimes those things become the become what is the most beloved about the product or how people find out about it, et cetera. Like I would rap song about the Flexia one weekend. And then like that was one of our best performing ads ever for the product. Like things that don't scale sometimes can scale.

Yeah. But it all that, you know, people won't remember what you said, but they'll remember how you made them feel. And so the things that don't scale are what makes you feel. That's beautiful. So the voices.

Yeah, it's kind of that. Speechify, first I would encourage all our listeners to download it. The onboarding is beautiful. You build a truly lovely consumer experience. And I think you feel good when you're using it.

It's very clean. You really get taken through. You hear a bunch of voices. They all sound fantastic. Your sister, Geffen, is the number one voice.

She is. On the platform. Gwyneth Paltrow, number two. Yes. And you are number three.

Yes. How's it feel being beaten by Gwyneth? She beat me by like 10x. I remember when we recorded her voice originally, we needed a variety of different things to read. And so I had her read her blog and she read some messages and emails.

And then we wanted her to read a script. And she had not worked as an actress for a long time because she was running Goop. Now she's gone back to it and she started reading. And she turned on. That's good.

And I was like, I have never seen someone be so good at reading a script in my entire life. What can't she do? Everything. Like she's amazing. And I was just like absolutely blown away.

But I think that when I was a kid and I wanted to read Harry Potter or whatever, I couldn't. And so I listened to my dad's voice. And my dad has this like very deep voice. So I blindbed and had listened to him. On the faraway island of Solomon's soul, Yertle the turtle was king of the pond.

A nice little pond. It was clean. It was sweet. The water was warm. It was plenty to eat.

And I'd be like, oh, this is like, I love, I idolized my dad. And so the fact that actually I can kind of read now, but I don't read fast. And so the fact that the speech by voice is better than me at reading. And people have listened to at least 10 million full books. Like take all the words in a book times 10 million.

Like that many words with my voice. That's crazy. That's true. I wanted to sit and be the person reading that to kids. I would need to not eat, not sleep.

And like multiply myself times a couple million. Like that's incredible. It's completely surreal. So I think we're entering an interesting world where like people are starting to be represented by their agents in a sense. And it feels like a good point.

I never thought about that. You guys are in many ways an AI research lab. On top of being a consumer product, you have 45 AI researchers now, which is super impressive. Like the talent war is tough. And I want to drill into hiring strategies within a minute.

Heading into that world, can we break down the actual mechanics of a celebrity licensing deal? Sure. So you've got Snoop Dogg as an example. How does that work? Sure.

So even to take one step back. So Speechify is an applied AI research lab. Like you said, we have 45 AI researchers. We've got about 150 product-facing engineers, so roughly 200 people in total. And the original goal was to make sure that reading was never a barrier for learning for anyone to matter what your background is.

Now, we are the largest consumer voice agent company in the world. And we just launched enterprise voice agents. Congratulations. Thank you very much. SimbaVoice is that AI.

And if you DM me, I'll get you a million minutes. And we have a B2C agent called Jarvis. And we have a B2C agent called the teacher agent that like, will basically quiz you in the material, figure out where your knowledge gap is, and then teach it back to you. I think that a lot of the through line of Speechify and where we've gotten lucky is by real people using the product or people resonating with a message. So for Snoop, the story is, I one day got a text message from this number, and then I got a call from this number, and it is Guy Arrey-Manuel.

If you ever watch Entourage, Arrey Gold, based after learning. Yeah, yeah, you found out. WMA. Yeah, WMA Endeavor. And then he also, for a while on the WWE and UFC, then he like packages them all together.

He's like an incredible entrepreneur. But basically he calls me and he's like, why does your app suck? And I was like, whoa, okay. You're like, hi. What's your problem?

And so he's telling me about his issues, and I was like, all right, what's your email? I'll log into the database. I figure out what's going on. I fix this problem. Very happy with fix.

I was like, oh. Tell me about you. Like, what's up with this company? That's what we started chatting. And we ended up becoming good friends.

And he ended up becoming one of the most supportive people I have ever met on our journey with Speechify. Money. Super, super on top of giving us opportunities, introducing us to people. He's a huge user himself. He messaged me twice a week, just like product, like ideas.

And he has a whole team dedicated to his Speechify. Like literally what they'll do is, he is a prolific reader and he'll read a ton of news, a lot of industry reports, like deep stuff, very intellectual stuff. And his team will upload it to his Speechify from the web app, and it'll show up on the iOS app product for him. And he just is ravenous for consuming information. And he wants like the most real-time information.

So for him, that's better and more dense than a podcast right on you. Anyway, I was shooting an ad in LA. And I got a call from Ari. And he's like, Cliff, meet Snoop. Snoop, meet Cliff.

He's got a product called Speechify. I love it. I use it every day. So many people I know you use this product. It helps kids with the sex you read.

I'm dyslexic. My kids are dyslexic. You should put your voice on the app. And Snoop goes, oh man. And I'm like, all right.

And he's like, yeah, man. Like people who got issues with vision and you know, anxiety and concussions. Like, I'm glad to be the voice of reason. What's going on, the voice of Snoop Dogg? And I was like, amazing.

Well, the man has had so many side quests. So many side quests. And I was like, great. Like, I'm literally only here today. Do you want to record later today?

And he's like, sure. Come to my crib. He has a studio. We record. I have him read Harry Potter.

And he just like off the cuff goes, A.O. with Snoop D.O.W.G. And I'm going to read to you with flavor. There's an English voice from the United States. And he's reading, but like he keeps reading the same text over and over again because he wants to give it the vibe.

And I'm like, Snoop, you don't even need to do that because it's AI. Like, I just need to hear you say as many syllables and phonemes as possible and it'll catch on. Like, he ignores me. He keeps reading. I'm like, all right.

Well, we're going to run out of time. We're not going to finish the stuff that we need to read. Like, I say it again. He ignores me. And I'm like, Snoop, like listen, you don't need to read the same thing over and over.

It's fine. He goes, I know what I'm doing. I've been doing this. This is, yeah, we'll go fish. So he's a very good example of, you can't manufacture that voice.

Yeah. It's the energy behind the voice. And this is why I often explain to people, like, one should not be afraid of AI in any way because the human touch still will always rock. But finding ways to put it together is the real magic. And if you can put it together, you have a one plus one equals a thousand.

And like, that's the thing that always ends up being amazing. That's beautiful. That's incredible way to get him. So looping back to the scale of the company that you've built, you guys are really capital efficient. You've deliberately raised very little capital.

You still own substantial portions of the equity of the company. And there are competitors out there that have raised like tens of millions and have nowhere near your MOUs, which is super impressive. How have you done it? What's the secret to be so capital efficient? So the first is just principles around frugality.

So we have four core principles, extreme product quality. We talk to users a ton. Leading with love, we take really good care of each other, almost like siblings. Frugality, we don't waste money. We have forever made our own tools.

Like we don't use notion or stuff like that. And speed, we move really fast, we look to shift to production. When we hire people, we want people who have fire in the belly for the product, high loyalty to the team, they're able with a ship, features fast and move metrics. And so we have people all over the world of the 200 folks. I think we've got like 36 countries represented.

Wow. We don't think that all of the smartest people in the world happen to be living in the Bay Area in California. When we hit... Refreshing to hear that. Yeah.

When we hit inference cost challenges around 2022, we had solved the voice quality problem, just like the voices sounded great. We could clone anyone's voice. The latency was really fast, but it was very expensive. And as the product got better and better, and people were using it more and more and more, we just hit a wall where we couldn't afford to bring more people on because we lose money. And so the entire company became oriented on reducing inference costs.

And it took us about two years. We filed so many patents on the stuff that we built around, like just the efficiency of the models that is definitely related to text to speech and speech to text and voice and LLMs, but also just like general inference work. And we solved that problem. And only once we solved that problem, didn't we start scaling to the degree that we wanted to again? The other thing is being a very strong individual contributor.

So at every point in time, at different points of time, I've ran every department at Speechify. So I've obviously led engineering, I've led product, I've led design, I've led customer acquisition, I've led customer support, I've led recruiting. And I have a very simple playbook, which is I'll listen to 100 books about the topic on Speechify. I'll interview 100 experts, I'll just like send unlimited cold messages and people respond and they'll hop on a Zoom or I'll show up in their office wherever they are in the world, then I'll learn how to do it. And then I'll run myself, and then I'll anoint someone else is more qualified than me to run the blueprint.

But the blueprint always ends up being different than what is industry standard. And it ends up being more efficient and much more cost effective. We are a very flat organization. There's no gigantic chain of command. Like any person can DM me directly and I will respond.

And we look for people to say responsibility and you can take as much responsibility as you want at Speechify. Just don't damage the funnel because this funnel is so valuable. One place where we really excel is customer acquisition. So about 10 to 15% of our users now come organically from Chachi PTE. We're very good at SEO.

We get featured a lot by Google and Apple. Word of mouth is incredibly strong for us. The app literally speaks for itself. And even when it comes to ads, like I'll be in the ads as a character. I'll write ads, I'll edit ads.

I'll hire people to do ads on top of all the engineering side and work. And every leader in the company basically has like three or four different jobs. So you get a lot of efficiency from that. There's a phenomenon in economics. This is like Friedrich Hayek and Mises from the Austrian School of Economics.

Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. And his line is no single man can hold all the knowledge of the economy in his head once. And this is like a reason why communism doesn't work. One secretary can't do central planning for everything. You need what's called temporal and local knowledge.

But the nice thing about the tutorial regimes is in small, fast moments. They can't be very efficient. They just will not be very efficient in the long term. And so what you do want is a collective of really strong leaders who each one has the ability to go as deep as possible. Because the more people you have, the more things get fragmented.

So like, you know, there's a bathroom over there. If you wanted to re-tile the floor, hiring five contractors to be in a five square foot bathroom like wouldn't make any sense. Like in the same way throwing more engineers at a problem does not help. You just want one really good general contractor that's able to do all the things. And so like our CFO will also lead growth.

And he'll also lead hiring and also lead a bunch of different things. And like Simon is CO, but he leads product and technology. And like, I'm CEO technically, but I also work on growth. And I also work on voices and I also work on product. And I also work on QA.

So every like Tyler's head of AI, but he also leads all illegal. And so you look for people like Rowan's chief business officer, but he's also leading Simba Voices. And he also did all our contracts with publishers. And he also at a certain point led like right now leads all over recruiting. You want really high AQ, high EQ, high IQ people.

And you just give them opportunities to be exceptional. And you push them to go really, really deep. That results in being able to have a lighter team that has less layers. And it ends up being a very cohesive team with people feel very appreciated and that they're creating a lot of value. So that's always been very important.

We do always think about customer acquisition, for example, I will never spend a dollar without knowing that I'm getting the dollar back. And so there's a good saying in marketing, which is CMOs will say, I know I'm wasting half my marketing dollars. I just don't know which half. And I actually would like to do that more. I know by and large exactly how much money I'm making for every dollar that I'm spending.

So there is an argument I should be more creative. And that's one of my actually biggest limiting factors as a person is I am too frugal. I will not spend money if I don't see the clear ROI and I'm trying to break out of that. I do think that I'm stuck in a little bit of a local minima and I'm attempting to break into a local minima. My friend Elliot calls it a famine syndrome.

I have famine syndrome. Yes, Elliot and I should talk. We were in London in 2024 and I remember you were scaling headcount at the time. And I think my team was 15ish at the time. Now we're like 31.

You guys have grown to almost 200. And I was asking, I was picking your brand sort of hiring tips. Like, how do you get good people? And you said to me, everyone I hire for their role loves what they do, like loves. And I jokingly say to you like, what about the guy who runs AB test?

No one likes running AB test. And you turned to me and you said, our guy loves AB test. You guys. So you've got 45 AI engineers in an era where AI engineers are getting poached left, right and center to meta for $100 million a billion. Meta is the most scary.

It's the main one that when we give an offer, people were sent for meta. There's a guy who went to a high school near me in Perth, Australia. He got $1.2 billion offer from a few months ago. I think it was the record to leave SSI and move to meta. I think he did end up taking it.

How are you getting talent in this era? Hiring is such a hard thing to found us. So the first thing is don't only hire in the Bay Area. It doesn't matter where you are in the world. If you're super talented, we want you on the team.

We had 178,000 people who applied to open engineering positions in speechify last year. Wow. We have a synchronous challenge not started but finished. 19,800 people finished the challenge. We have a very wide aperture for talented people.

And obviously now, technical talent is actually less important than it used to be before. Obviously, still important. The weight of your ability to communicate and drive outcomes at the end outcome owner is even more important. So now we look for that very strongly. Basically, we're now only hiring for outcome one.

If you can't drive a feature all the way, it's very challenging to make the argument. And we just look everywhere. So people are looking just on like total ownership of Intel stack. And then we look for people who are like the Mathilini LMP ad top 10 in their country. They were really into computer science, programmatic competitions.

I want to talk to you and like, what's your top three software engineering textbooks you've read? And why did you do like each one of them to know that it's more than vibe coding? But I also want to see your project. Yes. And so I think that that works really well.

People are very excited about speechify because of the mission. There's very few companies that hyper scale to the degree that we do in our very legit AI operation, but still are like objectively super good for the world, helping people with learning differences, et cetera. I think a lot of people also like to listen. Like if you're listening to this podcast, you like to listen. Yeah, people love long-form content.

Yeah. And I don't know if you're listening at 1X or 1.5 or 2X, but like that resonates with people. We also really invest in people. So the principle I have is I want to see the greatness in others before they see it in themselves. And that gives them a reputation to live up to.

It's beautiful. And I've seen this with basically every person who I've been lucky enough to work directly with, they become beasts, all of them. Frederick from Google Ventures gave us a variation of that quote, which I think is super interesting when you're hiring someone, ask, has this person seen excellence? Do they know what excellence looks like in this role? Like true excellence.

And sometimes they don't. Of course. And then every now and then, I was like, classically guilty of this. Like we brought in someone for a role, which I won't say what it was, because it will out the person. But we brought in someone for a role where I questioned if it was valid to hire someone for this.

And I had never seen excellence in this role. And then this person did such a good job that we restructured a hole around them. And I was like, turns out, I just never seen excellence in that role. Never really knew how to value it. Wow.

So I'm jealous. I'm going to, I'm flying. I'm going to hear more. But I think there's like such a true learning lesson in that. And it's especially for those first few employees.

Like, I remember the way, just like getting your first few users, the way you get your first few employees, also totally unscalable. Totally. We were getting celebrities to text them. We were like, I was making personalized Spotify playlists to send to our early, early employees. And as we were basically needing offer, I'd be like, press play on this playlist and it'd be like, the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack.

We'd be like, we'd love you to come and join our mission. And I'm like, you can't do that beyond, you know. Wow, that's amazing. Elizabeth Wheel from Scribble Ventures, she was very, very early at Twitter. And she would hand write a note to every single Twitter offer that they made.

And that's actually where the term Scribble Ventures came from. She was scribbling these notes out, but just hundreds and hundreds of people. And so doing unscalable things works really well early on, like very, very well. Very well. And later on too.

Yeah, yeah, whichever stage you're trying to track into. So you're both days and two days. It is. I remember, I'm going to say it was two years ago. It was probably around the same time, a few days for your birthday.

You posted a list of life principles on your Instagram story. Now, very interesting. There was a principle in there that stuck out to me actually, which was that if you can help someone does nothing negative for you, then you should help that person. Yes. I've heard that as well.

From Richard Rosenblatt actually told me the exact same thing. He was like, my life loss fees. Someone asked for someone asked you for something and you can do it. And it doesn't attract from you at all. Always, always do it.

So the life principles were amazing. Well, I want to challenge you. I want you to pick one that is sort of like you're overarching. Well, that's easy. Above all.

And then one that you could draw. Whoa, I like it. All right. So the overarching one is give love first. My philosophy is love is the most important thing in life.

And the more you give of it, the more you have to give. It's like fire. You can light an additional candle without extinguishing the original flame. It's like a jug of the bigger. The more you pour, the jug gets bigger.

But the limiting factor in love is people feel scared to show love first, because they don't want to be rejected. Thankfully, I have very little fear of rejection, and I'm okay making a client myself. So if I'm hanging out with a friend, let's say it's the third time we're hanging out. All right. See you, man.

Love you. Don't know what boom. Even my family doesn't say love you that much. Like this dude, I met him three times. And then like it becomes the norm.

And it's just like give as much. So there's a saying the your success in life can be measured by the number of conversations. The number of hard conversations you have. I think your success in love in life can actually be measured by the number of conversations you finish with. I love you.

Like when you hang up the phone, ideally you should be finishing with I love you. And like with our lawyer, with our CFO, like everybody like just give as much love as possible. And the world just rewards that. That's beautiful. That's really.

So that's the overarching one. Love that. And many of them overarching is a nice word. Collapse into that one. So for example, if you smile at others, typically they'll smile back.

They'll always smile first. That's so I when I moved to Los Angeles in 2022, I was trying to pick a gym. And I built this is a classic. Maybe I built a spreadsheet of all the gyms in West Los Angeles. And I went to all of them.

And I was writing them on various criteria. And one of the criteria was whether the people at the door would smile at me. So which team did you pick? I know going with Icon Fit and Sawtell, it was fantastic. Oh, interesting.

Oh, fantastic gym. They were so friendly. Every time I walked in, they were like, they had a nickname for me and everything. And they were like high five million stuff. And it was great.

But I totally agree with it. That's amazing. And then which one I would look side during our series, we turned down a term sheet from a fund where the partner never smiled on a single Zoom call. And my co-founder and I were completely unanimous, who were like, they're wonderful tier one funds that a lot of people know. It's like a household name.

And this partner could be worked with this person for 20 years. And we decided, no, it'd just be too hard. Could I sit next to them on a plane? Probably not. And so yeah, this is 100% resonates.

I love it. One day I would drop. That's hard. So I spent a lot of time thinking and whittling down. Fressing you here, yeah.

Or even like one that you've considered is weak. And you've responded over the years, you know? The challenge is a lot of them, like that list was like 100 in the beginning. And I whittled it down to 30. Dancing is one of the best sports to learn.

It will keep you fit when you're old. Does not require a huge new mobility. It's hard to get injured. And it's just crazy fun. So not that I disagree with it.

But if I had to drop one, that's the one that I would drop. I love it. We're going to put those up on the screens so we can see our life principles. On that note of the physical activity, there's a particular move you've been trying to land. Oh, yeah.

For a long time. I've seen videos online of you going for it. How close are you? And what is holding you back physically? Oh, that's a great question.

So in tricking, I do parkour and tricking, there's a move called the cork, where you basically plant your right foot, you kick your left foot, but you keep kicking until it goes over your right shoulder, and you basically do a backflip with a 360 twist, but off of one leg and then you land. If you do gymnastics, it's like a back full, but off of one leg. I find this move so elegant. It's beautiful. I've been working on it since I was 14.

And I have it. I just don't have it smooth like I want. And if I had it smooth, I could do it in this room. And I could do one and then another one and another one. Like on my really good days, I could do two of them in a row and like I could do it on grass.

I would never try it on concrete, which means I don't got it blocked because like a backflip I'll do in concrete any day. The physical thing that's blocking me mainly is I'm very upper body. As a person, I'm very upper body aware. I don't have the mind muscle connection with my lower body to the degree that I need to. And so it's very hard for me to ride my left leg up on the kick.

And really, you should lock your left leg. And I kind of bend my knee because I'm scared. And I have the temptation to tuck in like I would on a backflip. The other thing that you should do on a cork. I kind of think of it like you're giving yourself a roller coaster ride.

Like you need to go all the way. You need to keep your body hollow. And then just the right moment, you need to do this with your head and look behind your shoulder at the ground, which is so scary and terrifying. Like in a split second when you're upside down, you just don't want to do this. When you're upside down, you want to do this.

But your body actually will perform better. So obviously the way that the body works is the body follows the head and the head follows the eyes. But if you do this, your head will spin in the right way. If you had to, you will not spin if you had does that. But it's just so counterintuitive as emotion.

And so for me, the reason why I can land corks is I've drilled them like north of 20,000 times. Like the reason I can land corks is because I've drilled them north of 20,000 times. And so I'm completely reliant for the most part on my muscle memory for the move. I am very, very scared in the split moment of like fully committing. Now I have fully committed before.

That was fine. Everyone's somehow fully committed and evident. My rib or like, you know, I paid a consequence. I am very conservative when it comes to physical movement. I really don't want to get injured.

And so I'm okay with the slow and steady wins the race. It's so interesting about sort of the upper body awareness and lower body awareness. I used to rock climb prolifically all the time. And the best casual non professional rock climber I've ever trained with was a guy in Western Australia called Josh McMurray. But Josh was actually a pro skateboarder.

And his body awareness was unbelievable. He wasn't necessarily like stronger or fitter than anyone, but he wasn't very strong guy. But he wasn't like abnormally, freakishly strong. His coordination and body awareness, particularly his lower legs, was just unreal. I'm like, we all assumed rock climbing was his main sport.

And then when I added on on Instagram, it was all skateboarding videos. And this was like the best climber in our gym. And so I used it's such a real thing. And it's so hard to like, unless you skateboarders just have such an incredible... Can you all like, can you all the skateboard?

I wish. I always wished I could. So like on a very, very, very good day, I could all the skateboard, but like, it's so hard. One out of 20 times. It's so hard.

Kickflip feels totally unattainable. It's such a counterintuitive motion. It's almost like cheating gravity. Like, this doesn't make sense. And so sometimes I do think about this for a backflip.

So I'm very, very good at backflips. And there's a move called a whip where you don't talk your backflip. My whip feels like an... Oh, the like, real clean. I've seen it.

Yeah. My whip feels like an ollie. And I just like, cemented in my muscle memory. Like it's... By the way, that's actually why my courts are really bad.

Because in a whip, you do bring your chest up. And of course, you should keep it hollow. It's called Eagle. And I'm over lying on a... It's like what we talked about before.

Stuck in a local minima as opposed to a global maxima. Like I need to like break from the local minima. Yeah. That's like warm and cozy and good. And go for the big one.

And push road. Yeah. So I'm still doing it. We're going to move past company stuff in a second into more sort of live philosophy things. I do have one more question about building.

Yeah. You have run an insane amount of content online. You actually produce your own ads. Yeah. You're in your ads, which for a lot of founders, interestingly, they're not.

I remember opening Instagram two or three years ago and you were in a swimming pool talking at me from the swimming pool. This ad I think did a lot for you guys. Yeah, yeah. Walk me through the cliff content playbook. Sure.

Walk me through how you perceive Instagram and TikTok differing in platforms and what you found as words and hasn't worked. Yeah. So one thing I did back in like 2020, I made a list of the top hundred best performing consumer subscription companies in the world. That was number one, out of interest. The one that was like growing fastest at the time in 2020 was Grammarly.

Because Grammarly had like 750 million in revenue very fast. Quite monster. Yeah. The biggest like spender on YouTube by far at the time. Yeah.

I learned from Grammarly. I learned from Notion. I learned from Instagram from Twitter. I learned from like Plaid, Brex, Naked Revolut. Like everyone I would go and fly around like just learn how they did their thing.

So one, I learned how to buy media really well. Two, I realized that no matter how smart you are, you're not going to be able to predict what ad is going to perform. You just got to test. The difference between performance marketing, by the way, in organic is in organic. You upload to your profile.

And if you upload almost exactly the same video, one, the algorithm will polish you. Two, your audience will be like, what the heck is this? Like why are you wasting my time? Performance marketing doesn't work that way. It can always serve a new audience because the audience is almost always new.

So therefore you can test 80 variations of the same video. And so it's actually a lot more A, B testing centric. So what you realize is just a volume game. So I'll test 4,000 organic, like 4,000 UGC based creative a month. And then I'll add on top of that like 600 AI generated creative a day.

You just got to figure out how to like organize the spend and make creative that is good. Back at the day, obviously I didn't have a team. I was doing it all my own. So I made a bunch of ads, found the local maxima. And it'd be like, as a lawyer, I love working for home.

From medical school, I listened to my textbooks with Future 5. You know, I have this like CNADHC and it's really hard for me to read. So I just use this app where I click a button and it speeds up and I can throw my PDFs in there and it'll read my email and completely change my life. It's amazing. It's a game changer.

And like you have product demos, whatever. So I found a really good local maxima doing those types of videos. But I was like, nah, I need to up the ante. And I wanted to crack YouTube. YouTube typically had slightly higher production value.

Horizontal videos, funny matter more. So I made a list of the top 100 best performing ads of all time. Like Super Bowl ads and ads that had won. Old Spice. Old Spice commercial.

Like I literally, I posted an Instagram, hey, anybody got a horse like a white horse. That's the, what I got from your ad was like, this is all spicy and spicy. Exactly. And the person who owned the horse at the time that I used was Logan Paul. And so like we went to his ranch like he helped me direct some of the ad.

And I just basically took the ads. I rewrote them to be about speech of fry. And then I shot them. You're giving me a great idea, by the way. I can now go with like cloud code, Higgs field, edit mode, write those ads, feed in those videos, and be like rewrite the script.

Because they ask you to try and remake each one of these ads about speech of fry. Test them. See what works. So Logan Paul lent you a white horse. He did.

For your ad. Did you know Logan Paul? We had a friend at the time who had introduced us. He said I need a white horse. He goes ring Logan.

Yeah, exactly. And then we hung out. It turns out he's like super, super, like dialed in. Very good product. Obviously incredibly good at marketing.

And so it was like COVID. We got to know each other really well. And he had a ranch at the time. And we ended up recording there. And it's like when you have no resources, you just beg, borrow, and steal from wherever you can.

Yeah. Like you steal shots and like out of license like all the time. By the way, there's a really great episode of founders about George Lucas who made Star Wars and like the early movies that he made and how he made them. And it's like absolutely fascinating. The life of George Lucas, both the long like nine hour audiobook, but also the founders episode is absolutely incredible.

So the whole point is as a founder, your goal is just get shit done. And it doesn't matter how you get the shit done. And the tool that I use to get shit done is learning. I just try to learn faster than everybody else. And there's no domain that I do not believe in my heart of hearts that I can conquer and learn how to do well.

And so it doesn't matter whether it's coding or designing or customer acquisition or video editing or being an improv actor in a skit. Like I will do everything. I have absolutely no shame. I will ask for help. 24, seven a day.

I'll send 50 quote messages a day all the time, very constantly. Most of my emails today I send out of cloud codes like CLI. And I will just look. I will just look for where can I go to get help? And I'll ask for help.

It's actually beautiful. I love that. So I want to dive more into your personal life and kind of like your philosophies around the people around you. Theodore Roosevelt. Oh yeah, I love Theodore Roosevelt.

Big hero of yours. Yes. And you actually likened a close friend of yours, Valentin Perez. I do. To Theodore Roosevelt.

So tell me about. Valentin and I worked out this morning. He goes, I'm going to do a Murph. You want to Murph is? It's the CrossFit exercise.

You run a mile. Then you do, I think it's a hundred pull ups. Then you do 200 push ups. Then you do 500 squats and you run another mile. Wow.

And like I go to his apartment to pick him up. He comes out with a 25 pound best on his chest. And I was like, that's how you're going to do the Murph? And he's like, yeah. And you know Valentin broke the world record for the number of pull ups.

I didn't know until I went to his apartment and there was a world record clock on the wall. Yeah. Valentin's the only guy I would break a world record and not tell anyone. Right. Just like so humbly.

60 pull ups in 60 seconds. Unbelievable. And like people at this gym were like, what is happening over there? So yes. So Theodore Roosevelt.

So Theodore Roosevelt is easily my biggest hero other than my dad. The other one's Arnold. And one of my favorite things about Teddy is he was super asthymatic. And like he couldn't even like leave the house properly. So he could just stay in the library and like read books.

Like he's just like a book with two legs sticking out. And at a certain point he got to the age where, you know, other people would like pick on him and move him around. And like he had this like pretty traumatic incident on a train where people bullied him. And his dad goes, Theodore, you have built your mind. It is time to build your body.

Amazing. It's like a moment out of like blue swain. Batman movie. So he started weightlifting before weightlifting was like a really a thing. And he was famous as president of the United States for having a huge band.

He's 200 pounds, I think five, 10. And he was like the consummate outdoorsman, right? Like he'd swim naked in the Potomac as president. He's like bringing foreign dignitaries from like Japan. He'd be like, bring a sumo wrestler and like he'd wrestle a sumo wrestler in the White House.

Like he's amazing. Anyway, because of his asthma, which was really bad, he went to Harvard, he got into boxing and like he needed to wear glasses. And obviously you can't box wearing glasses. This man would block. No, I couldn't even see, but he'd do it anyway.

And you know, he's very famous for the speech, the man in the arena, whose face is marred in blood and soot and sweat. Who knows the great exaltations of life? To him goes the credit, not to the critic. And there's a great story about him where he has a meeting with his doctor when he is in university. And the doctor goes listen to it or you can't do exercise, like you're gonna die.

And you can't do it. And you just need to live a life of relaxation. And that is how you're going to recover your health. And Teddy stands up and he's like, you don't know me. You don't know what you were talking about.

I am going to do exactly the opposite of what you say, sir. And he left running and his roommates at the time used to say, his roommates at the time used to say, you could tell that it was Teddy who got back home because the front door would burst open and someone would run up the stairs to the top of the stairs and the door would shut after the person got to the top. That's how you knew Theodore Rose and there's a foreign dignitary who would come and he'd be like, yeah, you know, you guys have two really incredible things in the United States that are super pneumatic, like full of energy. And it's the Niagara Falls and your president. It's a balancing press to me.

Is Theodore Roosevelt incarnate? He is just so full of energy. It's unbelievable. And my biggest aspiration is to have, Theodore Roosevelt's life motto was get action. And like, I'm nerding out on Theodore Roosevelt with you right now, but I could do this about any one of like 300 historical figures that I'm obsessed with.

I'm just, could, cannot get enough audio. Like, I love biographical audio books. I eat them for breakfast and I just know the lives of each one of these people intimately. And it just makes me really, really happy. And so you're the five closest friends of yours.

You think get action is a common trait between all of them, other common traits that you think link them. My friends? Yeah. Of course. One is intellectual curiosity.

One is they also people who give love first and give love aggressively. They really care about their family and have very like good family values. Everybody's very entrepreneurial. Almost everybody's very fit. Typically high levels of creativity, whether it be an art or music or whatever it might be.

And I think just very much adventure seeking. And everybody is better than me and many different things that I can learn from them which I love to do. I think that those are the big, anything kind like good people. Most of them don't drink, don't smoke. We'll turn up and be the life of the party when it's time to dance.

And I just find really interesting people throughout the world. And I almost think about it like I'm hunting for adventures. I'm hunting for the people who want to come with the adventure. And I don't care what city you live in. Like I'll just organize a thing.

We'll go and do it together. We've just come out of like winter and there's a big sign before that. I know you were traveling all over. What was the best adventure that you found in the last few years? I have a good mindset.

Well, I'll just answer for this summer. So I happen to be in San Francisco. And I actually had a moment exactly like this four years ago. So four years ago, I happened to be in San Francisco. I had a meeting that was canceled.

And so I went to visit Valentin and Cancun. And because this meeting was canceled, I had three times we had an engineer who were trying to get onto the team who was in Ukraine. And it was already like conflict escalation. And I flew to Ukraine to recruit this engineer. I had a sign a waiver that says, I understand that I'm taking full responsibility for me and entering the country and like United will not get me out of it.

Whoa. Anyway, I happened to be in San Francisco. I had a meeting that was canceled. And I was like, screw it. I'm gonna go to Sweden.

So I booked a flight to Sweden. Like that day, got an Uber, went to the airport, flew to Sweden, had a layover in France. In France, pulled up a story on Instagram. Hey, I'll be in Sweden. Anyone I should be didn't know anyone in Sweden, not a single person.

By the time it landed, I had like, I don't know, a hundred different DMs from random friends introducing me to folks in Sweden. One of them was like, hey, I signed on a podcast. I got an extra room if you want. You can come crash with me. Turns out it wasn't a room.

It was like literally a mattress on the floor of his living room, which is perfect. It's every day. There's some of you about mattress on floor energy. I've discussed this. So many friends, like it's like a, it's such a feeling.

That's what I want. And so landed, immediately met him at an underground chess bar where we just played blitz chess against people. And then I recruited like three people to come out with us and just like have fun in Sweden. And I just hung out there for the next week. And then I just started meeting founders organically.

I met Anton, who runs lovable. I ended up running with a bunch of meeting horses, which is like a thing in Sweden. I'll study the video. I met the guy who basically started the stripe of Sweden. I met a couple of folks who had like publicly traded companies.

I met a Vichy's manager and built like a really amazing community. What's going on? And then I had a friend who was in Israel at the time, Julius. So Julius Dean flew from Israel to Sweden. I convinced him like over FaceTime.

I literally bought, I was like, get in the car. Get in the car. Because he was complaining that it was like too hot. He got in the car. I bought him the ticket to go from Israel to Sweden in the car on the way to the airport.

He lands. We hung out, hang out. And then I went to Logan's wedding in Lake Como in Italy was absolutely amazing. Like the best dancing ever, incredible people. Julius is Logan Paul's wedding.

It was great. One, it was three days, which is exactly the right length for a wedding. Like all my favorite weddings are around three days. And I ended up having so many different weddings. It rained in the middle.

And so we all clustered inside of like the lobby of the hotel and it just became like this amazing, like mush of love and party. There were maybe like three, four different dance floors at every moment. We just like move from one to the other. And just, I think that weddings are a summation of the people of the wedding. And so the reason why it could have been done like in a tent is just, there were great people.

And that's why it's like, you know, good people. So you have a good time. And from there, where did we fly? Actually, my brother and my sister were adopted by Mark Roberts, who we met there and ended up like going on a trip to Greece with him. I couldn't go because I had to go to the UK to onboard John Reese Davis, who is the king of the dwarves in Lord of the Rings as a new voice for speech awhile.

And that was like a great week over the summer, just like making new friends and like all of his intertwined. And actually in the gym in the hotel and Logan's wedding, we made three of the top 10 best performing ads of that summer, like me and my sister. And so it's just like, everything just happens all together at the same time. And I just, I was just in the UK right before this. I did the 20 VC podcast and on the flight on the way here, we made like 10 new ads that I think like one of them is not gonna be like an absolute banger.

And so we're just constantly thinking of like new ideas and like whether it's people that you're hiring or projects that you're working on. So like I'm going May 8th to meet Joe Laitman in, I think his name is Joe Laitman in Austin. So he runs an amazing program called Alpha School, which is this like incredible learning education platform. The Friday before I did the fireside chat for Stripe. So I was interviewed by Patrick John Collison Patrick just introduced me to like a really cool person to do with like DNA sequencing that I'm really excited about.

And before that, I did like this incredible dinner with Marissa Mayer who's like so talented. She was the CEO of Yahoo and also was on the board of, is on the board of Starbucks, Walmart and Hyatt. And the person sitting across from me was Brett Taylor who's the chairman of OpenAI. He was CTO of meta and was co-CEO of Salesforce. And like, I think what happens is you, I have this concept called surface area of serendipity.

Just say yes. So like Marissa texted me and she's like, yeah, I'm doing this dinner. It'll happen tomorrow in San Francisco and I was in New York. It's like, we'd love to have you. And I was like, okay.

So I flew there. And then Harry was like, hey, if you want to do this podcast, let's do it. I was like, okay. So I flew there. You texted me, hey, would you be downstairs like, yeah, let's do it.

Now, there's maybe five other things like this that I had to say no to because I had too many things going on. But the principle that I follow is number one. I can always tether my computer with my phone. So I'm never in the back of an Uber, not using speechified to either read or respond to email or using cloud code or like on a call or working with someone on something. I never go to the lounge in the airport.

I go directly to the gate and I sit at the gate. I confirm that I'm at the right gate because I've made that mistake too many times. It's like, yeah. And I just like locked in for 15 minutes. As soon as I can get on the plane, I get on the plane and I keep working on my 100%.

And so if I didn't have that option, I just wouldn't do the travel, but there's something different about being in person with people that allows for these unlockings. Especially with the United adding Starlink to planes. I have yet to be on a United Starlink plane. I've been on it with like Hawaii Airlines. It is just for it.

So the thing is I typically still do JetBlue because JetBlue, you know you're going to get Wi-Fi. United, you've got like 90%, 10%. Great. It can be hit and miss. So I think, you know, for our audience listening, it's pretty evident that you are someone who is relentless and you're going to go 24-7.

I love sort of in your internal philosophies, you emphasize AQ over IQ and EQ. So for our listeners, IQ, obviously a common metric, a lot of people measure, there's EQ, right? So this emotional intelligence, like how well do people converse with other people? AQ is something that's not regularly mentioned, right? So adversity, quotient, how much you can get hit.

Correct, exactly. And keep moving forward. And this really ties in because you're running a book right now. I am. The book is titled You Can't Fail Unless You Quit, which is an awesome name for a book.

It's really great. It's really great. So tell us about the last time that you nearly quit. If such an event has ever occurred. No, no, no.

Yeah, 100%. So one of the things when I was reflecting and writing this book is my brother and my sister went to a boarding school called Exeter in New Hampshire. It's like the number one high school in the United States. Tyler's dorm was like literally where Zuckerberg went for high school. Tyler got the skip four years of math in high school and like four and a half years of computer science.

Wow, flipped. Four and a half years of math, four years of computer science. I really wanted to go to Exeter. And I applied and I didn't get in. And I applied again and I didn't get in.

And I applied a third time and I didn't get in. And for the fourth year, I didn't apply because I was going to go to college anyway. And then I got out with the college. And that sucked because I ran out of time to keep going. And by and large of my life, I haven't had too many situations where time bound, I can't keep trying.

So most people do gymnastics when they're maybe like 13, 14, 15, then they stop still doing corks. And I just I still haven't nailed it. So I'm just going to keep trying. I love playing music. In last summer, I was very into guitar.

Like I had a guitar coach and we would jam like every single day. I have not had a guitar lesson in 10 months. And I hate it. I want to play guitar so badly. I carry a guitar everywhere I go still.

But I just don't prioritize time. Fitness too. I've like not been on top of the gym at all in a while. And partly, it's because of clock code. Like there's a great line for Mark and Julie Center recently heard, which is talk to all the best engineers that you know and ask them how great AI is for coding and how much more efficient you are.

And like they're saying they're more efficient and then ask them, are you working more or less hours? Way more. Way more. Yeah. And so Valentine and I were talking about this morning, like both of us are like, I'm in the worst shape we've been in for like a long time.

Oh man, just looking back to that. But now that you can activate clawed agents from your phone while you're out and check their progress, it's like I'm building 24 seven. Like I'm never switching off now. But also people are like, hey, you're not present. Yeah.

Because like I am with my best friend, Janice. Yeah. Sorry, you were saying about it 100%. And so I kind of think about it like a like a MMA fighter where you push him and immediately need to re stabilize. The entire landscape of tech is now changing.

And so the onus is on us to re stabilize and make sure you're moving forward, we're like strength. So if there's one time to sacrifice the side hustles, not side hustles, the side quests, this is the time lock in on the core quests. Like we just launched the enterprise version of Simba Voices, which is like our voice agent. Voice agent is just code for co-worker, right? Whether it be outbound phone calls or meeting setting or inbound sales, like there's so much that you can do with it.

And oh my, like just the license to build is so big. So doing that, but also obviously maintaining friendships, connection with people, like rebasing yourself every once in a while, taking on challenges. So for example, as you said, it's about to be my birthday. And a bunch of my friends and my girlfriend were like, all right, well, you know, what do you want to do? I was just like, this is the last thing you want to think about right now.

But I also want to see all my favorite people. And so I sent out a part of like 48 hours before my birthday. Just like. I just got it. Yeah, I literally are, we're going to meet at this place.

Actually, no, it wasn't, we're going to meet at this time. I didn't even know what place it was. I just invited a bunch of people. And then like later I added in the place. And I'm very excited for it, but also my brain is just so locked in on the other stuff.

And so my framework for life is the following. There are five categories that make me happy and I don't want to not have them in my life. And it's making music, time spent with loved ones, working out, eating well in audiobooks. And like I need those five things to be like, violently happy. And if I don't have those things, my happiness will flip.

And then on top of that, I pull all the work stuff and everything else that I want to do. Right now, I'd say I'm still very on top of spending time with loved ones. Working out as weak music was really strong, but now it's really weak, eating good. Yeah, I'm pretty on top of it. In audiobooks, I haven't listened to an audiobook in a very long time.

At this point, almost everything I listen to is like 100 page reports about interesting things that I have AI generated from me. I actually sent you a bunch of them. Like the most recent thing I did is like my little brother's really sick. He has neural inflammation and he's had that for four and a half years and it causes OCD and psychosis. We mapped this entire genome and RNA.

And I just spent the last 48 hours like plugged in, analyzing all of it and made like a 60 page document that I've been reading through, listening through. And I just feel like we all have superpowers now. And it's like we're like a baby learning to walk and like acclimating for these new superpowers. But obviously you gotta find the balance. And so you do in the cracks, there's a really good YouTube video.

We should find it where there's a professor and he's like, hey, here's your time. He has like this big clear box and he puts his big stones in the box and he's like, is this box full? And they're like, yeah. And then he takes a bucket with smaller rocks and then he dumps it in. It's like, is it full now?

Cause like, yeah. And then he takes some sand. He puts the sand and he's like, is it full now? And they're like, yeah, it's full. And then he takes some water and he pours the water.

And so there's always space to fill things in but put the important things first. Yeah. And what you were saying about this is five common traits, the happiness for you. Yeah. Really identify with this.

I think like when I think through the happiest days of my life, and I used to track this. I would give it every day. I also did write that. It would always have exactly the same common traits. Yeah.

Some form of exercise with people, like I can run on my own, but like if I go to like a run club or a lift dance with friends or like just get something in with friends, even just playing sport in the park, like some form of exercise with people, some form of getting progressing career, like you're building on something that's very interesting, some form of the arts, like you engage the great movie, you listen really great music. And then randomly for me, it's like having a dinner with friends, like sharing a meal with people is something that really like ties it together. And it's so interesting you were saying that you've found like you've lost some of these, a few of these things over the last few months, you've been so busy, you've had to let go of like this stuff, right? And I go through those things. But they'll always come back.

They'll come back. And it's because you reflect on that and you go, well, why am I feeling down this week? And I'm like, well, I haven't seen anyone. I haven't seen the sun. I haven't worked out.

I've just been coding for four days straight. I'm just like sitting in my room and it's so easy once you identify those triggers to bring them back into your life and do your daily life and make them habits and sort of form around them, like completely resonate with that. Yeah. And so for anyone listening, if you feel down or whatever, write out the things that make you happy. And if you can't, that you noticed that debug it, just this, I used to do this all the time if I felt down, take a Google sheet, break it into not 24, but like 48 items of 30 minutes each and then write what you did in that timeframe.

And then categorize what that thing is. And then if something is invading your space and your time that needs to be clawed back, clawed back and then put in the times for the things that you really care about. And you'll see your mood improves very fast. I was free to, I recently, I connected Claude to my calendar and I said, you know, here's every journal intro I've ever written. Here's everything about me.

Here's my calendar. How am I doing with time? And it just shredded me. Wow. And it was like less than one percent of your time is on anything you love.

All you're doing is just grinding. Like less than one percent of your time. And I was like, damn, I should rework these priorities. But yeah, if you really want to be free to do what I really want to do, this is a really great idea. One, I'd love to connect it to the geolocation of my phone.

But two, I'd love to have some sort of screen recording of my computer that categorizes what I'm doing every hour. Automatically, and you see that at the clock. Wow, I really want this product. I really want that product. It would be so brutal.

I mean, everyone I know has turned off screen time on their phone because you don't want that notification that's like, guess what? This morning you lay in bed for two hours on reels. So I have the opposite. I have the child safety lock turned on on my phone. Like I'm a baby.

And everybody in my life knows the code except for me. I've never known the code for nine years. And I just don't have more than a minute a day. I've taken a minute a day of Instagram. It's incredible.

And I need to have it unlocked or access it on my computer and even there it's like heavily nuked with adblock. Very good. So be the person you needed when you were young. Yeah. It's literally your LinkedIn tagline.

What's the person that you still haven't become that you're trying to become? Oh, I love this question. Dude, Rory, there's so many versions of me that I have not become. It's not even funny. All right, let me first address it in terms of like, well, who I want to be for myself and then I'll address it for who I want to be for the rest of the world.

One, I think, you know, I really want to play this character, Caladin in the movie. Oh, yeah, Brandon Sanderson. Yeah, yeah. So I play Caladin in the show and I can do all the things that Caladin does in terms of like movements and martial arts, but I still don't have the role for the movie. I know I like, well, we'll see what happens.

So that's one thing that I really want. Two, I do want to write at least three songs that my friends play for fun at parties. Stole that line from Valentin. It's like a really good definition of a look. Yeah.

And when it comes to music and writing, I love Lionel Miranda. And I just like cry at things he writes all the time. I want to be able to self-express to that way with music. This is the author of Hamilton? Yes, that's correct.

But he's also just like, I'm frozen. Not frozen, but he wrote a lot of the music for many of the most successful Disney movies. So he did Moana. He did... Oh, the Moana soundtrack is great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he did, yeah. We don't talk about Bruno in Canto. All the songs there. He's unbelievable. And I want to have that ability to self-express like that.

I used to have a big goal. Great example of something I quit. I had an answer. I wanted to get to the point that I can freestyle rap for 10 minutes straight about items in the room around me. And I practiced that for a little bit.

And it just like it fell off the assembly line and it never got back. And like eventually it will. And so I think that's what always happens is like just other things take up the space. But I don't give up. I write them down.

They're in my Google sheet where I track all of my goals. And they make reappearances once I complete the other things that I want to do. Is there a goal that you put in there at the start of the year that you just like you were like, it's starting to get fresh energy. I want to do this thing. And then you haven't even touched it once.

No progress at all. No, there's attempts on everything. But there's no progress on many of them. Because the attempts might have been there, but I didn't succeed. Yes, that happens all, all, all the time.

All the time. And all the great eventually we'll do it. But right now, I don't have the bandwidth in terms of energy to make that thing happen right now. And I think that the life force inside of me, my energy that optimism, that's the thing that actually makes crazy things happen. And unless I can fully direct it, it doesn't work.

And often it's the case that I pick really big goals. And the only way that it happens and I need to direct all of myself into that goal. In the second, even 20% of it is deviated, I think will not happen. And so you just need to, it's almost like a laser. You need to focus on the thing, charge the thing for a long time.

And then finally, that thing cracks. In terms of who I want to be that I'm not yet one is, what was it called, famine? Famine syndrome. I want to alleviate myself with a famine syndrome. I'll let Rampano shout out.

I want to alleviate myself with a famine. I want to alleviate myself with a famine syndrome. And then person I want to be for others. So I have this principle which is, Churchill was so beloved, partly because of the speech you see we gave in the radio. We will fight on the beaches.

We will fight the landing grounds. We will fight on confidence and greater strength than the air we will never surrender. Same thing for JFK with the fireside chats. I think that I have potential to be a much better speaker and actually a much better storytelling. And I think that the way that you build those types of relationships can happen through a podcast, can happen through YouTube, can happen through writing.

I don't know how it will eventually for me. But to be a better leader, I think I need to figure out how to use asynchronous communication methods better. Maybe it's an email newsletter. I don't know. I've tried a bunch of these different things.

I just haven't landed them well yet. Exactly like a quirk. So I'm just not going to give up until I eventually succeed with them. And so that's one way in which I'd love to become a better leader is connecting with people on that level. The way I actually was thinking about this morning because speech prize growing really fast.

We're already at the point where I can't have a conversation with everybody in the company every single day. It just won't happen. Even every single week, it's tough. I think my quality of life will be higher with a smaller team where I have a really good relationship with everybody and they can help me grow and I can help them grow. And so I'm very much aligned on this principle of I'd rather bring exceptional people and pay them more, but have less people than bring more people and have village.

And then as it relates to who I want to be for the world, you know, like I said, my youngest brother is very ill and I spend probably one third of my time on medical stuff for Eric's. I haven't cracked it yet. And so I wish that I was more capable and there's a principle I found recently that I thought was amazing, which is whatever you want, more of, use more of. If you want more money, use more money. If you want more energy, use more energy.

Like don't lay in bed all weekend. Like of course you'll be tired. Use the energy. You want more strength? Use more strength.

Essentially you have to risk it for the biscuit. You're going to spend money to make money. But life will give to you that thing that you use and deplete. And so I want to leave it all in court as it relates to the medical research that I'm doing for Eric's. And good things happen when you just, you try as hard as you possibly can.

There's nothing left in the tank. I want to do that more and more and more. One thing I'm very proud that I never gave up on is figuring out a cure for Eric because it's been four and a half years. It's very frustrating. The brain is so complicated.

And just like me and my parents and the rest of my family, we're dialed in that we will solve it. There's a song I wrote called Mountaintops that we can link here that's about the experience of working on this thing for Eric's. So that's like the person that I want to be, not just for Eric's, but for everybody else who has a similar situation in life. My dad had prostate cancer on and off and we, with AI, we basically solved it. And I'm so grateful for that.

And I'd want to like very much eat it that way where the PSA stays low. And so I think a big principle that I found is, for founders in general, one of the coolest things that you can build is something that ties to where you were vulnerable. So in my personal case, it was dyslexia, but if I wasn't to work in speech or find out, I'd probably work on a cancer diagnostics company for my dad. Or a neuroinflammation in learning uni solution for what my brother has. It's a common thing with you.

The problems you want to solve in the world are unique to you and your family members that you're immediate loved ones, yeah. Correct. Because I don't want to build something that if I didn't build it, somebody else would. I want to build the thing that if I didn't build it, no one would get the round of the way for a long time. Because it's not like I have some genius inside about the world that other people didn't have.

All I just have is energy and optimism. And gratitude for getting to work on the problem. And those are actually my assets. And so I'm going to point them in some direction, let me point them in a direction that other people don't have optimism around, don't have gratitude around, don't have energy around. And just by virtue of the fact that I point all my laser energy on top of them and recruit other people to help me and ask for help consistently, great things will happen.

So like that is my principle for where the arbitrage happens as a founder. Because you pick a problem that other people don't go for and you just pour energy, optimism and gratitude on that problem and you just issue great energy into the rest of the world and it'll come back from you and you'll be directed at that problem. That's really beautiful. You've achieved so much. It's such a young age.

I wouldn't say that. If the achievements just stopped tomorrow, would you die happy, is it enough? No, I would not be happy. So I was reflecting with Valentin yesterday. We have this thing we call elephants.

It's like we track our goals and our happiness. So we have this thing called the wheel of life and it's ranking your joy from a scale of one to 10 on every category, business, health, spirituality, family, friends, romance. And maybe the happiest place I've been in the last three years but four years ago, I was happier. And five and six years ago, I was happier. Interesting.

And there were big step ups in my quality of life that happened around that time. Maybe we figure something out in the company, I went from high school to college, like something big, big, big happened and Valentin was laughing at me and he was like, Cliff, you can't count this. Like you rank this as a 12 out of 10. This is nobody, one of the 12 out of 10. Like I want my life to be a 12 out of 10.

And so that 12 out of 10, genuinely it's a comparison, right? Your baseline of happiness is compared to your best day, the week before, the month before, the year before. And so I rank, my health is one of the best that's ever been, even though I'm less on point with the gym, because I know I can solve the gym problem but I have issues with my vision, I have care to conus. And so I have asymmetric astigmatism, I can't see perfectly well in my left eye. And I found this like amazing scientific research that actually find out the solution.

I found the two doctors in New York City that are experts in it. And the doctor put something in front of my eyes, they got me to see well the other day. And like, I almost teared up, it was amazing. It's incredible. And so like my health is like 9.9.

Because I suffered with this, thank you so much with this vision thing for like a long time. And like a company I consider doing many time is basically you would scan the retina and then you'd 3D print a custom contact lens. And so someone did exactly this but with a different approach, like very brilliant approach. Essentially you have a hard shell that sits on a film of saline water and the water fills in the troughs and the peaks of your eye and then you have a perfect lens. And so that health was ranked really high because previously I had an issue.

Now that issue is solved, I will get used to it. And then with time it'll update. So no, if I stopped having the ability to self-improve, I would feel stagnated. This is like the classic blue ribbon challenge or like astronaut syndrome that people have. And if I hit that, then I'd have to start measuring and thinking and learning and readjusting and finding the optimism and finding the gratitude for the situation.

And I hope that I would, I think that I would. The problem with me is I'm a very emotional person but I'm very logically led. And so I would try to write my way out of that problem as opposed to feel my way out of the problem. And I know for a fact that in some places in life you can't logic your way out of a problem. You have to feel your way out of the problem.

So the thing that then I would find challenging is feeling my way into the solution which I know I'm capable of. My brain typically ends up being such a more valuable and powerful tool, but that's the, again, local maxima to a global maxima. It's beautiful. Okay, rapid fire, last few questions. We've met it to the end.

Question one, you're a fresh founder listening to this podcast or most of our listeners are either founders that they're gonna build something. Monday morning, 9 a.m. It's day one. Yes. What do you do?

Great. Message five of the friends that you think of most highly tell them, listen, for the next 90 days I'm going to code for six hours a day. I'm going to send you a screenshot of the rescue time or whatever time measurement SUS or software on the computer on text. Every single one of those days in a group chat and I'm gonna send you my GitHub commits for that day. And every day I don't do that by 10 a.m.

the next day I'm going to do 200 push-ups and 100 pull-ups. And if I miss any one of those workout days I'm gonna run 10 miles that weekend, like guaranteed. And if no, just you should know that I am not a man of my word. Accountability. And so like first I build that accountability system.

The second thing I would do is I would do rapid iterations because product is actually not the limiting factor today. Neither is engineering, another is design. It's customer acquisition. So I would build a new product in the niche that you're interested in. Every single day I would make a screen recording not of your phone of yourself explaining it with a computer or phone in the shot.

And I would post it in swear. And I'd be like, hey, here's what I built, whatever. Every single day you owe a video. And so you should send your friends that video every single day. So maybe you do six hours of coding and four hours of like merchandising of the product.

And if you see that one of them takes then you don't need to do a new product. You can just do a new feature every single day. And just do that for 90 days. And I guarantee if you do that you will find revenue and you will find success. Like there's no world where you don't.

And then after that just start grinding on customer acquisition. And it doesn't matter whether it happens through email or SEO or partnerships or organic, social, whatever. Like if you grind that, like you grind here, you will make it. That's how to win as an individual. But the rule is if you want to go fast, go alone.

If you want to go far, go with the team. So then from that point on, you look for people who you can see the greatness in them before they see it in themselves. Because those are the people who actually you can easily hire and then will join you. You level them up. And then you'll end up building so much momentum that you'll start being able to hire people who are much better than you at different places.

And then do your best to give them an opportunity to grow inside of your organization. And then you go from there. I love that. Okay, final two questions. I want you to recommend two world-class builders who should come on the show.

Whoa. Let me think about this for a moment. Is there a niche that you hear about? You don't hear about the niche. No, anyone, interesting.

Collins Key. Okay. Collins Key. He was pulling like MrBeast views on YouTube before there was MrBeast. And he has such a creative approach to production and also to like company building, Collins Key.

Amazing. Thank you. Final question. You're coming back on the show in one year. All right.

That's one thing you want to be true one year from now. If Eric's his health is better than I'll be. Over than when he said it. It's a perfect answer. Yeah.

Cliff, thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure, brother. It's been a pleasure, a fantastic discussion. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

And have your birthday. Thank you very much.