Why do they think, uh, why do you think that they chose you? And then kind of a bigger question beyond after them choosing you is, are you some kind of crazy to wanna take on that role? [laughs]

[laughs] Um, I think, uh...

I don't know.

I think there's a lot of people that could have done a good job at, at Scribe, um, th- that would have had different strengths than me, but I'm, I'm, I think, a little unique in that I had, I have some operating background, but I hadn't been a CEO before, but I worked in venture-backed startups, and so I've got that kind of, like, high-ambition s- high-pace operating background, um, which, like, not everybody in the agency, uh, kind of publishing world does.

Um, you know, I, I think I'm unique in that I'm not just an author, but a Scribe author, and not just a Scribe author, but, like- Behind Goggins, I think one of the top-selling Scribe authors, certainly like top 10.

Um, and I've got experience in the creator world, and that's what really drives like a lot of our...

Yeah, this is kind of the world we live in.

Where would you put that full-time energy if you could choose anything on Earth?

After all that immersion, what's risen to the top? What are the few ideas you think actually carry weight, not just in the world of rockets and electric cars, but in the world of construction?

Yeah.

The book is chock-full of them.

I mean, it's probably a list 50 long, and I really try to make it rich and dense so that there's something useful on every single page.

If I had to kind of bucket it into kind of the, like the personal side of things and the professional side, on the personal side, I would say the overarching thing that Elon shows us is just that we are capable of a lot more than we think.

I think he's special, but I don't think he's superhuman.

And the career that he's had in a bunch of different industries and the amount of risk that he's taken and the amount of seemingly impossible problems that he's solved, I find very inspiring and I think kind of helps us all lift our gaze to bigger problems and greater things.

Yeah.

But I have heard of your company.

Yeah, it was like 2011 to 2014.

I mean, the company was around a long time, but like the heyday was like 2011, 2012, 2013.

And before...

Before Uber existed, we were doing rides to the airport.

Before Instacart existed, we were doing grocery delivery, but it was a meta marketplace.

It was one of the original hyper-local real-time marketplaces.

Yeah.

What would Naval say about how to become luckier? Like how could you become luckier?

I think the, the path towards luck is, you know, you can follow those things up.

You can sort of go from one level to another.

You can do luck through persistence and effort that then becomes a little bit more of luck through or have a feel for the, the dynamics.

Um, and if you really, if you gain enough information through the persistence and reputation through the persistent luck, you'll have better information on where the luck might be heading and you can sort of meet it there and position yourself for it.

And if you do that enough times over time like you become the only person who can do it.

So i- if we use the real estate example that he uses for leverage and just like take that as like, you know, if you're a, if you're starting off as a general contractor or a handyman like you don't just wait around for jobs, you go knock on doors.

These are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else." What does he mean by that?

As an entrepreneur and executive, how do you look at it in terms of what's broken and what problem you're solving?

Yeah.

I think the first one is exactly what you said, which is just there's this huge, huge number of people that would really benefit from writing a book, and that their books would benefit readers.

But traditional publishing only cares about the books that they think can sell, you know, 100,000 copies, usually in hardcover and usually through traditional, uh, channels like, like bookstores, right? That's how the whole industry is set up.

It's a 150-year-old business model, and it relies on sort of giving an advance and an author giving a manuscript, and they take it out.

But the, the context that that business model was created in has changed almost 180 in, in all of the key aspects, right? You used to need a huge upfront capital run, uh, uh, upfront capital to fund a print run, but now most of these books are print on demand, so you as an independent author don't need somebody else to front your, your print run.

You also don't need access to the special distribution networks because everybody can just post their books for sale on Amazon and IngramSpark.

What was an unlimited possibility moment for you in your life when you achieved something or broke through something that you didn't think was possible?

How so?

I mean, his, uh, as David Senra says, like the story of the father is embedded in the story of the son.

Um, his dad was w- w- certainly abusive, like there's verbally abusive.

Imagine like standing there as an eight-year-old boy for hours while your dad like screams in your face, drill sergeant style, calls you worthless, calls you useless, calls you stupid.

Um, when Elon was young, he got the absolute shit kicked out of him, like gang stomped, not like lost a fight with one guy.

Hospitalized for a while.

Uh, his brother said he was like so swollen he was unrecognizable, and his dad sided with the bullies and like called him stupid for picking a fight that he would lose.

Mm.

Mm.

And Naval was, was, um, you know, obviously has done an incredible job distilling that wisdom and articulating it for sort of our era, and I wanted to preserve that in a permanent format.

And that side project that I did on nights and weekends, um, and published, you know, hoping to sell a few thousand copies, has gone on to sell, I think we're coming up on two million.

I've given away five million more digital versions-

Yeah.

And over the last, you know, five, six years, uh, he's become more controversial, but inside tech, he was...

Before he was a household name, he was the most ambitious person in tech, and nobody knew how that story was gonna end, right? He was running on a very thin tightrope for a really long time with both Tesla and SpaceX.

Yeah, explain what he had to go, like how he learned.

The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that shouldn't exist.

And there are many places that requirements come from, right? Sometimes they come from inside the organization.

Sometimes they came from a team.

Sometimes they came from legal.

Sometimes they came from a design partner like in NASA.

Like if you're going to shoot up a rocket and the capsule of the vehicle is going to like dock with the space station, they have all kinds of requirements about your latches and how things go in.

He's like, where the hell is the money going? And he was like, oh, it's going from this contractor who's, this subcontractor actually hired another subcontractor who hired another subcontractor who hired another subcontractor before I get to the actual person, like you said, bending the metal or making the thing.