When did you realize that fear, not strategy or funding was the real bottleneck for most founders?

I think it was when my life changed.

So I was spent six years training for the Olympics in the sport of rowing.

I rowed a, uh, single scull and was second in the Olympic trials in the, the one-man rowing, uh, [clears throat] and raced the World Cup for three years and raced all over the United States, all over the world.

I thought if I got courageous on the water as an athlete, I'd be courageous the rest of my life, and I'd be fearless, when in fact, I had a deep-seated fear of so many things growing up.

You know, I grew up very blue-collar.

My parents were first-generation Irish immigrants, and, um, I was the first person in my, in my family to go to college, and I was always afraid something bad was gonna happen.

Um, I also want to ask that how do doubt and overthinking slow momentum?

I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about your motivation and how you think about your role as a

capital allocator.

I would say it stems back to, especially in college, this desire of pursuing truth.

I studied economics, and part of the reason I studied economics is because I thought that was a good channel to do that, right? You get to really pursue this idea of trying to find causality or truth.

You see what...

X causes Y, maybe.

Well, let's actually build a research design and understand what actually is happening there.

That is

Yeah.

So most, most of the time I would say I am very, I'm always trying to keep people running.

I always want folks to keep doing what they're doing.

And that's true for whatever sport you're doing.

CrossFit, baseball, soccer, whatever it is.

I want you to keep doing the thing that brings you joy and that sort of thing.

There are times when we have to shut things down or, you know, for a short period of time.

So what was your, what was

look

cool on there.

But yeah, I don't know.

I'll try to move it there.

There's still the pencil marks where he's drawn it out.

But I realized we were talking about this.

I'm like, man, I should get some semblance of a resonator guitar rather than an acoustic.

That was fantastic.

Yeah, all

right.

So, yeah, and that would have been like 2000, I would guess, maybe 2001.

But because they're such a lightweight thing, you know, they're really fun to play.

So, you know, they've got, and they're really resonant.

You know, like I'll turn this, you know.

But they sustain for a long time, too, despite being hollow, which is different than, you know, like I have hollow.

that i was going to get tone lessons from patrick sweeney and that is exactly what i'm doing right now i love this

How exactly does that show up in founders? And why do most people fail to recognize it in themselves?

That's a great question, Caroline.

And one thing that our brain is designed to do is to be a prediction engine.

So we're constantly trying to figure out what's going to happen next.

And we have these predictions we're making subconsciously.

So when you go into a coffee shop and you order an espresso, your subconscious actually did the ordering and the deciding seconds, sometimes minutes before you even took that action.

so the the brain's desire to be a prediction error a prediction engine if we're wrong or incorrect we have we introduced something called prediction error and this is what one of my famous neuroscientists so my last book was called fear is fuel and that's the one that hit number five on the wall street journal bestseller list And in Fear is Fuel, I interview 35 different neuroscientists across the world.

loop.

So again,

milestones are strictly enforcement tools.

Let's not kid ourselves that they're anything else.

They are to make sure that they're getting what they paid for and that you are completely beholden to the publisher in providing that.

So not just in the amount of payment, front-loading versus back-loading, obviously development studios try to front-load as much of that payment as possible so you can onboard people.

Publishers try to do the opposite.

They wanna pay as little as possible until you're showing more and more And they know what they're getting.

okay,