Listen to the full-length recording below.

On the importance of being a multidisciplinary thinker

Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, ‘The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.’ You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well”, but how are you going to make any good decisions in life…the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life…if all you know is one well?

So why is it important to be a multidisciplinary thinker? The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, ‘To understand is to know what to do.’ Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that?

This is the beauty of deriving things multidisciplinarily. You can’t be wrong! You see these things lined up there like three bars on a slot machine. Boy do you hit the jackpot.  

A practical approach to becoming a multidisciplinary thinker

I tried to learn what Munger calls ‘the big ideas’ from all the different disciplines.

“Right up front I want to tell you what my trick was, because if you try to do it the way he did it, you don’t have enough time in your life to do it. It’s impossible. Because the fields are too big and the books are too thick. So my trick to learn the big ideas of science, biology, etc., was I found this science magazine called Discover Magazine. I found that this magazine every month had a really good interview with somebody from some aspect of science. Every month. And it was six or seven pages long. It was all in layperson’s terms.

So I discovered that on the Internet there were 12 years of Discover Magazine articles available in the archives. So I printed out 12 years times 12 months of these interviews. I had 144 of these interviews. And I put them in these big three-ring binders. Filled up three big binders. And for the next six months, I went to the coffee shop for an hour or two every morning, and I read these.

I would read some arcane subject and, oh my god, I saw, ‘That’s exactly how this works over here in biology.’ or ‘That’s exactly how this works over here in human nature.’ You have to know all these big ideas.”

On bucketing knowledge, “my three buckets”

Bucket number one is 13.7 billion years. It’s the inorganic universe. Physics. Geology. Anything that’s not living goes in my bucket number 1. 13.7 billion years.

Bucket number two is 3.5 billion years. It’s biology on the planet Earth

Bucket number three is 20,000 years of recorded human history. That’s the most relevant of all. That’s our story. That’s who we are.

On Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

For every action, there will always be an equal and opposite reaction.

Your entire life. Every interaction you have with another human being is merely mirrored reciprocation.

On Albert Einstein’s five ascending levels of cognitive prowess.

1. Level one is simple. Simple transcends genius

2. Level two is genius

3. Level three is brilliant.

4. Level four is intelligent

5. Level five is smart

Why is simple, the right kind of simple, better than genius? Because you can understand it!

...and If you understand, you know what to do.

Einstein on compound interest

He said, ‘The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.’ But that’s not all he said about compound interest. He not only said that it’s the most powerful force in the universe, he said it’s the greatest mathematical discovery of all time. He said it’s the eighth wonder of the world. And he said that those who understand it get paid by it and those who don’t pay for it. He said all these things, Albert Einstein, about compound interest.

A working definition of compound interest

I will propose one. You can have your own, but this is mine. Say compound interest is dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame. Is that a fair definition? Alright? I think that’s the answer from bucket number 1. The most powerful force that could be potentially harnessed is dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame.

The ethos behind my newsletter signoff/mantra ("Spirited & Resilient") is highly aligned with this definition and sentiment.

On dogged incremental constant progress over very long time frames

We go to bucket number 2. 3.5 billion years of biology. What’s the most powerful force in three and a half billion years of biology? It’s the machine of evolution. How does it work? Dogged incremental constant progress over a long time frame.

What do you think we’re going to find when we go to bucket number three? 20,000 years of human experience on earth. You want to win a gold medal in the Olympics. You want to learn a musical instrument. You want to learn a foreign language. You want to build Berkshire Hathaway. What’s the formula? Dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame.

Being constant is above genius

The problem that human beings have is we don’t like to be constant. Think of each one of those terms. Dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame. Nobody wants to be constant.

You have to be constant. How many people do you know that are constant and what they do? I know a couple. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Everybody wants to be rich, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. I’m telling you how they got rich. They were constant. They were not intermittent.

On being the list

…every single other person in the whole world, has this list in their head – trustworthy, principled, courageous, competent, loyal, kind, understanding, forgiving, unselfish, and in every single one of your interactions with others, BE THE LIST!

Most people spend all day long trying to get other people to like them. They do it wrong. You do this list, you won’t be able to keep the people away. Everybody’s going to want to attach to you. And be willing to do what? Just like the puppy, they’d be willing to die for you. Because you are what they’ve been looking for their whole lives. This is pretty profound isn’t it?

On all humans being alike

How many of you want to be paid attention to? How many of you want to be listened to? How many of you want to be respected? How many of you want meaning, satisfaction, and fulfillment in your life in the sense that you matter? How many you want to be loved? Everybody’s exactly the same. The only difference is, as Craig said, the strategy that they’re employing to try to get to fulfill those needs.

On canine strategies for manipulating humans

All you have to do is every single time they come home, you greet them at the door with the biggest unconditional show of attention that they’ve ever gotten in their whole life. And you only have to do it for like 15 seconds and then you can go back to doing whatever you were doing before and completely ignore them for the rest of the evening.’ However, you do have to do this every single time they come home. And what will the person do? They’ll take care of them. They’ll do anything for this dog.

On going first and going positive

All you have to do, if you want everything in life from everybody else, is first pay attention, listen to them, show them respect, give them meaning, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Convey to them that they matter to you. And show you love them. But you have to go first. And what are you going to get back? Mirrored reciprocation. Right? See how we tie this all together? The world is so damn simple. It’s not complicated at all! Every single person on this planet is looking for the same thing.

You have to go first. And you’re going to get back whatever you put out there.

It’s all mirrored reciprocation. So what do you want to do? You want to go positive, you want to go first.

On loss aversion

There’s huge asymmetry between the standard human desire for gain and the standard human desire to avoid loss. Which one do you think is more powerful? 98 percent versus 2!

Lou Brock set the Major League record for stolen bases with the St. Louis Cardinals many years ago. And he once said, ‘Show me a man who is afraid of appearing foolish and I’ll show you a man who can be beat every time.’ And if you’re getting beat in life, chances are it’s because you’re afraid of appearing foolish. So what do I do with my life? I risk the two percent.

On being patient enough

So you’ve got one lifetime. How do you want to spend your one lifetime? Do you want to spend your one lifetime like most people do, fighting with everybody around them? No. I just told you how to avoid that. And in exchange have what? A celebratory life. Instead of an antagonistic fighting life. All you have to do is go positive, go first, be patient enough. You know we have to be patient for a week with this puppy. Do you know how long it usually takes for a human being to do all the probing and testing that Emily was going to do and to find out that you’re for real? It takes six months.

On Win-Win relationships

The three hallmarks of a great investment are superior returns, low risk, and long duration. The whole world concentrates on Category 1. But if you’re a leader of any merit at all, you should be treating these three as what? Co-priorities.** How do you get low risk and long duration? Win-Win. This is the biggest blind spot in business. People are actually proud of a win-lose relationship. ‘Yeah we really beat the crap out of our suppliers.’ You know, ‘We’ve got these employees for…you know, we’ve got them on an HB1 visa, they can’t work anywhere else for three years.’ They’re proud of it! Total Win-Lose. You take game theory and you insert the word lose in any scenario in game theory and what do you have? A suboptimal outcome. What happens you insert win-win in any game theory scenario, what do you get? Optimal every time.

Axioms from psychology

The basic axiom of clinical psychology reads, ‘If you could see the world the way I see it, you’d understand why I behave the way I do.’

But corollary number two, if you want to change a human being’s behavior and you accept that axiom, you must necessarily, to get them to change, change how they see the world.

It’s not really that hard. You take a business. Most employees of a business see the world as employees. What if you could get them to see the world instead through the eyes of an owner? Do you think that’s going to change how they behave? It totally changes how they behave. Employees don’t care about waste. Owners do. Employees don’t self-police our place. Owners do.

See also, Principle Agent Problem. Always act like an owner.

On Leadership

This is the secret to leadership. The secret to leadership is to see through the eyes of all six important counterparty groups and make sure that everything you do is structured in such a way to be win-win with them.** So here are the six. Your customers, your suppliers, your employees, your owners, your regulators, and the communities you operate in. And if you can truly see through the eyes of all six of these counterparty groups and understand their needs, their aspirations, their insecurities, their time horizons. How many blind spots do you have now? Zero.

How many mistakes are you going to make? You’re going to make zero.

Two Proverbs

African proverb - ‘If you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far, go together.’ Live your life to go far together. Don’t live it to go quickly alone.

Turkish Proverb. ‘No road is long with good company.’ The essence of life is to surround yourself, as continuously as you can, with good company.

On avoiding asininity

Well, the conventional financial world is pretty reliable if you want to use electrical engineering or automobile transportation or a lot of things. But in the messy world of running businesses and institutions and so forth, the conventional religion is asinine. And my theory from the very beginning was I wanted to eliminate all the most conventional asininity. And I saw that if I could just do that, I'd have an advantage over most people. And so I collected asinine as things I should avoid.

On Probability

I saw instantly, for instance, when I was introduced to the math of Pascal and elementary probability, I saw immediately how important this math was. My math teacher had no idea that he'd come to a part of math that was very important in the fragile world to everybody. But I saw it immediately and I just utterly mastered it. And I used it. I'm still using it. I used it routinely all my life quite intensely.

On win-win businesses

My idea is so simple is that if you make your living selling things to other people that are good for them, that is safer and more profitable, averaged out and selling them stuff that's bad for them, like gambling, drugs, crazy religions, all kinds of things that are terrible for people. And so of course you want to sell things that are good for them.

On competency

Why the hell would I play against other people in a game where they're much better at than I am when I'm playing for something desperately important to me like my way of feeding my family. So of course we didn't go near it. I would argue that in practical life you want to succeed. You got to do two things. You got to have a certain amount of competence and you have to know what you know and what you don't know. You have to know the edge of your competency. And if you know the edge of your competency you're a much safer thinker and a much safer investor than you are if you don't know it. And I constantly meet people better to have an IQ of 160 and think it's 150.

On having children early in life

It's very constructive to help other people and everybody feels pretty good about these own children. To have a lot of responsibility and bear it well, I think helps people.

On Happiness

So early marriage and big families and believing in religion that is somewhat hard to believe in terms of its technical theology is very good for the occupants in terms of their personal happiness. I'm not interested in believing something I don't believe in, just to be happier, I'm a peculiar person that way. I have no doubt in my mind at all that the Mormons all average out happier than the rest of us. I just live with it.

On societal expectations

I'm used to things, not working perfectly. And so why should I expect my society is always going to be marching upwards because it has for a long time. I believe you just adjust to whatever society turns out to be and you do the best you can and that's all you can do and that's all I'm going to do.

On architecture

And you get things like dorms at MIT where people actually would go into the dorm and get seasick because all the walls are slanted and massively stupid. MIT has a school of architecture. And a place that's so stupid they build a dormitory where all the walls are slanted so much over to get seasick. And that really happened at MIT. So I think schools of architecture, they have a lot of folly to regret. It's not necessary for architecture to be as stupid as some of its dead denizens are.

peculiarity by itself is not art in my opinion

On multidisciplinary thinking applied to architecture

Yeah, they pay $20,000 a week to be on the ship and so forth. And they don't want a little light. They walk out of the ship and go into one of the common rooms. And of course that's what I arranged. They do in the dorm. So I was following correct precedence from marine architecture. But show me an architect that's learned anything from marine architect. I think you could go into any school or architecture in the country and you won't find anybody studying marine architecture. They think it has nothing to do with it. It has a lot to do with what they're doing. If you don't look, you won't find.

On inventing your own destruction

Go through Africa when I was young. There are two things you always saw, Coca-Cola and Kodak. That was the brands all over Africa from the poorest villages. And of course, Kodak went totally broke because somebody invented a new way of taking photographs and developing photographs. And it just absolutely did their whole damn business. And Kodak wiped out its common shareholders. That happens all the time, that kind of thing. And you can't blame the management for it and say why didn't Kodak invent its own destruction. That's hard to do for human nature.

On Berkshire’s business most emblematic of win-win

Take Dairy Queen. We have all these little shacks. Pretty far North where they're just open in the summertime.

Because you're not doing so much ice cream in the winter. All the parents come and get their cheap hot dogs and ice cream cones and so forth. And the people who own the little shack make pretty good money in the summertime. It's win-win.

Customers are getting something they want. The people who are managing the store get something they want. Of course, the Berkshire shareholders get some capital returns that they like. It's all win-win.

Of course, I'd rather do business that way.

On having fans in China and India

I think it's peculiar that these high IQ nerds in China and India love me. In my own country, people think I’m a pompus old bastard.

On excluding things because they are beneath you

You don't want to do all the business that's legal for you to do. You want to exclude all kinds of things because it's beneath you. It shows that you work at these things intelligently. It gets hard but it doesn't get impossible.

On Lee Kuan Yew

He was probably the greatest nation builder that ever exists in terms of quality of leadership.

Figure out what works and do it. Figure out what doesn't work and avoid it. He just was relentless. That's all he did.

So as far as I'm concerned, the politician who looks the most like Poor Charlie’s Almanac is Lee Kuan Yu and I'm not surprised that he got ahead better than any other nation builder that ever lived.

On ruthless self-assessment

I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist. And there were a few people in my classes like in quantum mechanics and so on who they could effortlessly do things that were so difficult for me. And I realized there are a thousand ways to be smart.

On coming up with 99 shit ideas to come up with one gem

I'm an inventor. If you, if you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with atypical solutions and, you know, and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny. But one of those 100 is like, hmm, maybe there is, maybe that might work. And then you can keep going from there.

On the importance of wandering

when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going. So to go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement. And incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor and everything you do. You have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering. And you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people, they feel like wandering is inefficient

On a thousand ways to be smart

There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way. And that is a really like when I go around, you know, and I meet people, I'm always looking for the way that they're smart and you find that's one of the things that makes the world so interesting and fun is that it is not, it's not like IQ is a single dimension. There are people who are smart in such unique ways.

On rate manufacturing

if you're going to launch the vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month. So you need an engine every week. So that engine needs to be being produced at rate and there's all of the things that you need to do that, all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures, the right people, process, et cetera. So it's one thing to build a first article. So that's, you know, to launch New Glen for the first time, you need to produce a first article. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glens at rate.

On advancing manufacturing technology

the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to, is to get to rate manufacturing and to do that in an efficient way. Again, kind of back to our cost point. If you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way, you haven't really solved the cost problem and maybe you haven't really moved this state of the art forward. All this has to be about moving this state of the art forward.

On decisiveness

We are going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry. And so, you know, at Amazon, for, you know, ever since the beginning, I said, we're going to become the world's most customer obsessed company. And no matter the industry, like people, one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare industry and want to know, how did you guys, how are you, how are you so customer obsessed? How do you actually not just pay lip service that, but actually do that. And from, you know, all different industries should come on to study us to see how we accomplish that. And the analogous thing at Blue Origin and it will help us move faster is we're going to become the world's most decisive company.

On one-way doors vs. two-way doors

You know, if there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's study them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind. It doesn't, you know, changing your mind. I took about one way doors and two way doors. Most decisions are two way doors. If you make the wrong decision, if it's a two way door decision, you walk out the door, you pick a door, you walk out, and you spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision. Come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one way door decisions.

On disagreeing and committing

I would think it was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view. They would say, Jeff, I think you're wrong. And here's why. And we would go back and forth. And I would often say, you know what? I don't think you're right. But I'm going to gamble with you. And you're closer to the ground truth than I am. I had known you for 20 years. You have great judgment. I don't know that I'm right either. Not really, not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. Let's do it your way. But at least then you've made a decision. And I'm agreeing to commit to that decision. So I'm not going to be second guessing it. I'm not going to be sniping at it. I'm not going to be saying, I told you so. I'm going to try actively to help make sure it works. That's a really important teammate behavior.

On compromise

Compromise the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy. But it doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a noble thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.

On stubbornness

Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn. Never get to a point where you are resolving something by who gets exhausted first. Escalate that. I'll help you make the decision. Because that's so de-energizing and such a terrible lousy way to make a decision.

On decisiveness at scale

Yes. And you want to try to get as close to truth as possible. So you want like exhausting the other person is not truth seeking. And compromise is not truth seeking. So now there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth. And that's where disagreeing and commit can come in. But escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say, hey, we can't agree on this. We like each other. We're respectful of each other. But we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to make a decision here so we can move forward. But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on decisions, as quickly as you responsibly can, is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions at all scale levels. So it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity. Amazon has a million and a half people. And the company is still fast.

On day one thinking

It's really a very simple and I think age old idea about renewal and rebirth. And like every day is day one. Every day you're deciding what you're going to do. And you are not trapped by what you were or who you were or you need self consistency. Self consistency even can be a trap. And so day one thinking is kind of we start fresh every day and we get to make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, about how we're going to operate.

On tenants

when we work on programs that Amazon, we often make a list of tenants and the tenants are kind of they're not principles. They're a little more tactical than principles but it's kind of the main ideas that we want this program to embody whatever those are. And one of the things that we do is we put these are the tenants for this program and then we in parentheses we always put unless you know a better way. And that idea unless you know a better way is so important because you never want to get trapped by dogma. You never want to get trapped by history.

On metrics

It's very common, especially in large companies, that they are managing to metrics, that they don't really understand. They don't really know why they exist. And the world may have shifted off from under them a little. And the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were when somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric.

On truth seeking

we humans are not really truth seeking animals. We are social animals. Yeah, we are. And, you know, take you back in time 10,000 years and you're in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive. You can procreate. If you're the village truth teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths are often they don't want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable.

On hunches

a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on anecdotes. They're intuition based. And sometimes you don't even have strong data. But you may know, you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in, it may resonate with the set of anecdotes you have. And then you may be able to say, you know, something about that feels right. Let's go collect some data on that. Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right. But for now, let's not disregard it because it feels right.

On the beauty of invention

…the perfect invention for the perfect moment in the perfect context, there is real beauty. It is actual beauty and it feels good. It's emotional. It's emotional for the inventor. It's emotional for the team that builds it. It's emotional for the customer. It's a big deal. And you can feel those things.

On books being antidotes to short attention spans

one of the things that phone does, for the most part, is it is an attention shortening device, because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans. And I'm not even going to say we know for sure that that's bad, but I do think it's happening. It's one of the ways we're co evolving with that tool. But I think it's important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things.

On the power efficiency of the human brain compared to AI

We do know that humans are doing something different from these models in part because we're so power efficient. The human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power. And the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks. So, there's something interesting about the way the human brain does this. And also, we don't need as much data. So, you know, like self-driving cars or they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try and to learn how to drive. And, you know, your average 16 year old figures it out with many fewer miles. So, there are still some tricks I think that we have yet to learn. I don't think we've learned the last trick. I don't think it's just a question of scaling things up.

On LLMs trained on private data

So many opportunities, shopping assistance. You know, like all that stuff is amazing. In AWS, you know, we're building Titan, which is our foundational model. We're also building bedrock, which are corporate clients at AWS, or enterprise clients. They want to be able to use these powerful models with their own corporate data. Yes. Without accidentally contributing their corporate data to that model. So those are the tools we're building for them with bedrock. So there's tremendous opportunity here.

On thinking retreats

I do little thinking retreats. So, this is not the only way. I can do that all day long. I'm very good at focusing. I'm very good at, you know, I don't keep to a strict schedule. Like my meetings often go longer than I planned for them to because I believe in wandering. My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document. So, the document should be written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high.

On breakthroughs

I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. And so, the meeting is about like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to like wander your way to a solution. And that is, when that happens just right, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels to me. It has a kind of beauty to it. It has an aesthetic beauty to it. And you get real breakthroughs and meetings like that.

On pre-meeting study hall

We do study hall. For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read. Notes in the margins. And then we discuss. And the reason, by the way, we do study, you could say, I would like everybody to read these memos in advance. But the problem is people don't have time to do that. And they end up coming to the meeting, having only skipped the memo, or maybe not read it at all. And they're trying to catch up. And they're also bluffing like they were in college, having pretended to do the reading. It's better just to carve out the time for people. So now we've all the same page. We've all read the memo. And now we can have a really elevated discussion.

This is why music is so magical to me. I can’t play a lick of or visualize anything.

What's so fascinating about the Grateful Dead, but moreover Jerry's playing, is that I cannot visualize it. Now I'm a good enough guitar player that I could close my eyes or not close my eyes and see what most guitar players are doing. And then pick, I don't even need to have a guitar in my hand. I could just pick it up and do it because I can see where you're going. And I've learned that the music I love the most is music I cannot visualize. So I hear Althea and I couldn't play it for you if you just handed me the guitar. And for the first time in years, I hear a thing on the guitar that I can't place. But it's like I don't play the guitar and now I want to.

What jungle gyms would I like to play on?

I got to be honest, I wanted to play on that jungle jam. Yeah. I just wanted to swing from those bars. Yes. Where else can you do it? This is why people have Grateful Dead cover bands. Not because they want anything else out of it, but to experience what it feels like to play that music. It is not a commercial endeavor. It's I got to know what that wind feels like blowing through my hair.

Riffing on, or spoofing on, or in the spirit of, your style is the essence of being creative, of being an artist.

That doesn't mean copy. It just means in the spirit of that thing, in the spirit of. And again, like almost the way that my career worked as a guitar player, where I took so, I copied so many times from so many people that I forgot what I was copying. So I just started being myself.

The critical voice is necessary but needs to be silenced after the correction is made. The critical voice should not pull the trigger to use the sniper analogy.

The way there's always the scout next to the sniper who writes down the windage and stuff. Just your windage up two clicks to the left. It's a little more like that. There you go. There you go. There you go. And then it goes away.

Straight lines that can be coaxed into circles is an interesting mental model.

If you didn't ever see the instrument, you'd think it looked different than it does because of how they're able to coax it. They're taking straight lines and making circles out of it. That's how I see great guitar players, great pianists. When I hear Bill Evans play the piano, if I'd never seen a piano, I would think it was circular or that it was like a spiral or something, not straight lines.

Being willing to suck at something you are a master at is likely an underappreciated skill/ability.

It's more fun than ever to pick up a guitar at home and play because I'm playing from a different place now. Like so cool. I'm playing from a different play. I don't have set stuff I play on the guitar. I don't have I think most guitar players like have a thing they do. I have none. I have no if I went to NAM the music conference or something and I sat down and there were a hundred people watching me pick up a guitar. I could suck for five straight minutes before I picked something up that was like all the sudden like oh he flipped a switch.

The simplest thing you could (insert verb) that would communicate the most out of this (insert noun) is another broadly applicable mental model.

Now it is about what is the simplest thing you could play that would communicate the most out of this guitar and sometimes it's I mean really really basic but with so much depth or the attempt At adding depth into it and when you do that I almost want to get other guitar players around and go just try this.

This sentiment really resonates with me—consistency compounds.

Now my commitment is to, it's hard to explain it, just consistency. Just consistency. And getting out of your head the idea that there's, how do I say this? You've got to depend on magic to be good at something.

It was comforting to know even prolific creatives need the magic to enter the room.

It's not how you're doing when, you know, the spirits in the room. How do you live off of crumbs for a long enough period of time that you can wait for the magic. You wait for the magic. Because you have to.

Spirited and resilient

You're a great writer in my book if you can drive home with the radio off, knowing you didn't get it today and showered off like a great basketball player who didn't win the game and Wake up the next day and go, let's hit it. Let's go again.

Must be nice. Lol. It is the goal, though.

I can live between the kills pretty well.

I very much struggle with the “cancel-everything” aspect of creative work, especially if there is no external deadline. Once I’m able to lock in, I have the “craftsman” in me, and I can produce good creative work. For me, I think it’s about cultivating a lifestyle that supports this type of commitment.

the other thing that I think young writers need to figure out is like, it's always going to be code cracking after you have your fun of bringing the song to life. Bringing a song to life is always the fun part. It's the best. But it doesn't finish the song. No. Now you have to put on a lab coat. Yeah, it's work to do. Absolutely. And you cannot go to dinner. The craftsman comes into the room and cancel everything. Yeah, there's work to do. There's work to do. And that is my favorite moment when you know that I got something. Yeah. And you know that what I just came up with in 15 minutes has inside of it all the information for the verses, codes, cracks, we know what it is.

This rant inspired a lot of this essay.

And when it's over, you never have to write it again. No. But you will always have it for the rest of your life. And I see young artists sometimes with a hard drive full of minute and a half ideas that were just the spark. Yeah. And they move on to another spark and they move on to another spark and they move on to another spot. And I'm like day two and three and four. Yeah, you don't leave the room. You put sweatpants on. You're in a hoodie. You're in a hoodie. You're not going out tonight. Your friends are going out and you're not. Why? Because the biggest thing is about to happen to you. And all these songs that I play on stage now represent a night. I went shut it down. We got work to do. It's my favorite and least favorite. It's just this wonderful torture you know you're in for.

Systemization or algorithmic approaches to building a body of creative work are highly appealing. However, I do think throwing away the system from time to time has value as well.

There's a way to write songs now for me that's very mathematical in terms of making it easier on yourself to understand what's left to write in the song. So I go okay if you have a verse you have a rhyme scheme. You have syllables. You have the spirit of what the song is. That's 15% of the song. If you have a chorus that's 50% of the song. You've got three times. As soon as you have a rhyme scheme you now know exactly what your second verse has to do or not do.

So everything you come up with is just take it off of what remains that you have to do. Yeah and the less you have to do the easier it feels. The easier it feels. Because you feel like you have momentum.

I love this technique for getting un-stuck

You know, like there's just tricks of momentum. There are tricks of momentum. You're absolutely right. The combination here didn't work. Wait till a new combination falls into place. That's actually the secret to life now is if something's not working just wait until the sequence changes and it'll open the door. It'll open a different door or open the same door a different way.

This is why I neurotically carry a notebook or my phone around with me at all times. If I don’t capture the genesis of an idea the second I have it, it's as good as gone. Something else I experience is an idea that seems really exciting at a specific moment, but when I return to it later, it’s lost some or all of its genius. The more I can write in the moment, the better.

Don't let that moment pass because you will never come back to that. You'll never come back to that. So again, I don't know if you have to refine it but you have to really get as close as you can to a great first draft where then maybe it's like, oh, I'll change this word. That's right. Maybe this line's not as good as it could be. That's right. But get to where it's like, I see this whole song. I couldn't agree more.

It just just get a circuit going. Yeah. Get the light bulb to light up because all the wiring is in there. Yes. And then it's so much easier to change it. Yeah. And then you realize most of it didn't need to be changed.

I like this approach to re-positioning something that evolves to such a point it no longer resembles the historical/expected form.

I call it split the stock. If you think that something's gone so downhill, then split it and call it something else. So if I were to say, I don't get today's music, I don't want to say that. So what I say is, well, a lot of what I'm hearing is social media soundtrack. And if I say that, now I can say that's really good social media soundtrack. Instead of that's bad music. And I do that with a lot of stuff so that if I redefine it, I give it the dignity of calling it something a little bit different.

I have actually adopted this same approach to being critical/discerning without being too much of a snob. “Oh, cool, thanks for sharing. It's not really my cup of tea.. but I understand the appeal.”

Rubin in response to Mayer’s point above

I just think about it. It's not for me.

This is so fascinating to me, not having any musical background. Vowel sounds that work for your voice? Shape of the larynx? Shaping the note? Tonal color? 🤯 I had no clue this was going on when someone is singing.

We write the vowel sounds that work for our voice. So all of a sudden, it's not that I can't do it. I would never write it for myself…

That's what I would do for the shape of my larynx. So to squeeze it into, it's not a very automatically pleasant thing. I know this. I have an ear. I can hear it as I go. My job is to find a way as best I can to shape the note. That sounds as close to what the spirit of the song, I can do that on the guitar way easier. Yeah. And there are times where I know that I'm not quite the exact tonal color that I'd want to be for the song, but I can't swap a vocal chord like I can a guitar. So that's an interesting lesson in embracing my limits. Hey, man, I'm just John. I know I try, man.

I’d like to be able to pick up on this level of musical nuance.

There's a couple of things. I mean, a couple, just magic nights. I've even thought to myself, is everyone perfectly slept and freshly showered on this version? Everyone just take a nap for the same length of time and woke up and had the same meal. They're playing perfectly. And really what it is is musical aquarium. You just stare at the fish. Once you learn the form, it all makes sense. It all makes sense.

I think this idea of isolating music and then not being able to hear the “ball” is super fascinating. Equally fascinating is Mayer’s claim to be able to take his ears out of focus.

everyone starts hearing it as a ball when they're a kid. Yeah. And as they get into the life of music, they start to isolate and they can't go back to hearing it as a ball. This is a brilliant conversation right here, this little nugget. Because I still have the ability to what I call like take my ears out of focus. Like crossing your eyes, just cross your ears. Yeah. And check it. Yeah. You know? And even I was in Berkeley College of Music months into it, weeks into it before I could isolate a kick drum. Which is funny because then I go back to these songs I loved as a kid and I go, oh my God, this is the recording. Yeah. But that's great. That's great ignorance.

I'm really interested in this concept of “jags” or “jagging”. I suspect there is some magic in improving one’s ability to “jag” in whatever capacity their modality allows. I also love the self-talk.

And you're right. And the longer your jags can be, the better you are. Yeah. You can sit behind the microphone for an hour and then get up. You're good. Yeah. Lately, sometimes I go 25 minutes and I go, John, you got to get your numbers up.

In regard to Mayer comparing himself to other musicians.

No. No, I'm not competing with anyone. Why would I do that? I don't want to compete. I want context.

Rubin:

I want to know less.

This reminds me of Taleb mentioning hard work is only a modern pre-requisite for genius.

Seriously, I'm happy to help in whatever way they are. That's the most honest thing. It's real. Yeah. I don't want to do it. I don't, I don't. Yeah. And the thing being as good as it could be and the less we have to kill ourselves for that to be the case, great. If we have to kill ourselves, we do, but...

The importance of noticing and tuning into parts of your life that are “lined up” with your creative pursuits.

Just sometimes you just feel tuned in with your tastes and what you know it takes and especially what little you know it takes. Right now I get my hometown by Bruce Springsteen. I get how you could write it. I get how I could write something that simple because I'm lined up with it. Whatever that thing is by playing these shows, I'm lined up with it. That's why I want to go right as soon as I can.

Rick Rubin inspires people to communicate with more bandwidth and resonance. It’s special. I’m tuned in, and I’m loving it.

I just knew that your ability to understand things would allow me to explain them with more sort of bandwidth.

“Probably okay” is not the standard.

• But in 90 days, I tend to be through the initial triage of, okay, let’s get ourselves on a solid footing here, where we can function and operate and understand, and then we can much more incrementally, iteratively progress from there. (View Highlight)

• I go after cultural issues. People that are just egregious violators of … things that we all generally find normal and acceptable, we very quickly separate on behavior. Performance is something that we will give more time; behavior we won’t. And that’s because behavior is a choice, not a skill set. (View Highlight)

• But most of the time, unfortunately, it’s like “Look, you’re not a fit here. This is not who we are, who we want to be.” It’s choosing. Just look, we want you to be this way, not that way. And for some people it’s like, hey, they learn behaviors in other companies; it’s part of who they are. It’s their culture. This is not for you, man. (View Highlight)

• Shane Parrish: Alan Mulally put it to me this way. He said, “When you’re choosing a behavior that’s not the organizational behavior that’s desired, you’re choosing not to be a part of the organization.” I thought that was a powerful way to think about it. (View Highlight)

• But in business, it’s more like being a professional sports franchise. You’re assembling the best players, and we may be friends, but we don’t have to be friends because we’re not coming together on the basis of friendship. We’re coming together on the basis of mission. In other words, share a purpose. We’re very demanding of each other and it’s really about our respective contributions to the mission. That’s the basis of our relationship. So it is much more akin to professional sports. I think that’s the correct analogy. (View Highlight)

• do things in sequence rather than in parallel because we just want to be lightning fast on the things that really matter and really make sure that we’re appropriately provisioned (View Highlight)

• We operate through influence.” If you can convince people, great. And if you can’t, well then, you just can’t. It doesn’t matter what your title is or what organization you come from or who your boss is. So it’s really an extreme meritocracy. It’s really [that] your ideas are judged on their merit, not on where they’re coming from. You fight it. I always say, “Let’s be like Peter Pan. We never grow up, at least not entirely.” So we maintain that chip on our shoulder, that attitude. And back to the insanely great thing—if we’re not inspired [by] what we’re working on, that’s a problem in and of itself. (View Highlight)

• maladjusted people, they just have this disparity between where they are and what they want to do and what they want to prove. I mean, all of us want to prove things either to our parents if they’re still around or [to] our siblings or our friends or people that didn’t believe in it—all this stuff. (View Highlight)

• I like people that have attitude, that have a chip on their shoulder, that have a burning need and desire to prove something. Now over the years, that will wear off a little bit. That is just the nature of things. I mean, when you’re 18, you have a very different life experience than when you’re 40 years older, depending on what happened in between. But I generally like people who constantly are very, very strongly aware of where they are versus where they could be. (View Highlight)

• I rarely use the word “proud” or “pride” because that signals a profound happiness with the status quo. And I don’t have that because I’m always at odds with the status quo. That’s sort of the natural malcontent posture that we have. (View Highlight)

• One way we do this, and this is throughout [our] organization, all our employees that are not in sales—because salespeople are on commission plans—but every quarter, the company has to earn the bonus pool. In other words, the money that we’re going to use for bonus[es], we have to earn it. (View Highlight)

• And then we tell people how we earn it, exactly what the metrics are, and we share all of that so they know, hey, none of us are going to get bonuses unless the company gets paid. But once the company earns it, now we’re starting to allocate the bonus money to managers and departments, and we just say, “Look, you use this money to send messages to all your people.” There needs to be a bell curve. We want to know who is deserving of two-X, three-X versus who is deserving of zero so that we see the full spectrum, the bell curve, if you will, of people that are performing incredibly well and the ones who are not in good standing. This is not so much about “Oh, I don’t want to give money to people who aren’t doing well.” It’s more “Are we giving enough to the ones who are doing great?” I don’t want the great ones to feel like they’re treated the same way as people that are obviously not in good standing. That’s not a performance culture. (View Highlight)

• So we do this every quarter, and in the beginning, when people have not lived this life before and it’s very challenging for them, it’s like “Oh my God, [I’ve] got to have a conversation like this about money and performance every single quarter with every single person. How do I do that?” Well, people get used to it because during the quarter, they now start to have a different, much sharper lens on the work and how the work’s getting done. And they keep notes and they make notes, and then they can really give a credible message back.

• And employees will also ask, “Hey, if I want to have [a] 150% bonus (or whatever number), what do I have to do?” And by the way, this is exactly the conversation you want to have. What do I have to do? Damn good question. Let’s go have that conversation. What do you have to do? Everybody wants to aspire to something; they want to be better. But [you’ve] got to force that conversation to happen in such a way that it has consequences in terms of compensation and recognition and celebration and all of that.

• So I’m big on recognizing great work. I think great people need to be celebrated and rewarded and singled out in every way possible. Again, that’s a merit performance culture these days that is being frowned upon in popular culture. But in enterprises, this is really important. People need to become the best version of themselves and this is part of how we go about doing that. (View Highlight)

• It’s recognition and celebration. For example, we have equity awards in sales for people that are landing designated customers that we desperately want. And they’re often surprised because they may have forgotten about it because it’s just something that only happens when you land certain customers, and we all get on it to send notes, have conversations, reference it in other conversations. All of a sudden everybody knows, in the whole company, like, “Wow, this guy, this team did this.” And they’re like, “Wow, they’re bathing in glory.” You know what I mean? And salespeople live for that.

• I mean, yes, they live for money. I know they’re coin-operated, but they also live for recognition because it’s very, very rewarding. It’s in a very deep psychological way. It’s very rewarding. So you want to bring that; don’t take it for granted. It’s not like “Oh, that’s just doing your job.” Yes, it is. But at the same time, man, this is amazing. Especially when it comes from me as the CEO and they’re like, “My god, you’re taking time out of your day to tell me this?” I’m like, “Yes, we are.” (View Highlight)

• You get [a] much better sales organization when you have full alignment in the entire company so that everybody works for sales effectively. We always say that we’re all working for sales here because they’re the tip of the spear and the rest of us are really the wood behind the arrowhead. That’s sort of the way I characterize the relationships between sales and the rest of the company. And sales needs to feel that wood behind the arrowhead, like everybody is killing themselves to help me succeed. (View Highlight)

• I’m a stickler for consistent execution in sales organization[s], meaning that every quarter, everybody shows up.

• What we can’t have is like “Well, I had a bad quarter, but I’m going to do better next quarter.” I don’t want that. We need to run ourselves in our organization in such a way that we show up, all of us. Every single period, every single line of business, channel, geography, and so on. And if that becomes the culture or the expectation and the reality, yeah, you’re going to do way better than the rest of them because sales tends to be a very unevenly distributed thing and you want to work on that.

• And so the expectation is “I don’t care how far ahead of the plan you are, [if] you have a shitty quarter, that’s now a problem with me. I can’t build on you; I can’t trust you. I can’t expect that you’re going to deliver.” And you work on that all the time. People that are not consistent yet, you better find a way to get there. Not overnight, but you’re going to make moves. What moves are you going to make? What are the reasons that this is inconsistent? What are you doing differently, right? (View Highlight)

• Because we always say a good quarter is one where you exceed your numbers but also one where you set yourself up for the next one. [You’ve] got to do both. It’s not just about making the quarter; you also have to lay the foundation for the next one and the rest of the year. So [you’ve] got to think much more long term, much more strategic[ally] about your business, rather than “I’m just trying to hit a number for a quarter.” (View Highlight)

• Shane Parrish: I think of that sort of like running a billiards table, like where you leave the ball matters for the next shot.

• Frank Slootman: It’s a good analogy.

• Shane Parrish: Anybody can make one shot, but you want to run the table. (View Highlight)

• The thing about sales is that great salespeople can’t sell a bad product, but lousy salespeople can sell a great product. (View Highlight)

• “No, because if you had a great product, even an average or a below-average salesperson will be able to sell it.” And typically sales problems are product problems, but typically that’s not the initial assessment because you don’t want your baby to be called ugly and the investors are around the table that invested in your technology, so you don’t want to openly face your demons and really confront things the way they really are. (View Highlight)

• This is actually a bit of a problem because [if] you hire people from a very successful company, they’ve never really sold because they were just riding the momentum. (View Highlight)

• I like to hire salespeople who have really been in shit fights because that brings the type of skills and focus that you really want to have, rather than people that are good at quoting and picking up orders. (View Highlight)

• What you don’t want to do is rely on information because you just get it secondhand, third-hand, fourth-hand, and you don’t know whether you’re dealing with a feeble person that has no fortitude or whether you’re dealing with a real issue. So there’s no substitute for inspecting things at the front lines and really [being] part of it. I always tell salespeople, if I can’t sell it, I’m not expecting you to sell it, okay? So if you’re going to get your nose bloodied, I’m going to get my nose bloodied. (View Highlight)

• you need to get to reality. In other words, you need to see things as they really are. So [you’ve] got to be very, very careful with what’s second- and third-hand information. And sometimes, you know, [I’ve] got to whip people up the hill and it’s like “Look, you guys are basically, you’re intimidated by the marketplace. You’re your own worst enemy because you just lack fortitude and confidence and you can’t articulate things.” And that’s all under the header of sales enablement. (View Highlight)

• people see me talk in front of a customer; they go and they see the customer react and they see the customer ask questions. They’re like, “Hey, I can do that, too.” There’s no better learning than right in front of where the action happens. So you want to bring that. (View Highlight)

• you want to press all the way into the end zone and then people go …, “Okay, I think I can do it. I’ve seen it. The results are there. It works.” (View Highlight)

• People ask me, “Why do you think this is sort of a late adopter?”

• I’m like, “Well, because he hasn’t bought yet. That’s why.” He would’ve bought already if he was an earlier adopter. So by definition, he didn’t. Why didn’t he? Okay, so he has different ways of assessing and thinking about the value, about the risk, all these kinds of things. And these things are difficult to observe. Sometimes you just wake up and you’re like, “You know what? Things are different now.” They have changed; just in the aggregate, you just sense the change that is happening, and then it becomes a question. Okay, we have to adjust, we have to change, [we’ve] got to do all these things. (View Highlight)

• I want to ask very business-specific questions.

• An insurance company may say, “Hey, I have disproportionate bodily injury claims in this state compared to the surrounding states. A, what’s going on? B, am I going to have it again next quarter? C, what might I do about it?” Should we just stop underwriting in this geography altogether, which is what’s happening in California right now? Or obviously it’s a pricing issue because how do we price risk? Is it a policy issue?

• Those are questions that … analysts would be launched on because people would do their reasoning, not the system. And the system becomes like an advisor to you in literally damn near real time. So our relationship with data is going to get amped up here, to use a term, in ways that we just can’t even imagine. (View Highlight)

  Note: In reference to the question about AI and data

• it’s going to be a renaissance in intelligence and computing and how we mobilize data for purposes. Yeah, it’s a great time to be alive and I think the innovation will drive a lot of new employment. We’ll also have a lot of obsolescence in jobs and even functions and industries and processes. But that’s the nature of a capitalist free economy. Creative destruction is just the nature of stuff. (View Highlight)

• I’m basically politically neutralizing the idea of making mistakes. Because making mistakes—everybody who makes decisions will make mistakes. People always ask me, “What are your biggest mistakes?” Well, my biggest mistakes are always around hiring. … I’ve hired a lot of great people over the years, but I’ve also made my share of mistakes because that’s just the nature of things. But if you’re willing to confront it … I talked about this in the book as well. I may make mistakes again and again on the same topic. But the one thing I will tell you is that I won’t stop until I get it right. In other words, I’m willing to say again and again that I screwed it up. But I won’t stop until we’re in the place that we need to be. So that’s a very powerful message to people to say, “Look, this is the behavior we want. Confront your demons.” Basically go after the things that didn’t work, that were wrong. (View Highlight)

• Interviews are far less valuable—not for all roles. I mean, [there are] roles where interviews, for example, in engineering, you put them in front of a whiteboard and say, … write code that does this. So you can very much test people’s skills that way. But [interviews are not as useful] in the other roles where people become good at selling themselves, right, because they’ve learned that over the years and they talk well, they look well and they’re very pleasant and they’re getting along and all these things.

• But the way to find out anything about people is to fully surround where that person has been, okay? If they’ve been at company A, you go find out who in my company was at company A while this person was there, and I’m going to go ask inside the company first “Who knows this person?” because you were a contemporary and “What was that person’s reputation?” and so on. You learn a whole bunch of things very quickly. You don’t even have to go outside of your own company to find out. And then you see if consistency of information is manifesting or [if] it’s still confusing and contradicting and all this kind of stuff.

• And then we go outside. We go call people that we know or have known and say, “Hey.…” And you really want to hear from people that have directly worked with them and say, “What was the experience like?” It doesn’t have to be an indictment type of conversation. It’s like, look, I just want to know more about this person. How did this go? Tell me some stories. Now you start to really get color and texture around a person, as opposed to the sniff test, which is what an interview really is.

• And the thing is, you’re going to learn; you’re going to get great conviction now because you’re like, “You know what? I think we’re really onto a great person.” Or you’re like, “Wow, I’m glad I made these calls because … this was not trending correctly at all.” And I find that people rush, especially in fast-growing companies. We have hiring targets and they’re just slamming bodies, and it’s the worst thing ever. I’d rather hire more slowly but better, (View Highlight)

• people are lazy. They’re like, “Oh yeah, it’s probably okay.” No. “Probably okay” is not the standard. You need to know and have conviction and you need to take the time and do the work to develop that conviction. (View Highlight)

• He was obsessed with studying not only people that were doing what he wanted to do, in this case, become a retailer.

• But also when he gets started in business, he's obsessed with studying his competition.

• It says later on in the book that people work for him, think that he visited more stores, more retail stores all over the world than anyone else in history.

• But he was obsessed with seeking information, which I find is a very common trait as I study entrepreneurs, whether they're reading, talking to people, studying their competition. (Time 0:03:06)

• Most everything I've done, I've copied from somebody else. Again, I may get annoying, I'm saying it so much, but it's the importance of collecting information. (Time 0:25:09)

• I always carry my little tape recorder on trips to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. The associates is what they call the employees working in the store. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of 10 or 15 things we need to be working on as a company. (Time 0:29:24)

• The larger truth that I failed to see turned out to be another one of those paradoxes, like the discounters principle of the less you charge, the more you'll earn. And here it is. The more you share profits with your associates, whether it's in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock discounts, the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers. (Time 0:31:47)

• And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies. Not in trying to drag strangers into your store for one-time purchases based on splashy sales are expensive advertising. Satisfied, loyal, repeat customers are at the heart of Walmart's spectacular profit margins. And those customers are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do.

• So in the whole Walmart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associate in the store and the customer. (Time 0:32:22)

• there may not be anything he enjoys more than going into a competitor store trying to learn something from it.

• Personally, he's such a fine, unassuming, quiet gentleman. But he's always picking your brain and he'll always have a notebook or tape recorder. Here learn everything you know, but he shares his information freely with you in return.

• you have to think small to get big. And he has interesting ideas on how you resist bureaucracy by doing it right the first time.

• direct quotes from David Glass on Sam's philosophies. “ If you don't zero in on your bureaucracy every so often, you will naturally build in layers. You never set out to add bureaucracy. You just get it, period, without even knowing it. So you always have to be looking to eliminate it. You know when Tom Watson Sr. Was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful. A lot of this goes back to what Deming told us, excuse me, to what Deming told the Japanese a long time again, a long time ago. Do it right the first time. The natural tendency when you've got a problem in a company is to come up with a solution to fix it.”

• But he has a chapter, it's chapter 17. And it's called running a successful company, 10 rules that worked for me. Sam talking. He says, when folks have asked me, how did Walmart do it? I've usually been flip about answering them. Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it.

• If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete. That passion has pretty much kept me on the go looking ahead to the next store visit or the next store opening or the next merchandising item I personally wanted to promote out in those stores.

• believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don't and about sticking to your guns.

• But I think more than anything, it proves there's absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they've given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best. So maybe by telling it the way it really happened, we can help some other folks down the line take these same principles and apply to their dreams and make them come true.

• The best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate.

• One of the real reasons I'm writing this book is so my grandchildren and great grandchildren will read it years from now and know this. If you start any of that foolishness, I'll come back and haunt you. So don't even think about (Time 0:52:44)