Guy Kawasaki: Discussing Passion, Grit, and Success in the Modern Technological World

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Is this the right spouse? Is this the right startup? Is this the right product? Is this the right project? Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And holy shit, do we have one for you today. I just got done interviewing the Guy Kawasaki. If you don't know who Guy Kawasaki is, I don't know where you've been. He was Steve Jobs' right-hand man at Apple. He was a chief evangelist for Apple in the way early days. He wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He's written 17 books. He's interviewed some of the most incredible people in the world.

And somehow, I landed him on my podcast here. So, I did a lot of prep for this one. I mean, I looked at all his interviews. I read his book. His new book, Think Remarkable, is really what the interview was based on. And during my prep, I came across an interview that he had done just a few days earlier, quite frankly, over at Google, where he had talked about the book, but also how he had created Kawasaki GPT, where he put every book, every podcast, and every interview he's ever done on it. And he said in the interview, if you ask Kawasaki GPT a question, you will get a better answer than if you ask me. And so, I decided to take him up on that challenge. So, the night before my interview with him, I asked Kawasaki GPT all the same questions.

And then, during my interview with him, I didn't tell him. I asked him the same questions. And at the end, I told him about my interview with Kawasaki GPT, and you're going to have to listen to his answer at the end to figure out which one was better. So, I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Hey, what's up, guy? How are you doing? I think we are ready to rock and roll. Ready to rock and roll. So, how's your day going? I literally, I literally just got out of the water. So, I was going to ask, did you get your surfing this morning? So, if I appear or sound particularly enthusiastic, it's because it's the endorphins still. I love it. Still pumping through my blood.

How close are you to the hang ten? You said last time I heard you at Scott McGregor's, you were four feet away. So, it was like one foot every five years. How close are you at this point? I'd say I got another four years to go. I have never progressed so slowly trying to do something in my life. No? Is this the biggest challenge thing that you've tried to figure out? Yeah, I mean, this is harder than dealing with Steve Jobs. That's a tall tap. That's saying a lot. Trust me. What's, I mean, I got so many questions for you that we'll dive into the book. But with your love of surfing, what would you say your biggest lesson that surfing has taught you about life? Oh, God. You know, I can explain all of life in surfing at this point.

So, yeah. So, first of all, the fact that I would take up surfing at 60 is a, it's evidence of a growth mindset. Because let's just say, most people don't take up surfing at 60. I mean, I swear all of my peers, they're, you know, their most active thing is changing the channel to Fox. And maybe they play golf once a year at the alumni tournament, right? But I'm surfing almost every day. So that's one life. But, not one life, one lesson. But I'll give you some more. So, 90% of surfing is sort of looking out to the ocean, looking out for the right wave. And that's kind of true of life. Like, you know, is this the right job? Is this the right spouse? Is this the right startup? Is this the right product?

Is this the right project? So, 90% of that is looking for it. Now, if you never turn and paddle, if you never ask a person out, if you never ask for a job, if you never ask for a raise, if you never start a book, if you never start a company, if you never start a project, you know, again, guess what? You will never accomplish anything. So, you can't sit there all day. At some point, you got to turn. And then when you turn, you got to paddle furiously. And, you know, sometimes you make it, sometimes you don't. And sometimes, you have made the wrong decision in surfing. You picked the wrong wave. You turned in the wrong direction. You turned at the wrong time. There's so many things that can go wrong.

But then, then it's a matter of, do you just sort of give up in disgust? Or do you try to make your decision right? As opposed to making the right decision. And, yeah, those are the major lessons of surfing. I love it. I love it. So, and look, these are all things I wanted to unpack. I got so many questions. And just to let you know, so I've always known about you, but I didn't know a lot about you until Scott McGregor had you on that talk. And then I read Think Remarkable and then started diving into everything else. And the more I learn about you, the more I appreciate everything that you're doing because, you know, this book about growth, grit, and grace, those characteristics that make up remarkable people, I wanted to back into those and pick apart each one and just ask you some very specific questions that I'm super curious about.

All right, fire away. And wanted to start with grace in two ways. One is to say thank you, obviously, for coming on this. Like, this is your Jane Goodall out of body experience moment. This is equivalent to that. So thank you for that. I really do appreciate it. You ought to raise your standards. No, not at all. But the other one I wanted to thank you, and this was really what caught me when you were talking with Scott was how the fact that you're an expert in assholes. And I say this because I've had this narrative in my head for a while that has really, really frustrated me about how it seems like you have to be a raging asshole to get to the pinnacle of success, right? Because that's what everybody gets glorified, the movies and the news and everything else.

But you really reframed my thought process around this, which I genuinely appreciate, because I kind of looked at it as almost a binary thing, right? And Steve Jobs, I actually use as an example. I'm like, he did incredible things, but from everything I've read about him or saw, like, he's just seemed like a raging asshole. He was. You broke it down into four different types of assholes, right? There's the political suck-up, the controlling micromanager, the egocentric, and the mission-driven. Can we focus the difference on the egocentric asshole and the mission-driven asshole? And could you unpack that a little bit, Cleet? An ego-driven asshole is all about self-glorification. You know, it's me, myself, and I.

It's me and my entourage. It's me and my personal assistant who has a personal assistant. It's me and my driver. It's me and my 25 people. And, you know, this is the glorification of this company is all about for me, right? Whereas, I can honestly tell you, I don't think Steve Jobs was like that. Now, Steve Jobs was an asshole, but not that kind of asshole. He was an asshole who was driven by the mission of making the best computer possible and making people creative and productive. And if you got in the way of that vision, then he would run you over. There's no question he would run you over. In fact, that was a great motivation for me that I wanted to avoid being run over. So that actually motivated me to do some of the best work of my life.

Now, I think that, you know, we could have a long discussion about which comes first. Like, you're an asshole. So that enables you to accomplish, you know, miraculous things. Or, you accomplish miraculous things. So all of a sudden, people tolerate your asshole-ness. I can tell you one thing. Do not interpret this as saying that being an asshole is necessary or sufficient to succeed. It's not at all true. And if you need an example, counter example to Steve Jobs, it's Melanie Perkins, who's the CEO of Canva. She is the opposite, right? But she's still very successful. So you don't need to be an asshole. Maybe in some cases, it helps. Or maybe you are successful. So people put up with your bullshit.

And so when people start putting up with your bullshit, there's no feedback mechanism. Well, or the feedback mechanism is flawed, right? So like, oh, I'm so brilliant. I'm so successful. People put up my bullshit. I just keep giving them bullshit because, you know, it doesn't matter because I am God, right? Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB Sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, which are filling the funnel and driving a close that cover all aspects of the sales process. It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like ChatGPT and how to leverage AI throughout the entire sales process.

Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to JBarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code PODCAST at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now let's get back to the conversation. How about this, staying on that, with you, Apple, A players. You always hired A players. You had this philosophy of hiring. And my curiosity on that is, does the world need B and C players? Right? Because the whole idea of like, if you have a bunch of A players, they might rip each other apart. But is there room for people to just do the job? People who aren't those, you know, turn and burn type of people.

Several thoughts here. First of all, A players do not rip each other apart. Right? I mean, if you're truly an A player, you're trying to make it work. You're not trying to rip each other apart. So that's number one. Number two is that as I've gotten older and older, I've become more accepting that, you know, I think there's a tendency to judge people in their careers. So you might say that, let's say you work at a company and you see some people, they don't come in as early. They don't stay as late. They don't fly on weekends. And you think, oh, they lack dedication. They lack whatever. Right? But I've come to believe that, you know, who are you to judge what's important to them? Maybe they're a single mom, right?

Maybe they're a single mom dealing with two kids and her parents. I mean, you just don't know how, you know, you cannot judge somebody else unless you're in their shoes. So that's number one. I also believe that. Yeah. I mean, so you could say, oh, that person is a B player. Well, not to her kids. Right? And arguably that's more important. So that's how I look at saying is, and now I have come to believe that everybody you meet can do something better than you. Right? So like, you know, you may think, you know, you're just a cat's meow. Right? But that person serving you cappuccinos, maybe he's like 10 times the surfer you are. Right? And now maybe the world doesn't value his surfing ability as much as your ability to write books or lead a company or, you know, whatever.

But, but, that doesn't mean that you are somehow morally superior or a more valuable human being. It's just, you know, how do you count? Right? It's very unfair to judge a person at that instant in time as a B player or a C player because when you consider the growth mindset, today's B player could be tomorrow's A player or A plus player. So if you make this instant sort of permanent judgment, you're a B player, you can never be more than that. That is wrong because a B player can become an A player. So I need to, I need to revise that theory that, you know, A players hire A players or people who can become A players and they have the growth mindset to help B players become A players. Yeah, I love that.

And I think the grit factor is what you, and that's, that's what I'm very curious about. First of all, why did you, why did you dedicate this book to Gen Z? I dedicated this book to Gen Z because I think that they're in this stage of life where they're looking for direction and, you know, like all of them, they're reading the four agreements and they're, you know, they're trying to figure out what to do and I hope with some hindsight and it's not just my hindsight because I have hindsight of 250 remarkable people. I mean, I could make the argument, I may have more hindsight available to me than anybody in the world, right? So, I, I, I, that's why I kind of wrote the book. I feel I have this moral obligation.

You have all this information and inspiration that nobody's going to listen to 250 hours and read 5,000 pages of transcripts. So, guy, you know, for some reason, you've been blessed with all this, all these resources that it's time to get it out. So, that's, that's kind of my, my perspective there, you know, that's, I, I have this amazing resource and I don't want it to go to waste and I think in particular, Gen Z and millennials need this. Yeah. Do you think that we're, we're lacking grit? Like, do you think it's going away or do you think it's just in a different place? Well, I mean, like, like we started this conversation, you know, like, what do you believe when you read the press? And right now, when you read the press, all you hear about is, ah, Gen Z, they don't want to come back in the office and, you know, they're, they're working in Bali two hours a day and they think that's a full-time job at Google and, you know, stuff like that.

But I, I guess over the course of my life, another thing I've come to the conclusion is, is that, uh, nostalgia is overrated and like every generation says, you know, when I was young, I used to study hard. I didn't do anything bad. I worked hard. I contributed to the bottom line of the family. You know, I never cheated. I never stole. I never did drugs. I was, you know, such a clean kid. I did everything. And now this generation is just lazy. All they care about is partying and working remote and all that. I mean, let's be honest, right? Yeah. We screwed around as much as anybody else. Oh, absolutely. There was no internet, thank God. So none of it was recorded for crying out loud. Yes, there is that.

So, you know, um, it's, it's amazing how retroactively, you know, man, you, all of us were perfect when we were young. None of us, none of you kids are perfect. That's total bullshit. You talk about this being a pivotal moment in, in society in general, but that what we're starting to see, at least from my perspective, I did this post a while ago, say, Hey, stop doing what you're supposed to do, right? You're supposed to get a, go to college. You're supposed to get a job. You're supposed to get a partner. You're supposed to have a kid. And there was a post that a millennial said that's, yeah, that's all well and good, John, but you as a Gen Xer and everybody above you, you had these societal norms that actually were comfortable because like you kind of knew what your next step was.

But now that those societal norms are breaking in front of us, religion, all these different things, now we can do whatever we want, but I don't know what to do. So we're, we're in this balance of you can do almost anything you want to do coming out of school, not even going to school at this point. You don't need a degree to make, you know, a living. So how, how do we kind of, is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? How do we make sure that we harness the talents while giving some directions so that it doesn't all unravel? Well, I hope that people, that the guiding light is that they want to make a difference and that they want to leave the world better than they found it. And I think, I think if you had that guiding light, that would pretty much put you on the right path.

I mean, there are people who are living, leaving this world worse than they found it, right? And yet, they have no compunction about that. No. Well, and this leads to pursue your interests versus your passions. Yes. You talk a little bit about, because I love that, because I used to, I used to, when people say, follow your passion, I'm like, if I followed my passion, I'd be a stoner artist, like living on the beach and I would be, I'd be broke. But you talk about focusing your interests. Yes. And then developing your passions. Could you unpack that a little bit? I think that we're doing people a disservice when we say you need to find your passion, because it implies that it's like a miraculous thing and you find it and instantly you fall in love and, you know, you dedicate the rest of your life to it.

And I don't think that happens very often, if ever. I think that as you go through life, especially Gen Z, Gen Z, man, you got like 90 years to do stuff. So you should pursue a lot of things that interest you and discard the ones that you don't like as you go. But don't set yourself up that, oh my God, you know, I'm 25. I don't have my passion yet. Because, listen, I've had three or four passions in my life. My last passion is podcasts and I came to that at, you know, 64. So I think that, you know, rather than, to use a dating analogy, if somebody says to you, you're 25 years old, how come you haven't met the man, woman, how come you haven't met the person of your life yet? You're 25. Oh my God.

So get out there and find that person. Well, I would make the case that, you know, when you set out on a path like that. That's just like, that's not organic. You know, you cannot force that, right? So, and, you know, I mean, you may meet the person of your life in coach on United Airlines as opposed to Tinder, right? So, so you gotta chillax and do a lot of sampling. So you talk about the shit sandwich. I actually use the shit sandwich analogy quite a bit. Even before I read your book, I use this quite a bit. And so there's a, I think, I'm curious on that as far as follow your interests versus the shit sandwich, right? Because I agree with you. Like, I tell people all the time, like, as long as you have a plan of where you want to go, at least directionally do good shit, that type of thing, then I'll eat a shit sandwich if that shit sandwich is going to get me to that next level, to that next level, to that next level.

But so many people taste a bite of the shit sandwich and they just don't want to do it. Yeah. So how do you balance the follow, you know, your interests with the shit sandwich that nobody wants to eat? Well, I would say that when you find yourself eating shit sandwiches and loving it, you have found your interests. There you go. So, you know, like, you're a podcaster, I'm a podcaster. As a matter of fact, today, I don't know why, it's like now ruining my brain, but I figured out for each podcast episode which lasts an hour, we put in roughly 20 hours of work. Now, you may find that astounding and maybe I'm astoundingly inefficient, but I added it all up. You know, the research, the transcription, the sound design, everything.

It's about 20 hours. And a lot of that is just shit sandwiches. It's a lot of editing. It's a lot. And, you know, but it's, to me, it's enjoyable stuff. And so, I don't want to take credit for this because I got this thought from Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a You Know What. and he said, guy, you know what, when you find yourself doing a shit sandwich and you love the shit sandwich, you know you found what you love to do. And, like, as a writer, this book, I bet you we made 10,000 edits. I mean, it's unbelievable how many edits we made in this book. from the outside looking in, you know, you would say, guy, like, what the hell? You had to make 10,000 changes. In the back of this book, just human interest, in the back of this book, I list every coffee shop and restaurant that I edited the book in.

And I swear, there's about 60 or 70, right? Like, you know, if you, if, if in the year 2023, if you saw me in a coffee shop, I was editing this book. And you look at that, it's a guy like, yeah, why are you killing yourself like this? Well, it's because this is what I love to do. Well, and by the way, did you get the Olive Garden gift card I sent by you with the book in the package? You know what? I swear to God, I swear to God, I carry it with me. This is the card you sent me. I'm sorry, I don't have your t-shirt on, but yeah. That's all right. Okay, I'll tell you a funny story. So, you know, sometimes when you make speeches, they give you this commemorative crystal, right? And it's, you know, spoken at the 76th annual, you know, ABC Company Sales Awards, Guy Kawasaki, you know, whatever, right?

So, sometimes when I get that, I take it to my wife, and my wife is just like shaking her head, like, what are we supposed to do with this? I don't know, honey. man, and this, so I've told her sometimes, you know, why don't people just give me an Olive Garden gift card? I mean, that's what I love. If you're out there and you work for Olive Garden, you should know, man, I am like your Olive Garden evangelist. And, you know, when I tell my friends I love Olive Garden, they all like shake their head and laugh at me, like, I don't understand that. And then I take them to eat there and they love the food and like Olive Garden, the food is good. Unlimited breadstick, salad, and soup. You never have to make reservations and there's always parking near an Olive Garden.

Like, what am I, oh, they got good Wi-Fi too. So you add all those up and then plus at the Olive Garden that I go to in Capitola, California, nobody knows who I am, which is a really big plus for me because nobody comes up to me in the middle of me eating my salad and my spaghetti with marinara and broccoli on top. Nobody comes up to me and says, ah, I got this idea. Can I just spend a few minutes pitching you? It's never happened in Olive Garden. I love it. So, I had a feeling because I was like, when I heard that, I was like, fantastic. Because that comes to the perception reality. Like, all of a sudden there's this narrative about something that takes off and now it's like, well, why? Like, I like Cheesecake Factory and for some reason the Cheesecake Factory gets shit on all over the place.

You're my kind of guy, yeah. I love Cheesecake Factory. I don't know, what's wrong with it? It's got great food. Everything I eat there is fantastic and it's a good environment and everything else. it leads me to the, and you brought up the book, Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. When did you, you get, I've heard you talk at one of the events where, you know, you're 60 years old right now, you just don't have, you don't have time for shit anymore. But in your 25, you could, when you were 25, you couldn't not give a shit. Like, you couldn't just be you. So when did you find your, like, not give a shit factor, if you will? When did that really kick into gear for you? Oh, about last year. No, I mean, you're not give a shit factor.

I'd say 55, you know, 55 or 60. You push back on, Bill, you, like, around 43 when you still, when you were at Apple, when that whole, the ad campaign thing different, and you were like, screw you. Well, you know, give me, give me one of those copies. Like, that takes a level of not giving a shit, right? You lost a, you see you joke about losing a lot of stock. But, you know, well, but, you know, honestly, not giving a shit has several components. One of which is you have to be somewhat financially secure, right? I mean, you still got to give a shit if you, if you have four tuitions to pay. Yeah. But my kids are older now, so that's one thing. I think the, a big component of not giving a shit is that you realize that the, the, the grains of sand in your, in your hourglass, there's more in the bottom than in the top.

So, you got to stop giving a shit about what everybody thinks. And you just got to do what you think is right. Because, you know, like, I look at many of these influencers, obviously younger, they got, you know, many more followers than me, but they refuse to engage politically. And they tell me, you know, what I, you know, I don't want to touch politics. I'm going to lose followers. You know, people, that's not why they, you know, listen to me, et cetera, et cetera. But I think you have a moral obligation as an influencer to influence people because, you know, God knows if, if democracy ends, like, yeah, how much lipstick do you think you're going to sell? Yeah. True. And I think that, you know, it's interesting because people do try to play all sides.

And when you pick that lane and you have core values, so for you, when did you find or have you ever gone through the why exercise or have you, like, the Simon Sinek why thing? Like, did you find your why or do you, it was a point where you were like, I get it, this is why I do what I do and the do good shit came up? Honestly, I'm not that cerebral. So I don't sit around asking myself, why do I do things? I mean, for the longest time, when people, you ask me, what motivate, when people ask me, what motivates you, God? I used to tell them, I got four tuitions to pay. And, you know, there's more truth to that than maybe they want to hear. I mean, that is literally true. Now, I only have one more tuition left, so, you know, I can tell you that my giving a shit goes down as the tuition goes down.

There's like high correlation there. I get it. So I, I, what about values? But, you know, really, really, it's just, I got only so much time left on this earth. I got only so much energy. I cannot be trying to be making everybody happy. Yeah. There's about 10 people in the world I care about making happy. Yeah, that's, I think, and those are the ones that matter. Let's talk about growth for, let's move to the growth section or back into the growth section. You talk about inspiration and motivation and how leadership needs to inspire, do both. What's the difference in your mind between inspiration and motivation? I would say that all inspiration is motivation, but not all motivation is inspiration.

So I think, you know, for example, Jane Goodall is inspiring and that will motivate people to be like her. but let's take your random hedge fund manager who is motivated by making as much money as possible. That's motivation. That's not inspiration. So there are forms of motivation like greed or lust or, you know, I don't know, power. I would not call that inspiring. Actually, you brought up something interesting when I, you said, don't worry about where the motivation comes from. Yeah. Well, that's a whole other story. Yeah. So how does that relate? Because some people are super motivated by very negative things. How do you make sure you don't get consumed by the negative motivation and you turn it into?

Yeah. I mean, I really didn't address that. I'm a very optimistic guy. So this book is written. What I say about motivation is don't worry what motivates you. Just worry that you are motivated and you bring up a good case like what if you're motivated by something evil and here's a guy telling you, well, don't worry that you're motivated by evil. Just worry that you're motivated which is a, that is a gap in what I wrote because I'm assuming that for me, motivation means motivation to do good things, right? To work hard, to study hard and what I'm saying there is, you know, don't worry about what motivates you to work hard and study hard. Just worry that you are motivated to work hard and study hard.

And the stories I tell in my book is that I think many people retroactively when they say what motivated you to study hard and work hard, you say, I wanted to democratize computing, I wanted to ensure the reduction of poverty, I wanted to end climate change, I wanted to, you know, whatever, whatever. But I'm being completely honest, when I was growing up, I came from a lower middle class family and I went to a school on the other side of town, so I had to catch the bus to school and twice I got robbed on the bus and then once a family friend gave me a ride in a Porsche on 9-11. Yeah, I heard this. And I'm telling you right now that, you know, people may be motivated by changing the world. All I wanted to do was change the car.

Change the car. So when I rode in that 9-11 and when I got robbed on that bus, I said to myself, you know guys, someday, you're going to live someplace where you're not going to get robbed on the bus and you're going to buy a 9-11 and so you better study hard and work hard and I swear to God that's what drove me. I mean, I'm being completely transparent. That's what drove me. Now, okay, call me shallow, call me insipid, call me plastic, but I'm telling you that's what motivated me. And I think that's to your point, like that's the way everybody feels like they have to have this huge why and I tell kids like I didn't, you know, I read the Simon Sinek book and, you know, my dad passed away a few years ago and that really forced me to reevaluate a few things and so I kind of really did go through the why exercise and the values and it was very helpful for me, but I'm a 48-year-old man.

You know what, at 22 years old, it's kind of like telling them find your passion or find your why. It's like, how the fuck do you know what that is? Like you just want to get up in the morning and make a few bucks and, you know, go to the bars and have some fun, right? That's a lot of ways. Yeah, but you know what, I mean, like who at 22 is not motivated like that, right? I mean, I think a lot of people who at 40 or 45, you ask them what their motivation was when they were 20. They're going to give you some bullshit answer, right? But all they really wanted to do was get up, go to bars, meet women, meet men. It's like, it's like you only hear money doesn't matter from rich people, right? It's like, oh, money doesn't matter.

It's like, well, when you were broke, it mattered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're a trust fund baby, yeah, money doesn't matter. What about, so from a growth standpoint, people, you know, coming up with products, I mean, design thinking, I think Apple almost defined what design thinking was and you talk about backing into it. Can you help me rectify that with or compare that to Henry Ford who says, you know, if I asked what the market was asking for, I would have made faster horses or whatever he said there because you work, like what is the need and back into that need and I apply that to sales across the board but then there's the innovators who are just like, I don't care, like this is what we got to do.

So how do we balance that? Well, I mean, I think the important realization is that there are multiple paths to success. So yes, you can be driven by the customer but you could also be the customer and build what you want for yourself. So Wozniak was not driven by talking to people who said we need a personal computer. Wozniak was driven by wanting to build a computer for himself. So one way is to build the product you want to use and hope you're not the only nutcase that wants it. That has worked very well in tech. Another is, you know, go and see what pain the customer's in and, you know, work backwards from the customer. That can work. So, and those two things are not at all the same but they can both lead to success.

I guess what I'm saying is that there are multiple ways. There are multiple ways and this is one of the problems with reading any book which is these books, including mine, they are not scientifically valid, right? we didn't take a random sample of successful companies and score them on, you know, how they came to their product. Actually, that would be an interesting exercise. All we know about is like, okay, Simon Sinek said this and Elon Musk said this and Steve Jobs said this and Guy said this Bill Gates said this and, you know, so it's kind of like whoever you want to believe or whatever book you read last, that's what's on the top of your mind and guilty as charged. I mean, anybody, any business book writer who is truly honest will admit that they're not really scientifically valid.

And even that the data that you see out there can be manipulated in about 15 different ways. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love your idea of like what's missing, right? For every data set that you look at, like what's missing from that data set? We see all these people who don't have degrees that are super rich. It's like, yeah, but let's find out like the 500 other CEOs of Fortune 500 companies that have a degree. So with education, you are a huge proponent of education, obviously, and shout out to your teacher, Tutti Akao, right? Because you wouldn't be here without her, right? When you talk about hiring, you talk about focusing on skills versus education. So could you, with where education is going right now and some universities are still charging absurd amounts of money for piece of shit degrees, what should a kid do right now in college?

Is it worth pursuing an education and getting a formal degree? I think that going to college is one of the best things you could do to invest in your future. Don't get me wrong. So if you have the money and the means and the ability and the time and, you know, if you can do it, I strongly encourage everybody to go to college. You know, I'm not, I'm not one of these Peter Thiel kind of guys that says, don't go to college, just go straight from high school, build your dream, right? I think going to college, it's four more years of exposure to the world, four more years of sampling that you would not get. It's years of meeting people you would have never met if you just got siloed in a job. If you can, go to all the foreign campuses, you know, just, I didn't do any of this.

So, so I, I think that's all true. Now, having said that, that, that sounds like, you know, somebody who's really got a sense of entitlement. so what I'm saying is, yes, you know, that, that I think is ideal, but if you don't have that situation, you, you, you, college is not the only way to get an education is what I'm trying to say, right? And so, the, the, the onus is on you to get educated. Yes. And so it could be, you know, Google has free courses. It could be Khan Academy. It could be whatever. And I just hope on the other side of this equation that recruiters, they don't limit the pool of hiring to people only who have, quote unquote, the right degree and the right work experience. Because I'm telling you, there are a lot of people who may not have that degree and may not have that work experience, including me.

My work experience was primarily in the jewelry manufacturing business and I went to Apple. On paper, there's no way you should have hired me. So I'm telling you, they should look beyond that. And, you know, the real question is, can this person do the job? Which is very different than does this person have the right educational and work experience pedigree? And do they have the grid? I mean, that's the one thing I learned. Before I, before I worked with Jack Welsh, I asked him when I was 25 years old this stupid question, effectively, because I had started my first company and we were, like the first 20 of us were all in and we were all super passionate and like the 50th person we hired just didn't have it and I asked the dumb question, Jack, how do you instill your passion on somebody else?

And he was like, you can't, you idiot. But he didn't say that. But he was like, you have to hire it. I'm like, oh yeah, that makes a lot more sense. So the grit factor, what do you look for? Like, can you identify grit in an interview? Wow, that is a good question. You know, I certainly think there's evidence of grit in people's lives, right? And I'll give you an example. So I think if you are hiring people and you see someone who was on a wrestling team in high school or college, I think you can be pretty confident that that person has a grit because if you're on a wrestling team, there is no more one-on-one achievement, you know, one-on-one. It's all on you. That's number one. And number two, you know that if you are the best wrestler in the world or in the NCAA, it's not like you're going to get a $20 million contract, right?

So you know that this person is put up with all this stuff just because of the love of the sport or something like that. So I've had wrestlers who work for me and I mean, that's a very rich vein. All you wrestlers listening out there and say, oh, thank you, guy, you know, you're making it so much easier because you're like me, you know, I have grit and you didn't get the full ride and you didn't get the payments under the table and you didn't get the free cars and you didn't get the, you know, the free meals and all that. You know, you didn't get your special dorm and all that. So look for wrestlers. I love it. Let's finish up on this because I know we're coming up on time. You are a massive proponent of AI.

Yeah. I mean, you've gone so far as to say that outside of women taking over the world because men have ruined it, that AI is the only thing that potentially might save us from ourselves as a society, right? And you use it a lot for your book. I did an interesting experiment last night. So I used Kawasaki GPT to have this conversation. Okay. So I interviewed you last night and you had great insightful answers for many of these questions and I did ask us. Wait, today or last night? Last night. So when I got on Kawasaki GPT and I, because I was thinking through the questions I wanted to ask you, right? And I was like, well, I want to see if these are decent questions. And so when I heard you speak at Google and you talked about Kawasaki GPT, I was like, holy shit, like this is perfect.

I can practice now my interview with guy. So I'm going to, I'm going to send this back to you if you, if you're interested. I'm going to compare your real answers with, with, Oh my God. I can tell you what you're going to find. Well, I think I know what you're going to say, but go for it. Kawasaki GPT is going to give you better answers than me. I really truly believe that. So with that, okay. I mean, I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you just because, just because I, I love your vibe. I love your values and everything. But if, if any kid now moving forward can have the, like if you put like an avatar to it, you know, I don't know if you saw Reid Hoffman, what he just did recently and how he interviewed himself and it was like, you could not tell the difference.

Where does that leave us from a huge, like, how can we make sure we retain the human element here moving forward with, with how fast this is moving? Well, I mean, in the case of Kawasaki GPT, Kawasaki GPT was force fed by me with all my writing, my videos, you know, my speaking, all the transcripts of all the interviews that I did. So the data set came from me. It, it, it wasn't, it's not like all made up shit, right? so Kawasaki GPT, it really, I think it's, in a sense, it's, it's a way for me to be immortal, scary as that might be. And so, I'll tell you something, you might, you may find this absolutely, you know, jaw dropping, drop the mic moment, but many times people ask me to write introductions or reviews or blurbs or guest essays, you know, for, shall I say, very famous publications.

And I confess to you that step one, whenever anything like that happens is, I go to Kawasaki GPT and I ask myself the question. I swear to God, I ask myself the question. and now, I don't just copy and paste, but, but, it is the start of most of my blurbs and forewords and contributions, you know, I mean, contributed articles because I swear to God, Kawasaki GPT understands me better than I understand myself. There's no question. I was floored last night when I was, I was just like, holy shit, this is, this is absolutely, I could have surfed longer. But I was, but I was really, but I think that's ultimately what I'm personally struggling with. You know, I met with Gary Vaynerchuk a little while ago and I asked him, this was back in 2017 and I, and I had seen an AI email written better than I could have written.

And what he said still sticks with me to this day. He said, don't let the tech, don't worry about the tech. You're not going to beat it. He goes, just be the last mile. Make sure that, like, let it do all the heavy lifting. But right before you hit send, right before you do whatever, don't just cut paste, make sure you humanize it. Because as long as there's a human on the other end of that, there's that connection that needs to be made. And, and I'm wondering if, if kind of that's what your kind of philosophy is and how you're leveraging this and where you see it going. Well, okay, don't get me wrong. I, I bet you if, if you took the amount of time if I wrote it from scratch versus starting with Kawasaki GPT and editing, I bet you, I don't save that much time.

Right. Yeah. But it sure is a lot less mentally taxing to get a really good first draft from Kawasaki GPT. And I, I would assume that, you know, LLMs will soon be able to kind of fake personalization. Yeah. I mean, it ain't, it can't be that hard to be like Guy, you know, if, if you look at Guy, you say, well, you know, he put it, you should ask, I want to, if you ask Kawasaki GPT, you know, write a response like Guy, be sure you emphasize that you don't give a shit anymore. and you're just telling it like it is. I bet you, I bet, I bet you've chat GPT or Kawasaki GPT could do that today. But you know, you know what's amazing to me? I just interviewed Leslie Valiant and he's this like super duper AI guy.

Like, you know, like he's the computer science, you know, large language model, you know, learning guru of the world. And, you know, he said, Guy, you just need to remember that when Kawasaki GPT or chat GPT is making an answer, it's based on data and it's just, it's just putting up syllable after syllable. It's not really, you know, thinking in the way that a human thinks, but, but I gotta tell you, man, I like, I have asked chat GPT questions that it just floors me with the answer. And you're telling me, yeah, that's just data putting in syllable after syllable based on probability. Like, I refuse to believe that. I mean, it's just, to me, so sentient. And I challenge you, are you listening out there?

So, I want you to go to chat GPT and I want you to ask it the question, should we teach the history of slavery in America to students? And you look at the answer chat GPT gives you and then you ask, well, what about white people who are gonna feel like, you know, they're gonna be ashamed they're gonna be traumatically affected by this and chat GPT is gonna give you an answer about, well, you know, kind of like, yeah, that could happen, but the upside of teaching slavery so much exceeds the downside. And when you read the answer, you're gonna think, I just had a conversation with somebody who's really wise. You're not gonna think, oh, syllable by syllable, it's just data. Nowhere. No, and that's what I find so fascinating about what's happening right now.

Like, you say that this is bigger than the internet, this is bigger than the PC, this is bigger than the iPhone, and I agree with you. I think this is an, like, this is a force multiplier where, you know, hockey stick learning on top of itself. So we don't know where this is going to go, but you gotta be along for the ride, right? Turn and, what is it? What do you do on a surfboard? Do you turn and burn? Turn and burn on it, right? And make your decision right. Yep, make your decision right. Well, guy, this has been an absolute pleasure. Oh, thank you, and you know what? You got me thinking about Olive Garden. I think I'm gonna go take my gift card. I swear to God, I'm gonna go with a gift card right now.

I'm gonna go eat at Olive Garden. Thank you, my friend, and look, is there anything, besides buying the book, is there anything you want to tell the audience on the way out the door? Well, actually, you know what? I'm gonna send you a link to an online Canva course that is How to Be Remarkable, so it's free and online. It's for people who don't have the book, don't wanna buy the book, don't wanna read a book. Love it. This is an online course about how to be remarkable, so that, you know, I'm always trying to help. I love it. I will put that in the show notes and make sure that everybody does. Yes, thank you. Thank you all very much. Hopefully, you all enjoyed this as much as I did on this one, and like I say all the time at the end of all these podcasts, especially this one, go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day went or you think it's going, you make somebody smile today, you know you had a good day, and the world needs a lot more of that right now, so thank you all very much, and I will see you on the other side.

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