AI companies are losing billions because of this. | Bobby Moesta

Silicon Valley has a religion. Build fast and break things, ship features even faster, and use AI to automate everything. But according to one of the greatest product minds of our generation, Bobby Moesta, that is exactly what's killing both the software market and the people working with it. Building the product is actually the easiest part of this entire situation. I can literally build a feature in 38 seconds if I have the system set up right. And so the fact is, more I can build faster. They're just building more shit. And to be honest, they're ruining the customer for at least two to two to five years. In this episode we decipher why having cool tech that popular on Twitter is a death sentence for your startup, and how modern CFOs and financial first thinking is actually killing sales for most companies. But the best part of this episode had nothing to do with jobs to be done or AI SaaS ecosystems. Well, I think the guest I have today really needs no introduction and I have an immense level of gratitude for Bobby to be on this podcast. So Bobby, thank you for taking out the time out of writing best selling books on on a whim to be on this podcast. Well, thank you for having me. What I want to be able to share today, kind of like how I think about this differently and kind of what's going through my head when I'm doing interviews and kind of what happens when it works and what happens when it doesn't work? Yeah, 100% one thing. So I'll get straight into it. Right now, a lot of the people that watch this podcast, especially AI founders, hallucinate the fact that they have demand for their product, when in actuality people are hiring their product to solve either a temporary pain point or they're just curious about it and they're using it and throwing it. And I think right now the number one problem that most AI startups have, even the ones that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is retention. And people being extremely mercenary with what they choose to do with the money that they have and the kind of tools that they use on a daily basis. So talk to me about how we can take the Jobs to be Done framework and help a lot of these AI companies solve for retention. So let's be clear, nothing is really about AI, right? The fact is AI is a tool that allows us to actually do things faster. We can build product faster, we can build features faster, we have access to knowledge faster. But the question is why? What am I trying to do? And so you start to realize that most people sit around and think about all the things that they can do with AI and say, like, oh, some of you are going to want this and somebody's going to want that. But the reality is the only thing that creates demand is a struggling moment. And if people don't struggle, they actually can't see it. And so part of it is my belief is there's a lot of trial because people are in what I call passive looking. They don't know enough and you don't know enough. And it's an emerging kind of what I would call an emerging market. And so part of this is there's tire kicking. Not because they're testing your product, they're tire kicking to literally, to help them understand can they do this or not, right? So, like right now, I've been through several different AIs, but like, I, I, I can't read, I can't write, I can't play music, I can't play an instrument, I can't sing, I can't, I don't have a rhythm, but I'm actually writing songs or, I don't know, assembling. I don't even know what to call it anymore. But the fact is, is like this and I'm, I'm just kicking the tires. And in less than a week, I've created a hundred songs. A hundred songs. And it's really what I've realized is that I'm going to build a playlist for my workout for me with the words that I want to hear, right? That's the struggling moment I have is like, I have to hear everybody else's word. But as I start to work out with my words, my workouts are better. And so I'm using it to help me build a better workout. It's a niche. There's so many other things that people are using it for, but the reality is like, at some point, somebody who doesn't know, I'm an anomaly, Right? Right. And so the fact is, I think right now we've got a world of anomalies and we're trying to figure out what the value prop is. And the thing is, nothing's actually centered because the market has not evolved. Right. The way I think about it is if you think about Surrey, right, Surrey has been around for over 15 years. It has 100% penetration on every iPhone. It still only has 25% usage. It's actually going up now, but it took 15 years for people to actually realize what it is and how it can work and for the system to catch up to it. They don't want Surrey. They want to actually be able to do things, do it a little faster, be able to talk to it. Like there's. They've wanted to talk to it, but they never counted on it. And now the fact is they want to go faster. Because they want to go faster, they're willing to figure out how to talk to it. At least for me, that's the case. So I've had Siri for all this time, but now I'm finally using it. Yeah, I think this Siri example is a particularly interesting one because it feels like Apple started with adoptive ego. They understood that there is a pain point to be solved. They're probably earlier than even Google in terms of getting Siri integrated into the iPhone and making it useful. But they ultimately lost out. What I did want to maybe I think this is the problem. I don't think the market was ready. I think the struggling moment existed, but it wasn't big enough for people to actually do the heavy lift to figure out how to talk to it. And so it's not Apple's fault. It's the fact is to realize that, read the market. Because at some point struggling moments start very small and they grow. And when they get big enough, that's when people take action. And so that's the whole aspect to it is like we keep thinking that, that we can create demand as our product creates demand. And I just think that's crap. The demand exists whether whether a product is there or not. And the demand exists primarily by a struggling moment that people have in their life where they can't stand the thing they're doing right now and they want to do something better or different. Those. That's the moment of where demand is. So when you say, you know, I have demand for my product, that's from the supply side perspective. Oh, people are downloading it, people are using it. It's demand from, from the supply side at pure demand or demand from the consumer side. It's like, why in the world are you doing this? Nobody's asking that question. They're asking about how good the AI is. They're asking about, you know, what questions, what can we do to make it better? As opposed to why are they using it? Why in the world would you even spend time to figure this out? That's the key. Right? So when the context is, let's say, more non deterministic, when a company is essentially trying to be everything for everyone, and I feel like that's almost endemic at this point with a lot of AI startups because they feel like they have to hedge against a larger LLM player, essentially coming out with a feature and killing the product. Talk to me about when a company is within a niche and they're trying to solve for a specific struggling moment for a specific customer. However, that's the sort of practical side of it. And the other angle of it is they're also trying to appease investors and try to fight the anxiety of okay, my product can be obsolete within six months. So when a founder is struggling with themselves, struggling with trying to build for who they know their customer is, and it's probably not going to go away, but couple that with the anxiety of okay, I need to be a Swiss army knife, essentially, how does a founder tackle that? Here's the thing, and this is what I think is the fundamental problem is that we either follow competitors or we follow investors. And the fact is neither one of them know what to do. And because what worked in the past doesn't work in the future, the fact is we have to actually, especially in this space, because it's so brand new, the, the tip of the spear is the customer struggling moment and the raise that come off it is what does the investors need and what are the competition doing. But ultimately, if you don't have the tip of the spear on the customer struggling moment, you're literally going to be lost because at some point you have a dull goal of we need to make it faster, we need to make it easier, we need to actually help them do more. What does that mean? And if we don't have the right level of detail, the right level of intimacy to that understanding of that struggling moment and what they're trying to do, the fact is, is there's no investor and there's no competitor to do it. Now we have to be very aware of kind of what, who competitors are and what they do. But here's what I'd say is in the SaaS era, 90% of SaaS companies were competing with the Intern and Microsoft Excel, not other SaaS companies. And so you start to realize like the competition is defined to me by the consumer, where investors define the competition by their business model and the investment strategy that they use. And so to me, there's two different, different kinds of there's a supply side set of competitors and there's a demand side set of competitors. And those are usually very different. Right? And so to be honest, the thing is what I, what I've been advising basically AI startups to do is go, go find struggling moments and help solve them in the, in the, in the way that the consumer, the progress that they're trying to make. And, and to be honest, the, the fact is, is because you took money. So I have this new term that I've built up is good money and bad money. Good money is basically investors who are understanding that this is not known and that they're willing to let you go explore and be able to do things. Bad money is those investors who step in and tell you what to do and give you constraints that actually don't let you actually pursue what has to happen. And so part of this is being able to see kind of where our customers are going. And the problem is that the market itself is emerging and so everything feels niche. And that's okay. It will consolidate, but it's going to consolidate by the customer's terms, not by the industry terms. It's really important to conceptualize it because especially with how like the app, I read a statistic that the average age of AI founder right now is 24. Right. When you're that young, you're probably not able to decipher what kind of steps do you need to take to build a sustainable business. Right? It's one thing to build a cool AI product because you're a great engineering talent, and it's another thing to build a business that's going to sustain for a longer period of time. That's why I also feel like the failure rate within AI startups is humongous. So I have to tell you one of my favorite things. You triggered me on something which is like, when customers tell me that your tech is cool, I consider it the kiss of death because people can't then articulate what cool means. And it's ultimately, it's like, it feels like it's cool. It's like I really want it, but the reality is they have no idea what to use it for. They have no idea what to. And so when it says, boy, this is really cool, that's literally a, A, a, a surrogate for a fact is like, I know I should need this, but I don't know why and I don't know where I would use it and I don't know what it is. So it's just cool. And you start to realize like, that is to me, like you, you either need to unpack that language or move past them because people don't buy cool things. They buy things that actually help them make progress right now, now, let's be clear. There's sometimes people will buy, quote, cool things because it's a social job. Everybody else has it, so I gotta have it, right? Is there. But that's. That the job there is an emotional and social job. It's not a functional job because they don't know what they're going to do with it, but they know that if they have it, they're cool. It's like the people who buy an aura ring because everybody else has an aura ring, but they don't even look at the data. Come on. And you can say it does a job, but it's like. But it doesn't necessarily do the value or it was designed to do. And so to be honest, I think of those as, like, those are the bonus sales you get that have nothing to do with that. But if you don't add value by helping people sleep better, the reality is like, aura will not exist. Yeah, very true. Is there like a. The example of that you've used before is a Snickers bar versus Milky Way, right? Is there like AI or SAS equivalent, let's say case study that you've seen, where somebody thinks they're competing with a Milky Way, but they're actually, you know, they are a Snickers bar. They're competing with other protein bars. Like, is there like a SaaS or AI equivalent of that, too? So think. Think of when do you use Perplexity, when do you use Claude and when do you use ChatGPT? And you start to realize, like, they think they all compete with each other, but you. But I would say is like, tell me the last time you went to Claude and what you did. And typically that's where people want to build things. They want actually an output, something to do, some code of some sort. Perplexity is literally like, it's just better search, right? And so all of a sudden you start to realize, do they really compete with each other? The answer is no, in the consumer's mind. And so part of this is to say, like, it's. It's very similar to Snickers and Milky Way, where the fact is, you know, why people buy a Snickers and why people buy a Milky Way are completely different. And the reality is, in the consumer's mind, they don't compete with each other. But in the industry perspective, they're both candy bars, they're both made by Mars, they're both bought in the same place, they're both priced the same, but one competes. Snickers competes with coffee and a sandwich and all these other things where Milky Way competes with ice cream and a. And Wine and a run and you start to realize that the competition is just wildly different. And so like, part of me is we have to be patient for the market to catch up. And so part of this is staying, being able to stay alive long enough that we can actually wait for the market to actually learn what it's, what struggling moments it's going to use AI for, right? And there are some super users who are using it who might be the best people to kind of follow because at some point they're actually learning what it is. And they're at the early adopters are basically at the cutting edge of it, but everybody else is still dabbling in it. Like, I mean all the data that comes back shows that there's very few, there's lots of people using it, but very people who are getting value from it. And ultimately AIs got to add value. Everybody's scared of it. I mean, this is, this is, this is, here's the thing, the software industry grew up in the 70s and 80s, right? It's never had a technological revolution really. You could say, well, the first revolution was basically the Internet, right? And now it's got a second revolution. But like think about automotive, think about cameras, think about weapons. You know, you start to realize they all go through very, very different revolutions where all of a sudden the old technology just true decimates and so that, so part of this is, I believe that we're just going through a, through a disruption curve that we have to actually start to adopt. But the reality is like, when do we adopt it and how do we adopt it? People have to be able to navigate through this, right? So, so, so here's the thing is the camera industry is my favorite example, right? It's, it's, you know, we have Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Hassenblatt. You've got like amazing camera companies who build amazing products. And what they did is they got so caught up in their own version of what a camera is and tried to build the best camera that they forgot about the consumer. And the best camera is the camera with you. And the fact is, to be honest, it was easier to take a shitty picture with my iPhone than it was to figure out how to get all my gear out and take a picture with my Nikon. And so you start to realize that. So at some point you start to realize, like at some point Apple disrupted the entire industry because it made you a good photographer by combining both the camera, camera and software as opposed to the camera company was trying to build camera and then they bolted software on it and none of it worked actually. Well. Yeah, very true. Do you also feel like for a founder to be cognizant of the fact that all they're trying to do is not what they think they're trying to do? So essentially what I'm trying to understand is if a founder is sitting with their data points, with customer interviews, which are bad ones, you know, a lot of most founders are not really great. That's why you just. But let's say they are sitting with data and they're trying to figure out what metrics should I be looking at, what examples should I be looking at to figure out what direction should I go into? Do you have an example of that? Metrics are one of the hardest things to do. I will tell you in my 40 plus years of building product, finding the right metric, because the metric drives behavior both internal and external. And when you get the wrong metric, the entire organization ends up kind of going way off course. And so I'm, I'm, I'm a proponent of basically taking time to really understand the right metrics because we tend to measure what's easy as opposed to what's important or what's valuable, because usually those things are hard to measure. And so being able to understand how to do that is very important. I think one of the things to me is most of the AI companies are using AI to generate their customers, not only who they are, but they're trying to say, like, what's their context, what's going on? And you start to realize, like, that's actually not the point. The fact is, AI only knows the patterns of past behavior. It doesn't know the patterns of new behavior. And so all it's going to tell you is what people did in the past, which doesn't actually help you understand what they're going to do in the future. And so I have people coming to me. I've got synthetic users, we've built these users to put together this thing. We can do interviews, we can actually automate the process. And what you start to realize is AI cannot detect the subtle comments of what are the differences and the contradictions in what they say. I want it to be, it's really slow, and we assume it means faster. And then the other side, it says, no, I want more. And you start to realize that faster and more are completely different products. Right? And so we make these assumptions of what I call symmetry when the symmetry doesn't exist. And to be honest, all AI knows is symmetry. It does not know asymmetry. At all. And so you start to realize that as a founder right now, trying to do this, you're literally saying, well, I know AI, I can use AI, I'm going to use AI to do my marketing, and I'm going to use AI to be able to. And you're missing the human element because we still have humans buying, we still have humans trying to make progress. And so you start to realize that all you're getting is the average stuff is like getting a Persona. Right? One of the things you talked about before is like, these people know who they're targeting, but it's not about who they're targeting, it's who they're targeting, when they're targeting them, where they're targeting them, and why they're targeting them. That's what make up a job to be done. And so if I just have who, that's like a quarter of the puzzle. And typically the who is the least important part, but it's the where, when, and why that are the most important parts. And we miss all of those because we basically say, oh, we're trying to do what a CEO wants to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or a head of sales is trying to do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, oh, then we try, we empathize or put ourselves in the role of the person who's the head of sales. And we've never been the head of sales. And I, I, I want to, I want to dive a little deeper on this. So, because I see so many tools right now that, oh, this AI tool is going to replace your CMO forever, or this AI tool is going to replace your sales teams for forever, so on and so forth. So there are these broad generalizations that teams make, and I feel like to a certain extent, boards buy it, CEOs buy it. Especially the more bureaucratic a team is, the easier it is for them to believe that cutting out 4,000 employees from their team and replacing all of that with AI is going to be a snap of a finger. But to me, it's, it's insane. Like, every, everybody's cutting, but most people are cutting because the economy is going down, not because of AI. Right. And so they're confusing the fact that, oh, we're, we're doing this because we got AI coming and we got this. And, and the reality is like, no, the economy is constricting and the fact that we're laying people off and so they're making the excuse instead of the economy AI. And, and the reality is, is like again, people are still buying. It's not. Not AIs aren't buying, right? Yeah, 100%. And this is the point of the functional part is what AI can get right, but the emotional and social part it can't get right because it's not rational. The question I wanted to ask was in terms of these AI, CMO and so on and so forth, all these tools for a bootstrap thunder that does not have the backing of a VC fund and doesn't have, you know, 10 millions in the bank. Yeah. So when they're trying to understand, okay, yes, they can market really well and they're getting millions of views on Twitter and so on and so forth, that's all great. But I'm going to build a business that competes with them because I'm going to be using jobs to be done. I'm actually going to understand where certainly problems are. When there is a founder like that, how do they understand where to start, what to do next? And then when they are trying to compete with somebody like that that can market so well and maybe has a lot of social image uplift because of that marketing dollar that's being spent, how does a bootstrap founder tackle? Yep. So the first thing I would tell you, and Ash Maori says this all the time, which is they need to own the problem, not the solution. And it seems very subtle, but the fact is a company that's raised millions or hundreds of millions or lots of money, they have an idea of a product and what happens is that actually locks in what they can do and they're more likely to pivot from a problem to a new market than they are to actually pivot the product to actually fit a customer need better. And so to me, owning a problem and owning it at the nth degree, and if you see what people are actually buying in the marketplace is they're actually buying small startups that actually know way more about a specific problem to weave into the bigger organization then they are trying to do it themselves. And that's exactly what Google did in the, in the 90s and 2000s. It's like when somebody else had a vertical that was actually they knew way more about or a niche that they knew way more about that then they had scale to take it somewhere they could afford to buy it. And so my belief is got the same characteristics as this is that like at some point, like, yeah, we say we want to go into this part, all of a sudden we can't figure it out. Can we actually go buy somebody who knows this part of the market better than we can, that actually will kickstart us because we've tried three times and we can't make it work. And so I would tell us, Bootstrapper, to basically say, stay true to your customer, stay true to the problem, focus on the problem, and be prepared to pivot the tool. And to be honest, I would tell you to be prepared to pivot the tool to something simpler and easier, not more and more complex and more features. Because it's ultimately the fact is it people have like, the step that people have to make to get into AI is so big, if we can figure out the half steps that people can make, we'll actually get, we'll help people make more progress and we'll, we'll get more traction. So is it about build more smaller tools that can solve specific pain points? I. I wouldn't say smaller tools. I would say. I would tell you to say focus on a very specific problem that happens to cut across many, many different, you know, verticals. Yeah, no, it does. Mostly what I was curious about is a lot of, of founders now especially are just thinking about if I solve this one specific tiny problem and a user can white code a solution for it within like a weekend. My company's office. Right, that's right. So. So how many salespeople have the time to do that? Exactly what I was going to ask you. So tell me about. It was actually expensive, but it was also long. I can literally build a feature in 38 seconds if I have the system set up right. And so the fact is, what happens is most people, because I can actually build more, more, I can build faster, they're just building more. And, and to be honest, they're ruining the customer for at least two to two to five years because they're gonna say, oh, yeah, I tried that. Oh yeah, I tried that. Oh yeah, I tried that. And when they, when it doesn't work, they, they're literally not willing to try for two to five years. This is what, this is what people don't understand is they're actually destroying the market by flooding it with shit. Very fair. So, and another thing that sort of gets attached with that is a lot of teams because they can build things and it's easier to build things. They're building things and the justification they're giving themselves is, hey, I'm solving, you know, I'm solving a job. I'm, you know, I'm going to be hired by potential customer, solve a potential pain point. And that drives them away from Maybe what the core of their product was or the core of their company was. So how does the team, and I know you have. You have a process for this as well. How does the team prioritize? What is the job to be done? That's going to be number one, two, number three in a world where they can do all three. So this is where I wish that people wouldn't talk about the job to be done, because at some point, the job to be done is the lexus of all of these things together. But the thing to focus on is the struggling moment. Where is the struggle the greatest? And where are people reaching for things where they have nothing to reach for? That's it. Right? But that's all back to a struggling moment as a context. It basically has a person in it. It has a struggling moment in it. It has basically a current product or a current process. They have at least some pushes of what's going on, and they have some dream of what's going to happen. And so ultimately, the job is the gestalt of all of that. But the reality is all you're really focusing on is, again, one of my other phrases that most people kind of hurt, you know, don't like me to say, but it's bitching, ain't switching. Just because they bitch about it doesn't mean they're going to switch about it. And so part of it is being able to figure out, where are they going to complain enough that they're going to try to do something new. Doing something new is hard. Where, like, we. We keep thinking about, like, ooh, they've complained about this. We should build something for that. And that's where we're getting into this mess of just building. Because they're complaining about it, but they're not willing to learn something new to make it work. They gotta be willing to actually put the energy in to make it work. And that actually is way more than just me complaining about it. When somebody is looking at it internally, though, let's say I'm trying to build a workflow for myself using AI, right? And yeah, so I was gonna ask you, like, what. What is a job to be done? Or let's say, what's a framework that somebody like that can follow to ensure that what they're doing is highest ROI to the amount of time, because it's not easy to build a workflow that it's going to take to build. So I worked with a CFO who basically has. He actually built his own dashboard, built everything around it himself, right? And the CEO said, I need this report. And so he made a version of the report. And the CEO said, no, no, no, no, that's not what I want. So he came to me and said, will you sit down with me and interview the CEO about why he wants this report? I said, perfectly. So we sat down and ultimately he's the customer of the report. And I kind of said like, all right, what can't you do today that you want to be able to do tomorrow? He goes, well, here, these meetings are too long. The fact is we end up spending more time looking at the data than discussing what the options are to go do it. And the fact is I would rather have the data come at me. So it's actually in this final form so we can have the discussion, right? And ultimately the guy, the CFO is thinking, well, I can not only give you the report, but I can give you recommendations of what you should do. And he said, no, I don't want that. I need us to have the conversation. This is not about replacing the meeting. This is about actually informing us so we can actually spend more time discussing options than actually doing options. Might be something nice we want later. But the reality is, like, right now, I need everybody on this team to basically be on the same page. And so this report is about getting us on the same page. It's not about actually being shorter or being. It's very, very intimate information. And so you start to realize that all of a sudden he didn't. And it turns out it's like, I need this for this meeting and I'm going to use it for this meeting. Well, how are you going to use it for this other meeting? It's like. And he turns out he doesn't want to use the same report. He actually wants a different report. And it turns out he wants three things, not one thing. Same process, same struggles, same, same looking for. Basically, what are the outcomes that are looking for? What can't they do today? What are the struggling moments wrapped around it now? And what are they hoping for when they actually, when I hand you this report, what are you hoping for? For? Right? And it's the intimacy of understanding how he's going to use it and what he's going to use it for and what he doesn't want to do. Like, again, he could have over designed it to do everything. And the reality is like, no, no, no, that's not what he want. But he never said he didn't want those things. So in the interview you have to go like, well, what If I did this, what if I gave you recommendation? What if I got rid of the meeting altogether? He goes, no, I don't want to get rid of. Right. And so this is why this is a human thing. Like, there's no AI that I've been able to put together at this point. And let's be clear, I'm trying, but at some point it's based on language and it's based on what I would call more traditional definitions than contextual definitions. So any one word, means, has a definition, and it basically then talks about the next probable word in the sentence, but it doesn't actually talk about the definition of that word in that context. And so that's why it can't be done right now. I'm not saying it won't be. It's just not. It's not able to contextually take the words. Also, there is this larger issue that I also feel like, I would love to know what you think on it is the self. How should I put it? The self proclamation of an LLM to confirm the bias that you hold and using that as a basis for either understanding, okay, what job am I doing? Or what job is my product going to be doing? And essentially getting swayed by it. So what I wanted to understand is when somebody is talking to their LLM and maybe they're thinking they're so smart because the LLM says they're your idea is amazing. It can even give you data to make you even more confident in your idea. So when somebody is, obviously that's not the right way to go about doing that. So how do you talk to somebody like that? Yeah, so the book that I basically make people start to read again is, I think it's from 1962. It's called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. And he talks about how scientists, when they see an anomaly, they actually throw it out because it does not fit the paradigm of the data that they were collecting. And so ultimately, what you're really trying to do is understand what's my paradigm around this and why do I have these anomalies? It all gets back to anomalies to me. And it's ultimately the fact this is like AI can only see the pattern that already exists. It can't talk about the new pattern that's going to emerge because it doesn't actually have the connections to make that work. And ultimately what we're doing is we're on the edge of. We're on the edge of language where people don't have the words and don't have the experience and they've done this, but it's like, yeah, I don't know how to. It's kind of like this and it's kind of like that. And that's when you're actually in the realm of where jobs should be. You should be talking to people because that's where the new things happen, is on the edge, not in the center. And AI is literally helping us understand the center really well, understand our biases. But I still don't think it can actually see the anomalies very well. I know you're currently. We were talking about this offline. I know you're exploring the idea of anomalies. If you had to give maybe a rudimentary answer framework for how can a founder find those kinds of anomalies within their business? So, so, so anomalies are those things that don't fit our current paradigm. Like, I was working with a company that sells software to banks and all of a sudden they look at this thing and they have one bank that comes in and goes like, this bank really doesn't fit what we're trying to do. Like we're just going to put them to the side, right? And there's one of them, right. It's not a big deal. But at some point in time, at the end of the quarter, they sit down and say, let's look at all the anomalies and see what it is. And you start to realize like, oh my gosh, these four bank, we did this four times and these four anomalies actually want something completely different. We need to go build actually a different product that actually would do this. And how many other people. Oh, there's thousands of other banks like this, right? But the fact is, we literally exclude that one bank and we just put it, say, like it's an anomaly and we never take the time to go back and look at it and we never see the patterns of the anomalies. And so anomalies are those things that stick out. We all have every day we filter things out, we pay attention to some emails, we don't pay attention to other emails. Right. And eventually we have to realize that those anomalies have a pattern to it that actually tell us where the boundaries are of our thinking. And so knowing what anomalies to look at and knowing how to. So half, half the time when I go into a big company, I ask them, tell me about all the things that failed and let me go look at those because it's like those are all the Anomalies that they couldn't make work. And typically, you can go make them work, but you may have to think about it completely differently than they did because it didn't fit their paradigm. It didn't fit the. How to say, it fit the business paradigm, but it didn't fit the consumer paradigm. And what you realize is the people who did use it used it for something completely different, but the company said, oh, we don't want to be in that business. But it turns out it's a big business, right? So anomalies are, I think, one of the, to me, part of the future. And I wrote a post from Clay last week was his 74th birthday, and I miss him kind of every. Almost every day. And what I would say is that he let me in the door because he had a sign out in front of his office said, anomalies wanted. And I knocked on the door and said, I'm here. And he said, what? I'm like, yeah, I'm an anomaly. And then I gave him my background and what I'm doing, and he's like, come on in. And he basically listened to me and we talked. And to be honest, we became friends for 27 years. How is there, like, a funny story of you and Clay when you were trying to figure out this. This idea of jobs to be done when we were trying to build it? Is there a funny story? Is there, like, a moment that you feel like if more founders also, or just more people had that, their thinking would be better, their acting would be better, like, everything they do in life would just be better? I think, to me, the funniest story that I know is really with his daughter Ann, where we were talking about jobs to be done, and we're basically walking through what it is and how. So it's what the consumer competes with, not with what other people compete with and are what we think are in the same categories. And this is where Clay went grocery shopping with his daughter. And ultimately, he's like, you see this product? It doesn't compete with these other products. It competes with this product in this other aisle. And poor Ann's like 7 or 8 years old, going like, dad, what are you talking about? So every time Clay would go to the grocery store, he'd be literally trying to figure out kind of like, what's the. What's the competitive set like? So as he's picking me off, what's the real competitive set to this thing? And so in that. That's where his mind just kind of started to meld around this thing but it was just one of those things where the, the funny scene to me is him trying to explain to his, you know, Ann in her. She might have been 10, but like a 10 year old about what, what, what in the world are you talking about, dad? Which my kids would say the same thing about me for sure. But it's, it's to realize like the competition is not defined by the industry. The competition is defined by the customer. Is the, is the Snickers Milky Way story from him? No, that was wonder because that would, that would have been epic. Okay, stepping back just for a moment. What I wanted to dive a little bit deeper on the idea of the over financialization of marketing and sales. And I know you've spoken about this there, you know, you, Rory Sutherland, there are a few other people that I really respect because it, like we said that's, that's an anomaly in itself. But what I wanted to dive deeper on is when a CMO is trying to talk their team or their CEO into the idea that okay, this might seem like the idea, the optimal way to do something or this cutting out this process, cutting out this team member would be amazing, financially speaking. But it's going to be horrible for the business however, because it's, it cannot be sort of contextualized with numbers just yet until should actually hits the fan. How does the CMO do that? How does it, you know, how does the team actually understand? Yeah, so. So there's a couple of things and these are other rabbit holes I've been going down. But let's say from the CMO perspective is if you take the product and the brand and divide it by price, that's their definition of value. So if the product isn't doing well, the value is going to go down. If the brand's not doing well, it'll go down. If the price goes down, the value will go up. Right. But that's not how value works. Value works in a context and it works with a different set of competition. It works with trade offs. And you start to realize that the definition of value is literally me in a context and having to choose different things around the brand and the pro. The brand is an effect, it's not a cause. Nobody's buying it because it's a brand. And if it is, it's because the brand is so old and it's really brand helps me rebuy after I know what it is. Right. And ultimately I have to know what it is. Right. But the fact is that when you start to go to Like, I've been a comcast user for 30 plus years. 37xfinity, I think it's called now or whatever. Right. But they will drop me in a heartbeat at and T will drop me in a heartbeat. If something goes. Like when something goes wrong, I'll drop them, they'll drop me. I'll look, say, hey, I've been with you for 30 years. Can I get a discount? No. What's the loyalty worth? It's just an artificial thing that marketing has created to basically say we can put that on the balance sheet as a way to say this is what people are going to buy. And so the fact is, what I would tell cmos is to figure out what's the real value proposition. Look up April Dunford. She's got the best process I know to how to do that stuff. And you start to realize that you need to actually differentiate not from your competitors, but from their competitors. Meaning who is the customer thinking are your competitors? Because again, half the time you're competing with an intern in a spreadsheet, right? You're not competing with Oracle. You think your SAP is competing with Oracle, but it might not be at all. Right? So the first thing is CMOs have to actually build a new definition of value and realize that brand is an effect. It's not a cause. If brand's in effect, what causes people to have brand loyalty? It's actually the delivery of the product and solving the doing the job. And so actually doing the job actually builds brand equity. And they don't see it that way. But how does somebody advocate for that? Because it's still like. I won't say it's. It's. It's digging deep into. Digging deep to. When does a consumer actually feel value? Where do they feel value? When do they feel value? What has to happen to them to feel value? It's not. What do you do? What do they do? We keep trying to put the value. Oh, we added this feature and we got 30% more sales. This must add value. No, this feature helped people make progress. This is what I was talking about is we, we connect the feature as, as one of the metrics for basically value. And it's not that it's. What are people able to do that they can't do today? That's actually the metric right now on the. And the other side is the sales process. This is where when you dig deep into the sales process, you start to realize that the sales process is, is literally created. It makes no. Like, nobody will agree with that, but the Fact is, I need a sales process because I got able to predict cash flow, and cash flow is most important. And I'm willing to spend money to actually build a funnel to be able to put together the way that our sales process works. But 90% of those processes don't match how people want to buy. And so what happens is you end up trying to manage a process. And here's the thing is you end up turning over salespeople over and over again. And what Deming would say is 85 to 90% of all problems are system problems, not people problems. So we're not saying the people are bad. It's the sales system that's bad because it's not designed against what it should be doing, which is to help people make progress in helping people buy. It's literally to help people predict what we're going to sell in the next quarter. By the way, how in the world can I give a 20% discount at the end of the quarter? Because sales approves it. No, finance approves it because they're trying to meet their numbers so they don't have to talk to investors, so they don't have to go to the banks and say, oh my God, we missed our numbers. And so all of a sudden you start to. When you start to pull again, it seems like anomalies, but when you really start to look at it, the power structure of sales is driven by finance, it's not driven by sales, and it's not driven by growth. Do you feel like this is maybe indicative of a pendulum that's maybe, hopefully could be swinging back into the idea that given. Given features can be built easily, given that product can morph into something else really easily. The contextualization within a company's head about where value sits is going to shift from cash flow into something else because of the propagation of AI within team's product. So I. What I'm. Yeah, what I'm hoping is, is I feel like the pendulum has Swung and the 2000s, up to 20 in the 2010, 2000s is, is it was finance driven. And ultimately, value is defined by what the. What, what the supply side would say value is. Right. And I think it's going to swing back to where we were in the 80s and the 90s, where value was defined by the customer and quality was defined by the customer. And ultimately being able to understand what they're trying to do is defined by the customer. And so the thing is, people will say they're customer centric, but they only look at customers who buy their product. My thing is I look at people who are basically within this struggling moment, whether they buy my product or not. That's customer centric. Most people look at the customer only through their product as opposed to the problems that they have. And so I see a swing coming back that way because now that it's easy, because it was so hard to build, we had to actually have the financing. But now that it's easier to build, we actually have to move back to this notion of being value based and quality based based on the progress people are being trying to make. It's the struggling moment that's the seed for all of this. And my belief is people are struggling more and more and more, which is a good thing. But ultimately the fact is they don't know how to decide because at some point there's too many choices and they're not smart enough to know how to make a choice yet. Think about five years from now, it'll be way easier for people to make a lot of the decisions they can't make today. And so this is why we have lots of trial and we have no repeat. Because at some point people are literally trying, but they actually don't know what they're doing and they don't really know what they want. And if we just help them instead of, if we just help them understand the progress they're trying to make, the outcomes they're trying to reach by doing like nobody is randomly going to chat GPT and trying. It, it's not random. Something about it causes them to go there. What are they hoping for and what are they getting? And ultimately that gap is what's causing them not to use it again or to move to something else. Oh, it didn't get this. Okay, I'm going to go quad. Okay, that didn't get that. Okay, I'm going to go to this. Okay, I'm not going to get this. And you start to realize they're going from one to one part because nobody's actually figuring out what they want because nobody's asked them and they don't really know how to articulate it. And so this is where there's a, there's a whole set of language here where there is no language to talk about this yet. And it has to be developed. And that's where the, to me, that's where the money is. This AI puts the consumer in the driver's seat again. But let's say, you know, you were talking to a open AI or Claude and they want to figure out how can we decipher where that moment is coming from? And why is it that somebody is not just coming to me, but going to four other elements to solve the same exact problem? Because I do that. And to my mind, the struggling moment is that it's almost there. And like. So that's one part, the other. No, no, I was just saying that it's almost there. And the other part is that I want to be sure that whatever path I take forward is the best one. But the determination of that has to still be made by me. And because of how products have been over the past, like, 20 years, I'm not confident enough to make that decision yet. But the LLMs give me the false sense of. Of accomplishment. Almost like, yes, you know, the path you're taking is the right way forward. So, yeah, I would love, I would love to know, like, if you were, if you were talking to an anthropic or an open AI, what would you tell them? So, so to me, the one of the fundamental problems is there's no taxonomy of language. Everybody's trying new things and they can't even tell. Like, if I ask you, so tell me, tell me about the last time you went to OpenAI and what did you try to do? And you're like, well, I tried to search. So you're using all the old language to describe a new thing. Well, what were you expecting? Well, something better than search. And what you start to realize is there's no language. And so what has to happen is a taxonomy of language has to start to emerge. And we can't force that. The market actually does that itself. And so part of this is we might have a way to influence it, but we can't control it, at least in my mind. Right. So what I would tell you is to be very close to customers and understanding kind of the taxonomy of language and how it's evolving. And the early adopters are the ones who are actually building the taxonomy of language right now. The second is the fact this is like, you talk about the best one in confidence. You have to give up on that concept. The reason why is because at some point, all the ACE students want the answer and I want the best one. There is no best one. There's a best one for today and there's a best one for tomorrow, and it's going to be different. And all of a sudden you can say, but I had the best one. It's like, yeah, but the best one is going to change because all of these other things are changing around it. So you have to actually learn to say, like, I don't want the best one. I want to know how to change as fast as the customer's changing. Right? And the thing is, what gives you confidence is if you're following the customer, oh, they're going to do this next. Oh my God, they did that. They're going to do this next. Oh my God, they're going to do that. Like all of a sudden you can start. That's what's going to build confidence. The thing that destroys confidence is when you make a prediction. I'll say, my words are a sloppy prediction and it doesn't work. You got to go, oh man, you know, we didn't hit the number we wanted to. Okay, we got to think it over. And you're thinking over three, four, five times, you lose your confidence. It's a bad system. It's not a. Like your confidence is driven by the system you wrap around it. And so this is why I say you got to get rid of the notion of a best one or the least risky. Like, the least risky is not going to get you there and the best one is not going to get you there. So what's going to get you there? It's the one that follows the customer. So you feel like right now a lot of the non deterministic chat interface based AI products, I'm not specifically sticking to LLMs here because there are other products that could do similar things. So let me ask this. Think about how much smarter you are about LLMs today than you were a year ago. Can you even articulate what you've been able to do and summarize at least some notion of what progress you've made by actually using chat or using any kind of AI? No, you can't. You, you can't because the only way you can use it is old language. Now, if I told you, do you feel like you've made progress? Oh, yeah. Like I would tell you, like, I've made a ton of progress, but I have no language to talk about it. And so that's where the work is. It's almost hitting me like a, it's hitting me like epiphany at the moment. I love it. Okay, so let's say. Yeah, sorry. So here, so here's the thing is my belief is on this podcast, right, there's, there's like 25% of these people who are going like, holy, this is just hitting me like, like I randomly picked up this podcast. I don't really listen to it that often, and it's just resonating like crap. The fact is, is it's not random. You've had to have all these problems. You've had to have all the, the conditions that make you ready to hear this. The other three quarters are going like, yeah, this is theoretical. Yeah, this doesn't really work. But the 25% are going like, holy shit, man, I've lived this. I get this. This is why people don't get jobs, because they don't realize it's in the context. And so when people take it out of context and say what it is, it's like it's garbage. But in context, it's very, very powerful. And so my belief is that 75% will come back to it six months from now and listen to it again and like go, oh my God, that was an amazing podcast. Like, I can't tell you how many people listen to Lenny's podcast and said it was okay. And then they came back when they were looking to job transition and went like, oh my God, this is the most amazing podcast ever. But they couldn't hear it. Why they were gainfully employed and loving what they were doing. So nothing's random. And so these are the things we have to realize is it's the context that's very, very important in the struggling moment. And my belief is most people are not studying what they are enough and going deep enough. They just hear the surface level struggle and go like, okay, it's about this. It's like, no, no, no, what does that mean? Why is that important? What's the consequence if you don't get it done? Like, there's like 20 other questions you got to ask when you find the struggling moment. And that's what people aren't doing. That's the interrogation part of this thing in just a moment. But what I do want to ask you is, do you feel like we're going to go from general purpose, which seems like the, the way every AI product wants to go into right now, like they want to be everything for everyone back to no focus on a smaller problem that you understand very deeply and that you can solve better than anybody else. And why I'm asking that question is most of the money that is flowing right now working from venture capital funds is, oh, the problem that you're solving right now is great, but it's not big enough. Right. It's not going to be a 10 billion dollar company. And that's. Maybe I'm a broken record, but it seems like a, you know, something that should be obvious. To most teams, but it really isn't. So do you feel like an open AI or a Claude or a Perplexity will maybe another six months, one year down the line, understand that it's actually not great to be general purpose. We actually want to be the LLM for a specific purpose. So the only thing I will tell you is if it's general purpose, it has to be ridiculously simple. Anything that's general purpose is. Let's talk about this general purpose flour. It goes into every ingredient, every. It goes into bread, it goes into all these other places. It's very, very simple. A general purpose camera, a Canon sure shot, I can use it in a lot of different situations. It's not a great camera. A general purpose piece of software, Excel, I can build a spreadsheet. All of them have this simple notion into it. And so I don't believe they're trying to build a. Actually what they're trying to do is they're actually trying to find where are the front lines, where are the stakes that I got to drive into the ground and I got to own, because once I have them in these different spots, it'll all fill in around it and become a general purpose thing. And so they don't know where the beach holds are, where the consumer will actually value it the most the earliest. Because value of AI in 10 years is very different than value in the next 12 months. And they have to know where the beach hole, the beachfront or the beach front that they have to actually attack and which ones they gotta own are. Basically there's like three or four they have to own that, then everything will fill in around it. And they're struggling to figure that out. So I don't believe they're trying to build a general purpose, this tool at all. I think they're trying to figure out like where do, where are we, where are we getting traction, that we should actually double down and go deeper and they're not finding it. So they're literally adding all these new features to try to find these new places where they can go because they can't actually find it. So you're saying that a lot of the investment that maybe at OpenAI or Cloud or any of these algorithm companies are making is based on I'm gonna throw, you know, as many darts as I possibly can on the board. They're gonna figure. My belief is, the investments are saying is I, I don't know who's going to win, but I know that they're going to figure it out because they're going to have enough money and they're, it's like we're going to throw it at ib. IBM will figure it out, you know, like back in the day. I'm not saying now, but it's like, you know, our open AI will figure it. Like, they're, they, we. So it's kind of like, like I'm in Detroit, right? And if you look at it like, we can't allow, for example, GM to fail. It didn't go into bankruptcy, it got bailed out because nobody could afford for it to go bankrupt. That's the situation that's building with AI, with OpenAI and Claude, and like, the economy will not be able to allow them to fail. The, the hardest part for me is everybody's like, oh, we're adding AI and their stock price goes up. What are they adding it for? I can add it for efficiencies. I can add it for. There's, there's a, there's literally a thousand ways I can add. And let's be clear, it's adding value in a lot of places. Like, you know, it's just one of those things where it's like, where, where it, where is the biggest place that's going to add value and how you. And so my belief is you're going to have one AI that ends up being really good for the supply side, helping you get efficiencies out of people and engineering and doing things that people don't want to do. Right. There's going to be another AI that's really going to be on the customer side and basically understand the demand side. And then there'll be one that actually kind of has the, has the ability to navigate both. That's my, that's my prediction right around. I think, I think the hard part is the way winning is defined is it's a complex equation between economics, the progress it creates for people, access it has for people, the penetration it has in the market in terms of number of people using it. I think there's five or six different dimensions of win. And so my belief we can have multiple winners under different situations. Like this. Is Ford winning or is GM winning? They're both winning, right? Is Toyota winning? And we can say one's beating another because of finances, but the reality is, like, which system actually is the best that's actually ready to go for kind of the future ahead? That's where we have to think about it. So winning is a very difficult phrase to me because it's not as simple as the financial side. Most people want us to think about it from the financial side of your best returns come from this. But as Warren Buffett would say, I'd never invest in the automotive business because it just never generates enough profit. It's doing a lot of value, but it's so expensive to do. It doesn't actually have good returns. But if you literally cause the automotive businesses to go away, the whole country will come to a stop. So is it adding value or not? So it's adding value, but it's not necessarily profitable or adding. So you're saying it. It becomes so integral to us that they all figure out their own lanes and make them exist and they learn how to swim in lanes and they let one might get ahead of another. And as the market changes again, I think as Toyota figured out scale better than we did, the fact is that all of a sudden they started to lead the world because at some point they, they understood the complexity, costs, and they were able to simplify and they built the Toyota production system, which now is the standard across every single automotive company in the world. Okay, if I were to maybe use the same sort of logic, bring it down to the interpersonal level. Your. Your recent book on how somebody can survive. Yeah. Job market. So somebody who's trying to figure out, okay, right now, what is the lane that I'm driving myself into? Because I feel like with just how much from a perception standpoint, AI has been destructive. Maybe it is not as disruptive as people think, if that's really my personal belief. But let's say a lot of people think that and they're trying to figure out what lane am I exactly going into? Like, how do I ensure that a company that I'm working at or I want to work at can understand the value I bring to the table. How could they do better? The first thing is, what I will tell you is most people have no idea who they are or what they want. They think it's very similar to what we talked about earlier. They think, oh yeah, I want to go do a PM job. Well, what's a pm? I don't know, but my friends are pm and I want to be it. And I. And what would make you good at the job? I don't know. And then they just start making up things to basically fit in to be the PM job. So the very first step here is to get people to understand, like, who are they? What gives them energy, what sucks their energy, and ultimately kind of like, what does progress mean to them? That's what the whole book is about is, like, what you start to realize is so many people made so many bad decisions about their next hire, the next place they went to work, because it was based on the previous place of work, which they actually didn't like and they wanted to get rid of, but they only felt like, hey, I'm in finance and I'm in. In marketing, or I'm in marketing in a financial services business. Like, I can only go to marketing and financial services. Like, no, I like to do analysis. I like to actually, you know, be creative. Like, there's thousands of places you can go for those things. So it's building it down to. It's breaking yourself down into first principles of what are the things that like. So the fundamental premise to me is what? When you go into a situation and when you come out, you have more energy than you walked in. You're more excited, you're more energized, you feel better, you feel relaxed, whatever it is. There's situations where you fundamentally change. And what you want to do is study those situations. Right? What causes you to be that way? What has to happen to cause you that way? I love working with people I love, like. And it's very specific. It's like, we went into this room, we had this specific problem. We brainstormed around all the different ideas. We basically came up with it, and out of it, we came without with a plan. I was just jazzed by that. Sorry, that's an old man's term. Right. But then there's another part where it's like, it feels like they're sucking the life out of you. I went in with this much energy, and then this happened, and literally I just went. Which is like all my. Like, I literally went home and just went to bed because it was just so bad. And being able to contrast those two things actually is. Is the foundation of what it is. Because what gave me energy when I was 30 is not what gives me energy when I'm 60. And it changes. And so part of it is learning about yourself first and understanding what drives you and what motivates you. And it's not things. It might be things, but ultimately you have to actually just take some time to realize what are those things that have to happen to you that actually give you energy and suck your energy. Because that's what we found is if you're doing the work that gives you energy, you don't even know you're working. Most of the people spend 95% of their time doing work they hate. For the 5% of work they love and then it just breaks them. Demi would say a bad system will break a good person every time. Right. And so part of this is like, part of it is because it's the wrong person in the wrong seat. So how do I help you find the right seat? Well, the first thing is I got to figure out what you. What, what gives you energy, what sucks your energy. And then basically being able to. The other part is you have to realize the second half of this is that companies write job descriptions. They're made up. They have no idea, like, oh, you need to know how to use a Claude. You need like the whole thing is, so what if I need to know what am I going to do? What progress are you trying to make as a company? What am I trying to do when you hire me to do this job? And what most people don't realize is they come in and they actually fix the job. And then what they are is they love to fix. And once they fixed it, they actually create problems to basically go fix because they love to fix problems. And then when there's no problems, they don't know what to do and they're going to get fired. Yeah, I was right. And most of them. And you're like, wait a second, what's going on here? It's like, no, just move them to somewhere else where there's another problem. Yeah, but they don't have any experience. No, they have experience in solving problems. Right. So the job descriptions are kind of all screwed up. And so that whole book is about one is if you want to find your best position, the first thing is you need to actually figure out what gives you energy, what sucks your energy. So I have a startup around this. I basically took all the interviews, took the book, put it into it. It's called joinvocation.com it's an AI career coach. For 150 bucks, it'll walk you through the entire process and get you to at least start to articulate what you want. It does two other things though. It allows you to. Now when you go interview is you're not interviewing for the job. You're interviewing them to see if you're worthy enough to go there, if it's going to actually fulfill your needs. Right. Because part of this is to realize there are trade offs. You're never going to find the ideal job. So what are the, you know, boy, I want this. I want it remote, I want it this way, I want it this way. It's like, yeah, but what if it's not remote? You know, okay, if I get paid this much and I have. And I, and I get to have this much more vacation and I do this, you know what I'll actually do? I'll do, I'll do non remote. And so you start to realize it's about the negotiations of what's going on. But if you don't know what you value and you don't know what they value, it's impossible to negotiate. Right. So that's the essence of that book, which is about helping people understand the job that they hire the company to do and the progress that they're trying to make. Take, like, what do you want to be able to do at this job? And, and ultimately when you leave that job, what do you want to be able to do next? It's helping you. Nobody plans your career. Your company does not manage your career path. Only you do it. And most people don't do it. Fair enough. Sorry. No, it's another rabbit hole. I went, honestly, you know, next thing you know, it is something that a lot of people don't think about because they're, they're sort of. Yeah. And they're, they're sort of. And they should stuck in this weird place of figuring out, okay, somebody says, I'm good at X and you know, I've done Y kind of work. So X and Y is the only logical direction I go in when that's. And a 16Z posted this. That you will never take the traditional path. Your career is going to be a roller coaster, ups and downs, and you probably may not end up where you think you would end up. So, yeah, I mean, I mean, look at your story also, right? Somebody who doesn't read or write writes four books. Right. So, yeah, I do feel like. But now you have to get to the definition of right. Did I write them? Technically, I did not. Like, when I became a professor at Northwestern, I literally had to go like, look, I have four books. I don't read, I don't write. I did not write these books. Here's the condition I have that's under it. And they're like, oh, that's okay. And so I have a whole process to do this. Right. And so then another professor said, hey, let's write a book together. I'm like, okay, we can use my process. And the fact that came back said, no, you can't do that. Like, why can't we do that? Well, he's not dyslexic. I'm like, I don't understand. Yeah, well, I mean, I still Feel like it's important for somebody to understand. So one of the things that helped me with all of this is to realize the only non renewable resource we have is time. I can make more money, I can make less money, but the only thing I can't do is I can't get back time. So I did something very weird. My mom died when I was 25. So my mom died the year I was married. So she never met my children, never been able to meet her grandchildren. It was all of those things. And the thing is she was a teacher and she basically retired. And four months later she had died and she had all these plans to do for the next 20 years and she couldn't do it. So I had done a project where I saw people who were just crazy productive outside of their industry. They actually end up changing the rules inside different industries. And one of the things they all had in common is they, they all had somehow a near death experience. They had cancer, they had a car crash, somebody close to them died. And they valued time more than anybody else. And so I'm like, all right, how do I reframe myself so I can actually figure out how to value time? So I took my mom's birthday and her death day and I took it and I, and then I, I added to my birthday. And so it's December 17, 2027 would be the day that I would die if my mom, if I was my mom, right? And I'm going in it. Like I know I'm going to die that day. So if I only have this much time left, what would I do? And so you start to realize there's things in it where like, you know, I would see. I have four children. I did it. It started with like 2500 days. I only have four. I have four children. I see them once a quarter, seven years. Seven years times four is 20. I'd see my kids 28 more times in my life. That's like, okay, wait a second, I got to do something. So I literally cut my clients. I figured out how to make sure my kids are all over the country. So I now try to travel to see them as often as I can. We go skiing together, we do different things together. We spend two weeks. Like everything is about basically spending that time. I'm down to 611 days now. I'm not going to die on that day. But the fact is every day after that day is a bonus day in my mind. So I've literally made up a lie. It's helped me make better Decisions. And it now gives me the dopamine hit of like, oh, my gosh. And I'm literally in the best shape I've ever been, so I'm pretty sure I'm not going to die that day. But I only got in shape because I didn't want to die, not because I wanted to be healthy. Healthy is just generic. And so part of this is to realize, like, nobody should be wasting their time at a job that they hate. Life is too short for that. And I, and I, to be honest, I realize that now at 60, but the reality is that at 30, you got to go, like, when is the time you're going to start to go do what you want to do? And I'm speaking to the people who are listening going like, holy, that's exactly what I'm thinking about the 25%. Going like, they're ready to go, like, why do I keep listening to that boss? He's such an asshole. Right, well, what are you going to do about it? You can, but you're not going to switch if you, like, you got to actually figure out what you're going to do. It's important for people to understand that everything is not about optimizing for outcomes that you feel you control, but you don't like. So, for example, if I want to build a startup or if I want to do get an X job or whatever that might be, you might think, okay, I have time and I can, you know, waffle around and get to it when I get to it. But ultimately, yeah, life is short and time is short and you're there. You're literally on a time ball. So, so, so I'm, I'm, I'm coaching. I coach. Yeah. Yeah, I could. Yeah, that's right. It's a time wall, right? You got to build a time wall. So what I've done is, like, I coach people in their 20s and their 30s and they're like, oh, I want to be a founder. I'm like, okay, well, what's the next job you want? Well, I want to be a founder. I'm like, are you ready? But don't, you know, well, I don't know how to do this and this and this. Let's go find you a job for two years. You're going to tell me you're only going to be there for two years because you want to be a founder and literally, like, what's the job? And this person took a job as chief of staff so they can learn every aspect and work directly with the founder. And they actually work. They took a 40% pay cut to actually go be the chief of staff for this very famous founder and allowed them to basically learn everything they could so they could actually go be a founder in the next shop. And. And they love it. The employer loves it, and the employee loves it. And he made the trade off. And then so I told him the moment, he goes, like, when you, when you take this job, you know it's less money, right? He goes, yeah. I'm like, you can't bitch about money because you're choosing to basically do this for this reason. And if, if you could go make more money, if you need money, then go, go take the other job. Job. But don't, don't have regrets. There are no regrets. You do make the best decision you can in the moment you have. Okay, to put a bow in this, in this discussion. What I do want to ask you, if somebody wants to sit down today and figure out how do I audit my professional life of where I am and where I want to go. Yeah, it's the first thing we have you do. It's the first thing we have you do is we have you draw a timeline. Right. And the timeline basically starts with, tell me about the different roles you've had and the different jobs you've had, where you were, what was your role, who is your boss. And then tell me about what part of that job did you get energy from and what part of that job did you suck your energy from and do that for every job you've had? And you can go all the way back to when you were in school. What subjects gave you energy, what subjects didn't give you energy. Right. Ultimately, then when you look across time, you start to say, hey, these are the things that give me energy. Do they still give me energy? What are the things that really hit me now that I love to do? And like in the last month, and so this process, most people want to sit down and do it, but it takes almost a month to do it because you start to realize during that week, oh, that was really energy giving. I didn't even realize that, oh, this was really energy draining. And so you start to realize, you build a list of things that give you energy and a list of things that basically suck your energy. And so that becomes the foundation of kind of like, what, what do I want to be able to do? And so that's the place to start. And that's what vocation takes you through. Vocation takes you through. It goes from, here's the timeline to what are your energy drivers and drains? To what are the themes about that? And then how do we benchmark each job against these themes? And then how do we go prototype four or five really different jobs so we can actually understand what fits and doesn't fit? And we can start to see things that might happen that we didn't anticipate. And then ultimately it gets down to here's the kind of job I want and here's where I'm going to take. And then what are the trade offs you're willing to make make? And so we start to weight those themes. Like, it's more important for me to get experience right now versus it's more important me to make money. So one is an A and the other is a B versus no, I'm in my 40s. Like, I got four kids, I got to make money. Like that's in the A. And the experience is second. Because at some point I got to make sure I'm providing for my family. And so you start to build priorities. And then ultimately then each job that comes in, you have a scoring matrix that basically can tell you with kind of a score relative, your current job, a score relative to kind of like what, how much better or worse it is. And then it will detail out kind of what's better or worse, and the trade offs you have to make so you can actually make a decision. And then it'll tell you how to negotiate. I wish I had it sooner. It's like, it's, it's your own personal, you know, agent to help you represent you. I definitely wish I had it sooner. That's. That, that's the most surprising thing is most people, when you ask about why they change jobs, they just would, they would say it was frustrating. Oh, I had an opportunity. What does that mean? Like, and what did, what did you not anticipate? Oh, my God. That was the worst decision of my life. Why was it the worst decision in life? Well, I thought it was gonna be this and it was that. Well, did you have the conversation? No, I didn't know how to have it. That's what we're trying to do is we're trying like everything about jobs and jobs to be done. And everything that I do is about going, thinking deeper, caring more to have impact. I, I also feel like it's a really helpful framework in terms of understanding what parts of your life, at a personal level, you could. That drains your energy. That's right. Because this is, this is. Yeah, this is, this is not just about your career. The career is kind of the, the chink in the armor where you were able to do it, but, but it's really about your life. What are the trade offs you're willing to make, how much time you're willing to do so, like I'm to the point where this is going to sound ridiculous. I lived my life from 20 to almost 50, 52 on four to six hours of sleep a night. I now sleep eight hours of sleep a night. And I'm way more productive than I've ever been. I didn't even know that was a thing because I thought in my paradigm I was sleeping is lazy. I can sleep when my phrase was I can sleep when I die. And the reality is like, no, I can't be sharp when I die. Awesome. Well, lobby, this has been. I don't even know how to summarize this conversation because it's both personally and professionally and I think everyone listened to this point. So I want to close it with one story though. So I've changed my name recently and you keep going as Bob. And then, oh no, Bobby. And, and I want to tell people why I did it is I have my first grandchild. And there's a very big difference between your child and a grandchild. It's like I would tell you the greatest gift your children could ever give you is a grandchild. Because when I had children, I had all the stress of, oh my God, how am I going to pay for college? How are they going to handle teenage years? It was just as happy as I were to have them. There was as much stress as there was happiness, if not more, more. And, and so, and the stress gets to you. So I had four kids in five years, which was a very long time. But when I was born, I was named after my mom's father, my grandfather, and his name was Bob. And he didn't want me to be called Bobby because he thought Bobby was one of those names that would be, you know, it's not, it's not for proper, for business. And so we're going to call him Bob and I'm going to change my name to Bobby. And so I know my grandfather is Bobby and it wasn't Grandpa, it was Bobby. And so part of this is to realize that when my grandchild was born, I changed my name to Bobby because I want her to call me Bobby, not Bob. And ultimately what I found is that as I got, as people started to call me Bobby, it was like, hey, Bobby, what's going on? Like all of a sudden it's a different register. It's a different level of energy. It's like all of a sudden, like versus hey, Bob, what's going on? It's like, it's like this, this downtone and I'm like, and so my son got married in September. And I said, you know what? I'm just going to change my name to Bobby. Because I just, I like when people call me Bobby. It' gives me. It so goes back to the drama. It gives me energy. I don't know why, but I'm going to take it. Is it because I feel younger? Is it because I, I, I get the intonation? I feel people using my name more. I don't really give a. But it gives me energy and I've done it and so creates awkward situations. My brand person said like, oh my God, you're going to change the brand. We can't do. I'm like, I don't really care. It gives me energy. Like, do you know how hard is to find energy at my age? And so that's why I changed my name from Bob to Bobby. Makes me think more. More people should think about even the smallest, tiniest things, like changing your name. Nobody would really think about that. But if it really gives you energy and there's something, yeah, it's crazy. Like, I never anticipated it, never, not in a million years would I think that adding a by to my name would give me energy. But it does. And, and like, let's be clear. I have friends who make fun of me for it. I don't care. I don't care. There's not like when my granddaughter can call me Bobby is like the thing like, like everything will melt away. All the, all the critics will melt away because I know what's important to me. Well, I think that's the perfect way to. Well, thank you. We went, we went an hour and 21 minutes. You're gonna have to. I hope I don't have to. I hope I don't have to. It might be too. I would much rather to put the rough on it out there because I feel like this is the most real Bob interview I've ever heard. So here's the thing is I, I ask your, your listeners to literally comment. I know that you don't comment often. You don't really do that kind of stuff. You listen. But I would ask, I would urge you, if you got value from this or it literally gave you energy in some portion of it, tell me where, tell us where, where did it give you energy? Because at some point that means there's. There's something going on and that will help you, but it will also help us. So please write your comments around just the fact of, like, where did you get energy in this podcast? And help us understand. Kind of like be the divining rod to help us decide. Decide which directions to go. Because as you can see, there's many directions. We'd love to have that. And honestly, if you're struggling with your career, because I know a lot of people are at the moment, definitely go check out. What's the website again, bobby? It's join vocation.com so we have it for both. Vocation.com is for the employer side. So we have a recruiting platform that will help you actually recruit using that thing so you can actually figure out people you're looking at, what are their energy drivers and drain. And then we have a management tool on top of it that allows you to frame the work to your employees around what gives them energy and doesn't tell. It's like, I need you to do this, this, and this, and you throw it into an AI and it restates it in terms of the things that they like to do. So it actually reframes the work in a way that actually helps them get energy from it. Lovely. Awesome. It'll be in the description for sure. Thank you so much to everyone who tuned in. See you.