Show Notes

Long-time Silicon Valley marketing guru Guy Kawasaki joins Tom to talk about his latest book, Wise Guy, and the lessons Guy has learned from his time at Apple.

About Guy Kawasaki

Long-time Silicon Valley marketing guru Guy Kawasaki joins Tom to talk about his latest book, Wise Guy, the lessons Guy has learned from his time at Apple, and his many experiences over the course of a 45-year career in tech. A remarkably open an entertaining look at one of the valleys most popular personalities.

Transcript

"TK: Guy, thanks for joining us today. I’m going to begin by saying that your latest book, Wise Guy, which I love, by the way, is very atypical from the kinds of books that you’ve written in the past. What drove that? Guy: When you’re 64 - at least I did. I came to this realization that I have to thread this needle. Before I was 64, in my 30s and 40s, I did not have the wisdom to put it on paper, and if I don’t hurry up and write this book, I may forget a lot of stuff. I don’t intend this as a memoir or an autobiography because, frankly, I don’t take myself that seriously, but I do have a lot of lessons that I think will help people optimize their life, and my thing is why should people make the same mistakes that I made? At least, I can help them make new mistakes. [Laughter] So, I’m trying to pass on all the wisdom that I can in a couple of hundred pages. TK: What I loved about the book was that you’re so incredibly transparent. You really do put yourself out there and share experiences, and you say in some cases, for the first time you talked about these experiences publicly. I loved when you talked about your dad and your upbringing. I especially loved when you talked about your dad and his Caddies because my dad used to love his Caddies. [Laughter] A big treat was always to get the Caddy to go out on a big date, right? Guy: Yes, I did that. [Laughter] TK: You’re unapologetic about the fact that you’re a car guy, and cars drove you. It motivated you, and there were other motivations too that you talked about in the book. Do you want to share a bit about your philosophy and motivation? Guy: Sure. TK: Because I loved it when you said, “I don’t care what motivates you. I know something motivates you.” Guy: That’s exactly how I feel. You know that Sandra Bullock movie where she’s an undercover FBI agent in some beauty contest? You have to go up there, and you have this little five-minute thing where you can talk about your passions in life, and everybody goes up there and says, “World peace. Saving the whale. Saving the dolphin.” I think that many people believe that that’s what they should do and how they should do it. Talking about motivation, you want to change the world, and you want to do all that kind of stuff. I’ll be quite honest with you that when I was in high school, I had a few experiences where I saw an AC Cobra at a race, and somebody took me for a ride in their 911, and my dad had a Cadillac, and I said, “Wow. I just love cars. I am going to study, and I’m going to work, and I am going to buy a car like this someday.” [Laughter] That’s not something that you would stand up in a beauty contest and say, “Well, I’ve been motivated not by changing the world, but changing my car.” That’s the god’s honest truth. I just fell in love with cars. Then I said, “I got to get one of these cars.” I have gone on to hopefully do more meaningful things [Laughter] than buy cars, but I’m certainly being transparent that something as insipid as a love of cars motivated me to work hard and study hard. What can I say? TK: You talked about that, and then on the headway, you talked about this encounter with a high-powered CEO, Sandra Kurtzig, who had founded ASK, and you saw on her computer, [Laughter] you happened to be - I love this one. It’s great. Again, I was just visualizing this as you were describing it in the book. You happened to be at her home, and tell us what happened then at her home. [Laughter] Guy: Sandra Kurtzig was this big-deal, high-tech CEO who started a software company. So, she was very well-known, very successful, very rich, and she happened to be a Macintosh user. One day, she had a lot of trouble with her Mac. So, I went over to her house to help her fix her Mac, and of course, she has a Testarossa in her garage, which is a whole another [Laughter] story, but anyway… TK: That’s great. Guy: I go into her house, and she has this massive Radius or SuperMac Two-Page Display, and she says, “Okay. This is my Mac. This is my problem.” She takes the mouse, and the screensaver turns off, and boom, there’s a window open, [Laughter] and the window was her Quicken checking account. I was a Quicken user. So, I know exactly where to look for the balance. [Laughter] The balance was something like $250,000.00, and I said to myself, “So, that is what it means to be rich. You have a quarter million dollars in your checking account.” At that time, my checking account status was positive or negative. [Laughter] It was on the cusp. [Laughter] It was never 250 or 275. So, that was also insipid, but powerful motivating moment for me. TK: It was a great story. [Laughter] I’m going to ask you the follow-up. When you finally had that much money to put into an account, did you stick it all in your checking account, just so you could look at it and say, “Hey, I made it.”? Guy: [Laughter] Honestly, [Laughter] the answer is yes. [Laughter] TK: [Laughter] Of course, you did. Guy: You know what? It’s also rational, and the reason why it’s rational is because [Laughter] with interest rates at 1% or whatever, [Laughter] it doesn’t matter, right? TK: Exactly. [Laughter] Guy: I had done it. [Laughter] I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg’s checking account - well, Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, assuming that they use an ATM. Maybe their people’s people go get cash for them, or maybe they don’t have cash. They just have their people pay behind them. What do they have their default cash withdrawal to be? [Laughter] TK: I think their spreadsheet for their budget looks like one of those spreadsheets when you overflow a certain field, and you get a bunch of error codes? That’s what it looks like. Guy: Yes. [Laughter] They have to make the column wider. [Laughter] TK: Exactly. [Laughter] You brought up that you worked with Macintosh, and you brought up Apple. I’m sure, you as an individual, can’t go far without someone who stop you and talk about Apple. It’s become such an incredible success story over the decades, and for those of us who have followed it and for those of us who, like you, have been part of it, it must be fascinating to see the incredible change that happened over the years, but take us back. Tell us a bit about some of the lessons that you learned from Apple, and of course, everyone wants to hear about Steve Jobs. Guy: Yes. TK: So, if you could talk a little bit of the wisdom that you gathered from Steve, that would be really cool to talk about too. Guy: I started working at Apple in 1983, and I got the job because of nepotism, straight out nepotism. My college roommate hired me. So, it wasn’t because I was imminently qualified because, quite frankly, I wasn’t. I had a psych degree. I never tool a computer class. I never worked in the computer business. For six months before that, I worked at a software company, but fundamentally, my career path was [Laughter] I worked for a jewelry manufacturer. I got this job because of nepotism, and I succeeded. One lesson there is it doesn’t matter how you get in. It matters what you do once you get in. I got in because of nepotism, but the day after you’re hired because of nepotism, it doesn’t matter anymore. You either deliver, or you don’t deliver. You can broaden that lesson because it also doesn’t matter if you have a great GPA from an Ivy League school, but if you’re incompetent, you’re incompetent, right? It doesn’t matter what your track record is, and the flipside of that is also true, which is more of my case, which is even if you don’t have the perfect track record, if you get in and do good work, nobody says, “That’s a really good employee. It’s too bad his GPA was only 2.75, and his SATs were only 500, and he went to a community college.” Nobody gives a shit. You either deliver, or you don’t. That’s the lesson there. The… TK: The guy who brought you on board though, Mike Boich, he was your roommate in college? Was that how you met Mike Boich? Guy: Yes. TK: So, he brought you on board. He had a quote in the book that Steve had played. [Laughter] He said, “Hey, go ahead and hire Guy, but you’re betting your career on it.” You talked about nepotism, but Mike obviously must have had a pretty good sense of who you were and your capabilities to be able to risk that much on bringing you on board. Guy: That is a very funny quote. It’s a true quote. I don’t know if he literally would have gotten fired if I turned out to be a bozo, but Steve has been known to do things like that. How much can you really know about your college roommate? You don’t really know if he’ll be competent in a business setting. So, I give Mike a lot of credit for risking his career on my career. [Laughter] TK: [Laughter] That was your first stint at Apple though, and I would imagine, being relatively great at that point, this must have been quite an experience for you, given the personality that Jobs had and given where the company was at that point in time and the role that you had in the Macintosh, this new, radical idea that, at the time, I’m sure had all the risks associated with. Guy: What a ride. It really was like going to Disneyland to work. It was because we were on a mission, a mission to prevent a George Orwellian society, totalitarianism, suppression of freedom of thought, et cetera, et cetera. So, this wasn’t just to ship a personal computer. This was to change the world and then the universe. We really did believe that. We definitely were drinking from the same fountain there. It’s a time that I would not trade for any other career that I’ve had. It was very formative, and I learned about innovation. I learned about people. With innovation, I learned that your current customers can’t really tell you what they want, but - I take that back. Your current customers can’t tell you what they need. They want a bigger, faster, cheaper Apple II, but what they needed was a Macintosh. This holds true for everybody running in a company today. If you ask your install base what do they want, they can tell you, “Bigger, faster, cheaper,” but they can’t describe the next curve, the next revolution. TK: I’ve heard it often about Jobs. Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, also had a similar philosophy. You can’t ask the market what it wants. You got to bring it obviously back to the marketplace. They will recognize it when they see it. Guy: Right. TK: Did Jobs actually articulate that? Did he say that in those kinds of words? Was it that powerful of a message, or did you just learn because it was just a cultural thing that you all understood that? Guy: Well, I think I came to understand that afterwards. I don’t think that - maybe he did, but it’s a long time ago. I don’t think he ever came out in a communications meeting and said, “Our customers are telling us, ‘We want a bigger, faster, cheaper Apple II,’ but we’re delivering a Macintosh. They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what they truly need.” In my mind, that never occurred, but if you look back, you have to say that that’s what we did. You can also find many negative examples, right? Imagine the CEO of Smith Corona or Remington Rand saying, “Our customers want a bigger, faster, cheaper typewriter. We need to have the lift-off error-correcting tape that the IBM Selectric has because that’s what they want.” Well, that’s why there’s no Remington Rand and Smith Corona today, right? TK: Right. Guy: Because they didn’t get to the next curve. The CEO of Kodak in 1975 or 1976, I don’t think he went and said, “We’re in the business of preserving memories, and right now we’re preserving memories by enabling people to take photographs with some chemicals on film. So, what our customers need is deeper, richer colors, more kinds of film, black and white film, that kind of stuff.” The total irony of that is that in 1975, an engineer in Kodak invented a digital camera. TK: Isn’t that amazing? That’s one of the most impressive examples of how poorly we understand the future, even when we’re seeing it on our lap. Guy: Well, of course, this is easy for us to say, right? TK: Sure. Guy: Holy cow, that’s the mother of all mistakes. TK: You talked about this in the book, right? How do you see that next curve? Kodak got it right there under their noses, and like you said, it’s easy for us to say, but still, you’d think that they could have been more with it. The same thing happened to Polaroid. The same thing happened to Blockbuster. Guy: Yes. TK: We’ve seen this over and over again. How do you spot that next curve? Guy: That’s why it’s much easier to be an author. [Laughter] TK: [Laughter] I appreciate the honesty. Guy: [Laughter] TK: I totally agree with you there. Guy: This something that you can only do in hindsight. If you look at any venture capitalist’s portfolio, you say to a venture capitalist, “Why did you invest in Google?” That venture capitalist will say, “Well, I knew Larry and Sergey were a really great team, and I knew that search would become increasingly important as the internet gets bigger, and I knew that if search got big, we can monetize that search, and I knew that these kids were capable of building patent-pending, curve-jumping, paradigm-shifting, world-class, scalable technology. That’s why I invested in Google.” If you said to the same guy, “Well, why did you invest in Webvan, so people can buy grocery online? Why did you invest in Pets.com, so people can buy dog food online?” The venture capitalist will say, “I told my dumbass partners not to go into those fields.” The way it works in Silicon Valley is we throw a lot of stuff up against the wall. Some of it sticks. You get your paint brush out. You paint the bullseye around it, and you say, “I hit the bullseye.” TK: Jobs had this wonderful ability to create what’s been termed a reality distortion field. You talked about this a little bit in the book, and you tied it to something which I thought was really interesting, this whole notion of - you called it second believer or second follower. Talk a little bit about that because I think we put so much emphasis on the first to market, the first one to demonstrate a new technology, and it doesn’t always work out that those are the ones who are successful. Guy: Listen. It goes against everything. [Laughter] It goes against most of what I believe to be the fast second, but rationally, the fast second may not be such a bad concept. Depending on how you want to look at history, you could say that Microsoft was the fast second. You could also make the case that Xerox PARC was the first one and Apple was the fast second and Microsoft was the fast third. We may see this again with cars. Point of disclosure, I’m a Mercedes-Benz brand ambassador. Tesla comes out with the electric cars, legitimizes electric cars, makes people accept electric cars. They are the pioneer, but it may be Mercedes or BMW or Ford or General Motors or Nissan that really reaps the electric car curve. Having said that, whether you are the fast second or the pioneer, the message is clear. You’ve got to get to the next curve. If Kodak had copied digital photography quickly versus inventing it, it would still be here today, right? TK: It’s interesting because when we look back on this phenomenon, it’s easy to slap labels on them and talk about who were the winners and who were the losers and what they should have been and what they could have done. In the moment, it’s always very difficult to spot those innovative curves. What you talked about in the book, which captured my attention, is that much of it, at the end of the day, does come down to certain core values that, as individuals and as organizations, we display and we exercise. Those core values, sometimes with a little bit of serendipity and good fortune, can create extraordinary results. You’ve been involved in a lot of situations where you hadn’t necessarily had an agreement to exchange value for services, but yet it’s turned out very well for you. When this happened to you, you were just lucky that you were in the right place at the right time? Guy: As I’ve gotten older and older, I’ve come to believe that it’s better to be lucky than smart. The way to optimize or at least maximize serendipity and the luck that I’ve had is that you default to yes, and this means that as a philosophy, as a perspective, you’re always thinking you’re going to say yes. There are people, however, who go through life who default to no. Whenever anybody asks anything, the answer is no, unless you convince me to go yes, and I think that is a suboptimal way to go through life because no is a hard stop. Whereas, yes, you can always renegotiate change or whatever to optimize later, but no is no. The fear of saying yes all the time is that you’ll be taken advantage of, but I think that the upside of saying yes all the time far exceeds the downside of being taken advantage of. TK: You’re paying more than a table, so to speak. You’re putting your bets on many numbers at the same time, rather than having the arrogance that you can pick the right one. Guy: I wish I could tell you that - I’m a big data guy, and I could tell you that that’s my rational line of thought. [Laughter] That’s not true. I just happen to be a half full glass kind of guy, and I just - if you look at the huge texts and thesis, we have to be honest and say, “Wow. Would you have said yes to Twitter? Would you have said yes to eBay, so that” - if you go down the line, Google was the fifth or sixth search engine. You go down the line, and you say, “Maybe I should just get involved with the most dumbass thing I hear [Laughter] because sometimes a dumbass can succeed.” TK: There’s a great line in the book where you talked about - this might be paraphrased, but you’ll know the line when I say it. “Go to the opposite of the crowd that’s going the opposite of the crowd.” It took me a little while to figure that one. I had to draw a diagram to figure that one out, Guy. Guy: [Laughter] The very analog example I use is there was this thing in L.A. called the carpocalypse where they were going to shut down a freeway. I think it was at 405 and the Ventura Freeway, past the Getty Museum when you go over the hill when you’re going north, right into Sherman Oaks where those two freeways intersect. They were going to close that intersection. L.A. Times and everybody was saying, “Avoid that area. It’s going to be closed. Traffic is going to be horrible,” et cetera, etcetera. So, all the crowd, because they’re wise, they read the L.A. Times, and they don’t go there, [Laughter] but I happen to be in Anaheim, and there was no choice. So, I said, “All right. Gird your loins. Get in the car.” So, I get in the car. I go there, and I fly through there. I was flying through. There was nobody because everybody, the crowd, the wise heeded L.A. Times. Amazingly, there was nobody left to go through the one lane that was open. [Laughter] It’s like when Waze tells you, “Well, the freeway is stopped. You should go through this backroad.” Basically, everybody has Waze here. So, now the backroad’s traffic [Laughter] is worse than the freeway. So, sometimes you should defy Waze and go on the way that it says not to go. Although, if anybody from Waze is listening, I have an idea for a business model, and the business model would be that you charge people certain amount of money for a VIP version of Waze. There’s the algorithm that says, “Take the backroad.”, but if you’re that person who pays $100.00 a year, we’re going to tell only a few number of people to go to this even better way. [Laughter] So, there’s Waze for the rest of us, and there’s Waze for the best of us, [Laughter] and I would so pay for that. No problem. TK: I love it. In Boston, we’re not quite as technologically advanced and adept. So, by default, you get the VIP version here when you’re using Waze. [Laughter] So, always say yes or say yes as often as possible, go the opposite of the crowd that’s going the opposite of the crowd, and yet, as you’ve written in your book, you let go of a chance to be a billionaire. Can you share that with us quickly? Guy: Yes. Well, I don’t know if it’s billionaire, but I turned down the opportunity to interview for being the first CEO of Yahoo! Yahoo! is in interesting times now, but this is way back when. So, that easily could have been a billion, and I also left Apple twice. I don’t know if that could have been a billion, but that could be - I swear it could be hundreds of millions, and then I turned down Steve for a job. So, that could be another at least a few dozen millions. So, yes. I don’t know why you’d read a book from someone who’s that stupid. TK: Somehow, things worked out really well for you. Let’s talk about leadership role because in the shadow of Steve Jobs, one of the great deal from his leadership style - but you talked about some other leaders here. Richard Branson, you got a one whole vignette about him. You really emphasized throughout the book, and I really enjoyed this because it’s good to see this coming out of Silicon Valley especially, a sense of humility, be humble, and how important this is for leaders. Could you give us a sense of the importance of being humble as a leader? Because you talked about that a great deal in the book, and I enjoyed the way that you positioned them as being a core value that you embrace, but you also saw many leaders embrace. We don’t see Steve Jobs as being this really humble person, right? So, I’m curious what you think about that. Guy: [Laughter] You would not put those two words together. TK: No. Guy: Listen. I don’t want to hold myself up as this fantastic example of humility and all that because I have my arrogant moments, but the story that I tell, which I think is really, really fascinating, is when I was in Russia and so was Richard Branson. He and I were giving a speech at the same conference, and he comes into the speaker ready room, and he asked me if I fly on Virgin, and I tell him no because I have United Airlines Global Services. So, I said, “Richard, I’m Global Services at United, and I don’t want to risk that.” He got down on his knees and started polishing my shoes with his jacket. TK: Wow. Guy: That’s the moment I started flying Virgin America. TK: That’s awesome. Guy: The skeptics might say, “Well, Guy, he did it because you’re Guy. It’s who you were.” My sense of him is that he would have done it for anybody. TK: Branson is one of those folks who seems to be extraordinarily authentic and approachable, as far as people of that sort of level of success go. This is a value that you do hold dear, and you talked about your parents and the upbringing that you had and how they taught you to be humble, and they taught you humility. I think it’s a very important part of this core that you’re telling in the book is that a lot of what you’ve done has been based on some very core, core of soul values that you feel are immutable and are important to keep in mind. The trip that you took with your uncle, I believe it was, to the hardware store, which still haunts you. [Laughter] He stole a few screws or a few nails. Was that it? Guy: Well, I’m glad he’s not alive, in one sense, [Laughter] because he might not be too happy about this story. Notice, I did not identify which uncle did this. I have many uncles. TK: Yes. Guy: That’s a possible deniability on many people’s parts. For your listeners who might not know. “What the hell is he talking about?” [Laughter] When I was a kid, one day I went to a hardware store with my uncle, and he needed a few screws, and he just opened up the little plastic container with a few screws, and we walked out of the store without paying. This was a really great uncle. I really loved him. He really did lots of fun stuff with me. A little piece of me died that day. [Laughter] He was my favorite uncle, and everybody is teaching me about being honest and all that kind of stuff, and he just shoplifted screws. [Laughter] How do you put that together? What if you were at a 7-Eleven, and you saw Mother Teresa come in and lift a Gatorade? [Laughter] Oh my god. So, that’s a lesson, that nobody is perfect. You know what I’m saying? TK: Yes. Guy: Nobody is a saint. That’s one lesson. I think the other important lesson is that something so tiny and so small and so trivial as that, in your mind, could be something fairly significant for someone watching you. I’m sure my uncle didn’t think, “I’ll just steal these two screws, and then I’ll teach a valuable lesson to my nephew that crime is okay.” [Laughter] He wasn’t thinking like that. I’m sure he didn’t think it would haunt me for the rest of my life. [Laughter] I think one of the messages from the book and from that story is that be careful. If you think, “What’s the big deal? I shoplifted a few screws.” or, “What’s the big deal? I yelled at a waitress.” or, “What’s the big deal? I yelled at a flight attendant.” It’s… TK: As leaders and influencers and people who have any degree of visibility, I think what you’re saying is you’re being watched. Guy: Yes. It is a big deal. What if you pulled into a parking lot, and there’s no parking? You’re driving with you kids, and you say, “Screw it. Let’s just park in the handicap slot.” Is that a big deal in the world? Not really, but maybe the story and the lesson that your kids will get from that act is you don’t have to really respect the law, you don’t care about handicapped people. There are a lot of ways that you could spin that as a formative experience. So, be careful. TK: That’s a meaningful story. Let’s switch gears a little bit here because I’m curious to find out what your take is on AI. You can’t go a day without having some conversation about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Guy: Yes. TK: On the one end, the way it’s going be is we’d have this apocalyptic overlord situation where humanity will be annihilated because we basically don’t meet the high bar that AI sets. On the other end, you have folks who say, “Well, let me see it. Prove it to me. I don’t believe that it’s there.” Do you have an opinion on that? Because I know a lot of our listeners are probably interested in AI. Guy: First of all, we’ve been talking about how AI is going to be great for about 50 years. [Laughter] It’s not like this is a surprise. I would be dishonest if told you that I didn’t think AI was promising and mostly positive. Particularly, in things like autonomous driving where AI plays a huge part, I think it’s great. I’ll tell you a story that I once - I’m an Allstate customer. When you get into a car accident, it used to be that you went to one of 900 claim centers and made an appointment, a guy or a gal with a clipboard would come out, will walk around your car, take pictures, fill out a thing, and all that, right? TK: Yes. Guy: Well, now, there’s no more claim centers. Now, you have a smartphone app. You take a picture of your damage. You send it in, and a day later, you get your settlement. Right now, those pictures are going to somebody at some place. They’re looking at it, and they’re going to say, “Okay. It’s this amount of damage, blah, blah, blah. Send a check.” Very shortly, there’s going to be a day when the pictures are done by a machine, and the machines are going to say, “Okay. This is from bumper damage. Send a check.” That’s an example of AI I think, right? If you’re a claim center person, that’s not good for you [Laughter] because you’re out of a job, but that just makes sense. Think about this. I spend half of my life in TSA lines, right? There are people who sometimes are paid, sometimes are not, depending upon the level of stupidity of our elected officials. I’ve got to believe that somewhere at Google, there is an algorithm that can spot a gun in luggage, right? So, why is it that we have people, one at a time, looking at our hand-carry luggage? I don’t understand that. I know that Google has a technology where you could put a camera in the water, and it can count and measure and identify the types of fish swimming past it. So, then if it can do that, surely, it can recognize a gun in a backpack or a knife in a backpack. So, why is it that we still stand in line? Why don’t we just put something in a machine, and out the other end, it either is accepted or rejected because some algorithm looked at the image using artificial intelligence and said, “Aha.” I think the machine won’t get tired. The machine won’t get distracted. Anyway, I’m positive. TK: I think there’s an answer. You’re a positive person. You look at the glass half full. I get that, but there’s an answer to your question about TSA. I believe that it’s like the longer line and greater the inconvenience, the more protected we feel. Guy: [Laughter] Well, then I must feel really protected. [Laughter] Even this government ends anything like that. [Laughter] Seriously, why can’t machine learning and AI go through our hand-carry luggage? TK: It can. Guy: Why? Why can’t it? I don’t understand that. TK: It has less to do with the technology than it does with a lot of other things that we can’t get into. At this point in time, I think you could probably guess on what’s on the top of the list. [Laughter] Hey, listen. There are two things that you’ve done. Of all the stuff that you’ve done, Guy, there are two things that I truly envy you. Guy: Oh, God. TK: I still have time to do this, but you got to give me a first-hand sense of what it was like to, number one, fly in an F-15E. [Laughter] That sounds like an absolutely incredible off-the-wall experience. Guy: Oh, my god. First of all, from the time that you go to the briefing room and to the time that you’re on the tarmac, it’s about three or four hours. There’s a lot of briefing. It’s not just, “You’re tall enough. Put your seatbelt on and go.” That’s one. Number two, I don’t care what hairy ride you’ve been in on an amusement park. There’s nothing even close to an F-15. I forget the number, but it’s like four Gs or eight Gs or something. You’re in this 26-million- or 30-million-dollar machine, and it’s just you and the pilot, and you’re flying over Alaska. TK: Wow. Guy: Honestly, ever since then, there is no amusement park ride that could change my pulse too much. I’m sure there’s stuff… TK: That sounds awesome. Guy: Not that many people have done something like that. By the way, I’ve also been caught on and off aircraft carriers. TK: Wow. Guy: That’s not nearly the power and the speed, but that’s also a very interesting and hairy experience, to go from 200 miles an hour to zero on your feet. It’s quite an interesting experience. TK: That is awesome. The last thing that you’ve done, which I still have time to do - you got a couple of years on me. So, I got a little bit of a buffer here. You started surfing at age 62. Guy: Yes. TK: Who the hell at the age of 62 decides, “I’m finally going to get on a surf board”? Guy: [Laughter] Well, it’s because my daughter took it up. So, that influenced me to try paddle boarding and stuff. I got to tell you, I love surfing. Don’t tell anybody. I went surfing twice yesterday. TK: Wow. Guy: I went in the morning and in the afternoon, and I had one of these interviews for the book rollout, [Laughter] and I sent them an email. I said, “Listen. The wind and the tide are just perfect. I can’t keep our interview.” I bet you, no one has ever told them on the day of the interview because people are dying to get everything. I sent them an email, and I said, “I’ll be transparent. I’ll be honest. I’m doing this because I want to surf, okay? So, we need to change it.” [Laughter] The irony is, as I figured out afterwards, the guy is in the middle of Winnipeg. [Laughter] He hasn’t even seen an ocean yet. TK: You’re rubbing salt into the wound. Guy: Yes. There’s some wisdom here. Number one is learning is a lifetime experience. It’s not like you get out of school and you stop learning, whether it’s a sport or a subject. That’s number one. You can learn something at 62. What a concept. I would say that if I look at my peers, 60 to 65 years old, I don’t think a lot of them are taking up surfing. They may play golf once a month and consider that an exercise. Learning is a lifelong thing, and the other important lesson that I hope people take away from that is that I see many parents who make their kids pick up what they are interested in. So, if you’re a professional hockey player, your kids take up hockey. If you’re a tennis player, tennis. If you’re an engineer, you make your kids take up programming. I understand that, and I’"