Remarkable People Behind the Podcast Live show: Life Advice That Doesn't Suck

Sam. Hello everybody. Scott Kawasaki, I am chief evangelist of Canva, creator of the Remarkable People podcast. And in a prior life I was chief evangelist of Apple, back when Apple was so going to fail. I have been on the board of trustees of Wikipedia and I was a Mercedes Benz brand ambassador, which meant that for a good four years or so I could get any Mercedes I want free. Actually, it's even better than free because you had to pay for nothing except gas, not even insurance. That was a thankless job, but somebody has to do it and I stepped up and made the ultimate sacrifice. So anyway, this show is not about Mercedes Benz. This show is about remarkable people. And this week's guest, remarkable guest is Mark Manson. And if you have not heard of Mark Manson, you probably have heard of his two New York Times bestsellers. One is called the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F U C K and the other one, I don't know, you know, in case you have a speaker on and you're in some office and I don't know, I don't want you to get fired. Although who's in an office today? Nobody's in an office. Okay. He wrote the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And his other book, New York Times bestseller is Everything is Fucked, a book about hope. So you may think he's just a profane kind of guy, but exactly, very, very deep. I would say he's an author and philosopher and it's about, or he's about prioritization and no bullshit and life advice. And it was quite entertaining, quite entertaining to interview him. So don't let the profanity get in the way of the gravitas and practicality of his thinking. It was, there's a lot to learn from old Mark Manson and he was in New Zealand when I interviewed him. So you may even hear his wife typing in the background. And I think for a while they were doing laundry too. So not exactly, you know, being in an NPR studio, but you gotta take it how you can get it. So, so a little ice breaking question here. Send it in the comments. What is the best life advice you've ever gotten? And our handy dandy producer, Jeff C. Is gonna get some of those and post them your answer and I'll tell you my answer about what's the best life advice you've ever gotten? So some of the things, as you ponder that, some of the things that Mark Manson talks about is why you should actually look for shit sandwiches. The basic line of reasoning is if you look for shit sandwiches and you love doing what it takes to do a shit sandwich. You. You may have found what truly interests you and what's truly your passion. So let me tell you something. There's lots of things about making a podcast. It is a shit sandwich. And so I love podcasting, so I love shit sandwich podcasting. So there's one. And second thing Mark discussed is that basically people can give a fuck about only two to three or four things. So keep that in the back of your mind. And he also believes that, you know, actions create passion as opposed to passion creating action. So what he means by that is if you take action and you, you know, you're interested in something, you take action and you get better and better. Pretty soon you might be passionate about it. And that's not how most people think. So, Jeff, let's see, you've got any interesting responses about the best life advice. Garrett says listen to understand, not to answer. Yeah, I. That I. That's very interesting. I think when most people are listening. Listening to most people is defined as it's a little pause before you start talking, which is not what Garrett says. Garrett is saying you should listen to understand before you answer, if you ever answer. But the purpose of listening is not just to get ready to spew forth your bullshit. Okay, another comment from my first boss. Piss everyone off equally. Don't try to make anyone too happy or you unbalance things. It's kind of a high risk thing, but okay, I can see how that works. I think that the real message there is, you know, don't suck up to the boss, because who knows how popular the boss is. Okay, how about one more? Jeff? Sometimes you don't need to pay too much attention to your thoughts. They're just thoughts. Wow. If we could get Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and I blocked his name out. Mitch McConnell and what's that other yahoo from Florida that's a senator. I have blocked him. If we could just get them to believe in that wisdom that sometimes your thoughts are just your thoughts, that would make the world a better place. So let's see here about one more. Man, I love these little, little life advice gems. If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. Gene Carter, 1978 Gene Carter. Are you talking about the Gene Carter that was the VP of sales of Apple? Or is there another Gene Carter? Yeah, I'd like that. So I'll tell you the best life advice I have ever gotten. Well, I think my. I don't know who told me this, but I'll give You, there's several gems in my life. One gem is don't ever ask people to do something that you won't do. So if you won't fly coach, don't ask your employees to fly coach. If you don't want to go through a captcha, you know, onboarding process, don't, don't ask your customers to go through captcha. If you, you know what, if you, let's say if you don't want to have to meet contractors for quotes at your house, then don't make people who are using your contracting service meet for people that go. That's not a, that's not a good example. Like, off the top of my head, I can't. Captcha is an excellent example of this. Oh, how about this? If you wouldn't give your credit card to open up a free account, why would you ask anybody to give their credit card to open a free account? So that's advice number one. Advice number two, I think I learned from Steve Jobs, which is your current customers cannot tell you how to innovate and revolutionize an industry. They can only tell you how to make something better, cheaper, faster that you're already getting. In other words, they can't help you jump to the next curve. They can just help you do better on the same curve. Then my father, my father's life advice was the, the concept of noblesse oblige, which is that, you know, basically if you're fortunate and lucky, you owe a debt to society. And he pounded that into me. So I believe in noblesse oblige. And my mother, you believe it or not, my mother, not even five feet, not even a hundred pounds, tiny little Asian woman. What she taught me is, and I kid you not, don't take from anybody. That's right. That's what I learned from my mother. Okay, so let's see. You got any questions here? Mark Manson. Mark Manson, today, the Subtle art of not giving a fuck. Great book. Great. Don't let the profanity get in the way of that great book. So. Oh yes. So I listen. I have a text ohana. This is an extended group of people who send me text messages and I send them text messages. Basically I blast out announcements once or twice a week and then if you respond, you actually are now in a point to point conversation with me. So it's one to many from me. But once you respond to me and I respond to you, it's one to one. And to join that, you send a text message to 831-609-06, 2, 8. Unfortunately, this service is only offered for the US and Canada. It has to do with just. There's so many different privacy laws all over the world that most companies have just not been able to thread the needle for all these countries. So right now, unfortunately, it's U.S. and Canada. 831-0-831-60-9-0628. Operators are standing by. Actually not. It's just a machine. Okay, so questions, questions in the comments. Send the questions. So I'm a big problem. Procrastinator. How do I manage? Well in a Sunday like, my observation of procrastination is when you procrastinate it, contrary to what you might think, it doesn't mean that you have too much to do. It means you have too little to do. So you have so too little to do. You don't need to force yourself to get organized. So I guess my recommendation is do more stuff and, you know, get to the point where you're. You're swamped and then you prioritize and then you discipline yourself. So contrary to what most people tell you, I think you need to do more, not less. All right, next question. Let's see. I love this series. We ran a show called Lucky Startups back in the day. My question is, do you have any startups we should be paying attention to these days? Besides Canva, of course. Of course I would have said Canva, but there's Canva. For my SquadCast recording. Excuse me. For my podcast recording, I use a startup named squadcast and it's really an excellent platform for recording podcasts. I also use a product called descript and descript enables me to edit the audio of my podcast. And I use a, a I use descript to edit my video recording. So believe it or not, the way Descript works is you upload audio or video. It provides a transcript, that transcript, when you edit the text in the transcript, like if you delete text in the transcript, you are deleting audio or you're deleting video. So this is a very easy way to edit and cut out the crap from audio and video. That's the script. I use a product for encoding, recording video and embedding picture in picture called ecamm. And also this, this broadcast is coming to you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. And that's because of a company called Restream. So what Restream does is it takes the feed from Ecamm and it sends it to multiple platforms at once. And one of the beauties, oh, I've frozen Here. Wait. Nope. No longer frozen. So one of the beauties of that is that now I can send out, you know, I can do one record, not recording. I can do one live. And. And it goes out to four places, and that's so much easier. And also the comments from four places appear in one place. In the old days, you know, you'd have to have like three or four windows open and try to watch the comments in different places. But Restream puts them all in one place. So if you are trying to go live in two or more places, you got to look at Restream. Okay, so see. You know another question that the audience. I'd love to hear from the audience is now, where do you go for advice? And I'll tell you my answer to that question too. So that's the next question to answer in the comments. Where do you go for advice? So, Jeff, any questions here? What mic are you using? I am using. Wait a second. This MIC is a Heil H E I L PR 40. So I hope you're asking because you like the sound, because that'd be a real bummer. Yeah, a high PR 40. And just FYI, because when you look it up, you'll notice that it is an XLR mic. It is not a USB mic, because real men use XLR mics, not USB mics. So the way this works is Heil PR 40. XLR mic goes to Rodecaster Pro. It's one of the multiple outputs on Rodecaster Pro. You can have, let me see, you can have four mics, one computer, one Bluetooth, and one iPhone. So you can have seven different inputs. So theoretically, post pandemic, you could sitting around table. And it could be four people using mics. So high OPR 40 goes to Rodecast Pro. The camera is a Sony A6100. It sends out video. The video goes to the imac. The audio comes from the PR40 to the Rodecast Pro. And Rodecaster Pro, then is where the magic happens. And you get audio and video, and that's the setup. What other questions here? No other questions. Well, what about the answer? What's your next big program? Depends what you mean by program. Like right now, I'm basically dedicated to Canva. Canva is a big push into making Canva the de facto standard for presentations. And also my podcast. So between my podcast and Canva and surfing and parenting, my day is done. That's it. And. But, you know, I give a speech maybe twice a week. Twice a week I give a speech, a virtual speech. And believe it or not, you know, you might look at that and say, okay, so guys, so what's the big freaking deal? Because you know, from the time you sign on to the time you're done is maybe an hour. The problem is that it sounds like an hour, but it's really not because there's always at least two calls before. So one call is about the content, you know, the briefing, and then there's a second one where there's a tech check. And I swear, for a, let's say 30 minute virtual appearance, I would say that the number of emails flying back and forth is 50 or 60. So there's 50 or 60 emails per engagement. And I'm doing, let's say two engagements a week. And I have to tell you that, man, it's just hard to keep track of what's going on. And there's so many moving parts and it's like, what time do you start? Okay, that's the time you start. But what time you want me to sign on? And do you want the keynote pre recorded and the Q and A live? Do you want both live? Do you want both pre record? I mean it's just freaking endless. So I am amazed that I have not screwed up an appearance yet. That is just sheer dumb shit luck. But anyway, and then. Oh, let me tell you about Canva for presentations. So I have cut the cord with PowerPoint and now I purely use Canva for my presentations. And here's the advantage. So with Canva it's much easier to make beautiful presentations. I mean, beautiful PowerPoint presentation is an oxymoron, let's face it. Okay, but with Canva it's trivial. And then with Canva you can do several things. You can save it to PDF, you can also present it from the browser, you can also record it as a video, and you can also record it as a video picture in picture. So you know, why would you do that? So let's say you have, you know, a PowerPoint presentation and now you put it in Canva instead of. And then you use canva picture in picture with video. And so you could have the background be the presentation. The foreground has a little circle with your face in it. So you're saying, all right, so you know this, blah, blah, blah blah, click. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, click. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah, click. So the whole thing is like 10 minutes of you explaining five slides, hopefully. And then now you have a video that has you explaining the slides and then you can send that to anybody, which is much better than Sending someone just the slides and hoping that they'll understand what you're saying and get the subtleties of it. And it's really a great thing. And then if you really wanted to do that a little better. Well, actually a lot better because there's more flexibility. You would use ECAMM Live. And so ecamm Live can also embed Picture in picture, but it has more flexibility about the size of the picture in the picture, where you can put the picture in the picture and all that. And so the scenario there just. We're going a little deep into this, but so you make a presentation in canva, okay? You export it to PDF, you drag it into the ECAMM scene, and from that point it is now the background. You have Picture in picture. Background is your PowerPoint excuse. Oh, my God. Background is your PDF. And you use the arrow keys on your keyboard to. So you are in a circle or a square or a rectangle in the front, presentation in the back, using your arrow keys. And it flips through the thing. It's a beautiful system. And then, so you record that and then you. What I do is then I import it into descript. And in descript, that's where you take out the first 10 or 20 seconds where you're clicking on record and you're going to. And you're getting all ready. You want to cut all that out and you send them something basically perfect. And that's like Canva rocks, baby, for that. So that was like a whole Canva ad. So, okay, what else. Does it. How do you handle work burnout, especially when you enjoy doing it? That's an interesting question. You could make the case that you never burn out of something you enjoy doing. I. I guess it's. You just need to take some time off. You need to get away. You need to, like, clear your mind. For me, that is surfing. So depending on the tide, I surf between. I don't know if I should admit this, but if the tide is right, I serve five hours a day, two sessions, two and a half hours each. If the tide is not right, I serve two and a half hours a day. If everything goes to pot, then I don't surf at all. But, yeah, I spend two and a half to five hours per day in the water. So you'd think I would be better than I am. So that's it. But I also, I want to burst the bubble. This is kind of Mark Manson kind of advice. And Mark Manson, I think, would tell you that, listen, this concept of work life balance is Bullshit. So there is no way to thread the needle of work, life, balance. And if you think that's possible, you're setting yourself up for failure. So you just have to come to the conclus that there are times in your life where there will not be work, life balance, It'll be just work and there'll be no life. And then there's going to be other times in your life where it's going to be life and no balance. But. But to think that you can thread the needle and do both for a whole career is. You're deluding yourself. So just. You heard it here first. Work, life, balance is. It ain't going to happen. Not only if you truly want to change the world. Anyway, Miriam, I just joined. I didn't follow thread. Anyway, I was wondering why you decided to go with a podcast. Well, I did a podcast because, frankly, I think podcasting is better than writing a book. Because writing a book. There's several things wrong with writing a book. First of all, it takes a year to write a book, and by the time you're ready to publish it and it comes out six months later, so it's 18 months into it, the book is out of date. I mean, imagine if you started a book six months before the pandemic started. You finished it, you know, right as the pandemic was starting. And like, everything is inaccurate, you know, I mean, so there's that. So it just takes too long to get a book out. Whereas the podcast, although right now we have a two month backlog. So we have in the can about eight recordings and we only ship one a week. So if I were to record another podcast today, it would be nine weeks before it comes out. But anyway. But still, nine weeks is better than 18 months. And then if there's really something topical, we can just jam it in the front. So we've done things where we record on Monday and we put it out on Wednesday. You cannot do that with a book. So there's that. With a book, you get one advance in three tranches, but one advance. And most people never get more than that advance because most people's book don't sell enough to equal the advance. So you get one shot. With a podcast, you can sell sponsorships every week for infinity. So that's a better model. So between the timeliness and the. And I also think that, I don't know, I think more people might listen to a podcast than actually read a book. But we'll see. We've had more than a million downloads of this Podcast. And I don't consider my download volume and subscriber base successful yet. So, you know, I think our top episode has 30,000 downloads now, you know, just as a data point, Joe Rogan's top podcast is probably, I don't know, 7 million. So there's a lot of space between 30,000 and 7 million. And I looked at, there's a site called Chartable, which is where they measure you against your category. And the last one I saw that is that in the United States, in the category called documentary, which is what remarkable people is, it is ranked 51st. So it depends on how you want to look at that. So you can say, oh, my God, guy. In the category in the United States of documentaries, you're in the top 100. I look at that and say, what the frick? I'm like, this is the 51st most popular podcast in documentary. How can that be 51st? I mean, I want to be in the top 10. And now in the top 10 are things from NPR and LA Times and New York Times. So those things have a significant advantage in that they have millions of subscribers, so you can reach them all the time. I don't have that advantage, but God damn it, man, that's the goal, being the top 10 documentary podcasts in the world. And I tell you something, if you look at my guest list, there is no doubt in my mind. I may not have the top 10 downloads, but I have in the top 10 guest lists in documentary podcasting, in all podcasts. There's no question in my mind. So what else got me off on a tangent there. What podcast do you listen to? I listen to. Wait, wait, don't tell me. Basically, npr. Wait, wait, don't tell me. Terry Gross, Malcolm Gladwell, you know, those kind of things I don't listen to. Literally, I think every podcast I listen to is npr. So that's why I position remarkable people as NPR without the pledge drive. That's how you should think of this. What else? I got about five more minutes because, believe it or not, I got another speech to give. So life is tricky today. So, oh, so where do I go for my advice? Really? I have a small group of people, like three or four people that I ask for advice. These are BFFs and my wife. That's where I go for my advice. So, yeah, what else? Question or comment. People always talk about the success of a business. What can we learn from them? Chris Karishma. I would make the case that you learn more from failure than from success, because with success, let's just say there are many factors that can cause success. For one thing, timing. Another is luck. Another is, you know, let's be honest here. You know, there could be a great product or service, so there's that. But I think when most people go into success, a company that becomes a success, then it's very difficult to support correlation from causation in a failure. You truly understand that, you know, this is the lesson that if you're ternos and you just lie about your results, you know that just ain't gonna work. So you should learn about that. And if you're a company that you decided that you're going to be so successful though, so you build an entire infrastructure so you can scale, and then guess what? The dogs don't eat the food. So you wasted all your money scaling. That's an important lesson. Another, you know, you could learn a lesson like, oh, tall white men hire other tall white men's men. And so there was no diversity in the company and it failed. Well, that's a good. That's a good lesson. That's a good lesson. So I think you learn more from failure. You see that message there? Text me 831. Put it back, Jeff. I forgot the number. 831-609-0628. That's if you want to join my text message message ohana. So sign up, please. Oh, and by the way, this is. It is so fun. I joined Cameo. And so believe it or not, if you want a cameo from me greeting, it's only 50 bucks. And so I've done it for birthdays, I've done it for employee hires. I've done it for, you know, company stuff. It's really quite entertaining. So go to Cameo. C A M E O. And maybe you want me to send your mother a Mother's Day gift of a custom shout out. This assumes your mother knows who I am and cares. Is a big assumption. But if you want a Mother's Day cameo from Guy Kawasaki, come on down, baby. Oh, my God. C A M E O dot com. Go there and look for Guy. All right, so I gotta go. I believe it or not. Oh, wait. I listened to your interview with Mark Manson moments ago. You asked where does he do his best thinking? Where do you do your best thinking? I. First of all, I hope you like that podcast. I do my best thinking. You're gonna think I'm bullshitting you, but I seriously believe I do my best thinking when I'm driving. And absolute best driving and thinking is done when I'm in a car that is a stick shift made in Germany. So that really narrows down where I do my best thinking. That narrows it down to a 911, I think. I think you can get a 718 as a stick, but there are not too many German cars that you can get as a stick today. So I have not owned one of those cars for a very long time. So arguably I have not done my best thinking for a few decades because I haven't owned a Porsche for a few decades. But maybe my best thinking is not necessary. So just my pretty good thinking is good enough. But yeah, the question was where did I do my best thinking? It would be driving a stick shift 9 11. So anybody out there wants to foster my best thinking, feel free to send me a stick shift 911. Alrighty. So remember, remarkable people. Listen, do me a favor, do me a favor, okay? Seriously, do me a favor. It's not that big a favorite. If you know anybody who would enjoy listening about and learning from remarkable people like Mark Manson this week like Melissa Bernstein from Doug and Melissa Toys from, let's see, Emma Isaacs from Business Chicks. Jane Goodall, Arianna Huffington, Martha Stewart, Christy Yamaguchi, Roy Yamaguchi, the chef. Andrew Zimmern, the chef. See Steve Wolfram, MacArthur Wardwin or physicist Angela Duckworth, Mrs. Grit. Also MacArthur Award winner Bob Cialdini, the godfather of influence. I'm telling you, please send a text message or an email to someone and particularly if you're an entrepreneur. I got a lot of entrepreneurs on my podcast. I promise you it will make your friend become more remarkable by listening to my podcast, I guarantee you that. So remarkable. People.com it is 10:30. I really gotta go. Have a great week. Remember, get vaccinated. Don't be a dumbass. Get vaccinated. Until you're vaccinated. Wear a mask. Even after your mask. Vaccinated, Wear a mask. I have two shots, the moderna. And I still wear a mask because vaccination is not perfect. So get vaccinated. Wash your hands, wear a mask, stay out of crowded areas. I don't. I wouldn't go into a crowded restaurant right now. Or bars. I don't care if I'm vaccinated. I ain't taking a chance. It's only my friggin life. So you know what is the big freaking deal? Put on a mask and get vaccinated. Don't be a dumbass. All right, so with that positive note, I end this live broadcast. Have a great week. Take care. See you next week. Next week will be. Who's next week? Katie Milkman. I think. Katie Milkman is a professor at Wharton. She is. She's all about influence and persuasion. Think of her as the next Bob Cialdini. That's Katie Milkman next week. And this week, Mark Manson. The subtle art of giving a or not giving a. So that's it. Take care. Bye.