012: Generating Personal MBA Momentum with Josh Kaufman

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello everybody. I'm really excited to be here today with longtime friend Josh Kaufman. Josh Kaufman is an author whose books have sold over a million copies worldwide. Today we're celebrating the 10 year anniversary edition of his best selling book, the Personal Master the Art of Business. Josh's research focuses on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, productivity, creativity, applied psychology, practical wisdom and more. Josh, welcome to the show.

Jenny, thanks so much for having me on. Have we been friends for 10 years?

I think so.

More than 10 years now.

I think it's at least our 10 year friendiversary because I remember hosting you for authors at Google when I still worked there.

Yeah, I remember that. And I remember we were both at south by Southwest when our first books were coming out and we had a co launch party.

That's right. That was in 2011.

Yeah.

Oh my goodness. So yes, this is our, it's at least our 10 year friend anniversary. That's so cool. I had so much fun doing the co launch with you.

Me too. Wouldn't have done it any other way. It was great.

In those 10 years your book has sold almost a million copies and it's kind of good that we haven't caught up super recently because now I get to ask you, with everyone here listening, what has that been like for you? I think. And let me, let me preface that by saying I think sometimes as entrepreneurs we're striving and striving. Okay, if only I can get a best selling book or I can get on this list or that one. And, and you actually achieved that tipping point with your work. And I wonder how did you handle the success of that over these last 10 years?

It's been pretty wild. You always hope when you write a book it's like you hope you write a good book, you hope it's something that's going to help a lot of people and you hope that it sells well.

But you never know until you actually write the book and you put it out into the world. And so one of the things that I think worked very well for Personal MBA is that it's an evergreen topic. Like people will always need to know more about how businesses work and improve their business skills, whether they're building their own business or they're working on their career. And so there's a consistent demand for information like this and then hopefully writing something that helps people do this important thing in their life, that's step one. But then marketing that book over a long period of time is step two. And so most of my marketing efforts over the years have really been focused on doing things to promote the book in a systematic way instead of, I think what a lot of particularly first time authors will do is spend a lot of time and attention doing the big book launch, which may sell a lot of books over a week or, or two weeks, but won't necessarily sell books over months or years or decades. And so I think the thing that worked really well for personal MBA is trying to find ways to keep the book out and available and relevant and accessible to people where they are when they decide they are interested in learning more about business and then making sure all of those promotional activities are things that can continue to exist for a long period of time, not necessarily, you know, things that are just out for a week and then disappear.

So I love that you're sharing this and we both know Michael Bungay Stanier. His best advice was I've watched him launch the coaching habit and he said my success timeline of how I'll gauge this launch is five years. And I know you think in a really similar way. I just love your focus on the systems behind longevity and creating something truly evergreen. I have a two part question. Choose your own adventure of which one you want to start with. Did you have gremlins picking such a vast evergreen Topic like business. Did you have gremlins at the outset of who Am I, Josh? To write this book? And there's already so much out there. So that's part one, and then part two is just, can you dig into those systems a little bit? What choices have you made? What have you said no to that actually help you systematize the ongoing marketing rather than the flash in the pan that you described?

Yeah. So. So to the first part, the whole genesis of the personal MBA as a project was me trying to find a book like this. So, so when I. When I decided I wanted to learn more about business, I thought. I remember thinking to myself, there has to be, you know, some business school professor somewhere who wrote a book in the 1950s about, you know, here, here's. Here's an introduction to business. Here's everything you need to know in order to get started. And I looked and I looked and I looked, and as far as I could tell, it didn't exist. And I looked long and hard enough that it's like, hey, I really care about this topic. I want to learn. I want to get better at this area of life. I want to understand what's going on. And then after looking so long and so hard and realizing there's just really not something like this that exists yet, there was the question of, well, do I care enough about this in order to make it? If it's going to exist, it looks like it's got to be me. Is that something that I'm willing and able to do? After thinking for a while, it's like, yeah, I think this is something that can and should exist in the world for people who are interested in this particular important area of life. And so that's when the work began. And for me, it began as a lot of research, reading thousands of business books, trying to figure out what's important and what's not, marrying the things that I was reading about with the things that I was experiencing both in my big company corporate day job, but also in the businesses that I was starting on the side, my entrepreneurial ventures. And so that combination of things, I think part of the reason that the personal MBA didn't exist prior to my work on it was because business school professors and business academia, business writers in general, as a rule, are rewarded for specialization. They're rewarded for going very deep on a very narrow sort of topic. And in order for something like the personal MBA to exist, it has to be general on purpose. You have to cover everything. And so I think that sensibility in that Perspective, frankly, being willing to do the work in terms of research and writing and synthesis in order to help a reader who may have no experience with business at all really understand the full lay of the land, how they work, how to work with other people, how to set up systems, what they are, why they're important. And I think just doing that over a long enough period of time, that's where it was less a question of.

Am I qualified, am I the person to do this? And more of coming into an understanding of, no. This is a very specific kind of work. And for whatever reason, historical accident, or rewards and incentives or anything else, I'm the person who's doing it right now. So I'm going to be the one who, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my ability.

I love that. I love what you're describing of doing the work of synthesis that inherently, this is, this is a book that is a general, sort of broad swath of what's out there. But it's not easy. It's very complex actually, to simplify somehow or create the essence of 270 + concepts that you do in the book. And also I would add that your slice your lens as a beginner, when you first set out on this quest to research this subject area of business, that beginner lens probably allows you to translate all of these specialists and niche topics into the book that it became for a general audience.

Yeah, I think if I had any, any particular advantage, it was not being worried about sounding too smart or, or too sophisticated.

That's awesome. Do you worry that, like, your business would evolve? Because, you know, it's always embarrassing to look back on a previous book. I did a revised edition of Life After College and like, I had inspirational quotes at the end of every chapter where I was quoting a certain president and I'm like, ooh, get those out of there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And did you worry when you were writing it that your knowledge, you know, would evolve beyond what you had written in the next five years or 10 years?

I think that I wasn't worried so much while I was writing, mostly because I was writing for it to be evergreen on purpose. And so I'm happy to say that most of that worked. There were a few things in the book that I absolutely needed to change. I was writing the draft at a point in time where Netflix's primary business model was mailing DVDs back and forth via the postal service. Like, oh man, that definitely dates the book. But in general, I tried to make the material evergreen, to use examples that would survive in general. When I did the Revision, and the 10th anniversary edition is a full revision of the entire book, I went back through everything, and it's a humbling experience. To go back and read things that you wrote a decade ago, both in terms of 10 years of experience, gives you a different frame of reference and a different sensibility of what good, clear, straightforward writing looks like. So I can't tell you how many unnecessary adverbs I just cut from the book. And just, like, I cringe every time, because going back into, you know, Josh 10 years ago, it's. It's this. Like, I'm trying to emphasize something. I'm trying to. To really signal to the reader that something's important. And. And then, you know, me now is looking back on this, like, dude, you're trying too hard. Like, just say what you need to say, though. They'll get it.

Or when in written form. My dad is one of my readers. Like, I won't ship something without his eyes on it. And he's so. He's so good about Occam's Razor, you know, if it can be said in fewer words, do that. And all the times where I say it's very this or, you know, all the descriptors, it's really important, you can just say important, because when the reader is reading, you actually don't need. You're right. All those adverbs just get in the way, and they create clutter, and they almost sound over the top. Which is strange, because when we're speaking, it might not sound over the top, but in writing, it does.

Yeah. I don't know about you. One of the things that I realized, and I think I've always. I've always done it this way. I.

Read what I write aloud to myself in my head as I'm writing it. And that includes things like pauses and emphasis and all of those things that we use in verbal speech. But when you try to translate that directly into writing, you end up with writing that's frankly not very good because there are a lot of verbal devices that just don't work very well on the written page. And so learning. Learning to not do that.

That's true. That's why reading transcripts is so awkward, because writing voice is one thing, but when you read the spoken voice in print, it's like, oh, man, is that how I sound? I mean, even just now, I said the word like. It's like, is that how I sound? And if I read that On a piece of paper, I would cringe. Yeah, just say, oh my Gosh, I've lost 100 IQ points just in reading this as a transcript rather than the craft of writing.

Yeah, I would overuse italics a lot because in my head there's, there's an emphasis at a point in a sentence and that's where I want to put it. But when you read it, it's like, no, like just, just stop doing command or control I. All the time. You don't need, you don't need to do that.

Oh my gosh. Yes. The eternal quest of clear writing. I feel so awkward. I mean, even though I've. I just, I always feel awkward. I always feel awkward writing. I feel awkward reading the drafts. I think people probably don't realize how many passes a book goes through of just cuts, slices, edits. Thank goodness that we have other people's eyes on it. I want to come back to what you said about launching in a systemic way over time. And I know you geek out on systems theory probably much more than I do, but I love thinking in terms of systems as well. And specifically I'm curious that you know, you wrote a book, your most recent book in 2018 is how to Fight a Hydraulic. And it strikes me that what everyone wants is to achieve some level of success. Not everyone. And you can define success in your own terms, but actually the more successful you become, the easier it is for your systems to break or you have one too many inboxes or you're now reacting to so many requests you have to uplevel your systems in order to handle it. So I'd love for you to talk about both the evergreen systems you put in place of how you gave your book that decade long sense of longevity and also what the heck you did once it started really taking off. How did you handle reacting to so much incoming to you?

Okay, so, so let's do the, the marketing and the sales first. Because, because I think that that was something that was built into the personal MBA from the beginning and it worked really well. So, so one of the things that, that I spent a lot of time thinking about is there's this is idea that I talk about in the personal MBA called point of market entry. Whereas in certain markets, even for someone who will eventually become a customer, there's sometimes a very long period of time where they just don't care about whatever it is that you're marketing or whatever it is they have to sell because they're not at the stage of life or in personal circumstances. That would cause them to care. And a good tangible example of this is baby clothes, baby items. Unless you are expecting a child in the near future or you know someone who is all. Any information about baby anything is likely to just be totally ignored. Go, go straight over your head. You don't even pay attention to it because it's not relevant to you and it's not relevant to to where you are in your life. There is a point of market entry for business, particularly adult business learners, and the easiest way to find them on the Internet is for better or worse, when an adult decides to become interested in business, the first thing they type into Google or the first thing they type into Amazon is mba. And the Personal MBA is not titled the Personal MBA by accident. It's a way of showing up when people are finally at the stage in their life where like this is important, this is valuable. I'm going to take learning about this area of life seriously. That's a place where I want to be. And so some of the thinking around, title around, framing around, how do we present this material to someone who is going to be interested in learning about this and taking it seriously? It starts there being in the places where people are already looking, already searching. And then what I wanted to do with the material, because all of the concepts are evergreen, I wanted to have them in the places where people are looking. And so if someone is, let's take a financial concept. If someone is looking up what's a cash flow statement? How does it work? Why is it important? That's a place that I want to be too. Because the type of person who is searching for that is also the type of person who would probably get a lot of value out of reading the Personal mba. And so I spent a lot of time optimizing both the book and then the website associated with the book. So if someone is searching for a cash flow statement or one of the other 270 odd concepts that I talk about in the personal MBA, if someone's searching for that, they're going to find me. And, and just being in a position to talk to a person where and when they are open and receptive and actively looking for the type of thing that you offer, the marketing and the sales becomes much easier. If someone's not in a life stage or a frame of mind to really benefit from business instruction, it's a much harder sell. So just meeting potential readers where they are and talking to them when they are open and receptive makes the rest of it much easier.

I love that. Yeah. And Pivot. I talk about make yourself discoverable. You know, in order for two Bluetooth devices to connect, they need to be in discoverability mode. And you creating a website that would meet readers where they are, what they're searching for, and really thinking in their terms makes you so much more discoverable. And not just for the book itself, but. But specific concepts. Because that's gonna be somebody's point of entry.

Yeah, totally. I mean, even think about. So the most valuable search engine for books is not Google, it's Amazon.

Right.

And even now, like, I just did it to verify this is still true. But if you go to Amazon and you type in MBA in the search bar, my book comes up first. And that's a valuable place to be.

Either that or they know. They're like, this guy Josh keeps buying copies of this book, the Personal MBA.

Mine on PIV. It's like, you have bought this seven times or, you know, 25 times. The other thing is, twice now in my life, in the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years, I've bought stacks of GMAT books. And I mean stacks. These books are thick, they're expensive. So of course, you're not this type to totally game the system, but it's like, why you should throw away your GMAT books and read this one instead. Like, it's just to figure out, what are people looking for? What do they think they need? When I. When I started Life after college in 2005, I did it as a project to help me get into business school. I was also lost and lonely, and I wanted to offer something to people like me, who my friends were still in college. I'd left school early, but I also thought, oh, if I apply to business school, it would look good if I started something. And then the irony is that it circumvented the need to go, but nonetheless, I just had this kind of misplaced notion of what I needed to do. And I love what you offer is an alternative, but you have to kind of meet people where they are. So it is. Even if you're not going to help people, I mean. Yeah, so I'll just pause there, but I just wanted to say I love how you think about it and how you're framing it in this way and really putting yourself in your reader's shoes. I think that's so important.

Thanks. Yeah. You actually reminded me of a quote by a friend of mine, Patrick McKenzie. Amazing programmer, entrepreneur. And he said something to the effect of the best training you could ever get for working for a company. Is starting your own business. Except that starting your own business and having it work cures you of the desire to ever work for a company ever again.

We'll be right back just after this.

And I wonder how you feel having worked at a really big company. I feel quite delighted by staying small. And I wonder for you. We still haven't talked about handling the influx, handling the success, but let's just put a pin in coming back to the size of your team and the size of your business. And have you stayed deliberately small?

I am a business of one and always have been and always plan to be.

Well, talk to us about that because again with the personal MBA taking off and this is something I tried to avoid actually myself, you could easily have built out this group of consultants or in house consulting firm or who even knows what a group of coaches. I mean you could have created something complex to meet that need of what the market was, the interest that was there. And so walk us through your decisions along the way of staying a delightful company of one.

So there are a couple of parts to that. Part of it is personal interests and inclinations and then part of it is, you know, the uncertainties and general craziness of life. And so the first part, you know, coming from a big corporate background, I worked in product development and marketing, marketing management for Procter and Gamble, so huge global consumer goods company. And there were a lot of really good positive things about that particular experience. What I didn't really like and found out, found out thankfully relatively early in my career is that I am capable and depending on who you're talking to, a pretty good manager when that is, when that is necessary to do. But I don't enjoy it. I find it extraordinarily stressful and I find that when I am in a management or an oversight capacity, it's very easy to spend all of my time and attention there a big bundle of worry and stress and I don't get to do the things that I find more rewarding, more valuable, more long term Feeling like yeah, this is how I want to be spending my time, this is how I want to be investing my career. And so for me the early decision of like I'm not going to build out a huge business, I'm not going to build this big corporate structure was out of pure personal preference. Like there, there are many ways I can spend my life and, and I would, I would, all things being equal, prefer to enjoy my daily experience instead of, of just kind of beating my head against the wall every day a.

Hundred percent I relate so much. And I think you and I both value reading, learning, digging, growing, expanding, you know, synthesizing, putting new ideas out. And it's, it's hard to do that if you're in manager mode.

Yeah, totally.

Or running complex company mode.

I enjoy building stuff.

Yes.

And it's really difficult to spend most of your time building stuff if you're overseeing other people who are building things.

And then I find I'm the bottleneck because.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because. Right. Capable is a good way to put it. Even when I was at Google and I became a manager for the first time, I loved the coaching aspect of it. I love just asking them big questions. And I remember some of the feedback my first team gave was she asks too many questions like we do. We just want her to tell us what to do a little bit and be more directive. And it just wasn't the thing I loved. And performance reviews and writing out all the logistics and all the meetings and then the HR stuff just like you found it extraordinarily stressful to. Oh, it just was not my zone of genius. And that's when I realized too, I'm like, okay, I have no aspiration to run a hundred person company. And that would even be considered, quote, small for some people.

Yeah, the other thing for me, and I found this out relatively early, you know, in experiences and thankfully, you know, relatively low risk, straightforward engagements with contractors or consultants or things like that, just personality wise. And my inclination is when I'm working with people, my inclination is to take care of them. And that becomes really challenging sometimes when there is a conflict between taking care of someone who works for you and managing to get a particular result. And so I found myself very early on in situations where as a business owner I was accepting results that were less ideal for me.

Out of a desire to take care of people, to make things easier for people, to not be a strain, to not be a stress. And there's a little bit of a fundamental tension there for me. And so particularly from a. One of the things that I like, because I do hire contractors, I do hire people to do specific things for me. And I think that's at least for me. And the way that I orient myself to the world, that's a much easier, more straightforward, more enjoyable relationship to have. So his name is Pete Garceau. He's, bar none, one of the best cover designers in the world. He did the COVID for the 10th anniversary edition of Purcelniva as well as how to Fight a Hydra. And working with Pete is a joy because he is excellent at what he does.

I give him as clear an instruction as I can and here's the timeframe that it needs to be done and he comes back with a bunch of different options. We go through a few iterations, we get to a final. I choose it, I get the result, he gets paid, everyone's happy. And that sort of structure for me is just much more enjoyable because I have more latitude to choose who I'm working with, what they're working on, what the terms of the relationship are. And then, you know, we're all just focused on getting the result as quickly as we can.

And like you said, because they're specialists, they're inherently complementary. They're giving you something you can't do on your own. So tell us a little bit, how is your team currently set up? Because I'm with you. I like to say no one on my team works full time, even me. So it didn't make sense to me actually to hire any full time employees because I thought I don't even work full time. I aspire to work 20 hours a week on average, let's say. And to me that's full time. I'm just redefining what full time means because I think it's easy to fill time. And so I'd love to know how's your team set up to enable you to do your building mode and your most creative work while balancing whatever kind of maintenance mode things that you also work on?

Yeah, totally. So I, I rely on two fundamental kind of types of structure or help right now. One is, is the consultant side. So like Pete is, is my cover designer. David Moldauer is my editor.

He, David Moldauer.

David's amazing. And I met David. David was my editor at Penguin Random House for the first edition of the book. He has since moved on and has been at a number of companies and is now doing developmental editing and a bunch of other author editorial services freelance. So I've worked with David on every single one of my books and he's a joy to work with. I have my agent, Lisa Demona, who is amazing and I also love Lisa.

We're going to have to send that. I love her.

Yes.

She is a wonderful person and one of those people that her job is negotiation, going back and forth with publishers, making agreements clear, trying to either get more compensation or other forms of how are we going to make a book or a deal work. And she's so good at it because she gets wonderful results and she doesn't browbeat people into submission. Everybody at the end of the process feels better about the whole thing than they did when they started. And that's just a very rare quality. And so yeah, I have my team of people who help me on the publishing side and then a lot of the things that I do.

So my second book, the first 20 hours was all about learning new skills quickly. And one of the things that I learned in the process of testing the theories in that book was computer programming. And I still, you know, almost a decade later, like I still do this every day because what I find is, is it helps me to build the systems that I need to save myself from future work or to make things that would take potentially an enormous amount of time and energy and, and attention capacity. I can just write a little program and, and all of that goes away. So a good example of this, how to Fight a Hydra was my first completely self published book. I did the entire process from beginning to end. The only things that I didn't do were editorial proofreading and Pete did the COVID design on that one. And so everything else from, from first draft to shipping the final version to make it available worldwide was me. And part of what made that happen was I wrote myself essentially my own little publishing layout program where I could take my manuscript and give a command to my computer and I had a print ready PDF ready to be uploaded in about 10 milliseconds, which was just a really fun way to work on a book.

That is so impressive.

Yeah, it's like you've been through this process a couple times now. Like books kind of feel surreal in the older process because, you know, they exist as a Word document on your computer for, you know, potentially years and you don't get to see the finished output until very, very late in the process. And so just, you know, being able to write myself or create myself a system where I'm seeing the finished result evolving as I work on it, I found very helpful and very motivating. It felt real faster and I wanted to make more progress on it faster because I could see the end result developing before my eyes.

I love that. And what's your philosophy that has you? For me, there's an Agile development quote. Each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it. It just resonates in my soul that I shouldn't be doing the same thing twice. What's your systems theory that drives your work or continuing to tweak your programs and teach yourself? What's the itch that you have to create systems Yeah, I think.

What's the old programming quote like? The virtues of a programmer are laziness, hubris, and something else that I don't remember off the top of my head. It's like, yeah, you're doing work that it feels like is repetitive, kind of boring. Oh, laziness, impatience and hubris. And so, yeah, when you're doing the same thing over and over again, that gets boring very quickly. Can you make that go away by just doing a little bit of programming, doing a little bit of systems design? Can you create a system that makes it very straightforward and easy to do something that would otherwise require a lot of thought? And so in a. If you have a website, everybody has the experience of kind of logging into a website and you have a title and places to post all the things that you need to think about before something is published live on a website. That's a form of structure that cues you about everything that you're going to need in order to take the next step. So sometimes those systems look like, I know you're famous for your book marketing spreadsheet, book marketing system, that that guiding structure helps you not have to reinvent the wheel. Every time you do something, you just, you pull out the checklist and you go down the checklist. So. So a little bit of that. And then on the creation side, there have been a few problems or challenges in, in publishing and, you know, working on websites for, for now, you know, almost two decades that are just really annoying. And I'm kind of having the same experience that I had with personal mba. It's like, really, this is still a problem. There should be something that exists that makes this problem go away. And the more often I think that about a particular problem, the more likely it is I'm going to spend some time systematizing or automating it.

I love that. Kevin Kelly says he tries to give all his best ideas away. He's the co founder of Wired and that if they keep coming back to him and they stick to him, then he'll pursue it, but he actually tries to give them away. And in your case, I am so with you that there are certain things you're like, how has this not been fixed yet? And it's just the software or the tools are just years behind where they should be, could be. And the other thing I find is sometimes my mind works in systems. It's just how it is. And it can be kind of frustrating where you're like, why wouldn't they see that this is so inefficient you know, or like just having to kind of be patient with people whose minds work in different, much more creative ways. You know, I'm creative about systems, not visual things. That's just like you. I kind of need to hire out for things like that that involve anything visually. So. And do you just real quick because we're almost at time. But what's your system for discernment about what to say yes and what to say no to?

That is a whole lot of gut feel and a lot of it comes down to does this sound interesting, does this sound enjoyable? Does this sound like something that would stretch me in an important direction? Or is this the kind of thing that sounds good or sounds promising or sounds novel or high status, but doesn't really have any long term implications? I wrote about an idea a while back and it actually made its way into the new edition of the Personal mba. This idea of status malfunction. And so human beings, we're status oriented creatures, we care what other people think about us. We want people to think we're smart and important and fancy in all the ways that we care about. And because we have this kind of built in inclination, things that have status attached to them often feel a lot more enticing or important than they actually are when you look at the results or the outcomes that come from pursuing those status oriented things. So a good example of this is that the Personal MBA has sold an enormous number of copies over the course of its lifetime and has never hit a major bestseller list ever. And probably will never. That seems really weird from the perspective of I'm not super concerned about that because those higher status signals, being able to put New York Times bestseller or something on your book like that can feel good in the moment. But when I look at what it would take to pursue one of those things versus spending the same amount of time or energy not doing that and making a more effective system to sell copies of this book for the next 50 years. There's no contest. And so I find myself becoming more and more conscious about am I doing this just because it sounds cool or good or important? Or am I doing this because I think it's going to create a long term result that's important to me.

So good. So good. And just to. I'm trying to work on slowing down so I can think that through and not leaping. And like you said, oh my gosh, the ridiculous hoops you do, you have to go through to try to just get on a list when the readers are going to spread it. Word of mouth if it's good. The longevity that you have selling almost a million copies. It's so much more meaningful in every way to have longevity and so many readers and such a robust community than it is to make a list for a week and fizzle out just like we started this conversation talking about.

Yeah, totally. I just go for it. Paying attention to what the long term is going to be will pay dividends well and above like what's really cool right now.

I love it. Josh, this has been so great to chat and catch up and hear how you think about everything and how you and celebrating the 10 year anniversary. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch? And I'll put a link to the new edition in the notes as well.

Thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, the best place to find out about the new edition of the book is at the website personalmba.com youm can browse around, see what's in the book, see what speaks to you, and the best place to find about my new projects, all the cool things that I'm working on right now. You can find that@joshkaufman.net Amazing.

Thank you so much Josh. Thanks everybody for listening.

Jenny it's so great to catch up.

Likewise. And congrats on our friendiversary and two updated editions of our book.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I appreciate it.

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