Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs

In this episode, I talk to my old friend Nick Ganju about ping pong, poker, hit songs, and tackling my most feared subject: math. He makes the complex seem simple, which is a rare gift. Nick is the founder and CTO of ZocDoc. As CTO, he is responsible for overseeing all software development. It's a huge job for one of the fastest-growing startups in the US, and he's repeatedly proven himself to be a master teacher. All show notes, links, resources for this episode can be found on www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast Enjoy! - Tim

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:07Speaker 02

  Well, we'll see in a brief time.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this show. 99designs, which is your one-stop shop for all things graphic design-related. Go to 99designs.com/tim to see the projects that I've put up, including the mock-ups and drafts of the book cover for The Four Hour Body. Xoficio, Xoficio and I go way back. Xoficio.com/tim. You can see the clothing that I've used for traveling through 20-plus countries, including the underwear. By the way, that's about half of my underwear drawer right now. Xoficio.com/tim. You can also see the viral video that I put out, which shows you how to travel the world with 10 pounds or less. As always, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, and you can find all of the links

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  and resources from this episode, as well as every other episode, by going to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Spell it all out, or you can go to fourhourworkweek.com and just click on Podcast. Feedback? If you have feedback, I would love your thoughts, anything at all, who you'd like to see on this show. Ping me on Twitter, @TFerriss, that's twitter.com/TFERRISS, or on Facebook, at facebook.com/timferriss, with two R's and two S's.

• 1:37Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss again. The Tim Ferriss Show. For those of you who are new to the show, this is where I try to dissect excellence, whether that is a billionaire investor, a chess prodigy, an entrepreneur, or otherwise. How do they do what they do? What are the tools and tricks and tactics that they use that you can use as well? And in this episode, I try to dissect the mind of Nick Ganju, who I've known for a very, very long time, since graduating from college, basically. He is the CTO of Zocdoc, and... Has raised more than $95 million in venture capital as of June 2003 or so, and they have more than 6 million users per month.

• 2:18Tim Ferriss?

  And although Nick would hate for me to describe it this way, imagine open table for doctors. Although it fixes much more than that, many other broken aspects of quality healthcare. And in this episode, we geek out on math, which I am phobic of. I've had a lifetime fear of mathematics. So we geek out on how to tackle numeracy if you're not comfortable with math, poker, ping pong, how to write a hit song, and the philosophical implications of Monsters, Inc., one of my favorite movies, certainly, among many other things. It is not too dense. That's the whole idea, to try to demystify and disarm things that are intimidating.

• 2:58Tim Ferriss?

  And Nick has just an incredible capacity for simplifying what appears to be the very, very difficult. So I had a blast with this. I hope you do as well. So please meet Nick Ganju. Hello, everybody. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode, an addition of The Tim Ferriss Show. Today is a rare treat because I have an old friend of mine who's got all sorts of dirt on me and knows all the skeletons in the closet. Nick Ganju, Nick, how are you?

• 3:29Speaker 03

  I'm great. How are you doing?

• 3:31Tim Ferriss?

  I'm doing very well. And you're in New York City at the moment?

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. I'm in Manhattan.

• 3:36Tim Ferriss?

  So the beginning, I suppose, goes back some ways. We initially met, it must have been in 2000? Is that right?

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. I think you were looking for an apartment, and I had an extra bedroom that I was renting out.

• 3:55Tim Ferriss?

  And if I remember correctly, I didn't make the cut.

• 4:01Tim Ferriss?

  This was, this was at the height of the dot com boom at, at, at a point where I suppose it was right at the top of the roller coaster in a lot of ways. And housing was just next to impossible, not unlike what it's like right now. And I guess it must, it must have been Craigslist, Casual Encounters, or I'm kidding, the, the rental section. And we met up and didn't end up becoming roommates, but ended up becoming friends and playing a lot of pool. And it's, it was amusing to me to, to read your official bio for the first time yesterday to try to get some additional context. See, you ended up being the Bay Area billiards champion, is this right?

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It was like a, one of those leagues that you, you joined and ended up being the champion that year. I played a lot of pool in college and then since we were both just out of college, I, I had, you know, still retained all that skill. If you played me right now, I'd probably be really good.

• 5:01Tim Ferriss?

  And the, we're going to dig into some of the other very varied eclectic sort of Dos Equis skills that you got, that you seem to have like table tennis and sort of deconstruct why that is. Also get into the music. But for, for those people who aren't familiar with you, and we can certainly get into the professional stuff, but where did you, where did you grow up? What, what, what did your parents do? Maybe you can give us some background.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. I grew up in Chicago, in the west suburbs of Chicago. My parents were both doctors. So, you know, nice, nice, comfortable sort of upbringing. I was very fortunate in that way. Went to undergrad, majored in computer science, finished in 1998, worked in Austin, Texas at a company called Trilogy for a year, but then decided that the, you know, that the dot com boom of the time was just way too hot for me to be working at a larger company. So, you know, like all the, all the gold hunters of, of history, I moved out west to California.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  You know, for the gold rush of 1999, I guess you could call it. And, you know, and tried my luck at a couple startups there.

• 6:17Tim Ferriss?

  And you ended up then, I suppose, bringing us to the to the current day co-founding Zocdoc.

• 6:26Tim Ferriss?

  And the what is the current state of Zocdoc? How many employees do you have? Maybe you can give us some stats.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  We are currently about 500 to 600 employees. And over 6 million people visit Zocdoc each month to search for a doctor. And, you know, to give a little background, Zocdoc is a site where you can come, you can search for a doctor. And you can see reviews, you can see photos, and you can book an appointment right online. So in the way that you can book everything else online these days, we're trying to bring doctor appointment booking online.

• 7:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now, for those people who haven't used the site, would it be fair to just as an imperfect analogy, say that it's similar to it's a more refined open table plus a bunch of other extra benefits for doctors that it has that sort of ease of use or more?

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, certainly. Certainly, it has that open table aspect where you can book appointments online. Of course, it also has the Yelp aspect where you can see reviews and you can see photos.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  And you can also now check in, which means you can fill out your medical history forms online before you get to the doctor's office. So that medical form is now pre-filled. And, you know, as you visit subsequent doctors, you don't have to refill a medical form. So we're, you know, we're slowly adding more and more features that make, you know, that process as painless as possible.

• 7:55Tim Ferriss?

  So the one of the one of the topics that I wanted to talk about comes to mind when I call to my memory, the first visit to the Zocdoc offices. And we we've spent a lot of time together. We've had plenty of wine together, played a lot of pool together. And I've always been fascinated by your your ability to not just test assumptions, but also cut through a lot of the fuzzy thinking to hard numbers and analytics. And the displays that you had at Zocdoc, the the real time displays of numbers and metrics.

• 8:35Tim Ferriss?

  I think we're a great sort of external representation for me of your mind. And many people probably do not know that one of the reasons I went to, I chose to go to Princeton undergrad, which by the way, those people who are listening, who might be applying to colleges, I was told by my guidance counselor I would not get into. Talk about encouragement. And I think this is actually going to be relevant to our conversation later. You have to look at incentives because economics ultimately is the study of incentives and how people respond to them. And what guidance counselors, even at very good schools, want to be able to say is 90% of my students got into their first choice. The easiest way to do that is to make sure that their first choices are mediocre.

• 9:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, sure. So, but the, one of the draws for Princeton was it was one of the few schools in the top group I was considering that did not have a math requirement. And I had a horrible experience in 10th grade with a math teacher. And this might seem strange to folks, but a, she was a female math teacher who I think had just been really put through the wringer to get to where she was. And she was really, really kind of belligerent towards a handful of boys in the class. And it turned me off to math completely from that point forward.

• 10:02Tim Ferriss?

  In contrast, my brother had the exact opposite experience in 10th grade, had a wonderful teacher, and he went on to major in math and get a, you know, pursue a PhD in statistics. So I'd be curious to hear sort of the origins of your interest in computer science and, and, and also sort of your general thinking on...

• 10:28Tim Ferriss?

  These types of skills, I know that's broad, but a lot of people like myself feared that it's something innate. It's completely innate. You either have it or you don't. So maybe you could sort of rewind the clock and talk about your experience with getting comfortable with this type of thing.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So in terms of the computer science, you know, I started the way that many computer nerds start, which is I started programming at an early age, like nine or 10 years old on my Apple IIc and just trying to make games, right? Like, we had those, we had those games, you know, we had the Atari 2600 and we had, I had some simple games on my Apple. And, you know, I was like, I want to try to do this. So I, you know, I bought a book on basic programming and I tried to make a couple of games. I tried to reproduce the game from War Games that, if you remember that movie.

• 11:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure, of course.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, with Matt Broderick. So I tried to make, I tried to reconstruct that game, which the game in that movie is called Global Thermonuclear War. And it's a very violent game and I, I tried to recreate it with my nine-year-old, you know, brain, trying to deconstruct where to like deploy nuclear missiles. And I actually, I was actually working on it at school, in grade school, and my, my principal walked into the computer lab and I got in big trouble because I was, I was making a game called Global Thermonuclear War in fourth grade. And so, but, you know, but that was the, like, the genesis of my, my interest.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  And then in, in, in high school, we had these programmable calculators and I, and I started writing games on the calculator and giving it to all my friends, you know, in, in the way that misguided nerds are. You know, at, at age 15, I thought, I thought I would get a lot of girls this way. And it turns out that writing, you know, Tetris on your calculator does not actually win you the cheerleaders. But, but that was, you know, that was, that was my best strategy at that time. Suffice to say, I was, I was single for, for high school.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  You know, but then, you know, and so my guidance counselor kind of saw these kind of things too and recommended to me that I, you know, that I go and and major in computer engineering or computer science. And that was something that was not even really apparent to me that that that was a whole major and stuff. And of course, this is in the 90s and you couldn't just Google things. And so it's just information. It was almost like, you know, a revelation to me that you could just go and and do this as a as a profession. And, you know, and there's like actually a formal training, like you can actually go to a four year college and get and get a computer science degree.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  So that that was great. And so I, you know, I went to University of Illinois, which is, which is like sort of a top five computer science school. It kind of kind of flirts in and out of there. Some years it's number four and some years it's number seven or whatever.

• 13:26Tim Ferriss?

  That's tough to answer. Didn't Marc Andreessen develop Mosaic there?

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andreessen is from there. Max Levchin from PayPal is from there. You know, a bunch of sort of illustrious current, you know, Silicon Valley moguls are from there. So, yeah, it's a good school. And I, you know, I certainly really, really fell in love with computer science when I, when I did those four years. And kind of knew that that's what I wanted to do as a profession.

• 13:51Tim Ferriss?

  What what made you fall in love with it there? And what do you think makes it a good? What what makes it a top five program aside from maybe the selection bias and having really good applicants over time start to select it?

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And certainly that's, you know, certainly every school has that sort of self fulfilling prophecy when you start to get that you gain traction and all the best kids want to go to your school. But I think that they are very vigilant about keeping the computer science curriculum current. And so you can see, and I had, I had a, you know, I had a couple of friends that had gone to different schools at that time and also majored in computer science. And, you know, I was learning Java at the time, which was the hot new thing. This is like 19,

• 14:36Speaker 03

  1996 or something. And, and, and, you know, there, we already had courses in in Java. And my friends were still learning stuff in C. And so, you know, I think that the the new schools are, are the best schools are very diligent about keeping the the curriculum up to date, especially in in computer sciences. We all know the the industry and the technologies change so quickly.

• 14:58Tim Ferriss?

  And in a world where that's changing so quickly, I think this is part of what's so intimidating to a lot of folks, whether they're just trying to get by and want to be employable, or they are hoping to invest in technology companies, which is a very dangerous game to play, I think, for a lot of reasons. But the, how much, past a certain point, because I recognize, for instance, it's easy for me to look at learning natural languages, which I assumed I was bad at learning up until 15 or 16. And I can destroy a lot of myths and old wives' tales about that.

• 15:41Tim Ferriss?

  So when someone says to me, "Oh, my God, I'm too old to learn a language. It would take me my entire lifetime. It takes decades to become fluent, blah, blah, blah." I can, I can very easily dismantle those and get people excited about learning a language, even if they're, you know, 30, 40, whatever it might be. With computer science and math, I have a lot of insecurities. And I can do very basic stuff, but never to calculus, you know, got up to pre-cal. And how is, how coachable are these things? And, and how valuable is it to try to become more comfortable with sort of the quantified side of life? At a later, at a later point, right? I just turned 37.

• 16:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's one of these things that dogs me as an insecurity, much in a way that not being able to swim dogged me for, until I was 30.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:34Tim Ferriss?

  But maybe you could, maybe you could comment on that.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. I think, you know, there's certain fields of math that are extremely important and just become more and more relevant every day. And you see like this kind of, you know, like the big data sort of, I hate to use buzzwords, but that, you know, that sort of trend that, that is, you know, has come into favor in the last few years, which is a very real thing, despite the buzzwords. You know, there's a lot of sort of information to be gleaned and improvements in our society to be had from, from, you know, from statistical analysis. So, you know, statistics and probability and statistics are things that are just going to become bigger and bigger parts of our, of our world. You know, in terms of calculus, I don't think, I think if anything, calculus is sort of diminishing because...

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Uh, that, that sort of, that sort of field of math was more applicable when you, when you didn't have a giant computer on every desktop. You know, giant in terms of, you know, processing power, uh, to, to crunch, uh, the crap out of, out of numbers. And a lot of things that were, uh, I'm trying to make it like layman's, a lot of things that were closed form solutions, which means, uh, you know, they got solved through these sort of complex equations, uh, that you see with, you know, lots of weird symbols in them. Uh, now computers can just sort of brute force crank out the answers to them. Uh, and, and, and in a better way too, because it's sort of, uh, you can, you can more closely mirror reality,

• 18:02Speaker 03

  with a computer than you can with a closed form solution like a calculus equation. And so, um, and so I don't think, you know, it, it's, it's not a big deal if most people don't know calculus, but there's, there's, there's fields of math, which are certainly helpful in understanding.

• 18:16Tim Ferriss?

  What would, uh, what would those areas be? And I suppose just to jump right into it, you know, if you were, and this, this conversation is inspired for those people listening, partially because we sat down at the Zocdoc offices to talk about, encryption. And, uh, I remember I was, I would be, I'd become really fascinated by encryption and, uh, ciphers and code breaking because of a, a science fiction, I suppose you could call a science fiction book, uh, called, uh, Cryptonomicon. And so we started talking about encryption and you got up and, and walked me through the basic principles of encryption, uh, and feel free to correct me or provide some details if I'm missing them, but

• 19:01Tim Ferriss?

  as it applies in a lot of computer science. Then we went out to dinner that night and sat down with a bunch of, uh, really impressive CTOs and, uh, guys who have been VPs of engineering. And we talked about encryption and it just blew my mind that something that I felt so utterly out of my depth with, uh, a few hours earlier, I was able to actually cogently listen to discourse about in a few hours. And that really encouraged me, but it's been hard for me to determine how do, how do I walk out? And I mean, I know you're a good friend of mine, but you're also busy. So it's like, I don't want you to be my, uh, my pro bono.

• 19:41Tim Ferriss?

  You know, like mental model mentor.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:45Tim Ferriss?

  So how should somebody, how should somebody in a fun or interesting way develop some of these skills, right? Because you look at, I remember this, and this is such a simple thing, but it kind of blew my mind. When the probabilities, if we look at probabilities, humans are so bad, sort of intrinsically it seems, at working with probabilities. And if you have, let's say, a birthday, if you have a big party and people bump into each other and they have the same birthday party, or birthday date, they're sort of astonished, right? They're like, oh my God, what are the chances? It's like one in a million. And I'm just, and I'm just looking at this description here on Wikipedia of the birthday problem or the birthday paradox.

• 20:30Tim Ferriss?

  And, you know, the probability obviously reaches 100 when the number of people reaches 367, because there are, you know, whatever, we extrapolate from 365 days a year. But you get to 50% probability with just 23 people. And it's just, it's so hard for people to grasp that. So.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Well, to be, to be, well, let me refine it a little bit, to be, to state it really precisely, it's not that one of those people, one of those 23 people could go and ask the other 22 and odds are would find the same birthday, right? It's that any two of those 23 people have the same birthday. Does that make sense?

• 21:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  It's a little, it's a little bit different, but it actually, I think that's where the misconception comes in, is that, you know, you kind of take from it like, wow, if I walked around and asked 22 people, like, there's a 50% chance that, that I'd have the same birthday as one of them, which is not the right, not the right way to think about it.

• 21:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And the devil's in the details, right? With those subtleties, I mean, massive miscalculations, even by very smart, experienced people, right? You look at something like long-term capital management, right? They build this massively sophisticated system that doesn't take into account that somebody else could have a similar machine that would then sort of trigger, trigger this crazy back and forth that would end in catastrophe, right? So.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:47Tim Ferriss?

  If somebody feels as I do, right, that they, they want to be more comfortable with this type of thing, but they're not, are there any particular approaches or books or anything like that that you would recommend?

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think that people get intimidated because they. You know, they sort of look look online and Wikipedia especially does this. You go and you're like, what is expected value or something? And you look at it and Wikipedia immediately like gives you these Greek symbols.

• 22:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  On the first and everyone's seen that, right? Like the first paragraph.

• 22:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's in the first line of the birthday problem.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, you know, and that that that serves the, you know, that even intimidates me and I, you know, I think I know a fair bit about math.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  But like, you know, the best way to do it is to just start really simple and then work your way up slowly. And so, you know, when you want to talk about probability, like, you know, let's play a game, you and me, right? Let's play a game where we roll a die, a six sided die, right? And

• 22:45Speaker 03

  and if if the number becomes six, if the number is six, I pay you a dollar. And then numbers one through five, you pay me a dollar, right? Now, would you play that game?

• 22:56Tim Ferriss?

  No, not play that game.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Right. So you wouldn't play that game. And so, you know, it's it's intuition, right? Now, now let's let's change the game and say that if if if a six comes up, I pay you a thousand dollars. And if one through five each come up, you have to pay me one dollar.

• 23:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I'll play that game.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Right. So you play that game, right? So now the question is, at which point, at what point should you play or play it not or not play it, right? Would you play it at three dollars?

• 23:24Tim Ferriss?

  Very Shakespearean. No, play it not. Yes.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  If to play or not to play. You know, if if the six was three dollars, if I paid you three dollars when a six showed up, you know, would you play that game?

• 23:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right, probably not. I have to start doing calculations here.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Sure, but that's that's the genesis of it, right? The genesis of it is, right, the genesis of all math, really, is is you're starting from these common sense or these real world problems and saying, okay, well, you know, how do I understand this problem? You know, my intuition says I I wouldn't play it. If I only won a dollar when I hit six and I would play it if I won a thousand dollars when I played six.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  You know, would I do it at $10? Would I do it at $3? And and, you know, the so, you know, start from there and we can walk through this problem, right? Let's say, let's, a simple way to think about this problem is, let's assume in six rolls, you get one of each, right? Like, let's say we roll it six times and you get 111213141516. Right? So. You know, for the three dollars, it's, it's right, you, you would lose five dollars for each of one through five. Right. And then you would win three dollars when you rolled a six. Right. So you would make three dollars and you would lose five dollars. So you'd be at negative two.

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  Negative two dollars. Yep.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Right. And so, uh, you know, so you can start to see at which point you, you would break even, which is five. I'll, I'll, I'll cheat and give you the answer. Um, but you know, at, at five dollars, you would break even exactly. Right. If I paid you five dollars every time a six showed up.

• 25:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Then you would lose five dollars for each of the other rules. And then, and then you would win five dollars when you got the six.

• 25:07Tim Ferriss?

  I'm tracking you. I'm tracking you so far. I'm not as dumb as I look. Actually, I'm a bit dumber than I look, but that's a different story.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  And so, right, but, but then that's the genesis of it, right? So now, now let's roll two die.

• 25:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Right. And like, what are the odds of getting, uh, you know, two sixes? Right. So the odds are that, you know, each, each one has a one in six chance of, of getting a six. Each die has a one in six chance of getting a six. And you multiply those together and the odds of getting two sixes are one in thirty six.

• 25:33Tim Ferriss?

  One in thirty six. Yep.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so now, right, so now you, now you can do the game again, right? Would I pay you? How much should I pay you if you get a thirty six? Uh, uh, how much should I pay you if you get two sixes, I should say? And, and it just goes from there, right? It just gets more and more complex. So, uh, right. And then you're like blackjack, then is, is, is just more of the same thing.

• 25:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  It's just a more complex version of the same thing. Uh, and so, you know, if you start simple and understand the, the conceptual underpinnings, you know, and then just work your way up from there. I think that sort of every field of math can just be, uh, can just be broken down that way. You just start simple and not, not get intimidated by all these Greek symbols.

• 26:16Tim Ferriss?

  Now, the, the, one of the things that sparked, uh, my interest in.

• 26:23Tim Ferriss?

  Exploring some of this was my experience in television when I was doing filming the Tim Ferriss experiment, which the future of which is TBD for those people listening and wondering, it's the entire division at Turner that produced it was fired, basically shut down, and it's sitting on a shelf. So I am, I've been battling to try to rescue that for months. Suffice to say, keep an eye out, I may need some public support to get that done. But the, the episodes included at one point, going to Vegas and being trained by a really fascinating guy named Phil Gordon, who has a CS background, who's taken home

• 27:04Tim Ferriss?

  millions of dollars in, in winnings as a professional poker player. And he had a week to train me to go heads up, you know, one on one against professional poker players. And so you can imagine that week was a lot of this type of conversation. Sure, sure. And he would ask me these very, very basic probability questions. And I would just have this like, like stoned Labrador Retriever response with no words coming out of my face. And he'd just be like, you're kidding me, right? But worked up to the point where he was able to give me matrices for deciding in a very binary way, like, do you, do you fold or do you raise? Right? And then it started, I started memorizing these sets of

• 27:44Tim Ferriss?

  rules. And it made it fun, right? It gave it a context so that I wasn't grappling with some of these questions in a vacuum. The, the, what are, and I know one of the books you recommended to me was How to Measure Anything. And some of it I found very interesting. And of course, when we were not too long ago, sort of sitting in, hanging out at the pool and, and brainstorming stuff like this and talking about investing, you know, you were able to, to throw an extra element into the conversation, which was, well, You know, if you have a 30% probability of doing X or 70% probability of doing Y, if the person giving you that information only tells the truth, you know, 60% of the

• 28:28Tim Ferriss?

  time, then, then what, right? Like, how does that affect the outcomes?

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:35Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other books or even just games or, or methods for making this a fun process for people, right? Because the, the idea that I could spend a week learning poker and be able to play with, without getting my total face ripped off.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:57Tim Ferriss?

  You know, probably 70% of the recreational players out there, pretty easily, is huge ROI, right? That's, that's massive.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's great.

• 29:05Tim Ferriss?

  What else, what else comes to mind? What other books would you recommend to people or resources?

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I love poker as well. I think poker is a great example of, of math, of a combination of math and like sort of emotional intelligence also coming into play.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  But, you know, poker is a great sort of reflection of, of all the stuff we've been talking about. Of course, the, you know, the, the books, I, I've recently read a great book, uh, which is called How Not to Be Wrong, uh, The Power of Mathematical Thinking. And this book, uh, by a guy named Jordan Ellenberg, um, is, is a, uh, is a, is exactly what we're talking about. It's like, it's written for an audience of people that have, you know, historically been intimidated by math or just thought, gee, I'm not good at math, uh, and introduces things in a very simple way and then works up to more complex, uh, concepts in the way that we just broke down, you know, probability with this dice game. Uh, and so that, that's

• 30:07Speaker 03

  a great book and I, and I hope it, it does well and I hope it, it alleviates some of this sort of, you know, the, that intimidation that people have.

• 30:17Tim Ferriss?

  And, and does this, uh, I, I know that we also chatted at one point about

• 30:24Tim Ferriss?

  Your classes, there might be a better term for them, but internally at Zocdoc, trying to help, you know, poor liberal arts majors like me become better at goal-setting and things along those lines. So I know you're a fan of what is often referred to as SMART goals. Would you mind talking about how you set goals, or how you suggest people set goals, and common problems with, or common mistakes that people make?

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that, you know, the easiest example is that people, so SMART goals means, you know, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. And, and so, right, it's sort of a framework to help you pick goals that you can objectively hit or miss. So measurable means I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do, I'm going to lose exactly 10 pounds, or, you know, at least 10 pounds in the next two months or three months. And, you know, and then you can objectively decide at the end whether or not you've lost 10 pounds, right? As opposed to saying, "I'm just going to lose weight," and then you don't, you don't really know whether, you know, what kind of goal, and you don't, it doesn't work psychologically, right? You're just like, "Oh, I'm just sort of vaguely losing

• 31:39Speaker 03

  weight." And, you know, putting that, writing down that goal, literally putting it on your wall actually gives you something to strive towards. But then, the next problem after that, so the first problem is just setting objective goals, right? Instead of just saying, "Let's try to accomplish X," right, "Let's try to get X more," like, "Let's just try to get more people using Zocdoc," right? As opposed to, "Let's get 10 million more people to use Zocdoc," are different goals, just psychologically speaking. And then, you know, and then, and then at review time, it's, it's, it's easy to see whether you did it or not. But then, the next problem after that is that... Uh, you know, people just say, uh, yeah, that sounds like a good number. Let's get a million more people to use it or whatever.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Uh, and but there's no basis in in how they're going to get to that million, right? And so, uh, you know, and the analogy I like to use is, uh, you know, when they tried to put the first man in space or the first man on the moon. Uh, you know, they they didn't just say like, okay, let's get in the rocket and and like burn the rocket as hard as we can. And maybe we'll get into space. Right? Like they they did all the math behind it, right? They were like, gravity pulls us this much and we, you know, we have to take this much weight up. And so then we this much fuel, uh, put this much fuel, then adds this much weight also to the to the rocket. So, uh, so that causes its own set of problems. And then there's wind resistance and everything, right? And and they did all the math to figure out how to get themselves into space.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  But I feel like in business and in life, people just say, uh, you know, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna add this much, or I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna create this much more, uh, X percent more of of whatever is gonna happen. Um, and they haven't really done the underlying math, right?

• 33:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think I think I'm guilty of that, too. Definitely, because you're you're constantly told as a, uh, as a non quant comfortable person, like, you gotta think big. And so people are like, okay, great. Like, I'm gonna build a billion dollar company and then,

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:31Tim Ferriss?

  you know what I mean?

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Right, sure.

• 33:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  That's a good example, right? Like, if you if you want to build a billion dollar company, what do you what do you need to do? Like, uh, right? What kind of revenue do you need, uh, to to justify, or what kind of earnings do you need to justify being a billion dollars? And then, you know, what sort of markets or what sort of opportunities are available to that would create that much earnings? And then, how are you going to get there, right? You can't just say, like, let's just build a billion dollar company. And so, uh, I mean, it's it's good to have that goal, but then you need a plan to to execute as well. And I think that, uh, you know, one of the big uh, improvements that that we've done operationally is is, you know, what I call business cases and what it's what it's the math of how you're gonna get there. Right? And the example I use, uh, which was sort of just a fun example was, um,

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Uh, was we use that Monsters Inc. So Monsters are recurring is a recurring kind of theme. Uh, at our at Zocdoc. So like the the monsters from Monsters Inc. Uh, I'm blanking on their names now, but uh, those characters from that movie.

• 34:32Tim Ferriss?

  I want to call one of them Elmo, but it's not the right name.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  It's uh, Mike Wachowski or something. Man, I can't believe I'm blanking.

• 34:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds good enough.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Sully. It's Sully and then Mike Wachowski or something. Um, anyway, uh, right. So you know, like, like, uh, you know, and any uh, team member that that crushes it that week, we give them one of the stuffed animals and they're the monster of the week and stuff. So it's this sort of recurring theme. Um, but you know, one of the, my example that I used was, uh, they have, uh, right. They had these doors to to children's bedrooms where they they go and they like make them. They either these to scare them, but now they make them laugh or whatever. Um.

• 35:08Tim Ferriss?

  James P. Sully Sullivan and Mike Wazowski.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Mike Wazowski. Yeah, that was pretty close.

• 35:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's close. That's close.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, uh, you know, so, so they they go into these children's bedrooms and they make them laugh and and that generates electricity for the for the uh, for the city that they live in Monstropolis, which is the name of the city. And so, right, like, let's say, you know, one day they're like short on electricity. And so the first thing, right, like the first like, so then the CEO of Monstropolis or CEO of Monsters Inc. is like, let's generate more electricity. And then a bad, you know, a bad way to do it would be like, let's just try to generate more, right? And and a good way to do it would be like, let's generate one more, like one gigawatt more, right? And then it's like, okay, uh, one gigawatt. Great. How do we get there? Right? And then, well, okay, so each door generates, you know, a megawatt.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, each door that you you manufacture to a new uh, child's bedroom like generates one megawatt. And so you need to generate a thousand more doors. Like you need to like manufacture a thousand more doors to to get to get this one gigawatt. And then, and then, so then, how do you make a thousand more doors? Well, you need like a hundred door manufacturers that each make 10. And then you try to do that, but then you realize there's like a 10% defect rate. Right. And so it's, it's, it's, it's like sort of building up from there. Uh, and, and understanding the math behind it. And then understanding if that's realistic, can I have, you know, a hundred door makers or whatever, whatever I just said. You know, is it realistic to hire that many that quickly in one month or whatever?

• 36:40Speaker 03

  But really breaking down the plan to, to, you know, and multiplying these numbers through to, to get to the goal. Is, is really the difference there between success and failure. And, and you know, it's not complicated math, right? It's just, it's just, uh, you know, I need a thousand doors. So I need, I need, uh, you know, a hundred door manufacturers that can each make 10 doors in a month. And then I'll have a thousand doors. And so none of it's, you know, calculus or any of this other stuff. But it is, you know, rigorous in terms of, you know, you have to be able to, those, those, those. When you break it down to the individual components, those things have to be executable. Right. Can I actually get a hundred door makers? And does each of them actually make 10 doors a month and et cetera?

• 37:22Tim Ferriss?

  And the, uh, how do you then translate that to say weekly check-ins or monthly check-ins? How do, how do you, how do people who take, who do this case study? Uh, who've set a quantifiable, objectively measurable goal. Uh, then ensure that they're on track or at least, uh, check in to see if they're on track or not. How frequently is that done? Uh, and, and how do, how do people improve the odds of hitting those goals?

• 37:58Tim Ferriss?

  Once they've set it down on paper and taken, say, a sort of, they, they have, they've accepted and agreed that yes, we need to understand sort of the, the, the different numbers that underpin this goal and the assumptions we're making. How do, how do they then, how do you encourage them, uh, to keep on track? How, how often are they checking in or having someone else check in on them? How does that work?

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So the goals are set quarterly. So every three months, they have, you know, they set this goal. So for, going back to this Monsters Inc. example, that would be a three-month goal would be the, you know, we're going to generate one more, one extra gigawatt of power. And then they have to, and then each week, they're going to follow the numbers that, that, you know, that were the breakdown of this plan. So they say, you know, how many, how many door manufacturers did I actually hire this week? And how many doors did they actually manufacture this week?

• 38:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  And then, and then you start to get confidence around those numbers, right? You start to see, oh, crap, I can't, I can't hire 100 door makers in a month. It's actually going to take me two, three months to hire 100. But I can hire 30 in the first month, and they're each going to contribute 10 doors. So I'll at least have 300 doors in the first month, or whatever. Right? And you learn something new. You learn that, that, that, oh, 10% of the doors are defective. So it's actually not 300 doors generated in the first month. It's 270 doors generated in the first month. And so then you add a new line in your, in your, in your business case here, that, you know, is going to subtract 10% from your finished product of doors. And over time, over time, you, you, you generate

• 39:38Speaker 03

  a really solid understanding of that game, of that, of whichever, whichever initiative it is that you're planning. As you add lines and as you refine the numbers for, for each, each line. And then, so basically, you start to fill in the actuals, and you look at their deviation from your, you know, from your projections when you started.

• 39:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, from your base assumptions, which is something that, you know, I'm, I'm constantly astonished. And I do this in a very Fred Flintstone, sort of knuckle-dragging kind of way. But if I look at, just as a group, for instance, investors, angel investors, or people who are doing early-stage investments, they form a thesis, they go out and raise a bunch of money, and then they never modify.

• 40:22Tim Ferriss?

  You know, it's kind of like the parody of George W. Bush that Stephen Colbert did at one point where he gave an address at like the Republican National Convention or something. And he said, you know, I had loved, you know, I it was paraphrase, obviously, but he's like, I stand behind a president who, no matter what happens on Wednesday, he still holds the same belief on Thursday that he did on Tuesday.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was making fun of because they branded they branded John Kerry as a flip flopper.

• 40:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  That's what it was. And, uh, and it's like, it's sort of the mark of intelligence to learn from your mistakes and change your attitudes of things. Uh, and so, and so they were, they were, they were sort of, uh, Colbert was, was, uh, ribbing.

• 41:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Bush for, for, uh, you know, for branding Kerry as a flip flopper.

• 41:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm not sure the, uh, yeah, that, that worked out exactly as I expected.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:11Tim Ferriss?

  So when you were a kid, just to really, not entirely shift gears, because this is closely related. Um, actually, before I go there, do you have all of your employees trained on Excel? Is that, is that what that means when they're inputting these values? So that things automatically update?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is done in Excel. Each column is a month. Uh, and so you can see the time progressing, you know, going to the right. And then each row will be one of these things. So like, you know, uh, again with this monsters Inc., it's how many, how many door manufacturers I have, how many do they make in a month? What's the defect rate, et cetera? Uh, and then as a month like turns into reality, you, you fill, you, you overwrite the, the projected assumptions with the, uh, with the, with the actuals. But it, what I think in general, like what I'm saying sounds really simple. Um, but, but people don't do it. People just don't do it.

• 41:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  You know, in general, at, in, you know, lots of companies that I've visited or, or like you said, like smaller startups that I, that I help out with, uh, in an advisory role, they just don't do these things. And, you know, if you think about the number of projects that fail in business, um, and then the amount of, of research or forethought that goes into them, uh, you know, in general, that that's way, way off, right? And, and, you know, to go back to probability, if there's. Even if you think there's a 90% chance of something succeeding and a 10% chance of failing, uh, well, then it's worth it to spend 10% of the time, uh, ahead of time to see if it's going to work. And so what that means is if you're starting a 10-week project, you spend a week to research it.

• 42:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  And, and people don't do that, right? People spend, people spend two hours thinking about it and they go, that'd be a great idea. Then they, and they hop off and do it for 10 weeks, right?

• 42:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, just to put that in perspective, that means if it's a 10-year project, it could, that you could justify a year.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:59Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, in doing due diligence, which is, is totally entirely not the case, obviously, in, in the vast majority of instances.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, or budget, right? If, if it's a, if it's a hundred million dollar project, you should spend $10 million just researching it. If, if you think there's a 10% chance it's going to fail. If, right, and, and more than, more than 10% of projects actually fail, right? So if you think there's a 25% chance that it, that it fails, you spend $25 million researching, uh, a hundred million dollar project. This is assuming that you're going to take the, the research project is going to take the odds of success to 100%. But still, it's, it's, uh, you know, and, and in the, you know, it's not a perfect world and nobody knows these exact numbers. But certainly the amount of forethought or research that's done in general is like way, way, way under, you know, what even a ballpark estimate would say that the amount of forethought should go into it.

• 43:54Tim Ferriss?

  Do you, uh, do you, do you hire people who, who have pre-existing Excel experience? I do not, for instance. I mean, I, I, I can read an Excel document, but if I have to create macros and so on, I, I couldn't create an Excel spreadsheet that functions to save my life. How would you, how would you train, how do you train someone to, do you do it all internally? Do you have a certain course you recommend, anything like that?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  We do, yeah, we, we do it all internally. And then again, like macros are, are just way, way ahead of, of anything we're doing, right? Just, just getting a standard, uh, Excel sheet working, just, you know, just let's call it 10 rows and, and 10 columns.

• 44:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Is, is fine. And then, and, right, and you can build up from there as, as you learn more and you get more comfortable. But, you know, again, you know, this is going back to that attitude again, saying like, uh, I can't do macros and I can't do like V lookup's and, and I can't do pivot tables.

• 44:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I can't do those either.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  But you know, but but basic Excel is is none of that. Basic Excel is I have, you know, it's just that. It's I have ten door manufacturers or whatever, a hundred door manufacturers that are making ten doors. And you multiply those two cells together and you get a thousand.

• 45:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Um, and that's how you should start, right? You should start with just the one row. So like, let's start with just the one row of like, uh, I'm gonna make a thousand doors. And so it's just like literally one cell that says a thousand. And then you say, okay, well, what's the math behind that? And so then you say, okay, well, I need a hundred manufacturers that are each gonna make ten doors. So you make two new cells and you say, you know, you put a hundred in one cell and ten in the other cell. And then the third cell that used to just say a thousand is now, you you change that to be the product of those other two cells. Right? So you say that that third cell equals the first cell times the second cell.

• 45:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  And then, and so so now if you change the numbers in the, you know, in the number of door manufacturers, you have the the thousand will automatically shift. Right? And then and and then you say, okay, well, how many door? Why do I have this many door manufacturers? Why do I think I have a hundred door manufacturers? And it's like, oh, because, uh, I'm gonna hire fifty this month and fifty next month. And so, right? So now that hundred, instead of just being a hundred, is is the sum of two other cells that each say fifty. Right? And so you just you just work backwards from there. You you just take each cell and break it down into its subcomponents. Uh, and pretty soon you have a working Excel document. And it doesn't need to be more complex than that. And that's right. And that's a great start. And you'll do that for a while and then you'll be comfortable with that. And then you'll be like, what is it? What what is this pivot table nonsense that everyone's talking about?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Is it actually useful? Uh, and then you'll go into pivot tables and right? But but nobody that, you know, nobody in the history of Excel, no matter what kind of computer genius they were, like started day one and was like, how do I make macros work? Or how do I make pivot tables work? Right? They all started this way. It's just the Excel. And, you know, it is, I think that's like the big sort of, uh, secret of of mathematicians in general is that, you know, everybody started from one plus one equals two and built their way up. And it's just the, you know, it's just, each step is not a big step, once you understand the previous step.

• 46:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a gentleman, I believe his name is Keith Devlin out of Stanford, who's very good at speaking to this topic. And I always find myself sort of nodding and agreeing with him after every essay I read or interview I hear. And then, once I sort of look at the possibility of delving into numbers, then I get cold sweats, which I need to get over. Let me, let me change gears just a little bit and ask, sort of fill in the picture of who Nick Ganju is. And the first is, do you have a favorite book, or a book that you've given most as a gift?

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it depends in which context. So

• 47:38Tim Ferriss?

  You could, you could give a couple.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. So, in, for my software engineers, I love a book called Don't Make Me Think, which is a book about usability and making, making software and user interfaces that are friendly to people. And often you see these software engineers where they kind of scoff, and everyone's, you know, encountered this guy, it's an IT guy or a software engineer that scoffs at the novice user, right? They say, ha, ha, ha, this guy doesn't know how to use this thing. Like, this guy doesn't know how to use Photoshop, you know, he's so dumb, or he doesn't know how to make his network, he doesn't know how to connect his computer to the network, and he's so dumb. And, right, that attitude is something that

• 48:20Speaker 03

  needs to vanish. And if you look at successful companies like Apple, where, you know, things just work, you know, none of the engineers have that attitude, right? They have the attitude of, you know, a bad software company has the attitude of, if somebody doesn't know how to use something, it's their fault, because that user is dumb. And then if, and a good software company has the attitude of, if they don't know how to use something, it's our fault, because we did not make the software intuitive enough, right? And we didn't make it simple enough for, for, for people to use.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  And you see Apple is a shining example of that where they really go out of their way and do extra work. You know, the engineers do immense amounts of extra work to make it easy and some simple for the user and they're rewarded in the market and you know, and so

• 49:08Speaker 03

  the book that I love, which which helps reinforce that sort of culture, you know, that that user-friendly culture here at Zocdoc is a book called Don't Make Me Think, which is a book on usability and it and it, you know, it's sort of a simple book. It's like 100 to 150 pages, lots of, you know, illustrations about like, you know, good user interfaces and bad user interfaces. And it's so it's kind of an easy read, but it is a treatise on on why we should make usable interfaces. And not not just how we should make them, like, you know, what what sort of, you know, user interface sort of patterns work or don't work, but also why we should do that.

• 49:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  And right, and and this is the reason, right? Like, I mean, think about Zocdoc, right? If if you go to the homepage, you know, people discovering it for the first time, they go to the homepage and if it's if it's complicated, they're just gonna leave.

• 49:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Right? And and if it's simple, they're gonna stay and and book an appointment. And so, you know, it's all very well and nice of us to scoff about, you know, ha, ha, that user didn't know how to use our homepage and we can be haughty and scoff about it, but then we just didn't get that appointment, right? It's our it's our job to get people to book appointments. And so, right, there's there's no room for being haughty about that. Like, we need to make it accessible to to everybody.

• 50:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, as a side note, the best, just to choose something that that people are also often afraid of, learning languages, the best language teacher, one of the best language teachers I've ever encountered was of the, his name is Michelle Thomas, amazing guy. If you can get the original recordings of the classes that he did, they're just amazing. And and what he would say to the students right off the bat was, Don't worry, don't be nervous, don't try hard because if you if you don't learn, it's my it's my fault, not yours. It's the job of the teacher to make sure that you learn. So he sort of took the exact same approach with language learning and unburdened the student to make it the responsibility of the teacher to make it easy,

• 51:02Tim Ferriss?

  which is, I think, partially why he was so spectacularly successful. So it just goes to show. And he could get people up to basic speaking and all the romance languages in about eight hours of class time. It's really amazing.

• 51:17Tim Ferriss?

  So what other what other books outside of outside of Don't Make Me Think, do you do you give most as a gift or recommend most?

• 51:26Speaker 03

  And then, you know, How to Measure Anything, which is what we talked about before, which is which is about,

• 51:33Speaker 03

  you know, being outcome based and being, you know, getting these measurable outcomes, saying, I'm going to lose 10 pounds as opposed to just saying, I'm going to try to lose weight. Is, you know, and this is a great book because, you know, people often complain

• 51:48Speaker 03

  that they can't measure something, right? Like, how many people like our site? Like, if people, do people really like our website? Well, how do you measure that? Well, it's measurable, right? You can do a survey, you can ask people, you can you can just look at conversion rates. How many people actually do something on your website? As opposed to just look at it and run away. And so this book is is, you know, I found is quite informative on to how to think about,

• 52:10Speaker 03

  you know, measuring things that you might have thought were intangible historically. And it also goes into these kind of ideas about why it's valuable to measure something. So going back to what I was saying about, you know, if there's a 10% chance of something failing, well, then you should spend 10% of your time like before doing it, you know, deciding if it's going to fail or not. And

• 52:33Speaker 03

  And so really getting that discipline about about doing, you know, doing enough forethought and like sort of reflection upfront is another big sort of, you know, theme of this book.

• 52:43Tim Ferriss?

  I thought the confidence interval aspect was really fascinating as well, not something that I've thought enough about.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:50Tim Ferriss?

  And just, you know, if you're 90% confident that something is going to happen or that something is correct, what does that actually mean? People throw that around like, how certain are you? I'm 75% certain. Like, how did, how should that be reflected in your actions and preparation and so on? Right?

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 53:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I thought was really, really fascinating. Do you have a, what is your favorite documentary or movie? Or favorites? And these don't have to be highbrow, it could be Legally Blonde.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't know. I really like Forrest Gump a lot. I don't know. That's like a common one or a cheesy one.

• 53:25Tim Ferriss?

  What do you like about it?

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Well, it's, you know, it's just like, you know, in the beginning, I mean, it's sort of an obvious symbolism, but in the beginning, there's like a feather floating around. The end, there's a feather floating around and he's sort of, you know, he kind of floats around, right? Like, he kind of, he kind of, I forgot the exact story, but like, I think he's like running, oh, I know, he like, there's a football field and he kind of runs through it because he's running, he's fleeing from something.

• 53:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  And he runs past everybody. So then they kind of like, oh my God, we got to get that guy to play football. And then he plays football and then he goes to college because he plays football. The end of college, like some army recruiter just hands him a flyer just at random and says like, you should join the army. And he's like, okay, I'll join the army. And so he's just kind of floating around on the wind there. And I think it's, it's a good sort of lesson where, you know, where you don't take yourself too seriously, right? Like, it's like, you're gonna just, like, things are gonna happen. And the more you stress out about like, life is not going exactly the way I planned, the more unhappy you're gonna make yourself, which is not to say you shouldn't try to

• 54:31Speaker 03

  do things, but, you know, you should certainly try to shape your life and all this, but, but, you know, don't, don't take it too seriously or don't, don't stress out too much when things don't go exactly how you planned.

• 54:42Tim Ferriss?

  So how, I would love to hear maybe a concrete example from your life because from all outward indications, I mean, you've done exceptionally well with Zocdoc and elsewhere. How do you choose?

• 54:59Tim Ferriss?

  How much to plan versus sort of allow to bend to serendipity, right? Because you do a bunch of other things that we haven't gotten into yet. But the music, you know, you take very, very seriously. We're going to talk about ping pong now that you mentioned Forrest Gump. But like, well, let's use ping pong as an example. Let's tell, maybe you can explain the ping pong phenomenon or your experience with ping pong.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. This goes back to what you were saying about, you know, older people wanting to learn something. You know, people, I play guitar and people say, well, I wish I had started guitar when I was a kid so I could play. And I said, well, I started it when I was 28. And so, you know, still young, but not, you know, I wasn't like a 10 year old. And ping pong, I learned when I was 36 and I'm 38 now. And I thought that would be, it's another interesting thing. It's really, I think people limit themselves as to they think they can learn or it's almost like an excuse to not have to try to learn something, right? Oh, I'm 36, like I can't learn ping pong now.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  I'm too old and it's just, it kind of makes it easy to say, it's easy to not try to double down and actually learn something because you can just kind of cast it off and say, oh, I'm too old to learn new things.

• 56:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  But the story of the ping pong was that we got, we purchased two or three ping pong tables for my office two years ago. And I was the worst player. I had never played ping pong in my life. I'd played like five times in my whole life. And I was the worst player out of everybody and everybody was laughing and they were like, ha, ha, ha. Because, you know, it's always fun to like, to screw with the boss, right? So, right, but the boss sucks at ping pong, ha, ha, we're all beating the boss ping pong. And so I got, I got, you know, I got a little, I got motivated, let's say I got motivated.

• 56:57Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good adjective.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  And I, you know, and I threw down the gauntlet and I said, uh, okay, I'm gonna beat everybody here. I'm gonna beat everybody at this company in 30 days.

• 57:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so you proclaimed this, this was like.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  I proclaimed it out loud and, and, uh, you know, and I, and I photoshopped like the, the Highland, you know, the Highland, there's a Highlander. I don't know if you remember that movie.

• 57:21Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, there can be only one.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like, you know, there's a sword, he's like, there's a photo of him with the sword in the air and the lightning is striking the sword. And I replaced the sword with a ping pong paddle and the lightning is striking the ping pong paddle. And I wrote, there could be only one and, uh, but you know, but, uh, I practiced and practiced. Uh, and in, in 30 days, uh, uh, I had beaten all but two people at the company. And then, and then, and you know, because this is like the long tail of, of right, like at the end of the bell curve, there's gonna be people that are exceptionally good. But, uh, and getting Matthew again, I know, but.

• 57:58Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, it's just like, I mean, it's like, uh, you know, Facebook and Peter Thiel's portfolio, right? There's just sort of like a power law.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 58:05Tim Ferriss?

  The last two people are gonna be monsters.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, but then in another 30 days, I beat those two people. And so in six, I, I said in 30 days, I'll beat everybody, but in 60 days, uh, I beat everybody but two people in 30 days. And then 60 days I beat everybody.

• 58:20Tim Ferriss?

  How, how did you, how did you go about learning it? Like when you sat down, you're like, okay, now I run the risk of humiliating myself if I don't make this happen.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:30Tim Ferriss?

  What was your, when you sat down to like plan it out, how did you do it?

• 58:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. So first of all, I don't think like, that's an interesting sort of way to put it. It, it never occurred to me to say like, oh, I'm humiliating myself if I didn't do this. And maybe that's like a sort of mentality that's, uh, you know, maybe that's like illustrative of the mentality, right? I wasn't, uh. Until you said that now, like two years later, it never crossed my mind that like the humiliation of defeat or how humiliating that would be. And so, you know, maybe, you know, it's just, it's more constructive to just think about, like to focus on the positive of when you're gonna win and not, and not like, and not fret about the downside.

• 59:13Tim Ferriss?

  So when you were fantasizing about gloating over the other, the employees in company?

• 59:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 59:21Tim Ferriss?

  How did you sit down to, to plan it out? Or what?

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 59:26Tim Ferriss?

  So what was the method? Because I actually want to get good at ping pong.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  Sure, sure, sure. So the first thing was, and by far the most important thing was, I went to the ping pong, like, parlor by my house and took lessons.

• 59:42Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  And so, right, and that was, and then when I, at the end, when, when, so I was taking lessons once a week from there and I, you know, and that of course just catapulted me in my skill level. But, and what would happen was at the third or fourth week, one of my coworkers came into that ping pong parlor and saw me, and saw me taking lessons and spilled to the entire company that I had been taking lessons. And, which I thought was another interesting sort of, you know, reflection on life, which is, you know, people are like, oh, you didn't say you were gonna do that thing, right? And I was like, I didn't say what I was gonna do or what I wasn't gonna do, it's just.

• 1:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  Other than beat all your asses.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I said I was gonna beat everybody. And, you know, when we started Zocdoc, people said the same thing, right? People said, oh, you'll never get, like, you know, there's, there's practice management software that exists out there. And they said, you know, you'll never be able to integrate to these third-party practice management systems because they're too antiquated and, right, that they're not gonna release a new version and some of, some of the companies are, you know, they're not even developing those things anymore. And we went and, you know, we just went and reverse engineered some of the existing ones just by literally like getting copies of the software and, and deconstructing the file structure and really reverse engineering it.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  And we got it working and all of a sudden, you know, Zocdoc started working, the, you know, the, all these, all these antiquated softwares were effectively communicating with us. And then those naysayers were like, oh, you didn't say you were gonna do that, right? Like, we thought you had to strike up partnerships with all these like software companies. You didn't say you were just gonna get the software and reverse engineer it. And it's like, well, I didn't say I was or I wasn't, but it's, you know, if you're thinking so inside the box and then when somebody thinks outside the box and gets something done, you did, you know, you should learn from it. You should be like, oh, that's slick. You shouldn't be like, oh, I, you didn't say you were gonna do that. That's not fair. Right? It's not, and you know, that's another sort of illustration of like, I'd say, you know, positive attitudes versus negative attitudes. But, you know, so I took these lessons.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  So I took these ping pong lessons and then they go, oh, you didn't say you're gonna do that. And, you know, then they started saying, oh, only you can afford lessons. The guy, the guy that came and found me in the ping pong place was like, uh, he, he ran into me at the bar of, there was, there's a bar in this ping pong parlor. And he said, yeah, not everyone can afford the lessons. And I was like, he's like, I was like, how much did you spend on these drinks? And he had bought a round of drinks for four or five of his friends. And he was like, this is $40. And I was like, the, the ping pong lesson I just took is $35 and I'm, and I'm not drinking. I haven't bought any drinks, so I'm gonna come out of this ping pong, you know, place spending less than you have. Uh, but, you know, so the first thing I did was that and, uh, and started with proper

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  form and then, uh, and then practiced a lot when, uh, when people weren't around.

• 1:02:35Tim Ferriss?

  How did you practice when people weren't around? So there's a, and what are, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna cheat here, I guess. Uh, what are some of the most common mistakes that people make playing ping pong? Just like the randos who like have a couple beers and grab a ping pong table? Like what, when you watch it, what, what makes you cringe? What are you like, ah, if they only knew the basics, they should do this and not do that.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Number one is, is the, is the grip. So a lot of people just hold it atrociously. Just hold the ping pong paddle in, you know, whatever way they first, they're first inclined to do it. And you know, the general way, there's a couple of like schools of hold, of holding it, but the general way you're supposed to do it is, it's called the handshake. And so you sort of extend your hand like you're having a handshake, you know, you're about to shake somebody's hand and then you, you put the, the handle in that way. Sort of hard to explain.

• 1:03:23Tim Ferriss?

  I think I get it. So you're, you're, your four fingers, not your thumb then are extended kind of diagonally across the back, the flat portion as opposed to the handle of, of one of the paddles?

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you don't want to cover a, a large portion of the paddle with your hand because then your backhand will just, it'll hit your fingers.

• 1:03:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  But yeah, that's essentially the right idea.

• 1:03:43Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. People can Google it though. The handshake.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Handshake method. And then, and the handshake grip. And then the, uh, the other thing is people just don't,

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  have any conception of, of how big a, a bigger, how big a roll of spin is in the game. And so it's a, it's a very light ball and, and spin has immense effect on the ball. And so, you know, your normal like looping forehand is supposed to have a lot of top spin on it. And so e- every ball should have spin on it. And you know, depending on what you're trying to do, if you're trying to slice it, if you're trying to side spin, if you're trying to top spin. If you're just hitting it flat, then you're sort of, uh, forsaking an opportunity to do something, you know, tricky with it that, that would, that would screw up your opponent. And so, uh, you know, learning how to hit the ball with spin is, is I'd say the second biggest thing.

• 1:04:31Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 1:04:33Tim Ferriss?

  What do you, what do you have any morning or evening rituals? Like what does the first hour of your day look like?

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Uh, that's an interesting question. Uh, I mean, I suppose I, I don't really have any rituals. I just get up and, and get ready and go to work. You know, I, I think that.

• 1:04:52Tim Ferriss?

  You do brush your teeth though every morning.

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  I do brush my teeth as long, on the days I remember I brush.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  You know, I think that uh, I'm very fortunate in that uh, every day has a different set of challenges and like, uh, you know, I kinda have uh, the whole, the whole company is, is part of, you know, uh, the stuff that I'm concerned with.

• 1:05:14Tim Ferriss?

  So, so let me, let me rephrase then, cause I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna push a little, I bet you do have patterns at least, whether it's weekly or daily, and I'm just curious, what of those patterns contribute to your sort of uh, effectiveness, uh, or, you know, just output, or lower your stress, right? I mean, so you, you know, music is, is part of your life, but are there, are there things you do say on a weekly basis? Like one day a week, or twice a week, or whatever it might be, that you think allow you to be a high functioning person without your uh, sort of having to be put in a mental institution every once in a while to de-stress?

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, certainly, uh, you know, I guess I don't really, I've never really thought about it in those terms, I don't uh,

• 1:05:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'm such a negative person.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  No, it's like an illustration maybe that I'm not, like maybe not self-aware that like, today I need to, you know, today I should do something to de-stress because my stress levels are, are high and, and certainly I do get, you know, uh, to, you know, there are certainly are days when the stress levels are high and I don't think I am self-aware enough to like, have like, okay, today I should meditate or whatever. But uh, you know, I certainly read a lot, uh, you know, I uh, I think I, I try to like rid myself of, of cognitive biases. It's something that is extremely nerdy thing to say.

• 1:06:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, could you explain to people, for those people who may not be familiar, what that means?

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, so uh,

• 1:06:40Tim Ferriss?

  Or give an example, either way.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, so there's, there's a huge slew of, uh, you know, what psychologists would call cognitive biases, uh, that humans have. And um, what they are, are things that make, uh, you know, a human

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  For whatever reason, like, you know, evolutionary reason, it makes them averse to something that they shouldn't be averse to, or like irrationally evaluate things. And so I'll give you an example, we can go back to gambling again.

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  You know, let's use the same example. So like, if we, if it was $10, you know, if, if we rolled a die and each time we lost, each time it was one through five, you lost a dollar. And if it was six, you won, you know, $10, then you would play that game. Uh, right. Because over time, you would, you would be positive. But if each, if each time-

• 1:07:33Tim Ferriss?

  Assuming I have the bankroll, yeah, correct.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, assuming you have the bankroll. But let's say each time that you rolled that die, instead of, uh, in- instead of each roll, losing $1, one through five, losing $1, and six gaining $10. Let's say that each of one through five, you lost $10,000. And then, uh, and then with a six, you won $100,000. Now would you play that game? So it, you know, it turns out that most people wouldn't play that game, even though the numbers are the same. Because the fear of losing that much money is, is, uh, right, sort of insurmountable. And so people have these, uh, even though you should play that game, right? And a large business would play that game.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  And even a rational actor would play that game. And so people have, uh, so that's a cognitive bias called loss aversion, right? Like, losing $100, uh, you, you feel more bad for losing $100 than you feel good when you win $100.

• 1:08:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Yeah. The sunken cost fallacy, a close, a close cousin, right? So if people-

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  Will hold on to an investment just because they have, it's gone down a certain amount.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. My favorite story of, of sunk cost is, uh, is there's this, uh, tennis, this tennis club where, um, where you can rent, uh, where the outdoor courts are free, but the indoor courts you have to rent, and you have to rent them ahead of time. You have to rent them like three weeks ahead of time, and you just pay like 50 bucks for, for the court for an hour or whatever. And, uh, and this is a real case, I forgot where it was, but in like March or April, uh, you know, you'll, and, and the outdoor courts are generally considered to be far more pleasurable because you're outside and it's warm and whatever, sunny.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  And the indoor courts are, you know, these uncomfortable like white lights or whatever. And so what happens is in April, it'll be a beautiful sunny day. And, and the people will be playing on the indoor courts and the outdoor courts are empty. And you say, well, why are you playing on the indoor court? You should go play outside. And they're like, well, we've already paid for the indoor court. Right? Like, we already, we paid for it last week. So now we're going to go to the indoor court and we're going to play. And you're like, but the outdoor court is far nicer and it's empty. Why don't you go play there? Right? And they go, well, no, because we've paid for this one. And so it's not, it's a sunk cost fallacy, right? And it's, it's a, this is a cognitive bias, right? You should do the thing that is most like, you know, you should play tennis on the most pleasurable court then. It doesn't matter if you paid 50 bucks a week ago for the less pleasurable court.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  If, if the nicer court is open right now, you should play on the nicer court.

• 1:09:59Tim Ferriss?

  So I should mention for folks, as, as imperfect as Wikipedia might be, there, if you search list of cognitive biases, don't, don't search cognitive bias, search list of cognitive biases. There's a long list of these types of, of cognitive biases. And there are also a lot of books that explore this, like Think Twice. But the, there's sort of two approaches here, right? So, or two ways that you can minimize the damage of cognitive biases or extract value from them. Right? The first is correcting those cognitive biases or at least becoming aware of them. The second is harnessing your inherent cognitive biases for something positive.

• 1:10:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right? For instance, there are cases where experiments have been done with, say, gym memberships. And so having someone pay on a monthly basis for gym membership is not nearly as effective as, say, having them overpay in advance and then giving them a refund of X amount for, for each Y number of, of times they go to the gym. And sort of harnessing that type of prepayment and loss aversion and sunken cost to, to incentivize somebody to do something positive they wouldn't otherwise do. So it's, anyway, this, this is also something that I like to nerd out about, so.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:20Tim Ferriss?

  What's, what's, what's a behavioral, what's a cognitive bias that you, that you overcame? Or something that you're currently working on? Anything in particular?

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, sure. I mean, I think all of these things were things that uh, all these things are things that are very innate in everybody. Uh, and so I think, you know, I, I, at some point, I did have sunk cost fallacy. At some point, I did have uh, loss aversion and these kind of things. Um.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  Let me see, what's a big one that, I, I think another big one that everyone has is anchoring, and I certainly had that before, which is, uh, you know, in a, in a negotiation when, uh, when it's not clear like what the price for something should be. Uh, you should, you should just throw out a huge number like, like, okay, like what you said, like you wanted me to be, you wanted me to be your, your mentor, right?

• 1:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  Your math mentor, right? And so what should an hourly rate be between you and me? Like, I have, like, I have no idea. Like, I, I don't, I've never taught, like, you know, for, for, uh, you know, for a living. And, uh, so we'd have no idea, you and I. So in that silent moment, when, when you and I are like, what do you think the price should be? Uh, I'm gonna blurt out a thousand dollars an hour. That's what I'm gonna say, right? And I, it's not because I think I deserve that. It's because now I've anchored the conversation, saying a huge number like that. Uh, has, has like blown away your, like, you know, it, it's destroyed like your brain. I've, I've just destroyed your brain.

• 1:12:43Tim Ferriss?

  It's not hard. It's not hard.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  And, and so, right? And so now when we settle on a, on a, on a final number, it's going to be much higher than it would have been otherwise. And that, that's just a cognitive bias. And I, and now, like, like you said, you use these to your advantage. This is a situation in which I can use that to my advantage. So, right, the final.

• 1:12:59Tim Ferriss?

  Especially because, especially because I suck at math on top of that.

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So, right, where, where is the final, you know, if I hadn't done that, the final price might have been twenty-five dollars an hour. Uh, and since I threw out that huge number, it's like screwed up your brain now. And, uh, and the final price is instead going to be forty dollars an hour, uh, because, because I've done the anchoring thing. And so, uh, and so that, that's a great one. Uh. For all you listeners out there, go into negotiation, go try, try this, try this out. Uh, it's, it only works when there's a not, not a preset sort of.

• 1:13:36Tim Ferriss?

  Reference point.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, reference point, right? Like if you're like, how much, you know, how much I'm going to sell you my used Toyota. Right? And how much should it be? And like, you know, a ballpark should be five grand. I can't be like a hundred grand, right? It just sounds stupid. And like rude, right? To be, so, so it, it, it only works really when, when there's not a good expectation from either party.

• 1:14:00Tim Ferriss?

  That is, that is a good point, though, that, that negotiating is a fantastic way. That's probably the most systematic way that I've tried to address my own.

• 1:14:09Tim Ferriss?

  Self-defeating instincts would be another way to look at biases, right? So the secrets of power negotiating is a great book. The audio is even better. Getting past no, I think is a fantastic book. Better than getting to yes. Do you have any, have you, have you read any particular books on negotiating or?

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  Actually, yeah, the, the first book that came to mind for me was Getting to Yes. So I haven't.

• 1:14:28Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yes. Okay.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  But I love, I love Getting to Yes, and I love.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  You know, a, a lot of important things that people misunderstand. And if just further that with the example I just said was that not, not all negotiation is a zero sum game.

• 1:14:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  I think Getting to Yes is a great, is a great, uh, you know, uh, exposition of that.

• 1:14:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. Yeah, no, it's, it's, uh, I think you'd enjoy Getting Past No. It was actually written after Getting to Yes by one of the co-authors of Getting, Getting to Yes.

• 1:14:58Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh? Who, when, when you think of the word successful or hear the word successful, who's the first person that comes to mind and why?

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Uh, I think I'd say Bill Gates. Uh, maybe that's a cliche, like sort of obvious answer, but, uh, you know.

• 1:15:14Tim Ferriss?

  Depends on the, depends on the reasons you give, I guess.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's, he's in tech, right? He is slash was a computer nerd. I'm a computer nerd. You know, he built a, an immense and, you know, one of the greatest software companies, uh, greatest technology companies ever. And something that I aspire to do. Uh, and then not, you know, not only that, but then, you know. Then, uh, you know, sort of the second chapter of his life, he's now gone and done all this great philanthropy. And it's something that, you know, I would, I would love to follow in his footsteps on that when, you know, retirement time comes for me. Is to go and give back and, and, uh, do these philanthropic efforts.

• 1:15:51Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to.

• 1:15:55Tim Ferriss?

  Follow Bill Gates' path in a lot of those respects that you just mentioned. What are the things about Bill Gates that if you could opt out of emulating, you would opt out?

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  I don't know. I guess.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  It was a tough one. I guess you could see like, you know, I guess he was very rough on his own employees. Within within Microsoft. And I think that. At a younger age, I was I was also very. You know, very abrupt and sort of, you know. You know, fit to like susceptible to like bouts of, you know, anger and whatever. And I think I've come a long way at this company to. To be a lot nicer and right as. Like I had a couple startups. In my twenties and I think I was very sort of mercurial in those in those startups, but. By the time I had started Zocdoc and sort of.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  Ironed all that out and it's much better to manage, be nice for someone you're managing.

• 1:17:00Tim Ferriss?

  I like mercurial. That's a good adjective. I was it makes me think of a comedian named Jim Gaffigan. I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but. He said, he said, yeah, you know, I wish I were, I think he said, I think he said at some point, I'm paraphrasing. He was like, yeah, you know. If you're a Latin guy or woman and you're really angry, people say, wow, it's just that Latin temper. And he's like, but. If I behave that way, people just say, wow, that guy's a dick.

• 1:17:28Tim Ferriss?

  But mercurial, I like that choice.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  It's just my Indian passion coming through.

• 1:17:36Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know what. Yeah, I don't. I can't pull off Scandinavian passion. Doesn't doesn't doesn't doesn't usually get accepted. The.

• 1:17:45Tim Ferriss?

  So on the flip side, what's the first face that comes to mind when you think punchable?

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Oh, Jesus. I don't know. I can't. I don't know.

• 1:17:55Tim Ferriss?

  Come on. Doesn't have to be a real person. I'll give you an out.

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  I don't know, maybe the Jersey Shore people.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  Right? Or the, you know, the sort of people that are, you know, famous for being famous.

• 1:18:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Like, not the people that are, you know, have actually contributed.

• 1:18:13Tim Ferriss?

  Built stuff.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, built stuff. Yeah.

• 1:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  What's the, what are the most frequently played albums or artists on your iPhone or computer?

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Well, I love the Beatles a lot.

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  And I think that the more, the more I listen to them, the more complexity and, and sort of stuff you discover as, as you listen to their stuff over and over. Which is great, right? A lot of, a lot of pop songs are just really simple and the first time you hear it, you've heard everything there is to hear.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  But, you know, and the Beatles, the early stuff was like that. Like, it was really simple and kind of about like chasing girls and stuff. And then later on, they, they got really, really sophisticated and, and, you know, there's a lot of lovely complexity to the music. And as you know, I'm a big, you know, I play music myself and I understand quite a bit about music theory, which is, you know, again, getting sort of mathematical. But really understanding why things sound good and why this chord sounds great here and this kind of stuff is all, once again, math. And not complicated math, simple math, but, but I love music theory and, and, you know, those guys were the kings of that.

• 1:19:26Tim Ferriss?

  What, what would be two or three tracks that you would suggest people listen to, to explore that?

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  Let me see. If you find, let me, let me think. I like Across the Universe a lot.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  So if you find like, you can, you can even see like which, once you understand music theory, you can even see like which ones were written by whom. And so you can see, like Paul McCartney always plays this, he always puts the four minor in his, in his songs. And that's, that's sort of a music theory term, but.

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  He's a big fan of putting the four minor in his writing. And so you can, when you hear, you know, a four minor come up, you're like, I bet this one was written by McCartney and then you go look.

• 1:20:13Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  And so I like Across the Universe, which does have a four minor in it. I like, uh, I like Something. That one's by, I think it's by George Harrison. And, um, let me see, what are some other good ones? Certainly like the more psychedelic ones, like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is great. I Am the Walrus is great. And, uh, yeah, there's really no end to the.

• 1:20:41Tim Ferriss?

  To the list?

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Tim Ferriss?

  If you had a thousand people, uh, non musicians, people who listen to music but have never played an instrument, and you wanted to get them hooked on learning more about music and potentially playing music?

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Tim Ferriss?

  What would you have them read, watch, listen, buy, whether it's an instrument or otherwise? I mean, you are, you are in large part responsible for getting me interested in hand drumming, right? But I'm not sure if that's the best gateway drug for people with music. But what would you, what would you have them listen to or buy or play with or do? If you had a thousand people and you had like a million dollars on the line, I'm not sure what the minimal threshold is for you to, to make it.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  I would do a business case and say I can train this many people. No.

• 1:21:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  Uh, I think that, uh, probably the guitar is the easiest because.

• 1:21:34Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that. Why?

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I, I think, well, for a couple of reasons. It's not, it's probably not the easiest to, uh, to play in terms of like, I mean, you know, it's kind of hard to hold a chord. And obviously with a piano, you could just plump the keys. But, um, but the second you get over the hump of learning three or four chords on guitar, you're off to the races, right? Because you can, you can play so many pop songs with just three or four chords on guitar. And, uh, so within a few weeks, you can already start be playing. Uh, you know, you know, simple songs and and then like Twist and Shout, for example, to go back to the Beatles is is just three chords, three easy chords. Uh, and so you can play Twist and Shout in, you know, in a week or two really well. And then and then what you do is as you learn each new song, uh, pick a song with one extra

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  chord in it, right? So so this next song has the same three chords as Twist and Shout, but one minor chord in it. And so now, right? So now you're learning that new song, you're leveraging, right? Seventy-five percent, you already know, because it's the other three chords. Uh, and you're only picking up one new chord. And so then, as as you play, you know, as you pick new songs, just add one new chord each time. Uh, and your repertoire grows of songs you know, and the repertoire of chords you know also grows. Uh, and it makes right, and so it's really easy to get into that groove where it's fun to play because you're playing songs that everybody likes. Um, and it doesn't feel like, you know, work or or rehearsal or practice. It's just, you know, e- each one, I just have to practice one new chord. Uh, and over time, you know, over the course of a year, you'll learn a ton of a ton of songs.

• 1:23:06Tim Ferriss?

  Now, the, uh, there's a couple of resources for mo- uh, for folks potentially. One is, uh, just Googling Axis of Awesome, uh, who I think, I don't know if you've seen this, does it does an amazing example of showing with three or four chords how you can play almost every pop song you've ever heard.

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, that chord progression is called one, five, six, four.

• 1:23:25Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  Uh, and, uh...

• 1:23:28Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there you go. People could just Google that. So chord progression, one, five, six, four.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  That's in the music theory notation, it'd be one, five, six, four, and then and they play like a hundred different songs. Uh, and it's really hilarious.

• 1:23:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they're they're amazing. Uh, are there any, for someone to add one chord at a time without having to manually figure it out themselves and kind of reinvent the wheel, is there any particular approach that you would suggest in doing that? Any any way that you would Google for that to figure it out? Or, uh, YouTube approach or teachers? I mean...

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a, there's a, I mean, there's a extreme wealth of of online of, uh, you know, online diagrams and and YouTube videos about how to do these things. So, you know...

• 1:24:09Tim Ferriss?

  What would you search for to whittle it down? I think it's a paradox of choice challenge for a lot of people.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I don't know really. I guess it's not like for the basic chords, it's, it's really like any, anything will do. You know, for example, a D major chord is just, you know, it's three of your fingers, your index, middle and fourth finger. And then you have to put them on the bottom three strings of the, of the guitar on the second fret, third fret and second fret. And so you just have to, you know, it's just that, right? It's not more complicated than that. There's no like specific,

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  you know, form that you have to do when you approach the guitar, whatever. You just gotta slam your three fingers down on those three frets on those three strings. Uh, and you'll play a D chord. And so at that level, uh, you know, you just need to know which fingers to put on which strings where. And it's not, you know, it's not an intense sort of, you know, form exercise or anything.

• 1:25:04Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. All right. Last question for now in this installment. Uh, if you could give your 20 year old self, advice at this point in retrospect, what would it be? And it does not have to be one thing.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:25:17Tim Ferriss?

  Or just 20 year olds in general. Could be you, yourself, but it could be in general.

• 1:25:22Speaker 03

  Sure. I mean, I guess it would go back to these. Uh, so I'd say certainly,

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  when you're young, do, do the things, do the entrepreneurial things because those are the things that will get you, uh, right. You, you'll learn the most by far. And so I did, like I said, I did two startups in my twenties and they were, you know, the, neither one was a great hit. But, um, but the amount I learned in, you know, one year of doing a startup was like doing, you know, was like seven years of working at a, at a, at a, you know, at a big company. And so, you know, when you're young and, you know, you just finished college or whatever, and you've got this, uh, you know, you've got this freedom and you're not encumbered with, uh, you know, uh, you know, with a spouse and kids that you have to, that you have to pay for. And you can live on ramen noodles and all this stuff. That's the time to go and, and take this entrepreneurial risk.

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  Because you, even if everything you do is a complete flop, uh, you know, if you spend five years doing it, you will learn, have learned like 35 years worth of, of, you know, career progression and, and life skills, uh, in those five years of, of, of just risking and failing and risking and failing. So even if it's a total flop, the, the person that you come out at the end of it, uh, as is, is, is far ahead of if you'd just gone and worked at, at a big company.

• 1:26:39Tim Ferriss?

  So on that, on that point, I lied about the last question. This is, this is one more. For, for people who are graduating now or considering a, a shift, a career change.

• 1:26:51Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not sure if this is age dependent, but let's just say for, for the sake of argument that they're, they're single or they just have a very low burn rate. What would, how would you suggest people choose their first gig or their next gig? I know it's a highly personal thing, but let's, let's just say people graduating, uh, college in the near future for the sake of simplicity.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's just like figure out a market need, like anything that you have in your day to day world.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, that, that sucks. Like what is, you know, is it hard to find parking or can you, you know, is a movie theater dirty or whatever? And, and just try to solve that problem. Uh, and you know, I, I think that's, that's a great way to get started and it, you know, you, you'll learn a lot. You'll do something.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, you, you'll just create a website where it's like, it shows you like which movie theaters are dirty. And you'll realize, wow, I can't like, there's no revenue from this website. Like I can't, I can't make any money telling people what movie theaters are dirty, but then that's a learning by itself, right? And, and you know, and you come away from that and you're like, okay, I need to think about, you know, things with actual revenue opportunities and you'll do that iterative process. And you'll, you know, and you'll flop a bunch, but that's fine. Like that's the learning process. And you know, it's the school of hard knocks. Uh, and you're going to learn a ton just doing that kind of stuff.

• 1:28:09Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. Well, Nick, I think, uh, this is, this is a great place to stop for now. I'm sure we'll have a round two in person with, uh, some food and some wine, but.

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  That's great. A lot of fun, a lot of fun.

• 1:28:23Tim Ferriss?

  Where can people learn more about, uh, you or Zocdoc? Where would you like people to check? Check what you're up to out.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Certainly, you know, I'm on the About Us page of Zocdoc. So, but you know, more importantly, if you need a doctor, it really is the best place to find a doctor. So zocdoc, Z O C D O C dot com. For myself, I don't, I mean, I don't have any, I don't have any about, you know, like, I don't have a shrine to me on the web anywhere. So I've got a LinkedIn page. You can find me on the LinkedIn page, I suppose. But, but you know, Zocdoc is my, is my pride and joy. So go there.

• 1:29:02Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. All right. Well, I'm going to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cut my teeth on some ping pong and we may have to have a showdown next time we get together. Balls of fury style. Awesome, man. Well, thanks very much and I will talk to you soon.

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Awesome. Thanks a lot.

• 1:29:21Tim Ferriss?

  All right, buddy. Bye bye. Bye. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs and Exoficio. 99designs is the world's largest online marketplace of graphic designers and I have used 99designs for years, including to get cover concepts for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. It was a huge hit. And here's how it works and you can check everything out, including some of my competitions. You can see these book covers and so on at 99designs.com/tim. Whether you need a logo, car wrap, a web design, an app, a thumbnail, a t-shirt, whatever,

• 1:30:05Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:30:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:31:29Tim Ferriss?

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