This is smash Notes, a podcast that brings you weekly summary off the best podcasts on the Internet. Before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to James Bashar from podcast called Below the Line. First of all, they just achieved a great milestone. They crossed 10,000 downloads, and Second, James is using smashing old summaries to promote his podcast. This helps his listeners see what's inside the episode, find the interesting bids for them in particular, and convinces those people who are on the line that each episode is worth listening because they already know what's going to be inside. You can find a link to below the line from the front page of smash nose dot com and see for yourself. And now, last thing before we begin. As I promised every week I tried to feature an indie artist. Here's your band called Pink Roses with a single west Side. If you like the snippet, the rest is in the end of the episode

top town like you already know just where to go into. You should see the signs of the Western lines when your heart beats fast in your world. On

and now Smash Notes episode for this week. Are you ready? Let's do this First. We have an episode from the Ezra Kline Show, where he asked Melinda Gates about life in 2030. What world is possible and what to do to get there. Here's her answer. Well, to be frank, all the member countries of the United Nations set out the goals they have for 2030 which is to try and imagine what is actually possible, whether it's climate change, whether it's fewer deaths for women. If you were just for kids, less disease, better forests mean that that is the vision they set out. But, you know,

like Bill and I, we have absolute goals that we think are achievable. We want child mortality has been cut in half since 90 night cut and 1/2 that is a phenomenal number is gonna get cut in 1/2 again by 2030. It's actually harder now because we've actually cleaned up the low hanging fruit. So we have some hard, innovative stuff that has to happen. Maternal deaths. They can get cut by substantially. So to me, I see a world in 2030 that if we make the right investments as a nation and is a world. I mean, it takes the other. It takes both the developing country to make certain investments, and that takes the developed world to make certain investments. We can have a much more peaceful and prosperous world in 2030. No doubt there you heard it.

It's totally doable to get to world. That's even better than the world we live in today. We just need to do some work. And speaking of work, as you may know, I really like startups. There's something incredibly addicting about being able to try and do everything and do something that's other people find impossible or maybe don't understand quite yet. But sometimes started, founders could be perceived a little insane. So instead of telling you my opinion about startups, I'm gonna have successful entrepreneur and millionaire Justin Khan tell you about his view on the wine Tre premiership and being a founder. It's so exhilarating.

Well, uh, you know, I've been a founder for a long time. Back in certain 2015 has been 14 years of starting companies and being an investor, I think the number one best part about it is that it forces you to grow as a founder, you are constantly put into situations where you're outside your comfort zone. I'm sure you you know, I know you experience that a lot. And for better, for worse, whatever happens, the good things, the bad things you are gonna learn, you're gonna have to learn It's gonna get beaten into you. And so I think that is a tremendously amazingly valuable experience, right?

It's not something that everyone gets. You know, I've raised $150 million or something like that so far. And who gets it? Spend $150 million on howto learn learning howto build a company and learning how to not just building companies skills but, like other skills, Right? Human skills like, how do you lead people out of you? Organize people. How do you market something? All those things. It's like almost like a Yeah, like a nine figure business school. Right. That's Ah,

that's incredible, right? What an incredible opportunity to be able to marshal that kind of resource is for your own education. It's like the opportunity of a lifetime. Were lifetimes. Yeah, right. That's that's my favorite part,

Sieben started Founder is just so incredibly valuable. And speaking of value, even though it took just in quite a while to get Thio successful financial outcome when they did get there, they did really, really well. One of the companies was twitched that TV that sold to Amazon for almost a $1,000,000,000. Never mind the other couple of startups that he started and sold in the process. But with all that, Justin has a very unusual opinion on financial wealth. You mean a lot of people who are chasing either start ups or just high income jobs so they can get more money? Ah, but Justin doesn't think that getting a lot of money is actually all that useful. So one more piece from Justin here, check out this.

You know your outcome. You think it's gonna make you happy, but it doesn't. It doesn't make you unhappy. It just doesn't do anything right. Like you might be happy for a second a minute on hour, a day, or even a week if you like. Look at your bank account. But, um, it doesn't affect it. Doesn't change your relationships with other people. Doesn't change your access to you doing things that you like to do. They give you joy, right? So it doesn't really change those baselines.

And, um, you know, at the time of we exited and, um did not continue, you know, I wasn't bringing Amazon or anything in between things to do, I was spending a lot of time just by myself, you know, not doing anything. And so you know, those days I was just like, sitting there looking at Netflix and twitch on my iPhone, right? And that's like, I remember this one time when I actually this has happened to,

like, quite a few friends of mine. That's before we had any exit. There was, ah, friend of one of my roommates who had sold his company for you know, you had a nice exit. Didn't ever have to work again as a young guy, but he just spent all day sitting at home playing video games what you could do with no money, right? And so it was just like a You know, it's kind of sad because here you are, with all these resource is, but at the same time, you, like your life is just is What you make out of it is depressing or not depressing as your ability to make your life less depressing and more joyful is completely,

you know, after a certain point of re sources of wealth or whatever, which is pretty low. Actually, you know, it's entirely up to you like this is the point. And so, you know, that's really the experience in that's experience. I was going through it, just like, Oh my God, what am I gonna do? What should I do with my time kind of independent of, like having money or not having you know, it's what What do I want to spend my time doing?

See, I find it remarkable that somebody who has everything financially would still go out until you that look beyond basic basic needs. Really, Money does not do all that much for you. I think it's incredibly invaluable to hear in the world that's so focused on money, and with that I want to share a little bit of personal news. I didn't need Justin to help me make this decision. We've already made us before, but I think what Justin just said, ah helps to reiterate this anyways, for next year. I've got two kids, therefore, and two. So for next year we're going to take them out of school and actually gonna go travel for a substantial period of the year. It's not that we're well see to have all the money, but it's actually quite the opposite.

Like you heard Justin say, you know you don't need all the money to make the choices that will make you happy. And I think living in suburbs for a year is going to mean a lot to be like a lot less meaningful, that if we go somewhere new and different and experience different place, whether that's internationally or locally in the United States, it doesn't matter. It just needs to be different. And speaking of new indifferent, here's my next episode. This is an excerpt from the interview between James Bashar and say, Hey, Lavinia, So Hit Living is the founder of Gum Road, a company that used to be based in San Francisco, then went through a bunch of ups and downs and eventually so he'll decided. You know what,

He didn't need to be in San Francisco. He's gonna go find something new and be in a different place for a while to learn how people live outside of the tech bubble. Sosa Hil moved his company to Provo, Utah, while he was in San Francisco. The only thing people wanted to know was how big his company was. Harmony Police. He had how much money here's raised in his last round and who his investors were. But what about Utah?

And none of that matters. You can't walk into a conversation and say, like, Hey, nice to meet you. You know, I have 17 employees I've raised from Kleiner Perkins Caufield buyers. People would look at you like you're insane. Um, and so it's, you know, they have their own priorities, right? They have their own measure of off what value is to the world, right? Like, Are you a member of the church where you go to church?

Are you married? You have kids. The questions, I think, are actually pretty similar, even though they sound really different in terms of gauging, like how you spend your time in the way that sort of in this society has represented value and like what is important, right? Are you going to church? Are you faithful. Are you sort of living the gospel, you know, Um so those are the types of questions you'd get again? Yeah. Surprised coffee? Yeah.

A lot of people. I tweeted it out. Like these were some of the questions that I get. And you know, people from that community like, there's no way you can question something you do. You'd be surprised. Um, there are some people that are super blunt, and sometimes I don't get those questions directly there through layers. You know, like, what's an example? Like, um, I think a pretty common one is Is where you from?

Which is sort of a mask over, Like, What are you doing in Utah? Are you a member of the church or Ling? What else brought you here is a pretty common one. Right? Um, which is totally a common question here in San Francisco to like where you're from. What brought you here? It's basically like, Yeah. What brought you here? Want you What? Do you do it? Yeah, what do you do?

But in Utah, it's not where do you work? Right? It's not like trying to figure out what what right? What company you're working for but like, Are you a member of the church? If not, like why Utah? You know, it's, um, various there, Sort of. It happens in any homogeneous society. Excuse me when you when you have sort of 90% of the population that you interact with, sort of believing the same thing,

believing that thing or not believing that things become significant, it becomes like the statement, you know, whereas like it. For example, if everyone is wearing a red shirt and you're the only person wearing a black shirt, it's inherently interesting. You can't help but make it interesting in Utah. That would be like swearing, you know, by swearing you're making a statement. You cannot not make a statement if you if you see, say, a swear word because it's so obvious that you're breaking the pattern right? And so I think it's It's sort of like that where you very quickly figure out what homogenize looks like based on a lot of those criteria.

Okay, so that was a little bit about sales experience being in Provo, Utah, as, ah brown Muslim, otherwise agnostic tech CEO. In a town that's Mormon and white, you may not have heard that in this particular segment, but sales experience in Provo seems to be a rural very positive. So I'm gonna link to his block post and to the rest of the show notes for this podcast in my show notes, and you can go check it out and see for yourself. You also hear, though a different opinion about Utah. I want to share segment from Bryce Roberts VC from indeed dot VC Fund Talking about living in Salt Lake City and not Provo, Granted. But Salt Lake City as a member of the Mormon church, but somebody who did not grow up in Utah you'll find it really interesting.

Check it out. I think it's interesting I having not grown up there but also being a member of the church. The last place you want to end up is Utah, because Utah is just it was always perceived is like backwater. The church has this kind of weird, you know, kind of influence over the state. You get that close to the church, you start to pick up like the politics of it, and so when you don't grow up there, that's really the last place you want to end up, but I think that's starting to change. I think what's interesting is people who come and visit now will come and they'll say, I had no idea I could get, like not just coffee at all. But,

like really good coffee, there's, you know, there's local breweries. There's you recognized notable chefs, that air creating restaurants. There's world class arts community that's that's coming up. And so it's like people come and most of them haven't like that came through on a road trip one. So they came to go skiing and they kind of buzzed right through Salt Lake up to Park City when actually, like, come into town and we can show them, Take them to some restaurants. You take them around town, show them some of the more interesting things. I think a lot of them are shocked. And when I talk Thio,

my friends for CEOs in Salt Lake, they're just finding, especially as the Bay Area is doing what the Bay Area is doing right now. It's just so much easier to recruit out of the Bay area when people can come here and experience Salt Lake. They just needed to fall in love with it pretty quickly. It seems like you tha is a pretty rad place to go live for a little while. So if you're like me and you want to take off for a couple months with your family and go live somewhere different than you Hey, maybe you taste the place to do it. And now if you've listened this for this is our last segment for today. This is from a podcast called Disrupting Japan, where the podcast host is talking about how he was able to grow his audience. If you're a podcaster, this is gonna be very valuable to you because this is going to tell you how to go and grow your own audience. And if you're a listener, I hope you can support your favorite podcasts in the way he describes the most effective way I found to grow, disrupting Japan was via interaction online.

This meant finding a handful of Facebook and linked in groups interested in Japanese startups. And then in joining in the discussions, most groups welcome to my contribution. However, it was my offline efforts that made the biggest impact. I sought out any event or seminar where I could speak about Japanese startups and innovation. And every time I spoke, I saw a small uptick in listeners and an email subscriptions. Oh, and by the way, that email list turned out to be far more important than I expected for two reasons. First, casual surveys showed me that about 25% of disrupting Japan fans were not subscribing to the podcast, but they were going to the site and listening from the browser or simply reading the transcript. Second, people seem to be far more willing to engage over email.

Even today, when an episode is released, one or two people may comment on the site, but around 20 will reply to the email announcement. Disrupting Japan's were and still are extremely engaged. And most guests tell me they receive a lot of positive feedback about their appearance on the show. But I'm bump Mom. This concludes this week's episode of Smash Notes. If you like what you heard, please go to wherever you listen to your podcasts and give me a five star review or six Tower 12 star. Basically, if you can help me share this with your friends and audience that outside of my sweat Fear, influence That's good. Helping grow the audience and make this more popular podcast. Thank you. And now to finish this podcast Westside buying pink roses,

I'm gonna link to them in the show notes. And if you live in Los Angeles, they're gonna have a show on June 22nd. So it's not too late to go buy some tickets. All right. See you next time, Sami,

to us. I want to take a long way. I want to stay with you. The Western job with sun on my face I been thinking about you all the time.