There's a smash notes a podcast that brings you weekly summary of the best podcast on the Internet this week. We're featuring below the line, Rico, Decode y Combinator, Snowball and others. Take a look at the show notes for details. S a better year and 1/2 ago I almost drowned in the Pacific Ocean. What? So my wife and I started trying to go spear fishing and diving out in the Pacific in Sonoma County and gun the water is pretty choppy. I'm not actually a very good swimmer, which is, um, you know, it sounds more badass to go like diving in the Pacific, but it's like I'm not actually that strong of a swimmer. We started. We were like we made a mistake.

We should not have gotten in here and we start trying to get out. And that moment a set of waves started coming in and there's a rope ascent right on descent, and I'm trying to climb with rope and the waves just come in and they're like knocking us off and it went from. This is annoying, too. It is a problem. Thio yelling for help, getting tired, though, and then to being like this is how I die. How did you feel about that? When you say Basta, I think about that a lot myself. I know what you mean. We've taken a couple $1,000,000,000 in and we've compound of that money at between 30 and 40% here. Yeah.

So to all the people that worked for me and whose money I took, you're fucking welcome. Your fucking welcome. Meaning what? You gave them stuff, and that was enough. I was. I hired them. Yeah, and LPs hired me to do a job. We did the job. We were asked to D'oh. But just like Michael Jordan had a decision to retire and go play baseball. I chose to retire and go play baseball. All right. Now,

I may come back to basketball, but this is my decision. I am not your slave, right? I just want to be clear. Yeah, my skin color 200 years ago may have gotten you confused, but I am not your slave. So we're out of money trying to figure out how to recover. Um, I had written a couple of block posts about growth as we're working on the company that had taken off. So I said, OK, we're going to turn those block posts into a book and I e mailed everybody who had subscribed to my block and said, All right, we're launching this Kickstarter.

I'm gonna finish up this book and the kick started it Something like $120,000 in sales. I mean, that's what I'm good at, right? How many people are on the list? A couple 1000? That's really good. Third. Yeah, that's if there's one thing I'm good at in life. It's but growing something quickly, building hype for something quickly. Yeah,

wealth is the thing that you really want wealth, his assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that, with robots, is cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out, although that's probably a lower use of productivity but land than actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep. But really, the reason you want well, it's because of buys your freedom. You don't have to wear a tire like a collar around your neck. They don't have to wake up at 7 a.m. and rush to work and sit in commute traffic so you don't have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours into a way to a syllabus job that doesn't fulfill you. Berkeley's. I've reached the point in my professional career where I don't have to go to work,

right. We've been so fortunate with the success of base camp that I could stop doing that neither, uh, start something else, another company or just do open source or spent my time on any other pursuits. So it is a question I ask myself pretty frequently as, ah, way of gauging whether we're heading in the right direction but base camp, because given the fact that neither Jason or I need to do base camp, we should do basically because we want to, and that revolves a lot around actually ensuring that things stay within the realm of allowing us to do our favorite things most of the time,

meaningful conversation. That's hard. It's hard to get people to go off script, particularly if they're not media trained, and they're not speaking in their native language. I wanted people to open up about what really worries them and talk about the problems that keep them up a night. But that takes a level of empathy and sincerity that I simply didn't have when I started this project. Ironically, it turns out that the best way to get people out of their comfort zone is for lack of a better term. Being comfortable outside my own comfort zone

says you should go to bed angry because likely you're mad about something that's pretty trivial, that you're not even going to remember in the morning to. Nobody's really, really good at communicate. And then equally few people are good at receiving critical feedback or communicating, so you're most likely gonna end up both going to bed angry or end spiraling into something that's way more than it was. So I go to bed. If you're still upset about in the morning, then take the time to figure out language that you could use to actually bring up your concern or issue in a way that isn't insulting to the

other person. I know you feel the stories so many times, but I love If you could just shared one more time of the year audience. You released your first premium WordPress theme for $5 then you go for a walk. Yeah. Yeah, man, it's true. I, um I was seen with guys like Brian Gardner and 80 from Lou. Themes were doing so. I think back then it was like Brian was doing his premium theme, which was like a news theme. And 80 do. It was doing his news theme as well. And I had this idea for a video thing because nobody was doing video of the time for WordPress and I threw this thing together. It was literally the simple,

like grid layout where you click the thumb now in a plate of video like a YouTube in bed. And I kicked it out there, and it's like I just gonna charge $5 for this thing and see what it does. And my wife and I went for a walk. An hour later, I come home and it had sold God I don't even remember. It was a lot of copies. It sold a lot. It was enough to kind of, you know, set the lightbulb off in my head. It's basically a neuro toxin, and it acts at something called the neuro muscular junction. So you got nerves, right? Nerves send signals to your muscles like not that your legs of muscle,

but it's made up of someone like nerve sends a signal your muscle contracts and you do the movement that your brain wanted you to. D'oh! So this communication happens where the nerve needs the muscle and extends this little chemical signal by a chemical called Aceto calling. Right. So that little signal goes from the dirt. It hits the muscle and the muscle contractions. Perfect. Okay, so now I want you to picture that this junction is blocked. It locks that neuro transmitter blocks a seal Coley Nasedo calling can't even get released. It can't get released from the nerve, and therefore it never makes it to the muscle to give the signal that it should contract. And that's exactly what botulinum toxin does. So the message is going down the nerves. But once it gets to the part Where supposed to jump over from the nerve to the muscle. It doesn't work.

Going. Yeah. And so basically, it's a seagull Calling cannot leave the nerve. And so the muscle is essentially paralyzed. Okay, Right. And this is a a permanent death is permanent. Permanent death. This concludes our summary for this week. Please go to smash nose dot com and subscribe. See you next Monday.