- I have a question about mentors. I'm a big believer in mentors, either mentors that know us and we know them or people that we assign as mentors without them realizing it, this sort of thing. Do you have mentors at this stage of life for particular areas of life?

Are you mentoring yourself? Are you flying with a few voices in your head that serve you well? Who are your mentors? - I definitely have people I consider mentors. I think at this point, rarely one way in the sense that they tend to be friends I spend time with.

They get something from it, I get something from it. Not in a transactional way, but they find it fun or beneficial or amusing, in some way redeeming to spend time with me. That's the hope. - But how is that different from traditional friendship, your sort of standard friendship? Are you spending time with some orientation toward their embodying areas of life that you would like to emulate?

- Totally. I spend time around people I hope to be more like, in some way. Because guess what? You're going to average into, say, the sum, holistic whole of the five or six people you spend the most time with. So you should choose that very carefully. That includes virtual parasocial relationships.

Like, okay, if you're listening to a fill-in-the-blank person for four hours a week, five hours a week, two hours a week, whoever that group is comprised of is going to influence who you become. And for me, then, I think carefully about my friendships. And they could be older, like Kevin Kelly who's become a good friend, who has a wealth of life experience that I don't have.

And so I might just call him and say, "Kevin, I have a question for you." But I do that with my younger friends, too. And they could be younger than I am, and I might still view them as a mentor in X, Y, or Z. I think mentor has a heavy weight to it.

It has a connotation of maybe never-ending, time-consuming obligation. So I would never, for instance, and I know a lot of people try this, ask someone to be my mentor. It's like, "Would you like to be "my free life coach forever?" You know, it's like, (laughs) that's kind of how it sounds to the recipient.

- It sounds very formal. - Yeah, it sounds very formal. So for me, I would say there have certainly been mentors. I've had wrestling coaches, I've had teachers, I've had resident advisors who are reverence, who had a huge impact on my life, and followed up with me, and paid attention to me, and cared for me.

In more of a one-directional sense, right? I view myself as the beneficiary. Of course, they certainly got something out of it if they had that job. I mean, they probably found it to be very gratifying in its own way. And teachers like Professor Ed Hsiao at Princeton, I feel incredibly indebted to.

These days, and for a long time, I've believed that you can learn something powerful from almost anyone, probably anyone you interact with. Could be an Uber driver, could be someone taking garbage out of a restaurant. If you really take the time to dig, you can find something. And before you can, I think as an adult, effectively think about who you would like to learn from, if I put it that way.

It's helpful to have a baseline of self-awareness so you know what you might want to work on to either amplify strengths, develop skills, address weaknesses. And so for instance, one of my close friends, Matt Mullenweg, he's younger than I am. He's the founder of Automatic, which runs WordPress.com. He was the lead developer of WordPress, although it was an open-source project, of course, with many, many contributors.

He was one of the lead developers, now powers something like 32% of the internet. And he exemplifies a cool and calm temperament, even in the most chaotic periods imaginable, during the most chaotic events imaginable. And when I find myself getting dysregulated, to use a fancy term, losing my shit, or getting carried away by emotion, getting righteously angry, or whatever it might be, and I recognize at some point that it's really not serving me, that I am being owned by the emotion, right?

Like I'm the dog on the leash, not the other way around. Then I think of Matt. I'm like, what would Matt do? What advice would Matt give me right now? How would Matt act in these circumstances? And I do that with many friends. I also think a lot about, and this is borrowing from someone named Cathy Sierra, from a long time ago, focusing more on just-in-time information as opposed to just-in-case information.

So just-in-case information is like, I'm gonna read these 20 books 'cause in two years I might be interested in X, Y, and Z. That, I think, is often a waste of time because if it ever becomes relevant, you're just gonna have to reread those books. People do the same thing with humans.

They're like, I wanna meet so-and-so and have them as my mentor because maybe five years from now, I'll do X, Y, and Z, and then they'll be useful for ABC. That's too speculative. And I think it ends up in a lot of wasted energy. So the podcast, for me, writing the books and doing the interviews, even prior to the podcast, becoming involved with startups, delving into the world of science and scientists, all helps me to develop a confidence that almost any question I could ask, I can find some semblance of an answer for by just reaching out to a few people and saying, who do you know who might be able to answer this?

And that's very reassuring, and it relieves some of the anxiety or pressure that people might feel to assemble some personal board of directors of X-men and women who can help them with everything. And then there are people I hire to be accountable to. So I might work with coaches, therapists, and so on, who I would view as mentors.

They just happen to get paid for it. (laughs) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)