You're Not Lazy: How To Learn Anything Faster - Cliff Weitzman Founder of Speechify
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Well, the number one word is lazy, right? So your teacher thinks you're slow. Your parents think you're lazy. And this is something that is uniquely true for most kids like me who grew up with dyslexia or ADHD or any type of neurodiversity. Your parents just think that you don't care. What you're about to hear is an interview between me and Cliff Weitzman, who is a friend of mine. Cliff is one of the most inspiring people that I've ever met. I believe that I could do anything. When you're a kid, you keep telling yourself that you can do these things. And at a certain point, most people believe that actually they can't. That just never happened to me.

He is the founder and CEO of Speechify, which is an app that helps basically convert the internet into audio books. Cliff has dyslexia and in his past he was unable to read and is still basically unable to read. And so ended up building Speechify as a way of helping himself get through school and college and university. We talk a little bit about his background there and how that affected his experiences growing up.

My younger brother Tyler, taught himself how to build iPhone apps. So we worked on it together. Tyler did most of the work and I did some. But while I was in college, I kept teaching myself more and more so that I could fix this program. Then I built a tool that would parse PDFs for me. So I could take 300 page PDF from my history class and turn it into a two hour audio book. And then I'd go work out and just finish the PDF.

Cliff is also incredibly intentional about the relationship in his life and about giving love and compassion, putting good vibes out there into the world. And so in the second half of the conversation, we talk a lot about his approach to relationships, how he just randomly called emails and messages people and says, hey, do you want to be my friend? And then somehow hangs out with them. I met Amar and Thomas and Matt from Yes Theory or Logan or...

Jimmy and I just would study how they created content and then I got good at creating content and we talk a lot about this balance between kind of striving for success and also investing in relationships just put good energy into the world and if you do that good things happen Cliff thank you so much for being on the podcast this is it's cool doing this like actually in person because I remember the first time we we were we got introduced through Valentin and did like a live streamy type thing and you were on mine and my brother's podcast talking about juntos and stuff and

So much to talk about. Let's start by rewinding back to childhood and the reading situation. So what was going on in your childhood with the whole struggling to read stuff? And I guess we'll track your life story over time and get to the present day. And I'm sure at some point we'll break it and do a part two because there's so much to dive into. Sounds fun. Yes, I think the first time we did our first interview was

It was the very beginning of COVID and I was sitting on a bench press that I just installed in my apartment. You were, yes. Because we had, I think, five of us living in a one-bedroom apartment in LA at the time. But to answer your question, so I grew up in Israel. I moved to the US when I was 13. And first, second, third, fourth grade, I had a really tough time learning how to read.

I have four younger siblings who are very sharp. My sister speaks seven languages. My brother started coding when he was eight and then skipped four and a half years of math in high school. You know, built 47 apps by the time he was 17, did his master's in AI at Stanford. And I couldn't figure out how to spell my last name. And I wanted to read really, really badly, but I would fall asleep inside of books all the time. And so eventually my dad was like, okay, there's no way he's like this lazy. And he started reading to me.

And my dad has a very deep voice. So every night, I'd fall asleep listening to my dad reading Harry Potter. And he would record himself with cassette tapes. And I just loved this so much, I would listen to them over and over again. And when I moved to the US when I was 13, I didn't speak English. And I found the Harry Potter audiobook set. And so I listened to that thing 22 times in a row. And that's how I learned English.

And I fell in love with audiobooks. So I listen to about 100 audiobooks a week. Sorry, a year. I listen to about 100 audiobooks a year. And I've done that for the last 16 years or so. And it doesn't matter if it's sci-fi or fantasy or philosophy or theology or politics or economics. I'm just obsessed with listening. And in the beginning, I would listen at like 0.75x speed because I literally didn't speak English.

And then I practiced, then I got to 1x speed and then 1.25 and then 1.5 and 2x and continued from there. So you moved to the US from Israel age 13. What was happening around the time of the move? Why did your family move? So we had moved for a very brief period outside of Israel earlier and we had wanted to move to the US, but it didn't work out for visa reasons.

And my parents were like, hey, this seems like a fun adventure. And my dad has this philosophy, you know, if you write a book in Hebrew, 7 million people can read it. If you do it in English, 7 billion can. And they saw it as one of the biggest ways that they could open up the world to us and give us opportunities. And so my parents did a really, really good job raising us. They're really the best example of parenting I've actually come across. And so they included us in all the big decisions. So I remember they sat us down and they're like, hey,

would you guys be interested in going on an adventure? I'm like, yeah, let's go on an adventure. And so we all decided that we wanted to move to the United States. And so when I got here, it was really tough because the culture in the US is slightly different than the culture in Israel. Like I spoke with a heavy Israeli accent, like nobody understood what I was saying. And I was a really small kid too. Like I was five, two freshman year, five, three sophomore year. Like literally I have a driver's license where I'm 16 and I weigh like 110 pounds. And

And when I moved here, I'm super dyslexic. So I spent all this time learning how to read in Hebrew and then I had to relearn how to read, but in English. But because I'd signed up for this move, I was really motivated. And it didn't matter if it was like eighth grade where I was like failing my history class and there was no like audio books for the textbooks. So I would like go online and Google and I'd like try to hack together some sort of audio book that I could listen to. And I actually ended up, I would go to my teachers and I would ask, hey, like,

I'll just be real with you. There's no way I'm gonna be able to read this chapter and do the outline that you assigned. Is it okay if I come to class like 15 minutes early and verbally summarize the chapter to you? And surprisingly, many teachers said yes. And so going into high school, my mom literally had to read my summer reading books to me 'cause I couldn't do them myself. Even going into college, we had this book called "Sons of Providence" and I spent all summer trying to read it. I didn't wanna be the one kid who shows up not having done the summer reading before his like fancy Ivy League school.

And I read about half. And so my mom had to read the rest of it and she worked and she didn't have time to read all of it. She read maybe another 25%. And so I was, I was stuck. And so the only thing that I did, the only thing I could do, which is like, I built this text-to-speech software that would read the book into my iPhone overnight. And then I listened to that on the plane and it worked. And then, you know, I used the version of that throughout college. But yeah, like I was very, very, very motivated to learn how to read and to like figure out English and succeed in school when I was young.

So having dyslexia, like what is that like? Like when you see words on a page, like how would you try to describe it to someone who, yeah. Yeah. So most people visualize dyslexia as like the words flipping around or jumping or flipping. That's not what it's actually like. The best description I've ever been able to come up with is reading a sentence takes me as much energy and brain power as most people take to do a long division equation in their head.

so that means that it takes a long time to read a sentence and it's very energy fatiguing so if i wanted to read a page that's like doing 20 multiplications all in a row but like 2 400 divided by like 13. you know 5 800 divided by 72 and

You know, you'd be tired after doing that. Now imagine doing it for a chapter. Like, you'd be asleep. So literally, this was my problem. I dedicated every school break that I had when I was young, like literally third grade and upwards, to trying to learn how to read. And I would get woken up by librarians in the public library basically on a daily basis. But I was really motivated because I really admired my dad. My dad is a lawyer.

And I wanted him to be proud of me. And in my head, I was very ambitious from a very young age. I think about it as like, I had this fire in my chest that if it was to open, it would like bounce off the walls. And I was like, look, I won't be a billionaire. I won't be president. I won't be a pop star. I won't be any of these things I want to be if I don't know how to read. So I have to figure out how to read. And so I just, I worked on it. And then

So number one, it's time. Like everything just takes a lot longer when reading is involved. Number two, it's draining. And number three, you know, spelling is difficult. You know, I mix up my left and rights. It's hard for me to remember names. The scientific backing behind dyslexia, there's no conclusive one answer, but here's the best one that I've understood reading a bunch of PhD papers about it.

There's these things in the brain called mini columns, and they're responsible for sharing information. If you are a normal person, you have normal length mini columns that are normally distributed. If you're autistic, interestingly, you have shorter mini columns that are closer together. If you're dyslexic, you have longer mini columns that are further apart. And so people who are savants, they're very good at specific small tasks, short-term memory. People with dyslexia have bad short-term memory. And most importantly, they have bad what's called phonemic awareness.

And so reading is challenging. And actually dyslexia is not a reading disability. It's a decoding disability. So if you look at the word like house, house, house, you need to break down the phonemes and understand them. It's like a puzzle. I'm bad at this. So in college, when I'd walk around with friends, like my girlfriend in college knew every single street name. I didn't know a single street name because when she looked at the signs,

Her eyes immediately told her what that was. But I would need to dedicate energy to reading that word. It's like doing a long division thing. And then, yeah, how are you going to remember that? Exactly. But if I see a picture of a guitar or a house, it's like an emoji, a dog emoji. I know what it is. Yeah. So that's how dyslexia impacts me. When did you figure out that you had dyslexia versus I'm just dumb or can't read or the other things you might have told yourself?

Well, the number one word is lazy, right? So your teacher thinks you're slow. Your parents think you're lazy. And this is something that is uniquely true for most kids like me who grew up with dyslexia or ADHD or any type of neurodiversity. Your parents just think that you don't care, but I really cared. And so in preschool, I'm very musical, right? Actually, the best example of, you know, what is it like to be dyslexia? Search up the song or read to you by Cliff Weitzman and you'll find it on Spotify. Yeah.

So I was good at all the plays and I was good at art and I was good at acting. And, you know, a lot of kids learn how to read a little bit before first grade. My parents couldn't get me to learn. I was like, oh, it's fine. He'll learn it in first grade. But then that didn't happen. And then it didn't happen in second grade either. And my dad started to get really mad at me because he was like, Cliff, like, why are you not paying attention? Like, why are you so lazy? Why don't you care? And I was like, I do care. And yeah, over time, I just kept working at it.

You mentioned that you were quite ambitious growing up and you said president and billionaire and pop star. What's going on there? You know, I don't know where this even happened, but like from the moment I remember having conscious thought, maybe four and a half years old, I believed that I could do anything. Like I thought I was a superhero. I believed I could do a backflip. I believed I could do a front flip. I believed that I could be in the Olympics. I believed that I could be, you know, I listened to someone on the radio. I was like, oh, I can do that.

And so I signed up for like a singing, dancing troupe. And by the time I was 12, I was performing on TV in Israel. And, you know, I believed that I could be like prime minister of Israel. So I was like, cool, I'm going to be a billionaire, prime minister and a pop star all at the same time. And, you know, when you're a kid, you keep telling yourself that you can do these things. And at a certain point, most people believe that actually they can't. That just never happened to me. Like everything, I still dream constantly. Like I live forever.

80% of my life daydreaming about the future. Okay. So you moved to the US, you taught yourself English through basically Harry Potter audio books, the Stephen Fry ones? The Jim Dale ones. So in the United States, this incredible Shakespearean actor named Jim Dale does all the Harry Potter narration. It's actually as a result of like some rights issues. Audiobook company actually own the masters. They don't own all the audio rights. And so Stephen Fry is an American dude who narrates the audiobooks for Harry Potter in Britain.

Interesting. And then you got to university or college and you went to Brown. Yes. What did you study? I studied renewable energy engineering. So it's a mix of physics, engineering, computer science. Brown is a very interesting spot because you can make your own major. So I invented my major. At the time, I thought that renewable energy would be the field that would grow the most over the next 50 years. And

Basically, I built like solar cells and nuclear reactors and like studied hydro energy. But down the street from Brown is a place called RISD, the Rhode Island Design Institute. And it's the number one design school in the world. Actually, both founders of Airbnb went to RISD. So I took a lot of industrial design and graphic design courses at RISD.

And I took classes in like philosophy and, you know, biotechnology and, you know, medicine, et cetera, because I just love learning. And so I basically like Brown also doesn't require you to take any requirements with the exception of two classes that have to do something with writing during the 32 courses that you take.

And so I just refused to take prerequisites. I would email professors and I would get them to let me take the class. I remember I had one semester where two of my classes, I was missing six or seven prerequisites to be in it. It was like master's level courses. And I was just, yeah, I'll figure it out. And then I just did them. And so I learned a lot. It was like my two weeks in, my cheeks started to hurt from smiling so much. It was like the best experience of my life. Okay. And you said that

Before you got there, you built a text-to-speech thing to be able to read the pre-reading. That's right. How did you build a text-to-speech thing? Were you dabbling with coding and stuff when you were younger? What was the story there? Yeah, so my younger brother, Tyler, is 18 months younger than me. Him and my sister were in the gifted program every single year when we were growing up. I didn't get in. Then they both got into Exeter, which is the number one high school in the U.S. Tyler lived in the same dorm that Mark Zuckerberg was when he was in high school.

Tyler started building Dragon Ball Z websites with HTML and CSS when he was in third grade. In fifth grade, he taught himself assembly so he could hack RuneScape and MapleStory games. And we moved to the United States. We met people using his hacks. When the App Store came out, Tyler was finishing seventh grade. He had just moved to the United States. He had just skipped his first math class and skipped a class in Spanish, even though he didn't speak Spanish before. And he fished this old Toshiba out of the trash.

who then had like a bunch of viruses and he cleaned them all up and he turned it into a Hackintosh and he taught himself how to build iPhone apps. And so I remember, you know, we were sharing a room, he'd just be on the computer all day. By the time he was 17, Tyler built 47 iPhone apps. One was ranked in the top 10 social networking category of the app store called Black SMS. It allows you to password protect and encrypt your text messages. So Tyler was coding all my childhood and I would always try and I would always fail.

because I would misspell the variables. And if you code and one variable says house correctly and one says incorrectly and I can't tell the difference, it would break. So it was very demoralizing. Right before college, I started going to hackathons. And I would try to code, but I sucked. But what I would do is I would hop on a table and I'd have some idea and I'd convince people to join my team. And then I would organize people. And so I won four out of the first eight hackathons I did.

One was at MIT. One was by this place called Startup Week in Providence. And after that, I was like, okay, I have to learn how to code. And then I just took a bunch of courses on Udemy on how to build iPhone apps and how to build websites. And I would see how other people did it. The first version of Texas Speech for Speechify, Tyler did most of the work. I did some of it. Tyler's blind in his left eye. He's astigmatic in his right eye. He does all of his work on Giant Projector. He now leads the AIT in Speechify.

And so we worked on it together, Tyler did most of the work and I did some. But while I was in college, I kept teaching myself more and more so that I could fix this program 'cause it was always break. It started as a Mac app on my computer and it would let me highlight words, I'd hit a keyboard shortcut and it would read. And most Americans read at 200 words per minute

People who use Speechify by default will listen at 240. Most of us can actually listen faster than we can read, especially today, because most people know they're on YouTube, double speed. TikTok, everything is fast. Instagram, double speed WhatsApp messages, podcasts, audiobooks. And then over the first month, people get to listen at 350 words per minute. I listen to everything at 700 words per minute. And so I was listening a lot faster than any of the default text-to-speech readers allowed me to.

But this thing kept breaking, so I kept fixing it. And then I took a couple of classes in computer science and I kept thinking about it. And then I built a tool that would parse PDFs for me. So I could take, you know, a 300 page PDF from my history class and turn it into a two hour audio book. And then I'd go work out and just finish the PDF. And I'd have like philosophy classes with super dense material from like Aristotle or Nietzsche or whatever. And I just put it on my computer. I'd click play. I'd listen a little bit slower and I played like

classical music or like EDM music in the background with no lyrics at like 30% volume. And so my ADHD brain was like very soothed because like 70% is on the reading and 30% is on the listening. And if you try to talk to me, be like, ah, don't talk to me. I'm like zoned. I'd sit like that for like three hours and I'd intake everything. And that's what I did.

How's your comprehension when you're listening that fast? Like people always are like, oh, well, I obviously, if you listen to audio books, a hundred audio books that you like, I sometimes mention the stat and people like, yeah, but like, obviously you don't like actually take any of it in. Like what's, what's your comprehension like? A hundred percent. So if I listen to things, I will have most of it memorized. If I listen to something three times, I'll have it memorized. So here's the thing, right? I typically listen and read at the same time.

The problem is my reading sucks. But Speechify highlights words as it goes. And so people with dyslexia, it's a decoding problem more than a reading problem. And so through Speechify, I learned how to sight read. So if I see the word house,

500 times a month in random text. And then I hear it at the same time. Next time I see house, I treat it like an emoji. Like I just know that those shapes mean house. It's just most people with dyslexia never get over that gap to be able to sight read. And so for me, I hear, I listen at the same time. And so my retention goes up, my comprehension goes up, my understanding goes up. I can do it faster and there's no fatigue.

Now, when you get good at that, you can start walking around, juggling, driving, working out, cooking, whatever, and still listen. You know, when you go to first grade, no one expects you to read well. They expect it to take, you know, 10 years, 12 years before you're actually a really good reader. You got to practice listening too. And so no one who I've ever met was good at listening in the first podcast or the first audiobook they listened to. Typically, it takes about 10 audiobooks before you become a fluent listener. And once you become a fluent listener, you can listen faster.

You can retain more, you can do other things at the same time, and you understand better. And so it's literally just a function of practice. And if you practice, you get really good at it, and then it becomes an absolute superpower because you can intake the internet three times faster than everybody else, and you can do it while you're walking around or doing whatever you want. Yeah, one of the nice things about this is that it's in a way very...

passive practice. Like all you have to do is like, and I try and tell people this one when, when people hear me listening, like if I have someone in the car and I was listening to an audio book on the way to pick them up and I, you know, it auto plays and suddenly it's like, and they're like, Oh my God, is this how you, is this, how fast you listen? And I'm like, that's only two X. Like I slowed it down because it was the, the climax of Oathbringer and I wanted to enjoy it more like, um, and I think people find it so hard to believe that you could actually listen to something at three times at 3.5 X speed and actually comprehend it.

But it really just is a case of start listening at one time speed. And then 1.1 is not that bad. And then you get used to that. 1.2, it's not that bad. And I only discovered this, I think it was two years into listening to audiobooks. I was getting through the Wheel of Time series. And I was like, okay, this is getting really slow. And then I tried 1.5 and I was like, oh my God, suddenly these slow books are way, way more interesting. And I just had never discovered the speed function on Audible before this. And then I was a complete convert. Yeah, if I listen at...

If I listen to less than 1.5x speed, I want to jump out that window. Like I literally, I cannot deal with it. Even in conversations with normal humans, like, you know, when I was single, if I would be a girl and she would speak quickly, it's instantly more attractive because you can get through so much more material together.

And it's literally just practice. So I think Malcolm Gladwell in one of his books, I think it's Blink, he talks about conscious versus passive practice. And conscious practice, most people don't type at 140 words per minute, even though they're typing all day.

But if you deliberately, deliberate practice, deliberately practice typing faster, you'll get really, really fast. So with Speechify, because it's passive, the computer does the work for you. What we do is there's an automatic speed ramping algorithm. And if you turn it on every thousand words, it increases the speed by five words per minute, whatever is relevant. And so people end up listening really, really fast. It's just practice.

One of the things we talked about in our previous thing, so I'm sure we're going to redo some material, is the criticism that people have of like, hey, look, man, why does life have to go so fast? Why can't you like enjoy, you know, one of those toxic productivity hustle culture bros that encourages people to listen and watch things faster than they should. That's not how the artist intended it. Like all of those things. I imagine you get those criticisms a lot. Like what's your response to those? I mean, you're like me. Yeah.

50% of my Audible library and Speechify library are fantasy books. I'm not listening to those things to be productive, man. I'm listening to them because I love them, but I listen to them at 3x speed. Imagine every YouTube video had to be watched at 50% speed. No one would finish the podcast. And so my brain is just adjusted to intake the same amount of information, but faster. That's it.

And so there's a lot of like, okay, my favorite piece of art ever is Hamilton, the musical. I'm obsessed. Like I've got every word of Hamilton memorized. I listened to Hamilton songs.

like a 1.4 when I get the chance. But part of the reason I like Hamilton is because it's fast and I intake all of it, right? But things that are slow are, give me more. So what is true is my brain has just adjusted to needing more information. And by the way, that's true for everybody, right? It used to be that 60% of kids in high school would read books for fun. This is like 60 years ago. Now it's less than 6%.

But when you grow up with Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and all this stuff, like your brain needs more information. And even movies, it used to be that the number one movie in the world was Gone with the Wind. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. That speed, people would, that movie would flop today. The speed is too slow.

And so society is adjusted. And if you adjust with it, you reap the rewards. And I guess the people who listen to audiobooks at three times speed are a bit more ahead of the curve on sort of speed of processing. It's like the Gen Zers criticizing that for spending all the time on watching high paced content on TikTok. Exactly. And thinking nothing of it. Yeah. So by the way, if you are able to listen and follow TikTok videos that go really fast, if you're able to

listen to a podcast at 2x speed or listen to an audiobook at 2x speed you have a superpower use it so okay um someone might be thinking what's the point of listening to all this stuff if you don't act on it like surely it's better to read 10 books a year and really apply their insights than it is to read 100 books a year and not apply their insights again that's another thing i've heard a lot in i've seen youtube comments and stuff whenever i talk about i can answer this um okay so here's how i think about things

All the knowledge in your brain is like a tree. I think of it as a tree of knowledge. When you go to high school and middle school, you talk to your parents, it builds the bark of your tree. When you go to university and you read more, it builds all the branches. And every book you read is a new leaf of information on that tree. Now, if you don't have a spot to let that leaf land, it'll float away. So for example, one of the things I did at a certain point is I listened to the entire Bible in Hebrew.

I did this a couple of times. You know, this doesn't mean anything to you because you don't have context about Hebrew. But even if I told you like one of the things that were said in the book of numbers, like again, no relevance. So you're not going to remember this five days from now. Sometimes it makes sense to re-listen to a book, right? So I listened to How to Win Friends about once a year by Dale Carnegie because I just think it's a great book. And so there's a lot of books that I go back to. I can quote most of the book to you, but I still find something new every single time.

Because I have that foliage built around that topic. And so recently I've been reading a ton of books about building brand, performance marketing, Austrian economics, whatever it might be. And the more I read in that density, the more I keep.

At the same time, I retain most of the material. And so reading like business books, for example, has become boring because I read like the top 300 books about business when I was in high school. It becomes repetitive. So you go deeper. You go literally read primary sources, which is what I do a lot now. And that becomes fascinating. And so

Definitely start by reading. Reading is the number one way in which I learn. I just do it with my ears. And so start with 10 books a year and understand them well. But if you unlock the superpower of listening, and like you and me, I finished two audiobooks a week. I've been that for about 16 years. Okay, you can listen to the same book over and over again, or you can diversify the sources. So that's one thing you could do. Yeah, one of the things that I found that speed listening really helps with is

Just reducing the cost of a book. So I was at this philanthropy retreat thing over the weekend where people were talking about AI and biosecurity and pandemic prevention and like, how do we avert nuclear war? And I just found myself being like, I have no idea what anyone is talking about here.

And so in conversations with people, I was like, well, what's like the one or two books you'd recommend to kind of get up to speed on what the hell's going on with nuclear, for example. And this chap who I spoke to who works in policy was like, you know, there's this really good book called The Bomb, which came out recently that charts the history of nuclear war from the 1960s onwards.

You should try that out. And I was like, all right, cool. And immediately just opened up Amazon on my phone, bought it on Audible. I saw it was a 12 hour read. I was like, cool, I can get through this in about three hours. Yeah, something like that. And I started listening to it on the drive home and already like, you know, two or so hours into it, like listening about 2.5x speed because there was a lot of names and stuff. And I'm not overly familiar with how the US government works. So it's like, you know, let's slow it down a bit.

I now feel like, oh my God, like I now have so much context on the nuclear thing, which I had zero on, like other than studying the Cuban Missile Crisis and like history when I was 15. Beyond that, I knew nothing about any of this. And it's like, oh, it turns out there's all this like drama between the Air Force and the Navy and the Army and the Marines, all the stuff around nuclear, like stuff with the Kremlin and the hotline. It's some really cool shit. And if that had been recommended to me as a book and I would have seen how dense it is, just like, I'm never gonna, I wouldn't have read Brandon Sanderson because I've seen how big the fricking Way of Kings is.

But as an audiobook, as an audiobook at like a speed multiple,

It only costs me about three hours of time where I'm driving or at the gym to be able to actually ingest a lot of information about nuclear. And maybe I can't recite the names of like, oh, in 1963, this was the person who was the head of the Department of State or whatever. But I don't really need to because what I care about is getting the gist and a general understanding of the topic. Yep. The story and the plot. Plus, it's asynchronous time, right? To read a book, you need to not drive, not work out, not cook. You're sitting at a desk.

Even reading while you're on the train or in an Uber is difficult. But if I'm listening, I finish my Zoom call. Here's how my day goes, right? I wake up in the morning, AirPods go in, I start listening. I brush my teeth, I'm listening. I'm cooking breakfast, I'm listening. I take them out when I'm eating breakfast with my teammates. And then if I have five minutes between a Zoom call and where I'm in, I'll listen.

And then I finished the Zoom call. I'm going to head over here. Cool. I start listening. I get in the Uber. I like might pick up a phone call or two. The second the phone call ends, I go back to listening. My AirPods just don't leave my ears. And then I only stopped listening. I texted you, hey, I'm downstairs, but I can do things and listen at the same time. And when you show up downstairs, I stopped listening. And so all that dead time in the day, typically it's like three to four hours. I'm listening to a book, but I'm listening at 3x speed.

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I wonder, like, I mean, most people do the same thing, but with music, right? So let's take Hamilton, for example. I eat biographies for breakfast. I'm obsessed, right? Like, I literally wrote a rap album about the life of Arnold Schwarzenegger after I listened to Hamilton for the first time. Hamilton, the musical, it's about two hours, 40 minutes long. It is the best biography of Hamilton, in my opinion, right? It's dramatized, but like, you

you can't take away from the beat and lyrics and everything else. When you listen to music, it's exactly like listening to a book, especially if you pay attention to the lyrics. By the way, one really cool thing is if you start listening to a lot of audio books, you will notice and remember all the lyrics from all the songs you listen to. Most people who I am friends with, they listen to the beat or the melody and they don't necessarily recall or understand the lyrics. They need to look at the lyrics on their phone to really intake them. For me, both happened because I've trained that part of my brain. But if you already do this for music, why do you do it with music? Because it enriches your life.

It makes you happy. Well, Brandon Sanderson's, you know, The Way of Kings enriches my life. I'm sorry, even more than music. And so again, it doesn't matter if it's fantasy or fiction or philosophy or sci-fi. I listen because it makes me happy. It's beautiful. It's enjoyable. I'm living inside this world. And the joy that you get from a book, if you read a book,

is so much deeper than the joy you get from watching a movie or watching a TV series. And so I don't watch TV. I don't watch movies. I just consume books, but I do it with my ears. Do you, like, presumably on the few occasions where you do watch TV, movies, YouTube videos, do you speed those up as well? Or do you sort of slow it down and watch it as the director intended or some shit like that? I cannot deal with the speed of movies and TV shows at this point. So I use an app on my computer called...

video speed controller uh you can increment the speed by 0.1 increments and when like my friends don't notice i i up it by 20 but if i was watching by myself i'd watch it by 5x speed youtube on my computer automatically plays at 3x speed for everything um and again okay we talked about you know working out right before this when i was younger you know lifting 145 pounds was difficult now i'm

I can bench press that however long you want me to. And so you build the muscle, right? If you build the muscle and you can bench press like 225 easy, there's no reason to set the resistance to 145. Set it to 225. And so the trick is just practice listening faster. And here's the key.

Some of us are able to read at a thousand words per minute. Like there are people who can do this, right? A college professor in the United States typically will read about 330, 350 words per minute. No one goes, how dare you read that quickly? It's the same thing. It's just that the upper level that is accessible to most people and listening is a lot easier to reach. And here's why. We've been listening for hundreds of thousands of years. We've only been reading for like a thousand years.

We evolved to be really good at storytelling and paying attention and at processing with our ears. It's a hack, you know, the idea of writing characters and then decoding them. It's an amazing hack, but it's a hack. It's not what humans evolved to learn how to do. If you learn, and here's the thing, right? Reading is a highly computational behavior for the brain to do.

Typically about 97% of your brain function is actually working on decoding and only 3% can focus on comprehension. But if you listen, like 3% is focusing on decoding, 97% focuses on comprehension. So computers are designed for computing. They're really good at computing. And so if you could outsource the computational work of reading to a computer, that's the best. Except AI was not good enough to read like a human until...

just about now. And so now you can do that. Just think about it this way, right? How many of us do long-division math in our head? Nobody. You pull up your iPhone, you do it on your phone. It makes sense to do the same thing with reading. Do you listen to podcasts very much? I didn't used to, and the quality of podcasts significantly increased over the last 10 months. So now I do. My favorite is How to Take Over the World by Ben Wilson. What is that? I haven't come across that. Oh my God, it's amazing.

Okay, so I came across this podcast. The first episode I listened to was The Life of Julius Caesar. And then I listened to Napoleon's biography by him. And then he recently put out the biography of Brigham Young.

And what he'll do is he'll read like five primary sources and he'll produce like a two to three hour biography podcast. He's got a great voice. And then he'll also find the overarching concepts from all their lives. For example, they all eat fast. They all attack fast. They're all really good at communication and it's fascinating. And so, you know, I love the idea of taking over the world, not in the same violent way that people used to, but there's a lot that you can learn.

So I'm obsessed with Hamilton. I'm also obsessed with Napoleon and, you know, same thing for Julius Caesar. And so the more you study people, the more interesting it is. And so that, the reason why I didn't like podcasts historically is, you know, you got one person interviewing another person, another person editing, basically three human hours went into one minute of you consuming. But if I fly from like California to New York and I listened to the

book Obama wrote before he became president, that book is eight hours long. I listened at 2x speed, 3x speed. By the time I landed, I finished that book. It's like I sat next to Obama the entire time, but he spent an hour thinking about every single minute of what he was going to say.

And so books used to be a more dense source of information. Podcasts recently have improved dramatically. The other thing that happened to me is I now read enough books that it's actually difficult for me to find new things in books. But the lead time from something being discovered

to appearing in a podcast is faster than the lead time for something being discovered to be published in a book. And so when I was in college, I knew I was in the right classes when I started not being able to Wikipedia the concepts about photovoltaics engineering that we were learning in class. And I could only learn that from the professors directly. And so what I did is I took all these classes and then I would email professors at Stanford and MIT and Harvard to like ask them additional questions. It's now become the case that for most topics, you can learn more cutting edge stuff from podcasts. So that's really cool. Yeah. Yeah.

That's interesting. That's a good way of thinking about it. The way I think about audiobooks versus podcasts is...

audiobooks are really good if I want to get like a just a broad general like sort of blitz about about a particular topic but one thing I like about podcasts is that usually like for example if Tim if Tim Ferriss is interviewing Morgan Housel about the psychology of money like the book is good but in a way him asking questions to the thing will spark other things in my mind of like even though I've read the book I still find the interview valuable or when Cal Newport is interviewing Tim Ferriss about something I'm very familiar with both of their work and so the way they talk about it has a meta level of

awareness to the topic. But there's no point in me listening to a podcast about nuclear because I know nothing about the topic. And so to get the foundational groundwork, the books are sick. And then at that point, I can understand what the experts are talking about. And then the other thing I would say is amazing about books is if you listen to fantasy or sci-fi, world building, it's really difficult to build a world and have it be...

Congruent and consistent and actually there's a lot of strategy in doing that and so you get a lot of emotional rewards By listening to a fantasy or sci-fi audiobook that someone has spent a lot of time thinking about Do you have any kind of note-taking process when it comes to learning from audiobooks and podcasts and stuff? I don't I remember it all in my head but the way I think about it is everybody has a mental model of the universe in their brain and

It's like a Google map where some areas you zoom in, it's more pixelated. Other places, like it's really fleshed out and all the topics are connected to each other. And, you know, when people get down YouTube wormholes and start believing conspiracy theories, you know, if the mental model is that gigantic tree, that conspiracy theory is a shrub that lives over here that's not connected to your main tree in any shape, way or form. Right.

A good example of this is I used to believe that Vikings were mythical creatures. I didn't think they ever existed. I thought they were like dwarves and elves. And then I went and I visited Denmark and I was in Copenhagen. And this girl said this thing about Vikings and I was taken aback because she talked about them like they existed in history. And then I realized they did. Like King Bluetooth was a real person who had a chipped tooth that turned blue. And he united like...

Denmark and Switzerland and Sweden and all these other countries. And they lived like right before World War I. And I was like, whoa. And that was the first time that Vikings were introduced into my mental model of the universe. So it all started to get connected. And so I consume a lot of books. I consume a lot of podcasts. I talk to a lot of people. I think a lot. And so my brain keeps making these fiber connections between things.

For note taking, I take notes on all my Zoom calls on Apple Notes. I love Apple Notes. I use them religiously and have done so since like 2011.

One of the things we've now built in Speechify is when you listen to an audiobook or PDF or whatever, you get both the text highlighted for you in your library and you can listen. And it works both on iOS and on web. And you can click on a sentence and it'll allow you to take the note in there. And one thing I want to do is ingest all the podcasts. And if you want to make a comment on something that you said, you can. And then the audience can upvote and it turns into a subreddit, essentially. Like you can build a community for the podcast listeners.

And then it makes all podcasts indexable and searchable by topic. So you can search neurotropics and you can see every time that Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss or Carl Newport or you talked about, you know, whatever neurotropic of choice. And so that's something to me that's really exciting. So we're trying to build that into Speechify.

Yeah, the thing around building a model of the world in your head versus outside of your head. You know, this you might be familiar with Tiago Forte building a second brain, all that kind of stuff. All of these new note taking apps that are allegedly trying to outsource the work of the brain to an app because a computer can understand an AI or whatever can link create links that you might not have found before.

useful yourself. And so I've been sort of dabbling in the space for the last like three years now, but I've never, I've never once had a situation where my, my,

has created a link that I wouldn't have created in my head. One thing it is useful for is, for example, let's say I had a call with someone two years ago interviewing them about the book and I tagged it with a thing. And two years later, when I'm refining that chapter, I search for the thing and it's like, oh, okay, I now have a searchable transcript, which is useful. But beyond that, I'm not sure what actual utility I've gotten from the let a device connect your thoughts to things. The CRM that I have on my computer is amazing for people. So I...

I put a note instead of anyone's contacts in my phone that when I put them in. So let's say I meet someone at a party, I'd be like, all right, Connor, yellow hat, Gangnam style, because we danced Gangnam style at the time. And then I'll search that every time I need that person, I'll text them the question. So a lot of my knowledge is actually linked to the people that I know.

You get a bunch of random texts from me. I'd say the thing for most people know me, because I think about random things at four in the morning, or when I get out of the shower and I always build them up. At this point, I've actually shifted to using iMessage and email for most of my communications, because it just makes it easier to follow.

And then everything is in Google, is in Apple notes. And so I know how I write. And so I search for the right keywords to unlock that thing. The other thing is I have an app on my phone that organizes my contacts by the date in which I entered them. So if I met someone at a Christmas party in 2018, I will go to that date. And then I look at who came into my contacts booth and oh yeah, it was Jimmy. And then I'll send him a message. So that's the thing that I really rely on. And if I didn't have it, I would cry. And so I back that up a lot.

Do you use the CRM for like just work stuff or also personal stuff? Oh, yeah. Personal stuff. Even more than work stuff. What's it called? Oh, no, no. Like my CRM is just the contact book in my phone and Apple notes. Like it's not. But you just add like some level of metadata to the thing that helps jog your memory and stuff. Nice. Okay. Let's go away from this sort of deep sort of speed listening. He typed rabbit hole for a bit. So.

You're in college, you're taking a lot of these classes, you're consuming a lot of information and you're using this hacked together text-to-speechy thing that you and Tyler kind of created to make it easier for you to absorb information because you've got dyslexia and reading is like a real fucking nightmare. Exactly. What happens next in the Cliff Weitzman story? And I guess also...

You're a very sociable dude. And I remember last time we spoke, you mentioned that you did some rogue things socially when you were in college. I wonder if you can elaborate on that. Yeah, of course. Cool. So I don't drink. I don't smoke. I've never been high. I've never been drunk. There's no way you're getting me to touch a cigarette. Psychedelics? Not psychedelics either. Oh, interesting. Yeah. The way I think about psychedelics, I have a lot of friends who love psychedelics. Many, many close friends. Yeah.

Psychedelics, the way they are described to me is, let's say this is the lens for the world. You get to look at the world from another angle. You shift it. It's like clicking a reset button. The thing is I love how my brain functions. I'm so happy. I do not want to roll the dice in resetting it. And I've also had a lot of friends who have had a life-changing experience with psychedelics that were negative. - Really? - Oh yeah. Many, many, many people.

and I don't wanna risk it. I'd rather stay as I am. Maybe when I'm like 60 and life becomes boring and I wanna change something, but so far I'm very happy.

I'm the happiest person I've ever met, really. I don't want to shift it. Okay, so I'm 18-year-old Cliff. You know, I'm just about to graduate high school. At this point in my life, I became obsessed with parkour. So when I was six, I saw a movie where Jackie Chan did a backflip, and I was like, obviously, I'm going to learn how to do this. And I got into university, and so, you know, I could do less work in school, and I would just spend, like, six hours a day doing parkour. And I was, like, working on, like, double backflips. And I started doing hackathons, got to Brown,

Oh my God. And Brown was ranked for eight years in a row, the happiest school in the world. People were interesting and interested. And for the first time, everybody was like someone I could learn something new from. It was a huge shift. And even though, you know, I went to like a public high school in California, this was a very different environment.

And so what I did is I would go to the dining hall and I very quickly realized the best thing about college is the people who are there, much more important than the classes. And I would have two dinners every single night. I would grab a plate. I would go to a table exactly like this. So you have eight people sitting at the table. I'd look for one that has six or seven people. I'd be like, hey, can I show you guys? What's your name? Allie, I'm Cliff. Nice to meet you. Can I grab a seat? Sure. Sure.

How's it going? And then I talked to everybody in that table. I'd finished my food. At this point, I was trying to eat 3000 calories a day. I get two more plates and I go and I'd sit at another table. And then I'd grab a cup of tea. I said another table, actually, sorry, I'd like three dinners a night. And I would do this for the first two months of every single semester, first semester, second semester. And I did this every year. So I got to know

60% of my freshman class within the first two months. And then I got to know the class underneath and the class underneath. And I got to know a lot of the seniors and juniors. And even when I graduated, I would fly back and I would crash on Valentine's couch and I would do this again. And I would host workshops for ADOC, which is the admitted students day. And I'd get people to open up. And so I'd meet all those people, even if they didn't come to Brown.

Before I got to Brown, I knew that I did not want to drink. And I was like, cool, I gotta make sure that I don't have any social inhibitions even without drinking. And I think right before that, I'd read the "Four-Hour Workweek" for the first time and "How to Win Friends." And so I combined the comfort challenges that Tim Ferriss suggests with the chapter about smiling from Dale Carnegie's book. And so every time I'd walk down the street and someone big was walking across, I'd lock eyes with them and I'd flash a smile in their direction. And my goal was to get them to smile back.

And the great thing about that is, number one, you become very happy from this physiologically. Because if you smile, your brain becomes... And then the other person is smiling at you genuinely. And I always play this game to this day, especially in airports. But I would go to a coffee shop and I'd try to negotiate a 15% discount. I'd lie on the floor on a Starbucks for 15 seconds, 20 seconds to give myself a timeout. I'd go to the mall and I'd ask out every person who walked by just to build the muscle. And...

I got good at just not being shy. And so I'm the first person dancing on a table at any party. I just don't drink. And that was really, really useful. And anyone can do it. It's just a matter of practicing. And then that's certainly really well because throughout college, I did 42 hackathons, I think. And I met a lot of friends in all those events and like,

I be the first person to ask questions every time, you know, someone interesting came to school. I'd build a relationship with them. I'd enter like, there's a rap battle. Cool. I'll do the rap battle. There's a breakdance battle. Cool. I'll do the breakdance battle. Someone's playing basketball or a sport. I like, let's say a sport I've never played before. I'm always in. I just have no inhibitions about going to do stuff. And I love putting myself outside my comfort zone always. Yeah.

And that served me really well. And then when I graduated and I started working on Speechify full time, it was quite lonely because I couldn't meet new people. And one of the best things about Brown is you have artists and musicians and philosophers and actors and people who are into math and physics and computer science and history. It's incredible cross-pollination of all these things. But downtown San Francisco is just all tech bros. So that was a lot less interesting. And I was living with my brother.

And all the people who I was working with, like I had hired them. And so there weren't that many people. So I started flying back to Brown every month or two. And then I realized that there were a bunch of cool people on Instagram and YouTube and Twitter. So I just started DMing people. And even before that, I was really good at cold messaging people on email, founders especially. And one of the strategies I developed once I got to the point where I'd read all the books that I could read to learn about a topic is I'd make a Google sheet of the hundred people who knew about the topic the most. And then I'd message everyone.

Every single one of them on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and then I'd follow up until I got on a Zoom call. Once I got on a Zoom call, I'd be like, whoa, this is amazing. You know so much about performance marketing. You live in Israel, Denmark, Chicago. Cool. Can I come say hello in person? It's easy for me to come visit Denmark on Sunday,

Can I come by? I'm like, yeah, sure. And then I'd fly there and then I'd meet them. And so, you know, it doesn't matter if it's an athlete or a musician or like an author. Like recently I went and I spent some time with Brandon Sanderson in Utah. And I, you know, one of my favorite rappers lives in Las Vegas. So I would, I'll fly to his studio and I'll record with him.

Or there's like this media mogul who is like an incredible agent for actors. So I'm going to meet him in Aspen in like three days. And then after that, I'm going to go to Las Vegas. And then after that, I'm going to go meet like Orlando Bloom in LA because he's a big user of Speechify. Like,

If there is someone who I think is awesome, I will just build a relationship with them. And then the way I got really good at performance marketing is I just made a list of the top 100 best performing consumer subscription companies in the world. And I went and I sat behind the founders of Grammarly, of Audible, of Goop, of Dollar Shave Club, of Robinhood, et cetera. And I saw how they bought ads. And then I met...

Amar and Thomas and Matt from Yes Theory or Logan or Jimmy. And I just would study how they created content. And then I got good at creating content. And then I wanted to know how to hire engineers. So I found the CTOs of all the top startups, John Collison, whatever, and I'd talk to them about it. And then I'd understand how they did it. And I'd figure out the process and then I'd implement the process. And so really my strategy as CEO at Speechify is if you're a founder, your number one rule is to learn. You learn how to code, how to

how to design, how to talk to users. Your number, your top three goals as a CEO is make sure there's enough money in the bank, set the vision and make sure the right people are in the right seats. And so a company by definition, the word means a collection of people. So your role is to collect incredible people and then have them grow in the same direction for a really big vision. And so, you know, I used to be the head of engineering at Speechify. I used to be the head of product at Speechify. I used to be the CMO at Speechify, not CMO. I led marketing and performance marketing and, you know, brand, whatever it might be.

So I'll read every single book there is about the topic, like literally 100 books until I'm a subject matter expert. And then I'll find all of the number one practitioners in the field and I will make friends with them and I will study how they do it. And then, you know, maybe I can teach them something and they can teach me something else. And then I'll do a ton of experiments and I'll rewrite the playbook of how to do this thing. And then I'll find someone who's more talented at that operation than me and I'll have them leave the department and I'll go and run the next department after that.

And so, you know, that one of my favorite things in life is to just make friends with the most awesome people in the world, right? So I love this podcast, you know, how to take over the world because it tells you the stories of just the most badass people in history. Well, there's a lot of badass people alive today. I would argue more badass than any other people who have ever lived because they've had the benefit of listening to all these books, listening to all these podcasts. Bro, every 13 year old always...

already gets to read everything that Newton never wrote about geometry. And then by the time they graduate high school, they know all the calculus. Man, Newton didn't have anything to, oh, he has the line, you know, if I've seen further is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants. So he had, you know, Capernaus, Aquinas, and Galileo, but like everybody today is so much more awesome than people who lived in the past because they get to benefit from everything that everyone else has ever written or said.

Plus, you have an iPhone, an external brain, and you can bench press. You can make yourself amazing. And so there's all these incredible people. I want to be friends with all of them. And so that's what I do.

Why do you want to be friends with all of them? Like what's driving that? So number one, I have this huge urge to be the best person that I can be. So if I look at like my top three goals in life, number one is to make myself the best person I can be and have kids who are greater than me. Number two is love. I think love is the most important thing in life. And the more you give it, the more you have to give. It's like fire. You light a flame and you can then light another one without extinguishing the original one. You know, renewable energy engineering, energy cannot be created or destroyed, but love can.

It's like a jug where as you pour of it, the jug gets bigger, has more water in it.

So I think love is magic. So maximize love in my life, whether it be with my friends, with my users, with my kids, with my partner, whatever it might be. And number three is to create as much value in the world as possible and elevate the collective quality of life. And I see creating value as a function of love. It's how you love on someone who you've never met before. You know, for Speechify, 15% of the reviews on the app store are people who say they cried when they started using the app because it was so impactful on their lives. I'll tell

I'll tell you a short story, which is right before I graduated college, I wrote this 30-page book, sorry, 30-page paper about my worldviews. And I finished writing it at like four in the morning. And I was writing the last paragraph of this thing. And I had taken all my views and I distilled them down into the 28 principles that I believe that most other people don't believe. And you can find this on Medium. And the last paragraph was in one of those days where Cliff was asleep in the book when he was 10 years old. Imagine if he had a dream that he could, right?

If you could read books about how to not get bullied, about how to be a good athlete, about how to learn, about math, about how to figure out how to take a challenge and not being able to go to computer science and figure it out. You know, how to deal with the psychological challenge of having younger siblings who are smarter than him and how to make friends. Imagine if you told him that, you know, he would actually go to college. I don't think he'd believe you or that he'd go to go to Brown.

Imagine if you told him that who he is today is greatly shaped by the fact that he is dyslexic and that he learned how to overcome that challenge when he was nine, 10 years old. And so I cried when I wrote this paragraph and I sent it to my girlfriend at the time. It was like a big paper, but I had like four spelling mistakes, three spelling mistakes. And it's because I can hear the spelling mistakes with Speechify. I couldn't believe it. And so I submitted this paper and immediately went on to write thank you notes.

to my eighth grade teacher, Mr. Bloom, who let me come in 15 minutes early and summarize the book, to my sophomore year teacher's assistant, Mark Reisler, who would sit behind me and say that one, but I didn't know which one of the options from the squiggly red line to pick because two, two, and two sounded exactly the same to me, and to some of my professors, to my parents. And then I added one more guy, and I basically sent him this email, and it was like, hey, you don't know me. I don't know you, but I just graduated college.

and I'm writing thank you notes, and the list would not be complete without you. In fact, I would not be the person I am today without you. And it was to Don Katz, who is the founder of Audible. And I sent that email. It was a long email, like eight paragraphs. And he responded like 40 minutes later with a longer email than the one I sent. And he went, you know, messages like this don't make my days and weeks, but my months. And we built a relationship. And to be like talking to Don Katz is more exciting than talking to LeBron. The crazy thing is I get

about 25 emails like this a day at this point, or Instagram messages or Facebook messages, et cetera, of people who use Speechify in the same way. Because Audible's got like 450,000 titles. Speechify lets you listen to the entire internet. And so the cool thing is like, as I've developed these relationships,

I get inspired by the people who I meet because not everyone's story is on the internet. You know, there's a lot of people who will build a cool product. I'll think it's awesome. And typically if someone builds a cool product, you probably, and you think the product is cool, you'll probably think the person is cool too. So I just send a ton of cold messages all day. If I see something cool, I message the person. I say, hey, you built something cool. You know, would love to be your friend. I'll ask a couple of questions, whatever it might be.

And that's how I approach recruiting. And that's why the team at Speechify is so strong too. It's like, we just hire awesome people who led teams and built awesome, great things. And so the goal is to just surround, give as much love as I can to the rest of the world, be able to give as much love as I can and just learn. And when you exhaust books, people are the next frontier.

Right, we're going to take a very quick break from the podcast to introduce our sponsor, which is Brilliant.org. Brilliant has been a supporter of my channel for the last several years. I've been using their product for the last several years, and it's the best app I've ever found for online courses in maths and science and computer science.

The courses are really fun and interactive and engaging and you learn stuff and then you apply it with a practical puzzle and you learn a bit more and then you apply it a bit more. So it's generally a way more engaging and interesting way of learning stuff compared to how we might've been taught in school, for example. My favorite courses on Brilliant are the computer science courses. So back when I was applying to med school, I was actually torn between medicine and computer science and I went for medicine in the end, which I don't regret, but there was always a part of me that really wanted to understand how computer science works. And so when I started taking the computer science courses on Brilliant, it really helped me understand like everything

at a deep level, what the deal is with the basics of computer science. Like they've got a fantastic course, Introduction to Algorithms. They've got a whole course on cryptocurrencies, which is all about how cryptocurrencies actually work and how the kind of SHA-256 encryption works. And it teaches the topic of cryptography and security in a really fun and engaging way, which is way better than any other explanation I found on the internet.

Anyway, if any of that's on the pure street and you would like to level up your knowledge and your thinking in terms of maths or science or computer science, then do head over to brilliant.org forward slash deep dive. And the first 200 people to use that link, which is also in the video description and in the show notes, will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much Brilliant for sponsoring this episode and let's get right back to the podcast.

This episode is very kindly brought to you by WeWork. Now, this is particularly exciting for me because I have been a full-paying customer of WeWork for the last two years now. I discovered it during, you know, when the pandemic was on the verge of being lifted and I'd spent like the whole year just sort of sitting in my room making YouTube videos. But then I discovered WeWork and I

I was a member, me and Angus, my team members, we were members of the WeWork in Cambridge and they have like hundreds of other locations worldwide as well. And it was incredible because we had this fantastic, beautifully designed office space to go to, to work. And we found ourselves like every day, just at nine o'clock in the morning, just going to WeWork because it was a way nicer experience working from the coworking space than it was just sitting at home working. These days, what me and everyone on my team has is the all access pass, which means you're not tied to a specific WeWork location, but it means you can use any of their several hundred coworking spaces around London, around the UK, and also around the world.

And one of the things I really love about the coworking setup is that it's fantastic as a bit of a change of scenery. So these days I work from home, I've got the studio at home, but if I need to get some focused writing work done and I'm feeling a bit drained just sitting at my desk all day, I'll just pop over to the local WeWork, which is about a 10 minute walk from where I am. I'll take my laptop with me, I'll get some free coffee from there, I'll get a few snacks. And it's just such a great vibe and you get to meet cool people. I made a few friends through meeting them at WeWork and it's just really nice being in an environment almost like a library, but kind of nicer because there's like

a little bit of soft music in the background and there's other kind of startup bros and creators and stuff in there as well. And it's just my absolute favorite coworking space of all time. It's super easy to book a desk or book a conference room using the app. And it's a great place to meet up with team members if you're gonna collaborate and you'll live in different places. They've got unlimited tea and coffee and herbal teas and drinks on tap. And they've also got various kind of after work events that happen like happy hours and yoga and a few other exercise type things. And you can also take in guests. So often when guests will come over to visit,

I'll say, hey, let's pop into WeWork and we'll just work from there for the whole day and then we'll go out for dinner sometime in the evening. Anyway, if you're looking for a co-working space for you or your team, then I'd 100% recommend WeWork. Like I said, I've been a paying customer for theirs for the last two years, which is why it's particularly exciting that they're now sponsoring this episode. And if you want to get 50% off your first booking, then do head over to we.co forward slash Ali. And you can use the coupon code Ali at checkout ALI to get 50% off your first booking. So thank you so much WeWork for sponsoring this episode. So let's say someone's listening to this and they're like,

And I feel like I'm sort of in this boat where, you know, I saw you very kindly shared your goals spreadsheet with me on Google Sheets the other day. And I was looking at it and I was just like, oh, wow, you're so intentional about people that you want to meet and want to hang out with. And part of me was thinking, I'd like to do that as well. That seems cool. And, you know, for example, when I...

had brandon sanderson on the podcast like that that that was sick like that was awesome um and i it was a cold a cold message on twitter and i almost didn't believe that it turned out turned out the way it did but another part of me was sort of scared and i think there was a fear around like oh sending cold messages seems like just like a it seems like a lot of work be it like

It's kind of weird. Like, I feel like I already struggle hard enough to keep in touch with my actual friends, let alone trying to then expand this network for people around the world. And even a part of me was like, oh, Cliff must have some kind of, like, insecurity to be wanting to become friends with celebrities. And I was like...

That's weird. Like, why am I, why is that like where my brain went with this? Because I think it was, it was me being afraid of like, that's really cool. And I want to do that, but I'm, but my ego is trying to find reasons for, to be like, oh, you know, you know, I'm, I'm more secure in myself. Therefore, I don't need to be friends with a famous person.

And I think this is, I feel like this is similar to the attitude some people have when, if you see someone who's like very successful at a thing and you kind of feel like you want it, like, oh, I want to be successful at that thing. But you feel like there is something stopping you from getting that. Like, you feel like you can't put in the time or the effort or like, or it just wouldn't be possible. It's very easy to be like, oh, I don't, I don't actually want the thing because, oh, you know, that, that person's materialistic. That's why they have a Lamborghini. I don't actually want Lamborghini. Oh, whatever that might look like. Yeah. Yeah.

So the funny part is like, we're talking about like being friends with famous people, but we're talking about Brandon Sanderson. Like that's the thing that both you and I are most excited about. Brandon Sanderson, most of the people who are watching this don't know who he is. And if they do know who he is, they have no idea what he looks like. But man, I, again,

The guy who I teared up messaging was the founder of Audible. None of you guys knew who Don Katz was before. I don't care how famous someone is. I care about what they've done. I care about their story. I care about how they've impacted the world and how I can be inspired by them. And so the people who I message, like,

They're a parkour athlete with like 1,000 followers on Instagram who are just their core friends. But they can do a move that I can't do. They can do a Webster. They can do a beautiful Webster. And so I'm going to message them. I'll be like, hey, Adam, you have the best Webster anybody I've ever seen. I know you live in North Carolina. Would it be cool if I hired you to coach me? And I'll set up my phone on FaceTime and I'll put my AirPods in and I'll just train for two hours and pay you for that. You're like, yeah, for sure. But you don't need to pay me. Like, I'm happy to coach you.

And so like, I'll just reach out to people who I think are cool. I don't care if they're famous. It just happens to be that if they're famous, I'm more likely to know their story. You know, I'm a bigger fan of Chaito or Simon who work with me than I am of any, any of these people. And yeah,

Yeah, it's just the fact that like, the more you learn about people, the more you realize that the world is stacked with incredible human beings who also just have such great character. And again, if someone doesn't have good character, if they're like a jerk, I have zero interest in being their friend, no matter what the story is.

And that's the key is like, you gotta just do it all from a place of curiosity and love. To answer your previous question of like, oh, it might take a lot of work and take energy. It doesn't take any work. It doesn't take any energy, right? So let's say you're on Instagram. Typically I send audio messages and I'm like, hey, Jason, I heard you on this podcast. I thought it was awesome. I specifically liked what you said about the true knowledge. I have the specific questions about backflips. Can I ask you? Sure. This is the question.

By the way, you know, I'm working on this. I'm doing this. 40 second message, right? If it's a cold email, dude, I said at least 40 of these this week. Hey, Steve, I just was going through the GitHub repository for the Mozilla text-to-speech open source project. And I saw this contribution that you did, and I thought it was amazing. You know, this can be a Twitter message, could be an email, whatever. I'm working on this company called Speechify. Here's the link.

or even before speechifying, I'm a student at Brown University. I'm studying renewable energy engineering. I'd love to be your friend. - Like, I'd love to be your friend. Like just that line. - Literally, all the time. - Nice, love it. - Yeah, like I'd love to get to know you, maybe be friends. Are you free for a Zoom call to get to know you like 3:00 PM or 4:00 PM on Thursday or Friday? My best Cliff. That's it. You're talking about three lines. Why you think they're awesome. Why you have some sort of credibility and it's enough to be interested in the topic to be a student. And a time that you suggest.

80% of people say yes. Really? Yeah. You just got a message. Don't make it long. Yeah. So the thing is like, one thing about me is like, I actually like couldn't care less about people's like status in life. When I was a freshman at Brown, Jack Dorsey came to give a talk. Jack Dorsey is the founder of Twitter and Square. And I like snuck into the talk late, but he was a great speaker. And so at the end I walked up and was like, hey, I really love the way you merge technology and design.

could I shadow you for a day in San Francisco? I'd love to learn how to do what you do. And he's like, maybe. And I was like, sweet. Can I get your secretary's email? And he's like, sure, here, here's her email. I messaged, no response. Messaged again, no response. Happened to be that at another conference in St. Louis, he was speaking and he like got off stage too quick for me to make the relationship. But I searched the crowd for someone who had a square t-shirt and I found one, this guy, Greg, this woman, Saki. And I started talking to them

Got Greg's email. Later that summer, I got a one-on-one lunch with Jack Dorsey. I was 18 years old. And just because I maintained the relationship and, you know, they engaged with me because they wanted to recruit me to the company potentially and I sent them this video of me pitching this product that was really good, but still, like, I don't care. Like, in my opinion, you know,

it's a great thing for jack to be friends with me because i will introduce him to a bunch of other cool things in his life um and that's the frame that any of you guys listening to this should have when you interact with a new person um you know none of it matters um it just matters like do you come into things with good intention and as long as you give more than you receive which is what you should try to do all the time your life will be amazing and here's the thing like i said it costs me nothing to give you love

And when I'm with Brandon Sanderson to ask him this question that I know you're curious to know about, or when I see your video or download your product to say, "Hey, you can improve this in the following way. Hey, I mentioned this person about this product that you built that I think is great." It doesn't cost me anything, but it might benefit you tremendously. And so if you give 70 points of value to a thousand people and they give you back 30 points of value, man, your life is so much richer because you didn't lose anything for the good energy that you spent.

you know with everybody else so i rule if in a short period of time i can significantly increase someone increase someone else's life do it and so you're already a master at this right like the reason why you have a youtube channel is one day you woke up and you were like hey

I know how to study for the medical boards really well. Let me make a video to teach people. And then you're like, oh, you know, I love iPads. Let me make a thing about how to take notes on iPads. And you build a following because you genuinely shared the things that you were good at with the community for no other reason than you wanted to help. And the same thing was true for me. I used to write a lot of productivity medium blog posts. And I used to post them as a

organic posts on the Facebook feed for the freshman classes that would come into Brown. And then that feed got so big with resources that it became a medium post because it just stopped matching the character limit.

And then I wrote another one. If I was an entrepreneur and I was starting at Brown, here's all the resources that I wish I knew. And like, here's an index of all the people on campus who I think are really cool that you should reach out to. And hey, you know, I'm going to go to this conference in MIT tomorrow morning. I didn't know how to get to MIT until I was a sophomore. So if you're a freshman, meet me at this gate at 6.30 a.m. Here's the link to register and I'll show you how to get to MIT. That's where I met Valentin, who became my best friend, who led to me meeting the girl that I dated for the rest of college. And

All these good things that happened in my life was just because I was doing things for nothing less than a desire to help other people figure out how to figure out things that I'm doing. And, you know, a lot of people talk about product market fit when they're working on startups. One thing I think people should talk about more is founder product fit.

And so my goal is to be the person that I needed most when I was young and what I really needed was someone to read my books to me. And so I also made sure that my mission in life, the thing I worked on, spent most of my time on was something that was congruent with who I am and the type of help that I needed. And so that's my way of giving love into the universe in general is I'm building the thing that I needed and I get to benefit those people and benefit myself because I'm uniquely capable of doing that because I understand the problem better than anybody else.

And so if you can align your life in that way, where you find a problem that you yourself have, studying for medical school, and you solve it for yourself, and you can broadcast how to solve that problem, great. Yeah, this is connecting a lot of dots in my own mind as you say this, because I think...

Like in my first year of med school, like, you know, I was part of the Islamic Society and there were medical students in the years above and they would all share like essay plans and notes and stuff. And it became this sort of like Islamic Society medics community sharing notes. So then I was like, I mean, that's cool. But like, cool, why don't I do that within my own college of my own cohort of medics? And then made a Google Drive sharing notes there and being like, hey, guys, if we all write three essays and they're different and we share them with each other, like 30 essays we can all memorize for the exam. And that...

And then a couple of years later, when I got super into like evidence-based study techniques, I thought, hey, why don't I give a talk about this? Because this would be a cool thing. And we just made a little Facebook event and it was meant to be just for the Islamic society. And we booked out the prayer room for seven people, but then it got 20,000 impressions on Facebook as a Facebook event. And like sort of 120 people showed up because it was like, shit, this is a talk on how to study for exams. And that gave me that sort of thing four years later, three years later, when I started the YouTube channel of

That talk I gave three years ago went down pretty well. I still have the slides from that. I'm going to make a video at some point doing evidence-based study tips. But before I do that, I need to make 100 videos so I can get good at making videos. And that video that I made, 181 videos later, went viral and caused the whole explosion of everything. And...

As you described this thing of just sort of like just putting yourself out there and trying to be helpful and trying to just add value in whatever way you can. I think a lot of people overthink this. A lot of people have this thing of, oh, I couldn't possibly say anything publicly because unless it's perfect, it can't go out there. And I was speaking to someone over the weekend who's like been writing in her journal for like a thousand words a day for the last like eight years or something. And she wants to be a writer. I was like, OK, have you published anything? She was like, no, it's not good enough to publish.

And she was asking me how I became, how I was so sort of chill about this. And it was Austin Cleon's book, show your work, um, which taught me, which gave me the model of as long as the thing that you're doing has the potential to benefit at least one person, then there's almost a moral obligation on you to put it out there. And I actually sent Austin a thank you email, like many years later, um, with a PS at the bottom being like, I'd love to connect. And then we ended up connecting and he was on the deep dive and, and just really nice things happen. Just sending a thank you email as a result of that one book. Um,

And that, yeah, just this idea of putting, putting good, good vibes out there into the world, just trying to be helpful in whatever way you can and trusting that like good things will happen as a result. Three points of that. Number one, I have a rule. If something positive is said about anybody else in a conversation with me, I'll check and then I'll text that person the positive thing that was said about them because it cost me nothing, but you just made their day. Yeah. If I'm procrastinating and like, I want to like, I don't know, watch TV or something. I won't, I won't watch TV. I'll just send gratitude notes to people that I love and

And it might be that it's the first time I thought about this person in six months, but I'll just send them a message. By the way, that's how I maintain connection with people who I'm close with, even if I'm not closer than the person. The way I got into making YouTube videos was when I was 15, I did parkour. And what we would do is we would shoot ourselves on our little point and shoot like cameras or iPod touches. And then I would make iMovie show reels. And I'd post that to YouTube. And you can find it has like, I don't know, a thousand views per video.

But then later I filed a patent when I was in college for a 3d printed skateboard break that I built and I had to figure out how to print it What I built this 3d printed skateboard break you mounted on the axle of skateboard break You mounted on the axle of your longboard. Yeah, and then you twist your heel and it'll stop your board for you Oh, yeah, it was great And so, you know, I built that in college and so I patented it but it was a huge hassle to patent like the online patent system for the US is like

designed by a deranged DMV employee who wanted to ruin the lives and productivity of everybody who went through it. So I learned how to do it. And then I was like, okay, well,

This literally took me three days to figure out, let me just make a video walking people through how to do this. And so I did. In that video, it got like 150,000 views. And then I devised this way of blocking the recommendations on the right panel of YouTube so I wouldn't get distracted. And it would block the main feed of YouTube as well. And most people won't know how to select the divs and use Adblock to do this. Let me make a screenshot how to do this. That also got 150,000 views. And then...

I got the scholarship for kids with learning differences. So basically I paid for college. And I did it by building all these products when I was in college. And I hired 10 freelancers to find and apply to scholarships for me full time. And I had like a bunch of criteria. It'd be like more than $5,000 eligible as a non-US citizen who was living in California, who had like a X amount GPA, who studied energy or had dyslexia or whatever.

And so one of the scholarships was for the Lyme Fellowship. They elect the top 20 highest performing kids with learning differences in the US and Canada. And I got into this thing and I realized nobody was using text-to-speech. And I was like, are you guys kidding me? And so I got up on stage and I demoed the tool that I built.

And, you know, three weeks later, half the people who were in that conference had already sent me thank you notes saying this completely changed my education. Thank you. And so when like the 15th person messaged me, my mom had called me up to dinner and I was like, give me 15 minutes. And I screen recorded how I used text-to-speech on my computer. I made a little YouTube video, one take, and then I uploaded it to YouTube. To date that thing's also got like 300,000 views. There's like thousands of comments saying like I'm literally crying. My third grader is doing her homework by herself.

This video got uploaded in like 2014, two years before I started working on Speedify as a company. And so don't try to get paid. Don't try to like arbitrage. Just put good energy into the world. And if you do that, good things happen.

I'd have to zoom in on this thank you notes thing. So you said that you don't procrastinate, you don't scroll social media. No, no, I definitely procrastinate. But instead of procrastinating, typically, if I'm low energy in my work and I find it difficult to focus, I just pull out my phone, I go to iMessage, and people who I feel gratitude towards, I send them specific messages for what I feel gratitude about. Wow. That's such a positive way to waste time on your phone. Exactly. And don't endless scroll Twitter. Like I imagine, every time I'm on the toilet multiple times a day,

you know, my default is Twitter. I just scroll, scroll, scroll. Oh yeah, I just go to iMessage and I message people. Wow. Oh man, my life would be so much better if that was my default like thumb action rather than scroll, swipe, swipe, Well the other thing I do is I use, so my phone, I activated the child safety lock. So, what's it called on your phone when it blocks you from being on an app after 15 minutes? Oh yeah, that thing. Yeah. So that thing, they just released an API for this. Apple... Focus mode. Yeah. Yeah.

I set my phone as if I'm a five-year-old and parental controls, and I do not know the code to open that parental control thing. And I haven't known the code for about five years. My brother knows it. My girlfriend knows it. Like all the rest of my team know it, but I don't. And so I get two minutes of Instagram a day, two minutes on Twitter, two minutes of YouTube.

two minutes of TikTok and then they're all locked and I can't open them. If there's something specific I need to do, I can ask someone to open them for me and it'll be open for a couple of minutes, but then they're immediately locked again. Yeah. I don't even have the app, I think, for YouTube on my phone. And that's how I defend myself. Wow.

All right, I'm going to try this. This gratitude message thing seems like a very easy life hack for just like, just all loads of good things happening. Because I find that one of the issues I have is, I mean, as I'm sure you do as well, like when you've got a lot going on, it's easy to let relationships slide. It's easy to be like, oh, I've got an extra two hours this evening. Oh, because meeting finished earlier or because I'm actually at home. Oh, great. Two hours. I can work on my book. I can do this thing. I can do something work related. Right.

And I know that that's the wrong answer here because like everything, single thing I've ever read around, you know, how to design your life and all this stuff. So is totally what I do. Yeah. First of all, I do the same thing as you. If I have a free time, I'm spending it on speech by butt.

You remember maybe a month before I got to the UK, you crossed my mind because I thought that I was moving here and I sent you a message. And I was like, hey, I'm going to be in the UK at this time. Do you want to hang out? You're like, yeah. I was like, how about this date? Literally a month and a half, two months into the future. And we booked a time to hang out. And you were like, do you want to do a podcast too? And I was like, yeah. So we put time on the calendar. Monday came. I was looking forward to hanging out with Ali. So I book all of it in advance. Yeah. Yeah.

there's like this really cool, you know, adventure vacation I'm organizing with a couple of friends. You know, I got this idea for a thing and then I messaged everybody, they all said yes. And then, you know, I had a teammate start to organize it for us. And so, you know, we consolidated a time, but like that one is not random. It's like happening organically, but like it got initiated in a month and a half beforehand. And then I have a couple of friends where we have, like, we know we're going to get together every quarter. And so when I think about them, I'll message them that nice thing. And I was like, hey, love you guys, thinking of you.

when are we meeting up for, you know, Rhinos this quarter? How will we go to Puerto Rico? I found this like cool place. And then I'll look forward like three months. We'll just book it and then I'll show up. And this is what I always do. And then, you know, if I'm going to be in Puerto Rico, I'll message like three friends who are in Puerto Rico. They'll like see them as well. Yeah. Now what I've also done is I, I encouraged my friends to move in with me. Even when I had a one bedroom apartment, there were five of us living in the one bedroom apartment and I would literally pay for people to break their leases.

And so if I do not need to work on Speechify, there's a bunch of my favorite people already in the kitchen. And then we'll go work out or go on a run or hang out or do whatever. So that camaraderie that you get in college of the dorm room took me a long time, but I revived it for myself. And really what I want to do is build a compound where all my siblings live and all my friends live and we all live on one street and each person has a house. That's going to happen. That's a dream. Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon has this in Utah. It's amazing. In Utah? Yeah. Well, all his friends have the same. Jimmy has this too. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really great. And yeah, that's the move. Okay. More specific questions on this. So,

Do you try and maintain Inbox Zero on email slash iMessage slash WhatsApp messages and all that shit? I have zillions of WhatsApps I need to reply to and I always feel like, ugh, about it. So I had a CEO coach, Matt Muscheri, for the first two years of working on Speechify. Yeah, I've read his thing. I think you linked me his stuff. I'm sure I did. Yeah, I've been through his whole Google Doc. It's incredible. Yeah, he's amazing. Matt loves Inbox Zero. He has a bunch of rules for being a CEO.

I tried to maintain inbox zero for two weeks and I got physically ill, like I literally got sick. And Matt was like, "Okay, don't do it." And so every person has a different way and style of working, right? I definitely do, 'cause I have ADHD and I have dyslexia, I have a neurodiverse brain. And every person learns a different way, every person has their own strengths. And so one key that I tell people who are working on companies is like, design your workflow to allow you to work on the things that are your zone of genius.

and have the teamwork and everything else. And, you know, we've talked about this a bunch more. And so, no, definitely not on email. I have the philosophy where if I missed your email, if it's important, you'll email me again. Typically that's true.

For iMessage, it's more personal. So I do make sure that I respond to all the iMessages. And so that, you know, and that's not very hard because you can just heart something. You can leave an audio message. Like iMessage is easy. WhatsApp is relatively easy. I leave groups on WhatsApp as quickly as I can. The only group I'm in in WhatsApp is for my team and for my family because I could care less what a random person who is like a second connection says. I don't want that to filter. I don't read the news. All my knowledge comes from like reading history and philosophy.

Yeah, that's my workflow around those kind of things. And then, you know, the other inbox on Instagram is also really valuable because you'll get a lot of inbound and there's no obligation to respond. But if something really good pops up, I'll respond. Do you use WhatsApp archiving to maintain Inbook Zero? No, absolutely not. I don't archive on email. I don't archive on WhatsApp. I don't archive on iMessage.

I just let it flow. And then if it's important, it comes back. I do on email star things. And then every month or so, I'll go on the stars and I'll go look through and I'll go, what's important that I missed? And 90% of those things a month later, they're not relevant and not important anymore. But really, like, unless you're working for like 911 or the police, nothing's actually urgent. If it's important, they'll message you again. That's it. Yeah.

And then when you're sending these cold DMs and stuff, it'll be like, oh, hey, you know, I loved your thing, whatever. Are you free on Thursday for Zoom 4 p.m. kind of vibes? Do you have a slot in your calendar where it just happens to be free? Or is it not like absolutely free? So I'm addicted to iCal. Addicted. My day is like fully blocked the entire time. If this week is October 1st, I'm probably booked for the next three weeks. So I looked at, you know,

October 25th, 26th, 27th. Those days are pretty free. So I'll just suggest two times on the 26th and two times on the 27th. Oh, so like usually four weeks out. Yeah, I just schedule four weeks out. By the way, I did this in college. Like during the summer, I think, whoa, this guy, Dan Schiebler is awesome. He's like the captain of the MMA team and he's also like a pre-med and he's also taking a bunch of CS classes. But I actually don't know him really well. Hey, Dan.

Sign the CIT the other day. Realize I don't owe you as much as I want to. I'd like to get to know you better. Are you free to grab lunch in the ratty? You know, I know school's going to start September 1st. September 2nd at noon. Yeah. Happy to. Boom. Calendar in my tent. Nice. And so I do the same thing with founders, with everybody. I just schedule four weeks in advance.

Nice. And then when it comes to on the day, do you not feel like I've got this Zoom call? Like, do you ever get that? No, because I don't schedule things I don't like. Okay. So the other thing is like internally in the team too, like the recruiting team works, you know, around the clock with a lot of urgency. And I do not allow anybody to put time on my calendar.

I put all the time on my calendar. So send me, introduce me over email to someone and I will suggest to them a time that I want to meet them. And if we agree on a time on the email, then yeah, please send me a calendar invite or I'll send it to you, but take it quickly, faster than everybody else. I have a keyboard shortcut on my phone and on my computer for my Zoom link. And so I just go, boom, 30 minute meeting, Cliff plus Ali, you know, uh,

asterisk Z, Alfred autocompletes the Zoom link, put it in your email, done. I'm waiting for your, and if you don't accept, I expect that the event is not happening. And then if I see same day you didn't accept, it's a question mark instead of a tag, I'll be like, Hayley, we good for three? And you'll be like, yeah. Sounds so easy. It actually is. One of the things I loved about your, last time we spoke, you said something like treat airports as if they're train stations.

Yes. So the quote is, I treat the airline system like it's a subway system. I book all my flights day off, almost entirely. When I was in college, I was like, ooh, if I get three credit cards, I get like 150,000 points. So I got all the points and was responsible with the credit cards. Never go into credit card debt, kids.

So Valentine and I booked this great trip to Hawaii, whatever. And later when I started spending money on ads, I had a lot of points. And so I do treat my calendar very dynamically. I'm making it sound like I'm more rigid than I am. I'm not. If I'm really excited about someone, I will suggest... Because tomorrow, your calendar is not booked back to back to back to back. You have two free slots. And so if I saw someone awesome on this podcast that I listened to today, I'll just... So okay.

Ben Wilson from how to take over the world. I finished his entire podcast in like three days. I found him on Instagram and Twitter. I messaged him on both. And I was like, Hey,

I love what you wrote here. One of my biggest problems in life right now is I have a team that's 120 people. We've got 23 million users and I feel like I'm not ambitious enough. I want to be way more ambitious than I am. And what I loved about your podcast is you extract why and how these people were so ambitious. I'd love for you to coach me on how to be more ambitious. Are you free for a call 3 p.m. or 5 p.m. on Friday? I sent this on a Wednesday and he said, yes. I was like, sweet. What's your email? Boom, calendar invites out.

But if I was not that excited about Waylon Wilson, but I was like, you know, eight out of 10 excited, I would invite him for like next month. Typically, I try to invite for, you know, three, four days. But like, if it's meeting someone in LA, and I know I'll be in LA in a month, I'm not going to be there right now, then I'll invite them for when I'm going to be in that place in person. Yeah, I mean, that sounds great. Like, I feel like

Yeah, so, I mean, currently there's like two people in Portugal that I know I want to hang out with, Paul Millard and Peter Levels. And I've been thinking...

I should just go to Portugal at one point and just hang out with them in person. And it would be great to have them on the pod. And we could do it remotely, but it would just be fun to do it in person and stuff. And then I keep on thinking, oh, but I look at my calendar and it's like, yep, that was book, book, book, book. And actually, four weeks out is probably empty. But I guess in my mind, I'm thinking, I couldn't possibly schedule something four weeks out. And that's just a bit dumb. You can schedule things a year out. Princess Beatrice is dyslexic. And so she messaged me.

I don't know, like two months ago being like, hey, I'm working on this thing. You know, I love your product, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, I'll be in the UK in two months. You want to meet at this place at this time? She was like, yeah. So you just booked a time. I was messaging with JK Rowling's team because I'm trying to get Harry Potter on Spotify as an audio book. We booked it for like a month and a half, two months out.

And then when the day comes, you can adjust. You're not gun to your head, married to the time. If something comes up, you go forward, you go backwards, you go the next day. It's fine. But once it's on the calendar, the intention is set. I've had many times, like I was going to meet someone. I'll give you an extreme example. We had a teammate who wanted to leave. Someone offered him more money. Actually, that was not exactly the case. Whatever. He was going to leave. He was based in Ukraine.

I was like, no, no, no, I want you to stay. I couldn't convince him. I booked a flight and I showed up in Ukraine like two days later. And then we went to the gym together. We did a bunch of things. Like it was literally under martial law when I went, but I was going to keep this person on the team. Yeah. And he stayed with us and it was great. And then I was like, oh, you know, I'm in Ukraine. I might as well go visit my friend Raz in Beijing. And so I just flew to China. And then I was like, oh, I'm here. I'm going to go to Turkey. So I went to, you know, hang out with a friend there. And then I went here and then I went back to California.

And so, yeah, it's all kind of very whimsical, lackadaisical, most meetings you can move. Okay, so the thing I was gonna say earlier is you want to work inside of your zone of genius and never step outside of your zone of genius. And so one of my zone of genius things is I'm really good real time, live. Like high pressure environments are where I shine. And so I try to put myself in those things as much as I can.

And if I have an opportunity to go full force into my zone of genius, I will clear my calendar and I'll go full force. And so sometimes that means going and leading like the web monetization team on a project or we're working on this like really big project with like TikTok and Facebook right now on acquisition. So like I will move other meetings to make sure that I can make those meetings happen.

And you know, that's really, really fun. Another example, by the way, is, you know, Tyler messaged me and you in a group chat like two days ago being like, hey, you know, I'm going to go to Paris this day to meet someone. Ali, do you want to join? And, you know, great. Let's hang out. And like, we know we're going to go to Paris. Awesome. I know Thomas is there and Matthew Vela is there. Let's go hang out with him too. And so,

And yeah, like making plans is like just super dynamic. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. Just make sure you communicate well. And, you know, we're going to be in Paris. There's actually these two other people who I really like in Paris. Let me DM them and be like, hey, I'll be in Paris at this time. You want to, you know, boom, there you go. I love that. That's so great.

Okay, so I got this message about the Paris thing. And I was thinking, okay, I'd love to go to Paris with these guys. But then I'm thinking, okay, but it would be cool to go with my girlfriend. And that involves coordinating her calendar because she works. And it's like, and then coordinating my calendar and figuring out like, when we've got, have we got podcast bookings and stuff? And it, in my mind, it ended up being like so much friction that I was like, I'll deal with this later. Because it was like at nighttime. And I haven't gotten around to dealing with that yet. Because it involves looking at my calendar and sifting through the mess of coordination and stuff.

Do you get that? Like, how do you know? I don't. So here's why not. Tyler goes, hey, it's going to be October 6th. I look at October 6th. Is there something in October 6th that is not movable? If it's not the case, I will move everything on October 6th. I'll go do the very fun thing that I want to do. Yeah.

I'll call my girl, I'll text my girlfriend at the moment or call her and be like, hey, we want to go to Paris at this date. Are you free this day? If she's not, I'll then, when are you free? Call your free here. Hey, Tyler, can you do this date? And if he says yes, fantastic. If he says no, then, you know, then I need to choose. Do I want to go to Paris without my girlfriend? Actually, it'll be a day trip. So yeah, yeah, why not? One thing I love doing is I book other people's flights for them all the time. So Chetu, who joined our team at Speedrify, he had just finished working at another company. He was in India.

We had a great call. We were considering working together. I was like, ooh, I really want to work with him. I called him back. I was like, hey, Shaitu, when's your birthday? Cool. Okay. I booked you a flight to LA from India, leaving this time of the date. And I checked with him ahead of time, like, you know, if he was free. So he came. And then he just didn't leave the United States. Like, he just moved in with us. And we started working together. I had a friend who was Sampar, who was organizing this basketball thing.

with Alex who used to coach Kobe Bryant one-on-one and now coaches Kerry Irving. And so we organized this basketball weekend. And so I messaged Ben Wilson and I messaged Jimmy. I was like, yeah, we talked about it. And so we just organized a bunch of friends and we just did a basketball clinic for a weekend. And then we met other awesome people like Hasan Minhaj came and whatever. And it was completely random. I think the plan came together maybe three days before the thing actually happened. So

sweet, cool. I did it for two days. I flew down to North Carolina, flew right back to New York. You know, that's it. And I had a couple of meetings there. I just moved them like three days forward so I could do the thing that I wanted to do. And like, that is the thing that gives me energy. So I always just, you know, vibe check. Is this the thing that is going to give me the most energy to do this day? And if the answer is yes, great. That's the thing I should do that day. Yeah.

Nice. That's so great. It's so simple. Yeah, I feel like in my mind, I really overcomplicate the hell out of the scheduling stuff. And then like, yeah, you're right. Like most things can be moved. Yeah. And so like there's so little that is immovable. Now, you and me have a freedom that most people don't have, which is we don't work a nine to five job. You know, you don't need to ask your boss for permission to fly to Portugal. But hey, most people listening to this, I bet you're still working remotely. Yeah.

or you're a student, if you miss a class, it's not a big deal. You know how many classes I missed in college to go and do like a hackathon or competition like in Boston or London or Ferris or whatever. I once missed a midterm. I just convinced them to like, let me take it on another day because someone invited me to this cool event that was going to happen the next day. So yeah, so I booked my flights, you know, day of and that's it.

And so, you know, what do you need to get to this one? Ideally you, so, okay. I'm like ridiculously frugal. I remember when I moved to San Francisco, um, I did not buy food for like the first like week. I like literally started being hungry because lunch in San Francisco is like $25. And I was like, there's no way I'm paying $25 for the poke bowl.

But in the end, I was like, cool, I got to not look at prices when I buy food here. And so I made a rule. I will not look at prices when I buy protein and high quality food. I'm not going to like ball out at some like fancy restaurant. I have no interest in that. It doesn't give me utility, but like I need to eat, you know, 200 grams of protein a day. And then I didn't go to events because I didn't want to pay for the Ubers. I would like a longboard, like an hour to get there. And then I made a rule. I will not look at the price when I book an Uber if it means I'm going to hang out with friends because it's important for my well-being. Yeah.

And then I extrapolated that rule to planes once it was reasonable to do so financially. I extrapolate the same thing to like buying gifts for people. Like if I saw a hoodie that I think you'd really like, I will buy this hoodie or like these headphones or whatever. Like if I can see that something I see is like uniquely great for, why not just do it? If I can, with a small period of time, significantly increases someone else's quality of life, just do it. Like, don't even think about it. Just do it. Like make it into a muscle, into a habit, right? If somebody throws a ball at me, I'm going to catch it.

If there's a way for me to help you and it doesn't, I'm just going to do it. Same thing for booking an event that's going to make me happy. And then if I can't do it, that's fine. Like no one's going to kill me. I can just readjust and communicate appropriately. That's it. Damn, that's so good. I love it. Do you have any other sort of

tricks, tips, hacks, principles, strategies that you use on the relationships fronts to put more love into the world? Thousands. So first of all, Cliff Weitzman on YouTube. I've got like a ton of videos on this on Instagram, on Medium, etc. Yes, there's a lot. Smiling at strangers is really important. Just don't be afraid of other people. So, okay.

No one will get mad at you for asking to hang out. No one will get mad at you for asking to hang out. And if they're busy, they just happen to be busy. So you're allowed to follow up. Like people are like stressing out so much about double texting people. Who cares if you double text people? You are an awesome, amazing human being. The fact that someone else is busy has nothing to do with your life. Like if you tried to message me during this basketball weekend, I was playing basketball.

Like I didn't have time to see the message. It's not that I don't love you. I just didn't look at my phone. Um, and so there's no problem in double texting or five X emailing, especially if you haven't met the person before they don't owe you anything. And so typically I am willing to message someone like eight times before they respond. And I have never had someone ever messaged me saying, well, stop messaging me, et cetera. Just be polite, be respectful. Um,

And don't get like hurt when you don't get a response when the person has no obligation to respond to you. And so that's really important. Removing that fear is key. When I was in college, I made a list of all the people who I thought were really cool at Brown, who I was not friends with yet. And I messaged all of them. And I was like, hey, you want to go to the gym? 3 p.m. on Monday? Most people said yes. Why? Because everybody wants to go to the gym.

Everybody would love someone to keep them accountable. And now you have an hour together where you're doing something together next to each other. You're going to talk. And so whether it's coffee, lunch or dinner, everybody eats or going to the gym, like all those things you're allowed to ask someone to do. And like, it's so easy for them to say yes. And they're repeatable too. Like my best friends in college were just the people who were my gym buddies because that's what we did. And actually, you know, when I moved here, the first thing you and I did was we went and we did a workout. And then I happened to be going to a show and you know,

the West End. So you join us for the show. And then we realized that both of us really like making music. So we started making music together. It doesn't matter what it is. So just find an excuse. And then I will say that the other thing that I do is I always look to spend time with people who are going to make me better. Right? So, you know, if this person has, you know, written a book that I admire, or they're a really good musician, or they're a good athlete, or they're just like a kind human being. My best friend in Palo Alto is this guy, Nick Hunter. He used to be the

captain of the Michigan gymnastics team. And he paints and he makes music. You've never heard about Nick Hunter, but he's just like the best human being I know. And like, he's just a really good friend. And I grew so much by spending time with Nick Hunter. And like his roommate was like a really good jujitsu coach. And so, you know, Benji taught me a bunch of stuff. And, you know, it's just fine people who are like genuine, who are like drunk on life, just passionate. And I just look to surround myself with those people.

people. And then if I run into people who are not, how's your day going? Okay. Why only okay? Oh, nobody ever asks. You know, this happens. So there's a Instagram page, Facebook page called Humans of New York. And so if you read a bunch of the posts, you can reverse engineer what the questions are. So I have this list of questions that I ask people, right? Can I ask you a personal question? Sure. What's your biggest struggle enough right now? What's your top three goals in life? What gives you energy in your work?

All these things and you get to like the meat of the person. And so in all those dinners at Brown, three dinners a night for two months, every semester, I just got really good at skipping over the small talk and immediately go into the big talk. And the easiest way to do that is you form relationships with people. Either you bond over ambition or you bond over vulnerability. And so if you're able to share that you were, you know, I was bullied in like third, fourth, fifth grade really badly. Someone slapped me on the face in the middle of class.

You know, I was bad at reading when I was young. I was really small, like all the stuff. I had an accent, whatever it might be. Hasan Minhaj talked to me about this. We talked about how in comedy, you know, you want to make a statement about something. And if you can go low as opposed to going high, go low status, that's really powerful. It's actually very, very attractive. If you're able to share something vulnerable, people gravitate towards you.

And so if you can figure out what are the things that you're vulnerable about, but that you're willing to talk about, that's really great. Right. You and I, I think at a certain point we talked about how you're looking for a wife. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me more about that. Yeah. I was over the whole like systemizing relationships and stuff. I was, I was single and I was like, oh, tell me more. And then we, we nerded out over, you know, being bad with me and girls.

And I have so many friends who like struggle with the same thing. I don't have kids, but one day I would love to have kids. I wanna have seven kids. Man, I love meeting friends who have kids and like talking to them about what it's like to be a parent. Like I just, again, I read all the parenting books ahead of time. So bond over vulnerability, bond over ambition.

And there's a million things like this. Amazing. Cliff, I think this is a good place to end part one of the conversation. We are still sort of in our timeline. It's still around 2015. So you're still at university. You haven't graduated and you haven't started Speechify full time. So part two, definitely. We'd love to have you in the new house.

We'll grab dinner once we set up our podcast studio in the next couple of weeks. It would be amazing to do a part two where we deep dive into Speechify and the story around that and the Richard Branson stuff and all of the cool shit that you're doing. Thank you so much for this. It's been great so far. Have you got any asks for the audience who might have seen or watched or listened so far?

Good question. Number one, check out Speechify, Speechify.com or Speechify on any of the app stores. Number two, if something sucks about Speechify, let me know. I'll fix it. We just launched audiobooks on Speechify. And so if you messaged me about that, I'd appreciate it. And, you know, we make a lot of ads on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. And I'm trying to hire comedians to help me write better ads. So if you are a small creator and you...

I think that you can make us good ads or write comedy for the ads. Hit me up. Also, I just moved to London and I'm looking for a videographer. So if you're a videographer in London, let me know. I'd love to hire you. That's it, man. Amazing. Thanks for having me on the pod. Thanks.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you want already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.