Many of us can remember when Captain Sully Sullenberger landed a US Airways airbus on the Hudson River. How would you react if you were on the plane that day. Rick Elias, who's a super successful venture capitalist, was on that plane. I wanted to talk to him to understand the lessons he learned from a near death experience and how it transformed him. This is a bit of optimism. I wanted to start January fifteenth, two thousand and nine, flight fifteen forty nine from Laguardi to Charlotte. This is the plane that landed on the Hudson River. And you were on that plane. And one thing I know, because you've talked about it, is how that experience changed you. Can you tell us what happened that day and how it affected you. Yeah, listen. It was January fifteenth, so it was very cold in New York. I had had a good dinner the night before for work. I got up early, went to play hoops on the Upper West Side, and I remember walking was snowing this big flake and I'm like, that's so beautiful. I'm just going to walk to the gym. And I had a couple of meetings, went to La Guardia. It was coming home. I've taken that flight a hundred times and I was coming home. And I had my son's basketball game when we landed, and I needed a coach, and you know, that was it. I was coming home. It was a normal day. It was. It was gloomy and rainy and cold in New York City. But to get to the crux of it, I was given the ultimate gift, Simon. The ultimate gift to me was a near death experience with zero suffering, where no one died so you can talk about it freely, where you had one hundred percent certainty of death. So to me, the question was am I going to blow up? Or am I going to drown in freezing waters? And with eighty seconds to really look at life in say goodbye. So all that combination to me made it. It wasn't too long, it wasn't too short, kind of the right kind of parameters to really change your perspective in life. And I was given a massive gift, which was the chance to come back and live differently. That's my whole goal in life now. I know that when I die, I'm going to ask myself one question is did you make the most out of the second chance you got, What were you like before or what most profoundly changed after I was cut up on the race. I was cut up on building a business. I was cut up on making money, I was cut up on being successful. It was probably like most people in similar circumstances that had a little luck. I was starting to believe it was because of me. I was starting to get a little bit of a big head. You know, our business was really booming. But what really changed that day for me is realizing Simon that it all changes in an instant. You know, we can talk about other stuff right now in this COVID environment, but it was the realization that we can't postpone the things that mattered to us, and that is a hug of forgiveness and experience. You know, we talked a little bit about this, but my only original thought is, you know, I collect bad wines, I drink my good ones, and the point of that is that's how I approach everything in life. I want the things that mattered to me. I'm going to prioritize and I'm gonna I'm going to experience them and enjoy them now. And that that was very clarifying The reason I like hearing the story, and the reason I think it's important to share the story is because most people won't have this kind of near death experience themselves, and if they do, as you said, one hundred percent of the people survived, there was no pain. It was the best kind of near death experience you can have. But the reason I think it's important to share these I think it reminds the rest of us. I had an experience when I went with the Air Force to Afghanistan where I was only supposed to be there for twenty four hours, and the plane that we were supposed to come home on we couldn't get on it because they needed the space for wounded warriors to bring them home, which is a good reason to get bumped off in aircraft. It's the best one I ever. We couldn't get on another plane and we were going to be stuck there for at least four days. And I didn't tell my family that I was going to be in Afghanistan, and now they won't hear from me. Wow. Plus when we landed, ten minutes after we landed, the base came on a rocket attack. I've never been in a war zone before, and three rockets hit one hundred yards off our nose, and so this intense paranoia came over me that I was going to die in Afghanistan because I just didn't know that's how my parents would find out I was there. And I remember the intensity of those feelings and the panic and the you know, becoming someone I'm not, And sort of the way I talk to people wasn't me, you know, like you get me on that plane is the way I talk. I'm like, I don't talk to people that way. But I have one intense memory. I remember being self aware enough to say to myself, you better remember these feelings, you better remember this, and have you been successful? I have. And one of the ways I've been successful is I've told the story many times, and I tell it more for myself than I do for others. And I'm able to go back to that time and find those feelings again because I made a specific I put a bookmark. Long story short, we did get on another plane home that day, and it was an unscheduled flight where we brought home a fallen soldier, where I flew for nine and a half hours in the back of a cargo plane with a flag draped casket and it changed me. Wow. I think one of the things that you and I have both done is we've taken these experiences and yes we've internalized them, and yes we've been able to live differently because of these experiences. One of the things I love talking to you about is you're very happy to share everything you know. You're not possessive with the lessons you've learned, and this is a dog eat dog world, and every little lesson, every piece of information, it's considered advantage. One of the things I find inspiring about you is you're so generous with what you've learned. First of all, thank you, And second of all, I kind of joke I'm like the forest gump of CEOs, you know. So I never thought I would be in this position, and it is with a lot of humility that I accept the responsibility of, you know, leading four thousand people across the globe. And if people knew how little I knew most of the time, they will know. Right. So, you know, I was a kid that grew up in Puerto Rico, and I was a normal kid, and there was nothing about me that said I was going to be able to get to this situation, and I look back and we all work hard. I just the ball bounced my ways more often than not. And you know, the day that that changes is the day that I'm a different person. Do you think that luck is made? I mean, you talk about being lucky a lot. Do you actually believe that, yeah, one hundred percent percent. Now you can improve your odds for sure, and you can learn from a lot of the things that people will deem lucky that ultimately may result in bigger luck. And you believe that. I know that, But I do believe that. You know, a lot of times it's understanding that you're getting lucky. Listen, we were born in incredible situations and an incredible time period in great families, and that's all luck. Having our health is perhaps the most remarkable luck you can have. Right, You don't find me anybody that is worth billions of dollars that is dying or sick, and they'll trade it all, you know. I think luck can be very basic but also can be opportunistic. You know, I struggle with the concept of luck, and I consider myself lucky, and I semi joke that my biggest fear is that my luck will run out yeah, and I look at my own career and people like you did this, you did this, and I was like, no, I was lucky there. It was lucky there, and the timing was really in my favor there. You know, It's like my ted talk when it went viral in two thousand and nine. I mean, it happened at a time where there weren't that many TEDx talks, and so there's no way it would stand out. Now. It's just just wouldn't happen. There's just too much. I got lucky, there's no other way to describe it. But very recently I've started becoming uncomfortable with the term lucky. And it came from listening to people when I would watch interviews on television or something with people who were born especially people who were born into extreme wealth, and they had this humility where they wanted to sort of downplay their position and because they knew they didn't earn it, and they would say to the interviewer, you know, I'm very, very lucky. And I realized it was almost demeaning to call it lucky, like the rest of us are unlucky. And I realized the things that I would say that it's like I was lucky because I'm trying to sort of be humble about that I don't deserve this. But I realized it doesn't sound nice, and so I realized it was an insecurity And so what I started doing is calling it gratitude. Instead of saying I'm lucky that this happened, I'm saying I'm grateful. I'm so grateful that I was able to give that first TED talk at a time where they weren't that many TED talks. Yeah. The difference is, and I can see how you would want to put it in that way, is did it happen to you or did it happen because of you? And in many ways, you know someone that was born into a lot of wealth, And by the way, I think that most of those people are actually unlucky because they're rubbed from a lot of things in life. And I worry about this a lot. For my kids. I worry that the success I've had has created a burden on them that is unfair, you know. And this is why you see so many kids of what others will perceive as successful people really not struggle and finding their rhythm is because they don't have that ability to achieve more than their parents achieve, or to do certain things that others do. So, you know, it's a choice of words. I think gratitude is what you feel, what you feel about something. I think acknowledgment that you're not in complete control, and then there's randomness to something. That's what I call luck. You can improve your aught of that through hard work, through you know, commitment, through not giving up and all those things. But it makes me feel better that you know, again, this is a belief. And the great thing about beliefs is like you choose what you want to believe. If it empowers you, then choose it. If he holds you back, then get rid of it. Was the culture in your company different before two thousand and nine than it is today. I listened to your ted talk and you have a lot more listens than mine, But I loved it. I was a big student of yours, even before we became good friends. But you know, I came back and I said, hey, I've realized now that this is the perch where I want to live the rest of my life, and I have no desire to go public. And growth is an important part of attracting the talent that we want, but this is kind of a race to nowhere, which is the infinite game, right, And in the core of the infinite game is winning in the game is to play the next game. Right. So I came back and I decided, you know what, I'm the painter of a hopefully a fifty year mural of which I'll paint the first half. Someone else will paint the other one if we're lucky enough, and who knows how long that paint will last. So that mindset really changed. I was building a company that I was going to sell and then I was going to go be happy. What I realized is I was sitting on a perch from which I could do a lot of the things that matter to me, you know, And at the end of the day, this doesn't belong to me, belongs to itself. I had the opportunity to meet doctor Cars before he died. He was the originator of finite and infinite games back in the mid eighties, and of course, as soon as I sat down with him, I said, how did you come up with it? I have to ask. And he was part of this core of intelligentsia in the mid nineteen seventies who were all talking about game theory, but always with an eye to win. They were always talking about winning. Yeah, And doctor Carr said, well, what about play? What about the actual game rather than the end of the game. And what I ended up calling the infinite mindset he called play. And I think a lot of people, especially in business, they keep thinking about the end where there is none. They keep thinking about the winning, which is impossible, but they actually forget about the joy of play, the joy of work, the joy of building a business or being a part of a business. And you and Body this more than any other CEO I've ever met, just an absolute love of the game with no desire to win. When I see successful business people that are driven, their competitive spirit has comes from a fear of failure. They kind of run out of gas, you know, if they achieve a lot, they're like, wow, you know, I don't want to lose this, so I want to cash out. And I see a lot of people that just tap out of the game because they're just the burn of losing being comes so massive because they're winning. If you take the infinite mindset back into competitive spirit, it's this notion that you're competing only against yourself, and when you compete against your version of yesterday that gives you this like endless potential. You're never going to be the best, but you can be like one tenth of a percent better tomorrow. I think it's very hard for us, right, There's always someone prettier, There's always somebody smarter, there's always somebody stronger, there's always somebody luckier. Always, no matter who you are, there's always somebody else. What did Teddy Roosevelt say? You know, comparison is the thief of joy. That's right, But it's so hard not to compare in a world where so much of what we do is finite, and we do have to be ahead, and we do have to compete for a job. You have to compete for this. Nobody at school tells us come to school just to get a good education. You come to school to get good grades. Yeah, we define good education by the grades that we get, not by how much we learned. You mentioned earlier, the sharing of knowledge. You know, there's many ways to frame people. But some people come from a position of scarcity and some people come from a position of abundance. You know, when you meet somebody, you can quickly tell where they're coming from. You know, if your success, if your thing is something you're taking away from them, perceived or not. Those are people that kind of subtract from you. Sure of what you do, you're trying, you know, as a thinker, as a philosopher, as somebody that is really trying to you know, bring knowledge uh to you know, the masses. What you're really doing is you know, using abundance as a principle. And I think there's something to that in the in the in the infinite game is you know, you want to associate yourself with people that are ambitious for something greater than themselves. And that's really a big principle of of our Company of Adventures. It's like, you know, how do you find that? And it's it's again it's the it's the infinite game in a different context. That's a perfect segue. How do you find that? And how you how do you do that? I mean, you you know a lot about a lot of companies, and when you look at the culture of your company, you compare it to others or quote unquote the norm. Yeah, what is it that you have been able to do inside your own company that is so different than everywhere else? You know, my good friend Daddy Mayers says that a culture is is like a shark. If it's stopped swimming, it dies. And you know, a lot of people come and ask the questions, so how do you preserve the culture? And the answer is you don't, right. Your goal is for the culture to continue to evolve in a way that is aligned with where you kind of want the general energy and direction of the team towards this version of infinite game. There's no winning of this. You just want to keep momentum in progress because life has plenty of inertia that you have to overcome. It's all physics. You know. People will be like, okay, so what's your mission statement, what's your vision? What are your values? And our model was evolving a lot, so I was afraid to kind of anchor on something. But the one that I really struggle with is this notion of like, here are my values, you know, And I was like, but values are things that I learned at home or I learned before I got here. I'm not really sure that I can teach somebody values. And we landed on this word that is semantics. But it matters is we run our company through a set of belief systems. There's a series of beliefs that is how we hire, how do we promote, how do we encourage people to go work someone else? And we go to people and say you have to believe this and it's a choice, but if you don't believe it, you're not going to do well here. So we have found a common language by which we get people to almost upt in into their journey. It's not for everybody. Can you tell me some of the specific beliefs. Yeah, So one of my favorite ones is we believe everything is written in pencil. So what that means is you have to be really comfortable with change and adaptability and that even things that we believe to be true today are likely not going to be true in a couple of years. So you have to have a curiosity and a level of being okay with that. So what we do is we do lots of things that will make you get comfortable with that will change your desk. Every nine to twelve months, we'll move teams around. We don't have a lot of big groups doing things. Everybody's volunteering to other things, so everybody's flexing different muscles. So it's not just what you say, it's how do you kind of, you know, structure your organization to do certain things. We believe in running up the escalators to us. Pace of play really matters. This is like, if you can play business like you play the two minute drill in football, you get a lot more done, you drop a lot more passes, You'll do a lot of things right. I'm not sure we got it right, but it's been a really interesting journey that it just gave us a common language on culture building. We want to be great people to work with, so no assholes allowed. If someone has too big of an ego, and that means you know, you walking into our building, people will say good morning, you get in an elevator, people will smile every new hire. I meet with all our new hires after like sixty ninety days. I just like to see their experience and they're like, I'm shocked at two things. I'm shocked at how much you trust me, and number two, I'm shocked at how nice everybody is. Unwilling to help me do my job right now. It just we are full of imperfections. But I think when you have a culture that is in harmony, it doesn't matter what tune your orchestra's playing as long as every instrument is kind of a on the same note. Yeah, you have this magical mindset, you have this amazing disposition, this calm that I wish I had. Do you have something that is a constant nagging struggle to you? It's your boulder, you know, your sissophus boulder, the one thing you feel like you're always pushing. You know. I was born and raised Catholic, and I even went through Confirmation, and I don't practice organized religion. I believe myself to feel the spirituality. I'm not claiming I'm spiritual, but with that I let go of guilt, like I have no guilt. It's like, you know, guilt is a complex I don't suffer from. So I think, if you really think about that boulder question inherent in it, there is some level of guilt that you carry that is making that boulder seem like a boulder. Listen, I laugh on myself all the time. I really just realize that I'm so ill prepared for the role that I have, and I'm okay with it. I don't beat myself up. I'm my best friend. The conversations in my head are so positive you know, ninety eight percent of our conversations her in our head. Why not make them great, Like and I'm like, wow, you were really bad there, dude, or like, oh wow, wow you got lucky, look at what happened. Like this is what it's in my head all the time. So I've been thinking a lot about Friday nights. I'm going to see my parents, right and until last a week ago, I will go and kiss my mom. And what Alzheimer's dimasion patient has is debility still give you a kiss. It's amazing that they don't remember anything, but they can give you a kiss. And I go and I see my mom and I get a kiss, and it makes me yearn for one more conversation with her. And then I sit outside with my dad and we share a great bottle of wine. And you know, I'm super grateful in this, like knowing that you know, I'm in awe that I can have this experience with my dad, but I'm also grateful that I was able to have done with my mom. In life, everything we do for the first time has all and then everything that we do for the last time, you know, has gratefulness. If we could marry a state of mind, which would be impossible to do where you can combine both emotions in most things. If you and I were together and we knew this was the last conversation we were going to ever have. One of us is not going to be here tomorrow, we probably will say a few thinks we haven't said. Correct. For sure, it's going to happen with lots of people. So is the appreciation. I love that we're friends. I've learned a ton from you. I am grateful that you invited me to have this conversation. Yet in some way we have the inability to be there in that sense of both owe and gratitude for too long. Let me play Devil's advocate a little bit here, sure, because I'm tempted to have that conversation with you right now and tell you how I feel as if this were the last time. And if it's not the last time, do I have that conversation again? And then if I do it too much, if I do it every time for fear that this is the last time, does it cease to be special? Because it happens every time. It's like somebody who says I love you too quickly, and it's like when they say it to me, I'm like, but you you don't know me, but you loved every boyfriend you had prior. What makes me some special infinite game love? A lot of people trying to cretain I don't think. I don't think you can fall in love with every person you date. I just don't. Maybe I'm a cynical bastard. I just believe every person, in amount of people you can love, So the infinite game does not apply that different. That's not the same. That's not what I said. I said, I don't believe you can fall in love with every person you date. You can absolutely have an infinite amount of love. I think you need some therapy to that one. Just talk to every extral friend. They will agree with you. That is too funny, too funny, you know. But I don't think it's it's a matter of saying it every time. It's making sure that you said it. So what I realized, you know, in that moment of clarity, in those ninety seconds we talked about earlier, is that there were a lot of things I wanted to say that I thought I had time to say. There were people I needed to us forgiveness from that I never did. There were people that I wanted to tell them how important they were to me or how much they had helped me. And I not. I think we go through life, not we think we're going to be here forever. Those ninety seconds on that US Airways plane, I didn't realize it was only ninety seconds. Yeah, from the moment Sully came on and said this is and you I assume you heard the engines go quiet, Brace for impact, Brace for impact, and then ninety seconds later you're on the Hudson River. They've done a study on people who facing your death experiences, and they did some with people who were parachuting out of a plane and their parachutes didn't open their first or seconds, so they thought they were going to die, and through some miracle they landed in a swamp and survived. And they all have the proverbial life flashing before their eyes. Did that happen? Yes, you know, because you know you can see the water coming, and as a matter of fact, that you almost I had an internal kind of countdown when we were going to hit the water. I closed my eyes. I was holding my own arm and I said, I love you, you know, I tell you something for me, you know, having been raised Catholic, I always wonder in the moment of death, if I had a moment that I knew I was going to die, was I gonna ask for forgiveness? Like was I going to buy insurance? I have some friends of mine and it's like, you know what, I believe in this because it's insurance, and I wonder like it would have been free. It's like a free insurance that you say. And one of the things I'm most proud of was the fact that I said, you know what I am, who I am, and if that's what it took and not you know, my own in humanity, I'm not going to do it. And that also gave me clarity on coming back on my relationship with religion. I got to tell you that that really chokes me up. Then, in this moment of eminent death, after you've thought, you know, a whole life has flashed before your eyes, you thought about your family, that you hold yourself and say I love you. It is really profound and I think it's the thing that we don't do, you know. I think that the term of loving yourself has unfortunately lost it's become pejorative. It's become synonymous with having a big ego. But if you can love someone else and that's not egotistical, Like why can't you love who you're trying to be or who you were when it's the end? You know, why shouldn't we all live a life that on our deathbeds or you know, being told to get into the brace position that we hold ourselves and say, I love you. You've lived a good life, You've earned my love. What a standard to live by, to earn one's own love. And the amazing thing about it is you can't learn that from a book or a magazine. You learned it in the moment. There was no prediction how you would have reacted in that situation. Some people may have been screaming, I don't know. Some people may have found solace and quiet. Some people may have been making phone calls. You know. The time at the core of love is forgiveness. Yeah, And I think we have such a difficult time forgiving our own selves about our past, about our habits, about our own movie in our heads, of the things that we have failed to do. And I think learning to love ourselves is learning to forgive ourselves and to truly forgive and to move forward in a way that you know, it's without carrying the weight of the world. Too many people walk around carrying so much guilt and shame and society puts it on us. And you know, raising teenagers is really interesting. You know, it's how do you raise kids that are accountable but don't feel shame. We have two teenagers, and my wife and I are like really driven to make sure that we don't ever shame them, and nor should we shame anyone. Well, I love you too, Yeah, I love you too. You know. It's uh. We collect friends, and we collect memories, and hopefully we collect bad wines. Those are the three things worth collecting because if you live that way, life is rich. Another friend of mine had this concept that everything in life should be at least a three for you ever heard this concept? No, No, I really like it because if the ultimate currency in life is time, yeah, right, And there's every study that show you that over sixty thousand dollars or something, it has zero effect on your happiness. You know, the only currency that really matters at the end of the day is time. If that's the case, how do you get a lot more yield out of time? And The example he used when he told me this and I how you use it for everything is to say, hey, you love golf, you go play golf. That's that's valuable. You go play golf with your best friends, that's two times valuable. You go play golf with your two best friends in a beautiful day, that's three times. How if you do it in an amazing course, that's four times. So he always says everything in life should be a three for. You know, when you talk about things, is like when you and I are together, I am learning, I am seeing a friend, and we're usually drinking a good glass of wine or a good coffee somewhere right. So every experience you should dimensionalize, and that means abundance. That means you've merting people together. One of the things that gives me the most pleasure is when two of my good friends become great friends. So, you know, everything in life should be thought of as maximize the yield out of your time. I love that. I love the idea of making something a three for. Once again, every time I talk to you, I'm richer and wiser and immensely immensely grateful coming from the teacher, I'm humble by those words, I hope our path cross before long, my friend. Please, if you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.

Many of us can remember when Captain Sully Sullenberger landed a US Airways airbus on the Hudson River. How would you react if you were on the plane that day. Rick Elias, who's a super successful venture capitalist, was on that plane. I wanted to talk to him to understand the lessons he learned from a near death experience and how it transformed him. This is a bit of optimism. I wanted to start January fifteenth, two thousand and nine, flight fifteen forty nine from Laguardi to Charlotte. This is the plane that landed on the Hudson River. And you were on that plane. And one thing I know, because you've talked about it, is how that experience changed you. Can you tell us what happened that day and how it affected you. Yeah, listen. It was January fifteenth, so it was very cold in New York. I had had a good dinner the night before for work. I got up early, went to play hoops on the Upper West Side, and I remember walking was snowing this big flake and I'm like, that's so beautiful. I'm just going to walk to the gym. And I had a couple of meetings, went to La Guardia. It was coming home. I've taken that flight a hundred times and I was coming home. And I had my son's basketball game when we landed, and I needed a coach, and you know, that was it. I was coming home. It was a normal day. It was. It was gloomy and rainy and cold in New York City. But to get to the crux of it, I was given the ultimate gift, Simon. The ultimate gift to me was a near death experience with zero suffering, where no one died so you can talk about it freely, where you had one hundred percent certainty of death. So to me, the question was am I going to blow up? Or am I going to drown in freezing waters? And with eighty seconds to really look at life in say goodbye. So all that combination to me made it. It wasn't too long, it wasn't too short, kind of the right kind of parameters to really change your perspective in life. And I was given a massive gift, which was the chance to come back and live differently. That's my whole goal in life now. I know that when I die, I'm going to ask myself one question is did you make the most out of the second chance you got, What were you like before or what most profoundly changed after I was cut up on the race. I was cut up on building a business. I was cut up on making money, I was cut up on being successful. It was probably like most people in similar circumstances that had a little luck. I was starting to believe it was because of me. I was starting to get a little bit of a big head. You know, our business was really booming. But what really changed that day for me is realizing Simon that it all changes in an instant. You know, we can talk about other stuff right now in this COVID environment, but it was the realization that we can't postpone the things that mattered to us, and that is a hug of forgiveness and experience. You know, we talked a little bit about this, but my only original thought is, you know, I collect bad wines, I drink my good ones, and the point of that is that's how I approach everything in life. I want the things that mattered to me. I'm going to prioritize and I'm gonna I'm going to experience them and enjoy them now. And that that was very clarifying The reason I like hearing the story, and the reason I think it's important to share the story is because most people won't have this kind of near death experience themselves, and if they do, as you said, one hundred percent of the people survived, there was no pain. It was the best kind of near death experience you can have. But the reason I think it's important to share these I think it reminds the rest of us. I had an experience when I went with the Air Force to Afghanistan where I was only supposed to be there for twenty four hours, and the plane that we were supposed to come home on we couldn't get on it because they needed the space for wounded warriors to bring them home, which is a good reason to get bumped off in aircraft. It's the best one I ever. We couldn't get on another plane and we were going to be stuck there for at least four days. And I didn't tell my family that I was going to be in Afghanistan, and now they won't hear from me. Wow. Plus when we landed, ten minutes after we landed, the base came on a rocket attack. I've never been in a war zone before, and three rockets hit one hundred yards off our nose, and so this intense paranoia came over me that I was going to die in Afghanistan because I just didn't know that's how my parents would find out I was there. And I remember the intensity of those feelings and the panic and the you know, becoming someone I'm not, And sort of the way I talk to people wasn't me, you know, like you get me on that plane is the way I talk. I'm like, I don't talk to people that way. But I have one intense memory. I remember being self aware enough to say to myself, you better remember these feelings, you better remember this, and have you been successful? I have. And one of the ways I've been successful is I've told the story many times, and I tell it more for myself than I do for others. And I'm able to go back to that time and find those feelings again because I made a specific I put a bookmark. Long story short, we did get on another plane home that day, and it was an unscheduled flight where we brought home a fallen soldier, where I flew for nine and a half hours in the back of a cargo plane with a flag draped casket and it changed me. Wow. I think one of the things that you and I have both done is we've taken these experiences and yes we've internalized them, and yes we've been able to live differently because of these experiences. One of the things I love talking to you about is you're very happy to share everything you know. You're not possessive with the lessons you've learned, and this is a dog eat dog world, and every little lesson, every piece of information, it's considered advantage. One of the things I find inspiring about you is you're so generous with what you've learned. First of all, thank you, And second of all, I kind of joke I'm like the forest gump of CEOs, you know. So I never thought I would be in this position, and it is with a lot of humility that I accept the responsibility of, you know, leading four thousand people across the globe. And if people knew how little I knew most of the time, they will know. Right. So, you know, I was a kid that grew up in Puerto Rico, and I was a normal kid, and there was nothing about me that said I was going to be able to get to this situation, and I look back and we all work hard. I just the ball bounced my ways more often than not. And you know, the day that that changes is the day that I'm a different person. Do you think that luck is made? I mean, you talk about being lucky a lot. Do you actually believe that, yeah, one hundred percent percent. Now you can improve your odds for sure, and you can learn from a lot of the things that people will deem lucky that ultimately may result in bigger luck. And you believe that. I know that, But I do believe that. You know, a lot of times it's understanding that you're getting lucky. Listen, we were born in incredible situations and an incredible time period in great families, and that's all luck. Having our health is perhaps the most remarkable luck you can have. Right, You don't find me anybody that is worth billions of dollars that is dying or sick, and they'll trade it all, you know. I think luck can be very basic but also can be opportunistic. You know, I struggle with the concept of luck, and I consider myself lucky, and I semi joke that my biggest fear is that my luck will run out yeah, and I look at my own career and people like you did this, you did this, and I was like, no, I was lucky there. It was lucky there, and the timing was really in my favor there. You know, It's like my ted talk when it went viral in two thousand and nine. I mean, it happened at a time where there weren't that many TEDx talks, and so there's no way it would stand out. Now. It's just just wouldn't happen. There's just too much. I got lucky, there's no other way to describe it. But very recently I've started becoming uncomfortable with the term lucky. And it came from listening to people when I would watch interviews on television or something with people who were born especially people who were born into extreme wealth, and they had this humility where they wanted to sort of downplay their position and because they knew they didn't earn it, and they would say to the interviewer, you know, I'm very, very lucky. And I realized it was almost demeaning to call it lucky, like the rest of us are unlucky. And I realized the things that I would say that it's like I was lucky because I'm trying to sort of be humble about that I don't deserve this. But I realized it doesn't sound nice, and so I realized it was an insecurity And so what I started doing is calling it gratitude. Instead of saying I'm lucky that this happened, I'm saying I'm grateful. I'm so grateful that I was able to give that first TED talk at a time where they weren't that many TED talks. Yeah. The difference is, and I can see how you would want to put it in that way, is did it happen to you or did it happen because of you? And in many ways, you know someone that was born into a lot of wealth, And by the way, I think that most of those people are actually unlucky because they're rubbed from a lot of things in life. And I worry about this a lot. For my kids. I worry that the success I've had has created a burden on them that is unfair, you know. And this is why you see so many kids of what others will perceive as successful people really not struggle and finding their rhythm is because they don't have that ability to achieve more than their parents achieve, or to do certain things that others do. So, you know, it's a choice of words. I think gratitude is what you feel, what you feel about something. I think acknowledgment that you're not in complete control, and then there's randomness to something. That's what I call luck. You can improve your aught of that through hard work, through you know, commitment, through not giving up and all those things. But it makes me feel better that you know, again, this is a belief. And the great thing about beliefs is like you choose what you want to believe. If it empowers you, then choose it. If he holds you back, then get rid of it. Was the culture in your company different before two thousand and nine than it is today. I listened to your ted talk and you have a lot more listens than mine, But I loved it. I was a big student of yours, even before we became good friends. But you know, I came back and I said, hey, I've realized now that this is the perch where I want to live the rest of my life, and I have no desire to go public. And growth is an important part of attracting the talent that we want, but this is kind of a race to nowhere, which is the infinite game, right, And in the core of the infinite game is winning in the game is to play the next game. Right. So I came back and I decided, you know what, I'm the painter of a hopefully a fifty year mural of which I'll paint the first half. Someone else will paint the other one if we're lucky enough, and who knows how long that paint will last. So that mindset really changed. I was building a company that I was going to sell and then I was going to go be happy. What I realized is I was sitting on a perch from which I could do a lot of the things that matter to me, you know, And at the end of the day, this doesn't belong to me, belongs to itself. I had the opportunity to meet doctor Cars before he died. He was the originator of finite and infinite games back in the mid eighties, and of course, as soon as I sat down with him, I said, how did you come up with it? I have to ask. And he was part of this core of intelligentsia in the mid nineteen seventies who were all talking about game theory, but always with an eye to win. They were always talking about winning. Yeah, And doctor Carr said, well, what about play? What about the actual game rather than the end of the game. And what I ended up calling the infinite mindset he called play. And I think a lot of people, especially in business, they keep thinking about the end where there is none. They keep thinking about the winning, which is impossible, but they actually forget about the joy of play, the joy of work, the joy of building a business or being a part of a business. And you and Body this more than any other CEO I've ever met, just an absolute love of the game with no desire to win. When I see successful business people that are driven, their competitive spirit has comes from a fear of failure. They kind of run out of gas, you know, if they achieve a lot, they're like, wow, you know, I don't want to lose this, so I want to cash out. And I see a lot of people that just tap out of the game because they're just the burn of losing being comes so massive because they're winning. If you take the infinite mindset back into competitive spirit, it's this notion that you're competing only against yourself, and when you compete against your version of yesterday that gives you this like endless potential. You're never going to be the best, but you can be like one tenth of a percent better tomorrow. I think it's very hard for us, right, There's always someone prettier, There's always somebody smarter, there's always somebody stronger, there's always somebody luckier. Always, no matter who you are, there's always somebody else. What did Teddy Roosevelt say? You know, comparison is the thief of joy. That's right, But it's so hard not to compare in a world where so much of what we do is finite, and we do have to be ahead, and we do have to compete for a job. You have to compete for this. Nobody at school tells us come to school just to get a good education. You come to school to get good grades. Yeah, we define good education by the grades that we get, not by how much we learned. You mentioned earlier, the sharing of knowledge. You know, there's many ways to frame people. But some people come from a position of scarcity and some people come from a position of abundance. You know, when you meet somebody, you can quickly tell where they're coming from. You know, if your success, if your thing is something you're taking away from them, perceived or not. Those are people that kind of subtract from you. Sure of what you do, you're trying, you know, as a thinker, as a philosopher, as somebody that is really trying to you know, bring knowledge uh to you know, the masses. What you're really doing is you know, using abundance as a principle. And I think there's something to that in the in the in the infinite game is you know, you want to associate yourself with people that are ambitious for something greater than themselves. And that's really a big principle of of our Company of Adventures. It's like, you know, how do you find that? And it's it's again it's the it's the infinite game in a different context. That's a perfect segue. How do you find that? And how you how do you do that? I mean, you you know a lot about a lot of companies, and when you look at the culture of your company, you compare it to others or quote unquote the norm. Yeah, what is it that you have been able to do inside your own company that is so different than everywhere else? You know, my good friend Daddy Mayers says that a culture is is like a shark. If it's stopped swimming, it dies. And you know, a lot of people come and ask the questions, so how do you preserve the culture? And the answer is you don't, right. Your goal is for the culture to continue to evolve in a way that is aligned with where you kind of want the general energy and direction of the team towards this version of infinite game. There's no winning of this. You just want to keep momentum in progress because life has plenty of inertia that you have to overcome. It's all physics. You know. People will be like, okay, so what's your mission statement, what's your vision? What are your values? And our model was evolving a lot, so I was afraid to kind of anchor on something. But the one that I really struggle with is this notion of like, here are my values, you know, And I was like, but values are things that I learned at home or I learned before I got here. I'm not really sure that I can teach somebody values. And we landed on this word that is semantics. But it matters is we run our company through a set of belief systems. There's a series of beliefs that is how we hire, how do we promote, how do we encourage people to go work someone else? And we go to people and say you have to believe this and it's a choice, but if you don't believe it, you're not going to do well here. So we have found a common language by which we get people to almost upt in into their journey. It's not for everybody. Can you tell me some of the specific beliefs. Yeah, So one of my favorite ones is we believe everything is written in pencil. So what that means is you have to be really comfortable with change and adaptability and that even things that we believe to be true today are likely not going to be true in a couple of years. So you have to have a curiosity and a level of being okay with that. So what we do is we do lots of things that will make you get comfortable with that will change your desk. Every nine to twelve months, we'll move teams around. We don't have a lot of big groups doing things. Everybody's volunteering to other things, so everybody's flexing different muscles. So it's not just what you say, it's how do you kind of, you know, structure your organization to do certain things. We believe in running up the escalators to us. Pace of play really matters. This is like, if you can play business like you play the two minute drill in football, you get a lot more done, you drop a lot more passes, You'll do a lot of things right. I'm not sure we got it right, but it's been a really interesting journey that it just gave us a common language on culture building. We want to be great people to work with, so no assholes allowed. If someone has too big of an ego, and that means you know, you walking into our building, people will say good morning, you get in an elevator, people will smile every new hire. I meet with all our new hires after like sixty ninety days. I just like to see their experience and they're like, I'm shocked at two things. I'm shocked at how much you trust me, and number two, I'm shocked at how nice everybody is. Unwilling to help me do my job right now. It just we are full of imperfections. But I think when you have a culture that is in harmony, it doesn't matter what tune your orchestra's playing as long as every instrument is kind of a on the same note. Yeah, you have this magical mindset, you have this amazing disposition, this calm that I wish I had. Do you have something that is a constant nagging struggle to you? It's your boulder, you know, your sissophus boulder, the one thing you feel like you're always pushing. You know. I was born and raised Catholic, and I even went through Confirmation, and I don't practice organized religion. I believe myself to feel the spirituality. I'm not claiming I'm spiritual, but with that I let go of guilt, like I have no guilt. It's like, you know, guilt is a complex I don't suffer from. So I think, if you really think about that boulder question inherent in it, there is some level of guilt that you carry that is making that boulder seem like a boulder. Listen, I laugh on myself all the time. I really just realize that I'm so ill prepared for the role that I have, and I'm okay with it. I don't beat myself up. I'm my best friend. The conversations in my head are so positive you know, ninety eight percent of our conversations her in our head. Why not make them great, Like and I'm like, wow, you were really bad there, dude, or like, oh wow, wow you got lucky, look at what happened. Like this is what it's in my head all the time. So I've been thinking a lot about Friday nights. I'm going to see my parents, right and until last a week ago, I will go and kiss my mom. And what Alzheimer's dimasion patient has is debility still give you a kiss. It's amazing that they don't remember anything, but they can give you a kiss. And I go and I see my mom and I get a kiss, and it makes me yearn for one more conversation with her. And then I sit outside with my dad and we share a great bottle of wine. And you know, I'm super grateful in this, like knowing that you know, I'm in awe that I can have this experience with my dad, but I'm also grateful that I was able to have done with my mom. In life, everything we do for the first time has all and then everything that we do for the last time, you know, has gratefulness. If we could marry a state of mind, which would be impossible to do where you can combine both emotions in most things. If you and I were together and we knew this was the last conversation we were going to ever have. One of us is not going to be here tomorrow, we probably will say a few thinks we haven't said. Correct. For sure, it's going to happen with lots of people. So is the appreciation. I love that we're friends. I've learned a ton from you. I am grateful that you invited me to have this conversation. Yet in some way we have the inability to be there in that sense of both owe and gratitude for too long. Let me play Devil's advocate a little bit here, sure, because I'm tempted to have that conversation with you right now and tell you how I feel as if this were the last time. And if it's not the last time, do I have that conversation again? And then if I do it too much, if I do it every time for fear that this is the last time, does it cease to be special? Because it happens every time. It's like somebody who says I love you too quickly, and it's like when they say it to me, I'm like, but you you don't know me, but you loved every boyfriend you had prior. What makes me some special infinite game love? A lot of people trying to cretain I don't think. I don't think you can fall in love with every person you date. I just don't. Maybe I'm a cynical bastard. I just believe every person, in amount of people you can love, So the infinite game does not apply that different. That's not the same. That's not what I said. I said, I don't believe you can fall in love with every person you date. You can absolutely have an infinite amount of love. I think you need some therapy to that one. Just talk to every extral friend. They will agree with you. That is too funny, too funny, you know. But I don't think it's it's a matter of saying it every time. It's making sure that you said it. So what I realized, you know, in that moment of clarity, in those ninety seconds we talked about earlier, is that there were a lot of things I wanted to say that I thought I had time to say. There were people I needed to us forgiveness from that I never did. There were people that I wanted to tell them how important they were to me or how much they had helped me. And I not. I think we go through life, not we think we're going to be here forever. Those ninety seconds on that US Airways plane, I didn't realize it was only ninety seconds. Yeah, from the moment Sully came on and said this is and you I assume you heard the engines go quiet, Brace for impact, Brace for impact, and then ninety seconds later you're on the Hudson River. They've done a study on people who facing your death experiences, and they did some with people who were parachuting out of a plane and their parachutes didn't open their first or seconds, so they thought they were going to die, and through some miracle they landed in a swamp and survived. And they all have the proverbial life flashing before their eyes. Did that happen? Yes, you know, because you know you can see the water coming, and as a matter of fact, that you almost I had an internal kind of countdown when we were going to hit the water. I closed my eyes. I was holding my own arm and I said, I love you, you know, I tell you something for me, you know, having been raised Catholic, I always wonder in the moment of death, if I had a moment that I knew I was going to die, was I gonna ask for forgiveness? Like was I going to buy insurance? I have some friends of mine and it's like, you know what, I believe in this because it's insurance, and I wonder like it would have been free. It's like a free insurance that you say. And one of the things I'm most proud of was the fact that I said, you know what I am, who I am, and if that's what it took and not you know, my own in humanity, I'm not going to do it. And that also gave me clarity on coming back on my relationship with religion. I got to tell you that that really chokes me up. Then, in this moment of eminent death, after you've thought, you know, a whole life has flashed before your eyes, you thought about your family, that you hold yourself and say I love you. It is really profound and I think it's the thing that we don't do, you know. I think that the term of loving yourself has unfortunately lost it's become pejorative. It's become synonymous with having a big ego. But if you can love someone else and that's not egotistical, Like why can't you love who you're trying to be or who you were when it's the end? You know, why shouldn't we all live a life that on our deathbeds or you know, being told to get into the brace position that we hold ourselves and say, I love you. You've lived a good life, You've earned my love. What a standard to live by, to earn one's own love. And the amazing thing about it is you can't learn that from a book or a magazine. You learned it in the moment. There was no prediction how you would have reacted in that situation. Some people may have been screaming, I don't know. Some people may have found solace and quiet. Some people may have been making phone calls. You know. The time at the core of love is forgiveness. Yeah, And I think we have such a difficult time forgiving our own selves about our past, about our habits, about our own movie in our heads, of the things that we have failed to do. And I think learning to love ourselves is learning to forgive ourselves and to truly forgive and to move forward in a way that you know, it's without carrying the weight of the world. Too many people walk around carrying so much guilt and shame and society puts it on us. And you know, raising teenagers is really interesting. You know, it's how do you raise kids that are accountable but don't feel shame. We have two teenagers, and my wife and I are like really driven to make sure that we don't ever shame them, and nor should we shame anyone. Well, I love you too, Yeah, I love you too. You know. It's uh. We collect friends, and we collect memories, and hopefully we collect bad wines. Those are the three things worth collecting because if you live that way, life is rich. Another friend of mine had this concept that everything in life should be at least a three for you ever heard this concept? No, No, I really like it because if the ultimate currency in life is time, yeah, right, And there's every study that show you that over sixty thousand dollars or something, it has zero effect on your happiness. You know, the only currency that really matters at the end of the day is time. If that's the case, how do you get a lot more yield out of time? And The example he used when he told me this and I how you use it for everything is to say, hey, you love golf, you go play golf. That's that's valuable. You go play golf with your best friends, that's two times valuable. You go play golf with your two best friends in a beautiful day, that's three times. How if you do it in an amazing course, that's four times. So he always says everything in life should be a three for. You know, when you talk about things, is like when you and I are together, I am learning, I am seeing a friend, and we're usually drinking a good glass of wine or a good coffee somewhere right. So every experience you should dimensionalize, and that means abundance. That means you've merting people together. One of the things that gives me the most pleasure is when two of my good friends become great friends. So, you know, everything in life should be thought of as maximize the yield out of your time. I love that. I love the idea of making something a three for. Once again, every time I talk to you, I'm richer and wiser and immensely immensely grateful coming from the teacher, I'm humble by those words, I hope our path cross before long, my friend. Please, if you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.