Paul Millerd | The Pathless vs Default Path

Srini Rao

Yeah. No, I mean, it actually was like one of those things where I just was like, Whoa, I'm like, Okay, wait a minute, because I remember reading it. I was like, Yeah, then I just went, That doesn't make any sense. And I was like, shit, this has already gone to print.

Paul Millerd

That doesn't make any sense.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, my last, I sort of, I mean, I think this is where like strategy consulting helped me. This is just like extreme obsession with doing perfect and really good stuff. So I'd been in that mode before, which is like extremely frustrating, but I was like, okay, I know I can do this and I've landed the plane before. So I just read it. Yeah, I read my book.

Srini Rao

Yep. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah, that's a good way of describing it. Is landing the plane, yeah.

Paul Millerd

10 times in the last two weeks?

Srini Rao

Uh-huh. Well, and that's the thing, man, no matter how many times by the time you get to that point, you're just like, fuck, I'm like, what? I'm so sick of even reading this thing. I remember when I did my first book, which was unmistakable, the one common comment from my writing coach was like, what does this have to do with the concept of unmistakable? I was like, I'm beginning to hate this word that I've built my entire life around, you know. But cool. Anyway, just out of curiosity, have you heard any of my previous interviews before?

Paul Millerd

I think I have. I saw your name at Rung of Bell. I'm not sure which one. I feel like it was a couple of years ago. I was trying to figure out what it was, but are you, were you at World Domination Summit?

Srini Rao

Okay.

Srini Rao

Cool, no worries.

Srini Rao

years ago, probably way before you were, I stopped going after 2014 because I just kind of, my biggest problem with World Domination Summit is it turns into a lot of mental masturbation where people are inspired but most of them don't do anything. I just kind of, and my sort of policy became I don't go to conferences unless I'm speaking at them anymore because I'm just like, I'm busy working.

Paul Millerd

Okay.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, this is, I think I heard of your stuff originally from somebody there. So I went at the perfect time in 2018. And I went this year and I sort of felt how you just described it. But it was a good place to meet people this year.

Srini Rao

Wouldn't be surprising. Yeah.

Srini Rao

it after a certain point yet. Well, it kind of gets to a point where you outgrow those things where you're like, yeah, I'm done with this. Well, it's just like, you know, you guys are busy fantasizing about the life you want to live. I'm busy building it. Like, you know, people go to I remember, you know, the day they put pod fund announced it's like venture funding for podcasters. They're like, you know,

Paul Millerd

Oh, nobody's taking action.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, exactly.

Srini Rao

Everybody in the Facebook group for podcast movement was discussing what they would do with $50,000 I went and filled out an application and I got the $50,000 Yeah, like that was kind of my default was like, you know what you guys can sit here You know jerking each other off and talking about this. I'm more interested in actually making shit happen. And so

Yeah, the only reason I ask like so the thing that I always tell people is this is like one of our listeners said This in a review there like if Ted talks about Oprah you'd have unmistakable. I'm like well that's really kind and flattering but The biggest thing I tell everybody is talk for as long as you want You can give me 20 minute answers to my question is totally cool in fact preferred I had a woman the other day I had to cut the interview in the middle I was just like this is mind-numbing like you're gonna bore our audience to death. You're not engaging

Paul Millerd

I'll be good. I'm very...

Srini Rao

Yeah, I don't doubt that. I well, you know, I knew your friends with Kay and Kay was like, you know, so I was trying to find your email address on your website. I was like, fucking am like he'd followed the Paul Jarvis advice. He was like, he's had enough. Yeah. Well, I yeah, I was trying to find a way to contact you and I was like, OK, well, I know Kay, so I was like, Kay, can you introduce me to this guy? Because I was just like, oh, this is actually I related so much to your book because, you know, I come from an Indian family where the default path is kind of, you know, a predominant narrative.

Paul Millerd

Really? No, that's not on purpose. I just, I should put it up, yeah.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, it's stronger in India, I think.

Srini Rao

And it was, oh yeah, dude, I mean, oh my God. Like the default path is kind of the defining path of every Indian, you know, kid's childhood. It's like, you know, we're in college. I remember my dad is like, do you want to be asking one of my uncles about his son? He's like, does he want to be a doctor or lawyer engineer? And he's in ninth grade. And I'm like, he's in ninth grade and my uncle's like, he's only interested in girls. I'm like, that's all he should be interested in.

But yeah, I think that's why I related so much to the concepts in this book. I was just like, wow, OK, this in a lot of ways is my story. I think I like the fact also that it didn't center around this sort of, because I'd always had this idea that when we got into things like World Domination Summit, and then Tim Ferriss, basically it's like you kind of are just trading the societal definition of success for the internet influencer's definition of success. This is not really your own.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about this during the pod.

Srini Rao

path, you know? Yeah, that, yeah, no, well, let's get to it, man. So at first, it'll sound like I'm asking you questions that have nothing to do with your book. That's by design. But I think you'll see there's a method to my madness and you're in good hands. I've done this more than a thousand times at this point.

Paul Millerd

Nice, I love it.

Srini Rao

Alright, well let's rock and roll man.

I'll just say Paul, welcome to Unmistakable Creative and we'll go for an hour.

Paul Millerd

Sounds good. You gotta hit record.

Srini Rao

All right. Did I hear? I did already. Yeah, don't worry, we'll cut all this out. I always do that right off the start for that very reason. Yeah, so, well, let's rock and roll. Paul, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Paul Millerd

Oh you did, nice. Oh yeah, there we go.

smart.

Paul Millerd

Excited to be here.

Srini Rao

It is my pleasure to have you here. So I actually came across your story because for some reason, Amazon recommended your book, The Pathless Path to me, and I remember reading the intro and thinking, yeah, I gotta buy this, and I couldn't put it down. I thought it was one of those books that was so resonant and so thoughtful and really kind of speaks to so many things that people are feeling. But before we get into the book, I wanted to start by asking you, what is the very first job?

that you ever had and what did you learn from it and how did that impact the choices that you've made going forward?

Paul Millerd

First job, I mean I had a bunch of like, do stuff around neighborhoods, yard work type stuff, but first job was working at a gas station, a town over from mine, and I was, it was like a bagel shop slash gas station slash ice cream and hot dog place, and, I really hated it. Like I was not one of these people that was like, oh I grinded when I was young, I was working every moment of my life.

I was like, this sucks. Like I gotta do better than this. And it's funny, I ended up quitting the story I used to convince my mother's good ideas. Like I need to focus on school. But really.

Srini Rao

Well, I have a version of that. Let me finish your story and I'll tell you my version of it.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, they kept putting me on Sundays and I wanted to watch the Patriots games. But I remember my mother saying, you just don't have ambition. Like, I'm worried about you. And there was some truth in that. It didn't really bother me. I sort of just thought like, I don't see how like learning how to just like muddle through this gas station job is good for me. And that's sort of a theme that stuck with me for many years later.

Srini Rao

Hmm. Well, OK, go back to that. Like, I'm with you. I didn't see how staying at McDonald's would be good for me, even though my parents made me stay for eight months. In retrospect, it was the most humbling and one of the most informative jobs I've ever had. So I wonder, like, when you look back at it, particularly being told that you don't have ambition, I'd imagine that kind of might have lit a fire under your ass. But when you look back at a job like that, what do you take away from it now?

Paul Millerd

Yeah, I wonder if you learn more from McDonald's because they're better run. Like, the place I was at was just like, everyone kind of hated working there. Everyone was like running scams to get free food and like our clientele was like coming in buying blunt wraps every day. I don't know if I learned a ton from it.

Srini Rao

Hahahaha

Paul Millerd

Every job I had when I was young, I just felt like I wanted to escape and do something else. So maybe that was a lesson, just sort of like, okay, you need to keep searching. This might be kind of hard.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, I think, you know, I, of course, I didn't recognize at the time. I thought, yeah, this is a shit job. Like, why would anybody want this? The thing that I realized in retrospect, when I looked back at McDonald's was that for me, it was a pit stop. And for a lot of those people, this was the life that they were destined to lead. And I never appreciated how much privilege there was in that until I got older.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, I think for me, I was always good at school. And I think I appreciate that now. I sort of got lucky because if you aren't good at school, there's not a lot of tracks for you. A lot of parents will think you, a lot of people stress around not succeeding in school. And we place so much emphasis on school when succeeding in school, there's many other types of intelligence. So I think I was lucky in that regard.

the sense that I probably knew, okay, I have many paths to pick from in the future. I don't have to worry about leaving this job.

Srini Rao

Okay, but you know, but in concert that your mom also said you lacked ambition What do you think that was like why would they say that because I don't think that any kid who's good at school is ever Told that they lack ambition

Paul Millerd

Yeah, I think it comes from this sort of industrial era script. I read about this in the book, which is that work is sort of suffering. You need to learn how to suffer. A lot of schools around this, you need to learn how to work hard. You need to learn how to put in the work to pay off for the grades. And it's all suffering in the present for a payoff in the future. So to succeed, you need to learn how to like

get the approval of others and jobs and big companies and basically like do things you don't wanna do. That I have eventually now landed on a different definition of ambition, but I think that definition of ambition both map to a reality of work, meaning there actually weren't many other options and that was a decent story to grasp onto because.

when you don't have options, you should come up with a good story to sort of make yourself a little happier. But I think that has become less true and sort of just this like cargo cult of, I call them sufferists. Like people just like glorify suffering for the sake of suffering when I don't know how much value there is in just learning how to suffer in like a pointless job.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Paul Millerd

I think that ends up trapping far more people than it helps because the state of climbing a ladder and things like that is just not as easy and flowing through life as it once was.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I was talking to my dad about this a few weeks ago. I said, you know, when you guys came to this country, the American dream was alive and well. And truth is, in my generation, that is not really the case. I've seen so much of this. And you even say this. You say that for a lot of people, this means that the expectations of life are centered around a small number of positive events that occur while we're young. Much of the rest of our lives remain unscripted. And

when we face inevitable setbacks are left without instructions on how to think or feel. So for you, what was the narrative about careers growing up? What were your parents, what was your parents advice about making your way in the world?

Paul Millerd

It was pretty much like put your head down, get good grades, and everything will be taken care of. Neither of my parents went to college and didn't really feel like they had options and possibilities in their life. So I think they sort of felt stuck. They weren't telling me about careers and jobs. It was just like, you should do this, and we've sort of bought in that this will work. And for the most part, it did pay off for me.

Srini Rao

Yep.

Paul Millerd

I think my issues are much more like mid and later career and like finding things that are sustainable. I'm not against like following the default path early in your career. The biggest challenge with the default path is there aren't really off ramps because we are so collectively aligned around this idea that like life can be planned on a linear path through large organizations and jobs.

I just think that doesn't map to reality anymore and it's not useful for an increasing number of people every year.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, I mean, I was just thinking about the sheer number of tech layoffs that have been happening in anticipation of a potential recession. Like every day you're seeing these headlines of mass layoffs at companies where people probably thought they'd have stable jobs. I mean, Facebook, for God's sakes, is laying people off. Yeah, I appreciate the fact that you said that it's not a bad alternative early in your career because you need, you know, what Cal Newport calls career capital before you can just jump off the ship. Because I've seen sort of two versions of this.

where people work no end at a job they hate, even though they have skills. And then there are these other people who, you know, quote unquote leap without a net and, or, you know, jump out of a plane without a parachute and try to build it on the way down, which Reid Hoffman says that's described by building a startup. And it's like, yeah, that's easy to say if Reid Hoffman is funding your startup. If not, that is more often a recipe for poverty than a security or even following your passion to no end. But.

For you, I mean, I know you went down this default path, and I thought there were some really interesting things about how you navigated that early part of your career to get yourself into a position where you probably wouldn't have been able to get in because of the school that you went to. Talk to me about that, because I remember, that stood out to me as somebody who went from Berkeley as an undergrad to Pepperdine Grad School, and seeing how many fewer opportunities I had based on the institution that I was at.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, so I wanted to break into strategy consulting firms like McKinsey Boss Consulting Group in Bain. And I talked to a number of these people when I was in college and people were mostly dismissive or talked down to me. One guy explicitly told me, you didn't go to the right schools. Like your best odds are to like go work at a big company for a couple years and then try to get into a top business school and then you might be able to get a job here. That just sort of like that actually lit a fire under me.

I was like, who are these people? Why do they talk like this and think like this? I had gone to UConn because I thought it would a rational, like financial decision. Like it was in-state tuition, plus I got some scholarship money. So I was like, okay, this is a smart decision. I sort of got captivated with trying to break into these worlds. So I just kept applying. I applied and got rejected from like every consulting firm in the world.

my senior year and then just applied again the following year. I sort of got lucky with my experience lined up with a very specific job at McKinsey & Company, which happened to be the number one company on that list. That's sort of like the biggest what-if of my whole trajectory because I had planned to leave my first job at GE and just move to Boston without a plan in 2008. That would have been a wild story.

I sort of want to know how that story ends, but I ended up breaking into consulting and staying there for the next nine years. Breaking into that world was sort of mind blowing, but it's a whole different reality, which is that you always need to keep moving. Everyone's always aiming for the next job and talking about the next job and getting into business school and promotions and raises. I sort of got caught up in that.

Mostly because I didn't generate any other options for what I should do with my life or how I wanted to work.

Srini Rao

You know, the thing that strikes me most about that is you're captivated by this world and so many people are. Where I went to college, that was sort of the pinnacle of achievement was, hey, you get into McKinsey and Berkeley hires like one McKinsey, one student from Berkeley every year to work at McKinsey. I know because it was one of my friend's girlfriends and it was my brother-in-law from Stanford in his year. He was the one. And yeah, so the question for me is like.

Why do you think it is that people are so captivated by these sort of symbols of prestige when they don't even often know what they're really getting themselves into?

Paul Millerd

So I think these companies actually get slightly bad rap. Like I went from GE, which is a pretty good company and decently well run, like better than most other big companies, to McKinsey and the actual reality of working there was way better. Like I was sort of blown away when people were whining at McKinsey how bad things were. People complain at every job, but.

It was actually wonderful. People gave a crap about me. I did trainings that were incredible and radically helped me improve. So I think there's that reality that these jobs are good. That's a result of high profit margins and continuously growing companies. But people get warped because it's basically just what other people pay attention to. I think.

I have a definition in my book of like prestige is basically like us using the heuristic of paying attention to what other people pay attention to. And people pay attention to these jobs because as a new grad, you can make good money, have great perks, and work on the most interesting problems in the business world. The plus side for that for me was when I landed at these firms, like I found the work really interesting.

challenging and like my core set of skills actually aligned up with what I was doing. But I sort of lucked out with that, that like I like synthesizing, researching, organizing information, doing stuff in PowerPoint and Excel. And that sort of like inspired and drove me those first few years. But I think a lot of people just want to feel special.

Um, so that also drove me like I'm young, insecure. I'm a man. Like I don't know how to like stand out in the world. I want to prove myself and yeah, these places offer a very easy path to feel special and important and good about yourself.

Srini Rao

The other thing that struck me about your story was that you didn't give up in the face of a no Particularly when you're at a place like Yukon as we both talked about that doesn't you know? It's not a place where companies like McKinsey recruit I know this because I faced the same dilemma when I was at Pepperdine Going from Berkeley to Pepperdine I saw that wait a minute like none of these companies that are hiring MBA interns come to Pepperdine to recruit They go to places like Berkeley and to Stanford So what do you think it is about you?

that allowed you to persist in the face of being told no so many times.

Paul Millerd

I think it's a bit of an engineering mindset. Like, I need to just figure things out for myself. I grew up like tinkering on computers and figuring things out. And I was always with enough time able to figure things out. Like computers used to crash a lot in the 90s. And I could always like figure out what went wrong and then like fix it. I've always had this tinkering mindset of like, okay, this is what people say, but is that true? And then let...

me go find out on my own. Yeah, I don't know where that comes from. I've just always been a bit skeptical of what people say. I think I just have like a decent bullshit detector. Like the amount of bullshit people communicate on like what you need to do in life, how you need to work, what is risky and what is not risky, a lot of it is just nonsense. Like it's not.

tied to any sort of like base reality. Like my path for example now, I don't find this risky whatsoever. Mostly because like I find it a lot more sustainable because I'm excited and connected about the work I'm doing. But other people are living a reality where they can literally have millions of dollars and see my path as like, man, I could never do that. And I'm just like.

I don't understand that. That's so crazy.

Srini Rao

Hey, Paul, hold on just a sec. I think my dad is here. I'm using his office. Give me just a sec. He's knocking the door.

Srini Rao

Sorry about that. We'll cut this out. Josh, make a note to edit here, please. Yeah, well, I know what you mean when you talk about this idea. Because I think that this is something that I observed with multiple conversations with college professors on this show, is that you go to college and it's almost like a fast food menu where they say, these are the majors. These are the jobs they lead to. And it's funny because they seem to get narrower and narrower in terms of options.

as you get older and you have this sort of set idea of what the path is and the default path, you know, what you call the default path by design seems almost limited. And you say in the book that we're convinced that the only way forward is the path we've been on or what we've seen people like us do. This is a silent conspiracy that constrains the possibilities of our lives. But I think that people get very comfortable with that because

then they don't have to figure it out for themselves. That's the one thing I noticed when I looked at two careers, when I contrast my sister going to medical school versus what I do, there's an actual set of instructions for that path. There isn't for the ones that you and I are on.

Paul Millerd

Yeah. And I think my perspective on this is that the world is becoming more like our paths. And it's probably useful to at least like try this mindset on. This is kind of like what I want to convey in my book is that the world is shifting in this direction. Reinventing yourself, recreating yourself, or at least coming up with a new story of what you're actually experiencing.

is going to lead to higher levels of sanity. Like even doctors, doctors had this idea. I talked to so many of them. They think I'm gonna help people. They now for the most part find themselves as middle managers as part of large hospital systems doing lots of paperwork and dealing with bureaucracy and internal politics. That is not what they signed up for. And they don't have any sort of story that can help them map to like what they're experiencing.

how to get out of that, how to even remix that path 10 to 15% around the edges, even if they wanna stay in medicine and continue practicing. And that's kind of what I see, the big shift. And this stuff is hard. Our paths are weird and hard because there's unconstrained possibility. That's the upside of it, but that's also the downside because you constantly need to be thinking about it.

experimenting, trying new things, talking to people, paying attention to the shifts and the ways people are working and how you make money. But not experimenting at all is also a failure mode, I think.

Srini Rao

Well, I mean, I was just thinking about this like having a job It might seem like the most stable and secure thing in the world until you get laid off and you realize it's the only way That you know how to make money

Paul Millerd

Well, I see a lot of people in my older cohort, like older millennial cohort. Like we actually did like decent. We graduated right before the global financial crisis. We weren't making enough to get laid off and like people crushed it in the late 2010s. Now I see people like couples making God knows how much like I've lost touch with like what people actually make and knowledge work, but

making like three, $400,000 a year and buying these super expensive homes and like their life is sort of dependent on two people earning 150 plus thousand dollars a year. That to me would scare the shit out of me. Like you have a house where you need to pay 8,000 a month. If somebody loses their job, like suddenly you're burning cash. Like that's pretty risky for me. Whereas like...

I can flex up and down my spending. Like I do sacrifice a lot in terms of like lifestyle compared to my peers. And this is the hardest thing about taking a path like mine. I call it a status tax. Like I don't own a home. I'm expecting, we're expecting a daughter in March. And like one of the number one things people say to me is like, oh, are you guys gonna get a home? You're gonna get a house? Like that is another script in people's head.

To have a kid, you need to own your own home. I don't have the resources to buy a home in a place where I wanna live right now, but that's totally fine with me. We're both perfectly happy with it, but that is a tax, and that would be incredibly painful for a lot of people, and they could not deal with that.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, talk to me about the actual impetus for walking away because right before you and I hit record here, we were having sort of this interesting, you know, back and forth about sort of how we define success and often what we think is our own definition of success when we walk away from the default path or the society definition of success is just trading that definition of success for Chris Gilbo's definition of success or Tim Ferriss's definition of success.

And it took me a long time to realize that that's what we'd effectively done. We're actually not really making choices based on our own desires, but based on some other person who's in a position of status has just happens to be in a different context.

Paul Millerd

A lot of my writing and thinking came out of me being hyper skeptical of all of that, including the Tim Ferriss definition or anything else I could gravitate onto. When I left my job, I wanted to escape work. I really just wanted to limit how much I was working. I wanted to escape the reality I was living in. I just couldn't do it anymore. And

I was scared of creating another job for myself. So I went really slow. The first chance I could get after making some money freelancing in the first six months, I sort of created a mini sabbatical for myself where I didn't try to get paid work for basically a year. I ended up getting one project that paid decent for like two months, but basically for a year, I didn't really work on anything paid. And...

It was in that space in which I was able to start reconnecting with myself, remembering the things I like doing as a kid, like starting writing and realizing, wow, this is really enjoyable just to do on my own terms, my own pace, and it might lead somewhere interesting. I started a podcast, even though I didn't really have like business ambitions around that. And I just found more connection with like things I actually like doing.

And this is the big shift for me, and I actually write about what you mentioned as like, I call these hustle traps. Basically trading one script for somebody else's script. Seeing somebody become a course creator, and you're like, I wanna become a course creator. You're just taking their script. What I try to do is really just take it slow and stupid, I call it.

and try to figure out like, what do I actually want to do? And I sort of accidentally stumbled upon this different relationship to work, which I now call like, designed for liking work. What if you design your entire life around actually liking what you do? Which is pretty radical. A lot of people just short circuit that because of a lot of stories in our heads. Well, you can't just do this, you can't just do that.

Paul Millerd

I like bare boned my life down to the bare minimum and I realize some people can't do that But I think far more people actually can strip their lives down far more than they think

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, I think that I want to appreciate that because it's not a sort of delusionally optimistic version of being able to do this that we're sold. It's grounded in reality. You acknowledge the fact that, wait, there are sacrifices, there's a status tax. I always have said that every decision that you make in your life is a tradeoff between freedom and security. You're going to give up freedom in one place for security in another, or give up security in another place for freedom in another.

And what I appreciated was that you said that choosing to leave full-time work was not a single bold decision, but a slow and steady awakening that the path I was on was not my path. My conclusion from this is simple. Beyond the headlines of dramatic life changers are almost always longer and slower and more interesting stories. And that's the funny thing is that people don't see everything that happens in between. They only see the headlines.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, part of this is like shows like this. You'll ask when is the moment you started to know that you had to go in a different path? And you usually get asked that enough times, you start coming up with a good story to answer that, right? And I noticed I was doing that. And also through my podcast, I started just interviewing people and going super deep.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Paul Millerd

I didn't ask when is the moment you decided to quit your job. I would ask questions like, before you quit your job, like maybe years before that, were there signs that like you were interested in other things and you get answers like that? Or when you were growing up, did you have evidence of being creative or naturally interested in things? And you start hearing these completely different timelines of people's past and how they ended up there.

And sometimes it seems super obvious upon reflection, but this is the challenge. Like it never seems obvious in the moment.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, it's similar to a question that John Lee Dumas would ask people when he interviewed them on Entrepreneur on Fire. And I remember he asked me this question, and I ended up writing a blog post about it. He said, have you ever felt like you have had an I've made it moment? And it's funny because every single moment that I've ever thought would be the quote unquote I've made it moment never felt like it. It never was. And I realized why that was. I was like, one, if you believe that you have an I've made it moment, you're done.

that is when you stop working, you start to rest on your laurels. And I just realized, I was like, there is no such thing. It's to your point, like a series of really, really small things that all add up over time. It's just that you only see the end result. You don't see, you know, what Scott Belsky calls the messy middle, like all the awful parts in between. You know, like you see somebody writing a book, you're like, wait a minute, you didn't see the two years that went into this.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, I did like a tweet thread about my journey of how the book happened. And it started with, I wrote when I was young, I had blogs, I had things like this. I screwed around in college. I had tumblers. I had a blog for grad school about getting into business school. I wrote on Quora for years. I wrote on LinkedIn. I had different sites and someone goes.

One of my friends, he just commented, oh, everything makes sense now. Because you often don't see that work, you're often seeing the final product, you stumble upon someone and like you, I'm not super familiar with your work, but I've dug in a little bit. It'd be very easy for me to think you arrived at this now. I'm smart enough from my own journey to know that you probably been headed in this direction. And...

creating awesome stuff now because you started probably decades ago in whatever form that took. But people really just wanna be saved. People want an easy answer. This is why they gravitate to, I just wanna follow the Tim Ferriss playbook, is because they don't wanna figure out their own path. They just want the shortcut. They wanna arrive. But anyone that finds work worth doing realizes that playing a long game is actually what's fun.

Um, there never is any arrival. You might get to a higher level of like, Oh, okay. I can stay on this path a little longer. In my first year, I was like, okay, I think I could probably make two years. Now I'm five and a half years in. I was like, I could probably make 10. Um, that's a form of making it, but I don't ever expect to arrive nor do I want to, because I, that would mean I would stop having fun.

Srini Rao

Well, I think there's this notion of the next level, right? I don't know if people have ever asked you about this when you've been interviewed. It's like, do you feel like you've reached this next level of success? And I remember Ryan Holiday and I talking about this once. It's this realization that the next level is really a false horizon. He said, because if you think about it, nobody ever gets to the thing they say they want to achieve, achieves it, and says, all right, that's it, I'm done.

He said, you know, you basically hit a home run and you say, no, it's hitting a home run in the world series, or it's hitting a grand slam, or it's having the highest contract in baseball. And the thing that he said to me was he said it's good on the aggregate because it drives a lot of achievement. If nobody if everybody is happy being senator, nobody would run for president. He said, but on the individual level, it's a lie because it never gives you the satisfaction you think it will. And I realized it's like.

It's just a recipe for constant comparison. And the truth is, it's almost inevitable, because every time you get to another level, there's another standard that is now set, and another benchmark, and another reference group that you benchmark against.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, I think Ryan's an interesting case. He talks about like a lot about being content and happy with what he's doing, but like through his actions, through his actions, he also just keeps publishing books like a maniac. Like I definitely have learned a lot from him, but I do wonder if they're just like different psychologies and personalities. Like I don't resonate with what he's saying there.

Srini Rao

Right.

Paul Millerd

Like I actually feel pretty good. Like in my, maybe this is from some of my success in my career. Like for me making six figures and like making it into like grad school at MIT and like working at McKinsey, like I honestly feel like I've had enough like external achievement in the business world. Like I'm very skeptic that.

That's what makes me very skeptical of doing anything for something else. X for Y, I think, is such a trap. People are like, oh, has your book helped you land speaking gigs? I'm like, is that a thing I'm supposed to be doing? I wrote the book because I wanted to write the book. And I just feel so content with everything I've done.

Srini Rao

Heheheheh

Paul Millerd

I like writing and I want to keep doing it. And like the value of being slightly more ambitious is that you can work on new and more interesting things. But like, I really don't have that like next thing. I feel like I need to create. Maybe I'm a, I do feel like I'm a weirdo sometimes. Cause it seems like everyone else is just like, I don't resonate with that. I need more.

Srini Rao

Well, I realized, I was writing about this the other day, because I think that there's this sort of psychological component, right? We're all apparently driven by our need for status. Status is a human desire. And you've got that from both MIT and McKinsey. I mean, I got that the moment I got the Penguin Portfolio book deal. I was like, OK, this is an elevation in status to a degree. And humans apparently are hardwired to need status. But.

The thing that I realized I was writing about this the other day is that when more becomes the end rather than the means, there's literally no end to it. It's just a recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction. And I think you made a really interesting point about doing X for Y because you say similar to expectations around meaningful work, far too many people limit their imagination of work worth doing to things that either come with a paycheck, require qualifications,

or have a socially accepted story of impact, which, particularly on the internet, it's building an audience that's massive or having thousands of fans. And you mentioned my creative work. You wouldn't believe how many laughable things are on the internet that you probably can't find that I did just for fun. Like I made a parody at a Bollywood music video with my roommate that I was living with in 2004. This was like right when YouTube came out, but a dozen blogs that nobody ever read. I mean, all of this, mainly because I was just curious.

And in a world where people's accomplishments are on public display constantly for us to compare ourselves to, how do you get people to change those expectations around meaningful work? I mean, I wrote an entire book about this. And even after writing that book, which was called An Audience of One, there were times when people were interviewing me about it when I said, yeah, it's called An Audience of One and I'm sure my publisher would be a lot happier if it was reaching an audience of millions.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, I don't know. I think one is I have always been skeptical of other people's opinions. So we were talking about that even in college and stuff. People's opinions were I couldn't work in consulting and it was like, that's bullshit. Similarly, I'm also skeptical of other people's opinions of what's worth doing.

It's very clear that if I tried to maximize income and make more money, I could get more attention and like some form of status, but I don't know if I actually want that form of status. Like I like building an audience online, mostly because it usually makes my life better in the form of meeting actual people in real life that I become friends with. But like that's why I...

typically only shared things that I want to continue talking about. Right. There are better ways to like scale attention if I like went a little harder on the hustle language and things like that, but it's just totally uninteresting to me. Um, yeah, I, I don't know what, um, how to avoid those traps. Um, I think two things that helped me one, leaving the U S

The US is an insatiable culture for more in every aspect of our culture. It's not like that in many other countries. So just befriending people and being around people and immersing yourself in cultures that aren't obsessed with more and don't have easy access to goods and things all the time, that was helpful. And two was just like literally making no money for a long stretch of time.

and realizing, oh, I'm okay. And like something I value is just like spending time wandering and spending time reading and spending time with the people in my life. Super valuable. I'm gonna have a daughter in March. Like I'm gonna price that time at like a million dollars an hour. So it's gonna be awesome. So I'm gonna be a time billionaire.

Srini Rao

Well, I can relate. I mean, my sister just had a baby. He's seven weeks old as of today. And something that really struck me was when my sister said, you know, this is actually really special before all of us getting to be here together, because it's just kind of unusual that we all happen to have this much time off and all living at my parents' house. And my old roommate keeps saying, he's like, you can't live there forever, man.

And I was like, yeah, I'm not planning on living here forever, but right now I'm really not in any hurry to make a commitment or a decision about where I'm going next, because I am not going to get this time back with my nephew. This is literally probably the only time in my life where I'm ever going to get to do this and to get to be with him in those early phases. There's no price that you can put on that.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, I sense there are moments in our life that open up like this. I had a similar period in Taiwan where I sort of arrived there. I was able to lower my cost of living under a thousand dollars a month. Wasn't buying anything, was spending very little on food and couldn't land freelance gigs either. I was living abroad in 2018. I was kind of failing at that. But I sort of had this deep sense that like...

let just sit with this time. Like, like, I don't know how like that emerges. Like it's sort of this deep intuition, but I did. And a lot of things that have emerged five years later really were planted in those moments. And those months where I sort of just would like softened into the world and myself a little bit.

Srini Rao

Well, one of the things that you say is that making life changes requires overcoming the discomfort of not knowing what will happen. Facing uncertainty, we make long mental lists of things that might go wrong and use these as reasons why we must stay on our current path. So how do you navigate the psychological and emotional aspects of navigating this kind of uncertainty? Because I think that this can drive some people to absolute madness.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, for sure. And I think what drives people mad is thinking about it and not actually experiencing it. The benefit of actually just stepping into the uncertainty is you can actually do things about it, right? And actually face those fears directly. This is one of the hidden benefits of taking an uncertain path is that you can learn to develop a relationship with that uncertainty. You can develop a capacity for managing.

the chaos and uncertainty of life, which is underneath the surface of all our stories about how smooth our lives are. It's there. The reality of the universe is uncertain, weird, chaotic, unpredictable. We just don't imagine life working that way. So we sort of blind ourselves to it. And full-time jobs are one of the best ways to blind ourselves from it, because everyone else who's...

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Paul Millerd

doing the full-time job agrees never to talk about the uncertainty of the universe, right? But when you take a path like ours, like boom, you're hit with it. And the thing that's hard is like, if you're imagining all the things that will go wrong, it can be like torture. But when you're actually experiencing the things that go wrong, you can actually act in the world, right? Like when I wasn't making money, I was like.

Okay, I need to start trying stuff and like having a better approach to figuring out how to make this path sustainable. Or when I get bit by a dog in a country, it's like, okay, probably got to figure out if I have rabies and like what's happening here. Or like just all these things I've experienced. It's like over time you start to realize there's wisdom in the unknown.

and the experiences you face because they will teach you about life and give you more confidence about being able to move forward.

Srini Rao

that? Well, I think that the thing about the unknown is that it takes us perfectly into this idea of what you call a fixed point, right? You say we all have fixed points that we aim towards in our lives. Home ownership is one of the most popular, but others include paying for children's college expenses, becoming an executive partner, founding a company, or reaching a certain net worth. The problem with these default fixed points is that they're culturally derived rather than a product of our unique motivations and desires.

The fixed points along the default path are not inherently bad, but they do tend to push people towards doing what others do. And for me, that one is getting married because I'm Indian and I'm still single and in my 40s, right? Like that is sort of in my mind. It's like, okay, is this the fixed point at which my parents will be like, all right, you have your shit together? But I think we all have versions of that. And yet in this path that you're talking about, there is really no fixed point that you're aiming for. It kind of takes us back to that whole idea of enough and more.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, and it makes a lot of other people uncomfortable. I love this path. I'm having a ton of fun on it. But the questions from other people never cease. And I realized at the beginning I was super defensive. I would try to convince them, actually I really thought I know what I'm doing. I had no idea what I was doing at the beginning. But now I sort of know what I'm doing and I have the wisdom to know that other people's questions are actually them just projecting their uncertainty on me.

So I'm a little more patient and I just sort of like listen to these things, but it's fascinating too. Like we're having a kid, we're living in a two bedroom rental and many, many people have been like, well you guys are probably gonna buy a home soon, right? It's so embedded in people's mind that you have to own a home to have kids. I literally said to somebody, I was like, they let you have kids in rentals. And she goes, wow, never thought of that.

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Paul Millerd

It's like, wow, these scripts are deep in people's heads. And they're just sort of endless. Like, so many people will say things like, don't you worry about retirement. It's like, well, I've written a post about that and like how I'm thinking about that. Like, what you're really saying is, I'm making less than you want in retirement and that makes you uncomfortable. But.

I'm sort of budgeting for like a lower expense life. Or aren't you worried about like paying for your kids' college? It's like, I don't know. I'll figure that out along with the many other things down the road, but like I'm not gonna restructure my entire life around that one fear 20 years down the road.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's amazing how much we make decisions about our entire lives on some unknown future that we can't predict or control.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, I saw this post today. Somebody shared it on Twitter. The title is, how are people buying these $10 million houses feeling frustrated after years of hard work? Mid-30s, engineering director at a fan company, salary and stock have tanked, and his net worth is down to $2.5 million. At the end, he goes,

Paul Millerd

What's it? I'm not, I've been a 1% student and now a top 1% high performing professional. I've been hardworking, bold, driven for as long as I can remember, but now I worry that I'll never be able to afford a house like these. It's like, what is happening here? Like, let's deconstruct this. Human has $2.5 million, one of the richest humans at the richest point in history of the world. And he's feeling like

he's on the wrong path, stuck. Things have gone terribly wrong. This person should be thriving. He's playing the wrong games. And part of this is just figuring out how to play a better game that's aligned with what you actually want in life.

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely. Well, one thing that I appreciate that you say is that many people struggle to start making a living from their creative endeavors because they're still operating within the logic of the default path. On the default path, you have to get the job before you can do the work. On the pathless path, you simply do the work first and then decide if you wanna continue. And that's the funny thing. People don't realize that you don't get to monetize your creative work or get attention for it until you've earned that.

And I see so many people wanting to shortcut that. And you think about how do you do this? How do I make more money doing this? And it's like, well, you do it and prove that you're doing something that's worth people paying you for.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, and I think the key is not being naive. There's a lot of marketing and branding around the passion economy and creator economy. I've been writing pretty consistently since 2015. 98% of the money I've made from writing has been in 2022. And that is mostly a surprise to me. I didn't expect my book to do as well as it did.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Paul Millerd

And that's sort of still how I'm orienting. I have no idea what the income from my book will be next year, but I'm sort of mentally expecting it to just be a lot lower because continuing to grow a book is really hard. But I'm still writing. I love it. It's so much fun. I learn about things. I get to share them. I get to connect with other people.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Paul Millerd

sharing about like that like those ideas and I get some intrinsic value from it and I want to continue writing for 30 years. So like the only reason I'm having success is because I stayed in a game I actually liked and what I've seen is most people quit or drop out. A lot of people start writing online. Most people don't last more than a couple of years.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, trust me, I know this because there are bloggers, people who have popular blogs, way more popular than mine. When I started in 2009, who are no longer around. And I appreciate the fact that you have called out this whole idea of the passion economy or the creator economy. I remember reading this headline on a medium article titled The Creator Economy is Booming. And I was like, no, it's not.

It's booming for a small subset of people. The creator economy is a developing country. It's basically ripe with inequality just in digital form. A handful of creators basically take the bulk of the revenue. And I said, it's rampant with inequality. There's a venture capitalist who wrote an article titled The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class. And I was like, yeah, there is no middle class in the creator economy. I don't care what anybody says.

Paul Millerd

That article was... I was not a fan of that article.

Srini Rao

Well, tell me why I want to hear your take on this.

Paul Millerd

It's just delusional. It's like a very American perspective. And it's starting with the idea that like it's starting with this sort of like 20th century idea of this booming middle class. And like it's starting there with the assumption. Right. I like to start with the like reality and facts of things. The reality and facts of the creator economy map to the American economy for the American worker is that on average, it is not a good opportunity for people.

Srini Rao

Exactly.

Paul Millerd

The hidden story about the creator economy is this is transforming the lives of people in lower income countries, especially those who can speak English because they can immediately tap into this global network of people share interesting things. And their like opportunity cost is just much lower. So they're much more willing to compete. And if they can make $300, $400 a month in many countries, that's gonna change someone's life.

And it's been interesting, like I do some online course stuff and the most motivated people are almost categorically non-rich, non-Western countries. Um, and that is just over and over again. Like people that are helping me on my podcast are in Poland, are in India, um, Ukraine, um, Asia, and they're so good and they're so driven and

Srini Rao

Interesting.

Paul Millerd

They're not gonna work with me for a long time because they're getting better, they're leveling up, they're learning and they're gonna go beyond me. Like I'm not gonna be able to afford them soon. And over and over again, these are the people I encounter. So this whole like American mindset like is based on this second half of the 20th century. We sort of had what the economist David Autar from MIT is called middle skill jobs.

These were comfortable jobs at big companies with good benefits. And you sort of didn't need to have decent skills. You could kind of just show up coast and you would get your life taken care of. This is the accidental meaning idea in my book is that like, just put your head down, work hard and you'll be okay. That is no longer true on the margin. At the high end of the workforce in the U S it has never been better, but people are expecting more at the high end too.

And yeah, this idea that you're going to have a middle class is just like not tied to economic reality. If anything, there is going to be more opportunities in the upper class, which is probably a good thing and an under told story in the US. Like the economic data is pretty clear about that. But the middle class is shrinking and the lower class in terms of income is increasing. So you have a like barbell effect happening.

in the US and like sure it needs a middle class but you can't start with that as the point of view. Like the only logical conclusion of that is basically just like subsidizing people with universal basic incomes which is sort of like where I it seemed like she was going but.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Srini Rao

I'm with you, I agree. Like when I read the article and I said, yeah, the creator economy needs a middle class, it's not gonna have one. It's just to your point, like I couldn't agree more with the idea that it maps to the reality of America. The internet is a developing country where you have extreme inequality. And the other thing I think that is often left out of this story.

about the sort of quote unquote passion or creator economy is that it's ripe with survivorship bias and almost all the stories are about outliers. Like you know I think it's like one I remember asking my editor at Penguin I was like how many people want this opportunity how many people get it she said one in five thousand.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, definitely.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, and so I think there's a more nuanced version of that though. If you are a certain type of like hyper curious person who likes technology and is driven to create in some way, if you can figure out how to structure your life around doing that for a few years, I think your odds of success are actually very high. Right. It's just that a lot of people.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Paul Millerd

a lot of people don't want to go all in or don't have those traits. The people with those traits, typically when they stumble upon these paths, like freak out like me. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is incredible.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I appreciate the idea of having those traits because I think that genetic determinism is something that people hate in the world of self-improvement and they can't stand that idea that genetics actually play a role in all of this. And I'm like, you are kidding yourself if you don't think they play a role. Like genetics, culture, environment, upbringing, all those things influence these things in ways that we can't control.

Paul Millerd

Yeah, if you give me two hours of free time, I'm gonna be like reading books and articles and then like trying to make sense of them in my head. Like I don't know where that came from, I've just always been like this. And I love computers.

Srini Rao

Yeah, or if you put me on the court with LeBron James, I'm gonna get my ass handed to me. I'm a scrawny Indian.

Paul Millerd

Exactly. But yeah, it's, and the thing is, like there are far more people that could succeed in this environment. I think it's a growing space and I think people are still underestimating the opportunities. It's just that most people with the skills don't actually wanna follow my path. I share my incomes. My incomes the first five years were like 40 grand, 30 grand, 25 grand, 50 grand.

and then like 70 grand last year. And then this year it's going to be like almost double that, which is mind blowing, but it's still less than I made in my previous job. If I had stayed just on my career path, I'd probably have about a million dollars more, but I have like a couple hundred thousand saved for retirement. And I just share those numbers because like I wanna be transparent and...

I want to let people know where I'm coming from. A lot of people assume I have millions of dollars in the bank, which is really funny. I talk to a lot of people in tech who just have a completely disconnected sense of reality about what things cost. They're like, yeah, you must have saved a few million before you left. I'm like, what are you talking about?

Srini Rao:

Yeah, well don't worry. After the whole Indian matchmaking experience, people on Reddit were speculating my net worth and I laughed and was like, you know, I according to a bunch of people who watched Indian matchmaking and decided to talk about me on Reddit I have a million dollar net worth which I just died laughing when I saw that I was like, yeah, I'm like too bad that doesn't map to reality.

Paul Millerd:

But I do sense like, I bet you have some sense that like you're onto something pretty incredible that has incredible opportunities. Now the great thing about the paths we're on is you don't actually need to opt into those opportunities. But they're sort of there, you're aware of them. The longer you stay in the game, you figure out what they are and the moves that are aligned with your own drivers. And that is incredible. Like that's real wealth.

To me, that's the wealth of opportunity, time, and your own autonomy and attention.

Srini Rao:

Yeah, I mean, like I said, I get to hang out with my seven-week-old nephew. If I were constrained by somebody else's restrictions, I wouldn't be able to do that. Something that you actually talk about in the book is the fact that you still do worry about money. So talk to me about that, because I think that is a part of the conversation that people might have probably glossed over and thought, wait, this guy doesn't sound like he worries about money at all. But you do.

Paul Millerd:

Of course, yeah. I think when you make very little, you worry about it all the time. And I think I actually went too far into not pursuing money opportunities in my first couple of years. And I was sort of playing the like minimize expense game. I realized that was not a healthy mode for me to be into in terms of how I was orienting toward my life. Because I was focusing on like cost minimization rather than maximizing possibility.

So I sort of leaned more actively in trying to make money after the first couple of years. And that was great because my possibility brain could be a lot more generative and exploratory. But yeah, I basically was micromanaging my finances and expenses, but also at this time I sort of did the math. Like a lot of people in the US don't really do the math of what they actually need.

Very few people actually just start with what they're spending and do an audit on their spending. A lot of people, because they work in full-time work, they start with their salary and then budget in expenses around that. And then maybe they have like a tight margin and assume they're struggling. What I did after I left my job is I went from like spending like six grand a month to like two grand a month. And I was like, oh, that was not as hard as I expected.

Srini Rao:

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao:

Sounds like you've spent a lot of time reading Rameet's material.

Paul Millerd:

I actually haven't, but I stumbled upon it a couple, like I've read it now and it's very resonant with my own approach to thinking about things. Just live below your means and you have time freedom. I think I just price my free time higher than most people do. I've always had this mental script of like, I'm gonna price my free time at a million dollars per hour.

Srini Rao:

Really?

Srini Rao:

You know, there's one thing that caught my attention when you said minimizing expenses. You didn't say maximizing income, but you said maximizing possibility.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah.

Srini Rao:

And I feel like there's a reason you specifically chose that word.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, I'm at my best when I'm dreaming and imagining new paths and new possibilities, new ways of working. I love trying new things, little experiments, things like that. It sounds like you're sort of wired similarly.

Srini Rao:

I think that the thing that's fascinating about that, right, is maximizing possibility is so much more generative than maximizing income. Because you only, when you think only in terms of income, it reminds me of one of my friends who told me, he's like, I don't have goals. He said I have a worldview. And that is three things. Go interesting places, meet interesting people and do interesting things. And I was like, that is so much more expansive than a set goal.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, and I think that's a great phrase. I'm going to steal that. But the, yeah, so I have a coaching and consulting business where I work with big companies and train them on strategy consulting skills. I actually really enjoy the work. It pays well, and I've sort of figured it out and tinkered with it enough to get it in which I have fun with it and I find it sustainable. Now.

Srini Rao:

Hehehehe

Paul Millerd:

I don't do much like outreach or like pushing on sales. Like I'll send somebody like here are my packages, here's what I do, but I like don't even follow up. Now if I needed to, could I triple down on that and like make a lot of money from that? I see a path to doing that. Would it succeed? Who knows? But I see a path to doing that. But for the most part, I use that to subsidize my time, which when I pay attention to what I actually want to be doing. I want to be having conversations like this. I want to be writing about our relationship to work and I want to be writing for free. And those are the things that generate possibilities and interesting connections in my life, which is sort of just working now. So I'm going to keep that going. And when it stops working, you pivot and change things up and shake things up. And I've noticed from like,

living in 40 different places over the last five years and changing variables and trying different kinds of work. When you change things, I actually got this from Toby Luca, who's the CEO of Spotify or Shopify. He was saying this in a podcast recently. He's like, when you're on an uncertain path or an infinite game, change is information. So you actually want to inject change in your path because you need more information. And that's kind of like how I think about things.

Srini Rao:

Of this, I, this is why I wanted to talk to you because I think that what I appreciated so much about your book was that it was a compass not a map.

Sort of catchphrases. So I was like, I tell people, I was like, I don't have advice, just observations.

Paul Millerd:

Yeah, my book's basically just a book of observations about my own lens on things. I have three pages of advice at the end of the book, which is like, here are 10 steps you can take because people really just kept asking for that. But it's really just like, hey, here's a bunch of different thoughts. I want people to like cherry-pick things.

Srini Rao:

Alright.

Paul Millerd:

Take a few things, remix them, make better versions of it. The pathless path is really just an excuse for what many people are experiencing, is they feel like they're failures, or weirdos, or can't quite fit. The pathless path should really just be a deep breath for people to say, huh, there are other people like me. I'm not crazy, maybe the world is shifting. This is an interesting mental model of how things are shifting. Maybe some of it's right, maybe I just grew parts of it, but.

It gives me permission to keep experimenting and trying to come up with a better way forward for me.

Srini Rao:

Beautiful. Well, I have one final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Paul Millerd:

I think it's daring to actually be true to yourself, which I think in today's world, where the possible paths, including unconventional paths, like being a digital nomad, being a podcaster, all these things, are hyper-legible. We think all these to-do lists and like roadmaps and how-to lists are how we need to approach life.

Well, shouldn't I do X? I think what makes people unmistakable is they look at the word should and are hyper-skeptical of it and say, you know what? I need to trust the worldly wisdom of what people have been saying for centuries and just getting in touch with myself and sort of connecting with that intuition and seeing where it takes me.

Srini Rao:

Amazing. I have really, really enjoyed our conversation and I love conversations like this because they just make you think. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your book, your work and everything else you're up to?

Paul Millerd:

I write every week on my newsletter. Right now that's on Substack, bondlist.substack.com. I'm also on Twitter for as long as that is still around, Paul Millard. But yeah, I'm the most Googleable Paul Millard. I think there's only two of us in the world anyway, but Google me. You should be able to find me. And I'm going to add my email to the site so I can meet amazing people like you.

Srini Rao:

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.