Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Priceline Co-Founder Paul Breitenbach

I recently interviewed Priceline co-founder Paul Breitenbach on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today co-founded a business that disrupted the world of travel. Paul Breitenbach is the co-founder of Priceline. Paul is also the founder and CEO of the AI company R for Technologies. Paul, thank you for joining us.

Paul: Adam, it’s great to be here.

Adam: You grew up on the Jersey Shore in the Garden State, a state that produced Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, so many of America’s best-known, most successful musicians, and you spent the first chapter of your career as a musician before pivoting to the world of tech. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Paul: People make fun of New Jersey, which is easy to do. Growing up on the beach in New Jersey, I couldn’t figure out why. Why are you making fun of this? This is like the most beautiful place in the world to grow up. I mean, the ocean is beautiful, the beach. We were just very lucky. It wasn’t fancy. But as you said, the trick-or-treating and some of the most incredible experiences. And sometimes you get them to come out and start singing. It just really was a great place to grow up. So we had a good childhood. But yeah, I grew up a musician. When you think about that, I guess you learn from the very beginning you have to work really hard. It’s very competitive. I was a union member of the local 399, I can’t remember, at like 13 or 14 years old. So I was really young when it went really well, but that kind of shaped who you are. I wasn’t a football player. I wasn’t really an athlete. I did play on the high school golf team, but we weren’t very good. But there are other ways to learn how to really dig deep and bring it to the game and add value. Being a musician certainly was it. And then New Jersey, too. They don’t have these anymore. I had a paper route. My brother and I had the largest paper route in the town we grew up in. Those are the kinds of things you think back to, like what made you who you are. I remember I was the first to go to college. You grow up in a town which was really wonderful. But what do you do with your life? So in the very beginning, it’s the same old thing. I just always thought I was going to be in this position.

Adam: What drew you from the world of music into the world of tech?

Paul: After you become a, you know, you really take it seriously. Being a professional musician, you realize this is really not about you, it’s about the audience. And so you end up doing stuff that you don’t necessarily love. I started in music because of just passion, real interest and whatnot. I can remember when we were kids growing up, we put our first computer together. And even though this wasn’t our thing, we didn’t have a computer science teacher. You don’t really even have anything like that. But it’s like, oh my God, this computer thing, it’s just so cool. You can get it to do things. It can help you do things. And so I remember when I went to school of music after a few weeks, and I was like, I don’t think I really want to be a musician. I remember calling my parents back on the hallway phone in the dormitory. I said, I think I made a huge mistake. I want to study and try other stuff. And it’s funny because it wasn’t until you get to college that you realize, oh my God, there are these other opportunities. In high school, my guidance counselor wouldn’t let me do this thing called Project Role as a musician. They had this thing where you could try out working in an office, try out doing other things that you may never really get a chance to do. And they said, yeah, you’re a musician. You shouldn’t do this business thing or whatever. So they didn’t let me do it. So it wasn’t until you get to college that you realize, oh my God, there’s a whole world outside of music, and it really matches my interest, the computer part, the idea of technology and sort of human interaction with the technology. When you look back at my early days, you can see exactly why my career in deploying advanced technology. You just have to be willing to be courageous to say, huh, maybe I shouldn’t be the musician, and I should try to go do something that I’m really, really interested in and be true to yourself.

Adam: I love that. Be willing to take chances. Be willing to say, you know what, I thought that I was going to spend my life doing this, but maybe I will actually enjoy doing that even more. Maybe doing this felt good to me at a certain age, but doing that is really what will allow me to be at my best, will really allow me to be at my most fulfilled.

Paul: 100%. That takes real courage, because when you think about a lot of us grew up with incredibly well-intentioned parents and a family structure that was very supportive. Some people aren’t lucky. They don’t have the support of the family. But you know, I like to think of when you look back is they all tried to really help you figure it out, but they only know what they know. My family, we weren’t in business at all. And so the idea of taking a chance and being courageous, and the only thing I’d add to that is really trying to find a way to add value. The only other thing that’s so hard nowadays, especially in the whole LLM craze, because we’re in the AI space, so I’m very familiar. The idea is not just to make it easy and repetitive. I feel like the other lesson I’d add, if I had to go back and take what got me going and how they’ve been doing it right now, is try to add value and do something different, not just repeating other things. I think it’s fair to say you could do a satisfying career, but true satisfaction comes when you’ve done something that really adds value, that ratchets up our humanity, that does something really quite interesting and in a different way.

Adam: The irony certainly isn’t lost on me in this conversation in that many people pursue careers in business, and deep down, they’re interested in going into music, and they might feel that need, that push, that urge. And if you want to do something different, if you want to change course, if you want to pivot, it starts with having the courage to do it, but to your point, it also requires doing it in a way where you are going to add value. And using the example of music, you can carve out a solid career playing other people’s music. But if you want to create a career where you’re going to be elite, where you are going to be at the very top, you’re going to have to create your own music.

Paul: Yeah, that’s exactly right. You got to add something new, especially in music. You look at the greats. It’s so inspiring. It brings something new. It combines things up. It does it in a way that’s very different. It stirs the soul. Not only do you have to have the skill, but you have to have the will. If you have the will and the desire to move in, I think there’s untold amounts of truly soul-moving change-ups that’s going to happen in the arts and music. And having been in both, this kind of AI world that we’re living in now is automating enough of the mundane. At least that’s the way we should use it. We shouldn’t use it to replace people. It just automates the mundane, but allows you to really add value as the human. My kids play stuff that is half human-made, half machine-made, combinatorial things. And it’s interesting because they find ways to break the traditions or combine them up. So I think courage, changing it up, adding some value, that’s the key for someone who’s trying to either, whether you’re in a job that you did because of all the right reasons and you want to try and change into a new job, or sometimes you always think, I would try this other area, and sometimes it’s really, really hard. So I think the first step is having the courage, trying to think about what would I do differently, how would I add value in that, and then you just have to grip it and rip it, as they say in golf.

Adam: Yeah, I love it. Whether you’re pursuing a career in music, whether you’re pursuing a career in business, regardless of where you’re pursuing your career, focus on creating art. Focus on creating value. Focus on bringing something into the world that people are going to enjoy, that people are going to appreciate.

Paul: Absolutely. Greatness comes from stirring our humanity in whatever it is, whether it’s medicine, whether it’s even legal and defense or legal and prosecution. You think about it, like you’re corporate. I think that’s what makes life worth living. Not that there aren’t great careers in so many areas, but the idea of trying to add innovation to something. When you think about it, innovation, it’s like a negatively selected thing. The pioneers take the arrows. It’s usually not Darwin, survival of the fittest. So innovation is a tough business to be in, but that’s where value gets added, and that’s what helps drive us forward. The only thing I’d add to that is, as you’re trying to add value, there’s kind of another arc of philosophy. Always try to do the right thing, and that gets to be really complicated very frequently, especially in the tech area that we’ve been working in for so long. So as you’re trying to do this stuff, like here’s anything of an AI-driven music, you don’t want to take other people’s stuff. You’re trying to create your own. Is that the right thing to do? I would argue that if someone put their blood, sweat, and tears into creating a music catalog of their own, it’s not really right just to rip it. Having said that, there are ways to build on what other people have done. So do the right thing is another critical aspect in this whole world that we’re moving into that is so often technology-driven.

Adam: You also brought up a really important topic, which is innovation. How can anyone get to a place where they are at their most innovative? And how can leaders foster a culture of innovation?

Paul: It’s funny. You make me think back to the beginning. So in the newspaper route, we had this really large paper route, over 100 customers, and whatever the newspaper is, $1.95 a week for seven days a week, and we had a service that was five bucks. But the difference of it is you could tell us where you want the paper. You want it in the front seat of the car, between the screen door and the door. So this incredible value-add of being able to have your paper where you wanted it. You have to remember, think back to newspapers back in the day. Kids would just throw the paper in the yard, it would go in the sprinklers, the dog would grab it, whatever. So this super value-add. I can’t remember her name, but I got home and we got a call from these two kids of what turned out to be a very elderly mother who’s living on our route, and they said, we heard about your service. Will you deliver the paper anywhere? And I’m like, yep, that’s the deal. You tell me where you want the paper. We’re going to deliver the paper where you want it. Would you be willing to go in the door and bring it in and hand it to our mother? One hundred percent, that would be a privilege, not an obligation. And so, of course, that willingness to add value became like a really special relationship. She would have milk and cookies. I would get things down from the shelf for her. It was just a wonderful relationship, so much so that they gave me a huge college send-off, paid for part of our college because they were just so grateful, because we helped her stay in that house for another seven years on her own, which is what she really wanted to do. So when you think about adding value, I like to think about it like it’s humanistic. Serving is a privilege. And how do you really have an attitude of gratitude about what we’re trying to do, and how do you embed that into the way you go about it? Because I think that’s where you get real breakthroughs, by truly adding value, by trying to do the right thing to help people, by saying, huh, what can we bring to the scenario to try to help really bring something new that adds real value. When people say they can’t add value, I use my newspaper story. Like, dude, if you can add value in a newspaper delivery, I mean, it’s a pretty simple concept, get the newspaper in the general area of the house. Well, there’s a lot you can really do. So I think that’s the challenge. How do you think and go beyond?

Adam: How, as a leader, can you foster an environment that drives that value creation, that drives that innovation?

Paul: Well, leadership is such a difficult thing. Like we were just talking about before, how to become the best version of ourselves. So now the responsibility, and you know, we as parents and as leaders in organizations, for myself, I’m responsible for all these other people. The first rule of thumb is servant leadership. We’re here to help and here to guide. My personal style is all about canvassing and listening, but then, as soon as the canvassing and listening happens, being decisive. Because I think a lot of us can relate to situations where things are just screwed up, can’t make a decision, and the fear of making the wrong decision is sometimes paralyzing for leaders. That’s why things really get screwed up sometimes. So trying to be decisive and then build a team spirit or rallying around that decision. Because when you make decisions as a leader, sometimes people have to contribute more in the grand scale. Like in football, okay, the kicker, he’s got to kick it 63 yards. Man, we didn’t give him a really good shot at this. So his contribution, he’s going to have to bring it and try to get another 15 yards out of this kick. So you don’t just be the kicker and say, I’m not going to try. So the team tried to get it as far down. So this is where, when you lead teams, I think it’s a really tricky thing, and the balance is not only individual contribution and trying to humbly, with privilege, lead the team, but then trying to make the hard decisions. That’s why doing what’s right is such a valuable thing. It becomes a true north, and it becomes a de-complexifier in the way that you try to make decisions and lead things. Leadership is a very, very tricky thing, and you’re smart to talk about it on this podcast, because you want to learn, like, how do other people think about this? So many things get messed up, and oftentimes just good leadership can really provide that clarity and that decisiveness that’s so frequently needed.

Adam: Paul, a key early theme in our conversation is the importance of really focusing on doing what’s right. I think back to the great Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing, and the key takeaway from that movie is sometimes it’s not all that easy to know what the right thing is. When you know what the right thing is, it’s easy to make a call, but when you don’t know what the right thing is, it becomes a lot harder. What advice would you give to leaders? What advice would you give to anyone on how to set up a framework to, number one, understand what is the right thing, and number two, how to do the right thing?

Paul: That’s a great question. The first thing is, yeah, I coached Little League forever, so you have to evaluate the kids and try to help them keep going beyond. The thing that I thought was the most important thing that I read, with a coach that sent a kid to me or when I would send one on, is this thing called coachability. How much can someone really take feedback and try to then make it into something? I played golf recently, and we had a caddy, and on the third hole he’s like, dude, you are so coachable. I said I strive for a 10 on the coachability index. Coachability starts within an individual, a self-awareness of your strengths and weaknesses and being honest with yourself and being true to who you are. So it starts with you as a leader. The second piece is once you can feel comfortable with who you are and being yourself, understanding your strengths and weaknesses and trying to really be coachable as a leader, the next thing is you try to inspire that out of a team. So you try to find and build teams that you can trust, and then try to inspire that out of the team. Each of us is really, really good at some things and really not so good at other things. The hallmark of an unbelievable team is when the magic of it all, the strengths are a weakness for the other, the weakness is a strength for the other, and it is like music. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful thing. So I think the first step is trying to understand, especially as an entrepreneur or someone who is put into leadership roles, who are you? Self-introspection. And then once you realize that, okay, I want to try to go be coached and mentored about the things I’m not so good at, then how do I inspire that in others? I think that’s the hallmark of this. I don’t know how else you do it any other way. You have to know who you are. You have to trust others to know who they are. And then you pick a good vision. It may be wrong, but at least you’re moving in the same direction in the canoe.

Adam: Paul, I love that. Being coachable is one of the most underrated elements of successful leaders, one of the most underrated elements of successful people, and it really ties in so many of the most important principles essential to successful leadership. Self-awareness, humility, listening, trust. You’re not going to be a successful leader if you’re not open to being better, if you’re not open to input from others, if you’re not open to feedback, if you’re not the kind of person who is coachable.

Paul: Yeah, and maybe growing up as a musician, there’s always a conductor. You just see it in their eyes. You just know what they want out of you and what they’re trying to do, and there’s real-time feedback. It seems really obvious to me, growing up so young in this space, but that is not so obvious to a lot of folks. I think athletes get it more than average, but a lot of people didn’t have either one of those experiences. That’s a real difficult thing. The other point I’d add to that is, okay, so you decide you want to be coachable, then how do you approach it? I learned a long time ago from a really good mentor of mine, he said, be careful who you ask the question to. Okay, so I’m really coachable. I’m willing to be open-minded, really be flexible. But then all of a sudden I start asking these questions, and it turns out to be totally the wrong person that you ask the question to. It’s sort of like teenagers in the lunchroom. They just ask, and oh my God, what a complete disaster. Advice that goes to completely the wrong person to get advice on a specific topic. So I think that’s the other part about being coachable that I find really interesting. Because, you know, having watched kids grow up through Little League and watched professionals come together, and my own career too, it’s like, oh my God, what do I think would really benefit me? What kind of perspective would really help sharpen it? And then be clear-minded about, does the person that you’re getting the coaching from bring that sharp thing that you’re missing, that you otherwise aren’t getting that point of view on? Because what you don’t want to do is be a teenager in high school getting advice from completely the wrong thing and then just throwing you into a ditch. So the hard part is figuring out who to ask the question to, and then how do I assemble that and make sense of that?

Adam: It’s a really important point. And when you’re a person who is open to receiving feedback, what’s equally important is to be discerning when it comes to receiving that feedback, recognizing that not all feedback is created equal. That feedback that is coming from someone who really understands how to get you to a place where you can become better is a lot more valuable than feedback from someone who could potentially lead you astray. And it’s really on you as the person receiving that feedback to take a step back and discern who the feedback is coming from and what the feedback is.

Paul: Yeah, that’s why building a team you can trust, understanding who you are, understanding who they are, and then sort of who to try to listen to and make sense of. It’s not any more complicated than that. The only other piece too is careers go by, and there are two kinds of things. You can either try staying in the same job forever, which is cool, that’s never been my thing. I’ve always tended to work myself out of a job or get promoted out of it, because you’re always stretching to try to innovate and add value. It’s just a natural part of the career. So this whole notion that I’m trying to make a change, so I found who I am, I figured how to be coachable, I’m trying to be true to myself, looking to add value, and you’re willing to take the risk. So then how do you build this coalition around who you are, what your vision is, and finding an opportunity so somebody undoubtedly will then give somebody the opportunity and say, hey, I believe in you. We should take a chance. Go try that. Whether it’s a boss in your current job or whether you’re looking around at new things. So the other part too is like, where’s your opportunity to shine? And again, using another musical analogy, in an orchestra or wind ensemble, there’s always someone playing the melody, someone playing the counter, there’s all this stuff in the background. So where are those parts in the arc of the music that let you shine? Where’s the opportunity? Then once you have all those other parts we just talked about, how do you pick your spot? How do you then say, this is a great chance for me to try to add value, be true to myself, step out, be courageous? I got the skill and the will to then try to say, hey, I’m going to swing for the fences and see. So looking for that opportunity, and then trying to say, is everybody else around me going to help me win at that? Because I’m going to be on the team. This idea, how do I go find something different in that? And basically, we kind of make a checklist. This is going to matter, the checklist that you need to hit.

Adam: You mentioned swinging for the fences, and you swung for the fences and you hit the ball out of the park when you and your partners founded Priceline and turned it into one of the most successful companies of all time in the space. How did Priceline come together? How did you and your partners actualize it?

Paul: I was just one of the humble founding team members, right? I was just really, really blessed. And a lot of things we’ve been talking about conceptually is that I know what I really do. I’m really, really good at the human user interface. I’m really good at strategy. I certainly get the concept of understanding how people do things, and in the beginning of the internet, are all the other things we need to win? Do we have it all? Or if we don’t have it all, how do we get it? So this self-awareness, I think it’s just serendipity, finding the right opportunity. I had a great job. It was going extremely well. And then just to come across and meet Jay and the folks within the team that we assembled, you could tell in the very beginning there was something very, very special about the team. And then, of course, being willing to bring others in that are better than you. That was another huge part of the success. Because I think it was the top-performing stock on the NASDAQ when we were there, but over the last 25 years, it’s been one of the best performers of all time, as you said. And that was because we had the courage to bring other people in better than us that brought something new to the table. But so much of what we’ve been talking about is trying to do the right thing. Man, here’s this new thing called the internet, and this crazy idea that we’re going to try to let people save a super amount of money, spend less, improve their lives. How we assembled the brand and the functioning of what Priceline is, is just so miraculous even to this day, about doing the right thing, trying to get a better deal, trying to help producers and suppliers make tens of billions of dollars of incremental profit. That is just serendipity and courage and all the stuff we’ve been talking about. We were just very, very fortunate to have an incredible, incredible team with a fearless leader with Jay, who could see things way before all the rest of us, and then rally around trying to bring that vision to reality. It was pretty interesting. My kids say, this internet thing you guys started turns out to be really cool. And yeah, thanks, guys. But you know, you think about all the people’s lives that got changed for the better with what the internet created, and then yeah, you think of where we are with AI and technology. It’s so exciting to see the goodness that’s going to come out of all this. I think the effect of AI is going to make the internet, frankly, look small, hard as it is to believe. But it was a right time, right spot, and a team that was really good at figuring each other out. Then we had some knee-scrapers the whole time. Sure, it was not a smooth ride by any stretch, but people were focused, and everybody knew we had a great team around us.

Adam: You were the Chief Marketing Officer of Priceline. What are your best tips on the topic of marketing?

Paul: So much. We could have a whole session just on marketing. This is kind of like a subject near and dear. If I had to pick one thing, and this is going to seem obvious, but it’s very hard, is to create a one-size-fits-all thing anymore. When you think about what we did with Priceline, creating this brand that meant I could be smart by saving money, that I could actually improve the quality of my life by spending less. When you think about that, it could have gone so many different directions. To me, that’s a big brand moment. That’s why Priceline has endured. The brand promise still lives to this day. I think that’s really, really hard to do nowadays. How do you really create a brand like that that fundamentally changes things for the better? So I think you have to be very, very pinpointed. Marketing now is all about understanding need states, because there’s so much access to people, and there’s just an incredible number of ways to get to the same pair of eyeballs. So how do you relate? How do you target? How do you understand what that individual set of lookalike customers needs and wants? I think that’s the nirvana. I think that’s what’s going to be the big revolution in AI, the whole idea of being able to personalize my way of doing me and my way of doing life in a way that just makes me fundamentally a better person. But there’s not going to be, I don’t think, a one-size-fits-all. It’s going to be hard to create brands like that. Not that it was easy then, because it was very, very difficult then, but it’s really hard now because the world is so fragmented. So targeting, you have to be a good marketing person, all the things we talked about, having a product that does the right thing, and then figuring out how to get the message in front of the eyeballs to the right person at the right time.

Adam: With all due respect, Paul, when people think about Priceline and marketing and branding, the first person who they think of isn’t you. The first person who they think of is, you know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Paul: Oh, I know exactly where you’re going.

Adam: Can you talk a little bit about the magic behind William Shatner and Priceline and how that all came together?

Paul: First, I want to say Shatner is an extraordinary human being. We ended up with Shatner, I don’t know whether he actually even knows this, but here’s this, we ended up with Shatner because Bill Cosby turned me down.

Adam: Wow. Talk about serendipity.

Paul: I chalked it up to 20 years of being an acolyte in church. Shatner was fully retired when we met him. It was a process to get to him, friends of friends of friends of friends. He was such and, still is, an amazing storyteller. And what was so cool about working with him is we wrote every word, with a bunch of us, for years that came out of his mouth. And what was so exciting about it is his ability to transfer the humanistic energy of the new world and of the new way of doing things. I think Shatner gave us, and humanity, a gift because he could help fearlessly lead us by telling the stories. Now, of course, we had to help him tell the stories. We had to create the construct of the marketing and what we were all about. But we started with radio and print, and then it wasn’t for a while that we moved to TV, because we couldn’t afford TV in the beginning of Priceline. He was an unbelievable storyteller, and he could do it in a way that allowed us to say, I’m going to follow this guy. You can see even just his Super Bowl commercials recently, he still has it. I think we should all hope that we still have it just as much as William Shatner does. Now, that’s a true gift. And so again, remember we talked about this team, trusting in yourself, trying to do the right thing, especially when it came to not really working out very well with Cosby. Like, yeah, Jay, I don’t think this is going to work out, and I don’t even think we want it to work out. This doesn’t look like it’s going to go well. But then having to convince Shatner and all his people was not easy. He was retired. He had done really well, but his whole career got reborn, and I feel very proud of that, because I think he had a lot still to give. He still has a lot to give to us. But yeah, he’s an exceptional human being. We are all still grateful. I think all of us in the world should be grateful that the internet became a cool thing, really in part because we had the creativity and the courage to try to bring him on to help us tell the story, because it gave everybody faith that, oh, maybe I should try this. Maybe this should be part of who I am, this internet thing.

Adam: And you were really on the front line of that internet thing, and today you’re on the front line of this thing that we call AI. What should leaders understand about AI? What is your best advice for leaders on how to most effectively utilize AI?

Paul: Yeah, that’s a really good question, and that’s an important question, because remember how you ask that is very important. In the beginning of the internet, the vast majority of people thought this internet thing is not for me, it’s for the young kids or whatever. Now, how long were they wrong? The internet turned out to be critical for everybody across all dimensions, in every direction. So I think the difference now with AI is people say, oh my God, this is going to be really important. And the truth is, it is going to be existentially important to leverage artificial intelligence. Like when I was building computers back when we had my paper route, getting computers to do stuff. I think the first rule of thumb leaders need to know about AI is that everybody knows ChatGPT and large language models. They have Claude, Anthropic, and whatnot. There is a very large world outside of large language models that is AI that the vast majority of people don’t focus on. When you think about what made Priceline so incredibly successful decades ago, it was data and math in real time to make a prediction, to make a decision about what would happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and matching supply and demand. That’s what is the magic behind what Priceline is. And when you think about that, what we did at Priceline and how at R4 we’re now applying this predictive AI capability, this ability to drive optimization of what will happen tomorrow, this yield out of data thing, I think this is the big untapped promise of AI. And I think we’re literally just at the beginning. Now, R4 was named by our head of data science who was with me, and it actually stands for right product, right consumer, right time, right price, and it’s actually R to the fourth, which means that in the golden age, revenues can go up while costs go down if you can be right on all these dimensions. And that’s the beautiful thing about math and data now. But our vision was to build it into a technology platform that did not require any data scientists. I’m just going to let that thought settle, because that is a gargantuan thought. To do something so complicated and to make it available to all the rest of us, non-technical people, that how do I leverage this capability to try to drive optimized predictive decisions? And it’s turning out that this is an incredibly great place to be, because first of all, you think about all the things we’re doing with it. We’re using the AI technology now to find, it turns out that 30 to 40 percent of all the food we produce in the US is wasted. Meaning from the beginning when it’s planted in the ground to the whole distribution system, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of food that we grow, we spend the money, and then nobody eats it. And we’re using the AI technology to find that 40 percent activity, wasted food, and then match it to the food stamp SNAP EBT customer, so the $300 we’re giving them buys $600. So it goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning of this, right? It’s like the idea of trying to do what’s right. So when you look at what we’re doing now in national security and defense and in food, and literally trying to take this incredible capability and apply it in meaningful spaces, that’s what R4’s DNA is. And you can see, by the way, we’ve tried to do the right thing. That’s, I think, the really big idea. And what’s neat about that is you start to find people who’ve always known a problem. And that’s what turns them out. You get to know people who talk about, I’ve always had this idea that you could solve this problem. Why do we have this problem? How is it that we can have a situation in the country where we have hundreds of billions of dollars of food, enough to feed everybody twice, if we throw it out, and yet we have all these hungry people? How is that possible? So there are these other problems that, I think again, being courageous, willing to step out, make a career change, jump into the AI world. How do we shape using technology to actually really solve and make our country better and the world better? That’s what R4 is all about. But yeah, it’s not that much different stylistically than the internet. When you think back to it, try to make a difference. Think differently.

Adam: Paul, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful, personally and professionally?

Paul: I think a lot of us grew up, me probably most important, in a kind of not the greatest school system. You get told, yeah. And I think the first thing you say is like, okay, I want to be more successful. Okay, so then you have a goal. That’s awesome. So then this determination, this will, is different than the skill that I’m going to keep going, and that’s a very, very hard thing, because it is easy to get depressed if something doesn’t go well. But that’s why, as we go back to the things we just talked about before, am I getting good coaching? Do I have the right team around me? Are the conditions set the best they possibly can be? But I think this notion of trying to be whatever your definition of successful is, a lot of people think it’s making money. My definition of success is really trying to make the world better, to try to really add value, to change for the better people’s lives. But to me, it’s all about the will part, the determination. And that’s going to require a little bit of competitiveness. But I like to think if you can be competitive and still be a really, really good person, just outwork, outthink, outsmart. That, to me, is, I think, the missing ingredient, because nowadays there are so many skills you can go learn, and you and I could go learn whatever coding language we want over lunch. So now it’s about the will.

Adam: You brought up an interesting line. You can be competitive and still be a good person. They’re not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, being competitive means that you want to be the best. You want to get the most out of yourself. So much of being competitive is that drive to be your very best, that drive to optimize your potential. And if you want to do the right thing, if you want to contribute as much as you can, if you want to leave a legacy, it really starts with being your best self. It really starts with figuring out how can I get to a place where I am going to get the most out of my abilities?

Paul: Yeah, that’s so well said. I’m now going to talk to kids for a second. A lot of kids, especially with social media, and now it drives me nuts, they just get so beaten up. You have to believe in yourself. God puts you on this planet for a reason. You’re not a mistake. You are loved. You add value. You may have to figure out what that means. But how many times do you bump into these kids that are starting from such a position of deficit, whether from the lack of an environment, either home or school, that we all had, but we still managed to make it through. But then the social media aspect just tells you, hey, you suck, you suck, you suck. I’m like, you don’t suck. You may think I suck, but that doesn’t mean I suck. I say this to the kids because it’s like the lemming effect. The pressures. I’m not good at something, or I’m not good at whatever you think I should be good at, is a pressure. I got to go chase that dream. Be true to yourself. Be who you are. And then I think the other part, the attitude of gratitude, the servant leader, this is a privilege. And that, I think, is a very releasing thought for young kids trying to figure it out. Because, and I know this for a fact, we were always the last draft pick in Little League. We were barrel scraping for kids, because there’s a kid that didn’t even know anything about baseball. And despite that, in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, we were in the championship game all three years, and we won it twice. So what does that tell you in life? You don’t have to be the number one draft pick, the coolest kid on the block. If you really work like a team and understand what you’re good at, what you’re not so good at, I think that’s really true. So I think this notion starts with you have to believe in yourself, and you can’t let people get you down. There are going to be a lot of haters in life. There are believers and non-believers in everything. Your job as a person is to be ruthless in getting rid of the non-believers and look for the believers, and then try to go surround yourself with other people who have the same point of view that complement the skills. And so I say that to the kids because I think it’s really hard now with social media, the ungodly amount of undue pressure that’s not real. It’s like this digital media, online social media pressure that doesn’t make any sense. And that’s where I think you have to go back and really do the self-discovery, who you are, what you’re all about. For the kids coming through this, that is, I think, the only way to do it. You almost have to turn the social media stuff off. And if someone’s telling you that you suck at something, hey, thanks for the feedback. Remember, be careful who you ask the question to.

Adam: Be careful who you ask the question to, and have enough confidence in yourself to be able to discern where the information is coming from. Have enough confidence in yourself to recognize that, you know what, I might not be good at this, I might not be good at that, I might not be the best baseball player. I was the captain of my baseball team in high school, and I was not the best baseball player. I struggled hitting a baseball. But I wasn’t the captain of my baseball team because I was a good baseball player. I was the captain of my baseball team because I was good at other things. What are you good at? What are you great at? Get on the journey to uncovering and unleashing that. That’s what it’s all about, 100%.

Paul: And you’re probably the captain of the team because leadership, inspiring others, getting other people to believe in themselves, those are hard things to do. So you don’t have to be the best player. And oftentimes that’s the definition of a good leader. By the way, you aren’t necessarily the best at any of it. You’re willing to go inspire the greatness out of others. So that is a very good example, and a good captain, like I’m sure you were, would also give credit to the rest of the team for pulling rabbits out of the hat, because that’s what it takes to win teams.

Adam: We didn’t win many games. There weren’t many rabbits out of the hat. There wasn’t much credit to give. But in theory, yes. But unfortunately, we did a lot of losing. Yeah.

Paul: Well, there’s nothing wrong with that either. It builds character. Man, you got to learn how to lose, get back up, show up to the next game. It’s a good life lesson. Nothing wrong with that.

Adam: I love it. Paul, thank you for the fun conversation. Thank you for all of the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Paul: Yeah, Adam, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation, and thank you for what you’re doing, trying to inspire people, because there’s a lot to get done. So let’s go off and make it happen.