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Mark explores the minds of visionary entrepreneurs who refuse to limit themselves to a single venture to learn how these trailblazers manage risks, innovate across industries, and turn ideas into impact.
Whether you’re scaling your first business or juggling several, this podcast is your ultimate guide to thriving as a parallel entrepreneur.
and I have come to adopt a pretty strong belief that
that learning how to
not just build software with these agents
but learning how to manage agents
both personal and professional use cases
is the most essential skill to learn for
every working adult in the world
instantaneously Claude
knows everything about every aspect of my business
and so in a in a way
it's like the most incredible board member or advisor
the middle manager layer is is gonna be gone
I think it's gonna be gone
and um
we've had almost 6,000 students go through the program
and we just had our seventh student win a Grammy
Spencer welcome to the Parallel Entrepreneur
so the Parallel Entrepreneur is all about
celebrating the messy beautiful
art of doing more than one thing at the same time
and investing your passions where they belong
where they wanna go and bringing things to life
and it manifested for me in owning
owning more than one company at the same time yeah
that's parallel entrepreneurship and uh
for you
we're gonna have a great
great conversation exploring your background
and when I when I look at your career
from music to software to education and to AI
it feels like there isn't a common thread
running through it until you
until you think well
hey Spencer what's the common thread
I think that the
I think that the common thread is curiosity
and learning
I think that that's the fundamental through line that
that everything that I've ever started um
it is rooted in I'm just naturally curious and I
I want to figure things out and as I figure things out
I think the natural next step for people is to
is to then pass that along and teach it to people and
and you can build businesses around that
teaching process and yeah
I think being curious unlocks
all sorts of opportunity to build
and create value in the world
so you're the CEO of a company called Sonora
yeah and the mission is to educate and bring uh
the power of the student forward right
would you talk talk to us about what Sonora is
yeah we're a modern music institution
so we've taken
what most people would do in an undergraduate degree
in four years and condensed it down to something that
a student can complete in six to 12 months
of focus study
we think about it through this lens of accelerated
learning so
taking principles from the neuroscience of learning
and adapting it to music
and allowing the student to progress through um
this curriculum really rapidly
we believe in hybrid learning
which is kind of
a combination of software based learning
but then also one on one direct mentorship
and we've been in operation for the last
almost eight years seven and a half years right now
and we've had
almost 6,000 students go through the program
and we just had our seventh student win a Grammy
seven Grammy Awards yeah
that's that's spectacular
yeah and you have Grammy Award winning teachers as well
yeah yeah
our our faculty
they've all taught at top institutions
and played with some of the best artists in the world
and yeah so we've
we've made a really solid team of people
who really know how to do
this stuff and
and as far as I'm aware
and I know the space pretty well
we're the most forward thinking music
institution on the internet
and we're not for everyone
but for people who kind of want this like
serious path
and are aiming to attain fluency
and be really creatively
expressive on their instrument
we're we're the best game in town
creatively expressive I like that
um the student experience at Sonora is what
student experience yeah
um it's a combination of a few different things
so there's software
my background's in in software engineering
um and so
there's software that models the student's memory
helps them understand
you know what they should be learning next
what they're about to forget
based on their own forgetting curve
so we power space repetition
then there's one on one
direct mentorship that happens on a daily basis
and there's group classes that people attend
we have a uh
we have a curriculum that we run them through
which is essentially equivalent to
what a student would learn in an undergraduate
education
so it covers all the same materials you'd learn at
if you went to you know
guitar
or you were a guitar major at Berklee College of music
or something like this um
and so yeah we kind of try and hit it from all angles
it's remote so you don't study in person
but we find that for a lot of the fun
fundamental mechanics of the instrument
it's actually learning online has a lot of advantages
because software can kind of harness the person into
a certain path it can
it can handle these things like spaced repetition
the delivery vehicle is more easily consumed um
and uh it's just more like or organized better
better pacing so it's really fun yeah
in the comment section
there's gonna be a lot of resources
that people are gonna
wanna click through and learn more
but tell us what a Sonic Sphere is
and why did it capture your attention
yeah
so the Sonic Sphere is a project that was developed
sort of a co living castle just outside of Paris
France that I spent a bunch of time at
it was initially developed by a man named Ed Cook
who is like a memory champion
really interesting amazing person and uh
he wanted to have a spherical concert hall
where he could experience the wonders of music uh
spatially and basically sit in
he wanted the vision was
I wanna sit in a net and have speakers
coming from all directions
from below me above me from all sides uh
and then I want spatial audio
and just be able to bask in the glory of it
and um there have been uh
11 iterations of this sphere
and they've gotten progressively larger each time
the first one was the size of a of a bedroom uh
and then you know sort of got progressively larger
there's a sphere still at
in France
that holds about 30 people inside of it in a giant net
um and then we brought one to Burning Man
it was a fairly large sphere
and then the biggest one that was created was um
it was stored in in the shed at in Manhattan
which is the largest indoor
one of the largest indoor art exhibition spaces
in Manhattan and it was a
a megasphere that holds somewhere around
like 200 people inside of it huge
massive sphere in a massive production and um
you know millions of dollars went into the sphere and
and we had some amazing artists play
play in it and um
and I built a bunch of
music experiences for the sphere
and have been um yeah
she's kind of like involved as a
as a creative in that project
for the last couple years
so you studied music at UCLA
yeah at the musicology practice there uh
and for thousands of hours
like most musicians you just kept on
until you owned the instrument at some level and then
I think after like
two decades of traditional music approach
you found yourself stuck yeah
what did that feel like and how did you get unstuck
yeah I think there are uh
with any skill so I'll speak more broadly
but this happens in music
but also happens in any other like
skill acquisition path
be at languages or learning about business
or learning about any any skill
there's massive gains from 0 to 60% capability um
you just make massive leaps and strides
it's the most exciting time of of
of learning a skill is is the beginning stages um
it can be frustrating but it's also just like
every day your skill set is changing um
so uh
then you get to the intermediate
what I call the intermediate plateau where the
the incremental gains just um
they just slow down a lot and and
and it it can be a year of like basically no progress
even though you're still putting in work and
like working on the craft
it can feel like you're basically spinning your wheels
and um
this exists in yeah
most most domains within the sphere of guitar um
everyone gets stuck at this level
where they learn their open chords
their bar chords
pentatonic scale and then they sort of most
90% of guitar players out there
just kind of stop there that's the intermediate plateau
you can kind of sound okay to the
you can be good at a party
yeah right
campfire guitar player kind of thing beyond that
there's obviously many many
many levels to the game
and there are true masters of this craft
that are stratospheric in their
in their capability and their
their ability to translate the ideas in their head
immediately to the instrument
seamlessly with you know with
with no impedance and um
and a lot of that has to do
with kind of circling back to the fundamentals
so it's it's sort of like um
people learning to cook is a good analogy
it's like you can go you know
use recipes and that that'll get you
you know
pretty far you can sort of like fake being a chef
so to speak
but if you want to actually become a great chef
you have to learn the fundamentals
you have to actually learn the principles of cooking
and and combining ingredients and the chemistry of of
you know what it takes to to actually be inventive
and so the same is true in music
in order to break past the intermediate plateau
fundamental principles so scales
diads triads
arpeggios seventh chords
inversions like how does the actual instrument map
and then how do you then apply that fundamental
architecture to all different styles
because all world music styles and I've spent
um as maybe we'll dig into spent five years yeah
just nomadic
traveling from country to country every three months
studying so many different types of world music
but the common thread through that
is that the principles of music are the same
the only difference is the rhythm changes
and the idiomatic phrasing change
changes so
like
the way that they express melody changes regionally
but the but the principles of how
how harmony functions is relatively the same
with a few exceptions that tend to happen in East Asia
so you found yourself stuck yeah
you described what that felt like
you were just not making progress
and that it's a common experience
the most the most common experience maybe and then you
a lot of people struggle with getting out of that place
yeah that
it's not necessarily common that people get unstuck
right they're stuck yeah
how did you get unstuck I just great teacher
I found a great teacher this woman named Ayla Cantor um
who was yeah
just had a really clear path and good pedagogy and
and sort of
helped me move through that path really smoothly
and then at the time
I was working as a software engineer uh
I was there was a position called a product engineering
leader at Patreon
so I was holding down that role
helping to build the growth team and um
on the side
I would work on little software projects to help
help me with my hobbies
and so I built some software around her path
that was basically
the first version of the Sonora software
um and it was a spaced repetition
app that you could plug exercises into
and it would kind of develop practice plans for you
and tell you what to do each day and
and then keep track of the things that were likely to
like leave my memory and then
you know sort of resurface them
and it would just send me emails like here's your
here's your practice plan for today and um
and then I
would sort of check things off in a little Google form
and then that would be the
that was the interaction um
and it it worked like it
you know
within a matter of about a year of study with her
I broke through that plateau and of course
there are more plateaus
beyond the intermediate plateau that
that happened and I'm on one right now that's
that's gonna last a few years
cause the incremental gains are just so small
it's more about repertoire but um
but there's the biggest
the biggest one is this intermediate plateau
cause on the on
on the other side of the intermediate plateau
is a profound level of expressiveness
where you can really
um be dynamic in any musical setting before that it's
it's very clunky so uh
most people need to get get over this hump uh
and so anyway we went uh
from from that initial sort of study with her
and building the software
about a year after that um
friends started basically asking for hey
can I do that thing that you did with the software
and blah blah
blah
and it was just sort of started as like a side project
just for fun and then it
you know those friends started telling other friends
and then
we sort of ran out of capacity to help students um
so I had to hire a a teacher and I um
I I happen to be taking some
some extra lessons from this guy on Instagram
who's kind of an influencer
and I was like hey
do you wanna teach some extra students
I got I got students coming through this thing
and we're kind of developing this
this like little pet project
and then that turned into more students
and then it turned into even more students
and the pandemic happened
and then we had all these amazing musicians uh
on staff who needed consistent work
so we had to build like a marketing function
like a proper marketing function and
and like an admissions function and
and then fast forward to now and now it's you know
a pretty large team and um
and yeah it was sort of like an accidental business
yeah but
but but coming from the uh
and I think I think this is also like a
a thread that feels important
which is like the a lot of people think like
I wanna start a business what business should I start
um but I think actually the
the world sort of invites a business out of you
when the time is right
it's like the same is true with pioneer species
like I didn't
I'm not intending to start a business here
but enough friends at this event that we that we uh
that we did over the New Year enough friends were like
teach me about everything you're doing with AI
and I was like OK
cool and I organize it
and now it's now it's like a company
and then it requires no marketing
cause those friends tell more friends
and like every cohort is filling with like friends
basically
or friends of friends and so
the world recognizes
you as a person who knows a thing about a thing
and then they want to learn from you
and then suddenly you're doing that thing
and I I like that most successful businesses or
or entrepreneurs solve a problem that they have
that they understand yeah
and that happens to solve problems for other people
and I think this sort of rote approach to
I'm gonna do this and my my Tam is this and right
you know it's it it's
it's an exercise that is good to have familiarity with
but it is not the heart and soul
it's not what a culture is built on right
a culture is built on your passion for music
and I think awesome also teaching like
what have you Learned about how humans learn
that has impacted your business and your
your life your lived experience yeah
so many things
I think that obviously there's a bunch of there
there are a bunch of principles and cool
techniques for sequencing content
and making sure that pads are digestible
and pedagogy is strong um
that's a whole field of study that's fascinating and
and and um
and useful but I think the biggest
thing that prevents most people from learning
complex skills like music or
business or engineering is um
is just the motivation wheel
so how do you actually get the motivation wheel running
um so that there's enough of a carrot
with each incremental step
that's pulling you to the next step right
how do you
how do you basically embed wins into the process
so that
while you're learning this very challenging thing
that
forces you to confront all sorts of limiting beliefs
and and uh
difficulty in yourself
how do you make it so that along with that adversity
you're also getting little treats of like wins
basically so I think
I think good educators have ways of embedding
those wins uh
in in the learning path
um and yeah
I think I think that's
I think that's one of the main things
I call those little victories
yeah I like to open up a meeting with hey
what's your little victory
and everybody has to find one
you gotta come to the meeting with a little victory
even if you you know
most of us think that a victory has to be big
and in fact they're just um
stringing together a whole bunch of small progress
right yeah yeah
I um
was enchanted with the sphere
we're gonna talk about that again in a minute
but yeah um
and because of our conversation
you'd like change how I thought about music
how I thought about experiencing music
and then you invited me to on Poco de planning
which yeah um
I'm gonna throw this out as a softball
first of all you could describe what it is
but I'm gonna
I'm gonna talk a little bit about how it was
to experience it yeah
great and uh
I'm so curious and this is something that you've done
a couple of years in a row
you invited my wife
Jenny and I and a number of our common friends
and then about 40 45 people that I did not know yeah
um um
creatives entrepreneurs from all over the world
and we went to Mexico City for a 2025 review
and a 2026 visioning exercise
that lasted a week yeah
and I I think it's notable to start with
most of us set goals aren't committed to them we
we might be clear enough to set intentions and
and that's better yeah
and then we put things in motion
but we didn't actually give it a week or in this case
two weeks total um
to really reflect and simmer and sort through
how would I be motivated and how would
how could I marinate on this idea
and then get committed to it yeah
so that was that was a piece of my experience
why did you create um
Pocahontas planning and what was your experience there
and what do you want people to know about it
um well
I love I love organizing my life and thinking about
thinking about what it would look like to
to paint a vision for my ideal future
and think about my contribution in the world and
and I like to have structure around it
and I've been doing it since I was
in my very early 20s like thinking about okay
life kind of has these like 5 to 7 categories
what are my like
main objectives for some period of time
in those categories and how can I
how can I kind of be intentional about
you know choosing my future rather than just like being
being subject to the whims of the world
or other people's intentions for my life
and um
there for a few years I uh
was in this accountability group called the team
Horrific Accountability Buddies uh
which was Accountability Buddies
Accountability Buddies yep
and uh
and so we would um you know
we would meet every single week
and hold each other accountable
and then we would do these little retreats where we'd
like fly to Thailand and do these sort of intensive um
uh annual planning and reflection things
and so I loved the model
and I just kind of continued doing it
that group phased out um
but a couple of years ago oh
and then I've also attended other people's like
New Year's planning thing
so I you know
I vibe with people who are like
into this intentionality around
around annual planning
and so a couple years ago my friend uh
my friends Marcus and Carter
uh were like hey
we're thinking about gathering another group
and I was like awesome
let me get involved and
and we organized that a couple years ago
uh for a smaller group
12 people and then this this last year um
you know sort of organized a larger group and
and took everyone to Mexico City and uh
and then thought a lot about how to structure
an event like that like how do you
how do you actually get 40 people on the same page
with different different intentions
different visions to think about the last year
think about you know
a 10 year vision for themselves
what what's their
what's their long term outcome that they're aiming
towards and then how do they get sort of tactical about
um the next
the next year and the next quarter and
and then um
and then also
there's just so much cross pollination that happens
like in these groups where
you know
obviously the folks that were at this event are just so
so inspiring on so many different levels
there were people who were very left brain
very right brain uh
a mix of both and
and so when you get everyone into uh
one place and they they
you know some of the most magical moments happen
outside of the programming and
and uh
just kind of
seeing how other people operate in the world
and what's inspiring to them and
and then um
yeah it's just
it's a really powerful container and I also think it's
it's a nice heartbeat for a community and I'm
I really especially as I get older
the value of like creating cohesive
community over long periods of time is really
important to me um
so it's and it's
I think it's such a vulnerable space to be in
that it creates these really deep bonds with
with the whole crew
because you really get to understand who's this person
at a fundamental level what are their values
what's their vision and uh
you get to learn from them and then
you know
you really get to form these relationships that last
forever you know yeah
you're building community intentionally right
um
the music community the musicians are a community and
and and here you've got um
people who are planning a life pivot or uh
extension it was
it was all the above yeah
and and the community was beautiful um
I Learned so much I uh
I my wife Jenny and I actually started
this process with um
well we're going to Mexico City
that'll be great yeah
and we tried to leave our expectations behind
so that we could just experience yeah
the process and um
you talked about left brain
right brain some of those structures
like I really gravitate towards
Spencer's organizational principles
for getting shit done yeah
you know yeah
and uh
I also really appreciated people being vulnerable about
their fears and yeah
uh you know
what's holding them back and talking
about what's holding you back
yeah um
this this experience LED
Jenny and I to commit
to building a new company together
and the motivation was we looked in our relationship
and found that we were happiest
we were extremely successful
feeling when we were collaborating yeah
and it didn't really matter
what we were collaborating on yeah
so we said well
how can we collaborate
on bringing something creative to life
yeah
and so I have this background in textiles for swiftwick
um she has this overall that everybody says is awesome
and she wears it you know
it's the only pair of overalls in her wardrobe
and she's wearing it and
and even the people at um
Poco de planning were um
reinforcing and supporting like that's really cool
where did you get that
and the answer is you can't get that anywhere right
so we decided to create happy overall
my friend Brandon shared a piece of advice recently
dress so that
if someone dressed up as you for a costume party
everyone would know it was you
now that's not entirely about clothing
that's about identity about showing up fully
my wife Jenny and I are leaning in on this concept
both in our personal lives and now in a little startup
we call happy overall we're making overalls
each one is made to order as a wearable canvas for art
overalls that are comfortable
durable and expressive
we're sourcing soft 100% cotton
we're partnering with
designers and with local seamstresses
who love the artistry of a well crafted
piece of clothing
we're launching in summer of 26
so check out happy overall.com
to see pics and see if anything resonates with you
fully you
and it'll happen every time you reach for them
if you want to be part of the first run
join our waitlist at happy overall.com
and there was this conversion
so I'm speaking as like an experiencer of that
where you got to commit
yeah I think that there's I love that question
I think I love seeing someone who's like
I have an inkling that this
idea is gonna feel really good for me to execute on
but I've got all of these like um
doubts about is it is it gonna be a good idea
is it gonna work am I the right person to do this thing
um is it is it just like a pie in the sky
like too ambitious blah blah blah blah
um I don't think you suffer from that
I think that you
you know that you can execute but a lot of people um
on on at all levels I have this like
doubting voice in the back of their head
that prevents them from taking a step
like that and it's cool to surround
surround yourself in community
where everyone sort of like
uh
it actually is quite possible
it's quite doable and here's how you would do it
in fact like you've got demand right here
like you got a bunch of people who want the thing um
do it and then
there's a light switch that turns on for people of like
oh actually if I
if I just commit to doing these things
and I see the first three steps
I can do that
that's realistic and it becomes much more plausible
and then suddenly action comes out of that
I think about last year my friend Connie
uh
she was she was at the the
the New Year's planning event and she was like
I really want to
I'm really good with words and I'm really
you know I have this artistic vision for this thing
where I interview people and then I paint
their bodies with some of the words that they have said
in this interview that's
that's really meaningful and take photos
but I have no idea how to do photography or like
it just seems like it like I
there's no way I'm gonna do this thing
and literally within a month of
of the the planning event
she had done it she had organized 12 shoots
12 interviews and 12 shoots
she had this whole art gallery piece essentially
and then she was presenting in Mexico City
ironically at Zona Maco by February
uh you know
a month after she had set this intention
with no idea how she was gonna accomplish it
she was like an artist
a gallery to artist a month later
and it's just the power of this intention and
and also the galvanizing of the people around you
who are like you know
in the room we're like
how could you do it well
you need some lights
you need someone to take the photos
you need a model to to interview and
and paint
and there were people in the room who were like
I've got lights I've got a camera
I'll be your model you know
it was just like it all came together
and next week they had a shoot
and then suddenly it was like a project right
um it's just really cool to see things manifest so
so quickly and easily and
and I think community does a lot of that right yeah
Parallel Entrepreneur started as a
an exploration of my
seemingly inability to focus on any one thing
for a 25 year career and get a watch yeah
you know
um I
I know a lot of entrepreneurs who
focus on one thing for a long time and
and we read a lot of books that say
you know 80
20 rule do one thing
sure and I
I I just don't think that is
resonates with me that's all yeah
it's not the model for everybody no
yeah I
I feel like there's some wisdom in this
parallel entrepreneurship
and there's also some challenges
and you you
you speak about it in your writings as generalism
yeah um
talk talk to me about that
yeah generalism is basically this
it's a perspective that most domains have have overlap
I mean we
we know about this from like the Renaissance era
like
there's such a thing as like the Renaissance person
and it's it's this
it's this idea that if you learn
a lot of things across a lot of domains
they have applicability in adjacent domains so
um
uh a really great example
one of my one of my favorite examples who I
I recently had on my podcast
Jack Conty um
is an amazing CEO of patron and um
and also an amazing band leader
and he's really good at running this company
which also makes him very good at running the band
and there's just like this immediate
obvious crossover of you know
you know study in this other domain
turns out it makes you really
really um
capable in this other domain
and so instead of feeling like
having a lot of interest and being uh
you know quote unquote scattered is a bad thing
it actually is uh
following that
curiosity will have all of these downstream
compounding effects because
of the way that subject matters
tend to be complementary
which is Charlie Munger was a lot
had had a lot of ideas around this
or has a lot of ideas around this
where he's got these
like the hundred mental models idea
where if you learn the
like primary mental models from all of the primary
disciplines biology
physics
you know statistics
all of these things
they although they exist within these specific domains
they are broadly applicable to all things in life
if you learn the 100 most common mental models
you can be really successful in life
as long as you internalize them
because they are these generalizable tools for
for life and I
I feel that way uh yeah
so most people talk themselves out
you were speaking about to to this earlier
most people talk themselves out of the business idea
yeah or it doesn't mean you're starting a business
it could just be a creative project
but for one reason or another
we talk ourselves out yeah
and when we got in community
we were reinforcing plus the right brain
the right brain
and the left brain person were each helping each other
right through these breakout sessions yeah
and I think a superpower for a parallel entrepreneur is
um not believing that
you start the answer to the question with no
I can't right exactly yeah
the answer to the question is let's find out
you know yeah
I also think that I also think that there is
something about generalism that creates agency
and I think that entrepreneurship is all about agency
I see a problem in the world
I want to fix it how quickly can I go from
from a desire to fix the problem to a solution
and it's very hard to do that
if you don't have a pretty broad array of skill sets
and so for me for instance
I I grew up a computer nerd so I
I loved making websites and coding since I was a kid um
and whenever I see a problem
I I very quickly moved to okay
well how can I use software to solve this for myself
uh or for other people
and so that skill set strapped on sort of has this
has this immediate agency component
which is
not that I'm gonna go monetize my skill as an engineer
but I can use this skill to build a
solution that I'm looking for
and then as you build companies
as you know
you end up having to strap on all these other skills
cause there's no one else there with you
until you've got the money for it yeah
so you learn accounting
you learn how to manage uh a team
you learn how to run a good sales process
you run you learn how to run Facebook ads
if that's what you're doing
you learn how fulfillment works
how to how to actually manage high quality uh
service for for your customers and
and so you you just have to like bolt these things on
and then you realize that all of those skills
though they are disparate skills and
and require different parts of your brain um
they are generalizable in and of themselves
and you can take those same components and then
apply them to every possible type of business
and you turns out you
everything in life is kind of a business
so you can then do basically anything yeah
basically anything you studied Chinese right
and then you've become fascinated by the
process of language learning
you even talk about a guitar as a language yeah
um how does the uh
how does language acquisition
factor into these skill sets that you're talking about
they're they're identical
especially kinesthetic skills
so I I kind of bifurcate learning into maybe this is
maybe it's it's there's
there's more gradient to to this
but you can kind of think of things as like
cognitive skills and kinesthetic skills
like embodied skills like languages and
and instruments versus cognitive skills
which are things like math and science
now
obviously kinesthetic skills have a cognitive component
but
but um
they all have a very similar learning mechanic
which is
you have a set of information that you need to memorize
um and then you need to figure out how to uh
turn that memorize stuff into into immediacy
so like uh
make the the information intuitive
uh uh
quickly so it's so for for
for instance uh
it's one thing to learn a scale
I can sit down and teach you the G
major scale on guitar and you'll sort of learn it
wrote it'll take a couple of days to get in your hands
and then um
then how do we take that skill and
and and
turn it into something that you can actually express
with it's a very different learning mechanic
there's a different step in the phase in the process to
to go from initial memorization to to implementation
the same is true in languages
I can teach you a bunch of vocab and
and throw it at you
but um it's not that useful if you don't know
you know how to structure sentences
and then how to pull those words um
into your working memory very quickly and and uh
and then use it in conversation
and know which version of this word to use
in a certain conversation
to imply the right um uh
feeling to the listener but yeah
a lot of the learning mechanics are the same
spaced repetition being one of the most useful ones
but also sequencing
like how to how to deconstruct skills
isolate the most high frequency
um high value vocabulary
grammar techniques and then sequence it
so that the next thing you're learning
is built on the last thing
and not you're not sort of like
randomly taking things from the tree and trying to like
digest it because the brain doesn't
have anything to associate it with yeah
I love the way that you self program and as a CEO
you're the leader
trying to train and develop a culture
trying to train and develop a business
trying to make sure that customers are
received in a way that
is consistent with your business mission vision values
and I I wonder
I don't
I don't think we all think enough about training
about the outcome that we're looking for
it seems to seems to apply
if I wanna my outcome is to
I wanna be a virtuoso yeah
um then I can embody that
but my outcome might be
I just wanna be a really great customer
service manager or a really great um
problem solver in a business
and these things that you're describing
are the building blocks and mechanics
of teaching people how to learn
yeah the fundamental principle
I think with a lot of this stuff is um
this you know
this theory of constraints idea um
like in a in a
in a business if we want to grow
we always have to direct our attention to the
the biggest constraint so not like uh
what is someone else telling me
I should do with my business
but actually look at the business
understand
what the throughput metrics are for the business
and where the biggest constraint is
and then try and understand
you know what's causing that constraint
and then come up with some hypotheses for how we might
unlock that constraint and then test it
see how it works and then if it
if it does work then
you know the constraint is gone
we focus on the next constraint
the same is true in in learning so with music
you run into constraints
by putting yourself in uncomfortable circumstances
so I'm trying to learn bluegrass
I'm gonna go to a bluegrass jam
I'm gonna get someone's gonna point at me and say
go take a solo and I'm gonna take a quick solo
and I'm gonna feel really comfortable over the G chord
but once I get to C I don't know what to do anymore
I don't have any vocabulary there
so okay my constraint is I need more C shape vocabulary
so that when I get to the C chord
I know what to do
I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna learn 10
10 licks in C
and then I'm gonna go back to the jam and see
did those did those licks come out
did I internalize them enough
that they became intuitive
so I could use them in the moment
and uh and then if they did
then I move on to the next constraint
so learning learning skills
learning languages uh running businesses
it's all it's all sort of like
fundamentally about attuning attention to the areas of
of most significant constraint
and then running experiments or devising devising
um little environments to fix those constraints yeah
I like this little environments um
sometimes we try to boil the ocean
instead of just getting the teapot going yeah
and I Learned a lot about AI
from you and a number of other genius people at
at the the at the planning session in Mexico City
and that then became
of course we were all like
hey Spencer
teach us yeah
um that became pioneer species
yeah and I think I'm one of your first uh
underperforming graduates haha
you did great haha
you did great I had a great time doing it
and what we
the experience was Spencer's gonna take us through AI
uh and I've
I've studied AI I've
had people working for me who were talking about AI
but there was always like
a missing block of vocabulary
or a missing reference point
or something about my learning
that made me less comfortable yeah
making decisions or directing
other people who are talented and expert in this area
and your approach was
all the things that we've been talking about
you laid it out in such a way that I got super excited
and there was this moment where I was
I was really taking it in
and then there was this moment where I was lost
and then there was this moment where I
started pulling all nighters
doing vibe coding you know
it was awesome yeah
um tell us
tell us what Pioneer Species is all about and how that
how that's playing out yeah
well I uh
so in November of 25
a new model came out called Opus 4.5
developed by anthropic and uh
it it really unlocked
it was the big unlock for
for agentic coding and development
before that it was pretty bad
like you you would try
and vibe code
and it would just basically just spit out broken code
and it was not useful but in November
end of November
early December right before poker to planning it uh
it got really good and so um
uh I
I've been tracking obviously
the ecosystem really closely
and experimenting with all the tools
and um
and then in the month of December
rewrote a bunch of software for my company
and then also like built an app for Poco to planning
and I was like okay
we're actually here at this point where
you know it's possible to build
like pretty complex software using these models and and
um and so um
what I came to realize over the first quarter and what
you know many
many people obviously are coming to realize now too is
yeah is um
we're moving into a very different landscape
in terms of the way that we uh
work in the world
and the way for operators and company owners uh
everything is is
is shifting um
about how we should think about hiring and and um
growing our teams
the types of skill sets that we should be looking for
and I have come to adopt a pretty strong belief that
that learning how to
not just build software with these agents
but learning how to manage agents
for both personal and professional
in both personal and professional use cases
is the most essential skill to learn for every working
adult in the world
no matter what you're doing
whether you're uh
in customer success or you're on fulfillment
or you're doing marketing
or you're an engineer or you're um
you know anywhere within an organization
or you're a solo entrepreneur building things uh
every single thing that you can do with a computer uh
agents can now do
if you design the right environment for it so uh
it's it's this amazing lever where
you know the the nature of my work personally
six months ago versus today is fundamentally different
I I start my day and I'm basically spinning up like 15
20 30 agents to work on different tasks and then I'm
I'm spending much more time uh
Q a and useful and
and then like sort of keeping the plates spinning and
and and I'm also
you know Pioneer
Species was basically designed to upskill my friends
who some of some of whom are
are technical and some of whom are
are not technical and uh
and also my team
so I built it to put my team through it
so now you know
a bunch of folks on my team are building software
tools that were never technical
from the most
junior to the most senior people on the team
everyone now can write code and like
build things for the company
uh within Sonora
we rewrote
the entire tech stack for every piece of software we
previously paid for so it was like you
know everything from our CRM
to our calendar scheduling tools
to our contract software
to a bunch of software that we
that didn't exist before
for different processes within the company
that we just invented from scratch
but built very quickly because you can now um
and uh and that was really great
one because we saved
like a quarter million dollars a year on sass expenses
um and two
because once everything is
is centralized and all the data lives in one place and
and and you own all the hooks
and you've customized
the software to exactly what you need
agents can now operate in that domain
a lot more fluidly than they could
with bespoke software from third party providers
where you don't own all the API endpoints
and so there's a real advantage to having everything
sort of centralized in terms of speed
um I can answer questions about my company
that I couldn't answer before instantaneously
Claude
knows everything about every aspect of my business
and so in a way
it's like the most incredible board member or advisor
it it knows second to second
exactly what's going on in the business
what's what needs improvement
what's what's going well what's what's
you know what it gives me
preview into things that
previously would have been impossible
or would have required an immense number of managers
who are Q a everything meticulously
and then reporting that back up to me
which is an incredible cost
structure right um
it also allows the ICS to be more capable
so instead of having someone
a marketing person write an email campaign
put the subject line uh
figure out who to send it to
I can just say
write me a you know marketing campaign for this thing
you already have the cloud skills
for how we write things and how we think about it
you
you know everything about the website and everything
it's gonna go make a landing page
it's gonna write the email campaign
it's gonna plug it into uh the email delivery software
it's gonna figure out who it should send it to
and who it shouldn't send it to
and it's gonna just say cool
I did everything everything that you know
previously would have been
you know a month long project with
with a lot of people involved
and it's just gonna say take a look at it
make sure it looks good
and if there's anything wrong with it
I fix the problem with it
but then I also fix the the cloud skill
I fix the context that created the problem
so that it never happens again and um
you know you can kind of see how this
how this downstream creates
so much more leverage in terms of use
usage of time and
and the quality improvements are amazing
and and so yeah now we just have like
you know a ton of agents that
that are working within the company
enabling everyone to move a lot faster
and I just think it's fundamentally
one of the most important skills for people to learn
so I'm teaching it now
it's mostly a pet project for fun
but we've done two cohorts now uh
a lot of my friends have done it
they've recommended more friends
we do like 80 people in each cohort uh
my parents did it uh yeah
so my daughter who's in the second cohort
yeah with yeah
my son in law yeah
they both got different things out of it
she reported that
she was looking to solve problems and prepare
for a community development project yeah
where she's gonna take a leadership role and um
as soon as she's ready to take it
she wants to hit the ground running
so she's really building cloud skills
yeah to be ready for this new volunteer
chairmanship role that she's got
and her husband was saying okay
well I now know how to
I t reports to me I now know how to see this um
smorgasbord of opportunity
and to make better decisions
in collaboration with the
people that you're charging to go do it right yeah
so the you
you I feel like super fortunate
because I got to know you
and got to spend all this time with you
and learn from you and the rest of the world
just kind of Learned a little bit of
something about you from a time
magazine article that was just published
what what was how did that come about
what was the outcome and
and yeah what can we learn from it
yeah um
I met a guy at a party um
a few months ago who that's what you said about me
I met Mark at a party yeah
yeah right exactly yeah
I met a guy at a party and I didn't know at the time
but he was a reporter for time magazine
and we were talking about this like
agent transformation thing
and he was writing a piece
his piece was primarily about um
displacement within small and medium sized businesses
and so he was he was looking for subjects for this
this piece and um
and and so
we ended up being sort of like the main
company that he wrote about
which was like here's how this company went went in
rewrote all their software
and our team scaled down a little bit
because there were functions within the company that
were either existed
because the role was to maintain the existing SAS
software or um
you know we had like an outbound um
setter team that uh we
we scaled back because a lot of
there were a lot of agents kind of doing that work
so there was a narrative there around displacement
my feeling around it when it was
it was cool to have this time article written
my feeling is uh
it's less about the displacement narrative
like in my view
we're still gonna be hiring the team is growing
like we're gonna uh
there there's still a need for humans in this world
but and the business is growing
and you're doing things more efficiently
and you can think of a question and get the answer
instead of saying memo right
so things are more efficient and there's an UPS
there's a the more empowering narrative here is
is around upskilling so fundamentally
as I said I think every single person who is
a working individual in the world needs this skill set
and so I started with my own teams
like everyone needs to learn this skill
like doesn't matter what you're doing in the company
you need to be really good with Claud um
or or Codex or whatever model is
is good they're all fundamentally the same um
and so um
how do we basically
take everyone who's in the organization
and upskill them
to a point where they're good at managing agents
and then the overall output of the company gets higher
and um
and so yeah the article spoke to that and
and uh
and it was yeah it was cool and then I wrote a
a another piece that
sort of a supplementary piece
that added more color to exactly what our process was
there like what we
what we replaced and why what the implications were
what it enabled us to do and how it accelerated that
I put it on my blog which maybe you can link to in the
yeah I
I thought that the blog was spectacular
and I particularly appreciate people who can write well
yeah and thanks
I like this idea that you know
for time magazine it's framed in one way yeah
and it's impressive and
but the reality is this is the
the many benefits I think there's so much fear yeah
we can we got
we got a choice brother we can choose the path of love
or we can choose the path of fear
and we make that decision every second right
and I loved how you pushed through the hype and yeah
got deeper into the benefits
and where everybody's winning yeah
I think one of the things we've talked about is um
and I I do mergers and acquisitions
and I work with entrepreneurs
who are taking their company to market yeah
and as a sell side advisor
there are some common things that I see happen
and most of the time it's
they're not prepared yeah
they think they are yeah
and they want to get prepared
so then
there's this
period of time in which you have to spin up
and be ready
and we'll create this thing called a data room
I mean yeah
okay what I love about my
all my conversations with you is
you have a virtual data room right now yeah
it's 24 hours a day working for you yeah
let's let's dive into that a little bit yeah
there's a benefit
75% of CEOs today report that they're spending
they are directing
and spending an enormous amount of time
compared to six months ago
as you mentioned
directing AI strategy and
and really hands on with AI
75% of CEOs wow
that's crazy you're doing That 100% right yeah
yeah so
this virtual data room
is actually a place where you get to learn something
yeah what did you learn about your company
when you got your 24 hour a day
virtual data room put up yeah
it's kind of wild
so we have something at snore called the Snore OS
and it's all of the software
it's like a it's a monolithic app
that has everything from our accounting to um
to you know
our CRM to all of the marketing channels
and like you know
up to the second
reports on basically every function within the company
every interaction
every call that's had every call review that's AI
you know
AI call reviews on every interaction with a customer
and so there's like a there's a
there's a data layer that is all of that information
and then there's an intelligence layer
which is um
Claude uh
working through a set of skills and um
uh
basically like um
methods that we've that we've trained it on uh
that gives us insights on things
and I think one of the interesting things
one of the hardest things that
that I was trying to figure out is like
you know we're at this point in the company
where we've fulfilled the initial vision
which is like we've had students win Grammys and we're
we're kind of at scale you know
within within reason we're at our
we're at the scale that I wanted to see
where the team is large enough
and we're seeing some serious impact
we got a lot of students and it's it's working
but what do you do next
and where do you prioritize time
how do you do constraint analysis at this level
and so the the the AI is really good at looking at a
a huge swath of information
and reading through the tea leaves
and figuring out where you should focus your energy
where's the low hanging fruit
and a lot of times it will find the constraint
and because it's already got hooks into everything
it controls every system
it can go do the fix without any human intervention
so it's weird
cause like quarterly planning can look like okay
Claude go look at the business
what should we work on and it's like well
you should probably work on this
this and this and this
do you want me to just do that right now
and you're like okay
I guess that was gonna be the quarter's plan
but I guess it's done and it's like
you know the agents are like executing on building
building the the fixes for things as well
and you can also make it closed loop
we don't do that uh
internally where um
you know you if you want
you can give it autonomy to go and just like
make the changes like find the problems
make the changes and you can do this recursive cycle
where there's no human in the loop
we have it makes suggestions
and we say that's a good idea or a bad idea
and then we let it let it cook
but yeah I mean
I've Learned a lot about the business through that
because it will surface insights
and then
and I've also Learned a lot about how
how I think that companies will look in the future
which I think is a tough pill to swallow
for a lot of business owners
and a lot of private equity groups
because I think fundamentally
and you know folks like Jack Dorsey talk a lot this um
I think that the the middle manager layer is
is gonna be gone I think it's gonna be gone
um I think that the way that companies will
will work in the future is
there's going to be an executive layer
there's going to be a layer of ICS
and they're going to be player coaches
within the ICS that are sort of more senior
and they're going to be teaching things
but they're also going to be doing like 70% of like
the IC work they're going to be doing
seventy percent of the time is gonna be spent doing
IC work and
and 30 is gonna be training but the management layer
if you think about it conceptually
they're just a they're a data normalization function
within the company
all they do is they take information from exec
intentions and directives
and they pass it down to the ICS
and then they take
stuff that's happening on the front line from the ICS
and they pass it back up they
they synthesize it
condense it into something that's a narrative
and they give it to exec and then they
they make sure that people are accountable right
that's kind of the core
function of most middle management and um
AI is maybe the best in the world at doing this
like it is amazing at that
and it can also do the a lot of the IC work too
so
I think what happens is most organizations flatten out
they just become exact with ICS
and most of the IC work becomes
anything that a computer can't do
which is relational uh
for for instance on our team uh
you know we did this AI transformation
we didn't touch the mentor team
the mentors are the sauce
that's what we do we
we do human connection and discernment and guidance on
how to guide someone through
you know a very in depth mastery path
humans are not leaving the loop on that ever
because it's a transmission right
it's a human transmission
and so but what we can do
is make it very easy for us to figure out
what's going well and what's
what's not going well uh
in in fulfillment
so AI can review every single student lesson
in the entire ecosystem
and the moment something weird happens or uh
something falls out of our
like core process that really
that we know works really well
to get people to a certain outcome
soon as that happens uh
I get a Slack ping that's like
this weird thing happened on that call
go check it out and then it's like training moment
right next meeting we're like
we're gonna review some tape this
this and this happened
let's make sure that doesn't happen in the future
but the AI is catching all of that
which previously would be like a manager's job
but there's so much volume
that it's impossible for one human to do right
your quality goal is on steroids
and your speed to response
for implementing any decision
or identifying any problem is instantaneous right
that has a lot of implications I um
I work with a lot of private equity firms
and I have this idea that um
probably the most valuable human
that a private equity firm can acquire
is somebody with your skills
who can look at a business and manage an AI
transformation yeah
and then go help other CEOs who are out
who are not comfortable train them
implement them mentor them and get this done
I mean I
I think that might be more valuable than your business
yeah um
but you're right I
I well
and I'm I see it
and I'm looking at you and I'm thinking to myself
there's a second thing that's really valuable
you know after this time magazine issue published you
you that um
you thought about it and
and wrote on your blog a response
you publicly shared
some things that you would have done differently
in this transformation and not every founder
has the authenticity or the bravery
to admit what they did that was wrong
and to acknowledge it and to try to also learn from it
and there's way too much ego involved
I think just historically and I
I like how you just flattened that out too
uh what were the mistakes you made
what are what could our listeners uh
learn from from your success
with any of these changes
you know if you change anything in your company
there's always a tax you're gonna pay the cost
so you you lose momentum in some way or
you know you have to retrain your team on a thing
which takes some time to on ramp into we
there were a couple of areas in the company
where we just did a hard switch
and we paid that tax um
and then I think and then
you know
I think one of the hardest things to do in a company is
uh communicate in a way that is transparent
while maintaining morale through hard times
like if you're if you're doing a big AI transformation
people are concerned right
there's there's worry in the air of like
am I next or what's the intention here
like they're hearing you know
the press is incentivized to say that AI
is displacing workers
and that's what they publish about
so everyone's consuming this diet of like fear
and then their CEO is like interested in AI
and then so how do you how do you navigate
um communicating with the team around like okay
you are safe here
like we're trying to create a stable ship and um
if we don't adopt these tools
the company is not gonna survive
because in two years time
everyone's going to adopt these tools
we're ahead of the curve thank goodness um
and so we need to make some changes
but that's gonna require the company to upskill
as a whole and for every individual to upskill as well
and it's kind of non optional right
it's like at a certain point
every single person every working
it will be to not have these skills will be like
not knowing how to use like Google Docs
a cellphone a cellphone yeah
it's like it's like
you're not really gonna get hired
unless you know how to
like write a document or
you know uh
use a cell phone or answer email
it will be that fundamental
to the way that people operate in the world
and it'll get easier because the
right now there's not a lot of abstraction
around how to interact with agents
you kind of have to be a little technical and like
you have to learn how to interact with an IDE
and all of these things and over
over the next few years it'll get simpler and
and people will build nice
polished user interfaces on top of it but um
but the way the way of thinking is the
is the
is the transformation and everyone's gonna need to
to change that like instead of doing the thing
they're gonna need to
manage the process and the environment
and the context necessary for agents to do the thing
and then know how to keep the plate spinning
uh huh so the mistake was
that you didn't take in a part of the human equation
yeah and consider it first yeah
the mistake was the mistake was the timing
thank you for bringing me back to that
the mistake is the the timing of communication and like
I didn't know how it was gonna go
like this is a experiment that I know is necessary
you gotta rip the Band Aid off and there's some
there's some like optimal way
of communicating the team
that this transformation is happening
and my emo is kind of like
get in there and like bull in a China shop
just kind of start and do it
learn it and just like
execute and then roll it out and just see what happens
and then let the team know we're doing this thing now
and I think you know
this is like a maturity factor for me of like
just like learning how to
learning how to do that still have the like directive
forward momentum energy of like executing and getting
getting the transformation done
ripping off the Band Aid
but then also knowing how to uh
communicate with the team incrementally about the
transformation and and
and get their buy in uh
and really their participation in the process
like how do how do we get
how do we make it so that
we're all transforming the company
we know what the goal is
and we all want to participate in the transformation
so that we feel ownership over its outcome
rather than feeling this adversarial relationship
to the transformation
where everyone is nervous to adopt the tools
cause is it just one step away from their their um
you know um
from changing their paradigm
yeah exactly yeah
we all
probably resist change more than we want to admit
yeah and
here's a moment in time in which embracing the change
has extraordinary
exponential benefits yeah
personally um professionally
yeah and I think culturally we make it
we make mistakes faster but we
we can also correct them quicker yeah
um you
you have I'm gonna
I'm gonna have to read these off because you
you have Sonora uh
playback sessions yeah
your podcast pioneer species
your educational transformation program
expeditions and along
and you've sold a couple of companies before uh
you have this long history of
of adventures and ventures
yeah how do you decide what to invest your energy in
that is the hardest question to answer
I think that um
there are also there's also a
a whole litany of failed experiments
right
ventures that I've been like
that could be a good idea and then I try it
and then it meets the market and it just doesn't work
um and
you know there's kind of a graveyard of those
of those things um
and I think that if there's a common thread
uh
if there's a common thread between the
the the things that have worked
it's always
it's always this like thing I mentioned earlier
which is the world invites it out of you
it's like
it's like almost like I didn't intend to start it
it's like friends have been like
can you teach me that thing
or this should really happen
or just enthusiasm there's enthusiasm
it's product market fit it's an undeniable feeling
when there's product market fit it
it it smacks you in the face and
and then it's like
it's just easyful it's like alright
I'm we're just gonna fall in this direction
and it doesn't really matter like how we do it
it's just as long as
as long as there's some action in this direction
it's just like it's just the easiest thing right yes
we're gonna go develop this technology
and hope everybody adopts it
that doesn't work because it's smart yeah
yeah yeah yeah
no that's not how it works right
it's not how it works
it's just the product market fit and and
and also you know
I Learned with Pioneer Species a lot about like tides
like there's just sometimes there's a tide where like
it just it carries
it carries the the project very
very easily so like flow
I like the word tide
I have not heard anybody use that before
but rising tides and lifts all ships
that kind of thing I
I
we spend a lot of time talking about maintaining energy
as a parallel entrepreneur yeah
and how you how do you recognize when you're in flow
and how do you get back into flow
yeah is there a secret for you
um
I don't know um
we've definitely
gone through a lot of seasons at Sonora
where it feels like the like eating glass thing
where it's just like gosh
there's so much headwind
and nothing seems to be working
and I don't know why
and like trying to diagnose and it's just like hard
what's that quoting the specific quote
yeah it's like eating glass and looking to the
looking into the abyss yeah
Elon's yeah yeah
it's like we
I've gone through so many seasons like this
like crazy cash crunches
where we thought the business was gonna collapse
and then we figure out some way through it
and I think uh
what it's taught me is like
a really profound sense of detachment from the outcome
and then
knowing that curiosity is the opposite of contraction
so it is impossible to be um
contracted or fearful and curious at the same time
it's maybe not impossible
but it's very hard to hold both of those dispositions
in a genuine way simultaneously
so and obviously curiosity
is expansive it's more useful
it's a it's a better disposition to be in
so when confronted with a lot of adversity uh
and trying to find our way back into flow
I find that one being totally OK
and maybe even writing down
here's the worst case scenario
the thing totally implodes and
and then I have to go work on something else and
you know it's a huge bummer for our team
and it's a huge bummer for the clients
and it's a huge bummer for
for me and the future of the
but also this too shall pass nothing yeah
no one's gonna die and we're teaching music
and it's not the end of the world yeah
and and
and in in the worst case scenario
you learn a bunch of lessons
and then the next thing is more successful
so detachment from the outcome so that there's no
there isn't
you're not operating from this like cortisol spiked
frenetic clenching energy
cause it's not nothing
produced from that space is going to be generative um
and then
and then and then the like practical tool is okay
I'm detached from the outcome
I'm still facing challenge
the way to get back into flow is uh
profound curiosity wow
it's not working I wonder why this isn't working
what would it take to just get a huge unlock
in this area what
what
what would I do if I had to figure out how to 10 x the
the business now not just get out of this rut
but like grow by 10 x in the next 3 months
just getting very broad
very curious about all potential paths forward
and then writing them down
I remember when we went through a cash crunch
uh this was in 2020
I faced a crazy amount of headwind
uh due to elections cycle spikes
um in
in ads in ads cost and um
we were just hemorrhaging cash
and I sat down uh
in like you know
a state of like panic
frankly
cause I had hired this team of amazing instructors
some of my favorite guitar players in the world
were on staff and I was like
I'm not gonna be able to make payroll
we had like $100,000 in
in accounts payable the following month in payroll
and like $8,000 in the account
and I was just like no
what am I gonna do it was like few days away
sure and I just like
and we've all been there yeah
and I wrote a list of all of the things that I could do
the first one was just like
crawl under my desk and have a panic attack and
and disappear from the the
the world and then
then it was like OK
well I mean
I could go uh
take out a revenue based finance loan
uh to like stopgap it and then give me some more time
I could go raise some capital
I could
run a little promo to all of our current students
or to prospective students and uh
pull forward some cash um
you know I could get on the phones myself and you know
just make it happen I could
I could do affiliate deals with this
this and this company that I've already
created relationships with
you know you just sort of get curious about
like all the lateral ways you can solve the problem
and then I was like great
I have 12 things I can do here
I know exactly what the next step is
and then I just executed on all of them
and then like three or four of them worked
and we got through the cash crunch and
and you know it's this
it's this sort of like curiosity based
expansive thinking from a place of
if this doesn't work
I'm gonna try my best and I'm not gonna worry about it
I'm just gonna
I'm gonna put one step in front of the other
one foot in front of the other and
and try and navigate this as calmly as possible
even though the situation sucks
and you just eat enough of that
that when big stuff happens
you're just like here's this again
it's fine yeah
and now I'm not super phased by like
really challenging situations
what have you Learned um
when you think about success today
when you define success for yourself today
how's that definition changed from the version of you
that was 10 years ago I think success for me uh
feels a lot more like alignment
it's just like am I
am I
hmm
there's some
there's some combination of alignment and freedom
but not freedom in sort of a Peter Pan way
but freedom of choice to do
and build the things in the world that I want to build
which obviously has a financial component
it's like
I need resources to be able to execute on a vision
or hire the people that I need to do a thing
but a lot of it has to do with like
do I feel aligned
with the things that I'm spending my time doing
and do I feel aligned
with the people that I'm working on it with
and does it feel good to wake up in the morning and
and do do
do the work um
that feels like success um
yeah and I think
I think with that comes like
alignment with like minded people in the world
like having
having access to have conversations like this
where it's like obviously
you know you've done awesome things in the world
and I'm inspired by your path and
and we get to hang out here and have this conversation
and this feels this feels like success to me because
you know had I not done things in the world I
you know I wouldn't have earned
the right to have this conversation and
and so that's that's like an indicator of success
it's just like alignment with like minded people
I love it um
yeah thank you for that
I received that and I'm also receiving a question
speaking of global like minded people in the world
yeah um
I'm now globally sourcing my questions for guests
I told Ed Cook
that you were gonna be on the podcast today
and I asked him what would be a great question
and it it really threads
nicely into this part of our conversation
where you're talking about alignment
and doing the things that I wanna do
sometimes it has to do with money
sometimes not and the this balance I'm
I'm really sensing a lot from our
from knowing you
about the balance between creativity and business
and um
so Ed wanted to ask this question
he said if you could take a 30 channel microphone setup
anywhere in the world
which traditions of song would you first go to
record in situ and why
wow what would the experience be in the Sonic Sphere
oh my gosh that's such a good question
so for the Sonic Sphere one of the projects
this is a timely question
because what
one of the projects that I made for this sphere
was this um
it was a tour of world vocal traditions
and so it was a 45 minute experience
where I took my favorite vocal traditions
from around the world from
you know everything from like you know
Amazonian field recordings
that I actually had recorded myself to um
Appalachian traditional Appalachian music
to stuff from the Balkans and stuff from West Africa
and uh
this um style
this you know
Indian style called Konokol and Balinese kechak music
really awesome world vocal traditions and um
and then I sort of narrated this
this um
experience kind of like a podcast type of thing
but it was a spatialized audio experience
where you sat in the sphere
and you could listen to um
all of these different world vocal traditions
and it's stunning
feels like you're in the middle of the choir
uh in
in the middle of you know uh
you know Corsica listening to these incredible singers
and and we presented that at the sphere in
at the shed in New York um
and so to answer Ed's question
um
yeah I would probably
hmm
I think Georgian folk choirs are
it's some of the most wild music
the compositions are incredible
and it's somewhat improvised there
there are aspects to Georgian folk music that it
that it's like uh
you can sort of uh
paint outside the lines a little bit
the vocalists are encouraged to paint
outside the lines a little bit
and it's texturally wild like they're they'll
they'll incorporate sounds that are not even singing
like crazy screams and guttural sounds and
like claps and stomps and like
it's really wild
it's the most creative form of vocal composition I've
I've heard probably it's yeah
maybe the most complicated and intricate
we talk a little bit about your five year
nomadic exploration of music around the world
so it's perfect you're
you're identifying something that you need to go record
yeah and all these experiences that you had
um it was uh
good Lord Spain
Bali Nepal
and then you went to Ireland
and what I what I took out of your writings
and again we'll put links here in the show notes
but what I took out of your writing
about your experience in Ireland is really
was about the session style of music yeah
knowing when to come in whether you're late
uh knowing when to be quiet and listen yeah
um and I'm curious
what has music taught you
it seems to me that that might be directly
attributable to how we behave in business
and how we behave in community settings
I have seen in Nashville
some of the greatest employees
that I've ever worked with
were all at Friday night and Saturday night
and somewhere in their life they were all musicians
yeah and they were such excellent collaborators
yeah and I
I had studied that I was trying to figure out what
what is it that makes these employees so fantastic
yeah
and their capacity to collaborate with other people
yeah and then you talked about
this took you to a different level what
what did you learn in Ireland that is applicable
yeah I think I think this is
this is applicable
this is this is just the fundamental lesson
I think of one of the fundamental lessons of music
which is music especially improvisational forms
or like jam session type forms technically
like most Irish music is not improvisational in nature
although the rhythm guitar parts can be
but it is um
music on the whole is about presence and listening
and like 10% playing it's like it so
so it's an amazing container
it's like it's like studying meditation
but it's active meditation
and the meditation is how can I basically
become psychic with the people I'm playing with
and put my brain inside of their brain
while remaining embodied in my own body right
cause I need to execute
I need to move my body in a certain way in time uh
but I also need to
find a way to lock in with their consciousness
and understand what they're about to do next
and some of that comes with just like
knowing the person well
but also some of it comes with just like
being so locked in to the present moment that uh
it's obvious what's about to happen right
and the feeling is is
the the
the feeling guides the the
the next action and then part of that presence is
is obviously listening to
to what they're what they're expressing and um
and I think this is also it's also uh
linked to I had a peek at your
your questions before
but I think it's also linked to to interview craft like
yeah you're running a podcast now
I run a podcast where I interview great musicians
and the whole game is like
obviously preparation knowing
knowing stuff about the person beforehand
but then just like
locking in and getting really good at the flow
sport of
of just staying coasting like hmm
surfing the present moment with the person uh
because the next question
or the next thing to do becomes obvious
the closer you are to the exact moment in time hmm
and so I think I think Irish music and all forms of jam
music with other people teaches this
it's a great container for and I don't think people
I don't think it's like expressed in the session
they're not like
we're all gonna get really present with each other
just the natural consequence of
if you wanna play that music and get good at it
there's no other option than to
lock into the present moment
and you cannot be distracted
there's nothing else in your mind
and you're just locked into
creating a vibe with other people
you know that makes so much sense
it's such a reward too for our existence here
we get to actually be yeah
right here right now yeah yeah
you um
you've said a couple of things that
I would like to just give you credit for um
trust the compound interest we
we've always in my life
talked about compound interest as this thing
you gotta save money and then compounding interest will
you know really make you wealthy in the future
you talk about compounding interest in
a different framework
it's about the transfer rate is an asset
and in learning in learning yeah
um
I think you also said something like this
one day you'll be in a room
and notice that nobody else noticed
what you noticed because
nobody
else has your particular combination of experience
yeah and I think what
what
what that draws out for me is this idea that nobody
is a better Spencer Hendley than you
yeah and I'm the best Mark Cleveland
I have ever been right now
yeah and I'm getting better tomorrow
and even five minutes from now
yeah and it
so how do you take what what does it mean to you
when you say the transfer rate is the asset
and what does it mean when you say
trust the compounding interest
yeah I think it's a good question um
I think that when I talk about the transfer rate it's
it's it's again
this like the the benefit of overlapping
bodies of knowledge is that
the pattern recognition becomes really strong
oh I noticed that this thing happens in music
uh when I'm collaborating with other people and uh
what I've Learned about jamming suddenly applies
I I used this example just a second ago
um turns out a jam session where you're playing improv
improvisational music is almost identical to a
to an interview a podcast interview
so I'm sitting down with Tommy Emmanuel
one of my favorite guitar players in the world
who's also an amazing improviser
this guy's mastered the craft of improvisation
he's a great interview because he's like
so there and it doesn't matter if I
I could have written down a bunch of questions
beforehand or not
I know enough about Tommy to sit down and know that
we're gonna surf the moment
and it's gonna be amazing because he's locked in right
and and
and there's there's this crossover in um
in those skill sets right
and so this compound interest in
in developing the skill of presence for um uh
for
for interviewing
and there's compound interest in
learning business skill sets
when I'm managing a band or trying to think about
you know projects that I want to launch into the world
I know how to market things
so there's like there's just all of this
like crossover between all of the domains
so that's what I mean by the
the transfer rate and then I
it also reminded me when you said that of uh
when I was living in San Francisco
I took a bunch of improv classes um
for a couple years there's a really great uh
improv like um
studio called Endgames in San Francisco
it's great and it's
it's it's all about um
say the obvious thing like
it's obviously we know these
these these these
um
the concept of like yes
ending someone uh
like agreeing with what offer they make
and then building on it right but
but one of the things they really emphasize is
don't try and be clever uh
say the obvious thing
because your obvious thing is someone else's genius
like they'll because you're a unique individual
the thing that immediately comes to mind
is not the obvious thing for somebody else um
so if you're trying to think of the thing that
you wouldn't think of um
that's not gonna that's not gonna feel as natural one
it's not gonna be as easy
turns out if you just say the obvious thing
that's obvious to you it's easy
and because of your unique background
uh chances are it's unique
you know
so um
I think that's true here too
and then so your
your job then is to like build this wide foundation of
lots of disparate skills and knowledge
so that the obvious thing to you turns out to be 10
um
uh orthogonal or
or or unique to um
to the
to the domain that you're evaluating in the moment
right it's like I've
I know enough about all these other areas
that my observations here are gonna be novel
just even though they they seem obvious to me
I wanna thank you for uh
opening my eyes in learning and education
um helping me gain confidence in AI
so that I could pull about six
or eight
or 10 all nighters and actually create something
you built a really cool thing
I had some fun and um
also being a part of inspiring
like
the people around you get to surf that moment with you
they're on their own wave
but they can see you on yours and you are very
very inspiring a tremendous leader
um and I'm
I'm I'm grateful to have had you on the podcast today
thank you Spencer
thank you for having me on
this was a total delight and it means a lot thank you
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