Welcome to the latest installment of The Curious Capitalist, brought to you by the Board of Conscious Capitalism in Connecticut. The Curious Capitalist is a series of podcasts where we take the opportunity to not only speak to board members from the Conscious Capitalism Connecticut chapter. But also to business owners, startups, and entrepreneurs.

The Curious Capitalist is available on all of the world's biggest podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Spotify. Never miss an episode again and subscribe today wherever you get your podcast from. Welcome along to the latest episode of The Curious Capitalist, and we've got a full house today.

We have got the Conscious Capitalism, Connecticut chair, and author Gavin Watson, the Executive Director Glenn McDermott, as we welcome our guest today on the Curious Capitalist Toby. Corey. Now Toby is the Chief Operating Officer of CruzFoam, a startup company backed by many people and companies, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher, to name just two.

He is also a seasoned entrepreneur and an educator at Stanford University. Now, CruzFoam employees and advisors have a deep background in pioneering disruptive technologies to power. Positive change in business and society. They are laser focused on working towards ending the plastic pollution epidemic with circular packaging solutions for single use plastics.

Now they've launched a brand new packaging line to displace polystyrene peanuts and bubble wrap in e-commerce, and we are all super excited to find out more. So, Toby, Gavin and Glen, welcome to the Curious Capitalist. Thank

you Claire, and welcome Toby. I realized that I've been trying to set up this podcast for about a year or so.

So, but now the time is right and we appreciate you getting an early start. In California to join us this morning. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you

got to this point? Boy, I'm gonna try and make this brief cuz the story could get really long and way outta control. I was telling Gavin that I was born in Waterville, Maine.

My dad was an educator science teacher, moved to Connecticut, went to school there, and then I ended up getting a major in economics and a modern computer science and. My first programming course, I fell in love with technology. I wasn't sure where it was gonna go, but I felt like this is really, really cool stuff and has, you know, the opportunity to change the worlds in ways I could only imagine back then.

And that brought me to a great career opportunity. I moved out to California, my wife. Myself and an eight month old daughter, a new family out there out here in Silicon Valley, and, uh, the rest of sort of history had the opportunity to grow in the tech space, had the opportunity to become a successful entrepreneur.

Built the world's largest web development company in the mid nineties. Had a successful public offering, had the opportunity to retire early in life at 37, and quite frankly, just got bored with playing golf and surfing and doing nothing. And that led me on a different quest. I had the opportunity. To be on the board of directors at Wildlife Direct.

Dr. Richard Leaky, who's most recently passed away, really focused on preserving biodiversity, and he was an amazing figure. And from there, my career trajectory moved more in the sustainability renewable energy space. I went through my second I P O as Solar City's Chief Revenue Officer. I ran Tesla Energy and 11 year entrepreneurship lecture at Stanford University.

And then I met the guys, the two co-founders at Cruise Film. The company started as a PhD research project at uc, Santa Cruz, John Phelps, who's our C E o, and Marco Orlandi, who's our chief science officer, and Marco had been working with this really interesting polysaccharide kit, and it turns out it's the second most abundant biopolymer on the planet.

And felt he had this crazy idea. Initially it was to build surfboards out of this. To come to find out, not a lot of investors want to invest in biofilm surfboards. The market wasn't that huge and either you die or pivot, right? So three years ago through. National Science Foundation, our c E o went through a full customer discovery process and found wow, this packaging industry's quite massive.

And the team worked on developing a very scalable, cost effective protective packaging phone called Cruise Coleman. Here I am.

What a great journey, Toby, and love the fact that you had a taste of what retirement could look like and was deeply dissatisfied there and come back to do work deeply embedded in purpose and conscious.

Capitalism's main sort of pillar is around creating businesses and do with purpose and, and using that as a way of unifying the brand and becoming a very clear sort of north star or. Customers and employees and and other vendors in the community. And what I love about your product is that it looks at stakeholders in a much broader light.

Not only the planet, but marine life in particular, that doesn't ordinarily have a voice with us. So, Tell us a little bit about the drivers in terms of the ecological side. Yeah,

so Dean, just to just give a little bit more context of that arc. So when you know, I fell in love with technology and saw I had the opportunity to download my first web browser that Tim Burners Lee invented over at cern and it really allowed for a voice to emerge.

Where old paradigms and structures that had been really disadvantaging humanity had the opportunity to emerge. And that's what gave me, you know, really excitement around that phase of my career. This phase here is really about, as I look forward, I view the lens through, are we creating more opportunities or more problems for future generations?

And unfortunately, I get to the calculus of more problems. That is really a disheartening, and I think like, as far as I know, I don't know of any other species on this planet that has the capabilities that we have. With that comes a deep, moral and social responsibility, in my opinion, to leave more opportunities for future generations to come and not more problems.

So, That's really where I've kind of focused my north start in looking for a catalyst and an opportunity to make an impact on a significant scale. And I guess I look at the world to two lenses. There's what I call the tactical lens, which is there's a lot of broken stuff, whether it's our politics, the way capitalism is structured today, social injustices, and the list goes on and you, and you're fighting into a massive headwind.

The shift, however, is my focus really in education, has been to teach. Intellectual curiosity and how to set that in motion. And my belief is that having spent 11 years working with Generation Z I, I think it's the most altruistic generation to ever exist on a macro level. And that's given me an insane hope that what kind of seeds can be planted, because I believe that that long-term play in the chess board looks far more interesting.

When you can set that in motion. So the focus is really on, I hate to word entrepreneurship because it has such a narrow connotation to it, and what it's really code word for is creative thinking, disruption, innovation, and it's needed whether you're a small, medium, or large company. And I worked at Tesla, Elon looked for two primary skills, really deep creative thinking outside the box, and that's why Tesla's been so successful, focusing on really hard problems on how to solve those.

And folks that can execute better than anyone else on the planet. So as the opportunity with cruise film, I got in touch with the two co-founders. I couldn't think of a better area at this point in my life than to focus on something that can remove this devastating material from our planet that is leading to massive health issues.

We're all aware of the, the massive pollution. This stuff, poly styrene and poly other petroleum materials sits in our landfill for four or 500 years. It's in our lights, it's in our streams, it's in our soils, it's in our beautiful oceans. And to sit back and allow that just to continue to play out was just something that I felt this was the, A platform and a technology that could do both.

And I feel like, you know, one of the things I learned at Tuss, I remember Elon talking about, You have to have green products. You know, in the earlier phases of the development of that era, it was really all about inferior products that cost more. And you have to solve that in a different way. You've gotta create great products that solve customer needs that also have this huge benefit because of their adoption that go on to do fantastic things, whether it's ecological or sustainable or renewable energy, or electric vehicles or what have you.

People buy a Tesla, it's a great car that happens to be electric. We want people to buy cruise film cause it solves real problems for them. It happens to be compostable and recyclable and have zero petroleum in it. That was a fantastic opportunity to introduce, you know, this really cool new material in the world.

You know, packaging alone's a 30 billion market. It's a sustainability movement is coming in like a tsunami and the opportunity to, to allow a product that solves real customer needs. And over time where this can magically disappear, we're excited to get this announced to get our commercial operations off the ground, which will be Q2 of this year.

I love

the way you introduced that, your, your thought process and, and I often talk to people, you know, especially students, and I say, you know, we're essentially, when we're at our best, we're we behave like a super organism. And Superorganisms are all about collectively raising the next generation together and improving the likelihood for the success for the next generations.

And as you were pointing out, that not only involves the things that we make and that sort of thing, but also the way that we do things. You know? So the whole. Capitalist system that we've set up and everything. It's something that we created and we can change it. And we want to have, you know, I think, you know, ideally all of us could agree that, you know, for the next generations, you know, coming along, we want them to have a better planet, better social systems, more democracy, better healthcare, better education, all of those things.

I think everybody in the planet should be able to get behind that. So working on problems like this is really the, the main thing that we all should be doing. And I also think you got a chance to retire fairly early. I did about in when I was 61, so about three years ago. And one of the key things about retired people are people who have that time affluence is we get to do stuff that, you know, the rest of society needs.

And we get to look around, see what needs doing, what we're good at, and, and go ahead and do those things. And, and so if retirement age gets pushed up at some point, that'll be in my mind to the detriment of society because all of us. People with a lot of wisdom getting together and figuring out where, where we can push things for the future as a key part of what needs to be done.

Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. It's so funny because when. I'm working full-time and as hard as I am right now, almost at the level I was at Tesla, Pryor places. I'm like, man, why am I working hard? And when I'm not working I'm like, I am so bored and I'm so, I literally like need to have something like, and I guess it's just, I'm a really restless soul.

I operate in a very binary fashion. I've either gotta be all in and putting my heart and soul, my energy and my passion into something that I really believe in that I hope has the kind of impact that sets that trajectory of inspiring. Future entrepreneurs and future innovators, and hopefully contributing to creating more opportunities versus more problems in society.

There's so much

of the packaging world as a byproduct of the petrochemical industry, and I'm wondering how they receive you as a disruptor. Tell us a little bit

about that, that industry lobbying activities and tentacles just go so deep. The profits that they make are. Obscene for putting out just such a terrible product.

I imagine that they are looking at ways to continue to, to dominate. Virtually almost every market that touches humanity that they're in. It even goes down to, you know, so one of the tools that's used in this industry is called an L C A. It's called a lifecycle analysis. And it basically lays out, well the material, how it's made, it's impact on the environment emissions, it puts into the atmosphere, and they literally have impacted those software platforms where as you go through an L C A, there literally is at the end of life for, let's say, polystyrene.

Their missions end, but yet this material sits in landfill for four or 500 years and there's no responsibility for the tail end of that product. So their influences are, are long and deep, and what I've learned is that, you know, the way to combat to this type of competition is to focus like a laser, creating amazing products that solve real customer needs, make it scalable, and make it affordable.

And like, let the market decide. And that's really the, the goal and the opportunity here is of course, federal tax credits and other types of, and legislation helps, but at the end day doesn't help. If your product isn't meeting a real need in the marketplace. So I think at this point in time, it's been really refreshing and amazing to see the amount of demand coming from very large enterprise companies where these E s G goals, they're actually real.

They've been adopted by, I think 96% of all Fortune 500 companies. Not only have they bled through the boardroom, now they're making their way through the organizations and people like. Packaging engineers, brand managers, operations people are focused on how do they cut their emissions and meet their sustainability goals.

And packaging is a really good key area of a single use plastic that serves one small purpose and getting rid of this terrible material that we have. So what's been interesting to watch is most innovations back in the day. It was a book by Jeffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm. Today it's the tipping point where you have an adoption curve that starts with, you know, innovators, which are 2% early adopters, early majority, late majority in laggards, and mostly at the front end of that.

You've got kind of a very small set of folks that are willing to get out there, get on the bleeding edge. This adoption curve is almost opposite, where you have very large companies, the largest of the large companies knocking on the, the doors of people like cruise film, and I'm sure others. And that's really refreshing to see it's incumbent on these inter entrepreneurs and innovators, is to create really great products that really solve their needs that can scale and continue to make it more affordable for them to adopt that.

And that's the magic, and that's the hard part. Doing the hard thing is really what, what creates value? So that's where we're at. We're pushing forward. We see the market demand, and it's just constantly, you know, focusing on creating better and more products that solve real customer needs. It's exciting stuff, Toby.

It really is. Tell me a little bit about cruise foam's operation. It's on the West Coast, isn't it? So say Amazon, knock on your door tomorrow and say, okay, we wanna do away with all of our polystyrene. How well placed are you to meet the demands of some of these big Fortune 500 companies and their packaging needs?

That's a really great question and one of the reasons why I decided to become an investor board member and chief operating officer at Cruise film. So when I first met the two co-founders, I thought it was quite interesting that they're working on a, on this cool biofilm. There's been a lot of biofilms.

We're not the first company to ever attempt to do that. However, where others have failed is in how do you make it scalable and how do you make it cost effective? Cuz not a lot of companies want to pay more for their packaging material. It's a tall order to ask when I'm asking you to cut your profit margins for better packaging material.

So the way the two co-founders look to solve this problem was in addition to creating this material based on this really cool material called kitan. By the way, we only acquire from sustainable sources and we divert from landfill. So it diverts from waste. It's an epic story. But more importantly, when they developed this material, they focused on how to create it.

Using existing manufacturing equipment. So today, one of the largest and most successful ways to produce a protective foam is through extrusion. It's a manufacturing process, and the fact that they were looking at developing a material that can utilize existing extrusion manufacturing out there and extrusion, basically the way it works in polyethylene and poly styrine is you start with a pellet or a resin.

So you take your raw materials. It compounds in a twin screw extruder. You get a pellet or a resin, and then foaming manufacturers buy that and foam, you know, into larger sheets and protective mailers and cruiser wraps and all kinds of cool stuff and products. Our material is manufactured the same way, so we're not having to, and not a lot of capital investors wanna invest in big CapEx or manufacturing floor footprint.

And when a company like Whirlpool comes to us and says they need, you know, millions and millions of pieces, that's no mean good. Say I can give you a hundred thousand pieces this year and it's gonna cost you three times more. And really, at the time, I wasn't sure they could pull that off. But as the company began to develop, we've had over a thousand different formulations in the course of the last six years and found a way to take advantage of all of that infrastructure so that we could scale and make the product affordable and continue to make it affordable.

And here's the analogy to it. It's almost like, okay, think about the internet. The internet's been around for a really long time. It started as ANet in the sixties as a a tcp i p based Unix. Network that allowed for no single point of failure. So the, the government wanted to ensure that their systems could stay up in, in the event of any kind of attack.

There was no single point of failure. This guy, Tim Berner Lee comes along and just adds basically a killer application on top of the internet. HTTP and H T M L and the world changed, right? But it used that existing infrastructure. And that's where I saw the opportunity here was to use all of this investment, trillions of dollars.

And on top of that, a lot of 'em, their customers, those phone manufacturers, their customers are asking for sustainable material. What do they care about? I wanna be able to run my line. I wanna be able to make money, I wanna employ people. And so if I can greenify those machines and give you a better product where you can make as much, if not more money at the same time, solving a really big problem.

That's the way. You line up where the snowball can go downhill instead of trying to push it uphill is to have a kind of business strategy like that. The Curious Capitalist Podcast on behalf of the Conscious Capitalism Connecticut chapter is created and produced by Red Rock Branding. If you are enjoying this episode, please subscribe to and share this podcast today.

I love companies that have got a particular pain point to solve. Toby, and you've hit on many of those, and I'm wondering how that affects the culture and the, and the leadership. Of cruise foam? Is it a unifying factor or what's it like to recruit and you know, how does that enable other operational

aspects?

That is a really good question. One of my famous quotes are, are startups are hard and it's actually, they're effing hard. There's just incredibly difficult because one, there's no playbook. If you had one, everyone would do it and have their island somewhere off the coast of Greece or Positano. In Italy.

So it takes an incredible amount of talent, focused energy and at the same time, a lot of the challenge comes into mostly finding what not to do. Cuz as I've been involved in early stage companies and you end up just chasing so many things. So what ends up happening is you have these very precious resources.

You end up trying to apply 'em over such a broad landscape and you end up doing 15 of 'em mediocre versus the two or three that are really, really important and, and really move the needle. And I found that there aren't a lot of like people that understand that dynamic. The same time, you wanna make sure that you have enough of a creative envelope where.

You have the right shots on goal and the right opportunities, and understanding that dynamic is like really, really hard and challenging. And I watched Steve Jobs do it. I watched Elon Musk do that, and the hard part is saying no. And that boils down to just staying connected with your vision, really deeply understanding your business strategy.

And what the customer need is, and that creates an interesting dynamic for companies and our side that the hardest part is that your biggest asset as an early stage company is the fact that you're small and you can move and you're very nimble versus large companies, petroleum industries and other large Dow chemicals and these other folks, they're like this big aircraft carrier.

So that puts a lot of pressure and dynamic on company culture in that you're having to move in an incredibly hard way, that the pace of it is really unprecedented and startups are not for everybody. I. You know, if you really like, my job description looks like this, I come into work, I just do this where I'm in a swim lane, you need what I call Renaissance people.

And you need folks that can basically have unique abilities across the spectrum of this early stage company. Because it's almost, think of it, this analogy is this. You're trying to get from point A to point B. So what ends up having to happen is you have to get one the right people on the bus. You gotta get him sitting in the right sea, and then the bus has to go in the right direction, right?

So it's almost a quote of it. We were all in a rowboat and like only half of us were in the rowboat and the other half were swimming alongside the boat, or everyone was in the rowboat, but people were paddling in different directions. It's gonna take you a long time to get there, and maybe you, you end up not making it because timing is so important in, in these early stage companies.

So the way to mitigate that is by a deep focus on people understanding your mission. Your business strategy, what problem you're solving, who your customers are, and just a deep focus on operational execution and synchronizing that across the company cuz you are gonna have to make changes. And what happens is if you don't have good communication and you have to just set that expectation and hiring people that have that.

DNA where, and I call it managed chaos. Sometimes I get criticized for that word, but that's really what it is in that you're coming in, there may be a new com, you know, something that's changed in the marketplace or an area, you know, in this case, it's really hard for us to go out and find, like make sure we have a supply chain that can meet this massive need that we have and how to scale that.

Oh yeah. We have to have these manufacturing partners that are set up that can run and process and manufacture our material and do that at scale and worry about. Where it's being foamed and not have too much transportation cost if you're filming in North Carolina to get that phone to California and how you're gonna scale, uh, into Europe and into Asia and into South America and other parts.

So by, by sequencing that and I think when you hire is setting that expectation. At the same time, I'd like to think of ourselves as a human-centric company that actually care deeply about the people that work here, cuz we're asking a lot of them. And I think what goes with that is this opportunity where to treat people well.

Everyone in our company has stock options align everyone's interest in, in the right direction. And it's funny because, you know, I often get asked from a lot of my Stanford students, what's a good career step for me out of college? And my take on it is, unless you already know what you wanna do, like, oh, I know I wanna be a lawyer or an HR person, or go into finance, most don't.

So, My advice is to find companies like cruise film that have had a successful Series A they're getting in the market. Because typically you're gonna come in, you're gonna work with the C E O, you're gonna work with the co-founder. You're gonna get to do a lot. That's what puts your career in the right trajectory where I've gained all this experience and all these insights working with like really smart people and being able to contribute at a level that I couldn't contribute at Google or Salesforce or Meta or, or name or LinkedIn or or Microsoft or name your largest company.

So that's how sort of I look at that dynamic, but it's always very challenging.

I think that's excellent advice for students. I love that because that is a big thing when they're, you know, getting out of college or whatever and they're looking for their first job and you know, what kind of places that they want to be in and, you know, all those things you just said, including, you know, a place where they're gonna be highly engaged, be able to do a lot of really cool stuff and we're, you know, the company really cares about them.

I think you sounds like the cruise phone place. Everybody cares about each other. Works really hard together and, and has a great time.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. I also think, you know, really lean, heavy into your intellectual curiosity, so, and I'll give you a couple quick examples of that. When I got recruited to join Solar City, I knew nothing about solar.

I mean zero. Like if you showed me my electricity bill, it would be like reading Greek, like what's a demand charge? What's a kilowatt hour? And so when I was contacted, And I said, why do you wanna hire someone with no experience? And it was, you know, Elon was our largest shareholder. His brother Lyndon and Pete Ri ran the company as the two cousins.

They wanted to, they wanted someone that was a successful entrepreneur. That could think outside the box, that could think about not just a solar company, but like how to innovate in large ways that solve real customer problems. I really deeply believe in first principles and coming in here, spend a lot of time understanding not only the technology, but like how does the tax credit work?

How does our structured finance work? What are pricing across. States like New Hampshire and Massachusetts and California of electricity. H how do we price our product where it's compelling, we can continue to survive And it's, and it's compelling enough for the customer. How does the technology work in terms of the solar cells and, and an inverter and everything in between, right?

And become an expert. And the same thing happened at Cruise film where I get excited. The bigger the opportunity and the more I get to learn, the more excited, the more passionate I become. So I don't have a degree in chemistry. I hated chemistry. I think I got absent chemistry in school, and I don't have anything, any formal education in material science.

Had the opportunity to come in here and spend time with our engineers and learn about every ingredient that goes into the product. Why is that ingredient in here? What percentage is it in? Everything around the, the mechanics of our IP and how it's processed and pricing and what polystyrene and polyA and everything in between, and that's what gets me excited is this opportunity to be not only intellectually creative, but how to set that in motion.

So, you know, use naivete as an asset. You know, if you don't think you can do a job or you're not skilled enough, then I can tell you you're absolutely not right. It's all mindset and believing and coming in with this. Ability to wanna listen and wanna learn and want to contribute. That's the magic of a great life and a great career and, and the opportunity to tackle some of our biggest challenges in a way that's like exciting and refreshing and innovative where we can deliver a great return to our shareholders.

It took a big risk on Cruise vo. We can deliver great value to our customers that are desperately needing this product. Product. We can do great justice to our employees who spend a lot of time and energy and blood, sweat, and tears at cruise foam and making their stock options worth something and delivering an incredible career experience for them.

It's quite a, uh, busy schedule you've got there. Toby, tell us a little bit about Toby. When he is not at work, how does he, uh, chill out? How does he relax? Uh,

that should be, does Toby know how to relax? Shouldn't he? I mean, the guy retired at 37. How long were you retired for? Toby. That's what I wanna know.

It was like three or four years. And it was so funny. My youngest daughter, she's 32 now, she just got married, a beautiful wedding in Carmel with her college sweetheart. And the wedding ceremony was, we ended up. Singing together Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen because when she was in sixth grade and I wasn't working, I jump in my truck.

I had a CD player in there and she and I, she's actually an amazing singer songwriter, would be just karaoke to Thunder Road. And so yeah, I was taking my daughter to school, surfing, a little bit of golf, a bunch of travel, and then you just sort of ask yourself like, God, is this all that life is? And they said, I, I'm just a restless soul.

And I think that for me, I, I find ways to unwind it very non-traditional ways. So just meditation just doesn't work for me and for me, nature is probably the greatest relaxation medicine. On the planet. So I love to surf. I haven't surfed that much because of the time investment here at Cruise Foam, but Santa Cruz has got so much abundance in nature and beauty.

You know, big Sur is uh, an hour plus ride away, half Moon Bay, Pescadero Monterey, and everything in between. The beautiful Santa Cruz mountains in, in incredible redwoods here. That is just an opportunity to just to leave everything behind my cell phone, my laptop. And all the stuff that's kind of racing through my brain and just get myself into this beautiful, you know, rhythm and energy.

And part of that is the framework I sort of look at my life through is if you think about three dimensions, uh, an x axis of y axis and a Z axis on the X axis. If you label that consciousness and that's, you know what's interesting is I had a, a world famous neuroscientist, Dr. David Eagleman speaking my class at Stanford many years ago, and he was citing a whole bunch of studies on how what happens with humans is that almost all of us losing all of this neuroplasticity over life because you don't use it.

So a someone from zero to two years old, I have a. Four month old new grandson. Right now they're making 24 million new brain connections a minute. And so you have this and I have a five year old grandson and the questions that comes out of his mouth, cuz there's no boundaries, just pure imagination and.

There's no, you know, he hasn't been zombified or followed into the path of status quo and life does that to you. You think like a human, you know, you think this way, and then what happens is as, as you don't lose that neuroplasticity arose cuz you're not using it. The brain consumes a lot of energy. So the buyer's like, Hey, we're not using.

So then you end up with the same thoughts, the same actions, the same emotions. That's how you stay in this rut. So I like to spend time and like, how do I connect with my true inner self and get divorced from all of what like traditional human looks like and acts like in here in, in the 21st century. And there's like massive health benefits to that.

And like that is the origins of where creativity comes from. Then that along to X axis. I label that knowledge. Um, how do we acquire knowledge or wisdom? Well, a lot of it is like through what are you reading? What podcasts are you listening to, and what people are you connecting with? And unfortunately, society actually does everything in its power to keep you in the same swim lane.

And I'll just give you a small example. If you go on LinkedIn right now and just randomly request like 30 people to join you on LinkedIn, if enough people say they don't know you, you're gonna get a message from LinkedIn. Don't reach out to people that you don't know. When the exact opposite is true, you want the most broadest, acculturation and differing points of view.

What happens on social media? There's a social graph, an algorithm that's sitting there and, oh, you're a conservative. Here's what you get. Oh, you're a liberal. Here's what you get, you're this, you're that, and these labels. And then you basically get spun into, into having your world become narrow and narrower over time when the exact opposite should be true.

And it's like I, as I've said, I hated science. In school and I found myself so intrigued with quantum mechanics and the state of like particles in matter and have been exploring along so many different horizons. You know, I'm reading this epic book right now called Sapiens and the old Toby would never be reading this book and it's, it's amazing.

You know the Doe Ching by Steven Mitchell, I think he's actually a graduate of Yale and on and on. But that's the basis of where your superpower comes from. Cuz we all have infinite creativity, all of us. And when it manifests itself in infinite different ways, you may be a great musician or an artist or a computer program or whatever that might be.

And so creativity comes from as having like how many unique data points can you get on your radar? You live a narrow life and you're meeting with the same people and reading the same things. You're not reading at all. And like aren't intellectually curious, then man, you've got like, then that neuroplasticity begins to erode and all this insane talent that you have, you end up just basically like letting it go off into some other, you know, universe or wherever that goes.

And then that Z axis is, how do I set that in motion? Right. And you know, I think like my dad once said, like, Hey man, like you can sleep when you're dead. And I just like believe in that deeply, right? So like I have grandkids now, like I wanna set the right example, but at the same time, like really connecting with who you are.

And like when I lecture, I tell everyone, take whatever I say with a grain of salt, like my opinion. And $3, maybe get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks, probably not. And you wanna have your own unique tapestry. You want to have your own path. Don't follow someone else's path, right? And you're gonna make mistakes.

I make mistakes all the time. And I'm human and that's part of it. And my daughter bought me this amazing book. So osha, I dunno if you've seen his series on Netflix, it's absolutely epic, but was an amazing guru lecturer and he never wrote anything down. Some folks followed him and took a bunch of his teachings and wrote a book called Fear.

And he spent a lot of time with people on their deathbeds and basically would ask them like, what are you feeling right now? And so many of 'em felt regret. At that time in that life where you go on to whatever, that's probably a whole different podcast. What, what happens after at that point in time? But he said the way to mitigate that is to live life.

As much out over your skis as you possibly can, and I really subscribe to that with no regrets. It doesn't mean I haven't made mistakes, it doesn't mean that I could look back, would do things differently, but it is who it is. It's who Toby Corey is right now. And I accept that and try to become better and better.

But like am I pushing the boundary? Are, am I lazy and loafing and having, you know, cuz like at the end of the day, what's life really about? It's collecting experiences and how many unique experiences can I collect? And that's how I look at that. Right? And the little help for some cool psychedelic trips I've taken along the way.

And again, probably a whole nother podcast. Oh, definitely host that one. Toby.

Toby, what a great way to wrap up. I really enjoyed your life journey and I share your enthusiasm for. Over the skis, and even if that wind's coming off a few times, it's definitely a, a full life lived. So thanks for sharing that today and thanks Gavin for joining us in this conversation.

And, uh, and Claire for setting it up at all as always, and really look forward to future chapters. Toby, I believe this will be the first. I think you kicked on a few topics that are almost standalone, so let's pick it up later. Yeah, it's fabulous.

I'd love to come back in. Gavin was a pleasure to meet you, Claire and Glen.

I was a pleasure. We met over a year ago. This was really fun and yeah man, call me anytime and we can delve into any crazy territory that that suits your fancy. Awesome stuff. Thank you so much for your time, gentlemen. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being a part of the Curious Capitalist.

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