On lying

I’ll never forget my ex-cofounders encouraging me to lie to potential investors.

I complained over and over again how uncomfortable it made it made me, and they whined over and over again at me about how everyone does it and how benign it was.

It hurt me every time I almost did it — and the few I did.

Luckily, and ironically, I don’t think any of the people I lied to ended up investing, energy was off. Shoutout Pareto. And even if I had/did, the list of 19, is a list of brothers and sisters now that I lived through something… interesting with.

I’ll never forget the younger cofounder calling me one night in a panic because he had realized morals were not a large part of his life’s… thought process.

He exclaimed he had to just get off his chest that he realized that day he would do almost anything to make more money, and wanted to apologize in advanced in case he ever did anything that harmed me.

Well Blake, if you’re reading this, I’m willing to entertain an apology for you guys locking me out of our company bank accounts.

Brandon on the other hand, was a bit less… sociopathic about it all.

He always just had this kind of demeanor about it all that was always sort of like:

“man, everybody does it… I don’t know what to tell you”

But to me, lying was one of the most vile, disgusting, and idiotic things you could do to another human being you wanted in your life, let alone a powerful one.

So I chose not to… most of the time.

You see, as someone who was so devoid of human interaction as a child, I can confidently say human kindness & friendship have become sacred to me.

But to folks less familiar with having so few humans in their life willing to… share time with them.. not so much.

Man, I had a lonely-ass childhood. Good thing I fixed that childhood trauma, and now have plenty of friends. :)