Constructing Meaning from Experience with Nicholas Luft

Nick Luft is Co-Founder & CEO of Idle, a startup app company. He’s also a musician, record producer, artist, rabid Avett Brothers fan, and occasionally, an amateur stand-up comedian.

You’ll enjoy this episode if you like deeper conversations about life, death & meaning. Nick & I discuss valuable lessons that aren’t taught in grade school or in university classrooms. They’re lessons learned only when we encounter people of different cultures, beliefs & ideas.

I’ve known Nick since first grade, but this podcast episode is by far the most we’ve talked. Since we hadn’t seen each other in almost 30 years, we made up for lost time. In this 1 hour & 45 minutes-long discussion, we cover life & meaning, religion & beliefs and dealing with death and loss.

Nick shares how losing his best friend, Cuyler Duncan, greatly impacted his life. His best bud was featured on ESPN College Gameday with Rece Davis after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in his 30s. Nick says the experience of losing Cuyler taught him the power of the human spirit and the value of positivity in our day-to-day lives.

Conversations keep getting better on the podcast.

Questions Asked:

How does losing your best friend change you?
Why did you send me the David Foster Wallace speech?
Why did it [the speech] resonate with you so much that you sent it to me?
How important would it be for a young person in school to learn that you can choose what to pay attention to [or what to believe?]
Do you think people who struggle with depression get joy from being kind?
At what age did you realize something wasn’t right?
Were you an angry kid?
How does someone know if they are depressed?
At what point do you think someone should visit a doctor [for depression]?
Does it bother you that people throw around the word (depression) so loosely?
Are there any habits that you tried to incorporate into your life to rid yourself of depression such as a daily gratitude practice or strenuous exercise?
Are you at a point now where you can wrestle with a thought and say this thought doesn’t serve me? How did you get to that point?
On a scale of 1-to-10, with 10 being very jealous, how jealous of a person are you?
Do you have an internal monologue running at all times?
I want to go back to our “depression” discussion because when I asked you to assess yourself on a scale of 1-10 on how jealous of a person you are, you were taken aback and asked: “Do you ask everybody this question?” [Do you not] see that as being a reasonable context of having depression?
Do you have a favorite book?
Do you have any thoughts on where the divide in our country started?
Let’s talk about investing, and the company you’re heading up right now called Idle—what is Idle?
How popular has Idle become lately?
What advice do you have for someone who might be sitting in a cubicle every day wondering if they should pull the trigger on an idea that they have for a start-up?
Experiences comprise your “gut,” do they not?

Fun Questions:

Have you ever paid for an app?
What’s an app that you’ve bought that you enjoyed?
If you go could back in time and pull Nick aside the day of your graduation…just for 5 minutes …and give him some advice, what would you tell him?
Do you think people are inherently good?
If someone dropped $1 million in your lap tomorrow, what would you do with it?
What are you most grateful for?