#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders

did you hear me say when i was asked who is the podcaster's podcaster the underground one that all of us listen to it's you yes i almost clipped it and then posted it i appreciate i watch all your q a's i love them thank you yeah dude i uh i would love a weekly q a from you oh god i don't know if the internet's ready for that there'll be a new one coming up soon anyway today i want to go through a bunch of. You spend your entire time studying history's greatest founders, greatest leaders, thinkers, and I wanted to go through some broad buckets of lessons that you've taken away from them.
So we're going to do 15 today. Okay.
First one, excellence is the capacity to take pain. Persevering through pain is mandatory.
Why? That is probably my all-time favorite maxim from studying all of these history of Grace on Trainers. It actually comes from the founder of Four Seasons, this guy named Izzy Sharp.
And he, sometimes like you're reading a book or you're listening to a podcast or sometimes it's even like a music lyric that just one sentence can stay in your brain forever. I haven't read that book in probably five years.
And he's describing how difficult it was. Like he had no experience in the hotel industry when he found Four Seasons.
And yet his goal was like, I'm gonna make a collection of the greatest hotels in the world. And he didn't kind of disregard the fact that I've never made a hotel before.
I don't have any money. I don't have resources.
I don't have contacts. So the whole book, the autobiography, which I think he wrote when he was close to 80 years old, is now him recounting this for the reader.
And there's just so many times where he's just like, he hit a, like, there's a problem that he can't figure out how to solve, you know, problems with partners, with contractors, with financing, all kinds of like, you know, basically unresolved issues. And he's laying up late at night.
And there's interviews with his wife, which is fantastic because they were married through this whole time. This whole time, they're still married to this day.
And she recounts where like, she would wake up at like two in the morning and he's just sitting there wide awake, hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling, just like can't sleep, depressed, agonizing over this relentless pursuit of a goal. And so he's the one that said that, that coined the term, you know, excellence is the capacity to take pain.
I was like that. And I think by that point I had read like 180 biographies and autobiographies of history, that's exactly what I see in every single book.
There's never a book. There's not a, no life story, no book starts with, hey, this guy had an idea uh he did the idea everything went well end of story it is all like hey i have this idea i want to do something and it's just one problem one obstacle one and it's one uh like essentially uh emotional and mental and in some cases physical pain to like persevere and push through to tilting get to the other side and actually achieve what they're trying to achieve why why is that the case is it just that achieving anything that is excellent requires you to negotiate with a world that's going to push up against you and that means that you're going to end up feeling discomfort therefore the capacity to deal with pain is important yeah there's no such thing as like a an important goal or an audacious goal that that comes easily.
I think Jeff Bezos has his own way of saying this. And there's this great book called Invent and Wander.
And it's the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. So they take his shareholder letters and they take transcripts of his speeches.
And you really get to understand how he was thinking as he was building Amazon and all the stuff that he's learned. And his whole thing was, you know, I have unrelenting, uncompromising standards for excellence and the talent of the people around me.
And if you're coming to work at Amazon, like you, I'm not going to bend. You are going to raise to my expectations, my standards.
It is not easy to work here. I'm going to tell you that up front because we're trying to do something that we can tell our grandkids about, that we can be proud to say, this is what granddad did.
This is how I spent my life life and he says he's like things uh things that you could tell your grandkids about are not meant to be easy there's a quote from tim cook at apple where he says um people say if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life i found that to be a total crock of shit uh at apple you will work harder than you ever have before but the tools will feel light in your hands i'm surprised tim said that because if you go back and steve jobs is like obviously what i consider him probably the greatest entrepreneur of all time just for his he's got a very unique story like there's only there's really no other founder that if you think about the story of steve jobs he founded apple twice and the second time he was alone. And then he winds up coming back, you know, after 12 to 13 years in the wilderness and he comes back and then goes on the greatest run that we've ever seen, creates, you know, the most successful consumer product of all time, sets the foundation for the multi-trillion dollar market cap that Apple has today.
And Steve's take on this was the reason that you have to love what you do is because it's so hard and so painful that if you don't you'll quit and it's sane and he goes why do people quit because it's sane it is that's the sane thing to do it's the misfits the rebels you know uh the the people that actually are obsessed with what they're doing that are able to persevere he also has this other quote that he feels what separates the success half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is just pure perseverance another all these all these ideas are all related like excellence capacity to take pain you should love what you do because if you love what you do you'll keep doing it through the pain did you ever hear me uh tell rogan about the region beta paradox that thing so it's just a an idea about where you get stuck in comfortably numb in the middle. Things aren't too bad.
They're not that good. But because they're not that bad, you don't have the motivation to go make them better.
It's a well-known psychological state. And I came up with a colliery of it, which is the reverse region beta paradox.
Being in an aggressively terrible working cadence or environment, but having such a tolerance for discomfort that you can endure it for a lifetime lower resilience less stubborn people would snap and have to find a way to change but not you you're the david goggins of working hard who's going to carry the workload you are forever and uh that that thing is um it's a blessing and a curse because it allows people to maybe continue moving when they actually should pivot to something else but if you know that the idea is right i guess that that's a competitive advantage i would say one of the greatest if you're talking about like one of the near perfect entrepreneur autobiographies is phil knight's shoe dog where he's telling the story of nike and the reason i think it's great is because it's in every chapter is a year and it goes in sequential order from the time he has the idea till the IPO of Nike. So like everybody identifies with the struggle wanting to like have a dream, wanting to achieve it.
I wish more biographies were like that because they spend too much time after the person's like donating things to education. That's way less relatable.
This is an is an egalitarian a temporally egalitarian book this is like 90 struggle and then he finally breaks through and then gets the ipo and then we know what happens after that we got that but he ends that i love what you said because the last chapter he's like for the char i think he calls him charlatan he's like for the charlatans that tell entrepreneurs to never quit he's's like, that's bullshit. He doesn't use that word, but he's like, he goes, you don't ever stop.
But sometimes quitting is the best thing. Meaning like you're in the wrong path.
So quit that path, but don't stop trying to actually do what you want to do in life. And what do you want to set out to accomplish? What about Elon? Because he strikes me as somebody that's just got a pretty high pain tolerance.
So now I'm completely back. So the very first episode of Founders in September 2016 was Ashley Vance's book on Elon.
And in fact, there's this guy named Kevin Rose, who's the founder of Dig, right? And he's like one of the first internet OG creators. He has like one of the first podcasts, but they weren't called podcasts back then.
He had this video podcast, what we call a video podcast today call a video podcast today called foundation and it was excellent high quality you would love it because like shot in like crazy cameras great sets and so you go back and he actually interviews elon and so i watched this in 2012 okay and they're on their interview is on tesla's factory floor so you kind of hear the stuff in the background elon looks way better he does now now. He's like, you know, he's been going through hell for the last- Tough paper round.
Yeah, 15 years. But at the time, they're just starting to produce the Model S.
And what was fascinating about this is the reason that was the first book that I covered, right? Because I wanted to do a podcast on biographies and autobiographies is because Kevin Rose asks Elon a question that changed my life. And he's like, hey, you know, Elon has a crazy experience.
Everybody knows about Tesla, SpaceX, but like, if you go back and him emigrating from South Africa to Canada and then Canada to the Bay Area. And, you know, I don't, a lot of people don't know that he had his first successful company exit when he was like 25, something like that, 26.
He sold this company called Zip2, winds up netting something like, you know like you know 20 30 million dollars at that age and then immediately rolls it back into paypal and then rolls paypal into tesla and spacex and does exactly what he always does now but the fascinating thing camera was like dude you didn't know anybody you didn't have resources like you didn't have a network like how did you learn like who were you how'd you learn how to build companies you were so young when you were doing that. Did you have a mentor? Did you read a lot of business books? And Elon said something that's fascinating.
He's like, I didn't read a lot of business books. He goes, I like biographies and autobiographies.
I think they're helpful. He goes, I was looking for mentors in historical context.
And so he talks about, you know, reading the biography of Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla. And I was like, that's genius.
Cause for the vast majority of humanity, right? We don't have world-class mentors in person, but you can access that their entire life learnings by picking up the biography. So a few years later, I started getting obsessed with podcasts.
I was like, I remember that. Cause as soon as he said that, I started reading a ton of biographies and then I got addicted to reading biographies.
Oh, I should just make a podcast about the biographies I'm reading. And so it's funny you bring him up because I just read for the second time.
I reread a lot of books. I think that's actually important.
We can talk about that later if you want to. But I just read this book called Lift Off Elon Musk in the Desperate Early Days of SpaceX.
Elon is in a class of himself. There is not.
In many cases, like a lot of the modern day founders,

like there's a historical equipment. There is like, you know, there is even a Steve Jobs before

Steve Jobs. I've given up on finding another.
There's no Elon Musk before another Elon Musk

before Elon. And the reason I love this book Liftoff so much is because it's the first six

years of SpaceX. That's it.
Just like I said, I loved how Phil Knight just covered, get to the IPO is fine. This is even better because then you go back and what I do is when I'm reading books, I'll look up, how old are they when this is happening in their life? That book is about Elon Musk when he's 30 to 37.
Now me and you think of Elon now, like world's most richest man, like unbelievable powerful tipping elections, like doing all this crazy shit, right? It's like, no, to 37 and it's insane and 90 of the book is him failing it is they can't get the rocket into orbit he's running out of money he's going to a divorce his his infant son dies um his girlfriend talks about in the book him literally waking up in the middle night screaming not like oh how you doing honey i how are you doing, honey? I can't sleep. No, no.

Screaming in pain and agony.

And because he put, when he was the largest shareholder in PayPal, okay, this is what I also admire about him.

His skin in the game.

When you already have multiple successful exits, you don't have to put your money on

the line anymore.

You can raise money from wherever you want.

He's like, no, no, I want to be the largest shareholder.

He made more money on PayPal than anybody else, right?

Because he put in all his own money. Gets $180 million after taxes when they sell to eBay.
Puts a hundred of a million into doing a rocket company who's no experience doing, 70 million into Tesla, where there hadn't been a successful American car company for like 80 years, and then puts 10 million in solar city, has to borrow money for rent. And and so then this is talking about he's like you know that that book is the next few years he just sees all that money just essentially being lit on fire how does he keep going he has fucking malaria and meningitis at the same time um this is what i love so originally he's like hey uh i have enough money for three rocket launches and that's what he thought he's like we can do this he's also like super early super optimistic so he's a little nutty you know in that in that case he just thought he could do this um and so the third rocket fails and he's like you know what we're gonna scrounge up enough money and we have 30 days we don't have six months i think it might be six weeks uh we have't have six months.
We have six weeks. We have to launch this rocket.
And his whole thing, he ends that speech after the failure of the third rocket. He's like, come hell or high water, we're going to make this work.
And I just think another thing that history skills entrepreneurs have in common, and I think me and you probably agree with this too, I definitely do, is the power of will and the power of one dynamic individual to change the course of history um i feel that like belief comes before ability is another like repeated um lesson that you it's obvious if you read biographies of people do great things and for elon it's just like i think he believes that he has strength and power of will and that he can literally bend and change the world problems are just opportunities in work clothes Business is problems. The best companies are just effective problem solving machines.
That line. So the closest now, the closest like historical equivalent to Elon, and this is still a bit of a stretch to bear with me.
There's a guy named Henry Kaiser. Okay.
Henry Kaiser founded like over a hundred different companies. He built a Hoover Dam in his day around World War ii he was almost as famous in his day as elon was today i think now elon's like on a different level um you know multiple billion dollar companies he built uh ships and he just like helped uh the allies win uh world war ii but that's his line where he was just like elon just default optimistic like every day like i'm gonna i know i wake up every I wake up every day.
There's going to be problems. That's fine.
That's what I want because problems, that's his line. Problems are just opportunities and work clothes.
So when his like employees would, you know, bitch and complain about, oh my God, this, this thing failed or this order fell through, or we can't find a guy for this. It's like good.
Problems are just opportunities to work clothes. So you, the default state, I think for humans is like to complain, oh, woe is me.
Here's another problem. Entrepreneurs, what they realize is like, oh, the problem or actually, if I can solve that problem, any problem you solve for a person could be a business.
And so the second line where it says like, you know, business is problems, that's something that's repeated over and over again. But then when you think about it, that second line is something I came up with where it's like,, oh, well, if business is problems, that means the most successful companies are just effective problem-solving machines.
Because the perpetuation of their existence is the fact that you know that they're solving problems for other people and they're doing so effectively. So if you want to build wealth and you want to be a successful company, it's like, find a problem and then solve it better than anybody else.
it's the reason that people at the top get paid more because they have more levels of input coming in. Anybody that's in the C-suite, that's good in the C-suite, it's basically just a very complex, high-level problem-solving algorithm.
But they can just, the number of inputs that they're able to see and the way that they can triage top down and prioritize what the most and wait their waiting is appropriate because of experience uh and maybe taste or talent or whatever insight um but yeah i i think you're right i think that the best companies just solve problems i was thinking about this yesterday because um you know we talked we we you know we, we, you know, we talk all the time. And one thing that you notice is like, I'm kind of like oblivious to what's going on online.
Like I'm just reading books and enviously and you know, talking to podcasters and entrepreneurs. It's like, Oh, that's my entire life outside of spending time with my family.
And I was struck and like kind of shocked because I saw a headline where, uh, there was a bunch of protesters that set up a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos's Washington, D.C. house.
This was like a year or two ago or something like that. An actual guillotine.
And, you know, like kill the rich or eat the rich. And I looked at that and I was dumbfounded because I'm like, Jeff Bezos made a magic button that I could press.
And if I want something to appear in my house in a day or two, I just press the button and Jeff hides all that operational complexity, right? Like, do you understand how difficult that was to do? And this, you know, talentless hack shows up at his house with a guillotine, like, give me your money. Like, what did you do? Like, did you make a magic button? Jeff deserves that money.
And that doesn't even talk about all the other businesses. In fact, he he owns the largest cloud computing business the fact that the hardware businesses he has the invention of the kindle uh his advertising business they probably have more multi 10 10 billion plus businesses and uncorrelated 10 billion plus businesses inside of amazon than any other business on the planet like you think you could have done that like that's insane he deserves that money and then the other thing i was thinking about too, in response is, because I've done probably like, I don't know, like eight podcasts on Jeff.
I think he's incredible. And so I read everything about him.
And I'm like, this is kind of hypocritical. Like you're protesting now because he's got a trillion or $2 trillion market cap, right? But there was no protest in front of his house after the dot-com bust when the stock goes from $180 to six.
You could have bought a share of Amazon stock at that time for $5.96. You weren't out in front of his house then.
And when he had a mass exodus of employees, you weren't saying anything about that. You waited till it's not, there's a line that, again, we talk about the fact that it's just a single line.
I read all the time, you're not going to read everything. You're not going to remember everything in an entire book, maybe 500 page book.
I'll remember a story, a line, right? And there's a line that I heard Charlie Munger say one time, which he was actually quoting Warren Buffett. And he says, it's not that greed, it's not greed doesn't run the world.
Envy. Envy runs the world.
Yeah. His whole point is like, cure yourself of envy.
I was like, dude, you're not outside of Jeff Bezos' house because you're trying to fix the broken world. You're envious.
It's like that when you hit that line and then now you start to look at all the interactions you have and the actions of other people, you're like, oh, they're right. Greed doesn't run the world.
Envy does. Yeah.
It's a shame because one of the things that this can incentivize people to do is to track the low points and track the journey in the

beginning sufficiently so that you always have this sort of stake that you've planted in the ground to say see you know that famous photo of jeff and he's in front of the handwritten amazon sign and it's like crt monitors and old school style keyboards and stuff everything's beige um why is that photo important Because most of Amazon's inception is bereft of the 4K behind the scenes footage that you would like to have now. You look at somebody like Chris Bumstead, best bodybuilder in the world, ex, I guess, he just retired a few weeks ago.
He has been tracking his journey for over 10 years on YouTube. youtube so when it comes to him people can look at this person and the envy i think you're able to dampen that down you're able to ameliorate it because you can show people the difficult times yeah if you're able to see jeff bezos at his worst elon musk at his worst dyson at his worst whoever trader joe at his worst if you could see those guys when they were really in the shit I think far fewer people would think that they did not deserve the success that they get on the other side the issue people have is that looks like it came easy therefore they don't deserve it I didn't have something come easy therefore I should take it from them yeah I um you're the one that introduced me to Chris I didn't know about Bumstead before I watched your episode with him.
I love the question you had for him. You're like, do you think you're a strange dude to be the best in the world at where you are? He's a real soulful dude.
Correct. He's very soulful.
I thought that was fascinating. I loved his perception because again, or his perspective rather, like this is somebody who got to literally the best in the world at what you do.
i love the this is something that's obvious because one of the um complaints that some very few complaints i get most of the like the people listen to podcasts are nerds right and i'm talking about history like and it just self-selects for like you have to be kind of a you know a driven kind of um like obsessive person to even be into this kind of stuff and i think you know obviously me and you are both like this well, but they're like, I can tell when sometimes the podcast is not for other people. Cause like, Oh, you're not, you're not telling me what to do.
And how is this like, cause there's no formula. And Chris made the point.
He's just like, listen, this is how I got there, but there's six other ways. There's 15 other ways.
There's like, you could do all, there's no, there's no right way. It's the right way for you.
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I was listening to Michael Dell's autobiography, which is really excellent. The second one, he wrote two, but they're both good.
But the second one is the one I was listening to. And for the longest time, I kept talking about the importance of building a life and business as a byproduct of that, that's authentic to you.
And then I'm listening to Michael Dell, who's a phenomenal entrepreneur, even when he was like young, like right away, like when he was like 19, he was like making millions and millions of dollars. And so he's running this crazy company in Austin and it's just exploding.
And he's still in college and he winds up recruiting like an older, more experienced, you know, C-suite executive to help him. And the guy helps him for a few years and he burns out real fast.
He's not sleeping. He's gaining weight.
And he's like, Michael, I love you, but like, I have to, I have to take a break. I can't do this.
I have to like leave the company. And Michael felt the opposite.
Like he's working all hours of the day. He's going to the full limit, but he, but he realized, and he put it better than I did.
He's like, oh, the difference was I built a business that was natural to me. This is how naturally want to spend my time this is what i'm naturally interested in this is what i'm naturally obsessed with this is what i'm naturally what i naturally want my life to be i'm like natural is a better word than authentic yes and i think what i took away from your conversation with chris was like he built a life that was natural to him he's swimming downstream yeah it makes life so much easier he's swimming downstream the partner partner that he picked compensates for his shortcomings and accounts for them and helps him to be a better person.
So does mine. So does my wife.
Yeah. I keep fucking hopping on about it.
This Michelangelo effect thing. Two people, they make each other better, two be better for each other and for themselves.
And together, they are positive some more than they could have been apart, etc uh i actually have an interesting tangent i think you you might um enjoy i read a book um so i was obsessed with arnold schurzner i love arnold and you know his his his autobiography that he wrote when he was 70 called total recalls excellent right but what's even better is he wrote an autobiography when he was 30 that is not that people don't think it was an autobiography it's called the education of a bodybuilder right the first 110 pages of that book is arnold telling his life story at 30 and then calling a shot saying hey the same principles i just did to give you the best bodybuilder i'm gonna get into movies i'm gonna build a business empire he just literally calls a shot and so i read everything get my hands on i watch everything with arnold and so i thought i read every book about arnold then i'm watching that netflix documentary on him that came out and they keep interviewing this his his girlfriend that the arnold lived with before he was famous from 21 to 26 and she goes and it's like author of arnold and me i'm like what i was like i ordered the book immediately and then i read the book and it's 300 pages of this woman bless her heart right i could have helped her in a minute her Her saying, I don't understand why this outlier of an outlier of an outlier won't just be a normal guy. Oh man.
And so the main takeaway from that book was, especially for entrepreneurs, especially for driven people and people like Chris as well. And I can give you multiple examples in the books as well like the founder four seasons it's also it's like for entrepreneurs you either need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all because like there is no separation from our work and our lives and it's not gonna work if like you're completely obsessed the reason me and you get along the reason i love hanging out with you we've spent nine hours talking about podcasting in miami like because you're a fellow obsessive and i was like that's why i flew here i was like there's no way i'm recording remotely i'm coming to like give you a hug and to sit down with you but you can't like you imagine your wife you know your future wife saying chris don't work so hard on the podcast like oh it doesn't matter like that doesn't have to be shot you know with a camera that's going to break spotify's video player like calm don't need to redo the barn.
It's just Matthew McConaughey. Like, why does this stuff matter? It's not going to work.
You either need no spouse or a supportive spouse. And this is where I see so many entrepreneurs, like, fight against this, where their spouse makes them feel guilty.
They're attracted to them because they're so driven and obsessed, right? Which is abnormal for the human population. And you deal with with a lot of young men a lot of young men don't they need to get offline and like increase their level of ambition and service to the world right stop thinking about themselves start thinking about other people um and so you're you're attracted to this person because they're so driven then you marry them just like hey i love what you are now be some something please stop that thing that made me so attracted to you it's actually kind of getting in the way of the comfort that I want to get.
Yeah, so true, man. I mean, Holmosi's got something where he says the cheerleader should not be telling the quarterback to get off the field when it's in the final play of the game.
And, you know, that can switch. I'm sure there's times when you need to step up and be the cheerleader for your wife uh not in the podcasting world but in all sorts of other stuff and you're like hey there you go stadium floor crack on i'm here to support you um i think what hormosi did too um that's smart that i've seen a few times um because you are gonna you know these these people are obsessed like they're not gonna write biographies about normal people it's not like hey, this guy had a you are going to, you know, these, these people are obsessed.
Like they're not going to write biographies about normal people. It's not like, Hey, this guy had a nine to five and you know, you just play pickleball on the weekends and you barbecue and it's like, no one's going to read that book.
So by default, like you're self-selecting into these very extreme people. And you know, my entire life outside of spending time with my family is talking to entrepreneurs and hanging out with founders.
Like I don't have any friends that aren't founders. And like one thing that you see this conflict between like, how do I balance work and family? And I think what Hormozy did is like he combined, he combined, you know, work with Layla.
I actually got that idea from two people from Estee Lauder and Sam Walton. Like Estee Lauder is one of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live that no one ever thinks about.
They know the company is named after her. It's probably $20 million market cap or whatever it is today.
But there's a very hard-to-find autobiography about Estee Lauder when she was still alive, published I think in the 80s. It's one of my favorite books I've ever read.
If you can get a copy, you can read it in a weekend. And there was a huge conflict between she's a monster she is a drip one of the most driven entrepreneurs ever and she's like but i want to also spend time with my sons and my husband so what i do she brings them into the business with them so her husband shuts down his business because her business is a lot more but it has a lot more potential he works in there and then they involve the kids since they were like.
Greg McHugh, an author of Essentialism, was on the speaking circuit's 10th year anniversary of Essentialism next month. And he's done speaking for forever and he didn't want to miss his kids, but he also wanted to build a life that his kids would be able to benefit from.
So he's sort of caught between a rock and a hard place because being away from his kids is the very thing that facilitates the life he wants to give them so he just put in a request part of his rider was a second ticket business class and a second hotel room and he took one of his kids with him every time that he did a talk i love so his kids got to travel the world with him can i tell you a funny writer so i was at i do a lot of well now i do less of them but for for the right people i'll do like a lot of speaking gigs for like private companies and usually like private companies or investment firms. And so I was at one, there was two speakers, me and Tucker Carlson.
And so the CEO of the company that will not be named, I was asking him because I was like, there's no way, like I probably charged way too less for it, like not enough money for this. So it's like, how much did you pay Tucker? And because, you know, he's a fan of the podcast.
Like I knew I could talk to him like, you know, a friend. And he goes, well, his writer's a little different than yours.
I was like, what do you mean? He goes, he insists that we fly him in and out on our private jet. And I was like, I didn't even know I could do that.
Number three, there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. History's greatest entrepreneurs all learned from history's greatest entrepreneurs so that is a direct quote from poor charlie's almanac and it is literally true um in that case uh there's there's this guy named henry singleton that i didn't know i guess i should back up and talk about part of my process which i think is is helpful outside of just making a podcast.
I really believe like anybody you admire, whatever field, it could be a director, it could be an entrepreneur, it could be an athlete, read, find a book about them and read about their life. Like I am an evangelist for reading biographies.
I think it's one of the highest value activities that you could have outside spending time on your health with your friends and family. I really think people should make it a habit.
And so what I do is like, I think Charlie Munger is the wisest person I've ever come across. He's like a hero of mine.
I got a chance to meet him. I got to go to his house.
It was incredible. But what I'll do is like, I'll read every single book I can find about somebody I admire.
And then I usually find other books about them by going through the bibliography. And like books are made out of books.
So anybody usually has one bibliography. It's a regress of people referring other people yes and then not only so that's not only how you find books to like a hard to find books or books that other people are reading but inevitably in that book they all studied history's greatest entrepreneurs all studied history so they will talk about the people that influence them and so i'm doing this going through the same process as described to you for monger and buffett and they keep bringing up this guy named henry singleton i was like who the hell is henry singleton i've never heard of henry singleton and they say wild stuff like henry singleton's the smart charlie monger says henry singleton is the single smartest person i've ever met that singleton is smarter than buffett uh buffett says that it's a crime that business schools don't study him that if you took the the the top 100 business school students and compared their record for singleton he'd blow him out of the water i'm like i have to read about this guy so then you start um there's this book called the outsiders and i pick it up i start reading about i'm like oh my god the ideas that i thought were buffett and mongers were singleton they just applied it to to building Berkshire.
And then you go and so then what I do, I go and read everything about Singleton. And then Singleton says, hey, there's this book that changed the trajectory of, he built this conglomerate called Teledyne.
And he goes, there's a book that changed the trajectory of Teledyne. I was reading Alfred Sloan, the CEO of GM's book.
And he says, as you're building a business, you need access to a financial institution. So I went out and bought either a bank or an insurance company.
I forgot which one he did. He's like, and that solved, like that helped Teledyne, not only did he use the money to invest and keep buying more companies to increase his conglomerate, but literally they made billions of dollars from an idea that was in a $30 history book.
And you see this over and over again. And that's another thing where it's, when I say like all of history's greatest entrepreneurs study all of history's greatest entrepreneurs, it's really important.
You're not, what they're doing is they're not trying to copy the what. They're trying to copy the how.
They're not trying to build another Teledyne. They're building their version of their business, what they were interested in.
And the greatest example of this is you go back and all the great entrepreneurs can place their work in historical context. So when Steve Jobs is developing the Macintosh, he goes and studies, what did Alexander Graham Bell, how did he market the telephone? Because I feel I just made the telephone of my generation.
And so they're like, oh, there's ideas around marketing this other invention a hundred years before my invention that still worked to this day. And so that's what I mean.
It's like, oh, these ideas, there's 30, there's ideas around marketing this other invention 100 years before my invention that still worked to this day.

And so that's what I mean.

It's like, oh, these ideas, there's ideas with billions of $30 history books.

What about that line between SpaceX and NASA?

Oh, so this is nuts.

So this was in that book, Liftoff, which is really, again, I highly recommend that book because you can, again, read it in a weekend.

Some of these books, you know, I don't read.

People are like, oh, you must read fast.

No, I read pretty damn slow because I'm taking notes. I'm like doing arts and crafts over here.
I got scissors, a ruler, a pen. I got post-it notes.
Like it takes a long time, but you can read that book in a weekend. And what they realized is like, hey, NASA has, because it's a government-run agency, They documented all of their experiments, all of their, all their, their, their hypothesis,

all their, uh hypothesis all their uh everything in papers and they're you could just download them and read them nobody read them so they wind up at least i think they said they like cribbed nasa's notes and they got a couple billion dollars of value uh from like for ideas in the early days of spacex and then you could also do that. There's another line in the book that Elon talks about

where this reporter goes,

he's flying on Elon's jet after a failed,

I think it's like the second failed rocket.

And Elon's brother's on the jet

and he's like watching TV or playing video games.

And Elon's in the corner reading biographies

of all the rocket engineers.

Because again, he's like,

I want to know what they know. So I can one, take the good ideas and avoid the bad ones and so this just happens over and over and over again relationships run the world trusted personal networks may be the most valuable asset in the world okay so this this this might be the most important idea that i've actually internalized and seen play out in the last like year of my life.
I'm going to go to, there's, I had the ability to meet Charlie Munger that I just met and went to his house, had dinner with him. The night started out in his library, which is really cool for me because, you know, I love reading and I got to see, I got to see not only like what was in his library, but I also got to see like, I could read biographies the rest of my life and like, I'll never have what he has.
And what I mean by that is he's sitting in front of his bookshelf, right? And I get there. And first of all, he's like my hero when I mean that.
So I, first of all, I'm sitting there and, you know, I'm there with two other of my entrepreneur friends and you just start having conversation they had met him before and i'm in shock i'm just staring at him because i'm like that that's charlie munger like i watch all the agm videos like that's i still watch his speeches like that's him he's just sitting there and you know he's looking at you because he his eyes were really degenerated so like he has like the bifoc's not just like, he looks at you like this. He'll look and I'll go like this.
Cause he's got to look through the bottom and he's making eye contact with me and I'm looking and for 10 minutes, I'm just like frozen. And then my friend Andrew was like, Hey, like get in here.
Start asking him. You're going to waste this.
And so what I do, I was like, I don't know what to say. Like I had all these notes.
I had made all these things on my Apple notes on my phone, never looked at my phone once in three hours. And so immediately I just started looking at his shelf behind him.
And I started noticing all the books. Cause again, I find people I admire.
And then if they say, Hey, I like this book, I go and read it. So I start asking him questions about all these books.
And what I mean that I'll never have what he has. I have to like reread stuff.
I have to like study. I have to like practice.
Immediately ask him about a book he hasn't read in 25 years. He can tell you what the, what the company does, what their revenue was, what, who sold, who was partners, who sold it.
Like he was a legit genius. Like, absolutely.
I don't have whatever brain he has. And anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline, right? You have to sum up.
Imagine him at 35. He would destroy me.
He would just like, 55, any of that, he would destroy me.

So relationships around the world is one of the lessons that he taught us.

Because, you know, he knew he was not going to lift up.

He knew he didn't have that much longer.

And so he prioritized meeting with other young, ambitious, like entrepreneurial kind of people.

And his whole thing was, we talked a lot about Ben Franklin because he's got a bust. He commissions busts of people he admires.
So he's Lee Kuan Yew and Ben Franklin. And he's got every biography I've ever seen of Ben Franklin.
And his whole thing, he's like, one of the things I learned from Ben Franklin is that no matter your age, go out and seek talented people. If they're peer group, that's fine.
But if they're younger and build a relationship with them. He talked about how Ben Franklin did that with a young George Washington.
Ben Franklin's like 48 years old. When he cold DMs about the day, George, George Washington, who's 21, right? And they build a relationship and they have a relationship their whole life.
And then he was describing that. I was like, that sounds like what you did.
He's like, that's exactly what I did. He's like, I met Buffett.
I was 35, Buffett was 28. And we built a seamless web of deserved trust.
He goes, everybody knows about us, but there was all these other guys around us that were similar age and similar interests. And we just did deals, uh, forever.
And most of them had passed on, you know, by the time I got to meet, uh, but I got to meet Munger, but relationships around the world, what you realize is, um, everything, like we think of like an organization.

Like let's say we need, there's something, there's certain organizations that are important in podcasting, Spotify being the most important one.

So we think of Spotify as an organization, but is it an organization?

Well, inside an organization, there's people.

And there's people that me and you have relationship with, like Daniel Ek, or people on the board, or the head of podcasting.

So if you need something done, right, because of their personal relationship they have with you, it's a call. It's relationships around the world.
And so there's another guy that I got to meet who was one of my heroes. This guy named Sam Zell.
He also, he was 81 years old when I met him. He passed away, unfortunately, about six months after I got to have lunch with him.
And in his autobiography, he mentions, Sam Zell's a legend. You know, one of the best entrepreneurs, investors.
He sold the largest real estate company in history for like $38 billion. The guy just could, he fell ass backwards into deals and deals and money.
He was just phenomenal. But I got to have a two hour lunch with him and he's sitting closer than you are to me and could ask him whatever I wanted.
So I brought up the fact that I read, he knew i read his autobiography because the way i met him is he got into podcasts and he heard the podcast i did on his autobiography and he starts listening to a bunch he goes hey can i meet this guy and so i get a message like sam's not wants to meet you i thought it was like fake i was like yeah he just doesn't want to meet this is ridiculous so i go sam um i bought the book that you talked about that change go back to there, there's ideas worth 30, I forgot about this. There's ideas worth billions and $30 history book.
When Sam, Sam Zell was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school. He was an entrepreneur for 61 years and one of the best to ever do it.
And he picked up a book that changed his life when he was in law school. It's the autobiography is a guy named William Zeckendorf.
William Zeckendorf is one of the greatest real estate developers to ever live. In that book, he has this idea he calls the Hawaiian technique, right? And it works in real estate and what, and it worked in real estate when Sam Zell used it, but Sam Zell also realized it works in business, buying private businesses, where he says like there's components of a building that, you know, the land underneath, you can piece it apart.
Like the land is valuable, is high, will be highly valuable to a certain party. You can sell it to the highest bidder there.
And then maybe the leases that somebody else prioritizes that. So, so break up the components of the business and sell to the highest bidder and the sum of the parts, like that'll make, that's how you make more money.
Right. And so Sam used that idea, made billions of dollars.
He also used it in private business, but I tell Sam, I go, Sam, I bought Zeckendorf's book. He's like, did you read it? And I go, not yet.
And Sam, he was famous for this gravelly voice. He goes, read it.
I was like, okay, Sam Zell tells me to read the book. I immediately read the book.
In that book is where it crystallized for me that relationships around the world. Zeckendorf, you know, very wealthy, winds up losing all his money, but at the time, very wealthy and wasn't born wealthy.
So like very similar to me and you with our background, right? We don't understand any of this stuff. So what he realizes as he climbs through society and he's in New York and he gets more successful and he meets more people and he gets richer, what he goes, hey, you're a normal dude, you know, how we grew up.
You're at the base of the mountain. You might be able to see that peak, right? But what you don't see, because you're not climbing the mountain, is when you get to the other, as you get closer to the peak, other peaks starting to appear.
And then, so these are all very influential, rich, very powerful people. And then what you realize is all these mountain peaks are actually connected by little pathways.
And you don't have access to those pathways unless you've climbed the mountain. And goes and then if i need something from a howard hughes or a j prissler family which is you know multi-billion dollar chicago family or you know the the mayor of new york city because i'm a developer well guess what i'm on a peak too there's a path right here relationships around the world and so the advice that they both gave me is like you need to develop seamless webs that deserve trust good just that there's an additional element in there which suggests you need to also be able to display value in some way you need to be able to have yes you can build a relationship with somebody but the analogy of the peak suggests to me that you stand alone atop a mountain of your own you have done a thing which enables you it unlocks that i love i love that you said that there's another maxim so i try to break everything down to maxims like so everything i'm learning right because i've done let's see you probably read 380 biographies 100 over 100 000 pages eight years two months but like you can't remember all that stuff so you have to like i love what neval ravikant He's like, I break things down to the maximum level.
So then they're easy to remember. And then you contextually apply it to your situation.
It's a zipped file. People, this is a, because of the way that I learn as well, which is the same, essentializing, right? Taking large concept into memorable mantra, maxim, aphorism, whatever it is.
It can feel like quote pawning, right? Which is fine. And I don't actually mind all that much.

But that's the sticky thing

that stays in the back of your mind.

And if you're not going to be able

to remember the entirety of a book,

but you can remember do less but better.

That's the concept of essentialism, right?

Do less but better.

How awesome.

That's really lovely.

Do less but better.

It's like from a German saying.

You go, right.

Well, you can't use it if you can't remember it. Correct.
David Ogbe has this line where he's like, why do you have to write interesting ads? And you do this phenomenally. I just saw the ad you just did yesterday.
Thank you. Because in his response is you can't save souls in an empty church.
So then you'll remember. I'll remember, oh, I can't save souls in an empty church.
If no one reads this or no one, if I want to educate. So I have a, my life's goal is like very simple.
I have one simple organization principle is I want to help people learn from history, skills, entrepreneurs, and I want to do that better than anybody else in the world. That's it.
So then I can go, I remember that, that's my principle. And then I look at how I'm spending my time.
Single, ordinating, single direction. Yeah, I want to go back to what you said though.
So my maximum on this is you need to make yourself easy to interface with. Okay.
And I go back to how we were able to build a relationship. We're in a industry full of second rate products and second rate talent.
And most people that go to podcasts or podcasters don't want to work. They do.
It's not the only thing that it's like one of 10. And what me and you saw in each other media is like, Oh, this is another me.
We may talk about different things. We have different formats, but it's another me.
It's so much easier for me to like, I knew, I listen to your podcast, so I know exactly who you are. And then we can build a relationship real fast.
So be easy to interface with the person that did this the best. And he did it in three words, Steve Jobs, insanely great products.
He said, you want to come make insanely great products? Then you come to Apple. If you are passionate about doing this, then come work with me.
If you're not interested in it, then remove yourself from my life. And the key thing is where people make mistakes when you go back to relationships around the world, okay? It's very important that you build a seamless web of your trust.
I really do believe these high-end personal networks are the greatest assets in the world. I'm not, that's not hyperbolic.
I literally believe that you have to make yourself easy to interface with. Right.
And what people make the mistake of is all these people, right. On these peaks that are connected to these paths all day long, I call it gimme gimme all day long.
They wake up and somebody wants something from them. You know, give me money, uh, be my customer.
Uh, let me pick your brain, like all this stuff. It's like, no, no, the way you build relationships is doing acts of service.
I make myself, the way I'm able to build relationships with these kinds of people is really simple. I make myself easy to interface with.
Why? Because I can point to a body of work. Like I, and one, I don't ask for anything, never.
I'd never ask for a favor. I don't want to pick your brain.
I don't want any money from you. I don't want anything.
I just want to give, give, give. And my active service is the podcast.
It's like, Hey, I spent eight years and two months doing this, you know, hundreds of thousands of hours or whatever the time, the timeframe is. And I've condensed it down into, you know, 400 hours that you can learn and hopefully be educated and entertain while you're doing other things, while you're on your plane, while you're walking your dog, while you're washing dishes, whatever it is.
And I make myself easy to interface with. It's like, oh, is this a serious person? Well, you've read fucking 400 biographies of entrepreneurs.
That seems a little odd. That seems like somebody worth my time.
And then the higher up you go, right? Learning from history is a form of leverage. That's another maxim from Charlie Munger.
Why is Charlie Munger, Charlie Munger is a multi-billionaire, can learn from anybody. Why is he still reading biographies? He could literally pay anybody in the world to tutor him.
He's like, this is the best value of my time. And so anybody that builds a very valuable company, sees a podcast like Founders or sees somebody like me, he's like, oh, talking to this guy, a good friend of mine said this the perfect way.
And he runs a multi-billion dollar fund. And he goes, talking to you is like talking to 50 of his history's greatest entrepreneurs simultaneously.
I made myself easy to interface with. And I never asked for anything.
I'm not like, oh, you know, can you do this? Can you introduce me to this person? Can you do me this favor? Can you help me raise a fund? Nothing. In other news, this episode is brought to you by NetSuite.
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So when I think about a lot of the people that have ended up working for me in one form or another in nightlife, on the podcast, so many of them started off working for free. Dean, the guy that's still with me now, that's edited 2,000 videos, I've gone out every single one of them, creative director now, maybe the best podcast editor on the planet, arguably, I would say so.
He did the first two, three years for free. He came and did the first shoot for free free no we were friends or whatever but he was a working professional photographer and videographer but he was like i think there's something here i'm just going to do it and let's see what happens it's like offer offer offer give give give and just to round out what you were saying before about uh this sort of essentializing the fact that mantras and maxims are a useful winzip tool to then unlock this file downstream from it uh andre guide a nobel prize winner everything that needs to be said has already been said but since no one was listening everything must be said again that line is in my favorite book um on buffett and munger it's called all i want to know is where i'm going to die so i'll never go there um and i thought it was them so that's funny that you said it's his because I thought it was their quote.
Yeah, you've got like Mungarian grift.

All right.

You can always understand the son

by the story of his father.

The story of the father is embedded in the son.

A desire to not end up like your father

is a powerful source of extreme drive.

So again, that line comes from

a Francis Ford Coppola biography.

So the way I would say this is like, I think I have a very broad definition of entrepreneur, right? Entrepreneur is like somebody has ideas and does them. And so I think filmmakers, entrepreneurs, I think certain athletes are entrepreneurs.
I think podcasters are entrepreneurs. It's not like, it's literally somebody is, you don't have a job, you have an idea, you have something you want to happen in the world and you build a company around it to be able to accomplish that.

And that, I think it's like, I know if I'm correct, it's like, I was like 242, 243 books in and I'm going through and reading all these biographies of filmmakers because I feel like making, creating, I think directors and entrepreneurs, like there's just a lot of, they have a lot of similarities. and that line

like you can always understand

the father by

the son by the sword

the father

the father by the, the son by the story of the father, the father, the story of the father's the bed and the son was literally in that book. And it's because Francis Ford Coppola, right, is talking about the relationship that he had with his dad.
And as somebody, I have two kids and, you know, I have a daughter and a son. And I could never imagine talking to my son the way that Francis Ford Coppola's dad did.
Francis Ford Coppola's dad was a musician, but he was a failed musician. And what's going to happen if like you have something you want to do in your life and decade after decade, you're saying, I'm a talented musician.
The world's saying, no, you're not. We're not interested in what you're offering, sir're offering sir you become most people you know we i would consider the weaker people become bitter right and so it's not them i'm not the problem it's the world that's the problem no it's always you you have to have extreme ownership you know and so he would say stuff to his son like francis when they were growing up obviously not a lot of money uh there there can only be one genius in the family and that's me so it can't be you and like he would try to like basically you know pull his son down i want my son to like i would not like i want him to do whatever he wants his life all of your accomplishments yeah i think some entrepreneurs some driven people make the mistake of like oh you're driven and so i'm gonna make my kids driven and i think you alienate them sam walton said this the best because if you think about how crazy sam walton is like if he didn't disperse his um fortune through his kids

and he did this way before the the actual assets appreciated you know he created one of the world's largest fortunes the family net worth today is like 220 billion dollars he said he's dying of cancer when he's writing his autobiography and he says something like well i'm a fair in the biggest understatement of the century he's like i'm a fairly overactive fellow and i don't and he goes

I'm

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I'm

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I'm

I'm

I'm

I'm

I'm

I'm

I'm

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I'm

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I'm a fair in the biggest understatement of the century. He's like, I'm a fairly overactive fellow.
And I don't, and he goes, I don't expect my kids to be like me. So I don't push them that hard.
Yes. Well, think about it that way.
Like it is an odd thing for you to be an outlier, for you to know that you're an outlier, for you to kind of want to bestow the benefits of outlierness on your kids. But if you're that much of an outlier, hopefully some smarts have come along with you.
And if you're that smart, you'll know what regression to the mean is. And if you are way out on the tail of this thing, where do you think your kids are going to be? They're going to move back toward the center.
That's how it works. Yes.
Right? Yeah, I would like, I just want my kids to do whatever they want. Like my daughter wants to, sometimes she's like, i want to you know i want to sing i want to dance whatever i don't care what you do you don't have to make any money i'll take care of that don't worry about that i want my son to just be happy yeah i want them to have good habits like i wouldn't ever like you're not gonna do drugs you're not gonna be a loser you know but you don't have to like shoot for outside success that's ridiculous um and so like just bringing your son down i so i get just i need to interject um isn't it interesting though that the thing that gives you such a sense of contentment and meaning in the world is your pursuit of something difficult is this insatiable unstoppable drive to go and do this thing.
And what you're trying to bestow on your kids

is equanimity and peace and enoughness.

If I went to you and said,

I'm a super intelligent AI and I can go in

and I can change your source code

and I can get rid of your need to do the drive.

You can be as happy in a hammock as you are in a podcast studio as you are reading a biography i don't think that you would take that deal no so even though my first proposal was you know don't try and expect your kids to be as much of an outlier as you are tails go back to the middle they don't go further out to the tails but on the flip side of that too what if your kids are made of the same stuff as you and throwing some fuel onto that furnace would be maybe the best blessing because wow i'm made of the same stuff that dad is and dad gets me and dad taught me how to handle and and control this huge stallion that i've got that i'm trying to you know what i mean that we've got this sort of really interesting easy for a fucking non-father to say here no no no no no no this is a really important like i think this may be the most important maxim i say so much like people so i i i surveyed my audience the other day because i've been trying to break down all the lessons because like i think repetition is persuasive i'm not this person it's oh you should learn something new all day it's like no no you should i think the people that build great companies they identify a handful of principles they master the fundamentals and the basics and you do it for decade after decade that's what it is it's the boring shit decade after decade where most people especially now they're like i need you know you have to i have to memorize the 2 000 new things no no it's like a handful of principles and you'll just see them repeat over and over again that That's why I think the best description of Founders Podcast was it's church for entrepreneurs. So I grew up in a Christian, like a fundamentalist Christian church.
It's not like the preacher set up on Sunday. He's like, okay, last week we went over that Jesus guy.
We're done with him. Like, let's go on to somebody else.
No, they literally go and teach messages from the same book for centuries, forever. I think there's actually a power to that.
And I think the best entrepreneurs do that. Jeff Bezos identified a handful of principles.
He has 14. I would argue he has one obsessed over customers.
And he said it over and over and over and over again. So I would be fine with that.
My son, because he's going to grow up. It's not the drive.
They have an issue with it's the source has to be positive. My source is not positive.
Yeah, mine neither. Yours is not positive.

Francis Ford Coppola's is not positive.

We're trying to right a wrong.

We're trying to right, in many cases, a multi-generational wrong.

Correct.

And so, like, I'm not sitting on a fucking hammock.

I don't like to relax.

I'm incapable of relaxing.

People are like, how many hours do you work?

All of them.

Literally all of them.

Because, I just got to get this out.

Sorry.

Because, like, so I'm willing.

And again, I love my job.

I think that's the best job in the world i love like my life but yeah i have a hole in my heart that will never be filled and it's because it's personally important to me and a mission to me is like to there's there's this um this term i have and you can call it the founder of a family it's the generational inflection point, right? And essentially you go and look at this family tree and you just see like one shitty branch after one shitty branch after one shitty branch. And then eventually it's all going downhill.
And then there'll be literally a gen, there's like one dude, or sometimes it's a woman, most of the time he's a dude, and then straight up, right? And so- Like a circuit breaker. Exactly.
That is what the role I'm trying to play.

That is, my friend Sam Hickey has this great line.

He says, I find it intoxicating to be there for my tribe.

And like, I want that, I want that pressure.

I want that responsibility.

So if now I know for a fact,

like, you know, I got the shit beat out of me when I was a kid, like stomped on,

like all kinds of crazy stuff happened. I've never my kids like my kids grew up unbelievable like they're they're great kids too and they're way sweeter and nicer my boy's way sweeter than i was at his age and that's fine so if he grows up in this positive environment he knows he's loved he knows me and my wife have a good uh good relationship he sees that his dad gets out of bed and tries to help other people all day.

We can talk about this.

One of my favorite maxims

from history of entrepreneurship

is that money comes naturally

as a result of service.

People are like,

oh, I'm going to be wealthy.

Fine.

Find a problem,

solve the problem,

and then all you have to do

is scale up the amount of people you serve.

That's where wealth comes from.

So I wake up every day

trying to do things for other people.

I'd be reading these books anyways,

no matter what.

But the fact that I sit down

and record my thoughts and condense a 40-year career and 40 hours of reading into 45 minutes, that's an act of service. So he sees what I do all day.
He sees I take this very seriously. And if he says, hey, I want to do that, and he does it from a place of good, then good.
That's what I want. In other news, this episode is brought to you by AG1.
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You can get that 90 money back guarantee and try ag1 with a year's free supply vitamin d and five free ag1 travel packs by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink ag1.com wisdom that's drink ag1.com wisdom i wonder you know i've spoken to 850 people whatever on the show maybe with doubles like 750 something like that and uh i would say that on average high performers are driven 90 of them 95 of them are driven by a sense of insufficiency not a perfectly balanced desire to enact their logos forward and be the best version of them that they can be simply for the flourishing that comes along with it. Most people don't have that.
Most people are trying to fill a void. They're looking for validation.
They want the world to see them as useful because they've never felt like they were loved. They want someone to tell them like they're enough, so they're going to make themselves so much more than enough that they have this undeniable stack of mountain of evidence that they were not the thing not the thing that they feared that they were.
And I just get the sense that it is a balance between happiness and success. But given that most people try to become happy by being successful, unhappy people try to use success to achieve happiness.
If you can just shortcut it and go straight to happiness which it sounds like you're trying to teach your kids to do and much of this is genetic in any case it's like hey here's a roll of the dice there's 50% of your psychological disposition like good luck hope you're ready um but yeah if you can do what you can from a rearing perspective you're safe're validated. I love you if you win and I love you if you lose as long as you try.
Here's some principles that you should do that are scalable, that are blah, blah, blah.

like I I think the success thing especially especially the people that listen to this podcast the people that listen to yours are the kinds of people that have buried themselves

being that breakwater being that circuit breaker of intergenerational trauma of one kind or another. And if that's you, if you've prostrated yourself on the domino lineage of your ancestors and you've just like, no, you've Samsoned this entire thing together, that's what it's like, right? Holding these pillars up.
That's you and you have intergenerational problems. If you've done that, first off, bravo.
Secondly, you have got the skills, you have got the gifts, you have got the insights, you've got the lessons, you have probably got the resources that your parents and your grandparents and your great-grandparents couldn't have even imagined existed not only because we're in a world that offers you that opportunity and education and so on and so forth but because you were the outlier and that's why you listen to shows like yours and shows like this because you are an outlier among outliers yes right you can't overestimate how normal the normies are. Go out in the street.
Like I served normal people at my nightlife business. They're fucking fantastic.
They're not riven with this sense that you have that for the most part is probably pathological and you would be significantly better off if you didn't have. But what does it allow you to do? It allows you to push yourself into places that other people won't go.
So can you take on that pain? Can you take on, like we said in the very beginning, can you take on that burden, shoulder that burden, pass on what's good, try to hold on to the stuff that you wish didn't go, and then use the fruits of that labor, the lessons, the resources, the insights, give that and be like, I have, it was me that did the thing. I accumulated the stuff.
I passed it on to my kids and they got most of the benefits structurally of what I did with as few of the pathologies emotionally of what caused that to happen. Yeah.
I think that would be a definition of success. The definition of my success is that like my kids grow up happy.
Like that's, I'm like, there is something, I think what you said, like when you, I think you correctly identified like this, the source of this internal drive. And one thing that I think would surprise most people is there's one i think people would be surprised that a large source and i think we'll go back to francis for coppola because this certainly was the case for him is like revenge and it's revenge for being born in an environment like that with a father like his.
And so how does it manifest? Oh, revenge is so interesting. It manifests, right? Where his dad's like, oh, no, no, I'm the genius of the family.
You can't believe him. His fierce work ethic.
So it's obvious in the very beginning of Francis Verkobel is trying to break into movies and he's one of the first, at the time in Hollywood, there was no such thing as young directors. He's the one that broke down the door for like a young Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and all these other people, right? The idea that you have a 28 year old feature film director was unheard of back then.
And so he meets a young George Lucas. He meets a Steven Spielberg.
Hey, that guy did it. I can do it.
But you see the 10 years of work that he put in before that in the book. When's literally he starts out as an editor and he's literally editing 24 hours he falls asleep he doesn't get up from his desk he just time to go i'm editing time to go to sleep i'm gonna just put my head down he has this fierce work ethic and then the revenge is dad i'm doing this uh movie it's probably gonna be a success because it's the sequel to godfather, right? He goes on, he has one of the greatest directing runs ever.
In one decade, he does Godfather 1, Godfather 2 and Apocalypse Now. Like maybe you've never seen another 10 year run like that ever, especially at such a young age.
And he's like, dad, I'm gonna let you do the score for the Godfather 2. And then his dad an oscar for the only achievement he ever does for in music came because his son hired him wow revenge and so this idea you just nailed it i think it's 90 90 to 95 percent of sons usually trying to say i i don't want to be like my dad i'm going to succeed where he failed and

then there's maybe a five to ten percent where it's like my dad is my hero i want to be more like him and i'm going to try to like i wonder whether this could totally just be availability bias because the people that i look up to uh and that i surround myself with but i get i'm really hopeful for the next generation that maybe they have more of those, maybe that 90 to 95 actually gets closer to sort of, you know, 70 or 80 because the proliferation of people trying to make themselves better. Like if founders is church for entrepreneurs, then modern wisdom is church for people who want to make their lives better like i'm curious i i have the sense that i'm built for more and i'm interested in finding out if that's true yes and i don't know i just i don't get how so much of this stuff even if you only take fucking 0.1 percent of the things that you're exposed to and you're a little bit discerning about what's good and what's not good.
You are, this is what I said before about the difference between our parents and grandparents and our great grandparents generation and ours. You are orders of magnitude, better constructed, better informed.
Listen, I think podcasting is a miracle. I think it's world-class education on demand anytime you want about any subject you want.
Like you want to learn about history, you want to learn about philosophy, you want to learn about business. You'll find somewhere in the podcast directory, some nut crazy educator that has gone down the rabbit hole to a degree that most people find unreasonable.
And you can download that into your brain on demand. Here's the problem that I noticed.
People don't understand what learning is. Learning is not memorizing information.
Learning is changing your behavior. Correct.
Okay. That's Alex's definition too.
Yeah, perfect. There's a lot of like, you could tell her Mosey, like, I don't know if he reads a bunch of biographies, but he sounds like he does.
Because a lot of the stuff he says is like, oh, like that sounds a lot like Buffett. There's a lot of stuff.
You should hang with him. I'd love to see you two talk yeah i'd love to um so the what i am shocked by because again like the way i spend my life like if i'm not with my family i'm hanging out with other founders and all the founders listen to the show because that's we're like my entire network right and i'm so and you know i become like the founder whisperer and i know a lot about what's going on in their business and everything.
And I'm like, you said you listened to episode 299 or like that idea. It's like, Hey, uh, never, ever forget the dynamic range of human beings.
Like you saying, Hey, this guy's super talented, but he wants five times the amount of salary as this other guy. Who's like one 10th is good.
Obviously pay the most talented person. Like there, there's so many times where they know the lessons and they're not actually changing their behavior.
And so I am delusionally optimistic on the impact that podcasts have because I say podcasts are a miracle. And so I do hope it happens.
You're living in it. Yeah, but I'm worried.
I'm worried that I'm overestimating. I think we both are.
How many people, like I changed my behavior. I'm obviously not a perfect person, but like I literally say every single person I've read about, and I have no ego attached to this, they are smarter and more productive than me.
That's a fact. That's not like, that's not hyperbolic.
That's a fact. So what is the point of me spending all my time studying and learning from them? If I don't change my behavior, that means my entire life was a waste and I refuse to waste my life.
So I changed my behavior. And so I'm just worried that a lot of people don't.
So I would love it to be 70%, 60%. My also thing is people are like, oh, do you have to grow up poor to like have outsized? And no, the answer is, of course not.
It's just most people grow up poor. Like if we, I'm sure we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside of a bubble even if you look at like the top one percent in the world you know across eight billion people was it's like forty thousand dollars a year or something like that let's say just in america i think it's like seventy thousand dollars a year it's like we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside of a bubble um and so i i i'm very uh and i i think also human nature is constant so I'm a little worried that we can shift the variance by that much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Behavioral genetics is like the physics of the way that people show up.

And there's no changing that.

You don't get to go in and tinker.

We talk about like the impact that your relationship with your father could have on increasing your drive.

Well, was Francis Ford Coppola's siblings that way? I just did this episode and this guy named james j hill right and again same way i found him munger's like hey there's this great uh james j hill is a great operator like rockefeller and carnegie i'm like what like i know who carnegie and rockefeller who's this guy he's the greatest railroad entrepreneur in american history uh he created this the the only at the time time railroad industry right in the 18 the 1800s whereas it was the by far the most important industry in america by far it's like what the internet or ai would be now uh in 1885 the railroad industry took in twice the amount of revenue as the federal government uh it was holy fuck yeah yeah it was the large the nation's largest employer the railroaders which were the the railroad entrepreneurs that's why they were called railroaders owned over 10 percent of the landmass in the united states like wild that you've got such shit railways yes i know i know i know and but james j hill was the only person right the only person only railroad entrepreneur to ever uh to run an uh a railroad rail line that did not go bankrupt so this guy is the best in the most important industry of his time okay he's the elon of the train he he grows up with a poor father so poor that he's laying in his house and he could see the moon through the roof because there's holes in the roof yet he dips out of canada he's like i i'm he believed in the dynamic you know the power of one individual and everything else so he goes and he seeks his fortune in america right what does his two siblings do they talk about in the biography they're like this is what our life is we're just poor farmers they stayed yeah fascinating what is that fascinating yeah you've got this split test you've got the same father you've got the same environment but a totally different outcome this is why uh so much a woman called nancy etkhoff and uh she's probably the leading twins researcher on the planet and um between her and robert plowman you realize just how squirrely uh life can become even when you share the same uh environment when you grow up in the same environment. Genes matter a lot, man.
So I was going to tell you about this a little bit later on. I did a genetic test.
So I had a full genome sequence done. And as a part of that, the organization, they're able to compare you to the population at mass and they can say, this is a one copy of this snip or two copies of this snip is uh 20 of the population have got that six percent of the population have got it when it's both and they do it for everything yeah and uh this is related to this this is related to dopamine this is related to drive this is related to obsession this is a risk for alcohol this is a risk for alzheimer's or or whatever whatever whatever whatever and um i need to go back and and uh go through it properly before i start talking about it fully on the show but um i want to introduce you to the same company because i want you to get it done because it taught me so much about myself so many of the things that i thought were cultivated virtues um what it's very much been is like unbelievably fertile ground i've thrown a bit of water on and it's just like oh you were going to be this way now you could have been this way for drugs yeah or alcohol or or you know any other kind of obsession yeah but you were going to be obsessed there was no way there was no way that i was going to grow up and not be obsessed about something did they identify why your forearms are so huge they that actually isn't available uh i love the q a they're like it's just the four bro but you know you know what the other thing is when i do these fucking live shows the q a's live are just the same i like shake someone's hand doing a meet and greet and like dude they really are big in real life they don't even refer to the forum they're like they really are as if it's like bro you need merch just just a picture of your forums all right actions express priority we are only what we do not what we say we are No, no.
I mean, I, and this is, I think just part of getting older, having more experience,

but. Express priority We are only what we do Not what we say we are No, I mean

I, and this is I think

Just part of getting older

Having more experience

But I don't care at all

What people are like

What they say is important to them

I just look

How do you spend your time?

Like you came in here early

And I gave you a hug

I was like how the hell

Are you even bigger

Than I saw you last time

Where I just saw you in Austin

Like two months ago

And you're like

I lift heavy weights

Yeah, I could tell

Like what is important to Chris

Is obvious

Obviously you take care of your health

Thank you. And then I saw you last time where I just saw you in Austin like two months ago.
And you're like, I lift heavy weights. Yeah, I could tell.
Like, what is important to Chris is obvious. Obviously, you take care of your health.
You're a madman about, you have probably, not probably, you have the best, most cinematic video podcast on the planet. Like you are expressing to the world and you make yourself easy to interface with as a byproduct of this.
It's like, what is important to you? As you and you had like this big gut you're like yeah you know i love working out and you know i eat healthy i'm like yeah are you sure about that or like i take my podcast so many people that come this part happens to you too they like hey you know talk to me about podcasts and i remember this happened one time where this guy's like all right i started podcasts and like he's a family friend and so he asked my brother-in-law, he's like, can, do you think David would meet with me about his podcast? And so I was like, yeah, if it's a favor for you, it's fine. I talked to him and five minutes into it.
So like, wait a minute, how many episodes have you done? He's like, six. I was like, six.
I was like, there's nothing to talk about. Like come back when you've done like 200 and then we can talk.
But like, this doesn't make, this is use of your time and so the entrepreneurial uh like the reason that's that's so powerful in the history of entrepreneurship is because the greatest entrepreneurs like they most of them work well beyond well beyond the need for money so money is not their greatest resource money is a way and an asset that they use to bring what they want forth into the world what they want right they all. They all know that time is your most valuable resource.
It's the only unrenewable resource that they have. And so if you're watching, like if you are curious about like what was important to Steve jobs, for example, he really gave blew my mind about this.
And this is something me and you've talked about in private. Like I need to get better at marketing the podcast.
Right. And because his whole point was like, Hey, I think the Apple devices I'm making are good for the world.
I want every single human on the planet to own an Apple device. And first of all, Steve, not at the price point that you're at, but that's fine.
And he goes, but, and to do that, we have to become a great marketing company. He goes, we know how to build great products.
We are not a great marketing company. So what do you do? His actions express priority.

So he said, every Wednesday,

we are going to have a three hour meeting.

I will be there every Wednesday.

I will be involved.

All the people involved in the marketing advertising for Apple are going to be present

and we're going to review our work every Wednesday.

And he got to the point where like,

you know, some people call them micromanagers.

I just say they're into the details.

You know, James J. Hill,

all the great entrepreneurs are into the details.

When you came in here and started,

I saw you directing.

I was like, oh,, some people call them micromanagers. I just say they're into the details.
You know, James J. Hill, all the great entrepreneurs are into the details.
When you came in here and started, I saw you directing. I was like, oh, this guy, this is another Steve Jobs guy.
It didn't matter if it was an ad that was going to run as a full page in the Wall Street Journal or a billboard in nowhere, Missouri. It did not go out without his approval.
His actions were expressing his priority. And what you do is like, that's not's not just in business it's in everything if you want to be a good dad and you don't spend time with your kid your actions are expressing what you what you actually want to do so uh yes and i love this um but the issue is that it can become difficult to work out where the boundaries of that stop.

How much should you care about the things that you do?

I'm not sure, but the answer probably isn't as much as possible all the time about everything.

You can't be a perfect example of this.

And the solution is deliberate deoptimization, right?

So it's choosing in advance what you're going to suck at. These are insights from Oliver Berkman, who's fantastic.
One of my friends told me about deliberate deoptimization strategy that he was using. I asked him for an example.
He said, well, I fly a lot. And if I had the right number of different credit cards, and I had all my points tied in, and I made sure that I used the best way and i had you know a wallet this big i would be able to maximize my points but i just it it's not a sufficiently high priority i have other things that are higher up so i just i'm gonna let that one slide yes that's just gonna be an l for me could i be more optimized yeah i could but look it works yeah now are you going to do that in your highest calling am i going to do that when I'm trying to book a guest on the show or we're trying to set up the lighting or we're fighting for a great location or whatever? No, no.
That's an area that I need to do it. The problem that the insecure overachiever has, that the type A person with a type B problem has, is not knowing where the boundaries of their obsession should stop because it can't be everything.
i agree with that it can't be everything and if it is everything the things that it really should be for will suffer and you will feel it and you will feel miserable no i definitely agree so you mentioned tim kirk earlier steve i think was the best like he was he was a ruthless uh he had the ability to like ruthlessly prioritize things and so he picked like product right and he would again just like every ad every pixel on your screen every button on that device he would have to approve before it goes out but could he do that for everything no he sucked his supply chain so that's why he actually hired and and had tim cook that was what tim cook's job was primarily before you know steve died of cancer um so yeah i completely agree i the way i put it is um something that also reappears in the books is they limit the great entrepreneurs limit the amount of details to perfect and then they make every detail perfect where a lot of entrepreneurs mistake is like they are optimizing something that should never exist this is something elon talks about over and over again he's like before you optimize something make sure it's actually essential to like what you're actually trying to bring into the world um and so for for like me and you are i guess for me it's really simple it's like how should i be spending the time i should either be reading or i should be making podcasts in my work that's all i have to do and the one reason like i don't have an assistant or i don't have anything else so So they're like, well, you need an assistant. You're hard to get in touch with.
I was like, well, then I'm managing a calendar. I shouldn't have a calendar because all I have to do is wake up every day.
As long as I wake up every day and I read for a few hours a day, right. And I sit down once a week and I summarize what I learned that week from my reading.
I will get everything I want in life. Everything else from that is a distraction.
Dude, we, uh, we broke the entire show, this this whole thing all of the different machinery and the bits and pieces behind it how the growth happens and what i feel fulfilled by and what makes the world a better place and what grows the revenue and all the rest of the things we broke all of that down and it's one two three four it's four things but because of your next lesson i'm not going to say them but there's four things. It's four things.
But because of your next lesson, I'm not going to say them. But there's four things.
Yeah. It's four things.
That's it. Should we, oh, I've heard that TikTok's prioritizing videos that are over 90 seconds long.
So maybe we should be, is it one of those four things? No, it's not. Well, what if we repurp, because we can do a cross promo.
It's not one of the four things. Yeah.
It's only four things that make an impact on everything you you see this at elon so all the stuff that happened with the election i you know i saw all the tweets and everything i think the most important tweet was that uh the this perfect encapsulation of why it makes elon great and like he literally figures like what is the most important lever for what i'm trying to accomplish today and then he he relentlessly jumps up and down on it. So he identifies like, oh, the entire election hinges on Pennsylvania.
So I will build a ground game there. He's like, if we win Pennsylvania, we do everything else.
And so he sets up shop and he just puts all of his resources behind it. You know, in the early days of SpaceX.
The only thing that matters is if we don't get a rocket into orbit, we have nothing else. So what's the most important thing? Getting a rocket to orbit.
And then once we do that, we obviously have to sell it and everything else. And Elon doesn't have a lot of mentors, but I've heard him reference Larry Ellison as one of his mentors, which I thought was fascinating.
And I've read three biographies on Ellison. I wish there were more.
And in one of the biographies, Larry Ellison is arguing, right? He's one of the richest people on the planet. He was like 40% of Oracle, for God's sake.
He's arguing with his assistant because his assistant's like, hey, we have a hundred important things. There's a thousand things we need to get to.
He's like, no, no, no, there's not a hundred. There's not a thousand.
There's three. He goes, I'm going to focus on those three and I'm going to ignore everything else.
Ruthless prioritization. Like that is such a key part of achieving things in life.
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Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to grow your business now no matter what stage you're in bad boys move in silence yes when you find an edge shut up about it talking invites competition competition destroys profits so i grew up listening to hip-hop and the interesting thing about my obsession with like maxims and memorable things like you i think a lot of that came from it's not like i read poetry when i was younger i'd listen to hip-hop and like they're very poetic and they have lines in there that you just remember that's from biggie smalls bad boys move in silence and it's funny because i'm reading this obscure biography of rockefeller and it really clicked because everybody's read there's there's one canonical biography of rockefeller called titan it's like 800 pages it's great that's fine i've read it like two times rockefeller's the man right but i went through the biography or the bibliography and i discovered books were made out of books and so i found this obscure biography uh published uh in like 1970 and now you try to get the book it's like $4, because all these books are out of print and it's in there and it's it's 250 pages right um there's a longer thing here where i think i think it's slothful not to compress your thoughts that's like turtile say stuff like that what was that thing about uh sorry i wrote you such a long letter if i only had more time i could have written you a shorter one i think it's disrespectful to people to not like think about if you want a high value audience and you're saying hey i can tell a story in an hour and a half or i could tell a story in 45 minutes but i took an hour and a half i just stole 45 minutes of your life you're not getting back times that by however many people like i i spent an entire day i mean you've talked about this privately uh one one of the big breakthroughs i had is like an entire day before I sit down and record, just literally going through all my notes and highlights and just cutting.
I never add. It's like, nope, ruthlessly cut.
Try to respect the people's time. But anyways, I think authors should do that.
I like Titan. Do I need to know what the furniture is like in his grandfather's house? No, I do not.
I want to know how he built maybe the greatest business has ever existed. And so this book is 250 pages of how he built standard oil.
It's called John D the founding fathers of the Rockefellers. I, you know, friends that have literally bought the book because they heard the episode and they spent $2,000.
Cause it's like, this is the guy, like there's an idea worth billions in a $2,000 history book. And so in that book, it's all secrecy covered everything in his, when I think of bad boys move in silence, I think of Rockefeller.
It's in all kinds of other entrepreneurs, but essentially saying, Hey, you don't understand how lucrative this is. And I'm not going to educate my competition because if you go and say, Hey, look how much money I'm making.
What are humans going to do? They're all mimetic. They're like, Oh, I'm going to try to do exactly what chris does and so i'm going to do and it's you invite competition there goes your profits and so not only he would like do deals and he's like hey i'm going to buy your refinery you can't tell your wife how much i bought and who bought it he would have this thing called uh there would be secret ownership so people hated rockefeller because he was dominating this area in cleveland and so there's this thing called cle massacre where he, he essentially in like a day or a few days rounds up like 22 of his top 25 competitors.
Like, and then from there on at 25 years old, 28 years old, he's really young. He's the dominant player.
And so then he goes, he also has a secret Alliance where they put them at the head of the national is the kerosene refineries association, something like that, essentially just like group and he goes around he meets with all the other people in his business and they're trying to uh collude to keep prices like at a profitable level and so he gets to see their books and now as a result of this secret alliance he knows oh just so we know each other it's like i knew chris was a a legit player i need to spend more time with him because he's another me right and then he goes oh that's a that's a good competitor maybe i need to buy him this guy i don't have to worry about this guy this guy's not serious i see his books and so what he would do is some of those people say rockefeller too powerful i'm not selling to you and so they go and they sell to a company not knowing that rockefeller secretly owns that company so if you really want to internalize bad boys move in silence, Rockefeller's the prototype. But there's another great thing.
In Steve Jobs' lost years, he dumps 50 million of his own money. And at the time he only had $70 million.
So he dumps almost all, the majority of his wealth into Pixar. And literally they can't make payroll.
They don't have a product. He's just writing checks to cover the payroll.
And they pivot from trying to sell hardware, which is how Pixar started, to what the team really wanted to do and they were passionate about. It was like, we want to make the world's first computer animated movies.
And so Steve's like, all right, we need to study. Like, is animation profitable? And he has a great line in that book.
He's like, it's not like you can go to the library and check out a book that says the business model for animation because there's only one company that's ever done it successfully that's disney and they don't want anybody to know how lucrative it was so he winds up building relationships relationships around the world see how all these things tie together with people in disney he finds out holy shit they they can literally like they take snow white he what he discovers the snow white came out like 60 years before and then you have the new invention of v VHS and you have a new invention of DVDs, so you're in the 90s. And they take something they haven't put a dollar into in 60 years that our kids are still going to watch.
They put it on the new technology of the day, VHS, DVD, quarter trillion, or excuse me, not quarter trillion, 250 million drops to their bottom line, all profit. That's one movie.
And so that's when you realize, oh, the reason they shut up about it because they don't want people to know how lucrative it is. And you see this over and over again, a friend of mine is doing, he's doing, let me see if I can put this sensitively.
He is buying a bunch of other companies. So he's rolling up a bunch of other companies, okay? And he's doing it so successful.
He runs a publicly traded company that he caught the attention of somebody else that has been doing a similar strategy in a different domain for the last like three decades. And he goes, they share a board member.
And so he meets with them. And this older, wiser guy tells my friend, he goes, hey, what you're doing is working.
He goes, now shut up about it. Stop doing interviews.
Stop talking about your strategy. He goes, because I, you know, the amount of competitors I created for myself because I didn't hide what I was doing successfully.
And so people saw how this guy became the guy that's giving him the advice became a multi-billionaire. Anyway, he's like, this guy's worth $3 billion, whatever numbers.
How do you do that? Oh, this is what he does. Let me copy him.
He's like, now I just created all these clones of me. And now I have made it more difficult to do what I wanted to do anyways.
So bad boys move in silence as something appears over and over and over again. Belief comes before ability.
The external world has this backwards. The belief that you can do something is a prerequisite for trying.
This drives me insane. So you mentioned earlier, like you don't know how normal, normal people are.
And I'm going to remember that line because people are like over and over again, when you have somebody, you have somebody like the founder of four season we talked about, you know, Hey, uh, Chris, we're friends. Like I'm going to tell you my dream.
And my dream is to build the collection, not just one, a collection of the world's greatest hotels. And you're like, Izzy, you've never, you have no money.
You've never built a hotel. Like hotel like what are you talking like why would you even think this is possible what you need to do is prove it first and then we'll believe in you it's like no that's ass backwards belief always comes before ability there's a story where elon's on you know he tries to buy a rocket at first he thought he was just going to shoot like this this um this like garden uh for lack of a better word to mars on somebody else's rocket and because he was trying to like draw attention to the fact that hey nasa is not innovating we're like not we're stuck in like lower earth orbit like why aren't we trying to get to mars why aren't you trying to you know um colonize the galaxy and he he's goes to russia they like treat him like shit and he's on the way back and he just realizes hey we're we're going to build our own rocket.
And people laugh at him. They're like, oh, this internet kid.
Because he's 29, 28. He's like, who are you, internet kid? You can't do that.
His belief came before his ability. He believed that he could do that.
And then he went out and proved it. Now, when I say belief comes before ability, it doesn't mean you just sit there and be like, I'm great.
And you don't do it. No, you do the work necessary to achieve what you want.
But if you're waiting for the external world to like push, encourage you or an edge,

you're waiting for the external world to like push encourage you or and edge you on like it's impossible so i wasn't sure i wasn't sure what direction you were going in with that because one reading of that sounds fantastic and i wholeheartedly disagree but the one from the outside world i think is absolutely bang on so the reason that i disagree if you were to say belief comes before ability as in self-belief uh i wrote an essay this week about it so i'm going to read it to you okay an ode to people who don't believe in themselves what comes first belief or action do you need to believe that you can do a thing before you do it fake it until make it is one option, but incredibly hard if you're introspective or have low self-belief and high standards. So what about make it until you fake it? Here are some lessons I've learned.
You can believe you're not worthy of a thing and still attain it. You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed.
You can grip and grasp and fear and ruin the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted and things still go well. You can have no self-belief and show up anyway and still win.
You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like. You can doubt the process, question your talent, be uncertain that you're making progress, disparage your accomplishments, permanently feel like you're not working hard enough, no matter how hard you work, never give yourself a break, fail to fully feel gratitude, be terrified of never reaching your goals, and still end up in a place that your 20-year-old self could not imagine you'd ever get to.
Self-belief is overrated. Generate evidence.
Yeah, I would, like, you could say self, when I say belief comes before ability, I self-belief yeah but i don't that line i would disagree where it's like self-belief is overrated i think it's the the the highest order bit there's actually one area where i disagree with steve jobs and he talks about like um the highest order bit it's a it's from like computer science where it's like the most important part of the system right and this is like a complete like oversimplification of it but um and his whole thing was like the highest order bit is that like you love what you do and for all the reasons that we discussed earlier you'll keep doing it for a long time you'll persevere and everything else and i love what i do i know you love what you do and i agree like it's super important i think easier. You used the phrase, like, you're swimming downstream earlier, I think is a great way to put that.
And so I was thinking about that because the Steve Jobs archive, which is run by Steve Widow, just released this free book you can read online called Make Something Wonderful, Steve Jobs and His Own Words. And it's remarkable.
And so, like, I've read it a bunch of times. And, you know, he talks about this in there.
That's where I discovered the highest ordered bit part. And then was thinking about it more and more and i was just like well no that's not like what comes first it's like the belief that you can actually do something that's valuable to the world that provide that like is an active service and makes the world a better place and i think me and you might be good examples it's like how many years were you doing the podcast before anybody gave a damn three and a half mine was five and a half why were you still doing it because i was swimming downstream because you believed that you could like you believed that you could do it the belief that you had that you could actually make something worth people's time and listening right yes that lag was a couple years before the world's like yes chris we agree with

you yeah that's an interesting way to think about self-belief um because i believe that the thing that i'm doing right now is of value to the world and the world just as yet hasn't recognized that it's like an interesting pivot on self-belief um the belief i know that i can make it i have never had i've never had yeah ever ever i am the best avatar for somebody that is permanently looking at his feet going how the fuck am i stood here like how did this happen uh very much don't believe that you're worthy of a thing still attained it disparage your accomplishments yeah but still get them uh grip grasp fear ruin the enjoyment all of that all of that like the entire for me journey up until probably only the last two years basically moving to america was sort of riven with self-doubt and uncertainty. And am I even doing this right? But I enjoyed the thing that I was doing.
And I knew that I was good at that thing. But I didn't know that there was going to be some outcome.
So I think it's what is the sort of self-belief directed at, in a way directed at the outcome of i know that i can do this thing well and i enjoy it all day directed at this is going to reach something that some portion of people will accuse of being success never really once so i've heard you say that perspective on your show before i would say like interacting with you in person you come across unbelievably you've only known me for the last two years yeah much bigger much bigger mountain of evidence yeah good point after a while if imposter syndrome continues to persist even though you keep disproving it do you have imposter syndrome today no okay no no more i'm about to step out on stage in front of three and a half thousand people in London. I just came back from Oz, 5,000 people.

Yeah.

Other side of the planet.

Yeah.

And, um, no, not anymore.

But that, like, I need to really write this out because I haven't yet.

I'm just such a fucking poster boy for somebody that would have abiding imposter syndrome.

Like, very... somebody that would have abiding imposter syndrome like very uncertain very unsure of himself of his place in the world a need for validation a desire to be seen as competent like all of the things all you know just like the fucking ingredients to make a really beautiful imposter syndrome casserole and um it's dropped away and it's gone and it's not gone through any weird combination of mindset changes and and sort of conscious reframing uh it's gone because it's been crushed under a fucking neutron star worth weight of evidence.
i'm like i just can't i can't keep holding on to a belief that things are going to go badly or that i'm not good enough or that i don't have the talent or that even though i feel like i'm working hard i know that i should be working infinitely harder because i'm just like how many times do want to roll the dice and it come up six six six like over and over and over and over again and um yeah i just i really want to write it out because i think that there's a lot of people who have a level of self-doubt so great that they struggle to even connect with with like an inspirational story because it feels like it's a different. I agree completely.
I think a lot of people accuse entrepreneurs of being arrogant. And of course they are like, you'd have to be arrogant to think like, oh, I don't have to go.
I can, I don't have to work for somebody else. Like I can, I can literally take something that doesn't exist and like bring it to the world.
But my issue with that is like, we don't have an epidemic of arrogance. We have an epidemic of people that don't believe in themselves.
And so the weird thing about the early days of the podcast, you know, these people that I'm reading about and telling stories about, they're crazy people. Like they are all crazy people.
And yet I kept hearing the same review, the same email, the same DM. I find your podcast so comforting.
I'm like, what kind of, I was like, oh, there's a million, you know, of us out there out there that are like this is me too and that's the biggest key where like the reason the biographies are important and life stories in general is not because like we're talking about francis for coppola's life or steve job's life or any of the lives we've talked about it's like no no you see yourself in them correct that's the key dude i i've realized this over the last couple years. We don't fall in love with other people who are perfect.
We fall in love with other people who we see ourselves in their flaws. And there's been a few times on the show or going out for dinner and meeting people or whatever.
Like, huh, this person's, you know, really smart or really interesting or really insightful and i just don't care and i have nothing to talk to them about and i realized it's that i can't find hooks in their shortcomings that i can latch on to that either i'm not uh i'm unable to see them for some reason,'re being hidden they're incentivized to hide them they don't align with the way that i see the world perhaps you know cultural differences stuff like that um but yeah we we what we really really resonate with is somebody else who has a shortcoming that we see ourselves in you see a little version of yourself in Chris Bumstead

when he cries on stage,

or when he's uncertain about whether or not he's going to win.

You see a little bit of yourself in Kobe

when he snaps his Achilles and he's unsure about where he's going,

but then he pulls himself back around.

You know, like, whoever it is.

Like, you see your...

And that, I think, is reassuring to a lot of people.

It's certainly reassuring to me

when I realized that the most interesting person in the room

I'm not sure. Like you see your, and that I think is, um, is reassuring to a lot of people.
It's certainly reassuring to me when I realized that the most interesting person in the room, in fact, this was, this was born out of our trip to Miami for George's birthday. Uh, the most interesting person in the room isn't the most interesting person in the room.
It's the person who makes everybody else feel like they're the most interesting person in the room. So you don't need to worry about not being charismatic.
You just need to make other people feel charismatic. Like I called it inverse charisma, that you know that story was at Winston Churchill's wife who went to go and see the two different American presidents.
She said, I sat down with one of them. And after a dinner being next to him, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in the world.
And I sat down a couple of months later with his opponent. And after that dinner, I left feeling like I was the smartest person in the world.
Like, who do you want to be? I want to be the sort of person that makes other people feel like the smartest person in the world. And the beautiful thing about this idea is that so many people want to be liked and charismatic, but feel like they don't have any charisma or likability, but you don't need to.
It's not about you. It's about what you do to other people.
And that is so much easier. If you're just, you don't need to be interesting.
You just need to be fucking interested in somebody else. I love that you said that because I say the most interesting people are the most interested.
And like the people that I'm drawn to, right? Because to your point, like you you meet so many people and some cases, like you admire them from afar. And I think one of the biggest benefits is like, and this is why I'm again, evangelist for reading biographies and autobiographies is because like we're incentivizing our day to day to like, may things seem better.
Like you were just talking about the health problems that, you know, you're like, Hey, I'm not ready to talk about this, but you know, when I am, I'll talk about it. But like from the outside people are like, Chris has, has you know he's handsome he's in great shape he's world famous like he's got one of the best podcasts in the world and you're like yeah but you haven't seen the shit that i've been going through for the last like 12 months and the biography is like you see that because they're not people don't write sit down to write a biography when they're like 30 35 40 when they're still in it they there's some weird genetic thing where it's like i I know I'm going to die soon.
I want to pass down everything I know in this book. It's an act of service to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
I think it's really important. And that's the, when I just did the Elon episode on the SpaceX book, one of the things I said is it's like, the reason that you guys should read this book is because like you have, not only is just Elon a genius, but all the early SpaceX employees employees are genius and the whole book is these geniuses can't figure shit out and like they're running into problem after problem after problem and then you know six years later they figure it out that is so good for you it's like oh if that guy you know if that guy couldn't do that then then it makes sense like i feel better about myself again it's technically a story about elon spacex but you make it about yourself i just think that's human nature by endurance we conquer time carries most of the weight it is hard to beat someone who never stops oh this is uh i feel hormosi would say something like that too so uh my phone has now changed uh you know this when i call you it's it's it's michael jordan being really intense but for year and a half, it was, or for like maybe two years, it was, by endurance we conquer is the family motto of Ernest Shackleton, who's probably the greatest, you know, polar, one of the greatest polar explorers.
And I believe I'm a huge believer in consistency over intensity. And I think what a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake is like, there's, first of all, there's never up until the first first few years ago there's no such thing as like an entrepreneurship like industry now there's like an industry and people are incentivized to try to spread it and try to put money into these companies and so what happens like people are in a rush right and they try to take like an idea and like instead of building it slowly and making it durable right they're like let's just throw a lot of money and people at it and like try to do it fast and then then you see them, like it may grow for a little bit and pop.
And I think there's an issue. And so what I realized is like the greatest entrepreneurs is like, no one writes a book about somebody.
It's like, oh, they ran a company and five years in, it was really successful. 10 years, it was gone.
Right. They, they write about businesses that last.
And so, um, I had one of the greatest experiences of my life this year. And I was at this company offsite and it was a 70 year old female billionaire owning a private company.
Right. And like just her company building philosophy, like I told her, I was like, I'm in love with you.
And my wife was with me. And I was like, like, I literally love you.
Like, I love every way you build your company. And her whole thing is just very common sense.
She's just like, handful of principles. I'm always just going to do what's best for the customer and the customer experience.
And that's where I'm going to put my money. And I'm in this forever.
And so she told me this hilarious story where, you know, she felt because she wasn't trained in business and she was a woman, like, I need consultants. I need McKinseysey and I need Bain and I need hiring, spending millions of dollars on this.
And first of all, they're like, uh, you know, you should buy up all your competitors. And so they started looking into this and it's like, well, how much would that be? And you know, whatever, let's say that company's going to cost 200 million to buy.
And she's like, but why don't I just put that $200 million into like making my customers experience better and so she told me this hilarious story she's like year five you know i had 15 competitors uh year 15 i have 10 year 25 i had three year four she's running a company for 40 year 40 i have one he I took, took the money instead of buying out their companies. I made my customer experience better, my product better, my marketing better, controlled more things.
And they went out of business slowly, but surely. And so time carries most of the weight that that's a, that's a maximum that I came up with where I was listening to Charlie Munger.
Charlie Munger has this good, his whole point is like, Hey, there's, if you just master the big ideas in a handful of disciplines and you really master them and implement them, that it, like the big ideas in like, you know, physics, biology, psychology, economics, there's only a handful of ideas you actually need to memorize in all these main subjects and that carries most of the freight. And it's like, oh, that's a good turn of phrase.
Like that makes sense. And then I'm reading more and more about these stories and it's like, oh, like you're not winning because you're a genius.
You're not winning because you're winning because you just outlast everybody by endurance. We conquer you.
She conquered through endurance because she made sure she was, she made her company durable. This is what the Peter Thiel is wrote.
What I, if you're only going to read one book on business, obviously at my opinion, especially today's day and age, you read zero to one, right? And everybody that's building a tech company has read that book. And yet they miss his most important lesson, which is like, hey, don't optimize for growth at the expense of durability.
And the reason you're likely to optimize for growth at the expense of durability is growth is measurable and durability is not. And the reason durability is so important, he says, is because in technology companies and almost all companies, all the vast majority of the profits are 10, 15, 20 years out.
The amount of money that company, that woman I just described, is making today is 95%, 99% more than what she was making in year 10. All the money was in the future.
What's that thing about Buffett made some obscene percentage of his entire net worth after 60? Yes, like 90. You see that graph.
It goes viral on Twitter all the time. And that's obviously the magic of compounding too.
And it's like, that's why I say buy endurance, we conquer. Like I'm not trying to have the hot podcast or a great episode this week.
I'm trying to do this until I die. I want them to pry the microphone from my cold dead hands.
And so therefore I need to make sure that I'm, how do I do that? I have to maintain, first of all, there's valuable for the audience. I have to have trust with the people that give me their time.
And so like you just say, hey, I'm not making a decision based on what I'm doing today. I'm, is this decision going to serve that goal? So people will still think that I'm trustworthy and that what I'm doing in the world is valuable for 10, 15, 20 years from now.
If you know your business from A to Z, there is no problem you can't solve. The best entrepreneurs stay in the details of their business.
I love that you say Z. Every time I hear it on your podcast, I just...
So this is literally a line that was this guy named Sam Zemurri. Okay.
So I go out, this is our friend george mack right who we both love he's the one that really has put into my brain the importance of being high agents you know he's really you got just breaking everything about yourself keep going it's all your big muscles that's true um so so george mack is the one that put the importance of being high agency in my, like, I think his writing on it, his memes, the stuff he makes is just perfect. And I would say every single person I read a biography about is high agency.
The most high agency person I've ever come across is that guy named Sam Samurai. So what's funny is there's another line in zero to one that I think people mistake too, where they say all technology is, is a better way to do something.
So people think technology has got to be like software. It's got to be computers.
It's like, no, at one point, a steamboat, the invention, the steamboat engine was a technology of that day because it made, uh, it made it possible a better way to do something. And what did that do? So one of the first, this will surprise a lot of people.
One of the first multinational corporations in human history were the fruit companies. Because before you had a banana, you grew it in Jamaica or you grew it in Honduras.
That banana, you have to eat in like four days. So without the, or five days or week, whatever it is, without the invention of the steamboat, you have a local market.
So you match fruit, which humans have, are gonna eat forever with the steamboat and you create one of the first multinational corporations. So Sam Zemuri, right? Is this guy, he is a poor Russian immigrant, right? Comes to America, shows up in like Alabama and builds this gigantic fruit empire.
And the book, the reason the book is called The Fish That Ate the Whale is because the biggest fruit company of the time is called United Fruit. And Sam Zemuri competes head to head with them.
And then eventually he takes over the little fish eats the whale. He takes over that company.
So the reason that he says that is because his competition, when the founders die, the people running United Fruit, their business is in Central America. That's where all the fruit is grown.
And then it's shipped into like the Gulf Coast and Florida and then put on trains and and put everywhere else they thought they were going to run their business remotely in boston and this guy's out here he's literally hacking machetes he's helping lay the railroad track uh he's taking uh inventory he's building the boats he's doing every single thing and the reason he did that they're like why are you doing this his whole point is like because if i know my from A to Z, there's no problem I can't solve because I know every component. You just said you broke down your business to four components.
You probably know those four components in and out. Now, if you know, hey, we have a problem with component three, no problem.
I understand what we need to fix. It's such an important thing where a lot of people like this goes back to normal people or, you know, unobsessed people.
They call this micromanaging or, oh, you shouldn't do all this. It's like, no, they're in the details.
He is in the details. One of the funniest stories of this is the fruit association or something.
There's some kind of trade group. He's in Havana, right? And this is probably like 1900, 1910 or something like this.
And he's there, they want to give him an award. So like they call out his name.
Here's this award for the, you know, fruit guy of the year,

whatever they call it.

And like, it's not in the audience.

They track him down.

He's on the port.

He's going over the inventory. He's like, I don't have, I don't care about awards.

I care about the business.

Like I'm in the details of my business.

And so I would say way, this isn't like a, oh,

none of these are like, you know,

like what Chris Bumstead said, like, you know,

you can, some of these work for you. Some of these are not going to work for you.
I would say most of the people I read about are, you would consider like micromanagers. Larry Ellison, I mentioned earlier, not a micromanager, not a grinder.
He says in his book, he's a sprinter. He's like, I take care of the top level stuff, strategy, products, stuff like that, putting the right people in.
But then I hire other people to be in the details. Elon, and I maybe changed now but in his early days like in spacex he knew the rocket forward and backwards so it could also these could also apply again contextually apply them to your situation the beginning of your company you might want to do that maybe your your interest shift or maybe you find somebody's better at that detail than you are you just figure out how to apply yourself but but this is something that reoccurs over and again.
The public praises people for what they practice in private. There is no such thing as an overnight success.
Every great act is built on years of practice no one sees. So this goes back to my love of hip hop.
The public praises people for what they practice in private is this line from this rapper named Russ. And I think Russ is actually interesting.
He'd actually be a good guest for you. He's done some great interviews, but Russ was the first person in history to write, record, produce, mix, and master an entire album.
So one person, only one person, and it got over a billion streams. And so, and I think he's like, he's a very fascinating person how he thinks about things, but he's also a gifted lyricist and he, he, um, says stuff that like kind of sears in my brain.
Um, and so the, this is like the point we were talking about earlier where like, you know, you can go out and say Jeff Bezos has too much money. He shouldn't have the world's largest yacht and he shouldn't have all these things and a giant house everywhere.
And so I'm going to put a guillotine and I'm going to take things away from him. But you didn't see like all the stuff that, that he was doing before that.
You didn't see the fact that he was making door desks. You didn't see that he was literally, there's a line in his biography where he is buying knee pads because he's the one putting the back packages together, putting them in his like Jeep and then taking them to UPS.
And so one of my favorite stories about this, and it's actually like an idea I think that's related to this, that the public praises people for what they practice in private, is this idea of going slow so you can go faster later on.

And I think Sam Walton's a perfect example of this.

And I bring up Sam all the time because he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs because it's like a very – business is so easy to understand in a way that I think Amazon is not.

You know, what's Walmart's business?

I buy cheaply and I sell cheaply and I just do that and I'm bigger and better than anybody else. And that's think Amazon is not.
You know, what's Walmart's business? I buy cheaply and I sell cheaply

and I just do that and I'm bigger and better

than anybody else.

And that's what generates the wealth.

And so the crazy thing about like the outcome

that Sam had is nobody saw that for the first five years

of his life, he had a single store, one store.

He was like trying to figure out like,

what is this retail thing?

What am I good at?

What should, what's the merchandise I should do?

What, like, how do I do this?

How's the marketing?

And there's a great line in his biography

we're going to be store. He was like trying to figure out like, what is this retail thing? What am I good at? What should, what's the merchandise that should do? What, like, how do I do this? How's the marketing? And there's a great line in his biography where it talks about the fact that his first store that he owned for five years was so successful that he made a mistake, a rookie mistake.
His land, he had a lease and the lease could be terminated anytime. There was no option.
He didn't have the option to renew. The landlord would have to say, yeah, I want you back in here.
The landlord realized that, oh my God, this store that was making $20,000 a year is now making 300,000 in a tiny little town. I'm just going to say, Sam, nice to know you.
I'm taking over your store. And so he's forced to then go look for another store.
That's where he discovers Bentonville, Arkansas. So he buys a store there.
But there's like a multiple month timeframe where he has to run two stores for the first time in his life. And this is really important because one, he realized, oh, I don't have to have just one store.
I can run two stores at a time. But he's also driving back and forth over between these like mountainous roads.
So even though the stores are, let's say they're 300 miles away from each other, it was like an eight hour drive or something there each way. And so he's like, man, there's gotta be a more efficient way to do this.
And one day he's driving and he hears a plane overhead. And he's like, oh, it's a Cessna.
So he goes to the airfield. He says, hey, how much would it cost to hire a Cessna to fly me from Bentonville to I think Newport is where the other store was.
And it was, you know, whatever, 50 bucks, a hundred dollars back in the day. And then he realizes, hey, I don't want to keep having this expense of like having to charter a plane every

time, like have somebody else drive. I'll just teach myself how to fly.
And why is that important?

Because it goes back to the public praises people for what they practice in private. They say, look,

Sam, you built a $200 billion fucking fortune. Look at all the stuff you did.
They don't see

all the stuff that happened. What he realized is like, hey, now I can fly my own plane.
So this, what was a problem, was problems are just opportunities in work clothes. I thought me losing my first store was a problem.
It wasn't being the best opportunity in life. It taught me one, that I can run more than one store at a time.
And then two, I accidentally discovered, oh, I can now fly. I learn how to fly.
And so the advantage he had over his competitors where I can fly over, they're in jets. My competitors in Kmart, they're in jets, right? They're above the clouds.
I'm in a little tiny Sessna. I can see traffic patterns.
I can see, and he was scouting out. I think he scouted out personally the first like 300 stores that he was doing.
And so the idea where it's like, yeah, we can see that, you know, the richest people in the world when he was older. We could see that he has 300 stores and he's got all this other stuff.
But it's like, you didn't see all the practice that went in there. There's another story that illustrates the public praises people for what they practice in private.
He had no relationships with suppliers. So at the time, the hula hoop was like a a huge craze all the kids wanted hula hoops all of america the suppliers didn't know him so they wouldn't buy um they wouldn't sell hula hoops to him so he just looked he's like what's a hula hoop well that's a problem right what's a hula hoop he's like it's just a little pipe that's connected and it's colored and you just wiggle your hips and that's like what the toy is he's like okay he okay.
He bought the material. And at the end of the night, after he worked all day,

he's like, I'm going to make my own hula hoops.

He winds up doing thousands of these.

And then because he didn't have any money,

he's like, now he had multiple stores.

How do I get the hula hoop to other stores?

He had a John boat, which is like a little tiny boat

because he's like a redneck fisherman.

And he just put all the hula hoops in behind the John boat

and he towed behind his car.

And that was his delivery system.

So in every single story, you're going to see like,

We'll see you next week. like a redneck fisherman and he just put all the hula loops in behind the john boat and he towed behind his car and that's was his delivery system so in every single story you're going to see like it seems like there's no possible way these giant companies can start with this these little basic improvisations like just feeling your way through and then you're slowly practicing you're like oh that idea worked let me do more of that oh that idea didn't work let me avoid doing that in the future and just over and over and over again and just compound so the public praises people for what they practice in private i love it i mean it's cliche to say

it takes 10 years to become an overnight success but go go listen to i remember um when george mac

uh i went back and listened to george was like one of your first guests and i went back and

listened to the very first time on the show and then you go and look at your skills as a podcaster

Thank you. back and listened to because george was like one of your first guests and i went back and listened to the very first time on the show and then you go and look at your skills as a podcaster it's you see this literally everything yeah self-pity has no utility if you live long enough bad things will happen to you your goal is to use the bad in life in a constructive fashion so self-pity has no utility is another maxim from Charlie Munger.
And Charlie, you know, a lot of people don't like that. They don't like, oh, don't tell me how to feel.
You know, like he can speak to this because he experienced the worst thing somebody could go through. I think he was like 29 years old.
He was getting divorced. He's got a nine-year-old son named Teddy, if I remember correctly.

And Teddy gets diagnosed with fatal leukemia.

And at this time, now he could have been saved.

But at that time in history, there was nothing.

They didn't know how to heal him.

So he is, just went through a divorce.

He's not doing well financially because Charlie Munger doesn't become

a full-time investor until he's 40.

So he's 20, late 20s in the story.

And he is struggling at work, failed marriage. And he is going to the hospital every day and slowly watching his son fade away so anybody that's lost somebody from cancer like my mom died of breast cancer in 2017 the last two years of her life were the worst way to die because there's all through her bones too and so like you literally see her like get smaller and like not be able to get a bed and be addicted to pain medication and like can't do anything without it um and so it's one thing for that to happen to your mom is obviously be devastating it's the love you have for your mom is orders of magnitude less than you have for your child when people talk about oh like the way i would describe why this is such an important thing and why this to anchor that self-pity has no utility in this story that Charlie Munger mentions it in is because, you know, people that don't have kids are like, they think they know what love is, right? And the way I would describe this, the best description of why they don't know what love is yet is actually a story that I heard Ryan Reynolds, the actor, say.
And he's like, you know, his wife, Blake Lively, he's like, I've never loved somebody as

much as I love Blake. I think it was impossible that I'd ever love somebody more.
He goes, and that instilled a day that Blake gave birth to our baby daughter. And then the moment I saw the daughter, I knew that if we were ever under attack, I would use Blake as a human shield to protect that baby.
And having two kids, I was like, that's exactly right. That is the best description.
And so when I, I don't just read these stories, I try to put myself in their shoes. And like, I want to like cry thinking about that happening to my son.
And even then he's like, listen, you're going to mourn. It's going to change certain bad things are going to happen in your life, right? Many of these are out of your control.
That's the point. That's why it's like self-utility is not the solution.
Yeah. You're going to grieve.
You're going to mourn. You're going to be changed forever.
If you lose your God for you, you lose your child, your life, the rest of your life is going to be fundamentally different. Using a parent, your life is fundamentally different.
And his whole point, I think he quotes Epictetus, if I'm not mistaken, where he's just like, the response to the inevitable tragedies, the trials and tribulations you have in your life is like learning from them and trying to use them as constructive, in a constructive fashion. It's not to wallow, oh, woe is me.
Like bad things happening is a part of the human experience. So self-pity has no utility.
Utilize, spend your time doing something else. The good ones know more.
The top talent in every industry has gathered more information than most people would find reasonable. Oh, this is my favorite.
This is literally what I'm doing for a living because it's also in the books. So my idea was just like, I don't think like, you don't have to be smarter than everybody else, right? And some of that's out of sight of your control.
It doesn't matter what I do for the rest of my life. I will never be as smart as Charlie Munger, but I can gather more information than another person would want to, right? And so like the example I have of this is like, I would read, I just told you my thing where like I read a biography about somebody, to the bibliography and I find obscure books.
I found this obscure book on Thomas Edison, right? In the bibliography of a book. It was published in like 1950 or something like that.
And it talks about when he was 12 years old, he was so voracious and has such an innate inner drive to, to, to make something of himself and to become an inventor and like to really have control for his own destiny. He was working as like a boy.
So like, you know, very common for a 12 year old boy to have a full-time job at that point he was working on a railroad on an actual train and the train would have like a switch over so to be a few hours every day where he would go and he'd wind up find himself in detroit and so what he's to do he goes oh there's a library here he reads every single book in the library over a course of a few years um there's a guy named edwin land who i won't shut up about i talk about all the time because he was steve jobs before steve jobs edwin lands the founder of polaroid he's also one of the most prolific uh individual inventors in american history when he died he had the third most patents to his name behind edison and somebody else um and so steve jobs the reason i found edwin land is because steve jobs when he was in his 20s, talks about meeting Edwin Land when he was in his 70s.

And he said that meeting was like visiting a shrine.

So Steve's talking about Edwin Land when he's 20.

Steve's dying of cancer in his late 50s, right?

Still giving interviews to Walter Isaacson for his biography.

Still talking about this guy, Edwin Land, right?

So I was like, oh, obviously I need to read about this guy.

He started reading about Edwin Land.

He does the exact same thing.

His idea, he had two goals in life.

I want to be the world's greatest scientist

and I want to be the world's greatest novelist.

So obviously outside-

Low ball.

Outside levels of ambition.

He decides, he's like,

he picks a scientific field

where he feels he can be the best.

That's the field of light

and how it affects our vision.

And so he starts sleeping with the canonical textbook on the science of light and vision. It's underneath his pillow when he's like 14, okay? Gets accepted to Harvard, realizes there's nobody at Harvard that can teach him what he wants to learn.
So he goes to the Harvard library, reads every single book in the Harvard library on light, then immediately drops out, moves to New York, goes to New York City Public Library, the beautiful one with the lions out front reads every single book in the harvard library on light then immediately drops out moves to new york goes to new york city public library the beautiful one with the lions out front reads every single book on light and then starts to do his experiments doesn't have any money doesn't have resources he breaks into i think nyu might be columbia let's say it's columbia breaks into columbia right there's a lot of you know misfits that break do uh breaking. They're like trying to steal your TV or something.
This guy was breaking in so he could use scientific, uh, scientific equipment so he can run his experiments. But it's like, they just go to unbelievable levels of, um, like just way beyond that you would, you would find reasonable.
So another example of this, the good note ones, no more is this line from David Ogilvie. Again, I didn't know who David Ogilvie was reading all of warren buffett's shareholder letters right and he keeps talking about this g he calls he has this genius david ogrevy it's like genius who is this guy read about him he talks about he built one of the most valuable uh advertising agencies that ever existed and he talks about he's like oh you want to get promoted you want to get my spot like how do you think i got to my spot and he would encourage his his, the young men in his organization.
He goes, I'm going to sign you to one of their biggest clients was Shell Oil, right? You're going to read every single piece of paperwork on the company history. You're going to read textbooks on geology.
You're going to read textbooks on oil exploration. You're going to know all the executives at Shell.
On Saturdays, you're going to go down to the Shell gas station and you're going to interview the customers of, that are, that are patronizing their business within a year. You'll be ready to, uh, you'll be ready to take over your boss's position, but that, and he's like the good ones, no more.
It's like that he worked for a French chef. He's like, they just knew every single thing about, they collected more information about their craft and things related to

their craft than anybody else.

It is interesting.

You know,

so much of the stuff that we're talking about today is going beyond the

reasonable.

Yeah.

There is a bar that lots of people get to tolerance for pain,

endurance,

kind of time persisting,

doing a thing.

That's a great insight.

Amount of talent that somebody has prepared.

And it's just a case of going orders of magnitude past that.

Thank you. of time persisting doing a thing that's a great insight amount of talent that somebody has prepared and it's just a case of going orders of magnitude past that there's a guy named les schwab um who he we could have talked about him when we talked about the the trying to not wind up like your dad because his dad was a drunk and a loser and les was very poor and his dad i think les is like 12 years old or 9 years old and his dad they find him dead

in a ditch

in front of a bar

and Les goes on

to build a multi-billion dollar

tire company

and like

you know

half a century ago

40 years ago

and he says something

in his autobiography

he's like

everything you do

it's volume

it's like gusto

and he goes

the combination of gusto

so like you know

really throwing yourself

into it

and volume

and he's like

he says

it's a case of

repeat repeat repeat repeat

Thank you. and it's a he goes the combination of gusto so like you know really throwing yourself into it and volume and he's like he says it's a case of repeat repeat repeat repeat and again i think the the if you really want an edge in what you're doing again i'm not trying to copy i'm not trying to make a tire company i'm not trying to invent the instant photography like edwin land did i'm not trying to be an inventor like thomas edison i'm not trying to to build an advertising agency like David Ogilvie, but I just take that idea as like good ones no more.
So it's like, not only am I going to spend, I read for a few hours every day, right? That's usually in the morning because that's the time my brain works best. Then I usually have lunch.
And then in the afternoon, what I do is then I reread past highlights and re-listen to old episodes. And I just seep myself in that.
So anytime you see like some kind of social media post from me, all that is, is something I reread that day that I read for the first time four years ago. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting.
I posted this quote about Rockefeller and importance of concentration because I went back through and I reread the highlights from the book Titan. And that's what I was spending 30 minutes doing.
And it's just like, all I'm i i can't guarantee that i'm going to be successful i can't guarantee that i'm going to make a podcast that people find they think it's worth their time but what i can do is like i can't control that but i can because it's more like a um especially with podcasts it's like more like a it's a subjective kind of thing right and but i can objectively do more work to hopefully influence and tilt the subjective nature of podcasting in my favor. And I just, all I do is read books.
I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. I'll take that.
Thank you very much. This isn't fucking rocket science.
Money comes naturally as a result of service. A business is just an idea that makes someone else's life better.
This drives me insane. Because again, all I do is hang out with founders.
And, you know, now the filter's got a lot tighter than it has for the last few years. But what I don't like is when people are like, you know, I always ask them like, you know, who are your entrepreneurial heroes? Like, who's the smartest person you know? What's the best business you can think of? Like, what's your favorite biography? Like, who do you want to emulate? I think picking the right heroes is like one of the most important things you can do in your life.
Cause you're going to naturally, like all of us are going to copy and absorb things from people around us, whether they're, we're, we're in together in person or I'm reading a book about it or watching a movie about it. And what drives me insane is they're like, well, I want, they put a number on it.
It's not like I want to start a company that does X, or I want to help somebody do Y. It's I want to build a $100 billion company.
And it's like, do you understand the people that built a $100 billion company? You think Jeff Bezos was sitting back there and was like, I'm going to build a $3 trillion company. You think Steve Jobs, you think Steve Jobs thought that Apple was going to get to $2 trillion or whatever it's at today? One of my favorite pieces of trivia about Apple is the first ever Apple sale was made barefoot.
He didn't even have shoes on when he sold his first set of computers. They weren't even computers.
Like his first Apple product, his first sale was made barefoot. There's no way that guy was like, I'm going to start this because there's a number attached to it.
So money comes naturally as a result of service is from Henry Ford, okay? Henry Ford's autobiography, I think is like a mandatory, like I think entrepreneurs should read it over and over again, you know, every two or three years. And he, Henry Ford and 1919, he owned a hundred percent of Ford motor company.
Cause he bought out all his investors and he was arguably the richest person in America at the time. So it's like, it's like me and you owning like a $20 billion company, we know outside shareholders today, like just insane.
Right. And yet you go and you analyze like the life of Henry Ford.
And he's the one that said that is like, he had one single idea. He's like, it's kind of messed up that, uh, cars are only for the rich people at the time.
They're like hand making them. Most of the cars on the road are either electric or steam.
He obviously populates internal combustion engine. It was a a funny let me take attention it's a funny story i'm rereading uh rockefeller's autobiography that he wrote when he's like in his 80s uh like a few months ago and he there's a line in there he's like young henry ford came to visit to me today i love that guy i'm like yeah he made like the demand for the product you have a monopoly on like orders of magnitude yeah aura yeah i bet you probably give him a hug and a kiss when you see him like of course you love him but but uh henry what i love about henry ford and i love this about everything it's like you only need one idea you only be right one time henry ford had a single idea in his entire career one idea uh everybody should be able to afford a car we can't do that right now because at the time cart let's say cars were like six thousand dollars and the average average person made, you know, two bucks a day, a dollar a day.
It is not going to happen. And so it took him, when you read biographies about him and he studied his career, it took him like a decade and a half, two decades to finally figure out mass production so you can drop the price of the car, right? And so how did he become the wealthiest person in America at the time that he was alive? Money comes naturally as a lot of service.
The service he provided was he made the car affordable. So everybody, and I literally think about like, there's a lot of great products.
There's not many products you can make that change the geography. Like that's how influential this guy was.
And so what I think where people make mistakes, they're always like, I want to make X amount of money in my pocket, or I want to make, you know make my market cap of my company being this. It's like, well, the way to get wealthy is to solve a problem for somebody and then increase the amount of people that you're able to solve that problem for, assuming that is a widespread problem.
It turns out how many people would want a car that they could afford? Well, they're either on foot or they're being driven by horses. Probably a lot if you can solve that problem.

And so the second line of that,

after Henry Ford says money comes naturally as a result of service,

the best definition of a business I've ever heard

is that second line from,

and that came from Richard Branson.

And the weird thing you're going to see,

and he says that all businesses is an idea

that makes somebody else's life better.

The weird thing that happens,

this is, there's another maxim I repeat

over and over again on the podcast, that history doesn't repeat, repeat human nature does every generation thinks that there's no more opportunity like oh we missed it there's like there's always there will be limitless opportunity as long as humans are alive because all a business is is an idea that makes somebody else's life better a podcast can make somebody else's life better the people that made the camera that makes sure somebody else's life better whoever made the microphone the ipad your drink that i down the orange sunrise when i'm doing my podcast that makes somebody else's life better there's an infinite way to make other people's lives better if you love what you do the only exit strategy is death retirement can be fatal again this is something that that's fascinating because like my dad is like a he's a blue-collar guy he's got like an eighth grade education and um i realized you said how normal normal people can be and um i told him like like it was like a big deal to me because it's like the first like super famous and like wealthy person that i got to spend

time with was sam zell and you know at the time sam's all probably had like 10 billion dollars

or something like it was insane he's 81 years old he's working seven days a week and um he was you know i talked to him he's he's like i'm gonna be doing deals till i die he was like obsessed with this and he was right he was working on deals six months later he's dead still working you know every day or you know very a lot maybe not every day but he was he was still on all the time and my dad for the life of him could not understand that this guy had billions of dollars and he still chose to work and he realized like oh for a vast majority of people work they equate work with something i have to do it's drudgery there's a great line called how to do great there's a great essay called how to do great work it's by this guy paul graham yeah and he he's his guess is like how many people out of eight billion people on the planet really wind up finding work that they love to do and is they're able to like support themselves with it there's a lot of people find things they like to do that they love but, but can they make your avocation, your vocation, I think is the line from Steve Jobs. And Paul's guess, Paul Graham's guess is like probably a few hundred thousand.
I think he might be right about that. Like it is unbelievably rare where I don't look at, like I wake up every day, like I get to do this, not I have to do this.
Sam Zell looks at it like i get to do this that i have to do this and what's remarkable is the overlap between people that got to the top of their profession and the people that had no exit their exit strategy was death not only would they not sell their company they would never retire i did this at this at one of the episodes i'm most proud of and one of the guys i really like and and I, it's the founder of Red Bull and his name's like Dietrich Mastisch, Dietrich Mastischisch or something like that. There's no even biography of him in English.
So I had to, I had to use ChatGPT to translate a German biography to read in English, which is, you know, the translation is not perfect to do that episode. And he came to my attention because he had just passed away.
And he, remarkable story.

Didn't start, he was like a executive,

like an account executive for like Unilever or something like that.

And didn't start his first company.

It was Red Bull.

He was like 41 years old.

He owned 49% of it.

So he had, there was a 49% partner,

49% partner, another guy that owned 2%.

Towards the end of his life, he turned,

he was paying himself between like 200 million a year and 500, 700 million a year year so that's his paycheck right right uh was turning down like right now you could sell red bull for 40 billion dollars probably more so multiple times he turned down 10 billion dollars in his pocket 10 his share would be 10 20 billion dollars and his whole point he's like love what I do. Why would I sell it? Then I don't have anything to do.
And he, and he was like, you would love him because like, he liked to, uh, he took care of his health. Um, you know, he was, he, he had his own fleet of airplanes.
So he'd fly his own planes. He'd ride his motorcycle.
He just live life to the fullest. And there's so many people like that, where like they achieve outside success because time carries most of the weights, all the stuff we been talking about today and to them taking that away from them would be like losing a child what about retirement can be fatal where did that line come that's a line from david ogreby and um same thing where he noticed it the problem is is like i think you you've mentioned this on your um show and i think got some like shit for it before too, about like the different values that historically men and women and like how it contrasts.
Um, but for men, like for us, I think it's really important for us to like wake up every day and like put, solve a problem, put something out into the world, feel like we're being useful to our tribe. You are not a selfish person.
Like you are a driven driven person but you are doing you you are doing things every day for other people and i think when you remove that and they've showed studies of things like this like then they don't have they it's not just work it's this is my life's work this is my purpose like i wake up every day with a burning desire to achieve mission success like well there's a you know thinking about it through an evolutionary lens you're useful yes what are the signals that the world's giving you you're moving toward a goal you're useful people need you you contribute and yeah i the evidence is there in your your friend jordan peterson said something one time i saw this clip on um on youtube and i don't i didn see the whole conversation, but the clip was, I was like, oh, this sounds exactly, this sounds like this guy's read hundreds of biographies because he said successful men are insane. And he's just like, they wake up every day.
He goes, you could put them in a forest and they would just run around all day chopping trees down with an ax. Like they have to do something.
And to take away their ability to be productive, to be useful using your term is torture. It is, it takes away their purpose.
It takes, and in many cases, like you'll find like, oh, they stop working. And then all of a sudden this young or not young, this, you know, virile, healthy, overall healthy, older person is dead.
How did that happen? And so I think when the point point is like this is the way i would describe this i think is really important um and this is the the maxim that uh i took away from the two-hour conversation i had with sam's out is go for freedom and essentially what he told me he's like listen i know all the rich guys he's like they're all miserable uh he's like they make the mistake of like buying spending more time doing shit they don't like to buy slightly more nicer versions of the same shit. That's his word, himself.
That's what he said, right? He also did something that's hilarious. He's like, I have a place in Chicago and I have a compound in Malibu.
That's the word he used, right? And he goes, every year I take my family, like his kids, his extended family, and we spend the holidays in the South of France. He goes, I could buy the village.
He goes, I don't buy it. I rent it because the things that you own start to own you.
And then he's, the funny thing is he wanted to show me pictures of his Malibu house. And so I thought it would be like pictures on his phone.
He hands me his phone and it's Google images. It says Sam Zell Malibu house.
And so it's like, imagine having a house that's so well-known, a compound, where it's like it's on Google Images. Jesus.
But his whole point was like, David, do not trade money for freedom, okay? He goes, go for freedom. And this is the rough synopsis of what he said.
He goes, if you go for freedom, if you have freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can work on what you love.
If you work on what you love, you'll do it for a long time. If you do it for a long time, you'll get really good at it.
If you get really good at it, money will come as a result. And so his whole point, he's like, I had unlimited money.
I never made the mistake of trading money in exchange for my freedom. And that is really powerful.
And that gives you the ability when you find like, when you really, your goal in life is to find your life's work and the thing that like the purpose why you feel you're here

and then to do it until you die.

I can give you a list of people.

Enzo Ferrari, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett's doing this.

Charlie Munger, Coco Chanel, Estee Lauder.

The list goes on and on and on and on.

These people were decades past

the need for working for money.

And in many cases, like Enzo Ferrari,

he was working like 11 hour days,

seven days a week for the rest of his life. He didn't need the money.
Dude, I love what you do. I said it at the start.
I said it on the Q&A. I think Founders is a podcast that everybody should go and listen to.
It's not a cadence that's going to actually eat into your modern wisdom time because you can only get one out a week. He's got to read all of the books.
Bro, you're great. You're great.
I really appreciate you as a friend.

I appreciate everything that you do.

Where should people go?

They want to keep up to date with the stuff that you get on them.

The Founders Podcast and your podcast player, you Founders Podcast on all the networks.

Dude, Chris, I admire you.

I'm so glad we became friends.

I love the opportunity and I appreciate you inviting me.

Until next time, man.

You're the man.