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

Speaker 1 Did you hear me say when I was asked who is the podcaster's podcaster, the underground one that all of us listen to?

Speaker 2 It's you. Yes.
I almost clipped it and then posted it. I appreciate it.
I watch all your Q ⁇ As. I love them.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Yeah, dude.

Speaker 2 I would love a weekly Q ⁇ A from you. Oh, God.

Speaker 1 I don't know whether 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 lessons.

Speaker 1 You spend your entire time studying history's greatest founders, greatest leaders, thinkers. And I want you to go through some broad buckets of lessons that you've taken away from them.

Speaker 1 So we're going to do 15 today. Okay.
First one, excellence is the capacity to take pain. Persevering through pain is mandatory.
Why?

Speaker 2 That is probably my all-time favorite maxim from studying all of these history space on traders. It actually comes from the founder of Four Seasons, this guy named Izzy Sharp.

Speaker 2 And he, sometimes, like you're reading a book or you're listening to a podcast, or sometimes it is even like a music lyric that just, one sentence can stay in your brain forever.

Speaker 2 I haven't read that book in probably five years, and he's describing how difficult it was.

Speaker 2 Like, he had no experience in the hotel industry when he found Four Seasons, and yet his goal was like, I'm going to make a collection of the greatest hotels in the world.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 reader. and there's just so many times where he's just like he hit a uh like there's a problem he can't figure out how to solve uh you know problems with partners with contractors with financing uh

Speaker 2 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 thing uh 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 right wide awake hands behind his head looking up at the at the ceiling, just like can't sleep, depressed, agonizing over this relentless, like this relentless pursuit of a goal.

Speaker 2 And so he's the one that said that, that coined the term, you know, excellence is capacity to take pain. I was like, that.

Speaker 2 And I think by that point, I had read like 180 biographies and autobiographies of history gets depressed. Like, that's exactly what I see in every single book.

Speaker 2 There's never a book. There's not a, no, no life story or no book starts with, hey, this guy had an idea.
He did the idea. Everything went well.
End of story. It is all like, hey, I have this idea.

Speaker 2 I want to do something. And it's just one problem, one obstacle.

Speaker 2 And it's one

Speaker 2 like essentially

Speaker 2 emotional and mental and in some cases, physical pain to like persevere and push through to till they can get to the other side and actually achieve what they're trying to achieve.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And that means that you're going to end up feeling discomfort. Therefore, the capacity to deal with pain is important.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's no such thing as like an important goal or an audacious goal that comes easily. I think Jeff Bezos has his own way of saying this.
And there's this great book called Invent and Wander.

Speaker 2 And it's the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. So they take his shareholder letters and they take transcripts of his speeches.

Speaker 2 And you really get to understand how he was thinking as he was building Amazon and all the stuff that he's learned.

Speaker 2 And his whole thing was, you know, I have unrelenting, uncompromising standards for excellence and the talent of the people around me.

Speaker 2 And if you're coming to work at Amazon, like you, I'm not going to bend. You're going to raise to my expectations, my standards.
It is not easy to work here.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he says, he's like,

Speaker 2 things that you can tell your grandkids about are not meant to be easy.

Speaker 1 There's a quote from Tim Cook at Apple where he says,

Speaker 1 people say if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. I've found that to be a total crock of shit.

Speaker 1 At Apple, you will work harder than you ever have before,

Speaker 1 but the tools will feel light in your hands.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then he winds up coming back, you know, after 12 to 13 years in the wilderness.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 sets the foundation for the multi-trillion dollar market cap that Apple has today.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Because it's sane. It is, that's the sane thing to do.
It's the misfits, the rebels, you know, the people that actually are obsessed with what they're doing that are are able to persevere.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Did you ever hear me tell Rogan about the region beta paradox? That thing? So it's just an idea about where you get stuck in comfortably numb in the middle. Things aren't too bad.

Speaker 1 They're not that good. But because they're not that bad, you don't have the motivation motivation to go make them better.
It's like a well-known psychological state. And I came up with a

Speaker 1 colliery of it, which is the reverse region beta paradox.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You're the David Goggins of working hard. Who's going to carry the workload? You are forever.

Speaker 1 And that thing is, it's a blessing and a curse because it allows people to maybe continue moving when they actually should

Speaker 1 pivot to something else. But if you know that the idea is right, I guess that that's a competitive advantage.

Speaker 2 I would say one of the greatest, if you're talking about like one of the near-perfect

Speaker 2 entrepreneur autobiographies is Phil Knight's shoe dog, where he's telling the story of Nike.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So like everybody identifies with the struggle wanting to like have a dream, wanting to achieve it.

Speaker 2 I wish more biographies were like that because they spend too much time after the person's super rich and like donating things to education. That's way less relatable.

Speaker 1 This is an egalitarian, a temporally egalitarian book.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I love what you said because the last chapter, he's like,

Speaker 2 for the Charlotte, I think he calls him charlatan. He's like, for the charlatans to tell entrepreneurs to never quit.
He's like,

Speaker 2 that's bullshit. He doesn't use that word, but he's like,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 want to do in life and what you want to set out to accomplish.

Speaker 1 What about Elon? Because he strikes me as somebody that's just got a pretty high pain tolerance.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He has like one of the first podcasts, but they weren't called podcasts back then. He had this video podcast, what we'd call a video podcast today, called Foundation.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And they're on, the interview is on Tesla's factory floor. So you kind of hear the stuff in the background.
Elon looks way better than he does now.

Speaker 2 He like, you know, he's, he's been going through hell for the last tough paper around. Yeah, 15 years.
But at the time,

Speaker 2 they're just starting to produce the Model S.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Kevin Rose asks Elon a question that changed my life. And he's like, hey, you know, Elon has a crazy experience.

Speaker 2 Everybody knows what Tesla space 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 think a lot of people don't know that he had his first successful company exit when he was like 25, something like that, 26.

Speaker 2 He sold this company called Zip2,

Speaker 2 winds up netting something like, you know, $20, $30 million at that age, and then immediately rolls it back into PayPal.

Speaker 2 And then he rolls PayPal into Tesla and SpaceX and does exactly what he always does now. But the fascinating thing, Kimaro is like, dude, you didn't know anybody.
You didn't have resources.

Speaker 2 Like, you didn't have a network. Like, how did you learn? Like, who were you? How did you learn how to build companies? You were so young when you were doing that.
Did you have a mentor?

Speaker 2 Did you read a lot of business books? And Elon says something that's fascinating. He's like, I didn't read a lot of business books.
He goes, I like biographies and autobiographies.

Speaker 2 I think they're helpful. He goes, I was looking for mentors and historical context.
And so he talks about, you know, reading the biography of Ben Franklin, Henry Floyd, Nikola Tesla.

Speaker 2 And I was like, that's genius. Cause for the vast majority of humanity, right, we don't have world-class

Speaker 2 mentors in person, but you can access 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.

Speaker 2 Cause as soon as he said that, I started reading a ton of biographies. And then I got addicted to reading biographies.
I was like, oh, I should just make a podcast about the biographies I'm reading.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I just read this book called Lift Off Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days of SpaceX. Elon is in a class of itself, himself.
There is not,

Speaker 2 in many cases, like a lot of the modern day founders, like there's a historical equivalent. There is like a, you know,

Speaker 2 there is even a Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2 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, Lift Off, so much is because it's the first six years of SpaceX.

Speaker 2 That's it. Just like I said, I loved how Phil Knight just covered get to the IPO is fine.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 That book is about Elon Musk when he's 30 to 37.

Speaker 2 Now, me and you think of Elon now, like world's most richest man, like unbelievably powerful, tipping elections, like going, doing all this crazy shit, right? It's like, no, no, he was 30 to 37.

Speaker 2 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 through a divorce.
His

Speaker 2 infant son dies.

Speaker 2 His girlfriend talks about in the book him literally waking up in the middle of the night, screaming, not like, oh, how are you doing, honey? I can't sleep. No, no, screaming in pain and agony.

Speaker 2 And because he put when he, when he was the largest shareholder in PayPal, okay, this is what I also admire about him. His skin in the game.

Speaker 2 When you already have multiple successful exits, you don't have to put your money on the line anymore. You can raise money from whoever you want.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 when they sell to eBay.

Speaker 2 Puts $100 of million into doing a rocket company, he's never had 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 to Solar City, has to borrow money for rent.

Speaker 2 And so then this is talking about, he's like, you know, that book is the next few years. He just sees all that money just essentially being lit on fire.

Speaker 1 How does he keep going?

Speaker 1 He has fucking malaria and meningitis at the same time.

Speaker 2 This is what I love. So originally he's like, hey, 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, super optimistic.

Speaker 2 So he's a little nutty, you know, in that case. He just thought he could do this.

Speaker 2 And so the third rocket fails. And he's like, you know what? We're going to scrounge up enough money and we have 30 days.
We don't have six months. I think it might be six weeks.

Speaker 2 We don't have six months. We have six weeks.
We have to launch this rocket. And his whole thing, he ends that speech

Speaker 2 after the failure of the third rocket. He's like, come hell or high water, we're going to make this work.

Speaker 2 And I just think another thing that history's good entrepreneurs have in common, and I think me and you probably agree with this too.

Speaker 2 I definitely do, is like the power of will and the power of one dynamic individual to change the course of history.

Speaker 2 I feel that like belief comes before ability is another like repeated lesson that

Speaker 2 it's obvious if you read biographies of people who do great things.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Problems are just opportunities in work clothes. Business is problems.
The best companies are just effective problem-solving machines.

Speaker 2 That line. So the closest, now

Speaker 2 the closest like historical equivalent to Elon, and this is still a bit of a stretch, so you have to bear with me. There's a guy named Henry Kaiser.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Henry Kaiser founded like over 100 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.

Speaker 2 I think now Elon's like on a different level.

Speaker 2 You know, multiple billion-dollar companies. He built ships and he just helped the Allies win World War II.
But that's his line where he was just, like Elon, just default optimistic.

Speaker 2 Like every day, like, I'm going to, I know 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.

Speaker 2 Problems are just opportunities to work close.

Speaker 2 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. Like, good.

Speaker 2 Problems are just opportunities to work close. So you, the default state, I think for humans is like to complain, oh, woe is me.
Here's another problem.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 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...

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 It's the reason that

Speaker 1 people at the top get paid more because they have more levels of input coming in.

Speaker 1 Anybody that's in the suite, the C-suite, that's good in the C-suite, is basically just a very complex, high-level problem-solving algorithm.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Their weighting is appropriate because of experience and maybe taste or talent or whatever, insight.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I think you're right. I think that the best companies just solve problems.

Speaker 2 I was thinking about this yesterday because,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 we talked, 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

Speaker 2 and, you know, talking to podcasters and entrepreneurs. It's like, oh, that's my entire life outside of spending time with my family.

Speaker 2 And I was struck and kind of shocked because I saw a headline where there was a bunch of protesters that set up a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos' Washington, D.C. house.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I looked at that and I was dumbfounded because I'm like, Jeff Bezos made a a magic button that I could press. And

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that doesn't even talk about all the other businesses.

Speaker 2 The fact that 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 to this because i've done probably like i don't know like eight podcasts on jeff i think he's incredible um and so i read everything about him And I'm like, this is kind of hypocritical.

Speaker 2 Like you're protesting now because, you know, he's got a trillion or $2 trillion market cap, right?

Speaker 2 But there was no protest in in front of his house after the dot-com bust when the stock goes from $180 to $6. You could have bought a share of Amazon stock at

Speaker 2 that time for $5.96. You were not in front of his house then.
You weren't. And when he had a mass exodus of employees, you weren't saying anything about that.

Speaker 2 You waited till it's not, there's a line that,

Speaker 2 again, we talk about the fact that it's just a single line. Like I read all the time, you know, you're not going to read everything.
You're not going to remember everything in an entire book.

Speaker 2 Maybe 500 of each 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.

Speaker 2 And he says, it's not that greed, it's not greed doesn't run the world. Envy.
Envy runs the world.

Speaker 2 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 word world.
You're envious.

Speaker 2 It's like that when you hear 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.

Speaker 2 Envy does.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a shame because

Speaker 1 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 remember 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.

Speaker 1 Everything's beige.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You look at somebody like Chris Bumstead, best bodybuilder in the world, or ex, I guess, he just retired a few weeks ago.

Speaker 1 He has been tracking his journey from

Speaker 2 over 10 years on YouTube.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If you were 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.

Speaker 1 The issue people have is that looks like it came easy. Therefore, they don't deserve it.
I didn't have something come easy.

Speaker 1 Therefore, I should take it from them.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You're the one that introduced me to Chris. I didn't know about Bumpshead before I watched your episode with him.
I love the question you had for him.

Speaker 2 You're like, do you think you're a strange dude to be the best in the world at what you are? He's a real soulful dude. Correct.
He's very soulful. I thought that was fascinating.

Speaker 2 I loved his perception because again,

Speaker 2 his perspective, rather, like, you know, this is somebody that got to literally the best in the world at what you do.

Speaker 2 And I love

Speaker 2 this is something that's obvious because one of the complaints that some, very few complaints I get, most of the, like the people that listen to the podcast are nerds, right?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 like obsessive person to even be into this kind of stuff and i think you obviously me and you are both like this as well but they're like i can tell when sometimes the podcast is not for other people because like oh you're not you're not telling me what to do and i was just like because 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 in other news this episode is brought to you by function you probably want to know what's happening inside of your body but getting your blood work comprehensively analyzed can cost thousands, which is why I partnered with Function.

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Speaker 2 I was listening to

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so he's running this crazy company in Austin and it's just exploding. And he's still in college.

Speaker 2 And he winds up recruiting like an older, more 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like he's working all hours of the day. He's going to the full limit, 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.

Speaker 2 This is how I 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 He's swimming downstream.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It makes life so much easier.

Speaker 1 He's swimming downstream. The partner that he picked compensates for his shortcomings and accounts for them and helps him to be a better person.

Speaker 2 So does mine. So does my wife.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, I I keep fucking hopping on about it.

Speaker 2 This Michelangelo effect thing, two people, they make each other better to be better for each other and for themselves and together they are positive some more than they could have been apart etc and uh i actually have an interesting tangent i think you'll you you might um enjoy i read a book um so i was obsessed with arnold schwarzinger 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 a autobiography when he was 30 that is not on that people don't think of as an autobiography.

Speaker 2 It's called The Education of a Bodybuilder, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm going to get into movies. I'm going to build a business empire.
He literally calls a shot. And so I read everything I can get my hands on.
I watch everything with Arnold.

Speaker 2 And so I thought I read every book about Arnold. Then I'm watching that Netflix documentary on him that came out.

Speaker 2 And they kept interviewing this, his, his girlfriend that 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?

Speaker 2 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 saying, I don't understand

Speaker 2 why this outlier of an outlier of an outlier won't just be a normal guy.

Speaker 2 And so the main takeaway from that book was, especially for entrepreneurs, especially for driven people and, you know, people like Chris. as well.
And

Speaker 2 I can give you multiple examples in the books as well, like The Founder of Four Seasons. It's also, it's like, for entrepreneurs, you either need a supporter spouse or no spouse at all.

Speaker 2 Because, like, there is no separation from our work and our lives. And it's not going to work if like you're completely obsessed.

Speaker 2 The reason me and you get along, the reason I love hanging out with you, and we've spent nine hours talking about podcasting in Miami, like, because you're a fellow obsessive.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, that doesn't have to be shot, you know, with a camera that's going to break Spotify's video player. Like, calm down.
Like, you don't need to redo the barn. It's just Matthew McConaughey.

Speaker 2 Like, why does this stuff matter? It's not going to work. You either need no spouse or a supportive spouse.
And

Speaker 2 this is where I see so many entrepreneurs fight against this, where their spouse makes them feel guilty.

Speaker 2 They're attracted to them because they're so driven and obsessed, right? Which is abnormal for the human population. And you deal with a lot of young men.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so you're attracted to this person because they're so driven. Then you marry them.
It's like, hey, I love what you are. Now be something you're doing.

Speaker 1 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, Homozi's got some thing where he says

Speaker 1 the cheerleader should not be telling the quarterback to get off the field when it's in the final play of the game.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 not in the podcasting world, but in all sorts of other stuff. And you're like, hey,

Speaker 2 there you go. Stadium floor, crack on.

Speaker 1 I'm here to support you.

Speaker 2 I think what Hormozy did too, that's smart, that I've seen a few times,

Speaker 2 because you are going to, you know, these people are obsessed. Like,

Speaker 2 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 played anyone off.

Speaker 2 Yeah, pickleball on the weekends, and you barbecued. And it's like, no one's going to read that book.
So, by default, you're self-selecting into these very extreme people.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 like, one thing that you see this conflict between, like, how do I balance work and family? And I think what Hormozzi did is like, he combined, he combined, you know, work with Layla.

Speaker 2 Estee, 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, like, thinks about.

Speaker 2 They know that the company's named after her, you know, it's probably $20 billion market cap, whatever it is today, but they don't, there's a very hard-to-find autobiography about Estee Lauder when she was still alive, published, I think, in the 80s.

Speaker 2 It's one of my favorite books I ever read. If you can get a copy, you can read in a weekend.
And there was a huge conflict between she's a monster.

Speaker 2 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 do I do? She brings them into the business with them.

Speaker 2 So her husband shuts down his business because her business is a lot more, has a lot more potential. He works in there.
And then they involve the kids since they were like six.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 that.

Speaker 1 So his kids got to travel the world with him.

Speaker 2 Can I tell you a funny rider? So I was at it. I do a lot of, well, now I do less of them, but for the right people, I'll do like a lot of speaking gigs for like private companies.

Speaker 2 And you usually like private companies or investment firms. And so I was at one.
There were two speakers, me and Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 2 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 that, like, not enough money for this.

Speaker 2 So I was like, how much?

Speaker 2 How much did you pay Tucker? And because, you know, he like, he's a fan of the podcast. Like, I knew I could talk to him, like, you know, a friend.

Speaker 2 And he goes, well, his writer is 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.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I didn't even know I could do that.

Speaker 1 Number three, there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. History's greatest entrepreneurs all learned from history's greatest entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2 So that is a direct quote from poor Charlie's Almanac, and it is literally true.

Speaker 2 In that case,

Speaker 2 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 helpful outside of just making a podcast.

Speaker 2 I really believe like anybody you admire, whatever field, it could be a director, it could be an entrepreneur, it it could be an athlete, read, find a book about them and read about their life.

Speaker 2 Like I am an evangelist for reading biographies. I think this is one of the highest value activities that you could have outside spending time on your health with your friends and family.

Speaker 2 I really think people should make it a habit. And so what I, what I do is like,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And like books are made out of books. So you, you, anybody usually has one body.
It's a regress of people referring other people.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 And then not only, so that's not only how you find books to like 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's greatest entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2 So they will talk about the people that influence them. And so I'm doing this, going through the same process as just described to you for Munger and Buffett.

Speaker 2 And they keep bringing 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.

Speaker 2 Like Henry Singleton's the smartest. Charlie Munger says Henry Singleton is the single smartest person I've ever met.
That Singleton is smarter than Buffett.

Speaker 2 Buffett says that it's a crime that business schools don't study him. That if you took the

Speaker 2 top 100 business school students and compared their record for Singleton, he'd blow them out of the water. I'm like, I have to read about this guy.

Speaker 2 So then you start, there's this book called The Outsiders. And I pick it up.
I start reading about it. I'm like, oh my God, the ideas that I thought were Buffett and Mungers were Singleton.

Speaker 2 They just applied it to building Berkshire. And then you go and start, then what I do, I go and read everything about Singleton.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I was reading Alfred Sloan, the CO of GM's book. And he says, if as you're building a business, you need access to a financial institution.

Speaker 2 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, that made that helped Teledyne.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you see this over and over again. And that's another thing where it's when I say, like, all of history is great entrepreneurs, study, all of

Speaker 2 history's greatest entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They're building their version of their business, what they were interested in.

Speaker 2 And the greatest example of this is you go back and all the great entrepreneurs can place their work in historical context.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so they're like, oh, there's ideas around marketing this other invention a hundred years before I'm my invention that still works to this day and so that's what I mean it's like oh these ideas there's 30 there's ideas with billions of $30 history book.

Speaker 1 What about that line between SpaceX and NASA?

Speaker 2 Oh, so this is nuts. So this is, this was in that book, Lift Off, which is really, again, I highly recommend that book because you can, again, read in a weekend.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And what they realized is like hey uh 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 everything in papers and they're red you could just download them and read them nobody read them so they wind up

Speaker 2 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 space x and that you could also do that um there's another line in the book that elon um talks about where this reporter goes he's flying on

Speaker 2 Elon's jet after a failed, I think it's like the second failed rocket.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Relationships run the world. Trusted personal networks may be the most valuable asset in the world.

Speaker 2 Okay, so this, this,

Speaker 2 this might be the most important idea that I've actually internalized and seen play out in the last like year of my life.

Speaker 2 I'm going to go to, there's, I had the ability to meet Charlie Munger, I just met, and I went to his house, had dinner with him.

Speaker 2 The night started out in his library, which is really cool for me because, you know, I love reading. And I got to see,

Speaker 2 I got to see not only like what was in his library, but I also got to see like I could read

Speaker 2 biographies for the rest of my life and like I'll never have what he has um and what i mean by that is

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 i first of all i'm sitting there and you know the 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 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.

Speaker 2 So like he has like the bifocals, but it's not just like he looks at you like this. He'll look and I'll go like this because he's got to look through the bottom.

Speaker 2 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 is like, hey, like get in here.
Start asking him.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 all these things on my Apple notes on my phone, never looked at my phone once in three hours.

Speaker 2 And so immediately I just started looking at his shelf shelf behind him and I started noticing all the books. Cause again, I find people I admire.

Speaker 2 And then if they say, hey, I like this book, I go and read it. So I start asking questions about all these books.
And what I mean that I'll never have what he has, I have to like reread stuff.

Speaker 2 I have to like study. I have to like practice.
Immediately ask him about a book he hasn't read in 25 years.

Speaker 2 He can tell you what the, what the company does, what their revenue was, what, who sold, whose partners, who sold it. Like he was a legit genius.
Like absolutely, I don't have whatever brain he has.

Speaker 2 And anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline, right?

Speaker 2 you have to some level 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 he knew he was not gonna 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 um we talked a lot about ben franklin because he's got uh a bust he he uh like he commissions busts of people he admires so he's leak on yu and ben franklin And he's got every biography I've ever seen in Ben Franklin.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 George George Washington, who's 21, right?

Speaker 2 And they build a relationship and they have a relationship

Speaker 2 their whole life. But, 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 met Buffett. I was 35.
Buffett was 28.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 forever. And most of them had passed on, you know, but by the time I got to meet,

Speaker 2 but I got to meet Munger. But relationships around the world, what you realize is.

Speaker 2 Every like we think of like an organization, like let's say we need,

Speaker 2 there's something, there's, there's certain organizations that are important in podcasting, Spotify being the most important ones. We think of Spotify as an organization, but is it an organization?

Speaker 2 No, inside an organization, it's a per, there's people, and there's people that me and you have a relationship with, like Daniel Eck or people on the board are the head of podcasting.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so, there's another guy that I got to meet who's one of my heroes. His guy named Sam Zell.
He also,

Speaker 2 he was 81 years old when I met him. He passed away, unfortunately, about six months after I got to have lunch with him.
him. And in his autobiography, he mentions,

Speaker 2 Save Zell's a legend, you know, one of the best entrepreneurs and investors. He sold

Speaker 2 the largest real estate company in history for like $38 billion. Like the guy just could, he fell ass backwards into deals and deals and money.
He was just phenomenal.

Speaker 2 But I got to have a two-hour lunch with him and he's sitting, you know, closer than you are to me and could ask me whatever I wanted. So I brought up the fact that

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he starts listening to a bunch and he goes, hey, can I meet this guy? And so I get a message like Sam Zell wants to meet you. I thought it was like fake.

Speaker 2 I was like, no, he doesn't want to meet you. This is ridiculous.
So I go, Sam, I bought the book that you talked about that changed. Go back to there's ideas worth 30.
I forgot about this.

Speaker 2 There's ideas worth billions and $30 hitchhiker. When Sam, Sam Zell was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school.
He was an entrepreneur for 61 years. One of the best to ever do it.

Speaker 2 And he picked up a book that changed his life when he was in law school. It's the autobiography of this guy named William Zekendorf.

Speaker 2 William Zekendorf 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, the land is valuable,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, so break up the components of the business and sell it to the highest bidder and the sum of the parts, like that'll be, that's how you make more money. Right.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And Sam had this, he was famous for this grabbly voice. He goes, read it.
I was like, okay, Sam Zell tells me to read the book. I immediately read the book.

Speaker 2 In that book is where it crystallized for for me that relationships around the world.

Speaker 2 Zeckendorf, you know, very wealthy, winds up losing all his money, but at the time, very wealthy and didn't, wasn't born wealthy. So like very similar to me and you with our background, right?

Speaker 2 We don't understand any of this stuff.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You're at the base of the mountain. You can, you might be able to see that peak, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you don't have access to those pathways unless you've climbed the mountain.

Speaker 2 And he goes, and then if I need something from a Howard Hughes or a Jay Pritzker family, which is a multi-billion dollar Chicago family, or, you know, the mayor of New York City, because I'm a developer, well, guess what?

Speaker 2 I'm on a peak too. There's a path right here.
Relationships are in the world. And so the advice that they both gave me is like, you need to develop seamless webs of deserved trust.
Go ahead.

Speaker 1 Just that there's an additional element in there, which suggests you need to also be able to display value in some way.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You have done a thing which enables you. It unlocks that.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Because I've done, let's see, probably read 380 biographies, over 100,000 pages, eight years, two months. But, like, you can't remember all this stuff.

Speaker 2 So, you have to, like, I love what Naval Ravakan said. He's like, I break things down to the maxim level.
So then they're easy to remember.

Speaker 2 And then you contextually apply it to your situation as a process. It's a sipped file.
People, this is a...

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if you, 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.

Speaker 2 How awesome. That's really lovely.
Do less but better.

Speaker 1 It's like from a German saying. You go, right.

Speaker 2 Well, you can't use it if you can't remember it. Correct.
David Ogley has this line where he's like, why do you have to write interesting ads? And you do this phenomenally.

Speaker 2 I just saw the ad you just did yesterday. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Because his response is, you can't save souls in an empty church. So then you'll remember.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I have one simple organization or organization principle is I want to help people learn from history of case entrepreneurs and I want to do that better than anybody else in the world. That's it.

Speaker 2 So then I can I remember that that's my principle and I look at how I'm spending my time.

Speaker 1 Single ordinating, single direction.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I want to go back to what you said, though. So my maxim on this is you need to make yourself easy to interface with.
Okay.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And most people that go to podcasts or podcasters don't want to work. They do, it's not the only thing they do.
It's like one of 10.

Speaker 2 And what me and you saw in each other media is like, oh, this is another me.

Speaker 2 We may talk about different things. We have different formats, but it's another me.

Speaker 2 It's so much easier for me to like, I knew exactly, 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

Speaker 2 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 going back to relationships around the world okay

Speaker 2 it's very important that you build a seamless web of trust. I really do believe these, these high-end personal networks are the greatest assets in the world.
I'm not, that's not hyperbolic.

Speaker 2 I literally believe that. You have to make yourself easy to interface with, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know, give me money, be my customer.

Speaker 2 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 kind 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 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 act of 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 time frame is and i've condensed it down into you know 400 hours that you can learn and hopefully be educated and entertained 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, talking to this guy, a good friend of mine

Speaker 2 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 greatest entrepreneurs simultaneously.

Speaker 2 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 this person? Can you do me this favor?

Speaker 2 Can you help me raise a fund? Nothing. In other news, this episode is brought to you by NetSuite.

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Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Dean, the guy that's still with me now that's edited 2,000 videos that have gone out, every single one of them, creative director now, maybe the best podcast editor on the planet, arguably.

Speaker 1 I would say so.

Speaker 1 He did the first two, three years for free. He came and did the first shoot for free.
No, we were friends or whatever, but he was a working professional photographer and videographer.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And just to round out what you were saying before about this sort of essentializing the fact that mantras and maxims are a useful win-zip tool to then unlock this file downstream from it.

Speaker 1 Andre Gied, Nobel Prize winner, everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

Speaker 2 That line is in my favorite book on Buffett and Munger. It's called All I Want to Know Is Where I'm Gonna Die, so I'll Never Go There.

Speaker 2 And I thought it was them. So that's funny that you said it's his because I thought it was their clip.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you've got like Mungarian drift.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 So again, this 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?

Speaker 2 Entrepreneur is like somebody has ideas and does them. And so I think filmmakers are entrepreneurs.
I think certain athletes are entrepreneurs. I think podcasters are entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2 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're, you build a company around it to, to be able to accomplish that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that line, like you can always understand

Speaker 2 the son by the story of the father, the father, the story of the father is the better than the son, was literally in that book.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We're not interested in what you're offering, sir.

Speaker 2 You become most people, you know, 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.

Speaker 2 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 obviously not a lot of money,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I want my son to like, I would never, like, I want him to do whatever he wants with life.

Speaker 2 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 going to make my kids driven.
And I think you alienate them.

Speaker 2 Sam Walton said this the best because if you think about how crazy Sam Walton is, like if he didn't disperse his fortune through his kids and he did this way before the actual assets appreciated, you know, he created one of the world's largest fortunes.

Speaker 2 The family net worth today is like $220 billion. He said, he's dying of cancer when he's writing his autobiography.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 he goes, I don't expect my kids to be like me, so I don't push them that hard. Yes.
But think about it that way.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if you are way out on the tail of this thing, where do you think your kids are going to be?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like my daughter wants to, sometimes she's like, oh, I want to, you know, I want to sing. I want to dance.
Whatever. I don't care what you do.
You don't even have to make any money.

Speaker 2 I'll take care of that. Don't worry about that.
I want my son to just be happy. I want them to have good habits.
Like, I wouldn't ever, like, you're not going to do drugs.

Speaker 2 You're not going to be a loser, you know, but you don't have to like shoot for outside success. That's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 And so like, just bringing your son down. So I get into it.

Speaker 1 Just to interject.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And what you're trying to bestow on your kids is equanimity and peace and enoughness.

Speaker 1 If I went to you and said,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can be as happy in a hammock as you are in a podcast studio, as you are reading a biography.

Speaker 1 I don't think that you would take that deal. No.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 easy for a fucking non-father to say here.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no, no, no. This is a really important, like, I think this may be the most important maxim.
I say it so much.

Speaker 2 Like people, so 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.

Speaker 2 I'm not this person who's like, oh, you should learn something new all the day.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 No, no, it's like a handful of principles and you'll just see them repeat over and over again. That's why I think the best description of Founders Podcast was it's church for entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2 So I grew up in a Christian, like a fundamentals Christian church. It's not like the preacher set up on Sundays like, okay, last week we went over that Jesus guy.
We're done with him.

Speaker 2 Like, let's go on to somebody else. No, they literally go and teach messages from the same book for for centuries, forever.
And I think there's actually a power to that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's not the drive they have an issue with. It's the source has to be positive.

Speaker 2 My source is not positive.

Speaker 1 Yeah, mine neither.

Speaker 2 Yours is not positive. Francis Foracopoulos is not positive.
We're trying to right a wrong. We're trying to right, in many cases, a multi-generational wrong.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So because, but I just got to get this out. Sorry.
Because like,

Speaker 2 so I'm willing.

Speaker 2 And again, I love my job. I think it'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.

Speaker 2 And it's because it's personally important to me and a mission to me is like to, there's, there's this um

Speaker 2 this term I have and you can call it the founder of a family is the generational inflection point, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then there'll be literally a gentle, there's like one dude, sometimes it's a woman, most times a dude, and then straight up, right? And so I circuit breakup. Exactly.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I've never touched my kids. Like, my kids grow up unbelievable.
Like,

Speaker 2 they're great kids too, and they're way sweeter and nicer. My boy is 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.

Speaker 2 He knows me and my wife have have a good, uh, good relationship. He sees that his dad gets out of bed and tries to help other people all day.

Speaker 2 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 want to be wealthy. Fine.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

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Speaker 1 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 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They want someone to tell them like they're enough.

Speaker 1 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 the thing, not the thing that they feared that they were. And

Speaker 1 I just get the sense sense that

Speaker 1 it is a balance between happiness and success.

Speaker 1 But given that most people try to become happy by being successful, unhappy people try to use success to achieve happiness.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's like, hey, here's a roll of the dice. There's 50% of your psychological disposition.

Speaker 2 Like, good luck.

Speaker 2 I hope you're ready.

Speaker 1 But yeah, if you can do what you can from a rearing perspective, you're safe, you're validated. I love you if you win and I love you if you lose.

Speaker 1 As long as you try, here's some principles that you should do that are scalable, that blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 like domino lineage of your ancestors, and you've just like, no, you've Samsoned this entire thing together.

Speaker 2 That's what it's like, right?

Speaker 1 Holding these, these holding these pillars up. That's you.
And you have, you know, intergenerational problems.

Speaker 1 If you've done that,

Speaker 2 first off, bravo.

Speaker 1 Secondly,

Speaker 1 you have got the skills, you have got the gifts, you have got the insights, you have 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's why you listen to shows like yours and shows like this, because you are an outlier. Among outliers, right? You can't overestimate how normal the normies are.
Go out in the street. Like,

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 served normal people at my nightlife business. They're fucking fantastic.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It allows you to push yourself into places that other people won't go. So can you take on that pain?

Speaker 1 Can you take on, like we said in the very beginning, can you take on that burden, shoulder that burden?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 it was me that did the thing. I accumulated the stuff.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I think that would be a definition of success.
The definition of my success is that like my kids grow grow up happy. Like, that's, I'm like,

Speaker 2 there, there is something, I think what you said, like, when you, I think you correctly identified like this, the source of this internal drive.

Speaker 2 And one thing that I think would surprise most people is

Speaker 2 there's one

Speaker 2 I think people would be surprised that a large source, and I think we'll go back to Francis Forcopla, because this certainly was the case with him, is like

Speaker 2 And it's revenge for being born in an environment like that with a father like his. Yeah.
And so you, how does it manifest?

Speaker 1 Oh, revenge is so interesting.

Speaker 2 It manifests, right? Where his dad's like, oh, no, no, I'm the genius of the family. You can't beat him.
His fierce work ethic.

Speaker 2 So it's obvious in the very beginning of Francis Vorcopolis trying to break into movies.

Speaker 2 And he's one of the first, and at the time, at the time in Hollywood, there was no such thing as young directors.

Speaker 2 He's the one that broke down the door for like a young Steven Spielberg, a George Lucas, and all these other people, people, right?

Speaker 2 The idea that you could 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.

Speaker 2 But you see the 10 years of work that he put in before that in the book, where he's literally, he starts out as an editor and he's literally editing 24 hours. He falls asleep.

Speaker 2 He doesn't get up from his desk. He just, time to go, I'm editing.
Time to go to sleep. I'm going to just put my head down.
He has this fierce work ethic. And then the revenge is,

Speaker 2 Dad, Dad, I'm doing this movie. It's probably going to be a success because it's the sequel to Godfather, right? He goes out.
He has one of the greatest directing runs ever.

Speaker 2 In one decade, he does Godfather 1, Godfather 2, and Apocalypse Now. Like, maybe we've never seen another 10-year run like that ever, especially at such a young age.

Speaker 2 And he's like, Dad, I'm going to let you do the score for the Godfather 2. And then...
His dad wins an Oscar for the only achievement he ever does in music came because his son hired him. Wow.

Speaker 2 Revenge. And so this idea, you just nailed it, I think it's 90, 90, 90 to 95%

Speaker 2 of sons

Speaker 2 usually trying to say,

Speaker 2 I don't want to be like my dad.

Speaker 2 I'm going to succeed where he failed. And then there's maybe a 5% to 10% 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

Speaker 1 this could totally just be availability bias because the people that I look up to and that I surround myself with. But I get, I'm really hopeful for the next generation that maybe they have more

Speaker 1 of those. Maybe that 90 to 95 actually gets closer to sort of, you know, 70 or 80 because

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm curious.

Speaker 1 I have the sense that I'm built for more and I'm interested in finding out if that's true.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I just don't get how so much of this stuff, even if you only take fucking 0.1%

Speaker 1 of the things that you're exposed to, and you're a little bit discerning about what's good and what's not good.

Speaker 1 You are, this is what I said before about the difference between our parents and grandparents and our great-grandparents' generation and ours.

Speaker 2 You are orders of magnitude better

Speaker 1 constructed, better informed.

Speaker 2 Listen,

Speaker 2 I think podcasting is a miracle. I think it's world-class education on demand anytime you want about any subject you want.

Speaker 2 Like, you want to learn about history, you want to learn about philosophy, you want to learn about business.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Learning is changing your behavior. Correct.
Okay.

Speaker 2 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 buffet there's a lot of stuff you should hang you should hang with him i'd love to i'd love to see you two talk yeah i'd love to um so

Speaker 2 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 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.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, you said you listened to episode 299 or like that idea. It's like, hey,

Speaker 2 never ever forget the dynamic range of human beings.

Speaker 2 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 tenth as good, obviously pay the most talented person. Like

Speaker 2 there's so many times where they know the lessons and they're not actually changing their behavior.

Speaker 2 And so I

Speaker 2 am delusionally optimistic on the impact that podcasts have because I say podcasts are a miracle. And so I do hope that you'll live, but you're living in it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I'm worried, I'm worried that I'm overestimating.

Speaker 1 I think you, I think we both are.

Speaker 2 How many people, like I change 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 1%

Speaker 2 in the world,

Speaker 2 you know, across 8 billion people, what is this like $40,000 a year or something like that? Let's say just in America, I think it's like $70,000 a year.

Speaker 2 It's like we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside of a bubble.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I'm very,

Speaker 2 and I think also human nature is constant. So I'm a little worried that we can shift the variance by that much.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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 into that.

Speaker 2 But we're talking about like the the impact that your, the relationship with your father could have on increasing your drive. Well,

Speaker 2 was Francis Forcopouless siblings that way? I just did this episode and this guy named James J. Hill, right? And again, same way I found him.
Monger's like, hey, there's this great, James J.

Speaker 2 Hill is a great operator like Rockefeller and Carnegie. I'm like, what? Like, I know who Carnegie and Rockefeller are.
Who's this guy? He's the greatest railroad entrepreneur in American history.

Speaker 2 He created this, the only

Speaker 2 at the time, railroad industry, right? In the 1800s, whereas it was by far the most important industry in America by far. It's like what the internet or AI would be now.

Speaker 2 In 1885, the railroad industry took in twice the amount of revenue as the federal government.

Speaker 2 Holy fuck.

Speaker 2 It was the nation's largest employer. The railroaders, which were the

Speaker 2 railroad entrepreneurs, that's why they were called, railroaders, owned over 10% of the land mass in the United States.

Speaker 1 Wild that you've got such shit railways.

Speaker 2 Yes. I know.

Speaker 2 I know. I know.
And, but James J. Hill was the only person, right?

Speaker 2 The only person, only railroad entrepreneur to ever succeed to run a railroad rail line that did not go bankrupt. So this guy is the best in the most important industry of his time.
Okay.

Speaker 1 He's the Elon of the train.

Speaker 2 He grows up with a poor father, so poor that he's laying at his house and he could see the moon through the roof because there's holes in the roof. Yet he dips out of Canada.

Speaker 2 He's like, 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?

Speaker 2 They talk about in the biography. They're like, this is what our life is.
We're just poor farmers. They stayed.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 so much, a woman called Nancy Atkoff, and she's probably the leading twins researcher on the planet. And between her and Robert Plowman, you realize just

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 squirrely

Speaker 1 life can become, even when you share the same environment, when you grow up in the same environment.

Speaker 1 Genes matter a lot, man. So I did a, 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,

Speaker 1 they're able to compare you to the population at mass.

Speaker 1 And they can say, this is one copy of this SNP or two copies of this SNP is 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 whatever whatever whatever whatever and um i need to go back and and uh

Speaker 1 go through it properly before I start talking about it fully on the show. But 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.

Speaker 1 So many of the things that I thought were

Speaker 1 cultivated virtues,

Speaker 1 what it's very much been is like unbelievably fertile ground that I've thrown a bit of water on. And it's just like, oh, you were going to be this way.

Speaker 1 Now, you could have been this way for drugs or alcohol or,

Speaker 1 you know, any other kind of obsession, 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.

Speaker 2 Did they identify why your forearms are so huge?

Speaker 1 That actually isn't available.

Speaker 2 I love the QA.

Speaker 1 They're like, it's just the

Speaker 1 other thing is when I do these fucking live shows, the QA's live are just the same. I like shake someone's hand doing a meet and greet, and they're like, dude, they really are big in real life.

Speaker 2 They don't even refer to the forearm. They're like, they really are.
As if it was like, bro, you need merch, just a picture of your forearm. Farms.

Speaker 1 All right. Actions express priority.
We are only what we do, not what we say we are.

Speaker 2 No. I mean,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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? I just saw you in Austin like two months ago.

Speaker 2 And you're like, I lift heavy weights. Yeah, I could tell.
Like, like, what is important to Chris is obvious. Obviously, you take care of your health.

Speaker 2 health uh you're a madman about you have probably not 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 as a byproduct of this is like what is important to you as opposed if i saw you and you had like this big gut and you're like yeah you know i love working out and i 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 probably 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 a podcast and like, he's a family friend.

Speaker 2 And so he asked my brother-in-law, he's like, can, 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, that's fine. I talked to him.

Speaker 2 And five minutes into, I was 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.

Speaker 2 Like, come back when you've done like 200 and then we can talk. But like, this doesn't make, this is not a good use of your time.
And so the entrepreneurial,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 They all know that time is your most valuable resource. It's the only unrenewable resource that they have.

Speaker 2 And so if you're watching, like if you're curious about like what was important to Steve Jobs, for example, he really gave, blew my mind about this.

Speaker 2 And this is something me and you've talked about in private. Like, I need to get better at marketing the podcast, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And first of all, Steve, not at the price point that you're at,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 When you came in here and started, I saw you directing, I was like, oh, this guy, this is another Steve Jobs guy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 His actions were expressing his priority. And what you do is like, that's not just in business, it's in everything.

Speaker 2 If you want to be a good dad and you don't spend any time with your kid, your actions are expressing what you actually want to do.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 yes, and I love this.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the issue is that it can become difficult to work out where the boundaries of that stop.

Speaker 1 How much should you care about the things that you do?

Speaker 1 I'm not sure, but the answer probably isn't as much as possible all the time about everything. Yes.
You can't be perfect example of this. And the solution is deliberate de-optimization, right?

Speaker 1 So it's choosing in advance what you're going to suck at. These are insights from Oliver Berkman, who's fantastic.

Speaker 1 One of my friends

Speaker 1 told me about deliberate de-optimization, a strategy that he was using. I asked him for an example.
He said, well, I fly a lot.

Speaker 1 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 them the best way and I had, you know, a wallet this big, I would be able to maximize my points.

Speaker 1 But I just,

Speaker 1 it's not a sufficiently high priority. I have other things that are higher up.
So I just, I'm going to let that one slide. Yes.
That's just going to be an L for me. Could I be more optimized?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I could. But look, it works.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, are you going to do that in your highest calling?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's an area that I need to do it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, 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.

Speaker 2 No, I definitely agree. So you mentioned Tim Kirk earlier.
Steve, I think, was the best, like he was ruthless. He was a ruthless,

Speaker 2 he had the ability to like ruthlessly prioritize things. And so he picked like product, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He sucked his supply chain. So that's why he actually hired and had Tim Cook.
That was what Tim Cook's job was primarily before, you know, Steve died of cancer. So yeah, I completely agree.

Speaker 2 The way I put it is

Speaker 2 something that also reappears in the books is

Speaker 2 they limit the great entrepreneurs limit the amount of details to perfect and then they make every detail perfect.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so for like me and you, or I guess for me, it's really simple. It's like, how should I be spending my time? I should either be reading or I should be making podcasts in my my work.

Speaker 2 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 they're like, well, you need an assistant. You're hard to get in touch with.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 1 we broke the entire show, this whole thing, all of the different machinery and the bits and pieces behind it, how the

Speaker 1 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 yeah it's four things that's it should we oh i've heard that tick tocks prioritizing

Speaker 1 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 re-purpose Because we can do a cross promo. It's not one of the four things.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's only four things that make an impact on everything.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 this perfect, perfect encapsulation of what makes Elon great. And like he literally figures like, what is the most important lever for what I'm trying to accomplish today?

Speaker 2 And then he relentlessly jumps up and down on it. So he identifies like, oh, the entire election hinges on Pennsylvania.
So like, I will build a ground game there. I will go.

Speaker 2 Like, 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then once we do that, we obviously have to sell it and everything else.

Speaker 2 He, and one of 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.

Speaker 2 I wish there were more. And he, there's in one of the biographies, Larry Ellison is arguing, right? He's one of the richest people on the planet.
He owns like 40% of Oracle, for God's sake.

Speaker 2 He's arguing with his assistant because his assistant's like, hey, we have 100 important things. There's a thousand things we need to get to.
He's like, no, no, no, there's not 100. There's not 1,000.

Speaker 2 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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Speaker 1 That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to grow your business now, no matter what stage you're you're in. Bad boys move in silence.
Yes. When you find an edge, shut up about it.

Speaker 1 Talking invites competition. Competition destroys profits.

Speaker 2 So I grew up listening to hip-hop. And the interesting thing about my obsession with like maxims and memorable things, like

Speaker 2 I think a lot of that came from, it's not like I read poetry when I was younger. I listened to hip-hop and like they're very poetic and they have lines in there that you just remember.

Speaker 2 That's from Biggie Smalls, Bad Boys Move in Silence.

Speaker 2 And it's funny because I'm reading this obscure biography of Rockefeller and it really clicked because everybody's read there's one canonical biography of Rockefeller called Titan.

Speaker 2 It's like 800 pages. It's great.
That's fine. I've read it like two times.
Rockefeller's the man, right?

Speaker 2 But I went through the biography or the bibliography and I discovered books are made out of books. And so I found this obscure biography published in like 1970.

Speaker 2 And now you try to get the book, it's like $4,000 because all these books are out of print. And it's in there and it's, it's 250 pages, right?

Speaker 2 Um, there's a longer thing here where I think

Speaker 2 I think it's slothful not to compress your thoughts.

Speaker 1 That's like Churchill says stuff like that. What was that thing about, uh,

Speaker 1 sorry, I wrote you such a long letter. If I'd only had more time, I could have written you a shorter one.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 I buy however many people are.
Like,

Speaker 2 I spent an entire day, me and you've talked about this privately.

Speaker 2 Uh, one of the, one of the big breakthroughs I had is like spending an entire day before I sit down and record, just literally going through all my notes and highlights and just cutting.

Speaker 2 I never, I never add. It's like, nope, ruthlessly cut.
Try to respect people's time. But anyways, I think authors should do that.
I like Titan.

Speaker 2 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 businesses ever existed.

Speaker 2 And so this book is 250 pages of how he built standard oil. It's called John Dee, the founding fathers of the Rockefellers.

Speaker 2 I know friends that have literally bought the book because they heard the episode and they spent $2,000 because it's like, this is the guy.

Speaker 2 Like there's an idea worth billions in a $2,000 history book.

Speaker 2 And so in that book, it's all secrecy covered everything in his, when I think of Bad Boy's Move in Silence, I think of Rockefeller. It's in all kinds of

Speaker 2 other entrepreneurs, but essentially saying, hey,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 They're all mimetic. They're going to be, oh, I'm going to try to do exactly what Chris does.
And so I'm going to do it. And it's, you invite competition and there goes your profits.

Speaker 2 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 it and who bought it.

Speaker 2 He would have this thing called, there would be secret ownership. So people hated Rockefeller because he was dominating this area in Cleveland.

Speaker 2 And so there's this thing called Cleveland Massacre where he essentially in like a day or a few days rounds up like 22 of his top 25 competitors.

Speaker 2 Like, and then from there on at 25 years old or 28 years old, he's really young. He's the dominant player.

Speaker 2 And so then he goes, he also has a secret alliance where they put him at the head of the national, it's a

Speaker 2 kerosene refineries association, something like that, essentially just like a trade group.

Speaker 2 And he goes around, he meets with all the other people in his business and they're trying to collude to keep prices like at a profitable level. And so he gets to see their books.

Speaker 2 And now as a result of this secret alliance, he he knows, oh, just how we know each other. It's like, I knew Chris was a legit player.
I need to spend more time with him because he's another me.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so what he would do is some of those people say, Rockefeller, you're too powerful. I'm not selling to you.

Speaker 2 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 is the prototype.

Speaker 2 But there's another great thing.

Speaker 2 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, you know, majority of his wealth into Pixar.

Speaker 2 And literally, they can't make payroll. They don't have a product.
He's just writing checks to cover the payroll.

Speaker 2 And they pivot from trying to sell hardware, which is how Pixar started, to what the team really wanted to do when they were passionate about.

Speaker 2 It was like, we want to make the world's first computer animated movies. And so.

Speaker 2 Steve's like, okay, we need to study like, is animation profitable? And he has a great line in that book.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he finds out, holy shit. They, they can literally, like, they take Snow White.
What he discovers is Snow White came out like 60 years before.

Speaker 2 And then you have the new invention of VHS and you have a new invention of DVDs, you know, in the 90s.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 quarter trillion, or excuse me, not a quarter trillion, 250 million drops to their bottom line, all profit. And that's one movie.

Speaker 2 And so that's when you realize, oh, the reason they shut up about it is 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.

Speaker 2 He's doing,

Speaker 2 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 successfully.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 successfully. And so people saw how this guy guy became, the guy that's giving him the advice became a multi-billionaire.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And now I have made it more difficult to do what I wanted to do anyways. So bad boys move in silence.
It's something that appears over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 Belief comes before ability. The external world has this backwards.
The belief that you can do something is a prerequisite for trying.

Speaker 2 This drives me insane. So you mentioned earlier, you're like, you don't know how normal, normal people are.

Speaker 2 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 Seasons you talked about, you know, hey,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you're like, Izzy, you've never, you have no money. You've never built a hotel.
Like, what are you talking about? Like, why would you even think this is possible?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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's not innovating.

Speaker 2 We're like, not, we're stuck in like low Earth orbit. Like, why aren't we trying to get to Mars? Why aren't we trying to, you know, colonize the galaxy?

Speaker 2 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 going to build our own rocket.
And people laugh at him.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 and edge you on. Like it's impossible.

Speaker 1 So I wasn't sure.

Speaker 1 I wasn't sure what direction you were going in with that because one reading of that sounds fantastic and I wholeheartedly disagree.

Speaker 1 But the one from the outside world, I think, is absolutely bang on.

Speaker 1 So the reason that I disagree, if you were to say belief comes before ability as in self-belief, I wrote an essay this week about it, so I'm going to read it to you. Okay.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Fake it until you 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can grip and grasp and fear and it 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.

Speaker 1 You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Self-belief is overrated. Generate evidence.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I would like I, you could say self, when I say belief comes before ability, I mean self-belief. Yeah.
But I don't, that line, I would disagree where it's like self-belief is overrated.

Speaker 2 I think it's the, the, the, the highest order bit. There's actually one area where I disagree with Steve Jobs, and he talks about like, um,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 it makes life easier.

Speaker 2 You used the phrase, like, you're swimming downstream earlier, I think, is a great way to put that.

Speaker 2 And so I was thinking about that because the Steve Jobs archive, which is run by Steve's widow, just released this free book you can read online called Make Something Wonderful, Steve Jobs in His Own Words.

Speaker 2 And it's remarkable. And so, like, I've read it a bunch of times.
And, you know, he talks about this in there.

Speaker 2 That's where I discovered the highest ordered bit part. And then I was thinking about it more and more.
And I was just like, well, no, that's not like what comes first.

Speaker 2 It's like the belief that you can actually do something that's valuable to the world that provide that like is an act of service and makes the world a better place.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 Three and a half.

Speaker 2 Mine was five and a half. Why were you still doing it?

Speaker 1 Because I was swimming downstream.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That lag was a couple years before the world's like, yes, Chris, we agree with you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's an interesting way to think about self-belief.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The belief, I know that I can make it, I have never had, I've never had, ever, ever.

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 1 am

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Very much, don't believe that you're worthy of a thing, still attained it. Disparage your accomplishments, but still get them.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 sort of riven with self-doubt and uncertainty. And

Speaker 1 am I even doing this right?

Speaker 1 But I enjoyed the thing that I was doing. And I knew that I was good at that thing,

Speaker 1 but I didn't know that there was going to be some some outcome.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Directed at this is going to reach something that some portion of people will accuse of being success, never really once.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 much bigger, much bigger mountain of evidence.

Speaker 2 Yeah, good point.

Speaker 1 After a while, if imposter syndrome continues to persist, even though you keep disproving it.

Speaker 2 Do you have imposter syndrome today? No. Okay.
No, no more.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Other side of the planet.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And

Speaker 1 no, not anymore.

Speaker 1 But that, like, I need to really write this out because I haven't yet.

Speaker 1 I'm just such a fucking poster boy for for somebody that would have

Speaker 1 abiding imposter syndrome. Like

Speaker 1 very

Speaker 1 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, you know, just like the fucking ingredients to make a really beautiful imposter syndrome casserole.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's dropped away and it's gone. And it's not gone through any weird combination of mindset changes and sort of conscious reframing.

Speaker 1 It's gone because it's been crushed under a fucking neutron star worth weight of evidence.

Speaker 1 I'm like, I just can't, I can't keep

Speaker 1 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 I feel like I'm working hard, I know that I should be working infinitely harder.

Speaker 1 Because I'm just like, how many times do you want to roll the dice and it come up six, six, six, like over and over and over and over again?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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 like an inspirational story because it feels like it's a different

Speaker 2 I agree completely. I think

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We have an epidemic of people that don't believe in themselves.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And yet I kept hearing the same review, the same email, the same DM. I find your podcast so comforting.

Speaker 2 I'm like, what kind of, I was like, oh, there's a million, you know, of us out there that are like, this is me too. And that's the biggest key.

Speaker 2 Where, like, the reason the biographies are important and life stories in general is not because, like, we're talking about Francis Forcopo's life or Steve Jobs' life or any of the lives we've talked about.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, no, you see yourself in them. Correct.
That's the key.

Speaker 1 Dude, I've realized this over the last couple of 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

Speaker 1 there's been a few times on the show or going out for dinner and meeting people or whatever, like, huh, I, this person's, you know, really smart or really interesting or really insightful. And

Speaker 1 I just don't care. And I have nothing to talk to them about.
And I realized it's that I can't find hucks

Speaker 1 in their shortcomings that I can latch on to that either I'm not

Speaker 1 I'm unable to see them for some reason they're being hidden

Speaker 2 they're incentivized to hide them

Speaker 1 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 or not he's going to win.

Speaker 1 You see a little bit of yourself in Kobe when he snaps his Achilles and he's unsure about where he's going to, but then he pulls himself back around.

Speaker 1 You know, like whoever it is, like you see your, and that, I think, is

Speaker 1 reassuring to a lot of people.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That you know that story. Was it Winston Churchill's wife who went to go and see the two different American presidents? And she said, I sat down with one of them.

Speaker 2 And after

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And after that dinner, I left feeling like I was the smartest person in the world.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But you don't need to. It's not about you.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Because to your point, like you meet so many people and in some cases, like you admire them from afar.

Speaker 2 And I think one of the biggest benefits is like, and this is why I'm again an evangelist for reading biographies and autobiographies is because like we're incentivizing our day-to-day to like make things seem better.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But like from the outside, people are like, Chris has it, has it everything? 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There's some weird genetic thing where it's like, 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.

Speaker 2 I think it's really important. And that's the,

Speaker 2 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 guys should read this book is because like you have, not only is just Elon a genius, but all the early SpaceX employees are genius.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That is so good for you. It's like, oh, if that guy, you know, if that guy couldn't do that, then

Speaker 2 it makes sense. Like, I feel better about myself.
Again, it's technically a story about Elon and SpaceX, but you make it about yourself. I just think that's human nature.

Speaker 1 By endurance, we conquer. Time carries most of the weight.
It is hard to beat someone who never stops.

Speaker 2 Oh, this is,

Speaker 2 I feel Hormosi would say something like that, too. So my phone has now changed.

Speaker 2 You know, this one I call you, it's, it's, it's Michael Jordan being really intense, but for, for like a year and a half, it was, uh, or for like maybe two years, it was, uh, 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.

Speaker 2 And I believe, I'm a huge believer in consistency over intensity.

Speaker 2 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 few years ago, there was no such thing as like an entrepreneurship like industry.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And they try to take like an idea and like instead of building it slowly and making it durable.

Speaker 2 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 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 um i was at this company off site and it was a 70 year old female billionaire owning a private company right

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, I love every way you build your company. And her whole thing is just very common sense.
She's just like,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so she told me this hilarious story where,

Speaker 2 you know, she felt because she wasn't trained in business and she was a woman, like, I need consultants. I need McKinsey and I need Bain.
And I hiring, spending millions of dollars on this.

Speaker 2 And first of all, they're like,

Speaker 2 you know, you should buy up all your competitors.

Speaker 2 And so they start looking into this. And it's like, well, how much would that be?

Speaker 2 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 dollars into like making my customers experience better?

Speaker 2 And so she told me this hilarious story. She's like, year five, you know, I had 15 competitors.

Speaker 2 Year 15, I have 10. Year 25, I had three.

Speaker 2 Year 4, she's running a company for 40. Year 40, I have one.
He goes, I took the money.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so time carries most of the weight.

Speaker 2 That's a maxim that I came up with where I was listening to Charlie Munger. Tarling Munger has this good, his whole point is like, hey, there's...

Speaker 2 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 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 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 like 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 You're only going to read one book on business, obviously, in my opinion, especially in today's day and age, you read zero to one, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the reason you're likely to optimize for growth at the expense of durability is growth is measurable and durability is not.

Speaker 2 And the reason durability is so important, he says, is because in technology companies, in almost all companies, all the vast majority of the profits are 10, 15, 20 years out.

Speaker 2 The amount of money that that company, that woman I just described, is making today

Speaker 2 is 95%, 99% more than what she was making in year 10. All the money was in the future.

Speaker 1 What's that thing about Buffett made some obscene percentage of his entire net worth after 65 years?

Speaker 2 Yes, like 90.

Speaker 2 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 sweet conquer.

Speaker 2 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 to pry the microphone from my cold, dead hands.

Speaker 2 And so therefore, I need to make sure that I'm, how do I do that? I have to maintain, first of all, it's valuable for the audience. I have to have trust with the people that give me their time.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 I love that you say Z.

Speaker 2 Every time I hear it on your podcast, I just,

Speaker 2 so this is literally a line that was this guy named Sam Zamuri. Okay.
So I go out. This is

Speaker 2 our friend George Mac, 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

Speaker 2 just breaking everything.

Speaker 2 Keep going. It's all your big muscles.
That's true.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 George Mac is the one that put the importance of being high agency in my, like, I think his writing on it, his memes, the, the stuff he makes is just perfect.

Speaker 2 And I, 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 Samsung Murray.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So people think technology has got to be like software. It's got to be computers.
It's like, no.

Speaker 2 At one point, a steamboat, the invention of the steamboat engine was a technology of that day because it made it possible a better way to do something. And what did that do?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Because you, before you had a banana, you grew it in Jamaica or you grew in Honduras. That banana, you have to eat in like four days.

Speaker 2 So without the five days or a week, whatever it is, without the invention of the steamboat, you have a local market.

Speaker 2 So you match fruit, which humans have, you know, are going to eat forever, with the steamboat and you create one of the first multinational corporations. So Sam's Amurray, right, is this guy.

Speaker 2 He is a poor Russian immigrant, right? Comes to America, shows up in like Alabama and builds this gigantic fruit empire.

Speaker 2 And the book, the reason the book is called The Fish that Ate the Whale is because the biggest fruit company at the time is called United Fruit. And Sam's Amurr competes head to head with them.

Speaker 2 And then eventually he takes over, the little fish eats the whale. He takes over that company.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 grown. And then it's shipped into like the Gulf Coast and Florida and then put on trains and put everywhere else.
They thought they were going to run their business remotely in Boston.

Speaker 2 And this guy's out here. He's literally hacking machetes.
He's helping lay the railroad track. He's taking inventory.
He's building the boats. He's doing every single thing.

Speaker 2 And the reason he did that, they're like, why are you doing this?

Speaker 2 His whole point, he's like, because if I know my business 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, they're in the details. He is in the details.

Speaker 2 One of of the funniest stories of this is the the like the fruit association or something there's some kind of trade group he's in havana right this is probably like 1900 1910 or something like this and he's they're 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 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Elon, in I think 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,

Speaker 2 again, contextually apply them to your situation. The beginning of your company might want to do that.
Maybe your interests shift, or maybe you find somebody who's better at that detail than you are.

Speaker 2 You just figure out how to apply it yourself. But this is something that reoccurs over and over again.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So one person, only one person, and it got over a billion streams. And so

Speaker 2 I think he's like a very fascinating person how he thinks about things, but he's also a gifted lyricist and he

Speaker 2 says stuff that like kind of sears in my brain.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But you didn't see like all the stuff that he was doing before that. You didn't see the fact that he was making door desks.

Speaker 2 You didn't see that he was literally, there's a line in his biography where he is buying

Speaker 2 knee pads because he's the one putting the packages together, putting them in his like Jeep and then taking them to UPS.

Speaker 2 And so one of my favorite stories about this, and it's actually 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.

Speaker 2 And I think Sam Walton's a perfect example of this.

Speaker 2 And I bring up Sam all the time because he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs because it's like a very, a business is so easy to understand in a way that I think Amazon is not.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And there's a great line in his biography where it talks about the fact that his first store they owned for five years was so successful that he made a mistake, a rookie mistake.

Speaker 2 His land, he had a lease and the lease could be terminated at any time. 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.

Speaker 2 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, tiny little town. I'm just going to say, Sam, nice to know you.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But there's like a multiple month timeframe where he has to run two stores for for the first time in his life.

Speaker 2 And this is really important because one, he realized, oh, I can, I don't have to have just one store. I can run two stores at a time.

Speaker 2 But he's also driving back and forth over between these like mountainous roads.

Speaker 2 So even though the stores are, let's say they're 300 miles away from each other, it's like an eight hour drive or something there

Speaker 2 each way. And so he's like, man, there's got to be a more efficient way to do this.
And one day he's, he's driving and he hears a plane overhead. And he's like, oh, it's a Cessna.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it was, you know, whatever, $50, $100 back in the day. And then he realizes, hey, I don't want to keep having this expense of

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 This 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.

Speaker 2 They don't see all this stuff that happened. What he realized is like, hey, now I can fly my own plane.
So

Speaker 2 what was a problem

Speaker 2 was problems are just opportunities and workloads. I thought me losing my first store was a problem.
It went up being the best opportunity in my life.

Speaker 2 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 learned how to fly.

Speaker 2 And so the advantage he had over his competitors where I can fly over your, they're in jets. My competitors in Kmart, they're in jets, right? They're above the clouds.
I'm in a little tiny SESTA.

Speaker 2 I can see traffic patterns. I can see, and he was scouting out.

Speaker 2 I think he scouted out personally the first like 300 stores that he was doing um and so the the idea where it's like yeah we can see that you know he's one of the richest people in the world uh 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 that that illustrates the uh public praises people for what they practice in private he had no relationships with suppliers so at the time there was a there's a the hula hoop was like a huge craze all the kids wanted hula hoops all over america the suppliers didn't know him, so they wouldn't buy, um,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's colored. And you just wiggle your hips.
And that's like what the toy is. It's like, okay, he bought the material.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 He had a John boat, which was 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.

Speaker 2 And that was his delivery system.

Speaker 2 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 these little basic improvisations, like just feeling your way through.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you just over and over and over again. And it just compounds.
So the public praises people for what they practice in private.

Speaker 2 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 because george was like one of your first guests and i went back and listened to the very first time mental model of the show and then you go and look at your skills as a podcaster it's just you see this literally everything yeah

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 So self-pity has no utility is another maximum 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,

Speaker 2 he can speak to this because

Speaker 2 he experienced the worst thing somebody could go through. I think he was like 29 years old.
He went to getting divorced. He's got a nine-year-old son named Teddy, if I remember correctly.

Speaker 2 And Teddy gets diagnosed with fatal leukemia. And at this time, now he could have been safe, but at that time in history, there was nothing, they didn't know how to heal him.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he is struggling at work, failed marriage, and he is going to the hospital every day and slowly watching his son fade away.

Speaker 2 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 it was all through her bones too.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so it's one thing for that to happen to your mom is obviously going to be devastating. It's the love you have for your mom is orders of magnitude less than you have for your child.

Speaker 2 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, you know, utility in this story that, 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he goes, and that is till the day that Blake gave birth to our baby daughter.

Speaker 2 And then the moment I saw the daughter, I knew that if we were ever under attack, I would use Blake as a a human shield to protect that baby.

Speaker 2 And having two kids, I was like, that's exactly right. That is the best description.
And so when I, I, I, I don't just read these stories. I try to put myself in their shoes.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Certain bad things are going to happen in your life, right? And many of these are, they're out of your control.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And his whole point, I think he, he quotes

Speaker 2 Epitetus, if I'm not mistaken, where he's just like, the, 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.

Speaker 2 in a constructive fashion. It's not to wallow, oh, woe is me.
Like bad things happening is a part of the human human experience. So self, self-pity has no utility.

Speaker 2 Utilize, spend your time doing something else.

Speaker 1 The good ones know more. The top talent in every industry has gathered more information than most people would find reasonable.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You don't have to be smarter than everybody else, right? And some of that's outside of your control. It doesn't matter what I do for the rest of my life.

Speaker 2 I will never be as smart as Charlie Munger, but I can gather more information than another person

Speaker 2 would want to, right?

Speaker 2 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, I go into the, to the bibliography, and I find obscure books.

Speaker 2 I found this obscure book on Thomas Edison, right? In the bibliography of a book.

Speaker 2 It was published in like 1950 or something like that.

Speaker 2 And it talks about when he was 12 years old, he was so voracious and has such an innate inner drive to make something of himself and to become an inventor and like to really have control of 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 uh on an actual train and the train would have like a switchover so it'd be a few hours every day where he would go and he'd wind up find himself in detroit and so what does he 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.

Speaker 2 Edwin Land is the founder of Polaroid. He's also one of the most prolific individual inventors in American history.

Speaker 2 When he died, he had the third most patents to his name behind Edison and somebody else.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You start reading about Edwin Land. He does the exact same thing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So obviously outside

Speaker 2 levels of ambition, he decides, he's like, he picks a scientific field where he feels he can be the best.

Speaker 2 That's the field of light and how it, like, how it affects our vision. And so he starts sleeping with the canonical textbook on the science of light and vision.

Speaker 2 it's underneath his pillow when he's like 14 okay gets accepted to harvard realizes there's 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 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?

Speaker 2 There's a lot of misfits that

Speaker 2 breaking in area. They're like trying to steal your TV or something.
This guy was breaking in so he could use

Speaker 2 scientific equipment so he can run his experiments. But it's like they just go to unbelievable levels of

Speaker 2 like just way beyond that you would find reasonable. So another example of this, the good note ones know more is this line from David Ogarvey.

Speaker 2 Again, I didn't know who David Ogarvey was, reading all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters, right? And he keeps talking about this gene. He calls this genius David Ogarie.

Speaker 2 I was like, genius, who is this guy? Read about him. He talks about he built one of the most valuable advertising agencies that ever existed.

Speaker 2 And he talks about it's like, oh, you want to get promoted? You want to get my spot? Like, how do you think I got to my spot?

Speaker 2 And he would encourage his, the people coming up, the young men in his organization. He goes, I'm going to sign you to

Speaker 2 one of their biggest clients with Shell Oil, right? You're going to read every single, you're going to read every single piece of paperwork on the company history.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 On Saturdays, you're going to go down to the Shell gas station and you're going to interview the customers

Speaker 2 that are patronizing their business. Within a year,

Speaker 2 you'll be ready to take over your boss's position.

Speaker 2 And he's like, the good ones know more. It's like that.
He worked for a French chef.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 It is interesting, you know, so much of the stuff that we're talking about today is going beyond the reasonable.

Speaker 1 There is a bar that lots of people get to.

Speaker 1 Tolerance for pain, endurance, amount of time persisting doing a thing.

Speaker 1 That's a great insight. Amount of talent that somebody is prepared.
And it's just a case of going

Speaker 1 orders of magnitude past that.

Speaker 2 There's a guy named Les Schwab

Speaker 2 who he we could have talked about him when we talked about the trying to not wind up like your dad because his dad was a drunk and a loser and Les was very poor.

Speaker 2 And his dad, I think Les is like 12 years old or nine 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.

Speaker 2 And like, you know, half a century ago, 40 years ago.

Speaker 2 And he says something in his autobiography. He's like, everything you do, it's volume.
It's like gusto. And it's, he goes, the combination of gusto.

Speaker 2 So like, you know, really throwing yourself into it and volume. And

Speaker 2 he's like, he, he says it's a case of repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Speaker 2 And again, I think 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.

Speaker 2 I'm not trying to invent the instant photography like Edwin Land did. I'm not trying to be an inventor like Thomas Edison.

Speaker 2 I'm not trying to build an advertising agency like David Ogaby, but I just take that idea. It's like the good ones no more.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So anytime you see like some kind of social media post from me, all that is is something I reread that day

Speaker 2 that I read for the first time four years ago. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting.

Speaker 2 I posted this quote about Rockefeller and the importance of concentration because I went back through and I reread the highlights from the book Titan.

Speaker 2 And that's what I was spending, you know, 30 minutes doing. And it's just like, all I'm doing, I can't guarantee that I'm going to be successful.

Speaker 2 I can't guarantee that I'm going to make a podcast that people find, find, they think it's worth their time.

Speaker 2 But what I can do is like, I can't control that, but I can, because it's more like a, especially with podcasts, it's like more like a, it's a subjective kind of thing, right?

Speaker 2 And, but I can objectively do more work to hopefully influence and tilt the subjective

Speaker 2 nature of podcasting in my favor.

Speaker 2 And I just, all I do is all I do is read books like, oh, that's a good idea. I'll take that.
Thank you very much. This isn't fucking rocket science.

Speaker 2 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 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?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 I think picking the right heroes is like one of the most important things you can do in your life because you're going to naturally, like, all of us are going to copy and absorb things from people around us, whether we're in together in person or I'm reading a book about it or watching a movie about it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's, I want to build a $100 billion company. And it's like, do you understand that people that built $100 billion company?

Speaker 2 You think Jeff Bezos was sitting back there and like, I'm going to build a $3 trillion company.

Speaker 2 You think Steve Jobs, one of my favorites, you think Steve Jobs thought that Apple is going to get to $2 trillion or whatever it's at today?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So money comes naturally as a result of service is from Henry Ford. Okay.
Henry Ford's autobiography, I think, is like a mandatory.

Speaker 2 Like I think an entrepreneur should read it over and over again, you know, every two or three years.

Speaker 2 And he, Henry Ford, in 1919, he owned 100% of Ford Motor Company because he bought out all his investors. And he was arguably the richest person in America at the time.

Speaker 2 So it's like, it's like me and you owning like a $20 billion company with no outside shareholders today. Like just insane, right?

Speaker 2 And yet you go and you analyze like the life of Henry Ford, and he's the one that said that. It's like he had one single idea.
He's like, it's kind of messed up that

Speaker 2 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 popularized an internal combustion engine.

Speaker 2 It's a funny, let me take a tangent. It's a funny story.
I'm rereading Rockefeller's autobiography that he wrote when he's like in his 80s,

Speaker 2 like a few months ago. And there's a line in there where he's like, young Henry Ford came to visit to me today.
I love that guy.

Speaker 2 And like, yeah, he made like the demand for the product you have a monopoly on. Like orders of magnitude.
Oh, yeah. Aura.
Yeah. I bet you probably give him a hug and a kiss when you see him.

Speaker 2 Like, of course you love him. But, but Henry, what I love about Henry Ford, and I love this about everything, it's like you only need one idea.
You only have to be right one time.

Speaker 2 Henry Ford had a single idea in his entire career, one idea.

Speaker 2 Everybody should be able to afford a car. We can't do that right now because at the time, let's say cars were like $6,000 and the average person made, you know, two bucks a day, a dollar a day.

Speaker 2 It is not going to happen.

Speaker 2 And so it took him, when you read biographies about him and you study his career, 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?

Speaker 2 And so how did he become the wealthiest person in America at the time that he was alive? Money comes naturally as a result of service. The service he provided was he made the car affordable.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so what I think where people make mistakes, they're always like, I want to make X amount of money.

Speaker 2 uh in my pocket or i want to make you know 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so the second line of that after Henry Ford says money comes naturally as a result of service.

Speaker 2 The best definition of a business I've ever heard is that second line from, and that came from Richard Branson.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 there's another maxim I repeat over and over again on the podcast, that history doesn't repeat, human nature does. Every generation thinks that there's no more opportunity.
Like, oh, we missed it.

Speaker 2 He'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.

Speaker 2 A podcast can make somebody else's life better. The people that made the camera, that makes you somebody else's life better.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There's an infinite way to make other people's lives better.

Speaker 1 If you love what you do, the only exit strategy is death. Retirement can be fatal.

Speaker 2 This is something that's fascinating because my dad is like a, he's a blue collar guy. He's got like an eighth grade education.
And

Speaker 2 I realized. you said how normal normal people can be.
And

Speaker 2 I told him like, like, it was like a big deal to me because it was like the first like super famous and like wealthy person that I got to spend time with was Sam Zell.

Speaker 2 And, you know, at the time, Sam Zell probably had like $10 billion or something. Like it was insane.
He's 81 years old. He's working seven days a week.
And

Speaker 2 he was, you know, I talked to him. He's, he's like, I'm going to 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.

Speaker 2 Still working, you know, every day. Or as, you know, very, a lot, maybe not every day, but he was, he was still on it all the time.

Speaker 2 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 it realized like, oh, for a vast majority of people,

Speaker 2 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 named Paul Graham.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he, he, his guess is like, how many people

Speaker 2 out of 8 billion people on the planet really wind up finding work that they love to do and they're able to like support themselves with it there's a lot of people that find things they like to do that they love but can they make your uh your advocation your vocation i think is a line from steve jobs and paul's guess paul graham's guess is like probably a few hundred thousand i 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 not 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.

Speaker 2 Their exit strategy was death. Not only would they not sell their company, they would never retire.
I did this at this, one of the episodes I'm most proud of. And one of the guys I really like, and I

Speaker 2 is the founder of Red Bull. And his name's like Dietrich,

Speaker 2 Dietrich Machischis, or something like that. There's no even biography of him in English.

Speaker 2 So 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.

Speaker 2 And he, he came to my attention because he had just passed away. And he remarkable story.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He owned 49% of it. So he had, there was a 49% partner, 49% partner, another guy that owned 2%.

Speaker 2 Towards the end of his life, he turned,

Speaker 2 he was paying himself between like 200 million a year and 50, 700 million a year every year. So that's his paycheck.
That's his paycheck, right? Right. uh was turning down like

Speaker 2 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 i 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'd 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 weight.

Speaker 2 It's all the stuff we've been talking about today. And to them, taking that away from them would be like losing a child.

Speaker 1 What about retirement can be fatal?

Speaker 2 Where did that line come from? That's a line from David Ogreby.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 same thing where he noticed it.

Speaker 2 The problem is, is like, I think you've mentioned this on your show.

Speaker 2 And I think you got some like shit for it before, too, about the different values that historically men and women and like how it contrasts.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You are not a selfish person. Like you are a 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

Speaker 2 like this, like then they don't have, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 You're useful.

Speaker 1 People need you. You contribute.

Speaker 2 And yeah,

Speaker 1 the evidence is there.

Speaker 2 Your, your friend Jordan Peterson said something one time.

Speaker 3 I saw this clip on

Speaker 2 YouTube and I don't know, I didn't 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.

Speaker 2 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 axe.
Like they have to do something.

Speaker 2 And to take away their ability to be productive, to be useful, using your term, is torture. It is, it takes away their purpose.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 How did that happen?

Speaker 2 And so I think when the

Speaker 2 point is like, this is the way I would describe this that I think is really important.

Speaker 2 And this is the maxim that I took away from the two-hour conversation I had with Sam Zell is go for freedom. And essentially what he told me, he's like, listen, I know all the rich guys.

Speaker 2 He's like, they're all miserable.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's his word, himself that's what he said right he also did something 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 he like his kids his extended family and uh we we spend the 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 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 Samzell Malibu House.

Speaker 2 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, you do not trade money for freedom. Okay.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that is really powerful.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 These people

Speaker 2 were decades past the need for working for money. And in many cases, like Ensofari, he was working like 11 hour days, seven days a week for the rest of his life.
He didn't need the money.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. So you've got to read all of the books.
Bro, you're great. You're great.

Speaker 1 I really appreciate you as a friend. I appreciate everything that you do.
Where should people go?

Speaker 2 They want to keep up to date with the stuff that you get on my founders podcasts and your podcast player? You founders podcasts on all the networks. Dude, Chris, I admire you.

Speaker 2 I'm so glad we became friends. Like, I love the opportunity, and I appreciate you inviting me.

Speaker 1 Until next time, man. You're the man.

Speaker 2 Appreciate you.

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