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

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show.

My guest today is David Sennre, he's the host of Founders Podcast and an investor.

Every success story is like a unique song composed with different instruments, yet when you listen closely, many of them share the same underlying rhythms.

So what are the core principles that play a key role in the lessons of the most successful individuals from history?

Expect to learn why excellence is defined by the capacity to take and manage pain, why having high -powered relationships is the secret to running the world, if self -pity has any utility, the reason that bad boys move in silence, why the story of the father is embedded in the story of the son, and much

more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David Sennre.

David, did you hear me say when I was asked, who is the podcaster's podcaster, the underground one that all of us listened to?

It was you. I almost clipped it and then posted it.

I appreciate it. I watch all your Q &A, I love them.

Thank you. Yeah dude, I...

I would love a weekly Q &A from you.

Oh god. 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.

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

So we're going to do 15 today.

First one, excellence is the capacity to take pain.

Persevering through pain is mandatory, why?

That is probably my all -time favorite maxim from studying all of these history -scared trainers.

Actually comes from the founder of Four Seasons, this guy named Izzie Sharp.

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

I haven't read that book in probably five years.

And he's describing how difficult it was.

Like he had no experience in the hotel industry when he found Four Seasons.

And yet his goal was like, I'm going to make a collection of the greatest hotels in the world.

And he didn't kind of disregard the fact that I've never made a hotel before, I don't have any money, I don't have resources, I don't have contacts.

So the whole book, the autobiography, which I think he wrote when he was close to 80 years old is now him recounting this for the reader.

And there's just so many times where he's just like, he hit a, there's a problem he can't figure out how to solve, problems with partners, with contractors, with financing, all kinds of like, 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 to this whole thing.

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

And so he's the one that said that coined the term, you know, excellence, the capacity to take pain.

And it's like that.

And I think by that point, I had read like 180 biographies and autobiographies of history as a person.

Like that's exactly what I see in every single book.

There's never a book.

There's not no life story, no book starts at, 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.

I want to do something.

And then it's just one problem, one obstacle, one, and it's one, like, we're such emotional and mental and in some cases physical pain to like persevere and push through to until they can get to the other side and actually achieve what they're trying to achieve.

Why is that the case?

Is it just that achieving anything that is excellent requires you to negotiate with a world that's going to push up against you and that means that you're going to end up feeling discomfort, therefore the capacity to deal with pain is important?

Yeah, there's no such thing as like 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 and it's the collected writings of Jeff Bezos.

So they take his shareholder letters and they take transcripts of his speeches and you really get to understand how he was thinking as he was building Amazon and all the stuff that he's learned.

And his whole thing was, you know, I have unrelenting, uncompromising standards for excellence in the town of the people around me.

And if you're coming to work at Amazon like you, I'm not going to bend.

You are going to raise to my expectations, my standards.

It is not easy to work here.

I'm going to tell you that up front because we're trying to do something that we can tell our grandkids about, that we can be proud to say this is what granddad did.

This is how I spent my life.

And he says he's like things things that you could tell your grandkids about are not meant to be easy.

There's a quote from Tim Cook at Apple where he says, people say if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.

I found that to be a total crock of shit.

At Apple, you will work harder than you ever have before, but the tools will feel light in your hands.

I'm surprised Tim said that because if you go back and Steve Jobs is like, obviously what I consider him probably the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

Just for his he's he's got a very unique story.

Like there's only there's really no other founder that if you think about the story Steve Jobs, he founded Apple twice and the second time he was alone.

And then he winds up coming back, you know, after 12 to 13 years in the wilderness and he comes back and then goes on the greatest run that we've ever seen created creates, you know, the most successful consumer product of all time gets the foundation for the multi trillion dollar market cap that Apple

has today. And Steve's take on this was the reason that you have to love what you do is because it's so hard and so painful that if you don't you'll quit and it's the same and he goes, why do people quit because it's sane it is.

That's the sane thing to do.

It's the misfits the rebels, you know, the people that actually are obsessed with what they're doing that are able to persevere.

He also has this other quote that he feels what separates the success half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non successful ones is just pure perseverance.

Now, all these all these ideas are all related, like essence capacity to take pain.

You should love what you do because if you love what you do, you'll keep doing it through the pain.

Did you ever hear me tell Rogan about the region beta paradox thing?

So it's just an idea about where you get stuck in comfortably numb in the middle.

Things aren't too bad.

They're not that good, but because they're not that bad, you don't have the motivation to go make them better.

It's a well known psychological state.

And I came up with a colliery of it, which is the reverse region beta paradox being in an aggressively terrible working cadence or environment, but having such a tolerance for discomfort that you can endure it for a lifetime.

Lower resilience, less stubborn people would snap and have to find a way to change.

But not you, you're the David Goggins of working hard.

Who's going to carry the workload?

You are forever. And that thing is it's a blessing and a curse because it allows people to maybe continue moving when they actually should pivot to something else.

But if you know that the idea is right, I guess that that's a competitive advantage.

I would say one of the great if you're talking about like one of the near perfect entrepreneur autobiographies is Phil Knight's shoe dog, where he's telling the story of Nike.

And the reason I think it's great is because it's in every chapter is a year and it goes in sequential order from the time he has the idea till the IPO of Nike.

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

I wish more biographies were like that because they spend too much time after the person that's in the fridge and like donating things to education.

I think that's way less relatable.

This is an egalitarian, temporally egalitarian book.

This is like 90 % struggle and then he finally breaks through and then gets the IPO.

And then we know what happens after that.

We got that, but he ends that.

I love what you said because the last chapter, he's like, for the charl… I think he calls him charlatan.

He's like, for the charlatans to tell entrepreneurs to never quit.

He's like, that's bullshit.

He doesn't use that word, but he's like, he goes, you don't ever stop.

But sometimes quitting is the best thing, meaning like you're in the wrong path.

So quit that path, but don't stop trying to actually do what you want to do in life and what do you want to set out to accomplish.

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

So now I'm completely back.

So the very first episode of Founders in September 2016 was actually Vance's book on Elon.

In fact, there's this guy named Kevin Rose, who's the founder of Digg, right?

And he's like one of the first internet OG creators.

He has like one of the first podcasts, but they weren't called podcasts back then.

He had this video podcast, what we call a video podcast today, called Foundation.

And it was excellent, high quality.

You would love it because like shot in like crazy cameras, great sets.

And so you go back and he actually interviews Elon.

And so I watched this in 2012, OK?

And they're on their interviews on Tesla's factory floor.

So you kind of hear the stuff in the background.

Elon looks way better.

He does now. Like, you know, he's been going through hell for the last.

Tough tape around. Yeah.

15 years. But at the time, they're just starting to produce the Model S.

And what was fascinating about this is the reason that was the first book that I covered, right?

Because I wanted to do a podcast on biographies and autobiographies.

Is because Kevin Rose asks Elon a question that changed my life.

And he's like, hey, you know, Elon has a crazy experience.

Everybody knows about Tesla, SpaceX.

But like if you go back and him emigrating from South Africa to Canada and then Canada to the Bay Area and you know, I don't 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.

He sold this company called Zip2, winds up netting something like, you know, 20, 30 million dollars at that age.

And then immediately rolls it back into PayPal and then rolls PayPal into Tesla and SpaceX and does exactly what he always does now.

But the fascinating thing, camera was like, dude, you didn't know anybody.

You didn't have resources.

Like, you didn't have a network.

Like, how did you learn like, who were you?

How'd you learn how to build companies?

You were so young when you were doing that.

Did you have a mentor?

Did you really have business books?

And Elon said something that's fascinating.

He's like, I didn't read a lot of business books.

He goes, I like biographies and autobiographies.

I think they're helpful.

He goes, I was looking for mentors and historical context.

And so he talks about, you know, reading the biography of Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla.

And I was like, that's genius.

Because for the vast majority of humanity, right, we don't have world class mentors in person where you can access that their entire life learnings by picking up the biography.

So a few years later, I started getting obsessed with podcasts.

I was like, I remember that because as soon as he said that, I started reading a ton of biographies.

And then I got addicted to reading biographies.

He says, oh, I should just make a podcast about the biographies I'm reading.

And so it's funny you bring him up because I just read for the second time, I reread a lot of books.

I think that's actually important.

We can talk about that later if you want to.

But I just read this book called Lift Off Elon Musk in the Desperate Early Days of SpaceX.

Elon is in a class himself.

There is not, in many cases, like a lot of the modern day founders, like, there's a historical equipment.

There is like, you know, there is even a Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs.

I've given up on finding another.

There's no Elon Musk before, another Elon Musk before Elon.

And the reason I love this book Lift Off so much is because it's the first six years of SpaceX.

That's it. Just like I said, I loved how Phil Knight just covered.

Get to the IPO. It's fine.

This is even better because then you go back and what I do is when I'm reading books, I'll look up, how old are they when this is happening in their life?

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

Now me and you think of Elon now like world's most richest man, like unbelievable powerful tipping elections, like going through all this crazy shit.

Right. It's like, no, no, he was 30 to 37.

And it's insane. And 90 percent of the book is him failing.

It is. They can't get the rocket into orbit.

He's running out of money.

He's going to a divorce.

His infant son dies.

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.

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

When he when you already have multiple successful exits, you don't have to put your money on the line anymore.

You can raise money from everyone.

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 one hundred eighty million dollars after taxes when when they sell to eBay.

Puts a hundred of a million into doing a rocket company who's there was no experience doing 70 million into Tesla, where there hadn't been a successful American car company for like 80 years and then puts 10 million in a solar city as the borrow money for rent.

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.

How does he keep going?

He has fucking malaria and meningitis at the same time.

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.

So it's a little nutty, you know, in that in that case.

He just thought he could do this.

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.

We have six months.

We have six weeks. We have to launch this rocket.

And his whole thing, he ends that speech after the failure of the third rocket.

He's like, come hell or high water, we're going to make this work.

And I just think another thing that he should get as entrepreneurs have in common.

And I think me and you probably agree with this, too, I definitely do, is like the power of will and the power of one dynamic individual to change the course of history.

I feel that belief comes before ability.

Is another, like, repeated lesson.

It's obvious if you read biographies of people that do good things.

And for Elon, it's just like, I think he believes that he has strength and power of will and that he can literally bend and change the world.

Problems are just opportunities in workloads.

Businesses problems.

The best companies are just effective problem solving machines.

That line. So the closest, the closest like historical equivalent to Elon, and this is still a bit of a stretch, so you have to bear with me, is a guy named Henry Kaiser.

OK, Henry Kaiser found like over 100 different companies.

He built the Hoover Dam.

In his day around World War II, he was almost as famous in his day as Elon was today.

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

You know, multiple billion dollar companies, he built ships and he just like helped the allies win World War II.

But that's his line, where he was just like Elon, just default optimistic.

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 not problems, just opportunities to work close.

So when his like employees would, you know, bitch, complain about, oh, my God, this this thing failed or this order fell through or we can't find a guy for this, a good promises 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.

Entrepreneurs, what they realize is like, oh, the problem or actually if I can solve that problem, any problem you solve for a person could be a business.

And so the 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 when you think about it, that second line is something I came up with, where it's like, oh, well, businesses problems, that means the most successful companies are just effective problem solving machines, because they're the perpetuation of their existence is the fact that they're you

know that they're solving problems for other people and they're doing so effectively.

So if you want to build wealth, that you want to be successful companies like find a problem and then solve it better than anybody else.

It's the reason that people at the top get paid more because they have more levels of input coming in.

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

But they can just the number of inputs that they're able to see and the way that they can triage top down and prioritize what the most and wait the waiting is appropriate because of experience and maybe taste or talent or whatever insight.

But yeah, I think you're right.

I think that the best companies just solve problems.

I was thinking about this yesterday because, you know, we talked, 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 in the audience.

Yeah. And, you know, talking to podcasters and entrepreneurs is like, oh, that's my entire life outside of spending time with my family.

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

House. This is like a year or two ago or something like that, an actual guillotine and, you know, like kill the rich or eat the rich.

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

And I 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 in this, you know, talentless hack shows up his house with a guillotine like give me your money.

Like, what did you do?

Like, did you make a magic button?

Jeff deserves that money.

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

In fact, he owns the largest cloud computing business.

The fact that the hardware businesses he has the invention of the Kindle, his advertising business, they probably have more multi ten ten billion plus businesses in uncorrelated ten billion plus businesses inside of Amazon than any other business on the planet.

Like, you think you could have done that?

Like, that's insane.

He deserves that money.

And then the other thing I was thinking about, too, in response is because I've done probably like, I don't know, like eight podcasts on Jeff, I think he's incredible.

And so I read everything about him and I'm like, this is kind of hypocritical.

Like you're protesting now because, you know, he's got a trillion or two trillion dollar market cap, right?

But there was no protest in front of his house.

And after the dot com bust, when the stock goes from one hundred eighty dollars to six, you could have bought a share of Amazon stock at that time for five dollars and ninety six cents.

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.

You waited till it's not.

There's a line that that 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, maybe five hundred 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.

And he says it's not that greed, it's not greed doesn't run the world envy.

Envy runs the world.

Yeah. His whole point is like cure yourself of envy.

I was like, dude, you're not outside of Jeff Bezos's house because you're trying to fix the broken word world.

You're envious. It's like that when you hit that line and then now you start to look at all the interactions you have and the actions of other people are like, oh, they're right.

Greed doesn't run the world.

Envy does. Yeah. It's a shame because.

One of the things that this can incentivize people to do is to track the low points and track the journey in the beginning sufficiently so that you always have this sort of stake that you've planted in the ground to say, see, you know, that famous photo of Jeff and he's in front of the handwritten Amazon sign

and it's like CRT monitors and old school style keyboards and stuff.

Everything's beige.

Why is that photo important?

Because most of Amazon's inception is bereft of the 4K behind the scenes footage that you would like to have now.

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

He has been tracking his journey from over 10 years on YouTube.

So when it comes to him, people can look at this person and the envy, I think you're able to dampen that down, you're able to ameliorate it because you can show people the difficult times.

If you're able to see Jeff Bezos at his worst, Elon Musk at his worst, Dyson at his worst, whoever, Trader Joe at his worst, if you could see those guys when they were really in the shit, I think far fewer people would think that they did not deserve the success that they get on the other side.

The issue people have is that looks like it came easy.

Therefore, they don't deserve it.

I didn't have something come easy.

Therefore, I should take it from them.

Yeah, I am. You're the one introduced me to Chris.

I didn't know about Bumstead before I watched your episode of them.

I love the question you had for him.

You're like, do you think you're a strange dude to be the best in the world at where you are?

He's a real soulful dude.

He's very soulful. I thought that was fascinating.

I loved his perception because again, his perspective, rather, like, you know, this is somebody got to literally the best in the world at what you do.

And I love this something that's obvious because one of the complaints that some very few complaints I get most of the people is in the podcast are nerds, right?

And I'm talking about history, like, and it just self selects for like, you have to be kind of a, you know, a driven kind of like obsessive person to even be into this kind of stuff.

And I think obviously me and you are both like this as well.

But they're like, I can tell when sometimes a 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 like, listen, this is how I got there.

But there's six other ways.

There's 15 other ways there's like you could do all there's no there's no right way.

It's the right way for you.

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I was listening to Michael Dell's autobiography, which is really excellent.

The second one he wrote to, but they're both good.

But the second one is one I was listening to.

And for the longest time, I kept talking about the importance of building a life and business as a bipartisan that that's authentic to you.

And then I'm listening to Michael Dell, who's a phenomenal entrepreneur, even when he was like young, like right away, like when he was like 19, he was like making millions and millions of dollars.

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

And he's still in college and he wants to be recruiting like an older, more experienced C -suite executive to help him.

And the guy helps him for a few years and he burns out real fast.

He's not sleeping. He's gaining weight.

And he's like, Michael, I love you.

But like I have to I have to take a break.

I can't do this. I have to leave the company.

And Michael felt the opposite.

Like he's working all hours of the day.

He's going to the full limit.

But he what he realized and he put it better.

And I did. He's like, oh, the difference was I built a business that was natural to me.

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 naturally want my life to be.

I'm like natural is a better word than authentic.

And I think what I took away from your conversation with Chris was like he built a life that was natural to him.

He's swimming downstream.

Yeah. It makes life so much easier.

Swimming downstream.

The partner that he picked compensates for his shortcomings and accounts for them and helps him to be a better person.

So does mine. So does my wife.

You know I. I keep fucking hopping on about this Michelangelo effect thing to 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, et cetera.

And I actually have an interesting tangent.

I think you you might enjoy.

I read a book. So I was obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I love Arnold. And you know, his his his autobiography that he wrote when he was 70 called Total Recalls.

Excellent. Right. But what's even better is he wrote an autobiography.

He was 30. That is not that people don't think of as an autobiography.

It's called The Education of a Bodybuilder.

Right. The first hundred and ten pages of that book is Arnold telling his life story at 30 and then calling a shot saying hey, the same principles I just did to give you the best bodybuilder.

I'm going to get into movies.

I'm going to build a business empire.

He literally calls a shot.

And so I read everything and get my hands on.

I watch everything with Arnold.

And so I thought I read every book about Arnold.

Then I'm watching that Netflix documentary on him that came out.

And they kept interviewing this his his girlfriend that he lived with before he was famous from 21 to 26.

And she goes in. It's like author of Arnold to me.

I'm like, what? I was like, I ordered the book immediately.

And then I read the book and it's three hundred pages of this woman.

Bless her heart. Right.

I could have helped her in a minute.

Her saying, I don't understand why that why this outlier of an outlier of an outlier won't just be a normal guy.

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

And I can give you multiple examples in the books as well.

Like the founder Four Seasons.

It's also it's like for entrepreneurs, you either need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all, because there is no separation from our work and our lives.

And it's not going to work if like you're completely obsessed.

The reason you get along, the reason I love hanging out with you.

We've spent nine hours talking about podcasting in Miami, like because you're a fellow obsessive.

And I was like, that's why I flew here.

I was like, there's no way I'm recording remotely.

I'm coming to like give you a hug and to sit down with you.

But you can't like imagine your wife, your future wife saying, Chris, don't work so hard on the podcast.

Like, oh, it doesn't matter.

Like that doesn't have to be shot 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.

Like, why does this stuff matter?

It's not going to work.

You either need no spouse or a supportive spouse.

And I've seen this is where I see so many entrepreneurs like fight against this, where their spouse makes them feel guilty.

They're attracted to them because they're so driven and obsessed.

Right. Which is abnormal for the human population.

You deal with a lot of young men.

A lot of young men, they need to get offline and like increase their level of ambition and service to their world.

Right. Stop thinking about themselves.

Start thinking about other people.

And so you're you're attracted to this person because they're so driven.

Then you marry them to say, hey, I love what you are.

Now be something please stop.

That thing that made me so attracted to you, it's actually kind of getting in the way of the comfort that I want to get.

Yeah. So true, I mean, Hormozi's got some thing where he says the cheerleader should not be telling the quarterback to get off the field when it's in the final play of the game.

And, you know, that can switch.

I'm sure there's times when you need to step up and be the cheerleader for your wife.

Not in the podcasting world, but in all sorts of other stuff.

And you're like, hey, there you go.

Stadium floor, crack on.

I'm here to support you.

I think what Hormozi did, too, that's smart that I've seen a few times because you are going to these people are obsessed like they're not going to write biographies about normal people.

It's not like, hey, this guy had a nine to five and you know, you just play the pickle ball on the weekends, any barbecue, and it's like no one's going to read that book.

So by default, you're selecting into these very extreme people.

And, you know, my entire life outside of spending time with my family is talking to entrepreneurs and hanging out with founders.

Like I don't have any friends that aren't founders and like one thing that you see this conflict between like, how do I balance work and family?

And I think what Hormozi did is like he combined, he combined, you know, work with Laila Este actually got that idea from two people from Este Lauter and Sam Walton.

Like Este Lauter is one of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live that no one ever like thinks about.

They know the company's named after her.

You know, it's probably $20 million market cap, whatever it is today, but they don't there's a very hard to find autobiography about Este Lauter where she was still alive, published, I think in the eighties.

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.

She is a one of the most driven entrepreneurs ever.

And she's like, but I want to also spend time with my sons and my husband.

So what I do, she brings them into the business with them.

So her husband shuts down his business because her business is a lot more has a lot more potential.

He works in there. And then they involve the kids since they were like six.

Greg McHugh, an author of Essentialism, was on the speaking circuit's 10th year anniversary of Essentialism next month.

And he's done speaking for forever and he didn't want to miss his kids, but he also wanted to build a life that his kids would be able to benefit from.

So he sort of caught between a rock and a hard place because being away from his kids is the very thing that facilitates the life he wants to give them.

So he just put in a request.

Part of his rider was a second ticket business class and a second hotel room.

And he took one of his kids with him every time that he did a talk.

So his kids got to travel the world with him.

Can I tell you a funny rider?

So I was at it. I do a lot of what now I do less of them.

But for for the right people, I'll do like a lot of speaking gigs for like private companies and you usually like private companies or investment firms.

And so I was at one there was two speakers, me and Tucker Carlson.

And so the CEO of the company that will not be named, I was asking him because I was like, there's no way like I probably charged way too less for it.

Like not enough money for this.

So it's like, how much 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, friend.

And he goes, well, his rider 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.

I was like, I didn't know I could do that.

Number three, there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book.

History's greatest entrepreneurs all learned from history's greatest entrepreneurs.

So that is a direct quote from poor Charlie's almanac and it is literally true.

In that case, there's this guy named Henry Singleton that I didn't know, I guess I should back up and talk about part of my process, which I think is is helpful outside of just making a podcast.

I really believe like anybody you admire, whatever field, it could be a director, it could be an entrepreneur, it could be an athlete.

Read find a book about them and read about their life.

Like I am an evangelist for reading biographies.

I think it's one of the highest value activities that you could have outside spending time on your health with your friends and family.

I really think people should make it a habit.

And so what I what I do is like I was 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 was incredible.

But what I'll do is I'll read every single book I can find about somebody I admire, and then I usually find other books about them by going through the bibliography and like books are made out of books.

So anybody usually has one body of regressive people referring to the people.

And then not only so.

And that's not only how you find books to like a hard to find books or books that other people are reading, but inevitably in that book, they all studied history's greatest entrepreneurs all studied history's greatest entrepreneurs.

So they will talk about the people that influenced them.

And so I'm doing this going through the same process as described to you from Munger and Buffett, and they keep bringing up this guy named Henry Singleton.

I was like, Who the hell is Henry Singleton?

I've never heard of Henry Singleton.

And they say wild stuff like Henry Singleton is the smart Charlie Munger says Henry Singleton is the single smartest person I've ever met.

That Singleton is smarter than Buffett.

Buffett says that it's a crime that business schools don't study him.

And then if you took the 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.

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 Munger's were Singleton.

They just applied it to building Berkshire.

And then you go and start, then what I do, I go and read everything about Singleton.

And then Singleton says, Hey, uh, there's this book that changed the trajectory of, he built this conglomerate called Teledyne.

And he goes, there's a book that changed the trajectory of Teledyne.

I was reading Alfred Sloan, the CEO of GM's book.

And he says, if, as you're building a business, you need access to financial institutions.

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, not only to use the money to invest and keep buying more companies to increase his conglomerate, but literally made billions of dollars from an idea that was in a $30 history book and you see this over and over again.

And that's another thing where it's, when I say like all of history's greatest entrepreneurs study, all of history, uh, study history's greatest entrepreneurs.

That it's really important that 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.

And they're building their version of their built business, what they were interested in.

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

So when Steve Jobs is developing the Macintosh, he goes and studies.

What did Alexander Graham Bell?

How did he market the telephone?

Because I feel I just made the telephone of my generation.

And so they're like, Oh, there's ideas around marketing this other invention.

A hundred years before I'm my invention that still worked to this day.

And so that's what I mean.

It's like, Oh, these ideas, there's 30, there's ideas with Brian's $30.

What about that line between SpaceX and NASA?

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.

Some of these books, you know, I don't read people like, Oh, you must read fast.

No, I read pretty slow because I'm taking notes.

I'm like doing arts and crafts over here.

I got scissors, a ruler, a pen.

I got posted notes.

Like it takes a long time, but you can read that book in a weekend.

And what they realized is like, Hey, NASA has, because it's a government run agency, they documented all of their experiments, all of their, all their, their, their hypothesis, all their everything in papers and the route.

You could just download them and read them.

Nobody read them. So they wind up, I think they said they like cribbed NASA's notes and they got a couple billion dollars of value from like for ideas in the early days of SpaceX.

And then you could also do that.

There's another line in the book that Elon talks about where this reporter goes.

He's flying on Elan's, Elon's jet after a failed, I think it was like the second failed rocket and Elon's brothers on the jet and he's like watching TV or playing video games and Elon's in the corner reading biographies of all the rocket engineers, because again, he's like, I want to, I want to know

what they know. So I can one take the good ideas and avoid the bad ones.

And so this just happens over and over and over again.

Relationships run the world, trusted personal networks may be the most valuable asset in the world.

So this, this, this might be the most important idea that have actually internalized and seen play out in the last like year of my life.

Um, I'm going to go to, there's, I had the ability to meet Charlie Montgomery just met and our winter's house had dinner with them.

Uh, the night started out in his library, which is really cool for me because you know, I love reading and I got to see.

Um, I got to see not only like what was in his library, but I also got to see like, I could read, uh, biographies the rest of my life and like, I'll never have what he has.

Um, and what I mean by that is.

He's sitting in front of his bookshelf, right?

And I get there and first of all, he's like my hero when I mean that.

So I, first of all, I'm sitting there and you know, I'm there with two other, my entrepreneur friends and you just start to having conversation.

They had met him before and I'm in shock.

I'm just staring at him cause I'm like, that, that's Charlie Munger.

Like I watch all the AGM videos.

Like I said, watch his speeches.

Like that's him. He's just sitting there and you know, he's looking at you because he, his eyes were really degenerated.

So like he has like the bifocals, but it's not just like he looks at you like this, he he'll look and I don't go like this cause he's got to look through the bottom and he's making eye contact with me and I'm looking and for 10 minutes they're just like frozen.

And then my friend Andrew was like, Hey, like get in here.

So asking him, you're going to waste this.

And so what I do, I was like, I don't know what to say.

Like I had all these notes.

I had made all these things on my Apple notes on my phone, never looked at my phone once in three hours.

And so immediately I just started looking at his shelf behind him.

And I started noticing all the books.

Cause again, I find people I admire.

And then if they say, Hey, I like this book, I go and read it.

So I start asking him questions about all these books and what I mean that I'll never have what he has.

I have to like reread stuff.

I have to like study after like practice.

Immediately asking about a book he hasn't read in 25 years.

He can tell you what the company does, what their revenue was, what, who sold, who, what, who was partners, who sold it like he was legit genius.

Like, absolutely. I don't have whatever brain he has.

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

You have to sum up.

Imagine him at 35. He would destroy me.

He would just like 55, any of that you would destroy me.

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

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

He knew he didn't have that much longer.

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

And his whole thing was we talked a lot about Ben Franklin because he's got a bust, he, like he commissions busts of people he admires.

So he's Lee Kwon Yoo and Ben Franklin.

And he's got every biography I've ever seen of Ben Franklin.

And his whole thing, he's like, one of the things I learned from Ben Franklin is that no matter your age, go out and seek talented people.

If they're peer group, that's fine.

But if they're younger and build a relationship with them, he talked about how Ben Franklin did that with a young George Washington.

Ben Franklin is like 48 years old when he cold DMS about the day slides in George George Washington, who's 21, right.

And they built a relationship and they have a relationship their, their, 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 Buffett.

I was 35, Buffett was 28.

And we built a seamless web of deserved trust.

He goes, everybody knows about us, but there was all these other guys around us that were similar age and similar interests.

And we just did deals forever.

And most of them had passed on, you know, but by the time I got to meet, but it, but I got to meet Munger, but relations from the world, which you realize is, um, every, like, we think of like an organization, like let's say we need, uh, there's something there's, there's certain, uh, organizations

that are important in podcasting, Spotify being the most important one.

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

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

So if you need something done, right, because of their personal relationship, they have with you.

It's a call it's relationships around the world.

And so there's another guy that I got to meet was one of my heroes.

It's got him Sam Zell.

He also, uh, he was 81 years old when I met him, he passed away, unfortunately, about six months after I got to have lunch with him.

And in his autobiography, he mentions, uh, same as all a legend, you know, I'm one of the best entrepreneurs, investors.

He sold, uh, his, uh, the largest real estate company in history is for like $38 billion.

Like the guy just could, he fell ass backwards into deals and deals and money.

He was just phenomenal, but I got to have a, uh, two hour lunch with him and he's sitting, you know, closer than you are to me and can ask him whatever I wanted.

So I brought up the fact that, um, That I read, he knew I read his autobiography cause the way I met him is he got into podcasts and he heard the podcast I did on his autobiography and he starts listening to a bunch and goes, Hey, can I meet this guy?

And so I get a message like Sam is all wants to meet you.

I thought it was like fake.

I was like, yeah, it doesn't want to meet you.

This is ridiculous.

So I go, Sam, um, I bought the book that you talked about that change, go back to there's ideas where 30, I forgot about this.

There's ideas with billions and $30.

Here's your back. When Sam, Sam was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school, he was an entrepreneur for 61 years and one of the best ever do it.

And he picked up a book that changed his life.

When he was in law school, it's just the autobiography is a guy named William second Orfe.

William second Orfe is one of the greatest real estate developers to ever live in that book, he has this idea.

He calls the Hawaiian technique.

Right? And it works in real estate and what I worked in real estate.

Um, when Sam Zell used it, but he also realized it works in business buying private businesses, where he says like, there's components of a building that, you know, the, the land underneath you can piece it apart.

Like the land, uh, is valuable.

It's high, we'll be highly, highly valuable to a certain party.

You can sell to the highest bidder there.

And then maybe the leases that somebody else prioritizes that.

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

Right. And so Sam used that idea made billions of dollars.

He also used it in private business, but I tell Sam, I go Sam, I bought second door of his book.

He's like, did you read it?

And I go, not yet. And Sam had this, he was famous for his gravelly voice, he goes right at, I was like, okay, Sam Zell tells me to read the book.

I immediately read the book in that book is where.

It crystallized for me that relationships around the world, second door, you know, very wealthy ones have 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, or our background, right?

We don't understand any of this stuff.

So what he realizes as he climbs through society and he's in New York and he gets more successful and he beats more people and he gets richer, what he goes, Hey, uh, you're a normal dude, you know, how we grew up, uh, you're at the base of the mountain, you can, you might be able to see that peak, right?

But what you don't see, because you're not climbing the mountain is when you get to the other as you get closer to the peak, other peaks starting to appear.

And then, so these are all very influential, rich, very powerful people.

And then would you realize this all of these mountain peaks are actually connected by little pathway pathways and you don't have access to those pathways unless you've climbed the mountain.

And he goes, and then if I need something from a Howard Hughes or a J Pritzker family, which is, you know, multibillion dollar Chicago family, or, you know, the, the mayor of New York city, cause I'm a developer, well, guess what?

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 that deserve trust.

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

You need to be able to have, yes, you can build a relationship with somebody, but the analogy of the peak suggests to me that you stand alone atop a mountain of your own, you have done a thing which enables you, it unlocks that.

I love, I love that you said that there's another maxim.

So I try to break everything down to maximums, like to sell everything I'm learning, right?

Cause I've done, let's see, you probably read 380 biographies, over a hundred thousand pages, eight years, two months, but like, you can't remember all that stuff.

So you have to, like, I love when Evolve Ravikon said, he's like, I break things down to the maximum level, so then you, they're easy to remember.

And then you could actually apply it to your situation as it pops up.

File, if people, this is a, because of the way that I learn as well, which is the same essentializing, right?

Taking large concept into memorable mantra, maxim, aphorism, whatever it is.

It can feel like quote pawning, right?

Which is fine. And I don't actually mind all that much, but that's this sticky thing that stays in the back of your mind.

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.

How awesome. That's really lovely do less, but better.

It's like from a German saying you go, right.

Well, you can't use it if you can't remember it.

Correct. David Ogwe has this line where he's like, why do you have to write, uh, interesting ads and you do this phenomenally.

I just saw the ad you just did yesterday.

Thank you. You can't, cause he, in his response is you can't save souls in an empty church.

So then you'll remember, I, I all remember, oh, I can't save souls in an empty church.

If no one reads this or no one, if I want to educate, so I have a, my life's goal is like very simple.

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

That's it. So then I can, I remember that.

That's my principle.

And I look at how I'm spending my time.

So, you're ordinating single direction.

Yeah. I want to, I want to go back to what you said though.

So my maximum on this is you need to make yourself easy to interface with.

Okay. And I go back to how we were able to build a relationship.

We're in a industry full of second rate products and second rate talent.

And most people that go to podcasts or podcasters don't want to work.

They do, it's not the only thing they do.

It's like one of 10.

And what me and you saw in each other media, I was like, Oh, this is another me.

We may talk about different things.

We have different formats, but it's another me.

It's so much easier for me to like, I knew I was in your podcast, so I know exactly who you are and then we can build a relationship with us.

So be easy to interface with the person that did this the best.

And he did it in three words, Steve Jobs, insanely great products.

He said, you want to come make insanely great products.

Then you come to apple.

If you are passionate about doing this, then come work with me.

If you're not interested in it, then remove yourself from my life.

And the key thing is what people make mistakes when you go back to relationships around the world.

Okay. It's very important that you build a seamless web.

For us, I really do believe these, these high end personal networks are the greatest assets in the world.

I'm not, that's not hyperbolic.

I literally believe that you have to make yourself easy to interface with.

Right. And what people make the mistake of is all these people, right?

On these peaks that are connected to these paths all day long.

I call it gimmee gimmee all day long.

They wake up and somebody wants something from them.

You know, gimmee money, uh, be my customer.

Uh, let me pick your brain.

Like all this stuff.

It's like, no, no, the way you build relationships is doing acts of service.

I make myself the way I'm able to build relationships with these kinds of people is really simple.

I make myself easy to interface with.

Why? Cause I can point to a body of work.

Like I, and one, I don't ask for anything.

Never. I'd never ask for a favor.

I don't want to pick your brain.

I don't want any money from you.

I don't want anything.

I just want to give, give, give.

And my active service is the podcast.

It's like, Hey, I spent eight years and two months doing this, you know, hundreds of thousands of hours or whatever the time, the timeframe is.

And I've condensed it down into, you know, 400 hours that you can learn and hopefully be educated and entertained while you're doing other things, while you're on your plane, while you're walking your dog, why you're washing dishes, whatever it is.

And I make myself easy to interface with.

It's like, Oh, is this a serious person?

Well, you've had fucking 400 biographies of entrepreneurs.

That seems a little odd.

That seems like, that seems like somebody worth my time.

And then the higher up you go, right.

Learning from history is a form of leverage.

That's another maxim from Charlie Munger.

Why is Charlie Munger Charlie Munger is a multi -billionaire can learn from anybody.

Why is he still reading biographies?

He could literally pay anybody in the world to tutor.

And he's like, this is the best value of my time.

And so anybody that builds a very valuable company season podcast, like founders, or see somebody like me, like, Oh, talking to this guy, a good friend of mine, says, said this the perfect way.

And he runs a multibillion dollar fund.

And he goes, talking to you is like talking to 50 of his greatest entrepreneurs simultaneously.

You, 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 interview me this person?

Can you do me this favor?

Can you help me raise a fund?

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So when I think about a lot of the people that have ended up working for me in one form or another in nightlife, on the podcast, so many of them started off working for free.

Dean, the guy that's still with me now that's edited 2 ,000 videos that have gone out, every single one of them.

Creative director now, maybe the best podcast editor on the planet, arguably, I would say so, uh, he did the first two, three years for free.

He came and did the first shoot for free.

Now we were friends or whatever, but he was a working professional photographer and videographer, but he was like, I think there's something here, I'm just going to do it and let's see what happens.

It's like offer, offer, offer, give, give, give.

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

Uh, Andre Gied, a Nobel prize winner.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

That line is in my favorite book, um, on Buffett and Munger.

It's called all I want to know is where I'm going to die.

So I'll never go there.

Um, and I thought it was them.

So that's funny that you said it's his cause I thought it was, I thought it was there.

Yeah. You've got like a Mongerian grift.

All right. You can always understand the son by the story of his father.

The story of the father is embedded in the son.

It's desired to not end up like your father is a powerful source of extreme drive.

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?

Entrepreneurs, like somebody has ideas and does them.

And so I think filmmakers, entrepreneurs, I think certain athletes are entrepreneurs.

I think podcasters are entrepreneurs.

It's not like it's literally somebody is, you don't have a job.

You have an idea. You have something you want to happen in the world.

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

And that, I think it's like, I know if I'm correct, it's like I was like 242, 243 books in.

And I'm going through and reading all these biographies of filmmakers.

Cause I feel like making creating, uh, I think directors and entrepreneurs, like there's just a lot of, uh, they have a lot of similarities and that line, like you can always understand, uh, the, the father by the son, by the story of the father, the father, the story of the father is about, and the son was literally

in that book. And it's because Francis Ford Coppola, right?

It's talking about the relationship that he had with his dad.

And as somebody, I have two kids and you know, I have a daughter and a son and I could never imagine talking to my son the way that Francis Ford Coppola his dad did.

Francis Ford Coppola his dad was a musician, but he was a failed musician.

And what's going to happen if like you have something you want to do in your life and decade after decade, you're saying I'm a talented musician in the world saying, no, you're not, we're not interested in what you are offering.

So you would become most people, you know, we, I would consider the weaker people become bitter, right?

And so it's not them.

I'm not the problem.

It's the world that's the problem.

No, it's always you.

You have to have extreme ownership, you know?

And so he would say stuff to his son, like Francis, when they were growing up, obviously not a lot of money, uh, there, there can only be one genius in the family and that's me.

So it can't be you.

And like, he would try to like, basically, you know, pull his son down.

I want my son to like, I would not like, I want him to do whatever he wants.

It's all of your accomplishment.

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.

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

The family net worth today is like $220 billion.

He said he's dying of cancer when he's writing his autobiography.

And he says something like, well, I'm a fair, in the biggest understatement of the century.

He's like, I'm a fairly overactive fellow.

And I don't, and he goes, I don't expect my kids to be like me.

So I don't push them that hard.

Yes, exactly that way.

Like it is an odd thing for you to be an outlier, for you to know that you're an outlier, for you to kind of want to bestow the benefits of outlierness on your kids, but if you're that much of an outlier, hopefully some smarts have come along with you, and if you're that smart, you'll know what regression to

the mean is, and if you are way out on the tail of this thing, where do you think your kids are going to be?

They're going to move back toward the center.

That's how it works, right?

Yeah, I would like, I just want my kids to do whatever they want.

Like my daughter wants to, she 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 have to make any money.

I'll, I'll take care of that.

Don't worry about that.

I want my son to just be happy.

Yeah. I want them to have good habits.

Like I wouldn't ever like, you're not going to do drugs.

You're not going to be a loser.

You know, but you don't have to like shoot for outside success.

It's ridiculous. Um, and so like just bringing your son down, so I get into, I need to interject.

Um, isn't it interesting though, that the thing that gives you such a sense of contentment and meaning in the world is your pursuit of something difficult is this insatiable, unstoppable drive to go and do this thing.

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

Uh, if I went to you and said, I can, I'm, I'm a super intelligent AI and I can go in and I can change your source code and I can get rid of your need to do the drive.

You can be as happy in a hammock as you are in a podcast studio, as you are reading a biography, I don't think that you would take that deal.

So even though my first proposal was, you know, don't try and expect your kids to be as much of an outlier as you are, tails go back to the middle.

They don't go further out to the tails.

But on the flip side of that too, what if your kids are made of the same stuff as you and throwing some fuel onto that furnace would be maybe the best blessing because wow, I made it the same stuff that dad is and dad gets me and dad taught me how to handle and, and control this huge stallion that I've

got, that I'm trying to, you know what I mean?

That we've got this sort of really interesting, easy for a fucking non -father to say here.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

This is a really important, like, I think this may be the most important maximum.

I say it so much 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.

I'm not this person's like, Oh, you should learn something new all day.

It's like, no, no, you should.

I think the people that build great companies, they identify a handful of principles, they master the fundamentals in the basics.

And you do it for decade after decade.

That's what it is. It's the boring shit decade after decade, where most people actually now they're like, I need, you know, I have to memorize the 2000 new things.

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 founder's podcast was it's church for entrepreneurs.

So I grew up in a Christian, like a fundamentalist Christian church.

It's not like the preacher set up on Sunday's like, okay, last week we went over that Jesus guy.

We're done with him.

Like, let's go on to somebody else's.

No, they literally go and teach messages from the same book for centuries forever.

I think there's actually a power to that.

And I think the best entrepreneurs do that.

Jeff Bezos identified a handful of principles.

He has 14, I would argue he has one obsessed over customers.

And he said it over and over and over and over again.

So I would be fine with that.

My son, because he's going to grow up.

It's not the drive.

They have an issue with it's the source has to be positive.

My source is not positive.

Yours is not positive.

For instance, for a copal is not positive.

We're trying to write a wrong.

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

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

I don't like to relax.

I'm incapable of relaxing people.

Like how many hours you work?

All of them, literally all of them.

So because I just got to get this out.

Sorry. Because like, so I'm willing.

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.

And it's because it's personally important to me and a mission to me is like to, there's, there's this, um, this term I have and you can call it the founder of a family.

It's a generational inflection point.

Right. And essentially you go and look at this family tree and you just see like one shitty branch after one shitty branch, after one shitty branch.

And then eventually it's all going downhill.

And then there'll be literally a gen there's like one dude, or sometimes a woman most times a dude and then straight up.

Right. And so I circuit breaker.

Exactly. That is what the role I'm trying to play.

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

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

And like, I want that.

I want that pressure.

I want that responsibility.

So if now I know for a fact, like, you know, I got the shit beat out of me when I was a kid, like stomped on, like all kinds of crazy stuff happened.

I've never touched my kids.

Like my kids grew up unbelievable.

Like they're, they're great kids too.

And they're way sweeter and nicer.

My boy's way sweeter than I was at his age.

And that's fine. So if he grows up in this positive environment, he knows he's loved, he knows me and my wife have a good, um, good relationship.

He sees that his dad gets out of bed and tries to help other people all day.

We'll talk, we can talk about this.

My, one of my favorite maxis from his entrepreneurship is that money comes naturally as a result of service.

People like, Oh, I'm going to be wealthy.

Fine. Find a problem, solve the problem.

And then all you have to do is scale up the amount of people you serve.

That's where wealth comes from.

So I wake up every day trying to do things for other people.

I'd be reading these books anyways, no matter what.

But the fact that I sit down and record my thoughts and condense a 40 year career and 40 hours of reading into 45 minutes.

That's an act of service.

So he's, 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 says, if we place a good thing, good, that's what I want.

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I wonder, you know, I've spoken to 850 people, whatever on the show, maybe with doubles like 750, something like that.

And, uh, I would say that on average, high performers are driven.

90 % of them, 95 % of them are driven by a sense of insufficiently, not a perfectly balanced desire to enact their logos forward and be the best version of them that they can be simply for the flourishing that comes along with it.

Most people don't have that.

Most people are trying to fill a void.

They're looking for validation.

They want the world to see them as useful because they've never felt like they were loved.

They want someone to tell them like they're enough, so they're going to make themselves so much more than enough that they have to have this undeniable stack of mountain of evidence that they were the thing, not the thing that they feared that they were.

And, um, I just get the sense that it is a balance between happiness and success.

But given that most people try to become happy by being successful, unhappy people try to use success to achieve happiness, if you can just shortcut it and go straight to happiness, which it sounds like you're trying to teach your kids to do, and much of this is genetic in any case.

It's like, Hey, here's a roll of the dice.

There's 50 % of your psychological disposition like good luck, I hope you're ready.

Um, but yeah, if you can do what you can from a re -ring perspective, you're safe.

You're validated. I love you if you win and I love you if you lose, as long as you try, here's some principles that you should do that are scalable, that are blah, blah, blah.

Like I, I'd think the success thing, especially, especially the people that listen to this podcast, the people that listen to yours are the kinds of people that have buried themselves being that breakwater, being that circuit breaker of intergenerational trauma of one kind or another.

And, uh, if that's you, if that, if you've prostrated yourself on the, like domino lineage of your ancestors and you've just like, no, you've Samsunged this entire thing together.

That's what it's like, right?

Holding these, these pillars up.

That's you and you have, you know, intergenerational problems.

Uh, if you've done that first off, Bravo.

Secondly, you have got the skills, you have got the gifts, you have got the insights, you've got the lessons, you have probably got the resources that your parents and your grandparents and your great grandparents couldn't have even imagined existed, not only because we're in a world that offers you

that opportunity and education and so on and so forth, but because you were the outlier and that's why you listen to shows like yours and shows like this, because you are an outlier among outliers, right?

You can't overestimate how normal the normies are.

Go out in the street.

Like they, I, I, I served normal people at my nightlife business.

They're fucking fantastic.

They're not riven with this sense that you have that for the most part is probably pathological and you would significantly better off if you didn't have, but what does it allow you to do?

It allows you to push yourself into places that other people won't go.

So can you take on that pain?

Can you take on, like we said in the very beginning, can you take on that burden, shoulder that burden, pass on what's good, try to hold onto the stuff that you wish didn't go, and then use the fruits of that labor, the lessons, the resources, the insights.

Give that and be like, I have, it was me that did the thing.

I accumulated the stuff.

I passed it onto my kids and they got most of the benefits structurally of what I did with as few of the pathologies emotionally of what caused that to happen.

Yeah, I think that would be a definition of success.

The definition of my success is that like my kids grow up happy.

Like that's, I'm like there, there is something I think where you said, like when you, I think you correctly identified like this, the source of this internal drive and one thing that I think would surprise most people is.

There's one, I think people would be surprised that a large source, and I think we'll go back to Francis for Copa, cause this certainly was the case for him is like revenge and it's revenge for being born in an environment like that with a father like his and so you, how does it manifest?

Oh, revenge is so interesting.

It manifests, right?

Where his dad's like, Oh no, no, I'm the genius of the family.

You're, you can't be him.

His fierce work ethic.

So it's obvious in the very beginning of Francis for Copa is trying to break into movies and he's one of the first and at the time, at the time in Hollywood, there was no such thing as young directors.

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

Right? The idea that you have a 28 year old feature film director was unheard of back then and so he meets a young George Lucas.

He meets a Steven Spielberg, Hey, that guy did it.

I can do it. But you, you see the 10 years of work that he put in before that in the book.

He's literally, he starts out as an editor and he's literally editing 24 hours.

He falls asleep. He doesn't get up from his desk.

He just time to go.

I'm editing time to go to sleep.

I'm going to just put my head down.

He has this fierce work ethic and then the revenge is dead.

I'm doing this a movie.

It's probably going to be a success because it's the sequel to Godfather, right?

He goes on. He has one of the greatest, directing runs ever in one decade.

He does Godfather one, Godfather two, and apocalypse.

Now, like maybe you've never seen another 10 year run like that ever, especially at such a young age.

And he's like, dad, I'm going to let you do the score for the Godfather too.

And then his dad wins an Oscar for the only achievement he ever does for in music came because his son hired him.

Revenge. And so this idea you just nailed it.

I think it's 90 to 95 % of sons usually trying to say, I don't want to be like my dad.

I'm going to succeed where he failed.

And then there's maybe a five to 10 % where it's like, my dad has been my hero.

I want to be more like him.

And then I'm going to try to like, I wonder whether this could totally just be availability bias because of 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 of those, maybe that 90 to 95 actually gets closer to

sort of, you know, 70 or 80 because the proliferation of people trying to make themselves better.

Like if founders is church for entrepreneurs, then modern wisdom is church for people who want to make their lives better.

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

And, I don't know. I just, I don't get how so much of this stuff, even if you only take fucking 0 .1 % of the things that you're exposed to, and you're a little bit discerning about what's good and what's not good.

You are, that's what I said before about the difference between a parents and grandparents and a great -grandparents generation and ours, you are orders of magnitude, better constructed, better informed.

I, listen, I think podcasting is a miracle.

I think it's world -class education on demand.

Anytime you want about any subject you want.

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

You'll find somewhere in the podcast directory, some nut crazy educator that has gone down the rabbit hole to a degree that most people find unreasonable.

And you can download that into your brain on demand.

Here's the problem that I noticed.

People don't understand what learning is.

Learning is not memorizing information.

Learning is changing your behavior.

Correct. Okay. That's Alex's definition too.

Yeah. Perfect. There's a lot of like, you could tell her, Mosey, like, I don't know if he reads a bunch of biographies, but he sounds like he does cause 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 with him.

I'd love to, I'd love to see you to talk.

Yeah, I'd love to. Um, so the, what I am shocked by, because again, like the way I spend my life, like if I'm not with my family, I'm hanging out with other founders and all the founders listen to the show because that's where like my entire network.

Right. And I'm so, and you know, I become like the founder whisperer and I know a lot about what's going on in their business and everything.

And I'm like, you said you listened to episode 299 or that, as like that idea.

It's like, Hey, uh, never ever forget the dynamic range of human beings.

Like you were saying, Hey, this guy's super talented, but he wants five times the amount of salary as this other guy who's like one 10th is good.

Obviously pay the most talented person.

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

And so I, I am delusionally optimistic on the impact that podcasts have because I say podcasts are miracle.

And so I do hope it happens that you're living in it.

Yeah, but I'm worried.

I'm worried that I'm overestimating.

I think you, I think we both are 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.

That's a fact that's not like, that's not hyperbolic as a fact.

So what is the point of me spending all my time studying and learning from them?

If I don't change my behavior, that means my entire life was a waste and I refuse to waste my life.

So I changed my behavior.

And so I'm just worried that a lot of people don't.

So I would love it to be 70%, 60%.

My also thing is people are like, Oh, do you have to grow up poor to like have outsized?

And no answer, of course not.

It's just most people grow up poor.

Like if we, I'm sure we're in a bubble inside of a bubble, inside of a bubble.

Even if you look at like the top 1 % in the world, you know, all across eight 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.

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

Um, and so I, I, I, I'm very, uh, and I, I think also human nature is constant.

So I'm a little worried that we can shift the variance by that much.

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

And there's no changing that you don't get to go in.

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

Well, was Francis Fourcopa siblings that way?

I just did this episode in this guy named James J.

Hill, right? And again, same way I found him Munger is like, Hey, there's this great, uh, James J.

Hill is a great operator like Rockefeller and Carnegie.

I'm like, what? Like I knew Carnegie and Rockefeller, who's this guy?

He's the greatest railroad entrepreneur in American history.

Uh, he created this, the, the only, uh, at the time railroad industry, right?

In the 18, the 1800s.

Whereas it was the, by far the most important industry in America, by far, it's like what the internet or AI would be now, uh, in 1885, the railroad industry took in twice the amount of revenue as a federal government.

Uh, it was, holy fuck.

Yeah. It was the largest, the nation's largest employer, the railroaders, which were the, the entre, the railroad entrepreneurs, that's why they were called railroaders owned over 10 % of the landmass in the United States.

Like, it's crazy that you've got such shit railways.

Yeah. I know, I know, I know.

And, but James J. Hill was the only person, right?

The only person, only railroad entrepreneur to ever, uh, success 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. He's the Elon of the train.

He, 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.

He's like, I'm, I'm, he believed in the dynamic, you know, the, the power of one individual and everything else.

So he goes and he seeks his fortune in America, right?

What does this two siblings do?

They talk about in his biography.

They're like, this is what our life is.

We're just poor farmers.

They stayed. Yeah, fascinating.

What is that? Fascinating.

You know, you've got this split test.

You've got the same father.

You've got the same environment, but a totally different outcome.

This is why, uh, so much, a woman called Nancy Ekkoff.

And, uh, she's probably the leading twins researcher on the planet.

And, um, between her and Robert Plowman, you realize just how squirrely, uh, life can become even when you share the same, uh, environment, when you grow up in the same environment.

Genes, 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 hadn't full genome, uh, sequence done.

Uh, and as a part of that, the, uh, organization, they're able to compare you to the population at mass and they can say, this is a one copy of this SNP, uh, two copies of this SNP is, uh, 20 % of the population have got that.

6 % of the population have got it when it's both and they do it for everything.

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 real risk for Alzheimer's or whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever.

And, um, I need to go back and, and, uh, go through it properly before I start talking about it fully on the show.

But, um, I want to introduce you to the same company because I want you to get it done because it taught me so much about myself, so many of the things that I thought were cultivated virtues.

Um, what it's very much being 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.

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

Did they identify why your forearms are so huge?

They, that actually isn't available.

Uh, I love the Q and a, they're like, it's just the four.

Do you know what, you know what the other thing is when I do these fucking live shows, the Q and a is live are just the same.

I like shakes someone's hand out doing a meet and greet and they're like, dude, don't they really are big in real life.

They don't even refer to the forum.

They're like, they really are as if it was like, bro, you need merch, just, just a picture of your forearms.

All right. Actions express priority.

We are only what we do, not what we say we are.

No. I mean, I, and this is, I think just part of getting older, having more experience, but I don't care at all what people are like, what they say is important to them.

I just look, how do you spend your time?

Like you came in here early and I gave you a hug and I'm like, how the hell are you even bigger?

Then I saw you last time where I just saw you in Austin like two months ago.

And you're like, I lift heavy weights.

Yeah, I could tell like, like what is important to Chris is obvious.

Obviously you take care of your health, 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 pod.

So many people come, this part happens to you too.

They like, Hey, you know, talk to me about podcasts.

And I remember this happened one time where this guy's like, all right, I started a podcast and like, he's a family friend.

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 and five minutes since 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.

Like come back when you've done like 200 and then we can talk.

Well, like this doesn't make, this is not a good use of your time.

And so the entrepreneurial, uh, like the reason that's, that's so powerful in the history of entrepreneurship is because the greatest entrepreneurs, like they, most of them work well beyond.

Well beyond the need for money.

So money is not their greatest resource.

Money is a way and an asset that they use to bring what they want forth into the world, what they want.

Right. They all know that time is your most valuable resource is the only unrenewable resource that they have.

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

And this is something me and you've talked about in private.

Like I need to get better at marketing the podcast.

Right. And because his whole point was like, Hey, I think the Apple devices I'm making are good for the world.

I want every single human on the planet to own an Apple device.

And first of all, Steve, not at the price point that you're at, but, well, that's fine.

And he goes, but, and to do that, we have to become a great marketing company.

He goes, we know how to build great products.

We are not a great marketing company.

So what do you do? His actions express priority.

So he said, every Wednesday, we are going to have a three hour meeting.

I will be there every Wednesday.

I will be involved all the people involved in the marketing advertising for Apple are going to be present.

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

And he got to the point where like, you know, some people call them micromanagers.

I just say they're into the details.

You know, James J. Hill, all the, all the great entrepreneurs into the details.

When you came in here and started, I saw you directing.

I was like, Oh, this guy does another Steve Jobs guy.

Um, it didn't matter if it was an ad that was going to run as a full page in the law street journal or billboard in nowhere, Missouri.

It did not go out without his approval.

His actions were expressing his priority.

And what you do is like, that's not just in businesses and everything.

If you want to be a good dad, you don't spend any time with your kid.

Your actions are expressing what you, what you actually want to do.

So, uh, yes. And I love this.

Um, but the issue is that it can become difficult to work out where the boundaries of that stop.

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

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

So it's choosing in advance what you're going to suck at.

These are insights from Oliver Berkman, who's fantastic.

Um, one of my friends, uh, told me about deliberate de -optimization strategy that he was using.

I asked him for an example.

He said, well, I fly a lot.

And if I had the right number of different credit cards and I had all my points tied in and I made sure that I use them the best way.

And I had, you know, a wallet this big, I would be able to maximize my points.

But I just, it's not as sufficiently high priority.

I have other things that are higher up.

So I just, I'm going to let that one slide.

That's just going to be an L for me.

Could I be more optimized?

Yeah, I could, but look, it works.

Yeah. Now, are you going to do that in your highest calling?

Am I going to do that when I'm trying to book a guest on the show or we're trying to set up the lighting or we're fighting for a great location or whatever?

No, no, that's an area that I need to do it.

The problem that the insecure overachiever has that the type a person with a type B problem has is not knowing where the boundaries of their obsession should stop because it can't be everything.

It can't be everything.

And if it is everything, the things that it really should be for will suffer and you will feel it and you will feel miserable.

No, I definitely agree.

So you mentioned Tim Kirk earlier.

Steve, I think was the best, like he was, he was a ruthless.

He had the ability to like ruthlessly prioritize things.

And so he picked like product, right?

And he would, again, just like every ad, every pixel on your screen, every button on that device, he would have to approve before it goes out.

But could he do that for everything?

No, he sucked his supply chain.

So that's why he actually hired and had Tim Cook.

That was what Tim Cook's job was primarily before Steve died of cancer.

So, yeah, completely great.

The way I put it is something that also reappears in the books is they limit the great entrepreneurs, limit the amount of details to perfect, and then they make every detail perfect.

Where a lot of entrepreneurs mistake is like they are optimizing something that should never exist.

This is something Elon talks about over and over again.

He's like before you optimize something, make sure it's actually essential to like what you're actually trying to bring into the world.

And so for, for like me and you are, I guess for me is really simple.

It's like, how should we spend time?

I should either be reading or should be making podcasts in my work.

That's all I have to do.

And the one reason, like, I don't have an assistant or I don't have anything else.

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

I was like, well, then I'm managing a calendar.

I shouldn't have a calendar because all I have to do is wake up every day.

As long as I wake up every day and I read for a few hours a day, right?

And I sit down once a week and I summarize what I learned that week from my reading, I will get everything I want in life.

Everything else from that is a distraction.

Dude, we, we broke the entire show, this whole thing, all of the different machinery and the bits and pieces behind it, how the growth happens and what I feel fulfilled by and what makes the world a better place and what grows the revenue and all the rest of the things.

We broke all of that down and it's one, two, three, four, it's four things.

But because of your next lesson, I'm not going to say them, but there's four things.

It's four things. That's it.

Should we, oh, I've heard that TikToks prioritizing videos that are over 90 seconds long.

So maybe we should be, is it one of those four things?

No, it's not. Well, what if we re -purp, because we can do a cross promo.

It's not one of the four things.

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

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 this 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?

And then he, 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 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, SpaceX, the only thing that matters is if we don't get a rocket into orbit, we have nothing else.

So what's the most thing getting a rocket to orbit?

And then once we do that, we always have to sell it and everything else.

He and, uh, one of he, Elon doesn't have a lot of mentors, but I've heard him reference Larry Ellison is one of his mentors, which I thought was fascinating.

And I've read three biographies on Ellison.

Um, I wish there were more and he there's an, in one of the biographies, he's Larry Ellison is arguing, right?

This is one of the richest people in the planet.

He was like 40 % of Oracle for God's sake.

Um, he's arguing with his assistant cause assistance like, Hey, we have a hundred important things, there's a thousand things we need to get to.

He's like, no, no, no, there's not a hundred.

There's not a thousand.

There's three. He goes, I'm going to focus on those three and I'm going to ignore everything else.

Ruthless prioritization.

Like that is such a key part of achieving things in life.

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Bad boys move in silence.

When you find an edge, shut up about it.

Talking invites competition.

Competition destroys profits.

So I grew up listening to hip hop and the interesting thing about my obsession with like maxims and memorable things, like I think a lot of that came from, it's not like a red 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.

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

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

It's like 800 pages.

It's great. That's fine.

I've read it like two times.

Rockefeller is the man.

But I went through the biography or the bibliography and I discovered books were made out of books.

And so I found this obscure biography published in like 1970.

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 250 pages, right?

There's a longer thing here where I think, I think it's slothful not to compress your thoughts, that's like Churchill say stuff like that.

What was that thing about, sorry, I wrote you such a long letter.

If I only had more time, I could have written you a shorter one.

I think it's disrespectful to people to not, like think about if you want a high value audience and you're saying, Hey, I can tell a story in an hour and a half.

Or I could tell a story in 45 minutes, but I took an hour and a half.

I just stole 45 minutes of your life and you're not getting back.

Times that by however many people, like I, I, I spent an entire day.

I mean, you've talked about this privately.

Uh, when 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.

I never, I never add.

It's like, Nope, ruthlessly cut, try to respect the people's time.

But anyways, I think author should do that.

I like Titan. Do I need to know what the furniture's like in his grandfather's house?

No, I do not. I want to know how he built maybe the greatest businesses ever existed.

And so this book is 250 pages of how he built Standard Oil.

It's called John D, the founding fathers of the Rockefellers.

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

And so in that book, it's all secrecy covered everything in his, when I think of bad boys move in silence, I think of Rockefeller, it's, it's in all kinds of, um, other entrepreneurs, but essentially saying, Hey, uh, you don't understand how lucrative this is.

And I'm not going to educate my competition because if you go and say, Hey, look how much money I'm making.

What are humans going to do?

They're all memetic.

They're going to like, Oh, I'm going to try to do exactly what Chris does.

And so I'm going to do, and it's, you invite competition and there goes your profits.

And so not only he would like do deals and he's like, Hey, I'm going to buy your refinery.

You can't tell your wife how much I bought it and who bought it.

He would have this thing called, uh, there'd be secret ownership.

So people hated Rockefeller cause he was dominating this area in Cleveland.

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

Like, and then from there on at 25 years old, 28 years old, he's really young.

He's the dominant player.

And so then he goes, he also has a secret Alliance where they put him at the head of the national is that the kerosene refineries, association, something like that, essentially just like a trade group.

And he goes around, he meets with all the other people in his business.

And they're trying to, uh, collude to keep prices like at a profitable level.

And so he gets to see their books and know as a result of this secret Alliance, 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, right?

And then he goes, Oh, that's a, that's a good competitor.

Maybe I need to buy him.

This guy, I don't have to worry about this guy.

This guy's not serious.

I see his books. And so what he would do is some of those people say Rockefeller too powerful.

I'm not selling to you.

And so they go and they sell to a company, not knowing that Rockefeller secretly owns that company.

So if you really want to internalize bad boys move in silence, it's Rockefeller's the prototype, but there's another great thing.

In Steve Jobs, lost years, he dumps 50 million of his own money.

And at the time he only had $70 million.

So he dumped almost all, you know, majority of his wealth into Pixar and literally they can't make payroll.

They don't have a product.

He's just writing checks to cover the payroll.

And they pivot from trying to sell hardware, which is how Pixar started to what the team really wanted to do and their passion about was like, we want to make the world's first computer animated movies.

And so Steve's like, all right, we need to study like is animation profitable?

And he has a great line in that book.

He's like, it's not like you can go to the library and check out a book that says the business model for animation, because there's only one company that's ever done it successfully that's Disney and they don't want anybody to know how lucrative it was.

So he winds up building relationships.

Relationships are in the world.

See how all these things tie together with people in Disney.

He finds out, holy shit.

They they can literally like they take Snow White.

What he discovers is Snow White came out like 60 years before.

And then you have the new invention of VHS and you have a new invention of DVDs.

You know, the 90s and they take something they haven't put a dollar into in 60 years that our kids are still going to watch.

They put it on the new technology of the day, VHS, DVD, quarter trillion or excuse me, not quarter trillion, 250 million drops to their bottom line, all profit.

That's one movie. And so that's when you realize, oh, the reason they shut up about it, because they don't want people to know how lucrative it is.

You see this over and over again, a friend of mine is doing a.

He's doing let me see if I can put this sensitively.

He is buying a bunch of other companies.

So he's rolling up a bunch of other companies.

OK. And he's doing it so successful.

He runs a publicly traded company that he caught the attention of somebody else that has been doing a similar strategy in a different domain for the last like three decades.

And he goes, they share a board member.

And so he meets with them.

And this older, wiser guy tells my friend, he goes, hey, what you're doing is working?

He goes, now shut up about it.

Stopped in interviews, stop talking about your strategy.

He goes, because I you know, the amount of competitors I created for myself because I didn't hide what I was doing.

Successfully. And so people saw how this guy became the guy that's giving him the advice became a multi billionaire.

Anyways, like this guy's worth three billion dollars.

We're having numbers.

How do you do that?

Oh, this is what he does.

Let me copy him. He's like, now I just created all these clones of me.

And now I have made it more difficult to do what I wanted to do anyways.

So bad boys moving silence is something appears over and over and over again.

Belief comes before ability.

The external world has this backwards.

The belief that you can do something is a prerequisite for trying.

This drives me insane.

So you mentioned earlier, like you don't know how normal normal people are.

And I'm going to remember that line.

Because people are like, over and over again, when you have somebody, you have somebody like the founder of Four Seasons, you talked about, you know, hey, Chris, we're friends.

Like, I'm going to tell you my dream.

And my dream is to build the collection, not just one, a collection of the world's greatest hotels.

And you're like, Izzy, you've never, you have no money.

You've never built a hotel.

Like, what are you talking about?

Why would you even think this is possible?

What you need to do is prove it first and then we'll believe in you.

It's like, no, that's ass backwards.

Belief always comes before ability.

There's a story where Elon tries to buy a rocket.

At first, he thought he was just going to shoot like this garden, for lack of a better word, to Mars on somebody else's rocket.

And because he was trying to like draw attention to the fact that, hey, NASA is not innovating.

We're like, not we're stuck in like low Earth orbit.

Like, why aren't we trying to get to Mars?

Why aren't we trying to, you know, colonize a galaxy?

And he 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.

They're like, oh, this Internet kid, because he's 29, 28.

He's like, wait, Internet kid, you can't do that.

His belief came before his ability.

He believed that he could do that.

And then he went out and proved it.

Now, when I say belief comes before ability, it doesn't mean you just sit there and be like, I'm great.

And you don't do it.

No, you do the work necessary to achieve what you want.

But if you're waiting for the external world to like push, encourage you or and edge you on, like it's impossible.

So I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure what direction you were going in with that, because one reading of that sounds fantastic.

And I wholeheartedly disagree.

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

So the reason that I disagree, if you were to say belief comes before ability as in self -belief, I wrote an essay this week about it.

So I'm going to read it to you.

An ode to people who don't believe in themselves.

What comes first? Belief or action.

Do you need to believe that you can do a thing before you do it?

Fake it until 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?

Here are some lessons I've learned.

You can believe you're not worthy of a thing and still attain it.

You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed.

You can grip and grasp and fear and it ruined the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted and things still go well.

You can have no self -belief and show up anyway and still win.

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

You can doubt the process, question your talent, be uncertain that you're making progress, disparage your accomplishments, permanently feel like you're not working hard enough, no matter how hard you work.

Never give yourself a break.

Fail to fully feel gratitude.

Be terrified of never reaching your goals and still end up in a place that your 20 year old self could not imagine you'd ever get to.

Self -belief is overrated, generate evidence.

Yeah. I would like 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.

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, the highest order bit.

It's a, it's from like computer science where it's like the most important part of the system, right.

And this is like a complete like oversimplification of it.

But, um, and his whole thing was like the highest order bit is that like you love what you do.

And for all the reasons that we discussed earlier, you'll keep doing it for a long time.

You'll persevere and everything else.

And I love what I do.

I know you love what you do.

And I agree. Like it's super important.

I think it makes life easier.

You used the phrase like you're swimming downstream earlier.

I think is a great way to put that.

And so I was thinking about that because, um, 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.

And it's remarkable.

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

Um, that's where I discovered the highest order 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?

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

And I think me and you might be good examples.

It's like, how many years were you doing the podcast before anybody gave it down?

Three and a half. Mine was five and a half.

Why were you still doing it?

Because I was swimming downstream.

Cause 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 the people's time and listening.

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

Yeah. That's an interesting way to think about self belief.

Um, because I believe that the thing that I'm doing right now is of value to the world.

And the world just as yet hasn't recognized that it's like an interesting pivot on self belief.

Um, the belief, I know that I can make it.

I have never had, I've never had, ever, ever.

I am the best avatar for somebody that is permanently looking at his feet.

Going, how the fuck am I stood here?

Like, how did this happen?

Uh, very much don't believe that you're worthy of a thing.

Still attained it. Disparage your accomplishment, but still get them, uh, grip, grasp, fear, ruin the enjoyment, all of that, all of that.

Like the entire, for me, journey up until probably only the last two years, basically moving to America was sort of riven with self doubt and uncertainty.

And am I even, is, am I even doing this right?

Like, but I enjoyed the thing that I was doing and I knew that I was good at that thing, but I didn't know that there was going to be some outcome.

So I think it's what is the sort of self belief directed at in a way, directed at the outcome of I know that I can do this thing well and I enjoy it all day.

Directed at this is going to reach something that some portion of people will accuse of being success.

Never really once. So I've heard you say that perspective on your show before, I would say like interacting with you in person, you come across unbelievably.

You've only known me for the last two years.

Yeah, much bigger, much bigger mountain of evidence.

Yeah, good point. After a while, if imposter syndrome continues to persist, even though you keep disproving it, do you have imposter syndrome today?

No. Okay, no, no more.

I'm about to step out on stage in front of three and a half thousand people in London.

I just came back from Oz, 5 ,000 people.

Yeah. Other side of the planet.

And no, not anymore.

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

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

Like very 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 thing.

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

And 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, it's gone because it's been crushed under a fucking neutron star worth weight of evidence.

I'm like, I just can't, I can't keep holding on to a belief that things are going to go badly or that I'm not good enough or that I don't have the talent or that even though I feel like I'm working hard, I know that I should be working infinitely harder because I'm just like, how many times do you want

to roll the dice and it come up six, six, six, like over and over and over and over again.

And 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, I agree completely.

I think a lot of people accuse entrepreneurs of being arrogant and of course they are like you'd have to be arrogant to think like, Oh, I don't have to go.

I can, I don't have to work for somebody else.

Like I can, I can literally take something that doesn't exist and like bring it to the world.

But my issue with that is like, we don't have an epidemic of arrogance.

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

And so the weird thing about the early days of the podcast, you know, these people that I'm reading about and telling stories about, they're crazy people, like they are all crazy people.

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

I'm like, what kind of, I was like, Oh, there's a million, you know, of us out there that are like, this is me too.

And that's the biggest key where like the reason the biographies are important and life stories in general is not because like we're talking about Francis Ford Coppola's life or Steve Jobs life for any of the lives we've talked about.

It's like, no, no, you see yourself in them.

Correct. That's the key.

Dude, I'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 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 I just don't care.

And I have nothing to talk to them about.

And I realized it's that I can't find hugs in their shortcomings.

That I can latch on to that either I'm not unable to see them for some reason.

They're being hidden.

They're incentivized to hide them.

They don't align with the way that I see the world.

Perhaps, you know, cultural differences, stuff like that.

But yeah, we, what we really, really resonate with is somebody else who has a shortcoming that we see ourselves in.

You see a little version of yourself in Chris Bumstead when he cries on stage or when he's uncertain about whether or not he's going to win.

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

You know, like whoever it is, like you see your.

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

It's certainly reassuring to me when I realized that the most interesting person in the room, in fact, this was, this was born out of our trip to Miami for George's birthday.

The most interesting person in the room isn't the most interesting person in the room.

It's a person who makes everybody else feel like they're the most interesting person in the room.

So you don't need to worry about not being charismatic.

You just need to make other people feel charismatic.

Like I called it inverse charisma.

That you know that story, was it Winston Churchill's wife who went to go and see the two different American presidents?

You said, I sat down with one of them and after a dinner, being next to him, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in the world.

I sat down a couple of months later with his opponent.

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

Like who do you want to be?

I want to be the sort of person that makes other people feel like the smartest person in the world.

And the beautiful thing about this idea is that so many people want to be liked and charismatic, but feel like they don't have any charisma or likability.

You don't need to. It's not about you.

It's about what you do to other people.

And that is so much easier.

If you're just, you don't need to be interesting.

You just need to be fucking interested in somebody else.

I love that you said that because I say the most interesting people are the most interested in like the people that I'm drawn to, right?

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

And I think one of the biggest benefits is like, and this way, I'm again, evangelist for reading biographies and autobiographies because like we're incentivized in our day to day to like, may things seem better.

Like you were just talking about the health problems that you know, you're like, okay, I'm not ready to talk about this, but you know, when I am, I'll talk about it.

But like from the outside, people like Chris has, 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.

And you're like, yeah, but you haven't seen the shit that I've been going to for the last like 12 months.

And the biographies like you see that because they're not people don't write sit down to write a biography when they're like 30, 35, 40, when they're still in it.

They there's some weird.

Genetic thing where it's like, I know I'm going to die soon.

I want to pass down everything I know in this book.

Act of service of next generation of entrepreneurs is really important.

And that's when I just did the Elon episode on The SpaceX book.

One of the things I said is it's like the reason that you guys should read this book is because like you have not only just Elon a genius, but all the early SpaceX employees are genius.

And the whole book is these geniuses can't figure shit out.

And like they're running into problem after problem after problem.

And then, you know, six years later they figure it out.

That is so good for you.

It's like, oh, if that guy, you know, if that guy couldn't do that, then it makes sense.

Like I feel better about myself.

Again, it's technically a story about, you know, on SpaceX, but you make it about yourself.

I just think that's human nature by endurance.

We conquer time carries most of the weight.

It is hard to beat someone who never stops.

Oh, this is I feel a hormones.

He would say something like that, too.

So my phone is now changed.

You know, this one I call you.

It's it's it's Michael Jordan being really intense.

But for like a year and a half, it was for like maybe two years, it was binders.

Conker is the family motto of Ernest Shackleton, who's one of the greatest polar explorers.

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

And I think what a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake is like there's first of all, there's never up until the first few years ago, there's no such thing as like an entrepreneurship like industry.

Now there's like an industry and people are incentivized to try to spread it and try to put money to these companies.

And so what happens, like people are in a rush, right?

And they try to take like an idea and like instead of building it slowly and making it durable, right, they're like, let's just throw a lot of money and people at it and like try to do it fast.

And then 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.

With 10 years, it was gone.

Right. They write about businesses that last.

And so I had one of the greatest experiences of my life.

This year, and I was at this company offsite and it was a 70 year old female billionaire owning a private company, right?

And like just her company building philosophy, like I told her, I was like, I'm in love with you.

And my wife was with me and I was like, she's like, I literally love you.

Like I love every way you build your company.

And her whole thing is just very common sense.

She's just like handful of principles.

I'm always just going to do what's best for the customer and the customer experience.

And that's where I'm going to put my money.

And I'm in this forever.

And so she told me this hilarious story where, you know, she felt because she wasn't trained in business and she was a woman, like I need consultants, I need McKinsey and I need Bain and I'm spending millions of dollars on this.

And first of all, they're like, you know, you should buy up all your competitors.

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

And, you know, whatever, let's say that company is going to cost 200 million to buy and she's like, but why don't I just put that $200 million into like making my customer experience better.

And so she told me this hilarious story.

She's like year five, you know, I had 15 competitors, year 15, I have 10 year 25.

I had three year four.

She's running company for 40 year 40.

I have one. He goes, I took took the money instead of buying other companies.

I made my customer experience better.

My product better. My marketing better.

Controlled more things.

And they went out of business slowly but surely.

And so time carries most of the weight.

That's a maximum that I came up with where I was listening to Charlie Munger.

Charlie Munger has this good.

His whole point is like, hey, if you just master the big ideas and a handful of disciplines and you really master them and implement them, the big ideas in physics, biology, psychology, economics, there's only a handful of ideas you actually need to memorize in all these main subjects.

And that carries most of the freight.

And it's like, oh, that's a good turn of phrase.

Like that makes sense.

And then I'm reading more and more about these stories.

And it's like, oh, like you're not winning because you're a genius.

You're not winning because you're winning because you just outlast everybody.

Buy endurance. We conquer.

You, she conquered through endurance because she made sure she was, she made her company durable.

This is what the Peter Thiel is wrote.

What I, if you only gonna read one book on business, obviously, my opinion, especially in today's day and age, you read zero to one, right?

And everybody that's building a tech company has read that book.

And yet they miss his most important lesson, which is like, Hey, don't optimize for growth at the expense of durability.

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

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

The amount of money that, that company, that woman I just described is making today is 95%, 99 % more than she was making in year 10.

And all the money was in the future.

What's that thing about, uh, Buffett made some obscene percentage of his entire net worth after 60.

Yes. Like 90, you see that graph that goes viral on Twitter all the time.

And that's obviously the magic of compounding too.

And it's like, that's why I say buy endurance.

We conquer. Like I'm not trying to have the hot podcast or a great episode this week.

I'm trying to do this until I die.

I want them to pry the microphone from my cold, dead hands.

And so therefore I need to make sure that I'm w how do I do that?

I have to maintain first of all, there's valuable for the audience.

I have to have trust with the people that give me their time.

And so like you just say, Hey, I'm not making a decision based on what I'm doing today I'm a, this decision going to serve that goal.

So people will still think that I'm trustworthy and that what I'm doing in the world is valuable for 10, 15, 20 years from now.

If you know your business from A to Z, there is no problem.

You can't solve the best entrepreneurs.

Stay in the details of the business.

I love that you say Z.

Every time I hear it on your podcast.

So this is literally a line that, um, was this guy named Sam's Murray.

Okay. So I go out, this is 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 age.

You know, he's really, you got just breaking everything about yourself.

Keep going. It's all your big muscles.

That's true. Um, so, so George Mac is the one that puts the importance of being high agency in my, like, I think his writing on it, his memes, the stuff he makes is just perfect.

And I would say every single person I read a biography about is high agency.

The most high agency person I've ever come across is that guy named Sam's Murray.

So what's funny is there's another line in zero to one that I think people mistake to where they say, um, all technology is, is a better way to do something.

So people think technology has got to be like software.

It's got to be computers.

Like, no, at one point a steamboat, the invention, the steamboat engine was a technology of that day because it made, uh, it made it possible, a better way to do something.

And what did that do?

So one of the first, this will surprise a lot of people, one of the first multinational corporations in human history were the fruit companies.

Because you, before you had a banana, you grew it in Jamaica, you grew in Honduras.

That banana, you have to eat in like four days.

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

So you match fruit, which humans have, you know, are going to eat forever with the steamboat.

And you create one of the first multinational corporations.

So Sam's Murray, right?

Is this guy, he is a poor Russian immigrant, right?

Comes to America, shows up in like Alabama and builds this gigantic fruit empire.

And the book, the reason the book is called the fish to eat the whale is because the biggest fruit company at the time is called United Fruit.

And Sam's Murray competes head to head with them.

And then eventually he takes over the little fish eats the whale.

He takes over that company.

So the reason that he says that is because his competition, when the founders die, the people running United Fruit, their business is in central America.

That's where all the fruit is is grown.

And then it's shipped into like the Gulf coast and Florida and then, and then put on trains and put every else they thought they were going to run their business remotely in Boston.

And this guy's out here.

He's literally hacking machetes.

He's helping lay the railroad track.

Uh, he's taking, uh, inventory.

He's building the boats.

He's doing every single thing.

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

His whole point is like, because if I know my 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.

You probably know those four components in and out.

Now, if you know, Hey, we have a problem with component three, no problem.

I understand what we need to fix.

It's such an important thing where a lot of people like this goes back to normal people or, you know, unobsessed people.

They call this. Micro managing are all, you shouldn't do all this.

It's like, no, they're in the details.

He is in the details.

One of the funniest stories of this is the fruit association or something.

There's some kind of trade group he's in Havana, right?

And this is probably like 1900, 1910 or something like this.

And he's there. They want to give him an award.

So like they call it his name.

Here's this award for the fruit guy of the year, whatever they call it.

And like, it's not in the audience.

They track them 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 can hear about the business.

Like I'm in the details of my business.

And so I would say way this isn't like a, uh, none of these are like, you know, like what Chris Bumstead said, like, you know, you can, some of these work for you, some of these are not going to work for you.

I would say most of the people I read about are, you would consider like micromanagers.

Larry Ellison mentioned earlier, not a micromanager, not a grinder.

He says in his book, he's a sprinter.

He's like, I take care of the top level stuff, strategy products, stuff like that.

Putting the right people in.

But then I hire other people to be in the details.

Elon in, I think maybe he changed now, but in his early days, like in SpaceX, he knew the rocket forward and backwards, so it could also, these could also apply, again, can actually apply them to your situation at the beginning or company might want to do that.

Maybe your, your interest shift, or maybe you find something better at that detail than you are.

You just figure out how to apply yourself, but this is something that occurs over and over again.

The public praises people for what they practice in private.

There is no such thing as an overnight success.

Every great act is built on years of practice no one sees.

So this goes back to my love of hip hop.

That public praises people for what they practice in private is this line from this rapper named Russ.

And I think Russ is actually interesting.

He'd actually be a good guest for you.

He's done some great interviews, but Russ was the first person in history to write, record, produce, mix and master an entire album.

So one person, only one person, and he got over a billion streams.

And so I think he's like a very fascinating personality thinks about things, but he's also a gifted lyricist and he says stuff that like kind of sears in my brain.

And so the, this is like the point we were talking about earlier where like, you know, you can go out and say, Jeff Bezos has too much money.

He shouldn't have the world's largest yacht and he shouldn't have all these things and the giant house everywhere.

And so I'm going to put a guillotine and I'm going to take things away from him.

But you didn't see like all the stuff that, that he was doing before that.

You didn't see the fact that he was making door desks.

You didn't see that he was literally, there's a line in his biography where he is buying knee pads because he's the one putting the back packages together, putting them in his like Jeep and then taking them to UPS.

And so one of my favorite stories about this, and it's actually like an idea.

I think that's related to this, that the public raises people for what they practice in private is this idea of going slow so you can go faster later on.

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

And I bring up Sam all the time because he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs because it's like a very, a business is so easy to understand.

In a way that I think Amazon is not, you know, what's Walmart's business?

I buy cheaply and I sell cheaply and I just do that.

And I'm a bit bigger and better than anybody else.

And that's what generates the wealth.

And so the crazy thing about like the outcome that Sam had is nobody saw that for the first five years of his life, he had a single store, one store.

He was like trying to figure out like what is this retail thing?

What am I good at? What should, what's the merchandise that you do?

What, like, how do I do this?

How's the marketing?

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

His land. He had a lease and the lease could be terminated 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.

The landlord realized that, Oh my God, this store that, you know, 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.

I'm taking over your store.

And so he's forced to then go look for another store.

That's where he discovers Bentonville, Arkansas.

So he buys a store there, but there's like a multiple month timeframe where he has to run two stores for the first time in his life.

And this is really important because one he realized, Oh, I can, I don't have to have just one store.

I can run two stores at a time, but he's also driving back and forth over between these like mountainous roads.

So even though the stores are, let's say they're 300 miles away from each other.

It was like an eight hour drive or something there, uh, each way.

And so he's like, man, there's gotta 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, this is a Cessna.

So he goes to the air airfield.

He says, Hey, how much would it cost to hire a Cessna to fly me from Bentonville to I think Newport is where the other store was.

And it was, you know, whatever 50 bucks, a hundred dollars back in the day.

And then he realizes, Hey, I don't want to keep having this expense of, um, I like having a charter plane every time.

Like have somebody else drive.

I'll just teach myself how to fly.

And why is that important?

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 this stuff you did.

They don't see all this stuff that happened.

What he realized is like, Hey, now I can fly my own plane.

So I this, this, this, what it was a problem was problems.

It was just opportunities and workflows.

I thought me losing my first store was a problem.

Is that one of being the best opportunity in my life?

It taught me one that I can run more than one store at a time.

And then two, I accidentally discovered, Oh, I can now fly.

I learned how to fly.

And so the advantage he had over his competitors where I can fly over you're there in jets, my competitors in Kmart, they're in jets, right?

They're above the clouds.

I'm in a little tiny Cesta.

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

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 he's like, you didn't see all the practice that went in there.

There's another story 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 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, they wouldn't sell hula hoops to him.

So he just looked, he's like, what's the hula hoop?

Well, that's a problem, right?

What's the hula hoop?

He's like, it's just a little pipe that's connected and it's colored.

And you just wiggle your hips and that's like what the toy is.

He's like, okay. He bought the material and at the end of the night, after he worked all day, he's like, I'm going to make my own hula hoops.

He winds up doing thousands of these.

And then because he didn't have any money, he's like, how, now I had multiple stores.

How do I get the hula hoop to other stores?

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

Cause he's like a redneck fisherman and he just put all the hula loops in behind the John boat and he towed behind his car and that's was his delivery system.

So in every single story, you're going to see like, it seems like there's no possible way these giant companies can start with this.

These little basic improvisations, like just feeling your way through.

And then you're slowly practicing.

You're like, Oh, that idea worked.

Let me do more of that.

Oh, that idea didn't work.

Let me avoid doing that in the future.

And you just over and over and over again, and just compound.

So the public praises people for what they practice in private.

I love it. I mean, it's cliche to say it takes 10 years to become an overnight success, but go, go listen to, I remember, um, when George Mac, uh, I went back and listened to cause George was like one of your first guests and I went back and listened to the very first time, so models show.

And then you go and look at your skills as a podcaster, it says it, you see this in literally everything.

Self -pity has no utility.

If you live long enough, bad things will happen to you.

Your goal is to use the bad in life in a constructive fashion.

So self -pity has no utilities, another maximum from Charlie Munger.

And, um, 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, I like, uh, he, he can speak to this because he had, he went, he experienced the worst, uh, 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.

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, to heal him.

So he is just went through a divorce.

He's not doing well financially because Charlie Munger doesn't become a full time investor until he's 40.

So he's 20 at late twenties in the story.

And he is struggling at work, failed marriage.

And he is going to the hospital every day and slowly watching his son fade away.

So anybody that's lost somebody from cancer, like my mom died breast cancer in 2017, the last two years of her life were the worst way to die because there's all three bones too.

And so like you literally see her like get smaller and like not be able to get a bed and be addicted to pain medication and like, can't do anything without it.

Um, and so it's one thing for that to happen to your mom is obviously going to be devastating.

It's the love you have for your mom is orders of magnitude less than you have for your child.

When people will 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. And the way I would describe this, the best description of why they don't know what love is yet is actually a story that I heard Ryan Reynolds, the actor say, and he's like, you know, his wife Blake Lively, he's like, I've never loved somebody as much as I love Blake.

I think it's, it was impossible that I'd ever love somebody more.

He goes into that. And still the day that Blake gave birth to our baby daughter.

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

I was like, that's exactly right.

That is the best description.

And so when I, I, I don't just read these stories.

I try to put myself in their shoes.

And like, I, when I like cry, thinking about that happening to my son.

And even then he's like, listen, you're going to mourn.

It's going to change.

Certain bad things are going to happen in your life, right?

And many of these are out of your control.

That's the point. That's why it's like self -utility is not the solution.

Yeah. You're going to grieve.

You're going to mourn.

You're going to be changed forever.

You're if you lose your God, for you, lose your child, your life, your rest, your life's going to be fundamentally different.

Using a parent, your life is fundamentally different.

And his whole point, I think he, he quotes, Epic, Keep Epitetus, if I'm not mistaken, where he's just like the, the response to the inevitable tragedies of trials and tribulations you're having in your life is like learning from them and trying to use them as constructive in a constructive fashion.

It's not to wallow.

Oh, well, with me. Like bad things happening is a part of the human experience.

So self, self -pity has no utility utilize, spend your time doing something else.

The good ones, no more.

The top talent in every industry has gathered more information than most people would find reasonable.

Oh, this is my favorite.

This is literally what I'm doing for a living because it's also in the books.

So my idea was this, like, I don't think like, you don't have to be smarter than everybody else, right?

And some of the outside of your control, it doesn't matter what I do for the rest of my life, I will never be as smart as Charlie Munger, but I can gather more information than another person wants, would want to, right?

Um, and so like the, the example I have of this is like, uh, I read, I just told you my thing where like I read a biography about somebody to go into the, to the, um, bibliography and I find obscure books.

I found this obscure book on Thomas Edison, right?

In the bibliography of a book, uh, it was posted like 1950 or something like that.

And it talks about when he was 12 years old, he was so voracious and has such an innate inner drive to, to, to make something of himself and to become an inventor and like to really have control over 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 switch over.

So to be a few hours every day where he would go and he'd wind up finding himself in Detroit.

And so what he's doing, he goes, oh, there's a library here.

He reads every single book in the library over a course of a few years.

Um, there's a guy named Edwin Land who I won't shut up about.

I talk about all the time, because he was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs, Edwin Land's the founder of Polaroid.

He's also one of the most prolific, uh, individual inventors in American history.

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

Um, and so Steve Jobs, the reason I found Edwin Land is because Steve Jobs, when he was in his twenties, talks about meeting Edwin Land when he was in his seventies, 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 fifties, right?

He's still giving interviews.

So Walter Isaacson phrasebography still talking about this guy, Edwin Land, right?

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

You start reading about Edwin Land.

He does the exact same thing.

He, his idea, he had two, two goals in life.

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

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

He 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, the science of light and vision is 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, he 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 lines up front reads every single book on light.

And then starts to do his experiments.

Doesn't have any money.

Doesn't have resources.

He breaks into, I think NYU might be Columbia, let's say it's Columbia.

Breaks into Columbia, right?

There's a lot of, you know, misfits that do, uh, breaking an area.

They're like trying to steal your TV or something.

This guy was breaking in so he could use scientific, uh, scientific equipment so he can run his experiments.

But it's like, they just go to unbelievable levels of, um, like just way beyond that you would, you would find reasonable.

So another example of this, the good ones.

No more is this line from David Ogry.

Again, I didn't know who David Ogry was reading all of Warren Buffett shareholder letters, right?

And he keeps talking about this gen - he calls it.

He has this genius David Ogry.

I was like genius. Who is this guy?

Read about him. He talks about, he built one of the most valuable, uh, advertising agencies that ever existed and he talks about 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?

And he would encourage his, his, the people coming up, the young men in his organization, because I'm going to assign you to, uh, one of their biggest clients with shell oil.

Right. You're going to read every, you're going to read every single piece of paperwork on the company history.

You're going to read textbooks on geology.

You're going to read textbooks on oil exploration.

Uh, you're going to know all the executives at Shell.

You're on Saturdays, you're going to go down to the shell gas station and you're going to interview the customers of, that are, that are patronizing their business.

Within a year, you'll be ready to, uh, you'll be ready to take over your boss's position, but that, and he's like the good ones know more.

It's like that, he worked for a friend chef.

He's like, they just knew every single thing about, they collected more information about their craft and things related to their craft than anybody else.

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

There is a bar that lots of people get to.

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

That's a great insight.

Amount of talent that somebody has prepared.

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

There's a guy named Les Schwab, um, who he, he, we could have talked about him when we talked about the, the trying to not wind up like your dad because his dad was a drunk and a loser and Les was very poor.

And his dad, I think Les is like 12 years old or 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 in like, you know, half a century ago, 40 years ago.

Um, and he says something in his autobiography.

He's like, everything you do, it's volume.

It's like gusto. And it's a, he goes, the combination of gusto.

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

And he says, he says, it's a case of repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

And again, I think the, the, if you really want an edge in what you're doing, again, I'm not trying to copy.

I'm not trying to make a tire company.

I'm not trying to invent the instant photography, like Edwin Land did.

I'm not trying to be an inventor like Thomas Edison.

I'm not trying to build an advertising agency like David Oglemy, but I just take that idea as like good ones.

No more. So it's like, not only am I going to spend, I read for a few hours every day.

Right. That's usually in the morning.

Cause that's the time my, my brain works best.

Then I usually have lunch.

And then in the afternoon, what I do is then I reread past highlights and re listened to old episodes.

And I just seep myself in that.

So anytime you see like some kind of social media post from me, all that is, is something I reread that day that I read for the first time four years ago.

And I was like, Oh, that's kind of interesting.

I posted this, this quote about Rockefeller and importance of concentration.

Cause I went back through and I reread the highlights from the book Titan.

And that's what I was spending, you know, 30 minutes doing.

And it's just like, oh, I'm, I can't guarantee that I'm going to be successful.

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

But what I can do is like, I can't control that, but I can, cause it's more like, um, especially with podcasts.

It's like more like, uh, it's a subjective kind of thing.

Right? And, but I can objectively do more work to hopefully influence and tilt the subjective, uh, like nature of podcasting in my favor.

And I just, all I do is I, all I do is read books like, Oh, that's good idea.

I'll take that. Thank you very much.

This isn't fucking rocket science.

Money comes naturally as a result of service.

A business is just an idea that makes someone else's life better.

This drives me insane because again, all I do is hang out with founders.

And, you know, now the filters got a lot tighter than it has for the last few years.

But what I don't like is when people are like, you know, I always ask them, like, you know, who are your entrepreneurial heroes?

Like, who's the smartest person you know?

What's the best business you can think of?

Like, what's your favorite biography?

Like, who do you want to emulate?

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

about it. And what drives me insane is they're like, well, I want, they put a number on it.

It's not like I want to start a company that does X or I want to help somebody do Y it's I want to build a hundred billion dollar company.

It's like, do you understand that people that built a hundred billion dollar company, you think Jeff Bezos was sitting back there and was like, I'm going to build a $3 trillion company.

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

One of my favorite pieces of trivia about Apple, about Apple is the first ever Apple sale was made barefoot.

He didn't even have shoes on when he sold his first set of computers.

They weren't even computers.

Like his first Apple product, his first sale was made barefoot.

There's no way that guy was like, I'm going to start this because there's a number attached to it.

So money comes naturally as a result of service is from Henry Ford.

Okay. Henry Ford's autobiography, I think is like a mandatory, like, I think entrepreneurs should read it over and over again, you know, every two or three years, and he Henry Ford, and 1919, he owned a hundred percent of Ford motor company cause he bought out all his investors and he was arguably the richest

person in America at the time.

So it's like, it's like me and you owning like a $20 billion company.

We know outside shareholders today, like just insane.

Right. And yet you go and you analyze like hand the life of Henry Ford, and he's the one that said that is like, he had one single idea.

He's like, it's kind of messed up that, uh, cars are only for the rich people at the time.

They're like hand making them.

Most of the cars on the road are either electric or steam.

He obviously popularized internal combustion engine.

It was a funny, let me take a tangent.

It was a funny story.

I'm rereading, uh, Rockefeller's autobiography that he wrote when he's like in his eighties, uh, like a few months ago and he, there's a line in there where he's like young Henry Ford came to visit to me today.

I love that guy. And like, yeah, he made like the demand for the product.

You have a monopoly on.

Like orders of magnitude.

I bet you probably get my hug and a kiss when you see him.

Like, of course you love him.

But, but, uh, Henry, what I love about Henry Ford, and I love this about everything, it's like, you only need one idea.

You only have to be right one time.

Henry Ford had a single idea.

And his entire career, one idea.

Uh, everybody should be able to afford a car.

We can't do that right now because at the time cart, let's say cars were like $6 ,000.

And the average person made, you know, two bucks a day, a dollar a day.

It is not going to happen.

And so it took him, when you read biographies about him and his studies 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. 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.

He, the service he provided was he made the car affordable.

So everybody, and I literally think about like, there's a lot of great products.

There's not many products you can make that change the geography.

Like that's how influential this guy was.

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

It turns out how many people would want a car that they could afford.

Well, they're either on foot or they're being driven by horses.

Probably a lot if you can solve that problem.

And so the second line of that after Henry Ford says money comes out, actually as a result of service, the best definition of a business I've ever heard is that second line from, and that came from Richard Branson.

And the weird thing you're going to see, and he says that all businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better.

The weird thing that happens, this is, there's another maxim I repeat over and over again on the podcast that history doesn't repeat human nature does every generation thinks that there's no more opportunity, like, Oh, we missed it.

There's, like, there's always, there will be limitless opportunity as long as humans are alive, because all a business is, is an idea that makes somebody else's life better.

A podcast can make somebody else's life better.

The people that made the camera that make sure somebody else's life better, whoever made the microphone, the iPad, your drink that I down the orange sunrise when I'm doing my podcast that makes somebody else's life better.

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

If you love what you do, the only exit strategy is death.

Retirement can be fatal.

Again, this is something that that's fascinating because like my dad is like, uh, he's a blue collar guy.

He's got like an eighth grade education.

And, um, I realized, you said how normal, normal people can be.

And, um, I told him like, like, it was like a big deal to me because it's like the first, like super famous and like wealthy person that I got some time with was Sam's El and, you know, at the time Sam's El probably had like $10 billion or something like it was insane.

He's 81 years old. He's working seven days a week.

And, um, he was, you know, I talked to him, he's, he's like, I'm going to be doing deals to like die.

He was like obsessed with this and he was right.

He was working on deals six months later.

He's dead, still working, you know, every day or as you know, very, a lot, maybe not every day, but he was, he was still on all the time and my dad for the life of him could not understand that this guy had billions of dollars and he still chose to work and it realized like, Oh, for a vast majority

of people. Work. They equate work with something I have to do.

It's drudgery. There's a great line called how to do great, there's a great essay called how to do great work.

It's by this guy, Paul Graham.

And he, he, his guess is like how many people out of 8 billion people on the planet really wind up finding work that they love to do and is they're able to like support themselves with it.

There's a lot of people find things they like to do that they love, but can they make your, uh, your avocation, your vocation, I think is the line from Steve Jobs and Paul's guest programs.

Guess is like probably a few hundred thousand.

I think he might be right about that.

Like it is unbelievably rare where I don't look at like I wake up every day.

Like I get to do this, not I have to do this.

Sam's L 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, their exit strategy was death.

Not only would they not sell their company.

They would never retire.

I did this, this one of the episodes I'm most proud of and one of the guys I really like and I, uh, uh, it's the founder of Red Bull and his name's like Dietrich Mattress, Dietrich Miesches or something like that.

There's no even biography of him in English.

So I had to, I had to use chat GPT to translate a German biography to read in English, which is the transition, not perfect to do that episode.

And he came to my attention because he had just passed away and he remarkable story didn't start.

He was like a, uh, executive like a 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.

Uh, he owned 49 % of it.

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

Um, towards the end of his life.

Uh, he turned, uh, he was paying himself between like 200 million a year and five 700 million a year every year.

So that's his paycheck.

Uh, was turning down.

Like it right now, you could sell Red Bull for $40 billion, probably more.

So multiple times he turned down $10 billion in his pocket, 10, his share would be 10, $20 million.

His whole point is 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 ride his motorcycle.

He just live life to the fullest.

And there's so many people like that where like they achieve outside success because time carries most of the weights, all the stuff we've been talking about today and to them taking that away from them would be like losing a child.

What about retirement can be fatal?

Why did that line come from David?

That's a line from David Ogoughby.

And, um, same thing where he noticed it.

The problem is, is like, I think you, you've mentioned this on your show and I think you got some like shit for it before too, about like the different values that historically men and women and like how it contrasts.

Um, but for men, like for us, I think it's really important for us to like wake up every day and like, put solve a problem, put something out into the world.

Feel like we're being useful to our tribe.

You are not a selfish person.

Like you are a driven person, but you are doing, you are doing things every day for other people.

And I think when you remove that and they've showed studies of things like this, like then they don't have it.

It's not just work.

It's, this is my life's work.

This is my purpose.

Like I wake up every day with a burning desire to achieve mission success.

Like, well there's a, you know, thinking about it through, uh, an evolutionary lens, you're useful.

Yes. What are the signals that the world's giving you?

You're moving toward a goal.

You're useful. People need you to contribute.

And yeah, I, the, the evidence is there.

Your, your friend Jordan Peterson said something one time, I saw this clip on, um, on YouTube and 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.

And he's just like, they wake up every day.

He goes, you could put them in a forest and they would just run around all day chopping trees down with an ax.

Like they have to do something and to take away their ability to be productive, to be useful using your term is torture.

It is, it takes away their purpose.

It takes, in many cases, like you'll find like, Oh, they stop working.

And then all of a sudden this young or not young, this, you know, virile, healthy, overall healthy, older person is dead.

How did that happen?

And so I think when the point is like, this is the way I would describe this.

I think it's really important.

Um, and this is the, the maxim that, uh, I took away from the two hour conversation, I was Sam's L is go for freedom.

And essentially what he told me, he's like, listen, I know all the rich guys.

He's like, they're all miserable.

Uh, he's like, they make the mistake of like buying, spending more time doing shit that they don't like to buy slightly more nicer versions of the same shit.

That's his word himself.

That's what he said.

Right. He also did something that's hilarious.

He's like, I have a place in Chicago and I have a compound in Malibu.

That's the word he used, right?

And he goes, every year I take my family, 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 Sam's L Malibu house.

And so it's like, imagine having a house that's so well known a compound where it's like it's on Google images.

But his whole point was like, David, do not trade money for freedom.

Okay. He goes, go for freedom.

And this is the rough synopsis of what he said.

He goes, if you go for freedom, if you have freedom, you can control what you work on, if you control what you work on, you can work on what you love.

If you work on what you love, you'll do it for a long time.

If you do it for a long time, you'll get really good at it.

If you get really good at it, money will come as a result.

And so his whole point, he's like, I had unlimited money.

I never made the mistake of trading money in exchange for my freedom.

And that is really powerful.

And that gives you the ability when you find, like, when you really, your goal in life is to find your life's work and a thing that like the purpose, why you feel you're here and then to do it until you die, I can give you a list of people, Enzo Ferrari, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett's doing this, Charlie

Munger, Coco Chanel, Estee Lauder, the list goes on and on and on and on.

These people were decades past the need for working for money.

And in many cases, like Enzo Ferrari, he was working like 11 hour days, seven days a week for the rest of his life.

He didn't need the money.

Dude, I love what you do.

I said it at the start, I said it on the Q and A.

I think Founders is a podcast that everybody should go and listen to.

It's not a cadence that's going to actually eat into your modern wisdom time because you can only get one hour a week.

You've got to read all of the books.

Bro, you're great. You're great.

I really appreciate you as a friend.

I appreciate everything that you do.

Where should people go?

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

The Founders podcast and your podcast player.

You Founders podcasts on all the networks.

Dude, Chris, I admire you.

I'm so glad we became friends.

Like, I love the opportunity and I appreciate you inviting me.

Until next summer. You're the man.

Appreciate you.

[The Core Principles of History’s Greatest Founders: Wisdom from David Senra]-[#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders]

📋 Summary

The Anatomy of Excellence: Lessons from History's Greatest Founders

Excellence as the Capacity to Take Pain

The Power of Will and Problem-Solving

Relationships and the "Seamless Web of Trust"

The Intergenerational Inflection Point

The Discipline of Study and Endurance

Conclusion: The Only Exit Strategy is Death

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript