So who exactly was this Floyd character I was referring to earlier?
His name was Floyd Ray Wilson, and he was about 37.
And for a year and a half in the late 1970s, he lived in my house.
He used to date my mom's best friend Jackie.
And years earlier, he would visit the apartment that my mom and I shared with her two roommates,
Jackie and Lilian.
And every time he came by, it was exciting.
Because I thought Floyd was really cool, and I could talk movies with him.
And since he was a hip guy who saw a lot of shit, he could keep up.
I remember where Jackie introduced us.
I was 10 years old.
And she said, Quentin, Floyd's who you should talk to about movies, he knows as much as
you do.
So I, a 10 year old, started testing this grown-ass man on his knowledge of movies.
Finally, I was able to talk to somebody about movies who knew what the fuck I was talking
about.
Also during this time, I realized a hard way that Floyd was a flaky guy who couldn't
be counted on.
On at least two occasions, he told me he'd come over next Saturday and take me to the movies.
Oh boy, I thought, not just talking about movies with Floyd, but actually going to the movies
with Floyd.
But when Saturday came, no Floyd.
No call, no excuse, no apology, just no show.
He either forgot or he didn't give a shit.
And I was so excited too.
As the hours passed and I waited and I waited and I waited and he got later and later, I finally
realized he wasn't coming.
I wasn't mad.
I was heartbroken.
I didn't even think of myself as a kid, but even I knew you didn't do that to a kid.
But I forgave Floyd and played it cool the next time he came by.
And a few visits later, he promised to take me out again.
I made sure when he left that he remembered that we had plans and I'd be waiting for him.
And he said, of course, no problem.
See you next Saturday.
And the fucking guy did it to me again.
But this time I wasn't heartbroken.
I felt lousy but not crushed.
It was just now I knew who Floyd really was.
He was an adult I couldn't count on.
This is a theme that's going to reappear over and over again.
Quinten's fierce self belief and fierce independence because he was surrounded by a bunch of adults
he couldn't count on.
He was an adult I couldn't count on.
I also promised myself when I grew up that I'd never do that to a kid.
Now cut to 1978.
I'm 15 going on 16.
My mom's work is requiring her to spend more and more time away from the house.
Or she wanted to and that was a good excuse so she ran with it.
Which happened to coincide with the age that I started getting in trouble a lot.
A lot of fights in school, skipping school and staying out late.
I was a young wise guy who thought he was tough.
So mom rented Floyd a spare room in our house with the provision that she keep an eye on
her 16 year old son.
I still thought Floyd was the coolest.
Yeah, yeah, years ago he stood me up.
But since that time I had gone through the whole trauma of being sent to Tennessee and
put in the care of hillbilly alcoholics.
I think that was his grandparents.
So by that time Floyd being a flake was easy to forgive.
But it equipped me with two pieces of information that would prove valuable as our relationship
move forward.
One, I could not count on Floyd.
And two, I cared more for Floyd than he cared for me.
I'm sure my mom thought she came up with a perfect solution for the whole what to do
with Quentin Problem.
At the time, I don't think she was aware of what a shady cat Floyd really was.
Nor did she consider the ramifications of having her very impressionable young son spend
so much time around such a sketchy dude.
It was sort of like moving Samuel Jackson's character in Jackie Brown or Del Robbie into
your home and having him look after your 16 year old boy for over a year.
And if you've seen Jackie Brown and you know that or Del Robbie was a character that was
a gun runner, killed people and attempted to manipulate every single person around him.
During the year of 1978 and some of 1979 Floyd and I saw a lot of movies together.
During this time, the only family I had around me was my mom.
But to us, her close circle friends were our family.
Her best friend Jackie was like my second mom.
Her friend Lillian was like my aunt.
Jackie's brother Don was like my uncle and they all looked out for me.
Floyd in his own way looked out for me too.
The difference between Floyd and them was while they loved me, Floyd didn't give a shit
about me.
Don't get me wrong, Floyd liked me, we had a good time together.
You see a guy like Floyd could like you and simultaneously not give a fuck whether you
lived or died.
One doesn't contradict the other.
If you're a guy like Floyd, not to say Floyd didn't have affection for me, but he was
always looking out for number one and that wasn't me.
It's very much like Ordole Robbie and Jackie Brown.
And it wasn't the worst thing in the world to hang around an adult who didn't treat you
with kid gloves.
You told it to you like it is without too much concern for your feelings.
Floyd never lied to me about me.
He didn't care enough about me to lie to me.
Obviously sometimes I hurt my feelings, but through Floyd I received an authentic glimpse
on the impression I was making on others.
Floyd moved out in 1979.
When Floyd moved out he was gone never to be seen or heard from again.
And that was a story of Floyd.
I didn't hold it against Floyd for not keeping in touch.
I'm sure he had enough of me.
And by that time he had done things to just chant everybody in our circle.
He was persona non grata with my mom due to some jewelry and a pawn shop and I'm sure
other things that I wasn't aware of.
Nevertheless Floyd Ray Wilson left a lasting impression on the 15 and 16 year old boy he
mentored in the year of 1978 as well as a bit of legacy that he could have never imagined.
What exactly Floyd did for living all these years was open to wild speculation.
Like everyone I've ever met like him, he always had stories of the days when he was living
the high life.
But if he's 37 years old and moving into his old girlfriend's best friends spare room
and made to keep a lookout on her teenage son he couldn't have been doing so well.
Floyd was a very personable guy yet he never had friends when the old days visit him which
I can't say rang any bells back then.
But now I think it's due to the fact that he didn't have any old friends.
People were in Floyd's life for a while and then they weren't.
The Floyd did have an ambition Floyd wanted to be a screenwriter by the time he moved
into my house he had written two screenplays.
Floyd's two screenplays were the first two screenplays I ever read.
The script that I loved the first script I ever read was Floyd's epic western saga called
Billy Spencer.
The story featured an incredibly cool black cowboy named Billy Spencer.
The essence of what Floyd was trying to accomplish in that script, an epic western with a black
heroic cowboy at its center was the very heart of what I was trying to accomplish with
Django Unchained.
But even more influential than any script was having a man trying to be a screenwriter living
in my house.
Him writing.
Him talking about a script.
He reading it made me consider for the first time writing movies.
It would be a long road from that year of 1978 to me completing my first feature length
screenplay true romance in September 1987.
So another theme that's 11 years between the idea and then the completion of the idea
that's going to be another main theme in Quentin's life.
The fact that he uses ideas, you know, sometimes decades later after he discovers them.
But due to Floyd's inspiration, I tried writing screenplays.
I usually never got that far, but I tried and eventually I succeeded.
So what happened to the script for Billy Spencer?
Nothing.
I'm sure at the time of his death, Floyd was the only one who still ought to copy of it.
And whenever he died, wherever he was, it was disposed of with the rest of his meager
possessions.
And whatever trash can it was tossed into was the final resting place of Floyd Ray Wilson's
dream of a black cowboy hero named Billy Spencer.
My dream of a black cowboy hero, Django Unchained, was not only read, it was made by me into a worldwide
smash, a smash that resulted in me winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
By the time I walked up to that podium and accepted the Oscar, Floyd was long since dead.
I don't know how he died, where he died, or where he's buried, but I do know that I
should have thanked him.
That was an excerpt from the book that we talked about today, which is cinema speculation
and is written by Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino is probably my favorite filmmaker.
This book is unlike any other book that I've read so far for the podcast.
I'm going to read from the front flap, like the front cover, about what's going on here.
And one of my favorite lines, and it jumps out, I says Tarantino is possibly the most joyously
infectious movie lover alive.
He's been obsessed with movies for 53, 54 years.
And so it describes what this book, this unusual book is.
But once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and a wonderful personal history,
it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as Quentin Tarantinos.
With a rare perspective about cinema, possible, only from one of the greatest practitioners
of the art form ever.
That idea is that it's written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as Quentin
Tarantino.
Maybe the lesson for you and I is the importance of having a very distinct, distinctive brand.
I've seen all Tarantinos movies multiple times, I've watched all his interviews.
I hear his voice.
When I read this book, I don't hear the words in my voice.
I hear it in his, and that idea that he has a singular voice that's recognizable immediately
as his own.
I might be of something more in Buffett said on the power of brand.
Warren said, everyone has something in their mind about Disney.
When I say universal pictures or 20th century Fox, you don't have anything special in your
mind.
If I say Disney, you have something special in your mind.
So as a mother going to walk in and pick out a universal pictures video and preference
to Disney, that's not going to happen.
And that is what you want to have in a business.
That is the mode and you want to mode, you want to widen that mode.
And that is exactly what Tarantino has and I would argue is one of his most valuable assets.
So I think this book gives you, is going to help give you an idea of like, how did that
come to be?
It's very unusual.
It's not really an autobiography.
You're going to, like, learn about his life.
But what he's doing is he's like writing these in depth reviews of these movies that he
watched in the 70s and then early 80s.
There's maybe like eight to 10 that he goes in detail.
And it's through this analysis that we get an idea of what was going on in his life at
the time.
And so here's something that's going to jump out because it starts out.
He starts being a, becoming obsessed with movies at seven years old.
This idea that true interest is revealed early is certainly true for Tarantino.
And his mom, this is going to be a main theme.
His mom let him watch adult movies at a very, very young age.
And so something I thought about a lot was other parents would say this is a bad idea.
In fact, some other parents wouldn't let their kids play with Quentin because he was watching
all these crazy movies.
So other parents would say, okay, this is a bad idea.
But this supposed bad idea leads Quentin to his life's work.
And if you think about it, like he's watching them at say a decade before, you know, we're
like 17 18, you're probably watching a bunch of R rated movies.
He's watching them at seven and eight.
And so it's almost like he had a decade of extra practice and study because of his mom's
quote unquote irresponsible decision.
So let's jump right into that.
He says, my young parents went to a lot of movies around this time and they usually brought
me along.
I'm sure they could have found someone else to pawn me off on, but instead they allowed
me to tag along.
But part of the reason I was allowed to tag along was because I knew how to keep my mouth shut.
I was encouraged to act mature and well behaved because if I acted like a childless pain
in the ass, I'd be left at home with the babysitter.
I didn't want to stay at home.
I wanted to go out with them.
I wanted to be part of adult time.
When they took me to the movies, it was my job to sit and watch the movie whether I liked
it or not.
And so this is the first example of this lifelong hobby that he's going to have where it says,
you know, the front cover, he is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive.
This idea of being in love movies and then analyzing them is going to be the foundation
of his life's work when he starts making his own.
So he starts asking questions about the meaning of films from very young age.
There's a ton of examples like this in the book.
So he's talking to his mom after they just watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid.
So that movie ends with the implication, but they do not show it that all the people
died.
And so he said, what happened?
I remember asking, they died.
My mom informed me.
They died.
I yelped.
Yes, Quentin, they died.
My mother assured me.
How do you know?
I asked.
Because when it froze, that was what it was meant to imply.
Why didn't they show it?
I asked almost indignantly.
They should have shown it.
And as you know from his movies, he definitely shows to show it.
When a child reads, this is the main point of why I'm reading this to you.
When a child reads an adult book, there's going to be words.
They don't understand.
But depending on the context and the paragraphs surrounding the sentence, sometimes they
can figure it out.
Same thing when a kid watches an adult movie on the ride home from the movies.
Even if I didn't have questions, my parents would talk about the movies we had just seen.
These are some of my fondest memories.
These are some of my fondest memories.
It was interesting to review the movie that I had just seen from there from the perspective
of their analysis.
So this in-depth study of movies forms the basis of his entire career.
By the time he starts writing his own scripts and making his own movies, he has a comprehensive
database of movies in his head.
If you were to have some kind of contest for movie history trivia of all the filmmakers
alive, I highly suspect that Tarantino would win back to this.
In that year of 1970, I saw a lot of intense shit.
He is seven.
He is seven in the year of 1970.
Because I was allowed to see things that other kids weren't, I appeared sophisticated to
my classmates.
Because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie making era in
the history of Hollywood, they were right.
I was.
At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren't letting their
children see, I asked my mom about it.
She said, Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news.
A movie is not going to hurt you.
This was Quentin's response when his mom said that to him, his mom's name is Connie.
It is interesting that he refers to her by her first name, but he says, right fucking
on Connie.
And so before I go on, it's really fascinating to think about this.
Most parents would say that Quentin's mom was making the wrong decision, letting her
young son watch these violent, orrated movies, especially the movies in the 1970s.
He feels like that was the best age of movies.
If you go back and actually analyze, he took a bunch, this is going to be incredible.
This is again why you and I know that we're on the right path over and over and over again.
We see the people who get to the top of their profession.
They have this comprehensive database in their head of the history of all the great work
they came before them.
There's a ton of, you know, I've been watching Chantoon movies forever.
I didn't know until I read this book.
There's exact lines, there's themes.
There's ideas that all he was doing is taking ideas from the 70s and then adapting him
to his own work.
But going back to this, it is impossible to read this book and not think that her decision
was helpful to his future career.
This is something I was thinking about myself because I was watching these movies when
I was watching Scarface and Godfather and all these violent movies when I was like a small
kid.
Yet with my own kids, I don't want them to do that.
I was watching.
I think I watched, this is crazy.
If people were to ask me, they're like, you know, I look at founders.
This is like one giant conversation on the history of entrepreneurship that I'm just
constantly updating every week and I hope to have, you know, for the rest of my life.
So I really don't look at it as, yeah, they're updated in separate episodes, but it's just
one conversation.
But if you'd asked me like, what I think the best episode ever was capable of making,
I think the best episode I've ever made so far was episode 311 on James Cameron.
And what happened with that is I kept trying to sit down and record and I couldn't stop
finding more interesting things about James Cameron.
And so I kept pushing it back and pushing it back and pushing it back.
I did the exact same thing.
I've been in listed Quentin Tarantino Deep Hole for, you know, two over two weeks because
I can't stop finding interesting, fascinating things about this guy.
And so you read this book and he mentions a movie made or then I'm watching what your
interviews with him at the same time.
So then I go back and watch the movie and like, oh, I missed that.
I didn't even understand it the first time.
And so during this time, I remember my daughter who's only 11, she comes in just as like,
you can't like listen.
I love you.
I love to spend a ton of time with you.
There's no way that you can watch Inglourious Bastards or Django Unchained or Pulp Fiction,
which are the movies I've been watching.
And I'm making that decision with my daughter and it probably is the right decision.
In the face of the fact that, you know, everybody said this is irresponsible.
They're literally not letting the friends at school.
Their parents are not letting them hang out with Quentin because what his mom lets
him see.
And there's just impossible.
It is absolutely impossible to read this book and not realize that that was actually
the right decision.
The obsession of movies grabs him right at a very young age and it never lets him go.
I love this idea that people don't have ideas, ideas have people.
And I think that's a great explanation of what happened with Tarantino.
There's a podcast I listen to.
There's a bunch of podcasts and interviews I listen to to prep for this conversation
as well.
And one of them was on the, he was, he was interviewed by his friend Brian Coppeman on
the podcast the moment.
And what was fascinating is Tarantino says that like this comes naturally like he thinks
in movies.
So he's going to talk over and over again about all the books that he reads.
He's obsessed with, he's, he's not going to surprise you.
He's obsessed with reading biographies and autobiographies of filmmakers, actors,
all kinds of people.
But he says when he reads books that he thinks in terms of movies.
So he literally will make the book that he's reading into a movie in his head.
And so he says as he reads, he puts a notepad next to him where then he starts writing
casting lists.
He's like, you know, there might be 15 characters in a novel.
He's reading or biography or autobiographies reading and he starts like, okay, well, who,
if this was, if this book was a movie, who would play that?
He starts adapting the plot.
He's like, okay, why can I would add, I would add to this like plot line or I'd remove
that or I would do it this way.
And he was like that from a very young age.
It was very fascinating.
The reason I brought this up is because he talks about, you know, I felt I was more sophisticated
in my classmates because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest moving
making error in the history of Hollywood.
What was interesting is he was so uninterested in score because he was so obsessed with movies
that people thought he was dumb.
And so if he didn't care about schoolwork, it was like zero or a hundred, right?
He's like, I'm going to be completely obsessed with movies.
Anyway, schoolwork that's not movies.
I don't care about.
But he was reading at an adult level way.
He's obviously not stupid.
He was reading an adult level way before a lot of the other kids.
And so people would make fun of him because he got bad grades.
And he said that there was one supportive teacher.
He was getting Mr. Simpson and Quentin's in like a public school.
And he's like, listen, Mr. Simpson saw something in me thought I was special.
He didn't.
He thought I was vastly underperforming because I would, you know, read, I could read and
have intelligent conversations about what I'm reading, but I wasn't doing any schoolwork.
And so this guy, this teacher, devised an entire separate curriculum just for him.
And when other people in the class would make fun of Quentin and say, oh, Quentin's kind
of dumb, Mr. Simpson would get up.
And he would stop like the bowling.
He said, listen, Quentin is reading on a level so far superior to you.
He's reading on an adult level.
He's reading on my level is what Mr. Simpson would say.
And then another interesting clue about the depth of his obsession is that he starts writing
screenplays instead of doing his schoolwork.
And he's like, you know, why is in the school?
He says I was a little surprised that the school wasn't looking at this as an academic
thing.
They looked at my writing and creating stories as they defined act of rebellion.
And they did that because essentially turned Tino's creating his own curriculum instead
of just regurgitating or accepting what they're giving him to learn.
So then in the book, he starts to talk about his childhood.
There is a million notes that I have left to myself as I'm reading this book.
Where is Quentin's dad?
Where is his dad?
Where is his dad?
I'm asking this over and over again because his stepfather, he referred to his parents earlier
that's his stepfather Kurt.
Turns out, I didn't know.
He's never mentioned in this book, but it's obvious that he's like yearning for some
kind of male, like positive male role model or figure in his life.
And I don't think he ever found one.
As you heard, he's hanging out with, or Del Robby, Floyd Ray Wilson, when he's like,
you know, 1617, that's not the person I want my son with when he's 16 or 17.
And what I found out later that he never knew his dad, I think his mom got pregnant super
early.
I would guess I couldn't find the exact date, but my guess is based on what I like the
context around it.
It's like probably 18, maybe 20, something like that, maybe 21.
And so he never met his biological dad.
His dad was never there.
But his mom winds up getting divorced from his stepdad.
And then when Quentin is 10 years old, this is what I meant about one of the main themes
that this kid had to grow up, this guy, I guess he was kid, this kid grew up fast.
And so now he's living with his mother in an apartment, he grew up in LA, okay?
They're all cocktail waitresses.
And it's his mom, his, her and her two best friends, Jackie and Lilian.
And so he describes this time in his life, he says all three were young, hip, good looking
women in the funky 70s with a penchant for dating professional athletes.
Remember he is 10.
During this time, my mother was dating a professional football player named Reggie.
Reggie asked to hang out with me.
Being a football player, he asked, does Quentin like football?
She told him no, he likes movies.
Well as luck would have it, so did Reggie.
And this one's a being a very important, Reggie's not going to stick around.
This is where the weird thing that's in the book, like these guys are, you know, there's
like a, let's just say a steady stream of people coming in and out, a series of men that
his mom were dating.
And in some of those men, Quentin would watch movies with.
And one of those guys introduced him to this genre that's going to be, that came around
in the 70s that is hugely influential to Quentin's movie career.
And I think it's pronounced black's plortation.
And so Reggie introduces him to this genre because he says my little face was the only white
face in the audience.
That was my first movie in an all black movie theater in a black neighborhood.
And he absolutely loved it.
He says as far as I was concerned, mom could marry this cat to one degree.
Now this is crazy.
This is all going to tie together.
And then you see the influence on his work later.
But he says to one degree or another, I've spent my entire life since both attending movies
and making them trying to recreate that experience of watching a brand new Jim Brown film
on a Saturday night in a black cinema in 1972.
The massive, this is the interesting part, which I didn't put together.
Again, this is why I think it was so helpful to me to constantly like put off like I sat
down, I was like, oh, I'm not ready.
I'm not ready.
I can't, I keep finding more interesting things because I didn't understand the full context
around this till, you know, two weeks, maybe a week and a half after I read this.
The massive theater full of black males cheered in a way that nine-year-old little me had
never experienced in a movie before.
At the time, remember I kept asking, where is Quentin's dad?
Where is Quentin's dad?
At the time, living with a single mother, it was the most masculine experience I had ever
been part of.
Remember the scene that reappears over and over again in these books, you can always understand
the sun by the story of his father, the story of the father is embedded in the sun.
Quentin didn't know his father.
And so I'm watching this.
I might do a completely separate episode on it because it's so, it's so excellent.
I might, I'm going to have to do another Quentin episode down the line.
But he's being interviewed by Robert Rodriguez in this series called Director's Chair.
And what they also do is, you know, it's directors, interviewing directors, and then they
also take questions from other directors.
And one of them was very surprising.
They're like, hey, are you ever going to do, I think maybe Francis Ford Coppola was
going to ask, ask him the question too, which is fascinating because you can always understand
the sun by the story of his father, the story of the father is embedded in the sun, comes
from Francis Ford Coppola's biography that I covered back on 242.
Wow, I didn't put that together until just now.
So that's incredible.
He adds, so I'm almost positive.
Francis Ford Coppola's going to ask him the question, it's like, are you ever going
to do anything more autobiographical?
Is it always going to be like somebody, you know, Quentin writes all of his movies?
I think he wrote every single one except for Jackie Brown.
And so he says like he did do auto, this is going to be surprising.
This was shocking to me that the most autobiographical film that he did was Kill Bill.
What the hell?
What do you mean?
Well, how is it even possible if we've seen Kill Bill one and two, which also interesting
enough, Quentin thinks it's just one movie.
He thinks of Kill Bill one and two as one movie, but he said it was the most autobiographical
movie that he ever did.
He just hit it under a bunch of metaphor and stories and everything else.
And so I'm rewatching Kill Bill.
And there's a line about Bill in Kill Bill two that I think applies to Tarantino.
If you combine this book with his movies, with these interviews, with that random question.
And he says like most men who never knew their father, Bill collected father figures.
I think that was what Quentin was doing and the way he did it was by movies.
He was looking for these male father figures in movies.
And what's fascinating is how much I've related to that.
My friend, Jeremy Gaffon has this ability to get right to the heart of the matter one time.
One time just randomly said to me, oh, pretty obvious what you're doing with the podcast.
So what do you mean?
And he said in your entire family, there's never been a successful role model.
So that's what you're doing with these biographies.
It's this obsessive search for a successful blueprint that you can emulate.
And I had never consciously had that thought before, but as soon as it came out of his mouth,
it was like, oh, he's right.
And so let's go back to Tarantino's childhood.
Later on in life, he was well known for his film knowledge and his video recommendations.
So like when he was working at his job, he's working minimum wage, trying to rate scripts.
He's working at video archives, which is a video rental place in Manhattan, Peach.
But everybody in the local community knew about the weird movie nerd at the video archives
because he had this extensive film knowledge and video recommendations that would come
directly from his brain.
Later on in life, like when people, he said, when people ask me if I went to film school,
I tell them, no, I went to films.
So this entire book is teaching you the importance of reps, reps, reps.
Tarantino was kidding on a lot of reps at a very young age.
He talks about the fact that he would go to double and triple features.
I don't think they even do this in movie theaters anymore.
It's like you watch one movie, then they immediately after start playing a second movie.
And then in some cases, they immediately after playing a third movie or sitting in the
movie theater for seven, eight, nine hours.
The depth of his obsession cannot be understated.
A young Tarantino, for some reason he doesn't mention why, but he has a child psychotic
psychologist and he says when he does sessions with her, all they would talk about is the
movies that they saw.
And so this is what a typical weekend would look like between the ages of eight to 11
years old.
My mom would drive me to the cinema on a Saturday, on Saturday and Sunday afternoon,
then drop me off and come back and pick me up four or five hours later.
And so this goes back to his mom's unusual, unusually relaxed attitude about movies,
sitting directly to his phenomenal career because by the time he starts making movies and
writing his own scripts, you know, 11, 15 years later, he's got this encyclopedic knowledge
of his industry just like Charlie Munger, just like Sam Zell, just like Kobe Bryant, just
like Magnus Carlson, the dominant chess player.
I was listening to my friend Patrick's podcast and best like the best.
It's episode three, 48.
I'll link it down below.
But it's Patrick and John Carlson, which are the founders of Stripe.
The title of the episode is a business state of mind, but they mentioned something in that
episode that was very fascinating that Magnus Carlson, who's, you know, dominating chess.
When he was younger, he entered some chess trivia contest.
It was just chess trivia and he won it.
He knew the most chess trivia out of anyone who's in this contest.
And that's this is a, I'm quoting from the episode.
He knew the most chess trivia out of anyone who was in this contest.
And that's not a coincidence that the world's number one player has also studied the most
about all chess history.
He's extremely knowledgeable on that.
You could say the exact same thing about Tarantino.
And so if you studied Tarantino's love and dedication to his craft, you can't help
up compare to your love and dedication to your own.
And so there's an incredible story about this.
And it's very simple.
Like how bad do you actually want it?
You can tell that Tarantino deeply, deeply wanted it.
The story I'm going to tell you takes place a decade, a decade before he writes his first,
he successfully sells his first screenplay.
It says, when I saw the movie Rolling Thunder with my mother and her boyfriend, Marco,
in 1977, it blew my fucking mind.
I loved Rolling Thunder.
For a period of 10 years, I followed it all over Los Angeles whenever and wherever it played.
This is way before Home Depot.
This is before Home Video.
This is before streaming.
You literally had to wait until they replay movies over and over again.
I don't even think they'd do this now.
And then he would go all over the city of Los Angeles looking for this.
I did this before I knew how to drive a car or before I had a car.
I would travel by bus hours away from my home to some really sketchy neighborhoods to
see Rolling Thunder.
After I watched the film a few times, I began to have a deeper understanding of it.
Again, this is another thing.
He will tell over and over again, you hear this in conversations, you hear this in writing.
He's like, oh, yeah, watch that movie 15 times.
I watched that movie six times.
It's not one or two movies he did this for.
He repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.
You know what's insane?
Tarantino made his own read-wise.
He made his own founders notes.
He had scrapbook.
So this is what he does.
He's comparing his love and dedication to films compared to this other director.
And he says, this guy didn't nor did he keep scrapbooks, make notes and keep files on index
cards of all the movies he saw growing up like I did.
That is read-wise and founders notes before software.
He's got the analog version of that.
He's got a database of index cards of every single thing and files on all the movies he
had growing up.
It would be almost impossible to approach whatever you're working on like Tarantino approached
what he was working on and not come out successful on the other time.
But this story is not over.
So he's like, okay, I'll get on a bus.
I will travel by bus for hours just to see this movie.
I will watch it over and over and over again so I can have a deeper understanding of the
film.
This is exactly like Napoleon.
The advice Napoleon gave you and I a couple weeks ago on episode 337.
What did he say?
You know, do you watch one movie one time?
Do you read a book one time?
Do you listen to the podcast one time?
Well, good.
He's just a little bit dusted by the people that repeat, repeat, repeat, and put in more
reps.
Napoleon said, read over and over again, the campaigns of Alexander Hannibal, Caesar, Fredrick
the Great, make them your models.
This is the only way to become a great general to master the secrets of the art of war with
their own genius enlightened by this study.
Quentin Tarantino was enlightening his own genius by this study, by building this database,
by taking these notes, by going to such great lengths.
And what does he do next?
That film Rolling Thunder made me a champion of its director, John Flynn.
So much so that I sought out, I sought him out at 19 to interview him.
How does he do that?
How did I manage that?
Simple, but not easy.
I looked up every John Flynn in the phone book, called them up and asked him, is this John
Flynn?
If they said yes, then I asked him the John Flynn who directed Rolling Thunder till eventually
one said, yes, it is.
Who is this?
Wow.
He's fucking him.
I had never spoken to a movie director before, no less the director of one of my favorite
movies.
So I introduced myself and told him I was writing a book on film directors and could we get
together an interview and could I interview him about his career?
And he agreed and we set a time and he invited me over to come over to his house and conduct
the interview.
As we sat down in his living room to conduct the interview, I began asking my questions
and testing my theories about Rolling Thunder.
I was so inexperienced at what I was doing that I brought my tape recorder with me, but
I only brought one cassette.
I could not imagine him giving me more than an hour.
So one, obviously did.
So once both sides of the tape were done, I didn't want to look like an idiot.
So I just kept flipping it over and re-recording over what I had just recorded.
So all this stuff on his early career was lost forever.
That is the end of that story.
That is why I titled that story, How Bad Do You Want It.
Here's another story that you and I have talked about in the past.
Steve Jobs was 14 years old.
Looks up Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of HP.
He's got a question he wants to make frequency counters.
He calls them up, Bill answers the phone.
He's like, hey, I'm Steve Jobs, I'm 14 years old.
I want to make frequency counters.
Can I have some extra parts?
Bill laughs and laughs and laughs.
Start us hilarious.
Gives him the parts and gives him a summer job on the assembling line at HP when he's
like 14 years old, assembling frequency counters.
So I want to go back to where this started, this unexpected benefit of his mom's unusually
relaxed attitude, about these violent movies, these R-rated movies, these adult movies,
that directly leads to the decade extra of time and reps and study, which that in turn
leads to the encyclopedic knowledge of his industry.
The people I mentioned earlier, in addition to Napoleon, was Charlie Munger, Sam Zell and
Kobe.
I didn't get a chance to meet Kobe before he passed away, unfortunately, but I got a chance
to meet both Charlie Munger and Sam Zell before they died.
And I'm telling you right now, I spoke directly to Charlie Munger for three hours.
You could ask him any question I wanted.
I spoke to Sam Zell for two hours.
You could ask him any single question I want.
They know this stuff down pat.
And I met Sam Zell before I met Charlie Munger and I remember coming back to my house
and telling my wife, I was like, I want that.
I want that at 81 years old, right?
I didn't know he was going to die six months later or maybe even less than that four months
later.
But, you know, he was still so fired up about what he was doing.
He wanted to, like, he didn't, he's like, what am I going to retire?
There's nothing to retire from.
You know, the guy's got billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars, not doing
it for money, doing it for the love, saying he's just going to do deals so he dies.
But when I came back from that, that conversation was, you know, he started, he was, he had 61
years experience as an entrepreneur and I'm supposed to be the business history guy.
And for two hours, there's not one thing that I could bring up that Sam Zell didn't
already know.
And I came back and I remember telling my wife, I was like, I know I'm on the right path.
You don't sell a company for $38 billion like Sam Zell did.
Then you learn all this shit.
You don't make incredible movies like Django and Chain and Inglorious Bastards and Pulp
Fiction and then learn all this shit.
You learn it way before in some cases, decades before you use it.
There's no way you can tell me that you and I are not on the right path that this complete
dedication to trying to condense, clarify this comprehensive knowledge of history, based
on较, we're clearly on the right path.
You see it over and over and over again in these people that get to the top of their
professions.
So people that literally get become great at what they do, whether it's war, chess, politics,
business, filmmaking, it's all the same athletics.
You see it over and over and over again.
And the great thing is Tarenty is much older than I am, much more accomplished than I am.
And I'm like, oh, I thought I was dedicated to this.
I was like, oh, there's levels to this.
There's a great example.
He's a constantly comparing and contrasting.
You know, some filmmakers he likes, but he's like, oh, it's a job to them.
It's an obsession with me.
And so he talks about directors like Sam Peckampal and Don Siegel, who made great films.
Don Siegel made Dirty Harry.
They were genre film masters.
That's what Tarentino calls them.
But he says, but they didn't make genre film films the way that I do.
As students of genre, similar, we make films because we love genre films.
They made genre films because they were good at it.
And that's what the studios would hire them to do.
And so when Tarentino studies other people, just like when I study him, it's like, oh,
that fires me up.
I want that.
Just like what I said to my wife when I met Sam Zell, I want that.
And so when I met him, I was like, oh, that's what I wanted to do.
I wanted to do that.
I wanted to do that.
I wanted to do that.
I wanted to do that.
I wanted to do that.
I wanted to do that.
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This is fascinating.
This is fascinating.
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Comparing in contrasting the way that Kevin Thomas approaches his work
is the direct opposite of how most people approach theirs in the same industry.
Most critics writing for newspapers and magazines set themselves up as superior to the films that they were paid to review.
Which I could never understand.
Which I could never understand.
Because judging from their writing, this was clearly not the case.
They looked down on films they gave pleasure.
And on filmmakers who had an understanding of the audience that they did not.
As a kid who loved movies and paid to see pretty much everything, I just thought they were snide assholes.
Today, as a much older and wiser man, I realized the extent of how unhappy they must have been.
They wrote with the demeanor of somebody who hates their life and hates their job.
Kevin Thomas reviewed movies for the Los Angeles Times.
The LA Times was the morning newspaper that most agents and students
and most agents and studio executives read.
So it's influential not only to a young grandterrentino but also people working in the industry, you know, a decade before,
maybe a decade, maybe half a decade before Terrentino breaks them.
Years later, at the Torrance Public Library, I looked up one of his reviews.
Okay, if you find yourself at a public library looking for a review of a movie that came out 20 years earlier,
that is a sign that you're obsessed, that is a sign that you have maneuvered yourself into the exact industry you should be working in.
And so he talks about the fact that Kevin loved, he was very passionate, again passionate and enthusiastic, infectious,
that Kevin loved the movie for the review that he's reading.
Quentin Riek, Quentin goes to watch it, he says, after 20 minutes, I walked out on this one too.
But I never begrudged Kevin Thomas his enthusiasm. Did I waste money?
Yeah, but I'm not going to pretend I even gave a shit about that. I liked Kevin Thomas so much, I was glad that he at least had a good time.
Think about the contrast where he started this, where he's like, you know, I'm reading these critics for newspapers.
Oh, and then you realize, oh, they hate their lives, they hate their jobs.
And then he's reading Kevin Thomas, Kevin's like hyped up about this movie.
Quentin who loves movies goes to see, he's like, oh, I didn't like this movie, but I'm still happy because at least Kevin loved it.
Passion and enthusiasm is infectious.
And so what's never stated, but it's also implied if you read this story is like, oh, Kevin was just like Quentin in the sense that he maneuvered himself into a job he loved,
which then increases your enjoyment of overall your life, right?
Then he goes into the importance of having this historical database in your head because you never know when you're going to use these ideas.
And so here's an example of that one review Kevin Thomas wrote in 1980 that I read when I was 18 years old was to have a significant impact on my film 17 years later.
So it was a review, this is going to, so he's 18.
I'm going to use this 17 years later, right?
It was a review for a jaws rip off called alligator in his review of this giant alligator movie, okay?
Which Kevin called well made and lots of fun.
Kevin focused on two lead performances.
One of those lead performances was this was a young Robert Forster.
Remember, Quentin is 18 years old when he's reading this review about this performance of this actor named Robert Forster.
15 years later, when I was writing my adaptation to what would turn into the movie Jackie Brown, I had to consider who was going to play the likable lead male character,
Bale Bondsmann Max Cherry.
There was something about Forster an alligator that really stuck with me.
I watched the movie again and I felt that the character from alligator could be Max Cherry just 15 years earlier.
So I started writing the script as if he was.
Would I have done that without Kevin Thomas's highlighting Forster so positively in his review?
No.
In the end, who had made Kevin Thomas so unique in the world of the 70s and 80s film criticism, he seemed like one of the only few practitioners who truly enjoyed their job and consequently their life.
I loved reading him growing up and practically considered him a friend.
In 1994, I won an award for Pulp Fiction from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association when I stepped up to the podium and looked out before the audience of LA Critics.
My first remarks to the room were, gee thanks, now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like.
And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. I highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player are available at FoundersPodcast.com.
You'll be supporting this podcast at the same time. That is 344 books down 1,000 ago. And I'll talk to you again soon.
Spending two weeks studying Tarantino has got me completely fired up. I don't know if I'm done making podcasts on them.
I might make the next episode might be on them again.
I have a lot of material that I still want to talk about. But the main thing I want to talk about you real quick and I can keep this real short is I can't get over the fact that you know how Tarantino had this historical database in his head of the movie industry like the entire history of the movie industry.
It was in his head. It's something that he could call on and that he not only could call on but he called on multiple times and he would use in his work later on. I really believe that sage, which is the new feature Founders Notes, is that for you but for the entire history of entrepreneurship for the entire entrepreneurship industry.
It's kind of blowing my mind how you know because I told you since 2018 I've been fit. I did what Tarantino did. I didn't even know that he did this until I read this book.
But just like he was cataloging and making index cards and all the things of all the movies that he had been watching since since he was a kid.
Since 2018 all the books for every single book that I've read for this podcast. I've been adding in all my highlights, all my notes into this database called Readwise into this app called Readwise which allows me to search it to review it.
There's a bunch of different ways you can search by book, you can search by highlight feed, you can search by keyword.
And so for the last six months, I think you already know this but for the last six months I partnered with them. I was like, hey, I was getting a bunch of messages over the years of people saying, hey, I want access to all your notes and highlights.
And so I partnered with the team of Readwise to build Founders Notes.com. Founders Notes.com is where you sign up to get this if you haven't done so already.
And you could see exactly what I see. You see every single note, every single highlight, you can search through everything that I have that all all the notes and highlights that I have.
It's a giant searchable database about like the collected knowledge of history, history, history, and newspapers that I've gathered over since 2018.
So six years or whatever that's been. Then I started adding other features like putting in every single transcript into Founders Notes for every single episode.
And you can search every single word of ever, ever, ever uttered on the podcast. And then I had this idea for a feature to build an AI assistant on top of that.
And so in addition to you being able to read all my notes, highlight searching everything, reading all the transcripts, you can do that sage can do this for you. And it's insane because you know, I have fear you've heard me speak on other podcasts, you've heard me speak publicly.
You know, I don't know what people are going to ask me in advance. And I'll just use that historical databases in my mind to answer, just take me to the question and run it through everything I've learned from studying this podcast and then answer the question.
Except sage does this is a perfect memory. So what sage is I was I was calling this, you know, this feature couldn't figure out what to name it. I was going to call founders chat GPT or founder GPT.
I was going to call founders chat and I was like, well, that's not really what it what it is. And so somebody that was actually in the private beta. So sage is available to every single person that has access to founders notes. If you already have it, you can use this immediately.
If you haven't signed up, you should sign up like exactly. I mean, I don't know how you're going to listen to the podcast you just listen to and not realize how valuable it is to have this historical database in your head. And sage allows you to have this on demand anytime you want.
And so somebody that was in the private beta was testing sage was a bunch of people that existing subscribers of founders notes. They were testing it. And he sent me an email.
I was like, listen, what is this founders chat, all these other names that you have AI assistant all of this is not actually that's not a good description of what you've built. And he's like, why don't you call it sage. And then he sent me the definition.
And when I think of sage, I think of Charlie monger and there's exactly what Charlie had in his mind. And so the sage has two main definitions. It's a profoundly wise person. This refers to someone with a deep understanding of life, accumulated knowledge and sound judgment.
That is every single person that you and I have ever studied on the podcast, except sage allows you to do this with across hundreds of these kind of people.
They are often looked to for guidance and advice. That's exactly why I'm reading these books is exactly why I'm making the podcast right. And then it says sage is wise, discerning discerning or prudent. This describes someone who shows good judgment and makes well considered decisions.
And so what sage does right when you ask sage a question and I'll leave a list of the questions a bunch of people have been sending me questions that they've asked that they've gotten great responses from about the questions they haven't they work like.
How do I find new customers question distribution marketing all kinds of different things that you decisions you have to make in your career. And so what I'm eventually going to do is first of all sage right now it's available founders notes calm go to founders notes calm and get it.
Okay now eventually I already realize this is like I called the one of the founders that read wise this week I was like sage needs to be its own app we've got to figure out a way let's start building it immediately this one feature will be you it'll always be available in founders notes right.
But I want this for myself I wanted on my phone as an app as a stand alone feature and so what sage does it automatically you ask it a question right.
It automatically searches every single highlight for every single book that ever refer to a gas every single note for every single book that ever refer for the podcast it searches every single transcript for every single episode of this podcast to give you the best answer possible which means sage searches every word I've ever uttered on the podcast to help answer your question.
Every week I'm adding more notes more highlights more transcripts I have so much more data I'm putting into this with the goals over time just like.
I'm trying to take decades right to get to this historical databases in this head Charlie monger took decades to do that Kobe Bryant took decades to do it Napoleon Sam's all these people I mentioned the podcast sage will every single person that uses it to have that exact same except for all of history's greatest entrepreneurs all the ones that have studied on the podcast so far and all the ones that I will ever study on the podcast over time I really do believe that everything all the features I'm building in founders notes sage being a huge part of that is over time like my goals I want this ever increase.
This ever increasing giant valuable curriculum and tool that you can use your entire career with the goal of condensing and clarifying the collective knowledge of history's greatest founders if you have access to this information on demand it will make your decision making better is it is a way for you to what it Charlie monger said learning from history is a form of leverage so to get access go to founders notes dot com as founders with an as you can subscribe on an annual basis if you choose to or you can do a one time option which means you get every single note.
Highlight transcript I've ever done and every single note highlight transcript I ever do plus any new feature I ever add as I continue to add more data to it as I continue to add more features of course the price will go up so make sure you sign up now you can lock in the lowest price that will ever will be you can do this by going to founders notes dot com that is founders with an as just like the podcast founders notes dot com thank you very much for your support thank you very much for listening and I'll talk to you again soon.
