#336 How To Lose A Few Billion Dollars: Samuel Insull

24:50We have dozens of these. Where do we go? How do we do this? And how much do you think we could make from them? Remember, this job is starting the first night that he gets there. Let's say the sun sets. This is in February. So what time would the sun set? Maybe five in the afternoon, something like that. He works all the way through the night. By four in the morning, he had gone through every single one of these transactions and had a plan on how to distribute them and sell them for the highest possible price. Edison's like, okay, this is the guy. So he goes, hey, what do you want to make? And Insul's like, I don't care.

25:22Just pay me whatever. And again, think about that. It's like, pay me whatever. I'm going to prove my worth to you. And then it's not like Edison had Edison's not organized. So if someone asked if someone was to go back in time and ask Sam, hey, what were you doing for Edison? Whatever was necessary is the answer. Whatever is necessary. And so there's just one paragraph I want to read to you that describes this. He systematized Edison's office without attempting to systematize Edison's own activities. Edison Edison's whole method of work in so later recalled, would upset the system of any business office.

25:58He cared not for the hours of the day or the days of the week. And so we would talk about, it's not like he had a set schedule, right? He would work on whatever he thought was most important or most interesting at that time. And so sometimes it's, he would talk to all the people on the staff for two or three hours about an invention or a thought that he had the night before. Or he'd spend two or three days in a row trying to say, hey, I just got, I just created something. Now I'm going to spend two or three days just running experiment after experiment with as little sleep as possible to try to push this idea into some kind of practical application as soon as possible.

26:34And then once he figured, like he saw the problem, he would hand it off to somebody else to turn it into a product. But there was no like organization or rhyme or reason to like the way Edison spent his time. And there's a great description of this a few pages later where it says, systematic as Edison, well, first of all, it says Edison possessed a colossal ego, of course, but systematic as he was when pursuing his own ends, he had an almost pathological hostility to any form of system, order, or discipline imposed from without. So the mandate is clear. Build a business around me. Systematize that business.

27:08Do not try to systemize the way I spend my time. I do not want input from others on how I'm doing that. And so I mentioned earlier, I really think of Insel and a lot of the, like Carnegie and Rockefeller and Ford. They're definitely company builders, but even more bigger than that, they're industry builders. And so Insel was the same way, because remember, Edison's going to give up on electricity. Insel stays with it for his entire life. He works with, well, let me just read this line to you. He says, that was to be Insel's job for nearly 12 years with Edison and 40 years thereafter to make Edison's system work.

27:45And so why do I say it's really industry building? Because listen to all the things they have to invent that you just wouldn't if you're not building an industry. The inventions, the electricity inventions, could not be immediately used with existing devices. So to make his electric light usable, Edison and Insel had first to invent every component of an electric generating and distribution system and then to create the manufacturing industry to make them, an engineering organization to install them and a central station industry to buy them. Hundreds of minor parts of a complete electrical system had yet to be devised.

28:20They had to develop practical switches, sockets, cables, junction boxes, wires, insulators, fusers, meters, filaments, voltage regulators, and scores of other devices. This is company building on hard mode because it is industry building. So the great thing about Insul, especially from Thomas Edison's viewpoint, is like you could just drop them in anywhere. It's like, hey, there's a problem over here. Just go fix it. And then you can just know that he's going to fix it without having to think about it. So this is where he drops him into the company that eventually becomes General Electric. Now, what's fascinating here is the value transfer that happens between Edison and Insel.

28:58And the value is not in money. Insel is not making a bunch of money. He's 25 years old at this point. But he is building a world-class network and then like priceless experience. So he's going to take this network and experience that he builds or that he picks up working for Edison and then apply it to his own business a few years later. But I do want to point out because it's kind of crazy is like how much time I had spent with this book. So, first of all, the book is not easy to read and it's not because it's bad writing. It's because there's so much it's so high, like information dense and there's so much going on because Insul is going to wind up having hundreds and hundreds of companies.

29:37and these very complex structures. So let's say the book is 350 pages. It's not. It's probably 700 pages because I had to reread several pages multiple times. But what is happening is while I'm reading the book, I forget. Like the intro is, hey, this guy, the subtitles, The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utilities Hycoon. He is so gifted and has such great ideas that I had to remind myself over and over again while I'm reading this book. This has a terrible, unhappy, disastrous ending. And you just cannot believe. And that's why I think it's really going to resonate in my brain and why I want to talk to you about it.

30:17It's because it doesn't matter how many great decisions you make throughout your 50-year career. If you over leverage yourself, you can ruin your entire life work and you can die with no money. And all your accomplishments wiped out. So I'm going to get to that in a minute because you see his fatal flaw. that barring, excessive barring and excessive leverage just became this deep-rooted habit with him. And you'll see that because he's going to mention in a minute. So this is all the stuff that he's accumulating just in the short four years. So now I fast forwarded four years in the story. It's only 25, but he's met virtually all important figures in the business world.

30:53He had accumulated a bunch of experiences, which would ultimately prove very useful in the business that he's going to set up and run for the next 40 years after that. That he knew everybody who was anybody in the electric business. He had picked up firsthand knowledge of urban politics on a depth and a scale that was rare. He had learned enough about manufacturing, selling, promoting, administration, and organizing. And he had also learned the meaning of credit and what it could do. Borrowing became a deep-rooted habit with him. He would say, never pay cash when you could give a note. And so I just want to pull up a couple of things that came to my mind.

31:29They all come from Charlie Mungin and Warren Buffett when I got to this part. because he owned a bunch of different companies. One of them, let me just give you the idea of like how highly leveraged he is. After the Great Depression, this guy is going to wind up borrowing like another$200 million. Again, he had gone through a bunch of, this is the very difficult part about this. It's like he had gone through a bunch of different financial panics. He didn't really believe, this is one of his fatal flaws, I should say. He didn't believe the Great Depression was anything different. He's like, oh, this is like, I've been through a bunch of financial panics.

31:57Everything will be fine. I'll be back in like a couple months, a couple of years. And so he literally called to the White House with a bunch of other prominent American businessmen. And Hoover's like, oh, just conduct business as usual. Now, all this falls. The weird thing is when you read about Insul in the biographer, too, and I watched a couple videos on him as well. They all like, oh, it wasn't his fault. It was the Great Depression. It's like, no, no, no. It's always the founder's fault. It doesn't mean he was. I don't think he committed fraud. He winds up being, I'm not even going to talk about that.

32:29It's later on in the book, though. He winds up going to trial. He beats every single trial. From my reading of this, and it's very hard to tell, I don't believe that he did this. I just thought he made a bunch of terrible, terrible decisions and had way, way, way too much leverage. So I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me just read this because this idea came up to it. It's like, oh, never pay cash when you can give a note. And so what I did is I went to Founders Notes and I searched leverage. And specifically this note that I had in my mind on the dangers of leverage. and the fact that this is coming from Warren Buffett's shareholder letter.

32:59And he says, like, most people won't heed history's warning. So I just want to read, because this is essentially exactly what happens, very similar to what happens to Sam Insull. Warren Buffett says, unquestionably, some people have become very rich through the use of borrowed money. However, that's also been a way to get very poor, which is exactly what happened to Insull. When leverage works, it magnifies your gains. Your spouse thinks you're clever and your neighbors get envious. But leverage is addictive. And he was addicted to it from a very early age. And maybe you had to. I'm not like, again, I'm not sitting here.

33:26Oh, I wouldn't have done this if I was him. I never have that. Like highly likely that Sam Itzel is smarter and more talented and more accomplished than I am. And so it'd be very arrogant to think that if I was presented in the same situation, that I wouldn't have made his same decisions. The point is like, we need to, we're learning from history because as Munger said, learning from history is a form of leverage. It's to know this shit. So, oh, I don't do this if I'm ever presented with that opportunity. Right? So I want to be very clear. When leverage works, it magnifies your gains. Your spouse thinks you're clever and your neighbors get envious.

33:54But leverage is addictive. It seems that he was very addicted at an early age. Maybe he had to be. I don't know. Once having profited from its wonders, very few people retreat to a more conservative practices. And to repeat, as we all learned in the third grade and some relearned in 2008, any series of positive numbers, however impressive the numbers may be, evaporates when multiplied by a single zero. History tells us that leverage all too often produces zeros, even when it is employed by very smart people. It's impossible to read this book and not think that Sam Insull was very smart, right?

34:24That is the dangerous. That is why it's going to latch onto your and I's brain. It's like, oh my God, this happened to him. I need to avoid this. Leverage, of course, can be lethal to businesses. Companies with large debts often assume that these obligations can be refinanced as they mature. This something happens with Insull. He was guaranteed. Don't worry, you have unlimited credit. And the bank said, oh, you don't. And Reynolds wrapped. That assumption is usually valid. Occasionally, though, either because of company-specific problems or a worldwide shortage of credit, which is what he goes through, what Insel goes through, maturities must actually be met by payment.

34:55For that, only cash will do the job. End of Warren Buffett's shareholder letter. Two quotes that I always think about on the dangers of too much leverage. Charlie Munger said,

35:10Sam Insel was married to the same woman his whole life. He never drank a drop of alcohol in his entire life. He did not go broke because of ladies or liquor. He went broke because of leverage. Warren Buffett, whenever a bright and rich person, that is what Samuel Insull was, he was a bright and rich person. Warren Buffett, whenever a bright and rich person goes broke, it's usually because of leverage. And so this is a very important six years in Samuel Insull's life because he is now essentially saying, hey, Thomas Edison is like, you have to run the company. And Edison is, he's not interested in, he's off on other things now, right?

35:47he got it started and then goes off and does something else. And he does. It's not like he's going to give you a list of like, well, this is what you should do. This is what he does. This is what he tells him. Edison says, do it big, Sammy, make it either a big success or a big failure. And so he takes over company. The stock is around twenty five dollars a share. They have two hundred employees. Six years later, the stock will be one hundred fifty dollars a share and he has six thousand people. And so not only does he have to be a manufacturing of all this electrical equipment, but he also has to become, this is where he has to learn how to be a financier.

36:19And he says that almost times a magician, because of this rapid growth that the company is having, they're perpetually short on cash. And so that is why they're always having to, they have no operating capital. So they're constantly having to borrow, borrow a lot of its debt, actually way more of its debt than was equity, which was interesting as well. They actually had a hard time to get people to invest in the company. And so this is a description of this problem he's having, he spent almost half his time going from bank to bank to borrow and to beg money on short-term notes and juggling his available cash and credit with extreme dexterity in order to make ends meet.

36:56This experience was frantic, nerve-wracking, and disgusting to him. Now, these companies are going to be essentially taken over and recapitalized by a combination of Henry Villard and JP Morgan. There's more about the details of that in the book, but the reason I want to bring this up is because I really want to hammer home how Insel operated, because I think these principles, again, minus the leverage, are very valuable to this day. Fortified for the first time with working capital, Insel reorganized and integrated the manufacturing operations, rendering them vastly more efficient. Insel followed a set of basic principles that he would follow throughout his career.

37:30Remember, he is somewhere between 25 and 31 years old. They're describing him here. The first was to expand. Expand by raising new capital whenever possible. Expand by plowing profits back into the business. expand by borrowing every nickel he could lay his hands on. The next was to treat his workers generously and humanely. So I need to pause there. This constant expansion, remember, he's trying to turn a luxury product into something that is universally cheap and abundant. And he knew from the very get-go, scale is the key to that. I have to build, in some cases, the biggest electricity generating plants in the world.

38:08And obviously to do that, he's going to need a ton of cash. The next was to treat his workers generously and humanely, not out of sentimentality, but for the sound economic reason that discontent breeds stoppages and stoppages are inefficient, irrational and costly. Another principle was to spread fixed costs. This is related to his desire to expand and scale. OK, another was to spread fixed costs as thinly as possible by diversifying operations in order to keep the plant busy at all times. Keep that idea in your mind for later on this idea of like okay how do we spread fixed costs as thinly as possible he's going to vertically integrate this is what it's like it'll make a lot of sense like why does he keep buying electric part companies and then these electric traction um and like these electric electric essentially like trolley or train companies it'll make more sense in a little bit but really the main point is because he wants to spread his spread as fixed costs as thinly as possible by diversifying operations in order to keep the plants busy at all time and then another want to sell products as cheaply as possible.

39:05Before he had any proof, it was his belief that lower prices would bring greater volumes, which would then lower unit costs of production and thus yield greater profits. Okay, so everything I just described to you, he was doing in New York. But at the very beginning of the book, it mentions, hey, it's that billionaire utility tycoon from Chicago. How did he get to Chicago and why did he go? So because he's one of the most prominent people in the early electricity industry, people asking for advice. He gets a letter from the Chicago Edison Company, and they're looking for a president. And so they're like, hey, do you know anybody that'd be good for the job?

39:40Like, who's the best person we could hire? And I don't think they wrote this letter thinking that they would get him, because at the time, he's running General Electric. That's a$50 million company, which is insane. And he's making$36 ,000 a year just in salary with, you know, obviously other compensation in there. And Chicago Edison Company is one fiftieth the size. It's not even a million dollar company. And in the letter, they're trying to find somebody that would work for$12 ,000 a year. So a third of the salary, one fiftieth of like the market cap value. But they are offering something that is enticing.

40:17And whoever they hire gets to run things the way that they want it to run. Like they're looking for an operator, right? These are just investors and board and members of the board. He's going to take the job. Then when he's leaving, he says, let me actually get there. I'll skip ahead real quick. He gives us toast and he says that one day he's going to make the Chicago Edison bigger than General Electric and everybody else except him laughed. He was not joking. He believed that he was going to do that. and so it says the job opportunity uh if he took it would be bound only by the limits of his own ability and ambition i don't think he believed he had any uh limits on his ability and his ambition and he wasn't gonna actually offer himself up for the job and he's actually having a conversation with his mom and and he's like i would take the job but you know they're asking me to the best to help them find the best like possible fit and his mom's like what are you talking about like you should do that she goes uh they asked him in his capacity with ed as uh with the ge to recommend the best available man did they not well then he was the was he not the best available man and so he should sit right down and he obviously believed that he was the best available man right and so his mom's like you should sit right down and write them a letter saying so and so he sends the letter back and they're like oh oh yeah oh i didn't even know this was a possibility yes please take the job.

41:39And so he accepts the job. And then he says, hey, I want you to do I have one like demand. You need to issue two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in new stock. Remember the stock, the market cap is eight hundred and eighty five thousand at the point that he takes a job. He says, you need to issue two hundred fifty thousand dollars more in stock and you need to sell it to me to buy the stock. And so borrowed the entire sum from Marshall Field, who is this older, successful entrepreneur who in his old age figure that the best possible place to invest money was in bright young men. So we still see the exact same thing today.

42:13You have wildly successful people. Jeff Bezos is still making investments, right? And what is he doing? He's like, the best possible place to invest is probably in bright young entrepreneurs. And so we see the same exact same thing here where Marshall Fields like, yeah, I'll loan you the money because this is a great investment for me. And so this is the point in which Insul goes, and this is what he's going to, this is his starting point for the next 40 years. This is, he's going to turn this company and other companies into this giant holding company conglomerate, whatever you want to call it.

42:40And it's going to be phenomenally successful worth a couple billion dollars right before it collapses. And so he comes to Chicago and he's like, hey, we're going to invert the way other people think about electricity. We're going to try to make electricity cheaper, not more expensive. And to do that, I need the largest possible base of customers. And so we have to aim for a monopoly. Now, you and I know today, like utility companies are something like I can shop around. It's like, oh, I want my electricity. Their government mandated like monopolies, right? That was Insul's idea. The world we're living in was influenced by this guy that you and I are talking about.

43:13So it says, Insul was thinking differently from the others in one vital respect. To most others, monopoly was desirable because it would enable them to charge higher prices and thus make more money. To Insul, it was imperative because it would enable him to build on a broader base of customers. All of his thinking was therefore inverted. Their thinking was based on the premise that electricity should be considered a luxury product And that should be sold at the highest possible price. Insul's thinking was based on the premise that electricity should be considered for everybody, even the smallest consumer.

43:40And that if we're able to fulfill that goal, it should be sold at the lowest possible price. And it is for that reason that Insul set out to build a monopoly before it was mandated by the government. And you see this at the very beginning because the very first meeting he has with the executive committee for this new company, Chicago Edison, that he's taking over. He's like, all right, we need to buy our second largest competitor. And so they help raise the money and they do that. Three months later, he goes, okay, now we're going to buy our biggest competitor. And those first two moves. Now, this is why he, I know I've repeated this a lot, why he, you can really think of him as like the, one way to think about it was like the Rockefeller of the electric utility industry, because Rockefeller believed that too.

44:19He's like, listen, if you're going to, you're competing with a bunch of people, let's say you have 20 competitors, don't go for number 17 and 18, go for the top. Try to knock out the first guy. In this case, he, and so knocked out the second guy and then the first guy. Because he's like, if you can achieve that, then the rest of them follow. And so after the combination of Chicago, Edison and his two largest competitors, he is running at the time the largest electric power station in the world. And he would continue to do so for the next 40 years. And another thing that he had in common, this is why I always say the most important lesson from the history of entrepreneurship is the importance of focus.

44:53It's not like this guy was like, hey, I know more than anybody else in the world about the electric industry. let me go diversify into something else. Why would you do that? He understood the potential of his industry in a way that others did not. You could say the same thing for Rockefeller and oil. Rockefeller just pops up off this page over and over again. I think of Edwin Land when he created the, his invention created his industry, which then he had a monopoly on for 40 plus years. He's like, no one else in the world, because we're patent protected, can make instant photography. And you want me to go make a copier?

45:26And you want me to go make a printer? And so there's many examples where he's talking to people inside his company. He's like, no, we're only going to do things that other people cannot do. And that is just one of the main, main benefits of focus. And so what does he do? One of his earliest decisions is like he's buying these other electric generating companies. But then he goes and he buys Fort Wayne and Chicago ARC-like companies. Why is he doing that? This is his first step in vertical integration because these people are manufacturing electrical equipment that the people generate, these generating plants need.

45:55He's like, oh, I'm going to buy this company because all the other smaller companies of him have to go to these companies to buy stuff they need. And listen to this. This is going to be Rockefeller too. This policy quickly paid off. Caught between bad times and difficulty even in buying replacement light bulbs, six of the small central stations in Chicago gave up in 1894. This is Cleveland Massacre's win in a couple months. I think Rockefeller swelled up 17 or 25 of his smaller competitors or something. This is something that's very similar to what's happening here in Chicago in 1894 and 1895.

46:28These six smaller stations sold out to Chicago Edison. So he knocked off two. Then he knocked off the second biggest competitor. Then he knocked off the first. Now that company combined with those three companies, right? He's the biggest player in town. Now he's found a way to get six other smaller people to sell to him. So they sell to Insel. When he won, Insel was always generous to the losers, paying them more for their plants than they were worth. Rockefeller did the same thing. This is incredible. This was not him being benevolent, but good business. This is a great line. Insel recognized that while money may not buy friends, it will keep many a man from becoming an enemy.

47:08And people, while they're watching him do this, like, this is dangerous. You shouldn't do this. This is a little boutique. You know, this is a tiny little business. What are you doing? optimists at his time, right? They're like, okay, how many possible customers can you have in a city of Chicago? The most optimistic in the early electric lighting, electricity industry, right? They guess that maybe, maybe one day you might be able to get 25 ,000 customers, Sam. 25 ,000 customers. Like you're spending a lot of money for only 25 ,000 customers. You know what Sam thought that number was? He's like, well, how many people live in Chicago?

47:44And they're like a million people. He's like, okay, so I'm going to get a million people. Think about that. His guess for how big his market is, and he actually shot underneath that, he's going to get way more than a million people. I think his companies wind up combined producing all the electricity for like one eighth of the entire country's population. But think about this. Everybody around him, again, this is why I tied it in with focus and the importance of like, if you understand the potential of your industry in a way that others do not, why the hell are you diversifying into something else.

48:14Just keep going down that curve, right? Because the other people that thought they understood maybe somewhat as much as he did, they were 40 times, their most optimistic projections were 40 times smaller, right? Than insoles. And insoles were even what, maybe 10, I don't even know how many people were in the country at the time. Let's see if he's one eighth and there's a hundred million people in the country. That means he was off on his own estimate by what, 12, 13 times. And so look what he achieves in his first six years. Oh, and I didn't even mention this. He's doing this during a financial panic.

48:48So again, I think you can learn the wrong lessons from your own experience. He's like, I've been through a bunch of financial panics. I survived them and I even prospered in them. How different can the Great Depression be? Ooh, yikes. Could be very different actually. And so half a dozen years. So he's got six years. Many of these are during some kind of like bad financial depression, but not the Great Depression. His company was 10 times as large as it had been when he took it over. And during this period, so that's 24 consecutive quarters, he was able to pay a quarterly dividend of at least 2%, 24 times in a row.

49:21And so he has a great understanding of what we would call public relations, even though there was no such term as public relations in his day. And this is what he realizes is like, well, okay, the bigger I get, the more scale I get, the cheaper I make. Remember, he's going for Monopoly so he can make it cheaper. And as a result, his customers love it. They go from having to burn kerosene or candles, and now they have electric lights. And so he's a beloved person in his community. He's built a lot of relationships with a bunch of politicians, and he has a great line about this. So he says, More profound than his organizational ability was Insel's sense of public relations.

49:58To him, the moment of applause was the moment for action. The moment of applause was the moment for action. And so he's beloved and he goes, hey, these should be government regulated monopolies. That was his idea. So he goes, he initiates and he brings to successful conclusion the movement for utility regulation in the United States. And he believes this is necessary because he believes that you have to expand. You have to spread all your fixed costs over the largest customer base as possible. This is the most effective way to do this. Some people have described this as regulatory capture. And so this push for this like legalized monopoly, it helps him expand, which obviously was what his goal is.

50:35He's like, I have to spread all my fixed costs over the largest customer base. If I have a legalized monopoly, that's going to, it's the best way, the best tool I have to extend my customer base. Now, here's the problem too, where this is, this constant expansion is the way they thought about the constant raising of debt. If you go back to what Warren Buffett said earlier, companies with these large debts often assume that these obligations can be refinanced as they mature. That assumption is usually valid. Occasionally though, either because of company specific problems or worldwide shortage of credit, which are as much actually being met by payment.

51:06And for that, only cash will do the job. When that happens to Insull, he doesn't have any of the cash, and so he loses everything. But the way they looked at it was, hey, to expand this new industry, we're going to need vast quantities of debt capital. And it says electric companies, like modern governments, borrow money that they cannot and do not attend to repay except by perpetually refinancing. They are borrowing money that they do not and cannot intend to replay except by perpetually refinancing. And so this constant need for more money that's ever present because this guy never stops expanding, it actually leads to the invention.

51:46They credit him with the invention of the open-ended mortgage. And that's, I think the main lesson here is the the way you position and frame things actually matters and it can actually get people to comply with your request for something that they previously declined. And so he goes to the board or the executive committee and he says, hey, I need$100 million in bonds. This is 1896. They're like, are you crazy? $100 million in bonds. And a year earlier, he had tried to get them to do$6 million. So this is like, again, how fast this guy moves and like how his ambition is and his scale. Like, think about that.

52:24Last year, he goes to them. He's like, I need$6 million in bonds. They said no. Comes back and next year, he goes, okay. And he said no on$6 million, but I need$100 million in bonds. And they tell him no again, of course. And so he winds up talking to a friend of his who actually had a lot of experience in financing the early railroads in the United States. And then he had this idea. He goes, hey, you're going to have a hard time convincing your board to accept that. I have a way you can reposition this. He says, why don't you ask them for a mortgage with no limit? And he says, a mortgage with no limit might seem much smaller and more conservative than one with a limit of$100 million.

52:58And you sound like, that sounds crazy. How could that possibly work? Insole proposed to them a mortgage with no limit, and they accepted. Under this mortgage, Insole would issue half a billion dollars in bonds before he was through. So you come and put a number on it. That$100 million scares the crap out of him. Then you said, hey, I essentially have this open-ended mortgage. I'll draw from it, you know, little by little, whatever the case is, they accept it. And then over the long term, he actually gets five times the amount that he actually want that they initially did not approve. And this is where this is the interesting thing.

53:30He was describing to other people, like when he's raising capital on the people inside of his company, like, what is he doing? And he called it massing production. According to this book, they say he is the one that came up with the term mass production. Insul soon began describing what he was doing as massing production. Think about it as a massing production, right? A phrase that his publishers shortened to mass production long before historians mistakenly ascribed that term to Henry Ford. Massing production turned into mass production. Another very fascinating idea. Remember, he was acquisitive by nature, right?

54:04So he's buying all these companies. And what he realizes is like, okay, well, I'm buying them. Sometimes I'm paying more than their worth because money is a good way to avoid people being enemies with me. I want people on my side. Think of a Rockefeller essentially built a company full of founders. He just bought their company and then he's like, hey, you guys are talented. Come advise me. And then you'll be rewarded with standard oil stock. Now, this is fascinating. So he starts buying all these new properties like, oh, wait, I'm not only applying scale, I'm acquiring customers, I'm acquiring equipment.

54:33More important than that, I get talent. So he's like aqua hiring people back in the day, right? He would devise methods and he would detect talented people. And if he thought they were talented, he would partner with them or buy their entire company. And so he said new properties were the most prolific producers of executives inside of the insole organization. That sounds a lot like Rockefeller, another Rockefeller-esque thing. Sell at the lowest price possible. Sell ridiculously low. He sold so low that no one could afford not to have electricity service. to win customers insold sold electricity at rates so low they appalled other central station men.

55:11That's like Rockefeller trying to buy you out and you're saying no and he just shows you his books and you're like, oh my god, this guy can make a profit at prices that would drive me out of business. To win customers he sold electricity at rates so low that they appalled other central station men. Now he is building a public utility, so he's going to need an advanced understanding of public relations. And he understood that you must craft the story and you must educate your customers. So there's three separate examples, I think all go together, that talk about this advanced understanding of public relations.

55:40And I think there's just a lot of good ideas in here. And so it says he displayed an advanced concept of public relations. I care not, he said, how good you operate. How able maybe the management of your property. So he's talking about all these. He's got, I don't even know, 150 subsidiaries. This is where it gets so complicated and I think led to his downfall was how complicated his organizational structure and how many different entities were involved. Or how good your engineer may be and how perfect your plants are. Unless you conduct your business as to get the goodwill of the community in which you are working, you might as well just shut up shop and move away.

56:18He's talking about public relations. Convinced that the vulnerability of utilities derived from a lack of popular understanding, Insull attempted to educate his customers. He began making public appearances at every opportunity. He was instructing employees in public relations. He established an advertising department, which soon expanded into one of the first full-fledged public relations departments in existence. He published a magazine called Electric City and distributed the magazine free of charge by the tens of thousands all over Chicago. But he said by far the most effective device Insole had for winning over the public was rate cuts.

56:56This is exactly what Henry Ford did later on in his career when the Model T was up and running. He effectively was able to stop paying for any advertising because all he did was try to root out any inefficiency and any waste and just keep making his automobile manufacturing plants more efficient, thus allowing him to drop the price of his car. And so every time he dropped the price of the car, it would be picked up in the newspapers. And that made him beloved because this thing that used to cost$6 ,000 and only be available for the rich, I can buy it for$250. So again, the most effective device that Insul had for winning over the public was rate cuts.

57:31The cuts were simply good economics, but they also created immense publicity, just like I described for Henry Ford. Immense publicity value. Who had ever heard of a public utility voluntarily cutting its rates? He hits on that idea that you need to pay attention to public opinion. These are your customers. This is very important to you. The customers, obviously he's heavily regulated. So it also influences the customers are also voters. From Insul's position, the task ahead was thus one of swaying public opinion. And at a time when public relations and mass selling were in their infancy, in this art, Insul had few peers.

58:06And so they make the point later on in the book. It's like, listen, say there's 50 ,000 people who understand the necessity of the service that you provide, right? But there are a hundred million Americans that have not even thought of it. He says, our task is to see that the figures are reversed, right? So it's 50 ,000 people that understand the importance of all the work that goes into what we're doing, but there's a hundred million. Those hundred, those are potential customers. We need to reverse that. We need to make the people that understand that our customers are ours, the majority. And one way to do that is to one, make your product as valuable as possible.

58:39Like the value to cost ratio excessively high, right? but also tell them what goes into making and delivering the service that they enjoy. So he had later, much later on in the book, he has these two rules. They said it was a concise summary of like his principles of public relations. And this is now in soul writing, right? He says, practically everything that a public utility company does affects the relations between the company and its customers. And anything it does is therefore an item of public relations. The first objective in public relations work is to produce the best possible service at the lowest predictable rates.

59:15Why? Because that is of the greatest interest to the public. And then once that's taken care of, that leads us to the second. The public is in no position to judge service and rates when it knows nothing about the multitude of details involved in furnishing the service. So let me read this, finish reading this. Hence, the second objective in the public utility industry's public relations work, right, is a public well-informed on the tangible details as well as the social and industrial significance of the industry and all its ramification. What is he saying? This is exactly what David Ogilvie said in the 1960s, what Claude Hopkins said in the early 1900s, 1910s, which is apparently Sam Insull had derived from his own experience.

59:56You need to tell your customers what goes into making your product. It may be normal to you because it's your everyday thing. It is not normal to them. And if you explain and you educate your customers, they will find it fascinating. And as a result, it will make the service and the product that you provide more valuable in their eyes. That is absolutely incredible that he understood that at the time in which he did. So this is the end result of his career before the collapse, right? By the time it was over, electric power would be so abundant and cheap in the United States that people who had never expected to use it found it as natural and as necessary as breathing.

1:00:34so there is going to be a ton of regulation uh that is put into to law after the collapse of his empire there's a there's a there's something that takes place that i have to tell you that shocking to me might be shocking to you uh every employee of insoles uh companies were stock salesmen so what does that mean like the employee that would come and check your meter would also knock on your door and try to sell you stock in the company. This is crazy. He would see his personal fortune increase from around$5 million in 1927 to$150 million in 1929, and then tumble by mid-1932 to zero and below. To a net indebtedness so large that as one banker put it, he was too broke to be bankrupt.

1:01:28With him went hundreds of thousands of stockholders who shared his faith in his own invulnerability. And so they set the context where I could see a lot of people that essentially say, hey, you know, and so it was like, this is a macroeconomic environment. The Great Depression is kind of out of his hands. Yeah, but it's your choice to take this. Like this is, when I read this paragraph, it's going to sound very familiar. Like, you know, we've gone through many times where like credit and money is essentially free. And that was happening in the late 1920s. And so you have all these bankers, they come up to him and they try to like essentially just feel like they're deluging him with easy credit.

1:02:05And they really, in many cases, like beg him to accept it for any purpose. And so one of the banks that's going to wind up screwing him over later because they're like, oh, the money's there, the money's there, we'll back you. And then they wind up losing their ass so they can't back him is Continental Bank. And they would come up to him and they're saying, hey, just so you know, So if you fellows ever want to borrow any more than the legal limit, all you have to do is organize a new corporation and we'll be happy to lend you another$21 million. They said that at a party. Please take 20, like set up another company.

1:02:35It doesn't even matter if you know what you're going to do with the money yet. Let me wire you. Let me send you this$21 million, please. Another banker, Mr. Insul, isn't there something you could use our$10 million for? Anything? Anything? Something? Just let us give you$10 million. And so at the same time this is happening, there is a corporate raider by the name of Cyrus Eaton, who is starting in late 1920, 27. And for the next several years, he begins buying up large blocks of stocks in Insul's companies. And so he's got three main companies. And this is where the story gets really, really, really confusing.

1:03:13Somewhere between 1920 and 1929, Insul realizes that he did not control enough stock in his operating companies to prevent a takeover. And so he creates two investment companies through which he could control the utilities. And that may have been the case if it wasn't for the Great Depression, but those become over leveraged. And as the prices go down, he keeps having to put up more and more collateral. We'll get there in one second. So I'm going to give you like a brief overview. You have the Great Depression. And again, like without his actions after the Great Depression, his companies could have survived.

1:03:42You know, it's not like you're going to cut like you're going to cut your electricity unless you absolutely are in complete dire situations. But it's what he does is like how much money and debt he takes on after. Like after and the beginning and through the Great Depression. This is, I don't have any words to describe this. I don't understand this. I don't understand how somebody so smart and so accomplished and with so much experience does this. So it says, then came the great crash in October. The first thing he did was go to the rescue of his employees who were caught with margin brokerage accounts by supplying him from his personal portfolio, whatever additional collateral they needed.

1:04:1710 days later, as if nothing had happened, 10 days after the crash in October, right? Black Friday or Black Tuesday, rather. Sorry, not Black Friday. Black Friday is the sales. OK, so Black Tuesday. So it'd be October 29th, 1929. 10 days later, as if nothing had happened, he proceeded with the long planned opening of the palatial new Civic Opera House. He undertook a huge new venture of a construction on a natural gas pipeline that he was running from Texas to Chicago. That is a project. That one project alone would cost$80 million. Remember, this is$80 million in 1929, okay? What he did next would suggest that he was possessed of delusions of grandeur.

1:04:54Supremely confident that this depression would be neither longer nor more severe than those he had weathered in the past, he expanded far more than turned out to be prudent. He returned to debt financing, and he bought Eaton's Holdings. So that's that corporate reader. Insul's company spent$200 million on capital investment during 1930. Most of that is debt. So 200 million times that by 20 to get a rough estimate of today's dollars. And he did that in one year. I don't understand this. Every page, I'm like, why is he doing this? Why is he doing this? These are no sudden leaving myself. And then I get to this point.

1:05:31It's like, this is a 50-year successful career destroyed. This is terrifying to me. And so people around him were shocked that he was willing to take on more than$200 million of new debt in the wake of the Great Crash. This reminded me of, if you listen to the episode that I did on Ted Turner, it's episode 327. He winds up having to get bailed out by John Malone. And John Malone says something in that book that I think applies to Sam Insull. John Malone describing Ted Turner says, He took his leverage too high and the structure of the leverage was a problem. So he spends that$200 million debt, right?

1:06:07Then he's got to buy out this corporate raider. They agreed a$63 million transaction. Goes back to the bank, right? And then they pull. Four times in the month of May and June in 1930, the president of Continental Bank said that they'd be behind him all the way. Four times, Ensel refused. Then he came back a fifth time and Ensel said yes. He says the only way to finance this purchase was through bank loans secured by the stocks from his two holding companies. price so six 50 somewhere between 56 and 63 million dollars more of debt right secured by stocks from his two holding companies uh they get the chicago can't he's usually dealing with chicago banks at the time they have to go to new york he hates the new york bankers he has to go to new york because chicago can't fulfill this right and he says the various loans were extremely complex what did john malone just say about ted turner he took his leverage too high and the structure of the leverage was a problem this is exactly what's taking place in sam insul's life and career at this point.

1:07:03And he's doing this in a market that's dropping like a stone. Each drop in the market would force the investment trust to put up more collateral against their bank loans. If the market were driven down far enough, the bankers would have as collateral the entire portfolios of Insul's company with that control of the whole Insul empire. And so as this is happening, what do you think the reaction is? They keep buying. They ignore, they're ignorant of the danger. And so this is what they were doing. In essence, they would buy up in social securities on the exchanges and then try to sell as much as possible in small lots through their secondary market, which is like the customer ownership.

1:07:40And then the guy that is doing this for Insole said this, it's very simple. He said, you can't go on buying your own stocks forever. Sooner or later, you run out of money. In spite of everything he knew, Insole could not as late as mid-summer 1931 bring himself to believe that he was in serious danger. But he was. The end was very near. To keep the market up through the summer, they try to keep the market up through the summer of 1931. But in September, England went off the gold standard and the New York Stock Exchange reacted with complete hysteria. Short sellers spread a rumor that Insel was dead or dying.

1:08:16And in that week alone, the stocks of his three companies dropped by a value of$150 million. As the market declined, they had to put up ever-increasing amounts of securities as collateral against their bank loans. By mid-December, the well had run dry. Every nickel of the combined portfolios of the two investment trusts were in the hands of bank creditors. That is a Reynolds rap. The creditors then, in turn, demand that he resigns. On Monday, June 6th, the deed was done. Insel dictated and signed papers all day, drafting resignations from chairmanship and presidencies and receiverships of 60-odd corporations.

1:08:55All afternoon, as the orgy of registrations and resolutions went on, Newspaperman swarmed around Insel's door. When it was over, he emerged. His statement to the press was a single sentence. Well, gentlemen, here I am, after 40 years, a man without a job. He eventually flees and is extradited back to the United States, put on trial multiple times, beats every single trial that can never prove any fraud. I do believe his statement that he made, he says, I have erred, but my greatest error was in underestimating the effect of the financial panic on American securities and particularly on the companies I was working so hard to build.

1:09:33He didn't even understand the danger he was in. I worked with all my energy to save those companies. I made mistakes, but they were honest mistakes. They were errors in judgment, but not dishonest manipulations. I do think that is true. For 53 years, for his 53 years of labor to make electric power universally cheap and abundant, Insul had his reward from a grateful people. He was allowed to die outside of prison. He does not live for long. The only remaining enemy of Insul's was boredom. Like Napoleon, Insul was required to spend his declining years in well-fed inactivity. For two more years, his life dragged on.

1:10:12He followed the news of business and politics with keen interest, but there was rarely anyone with whom to discuss these subjects, and Insul was ill-equipped to play the passive spectator. On the morning of July 16th, Insul entered a Paris subway, and while waiting for a train, he had a heart attack and died. His body remained unidentified for several hours, and the official police statement reported that he had nothing in his pockets. And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. Highly recommend getting the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

1:10:44That is 336 books down, 1 ,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon. Okay, so two quick things before you go. Number one, founders only. I'm doing an in-person conference for founders and CEOs with Founder Mentality in Austin, Texas, March 12th through the 14th. If you have not yet applied to go, go to foundersonly.com. That's founders with an S. Everything I do is founders with a S. Okay. So foundersonly.com, make sure you apply. I'm going through all the applications. It's listed. It's limited to 150 slots. I'll probably send out like 200 invites and then whoever just finalizes a registration fastest will get those.

1:11:22So if you already applied, make sure you check your email. I'm emailing, I'm sending messages on LinkedIn. in. So check both those places and just try to finish your registration as fast as possible. If you have not yet applied, there is still time jump in. Um, and then every single person that applies will obviously go on the email list in case I fill this one out, uh, before I get to your application. And therefore you will automatically be notified. I'm doing a bunch of in-person events and conferences. Cause my goal is to help other founders build relationships with other founders has been there's two things that i'm asked for the most right uh is let me get for years i was asked can i get access to your notes and highlights uh that's founders notes and then hey can you build some kind of community uh can i meet other founders that listen to founders how can we facilitate that the way i do this is like i build relationships in person i just think it it helps jump start things um and so anyways there's a bunch of people speaking at this conference that are a perfect example of this.

1:12:22These people are unbelievably impressive. They are very important to me. And we've built a relationship over the last three years because of the podcast. And so I'm calling in favors. These are people that in some cases have never spoken publicly. And in other cases, speak publicly very, very rarely. We're not going to be recording anything. This is you have to be there or you miss it kind of thing. So if you are interested in doing that, if you're a founder or a CEO, there'll be other events that are open to much more people. But for the very first one, 150 people just for founders and CEOs, foundersonly.com.

1:12:59Apply if you haven't. And then if you see a message from me, just try to respond as fast as possible. I'm dedicating the next. This will be done within the next like seven to 14 days, maybe something like that. So time is of the essence. The second thing is if you have not yet subscribed to Founders Notes, go to foundersnotes.com and get access to what I believe is the world's greatest and world's most valuable notebook for founders. I was sitting here thinking today as I was listening to this episode because I listen to every single episode before it goes out again. And I was just sitting here thinking, it was like, imagine a young Sam Insull, right?

1:13:39You have somebody that's super smart, super determined, super dedicated. that he will, no matter where he starts in life, he's going to make his life a success. And so he finds people he admires and then reads every single thing he could find about them. You know, Thomas Edison being the best example of that. And I was like, imagine if Sam Ensel was alive today and he had access to Founders Notes. So what Founders Notes is, in case you don't know, is for years, I have been adding every single highlight and every single note on all the books that I read for this podcast into this app called Readwise, right?

1:14:16And then I've gone for years on other people's podcasts and I tweet about it. I post on LinkedIn about it. I was like, Readwise is the best app I pay for. I could not make the podcast without it. That is legitimate. People think I say this over and over again. People are like, you have such a good memory. I promise you I don't. It's because I reread and reread and reread same book, same highlights over and over again. And the reason I'm able to do that is because this app allows me to put all my notes, all my highlights everything on how i make this podcast right all the research um and if you really think about i've essentially sat in a room by myself for eight years like a maniac uh documenting the best best and worst ideas from the history of entrepreneurship so we can all learn from them right and like charlie munger said learning from history is a form of leverage and so for the first few years like it was really hard to keep track of all that and then i discovered read was like oh this is genius and then for years people were sending me messages like i can I get access to this?

1:15:08Can I get access to it? And I said no every time. Like, I don't know, a thousand, two thousand people. It didn't count, but it was a lot of people that asked this. And I said no because I thought it was like my secret sauce. Like, oh, like what if you get access to it and you like start a competitor to founders? I don't think people are going to start a competitor to founders. Like I realized that was a very like zero sum mentality I was having. and because what would happen is like i would talk to other founders and like we'd be on the phone they had a problem i was like oh i would just be searching i'd bring something up they'd say something and i'd search my all of my notes and highlights i'd come up with something it was like really helpful it's like oh well not everybody can be on the phone like why don't and i do this in person in conversations too uh in fact i just had a dinner the other day with three other founders that listen to this podcast and we essentially spent like two or three hours just talking about all the biographies we were reading uh like phil knight cornelius vanderbilt steve jobs edwin land we're talking about all this and so i pulled out this app over and over again in fact all three of them subscribed to to founder's notes so they had it too but in any case uh i was like oh this is like a superpower this is why it's the most valuable uh notebook for founders in the world so it is right now it is i would not sign up and this applies to founders only and founder's notes this is only for people that already have successful companies uh There's obviously no free trial.

1:16:30You'd have to pay for it. What I consider a free trial is like the podcast is a giant free trial. It is free. You can listen to 336 episodes as much as you want. Listen to them over and over again. Take your own notes, whatever the case is. So what I am trying to build is excessively high value. And I would only do it is I would only do this. This is only for people that have already successful companies because those are the people that are going to get the most value out of it because they already have a way to turn that knowledge that's in Founders Notes into profit. So think about like a young Sam Insel or anybody, anybody running a company.

1:17:04It's like, hey, I want to learn every single thing I can about Steve Jobs. So there's a few different ways that I use Founders Notes. And then when you sign up, you'll get a welcome email and it goes into detail about this. So it gives you an idea. And oh my God, I saw a preview of the Founders GPT that is going to be another feature in Founders Notes. Uh, I'd sign up now because as I had features, obviously the price will go up. I don't have a landing page yet. So you just have to go off this description and do you think like it's valuable if I use, I use the product every day. So that should tell you something, right?

1:17:38Uh, this is, this, this thing's going to be nuts. I have so many ideas for it. It's going to be incredible because I'll get there. Like I'm getting excited. So I'm going to be testing it for the next few weeks. It'll pop up. If you're already an existing subscriber, don't worry. You'll be notified that when this feature is available. I don't know if I've ever been more excited about anything. So the way I use Founders Notes right now is when you log in, right, and you sign up, you're dropped onto this page. And at the very top page, it's going to be self-explanatory. It says search highlights.

1:18:10So this is put in any, you could put in a name, something you're thinking about, a problem you're having in your company. How do I build a sales team? What should I do about marketing, hiring, recruiting, advertising, anything that pops to your mind, you search highlights and it'll pull back every single time that that's been mentioned either in a note or a highlight of mine. So that is something I use every day. So right now there is no app. This is just in your browser. So you can use the browser on your computer or your phone. I leave, I would, once you log in, just leave it up in your browser.

1:18:41I search this thing every day, multiple times a day. Okay. So that is by far the most valuable feature this is where but like what i again i know it's the most valuable feature but what i think is like excessively special is this thing called the highlights feed and again this is this product is for think about who i who i had in mind when when i wanted to make this right when i contacted the team at readwise and i said hey both of the founders listened to the podcast i was like hey we should build a product together i want to essentially give people access and see exactly what i see and i want it to be a new product and i want to call it founder's notes and so that's that's how this thing came to be and i knew already the people that are going to get the most value out of already have a successful company so that's why i say it's for them so those people also read a ton right there's a high positive correlation between success entrepreneurial success and reading and so the highlights feed is very special because think about all the other platforms that we're giving our attention, right?

1:19:45It's like kind of just algorithms throwing things in our face. You're seeing like random posts from, you know, somebody you went to high school with 25 years ago, or, you know, somebody angry about something else. And it's just like, you know, anything that gets engagement. And the way I think about highlights feed, the highlights feed feature, right? It looks like this is what my friend Morgan, me and my friend Morgan Housel, the bestselling author talked about. It's a smart twitter feed is what it looks like or a smart facebook feed and the highlights feed is random highlights and notes right you go on it and instead of scrolling this is like if obviously the reason i said you should have a successful company because usually you know those people also read as well and if you could read this thing for 10 or 15 minutes a day or whenever you want to really uh sometimes i read for a couple minutes i've been lost in here for hours uh and what happens is like it's almost like a random it's like history's greatest entrepreneurs a random sampling of history's greatest entrepreneurs speaking directly to you like i just clicked on and there's two quotes from poor charlie uh poor charlie zamanac right then there's one from ted turner then there's one from uh john d rockefeller then there's three in a row uh from sam zell then there's uh two from napoleon there's one about balenciaga and like it just goes on and on and on.

1:21:05And some of them, you know, it depends on the context of what's going on in your career. Some of them aren't going to be meaningful for you, just like when you're scrolling any other feed. But they're really good prompts for your thinking and reminders of the lessons that we're learning on the podcast, because you can listen to every single episode. And I know a ton of people that have, but you're going to forget a lot of stuff. Our mind is meant to like, forget, you know, 99 % of the stuff we take in. So that's why I think repetition is the mother of learning. It's so important. I think that's what the highlights feed does.

1:21:33I'm sitting here scrolling. I'm talking to you it's like here's another great idea on uh david ogrevy for example uh he took an idea from henry ford and he says following henry ford's advice to his dealers that he should solicit by personal visitation i started by soliciting advertisers who did not employ an agency at all so he's talking about the how he started his his agency when he was like 35 years old and the fact this is like yeah i can go and say hey hire me and fire your existing agency but i should just do what Henry Ford did. And it was like, go to the people, buy personal visitation that don't have any, like it's easier to sell somebody that doesn't have an advertising agency already, a partner, as opposed to like getting them to switch to some unknown entity.

1:22:14And you'd be shocked at how much like you, and you'd be shocked at how much either you didn't know, or you had forgotten. Here's another one that's fascinating. He's talked about, this is the book, my friend, Jimmy Sony, he's a good friend of mine now. He's the author of this book called The Founders, which is on the beginning of PayPal. And it talks about how competitive in the end of, It's really competitive at all times, but especially during the dot-com bubble, how competitive it was for engineering and really A-plus talent and something that helped Musk out. He's just like, hey, I got a lot of my own money in this.

1:22:43And so there's the unexpected benefit of putting so much of your own wealth in helps with recruiting because they're like, this guy has, I think at the time, I don't remember how much of Musk's net worth, but he had a ton. I think he got like after selling zip to you know 28 million dollars what is that after taxes who knows 15 million something like that and then he's telling this guy hey I have 13 million I have 13 out of my 15 million dollars in this company it has to work uh so there's just these weird ideas that happen and what happens which I've heard over and over again from a ton of founders is like an idea or a comment on the podcast or reading in a book or reading founder's notes will go into your brain it'll go it'll go through everything else that's particular to your company on the outside it's something unique and usually beneficial to your uh company so that's the way i think about highlights feed it's like it's very interesting and special um i don't even want to confuse you but almost feel like it could be like a separate app which whatever maybe i'll test that personally and see if that it's just it's fascinating it's very very fascinating and then finally uh because I don't want to talk your ear off.

1:23:49Books. You can go to the book section and just go buy books. So last week I talked about you can go read all of the highlights from Brad Jacobs' book. And in Brad Jacobs, when I was reading about Brad Jacobs, I was really thinking a lot about Danny Meyer. And I hadn't read Danny Meyer's autobiography, Setting the Table, for years. But it is excellent. And so then you can go, and I think there's what, 59, I said? No, 29. Sorry, 29 highlights. And so those 29 highlights, you know, probably take 10 minutes to read and really think about. And it's shocking how much you can learn, you know, just by reading 30 highlights from a book or 44 highlights from a book or 71 highlights from a book.

1:24:28So that's a brief overview of how I use Founders Notes. You can sign up, invest in a subscription for what I think is the world's most valuable notebook for founders at foundersnotes.com. They're annual subscriptions. So every day, I'm adding more highlights every day the product gets better so if you think about that now you sign up now within the next year i'll add another 50 books and probably i don't know 4 000 more highlights the more highlights and notes that are added the deeper the ideas go and i think the the context around them uh only get more valuable with time so all right that's enough for me uh if you have not yet subscribed highly recommend doing that i think that is for sure subscribing to founders notes.com is the best way to support the podcast.

1:25:10If you want to travel to Austin, Texas and hang out with me for three days, it's all inclusive. That means if you get to, you have to get yourself to Austin, but then the event, uh, is everything's included in the price. So the event, all the talks, um, all the lodging, all the food, everything. It is a private, I rented out this entire private venue. It is, is not open to the public. The only people that will be on the property will be people taking part in founders only. So if that sounds interesting to you, that is foundersonly.com, foundersnotes.com. Both of those links will also be in the show notes.

1:25:49Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much for listening to founders. And I got to get going and start reading again for the next episode. I'll talk to you again soon.