Jay Z's Autobiography

22:52And he knows what Peter Thiel taught us. It's like, you don't build an undifferentiated, commoditized product. You have to differentiate. You have to build something. And it's even better, like James Dyson taught us on his autobiography. Build something that looks strange. At least it gets people talking about it. Don't just go out and copy what everybody else is doing. Like make it look weird. Rick Rubin, your experience in dealing and letting him produce your music, it's going to be an odd experience, an experience that you can't get nowhere else. And so in that documentary, Rick is telling something else.

23:21He's like, Jay -Z is very unique because he does everything in his head. He doesn't write it down. He waits to hear the track and then he's got an idea and you'll see him like he calls it his Rain Man. He's like mumbling, like you can't really tell what he's saying, but his lips are moving. And so the reason I bring that up is because Jay -Z talks about it. He's like, I think of, I'm like a poet. That's the way I look at what I'm doing. And that's why I have to explain it to you because a lot of people are listening to my music and they're not even understanding what I'm trying to say. And so this idea where he's like, wait a minute, like where Kim is the first person actually saw approach rap like literature, like art.

23:53That's what I want to do. And then he says, and his song still banged at parties. Then he starts talking about what he learned from Ice -T, KRS -One, Dr. Dre, all these other people over and over again. And so the way I think about what's happening right there in the book is like, Jesus is doing exactly what Steve Jobs did, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, they all did this. They're analyzing the people that came before them, seeing how they approach their work, seeing what ideas that took them many, many decades to learn, and then taking the ideas and adding, he's taking their ideas and adding his own unique twist on and using them for his work.

24:28And I think the reason I like I'm talking fast and like getting kind of excited is because like, this is just a reaffirmation for me and for you is like, we are on the right path. We are doing exactly what we should be doing. Just keep doing it. And so another theme of the book that Jay -Z talks about, he's like, I just love language. And so this is him talking about his love of metaphors. I love metaphors. And for me, hustling is the ultimate metaphor for the basic human struggle, the struggle to survive and resist, the struggle to win and the struggle to make sense of it all. And something that may surprise you, but I kind of like listening to his music and hear him talking interviews, you kind of get this.

25:04He's rather introverted. and he says the promotion, he's talking about what happens after you create the album. He says the promotion was already starting, which isn't my favorite part of the process. I'm still a guarded person when I'm not in the booth or on stage or with my oldest friends. And I'm particularly wary of the media. And so he talks about it. He says, listen, man, if I don't know you, I'm going to be real quiet. But once I get to know you, I won't shut the hell up. Like, I'm the exact same way. And that's another thing I appreciate that Jay -Z talks about not in his music, but in the book a lot.

25:36It's like humans are multifaceted, man. We do things that we can't really explain. There's going to be actions that we're really proud of, actions that we don't like about ourselves. And you have to take the person as a whole. But there's just simply no such thing as a perfect human. Okay, so now we get to the first example of when he's breaking down his own lyrics. This is from the song American Dreaming. And it's really a story about entrepreneurship. I've mentioned Jay -Z a bunch of times on previous podcasts because I think, especially like his album 444, a lot of them, it's like entrepreneurial anthems.

26:04And so I'm going to go through this and try to make sense. I have connections I make here are so bizarre. Okay, so it starts, first I'm going to give you the line he says and then his interpretation of this. So it says, this is the shit you dream about with the homies steaming out, backing them beamers out. So his interpretation of that line, this is Jay -Z talking. This is really where it begins. in a room with your dudes, too young to shave, dreaming about big body benzes you're going to push. Obviously, for me, this is happening in Marcy, but this could be anywhere. A basement in the Midwest, a backyard in California, an Oldsmobile somewhere down south.

26:42The danger is that it's all just talk. And then this is, I double on this section, I believe you can speak things into existence. So another thing that surprised me, and it shouldn't surprise me by now, Jay -Z talks over and over. He probably mentions it at least three or four times in the book on the power, and he talks about in the documentary, the power of visualization, of seeing things in your mind before you see them in person. This is something that we learned Estee Lauder did. Bob Noyce, the founder of Intel, did. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, did. Steve Jobs did. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

27:13They all did this. Now, Jay -Z, I believe you can speak things into existence. And he says it starts from a dream. You're sitting there daydreaming with your friends about future success. And so then he says, seems as our plan to get a grant, then go off to college, didn't pan or even out. He's like, no one goes to college from the hood, from where I'm at in the hoods. So he's like, all right, so that's not going to work. What are we going to do? We need it now. We need a town. We need a place to pitch. We need a mount. And so that's the first time he's going to mention you need a product to sell and you need a market to target.

27:45That's exactly what he's telling us here. This is what I mean. They're just entrepreneurial anthems disguised as rap songs. He says, Mama, forgive me. I'm not going through every single. I'm not going to read. These are just the highlights I had, like the things I underlined it in the song lyrics. And then so he says, Mama, forgive me. I should be thinking about Harvard, but that's too far away. We're starving. And so even though everybody didn't grow up in the projects like Jay -Z, there's a lot of people that understand exactly what he's saying there. He's like, I should be thinking about Harvard, but that's too far away.

28:16We're starving. I remember when I was about to graduate high school, He's like, hey, where are you going to go to college? What do you mean where am I going to go to college? Whichever one I can drive to, whichever one I can work full time while I'm doing this. My parents didn't even graduate high school. So this idea where I should be aiming at Harvard, that's ridiculous. And then he goes on to the next thing. This is going to remind me about, okay, so he says, let me tell it to you first. Ain't nothing wrong with the aim, just got to change the target. So to me, he's saying you have to pick, picking the right market is essential.

28:42This is something Warren Buffett warns over and over again in his Sheryl letters. this is something Mark Andreessen talks about over and over again in his blog archive, that picking the right market is essential. In fact, if you would ask Mark Andreessen, he's like, what is a more predictor for business success? Is it the market, the team, or the product? And then he, Mark's a great writer too, and he gives the answers that you're most likely to expect. It's the team, it's the product. And he's like, well, actually, I'll take the market. And so what's crazy is all that stuff, Jay -Z just described all the ideas behind these lines.

29:15This is where I'm extremely envious of him is like his efficiency with communication. Like he can just use, he can tell entire stories. And a lot of great musicians do this as well in just a few lines. So we're not even, what is that? Three, four lines? We're not even, we haven't even touched the surface of the song. So he says, ain't nothing wrong with the game, just got to change the target. I just got to figure out where I'm going to direct my talents. And so then he says, and it's not like they're just young kids. They have to figure it out as they go. And it's not like we're professionals moving the decimals.

29:42Do you know where to cop? Nah. Got to connect? No. So what he's saying there is that's obviously for drugs, but for our purposes, it's do you have something to sell? Do you have a way to get something to sell? You can sell somebody else's product or you're going to make your own? So he's like, do you know where to cop? Do you know where to buy drugs? No. Do you got to connect the person selling drugs? No. And then he summarizes the very beginning of an entrepreneurial journey. Who in the F knows how to be successful? They say it's celestial. It's all in the stars. bars and then he says and at all cost you better avoid these bars so in his game it's like listen you better not uh like you need to avoid going to jail like you're just the way you go bust or you can't you can't be successful if you don't first survive so that's their example of that you know what i wrote down when i when i got to the line he says at all cost you avoid these bars it's something i love um the founder of sequoia capital don valentine because uh and i didn't i don't think i even knew about him when he was alive maybe i did but he passed away recently And if you go back and like watch videos of his on YouTube, they're just absolutely fantastic because this guy's got no fluff.

30:42And what I wrote down when I got to this part, he says that at all costs, you better avoid these bars. Don Valentine says, all companies that go out of business do so for the same reason. They run out of money. And so Don would advise his entrepreneurs, you need to focus on cash flow. Another thing I love, Don, he just cuts through all the bullshit. Don says, two things in business matter. And you can learn this in two minutes. High gross margins and cash flow. The other financial metrics you can forget. So back to Jay -Z, he says, at all costs, you better avoid these bars. This is a crash course.

31:14This ain't high school. So it's obviously very dangerous. In his case, you could die or go to jail. In our case, we could go bankrupt. We can run out of money. We can cause a lot of pain, not only to ourselves, but everybody else around us. This is a crash course. This ain't high school. If we make mistakes, we have very, very real consequences. And then this is one of my favorite parts of the song that I've repeated over and over again in my own life. You're now in a game where only time can tell. Survive the droughts, I wish you well. Survive the droughts, I wish you well. How sick am I? I wish you health.

31:42I wish you wheels. I wish you wealth. I wish you insight so you can see for yourself. I double underlined that last part. I wish you insight so you can see for yourself. And that is him telling us, you have to do the work necessary to trust your own judgment. Companies live and die by the founder. No one is coming to save you. I wish you health. I wish you wheels. I wish you wealth. I wish you insight so you can see for yourself. Now let's go back to when Jay -Z was 19 and his informal mentorship, right, with Big Daddy Kane. And so he says, it was 1988. I was still in the streets and I basically accepted that I'd be a hustler who happened to rap in his spare time.

32:23I thought the rap game was crooked and a little fake. Big Daddy Kane was playing a role, hip -hop's first playboy. He had silk robes and pretty girls in all his videos and all that. But his flow was sick. So his point was, yeah, people see the flash, right? They see the girls, they see the robes, they see the jewelry. But I'm actually looking at what he's actually saying and how he does it. And I'll tell you what this made me think of in a minute. He was condensing, stacking rhymes on top of one another. Trying to keep up with him was an exercise in breath control, in wordplay, in speed and imagination.

32:57He was relentless on the mic. So think about that. How many people watching Big Daddy Kane's music videos, how many people are listening to his music or thinking about stacking rhymes on one top of another? How many of them are thinking about the importance of your breath control, the importance of your wordplay, the speed at which you're saying the words and how you space them out? And so he says, I went on the road with Kane for a while. And I double underlined this section. I got an invaluable education watching him perform. him. This is the exact same. The way Jay -Z is talking about Big Daddy King is exactly, exactly the way Kobe Bryant used to speak about Michael Jordan.

33:32And so Kobe said, when I grew up watching Michael play, my generation, listen, this is, I have goosebumps right now. This is freaking crazy. When I grew up watching Michael, excuse me, when I grew up watching Michael play, my generation saw the highlights and the fancy stuff. But what I saw was his footwork. I saw the spacing. I saw the timing. I saw the fundamentals of the game. Is that not exactly what Jay -Z was just telling us? I got an invaluable education from watching him perform. I was watching his breath control, his wordplay, the way he stacked rhymes on one another. While you're watching the girls and the jewelry and the robes, just like Kobe's generation was watching the highlights and the fancy stuff.

34:13Kobe's focused on the footwork, the spacing, the timing, the fundamentals of the game. Back to Jay -Z. Kane had just an incredible amount of showmanship. Even today, I use some of the ideas I picked up back then in my own shows. Let's go back to what Kobe just said. I haven't said it yet, but what Kobe said. Everything that I do, I learn from the guys who came before me. Go back to Jay -Z before we go back to Kobe. I use some of the ideas I picked up back then in my own show, and he was generous too. Generous, remember that word. He'd stop the show and bring me out when no one knew who the hell I was.

34:49If you watched the fantastic documentary, The Last Dance, episode five, right before Kobe passed away, unfortunately, he was interviewed. And this is what Kobe said. When I came into the league, Michael provided a lot of guidance for me. I don't know why I'm getting a little emotional. I had a question about shooting his turnaround shot. He gave me great detailed answers. And on top of that, he said, if you ever need anything, he gave me a call. Guess what? Bob Noyce of Intel and Bill Hewlett and David Packard of HP were generation older than Steve Jobs and they did the same thing. It's the right thing to do.

35:26And then Kobe says, I truly hate having discussions. What is going on? My voice is like cracking. All right. Okay. I get excited about this stuff, man. I truly hate having discussions about who would win one -on -one our fans saying that you'd beat Michael. I feel like yo, and he puts his hands up, Kobe puts his hand up to say stop, to chill. And he says, so I hate having these discussions about who would win a one -on -one, our fans saying that you'd beat Michael. I feel like yo, what you get from me is from him. I don't get five championships without him because he guided me so much and gave me so much great advice.

36:05That is so powerful. It made me think of when I reread the Steve Jobs biography by Isaacson. And I just recorded another podcast on it. It's episode 214, if you haven't gone back and listened to it. But there's something that Steve says as he's dying, because he's working with Isaac as he's dying. There's two things, but I want to read this to you. And he talks about what Kobe could say. Yeah, yeah, you know, oh, I'd give it to him one -on -one and all this other stuff. He's just like, I wouldn't have had five championships without them. Everybody builds on the work from the great people that came before them.

36:33And so Steve is telling us, like he's parting words of advice to us. He's like, listen, I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do what it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in the business. That is how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did and Hewlett Packard and the people who built Intel.

37:07They created a company to last, not just to make money. And that is what I want Apple to be. And then the other example happens when Jobs is in a massive lawsuit with Google. And so he says Jobs had another visit that month from someone who wanted to repair fences. It was Google's co -founder, Larry Page, who lived less than three blocks away and had just announced plans to retake the reins of his company. He asked if he could come by and get tips on how to be a good CEO. This is really important because they're in a massive lawsuit against each other. And look at what Jobs does. He does the right thing.

37:40So it says, Jobs was still furious at Google. My first thought was, fuck you, Steve said. But then I thought about it and I realized that everyone helped me when I was young. What is happening in the book where we're at? Big Daddy Kane is a star. No one knows who the hell Jay -Z is. He does not have to give him the time of day. Not only does he put him on songs. not only does he let him go on tour with him, he brings him out and tries to introduce him to other people when no one knew who he was. But then I thought about it and realized that everybody helped me when I was young. From Bill Hewlett, founder of HP, to the guy down the block.

38:16So I called him back and said, sure. Larry came over, sat in Jobs' living room, and listened to his ideas on building great products and durable companies. So then he talks about mentoring Memphis Bleak. which is like this young kid that lived in his projects as well. They do a song together. And I just want to pull out one line here because just one line made me think of so many other examples. And so Jay -Z, in the song, he's playing the role of like the older mentor to the younger person. And he says, hold up. Now listen to me. You let them other dudes get the name. Skip the fame. 10 ,000 or 100, so 10 ,000 or 100 Gs.

38:52So 10 ,000 or $100 ,000. Keep your shit the same. And so that's the line. And then this is Jay -Z now writing many years after the fact what it means. And he says, this is a classic piece of OG advice. So original gangster, like the interpretation of that would be like somebody older and wiser than you. Okay. So their slang is OG. This is a classic piece of OG advice. It's amazing how few people actually stick to it. So the advice from Jay -Z is stay on your grind. That's the way he says it. If you go back to founders number 56, when I did the biography, the book on Herb Keller, the founder of Southwest Airlines, the only airline that was profitable for 40 something straight years.

39:32It's amazing. Herb's got a fantastic personality, one of the best personalities of anybody I've come across. But he says, and he's essentially saying the same thing, that the same advice that Jay -Z has given to Memphis Bleak here and giving to us, Herb gives us to as well. He says, success has to be earned over and over again or it disappears. And so Jay -Z saying, doesn't matter if you have a little bit of money or a lot of money, you still act the same, you still do the same thing. Jay -Z quotes later on, and he puts it on one of his songs, at the very beginning of one of his songs. It's Biggie Smalls talking about advice that he got from who signed him, which is Diddy.

40:09The advice that Diddy gave him when they were coming in, they were both young, you know, early 20s. And so Biggie says, he says, just try to stay above water, stay busy, stay working. Puff, who's called Puff at the time, we know him as Diddy today. Diddy told me that the the key to this joint, the key to staying on top of things is to treat everything like it's your first project. Do you know what I'm saying? Like it's your first day back when you were an intern. That's how you try to treat things. You have to stay hungry. And so they're picking up on this natural tendency of human nature that, you know, you're really hungry when you're coming up, you're dedicated, you stick to it, but it's really hard.

40:47Like you got rich, maybe you don't have the same motivations that pushed you when you were younger or when you were hungrier. you lose that hunger and that what happens as soon as you stay off your grind as he says 10 ,000 or 100 G's keep your shit the same once you get off of it you fall off as Herb said you can't do that your success has to be earned over and over again or it's going to disappear skipping ahead he's analyzing the song called uh it's the evils devils with an apostrophe is uh but there's just one line from here and he says nine to five is how you survive I ain't trying to survive.

41:23I'm trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. That's why I feel they're really entrepreneurial anthems. Nine to five is how you survive. I ain't trying to survive. I'm trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. Entrepreneurs are chasing what Mark Andreessen says. As an entrepreneur, you only experience two feelings, euphoria and terror. We're not seeking equilibrium. If we wanted to seek equilibrium, we'd go get a job. We're not interested. Going back to the Jay -Z's parallel, his thoughts on lyrics and rhymes is very similar to my thinking on books. He says, great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don't necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it.

42:06Instead, it plants dissonance in your head. It leaves shit rattling around your head and that won't make sense till the fifth or sixth time through. It challenges you. The problem isn't in rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music. And here's an example of that, because this is just one line, and I'll tell you it's very similar to what you and I just discovered on that book about the early history of PayPal back on episode 233. Every hustler knows the value of a faint, meaning a head fake, like a movement that is not actually, that's not, going to reveal your intention.

42:43Every hustler knows the value of a feint. It keeps you one step ahead of whoever's listening. So in that fantastic book, Founders, that Jimmy Sony wrote about the early history of PayPal, there is something that Reid Hoffman, who was working at PayPal at the time, goes on to find LinkedIn, and now he's a venture capitalist and all this other stuff. But at the time, he gives the rope a do. He does a feint to eBay. So PayPal is getting ready. They had been in acquisition talks with eBay over and over again. They always fell through. And so PayPal is going ahead with the IPO. And they're worried that during the quiet period, where they can't say anything, that eBay could torpedo their IPO by saying, oh, yeah, most of their business is on our platform.

43:26And we're getting ready to kick them off our platform and just use our own payment system. So essentially, when they're going to attack somebody that they don't like, because eBay and PayPal did not like each other, and they're going attack the weakness of their enemy at a time when the when the enemy cannot fight back so they come up with and that's why you have to read the book over and over again because these guys were geniuses on how they just this unique way they they solve problems so reid hoffman says hey you know what let we let's sit down and let's have like more acquisition talks i think we can work this out and so he's only doing that because if you're in the middle of if your company's trying to buy my company and I can convince you I'm fainting, I'm faking that I'm really interested and I want to sell you my company.

44:08Let's just get this locked up now. You're not going to say things that will decrease the value of the company. You're not going to destroy my IPO. And the entire time, Meg Whitman, who's the CEO of eBay at the time, thought that they were serious. They were never serious. They did not want to sell the company. They just wanted you not to destroy the IPO. So let's go back. Again, that's a long story. It goes over a couple pages in a book. Jay -Z says it. Every hustler knows the value of a feint. It keeps you one step ahead of whoever's listening in. So then we go back to studying the greats. Before he could meet the greats, he would study them through their music, right?

44:48At this point in his career, and this is not, the book is not in chronological order, just so you know. At this point in his career, he's already super famous, so he gets to sit down and meet with Quincy Jones and Bono from U2. I met Bono years ago in the cigar room of a bar in London with Quincy Jones. This book is filled with stories like this, which again, I've been a lifelong Jay -Z fan. I didn't even know that stuff. I spent most of the night quizzing Quincy about Thriller, which I think is the greatest album that has ever been made. Bono was beaming and laughing the whole time. I liked him right away.

45:14I was completely unprepared for what a genuine, humble, and open person Bono was. We became friends after that night. So then they run into each other later on in New York. He told me he read an interview I'd done somewhere. The writer had asked me about the U2 record that was about to be released, and I said something about the kind of pressure a group like that must be under just to meet their own standard. Bono told me that my quote had really gotten to him. In fact, he said it made him a little anxious. He decided to go back to the studio, even though the album was already done, and he kept reworking it until he thought it was as good as it could possibly be.

45:45This is the important part and the reason I'm bringing this to your attention. Because again, from the outside, Bono's super famous. He's U2. He's settled. He's not nervous. He's not worried. Yes, he is. Everybody is. I really wasn't trying to make him nervous with that quote, and I was surprised to find out that at that point in his career, he still got anxious about his work. It is only right that I met him and Quincy Jones on the same night. They're both already in the pantheon. We ended up trading stories about the pressure we felt even at this point in our lives. And so Jay says, I've heard him say in interviews over and over again, Hey, listen, I respect the greats.

46:16I learned from the greats, but I'm competing with them too. I want to be the best that ever did it. There was something beautiful about Tupac being my closest competition on the charts that week. So he talks about they both released albums. This is many years after Tupac died and Tupac winds up coming in second. He comes in first. So there's something beautiful about Tupac being my closest competition on the charts that week. Aside from the heartbreaking, the heartbreak of losing two great MCs and one great friend, I've always felt robbed of my chance to compete with Tupac and Biggie. Competition pushes you to become your best self.

46:47Jordan said the same thing about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. that desire to compete and to win was the engine of everything we did so then he flashbacks in his life he's still thinking okay like am i gonna sell drugs or like can i make this hip -hop thing work and i'm gonna read read my note to you first before i read this section because i think it informs what happened what's happening here and i wrote founder mentality you know exactly what jay means here i wanted money and excitement and love the idea of cutting myself loose from the rules and low ceilings of the straight world. So he's like, I'm not going to get a job.

47:20The kid on the street is getting a shot at a dream. He sees the guy who gets rich and thinks, yep, that'll be me. He ignores the other stories going around. So for his purposes, he's talking about death and jail. Our purposes, we're thinking, yep, that person built a successful company. So can I. We also know that there's a ton of people who fail and there's devastating consequences to that. And so kids or he sees the guy who gets rich and thinks, yep, that'll be me. He ignores the other stories going around. They're working because they think they're due for a miracle. The kid in McDonald's gets a check and that's it.

47:54I never even consider that as a possibility. When you've got a nation of hustlers working for a small handful of slots, you learn something that you never learn at McDonald's. If you got the heart and the brains, you can move up quickly. There's no way to quantify all of this on a spreadsheet, but it's the dream of being the exception. And he also clarified, he's like, listen, I'm not dissing you if you go to work at McDonald's. Cause he says it's like, it was very, there's like a level of courage to walk through the hood, the Marcy projects in your uniform and everybody else is saying, Hey, go play basketball, go sell drugs, do all this other stuff.

48:30He's like, no, I'm taking a predictable path to success where I can actually pay my bills legitimately and not worried about getting killed or going to jail or whatever the case is. But Jay -Z he's saying this is like i don't ever i never thought about that i've never he says in his rap he's like i never had a job like he never had a job in his entire life other than one that he made for himself so one of the people that he gets to know when he's still before he's in the music industry is this rapper named jazz and there's just he learned something because jazz gets signed he's one of the first people he knows to get signed to a major record deal and that's where he's like wait a minute this isn't what do we see like they're not actually adding a lot of value they want to he says it's like the most crooked legal contract in history so he says i I would link with Jazz.

49:08We'd go back and forth to each other's houses and write rhymes for hours. We'd lock ourselves in a room with a pen and a pad. So again, he's telling us practice, practice, practice over and over again. Jazz got a record deal. EMI advanced him a ridiculous amount of money, nearly half a million dollars. That was huge back then. The label rented Jazz a flat in London to work with Chuck, which is this new, I guess, successful producer. So go to London, we'll rent you an apartment and work with Chuck and record your debut. Jazz invited me along for the ride. And inside, I was doing backflips and shit.

49:43So Jay -Z's talking about, I was like, listen, I barely, I'd been out of my projects. I'd been to maybe Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, but I'd never been abroad. Like, this is insane. And even though I didn't go around talking about it, even to my closest friends, I believed I could make it as a rapper too. So he talks about the time in London. I was like a sponge. When I'd sit in on Jazz's recording sessions and meetings, I never gave my opinion about how his business was being run. I was new and I didn't necessarily know how things worked in the music business. I did notice that even though we were in London for more than a month, when the guys from EMI finished Jazz's album, it didn't sound that different than his demo.

50:20So, okay, wait a minute, we spent all this time and money over here. Like, his album's the same. And besides, you gave him one new track. It says the only new track they gave him was Hawaiian Sophie. But the point is like, well, this doesn't seem right. So I'm noticing, I'm trusting, I'm intuition saying, hey, something's off here. But the problem is, they have the experience. They are the record label. They had just made a successful album of Will Smith. Maybe they know something we don't. So it says, but we were looking at the plaques on their walls and thinking about the radio play that got Will Smith.

50:49And we let them convince us that Hawaiian Sophie was going to make jazz blow. Unfortunately, it didn't read that way once the video came out. That single was nearly career suicide for jazz. He went from being courted at the highest level to not having EMI return his phone calls. The wildest shit about the whole thing was that the executives at EMI, who had withdrawn support for Jazz's project, were coming to me behind his back to holler at me on some solo shit. I thought to myself, this business sucks. There's no honor, no integrity. It was disgusting. And he talks about how devastating it is from the individual's perspective.

51:25Jazz's debut album, something that he'd been dreaming about his whole life, did come out, but in the end, it was nothing more than a tax write -off for a giant corporation. After the way EMI handled jazz, I buried my little rap dreams, and I took it out on the block. So he's like, all right, I'm not going to be a rapper. I'll go back to selling drugs, and then here's the problem a little while after. He's like, this can't be my life. This isn't how my life should be is a very powerful motivator. He says, in that bitter cold folded into the crevices of a project wall hundreds of miles from home.

52:00I sold crack to addicts who were killing themselves, collecting the wrinkled bills they got from God knows where. I stood there thinking, what the fuck am I doing? And so eventually he's going to be like, I got to give it a go. And he realizes, forget trying to get signed by a record label, right? Even though no one would sign him, which is hilarious because he sold what, 125 million records up until this point. No one wanted to sign him. So he had to make his own record label, which winds up being the best idea he ever had in his life or one of the best ideas he ever had in his life. But he goes back to studying the greats.

52:28And this is going to be, I mentioned Rick Rubin, one of the co -founders of Def Jam. This is the guy, Russell Simmons, who essentially is the first rap mogul. So it says, when I was moving off the street and tried to envision what winning looked like, it was Russell Simmons. Going back, see what I mean? How blows your mind or blew my mind? How much of this book is Jay -Z just studying the great people that came before him? Russell was a star. the one who created the whole model for the hip -hop mogul that many people like Andre Harrell, Puff Daddy, and even Suge Knight went on to follow. People in the record business had always made a lot of money.

53:03Not the artists, who'd kept dying broke, but the execs. Still, regular fans had no idea who they were. Russell changed that. His brand as an executive mattered not just within the industry, but among people in the street. And with Def Jam, he created one of the most powerful brands in the history of American entertainment. Russell also made being a CEO seem like a better deal than being an artist. He was living life crazy. Fucking with models, writing in Bentleys, with his sneakers sticking out the window, with his sneakers sticking out the window, and never once wrapped a single bar. His gift was curating a whole lifestyle.

53:40Music, fashion, comedy, film, and then selling it. He didn't just create the hip -hop business model, he changed the business style of a whole generation of Americans. The whole vibe of startup companies in Silicon Valley with 25 -year -old CEOs wearing shell toes is Russell's Def Jam style filtered through different industries. The business idea, so he's still talking about all the lessons he learned before he met Russell. The business ideal for a whole generation went from growing up and wearing a suit every day to never growing up and wearing sneakers to the boardroom. I understood what Russell was onto.

54:15He discovered a way to work in the legit world, but to live the dream of the hustler. Independence, wealth, and success outside of the mainstream rules. That's more founder mentality. Independence, wealth, and success outside of the mainstream's rules. This was a better story than just being a rapper, especially based on what I now knew about how rappers got jerked. And so we moved on to a different page. He's about to meet Russell. And I just wrote, so many gems are on this page. So he says, I first met Russell when Dame, Biggs, and I, so Dame -Biggs Burke, I think is his last name, and Jay -Z were the three co -founders of Rockefeller Records before Jay -Z is going to wind up breaking off by Onizone later on.

55:02I first met Russell with Dame, Biggs, and I were negotiating for a label deal with Rockefeller after Reasonable Doubt dropped. So first out, at this point in the story, he's already said, hey, I'm not going to sell drugs anymore. I'm going to dedicate all my time and effort into making it as at this he says making it at this rap shit is the way he puts it so his first album comes out doesn't sell a lot but it's like critically it's like wow this guy's really good so it says I remember sitting across the table from him in Lior Cohen this is a really remember Lior Cohen from later on in the story too because Lior is really important to the story because he's one of uh he's one of Jay -Z's mentors and is also again Jay -Z we've he's demonstrated like I'm going to find the smartest people that that know more than I do and I'm learn everything I can from them.

55:43Right. And so he does that with Leo becomes like Leo becomes his mentor. And this causes a rift between Jay and his co -founders. So he says, I remember sitting across the table from him and Leo Cohen in disbelief that we were negotiating a seven figure deal with the greatest lab, greatest label and rap history. But I was feeling a dilemma. I was looking at Russell and thinking, I want to be this dude, not his artist. Russell would become a valuable, informal mentor for me. He knew that the key to success was believing in the quality of your own product enough to make people do business with you on your terms.

56:16He knew that great product was the ultimate advantage in competition. Not how big your office building is or how deep your pockets are or who you know. In the end, it came down to having a great product and the hustle to move it. He knew the culture's power and was never shy about leveraging it and making sure that it was the people who were creating the culture who got rich off of it. So let's stop here. Let's flashback. Just like Jay -Z said at the very beginning, I knew hip -hop was new. I just knew one thing and I knew it in my bones. I knew it was going to be bigger than it was. It's going to be bigger in the future than it is today before it dies.

56:59Well, the analogy here is Russell knew how valuable. Russell was one of the first people that knew that the birth of the hip -hop industry was going to make billionaires. He knew it. He was one of the first people to profit off of it. And the whole part is like, we're the ones in control. We're the ones making, it's what Steve Jobs said, the most important people in the company are the people that are making your product. The people that can create wonderful products, both in Apple and Pixar, those are the people that are valuable. And the way to build a strong company is to make sure that those people are the most important people in the company.

57:31And what Steve Jobs learned from getting kicked out of Apple is like, oh, we used to be the most important people in the company. Then when we build a product that turns a company into a rocket ship, then they bring in like adults, they start prioritizing sales and marketing. And then eventually you've already peaked. You don't even know it. You're like the walking dead. And 10 years later, everybody that's capable of creating great product has left. So in the end, it came down to having a great product and the hustle to move it. So build and sell, and you will become unstoppable. That is Naval Ravikant from the Almanac of Naval.

58:04I can't remember what podcast number that is, but you can find in the archive. He knew build, if you can build and sell, you will be unstoppable. He knew the culture's power was never shied about leveraging it to making sure that it was the people who were creating the culture who got rich off it. That was the idea. Now, this is again, I'm still on the same page. So many gems on this page. And I'm reading you almost the whole page. It's amazing. The idea was at the heart of Rocketware. So this is a company that they're going to start. They wind up selling. So Jay -Z sold multiple companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

58:31Rockerware he sold for $200 million. I forgot how much he sold his liquor company for. He's got a few liquor companies. He just sold Tidal to Jack Dorsey at Square for like $400 million. So he just does this over and over again. The idea was at the heart of Rockerware. I mean, that's how you wind up being able to live in a $100 million house, right? The idea was at the heart of Rockerware, the clothing company we founded. In the late 90s, I was wearing a lot of clothes from this company called Iceberg. After a while, I'd look out into the audience at my concert and see hundreds of people rocking Iceberg.

58:58The executives at Iceberg looked at us like we were speaking a foreign language. So they wanted to do a partnership deal. They wanted to get paid for their influence of sales, right? They go meet. Executives are like, nah, get out of here. They looked at us like we were speaking foreign language. They offered us free clothes, but we wanted millions. We walked out of their office realizing that we had to do it ourselves. And so what he realized is like, forget endorsing other people's products. I'm not doing that. I'm making my own. If you'll buy a t -shirt that you see me in, the t -shirt should be owned by me.

59:28If you go to the club and order a drink like Cristal or whatever else, because I rap about it, then I should just rap about, like I should own everything. It's like almost like a form of like virtual integration. And so he talks about this, like forget Timberland, forget Crevasse, forget Versace and all the other stuff. Like we're going to make our own stuff. And he just got a great line. Like what story are you telling about your product? and he says we gave those brands a narrative which is one of the reasons anyone buys anything to own not just a product but to become part of a story. That line could have came directly out of Coco Chanel's mouth.

1:00:04She said the exact, the sentiment behind that line is exactly how she built her massive, massive empire around. It's why anybody buys anything. Not to just own a product but to become part of the story. and although so he picks up on something about change in his outlook on things in life that he becomes older and wiser and just learns more one thing like like was interesting is like you know you have all these like rap beefs and rap battles and they make songs about each other and all this other stuff and it's still you know these people still fight over this stuff today when i was younger i really liked it i thought like the like the art form is very interesting and as i get older i'm like this is kind of dumb like if i'm making music and somebody else is making music and And that other person that's making music says something bad about my music.

1:00:49The best thing for me to do is to ignore and outperform, right? Instead of me giving them attention. Now, some of this is all fake. And they do this wrestling thing where it's like, if we have this fake beef, we'll sell more records and stuff. But I think, in general, I don't care what other people are doing. I'm just focused on me and my product and getting the word out. I just think that's smarter. And so that's what he's realizing here. He's like, I'm not going to freaking argue with every single person that comes at me. I don't have that much time. So he says, I don't scrap with every up and comer these days.

1:01:20I got so many people coming at me. I'd never do anything else. I'm not competing with rappers anymore. I look at things a little differently than I used to. The competition isn't always zero sum like it was when we were on the streets. I discovered that there really is such a thing as a win win situation. So this whole point is like, this is all zero. This is not a zero sum game. You can like my music. You can like that person's music. You can like that woman's music. And like it goes on forever. So he says, I discovered there really is such a thing as a win win situation. I'm only competing with myself to be a better artist and businessman, to be a better person with a broader vision.

1:01:49This is genius. This is exactly what we should be doing. I'm only competing with myself to be a better artist and businessman, to be a better person with a broader vision. I'm still that dude on the corner. And he talks about the mindset he has. I'm still that dude on the corner, seven nights straight, trying to get back the money I lost. I'm still the kid who'd fight to be able to walk through a park. I'm still the MC who'd battle anyone in a project courtyard. So he's not saying this literally. He's saying, I still have that mindset. This is what the streets have done for us. What they have done for me.

1:02:14They've given us a drive. They've made us stronger. Through hip -hop, we found a way to redeem these lessons and to use them to change the world. So this is just fantastic, too. The note I left myself on this page is, this is just great. It's a million dollars worth of game for $9 .99. That is a line he said in his album, 444. What he means is like, you're buying an album for $10 and you're going to get a million dollars worth of ideas for it. Very similar to what they said in Poor Charlie's Almanac, Founders No. 90, if you haven't listen to that, where I said there's 30, the reason that all hit, like when you study the best founders and the best investors, like they all have deep historical knowledge.

1:02:46And the reason is, there's a line in Port Charlie's Almanac. They said there's 30, there's a, there's an idea, there's ideas worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book. And so this is just fantastic. So he's going to analyze the career and life of John Michel Basquiat, who, if you listen to JC Music, you know who he is because he won't shut up about him. And he's just talking about, he's analyzing his work, taking the good ideas, right? And then avoiding the bad. It's exactly what we're doing. Bosquette was from Brooklyn, like me. He started off living in the streets as a graffiti artist.

1:03:16He was hanging around with Madonna before she was famous, and he collaborated with Andy Warhol. He came onto the scene with a crew of graffiti writers, but he didn't want to be boxed in with that movement. So when the graffiti scene died, he didn't die with it. He moved in a white art world, but flooded his art with black images, attitudes, and icons. He wanted to be the most famous artist in the world. So I double underline that section because Jay -Z may not want to be the most famous, but he wants to be the best. He wants to be the best artist in the world. He was hip -hop when hip -hop was still in its cradle.

1:03:48So he's seeing things in Basquiat's art. And he's realizing that same theme that's running through his art is exactly the foundations of this industry that I just jumped into. On the night he died, he was 27. Basquiat had been planning to see a run DMC show. When people asked him what his art was about, he'd hit them with the same three words over and over again. Royalty, heroism, and the streets. When he died in 1988, I'm not sure I knew who he was, even though he was a Brooklyn kid like me and he wasn't that much older. And so then he's saying Basquiat wound up getting his wish, but he got it in death.

1:04:19You don't want to get your wish in death. You want it in life. He's probably among the most famous artists in the world. Two decades after his death, I own a few of his paintings. His technique feels like hip hop. Another sentence I underlined twice. his technique feels like hip -hop this is where he's again don't think of things literally the one thing you learn if you study the the life of claude shannon the inventor of information theories like he looked at everything like a giant abstraction which is what you and i are trying to do with these books his technique feels like hip -hop in the way he combined different tradition traditions and techniques to create something new okay he brought together elements of street art and european old masters he combined painting and writing he combined icons from christianity and Santeria and voodoo.

1:05:00And on top of all that mixing and matching, he added his own genius. Bingo, exactly. And this is why you do that, which transformed the work into something completely fresh and original. So you go study the life and career of Steve Jobs and you see elements that he learned from Edwin Land, which he called his hero. He called Edwin Land a national treasure. You see Edwin Land's ideas in the back of Steve Jobs, like the influence, the veins of influence runs through Steve Jobs' approach to his work. It's not Edwin Land's ideas. It's Edwin Land's ideas mixed in with Steve's own genius, which then transforms Steve's work into something completely fresh and original.

1:05:43And if you want to put a price tag on it, what is it? Multiple trillion dollar market cap is insane. Vazquez's work often deals with fame and success, the story of what happens when you actually get the things that you would die for. One Basquiat painting I own is called Charles I. It's about Charlie Parker, the jazz pioneer who died young of a heroin overdose, just like Basquiat. In the corner of the paintings are the words, most kings get their head cut off. So why is he telling us this? Why is he bringing up? Is he just bragging about that he's got really expensive art on his walls? No. This is the important part.

1:06:22And the reason I collect maxims and song lyrics and short form videos. I read, so he's talking about looking at that, walking in the corner in his house and seeing that painting on the wall. Most kings get their heads cut off. The reason why I have Ernest Shackleton on my lock screen on my phone. Why? Because I see Ernest, I see Shackleton covered in snow, looking like death. And I'm immediately reminded of his motto, by endurance we conquer. So when I look at my phone, I see, oh, you're going to give up, David? You're really going to do that. No, you're not going to conquer anything. Buy endurance.

1:07:00Get used to taking pain. And then when you open my phone, it's a line, a screenshot from The Last Dance, the biography of Michael Jordan. A guy that was totally focused on one thing and one thing only. So we see this. It's very common for people to have these little reminders set around their house. Same reason I leave the book, The Towel of Charlie Munger Out, The Bed of Procrusties, Autobiography of a Restless Mind. These are just like little books I leave in places in my house. So I just pick up. They're books of maxims and aphorisms. It's not to sit there and read for 15 minutes. Pick one up for two minutes.

1:07:35Read an aphorism, a maxim. Turn to a random page and it's going to prompt your thinking, right? It's going to remind you of things just like J .C. sitting in his big, beautiful house looking at this Basquiat painting. And he's saying, most kings get their heads cut off. This is what J .C. says. I read it as a statement about what happens when you achieve a certain position. People want to take your head. your crown, your title. They want to emasculate you. And you resist it until one day your albums aren't moving and the shows aren't filling up and it seems like the game might have moved on without you.

1:08:06And this is the problem. You do exactly what you shouldn't. Then you start to change and you do whatever you need to get back into that spotlight. And that is when you're the walking dead. So in that margin of that paragraph, I wrote Steve Jobs avoided that. Look at the weird, crazy arc of Steve Jobs' life. There were many times like, no, Steve, why are you? They said something about he was trying to build really nice, expensive Apple computers when everybody was just buying, the market had shifted and everybody was buying cheap PCs. And there's a line in that book in Steve Jobs by Isaacson. It says Apple's problem is that they still believe the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers.

1:08:52I'm not here to serve you cheese and crackers, Steve Jobs said. I'm building insanely great products because that's what I feel I should do. And if I start to change and just build an undifferentiated commodity PC like everybody else is doing, then Apple never returns. He looked at Apple's, and this is this period that that line comes from when this is the late 90s when Steve Jobs comes back to Apple. And he looks at the product lineup. He's like, this lineup sucks. There's too much stuff. All of it sucks. Let's get rid of it all. and we're going to build four products and there's going to be four badass, insanely great products.

1:09:25And we're going to stake our claim and we're going to rebuild our company on the quality of our fucking products. And that, that line of thinking becomes the foundation for the greatest corporate turnaround the world has ever seen. Not sticking your finger up in the air and be like, hey, what's the, what, what way is the wind blowing? Oh, let me, you don't like what I'm doing. Let me change. Let me do whatever I need to do. Get it back in the spotlight. No, the spot, I'm going to build the best products and that's going to direct the spotlight. I'm not going to just copy you and go down this crappy path.

1:09:51That reminds me of this fantastic, fantastic anecdote that's in Joni, or Joni, I said it again. I did a whole podcast on it. Joni, his name is Joni, Joni Ives' biography. It's Joni Ives, the genius behind Apple's greatest products. And so at the time, the market, the market demand saying, everybody, all the undifferentiated PC makers were building these things called netbooks. And they go from being like nothing to the laptop market to like 20 % of the laptop market. And when they were talking, I was like, should we build a netbook? Steve Jobs just nailed it. And you only know this by being authentic to yourself.

1:10:25And he says, even though they were 20 % of the market, Apple never seriously considered making one. And Steve said, netbooks aren't better than anything. Steve Jobs said at the time, they're just cheap laptops. And so he's like, no, I'm not building it because they're not better. They don't do anything better than any other product. They're just popular because people are mass producing them and buying them. And so instead of dedicating time to build a netbook, you know what Steve directed Apple's resources at building instead? The iPad. That is why what Jay -Z is describing to us is so important.

1:11:00So back to this paragraph, nearly every rapper who made it big has had to deal with getting one of his heads chopped off. The stories you hear can really make it seem like success can be a curse. And so what Jay -Z navigate his way through. The stories you hear can really make it seem like success can be a curse. Rappers who have been dangled over balconies for their publishing money. That's a true story, by the way. Held by their ankles. Sign this contract and we're going to drop it off the balcony. Driven out of their hometowns, fucked up by drugs, sued by their own families, betrayed by their best friends, sold out by their crews.

1:11:33There are rappers who blow up and blow through whole fortunes. They squander every opportunity and before you know it, end up back on the block. And so this is why this book is really hitting hard for me, hitting home for me, is because there's a bunch of other people that I like their music. The same time I discovered Jay -Z's music 20 years ago. And let's say there was 20 of them. How many of them are still surviving to this day? How many of them did not successfully navigate through that labyrinth of what Jay -Z described to us? It's a handful. A handful. And let's put that number. There's in thousands of people that have made a hit rap, a hit song.

1:12:13How many of them are still doing it decade after decade after decade? That's what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in being good at podcasting for a year or two, but a decade after decade after decade, because that is what my heroes did. Steve Jobs is a hero. He worked on his career for 40 years. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett are still out. Enzo Ferrari died. Enzo Ferrari's exit strategy was death. Edwin Land ran his company longer than almost any other American business founder, or excuse me, any other founder in American business history. Steven Spielberg is still at it. All these other people I look up to and admire for different reasons.

1:12:50The one thing that they all have in common is longevity. Jay -Z, same thing, longevity. So you take maybe thousands of people that had a hit song like Jay -Z did, and maybe five are still doing it for as long, maybe three or four, whatever the number is, are still doing it as long as he is. That, that long -term success is the ultimate goal. And so I turned the page and he's back at it. And this is what I wrote. He just gets it. Jay just has the ability to connect the dots. I'm also lucky never to have needed the approval of the gatekeepers in the industry because from the start, we came in the game as entrepreneurs.

1:13:24That gave me the freedom to just be myself, which is the secret to any long -term success, but exactly what we just talked about with Steve Jobs, right? That is a secret to any long -term success, but that's hard to see when you're young and desperate just to be put on, just to get put on. I don't accept, and I ran over my own point I just said a minute ago, this is the goal here. I don't accept that failing is inevitable. I think there's a way to avoid it, a way to win, to get success and it spoils, and to get away with it without losing your soul or your life or both. This is exactly what Jay -Z is able to accomplish.

1:14:00I'm trying to rewrite the old script, but Basquiat's painting sits on my wall like a warning. A few pages later, just one line here. A reminder that this is something I learned from Bill Gurley. Be the best informed person in your field. If you've never seen that fantastic talk, go to YouTube, type in Running Down a Dream, How to Survive and Thrive in a Career You Love, I think it is. be the best informed person in your field is a direct quote from that talk. And he says, I'm a music head, so I listen to everything. People around me are passionate about music. We study music. We seek it out. Then he talks about, he's like, you shouldn't be an artist.

1:14:41You should be a businessman. You should approach your art as a business. And again, really, he's just listing the pitfalls of the game that he was able to avoid. And so this idea, it's funny because everybody's like, they describe the emergence of what they call, quote unquote, the creator economy. That is not a new idea. Back in 2005, and I think Jay -Z put it better than the term creator economy. He says, I'm not a businessman. I'm a business man. The other part of commercialization is the idea that artists should only be thinking about their art and not about the business side of what we do.

1:15:11When I committed to a career in rap, I wasn't taking a vow of poverty. I saw it as another hustle, exactly, dead on. It's just another product to move. I saw it as another, just, hey, he happens to love and be obsessed with it. And obviously, the intent or the reading through the lines there is that that increases his ability to the likelihood of his success. I wasn't taking a vow of poverty. I saw it as another hustle, one that happened to coincide with my natural talents. So I mind my business, and I don't apologize for it. There's this sick fascination with the dead artist, the broke artist, the drugged -out artist.

1:15:44And another thing that's kind of surprising is how much Jay -Z talks about, like, don't drink all the time, don't smoke weed, don't do coke. Like, have a clear head. There's a fantastic story about him and Biggie. With regard to that, I'll get to it in a minute. There's a sick fascination with the dead artist, the broke artist, the drugged -out artist, the artist who blows all of his money on drugs and big chains and ends up on a VH1 special. And he's just saying, he's like, I'm not doing that. You're not going to catch me slipping like that. So then we get to the point where he's analyzing one of his freestyles.

1:16:13I'm going to skip the line. I want to tell you just a few sentences, two sentences, I think, about what he's talking about. And again, Bob Noyce, Estee Lauder, Edwin Lance, Steve Jobs, Arnold, Jay -Z, they all do this in the song. I keep talking about seeing it all before. And it's true. Not that I was prophetic, but I have always used visualization the way athletes do to conjure reality. The mind is a powerful place and what you feed it can affect you in powerful ways. And so I think for a lot of people, they think, oh, this is weird. You know, that's like Willy Foo Foo stuff. Well, I see it all the time.

1:16:48I don't know what to tell you. I remember I was having coffee with a listener of the podcast, Seth. He's a founder and investor. He's around the same age. And we both arrived at the same conclusion when we were having this conversation. And we talked about, you know, like when you're younger, you're kind of like, I think we both had like a more analytical bent. And the more life experience you have, and you also see in this book over and over again, the more you're like, wait, intuition, just because we don't understand it doesn't mean it's not powerful. And there's some kind of evolutionary benefit to listening to your gut, whatever you want to call it, intuition, gut, your mind, inner monologue, whatever word you have.

1:17:18happen to put on it. But before I completely discounted anything that was like humans scoring the abstract. Well, I was one of those people that's scoring the abstract before I understood how valuable that is. There's something about having this positive mental attitude, having a belief in yourself. You're walking out into the unknown. You think that you have a good product. You think you have some traction on your business, but you have to believe that you are going to succeed. You have to see it in your mind and brainwash yourself. And I'm kind of doing the same thing when I'm reading this book.

1:17:46It's impossible. It is absolutely impossible to read biography after biography of people believing in themselves when they had no reason to believe in themselves and using that as fuel to fuel their dreams and not have a profound sense of belief in your own ability and what you're doing. That's not something you can put in a spreadsheet, but it's very real and it's very valuable. Listen to yourself, your heart, your soul, your intuition, your gut, whatever it is. It's the same thing that Jay -Z sang there. I always use visualization the way athletes do, to conjure reality. Okay, so now we get to, like I said, there's tons of fantastic stories in the book.

1:18:26This is on having dinner with Michael Jordan. So he says, I also believe there's a lot to be learned from elite athletes. Sports are one of the great metaphors for life. I know I'm not alone when I say this, but I absolutely love Michael Jordan. His career was a perfectly composed story about will. I went to his restaurant at his invitation to have dinner with him. And so he's like, this was just fantastic. I got to be a freaking, just an absolute fan. And I got to pepper him with any question I wanted to. So he says, I found out how much Jordan loves Hakeem Olajuwon. He pointed out that Olajuwon was a leader in steals, which is rare in his center, because he played center, which is rare in the center position.

1:19:03I asked him to name his five favorite centers, the best games he ever played, which championships meant the most to him. I got to be an unabashed fan. It was an absolute dream conversation for me. The things that distinguished Jordan wasn't just his talent, but this is the most important part. And it speaks to exactly like his dedication, the dedication that Jay -Z had in his craft, the one that Kanye we mentioned earlier. I'm locking myself. I'm doing lock yourself in a room and do five beats a day for three summers. I deserve to do these numbers. The thing that distinguished Jordan wasn't just his talent, but his discipline, his laser -like commitment to excellence.

1:19:42That's something I always respect, especially in people who have great natural talents already. And so he's like, Jordan, that same approach that Jordan uses, I've seen it in other people. It's the through line through excellence. My earliest mentors in rap taught me that making music is work. whether it was jazz locking himself in a room working on different flows, or Big Daddy Kane taking the time to meticulously put together a stage show. There's unquestionably magic involved in great music, songwriting, and performances, like those nights when a star athlete is totally in the zone and can't miss.

1:20:15But there's also work. Without the work, the magic won't come. There are a hundred Harold Miners for every one Michael Jordan. So what he means is there's plenty of people with talent. That's not enough. You got to comply and discipline and laser -like commitment to excellence with your talent. And that becomes your end of what I guess in like the startup world you hear is like they're looking for, they describe this phenomenon, this like Jordan -esque phenomenon as N of one founders. So that's the way to think about it. It's like when you hear that, you think, oh, they're looking for the next Michael Jordan.

1:20:49And so Jay -Z talks about this because he also not as a rap, but he signs other rappers. When it comes to signing up new talent, that is what I'm looking for. not just someone who has skill, but someone who's built for this life. Someone who has the work ethic, the drive, the gift that Jordan had wasn't just that he was willing to do the work, but he loved doing it because he could feel himself getting stronger and ready for anything. That is the kind of consistency that you can get only by adding dead serious discipline to whatever talent you have. And so one of these people that Jay -Z saw that in is, he winds up signing this rapper who's one of my favorite rappers, like of the new school rappers named J.

1:21:29Cole. And there was an interview Jay -Z was doing to promote his album. I think this was back in like 2013, 2014. He was releasing Magna Carta, Holy Grail, that album. And he talked about the fact that him and J. Cole have albums coming out at the same time. And he talks about the mentality that you should have. And he says, I know for a fact, J. Cole thinks his album is better than mine. and the next line is the sponge line and he's supposed to he is supposed to feel that way that doesn't mean he's like he's respectful to me he learns a lot from me just like i learned from and he says in the in the interview he's like you know i'm studying with cam big daddy came but i'm also competing with them he's like you respect the people that came for you but you're competing with them you're supposed to i know for a fact j cole thinks his album is better than mine he's supposed to you're supposed to feel that way that is not something that people that don't have fundamentality have a, they can't wrap their mind around them.

1:22:24So later on, he says something that's just a fantastic line, a fantastic point. He talks about later on, he becomes like a business partner in this restaurant with like Bono and Bill Clinton. And he's like, I didn't really like the laws Bill Clinton passed. He was detrimental to people like that look like me and everything else. But he talks about like meeting them and like becoming friends with them. And he says, but I'm not exactly, and this is his great point, but I'm not exactly the same person I was in 1992. either. Everyone needs a chance to evolve. Two great ideas on this page a little later on.

1:22:57When you step outside of school and you have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas rather than marching in a straight line. Purely linear thinking will rarely get you from the projects to being a billionaire. So that's obviously a good idea. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas rather than marching in a straight line. It's exactly what I'm trying to do with founders.

1:23:30I'm trying to connect disparate thoughts. I've always believed in motion and action and following connections wherever they take me and not getting too entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simply steady movement or worse stagnation. It has allowed me to stay open. He's essentially saying the value of flexibility is what he's talking about here. It's allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next. And on this page, I just listed a bunch of people that optimize for flexibility too.

1:24:03Singleton, Herb Keller, Buffett, Munger, Nims Persia, the mountaineer we just covered a few podcasts ago. Chuck Feeney, the billionaire who wasn't, the guy that made $8 billion and gave it all away when he was still alive. Walter Chrysler, Henry Ford, Ed Catmull. They all say things just like what Jay -Z is saying here. Allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next. So then he goes back to his childhood. And this is just insane. These are lessons from his dad. And just imagine. Like, it's one thing, and they're both terrible, obviously.

1:24:37but it's one thing if like you you're never part of your kid's life and you ran away i still think it's cowardly spickle what behavior but what his dad did to him is even worse imagine walking out on your nine -year -old son so he he was raised his son for the first nine years of his life and then disappears and doesn't see him until right before he dies uh a few weeks before he died they wind up meeting again so this is my i just cannot i have a nine -year -old daughter she's about to turn 10 like the idea that i would like that is just you have to be so something wrong i remember um one of my oldest friends his friend and i don't know how close he is to this his friend they went to college together but he said that his friend did this where it's just like he got a girl pregnant and then just dipped out and never like didn't support the kid and did like just completely uh like abandoned his responsibilities as a father and i was like And I told my friend, I was like, never talk to that dude again.

1:25:33That's a scumbag. He doesn't care for his own kids. He doesn't care for shit about you. And he thought I was being harsh. And he's like, well, what if... And we'd been friends at that point probably 15 years when I was having this conversation with him. And he's like, well, what if I did that? I was like, I'd never talk to you again. This is despicable, despicable behavior. You're destroyed. Kids don't deserve that. You're the adult. You're the one that had the responsibility. You're the one that had the sex. You're the one that did the, like, you're the one that made help make that baby. Like you take it.

1:26:03It doesn't mean you have to be with the, like the mom, obviously, and everything else, but like you have to support your kid. And so Jay -Z talks a lot about that. Not only his lyrics, but in the book about his, his generation really did their best to flip. Cause he's like, it was extremely common that our mothers would raise us. The dads were never around. And so we try to take that curse, that generational curse and fix it and be like, yo, if you do this, you're a sucker. is the way he puts it. My father was crazy for detail. I get that from him. Even though we didn't live together after I was nine, there were some things he instilled in me early that I never lost.

1:26:37There was nothing he missed about a person. He was really good about taking it all in, taking in all the nonverbal clues people give you to their character, how to listen to the matrix of a conversation, to what a person doesn't say. For my pops, it was just as important to take place, to take in places as people. He wanted me to know my own neighborhood inside and out. When I was walking with him, he'd always walk real fast. He said if someone following, he did that because if someone's following you, they'll lose you. And he expected not only to keep up with him, not only for you to keep up with him, but to remember the details of the things I was passing.

1:27:06He was teaching me to be confident and aware of my surroundings. There's no better survival skill that you could teach a boy in the ghetto. And he did it by showing me. And so then he talks about the fact that his dad left and that hip hop took this as like, hey, we got to change this. The hip hop generation never gets credit for this, but those songs changed things in the hood. They were political commentary, but they weren't based on theory or books. They were based on reality, on close observation of the world we grew up in. The songs weren't moralistic, but they created a stigma around certain kinds of behavior just by describing them truthfully and with clarity.

1:27:45One of the things we corrected was the absent father karma our father's generation created. We made it, and Jay -Z puts it very eloquently, more eloquently than I could put it, And he says, we made it some real bitch shit to bounce on your kids. We as a generation made it shameful to not be there for your kid. So then he goes back to the burden of growing up poor and how you never, and I've seen this, what he's about to describe to us, I've seen this in a lot of the books that we read as well. The burden of poverty isn't just that you don't always have the things you need. It's the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life and that you do anything to lift that burden.

1:28:25I remember coming back home from doing work, so selling drugs, out of state, with my boys in a caravan of Lexuses that we parked right in the middle of Marcy. I ran up to my mom's apartment to get something and looked out at the window and saw those three new Lexuses gleaming in the sun, and I thought, man, we're doing it. In retrospect, yeah, that was kind of ignorant. But at the time, I could just feel that stink and shame of being broke lifting off of me, and it felt beautiful. The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off. no matter how much money you get. And so all the way back, I think it's like Founders 115 maybe, or 116 actually, and it's Samuel Bronfman who grew up extremely poor in Canada and winds up building the gigantic Seagram's business that like produced generational wealth.

1:29:09He's one of the first examples of this thing, this topic you and I've talked about a few times, which is the generational inflection point where you have an entire family, a history of a family seeped in poverty and you have the one, like Neo, like the Matrix, like you have the one, the one person that's going to change, the generational inflection point that changes the trajectory of the future generations forever. Sam Bronfman is that one in his family. And it's certainly the role I'm trying to play in my family. And it says, Sam recorded little of his childhood except to reiterate how painfully he experienced the poverty in which his family lived.

1:29:42He worried that his parents might fail to make their payments on the family home. Sam later recalled the shame of appearing before his classmates in torn clothes. A humiliation he recounted to his own children the rest of his life. His daughter in the book talks about they're living in a giant mansion and he'd bring up the fact that he would have to go to school, be around his peers in torn clothes, and he would shiver, literally many decades later, shiver at that thought. And what did Jay -Z just say? The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get.

1:30:22It's the exact same idea. So Jay -Z talks about the value of mentorship. Really think about this. The mentorship you either get in books or in person is just a way to speed up time, right? It accelerates the learning curve because you can learn from their experiences. You don't have to put in the 15 years that they put in. So Leo Cohen, who I consider my mentor, once told me something that he was told by a rabbi about the eight degrees of giving in Judaism. So I didn't know where this came from, but I've heard Jay -Z rap about this before. The seventh degree is giving anonymously. So you don't know who you're giving to and the person on the receiving end doesn't know who gave.

1:30:54The value of that is that the person receiving doesn't have to feel some kind of obligation to the giver and the person giving isn't doing it with an ulterior motive. The highest level of giving, the eighth, is giving in a way that makes the receiver self -sufficient. So now we get to the point where he describes this as literally crossing over from one life to another. From going from I'm a full -time drug dealer to I'm a full -time rapper. All these threads came together at a pivotal moment in me. The moment when I fully crossed over from one life to another. I was sitting across the table from Ruben Rodriguez.

1:31:26He was a music business vet wearing the uniform, double -breasted silk suit, pinky ring, tie. The room, the table, the view outside the window of a skyscraper. The whole scene was surreal to me. I'd been living like a vampire. The only people I'd seen in weeks were the people in my crew down south and of course, to customers, the endless nighttime tide of fiends. My hands were raw from handling drugs and handling money. My nerves were shot from the pressure. Now I was in this office. Sitting next to me was Dame Dash. So this is going to be one of his co -founders. He says, Clark Kent, the producer.

1:31:57So Clark Kent was a well -known New York producer and DJ. And he introduced, he's another important person in Jay -Z's life. He made beats for him, put him in the music business. He says, and he introduced him to a bunch of people. Clark Kent was the person who introduced me to Dame. Clark Clark was pivotal at this stage in my life. In the mirror, all I saw was a hustler. Clark would find me and say, let's do this music. I appreciated him. Him, Clark Kent, Ty Ty, Be High, all these other people, they would encourage me. But I was also skeptical about the business that I would also get, I was so skeptical about the business, I would get annoyed at them.

1:32:31Be High, which is his cousin, used to really come down hard on me. He was real honest and direct and told me straight up, he thought I was throwing my life away. Clark thought I had something. This is why, again, if we can encourage, especially younger people, it's just so important. Clark thought I had something new to offer to this world that he loved. So he's saying, I love your music. You have something new, something valuable. I want to help people discover it. It's like, stop dealing drugs, Jay. Take the rap shit seriously. You're good at it. Clark knew Dame was hungry. Dame Dash was hungry for talent to represent.

1:33:08so he could break into the music industry and thought we'd make a good match. Dame walked into the room talking and didn't stop. He was a Harlem dude through and through. Flashy, loud, and animated. He projected bulletproof confidence. That is important. He projected bulletproof confidence. And this is advice. I talked to a founder the other day and this topic came up where it's just like, he knows his stuff. He's got a good product that's valuable, but he's just like, I don't have the confidence. It's like, doesn't matter. Act like you do. Like, act like you do until you actually do. That's not even me.

1:33:46Like, that's not advice for me. That's the advice Nolan Bushnell gave to a 19 -year -old Steve Jobs that Steve Jobs ran with. Nolan said, only the arrogant are self -confident enough to press their creative ideas on others. Steve believed he was always right and was willing to push harder and longer than other people who might have had equally good ideas, but who caved under pressure. Dame Dash projected bulletproof confidence. If you're not like this, act like you are. Who cares? Just act like you are. So it goes more into the early days of them trying to hustle and just trying to, but it's actually bootstrap is what they're doing.

1:34:19They're trying to bootstrap a record label. And again, this, no doubt for myself, I'm many times in this book, a lot can change in a lifetime from five dudes in an SUV and sharing hotel rooms to a billionaire. Every time Dame left these meetings, he'd get so heated. He couldn't believe that they didn't get me. But I wasn't surprised. I expected nothing from the industry. I just tried to shrug it off and I'd get back to my real life. Dame was getting frustrated trying to keep up with me. So he put together a makeshift tour to keep me focused on music. Sometimes Dame and his group and I would just pile into a Pathfinder, a Toyota Pathfinder, or Nissan Pathfinder, sorry, and do shows up and down the East Coast.

1:34:53I was being a team player. I piled in the truck, stayed in the double rooms with the rest of them. In some ways, these were like my college days, taking road trips. Jay -Z didn't even graduate high school, if I'm mistaken. In some ways, these were like my college days, taking road trips, bunked up with friends, learning my profession, except that I still had a full -time job selling drugs. And so he's talking about not trying to hide who he was, essentially on being human. This is one of the things that make rap at its best. It's so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner.

1:35:26it recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places. And so now he's fast forward into his career a little bit. And the note I left myself that I've left on a lot of these books is how bad do you want it? There's all these examples in the book. I'll just give you one that pops my mind because I just talked about it.

1:36:02Sam Bromfman, the generational inflection point, the one that made generational wealth and ended his family's curse of poverty. At the time he's growing up in Canada, it's extremely cold. They're learning, hey, we're going to sell liquor. At the time, they had all these weird prohibition laws and things like that. And so one way to get around that is you buy an existing hotel that's grandfathered in that's exempt from this law that allows you to sell liquor. He hears about a hotel that is for sale. There's another guy in the same town that he lives in that also wants to bid on this hotel. Turns out the owner of the hotel is in the middle of nowhere, like the middle of icy tundra somewhere out in Canada hunting.

1:36:43And so you have Sam who wants the hotel to make an offer on a hotel. You have Sam's competitor that wants to make an offer on a hotel. They found out the guy is not going to be back for a few weeks. The other guy's like, okay, I'll just wait. Sam's like, all right, where's the guy at? He's in this remote, you know, Yukon territory, wherever it is. How do I get there? Oh, I have to rent a dog sled and I have to sled in the ice and the freezing cold for six days and I can't bring food. So we have to hunt and kill our food on the way just to get to this guy's remote location. Yeah, I'll do that. Does that for six days in unbearable pain and struggle gets to the guy's camp.

1:37:22You already know the end of the story, don't you? Who's going to get the deal? Not the guy sitting on his ass back by the fire waiting for this guy, the guy that went through it. So Sam Bronfman winds up getting, meeting the guy, negotiating the deal in the camp spot and getting the hotel before that other guy sitting with his feet up even knew what hit him. And so the way to summarize is that how bad do you want it? because there's extreme levels of drive and pain tolerance in the history of entrepreneurship. Okay, so this isn't necessarily painful, but Jay -Z's not also one to take no for an answer.

1:37:58He's going to describe how he gets the clearance for what becomes his biggest hit. So he did this song called Hard Knock Life. This is on his third album, if I'm not mistaken. It is before that, before Hard Knock Life, Jay -Z's critically acclaimed, not selling many records, after he sells 5 million records and he completely changes the trajectory of his entire career. And so they have to get clearance from that movie, like Little Annie. I forgot the little redheaded girl. I forgot Orphan Andy or whatever her name is. To use the song from Annie, we had to get clearance from the copyright holder.

1:38:31I wasn't surprised when the company that owned the rights sent our lawyers a letter turning us down. Lord knows what they thought I was going to rap over that track. But I felt like the chorus of that song perfectly captured what little kids in the ghetto felt every day. Instead of kisses, we get kicked. So that's the hook, right? So I decided to write the company a letter myself after being rejected. I made up this story about how when I was a seventh grader in the ghetto, our teacher held an essay contest and the three best papers won the writers a trip to the city to see Annie on Broadway. That was a lie.

1:39:03I wrote that as kids in Brooklyn, we hardly ever came into the city. That was true. I wrote that from that moment on, or from the moment the curtain came up, I felt like I understood her story. Of course, I had never been to see Annie on Broadway, but I had seen the movie on TV. They bought it. They cleared it. And I had one of my biggest hits. How bad do you want it? And so the note I left myself a few pages later could also have applied to what Jay -Z just, the story Jay -Z just told us. When somebody puts up a wall in front of you, what do you do? you put up a wall in front of Jay -Z, Sam Bromfman, all these other people, they're knocking the wall down, they're tunneling under the wall, they're jumping over the wall.

1:39:46But that wall is not going to stop them. After every label in the industry turned us down, and I do mean every label in town, Dame, Biggs, and Eyes decided, fuck it. Why be workers anyway? Being a recording artist on a major label is the most contractually exploitative relationship you can have in America, and it's legal. All three of us had read Hitman, which is this book, which is the industry bible, and we knew what kind of gangsters had established record companies. So in 1994, Dame, Biggs, and Eyes pooled our resources to form Rockefeller Records. Obviously an homage to some degree of John D.

1:40:20Rockefeller. The name was aspirational and confrontational. The first record we made was called I Can't Get With That. We made in Clark Kent's basement studio and we shot the video for $5 ,000. We pressed up our own vinyl and we made champagne baskets and sent them to DJ. So he's just saying, he's like doing things that don't scale to the Paul Graham advice to startup founders. He's starting a business and he just knows how to hustle. He's like, we don't have endless amount of money. So we gotta be resourceful here. So like, we're just do things on the low. We'll do things ourselves as much as we can.

1:40:55and we're going to push this and get the momentum of our label going. And so he says, we didn't know the business yet, but we knew how to hustle. We did more than talk about it. We wrote it down. The key thing is we wrote it down. This is exactly what Arnold Schwarzenegger says. He's like, you got to have a goal. You got to write it down and you got to think about it. That's the only thing you think about. And so Jay -Z says, the key thing is we wrote it down, which is as important as visualization and realizing success. How many times is he going to talk about visualization? singing in your mind before you sing it in person over and over again.

1:41:27Back then we'd go to record stores who still sold singles on consignment. This is wild. We would drop the single off and come back every couple of days to collect half the proceeds of what had been sold. We'd show up and we'd collect $150. I was right there in the stores, politicking with the retailers and personally building relationships with DJs. It was do or die. So they own all the records, So the only thing they don't have is distribution. So they have to, then distribution usually takes like a 20 % fee. In some of the videos I saved on my phone from Jay -Z, he's like 26 years old talking.

1:42:03He's like, yeah, own everything. I mean, I have actually, I wrote down what he says. Hold on. He says, I want full control over my, this is him and he's like 26 at the time. This is wild. I want full control over my music. This sounds like George Lucas. Try to own as much of yourself as possible because it's going to pay off in the long run. He's like, we own everything except the 20 % distribution fee and we're working on that. young dude. And he knew back then. This is amazing. We negotiated a deal with Payday that guaranteed wider distribution than the distribution we'd be able to get on our own.

1:42:35Once we secured that deal, we rented an office in the financial district. Check this out. We started a fan club before we even had any fans. So the note of myself here is something I already told you from the Kanye documentary. Before I had a car, I'd walk to the train practicing my grammy speech so they find a way to get their single on a getting radio play it's getting it's getting popular he's like oh i don't have the album done i gotta hurry this up says we had a small window of opportunity from the time uh this is he calls him flex that's funk master flex uh very famous dj on on hot 97 which is a very big um radio station in new york uh remember this way before streaming or any other stuff we had a small window of opportunity from the time flex started playing it in the beginning of 1996 i figured i had until the summer to complete an entire album That's about three to four months from studio to a packaged product with a marketing plan.

1:43:22I don't think I slept for weeks at a time back then. I was living off of pure adrenaline. One of his singles that's going to be on the album, he actually gets through his relationship with Clark Kent. When Biggie Smalls came through one of my sessions to see Clark, Clark played him the beat for Brooklyn's Finest. He told Clark he had to get on it. I met Big and we clicked right away. More than anything, I love sharp people. Men or women, nothing makes me like someone more than intelligent. And then he talks about what it's like being on the forefront, on the frontier of a brand new industry and why brand new industries usually attract a certain personality type.

1:44:01Rap started off so lawless, not giving a fuck about any rules or limits. It was like a new frontier. We knew we were opening up new territory, even if we left behind a whole country or sometimes our own family. We struck oil. and so then this is when he gets into a fantastic big story and really just a powerful lesson so he says I hadn't been on vacation since I'd gotten serious about music so I was happy to go to Miami to shoot the video for the song he's got with this other rapper named Foxy Brown Big was touring but he took the time out to fly down and make a cameo in the video Big loved to smoke so smoke weed but I could count the number of times that I had smoked trees Champagne and the occasional Malibu run were my thing back then, but mostly, I liked to stay sober.

1:44:47The better to stay focused on making money. I come from the class of hustlers who looked down on smoking as counterproductive. We used to judge dudes who smoked as slackers. When I did smoke, it was on vacation in the islands. But when Big asked me to smoke with him, I told myself, Relax, you're not on the streets anymore. It was happening and I had to admit it. I was out of that life. so I smoked with Big, and he smoked blunts. The last time I had smoked, whenever that was, I'm pretty sure I was hitting a joint. A couple hits later, and I was high as shit, sitting there, feeling outside of time, slightly stuck, and laughing uncontrollably.

1:45:26Big leans in so only I can hear him. I gotcha. That fucked me up. Big was a friend, but also a competitor. He gave me an important lesson at that moment. They call it the game, but it's not. You can want success all you want, but to get it, you can't falter. You can't slip. You can't sleep. One eye open for real and forever. Big's joke was such a small thing, but I was like, fuck that. The director was setting up shots and all that, and I went to my room and I sobered up before I came downstairs. When I came down, Big was laughing. His laughter was a beautiful thing, even when the joke was on me.

1:46:06This time, I leaned in close to him. Never again, my dude. And so that might be surprising because maybe he mentions it as music, smoking or drinking. I mean, he sells alcohol for God's sake, right? But that's, it's really interesting. Like, again, actions express priority, which might be my all -time favorite maxim. Like, what you do is actually important to you, not what you think in your mind or what you say. And it's interesting, like he might rap about smoking a blunt or drinking or whatever, but he's telling us, he's like, no, I actually don't like smoking that much. And I don't like drinking that much.

1:46:37Like I try to stay a clear mind. He talks about that too. It was like, especially in hip hop in the nineties, they glorified like going to the club. That was really big. They would hang out. And so he tells story in the book where he would show up to do a performance. He'd get on stage at a club, do a couple of songs. And then people think, Oh, Jay -Z's here. And in many cases you'd even be like paid by the club to show up. Cause it's like, Oh, Jay -Z's here. so those more people come tomorrow call to sell them etc etc but he's like what i would do is like i'd get on stage i'd rip it for 10 minutes and then i'd leave i'd get in my car and i'd go home i'd go back to work or whatever he's like i'm not hanging out in the club i'm not wasting time like that so here we go jay -z talking again about studying and learning from the greats that came before him slick rick was the wittiest shit out back then he can make the rawest rhymes sound like masterpiece theater and he had the kind of style that hustlers aspire to his songs were energetic and hilarious.

1:47:28Like all great comics, he knew how to hide deeper emotion between his punchlines. He kept it clean and honest and respected his listeners enough not to manipulate them. Slick Rick taught me that not only can rap be emotionally expressive, it can express those feelings that you can't really name, which was important for me and a lot of kids like me who couldn't always find the language to make sense of our feelings. Then he talks about another guy that he was studying, which is Scarface. And so he says, Scarface is one of my favorite rappers and maybe the first truly great lyricist to come out of the South.

1:47:57He's known as a rapper's rapper, and it's true. He gets respect across the board, and his influence is enormous. His music is an extended autobiography. Scarface always feels like he's rapping right in your ear, like the guy on the next barstool unburdening himself of a story that keeps him up at nights, or a nightmare that comes back to him all day. The power of his stories come in part from his willingness to pull the covers off of taboos, to get into the shit that people pretend isn't really happening. And so that's why I try to bring up these crazy stories in the books because I feel there's stories in the books that people are willing to share in like an autobiography or memoir form that they just won't talk about in like an interview or an otherwise.

1:48:37Like they'll talk about stuff in private. They're not talking about publicly. They'll put it in their books towards the end of their life. And so that line really hit me. His willingness to pull the covers off taboo to get into shit that people pretend isn't really happening. So Scarface is also... I'm going to really try to convince you to watch that Kanye documentary if you haven't seen it, but Scarface makes an appearance in that documentary. At this time, Kanye had produced a song or two from Scarface, and he asked Scarface to come to the studio to listen to his music. And so Scarface says two things that are really interesting.

1:49:09One, he pulls up, he's like, at the time, Kanye's having this video crew follow him around. and he's like, Scarface is like, why are the cameras here? He's like, oh, they're doing a documentary on me. And he's like, on who? He's like, on you? And you know, Kanye's barely known. You might know him as like a supplier in an industry, right? Just because he's making beats for people. And so Scarface says something about Kanye that really demonstrates the relentless resourcefulness that a young Kanye West had. Forget everything you know about him now. That's irrelevant. Study the first two episodes of the documentary and tell me that's not founder mentality.

1:49:46tell me that is not founder mentality that like it's just amazing what he did like to not only like put in 12 years of practice of his craft but then to make people believe but scarface says when he when he learns that uh the documentary accrues for him he goes that goddamn kanye be pulling rabbits out the hat man that is the perfect way to describe relentless resourcefulness pulling goddamn rabbits out that or excuse me goddamn kanye be pulling rabbits out the hat man and it's the exact quote. But anyways, the reason, the real reason that's important is because he goes in and he's like, listen, I know you like my beats.

1:50:22I want to play you music that I have rapped on. And so he, and you see this in the video. That's why it's crazy. Or in the documentary, he plays it. And this again, Scarface at this point is a legend. One of the best to ever do it in what, so think about this, like Kanye's aspiring to be, to just be taken serious as a rapper. Now he's Scarface taking serious as a rapper. He's widely acknowledged one of the best to ever do it. and so he plays that song for him and we get this on on the documentary it's on tape and he says this is incredible and then the narrator of the documentary says getting validation from one of the best rappers alive was more encouragement for Kanye to keep moving forward it is so important to encourage the next generation as much as you possibly can this is a tale's oldest time go back to Henry Ford he's like this is weird, man.

1:51:15All the cars at the time, they either steam or they're electric cars. I'm really thinking that the internal combustion engine is like, it's self -contained. We can fuel it and go farther. It's more reliable, et cetera, et cetera. He winds up meeting his hero, right? He didn't know him at the time. They wound up being really good friends, but at this time, he meets Thomas Edison and he gets to explain his idea to Thomas Edison and seven words changes, seven words, seven words from Thomas Edison changed the trajectory of Henry Ford's life. You have the thing, keep at it. And it says with encouragement from the man who Ford regarded as the greatest inventive genius in the world, ringing in his ears, Ford returned home with the conviction that he should persevere.

1:51:57Go back to the Kanye documentary after Scarface leaves. Kanye is in the parking lot beaming beaming full of energy and enthusiasm and he said he said it was incredible getting validation for one of the best rappers alive was more encouragement for Kanye to keep moving forward so he goes back to studying them Rick and Scarface slick wrist Rick and Scarface share the ability to get under your skin by dredging up all kinds of emotions that young men don't normally talk about with each other regret longing fear and even self -reproach so then he talks about this nice fast -forwarding in the story because he's talking about it's crazy.

1:52:31Like I admire Scarface and I'm doing a song with him. And so he says on the verse I did with Scarface, I went into some dark personal storytelling about a time in my life when I felt truly confused and lost. Every entrepreneur in the world has felt this before. I went into some dark personal storytelling about a time in my life when I felt truly confused and lost. I was between worlds, the voice in my head screaming at me to leave the street shit alone. While outside, I watched Big and Nas blow up. It was a verse about fear of failure, which is something everyone goes through but no one, particularly where I'm from wants to really talk about but it's a song that a lot of people can connect to the thought that this cannot be life is one that all of us have felt at some point or another when a bad decision and bad luck and bad situations feel like too much to bear those times when we think this, this cannot be my story but facing up to that kind of feeling can be a powerful motivation to change.

1:53:29Amen. It was for me. And then he talks about, yeah, I struggled when I was younger. I survived a crazy environment. I did things that could have wound up getting me killed or in jail and I survived. But the feeling from that earlier struggle never goes away. Inside, there's still part of me that expects to wake up tomorrow in my bedroom in apartment 5C in Marcy, to slide on my gear, to run down the piss -filled stairway and hit the block with one eye over my shoulder. So then he talks about one of his songs that he feels is like a hidden gem in his catalog. It's Beach Chair featuring Chris Martin.

1:54:07It's on his Kingdom Come album, which is the album that Jay -Z thinks is his worst. But there's just two things from his interpretation of the song, from his explanation of the song. And so there's two things I want to pull out for you. First, there's a line in the song where it talks about, I hear my angels singing to me. and then you hear Beyonce's voice, are you happy, Hov? Hov obviously being Jay -Z's nickname in case you're not listening to his music. So it says, I hear my angels singing to me. Are you happy, Hov? And so this is why he put that in the song. When you get things you think you'd always wanted, it doesn't stop the voice in your head's interrogation.

1:54:40If anything, it gets more insistent. When you get the things you think you've always wanted, it doesn't stop the voice in your head's interrogation. If anything, it gets more insistent. And then in the song, he talks about, I'm not spending all my day tied into what other people are thinking or saying. Like I give myself space so I can come up with something unique. So he says, I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of not trying. Every day hit every wave like I'm Hawaiian. I don't surf the net. No, I've never been on my space. I'm too busy letting my own voice vibrate, carving out my space. And so what does that mean?

1:55:18Give your brain space to think. Just like Henry Singleton did this. He sat alone in his corner office with his Apple II computer, and that office produced a cornucopia of ideas. Jay -Z says, It's always been most important for me to figure out my space rather than to check out what everyone else is up to minute by minute. And this hit me so hard. Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself. And that's essential, being connected to yourself, that is, for any artist, I think. And I've heard this song over and over again, and now that I read his interpretation of it, it's just like when I say, like if you, like I start reading the biography of entrepreneurs and you realize how much of their life went into what they do, like you appreciate an Apple product more if you know Steve Jobs' story.

1:56:05Like you'll appreciate Trader Joe's more if you know Joe Colombo's story. Like it's the same thing. And this song, I've heard it a thousand times. Still didn't understand it as much as I should have. And really what he's, it's just, and the fact that he doesn't write this down, it's just insane talent. So he is speaking, this is still the same song. He's speaking to his unborn child. And this is before he was a parent. And so he says, this song is like a Hallmark card until you reach here. So he's speaking to his unborn child, okay? His unborn daughter. This song is like a Hallmark card until you reach here.

1:56:37So till she's here and she's declared, the heir, I will prepare. A blueprint for you to print. A map for you to get back. A guide for your eyes. He's essentially telling the story. I'm going to start this over again. He's doing exactly what a good parent does, right? We're trying to, I'm not trying to control your life. I'm trying to prepare you for what life can throw at you. This song is like a Hallmark card. Until you reach here, so until she's here and she's declared the heir, I will prepare a blueprint for you to print, a map for you to get back, a guide for your eyes, and so you won't lose scent.

1:57:13I'll make a stink for you to think. I ink these verses full of prose so you won't get conned out of two cents. My last will and testament, I leave my air. My share of Rockefeller records and a shiny new beach chair. And so his interpretation of that is I'm still trying to give this unborn child something more than just money. A blueprint for life. A map. A guide. A scent to follow. And I really do believe that that is why, how many autobiographies of 80 and 90 -year -old entrepreneurs have you and I studied on this podcast? They know, like, I got a couple more years, man. Maybe I got a couple more months.

1:57:51And they just sit there and they write all their best nuggets of wisdom. And they're trying to give us something to follow, a blueprint, a guide, a scent to follow. And then I'll close with what Jay -Z says about the power of language and storytelling. what he's about to describe here is the same I feel the same way with these books and I think that's why biographies hit so hard when you read them whether it's in a movie or a television show or whatever the best characters get inside of us we care about them we love them and we start to see ourselves in them and in a crazy way we become them and that is where I'll leave it I absolutely loved loved reading this book If you are a Jay -Z fan, no brainer, don't make the same mistake I did and not read it.

1:58:42Even if you're not a fan of his music or you don't know much about it, there's still just a ton of lessons, I think, from hearing his story that can be applied to your life. So if you want to get the full story, read the book. I'll leave a link in the show notes. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 238 books down, 1 ,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon. Okay, before you go, I want to go back to this idea that for a limited time only, you can sign up and pay once and get access to every highlight and note that I have done, which is insane because I've been doing this since 2018, adding all the highlights and notes for everything I've read for the podcast into this app, that now you can get access for a limited time, sign up, pay once, and you get access to every highlight note that I've ever done.

1:59:27And you'll get access to every highlight and note that I will ever do. This tool is embedded in my workflow. So the only way I would stop adding notes and highlights to it is if I stop making the podcast. And I think it's obvious by now that I plan on doing this for the rest of my life. The only way I'd stop is like, oh, I don't have a voice. And even then, there's so many hours. There's hundreds and hundreds of hours of my voice trained where I could essentially have an AI version of my voice. So even if they take my voice, I will type my way to a podcast. So that I think gives you an indication that like, I mean, obviously, if you've listened to this many episodes, you've gotten this far, you know, I take this excessively serious.

2:00:10So serious that I would take the thing about this, like for me to I don't know if I ever told you this. I think I've told you this before, but I don't I read physical books. Right. And so to get my notes and highlights into the Readwise app, which is now the version that you get to have access of, of if you sign up for Founders Notes, you see exactly what I see in Readwise. So the process is I take notes and highlights in a book, right? Physical book. I sit down with a pen, a ruler, post -it notes, scissors. It's like I'm doing arts and crafts over here. And so once I'm done reading before I record the next episode, it's like go through and I figure out, okay, what do I want to put in the searchable database?

2:00:52So I remember I have to take pictures of all this. You know, it reads it, but you have to update it. Long story short, it takes several hours for every single book for me to add all my notes and highlights because I have to do this physical book. And people are like, David, why don't you do, like, why don't you read Kindle versions? It's like, one, I read a lot of old books. There are no Kindle versions. Two, when I was a kid, I didn't fall in love with Kindle versions of books, even though I have, you know, probably 300 digital books on my Kindle. So I'm not like totally against it, but I have a physical love for, or not a physical love.

2:01:22I have a love for physical books. And so that is my favorite way to read. And I'm not trying to do it in the most efficient manner. Yeah, if I read just digital versions or Kindle versions, I would do the job faster. I'm not trying to do the job faster. I'm trying to enjoy my work so I spend more time doing it. So anyways, long story short, since 2018, I've probably spent, let's say, you know, three to five to six hours for every book. There's hundreds, almost 300 books in there. You're talking about, you know, essentially like a full -time, a year of full -time work, just adding in these notes and highlights.

2:01:55And I go in there every day and it's like a garden that I tend. Sometimes I think books have too many highlights, so I delete some. Sometimes they don't have enough, so I add some. So anyways, the point I'm making is over time, this tool has evolved into this gigantic searchable database on the history of entrepreneurship. And so I'm just going to take a few minutes to tell you how I use Founders Notes right now and then a bunch of other features that are already in production, most of which I'm testing but you won't have access to yet. They'll be released in a few weeks. So first thing is you sign up for founder's notes.

2:02:29It's in my browser all the time. I never exit out. Once you sign up, it'll drop you onto this page. You have a bunch of features like how do you want to look at the highlights? Which route do you want to take here? So the first one is at the very top. I use the search highlights feature the most. Any topic that I'm thinking about goes into the search bar. This is fairly self -explanatory. Hiring, patience, obsession, monopoly, moat, incentives, frugality. Those are just some of the recent examples of ideas I've been trying to find more information on. I just read through all the highlights related to that keyword.

2:02:59And don't worry, you won't have to remember everything I'm saying because you'll get a welcome email after you sign up that tells you exactly how I use this. And so you can read all this. The next feature that I use the most is the highlight feed. This is like a smart Twitter feed. Instead of random ramblings of crazy strangers online, this feed is just a constant stream of ideas and thoughts from History's Greatest Founders. So I use this feature to remind myself of past lessons and to prompt new thoughts. The next feature is the books features. The books features is just what it sounds like.

2:03:26It's a list of all the books that I have in there. And if you want to read all the highlights and notes that I have on a specific book, then this is the feature you use. It's remarkable how much you can actually learn just by reading, you know, the notes and highlights of one specific book in five or 10 minutes. And there's another feature called favorites. So when I'm rereading my own highlights, like I just described in the Shazzy episode, when I read my own highlights and I come across something thought -provoking or something I don't want to forget, I favored it. And so now you can see which ones I favorite.

2:03:54that's like peering into my soul. The last feature that's available right now is called latest highlights. I don't use this feature, but other people seem to like it. It's exactly what it sounds like if I, the latest highlight I've added in, if you want to see by in order of being added to the database, that is latest highlights. Now the long -term vision and the good news is, is if you sign up for founder's notes right now, as I add features, all of these features are free to you, but will cost more if somebody said, as I add more features, more notes and more highlights, obviously, you know, a year from now, a couple months from now, the price will constantly go up.

2:04:29If you sign up now, you get all this for free. And so right now you get access to all my notes and highlights and you can search by keyword, by subject, by person, right? That is how I've searched all my highlights for years, right, just by keyword. I could not make the podcast without it, but I'm not stopping there. So what I've been testing, I'm calling it the Founders GPT chat interface, okay? I gotta come up with a different name. It's just like ChatGPT, which, you know, or any of these AI search platforms. What I really think about this is this is like search on steroids. So instead of just searching by keyword, I can ask it questions.

2:05:01And it has been making connections that I've even missed. And so this version, this search will be based on all my notes and highlights and on all the transcripts of every episode. And so that is coming soon. The ability to search, if you want to search keyword, if you want to search transcripts, every single transcript for every episode will also be in there. Again, all of this is included. There will also be bullet point summaries of the key ideas of each episode. So what I'm telling you is like Founders Notes maybe have four or five different ways right now that you can search through. It's going to wind up having 10, 15.

2:05:35I'm going to keep thinking of ways to condense and clarify. So this has really been like my North Star. And the way I've been describing this in private conversations is like, listen, my goal, right, my long -term vision for Founders Notes is to turn it into an ever -increasing, giant, valuable curriculum that condenses and clarifies the collective knowledge of history's greatest founders. And so any new feature, any way I'm thinking about this, first of all, I'm building the tool for myself first because it's only going to make me, as I keep reading of it, you know, 339 episodes now, right? I'll eventually get to 500 episodes and 600 and 800 episodes.

2:06:11And as I keep adding more and more data to this, I need better tools to be able to go back and synthesize and tie all that data together. And the only way that's possible is if I'm able to continue to condense and clarify. It just so happens that the ability to condense and clarify the collective knowledge of history as founders is very valuable to your career. Because then as we've seen over and over again, you can take ideas that they learned in their career and then apply it to your own. So as I keep updating it, as I keep building new things, I will keep you updated on the long -term visions for founders notes.

2:06:37But something that is unique and new right now is the fact that so many people have sent me messages saying, hey, is there a way instead of doing a subscription, can I just pay once? And anytime I've had a bunch of people ask me that don't know each other, ask me the same thing. Usually that's like a tip of an iceberg. The entire existence of Founders Notes came because so many people over the years like, hey, how do I get access to your notes and highlights? I'd really like to be able to search them. I'd really be able to read them. And I was like, well, this is kind of weird. People keep asking for it.

2:07:05And it turns out if you just make what people ask for, it attracts them in droves. So I highly suspect the same thing is going to happen here. This is a test. Founders Notes isn't going anywhere ever, but the ability to pay once and be in forever, meaning that you get access to not only every other highlight note I've ever done, but every note, highlight note I've ever will do. It is a test. It is for a limited time only, and it could off, this offer could end at any time, but I am wanting to test this because it makes it, first of all, interesting to me because you pay once and you're in forever.

2:07:37That means that this becomes a tool that you can use for your entire career to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs. And because I use this in my own life, I know how valuable that is. So don't dilly -dally. Time is limited. This offer can end at any time. Sign up right now at foundersnotes .com. That is foundersnotes .com. And I'll talk to you again soon.