Steven Spielberg

24:19Then talks more about his mom's influence on Stephen just realizing, hey, I don't really want to be an adult. I want to create these, I want to live like this fantasy world. The rule at home was just don't be an adult. Who needs to be anything but 10? We never grew up at home because she never grew up, Stephen commented. And so one of his favorite stories when he was younger was Peter Pan. And so something he took away from that story, he says, he was mightily impressed by Peter's defiant declaration. I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady. I always wanted to be a little boy and have fun, Spielberg admitted.

24:49I've always felt like Peter Pan. I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up. and that theme continues throughout the book there's a quote in here that's describing Citizen Kane the movie that comes from uh the main character of Citizen Kane which is Charles Foster Kane which is uh which is actually built upon the real life of William Randolph Hearst and I think this quote from William Randolph Hearst it also applies to Steven Spielberg which he says the same thing later on and the quote about William Randolph Hearst is he was disappointed in the world. So he built one of his own.

25:24That's a way to think about Stephen's approach to his work and his career. And so Stephen said, I never felt life was good enough. So I had to embellish it. That was also something that caught me semi by surprise. How much Stephen lies, constantly just making up stories. He would lie about his age over and over again, constantly wanted to make it seem like he was younger than he actually was. So it's more directing TV when he's 20 or 21, when he's actually maybe 22 or 23. There's just a ton of stories about that. A ton of stories he made up about his origination story, about how he broke into Universal Studios, commandeered an office, and then just went to work and nobody noticed for two years.

26:08That wound up being not true. But just this whole theme of like, I'm just going to, you know, I don't like my life. I'm going to create it, even if I have to lie and bend the truth is definitely something that appears in the life story of Steven Spielberg. This is about also something like, I was surprised at how many of things that happened to his childhood, in his childhood, that he would reference in movies many, many decades into the future, over and over again. And so this is one of them. I think this is actually a scene that is in his movie Catch Me If You Can, which he made, I think, in 2002.

26:41And this is something that happened to him back in his 60s. And this is the fact that this is very traumatic for him, but Steve's mom marries his dad's best friend that the family considered like an uncle. They didn't tell their kids. Stephen's dad, even though his mom fell in love with his best friend and left him and married him, Stephen's dad told his kids that he was responsible for the divorce. And so for 20, 30 years, he was largely alienated from his father based on another lie. This is bizarre. And they talk about it in the book, which I'm about to read to now. And then his sisters are interviewed in the documentary.

27:20It was like, this was bananas. Like, this was our Uncle Bernie. And our mom runs off and marries our Uncle Bernie. So it says, Bernie Adler was an engineer who followed Arnold out from New Jersey and worked as his assistant at GE, at General Electric. Bernie was almost like a member of the Spielberg family. The kids called him Uncle Bernie. He was always there. He did everything with them. Spielberg's mom would enter into an enduring marriage with Bernie Adler. She said she found Bernie so funny, so bright, so moral that I fell madly in love with him. And so this was rather embarrassing for the kids because even there's quotes from the neighbors in Phoenix.

27:59They're like, we weren't actually sure who the father was. And so there's a scene where Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can is sitting down with his dad saying hey you know let's call your mom let's call mom whatever the case is and the dad says no he she ran off and married my best friend that actually happened in spielberg's life and then in another plot twist bernie winds up dying many years later and now steven and his mom are steven's dad and his mom who are like in their 80s or 90s they're extremely they gotta be in their 90s are back together okay so let's go i want to move ahead a little bit because steve steven has this like encyclopedic knowledge of the history of films.

28:41And he's constantly going back, doing the same thing you and I are doing right now. We go back through the history of entrepreneurship, find ideas that are useful and apply them to our work. He did that in film over and over again. He's like, oh, I like that idea. In fact, I will take that exact same shot. And so this was very similar to David Geffen when I read his biography for the podcast. That's Stephen's obviously future partner. He was obsessed with show business. He would just hang out at the movies all day. are in Stephen's case, it's the movies. I think in David Geffen's case, it's Broadway shows.

29:11So you pay like a quarter and you could hang out there all day. So it says Stephen's movie fanaticism was nurtured at the Kiva Theater on Main Street in Scottsdale, Arizona. Parents would drop off their kids on Saturdays and leave them all day with 50 cents admission to a program that would include westerns and Tarzan movies, sci -fi and monster movies. It was a great Saturday. Saturdays were great, to be able to recall. I was in the movies all day long every Saturday. I've seen absolute duplicates in Spielberg movies of scenes that we used to see back in the 1950s at the Kiva Theater. Let me give an example of this.

29:44When Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark rides his horse down the hill and jumps onto the truck carrying the Ark, Spielberg got that shot from the 1937 serial Zorro Rides Again. Even the camera angle. One of Spielberg's heroes, and he has a bunch of filmmakers that he would look up to and idolize, and in many cases emulate would be Alfred Hitchcock. So says Arnold, his dad, Arnold Spielberg, took Stephen to see Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho. Now what's crazy is this idea, does it even say in the book? No, I think I, okay, let me read this to you and then he talks about this in the documentary.

30:20Stephen later told a neighbor how impressed he had been with Hitchcock's employment of the power of suggestion. Steve talked about the shower scene in Psycho, how Hitchcock never showed any real violence. It's he showed you the knife and this and that, but most of it was in the viewer's mind. So he uses that idea, the shower scene from Psycho. Steve uses that, the power of suggestion with Jaws. In the movie Jaws, the shark runs it breaking down, right? They didn't expect it to break down. So now you have the star of the movie you can't even use. And he comes up with this idea, if you've seen the movie, of the barrels, those yellow barrels that are tied to the shark.

30:54And he uses the power of suggestion, showing the movement of the barrels, never at barrels rather never actually showing the shark and that's an idea that he learned when he was a young person watching alfred hitchcock this is another example of how important studying the the filmmakers that came before him were for his career uh so the movies that impressed steven the most uh when he was a boy were two epics directed by david lean the bridge on the river quai and the lawrence of arabia spielberg later called lean the greatest influence i ever had he emulated lean's sense of visual storytelling throughout his career.

31:30He says the scope and audacity of those films filled my dreams with unlimited possibilities. You know, that's crazy. In the documentary, he says that he watches great films over and over and over again. Right. Just like we should be reading books or any kind of experiences that we have, like books is the most obvious example here is, you know, you may read a book once and you read it five years later and it's like, oh, the book changed. I was like, no, the book's the same. You change. Right. He still sees Lawrence of Arabia every year. He talks about that in the documentary. The movie came out in 1962.

32:03Okay, so now he's college -aged. This is where he meets... We're going to go into more detail about where he meets that mentor, Chuck Silvers. He gets a meeting and a tour where the Universal's head librarian, and this was Silvers' impression of Spielberg at that age. He explained how he wrote, photographed, and directed his own pictures, casting them with neighborhood and school friends, devising the special effects, and even making the costumes. Steven was such a delight, he said. That energy. Not only that impressed me, but with Steven, nothing was impossible. That attitude came through. It was so clear.

32:37He was so excited by everything. When we walked onto a dubbing stage, how impressed he was. At some point in time, it dawned on me that I was talking to somebody who had a burning ambition. And not only that, he was going to accomplish his mission. He was very young for his age in all other respects. But when it came to motion pictures, God damn, I knew he was going to do something. I didn't know what the hell he was going to do, but he was going to do something. You can't walk away from a kid like that. Just out of curiosity, you want to sit and watch. And so this is a quote from he's a senior in high school from the school newspaper.

33:17This is right after he met Silvers. So he says, Steve Spielberg worked with Hollywood directors this summer at Universal Pictures. he spent Spielberg spent the whole vacation working in his as an unpaid clerical assistant in the Universal editorial department the job enables Spielberg to roam the lot watching films and television shows being shot and to hang out with film editors and other post -production people learning the craft of professional filmmaking he would continue hanging out on the lot all through his college years until with Silver's help he was hired as a director this is more on the beginning, this beginning opportunity to Universal.

33:53And knowing of myself is this is amazing. He starts out as an intern at Universal, now gets 2 % of all Universal tickets. Reminded me of, remember that book, The Gambler on Kirk Kerkorian? I think it was like Founders number 67, somewhere back there. But Kirk Kerkorian starts out as a day laborer on the lot of MGM Studios. I think he's like moving around heavy rocks for production, right? He's getting $2 .60 a day. 30 years later, he owns MGM and the return on investment makes him $260 ,000 a day. From $2 .60 as a day laborer a day to owning MGM and making $260 ,000 a day. A lot can happen in one lifetime.

34:36But the reason I'm bringing this up to you is because Spielberg does something here that you and I have talked about over and over again. The importance of developing your own curriculum. We call this personal curriculum. I think a better term for it comes from Bill Gurley, that talk, it's called How to Run Down a Dream. It's on YouTube, and he talks about what he learned by studying Danny Meyer, not Phil Knight, Bobby Knight, and Bob Dylan, I think is the musician. But the fact that they would, all the work that they're doing that's not work, so all the stuff that they're trying to learn that they apply to work, he called it professional research.

35:14And he goes into detail in that talk, how they all did that and how it enhanced their work. It's a fascinating talk. But anyways, Spielberg began his apprenticeship at Universal in the summer of 1964. His mentor, Chuck Silvers, recalls that the ambitious teenager gradually worked out his own curriculum. They say it specifically here. He's working out his own curriculum on the lot, visiting sets, talking with editors and sound mixers. He was kind of a guest, a self -appointed observer who made his own arrangements with the people who responded to him. Many chapters later, it picks up this theme about the importance of developing your own personal curriculum, your own professional research.

35:52So it says Spielberg remained essentially an autodidact. Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career. Universal Studios, in effect, was Spielberg's film school. He couldn't get into film school. Every single film school rejected him. Giving him an education that was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment. Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal, immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucial to his development. And so it's this point where he finds other like minds.

36:23And this is just, again, I repeat myself, but this just blew my mind. Like the day Jaws comes out, Spielberg's driving around with Martin Scorsese. Like before Martin Scorsese was Martin Scorsese. The idea that you have George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola you have a group of crazy people who were all obsessed with movies all struggling to make it at this point right now you fast forward 50 years and they're all hugely successful but not this point and the whole group winds up becoming successful and dominates the movie business all the time all the time though they're giving each other feedback trying they're friendly but they're trying to compete with each other they go back and forth between producing like the most financially successful movies at a time first it's Godfather then I think Spielberg passes them and then I think Lucas passes Spielberg.

37:09It's just absolutely remarkable. And I've already read biographies on Lucas and Spielberg. I'm looking for biographies on the rest of these people as well. But let me just tell you a little bit more about this time in history because I found this fascinating. And I find it fascinating because, again, they're doing this to an already mature industry. There's always room for more opportunity. It just with questioning why things are done the way they are, right? So they're called the movie brats, this whole crew, and sometimes referred to as the USC mafia. And there's a bunch of us, not just these five people.

37:42There's screenwriters. There's entertainment attorneys. They're all helping each other. It's very fascinating. At the time they came to Hollywood, generations of nepotism had made the studios terminally inbred and unwelcoming to newcomers. The studio system, long under siege from television, falling box office receipts and skyrocketing costs, was in a state of impending collapse. So how fascinating is that? From the outside, it's like, why are you wasting your time making movies? What is wrong with you? Television is the future. This, look at this. They're making less money. You can't get in. You have to go.

38:14People are going to film school and the professors are saying, don't go to film school because you'll never get hired. It's just very fascinating. That's when they're like, okay, at the very bottom of the market, so to speak, they're like, okay, well, this is where the opportunity, I can't go anywhere up from, I can't go anywhere else from here, but up, right? The future seemed daunting for the determined young movie fanatics who came of age in the 60s and for whom film historians coined the phrase the movie brat. Spielberg vividly remembers how he and such other self -starters, that's how he's describing himself, Lucas and Scorsese, had to chisel and dynamite their way into a profession that never really looked to young people except as actors.

38:53There were no willing producers at that time I was trying to break into the business. My first thrusts were met with a great deal of animosity. But all these people, the movie brats, the USC mafia, this is a description of them, were unwilling to settle for such limited dreams. They ate, breathed, and slept movies with a passion earlier generations had brought to writing or painting. And so what they needed is they needed somebody like Francis Ford Coppola, who was the first young director to break through and then once they saw wait a minute that guy can do it and he's great talented they're not they weren't saying he wasn't talented but it's like okay he's not he's like a couple years older than me i can do it too it's extremely important it took coppola to start breaking down the doors of hollywood for other film school graduates in the late 60s he became as spielberg put it all of our godfathers and so now we fast forward uh to when spielberg and Lucas start becoming friends.

39:50They want to being pals, inspirers, collaborators, but they're pushing each other because of how talented they were. So Spielberg, you know, is like, I'm a young hotshot. I'm good too. Oh wait, there's another me, right? There's always another you. Like, you got to know that. And so what Spielberg realized is like, he watches Lucas's film. He's like, oh my God, I'm sick to my stomach at how good this guy is. So he says, when he saw the short film, Spielberg was jealous to the very marrow of my bones. I was 20 years old and had directed 15 short films by that time. And this little movie was better than all of my little movies combined.

40:27So he says now, you know, before he idolized people like Frank Capra, Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, all these people. But he's like, now I can have a role model and a collaborator and somebody inspires me. That's my own age. It's doing the same stuff I'm trying to do. So he says now, instead of having those role models, rather with someone nearer to my own age, someone I could actually get to know, compete with and draw inspiration from. And that was remarkable how, you know, they're obviously very driven, uh, big egos, but they didn't have big egos with each other. Right. They're like, listen, we're competing, but I'm also being inspired from you.

40:59And they were able to maintain like a friendship. Right. And not, they had the maturity to realize, Hey, it's, we're going to get a lot farther if we can help each other than if we just like, Oh, I hate that guy. Cause he's doing the same thing I'm doing. Well, this is not a zero -sum game. Like, people can like your movies, George, and they can like my movies as well. It doesn't have to be just one filmmaker. The fact that they were able to do that at such a young age is very, very admirable. So here's another fantastic little story from the book. And hell yes for Chuck Silvers is what I wrote here on my note on this page, because if we ever have the opportunity to stick up for a young, talented person, like, we should do it.

41:37And this is an example of that because Stephen's dad, who is now divorced and living in, uh, Stephen's living with his dad, but basically gone all the time because he's obsessed with, uh, with movies. Stephen's dad realizes, Hey, he's spending a lot of time at Universal, spending a lot of time with this, this guy named Chuck. I'm going to call this guy Chuck and tell him, Hey, my son needs to be focused on college. Stephen didn't want to go to college. He winds up placating his, his, I think mainly his dad, uh, it goes to like Long Beach College or Long Beach. university, something like that, but he doesn't give a shit about that.

42:09Like he's spending all his time at Universal, winds up dropping out. And the reason I say hell yes for Chuck Silvers is because look at the conversation that he had. He's like, your dad doesn't understand the opportunity and how gifted you are. And this is not an opportunity that waits around, right? For you to finish school. Shortly before Stephen started college, Arnold made a phone call to Chuck Silvers, Stephen's mentor at Universal, who described their conversation, the only substantial one he and Arnold ever had, as spirited. He's going to Long Beach State. I'd appreciate it if you would do what you can to make sure that he goes to school.

42:43Silver said he couldn't do that. Look, there's something you've got to understand about the motion picture business, he told Stephen's father. For Stephen to realize his ambitions, he's going to need a hell of a big break. Somebody's going to have to put a lot of faith and a lot of money up so the rest of us can see if Stephen is who he appears to be. I'm his friend. If it comes to a choice of Stephen having the opportunity to direct something that he could use as a showcase, I will advise Steven to do it. School be damned. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place in this industry, so you'd better be ready for it.

43:16They don't care whether you've got a degree or not. What they are interested in is what he can put up on the screen. And so his dad's like, well, okay, that's fine. I still want him to go to school. Silver's reaction is with talent like Steven Spielberg, you don't set that kind of goal. what the hell good is a degree that wasn't Steven and this is such an important part of this whole thing about this like I'm not trying to direct him what to do I'm trying to be there for him so Silver says my guy my idea of encouragement was to be there basically that's the only function I really served somehow I always became a listening board every time he got a story idea every time he shot some film.

43:56Asked why he went so far out of his way to help Stephen, Silvers replied simply, I liked him. I admired this lump of raw material. Just think about, oh, just pause and think about what is happening in the story. How important. There is an alternate future where Stephen does not have the help of Chuck Silvers, somebody that is a film historian, somebody that's been with Universal, somebody can help guide him. Somebody that's a few decades older than him. And we don't know the name of Steven Spielberg because that opportunity didn't present itself. He didn't actually stand up for this person. He's like, hey, this guy is talented.

44:36The work he's putting onto the world is important. I'm going to be there to encourage that. That is just so, so important if we're given the opportunity to do that for people. And Steven winds up playing that same role in the future for young filmmakers. And young writers and young producers. It's so, so important. And it's another idea that he got from Chuck, which I'll talk to you about later. But I just want to pull out this thing, what his father's telling him to do, right? He's going to school. He's going to drop out. But this is just a reflection of how disjointed school can be from real life.

45:06And this is something that Phil Knight, founder of Nike, and Fred Smith, founder of FedEx, dealt with too. They both wrote papers about exactly what they were going to do. The idea for Nike, the idea for FedEx. And I think they both got a C. Same thing happens to Spielberg. This is so silly. Nothing sums up the frustrations of Spielberg's academic experience at Long Beach State better than his record in the TV productions course. He received a C. Moving on. Reminder. Shoot your shot. Shoot your shot. Goes up. This is a young kid. And he just goes up. And again, he's not like an arrogant kid. Goes up with asking for help and saying why he wants help.

45:45He often would walk up to stars and directors and producers on the studio streets and invited them to lunch. Cary Grant and Rock Hudson were among those who accepted. This is the same thing that a young Steve Jobs did. He called up Bill Hewlett, if I remember correctly. I think it was Bill, not David. Either one, the partners, calls him up, asks for parts, says, I'm a 14, 12 -year -old kid, winds up getting a summer job. Later on, when he's like 18, 19, he calls up all the people. Bob Noyce, founder of Intel, the guy that did microsystems, I can't remember his name, The guy that did AMD, can't remember his name at the moment, sorry.

46:19All these people, he's just like, listen, I didn't know how to build a company. I greatly admired the people that knew. So I called them up. I asked if I could talk to them, if I could have lunch, coffee with them. Yeah, some people are going to ignore you. Some people are going to not be able to do it, whatever the case is. But some people will say, yes, just shoot your shot. A few pages later, look at this. This is repeated over and over again. It's so important. Professional research, personal curriculum. We've got to develop that. Spielberg asked a million questions to the editors. It was a process of absolute technical application.

46:51He worked out his own curriculum. I am not making up these words. This is the author using this sentence, this statement that you and I have talked about over and over again, multiple times in this biography. He worked out his own curriculum. It was the real world. There's no school you can really go to learn to be a filmmaker. That's not what they teach. and then later on we have Silvers talking about this. He's like, listen, I helped him, but like my impact, I try to open as many doors as I could, give him advice from an older, wiser perspective, but you can't teach, like who's going to teach Da Vinci, right?

47:25This is a very, very interesting, just quick paragraph for you. I don't want to cast myself in any way as his teacher. I wish to hell I had been. How the hell do you teach Maria Callas how to sing? Who taught Da Vinci? You can expose people to things. but they have to have it in themselves. As far as I'm concerned, he's the most gifted person in motion pictures. And so with the fact that Spielberg obviously was extremely, he calls himself a self -starter. He had a piece of work, which I have to repeat is very important. You have to have something you can point to. It's not just like, oh, come, you know, I'm just somebody you don't even know, you know, come help me.

48:05Like they see that this kid's out here hustling. He's out here working. He's actually doing this. He's really interested in this industry that I'm in. Right. and he's got something to point to so because he had like a calling card he was able to get signed and then he's just so grateful because he feels chuck silvers is the one that like opened all the doors for him at universals he's like be my manager and listen chuck is so wise here and he just has one request he's like listen i'm just doing this because i want to help you but you have to pay this forward after your success his one request chuck's one request of Steven Spielberg is the same thing.

48:40It's why Ingvar Kahnpratt said over and over again, founder of IKEA, why am I writing this book? People told me I didn't want to write an autobiography. I resisted the idea. He says explicitly the argument that convinced me from his co -writer was that, you know, stuff that will help future entrepreneurs and you love entrepreneurs. And so that's why he wrote the IKEA story, because I'm going to now he's passed on. It's a good thing he did because we wouldn't have had access to his ideas. Sam Walton, same thing. I'm writing this book because I wanted to help you. Phil Knight. There's some kind of instinct.

49:13You know, these people are older. I think in that case, in those three examples I just gave you, I think they were all in their 70s by the time they wrote it. And in Sam Walton's case, he knows he's dying. He's super, super sick. He talks about in the book, he's got cancer everywhere, right? But it was very important for them. Bob Noyce, same thing in Intel. They're like, what the hell, Bob? You're wealthy. You could be doing anything in the world. Why are you spending time having, you know 19 year old 20 year old steve jobs at your house why are you going to give these talks why are you doing all these investments he's like i need to restock the stream i fished from it's that natural human instinct to be like okay i benefited greatly from this knowledge from this industry from this mentorship i'm going to go and turn it around and do it for the next generation too it's amazing so so spielberg then asked me if i'd be as a manager uh silver said i said steven you need someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the business than I do.

50:03I'm not the right person. He asked me what I wanted for helping him. I said, well, Stephen, by the time you really make it big, I'll probably be too goddamn old for you to do me any good. In effect, what I told him was, when you can, pass it on. When you make it big, you can be nice to young people. I learned from people I had no way of thinking. Oh, excuse me. I learned from people I had no way of thanking. You can pass that on. Steve made me a promise and he kept it. You look at the list of first -time directors and new writers and first -time producers he has made an opportunity for. He puts his money and he puts his business personality on the line.

50:47Okay, so he's already signed as a director. Again, I've repeated this over again. I'm going to repeat it one more time because it's a note I left myself on this page. There's two notes for myself. Number one, have a piece of work that you can point to, right? he set up a screaming of Amblin it was an incredible piece of work this is how he gets signed this guy named Sid Sheinberg so think of this as as mentor number two in Steven's life and they're still friends to this day which again like this is something I always look for like if like when you meet new people it's like it's very important that they have they've been able to develop relationships for a long time because like you can fool like you can fake being a good person for you know a couple months maybe a year maybe even a few years but you know if somebody's known you for 20 years like you can't fake being a scumbag for that long right and steven something that he talks about i actually i wasn't going to talk about this now but i might as well because it passed my mind it's like something that that i think is an idea that we can take from spielberg he talks about like the reason he's able to work so quickly now is because he's worked with the same people for decades right his editors his visual effects people the people like when he's on a new project he winds up hiring a lot of the same people over over again because he says like we just have a way like all the knowledge we have working with each other it compounds and that that compounding makes it easier for us to communicate and work faster he's like if i had to hire brand new people every few years to do a project he's like i couldn't do this this is very similar if you i did a three -part series on larry ellison he said the same thing he's like the reason he's like the core programming team at oracle for the first i forgot it was like 10 years whatever the time period was like it didn't change it was like the same 30 people, whatever the number was, right?

52:21I can't, these numbers might be wrong, but the main point I'm telling you is definitely, I remember correctly. But the idea is like, you don't want all this turnover where you see these people jumping from project to project, working with constantly new people. Yeah, you might want to do that. You might want to get some fresh idea and new blood in there. But the idea is like, well, just like money compounds, time compounds, knowledge compounds too. And now you've been working together. You have a way of a fundamental understanding that has taken years to develop. And that if you keep switching, like you're interrupting the compounding.

52:48And so Stephen applies that to not only the people he works with, but his professional relationships up and down. Like not only the people he hires, but the people that hired him. It's very fascinating. So he has this piece of work. Sid winds up hiring him, gives him a contract. He makes him do TV first. Stephen does not want to do TV, right? So the second thing is you may not like your first opportunity, but you got to do your level best. It's just the script was terrible. Spielberg said later, I really didn't want to do the show. I told Sid, Jesus, can I do something else? He said, I'd take this opportunity if I were you.

53:19And of course, I took it. I would have done anything. And so he talks about the very beginning, something also that might surprise you. To this day, from the first time he makes a movie till now, he's constantly throwing up, nervous. Every time I start a new scene, I'm nervous. Talks about vomiting over and over again. He's a 65 -year -old man when he's talking about this, right? And the same thing that was happening to him when he was younger. We just don't, and I'm glad he shares this because from the outside, this guy obviously knows everything. He's got, I don't even know what, four of the, I don't know what the number is now, but I think when this book ends, he has four of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time.

53:58Just outsized, remarkable success. This guy clearly knows what he's doing, and yet you don't see before the camera turns on, he's in the corner throwing. I was so frightened that even the whole period is a bit of a blank for me. I was walking on eggs. I didn't know if I'd ever, I don't know if you've never been to bed for four days in a row. It's like taking drugs. I don't take drugs. I never have. Or I would have used every drug under and over the counter at the time. The show put me through dire straits. It was a good discipline, but a very bad experience. So you have, he goes from the euphoria, right, of being signed, youngest director ever, to the terror of not liking the work and being very bad at it.

54:35He has a breakdown and he winds up having to take a really the high from being getting signed and then the fall of being despondent he has to take a break not only had he failed to interest universal in letting him bring to life all the stories i had in my head but no one was even offering him tv episodes to direct i was in a despondent comatose state and i told sid i wanted to leave of absence and i got it and there's one more sentence about this point in his life because i think it's extremely important to remember success is not a straight line. He didn't just go from Night Gallery, the show he didn't like, to Jaws.

55:08His career stalled at a number of occasions. Okay, so there's an idea that popped up in the book and in my notes multiple times for the documentary. And it's this idea that he thinks visually. And really the way I think about this is like you got to find the perfect medium or the perfect format for your skill set. and there's another way to put it somebody else later on the documentary says that that Spielberg speaks cinema as his native language and Spielberg in the documentary also gives advice he's like you got you you have this idea of what you want to do and it's only in your head and he says no one can help you holding the entire idea in your head that that is your job that's something that you have to figure out how to do and I think that's his approach to to movie making so let's go back to the book.

55:56He thinks visually. He's in the perfect format for his skill set. And he says he seemed to be able to see more than other people saw. He didn't seem to waste any time. He didn't seem to get caught up in what directors often do. Eating up camera time, eating up miles and miles of film. This is back before there was digital film. There was literally a physical film. They produced literally, that's true, miles of film on a movie. He seemed to cut on the floor. We knew that this boy knew about the camera and it's he combined this this the way he thought visually which is perfect for obviously being a filmmaker with the fact that it's just try not to be a dick just try to be you're gonna get farther if you can avoid that and a lot of people would interact with steven like okay like he's not he's got he says he has a nice manner this gets you a long way when a director has the attitude i don't know everything about this but would you like to try something, which is how Steven interacts with his coworkers, you're willing to knock yourself out for that director.

56:57And so I think at this point in his career where he's really struggling, it was very helpful to have all these other filmmakers around him, these young filmmakers, because he's suffering internally. But this is the note of myself, positive forward motion, regardless of internal suffering, which is just a really smart idea. They're all not really getting what they like. Their talent and their drive is currently not being like, there's no evidence of actual accomplishments. Like they're not getting as far as they think they could based on the talent they already have and the drive they have. So it says, we were all ambitious and wanting to work and none of us were getting the kind of work that we wanted to do.

57:34Stephen knew he wanted to do features, meaning movies. When Stephen was very discouraged trying to sell a script and break in, he always had a positive forward motion, whatever he may have been suffering inside. So positive forward motion, regardless of external circumstances. So eventually he does get the opportunity to direct a movie. It's called Sugar Land. It flops. And it's very dangerous. As much as like the film industry talks about, oh yeah, it's an art and everything else. It's like, yeah, you have a couple of flops and you're out of the industry real quick. Right. And so he was in a very precarious position because he was being pushed into do a shark movie.

58:14And he's like, what the hell? I don't want to do this shark movie. And the real, the lesson here is that his biggest win, Jaws is by far the most important thing to ever happen to the career of Spielberg. And he says it right. His biggest win is going to come right after what he thought at the time was his biggest failure. When he received the bad news about Sugar Land in April 1974, Spielberg did not have much time to sit around engaging and second -guessing or nursing his wounds. He was on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, immersed in preparations to make another film. It was a modestly budgeted thriller called Jaws.

58:53So we're going to get into Jaws. I want to take a slight tangent first. I do have to tell you, I'll just tell you up front, Jaws is, people call Jaws his free pass into his future. And that's completely due to its financial success. at the time it was released, it was the most profitable movie ever made. And he's like, once I had that, I got final cut on every single project I ever did moving forward in my career. I got to choose those projects I did. I got to choose what they look like. It bought me my freedom. And again, finances buy you freedom. Uh, I want to, at before jaws, they're, they're shopping this, this idea of a, of a, um, of a science fiction film that is going to eventually become a close encounters of a third kind, which is also successful.

59:35But I want to pull something out here because I think it's important something we talked about on this the autobiography of Sid Meyer Sid Meyer is the computer programmer the game designer that made civilization the main idea of that book was so important is the fact that like you you discover that if you question that questioning conventional wisdom can be very profitable Sid wanted to make a strategy game everybody said nope strategy games can't make any money doing that he does it anyways releases a civilization, it sells 51 million copies, right? And so we see the exact same thing here. Lucas and Spielberg, they're trying to shop this project.

1:00:11It says in two decades since Star Wars and The Close Encounters were released, science fiction films have accounted for half of the top 20 box office hits. But before George Lucas and Spielberg revived the genre, there was no real appetite at the studios for science fiction. The conventional wisdom was science fiction films never make money. So questioning conventional wisdom can be profitable. Let's get to the making of Jaws because it was a just constantly in flux. They're rewriting the script the night before. Not sure if they'll have it done before the next day, if they can actually shoot anything.

1:00:48It went over budget and over schedule. I think like three times, like it was supposed to take 57 days. I think it took like 150 days, something like that. But it says, and then they wind up, the shark winds up, like the main character winds up disappearing. So it's just amazing how resourceful he had to be. So he says, I hired a man named Carl Gottlieb, who was an old friend of mine, and he came with me to Martha's Vineyard essentially to polish the script as the actor sat with me every night, often only 24 hours before the shot, and improvised. To facilitate their work on the script, Gottlieb and Spielberg shared a house on location, and Gottlieb would continue to work on the revisions after Spielberg went to sleep.

1:01:22Each morning, Gottlieb would give new pages to the company typist and by 8 .30 in the morning, they would be approved and ready for filming. It was incredibly tense. And so halfway through, Spielberg wants to quit. And this is just a reminder, your mind will play tricks on you. Lucas thought Star Wars was going to flop. If you remember that, Spielberg says the same thing. He's like, I'm going to be out of the movie business. This movie is not going to do well. I had two failures in a row and I'm done. Sid had words with Spielberg over Jaws. It was one of the few disagreements that Steven and I had.

1:01:53I literally forced him to do it. I think he was upset for a while and he turned to me and said, why are you making me do this B movie? He was scared. He felt overwhelmed. He wasn't sure he was the right guy for it. The picture was important to him, vitally important. There was such huge professional stakes. Nothing was ready. It was at that stage completely out of control and it was as it was during most of the shooting. Jaws ran into so many production problems that exasperated crew members began referring to the movie as flaws. Spielberg later admitted, I thought it would be a turkey. This is more about the terror part of Euphoria and Terror, right?

1:02:28Imagine having to shoot a shark movie without the shark. He thought he was doomed. And this winds up being his greatest achievement. It's just wild. For weeks after shooting started, Bruce simply refused to work. That's the name of the shark. That night, Richard Dreyfuss declared, if any of us had any sense, we'd all bail out now. Spielberg anxiously shot around the star of the movie. Out of desperation, he began shooting barrels instead of the shark. In the movie, the barrels are affixed to a shark by the harpoon, and they cruise the ocean surface as a stand -in for the submerged creature. We were very scared.

1:02:57I didn't know whether any of us could do it. We thought we're making a picture called Jaws, and we don't have the fucking shark. Today, with computers, you could just put the shark in. In those days, it was a strictly mechanical thing. The pressure on the 27 -year -old director was enormous. I thought my career as a filmmaker was over. I heard rumors from back in Hollywood that I would never work again because no one had ever taken a film 100 days over schedule, let alone a director whose first picture had failed at the box office. There were moments of solitude sitting on the boat thinking, this can't be done.

1:03:28It was stupid to begin with. We'll never finish it. No one is ever going to see this picture, and I'm never going to work in this town again. Think about the mind games that he had to deal with when making the movie. The movie is finished. The movie is released. This is what happens. Jaws surpassed Francis Ford Coppola as the Godfather to become the most successful film in motion picture history to that date. Jaws held that distinction until November 77, when it was dethroned by George Lucas' Star Wars. Spielberg took out an ad in the Hollywood trade papers showing a little robot from Star Wars R2 -D2 catching Bruce the shark in his jaws with a fishing hook.

1:04:03Congratulating Lucas for capturing the box office title, Spielberg wrote, Wear it well, your pal Steven. it and again just remarkable that all these guys were friends so after jaws he has a jaws is a hit uh close encounters a third kind is a hit he's like oh i can do anything real high on his own supply so he tries to do this comedy called 1941 um and this really the point of the reason i'm bringing this to your attention is because sometimes you learn more from failure and 1941 winds up being a failure he has a reputation that you know yeah jaws is successful close counters a third time successful, but he's always over budget.

1:04:39He's always like he's not disciplined. And so he learns from George Lucas that you have to watch your costs. You have to be disciplined about this. And so, again, it's where Lucas plays a huge influence in his life. But first, it says Spielberg used to say that he was born again after 1941. That's the big, gigantic failure, the mistake. Working as a hired hand for Lucas, a conservative and highly disciplined producer, Spielberg used Raiders of the Lost Ark as a form of professional rehab so after 1941 Lucas is like hey I have this idea I'm going to be a producer for this is you know Raiders of the Lost Ark one of the most successful film franchises in film history they don't know it at that time obviously he's like will you direct this for me and so Spielberg Lucas and Spielberg are now on set it's Spielberg the director Lucas lets him be as a director but he's the one you know putting up the money making sure everything runs on time so that's where he's just learning and from here on in he becomes you know he had a bad reputation lucas goes around selling trying to sell the movie and they're like well who's going to direct like spielberg like now we're out like how could you be out he just did jaws and close account as a third kind and like talked about you know the guy they're not lying about the budget but saying yeah we can do it for 20 million it comes in at 60 million like that's going to piss these people off right so it says the lucas spielberg proposal was presented to the studios the proposal dare to assault oh i'm bringing i'm bringing this to your attention because there's a quote from George Lucas's biography that's fantastic.

1:06:01And he says, some of the bravest and most reckless acts that we did were not aesthetic, but financial. Again, highly recommend it. All founders, I think, should read George Lucas's biography. How many people do know that founded multiple billion dollar businesses and did it like he just has this like a not aggression, but just like this damn it, I'll do it myself attitude that you just can't, You just love, you absolutely love. So it says they're going around shopping this and now they're saying, okay, this is after Star Wars. This is after Jaws. This is, we're playing a different game here. So it says the proposal dared to assault the standard Hollywood financial practices on several especially sensitive points.

1:06:40Chief among them was that while the distributor would be expected to put up the movie's budget to $20 million, it would receive no distribution fee and take no overhead charge. So that's like these Hollywood accounting. This is a term for like the shenanigans, the financial shenanigans that was known in the industry at the time. Those items usually accounted for more than 50 % of the gross film rentals. Besides demanding large sums of money up front, Lucas and Spielberg also wanted enormous shares of the gross, a demand that was especially unusual for a director in that era. And while the distributor would be allowed to recover their entire cost of raiders from gross film rentals before Lucas and Spielberg started to receive their shares of the gross, Lucas would eventually have full ownership of the movie.

1:07:23Studios were taken aback by such chutzpah. And so with Lucas's help, he becomes this disciplined watch your cost director. So it says, we knew we had to. Now they're talking about shooting the movie. We knew how to compromise. There were some moments where it would go to take two or three and take four and something wasn't working. So, you know, multiple takes. Stephen would say, that's it. Let's move on. We'll figure out another way to do it. He was very, very good in that respect. Raiders was the first picture he bought in on budget. I heard Stephen say that his friends were doing smaller pictures than him, less expensive pictures than him, coming in on budget and they were able to see money on the back end.

1:08:05Stephen rarely had that opportunity, so he was bound and determined to bring a picture in on budget so he could see the back end. So really what Lucas taught him is like, you gotta watch it. That's nice that you make a lot of money at the box office, but you'll make a lot more money personally if you watch your costs. And so he takes what he learned from Lucas on the Indiana Jones movies, right? and he applies it to E .T. and check this out this is now we're in the euphoria part of his career E .T. prints money so he winds up he's like alright I'm doing this movie for 10 million dollars E .T. was so tough because Steven had made a bet with Universal that he could do this thing for 10 million dollars completing E .T.

1:08:46within that budget enabled him to satisfy his obligation for the final remaining film from his 1975 contract with Universal in the first weeks and he winds up coming in on budget and on time right in the first weeks check this out this is going to blow your mind. In the first weeks after the film's release on June 11th, 1982, we're talking $1982, which is even crazier what I'm about to tell you. Spielberg personally was earning as much as half a million dollars per day as his share of the profits. And so as his movies become more financially successful, he's able to demand better and better deals.

1:09:20He also is learning from his third mentor, Stephen Ross. So it says, Steve, and I don't know if myself is you don't make three or four billion dollars by accident. Referring to Spielberg. Spielberg's as good as a businessman as he is a director. Spielberg is renowned and sometimes deployed in Hollywood for driving hard bargains with everyone from technicians to actors to studio chiefs. In recent years, his standard deal has been a remarkable 50 % of the distributor's gross on his pictures. And they said you compare that with five or 15 % of gross that even major stars command so he's making a lot more money right the studios also fully finance his uh spielberg's films even though that he that he owns it um that he owned that that the movies owned or shared by amblin his his company steven gets the studios to carry the risk and he takes in the money and so he winds up becoming real good friends with uh the head of time uh the head of is this warner brothers or time warner at the time i'm not sure time warner so it says um his connection came through his close friendship with Steve Ross, the chairman of the board of Time Warner.

1:10:29Ross was the most colorful and controversial of the film industry mentors to whom Spielberg had attached himself. Assuming the roles of Spielberg's best friend, an idealized father figure, as well as business mentor, Ross began educating Spielberg in the finer aspects of life as a Hollywood mogul. In the documentary, Tom Hanks talks about working with him with Spielberg is remarkable because how resourceful he is you could plan something out as best you can circumstances dictated it's not going to work out and he comes up with just he just makes the most of whatever is there and we see an example of this when he's on location filming his first uh his first movie in china so while preparing for the first day of shooting in shangai uh assistant director david tomlin plotted out all the crowd movements and everything and i planned to keep the road clear so there could be traffic so there could be traffic movement i drew it all out and told everyone what to do.

1:11:19Then 5 ,000 people suddenly flooded the road. I went crazy. I said to Stephen, oh Jesus, it's all gone wrong. He said, looks great. Roll the cameras. Action. He was happy with how it looked and I wasn't going to argue with the 5 ,000 people. He's very good like that. He's not pedantic. Whatever is there, he makes it work. That's the most important sentence of that entire paragraph. Whatever's there, he makes it work. That's the assistant director talking about something they made in the 80s. Tom Hanks did the exact same thing when they were making Save a Private Ryan. Another thing that Stephen talks about in this book, talked about in the documentary over and over again, is how important family is to him.

1:11:56The fact that he's got like seven kids, something like that. He got divorced for the first time. He felt like a failure, then got remarried. They'd been married for a long time. He says it's extremely important to him because of the traumatic childhood he had. And he's got this scene and hook that he took to heart. And I think it's fantastic. And so they're going back and forth. It's the character Peter and his wife. And it says, your children love you. They want to play with you. How long do you think that lasts? We have a few special years with our children when they're the ones who want us around.

1:12:26So fast, Peter. It's a few years that it's over. You are not being careful and you are missing it. That is the lesson Peter learns in Hook. And it is one Spielberg took to heart in his own life. and I would say that is the major life regret that I've seen in a lot of these biographies and autobiographies and when they're writing in these books it's too late it's the fact that they over -optimized for their work life at expense of their children um they all tell you not to do it it's a regret they can't do anything about the best term I've ever heard about this came from Ingvar Kamprad's autobiography because he did that his three boys if I'm not mistaken he's like I I missed their childhood because I was building Ikea and I messed up.

1:13:11I shouldn't have done that. And it says, childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered. There's also a line in the Hook movie with Peter Pan that I think Spielberg took this idea and ran with it as well. And that's the idea to make life the adventure it's supposed to be. So, Granny Wendy tells Peter, your adventures are over. Oh no, he replies. To live, to live will be an awfully big adventure. So when the book ends, he just finished Schindler's List and Jurassic Park. Finally gets his Academy Award that he's been dreaming about since he was 12, that he would have been snubbed for multiple decades before then.

1:13:50Has two of the most successful and well -known movies. And it says, as he approached his 50th birthday, Spielberg showed no signs of being crushed under the enormous weight of his success. Many a lesser career has collapsed from the burden of escalating expectations, and Spielberg, who still bites his fingernails and throws up before coming to a set in the morning, cannot help feeling the horrendous pressure of having to top himself, of simply having to be Steven Spielberg. But throughout his 28 years as a professional filmmaker, he has maintained a sense of inner balance that so far has enabled him to avoid losing his nerve.

1:14:26He seems comfortable, even if others are not, with his own complexities and contradictions. When his high school friend Chuck Case visited him at the Long Beach airport during the filming of 1941, Spielberg surveyed his army of uniformed actors and World War II airplanes and said with a childlike smile. You know, they pay me to do this. And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. Read the book. And I highly recommend watching the documentary as well. It was fantastic. If you want to buy the book using, if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

1:15:02That is 209 books down 1 ,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon. Okay. So what you're about to hear is this question I was asked a few months ago. I actually recorded this a few months ago. They asked, how did history's greatest entrepreneurs think about hiring? All the answers. People think I have a better memory than I actually do. If people say, oh, David, you have a great memory. My wife would laugh at that because I forget things all the time. It's not that I have a good memory. It's I reread things over and over and over again. Every single answer, every single reference you're about to hear in this 20 -minute mini episode came from me searching all of my notes and highlights.

1:15:38That option is now available to you. If you like what you hear, if you think it's valuable, if you're already running a successful company and you want an easy way to reference the ideas of history's greatest entrepreneurs in a searchable database that you can go through at your convenience anytime you want, then you can go to foundersnotes .com and sign up. I want to start out first with why this is so important. There's actually this book that came out in like 1997. It's called In the Company Giants. I think it's episode 208 of Founders. It's two Stanford MBA students, if I remember correctly.

1:16:10And they're interviewing a bunch of technology company founders. And in there, Steve Jobs is one of them. This is, you know, right, I think, even before he came back to Apple. And they were talking about, well, yeah, we know it's important to hire, but in a typical startup, a manager or founder may not always have time to spend recruiting other people. And I first read Steve's answer to this, you know, I don't know, two years ago, and I never forgot it. I think it's excellent. I think it sets up why this question is so important. And you should really be spending, especially in the early days, like basically all your time doing this.

1:16:45In a typical startup, a manager may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people. Then Steve jumps in. I disagree totally. I think it's the most important job. Assume you're by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You take a lot of time finding a partner, right? He would be half of your company. I'm going to pause there. This idea of looking at each new hire as a percentage of the company is genius. Why should you take any less time finding a third or fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.

1:17:18Each is 10 % of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three of the 10, were not so great, why would you start a company where 30 % of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does. Okay, so to answer this question, the advantage that I have making founders and that you have as a biopractive listening to founders is not only that I've read, you know, 300 something biographies of entrepreneurs now, but I have all of my notes and highlights stored in my Readwise app. And that means I can search for any topic.

1:17:58I can look at the past highlights of books or I could search for keywords. So what I did is first of all, like what I've started to do with these AMA questions is I read them, decide which ones I'm going to do next, and then think about it for a few days. I don't put any, I just literally that, that I know that's the next question. just let my brain work on it in the background for a few days. And then I'll go through and start searching all of my notes. And so that's what I did here. And so there's a bunch of, you know, I don't have, I may have like 10 or 15 different founders talking about hiring.

1:18:27The first idea is the most obvious, but I think probably works best when you're already established. So Steve Jobs is talking about, hey, you know, the great way to hire is just find great work and find the people that did that and then try to hire them. When you're Steve Jobs, that's a lot easier, right? Than if you're just somebody that doesn't have a reputation, maybe you don't have resources, maybe your company's rather new or not as well known. David Ogilvie, I just did Confessions of an Advertising Man a couple episodes ago, I think 306 or something like that, 307. And he did the same thing.

1:19:02But he's David Ogilvie at that point. So he would find, he'd go through magazines, find great advertising, great copywriting, and he'd write the person a letter and then set up a phone call. and he says he wouldn't, he was so well -known and, you know, he's one of the best in his field that he wouldn't even have to offer a job, just the conversation, then the person would, he'd want to hire the person, never mention it, and the person would apply to him. And so again, I think if you can do that, then of course, it's straightforward. Find somebody who does great work. Usually you can do this. I actually have a friend, I can't say who it is.

1:19:37He's doing this right now, actually. I have a friend that's really good at doing this. He's finding people that do great stuff on the internet and then just cold, cold DMing them and then getting, convincing them to work on things. And that usually works, especially with people like younger people early in their career. There's a bunch of different ways to think about this and a bunch of different ways to prioritize. So the first thing that came to mind that I found surprising is you read any biography on Rockefeller and he had a couple ideas where he felt the optimization, you know, table stakes that you're intelligent and you're driven and you're hardworking, right?

1:20:11We don't even have, like, if you're listening to this, you already know that. But he prioritized hiring people with social skills. And so this is what he said. The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I pay more for that ability than any other under the sun. There's the second part to this, though. And this also works well if you have access to more resources. Rockefeller would hire people as he found, as he found talented people, not as he needed them. It's not like, okay, Standard Oil has six open spots. Let's go find six candidates, right? He'd come across what he considered a talented person.

1:20:48He didn't even matter if he didn't know what they were going to do. He's like, I'm just going to stack his team. And if you really think about the, his partners are Standard Oil. He essentially built a company, an executive team of founders because he was buying up all their companies. So it's very rare, but there's a line from Titan. and I want to read to you. Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed. And then I found another idea in the hiring, like the actual interview process. So there's this guy named Vannevar Bush. I did two episodes on him.

1:21:20I think it's 270 and 271. He is the most important American ever in history in terms of connecting the scientific field, private enterprise, and the government. The most important person to keep alive for the American war effort was FDR. The second one was Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush is like the Forrest Gump of this historical period. He is involved in everything from the Manhattan Project to discovering like a young Claude Shannon to building a mechanical computer. Like this guy literally has done, he's just, he pops up in these books over and over again. If you were reading about American business history during World War II and post -World War II, you are going to come across the name Vannevar Bush over and over again.

1:21:59I read his fantastic autobiography called Pieces of the action. And I came across this weird highlight. And so this is his brilliant and unusual job interview process. And so he's talking about this organization he's running called AMRAD. At AMRAD, I hired a young physicist from Texas named C .G. Smith. The way I hired him is interesting. An interview of that sort is always likely to be on an artificial basis and somewhat embarrassing. So I discussed with him a technical point on which I was then genuinely puzzled. The next day, he came in with a neat solution, and I hired him at once. Here's another idea.

1:22:35This is from Nolan Bushnell. Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari, founder of Chuck E. Cheese, and Steve Jobs' mentor. He hired Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs was like 19 at Atari. He would ask people their reading habits in interviews. This is why. One of the best ways his whole thing was he wanted to build all of his companies laid on a foundation of creative people. So that's what he's looking for. He's like, I need creative people. one of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question. What books do you like? I've never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits.

1:23:06Actually, which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read at all. I've known many talented engineers who hated science fiction, but loved say books on birdwatching. A blatant, but often accurate generalization. People who are curious and passionate read people who are apathetic in a different don't. I remember one That's such a great line, and I obviously agree with it. I remember one—I'm going to read it again. A blatant but often accurate generalization. People who are curious and passionate read. People who are apathetic and indifferent don't. I remember one particular woman who, during an interview, told me that she had read every book that I had read.

1:23:42So I started mentioning books I hadn't read, and she had read those too. I didn't know how someone in her late 20s found this much time to read so much. But I was so impressed that I hired her right there and assigned her to international marketing, which was having problems. This is why. This is why I'm reading this whole section to you. A job with a lot of moving parts benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving parts. It wouldn't be possible to have read that many books without such a brain. So do you see what I mean? We start with Steve Jobs saying, this is the most important thing that your role as the leader of the company and the founders do, right?

1:24:19And it's so important to study, and this is why I'm glad this question exists, and why I'm glad that I took the time and I had like the foresight to like, hey, I should really organize my thoughts and notes because there's no way I would have remembered all this without being able to search my read -wise, right? But you have Rockefeller saying, this is what's important to me. You have Bush saying, this is how I hire. Now you have Nolan Bush now saying, well, here's another weird thing that I learned. Let me go through what Warren Buffett says about this. So this is about the quality. One thing that is consistent, whether it's Jobs, Buffett, Bezos, Peter Thiel, this just pops up over and over again.

1:24:53They talk about the importance of trying to find people that are better than you. The hiring bar constantly has to increase. Now, obviously, the larger the company gets, that's impossible. Steve Jobs has this great quote where he's like, you know, Pixar was the first time I saw an entire team, a entire company of A players, but they had 400 players. They had 400 team members. He's like, at the time, Apple had 3 ,000. It's like, it's impossible to have 3 ,000 A players. So there is some number that your company may grow to where it's just you're just not you're not going to have thousands of a players in my argument i don't even know if you get a 400 i guess you i mean i'll take steve's word for it on there and pixar definitely produce great products but it's probably a lot lower than that as well so warren buffett would tell you to use david ogilvy's hiring philosophy and so warren said charlie and i know that the right players will make almost any team manager look good again that is why it's the most important function of the founder maybe directly next to the product or right above the product actually, because those are people building your product.

1:25:52We subscribe to the philosophy of Ogilvy and Mather's founding genius, David Ogilvy. This is what Ogilvy said. If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we should become a company of dwarves. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. Jeff Bezos used a variation of Ogilvy's idea too. Jeff used to say in Amazon, every time we hire someone, He or she should raise the bar for the next hire so that the overall talent pool is always improving. They talk about this idea on Amazon where the future hires that we do should be so good that if you had applied for the job you already have at Amazon, you wouldn't get in.

1:26:32That's a very interesting idea. Take your time with recruiting. Take your time with hiring. There's this great book on the history of PayPal. It's written, actually, I've recently become friends with the author. His name is Jimmy Sonny. Um, and this is in his book. The most fascinating thing that I found was that PayPal prioritized speed. So from the time they're, they're founded to the time they sell to eBay, it's like four years. Jimmy spent more time researching the book than he spent six years researching book. I always tease him because like you took longer on a book than they took to start and sell their company.

1:27:06It just speaks to like the quality he's trying to do. But as a by -product of that, like obviously they move fast, but they prioritize speed over everything else except in one area. recruiting. Max Lutchen kept the bar for talent exceedingly high, even if that came at the expense of speedy staffing. Max kept repeating, A's hire A's, B's hire C's, so the first B you hire takes the whole company down. Let's read that again. A players hire A players, B players hire C players, so the first B player you hire takes the whole company down. Additionally, the team, the company leaders mandated that all prospects, here's another idea for you, all prospects must meet every single member of the team.

1:27:44Now, the next one is the most bizarre. It makes sense if you study. I did this three -part series on Larry Ellison. I should read those books again because the podcast is like 50 times bigger than when I publish those episodes. And he's just crazy. So he would hire based on the self -confidence level of the candidate. Listen to this. I have tears in my eyes. I don't know why laughing okay this is just so because this is you read about larry ellison and he's one of these people it's like really easy to interface with because you just you just know exactly who he is and what's important to him that's why i think it's so funny ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest new college graduates when they were recruiting from universities they'd ask people are you the smartest person you know and if they said yes they would hire them.

1:28:39If they said no, they would say who is, and they would go hire that guy instead. I don't know if you got the smartest people that way, but you definitely got the most arrogant. Ellicent, and this is why, the personality of the founder is largely the culture of the company. Apple is Steve Jobs. Apple is just Steve Jobs with 10 ,000 lives, right? I was just texting a founder friend of mine. He listens to the podcast. I actually met him through the podcast, and he's going through this process of self -discovery. He's already started a bunch of companies are really successful, but he's like, I think I'm more of this type of founder than the other type of founder.

1:29:10And that's good that he's doing that because he's, he's hopefully his next mission is like his life's mission, you know, and you can't get your life's mission unless you figured out who you are. Ellison knew who he was. Ellison's swaggering combative style became a part of the company's identity. This arrogant culture had a lot to do with Oracle's success. Here's another odd idea for you. Izzy Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons, actually could figured out that in his business, which was hotels, right, that hiring the right person could actually be a form of distribution for his hotel. He gave me the idea because of what?

1:29:43What do we know? What do you and I know in our bones? That history's greatest founders all read biographies. They all read biographies of people that came before them and took ideas from them. Izzy Sharp is trying to build Four Seasons. What do you think he did? He picked up a biography of Cesar Ritz, the guy that Ritz Carlton is named after, arguably the greatest hotelier of all time. And when he realized, oh, shit, Ritz, he says, remembering that Cesar Ritz made his hotels world famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs, we decided to do something similar. So what is he talking about? Cesar Ritz went out and partnered with August Escoffier.

1:30:16What Cesar Ritz was to hotel, to building hotels, August Escoffier was to French cooking. And so what happened is you partner with world famous chefs, people come into your restaurant that's in the hotel because the world famous chef. And now they know about your hotel that leads to more, that leads to more activity in your restaurant that you own, but also leads to more brand recognition of your hotel. And then as a byproduct of that, more people staying at the hotel. So hiring as a form of distribution, this is fascinating. That is a fascinating idea. Okay, here's the problem. You can identify great people, right?

1:30:48Maybe they even want to come work, like you've identified them, you've sold them, hey, this is our mission, this is what we're doing. and yet humans have complicated lives. They have spouses. They have kids. They have a reason maybe they can't move across the country to work for you even though they want to. So there's a problem -solving element that you see in these books on you have to solve. Like you've already identified the person. You've recruited them. They can't go for some other reason. Okay, well, the great founders are not going to take no for an answer. I read in this book called Liftoff, which is about the first six years of SpaceX.

1:31:25This is what Elon Musk did. They had anticipated his friend's issue. Having convinced Musk they needed to bring this brilliant young engineer from Turkey on board, it became a matter of solving the problem. His wife had a job in San Francisco. She would need one in Los Angeles, right? Because that's where SpaceX is at the time. These were solvable problems, and Elon's better at solving problems than almost anyone else. Musk, therefore, came into his job interview prepared. About halfway through, Musk told the guy that he wants to hire, So I heard you don't want to move to LA, and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google.

1:31:56Well, I just talked to Larry, and they're going to transfer your wife down to LA, so what are you going to do now? To solve this problem, Musk had called his friend Larry Page, the co -founder of Google. The engineer sat in stunned silence for a moment, but then he replied, given all that, he would come to work at SpaceX. That's really smart. There is another idea when you're promoting. Are you going to promote from within or from without? You know, that's dependent on you. depending on what's going on. I do think this is interesting, though. There's this guy named Les Schwab who built this really valuable chain of tire companies in the Pacific Northwest.

1:32:31I actually found out about him because Charlie Munger is like, hey, you should read this biography. He said it in, he didn't say it to me personally. He said it in one of the Berkshire meetings that to study, Les Schwab had one of the smartest financial incentive structures or any company that Charlie Munger had come across. So this is what Les Schwab did. He did not want to hire from, he didn't want to hire other people from other companies because they might come with bad habits. He liked to train his own executives. And so he says, in our 34 years of business, we have never hired a manager from the outside.

1:33:03Every single one of our more than 250 managers and assistant managers started at the bottom changing tires. They have all earned their management job by working up. And then another thing, if you're going to hire the best of the best and A players, A players don't like to be micromanage. And so this came in Larry Miller's autobiography called Driven. He owns like, he owned like 93 companies all throughout Utah, car dealerships, movie theaters, all kinds of crazy stuff. But he also owned the NBA team, Utah Jazz. And what was fascinating is he's trying to recruit Jerry Sloan as the coach at the point.

1:33:36And Jerry Sloan would only take the job on one condition. And I really like it. I really like this idea. If you hire me, let me run the team in business, right? That's what you're hiring me for. One of the best things we had ever done was hire Jerry Sloan as coach. At the time, he said, I'm only going to ask you for one thing. If I get fired, let me get fired for my own decisions. If you hire me, let me run the team slash business. Here's another idea from Thomas Edison that I think is fascinating. Really, the way I think about a founder is like you're developing skills that you can't hire for.

1:34:09You're going to hire for everything else, but you shouldn't be hireable. And Edison wasn't. Edison expressing his views on the preeminent role of applied scientists, which that's what he considered himself, coined the expression, I can hire mathematicians, but they can't hire me. And so when I read that paragraph for the first time, the note I left myself was develop skills that you can't hire for. Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. Estee Lauder would give you advice that you need to hire people aligned with your thinking and values. Hire the best people. This is vital.

1:34:39Hire people who think as you do and treat them well. In our business, they are a top priority. So this idea is like, that seems kind of weird, like hire people who think like you. There's obviously not one right way to build a business. I think that your business should be an expression of your personality and who you are as a person at the core. And so I think there is an art to the building of your business. And the reason I use the word art, I don't mean in like a hoity -toity, you know, pretentious manner. That's not me at all. I don't even care about art at all, really. I mean that you're making decisions not just based on economics.

1:35:15Like there are non -economic important decisions based on how you're building your business. Like you could probably make more money doing a decision A, but decision A goes against who you are as a person or you just don't like it or it's just not as elegant or beautiful. And so therefore you don't do it. So that's what I mean about, you know, hire people who think as you do. And for whatever reason, when I read Estee Lauder say that, I was like, okay, there's like this art to what she's doing. One thing that's going to be helpful in recruiting, this comes from Peter Thiel. I think this is the book, Zero to One.

1:35:45Understand that most companies don't even differentiate their pitches to potential recruits and to hiring. So therefore, as a byproduct of that, you're going to wind up with a lower overall talent base. And so he says, what's wrong with valuable stock, smart people, or pressing problems? Nothing. But every company makes these claims. So they won't help you stand out. General and undifferentiated pitches to join your company. don't say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of money instead of many others so that idea of like your pitch your actual he would tell you you're you shouldn't be building an undifferentiated commodity business but even above and beyond that like you're the the mission that you're trying to engage everybody to join you in that pitch that sale sale you're trying to make to potential recruits should be differentiated should not if that person's applying to five other jobs there should not be like it's like they may not like your mission.

1:36:36They might not like your pitch, but they shouldn't be able to compare it to anything else. Another quote from Nolan Bushnell, hire for passion and intensity. That's what he would do. All right. That's what he did when he found Steve Jobs. If there was a single characteristic that separates Steve Jobs from the mass of employees, it was his passionate enthusiasm. Steve had one full, one speed, full blast. This was the primary reason we hired him. And one thing all these founders have in common is that they know how important hiring is. And when something's important, you do it yourself. This is again Elon Musk on hiring.

1:37:08He interviewed the first 3 ,000 employees at SpaceX. That's how important it was. One of Musk's most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would fit his mold. His people had to be brilliant. They had to be hardworking and there could be no nonsense. There are a ton of phonies out there and not many who are the real deal, Musk said of his approach to interviewing engineers. I can usually tell within 15 minutes and I can for sure tell within a few days of working with them. Musk made hiring a priority. He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first 3 ,000 employees.

1:37:37It required late nights and weekends, but he felt it was important to get the right people for his company. And then to close on this, we started with Steve Jobs telling us why it was so important and why it should be a large part of how you spend your time. And now we'll close with what you do after. What do you do after you hire the person? This is what he says. It's not just recruiting. After recruiting, it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that their work will have a tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision.

1:38:10So that is the end to that 20 minute mini episode. I just re -listened to the whole thing. And it really does. I think it's a perfect explanation and illustration of why I think Founders Notes is so valuable because some of those books I haven't read in five, six years and just the ability to have a searchable database of all these ideas, like this collected knowledge of some of history's greatest entrepreneurs to reference and then contextually apply to our own businesses. It's nothing short of, like, it's magic. That's really the way I think about it. I think it's a massive superpower. It gives me a massive superpower.

1:38:43I couldn't make the podcast without it. I also think if you have access to it, it'll make your business better. And so if you're already running a successful business, I highly recommend that you invest in a subscription and you can do that by going to foundersnotes .com.