The best interview I've ever done about Founders

21:40One's Claude Shannon through Jimmy Sonny's fantastic book, A Mind at Play, and another guy called Alfred Lee Loomis. There was a biography of him called Tuxedo Park. And what Shannon and Loomis had in common is they wouldn't argue their ideas. I think a lot of entrepreneurs in general, they spend time on Twitter arguing about, should we be remote or should we be this or should we raise money or should we do that? It's like, who gives a fuck? You have an idea and don't let anybody get in your way until it's done. And if that's inspiration or perspiration or whatever the case is, the idea obviously matters because I think the largest predictor of business success is the market that you're operating in.

22:11This is all over Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. It's in this book that I have right here about Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie's partner and one of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live. He benefited from the fact that he was monopolizing the Coke industry. Coke, not being Coca -Cola or cocaine, but Coke is this ingredient needed to make steel and iron. And he was at the right place in the right market. He was in Western Pennsylvania at the exact time he needed to be. And guess what? You take that dude that's smart, that's disciplined, and you put them in a market that's decreasing, you let them run Berkshire Hathaway, the original textile in the 60s.

22:43It's gonna go right into the ground, just like you could be as smart and as hardworking, it doesn't matter. I think more of instead of the idea, I think more of like the market is way more important. One of the things I'm so excited about, why I'm obsessed and me and you share this obsession, which is like podcasting is like a miracle to me. We were talking about the importance of understanding why is this guy so freaking obsessed? Why is he working seven days a week on this? This is psychopathic behavior. It's because of the way I look at podcasting. I don't look at it as a means to an end. Podcasting is the printing press for the spoken word.

23:12The revolution that Gutenberg unleashed when he invented the printing press may have taken 40, 50 years, 60 years, 100 years to gain steam, even goes faster now. But that is exactly what podcasting is. Everybody's like, oh, we have too many podcasts. That's like saying you have too many movies. We have too many books. Like, that's ridiculous. We have too many bad of anything, but there's always room when it comes to media or anything that people consume, for good things to grow and prosper. And to me, when I look at where do I want to spend all my time, is there something I'm obsessed with that I'll think about even when I'm not working?

23:43And then also, is it a growing market? You're telling me today, we've reached the peak of how many people are going to listen to podcasts? That's absurd. That's absurd. And not only will more people find your podcast and my podcast now, there's people that haven't even been born that are going to be listening to episodes. I don't want to dismiss, is it idea or execution? It's like, you need both. I'm sure there are some markets where they're going to pull the product out of you no matter what. And if you're the only one in that market, then that market's going to be satisfied. But I can't think of anybody that I've read a biography about that's just like, I stumbled into a good idea and I didn't have to execute relentlessly and over and over and over again for a long period of time.

24:19That's another thing too, where I'm only interested in people that do things for a long period of time. There is a subset of people that can start a great business or be a great investor for two years, five years, 10 years. I'm interested in people that you started the conversation saying about Edwin Land and Estee Lauder. Okay, two obsessives. They both had good ideas and relentless execution. Estee Lauder had to wait 20 years. She got completely obsessed with the idea of beauty, didn't have the opportunity to start her company because she was a stay -at -home mom until she was 40. The reason I say, listen, man, you guys should be reading Estee Lauder's autobiography is because it is my belief that if you were able to bring her back from the dead and let her start a company today, she'd be kicking most entrepreneurs' ass up and down the court.

24:59Edwin Land too. Edwin Land started working on what would become Poyle Roy when he's like 19 and worked on it until he's 70. He had like the third most patents in American history behind Edison and I forgot the other person. Who the hell works on something from 19 to 70? That's incredible. But what about the people underneath these leaders? I probably listened to 50 episodes or something of founders. If I had to summarize one of the interesting lessons is the dramatic importance of the individual, which I think runs a little counter to maybe how a lot of people wish the world was, where it was more communal and Steve Jobs was going to emerge if Steve Jobs particularly wasn't him.

25:36Or I think the great individual theory or thesis, a lot of people don't like. But as I listened to a lot of your episodes and these stories, it strikes me that the person matters a lot. And I'm curious what you've learned about the layer of leadership underneath the founders and if there's any common stories, themes, traits that you've sussed out there. I want to start with a quote because you just nailed it. And I'm an Edwin Land fanboy. I am on a mission because I meet a ton of smart people don't even know who he is. So maybe people listening to this don't know that he was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs.

26:11Steve Jobs met him when he was in his 20s. Edwin was like 70 years old. And Steve came over from the meeting saying meeting Edwin Land was like visiting a shrine. These ideas that you've undoubtedly heard from Steve Jobs did not originate with him. He literally took them from Edwin Land. The idea of building a technology company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, that's not Steve. That was on every single presentation that he made on Apple. He got that idea from Edwin Land. He literally talked about him over and over. He said, this is my hero. And Steve also had this deep historical knowledge, which all these founders definitely have, all of them.

26:40I have not come across a founder that was not curious about what the great people before them did. I actually made a 30 -minute in -between episode. It's called Steve Jobs and his heroes. and I break down 39 podcasts on either Steve Jobs or the people that he talked about influencing him. Even when he was young, he was in his 20s and he could tell you how he felt the invention of the Macintosh was similar to Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone. It's like, how the hell do you know that at that age? That's remarkable. But Edwin said that there's no such thing as group originality or group creativity.

27:09He goes, I do believe wholeheartedly in the individual capacity for greatness. And he says, originality are attributes of a single mind, not a group. What happens is even if you have a bunch of co -founders, there's usually one. A lot of these people had co -founders. You could say one A, one B, whatever the case is, but it's always singular. It's never like a joint thing. And what's good is they find people that can play the role of the second or third. It's not like, hey, I want to be the smartest person in a company. They all obsess. This is in Warren Buffett, David Ogilvie, Enzo Ferrari, Steve Jobs.

27:38They only surround themselves with A players. There's a great book called In the Company of Giants. It's on the floor next to me right now. What's fascinating about that is it's two Stanford MBA students. in 1997, go and interview all these technology founders. If you think about the growth of technology industry from 97 until now, they were clearly like ahead of time. And what was fascinating is Steve Jobs, Youngstreet Jobs, he just came back to Apple, sits for the interview. They start the interview, they're like, hey, you know, startup founder doesn't have that much time to recruit. And I forgot the exact terminology, but he cuts them off.

28:09He's like, I disagree completely. Recruiting talent is the most important job as a founder. Think about the first 10 people in your company. Every individual is 10 % of the company. You don't transition from a startup, a nascent idea, to a super successful company that creates a great product if you fuck up that part. That was his point that he was making there. And he knows that because this is the crazy thing. So you mentioned Mike Moritz earlier. Mike Moritz wrote this fantastic book, The Little Kingdom. I read the updated version called The Return to the Little Kingdom. And what's fascinating about that is that's way before Mike was an investor.

28:41It's like the first, I think, six years of the history of Apple. And when the book ends, the Apple II is doing really well. Steve Jobs is still at the company, but we don't know how the story is going to end. So then I would read that book. And then what you need to jump into right after that, there's another book called Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing. I think it was written by Randall Strauss. That book is about the 13 years between he left Apple and then he returned. I call it bizarro Steve Jobs because it's a gifted, intelligent entrepreneur making every wrong decision in the book. That book ends in 97.

29:12he gives this interview. Think about this, how crazy this is. He starts next. One of his first 10 hires and next is an interior designer for the office. What the hell is happening here? You're reading that book and you're like, I know Steve Jobs is smart. I know he's talented. How the hell did he do this? We talked a little bit about ego before we started recording where it's like, it's very prone to let your ego get the best of you. People admire you because the work, what happens is like, you usually isolate yourself. You'll work really hard. You'll do a lot of work. that work draws the attention of other people because it adds value to their life.

29:43And then suddenly over time, you confuse like, oh, they don't like the work. They like me. And then I could just show up without having to do the work and everything will be fine. And that next he just showed up. He's like, I'm Steve Jobs. Ego is such an interesting one. That lesson is fascinating. Confusing people liking the work for liking you. I've never heard it phrased that way. And that is so damn interesting. Where else do you see ego rear its head, good or bad? It strikes me that ego is like a negative connotation. You don't want to have an ego, but you do want to be confident. You do want to be charismatic.

30:15You do want to be a good salesperson. Some of the things that high ego people might be good at. What other things have you learned about ego? That phrasing is so helpful. I actually don't think that you build a great company with a giant ego. I don't think that exists. Sam Walton has a good idea about that. He's like, listen, your ego should use to drive you, but you should not be on public display. And he's like, I hire people at Walmart with big eos that know how to hide it because there is some weird thing where it drives you. What's the problem is when you make it apparent that you think that you're better than everybody else.

30:46In almost every story, you have a young entrepreneur that needs some help. They're usually helped by people that are older, have a lot more access to resources. So think about how people are funding private companies now. You have super smart and determined founders, a lot of potential. Who knows what a person like that is going to be in 10 or 20 years? But they need assistance, whether it's they need resources, they need personnel, they need money. What I realized this morning is there's this guy named Thomas Mellon. And Thomas Mellon is one of the most important people in American business history because he's the patriarch of the Mellon family dynasty.

31:21What he did is he made a lot of money before and after the American Civil War. He's like maybe 50 years old, super rich, owns a bunch of banks and stuff like that. He comes across a 21 -year -old Henry Clay Frick. Henry Clay Frick shows a lot of potential at this time. What Mellon can't possibly know yet, 40 years in the future, Frick is going to be considered one of the best entrepreneurs to ever do it. So much so that Andrew Carnegie sees him and is like, I need this guy on my team. And then they have a falling out. There's a fantastic book called Meet You in Hell. I recommend everybody reads if you want to learn about Andrew Carnegie and Frick.

31:51It's about what Frick told them. They had a falling out. Later, when Andrew's about to die, he sends a letter to Frick. He's like, hey, let's reconcile. isle. We're living in the same city. We live a few blocks away. Let's get together. And he writes back. He's like, I'll meet you in hell. What was fascinating is Mellon sees Frick. Frick is at the very beginning of building this Coke empire that's eventually going to be acquired by Carnegie's company. And Mellon sees him. He's like, oh, this is another me. This is me when I was younger. He approves the loan. Then Frick takes that money, immediately deploys it, starts scaling up because it's like, hey, I got an opportunity.

32:22I need to do this as fast as possible. Goes back to Mellon. I think he borrowed like a thousand dollars. This is 1800. So it's a lot more money than a thousand dollars today. So he borrowed a thousand dollars, goes back almost immediately. He says, give me 10 ,000. Melon's like, yo, what the hell are you doing, kid? So he sends one of his partners, go check out this Frick guy. He seems he has potential to me, but I need to make sure this guy's not full of crap. So Melon's partner goes and shadows Frick and he writes back to Melon. And he's like, the guy works in the Coke plants all day long, studies his books at night, knows his business down to the ground, make the loan.

32:53And that is the first hand up that he gets that causes him to build a monopoly in his industry. There was no one B to fix Coke Empire. It was clearly him. What was fascinating is like, I didn't put this together the first time I read that book because I probably read 150 books, 150 biographies since I read it the first time. But I had just recently been rereading books on John D. Rockefeller. And this guy named Jay Gold pops up in Rockefeller's biography, every single one, which is really weird. everybody's read Titan, the most famous biography of John D. Rockefeller. What I did is I went in the bibliography of Titan, found a book that the author, Ron Chernow, used his research and ordered it.

33:27It's a very old book. It's like 40 something years old. It's very hard to find. I read that book and I'm like, wait, this is a biography of Rockefeller and there's an entire chapter based on Jay Gould. What the hell is happening here? And then you see when people would ask, Rockefeller is probably the most famous entrepreneur in history. And they asked him, who's the best businessman you know? And he said, without hesitation, Jay Gould. Without hesitation. Then you have Cornelius Vanderbilt. This is another thing we should talk about is how all these people wind up knowing each other. There is something to be like talking to other A players.

33:54And then you have Cornelius Vanderbilt, who's the richest person in America at the time, 40 or 50 years older than Jay Gold. And he's like, Jay Gold's the smartest person in America. So I was like, okay, what the hell happened? So the author actually sent me the book, a biography of Jay Gold came out like 15 years ago. It's called like Dark Genius of Wall Street or something like that. These are formidable people saying, this is the one, you got to pay attention to that. Why is that happening? So I'm reading Jay Gold's biography, Same situation. He's like 20 years old, 21, needs a leg up, meets this older, more successful businessman.

34:21But where Mellon did is like, I'm successful, but he didn't even let his ego get in the way. He's like, I want to be this guy's partner. His success does not threaten me at all. The difference in Jay Gold's life is Jay Gold winds up taking on an older partner. This guy named Zadig Pratt, I think is his name. I'm going off memory here, so I might get his name wrong. But that guy was super rich, owned a ton of land in the Northeast at the time, owned 30 different factories that would produce leather goods. and all the different factories would have different partners. So he winds up doing a partnership.

34:51Jay winds up doing some surveying work for him on some of his land. And Zadok's like, oh, this guy's smart. I'll partner with him. I'll put up the money. I'll give you the expertise. And then you run with it. Well, Jay Gold is a straight up genius, way smarter than I'll ever be. And he runs with it. He'll hit you up for advice and money. But eventually he's like, oh, I got this. I can figure it out. He's coming up with ideas. The crazy thing about Jay is this guy's been in the leather business for 40 years. I'm coming up with ideas that he doesn't see. That threatens Zadok's ego. How do I know it's Zadok's ego?

35:18Because the guy was so rich, he started his own bank, printed his own currency. Guess whose face he put on his currency? His face. You know Mount Rushmore? In this town, there's like a big like granite wall or a big rock formation. So, you know, Mount Rushmore, you got all the presidents on there. He hired somebody to carve his own face. Think about how egotistical you have to be. I want people to come to my town and see my giant head hovering above everybody. They started partnering. He didn't like that Jay stopped asking him for advice. He thought his success in Jay was managing his leather factory, they call them tanneries, better than his other partners.

35:53He didn't like that. He felt threatened. So he tried to maneuver and just said, hey, we're going to end the partnership. You have to either buy me out for $60 ,000, which is the money I put in, or I buy you out for 10, which is with the money you put in. He did that because he's like, this guy doesn't have 60 grand. Didn't know that Jay has a brain. He knew this was coming and he had secretly set up financing and he was waiting for that to happen. And Rockefeller has the exact same story for his first partners in the oil industry. He had older partners to try to screw him. And he says a great line.

36:19He's like, well, they were talking so loud. My mind was running. What happens? Like, OK, I'm hitting this provision in our contract. You have to come up with 60 grand. Jay's like, here it is. And he takes off and running. You had the opportunity to partner with one of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever do it. And you fumbled it because of ego. How often do these people, men and women, break the law or enter the gray area of the law? building what they built. In Jay Gold's case, all the time, because the SEC was founded 40 years later to combat things that Jay did. This is 1800. There's no securities law.

36:55They did insane things. There's no antitrust act yet. You could say, okay, is there a person like Steve Jobs in history? I just said there is. Is there a person like Elon Musk? There probably is, especially people that try to sell and like over promise in some domain. That's like Henry Kaiser, who was as famous in his day as Elon is today. There is not in the history of entrepreneurship an equivalent to Cornelius Vanderbilt. I read two books on him. If you said, okay, David, who alive today reminds you most of Cornelius Vanderbilt? I would say Vladimir Putin. Vanderbilt had nation level wealth.

37:29If you could have turned his entire fortune liquid at the day he died, he would have controlled one out of every $20 in circulation. The reason I say he's not like anybody else, and yeah, he breaks the law, is there's a fantastic book I did a podcast on. It's called Tycoon's War. There was this other guy, I think his name's William Wallace. This is like three years ago, so I'm going off memory. William Wallace was interesting because by the time he was 18, he had graduated law school, medical school, taught himself a bunch of different languages, really smart dude, winds up taking over different parts of Mexico, which was very common at the time.

37:58He was a military adventurer. He winds up taking over, I think, Nicaragua. And this is a time where Cornelius is doing the transition from just having steamboats and he's getting into railroads but this is gold rush. So people are paying to be transported from the East Coast to the United States to get to California for the gold rush. Vanderbilt makes a ton of money because he's one of the rare people that has steamships, railroads, and then boats to cut through South America. And then he'll put you on like a mule and then he'll pick you up on the other side. He had basically from A to Z. He cut down travel time by like six months.

38:29So substantial value. So some of his ships were stationed in Nicaragua. And Williams said, hey, I overthrew the government. I am now the president of Nicaragua. So these are my ships. Vanderbilt tried to have him killed. That's not hyperbolic. That is legitimate. He hired mercenaries to go get him. He petitioned the Secretary of State of both the United States and Britain. He's like, I'm not going to sue you. I'm going to kill you. The way they thought, you could argue that some in history's greatest entrepreneurs, they might've been more ambitious. I'm not saying go out and overthrow governments.

39:02but they did. Sam Zemuri, fish and ate the well. He did that. That's legitimate. He funded a coup because you tried to take away his banana property. I'm not saying these are good people. I'm just saying that they just looked at it like a problem, how we would be like, oh, I can't do anything. I guess my stuff is gone. Oh, he has my ships. What can I do? I'll try to go to diplomatic channels. Cornelius is like, I'll just send guys with guns. Go try to steal something from Putin. What do you think is going to happen to you? It's funny to think about some of these examples in contrast to like Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great or some of the great conquerors through history, where probably there's some similar threads to pull on in both eras.

39:36But in the modern era, especially now, like Elon, everything he says, you hear about four seconds later, the feedback loop is so much tighter. So there's probably less room for shenanigans. Maybe, maybe not. As you think about the role of constant learning in the story of these entrepreneurs, there was a Michael Jordan quote you sent me, which was something like, Successful people listen, and those that don't listen don't survive or something like that. And that's Michael Jordan. I mean, I think maybe the greatest athlete of all time. Talk about the role of constant learning. This relates back to ego too.

40:09I think ego would maybe cause you to stop learning because you think you know it all or something. You've mentioned several times people study the history of their industry. People are listening. They're learning. Say a bit more about the common trait of listening and curiosity and perennial learning. Not only is Michael Jordan probably the greatest basketball player you ever lived, you can make the argument that he was better at his job than anybody else has been as good at their job in history. Reading his biography changed my life. And I was a Michael Jordan fan when I was a kid. I don't have time to watch basketball now.

40:35I'm busy, but like I'm actually standing on it right now. I record on my podcast standing up because I try to bring energy every day. But like my foot is on Michael Jordan to life. It's like a 694 page biography of Michael Jordan. What blew my mind about that is every single person way before he even made his college team till the time he was a professional basketball, they all said the same thing. This dude was like a sponge. There's a great quote that Nick Saban said. And he said that average players want to be left alone, good players want to be coached, and great players want to be told the truth.

41:03Michael had a giant ego and a giant drive, but he would run up to the coach and tell me what I need to get better at. So the reason I say that book changed my life is this idea of practice. How many people want to get to the NBA? A ton, millions. How many get? 400 maybe. How many people get to the dream team in Barcelona in 92, which might be the greatest basketball team of all time? 15 people? a subset of a subset of a subset. So Michael's tired. He'd been playing nonstop, back to back. He's like, man, I really want to take some time off. I don't want to spend my summer at the Olympics, but I'm going to go.

41:33He goes, I want to see their practice habits. We're all the best of the best. What am I doing that's different than what they're doing? So what happened was he goes, he watched the way they practiced compared to the way he practiced. And the main theme of Jordan's book is I believe in practice. I would rather miss a game than miss practice. That's insane. He said something that gives me chills to this day. He goes, I watched their practice habits. And he goes, they're deceiving themselves about what the game requires. Best of the best, ton of people on there. But when he was done, no one had more championships than he did.

42:03So I was like, damn, that's crazy. This guy's at the top of the top, winning championships, MVP, scoring awards, all -star game. And he's still working harder than anybody else. That line, successful people listen, those who don't listen don't survive long, is from that biography. And he's like, listen, I don't have that big of an ego that I can't learn from other people. All of history's greatest entrepreneurs like that. I just talked about Edwin Land. Think about how crazy it is. That dude, to get started, he made his money in cameras and lighting. So to understand cameras, you have to understand lighting.

42:32How did he understand lighting? He went to the New York Public Library and read every single book on lighting they had. He invented instant photography. Before Edwin Land, you took a picture, you sent it to Kodak, and you got it back like two weeks later. After Edwin Land, you press a button and you have it then. That's insane, dude. And what did he do? He didn't say, look what I've done. He goes and he hires Ansel Adams, who he thought was a fantastic photographer. And he says, he's like, my aim is to produce the most picture -perfect making process. And you have shit in your brain that can help me achieve that.

43:06They're learning machines. They're like, okay, whether it's a book, whether it's a podcast, whether it's grabbing person. They're like, hey, that person has information I need. I want to see if I can talk to them. You mentioned Edward Land. There was this great quote that I think ties in here, which is something like, anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. Again, what I like when you send me stuff is when it's at odds with common wisdom, you know, everything in moderation or something like that. Talk about that excessiveness. And what I'm really interested in is hard work. It seems as though one of the modern things is to have a more balance, more freedom, more flexibility.

43:38I think if you look at all these biographies and everything I've listened to from you, that is definitely not the case for these people. And again, like you've said, we're not suggesting these people are the ones to emulate, just that they're ones that have created extraordinary outcomes. But talk about this, everything worth doing is worth doing to access. How you think about hard work, even though you're working your ass off to create founders, what do you think about excessiveness and hard work? The full line is what Edwin Land says, it's like, there's something they don't teach you at Harvard Business School.

44:05If anything's worth doing, it's worth doing to access. I put together maxims, because you're going to remember that. Successful people listen, those who don't listen, don't survive long. They'll stick in your brain and you'll understand the idea behind that. And this is as old as humans. They've been talking in maxims and common sense and homilies forever. Think about why song lyrics are so sticky because it's like an idea condensed down. One of my favorite ones, and it's the main theme of the history of entrepreneurship, it's why if you look at my phone, on my phone, my lock screen is a picture of Ernest Shackleton, the famous polar explorer who looks like hell, got a huge beard, covered in ice, looks like he's about to die.

44:38And his family motto was, by endurance, we conquer. Which is why I told you earlier, I'm only interested in people that do things for a long time because at every single step, these people are presented with opportunities opportunities to quit and they don't. So he's like, I don't have to be the smartest. I don't have to be the best. I don't have to be talented. And this is what I believe in myself. I don't have to be the best. I don't have to be the smartest. I don't have to be the most talented. I just have to outlast you. And I'm not giving up. I've had a bunch of people offer like partner up or buy the podcast or whatever.

45:02And they're like, hey, you're going at an extreme pace, which I really don't feel like I am because I just read. There's no trick here. I pick up a book and stare at it. And I do that for a few hours every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. My daughter's like, why are you reading? It's your birthday. Why are you reading? It's Christmas because I'd like to read. And if you do something for three or four or five hours every day that most people don't do, you're going to develop a value for other people in the world. And that's all a business is. The best description of a business I ever heard came from Richard Branson.

45:28He's like, all businesses, it's an idea or service that makes somebody else's life better. If you make other people's lives better, you'll capture that value in return. So I don't find many of these people are moderate. I'm going to read this quote that I have saved on my phone. It's hilarious. It's by Bill Gurley. It's called Running Down a Dream, how to survive and thrive in a job you love. But in that, he profiles five people that do exactly what Michael Jordan does, that did exactly what Edwin Land does. He profiles Bob Dylan, the musician, Bobby Knight, the coach, Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, Sam Hinckley, and Katrina Lake.

45:59What Bill Gurley did in an hour, he breaks down what are all the traits or what are their approaches to work that is similar. What does an entrepreneur have to do with a musician? A lot. What does a restaurateur have to do with a basketball coach? A lot. It's the same ideas applied to different domains. None of the people described are moderate. That's why in an hour, Bill would just break this down perfectly. It's insane. I just finished reading Bob Dylan's autobiography, which is the book that Bill Gurley read. That dude literally discovers folk music, finds out who does folk music the best, listens every hour of his day that he's not playing.

46:34Bill's term for this is professional research, which I think is exactly what Founders is. How do you get better at your job when you're not working? It's all the learning, the constant practice. that's professional research under one umbrella. So Bob Dylan engages in professional research, listening to every single record he can get his hand on, making friends with people that have hard to find records. And then he discovers Woody Guthrie and he's like, I gotta go find him. Where is he? I'm in Minneapolis. I have no money. My clothes are tattered, but I have a guitar and a dream. I'll go out to the side of the road and stick my thumb out and I will hitchhike to New York City with $10 and a guitar case to find him.

47:05And that's exactly what he did. So to answer your question, there's a quote I have on my phone. I've had this quote since 2017. I'm not a fan of moderation. I'm attracted to extremes. What do you want your life experience to be? Do you want to be exceptional? Do you want to push the boundaries of your capabilities? Do you want to walk around in a fog butting up against your potential but never actually realizing it? Then knock yourself out. Be moderate. I'm not interested in that. So I can't do the podcast less than I do. All I can do is say, hey, this thing, this obsession of mine will overtake my life because I've seen enough stories where it can ruin my life.

47:39So I have boundaries. I have a balance every day. The only thing I figured out is, because I'm an obsessive person, obviously you are, a ton of people are that are listening to this as well. So what I realized is like, okay, instead of working like a ton of hours, five days a week, I'll just spread everything out and have a balance seven days a week. This is Ed Thorpe. I literally just read his book, took his blueprint. I'm like, oh, I'll just do that. Ed Thorpe says, every hour you spend in fitness is one less day in the hospital. First thing I do is wake up in the morning and I do an hour of some kind of physical activity, whatever you like to do.

48:06Then I work, I spend time with my kids, I spend time with my wife, and I talk to friends. maybe have an hour or two to something that's fun. But really work is my hobby. And that's the advantage I have over other people. Somebody listening might say, hey, I'm gonna do a podcast on the history of entrepreneurship. Go ahead, you should. It's not like a zero -sum game, but I'm only gonna do this. I'm not gonna start a fund. I'm not gonna start another business. I'm only going to do this. And a lot of this is where it's comforting to me, where I can give you a list of people that I've studied. Daniel Ludwig, what a crazy book I read.

48:36It's called The Invisible Billionaire. Book is very hard to find. This guy was the richest person in the world and no one knew who he was. And he competed with like Aristotle Onassis. Everybody knew who Onassis was. He's married to Jacqueline Kennedy and shit like that. This guy, his work was his hobby. Edwin Land, work was his hobby. Henry Ford, Enzo Ferrari, Estee Lauder, Henry Kaiser, David Ogilvie, Warren Buffett, Sam Zamuri, Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer, Coco Chanel, Sam Brompton. I can go down the list. You just have an advantage because you love it. There's a guy named Larry Miller. He was the richest entrepreneur in Utah.

49:06He owned the Utah Jazz. He owned like 90 different fucking businesses, owned like a 30 ,000 square foot house on the hill. And he's writing his autobiography as he is dying. And he's saying, my life is a cautionary tale. Every hour, every minute I was awake. And this comes from childhood trauma. His mom called the cops on him, sent him to juvenile hall, kicked him out. He had this weird, incessive drive. There's probably like some weird sense of inferiority, right? And he's overcoming. I worked every hour of the day. I don't know my wife. I didn't know my kids. Now I'm dying. I'm kind of getting to know my grandkids, but he was excessively obese.

49:39And the entire book is not like, hey, look how successful I am. Might be a billionaire, whatever it is. It's like, don't do this. I screwed up. Think about this guy's unlimited resources. And he gets to the end of his life. He's like, if I could do it all over again, I would have worked less. I would have took care of my health. I would have spent time with my family and I would have had fun. I never had fun in life. That is terrifying to me. That should scare the hell out of everybody. Anybody that's obsessive that, again, work was his hobby too. If you don't have guardrails, it's dangerous. And what's crazy is he dies.

50:09So he's working with a co -writer and he dies before the book is done. The last chapter is his wife talking to the co -author and she goes, I miss Larry, but it's not like he was here when he was alive. If you think about the role of a soul of a business, I think you sent me this interesting quote from Sidney Harmon, where founders serve as guardians of the soul of a business. How do you think about the soul of your business? The business is you in many ways, but if it were to have an independent soul, I want to talk about this concept more generally too, but I want to start with you. Describe the soul of founders.

50:44What does it stand for? I'm not a good example of that because it's an obsession that just happens to be a podcast and podcasts just happen to be businesses. I feel like I'm like the Jiro dreams of sushi of the podcast world, where it's just like, you have a massive audience, you have people around you, you have a movement. The way I think about it is like, I read this great book called Masters of Doom, which is obviously about the video game Doom. There's John Romero and John Carmack. And John Carmack said something in what caused the rift of their partnership. He's like, Romero wants an empire.

51:14I just want to make great games. Somebody hit on this. Founders is like a handmade product. And I was like, thank you. Because that's what I think about. It's a handmade product at scale because of the miracle of podcasting. I can do everything myself. I don't have anybody helping me. I edit it. And I also don't have a script. I just read books. And then I just have a conversation just like I would if we were at dinner. Just like Jiro of Dreams of Sushi, every other podcaster I talk to, they're all super smart. They're like, dude, you're crazy. You've told me like, why the hell are you editing your own thing?

51:42Why are you doing this? And it's because like, I have to. I don't even have a choice. So I'm actually talking to a founder later on today who's really sharp. And I met him through the podcast. And like, I don't want to say he is, but he's really well known. He's got a theory about this. And again, I like talking to smart people that think I'm doing it wrong, which I love. I don't take offense to it at all. But he's like, you're crazy. The soul is just me. It's like a person that is a business. So the reason I think that's the best description of a founder that I've ever heard, it's not the same thing as like managing a company that's been around for 50 years that somebody else started, maybe the founder's been dead for a long time.

52:18I really do think that's the role of the founder. Sidney Harmon worked on his company for what, 50 years? You might know his name because anytime you get in like a luxury car, Harman Kardon, that's the guy who started that company. So he goes, the role of the founder is the guardian of the company's soul. And all these books, there is a decision you can make to compromise on the quality of your product or take a shortcut or do something you would never dare do it. I just read the biography of the guy that started In -N -Out. Compared to his contemporaries, to McDonald's and Carl's Jr. and all this explosion of fast food that was happening at that time in American history, Not financially successful, no, not nearly.

52:55He only had 17 stores when he died, but he was obsessed with quality. Everybody else is saying, hey, I'm gonna use frozen beef. He's like, I'm gonna buy my own cows. I'm gonna add salads and all this other stuff to my menu. He goes, I'm not changing my menu at all. It's that intense love. There's a cult. Anybody knows this. Go fly to LA and try to go to In -N -Out. Good luck. I was just in LA two months ago. Try to go to In -Out twice because I read the book. I'm not waiting in that line. There's a cult around In -N -Out because the expression of the founder's soul is manifest in the product. People that have in and out tattoos, how many people have McDonald's tattoos?

53:29So this is also people like, hey, what's your goal? Like, you want to make the biggest podcast in the world? No, I want to make the best podcast in the history of entrepreneurship in the world. That doesn't mean it will have more downloads than anybody else. I'm fine with that. That's not my goal. Just like if you study now, obviously, Apple being dominant, they have a huge market share and device and everything, but it wasn't like that. The vast majority of Apple, when they grew their cult following, it was like, what, 2 % of the market, 5 % of the market. Microsoft was killing everything. IBM destroyed everything.

53:53The important thing is, what do you want to build? Some people, I talk to founders and they say, hey, I want to make an Enzo Ferrari level of craftsmanship on their product. Ferrari is being handmade. And some people take the Ford route. Ford and Ferrari existed at the same time. Ford tried to buy Ferrari. There's a great line in the movie, Ford versus Ferrari. The guy that's playing Lee Iacoco is like, hey, we should be thinking like Ferrari. He's a Ford executive at the time. And there's hugely egotistical dismissive guys like, we spend more on toilet paper than they spend on their whole production.

54:20And he's like, yeah, but when you think of victory, you don't think of Ford, you think of Ferrari. So you have to decide there's nothing wrong with it. I talked to a ton of founders like, hey, usually when they want to go big, it's like, I want to make a billion dollars or it's like a number attached to the business. I've become like the founder whisperer. I have these conversations. People are just like, hey, I just want to talk to the shit I'm going through with you. And if there's anything that's in your brain that you've seen in these books, let me know. And a lot of these conversations we'll start with my goal is to be X.

54:46I want to make a $10 million company. I was like, okay. I always start with the same question. Who are your entrepreneurial heroes? Everybody copies somebody, dude. You're a human. I always have a maxim I say in the podcast that the mind is a powerful place. What you feed it affects you in a powerful way. I'm very careful what I let into my mind. So I'll have these conversations and they'll start listing off all these people that influence the way they think about entrepreneurship. And I was like, go read a book on him. Did Steve Jobs ever say, hey, I want to make a $100 million company? That was never in discussion.

55:12He said, I want to make insanely great products. And then I want to get really good at marketing because I want everybody in the world to have an Apple device. And the way to do that is to get really good at marketing. It's very easy to confuse yourself. And that's why if you're confused as the founder and you're the guardian of the company's soul, the reason I admire Steve Jobs so much, I've never come across another person that thought clearer than he did. If you could copy one thing about Steve Jobs, what would you right now? I want his clarity of thought. It's insane. How much mental computation for decade after decade did that guy have to go through to clarify his thinking like that you know exactly what is important to him there's a great book by ken cosienda called creative selection he demoed to steve jobs said the same thing he goes listen steve was at the center of all circles in apple he was like the oracle of delphi but the difference between steve and the oracle of delphi was when you ask the oracle of delphi a question you get back some kind of riddle you have no idea what the hell's going on when you get feedback from steve there is no ambiguity you know exactly what steve wants to do and that's it he's like there's no like oh i'm confused the quote that comes to mind when I think of the founder as a guardian of the company's soul is actually a quote about Steve Jobs.

56:14It's in one of the books I read about him. And he says he made and remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with 10 ,000 lives. That gives me goosebumps because that's exactly what a founder should be doing. It's impossible to build a company to spend all your life energy on it and not have it imbibed with your personality, with your ethics. Everything that you think about your business and your life is going to seep into it, the good and the bad parts. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Tony Hsu, who started DoorDash. Tony's a very mild mannered, very humble, almost quiet person, which is why this quote from him stands out in my memory so strongly, which is I asked him something about culture.

56:54How do you think about constructing the culture of a company? His answer is basically like, I think a culture of a company should be 80 % or 90 % just the personality of the founder. And that's it. It should be the extreme characteristics of the personality of the founder. Because if you try to make it generic, nothing stands out and there's no progress. Anersha dominates. I think that's basically what you're saying. These stories are fundamentally the stories of individuals replicating themselves in some interesting way, like you mentioned with jobs. And the marketing thing is such an interesting angle that I don't think you and I ever really talked about because so much of the time we think about the products and that's mostly what we've talked about, the phone, the Polaroid, the airplane, the whatever.

57:33and we don't think about as much the story and the marketing. What have you learned about all of these people as it relates to marketing? Did they all tend to be good at it? Was it just a means to an end for them? What have you learned about how these people distributed or got the word out about their products over time? I'm a collector of maxims and aphorisms. And I think my favorite one might be actions express priority. I don't look at what you say, I just look at what you do. They're marketing geniuses, all of them. what do you call a person that's gifted at customer acquisition or distribution?

58:06A founder. There's a ton of people that have great products and no one knows about, so you've failed that aspect of it. I've read a book called Insanely Simple, which is written by one of the guys that worked at the ad agency that Apple used, and he compares and contrasts in the book Dell's approach to marketing when he worked for them and Apple's. And he's like, Steve told you with his actions that marketing was important. And how do you do that? Every Wednesday, we had a three -hour meeting. And this is like, maybe post iPod and before iPhone, somewhere in there. But after they were already having a lot more success when he came back.

58:36And he goes, we had a three hour meeting and Steve would review every single marketing ad, every single thing. There was not a fucking billboard that was gonna go up until Steve said that was okay. And the reason it is important is because there's a lot of people that preach in their companies, marketing is important and it's just words. Steve showed with his actions. And then you have Enzo Ferrari's just on top of mine because I read three biographies of him and I just read all of my highlights again yesterday. But he was a marketing genius too because he's winning Le Mans. That's how he jumpstarted his company.

59:07And because of Ferrari stands for victory, you have all these rich Americans flying to Italy and they'd want to meet Enzo Ferrari. He's very mysterious. He wouldn't let you see his eyes. He'd wear sunglasses in every meeting. He did that on purpose. He thought they were like the windows of the soul and he didn't want you to read his soul. And what he would do is his employees would catch him giving a tour of this rich guy. And the guy's like, oh my God, Enzo, these cars are fantastic. I must have one. And he goes, I appreciate that. I'll see what I can do. I might be able to get you one, you know, maybe six months, maybe 12 months from now.

59:33And then the guy would leave and the employee would go up and be like, Enzo, we have a parking lot full of unsold Ferraris. He's like, a Ferrari has to be desired. He knew it. It's very similar to that fantastic podcast you just did with Rolex, with Ben Clymer. You see that same idea where they purposely limit production or don't even tell you how much they're making. There is a secrecy element to it. Edwin Land, same thing. When we think of like how much Steve Jobs would practice for his presentations. He got that from Edwin Land. Edwin Land would do all kinds of crazy stuff way before he invented a camera.

1:00:03He invented polarization. So one of his main inventions was when you were driving at night, you would be blinded by the oncoming headlights of the other car. So he has that film they put over it. He was trying to sell it to a bunch of other car companies. And there's a story in one of his biographies where he rents a hotel room. He figures out where the sun is going to be at what specific time, which hotel room that he needs to get that has a window that faces it. He puts like a fishbowl there. and then he invites the people he's trying to sell in. And then at the perfect time, it shows the light emanating through the windows of the fishbowl with and without the polarization.

1:00:33And that's how he sold them. So it's like that thought process. Walt Disney, fantastic, fantastic book. Enzo Ferrari and Walt Disney have one thing in common. Both their first companies went bankrupt, which a lot of people don't know. Walt Disney, everybody's like, oh, one of the best founders ever. How could he not be, right? Everybody thinks he was a cartoonist. Yes, he invented animation, first successful full -length animation movie. But if you ask Walt Disney, what is he most proud of? He's most proud of two things. one, starting his company and keeping control of it because he lost control of his first company.

1:00:59And two, Disneyland. Did not mention animation. When he was dying, he's in the hospital dying, his brother is his partner, Roy. They're looking on the ceiling of his hospital room and they're going over the plans for Epcot. He never got to see it because he was dying. This is a very common Coco Chanel thing. They work till the day they die. And so Ferrari, day they die. There's no retirement. It's not gonna be retirement from James Dyson. Wasn't retirement for Steve Jobs. What Walt Disney was gifted at is also the amusement park. It's like, hey, why are you making an amusement park? What people don't understand that back then as amusement parks were seen as low -life stuff.

1:01:27They were like dirty, full of scam artists, something like a circus kind of thing. So Walt Disney said something that was genius. They're like, why are you building an amusement park? They're dirty, low -class places. He goes, exactly. Mine won't be. And the way I frame that in my mind is their mediocrity is my opportunity. There is not a great amusement park. I will be the first. He's like, okay, I need to raise money to fund Disneyland. He borrowed against his house, borrowed against his life insurance. He was crazy. He didn't give a shit about money. He should have been way more wealthier than he was.

1:01:56He packaged the financing and the marketing together. So he's like, ABC, I'll do this weekly show. I'll be the one hosting it. Founders, Guardian, and the company's soul. They would show some things from his animation, but then they would also show, hey, this is what we're doing in the park. Essentially like a weekly ad that people were watching willingly. As a result, he gets money from that. He gets perfect marketing and advertising for that. Maybe the best ever. And ABC puts up a large percentage of the money needed to make the park. And what happens? As a result of people watching this It was one of the highest rated shows on television for a year.

1:02:26The day he opens the park, it's the biggest traffic jam in Orange County history. So it's not just, I'm going to make the very best product. He considered an amusement park like a cast. It's just a physical movie. I'm building a physical movie. So I'm going to make the very best amusement park ever. And it's going to have the very best marketing. It sounds like a common theme in all these stories is process as art. By revealing the process behind the product, because they're so obsessed with that, that is a common marketing story. Is that right? Do you see that over and over? I read Warren Buffett shareholder letters and to me it's like how many people have studied more founders and more businesses than Warren he says in there David Ogilvie's a genius I'm like who's David Ogilvie this is years ago and I find David Ogilvie and he's now one of my personal heroes I read five books on him and what did he do he did exactly what every single other history entrepreneurs did figured out what was the best shit that happened before I was alive hey those are good ideas human nature doesn't change let's use them so David Ogilvie winds up in the very last chapter of Ogilvy and Advertising, he talks about the six people, the six advertising giants that came before him that he studied.

1:03:25If they were alive, he befriended. That's another thing Bill Gurley's talk that's important. It's like going on, actually meeting these people if you can. And then he would just take all these ideas and build on it. His point was, there's no such thing as a business that is boring. It's only boring advertising. And he says, listen, it's boring to you because you do it every day. But if you explain to the customer the process, they'll find it interesting. So he did this for explaining the brewery process for one of the beer accounts he had. The person that owned the beer company was like, I don't want to do this.

1:03:50Every other brewery does it this way too. He goes, yeah, but we're the only one telling the story. So he spends three weeks or three months, can't remember, researching the hell out of Rolls Royce, talking to the engineers, reading all the material. He winds up reading a 50 -page document. There's one line in it that says the loudest thing in the car at 50 miles an hour was the clock inside. And he used that as a tagline and then put a couple thousand words of copy. Walt Disney too, maybe the best, if you want to call it a media company. Like, I can't think of another company that has the assets that Disney has.

1:04:18And it started with a huge fight with Roy Disney, who is the brother, the business aspect of that, and Walt Disney. They were having this fight in one of their books where it's just like, how much is this going to cost? And Walt says, we're innovating. I'll tell you when I'm done. To go into the process behind it, that book, Disneyland, goes into it. And to your point, it's almost like opening the kimono. He shared with the entire country all the work and effort and detail that went into it. I shopped at Trader Joe's for a long time. It's a weird place. Interesting. I liked it. Okay. Reading the biography of the guy that started it, you have to understand why they're doing what they're doing.

1:04:54The example I would use is when I talk about sometimes on the podcast, because people are like, it sounds like you have really good recall or like you can remember this stuff. You must have a really good memory. Absolutely not. The way I make the podcast, I read the book, make the highlight. That's the first time I read the highlight. The book is done the night before I record, I usually record in the morning, the night before, I'll reread all the highlights. That's the second time I've read the highlights now. I record the podcast. That is the third time I've read the highlights. I edit the podcast.

1:05:19That is the fourth time I've heard the highlights. And then the fifth time is I have to take pictures with the Readwise app and literally input them physically. One by one usually takes hours to do this. That's the fifth time. People knowing that, when they feel comfortable pressing play, when they listen to founders, because like, first of all, this dude, every single episode, he's got to read an entire book to prepare. That's kind of crazy. And then second of all, he's not just reading it casually, doing it once. He's read these words five times and then I'll reference them in future episodes.

1:05:47And the only reason I'm able to reference them in future episodes is because I did that five times. So if there's any part of your product that seems banal or ordinary to you, I promise you, no one is thinking about your business as much as you. The favorite business of mine in the world, you think about it less than probably five minutes a week. Nobody is thinking about it like you. So you have shit in your brain that is interesting to customers And then you could package that up and use that as marketing to get more customers. One of the lines that stands out from listening to all your stuff, I think, is the Kinkos founder who said his exit, and you've adopted it, that his exit strategy is death.

1:06:23Like if I think about summing up what we've talked about so far, it would sort of be find your obsession and then make your exit strategy death, right? Like your exit strategy is not make a billion dollars or $10 billion or whatever. it's this just lifelong pursuit of your life's work, right? I'd love to apply that now to you and podcasts. So my suspicion is like you've suggested other entrepreneurs that have done, you've studied the history of this industry. Who are your idols in entrepreneurship? I'm specifically curious about podcasting as a business, given that's what you're doing. But what have you learned about podcasting and why it's so exciting as a business?

1:07:07You mentioned a little bit about the Gutenberg Press for audio or for the spoken word. But if you apply Bill Gurley's kind of Bob Dylan, trained in New York concept of podcasting to yourself, what comes up? I have a unique advantage that Bob didn't have. There's barriers to entry. Almost all the people that are examples like that, there's barriers to entry. Somebody that has to sign you. There's somebody that has to hire you if you're like Bobby Knight. What I like about podcasting is it's completely permissionless. If I think about like, what is the skillset that I have is I can lock myself in a room with a book, a ton of espresso and a microphone.

1:07:42And I'm going to come out every five to seven days with an audio recording that is going to help you at your job. The thing I like about it is it's all work and no work about work. I just talked about this and I think it was a D Hawk podcast, but it pops up over and over again that so many of them get disillusioned with the business of business. And a lot of them wish they could go back to when it was just a small team. They weren't public yet. They knew everybody's name. they were actually doing some of the work themselves. Humans are terrible predictors at what they actually want. So you can say, okay, I'm doing the work now, but I can't wait till I can hire a team to do it.

1:08:14Then scale that up. And then I find myself 15 years later running this giant multinational public corporation. It's like, oh, I don't like this anymore. Think about this. I just read Amazon Unbound. Jeff Bezos is one of my heroes. One of the best, obviously, to ever do it. That's not really saying anything. I like the everything story more than I like Amazon Unbound. But Amazon Unbound, you get to the end and one of the notes I wrote in the margin is, think about it. being the CEO of Amazon is not fun. Because if it was fun, he would do it. What you really root for is, obviously you can't stay at the very beginning.

1:08:41The guy's got knee pads on. He's taken the books to UPS himself. You don't want to stay in that case. But one thing is I was obsessed with podcasts way before I even had one. So as a byproduct of that, me and you were talking about this the other day where people can give you bad advice on podcasts. And there was a piece of advice that I heard and I was like, oh, that person that said that doesn't like podcasts. Because if that person loved podcasts, there's no fucking way that would come out of their mouth. No way. So that is why my podcast is designed the way it is, which is like, listen, I'm doing as much as I can.

1:09:10I just want a way to be me at scale. I don't want to read from a script. I don't want to have to put on an act because if I want to do this for 40 years or till I die or whatever it is, you can't fake who you are. When people talk to you or people talk to me, what do they say? Oh man, I listen to you so much. I feel I know you. You do. You cannot listen to me for 400 hours. Those are my podcasts. And like, I have some weird other personality. It's so funny because I meet a lot of people from the show and I'll have dinner with them. They all say variations of, oh, this is like getting a private podcast.

1:09:39This is literally how I want it to be. I'm just meeting up with a friend every week and saying, I read some cool shit this week. Here's some stuff you might want to know. You might find it helpful. As far as heroes in the podcasting domain, I feel the best podcaster to ever live is Dan Carlin of Hardcore History. The reason I have a single person show is because of Dan. I've not only bought his back catalog over and over again, but I just listened to his podcast over and over again. For a long time, now I'm reading, lately it's been a lot of audiobooks, but almost every night I'd fall asleep to his voice.

1:10:06The fact is he inspired me to go the extra effort. One thing I didn't want to do, I didn't want to do two podcasts a month or a year like he does. Like I get sad if I don't record every week. I legitimately get sad. What I like about Dan is he'll read like 30 books and then he'll do an episode. So I was like, all right, well, if he's reading 30 books for every episode, he does two a year, that's 60 books. I'll just read them every five to seven days and then just release them as they come. I have a personal preference with podcasts where Dan in his early days, He did these multiple part series, which is really cool, but they were like an hour and a half.

1:10:34Now they're multiple part series in like five hours. I get lost. I don't enjoy it as much. I still love them, but I'm like, I don't like five hour long podcasts. Let me update it again. I don't like really long chapters in books. It's the same thing. Like, give me a break, dude. If you just want to pure entertainment, somebody that affected me was Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast, which is as low tech as you could possibly get. Most people are, at least people like you and I are using podcasts to learn. But what I liked about his is like, he's been doing it every year for over a decade. He shows up every week.

1:11:01I don't listen as religiously as I used to, but I don't think he's skipping any weeks. And he just sits up and he talks directly to you for an hour. And he might be talking about his life and all this other stuff, but it's perfect. Because if you really think about it, what I don't like and why I think you see podcasts that have bigger audiences than like cable news, because it's all fake. Humans desire authenticity. The words that are coming out of my mouth are not coming from words that somebody else wrote on a teleprompter. This is some fake shit. If a friend talked to you like that, you'd get up from the dinner table and walk away like, What's wrong with this guy?

1:11:30You're sweating. You got caked up makeup. Like, why are you wearing makeup? I think humans crave authenticity. And the reason I'm so bullish on podcasting as a business is because the village storyteller is as old as language. Except now, the village isn't just 10 people around a campfire. The campfire is 7 billion people. The reason why I'm so bullish on founders is I think it'll take me to really interesting prices, assuming I don't quit, which I don't plan on. They're like, you're wasting your time. You'll never achieve scale. Go start like a enterprise software business. you'll make a lot more money.

1:12:00So I just spent my life chasing money, doing something I hate. Great advice, thank you very much. And it's just like, why won't I reach scale? They're like, oh, because you know, what's the biggest podcast? Maybe the biggest podcast has like 10 or 15 million people. I was like, yeah, but now they do. How many people are interested in business? How many people are interested in entrepreneurship? And the way that I think about it, how many people are connected to the internet, speak English, and are interested in entrepreneurship? There's like 150 million business owners around the world, something like that.

1:12:26Somebody out there has better numbers than I do. But last time I looked, it was like that. I don't think this is like some small niche, dude. I got a freaking email yesterday and I love this shit. This is why I'm so obsessed with it. It's because you never know what they're going to do with the work you put out there. This dude listened to my podcast. I did like three or four podcasts on Jeff Bezos. He's like, dude, listen to your podcast. Help me get a job as an engineer in Amazon. And then he emails me. He's like, I love your podcast. I wrote this software. And now he's analyzing all the books and writing out a software program to map out the connections for us.

1:12:55And he's going to like make it available for everybody. What do you think are the, if any, major aspects of the people that you've studied that we haven't talked about yet? I feel like we've talked about people's obsession, their endurance, the dark sides maybe of some of these lives, the role of marketing, the role of the team. We've talked about a lot of the role of the market. Are there any other major things that you find yourself constantly like pointing out a segment in a book and saying, there it is again? We may have not talked about the most important. And that's the best maxim in the history of entrepreneurship was said by the founder of Four Seasons, that excellence is the capacity to take pain.

1:13:33Anybody trying to do something difficult, how many people want to do like a great achievement with their lives? Every single living person that has ever lived. No one's like, oh, I don't want to do anything. I'm here and I'll just die. No, they have ideas. They may never pursue. They may have the courage. They may attempt. They may fail. Think about like the difficulty he had to do of trying to make not only just a hotel chain, but at the time the best hotel chain in the world and all the struggle that he had to get to in his autobiography. His wife would wake up in the middle of the night, see him like staring at the middle of the ceiling, just wracked with guilt.

1:14:03Anybody that's ever done anything difficult, whether it's a company, anything, knows the euphoria and terror. It's the entrepreneurial emotional rollercoaster. And the reason that I think it's so important to talk about is because it is supposed to be hard. There's not a book that you're gonna pick up where the guy's like, our woman, hey, I have this idea, I started it, everything went great, and the end of the book. It doesn't happen. And so what's fascinating to me is I never know what books are going to resonate with me either. What I really try to tell people is like, there were so many times like no one gives a shit about founders.

1:14:32This isn't going to work. I'm trying to grow a podcast that doesn't have interviews. I don't have social media and I'm introverted as hell. And then you have to make a commitment. Like a podcast, it's like choosing a friend. I'm asking you to spend an hour, hour and a half with me. It's not like a 30 second TikTok, dude. This is a high bar here. And so many times I was like, man, I'll just give up. And a lot of what pushes me is these stories. Like, oh, okay, this is normal. When James Dyson says in his autobiography that there's many nights in his 14 years that he came in, he had two mortgages in his house.

1:15:03He spent the whole day trying to build a prototype. It blew up in his face, didn't work. At the end of that book, the reason it's so important, it's against the odds, an autobiography of James Dyson. It's hard to find, but if you can get a copy, order it. And he says, listen, it's easy for me to celebrate my doggedness now. I made $300 million last year, but I'd be lying to you if there wasn't times where I went inside my house had my wife look at me in the face like I'm a failure and I'd cry myself to sleep. And I got up and did it again anyways because excellence is the capacity to take pain.

1:15:31I apply this to like, I don't really feel like working out right now. I don't feel like doing cardio. I don't give a shit, David, how you feel. How you feel is irrelevant. That's an idea I got from Henry Ford. You read his autobiography. He goes, I feel sorry for these, I think he calls them soft and flabby men that can only do great work when they feel like it. That was one of the first episodes the Founders ever did. There was like 200 people listening at that point. I read the quote and I go, so essentially Henry Ford is saying, fuck your feelings. That line for some reason resonated because I didn't know people were listening to this.

1:15:59And what Henry Ford's point was, listen, a business exists to serve other people. So how you feel, there's going to be days where you get out of bed and you cannot wait to get to work. And that's great. And there's going to be days where you don't want to go to work. And that is irrelevant because the business is not about you. The business does not exist for your pleasure. The business exists to serve other people. What's surprising to me is in Readwise app, I can segment books by author. When's the last time I read it? What's fascinating is I segmented it by, what book has I highlighted the most?

1:16:31I was shocked what it was. It was the autobiography of Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc., which is the founder of Pixar. One thing that is in that book that I think is the perfect illustration of this idea that excellence is the capacity to take pain and that it is supposed to be hard. I just heard Stanley Drunkenmiller. he talked about this exact same phenomenon. I think he said he was working for George Soros. I don't know. I might have this wrong, which is kind of crazy. And he's like, lost a bunch of money. He just went away for a while. He's like, I can't do this anymore. I'm not good at it. I'm an idiot, completely depressed.

1:17:00He's like, I just got to go away. The difference between Stanley and a million other investors and entrepreneurs is like a million other people did that. They went away and they never came back. But he overcame. He's like, I'm in pain. I'm going to keep going forward. So there is a filmmaker that works for Pixar that put this beautifully. and he used the metaphor of doing anything difficult, but for your and I purposes of building a company. And he says, if you're sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing? You have to embrace the sailing, means that you can't control the elements and there's gonna be good days and there's gonna be bad days and whatever comes, you deal with it because your goal is to eventually get to the other side.

1:17:41You will not be able to control exactly how you get across. us. That is the game you decided to be in, which is exactly what Henry Ford was telling us. Then don't run a company, dude. That is the game you've decided to be in. If your goal is to make it easier and simple, don't get in the fucking boat. Maybe we'll call this episode passion and pain. Those seem to be the two themes of people's obsessiveness, willingness to devote themselves to something, but also then to endure a ton of hardship and pain. I think it's a good place to believe it. I think you also know my traditional closing question for people.

1:18:15What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? The kindest thing anybody's ever done for me happened a few decades before I was born. My grandfather on my dad's side was living in Cuba. He was just 38 years old. He had a wife and a newborn baby when the Cuban revolution happened and Castro took power. He didn't understand the language, had no money and no education, and yet took the gigantic risk and the complete correct choice at that time in his life to flee Cuba, to go to America, to give his family a better chance and a better opportunity. That one decision changed the entire trajectory of my life.

1:18:54None of my interests that I happened to be naturally born into, the passions that chose me that I did not choose would make a lick of difference if I grew up in Castro's Cuba as opposed to America. And as somebody that studies dead people for a living, it really resonates how our decisions not only affect our loved ones now and our family now and our friends now, but they reverberate through the generations. And if you think about it, not as the context of what's going to happen in your life this year or next year, but what the decisions you're making will affect people that aren't even born yet, you'll make your decisions differently.

1:19:28It's a wonderful closing thought. I guess I'll close by just saying what I've said elsewhere, which is I find your show to be almost like a meditation app for entrepreneurs, where you open meditation app to sort of get re -centered. And I find something similar in that word comforting, which you mentioned earlier, is definitely there for me too. It's like, oh, wow, there's lots of people who are nuts about whatever it is that they're doing. And it's comforting, certainly for me, but also I think for tons of people that listen to your show to just be constantly reminded of the agony, the ecstasy, the journey of building something or creating something.

1:20:02And it's like nothing else that I've encountered for this specific function. And so I'm just such a huge fan. I've so enjoyed talking to you over the last several months, getting to know you and listening. And I've so enjoyed this conversation today. Thanks for your time. I appreciate the support. You've been amazing, dude. And I really do appreciate it. And I thank you very much. I put a lot of my life energy into it. And to have somebody, you especially say that you get value out of it. I don't take that for granted by any means. If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus .com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast, complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning.

1:20:37You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.

1:21:02Outro Music