Patrick O’Shaughnessy - Creating on Principle - [Invest Like the Best, EP.455]

26:25I remember my mom and dad would have to sit and hold my hand for me to fall asleep at night. And the reason was I would just sit there like spiraling on this crazy idea, maybe this is why I studied philosophy, that like someday I would not exist. And that just freaked me out and did for decades. So that probably kicked off this introspective period of my life where I was very curious about philosophical traditions and religious traditions and metaphysics and all this kind of stuff. Because I wanted to know what the hell is the point of all this? Like, what's the point? What's the meaning? What's the purpose?

27:03And otherwise, it's just terrifying, right? That we're here for a blip and then gone. It's just terrifying. I try not to sit down and think about it too much. In fact, I'd like to move on. But that kicked off this period of, yeah, I wanted to understand myself and others. And so, I was very introspective. And of course, that made me want to not live a dull life. And I was very scared of just like living this train track existence. So, yeah, it did help a lot. But interestingly, once I have clicked into, I think, understanding what I want to do, I don't think about it at all. And now I have very little introspection left in my life.

27:41I used to be so obsessed with all of these personality tests and what they mean and psychology and seeking and like all the modern methods for doing that. And I've kind of just lost not total interest, but I've lost a lot of my interest in that. You solved the problem that you were using it. Yeah, maybe. Introspection was the tool. And then, like, you don't need to use the tool once the job is done. Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's right. You mentioned earlier that we have different approaches. And then you wanted to talk about that. What do you think, like, I'm always curious. Again, like, some of the stuff I should not say on a podcast.

28:13But I'm always curious, like, people that know me well. Yeah. Like, what is their interpretation of, like, their view of me that is different than my own? So, like, what do you think my organizing principle is? Your organizing principle. If yours is just helping as many people as possible and this is what life's about, and then you have all these resources to do so through media and capital and relationships. Just to clarify, it's not helping as many people as possible. It is trying to see enormous, like, not yet realized potential. Okay. And my principle is that when I do, it is my obligation.

28:55with nothing. Maybe I invest, maybe I end up benefiting, but that's not the point, that it's my obligation to tell people about it and to help foster it into existence. So, you know, important difference. Well, it took me a decade to state my organizing principle. I'm not going to be able to name yours in a minute, but you're probably the most single-minded and devoted to what they do person that I know in the sense that most people that have achieved a level of success in their field or in their job that you have begin to branch. The world, when that happens, pulls you into this branching exercise where you end up doing lots of different stuff.

29:40And you end up monetizing in different ways or going into different lines of business or changing how you do things, expanding. The single-mindedness that you have is quite distinct from the people that I know. And why are you doing it? I mean, I think you've talked about this certainly in private with me, but also in public about, you know, you came from, we came from opposite circumstances. Like I was born on proverbial third base or sliding into home. I come from a history of extremely successful entrepreneurs. My great-grandfather, who had the best name ever, his name was Ignatius Aloysius O'Shaughnessy.

30:22Everyone called him IA. He was, I think, the 13th of 13 kids. He was one of the richest men in the United States. He was an oil wildcatter, first oil hole he ever drilled. I think still pumps oil to this day in the Midwest. And so he was a giant, he was broken up in the antitrust, you know, in the Rockefeller antitrust stuff around Standard Oil. And our family takes great inspiration from him because he made this fortune. He did not give a shit about money. He didn't really spend it. He gave away basically all of it in his lifetime, mostly anonymously. My dad tells the story about being at his funeral when my dad was 11.

31:02And all these people were there and no one knew who they were. And my dad would go up to one and be like, who are you? And they would say, well, Mr. IA, you know, I cut his hair and he put my kids through college and bought me a house or Mr. IA did this or this, this. And we didn't even know where it went. And I have benefited from this tremendous history of business success in and around my family forever. Whereas you came from a very different set of circumstances. Our friend Sam has this idea of there's founders of businesses and there's founders of families. And I think of you as the founder of your family.

31:38And I think that's incredibly powerful. And I think it's your greatest accomplishment that things repeat through the generations. You're fond of saying the story of the father and the son are the same. And it takes tremendous character, willpower, talent, lots of stuff to break from that family tradition and go a new direction, which you've done, which I just think is remarkable. and I don't know if that's the underlying why that you refused to let your family continue to go the same direction that it had gone up until you were born and you went, as Sam would say, and we've talked about, you went searching for mentors because you didn't have them in your life.

32:21You found them in books and in founders and you've been telling everybody about it ever since and it worked for you to change your life and now we know based on your work that your work is now changing other people's lives in that same way that you changed your own first, but you were the first beneficiary of it. And so what is your principle or why? I don't know. Maybe it's that you don't have to just keep going the same direction that you were given. You can break off and found something new. I think that's pretty amazing. I think there's a lot of times, I really resonate with what you said when you found that book and you're like, you know, this paragraph, this sentence just like hits you with like a hammer to the face.

33:03this is also like you know i use podcasts for this reading mainly it's like i think people are rushing through things too fast you know i'm famous for only listening to podcasts on one x everybody's like oh you read a lot you must read fast i'm like yeah 25 pages an hour fast like i'm not speed reading here and i think i want understanding and like i want understanding of how things actually are, not how humans say they are. And humans, not only are we lying to ourselves constantly, which if you're lying to yourself, like, of course you're lying to other people about, like, why you're doing what you're doing or what you're doing, what it is that you're doing.

33:41And this is why I like autobiographies and biographies so much because in many cases, the person's, like, long past dead or they're older and they're just like, I'm writing this book and I'm 80. Like, I have no, I'm not incentivized to lie. And, like, here's the stuff I went through. And the trouble with whatever, being what kind of dad you are trouble with women trouble with business but you realize like there's nothing that you're experiencing that somebody else hasn't already experienced and so what i want is like true understanding of like humanity as it is human nature as it is and the world that we're creating and then i use their stories it's not really about them it's like about you and i I don't think this doesn't do with me.

34:25I think when you watch a great movie, you hear a great story, you hear a great song. You're not thinking about like, oh, this happened to Taylor Swift. You're like, oh, I had that same experience in this relationship. Or I went through this exact same thing. And it's like a form of understanding. Like, I'm in the middle of this right now. We were just having lunch upstairs. And, you know, essentially, like, I'm just like in the middle of like trying to find the story that I want to tell with this book that grabbed a hold of me for six months. And I told you about, this is Bruce Springsteen's autobiography.

34:55I don't even listen to his music. And I told you about this right when I was like, there's stuff in this book that like, this dude looks like he crawled inside of my mind. And like, especially in regards to how he views his work and the impact that it has on it. It's like, that is not a sentence. That is not a paragraph. That is like, that was made for me to read this at this point. And it's insanely powerful. And to the point where like, it's like a drug. Like, you know, I told you, like, right away. Again, I need to, like, give you credit. We'll go back to this drug and understanding because, like, I think this is really important about, like, people understanding why I want to talk to certain people and why, like, I was freaking adamant and, like, kind of pushing you on this.

35:37And we rescheduled a few times. And, like, I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for you. Not only because the platform that you gave founders, right, the podcast. than that crazy episode that we did together, which I think is like, we're never, like that was like lightning in the bottle. It was, yeah. It's Invest Like the Best. The title is Passion and Pain. And, you know, people are always like, oh, like, did you guys sketch this? I was like, no, Patrick doesn't sketch things out like that. He's like, we built a friendship. I want you on the show. Like, I don't think you told me anything we're going to talk about.

36:12I do remember you texting me a few hours where you're supposed to do it like 10 a.m. You're like, hey, I got pushed back. Can we do 1 p.m.? I'm like, oh, no, my brain only works in the morning. So I took like a quick power nap, and I'm in this booth. We didn't do video, but you can see me, and I'm in like this phone booth that I put in my house that I was the only person. These phone booths are all in these offices, and I had one. They came and delivered to my house, and like, you know, we've never delivered to somebody's house before. I was like, this isn't a phone booth. This is a podcast studio.

36:36This makes perfect sense to me. And then we just had that conversation, and, you know, that was like a huge inflection point. Like that weekend that happened after that was like one of the craziest weekends of my entire life. But then you push me for years. You're like, you should be recording conversations. You should be recording these conversations. What are you doing? And I was like, no, no, it's a distraction. I don't want to do it. I want to do it. And then, you know, I've told the story a bunch, but I think like it's really important. We're like, I would not be doing what I'm doing right now at this very moment if we didn't have, me and you had this dinner with Daniel Ek in New York.

37:10It lasted four hours. I know you don't like when I tell you how long I talk to people. This is one of David's quirks. He tells you how long he talked to someone every time. Because I'm not— I just had this four-hour lunch with stones. Yeah, because I'm not interested in superficial at all. Like, I can't tell you who it was. I just had dinner. How long was it? I'm going to tell you right now. But it was an incredible dinner the first time we met. And, you know, it was unexpected, requested by them. and three hours into this, this person's like, I have told you things no one else knows about me the very first time I met them.

37:49So it's just, I just, I have no, I have no interest in the superficial and I think you have to talk for a long time because it takes a little while to get like warmed up and like feel the person out. And this is why what you said earlier is so important. Like fewer deep relationships. Dude, think about the crazy conversation which we're not going to, you know, relive, but like me and you just had an insane two and a half hour conversation in Tel Aviv. at like two in the morning. You know, to have that level of honesty and conversation, like you would have to have like years of like getting to know somebody.

38:18So I do think. I also think you're providing people with a sort of set of ingredients, maybe through these episodes and conversations, but that it's important that people then go make their own recipe. Like you shouldn't just want to live like person XYZ. A lot of people you cover have the same pitfalls in their lives. And one might be tempted to think those pitfalls are just inevitable byproducts of success. But I hate that kind of thinking. I think, like, screw base rates. I don't care what the base, I never care what the base rate is. Like, the most interesting stuff is outliers, by definition.

38:50So, I don't care what happened to everybody else. I don't care if, you know, there's common pitfalls. Like, I think it's important that people take their own, make their own recipe from the ingredients that you've offered them from all these amazing and interesting lives that you've studied. And you're just doing that for yourself. Like that's, that's been the search. I think it is for myself. You are interested in other people and frankly, in a way that I am not. And I've seen, it's like very real and it happens every time we're with other people together. I'm like, oh, he like actually wants to know where like, I am on this search of like, how the hell do I not have a terrible life?

39:20This is why I think the skillset that gets you to where you are, like so many people plateau and like, I'm not, I'm not interested in plateauing. Like I'm not interested in, you know, mailing it in. Like I'm interested in, and I want to get to my end of my life. Like I don't want to tap dance on a giant reservoir of potential. I want, like, there was nothing more that I could have possibly done with my skill set and everything else. Like, I want to figure out how to get the most out of that. And this is, there's something you just said about, like, there's a line in this Bruce Binsing autobiography where he's like, people don't come to rock shows or to concerts, rather, to learn.

39:53They come to remind them, for you to remind them of stuff they already know is true. And I think, yeah, you're going to learn. Like, there's obviously creative ideas on how to build a company. in a 400-page biography of somebody. What are you going to realize? This is like, there's a lot of stuff that you already know and you know is true. And either you haven't applied it or you forgot it or you did it for a little bit and you need a reminder. This is why me and you always describe founders. Like, it's church. It's church for entrepreneurs. In that church, I think the animating interesting question is you read these stories, all of which back to my idea of originality, hardship transformation, you know, best story wins.

40:30that originality is you're inspiring people to wonder, what's my thing? Everyone's got something, I guarantee it. Like, it's my favorite thing to search for in conversation, especially if someone's not yet doing it, which is kind of the same search for unrealized potential or something. Everyone has a thing that for whatever set of reasons, their life experiences, how they're wired, their naturally endowed gifts. And searching for that thing is really interesting and really hard. And I think that's what founders continues to do for me is show me examples of people that went to the trouble to find their thing.

41:05And then once they found it, foster it the rest of their life. And again, once you find your thing, the second thing is hardship. It's not supposed to be easy. Like nothing meaningful is easy. And that's fine. And then once you learn that, I think that's when it gets really fun is that I always have this feeling the second something just feels easy and I'm kind of going through the motions, I get really uncomfortable. and want to try to push myself in some new way. But I think that's what Founders does so well is it shows, it's what, back to the very beginning of our relationship and why I sent that tweet out and why we talked to each other for an hour the first time we talked, it's because it was so unique and so different and inspiring.

41:45So I think it's a powerful thing to do for people. I think when I say this, like, what is my organizing principle? It's like, I want to understand things. Well, I want to understand, not things, I want to understand people. And to understand people, you have to, like, go deep and, like, where were you born? What was going on? Like, what was this experience like? You have to just spend a lot of time asking them questions and having these, like, long, deep conversations. And I don't think – I mean, there's a handful of people that I feel I truly know. It takes a long time. It takes, you know, at least 100 hours of conversation, you know, on the low end.

42:17You mentioned – you said organizing principle. Yeah. Which I think that's correct. Correct. Just to push, because this can now be something we talk about for the next couple of years, which is probably how long it'll take to articulate. That's different than what is your principle for invention. So back to the idea of inventing on principle. The principle should be something that when you see it violated, it is your obligation to go correct it, and that that correction is an act of service for other people, not for yourself. It's not about you. And that's what makes the idea so powerful. I agree that that's your organizing principle.

42:55That's like the thing behind why you're doing what you're doing. It will be fun to try to pin down what the principle is for invention because that's what you're doing. You're making new things, which is the most fun and rewarding experience of a lifetime. And I remember the opening quote in this compilation of his life's writing by Joseph Campbell that was done by his niece or something, the little opening quote in the book is, the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. And the people that make things that are the most interesting, those things are a reflection of themselves. That's the most sustainable form of creation.

43:32If you can sort of spill yourself onto the thing you're making, which benefits others, the thing, you know, being of service to other people in some way, I think that's the thing that we're, actually, I think that's what we're all after. I think what we all want is to make, participate in the act of creation on it in a small way that reflects the act of creation going on at a grand scale. And to have that experience of in so doing by pouring oneself out into the thing and then having the thing be of service to others. That's a, that's an amazing feeling and it's hard to get going. But once you do, I don't know anybody, I've never met anybody that's gone, that's had that experience and gone back, not one.

44:18And it's because I think it's the thing that we're all after. And that's what you're doing too with this show. I think like one of the biggest things I want to avoid is like finding the thing, doing the thing, being great at the thing. And then like something you do causes that to stop where like you know i'm kind of obsessed with like the sustained success uh you know like i don't want to you know have this huge spike i don't want to flame out like i'd rather just do like the slow build decade after decade get better and like keep doing it this is why essentially i read fiction and i read biography like that's basically what i read and like the biography part is like okay what happens after they got what they wanted and the conversations i've been been having a lot of these have been having on camera but after off camera i'm always asking because most of these people are older and more experienced and obviously more successful smarter and everything else just like what what i have to worry about like what am i not seeing that could like cause me to stop like i like what i'm doing i love it what am i doing that would cause it to like for me to not be able to do that and there's like interesting like human questions about this Well, the trap is before you do the work to figure out the thing that makes you feel alive.

45:36There's this great line in the Upanishads that it's always referred to abiding joy, like joy that doesn't run out. You don't use it up like you use up so many resources. As you use it, you get more of it. That's abiding joy. The target for most people becomes the traditional money, power, fame, because those are worldly proxies for success that we all recognize and are for sure to some degree true. It's hard to get a lot of those three things without being successful in some way. I think those things are huge traps because once you start to get one, it's the thing you start chasing. And it's different than chasing the feeling of being alive, that abiding joy of feeling alive that we talked about earlier, which you'll never run out of.

46:26That will always guide you well, always. And money, power, fame will not. And so I think the answer to your question or your worry is just like, make sure you're chasing the feeling of being alive and that the intuition around that and you'll be fine. And it's when we it's when we get sucked. And I, of course, have just like everybody else, like I've been intoxicated by those three things at various points in my life. And that's because they're intoxicating. It feels really good the first time you have a lot of one of those things. You're over fame, though. You don't like it. Yeah, I don't. I don't.

47:04I think it is. I wish I could do what I do. And you know that thing in Men in Black where they flash you in the face? I wish like at the end of each of my episodes, like flash people in the face and they forgot who I was and they didn't recognize me. I've been thinking about this lately. It's like what I actually. You're limited. You have limited time that you're like every day. Like what? Where do I like spend this? and it's like three things health work relationships and i can't think of anything else that i care deeply about health has to come first because if we are sick or we have no energy like we can't do anything else but other than that like if you look at like how i spend my time it's essentially just like i'm building i'm creating work that i hope it makes other somebody else's life better that i truly am like the abiding joy like uh chasing that and then i'm just deeply interested in a shocking way of like having really strong relationships with other people and like I was not like that 10 years ago.

48:01My experience, actually, I would disagree with the order. I had tremendously bad health problems for a long time. And I don't anymore, thankfully. But I'm convinced, I'm certain, that the reason is that I finally got my work and my relationships correct. And that when you're doing something you love and have great core relationships, all of a sudden, magically, your health gets way better. And during that time when I had lots of health problems, I ate unbelievably well. I worked out every day. I did everything you're supposed to do. Yeah. And then some. I was crazy about it. I kept daily logs of all this stuff.

48:42Like, there's nothing I didn't try. There's no willy foo-foo thing that I didn't explore. I tried everything to solve some of these problems. And I couldn't solve them. And at one point, I felt resigned. to just like, I guess, like, I'm just one of those people that's going to be sick in life. Like, that's just how it's going to be for me. And it cannot be coincidence that when I finally started doing the thing that I think I was meant to do with my life and spend all my time with the people and focused on the relationships that all of a sudden my health got better. So now, of course, I still invest a lot in my health.

49:20I'm not arguing with the three key things, but I found that an interesting experience in life. The body keeps the score. The fame part is interesting because this is something that like you uniquely understand and I can talk to you about. It's like, it's not to be known for the sake of being known. Like these like reality TV show people, that's weird. Like I want my work to be so good that it can't help but like become known and like talked about and like spread because they find value in it. This is just human nature. Like if you find value in a song, a movie, a book, a podcast, like no one keeps that to themselves.

49:52a restaurant, like we are compelled to tell other people about the things that we like. What I would say is like the reason I think I view it differently than you, and you can tell me if I'm wrong or whatever, it's just like, not even wrong, but like it's the relationships that you get to build as a result of you being easy to understand to other people. So like no one's going to stumble upon any of my work and be like, what is this guy actually interested in? Like it's like very, like. Quite clear. Yeah, it's quite clear, very obvious. and then if you think there's like some kind of like uh unique insight but my my point being is it's like i think this comes down to a principle of like all like why are people all the people that i've studied either have a conversation with or or um are read about it's like why are they great at what they do and it has to do with i do think the most fundamentally important thing that you do in life is choose who's around you of course like your friends people you work for Like, your company is the people that, like, that you are able to recruit and to build.

50:52And so, like, what I couldn't understand is, like, I was not interested at all in relationships with other people. I would say, like, 10 years ago, somewhere like there, where now it's, like, I invest a ton in that element. I think it's, like, the part—I'm very excited about my work. That has never diminished. But, like, I think it's the part that I'm most excited about and have been for, like, quite a while. Well, because, of course, on your deathbed, that's what you're going to be thinking about, not your 5 ,000 podcasts. You're not going to lie there and think. But that's surprising to me, Patrick.

51:26Like, this is why this freaking Bruce Springsteen book is, like, messing with me so much. It's because I'm seeing this. He's 66 when he writes it. 67, something like that. Now he's, like, 76. And I just heard him on another interview talking about it. Where the first half of the book is, like, this guy, like, has one of the most insane work ethics that you've ever, ever seen. and it's channeled into one thing and he has no doubt since he was 15 that this is what he's going to do. And he realizes that he does not have the skill set or he has all these things that he has not developed the skill set to handle.

52:01I'm just going to try to explain this. I'm going to just record a whole podcast about it so maybe this will hopefully make sense. It was surprising to me that this man who is psychopathically obsessed with professional achievement and fame and stardom and all the stuff that he was very upfront about what he wanted from a young age, okay? He gets it, which I'll get to in a minute. And his final realization is life is more important. Work is a part of life. It is not my full life. Life is life. It is important. And his biggest struggle was he becomes famous this is what Jimmy Iovine told me because like I got to meet him and right when I was leaving his house he's like you need to go watch the new Bruce Weinstein movie and it's called Delivery Me From Nowhere and I thought it was going to be like a biography of his life that's not what it's at all it is like a dark I was shocked dark movie this is the key to understanding unbelievable like terrible environment born into you're going to there's going to be two reactions there You're just like, this is what life is.

53:12I'm going to accept it. Or you're going to have this like maniacal will to change things. He has the maniacal will. And he's like, I don't want to live like that. His dad was one of the worst human beings to him. He takes all that pain, channels it into a work ethic that gets him exactly what he wanted, gets what he wants, which is now everybody knows who he is. He's worldwide famous. He's rich. Everything. and then immediately drops in his mid-30s into the deepest depression of his life. And what he realizes is that's not what I actually wanted. And this is what goes by. I think I told you this upstairs or maybe I even mentioned this.

53:51I had a very interesting conversation at dinner last night. And it started with, what is the lie that you're telling yourself? And me and another person going around that for quite a while. And it was very fascinating. And the lie that Bruce was telling himself was that work was the most important, that becoming a rock star was the most important, fame was the most important. And what he realizes is that his parents had so messed up his emotional well-being, he was incapable of doing the thing that he wanted. In his case, he desperately wanted to have kids, to be married, to break the chain, like we mentioned earlier, of like, my kids will not experience what he experienced.

54:31And he was even writing, he has a whole album, fantasizing about this before he's able to do it and what he would run into the same thing where like he it's it's gotta be such a crazy juxtaposition of like he's on stage in front of 40 ,000 people they all love him and yet like in his case he talks a lot about women in the book he would get close to a woman he'd have some kind of feelings for her they'd have she'd have feelings for him back okay then he immediately goes why do you love me like I am so fucked up and undeserving. So the fact that you love me means there's something wrong with you and I'm going to hurt you because you love me.

55:11And then he'd run away. And then he'd get into another relationship. And he'd go over and over and over again. And he didn't realize the source of his depression was he didn't know what he actually wanted. And he didn't have the skill set. And then he winds up meeting the woman. He's married, by the way. He winds up meeting another woman who's in his band and getting divorced because he realizes, like, this is the person that can, like I'm willing to do the work necessary to fix, which is like a crazy thing. And then he goes through 25 years of therapy and in some cases he has to get on antidepressants.

55:44And like, he's unbelievably honest from what took place his life from 35 until 67 when he's writing his book. And so I think there's all kinds of lessons in there from personal, like, what do you actually want in your personal life? Like the kind of relationships you want with friends, romantic partners, whatever the case is. But this is what I meant about like, I want to make sure I developed a skill set, not just to stay where I am. And you've pushed me in this direction a million times. You're like, stop doing everything yourself. Like we have a million conversations. You're just like, why don't you have a team?

56:14Why don't you do all this? It's like, it makes sense why I don't have a team because I don't fucking trust anybody. Like that's obvious, like why that is. And I do think I'm like getting better and better and better to like, even the stuff me and you talk about, like 10 years ago, there's zero chance I would have let that come out of my mouth. Zero. I mean, you tell Bruce's story, but I think you're talking about yourself to a large degree. I know. And maybe my arrival at the aspiration, by no means perfect, to be more service-oriented. My grandmother, who just passed away, she was 99, banged on me.

56:49Every time she'd see me, this would be the topic of conversation. She's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, congratulations on all the success. Like, who gives a shit? Like, what are you doing for other people? That's what I want to know. And I'm convinced that's the way out. That I think I, like you, and like so many listening, have their set of demons that they've struggled with. And the path out is others. Simple as that. And it sounds like Bruce, I don't know Bruce, I'm not a huge Springsteen fan. And I need to read the book, obviously. But that seems like a tale as old as time. But this is something I learned from you, this idea of making sure that your source of fuel and energy and ambition is generative and not negative.

57:33And I do think, like, the conversation I've had with you, with Sam Hickey, is really important. It's like, I'm getting to the point where, like, I push myself because I love it. I'm way nicer to myself than I have ever been because I'm like, oh, this doesn't serve me anymore. Like, I'm not going, like, I will be successful because I love it. And if I love it, I'll do it all the time. And if I do it all the time, I'll get really good at it. And if I get really good at it, money will come as a result because it's an act of service. Yeah, the clean fuel, dirty fuel debate is really interesting. And look, a lot of many, most, nearly all of the books that you've read were people that were fueled by dirty fuel.

58:11Dirty fuel works really well, but it consumes the person in a way that I would far rather die, you know, nobody knowing who I am with no worldly, you know, success, but having people that could count on me, rely on me. I was faithful to that. I was loyal to like, that's what I want at the end. So if you can work backwards from that, that's another cool way to think about it. Like, working backwards from what you hope is true is a simple heuristic for finding what to do well. And I think, yeah, I think I can't wait to read the book. This is why I think, you know, reading a bunch at the same time, or not at the same time, but, like, having a lot to pull from.

58:53It's like, I'm reading the Bruce Friesen book, but then you realize, like, another person with, like, superhero work ethic and drive and ambition was the LBJ, which Robert Caro brilliantly writes about. And you realize Bruce is generative. It took him a while to figure it out, but he got on the other side of that where LBJ never did. And even though their source is very similar. There's a great story that Robert Carroll tells in one of his books where LBJ finally gets to Washington. I think he's like an intern. I don't even remember what the job he has. He has no money. It's cold. And it'd be like the sun would be coming up at like 5.30 and this woman that worked with him would always see him running everywhere.

59:38and they just assumed, oh, he's got no coat, he got no money. He's like running to warm himself up and then the summer comes and he's still running and obviously Robert Kerr was a master with words and storytelling and his whole point was like, of course he was running. He like finally made it to the spot because he was talking about what he wanted to be president since like third grade or something. He's like, he finally made it to the city, to the spot of where all his dreams are and like he was going to run after his dreams. There's so much in between these two stories. One guy's a rock star, one guy comes president of the United States.

1:00:08And it's the same thing. One is generative. One is unbelievably manipulative and, you know, probably not a guy that you'd like want in your life to be around. And so I think also learning from like great examples, but almost like seeing like, oh, I don't want to be that way. This is like something like, you know, one of the best things about like our friendship is like, I actually want to like let people in. Like I want to have friends and like deep friends. and in the past like that wasn't an important like thing to me i agree this conversation is now therapy for david but this is my this is my point was like when i wanted to sit down with you like there's a bunch of things i want to talk about but it's like i also want to like kind of like talk about the stuff that like we normally talk about the reason i think it's important for like me and you too is like how much of our ideas actually came from the creation of the podcast like you think about like all the different ideas and topics and things that you've learned as a byproduct of just making this thing and then the unfair advantage that we have is essentially like we'd be like professional learner you know like you you get to study somebody you get to have a multi-hour conversation with them and like oh wait he said that or she said this like i'm going to take that idea who have you grabbed ideas from and like who do you let like influence your the way you think?

1:01:26I mean, how long you got? I could easily rattle off 50 people. Let's take one, like just some of the most important ideas and where they came from. To take the simplest example possible, in the early days of the show, this is a very like practical, real world example. If you take the ideas that I got from Daniel, who you mentioned before at Spotify about how to build software. From Brett Victor, who I mentioned before about this principle for great software and what it looks like. And from a guy named Chathan Pudagunta at Benchmark, one of the partners at a very storied investing firm called Benchmark, who taught me how to sell software.

1:02:10Just those three guys. I basically just stole their ideas and applied it to my situation. And it worked to a spectacular degree. I didn't know anything about software. I'd never built software before. I had an amazing team at the time that, you know, was able to pull it off. But the direction of the resources and what to do strategically just came from asking, you know, those three are three of the greatest in the world of what they do. How do I do this to somebody that could help me? And then not thinking too hard about what they tell me and just doing it and having it work. And so there's a tiny example, you know, three people.

1:02:50Did you have all three on your podcast? You're two out of three. I've never met Brett. Okay, so you have two out of three. I've never met Brett, yeah. These ideas came from conversations that you had on the podcast? No, I didn't ask them this stuff on the podcast, but in time spent just offline with them, I'll never forget, I was in Benchmark's office in San Francisco showing Chatham the demo. I'd shown them the demos, and it was amazing. He'd give me feedback. They weren't an investor in my business or anything. He was just doing it out of, you know, just the goodness of his heart, I guess. And same thing with the others.

1:03:24Just there's many, many more than three people that contributed to that project that influenced me and taught me things. But yeah, mostly just offline asking questions. But I did interview Chetan several times and Daniel sometimes. Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes. It's leaking through a thousand tiny decisions nobody's watching. Ramp puts guardrails on spending before it happens. real-time limits, automatic rules, zero firefighting. Try it at ramp.com slash invest. Every investment firm is unique and generic AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall Street, connected to your data, understanding your process and producing real outputs.

1:04:02Check them out at rogo.ai slash invest. The best AI and software companies from open AI to cursor to perplexity use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit workos.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. This goes back to the beneficial nature of relationships. You start out as like, okay, I had a conversation with them. And then if there's some kind of mutual respect, you build a relationship. Right now, we're filming, this is the first podcast ever filmed at the Amman in New York. You try to email the Amman in New York and ask them, hey, let me set up and film a podcast here for free that's not going to happen that happens because of the relationship a personal relationship that i have with a friend of mine who it like is involved with a mom this is why i would say like relationships run the world and our jobs are essentially like learning and then taking what we learned and packaging it for the consumption of somebody else on for an easy way for somebody else to consume and benefit from that learning where it's a conversation, a book review, or whatever the case is.

1:05:06So that's like very practical. That was in the early days when you were doing Canvas, right? Yeah. What about like larger things in your life? Like who do you think had like an impact? Like my life would not be the same if not for that one conversation, that one idea with that person. Two people came to mind right away. the first is Herb Allen from Allen & Company who I don't know well these lessons came from one incredibly you know incredibly interesting conversation about my sense of him again don't know him well is that he is uncompromising in his values he does he's maybe like the apex predator of like the thing I want to do which is like picking and supporting people I think that's what he's done for a really long time with unbelievable success.

1:05:58And that he is so incredibly uncompromising about how he does that and willing, I won't tell the examples, but like I think willing famously to like throw away huge commercial opportunities just because the person wasn't who he wanted to support. um so sometimes it's literally a conversation with a person that just smacks you in the face and makes you feel uh validated maybe um for for what you're trying to do there's a gentleman named reese duca who's been who's very very private um and you know there's no content about him or interviews with him i i wish to god i could he would let me interview him i know i know he never will, who has been incredibly impactful on, at like a philosophical level.

1:06:43He has all these amazing little phrases, but his life kind of boils down to simplicity, the beauty of simplicity. He gave me this line one time, simplify your life with rhythm and harmony. And that line is what you're talking about. Fewer deeper relationships, fewer things better, everything aligned with what gives you energy, listening to your own, you know, the feeling of aliveness. Like he lived that to a degree that's rare that I've never seen. So I could keep, I literally could rattle names. A gentleman I spend a ton of time with now named Jesse Beirutti, who I am with basically every day, who also I think has no interest in fame or accolades or recognition, but I think is one of the great, will go down, I would predict as one of the great investors ever.

1:07:30And he's like grease. He's completely uncompromising and the most principled way of living I've ever seen. It's like refuses to get sucked into the game. And I could, God, man, I could rattle off names for hours and hours. I mean, there's so many people that have influenced me. And that's what makes this all fun. That's what makes what you and I do so fun is I'm inspired constantly. And you're doing this new show. I interview people once a week, But really, I interview like 10 people a day. That's what I do. I just happen to have mics there one of the times. You know, if I'm doing it 40 or 50 times a week, which is not an exaggeration, it really is that many people every week.

1:08:12Just like, who are you? What's your deal? Like, I love doing that. And so there's just too many to name, but those are a couple that came to mind. Munger said, I'm paraphrasing, but he's like, you know, one of the best ways to learn is like you find somebody that's like kind of an outlier and you just ask like, what the hell is going on with this person? Yeah. And you just keep asking that question to try to get, like, deeper and deeper and deeper, but, like, reverse engineer of what they're doing and, like, why they're really successful. There's another fascinating thing where, like, there's, like, this meme where it's, like, everybody has a podcast now.

1:08:41And everybody starts podcasts. And as soon as that, like, takes hold, you've been doing podcasting for 10 years. And you decide, no, I'm going to go in a different direction. And the majority of our conversations, I would say, now are not even about the podcast. They're about these profiles that you're writing on Colossus. Some of them have been so incredible that I actually used them as source material for a Founders episode, which I think we should do more of those collabs because they were really well written, kind of like doing my job for me. Why did you decide to do that? I'm, in the abstract, very interested in how can I create and control valuable, scarce units of attention and then dole those things out to the people that we believe in.

1:09:28at a very high level. The reason we now have a magazine, which on its face, I think, everyone would have agreed was a stupid idea or told me it was a stupid idea when we started it. Why are we doing these profiles that take months or quarters or years to write and require lots of investment? Why do them? Well, the reason is, I think it's just in a beautiful way to shine the light beyond like podcasting on people that we admire and to teach someone teach the world about a compelling founder or a compelling investor or artist or whatever. And the thing that I didn't realize was that because I'm not writing the profiles, our amazing team is writing them, it would actually be a double whammy that not only when we started doing this, I went and read David Remnick, who's the long-time editor for The New Yorker.

1:10:21And New Yorker profiles were always my favorite growing up, these incredibly detailed, amazing, well-written profiles. He wrote in the introduction to this, his compilation of his favorite New Yorker profiles. There's this line that says the best profiles over the last hundred years are defined by somebody doing a thing they're obsessed with and a writer that is as obsessed with the person as the person is with the thing. And I remember reading that paragraph and just thinking, wow, I want to read. That's what I want to read. And, you know, so I went and I read a million profiles. And the very best one I read was in a publication called Tablet on Palmer Luckey from Andrel.

1:11:05And I reached out to the author. His name is Jeremy Stern, who's now the editor-in-chief at Colossus. And, you know, the rest of that story is sort of history. He joined. We've got other people, you know, that have joined or are joining to write these profiles. And it just felt like, wow, this is another way to do the thing we love to do, which is to find the person, become obsessed, learn everything about them, take great time and pain to write a definitive thing about them, and then share it with millions of people. And the fact, the one that we wrote about Josh Kushner and Thrive was one of these bizarre break the internet moments when it just completely took over the internet for a while.

1:11:51And I remember reading it the first time and I was like 45 minutes into reading it and I was still reading about the Holocaust. And I don't think anyone else would take that risk in a profile of Josh and his family and his team, but it was so important to understanding the the soil out of which his family and eventually he emerged. And Jeremy also the writer was the product of Holocaust survivors himself and knew a tremendous amount about Josh's family history because it was also his family's history. And I thought that was the coolest, most beautiful thing. I never would have, you know, so this, this project has become an excuse to uh first of all find more talented people the writers that we can support which is great see the see the potential you know same thing we've been talking about over and over again so now now team members become more people that we can do this supporting thing with and for them to write things they're obsessed with and passionate about and then for the rest of the world to benefit for the people being profiled hopefully to benefit if we tell the honest stories and we want to tell the hard parts and the interesting parts.

1:13:09And it's been successful beyond what I ever could have imagined. And I think it's important to note, like when I started with the first idea, everyone said it was a stupid, I mean, literally everybody said it was a stupid idea. When I started the podcast, everyone said it was a stupid idea. When we started Canvas, everyone said it. I think like if people say something's a good idea, I always get a little nervous because if it sounds like a good idea, It just feels you're in a more competitive space. It's going to be harder. I think the key is stuff that sounds dumb but isn't. And I think that's what I would, you know, starting a magazine in 2025, I think, falls in that category of sounds dumb.

1:13:45Magazines are dead or dying. But the thing underneath it was this desire to have more ways to do the thing that we love to do, which is find people, learn about them, tell the world about them. I suspect it won't be long until that's much bigger than even the podcast, which itself is, you know, very, very big. The surprising thing is I think you want that to be the case. What specifically? Colossus being bigger than the podcast. Of course. That's not an of course thing. You got to unpack that. You got to explain why you feel that way. I know you don't know how other people view you, but I get a lot of this because they know of our association.

1:14:17Like, they're like, this is the best, you know, business interviewer in the world. And this is incredible. well, like why would he not want that to be the biggest thing? I'm not saying I want to keep doing that. I know that. For sure. I love it. But I think in your heart, if you had to choose, you'd be like, no, I'd rather have the profiles be bigger. Because you like, again, this goes back to I think how we started the conversation. Like I really do believe you would like to be the guy behind the guy. That's true. But the reason for me is like almost so obvious that it's uninteresting, which is, well, if a bunch of other talented people are doing this and then creating these things.

1:14:54First of all, I'll have more of them so I can enjoy them more and I'll get to enjoy it just like everybody else. Like I can't tell you how fun it is to get the first draft of one of these things in Slack. Like the things that make me the most giddy in my work are some new draft that they've created for Colossus and some new research report on an investment created by my incredible team on that side who in many ways are just doing it's turtles all the way down. Like it's the same like deep investigation, publishing, writing, clear thinking. When I get one of those two things in the morning, oftentimes there's days where I have several of them.

1:15:31Those are the best days. And so selfishly, I would just love a world where I'm not needed at all because that means we're creating more of them. Obviously, I'm limited by my own bandwidth and time. I'll always do interviews. I hope it gets bigger and bigger and I don't want to like fade into the sunset, But I hope this is much bigger because that means I get to hire more incredible, talented people and hopefully put them on a career trajectory that's the best it could possibly be. And that's incredibly gratifying. I get to read more of these things. I get to do this thing that we love to do for more people and point the light that we're trying to cultivate on more and more talented people.

1:16:14That's like unbelievably exciting. I hope it's not just writing. I hope it's documentary. I hope it's, who knows where it goes? I hope we start convening people in small situations where meet this person, meet this person. That to me is the most fun thing in the world. And so a world where it's no longer rate limited by my time and energy is much more exciting than a world where it's me. And so, yes, I would vastly prefer that all the rest dwarf whatever I do, even though I hope what I do lasts forever and is big itself. I don't remember the first time you brought up this idea to me. Like what?

1:16:55Now it seems obvious in hindsight, right? Because people have been reading profiles. Yeah, now everyone's launching a magazine and it's going to be like podcasts. But not only that, like specifically profiles where like people have been reading, like you just mentioned it. I bought that book too that you told me about, The New Yorker. Yeah, yeah. Like people have been, they're always interested in people. I remember reading Larry Ellison loves to pick fights and he thought it was like really good and he didn't like the fact that Oracle, he had no media strategy for Oracle. And he's like, Oracle is just compared to other database companies and I don't like that.

1:17:23I want to be compared to the best companies in the world. It's like almost like this idea me and you bond over that we both learned from Jared Kushner are constant refinement of association. So he's like, I don't want to be compared to CBass or any of the, or whatever, however you say it. Like these other. CBass. What is it? From Dumb and Dumber. That's from Dumb and Dumber. But I don't know. I don't know what it's called. Well, all my vocab— David, not an investor. Podcaster. There you go. Forever. All my vocab comes from the written word. So, you know, everybody makes fun of me because all my DMs are like, you mispronounce this word.

1:17:56It's very obvious, buddy. But his whole point is like, I don't want to be associated with these people. I want Oracle to be in the same vein as IBM or Microsoft. And so he's like, the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to pick a fight with Bill Gates and Microsoft. And he does this huge fight. Like, and originally he thought that it was going to be, you know, Microsoft as Oracle. And he's like, but people are interested in personalities more than they're interested in companies or technologies. So it became billionaire A versus billionaire B, and it greatly elevated his profile. And then he said that Oracle and Oracle's products were risen, like came along with the increase.

1:18:31So the reason I bring that up is because people are fascinated with profiles of other people. We are fundamentally more interested in other people and like what they can teach us about ourselves and anything else. You just, what were you thinking? Because like that was something that existed forever. And who writes great profiles now? I don't even see any of them. That's the other part that's exciting is because I like things that are really hard. Okay, so originally hardship, we didn't talk as much about hardship. I think you've been talking a lot about doing something that's different just because it's different.

1:19:01I would add on, which I think is interesting and correct. But I would add on to that, like it should be different and really hard, like really hard to do. And if I just I'm sampling all the profiles we've written in my head, some of them are ridiculously hard to write. Not only because of all the hours and work that has to go into it and the talent as a writer that has to go into it, but sometimes it's sensitive parts of the person's life that's never been written about and they've never talked about. And maybe they don't want to talk about it or they don't want you to talk about it. And it's the coaxing it out of them.

1:19:35And that takes time and trust. And so the thing I can't wait for is the profile that we write 10 years from now that we start working on today. We have this idea, which we've started to do, where we just ask people, can I just have lunch with you once a year? I'm not going to do anything with it. Just like I'm just going to I just want to start collecting the line. And maybe we'll write something in 10 years, you know. So things that are really hard to make are really interesting to me. And I think people stopped doing profiles because they're really hard to make. They take time. The business model kind of sucks.

1:20:13Like, the pay is terrible. You know, profile writers are not paid well. The world went a different direction. It's much cheaper and faster to make a stupid fucking TikTok than write a 50-page profile about someone that's careful and intricate and well-written. And I believe, you and I certainly talk about this all the time, the world is desperate for some stuff like that. The world is so sick of this crap just all day, every day. It's just crap. And everyone makes the junk food comparison because it's a perfect comparison. Like junk food got to where it was because it's been optimized for us to want the most of it possible.

1:20:52Whether or not it's good for us, it's obviously horrible for us. It's the same thing with most content. And everyone knows this in their gut. And we all want something more carefully created. and I think profile might be perhaps the ultimate expression of that. If a documentary is like the ultimate profile, maybe that's even harder than writing a profile. But yeah, I'm interested in stuff that's very hard to make and that's singular, that can't be easily copied. And I mean, the literal answer to your question, it's kind of funny, was somebody, I'm actually seeing seeing in Monday gave me the idea to potentially buy this existing magazine.

1:21:38And we didn't buy it because I like to create our own things primarily. But it was notable to me that this magazine, which had been around for a long time, had all these incredible, I'd never heard of the magazine, and it had all these incredible people on the cover. And I thought, this is strange. Like, why are these people doing this magazine that no one's ever heard of? Big names. And it dawned on me, I was like, oh, it's the cover. Like people can't say no to a cover. And so I tested that theory out and it was true. And I think what that means is it's like the ultimate form of spotlight and attention that you can give to somebody.

1:22:12And so that's what got me actually literally spinning on like, oh, maybe we should, I would love to have a cover that I could dole out. Did that idea come before or after you read Jeremy Stern's piece on Palmer Luckey? before. So I was then on the hunt. And this is another idea that you and I talk about often, which is if you want to hire someone for a thing, just go consume as much of the thing made by a million people as possible. Whoever made the best one, go for them. There was this funny conversation during COVID. An investor friend of mine, one of the great investors ever who's now retired.

1:22:54It was part of the Zoom conversation. And the topic of the conversation was attributes of great founders. And at some point, someone goes, well, maybe it'd be easier to think about them not as founders, but as inventors. And everyone thought, oh, cool idea. Okay, let's talk about them as inventors, not as founders. And then someone said, well, what are the attributes of a great inventor? And people started, you know, this, they're this, they're this. And this one investor's face started contorting. And you could just see that he was frustrated by all these answers and it got to him. And he was like, morons, who cares?

1:23:34Did they make a good invention? If the invention is good, the inventor is probably good. And so, I think you and I have taken that approach to, I certainly have, defining people. Just look at what they did if they're the jeremy wrote the best profile that i read it turns out he's a great profile writer like he's written 10 more and we'll write 100 more like so i the i was then on the hunt after i had this i and we had this idea to go now okay now let's go find the let's go find the best people to do this thing people vastly underestimate the importance of volume like whatever you're into just be into it more than anybody else and like you'll be able to tell like what is a good idea what is a bad idea it's like this constant refinement of taste in fact i was shocked at the way your profile started with about josh kusher where it was like this visit to rick rubin's house and i'm a huge rick rubin fan like i like i read a biography on him i think it's like episode 245 founders did that um i think some of his interviews and stuff he says in an interview it can be a three-hour conversation and you just hear like there's like a 45 second clip that makes everything like it just makes perfect sense on on like i needed to hear that whole three-hour conversation just to get that 45 second clip and that 45 second idea uh in my head but if you think of like the guy started you know his his record company in like 1984 in his dorm room and he's been in the same business he's worked with all these different musicians in fact he said something that was interesting to me and actually screenshotted it saved it and i reread it on my phone and he talked about that the most obsessive artist he ever worked with was eminem which is like wait a minute, you worked with everybody.

1:25:12You've had a four-decade-long career. Why is that the case? That makes me want to know more about that. Our mutual friend, Brent Bateshore, told me this hilarious story one time. Brent's got, he owns a bunch of different companies, and sometimes those companies need a CEO. And he found himself, I think, at a lunch or dinner with Charlie Munger. And so he's like, I'm this young guy. I think he was probably 35 at the time. He said, I own these like 12 companies. How, you know, how do you and Warren find like great CEOs? And Charlie's just like, we just find somebody that is a great CEO and say, come do that for us.

1:25:48And Brian's follow-up, he goes, yeah, but what about hiring for potential? And he goes, we don't do that. It's a beautifully simple like idea. He's really good. Can you come do this over here? Yeah. Yeah, people show you. And I think that also, if you invert that to use another Mungerism, it serves as great advice too, which is if you're trying to get ahead, put stuff out in the world that people can find. I think he would call these breadcrumbs. Put breadcrumbs out into the world so that people see it and are amazed by it. Like if you create a single thing, not 10 things, just one thing that people are amazed by, pour a year of your life into making one amazing thing that people are amazed by.

1:26:33And amazing things will happen, I promise you. Like the internet is amazing at sharing something that is great. You say there's always room for great? Yeah. One of your maxims? That's true. Great takes time. Great's hard. You just proved this. The idea of just always room for great came because so many people are like, we don't need another podcast. I was like, okay, so we don't need any more music? We're going to stop making music? We're going to stop making movies? Like, no, it's just like we need less bad shit, but that's always going to happen. Like, there's always room for great. You just proved this with the profiles.

1:27:04Yeah. Like, that idea was just hiding in plain sight. It was just not being done well. And it's like, well, what if I just take this idea and not make it shitty? Well, how Walt Disney, towards the end of his life, it was very fascinating because, you know, everybody associates him with the animation. and Mickey Mouse and everything else. And yet when he's towards the end of his life, he's asked like, what is the things that he's most proud of? And he said, and he named two things. He said, keeping control of my company because he lost control of his first company and he's lost control of the first characters he made and Disneyland.

1:27:33And Disneyland was his obsession. In fact, I read this book called Disney's Land. I think it's by this guy named Richard Snow. And it's not about the animation. It's not about everything we know him for. It's about how he thought about making this amusement park. And at the time, amusement parks were think of like low quality. Yeah, sure. They were like kind of scammy because you're - Traveling carnies. Yeah, exactly. Like you would come in there and there'd be like games to play and you'd get ripped off because the games were set up and everything else. And he's going around trying to raise money for this very unsuccessfully.

1:28:01And they're like, yeah, but you know, amusement parks are like kind of like trashy. He's like, that's the point. Mine won't be. It's because like mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. And he's just like, I'm just going to take every single part of this and make it better. And then they remove the parts that don't make any sense. That's a great filter for finding new things to create in the world. By the way, I spent my 20s basically just reading. And I read more than you can imagine. I mean, you're probably the one person that can't imagine it because you did something similar.

1:28:37But I wasn't just doing, I mean, literally everything I could get my hands on, thousands and books and profiles and everything. and I started the podcast in part because I started to feel this awful feeling of like this is happening in this weird isolated way like just me and my notes I'm not talking to anyone about these books and so I wanted to I wanted to start sharing which is where that book email came from that you originally that's where the audience came from like I used to have the saying learn build share repeat and just like do that until I die um and I believe in that and so it's still Wait, wait, wait, learn, build, share, repeat.

1:29:12Yeah. Still really good. Still works. Yeah. And maybe that's my governing principle, probably, like you said before. And, yeah, it's an incredibly powerful loop to go on. But the 10 years of reading prepared me to be a good producer of profiles because I've seen great. I've seen good. I've seen average. I've seen bad. my reps are very, very, very high. And that's another thing I always tell people, especially young people, is like, what is the thing where you naturally have a lot of reps because you just like it? And find some, build off that because there's this learning by doing concept, like you get better at something just through being prolific in the thing.

1:29:56And most people have a thing for which they are naturally prolific. Even if that's following your sports team or whatever it might be, Like what's the thing you just can't help but do crazy high rep count of? Probably that's a good clue to like where you could go build one of these compounding curves for yourself. And for me, it was my first love was reading. That love of reading became the email list. You know, here's my four favorite books from the month. The email list gave me my first set of people to listen to the podcast. The podcast introduced me to all these people, helped me build my business and sell it successfully.

1:30:35and on and on and on. That led to positive sum. And me building my business successfully in software got me to all of these people building early stage companies, writing these small checks. Writing these small checks got me to this Series A investment that caused me to create this new investment firm. Creating this new investment firm caused me to go invest in all these companies in a bigger way and be more impactful on them and their trajectories than I could have been on my own. The whole thing is daisy chained together because I loved reading fucking books in my 20s. And I did something about it and I started telling other people which ones I liked.

1:31:12That's how it started. That's it. And all of that was unpredictable. Back to why I don't like goals. If you had told me when I sent that first email to list my goals, none of those things that I just listed would have been on my sheet. I wouldn't have even known to think about them. My own experience has cemented my belief in this growth without goals. Like I wanted to grow. I love the idea in weightlifting. Jeremy Giffen and I talk about it all the time, a progressive overload of like always like a little bit harder, a little bit more, like go to failure, go to failure, go to failure. But you don't, the beautiful thing about life is you don't know where that's going to take you.

1:31:49God, I never in a million years could have predicted any of this crap. What's even more exciting is it doesn't stop. Some set of stuff's going to happen over the next 10 years, which if I tried to make a goal as today, I would be unable to predict. It's going to be so much fun. But it all started with I had a thing I loved naturally. I just like to read books. And I think that's profoundly cool. Now, you know, obligatory disclaimer that like I've been so unbelievably lucky. I had the privilege to sit and read a gazillion books and not be spending all of that time just getting ahead like you had to.

1:32:27Because, again, I was very lucky. The situation I was born into in life with the parents I had and, you know, the things that were easy for me. I didn't have to pay for college. All this stuff made it possible for me to do these things. And I think that's important to acknowledge. But nonetheless, like you found your way there. You found the passion. You found the high rep passion. And now look, now look. That's like my constant urging to people. Like it's there, I promise. There's something. Just go find it. I think it was beautifully said. We haven't even touched on investing, which I want to.

1:33:00Let's do it. I want to talk about, is it code red? Seeing red? What is, there's this fantastic story that we've talked about before. where you were going to make an investment in somebody's fund. Is it seeing red? What did this person say about you? He said I was red on the color wheel. Okay, red on the color wheel. Can you tell that story? Sure. So you, me, and Sam Hinckley were walking, and I think you asked Sam, what's my biggest weakness or something? No, you were interviewing. I was doing an interview. When you just said, like, this all started from, because I love to read, and then that started this whole chain of events, And now you have this other parallel thing that you just do compulsively that you can't help, which is like exactly what you said.

1:33:45I'm doing 10 Invest Like the Best episodes a day. I'm just recording, you know, I'm doing 50 a week and I'm just recording one. Like if we're in a group, I know what's going to happen. You're just going to start lighting people up with questions. So we go on this five-hour walk, which Sam did not like. People don't know that you're like a goddamn billy goat. Okay? Like it's just you walk way too fast. You don't go around obstacles. you just go straight over them. That's why I call you a Billy goat because they do that in real life. Like, you know, if you're out in nature and usually people, there's a mountain here.

1:34:15Like, I'll follow the trail around it. It's like, no, Billy goats just go straight over and up. And like, that's like walking around with you. And so we're in Columbia, Missouri of all places. We go on this like five hour walk. And essentially it's a five hour private and that's like the best episode, except you're interviewing both of us. And you would ask the other person questions about the other person. It was like really, actually was like really impactful and important for me to understand myself. Because again, like somebody you trust and you know has your best interest in heart and is not trying to criticize you just for criticism.

1:34:46I think a lot of people are hypersensitive to criticism. And if it's like some random stranger, okay, that makes sense. But you know that person cares about you. You know that person wants the best for you and they're telling this about you. You should, even if you don't agree, you should think about it for a little bit. And I've thought a lot about what he said over the years. And I definitely agree. Like he was right. So I don't know how this got turned on you, but that's when he said you're code red. No. Red on the color wheel. There you go. Yeah. What does that mean? Well, first, just a thought on Sam, which is it's hard to imagine a higher compliment I could pay someone than the role that Sam plays in my life.

1:35:28The way I would phrase it maybe is I have more conversations with Sam when he's not there than when he is. What I mean by that is I'm often finding myself wondering in a situation, like, what would Sam think about what I'm going to do here? I so value his character and judgment and fidelity and just so many things about him. But, like, what a role to play in somebody's life. Like, he's the one I invoke in my head. one of three or four people that I invoke in my head of like, what would this person think about, you know, this thing I'm about to decide on. But back to the story. So he said, yeah, it was something like, what's my biggest weakness?

1:36:12And he described me as being red on the color wheel, which he explained meant that when I'm interested in something, I am intense, like, and I've always been this way. I am voracious and intense and aggressive. And I would say I have a skill at making things happen when I'm interested in them happening. And maybe that's one side of the sword. The other side of being red on the color wheel is this locked in intensity. The other side of it is that the moment that attention is focused elsewhere, I can tend to whiplash around a lot and change my opinion really fast. This is known lovingly amongst your friends as your Eye of Sauron.

1:36:58Okay. Where like, if Patrick is focused on you, he will, like, he will make shit happen. But if it's elsewhere, you're not, I've had to fly, literally, to Greenwich. Like, dude, get back, I think we need to focus on this. I had to get in your, because you're, in some cases, this is like a physical presence thing. Yeah, yeah. It's not just like, I can get you on the phone, but I was like, no, no, this is not good enough. So that's the strength. Your strength can be your weakness. You know, it's interesting. I learned something about myself recently, which I at first was terrified about. And now I've come to a view as everything is double-edged, you know, which is I have, if you close your eyes and try to visualize something, a red cardinal or something, there's a degree of how visually sharp that thing looks in your mind's eye when you close your eyes.

1:37:44For me, it's just black. I can't visualize anything. I can't see anything. I'm like, wait, I discovered this like a year ago. I'm like, wait a minute. You can see things with your eyes closed? Like, what do you remember talking about? We were at Brad Jacobs' house having breakfast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was very disturbed by this. And he tried to fix it. Yeah, I know. Yeah, he tried to, he put me through a guided, like, he tried to hypnotize me into visualizing something. It didn't work. So, anyway, the other side of that sword, it freaked me out that I couldn't see anything with my eyes closed.

1:38:12But the other side of that sword is, like, when I'm focused on something, like, here right now, I am not thinking about other stuff. Like it's just all of this. I wish it wasn't the eye of Sauron. That sounds so bad. It's said in a loving way. I understand. So Sam's point was you're red on the color wheel and when your attention shifts, it can be whiplashy for those around you. What was the example he gave though? It's too good of a story not to tell. The example he gave was that Sam at the time was raising his first fund. and I was going to be an investor in the fund. And so he called me and said, you know, putting this fund together, it's small, limited group of people.

1:38:59I'd love to have you if you want to do it. Hell yeah, I want to do it, of course. And told him the amount or whatever. And then he called me back like a month later and was like, okay, like I have the docs already and, you know, we're ready to go. And you're still in for this much? And I said something like, well, I can't. Yes, I'm still in, but I can't do that much because actually, like, I have also launched a fund. And he was like, what? And I said, yeah, you know, I need to make a GP commit to my own fund. And so, I'm, you know, this is before I sold my business. It's a little bit, you know, tighter situation.

1:39:37And I have to reduce the amount. And he started to tease me because he was like, wait, so when I first called you a month ago, So you had never even thought about having a fund. You have never heard you talk about that. I don't think you'd ever thought about it. And now a month later, like you already have a fund, like a month later, like it's raised and done. And I think that's a good example of like, yeah, some opportunity came out of left field. There was this investment opportunity in one company that led to a fund very quickly in the summer of 2020. And so, yes, I like to move really, really fast when I'm interested in something.

1:40:13but my interest does shift around. And I don't think this is a good thing, by the way. Like I don't want to whiplash people. And I realized, thanks to Sam, that I was whiplashing people. I would be so excited and willing and able to galvanize people around an idea. And then I would change my, and this still happens, but I would change my mind and completely forget about the idea. Back to like people that have this lack of visualization thing also have quite bad event memory. I don't ever think about stuff in the past, like ever. And so not only can I change my idea, but I literally never think about that thing again that I was so passionate about in the moment for a short period of time.

1:40:52And that is jarring for people that are signed on to do a thing. And then a week later, you're like, what are you talking about? What thing? We're doing this thing. And so I've worked pretty hard to narrow the simplify my life with rhythm and harmony, focus on fewer things, like get less distracted by what I would call like the flavor of the month club, which is something that can definitely snare me for sure. Yeah. Now that you say that, I haven't had any like eye of sorrow moments with you in quite a while. You've kind of fixed that. As your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk.

1:41:29Learn more at vanta.com slash invest. Ridgeline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just a software vendor. They've helped firms firms 5x in scale, enabling faster growth, smarter operations, and a competitive edge. Visit ridgelineapps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm. I heard Ari Emanuel on your podcast say something that was like actually pretty smart, where he's like, his idea of like when, especially when he's trying to do a deal, he like over communicates. And I think a lot of that is like the problems, like I didn't understand that about you because I had never worked with you before.

1:41:59And then I was like, I don't get it. Like what, what's going on here? And then other people that knew you explained that. And I'm like, oh, like, I'm like having an issue and we've never even had an argument or a fight. I mean, one thing that I love about it is like we worked together for years and we had like a, we never had paper anything. We never had a contract. We just said, hey, this is what the agreement is. We shook hands and like we did what we were supposed to do up until the very, like, it was just like exactly how I want to. I don't want to deal with people where there's like, have to deal with people where there's like a bunch of contracts.

1:42:27I want to know it's like you gave me your word, I gave you mine. And then like this is what we're going to do and we'll like figure it out. but the i think what was happening there is like there's all this like unsaid stuff that you think we are looking at on the same way and yet if we just said oh wait like this is something about this thing and this is something about that thing and like just essentially just over communicate as much as possible with the people that are important to you because then you're not gonna have there's no unspoken assumption you know and then if you let it sit there too long then you have another unspoken assumption on top of that one then things can get like really really weird i think a lot about leadership because ultimately my main job is to back people with LP dollars, lots of them, that have been entrusted to me as a fiduciary into companies led by these people that we're backing that are usually pretty early in their company building journey.

1:43:18So you're mostly or largely backing the person in the team versus the mature business story. And pretty important that that person's a good leader. And I think one of the things I underestimated about great leaders that Ravi Gupta is another person that I would list, you know, and people that have really impacted me. At one point I called like everyone I knew. I was like, define good leader. Just I'm going to do a survey. And Ravi gave my favorite answer. He was like, it's not hard. Like a great leader is someone that other people want to follow. That's it. And everyone else had given much more ornate definitions and i i robbie's was my favorite and what i've learned about what is shared in common amongst people that others want to follow um one of the big ones is that they are hyper communicative with those people and they're consistent and uh they lead from the front they you know they they take risk they take arrows for the team they communicate like crazy with the team if Something's changing.

1:44:22They over-communicate it. They're honest. All these things add up to someone that people want to follow. And I think I was quite bad on that dimension for a long time. Not because I was trying to be bad, just because I was so excitable. I am so excitable. When I find something new and interesting, I just cannot get enough. But very often, that means I'm billy-goating up ahead of the pack. and forgetting like, oh, wait, I need to like, there's all these people that I want to do this with. I don't want to just do this alone. So that's been a big lesson for me that has taken a while to learn. But yet another thing to credit Sam with.

1:45:05Some of the best leaders, like when you see in like company buildings, like history, spiritual, spiritual, like really think of them as like they're teachers and then they understand they need to repeat, repeat, repeat. I would say repetition is persuasive. You gave me a great Catholic saying where it's like, repetition doesn't spoil the prayer. So I think of Jim Senegal, the founder of Costco. He has this great line in the book, this biography of his mentor and this guy named Sol Price, who basically influenced—he's like the most influential retailer of all time. Jim Senegal was mentored by him.

1:45:35Sam Walton took more ideas from him than anybody. Bernie Marcus got the idea for doing Home Depot from Sol Price. Jeff Bezos took ideas from Sol Price. It's just incredible how influential this guy was, and most people don't know who he is. And in that book, he says that if you're not spending 90 % of your time teaching, you're not doing your job as the leader of the company. And what he is, it means like teaching what our philosophy is, what is our purpose, what we do, how we do it, why we're doing it. And you just repeat it over and over again. I just did this episode called How Elon Works, which is, I think, the most downloaded episode of Founders ever.

1:46:07Like, it's just nuts. And what I was shocked is even you don't think of Elon as like a—he's definitely a singular character. There's nobody else like him that I've found living or dead. There's usually some kind of historical equivalent of anybody. I haven't found a historical equivalent of him. And you would think, oh, he's working on like seven different companies at a time. He can't possibly be like this. And he was mentioning like that algorithm, that four-part algorithm he had that he uses in all his companies. He's like, I say it so much. I repeat it so much that you'll be in a meeting and my executives will be mouthing the words along with me.

1:46:36They know what I'm about to say. And I think that has to do with like over communication. It's like we are going to be on the same page. I'm not worried that you hear this for the 10th time. I'm worried that you're not understanding where we're going or how we're going to do it. And so I think about that like a ton, like repeat, repeat, repeat. Yeah, the joy of that sort of thing and that sort of leader, my favorite, you have all these great maxims. My favorite maxim, pretty much the only one we use in my business with my team, is the reward for great work is more work. And I find that saying that maximum to the right person, like the kind of person I want to spend time with, their eyes go wide and they understand it immediately.

1:47:16That the reward for great work is not money, power, fame. It is the privilege to get to do more of this thing that I love doing. The problem with coming up with good terms for this stuff, we use this term life's work, is that immediately everyone else starts saying it and it ceases to have any meaning. Because now every goddamn meeting I'm in, I'm doing my life's work. and my experience is that almost nobody is doing their life's work. Even a lot of great founders, I would say it's not their life's work. I love the fact that Thomas Jefferson on his tombstone has three things that describe his life, but one of them is not that he was the president of the United States.

1:47:52He was author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia, not president. And I think that's so interesting. And so I think a lot about like, is this thing this person is doing going to be on their tombstone? And usually the answer is no. And the reason I like this concept of life's work so much, which I would define as a lifelong quest to build something for others that expresses who you are, all three parts are really important. Say that one more time. A lifelong quest to build something for others that expresses who you are. And we have trained ourselves to see this in people.

1:48:27By the way, the best way to figure this out, my favorite question for founders is literally just take me, give me two hours. Tell me your whole life story up until the point you founded your company. We'll talk about your company later. Like, just tell me what got you to here. Back to best story wins, originality, hardship, transformation. In the business context, it's I want someone that's lived a very unique path. I find success in startups is the result of path dependency very often. Some unique set of lessons and experience led to you being the right person to do this thing. And then hardship, of course, you know, the harder the business is to build, the harder it will be to copy.

1:49:02You know, I think that's really important. Transformations about the customer. You know, if you build something crazy hard, the customer's life will get way better service. So I think this powerful concept of life's work can be applied to ourselves to make great investments. And it's really rare. But the leadership qualities of life, like the reward for great work is more work. The reason I started talking about life's work and investing. Is these people come to realize you will not be rewarded with great work if you do not become a good leader. And a common pitfall that I certainly have fallen in before is when there's someone really talented, they can do a lot themselves.

1:49:41They can get a lot done themselves. And I refer to this as like heroics. And that's always necessary. A founder always has the sort of is the flame keeper of the spirit of the company. and I think founder-led companies are so much, of course, so much more interesting, preaching to the choir here, than professionally managed companies for the most part. But I do think that, like, becoming a great leader becomes the most important way to secure more right to do great work. Is there anybody that you admire that was doing great work and then stopped, whether they sold their company, they retired, whatever the case is.

1:50:22Is there anybody that you know that you admire personally that stopped? There's tons of people I admire who change what they do a lot or have changed what they do a lot, who stopped one thing and went to another thing. But they're doing something. Yeah. I don't...

1:50:42I'm just wired this way. You are too. I just need to be doing something. I can't sit around. And so I'm drawn to people that want to make stuff. And so I have tons of examples of people who have tried lots of things and made lots of things and moved on from things and had chapters in their life and then a new chapter with doing something totally different. There's one investor that comes to mind whose name is John Pfeffer. And John has been wildly successful. and like the, it's almost like he picks whatever he's doing and as it gets to the tail end of it, he tries to find like the thing in the world that is the most different from what he's doing.

1:51:23He says with glee that require him completely abandon his current network because they're irrelevant for it. Like one time he went from being one of the key guys at KKR and then went to be like one of the most important guys in cryptocurrency. And then went from that to building like a grocery store chain in the UK. And each time he's like, I literally had to start from scratch and I love it. Like I had to build a completely new network of people. And so I know lots of people like John who have successfully hopped around. You know, I know your focus is more on people that do a thing for a really, really long time.

1:51:57But I don't spend a lot of time with people that were prolific creators of things that just stopped. I think they're like the saddest people. like you're in it's this infinite game and there's some set of circumstances that cause you to like make that decision and here's an example I love there's this really fun game you can do it with your friends you sit down and on piece of paper you write down ten roles that you play in the world podcaster father whatever friend and and then you tear them up So it's just one thing on each sheet of paper. And then you have to, in reverse order, 10 down to one, slowly throw the rolls away until you're left with one.

1:52:47Okay, so one roll left. It's a really interesting game. It's interesting for yourself, but also super interesting to see what your friends pick. First of all, what's on the list of 10? You can do this with attributes for yourself, too. Curious, hardworking, whatever. And then jettison those one by one. Fun game. I played this with my wife and my kids and my in-laws one time. And I'll never forget it. My father-in-law had a very, very successful career as an entrepreneur and executive in the kind of healthcare and insurance world. And we were doing this game. And his last one was grandfather. So that was like the role that he kept as his final, most important one.

1:53:35And he is an unbelievable grand, like the Michael Jordan of grandfathers. Like he is unbelievably good at being a grandfather. It's like, makes me emotional thinking about it and so thankful for it. And the difference it makes in my kid's life and his other grandkids' life is extraordinary. And so Dan, this is his name, Dan is no longer a major healthcare executive. He's still an entrepreneur. He's not giving it up completely, but he definitely devotes himself more to something like that, which in some sense is much smaller and in other senses the biggest possible thing you could do. And so even the people that sort of like stop the commercial side that I love tend to find a thing to pour themselves into.

1:54:19And in this case, it's the same thing we've been talking about this whole time. It's an active service to show up at everything, to be the most reliable, to be the most fun, just over and over and over again. in this case, in the role of grandfather. So I think that's exciting for my own life that maybe when I'm 70, I won't do any of this stuff and I'll do something else that's totally different. But my attitude towards it hopefully will be the same. And that will be because I've gotten the privilege of watching people like him do that sort of role at that stage of their life. So back to your original question, the people I love and admire most do pour themselves into what they're doing regardless of what that role is even as that role shifts around as life goes on you gave me this term that we describe people that we don't want to spend time with that now i think i just use and i make that i came up with it and it's casual it's like you know do you want to go to dinner with this person or do you want to meet this person and like shorthand between me and you we're always like no they're casual like they're just not it's the exact opposite that's a beautiful story like i i went from like i pity these people that don't work anymore to like that person's better than I am.

1:55:30That guy's a better person than I am. I mean, honestly? There's something very beautiful about the scope of the ambition shrinking so narrow. So we talk a lot about, you know, the trillion dollar coach. What's his first name? Bill Campbell. Bill Campbell. I never met Bill Campbell. I wish I had. It's this beautiful archetype of older guy from just working with a couple executives. And he worked with Google and some of the most famous companies, but was apparently like transformative in the lives of these people. But it was like five people or three people or whatever small set of people. And that's it.

1:56:08and he wasn't doing it for money or fame or power or any of this stuff. He was just doing it to help these couple people. I think that's a really cool exercise to be like, what if the only thing I was allowed to do in my life, nothing else was allowed, was help three people. Who would they be and what would I do for them? Dan helping his four grandkids or something like that. That makes me excited for later stages of life when I think the ability to do something like that goes up. and that is every bit as successful in my mind and in my book as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or, you know, pick the people that we all worship in the business world.

1:56:49I'm amazed by them too, but there are flavors of success. And to me, that sort of devotion, even if it's to one person, to your wife, to your kids, whatever, is every bit as successful and if not more so, because that shit will ripple through history. My son and my daughter will now behave differently because of the experience that Dan and my mother-in-law and my dad and my mom gave to my kids. So what's better than that? It is so unusual for us to even contemplate that like some of the decisions you're making right now are going to ripple through the generations. They're going to affect things way after that you're gone.

1:57:32somebody we talked about this uh i think yesterday somebody took a bunch of like interviews i've done stuff i've said on the podcast and like literally made like a hip-hop album and there's like eight track hip-hop album i think it's called like david center of founders or something like that and i we keep talking about it but i sent it sent it to hinky uh because the first one was like this idea of like general generational inflection point yeah generational inflection point which is like the founder of the family and you know hinky's rather religious in a way that maybe i'm not and you know he's like he's like did you script this i was like no i didn't he's like did you know about this like no like somebody just sent it to me like i didn't you think i'm making music about myself like go on here that's i wouldn't put it past you

1:58:16and so i was like no and uh you know he's like yeah i listened to a bunch of them but like that that first song he's like that's obviously like a that's a sign from god you should consider a sign from god i'm like what what is this and we're on the phone i was like what are you talking about The reason that came to mind is because in that song, I guess I talked about, I think it was on your show, where I was just like, you know, this choice by this man I don't remember and I never met. I met him, but I don't remember him, which is my grandfather who was 30 years old, living in Cuba, no education, doesn't speak English, doesn't have money, has two jobs, works in a shoe factory and is a butcher.

1:58:48Somehow I realized, oh, Fidel Castro, this is probably bad. I have to go to a country that, like, I don't know anybody. Yeah, I don't speak the language. And, like, that's just one choice, you know. three decades later or whatever, I'm going to be born. And now I'm born in a, you know, a capitalistic greatest country of my life and greatest country in the world. As opposed to that, like that one decision by somebody I don't remember, like ripples through the entire generations. I think it's a very interesting thing to contemplate when you were trying to make your decisions. The last thing on his list was grandfather.

1:59:17What was the last thing of yours? The story was so overwhelming. I honestly don't remember. It was probably husband or father, one of those two. To me, those are the most interesting roles in life. You know, you and I have talked, you know how I feel about those two things. And so it's probably one of those two where I probably cheated and said, can I have both? And I hope it's, you know, I hope it's that till it's grandfather, I guess. But the available, we said, I said something like this earlier, but the depths available in those relationships are crazy to me. I can't believe that every couple of years, I find a new level of those things.

2:00:03I just can't believe, every time it happens, I'm like, I can't believe it's happening again. And in terms of like a place that can yield rewards, those are the most interesting to me. But more generally, like the, maybe this is the theme of our conversation today, that the the set of small set of relationships with people for whom I would do anything. And that's how I'm wired. Like there's a certain category of person. You're one of them. Whatever you need, you don't need to explain it. Like I'll do it. And getting to that point with people, I don't think life's too short and, you know, there's only so much energy in a day.

2:00:46And so you can't do this for a thousand people, but you can do it for 10 or 15, you know, follow Dunbar's number or something. You could probably do it for 15. And that is my prized possession. That list of people for whom I would do anything is my prized possession. And I think that that can probably be true for just about anybody. And so I try, hope, to act in a certain way to deserve that group of people. And even if they don't feel the same way about me, that's okay. If I'm in their list of 50 and not 50, it's fine. yeah I think I think that that role game is quite fun because it I think it pulls out of you like where you have the most energy I think this exactly what like we talked about today is like why I'm so obsessed with having conversations with you know people I find interesting obviously people I have like deep relationships with because like this is why I'm gonna keep holding on to this idea that I'm not interviewing people I'm having conversations because we talk all the time I had no idea where this conversation was going And it went in places like I learned stuff about you that I did not know.

2:01:50And so I really appreciate you saying yes to me and coming kicking and screaming on. I want to end by turning it around on you. What is the kindest thing someone's ever done for you? One is they're related. So I'll tell them in order. The first was I had a cousin. I come from an Irish Catholic family where when you go to the family reunion, you get a sheet that looks like one of those maps from the 90s where you just have to keep unfolding it because there's just so goddamn many people. And so I have cousins who are technically my third or fourth cousins that feel in my family more like a first cousin.

2:02:32One of my third cousins was a guy named Tim O'Shaughnessy. And when I was a bad student in high school, I was a very good student as a young kid. I went to this giant high school in Connecticut, like 4 ,000 students. And I just partied way too hard and didn't get good grades and didn't take it seriously. And so there was a day, I remember it very distinctly. I was at a friend's house, having stayed up too late the night before. And my dad called me and said, hey, you know, you should probably come home. There's a whole bunch of very small envelopes here from colleges. So I actually got rejected from every college I applied to the first time I applied to colleges.

2:03:18And I got all the rejection letters on the same day, the bad day. So then I reapplied to some other schools. I had wanted to go to the University of Notre Dame. And I called them and I said, where are some schools that have a compatible curriculum with yours? Because I would really love to work hard and then transfer. So they gave me a list. I went to one of those schools. I got very good grades. I transferred to Notre Dame. So now I'm a sophomore at Notre Dame. And I didn't know anybody. I met they do. It's not like freshman year where you have all this amazing orientation. You transfer students.

2:03:50They're like, here's your room number. Like, see you later. So I met like the couple other transfer students and that was it. And back to being shy, like I wasn't at the time good at like navigating a new social situation. I just, I wasn't good at it. So Tim, who I had met, like maybe well i didn't know tim well you know tim was from the midwest um i didn't know him that well growing up he uh took it upon himself to come meet me find me he i remember distinctly he brought me a fake id uh he he went so out of his way for like the first six months to like organ transplant me into his social circle and like maybe tim owed me a beer or two you know a couple nights out and a beer was his obligation as a family member.

2:04:37But instead, he would like call ahead to his friends saying like, I'm sick. I can't go out, but Patrick's coming out. Can you just like show him a good time? Just like over and over and over again. Like literally, he just injected me into this community. Tim is the reason that I met my wife, which I'm going to come back to in a second. Met my best man, met the only other groomsman in my wedding that wasn't a family member. So, you know, through this act of over-the-top kindness of just, there was nothing And for him, he was just doing the right thing. It sort of set me up for the rest of my life, which brings me to the second thing.

2:05:08So my first night at Notre Dame, Kim shows up with this fake ID that says I'm five foot four with blonde hair and blue eyes. And we go to a place called Boat Club, which let me in with this fake ID and was shut down for letting people in with this sort of fake ID like three weeks later, permanently. May I rest in peace. And I walked into Boat Club, and the story of meeting Lauren, my wife, was that was my first night in Notre Dame, the first bar I walked into, and she was the first girl that I talked to. And that is a crazy stroke of divine luck or something. But it was lucky because I was 19 when I met her.

2:05:49She was 20. And, you know, we've been together and married and have kids ever since. and the true answer to kindness is her because for 20 years now we just crossed the point of our lives where I've been with her more than I haven't in my life which is so crazy I'm not I'm not young anymore I'm 40 but not old and to have been with her for more than half my life and to have grown up as an adult whatever they say your prefrontal cortex like matures when you're 25 or something so like six years with her where i didn't even have a fully developed brain um it's by far the number one blessing is that she uh yeah we created this we have created this life together in a way that i i i mean the thousand things that's 10 000 things that she's done that add up to that 20 years is like the very clear true answer um tim tragically died very young which was awful.

2:06:49But I think about him all the time because without him, none of this would have happened and this life wouldn't exist. And so I love this story because, and I love this question, because whole lives are downstream of simple, quick acts of kindness. And without Tim, my life doesn't look anything like what it looks like today. All the things I care the most about don't exist probably. And so I remind myself of that every day, which is why I love asking this question. That was awesome. Now everybody else gets to see what I get to see in private. And this is why you should do more podcasts. Thanks, Patrick.

2:07:26Thanks, buddy. If you enjoyed this episode, visit Colossus.com. You'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus, our quarterly print, digital, and private audio publication featuring in-depth profiles of the founders, investors, and companies that we admire most. Learn more at colossus.com slash subscribe.

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