#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders

23:05And uh, I actually have an interesting tangent. I think you, you, you might, um, enjoy. I read a book, um, so I'm obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I love Arnold. And you know, his, his, his autobiography that he wrote when he was 70, called Total Recalls. Excellent, right? But what's even better is he wrote a autobiography and he was 30 that is not that people don't think of us as an autobiography. It's called the education of a bodybuilder, right? The first 110 pages of that book is Arnold telling his life story of a 30 and then calling a shot saying, hey, the same principles I just did to give you the best body builder, I'm going to get into movies, I'm going to build a business empire.

23:37He literally calls a shot. And so I read everything and get my hands on, I watch everything when Arnold. And so I thought I read every book about Arnold. Then I'm watching that Netflix documentary on him that came out and they keep interviewing this, his girlfriend that he Arnold lived with before he was famous from 21 to 26. And she goes, and it's like, all of the are of Arnold and me. I'm like, what? I was like, I ordered the book immediately. And then I read the book. and it's 300 pages of this woman, bless her heart, right? I could have helped her in a minute. Her saying, I don't understand why this outlier of an outlier of an outlier won't just be a normal guy.

24:14And so the main takeaway from that book was, especially for entrepreneurs, especially for driven people, and people like Chris as well. And I can give you multiple examples in the books as well, like the Founder Four Seasons. It's also it's like for entrepreneurs you either need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all Because like there is no separation from our work and our lives and it's not gonna work if like you're completely obsessed The reason me and you get along the reason I love hanging out with you We've spent nine hours talking about podcasting about me like because you're a fellow obsessive and I was like That's why flew here.

24:47I was like there's no way I'm recording remotely I'm coming to like give you a hug and just sit down with you, but You can't like you imagine your wife, you know your future wife saying and Chris don't work so hard on the podcast. Like, oh, it doesn't matter. Like, that doesn't have to be shot, you know, with a camera that's gonna break spotifies video player. Like calm down. Like, you don't need to redo the barn. It's just Matthew McConaughey. Like, why does this stuff matter? It's not gonna work. You either need a spouse or a supportive spouse. And I've seen, this is where I see so many entrepreneurs like fight against this, where their spouse makes them feel guilty.

25:19They're attracted to them because they're so driven and obsessed, right? Which is abnormal for the human population. and you deal with a lot of young men. A lot of young men, they need to get offline and increase their level of ambition and service to the world, stop thinking about themselves, start thinking about other people. And so you're attracted to this person because they're so driven, then you marry them to say, hey, I love what you are. Now, be something really nice. Please stop. That thing that made me so attracted to you, it's actually kind of getting in the way of the comfort that I want to get.

25:48Yeah, so true. I mean, Holmosey's got something where he says,

25:55The cheerleader should not be telling the quarterback to get off the field when it's in the final play of the game. And, you know, that can switch. I'm sure this time when you need to step up and be the cheerleader for your wife, not in the podcasting world, but in all sorts of other stuff. And you're like, hey, there you go. Stadium floor, crack on. I'm here to support you. I think what Hormosi did too, that's smart, that I've seen a few times, because you are going to, you know, these people are obsessed. They're not going to write biographies about normal people. It's not like, hey, this guy had a 9 to 5 and you just play the piss and you know off.

26:32Yeah, pickleball on the weekends, any barbecue, no one's going to read that book. So by default, you're self -selecting into these very extreme people. And my entire life, as I've spent any time with my family, is talking to entrepreneurs and hang out with founders. like I don't have any friends that aren't founders. And like one thing that you see this conflict between like how do I balance work in the family? And I think what Hormozzi is, like he combined, he combined, you know, work with Laila. Actually got that idea from two people from S .A. Lauder and Sam Walton, like S .A. Lauder is one of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live that no one ever, like thinks about.

27:09They know the company's name after her, you know, it's probably $20 billion on a market cap, whatever it is today. But they don't, there's a very hard to find autobiography about S .A. Lara, where she was still alive, published I think in the 80s. It's one of my favorite books I ever read. You can get a copy, you can read in a weekend. And there was a huge conflict between, she's a monster. She is a one of the most driven entrepreneurs ever. And she's like, but I want to also spend time with my sons and my husband. So what I do, she brings them into the business with them. So her husband trusts on his business because her business is a lot more, but it has a lot more potential.

27:41He works in there and then they involve the kids since they were like six. Greg McEwan, author of Essentialism was on the speaking circuits 10th year anniversary of Essentialism next month and he's done speaking for forever and he didn't want to miss his kids but he also wanted to build a life that his kids would be able to benefit from so he's sort of caught between a rock and a hard place because being away from his kids is the very thing and facilitates the life he wants to give them. So he just put in a request part of his rider was a second ticket, business class, and a second total room.

28:10And he took one of his kids with him every time that he did a talk. So his kids got to travel the world with him. Can I tell you a funny writer? So I do a lot of, well, now I do less of them. But for the right people, I'll do a lot of speaking case for private companies. And usually private companies are investment firms. And so I was out one, there was two speakers, me and Tucker Carlson. And so the CEO of the company that will not be named, And I was asking him, because I was like, there's no way, I probably charged way too less for it, like not enough money for this. So it's like, how much did you pay Tucker?

28:44And because he's a fan of the podcast, I knew I could talk to him like, you know, a friend. And he goes, well, his writer's a little different than yours. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, he insists that we fly him in and out on our private jet. And I was like, I didn't even know I could do that. Okay. Number three, there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. History's greatest entrepreneurs all learned from history's greatest entrepreneurs. So that is a direct quote from poor Charlie's Omnick. And it is literally true. In that case, there's this guy named Henry Singleton that I didn't know, I guess I should back up and talk about part of my process, which I think is helpful outside of just making a podcast.

29:25I really believe like anybody you admire, whatever field, it could be a director, it could be an entrepreneur, it could be an athlete, read, find a book about them and read about their life. Like I am an evangelist for reading biographies. I think it's one of the highest value activities that you could have. Outside spending time with your health, with your friends and family, I really think people should make it happen. And so what I do is like, I think Charlie Munger's the wisest person I've ever come across. He's like a hero of mine. I got a chance to meet him. I got to go to his house. It was incredible.

29:53But what I'll do is I'll read every single book I can find about somebody I admire. And then I usually find other books about them by going through the bibliography and like books are made out of books. So you, anybody usually has one body. Be aggressive people referring to the people. Yes. And then not only, so that's not only how you find books to, like a hard to find books or books that other people are reading, but inevitably, in that book, they all studied history, history is just, how much for there's all study to history is just not first. So they will talk about the people that influence them.

30:24And so I'm doing this going through the same process that just described to you for Munger and Buffet. And they keep bringing up this guy named Henry Singleton. I was like, who the hell is Henry Singleton? I've never heard of Henry Singleton. And they say wild stuff. Like Henry Singleton is the smart, Charlie Margaret says, Henry Singleton is the single smartest person I've ever met. That Singleton is smarter than Buffett. Buffett says that it's a crime that business schools don't study him. And then if he took the top 100 business school students and compared their record for Singleton, he'd blow him out of the water.

30:53I'm like, I have to read about this guy. So then you start, there's this book called The Outsiders and I pick it up. I start reading about it. I'm like, oh my God. The ideas that I thought were buffeted mongers were singleton. They just applied it to building birchshire. And then you go inside then what I do, I go and read everything about singleton. And then singleton says, hey, there's this book that changed the trajectory of he built this conglomerate called teledine. And he goes, there's a book that changed the trajectory of teledine. I was reading Alfred Sloan, the CEO of GM's book. And he says, if as you're building a business, you need access to financial institutions.

31:27So I went on body there, a bank or an insurance company, I forgot which one he did. He's like, and that solved like that, that, that may, that helped tell an I not only did use the money to invest and keep buying more companies to increase his glomerate, but literally they made billions of dollars from an idea that was in a $30 history book. And you see it's over and over again. And that's another thing where it's, when I say like, all of history is great, such when you study all of his study history is great, such when there's, there's really important that you're not, what they're doing is they're not trying to copy the what, They're trying to copy the how.

31:55They're not trying to build another teletide. They're building their version of their business, what they were interested in. And the greatest example of this is you go back and all the great entrepreneurs can place their work in historical context. So when Steve Jobs is developing the Macintosh, he goes and studies, what did Alexander Graham Bell? How did he market the telephone? Because I feel I just made the telephone of my generation. And so they're like, oh, there's ideas around marketing this other invention a hundred years before I'm my invention that still worked to this day. And so that's what I mean.

32:27It's like, oh, these ideas, there's, there's ideas with Williams, a $30 Hushbook. What about that line between SpaceX and NASA? Oh, so this is nuts. So this is, this was in that book, Lift Off, which is really, again, I highly recommend that book, because you can, again, read in a weekend. Some of these books, you know, I don't read, people are like, oh, you must read fast. No, I read pretty damn slow because I'm taking notes. I'm like doing arts and crafts over here. I got scissors, a ruler, a pen. I got posted notes. It takes a long time, but you can read that book in a weekend. What they realize is, hey, NASA has, because it's a government run agency, they documented all of their experiments, all of their hypothesis, everything in papers.

33:10You can just download them and read them. Nobody read them. They wind up at the end of the day, they say they cribbed NASA's notes and they got a a couple billion dollars of value from ideas and early days to SpaceX. And then you could also do that. There's another line in the book that Elon talks about where this reporter goes, he's flying on Elon's jet after a failed, I think it's like the second failed rocket. And Elon's brother's on the jet and he's like watching TV or playing video games and Elon's in the corner reading biographies of all the rocket engineers. Because again, he's like, I wanna know what they know so I can one take the good ideas and avoid the bad ones.

33:49And so this just happens over and over and over again. Relationships run the world. Trusted personal networks, maybe the most valuable asset in the world. Okay, so this might be the most important idea that I've actually internalized and seen play out in the last year of my life. I'm going to go to... I had the ability to meet Charlie McGregor's met. and went to his house, had dinner with them. The night started out in his library, which is really cool for me because, you know, I love reading and I got to see, I got to see not only like what was in his library, but I also got to see like, I could read a biography used to rest my life and like I'll never have what he has.

34:32And what I mean by that is, he's sitting in front of his bookshelf, right? And I get there and first of all, he's like my hero when I mean that. So, first of all, I'm sitting there and, you know, I'm there with two other of my entrepreneur friends, and you just start having conversation. They had met him before, and I'm in shock. I'm just staring at him because I'm like, that's Charlie Munger. Like, I watch all the AGM videos, like, that's, I said, watch his speech, he's like, that's him, he's just sitting there. And you know he's looking at you because his eyes were really degenerated, so like, he has like the bifocals, but it's not just like he looks at you like this, he'll look, and I'm going like this, because he's got to look through the bottom.

35:09And he's making eye contact with me and I'm looking and for 10 minutes I was just like frozen and then my friend Andrew was like hey like get in here. So I'm asking You're gonna waste this and so what I do is I don't know what to say like I had all these notes. I had made All these things on my Apple notes on my phone never looked at my phone once in three hours And so immediately I just start looking at his shelf behind them and I started noticing all the books because again I find people I admire and then if they say hey, I like this book I go and read it So I start asking questions about all these books.

35:40And what I mean that I'll never have what he has. I have to reread stuff. I have to study. I have to practice. Immediately, he asked me about a book. He has a rent 25 years. He could tell you what the company does, what their revenue was, who sold it. Who's partner is who sold it. He was a legit genius. Like, absolutely. I don't have whatever brain he has. And anybody in 99 is going to have some level card in the client, right? You have to sum up. Imagine him at 35. He would destroy me. He would just like, 55. Any of that, he would destroy me. So, the relationship around the world is one of the lessons that he taught us, because you know, he knew he was not going to lift up.

36:13He knew he didn't have that much longer. And so he prioritized meeting with other young, ambitious, like entrepreneur kind of people. And his whole thing was, we talked a lot about Ben Franklin because he's got a bust. He commissions busts of people he'd hired. So he's Lee Kwan -Yu and Ben Franklin. And he's got every biography I've ever seen in Ben Franklin. And his whole thing, he's like one of the things I learned from Ben Franklin is is that no matter your age, go out and seek talented people. If they're peer group, that's fine, but if they're younger and build a relationship with them. He talked about how Ben Franklin did that, a young George Washington.

36:43Ben Franklin's like 48 years old, when he called DMs about the day. Slides in. George Washington was 21, right? And they build a relationship and they have a relationship their whole life. But, and then he was describing that. I was like, that sounds like what you did. He's like, that's exactly what I did. He's like, I met Buffett. I was 35, Buffett was 28. and we built a seamless web of deserved trust. He goes, everybody knows about us, but there was all these other guys around us that were similar age and similar interests. And we just did deals forever. And most of them had passed on, but by the time I got to meet Munger.

37:19But relationships from the world, what you realize is every, we think of like an organization. Like let's say we need, there's something, there's certain organizations that are important in podcasting. like Spotify being the most important one. So we think of Spotify as an organization, but is it an organization? Inside an organization, there's people. And there's people that me and you have, relationship with, like Daniel Eck, or people on the board are the head of podcasting. So if you need something done, right? Because of their personal relationship they have with you, it's a call, it's relationships run the world.

37:50And so there's another guy that I got to meet, who's one of my heroes, his name's Sam Zell. He also, he was 81 years old when I met him. He passed away, unfortunately, about six months after I got to have lunch with him. And in his autobiography, he mentions, St .Vizel's a legend, you know, one of the best entrepreneurs and investors, he sold the largest real estate company and in history for like $38 billion. Like the guy just, he felt asked backwards into deals and deals and money, he was just phenomenal. But I got to have a two hour lunch with him and he's sitting closer than you are to me and could ask him whatever I wanted.

38:22So I brought up the fact that I read, he knew I read his autobiography because the way I met him is he got into podcasts and he heard the podcast I did on his autobiography and he starts listening to a bunch and he goes, hey, can I meet this guy? And so I get a message like Sam's on, wants to meet you. I thought it was like fake. I was like, yeah, he just doesn't want to meet. This is ridiculous. So I go, Sam, I bought the book that you talked about that change, go back to, there's ideas where 30, I forgot about this. There's ideas with billions and 30 dollar Hershbuck. When Sam's, Sam's was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school.

38:54He was an entrepreneur for 61 years. One of the best I ever do it. And he picked up a book that changed his life when he was in law school. It's the autobiography of this guy named William's second orph. William's second orph is one of the greatest real estate developers to ever live. In that book, he has this idea he calls the Hawaiian technique, right? And it works in real estate and what, and it worked in real estate when Sam Zell used it, but he also realized it works in business, buying private businesses, where he says like there's components of a building that, you know, the land underneath, you can piece it apart.

39:23Like the land is valuable, it's highly, highly valuable to a certain party. You can sell it to the highest bidder there. And then maybe the lease is that somebody else prioritizes that. So break up the components of the business and sell it to the highest bidder. And some of the parts, that's how you make more money, right? And so Sam used that idea, made billions of dollars. He also used it in private business. But I tell Sam, I go Sam. I bought the second or second book. He's like, did you read it? And I go, not yet. And Sam and his huge famous friend is grabbly boy. She goes, we're rate it.

39:54I was like, okay, Sam Zell tells me to read the book. I have meaningly the book. In that book is where it crystallized for me that relationships from the world. The second dwarf, you know, very wealthy, wants a blues and ails money, but at the time very wealthy. And it wasn't born wealthy. So like very similar to Menu, where the background, right, we don't understand any of this stuff. So what he realizes as he climbs through society and he's in New York and he gets more successful and he meets more people and he gets richer, What do you go say? You're a normal dude, you know, how we grew up. You're at the base of the mountain.

40:24You might be able to see that peak, right? Well, what you don't see because you're not climbing the mountain is when you get closer to the peak, other peaks start into appear. And then, so these are all very influential, rich, very powerful people. And then what you realize is all these mountain peaks are actually connected by little pathways. And you don't have access to those pathways unless you climb the mountain. And he goes, and then if I need something from a Howard Hughes or a J. Prissier family, which is a multibillion dollar Chicago family, or the mayor of New York City because I'm a developer, well guess what?

40:56I'm on a peak too. There's a path right here. Relationships are on the world. And so the advice that they both gave me is like, you need to develop seamless webs up to deserve trust. Good. Just that there's an additional element in that which suggests you need to also be able to display value in some way. You need to be able to have, yes, you can build relationship with somebody, but the analogy of the peak suggests to me that you stand alone at top of mountain of your own. You have done a thing which enables you at unlocks that. I love that you said that. There's another maximum. So I try to break everything down to maximum.

41:32So everything I'm learning, right? Because I've done, let's see, you probably read, 380 biographies, over 100 ,000 pages, eight years, two months. But you can't remember all that stuff. I love when it evolved rather concept. I break things down to the maximum level. Then you're easy to remember. And then you could actually apply it to your situation as a pop -up. It's a zipped file. Because of the way that I learn as well, which is the same, essentializing, taking large concept into memorable mantra, maximum, aphorism, whatever it is, it can feel like quote -poining, which is fine. And I don't actually mind all that much, but that's the sticky thing that stays in the back of your mind.

42:10And if you're not going to be able to remember the entirety of a book, but you can remember, do less but better. That's the concept of essentialism. Do less but better. How awesome. That's really lovely. Do less but better. It's like from a German saying. You go, right, well, you can't use it if you can't remember it. Correct. Dave Ogbe has this line where he's like, why do you have to write interesting ads? And you do this phenomenally. I just saw the ad you just did yesterday. Thank you. You can't, because in his responses, you can't save souls in an empty church. So then you'll remember, I all remember, oh, I can't save souls in empty church.

42:42If no one reads this or no one, if I want to educate, so I have a, my life's goal is like very simple. I have one simple organization, organization principle, is I want to help people learn from history, history, search for winners, and I want to do that better than anybody else in the world. That's it. So then I can go, I remember that, that's my principle, and then I look at how I'm spending my time. Single -ordinating, single -direction. Yeah, I want to go back to what you said though. So my maximum on this is you need to make yourself easy to interface with. Okay? And I go back to how we were able to build a relationship.

43:09We're in an industry full of second rate products and second rate talent. And most people that go to podcasts, or podcasters don't want to work. They do, it's not their only thing they do. It's like one of 10. And what me and you saw in each other media is like, oh, this is another me. We may talk about different things. We have different formats. but it's another me. It's so much easier for me to, like I knew I was in your podcast, so I know exactly who you are. And then we can build a relationship with us. So easy to interface with, the person that did this the best, and he did it in three words, Steve Jobs, insanely great products.

43:44He said, you wanna come make insanely great products? Then you come to Apple. If you are passionate about doing this, then come work with me. If you're not interested in, then remove yourself from my life. And the key thing is where people make mistakes, when going back to relationships in front of the world. Okay? It's very important that you build a seamless web of your trust. I really do believe these high and personal networks are the greatest assets in the world. I'm not, that's not hyperbolic. I literally believe that. You have to make yourself easy to interface with, right? And what people make the mistake of is all these people, right?

44:14On these peaks that are connected to these paths. All day long, I call it Gimme Gimme. All day long, they wake up and somebody wants something from them. You know, give me money. Be my customer. Let me pick your brain. Like all this stuff, it's like, no, no. The way you build relationships is doing acts of service. I make myself, the way I'm able to build relationships with these kind of people is really simple. I make myself easy to interface with. Why? Because I can point to a body of work. Like, and one, I don't ask for anything. Never. I'd never ask for a favor. I don't want to pick your brain.

44:43I don't want any money from you. I don't want anything. I just want to give, give, give. And my active service is the podcast. It's like, hey, I spent eight years into months doing this. you know, hundreds of thousands of hours or whatever the time the time frame is and I condense it down until you know 400 hours that you can learn and hopefully be educated and entertained while you're doing other things while you're on your plane while you're walking your dog while you're washing dishes, whatever it is and I make myself easy to interface with. It's like, oh, it's a serious person. Well, you've had fucking 400 biographies of entrepreneurs.

45:10That seems a little odd. That seems like that seems like somebody worth my time and then you the higher up you go, right? He learned it from his shoes of former leverage. That's another maximum from Charlie Munger. Why is Charlie Munger? Charlie Munger is multi -billionaire. Could learn from anybody. Why is he still reading biographies? He could literally pay anybody in the world of two -dorm. He's like, this is the best value of my time. And so anybody that builds a very valuable company, sees a podcast like founders, or sees somebody like me, is like, oh, talking to this guy, a good friend of mine, says this the perfect way.

45:40And he runs a multi -billion dollar fund. And he goes talking to you is like talking to 50 of his huge greatest entrepreneurs simultaneously. I made myself easy to interface with and I never asked for anything. I'm not like, oh, you know, can you do this? Can you introduce me to this person? Can you do me this favor? Can you help me raise a fund? Nothing. In other news, this episode is brought to you by NetSuite. The less your business spends on operations, on multiple systems, on delivering your product or service, the more margin you have and the more money that you keep. But with higher expenses on materials, employees, distribution and borrowing, everything costs more.

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46:49So right now, you can get that by following the link in the show notes below or heading to netsuite .com -modern. That's netsuite .com -modern. So when I think about a lot of the people that have ended up working for me in one form or another in nightlife on the podcast, so many of them started off working for free. Dean, the guy that's still with me now, that's edited 2 ,000 videos that have gone out, every single one of them, creative director now, maybe the best podcast editor on the planet, arguably, I would say so. He did the first two, three years for free. He came into the first shoot for free.

47:24No, we were friends or whatever, but he was a working professional photographer and videographer, but he was like, I think there's something here, I'm just gonna do it and let's see what happens. It's like, offer, offer, offer, give, give, give. And just to round out what you were saying before or about the sort of essentializing the fact that mantras and maxins are a useful, windsip tool to then unlock this file downstream from it. Andre Geed, Nobel Prize winner, everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. That line is in my favorite book on Buffett and Munger.

47:58It's called All I Want to Know is Where I'm Gonna Die, so I'll never go there. And I thought it was them. So that's funny that you said it's his, because I thought it was their problem. Yeah, you've got like a Hungarian grift. Uh, all right. You can always understand the sun by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the sun. It desired to not end up like your father is a powerful source of extreme drive. So again, this, that line comes from a Francis Ford Copa biography. So the way I would say this is like, I think I have a very broad definition of entrepreneur, right?

48:30Entrepreneurs like somebody has ideas and does them. And so I think filmmakers entrepreneurs, I think certain athletes are entrepreneurs. I think podcasters are entrepreneurs. It's not like it's literally somebody, you don't have a job, you have an idea, you have something you want to happen in the world and you're, you build a company around it to be able to accomplish that. And that, I think it's like, I know, if I crack, it's like, I was like 242, 243 books in. And I'm going through and reading all these biographies of filmmakers because I feel like making, creating, I think directors and entrepreneurs, like there's just a lot of, they have a lot of similarities.

49:03And that line, like you can always understand the son by the father, the father, the story of the father is a better son, was literally in that book. And it's because Francis Ford Coppola is talking about the relationship that he had with his dad. And as somebody I have two kids and you know, I have a daughter and a son. And I could never imagine talking to my son the way that Francis Ford Coppola is dad day. Francis Ford Coppola's dad was a musician, but he was a failed musician. And what's gonna happen if you have something you wanna do in your life and decade after decade? You're saying, I'm a talented musician, the world's saying, no you're not.

49:42We're not interested in what your offering serve. You become, most people, you know, I would consider the weaker people become bitter. And so it's not them, I'm not the problem. It's the world that's the problem. It's always you, you have to have extreme ownership, you know? And so he would say stuff to his son, like Francis, when they were growing up, obviously not a lot of money, there can only be one genius in the family and that's me. So it can't be you. And like he would try to like basically, you know, pull his son down. I want my son to like, I would not like, I want him to do whatever he wants his life.

50:12Yeah. All of your accomplishments. Yeah. I think I'm so much better than some driven people make the mistake of like, oh, you're driven. And so I'm going to make my kids driven. And I think you alienate them. Sam Walton said this the best because if you think about how crazy Sam Walton is like, If he didn't disperse his fortune through his kids and he did this way before the actual assets appreciated, he created one of the world's largest fortunes. The family network today is like $220 billion. He's dying of cancer when he's writing his autobiography and he says something like, well, I'm a fair, and the biggest understatement of the century.

50:45He's like, I'm a fairly overactive fellow. And I don't expect my kids to be like me so I don't push in the heart. Yes. Well, it's exactly that way. Like, it is an odd thing for you to be an outlier, for you to know that you're an outlier, for you to kind of want to bestow the benefits of outliinous on your kids. But if you're that much of an outlier, hopefully some smarts have come along with you, and if you're that smart, you'll know what regression to the mean is. And if you are way out on the tail of this thing, where do you think your kids are going to be? They're going to move back toward the center.

51:19That's how it works. Yes. Right? I mean, yeah, I would, like, I just want my kids to do whatever they want. Like, my daughter wants to, sometimes she's like, oh, I wanna, you know, I wanna see, I wanna dance, whatever, I don't care what you do. You don't have to make any money. I'll take care of that. Don't worry about that. I want my son to just be happy. Yeah, I want them to have good habits. Like, I wouldn't, ever, like, you're not gonna do drugs, you're not gonna be a loser, you know, but you don't have to like shoot for outside success. That's ridiculous. And so, like, just bringing your son down.

51:45So, I get interested in, I need to interject. Oh, God. Isn't it interesting though that the thing that gives you such a sense of contentment and meaning in the world is your pursuit of something difficult? Is this insatiable unstoppable drive to go and do this thing? And what you're trying to bestow on your kids is equanimity and peace and enoughness. If I went to you and said, I'm a super intelligent AI and I can go in and I can change your source code and I can get rid of your need to do the drive. You can be as happy in a hammock as you are in a podcast studio as you are reading a biography.

52:29I don't think that you would take that deal. So even though my first proposal was, you know, don't try and expect your kids to be as much of an outlier as you are, tails go back to the middle. They don't go further out to the tales. But on the flip side of that too, what if your kids are made of the same stuff as you and throwing some fuel onto that furnace would be maybe the best blessing because wow, I made of the same stuff that dad is and dad gets me and dad taught me how to handle and control this huge stallion that I've got that I'm trying to, you know what I mean? We've got this sort of really interesting, easy for a fucking non -father to say.

53:11No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's a really important, like, I think this may be the most important maximum. I say it so much, like, people, so I surveyed my audience the other day because I've been trying to break down all the lessons because, like, I think repetition is persuasive. I'm not this person is like, oh, you should learn something new all the day. It's like, no, no, you should, I think the people that build great companies, they identify a handful of principles, they master the fundamentals on the basics and you do it for decade after decade. That's what it is. It's the boring shit decade after decade, where most people, so she now, they're like, I need, you know, you have to memorize the 2 ,000 new things.

53:41No, no, it's like a handful of principles and you'll see them repeat over and over again. That's why I think the best description of founder's podcast was it's church front winners. So I grew up in a Christian, like a fundamental Christian church. It's not like the preacher set up on Sundays, like, okay, last week we went over that Jesus guy, we're done with him, like let's go on to somebody else. It's no, they literally go and teach messages from the same book for centuries forever. I think there's actually power to that. And I think the best entrepreneurs do that. Jeff Bezos identified a handful of principles.

54:06He has 14, I would argue, he has one, obsessed over customers. and he said it over and over and over and over and over again. So I would be fine with that, my son, because he's gonna grow up, it's not the drive they have an issue with. It's, the source has to be positive. My source is not positive. Yeah, my neither. Yours is not positive. Francis Ford Coppola is not positive. We're trying to write a wrong. We're trying to write, in many cases, a multi -generational wrong. And so like, I'm not sitting on a fucking hammock. I don't like to relax. I'm incapable of relaxing. People like how many hours you work, all of them, literally all of them.

54:41So because, I just got to get this out. Sorry. Because like, so I'm willing, and again, I love my job. I think it's the best job in the world. I like my life. But yeah, I have a hole in my heart that will never be filled. And it's because it's personally important to me. And a mission to me is like to, there's this term I have. And you can call it the founder of a family. It's the generational inflection point, right? And essentially you go and look at this family tree and you just see like one shitty branch after one shitty branch after one shitty branch And then eventually it's all going downhill and then there'll be literally a gen there's like one dude Or sometimes the woman most times a dude and then straight up right and so I suck it break them exactly That is what the role I'm trying to play that is I my friend Sam Hakey has this great line He says I find it in intoxicating to be there for my tribe.

55:33And like I want that, I want that pressure. I want that responsibility. So if now I know for a fact, like, you know, I got the shit beat out of me when I was a kid. Like stomped on, like all kinds of crazy stuff happened. I've never touched my kids. Like my kids grew up unbelievable. Like they're great kids too. And they're way sweeter and nicer. My boy's way sweeter than I was at his age. And that's fine. So if he grows up in this positive environment, he knows he's loved. He knows me and my wife have a good good relationship. He sees that his dad gets out of bed and tries to help other people all day We can talk about this.

56:07I might one of my favorite Max's from his venture partnership is that money comes naturally as a result service People like all gonna be wealthy find find a problem solve the problem and then all you have to do is scale up the amount of people You serve that's where wealth comes from so I wake up every day trying to do things for other people I'd be reading these books anyways. No matter what but the fact that I sit down and record my thoughts and condense a 40 or career in 40 hours of reading into 45 minutes, that's an act of service. So he sees what I do all day. He sees I take this very seriously.

56:33And if he says, hey, I wanna do that. And he says, if I'm a place of good, then good, that's what I want. In other news, this episode is brought to you by AG1. It's important to me that the supplements I take are of the highest quality, and that is why for over three years now, I've been taking AG1. They conduct relentless testing to set the standard for purity and potency. Everything that they make is the highest quality. It's NSF certified, meaning even Olympic athletes can use it and they've updated the recipe 52 times over the last decade as new research and sourcing has come in. I'm massively focused on gut health at the moment and AG1's ingredients are insanely heavily researched for efficacy and quality and I love the fact that they've got pro and prebiotics plus digestive enzymes to help support my gut.

57:15Best of all, there is a 90 day money back guarantee so you can buy it and try it every single day for 89 days and if you do not like it they will give you your money back. You can get that 90 day money back guarantee and try AG1 with a years free supply of itim in D and 5 free AG1 travel packs by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink AG1 .com slash wisdom. That's drink AG1 .com slash wisdom. I wonder, you know, I've spoken to 850 people, whatever, on the show, maybe with doubles like 750 something like that. And I would say that on average high performers are driven 90 % of them, 95 % of them are driven by a sense of insufficiently not a perfectly balanced desire to enact their logos forward and be the best version of them that they can be simply for the flourishing that comes along with it.

58:06Most people don't have that. Most people are trying to fill a void, they're looking for validation, they want the world to see them as useful because they've never felt like they were loved, they want someone to tell them like they're enough so they're going to make themselves so much more than enough that they have this undeniable stack of mountain of evidence that they were not the thing that they feared that they were. And I just get the sense that it is a balance between happiness and success, but given that most people try to become happy by being successful, unhappy people try to use success to achieve happiness.

58:46If you can just shortcut it and go straight to happiness, which it sounds like you're trying to teach your kids to do. And much of this is genetic in any case. It's like, hey, here's a role of the dice. There's 50 % of your psychological disposition. Like, good luck. You're ready. But yeah, if you can do what you can from a rearing perspective, you're safe, you're validated. I love you if you win and I love you if you lose, as long as you try, here's some principles that you should do, the scalable, the blah, blah, blah. Like, I'd think the success thing, especially, especially the people that listen to this podcast, the people that listen to yours are the kinds of people that have buried themselves being that breakwater, being that circuit breaker of intergenerational trauma of one kind or another.

59:30And if that's you, if that, if you've prostrated yourself on the like domino lineage of your ancestors and you've just like, no, you've Samson, there's a thing together, that's what it's like, right? Holding these pillars up, that's you. And you have intergenerational problems. If you've done that, first off Bravo. Secondly, you have got the skills, you have got the gifts, you have got the insights, you've got the lessons, you have probably got the resources that your parents and your grandparents and your great -grandparents couldn't even imagine existed. Not only because we're in a world that offers you that opportunity and education and so on and so forth.

1:00:14But because you were the outlier and that's why you listen to shows like yours and shows like this because you were an outlier among outliers, right? You can't overestimate how normal the normies are. Go out in the street. Like I served the normal people at my nightlife business and they're fucking fantastic. They're not driven with this sense that you have that for the most part is probably pathological and you would significantly better off if you didn't have, but what does it allow you to do? It allows you to push yourself into places that other people won't go. So can you take on that pain?

1:00:48Can you take on, like we said in the very beginning, can you take on that burden, shoulder that burden, pass on what's good, try to hold on to the stuff that you wish didn't go, and then use the fruits of that labor, the lessons, the resources, the insights. Give that and be like, I have, it was me that did the thing. I accumulated the stuff. I passed it onto my kids and they got most of the benefits structurally of what I did with as few of the pathologies emotionally of what caused that to happen. Yeah, I think that would be a definition of success. The definition of my success is that like my kids grow up happy.

1:01:31Like that's them. I'm like, there is something, I think what you said, like when you, I think you correctly identified like this source of this internal drive. And one thing that I think would surprise most people

1:01:47is there's one,

1:01:52I think people would be surprised that a large source and I think we'll go back to Francis Forkopoulos because it certainly was the case for them is like revenge. And it's revenge for being born in an environment like that with a father like his. Yeah. And so you, how does it manifest? No, revenge is so interesting. It manifests, right? Where his dad's like, oh no, I'm the genius of the family. You can't be in his fierce work ethic. So it's obvious in the very beginning of Francis for Corp. was trying to break into movies and he's one of the first at the time, at the time in Hollywood, there was no such thing as young directors.

1:02:25He's the one that broke down the door for like a young Steven Spielberg, a George Lucas, and all these other people, right? The idea, you got a 28 year old feature film director was unheard of back then. And so he meets a young George Lucas, he meets a Steven Spielberg, hey, that guy did it, I can do it. But you see the 10 years of work that he put in before that in the book. When he's literally, he starts out as an editor. And he's literally editing 24 hours. He falls asleep, he doesn't get up from his desk, he just, time to go, I'm editing, time to go to sleep. I'm gonna just put my head down.

1:02:55He has his fierce work ethic and then the revenge is Dad I'm doing this movie. It's probably gonna be success because it's the sequel to Godfather, right? He goes out he is one of the greatest Directing runs ever in one decade. He does Godfather one Godfather two and apocalypse now like maybe you've never seen another 10 year run like that ever especially a such a young age and He's like dad. I'm gonna let you do the score for the Godfather two and then his dad wins an Oscar for the only achievement he ever does for in music came because his son hired him. Wow. Revenge. And so this idea, you just nailed it.

1:03:35I think it's 90, 90 to 95 % of sons, usually trying to say, I don't wanna be like my dad. I'm gonna succeed where he failed. And then there's maybe a five to 10 % where it's like, my dad has been my hero. I wanna be more like him and then I'm gonna try to like, I wonder whether this could totally just be availability bias because the people that I look up to and that I surround myself with. But I get, I'm really hopeful for the next generation that maybe they have more of those, maybe that 90 to 95 actually gets closer to sort of 70 or 80 because the proliferation of people trying to make themselves better.

1:04:17Like if founders is church for entrepreneurs, then modern wisdom is church for people who want to make their lives better. Like I'm curious, I have the sense that I'm built for more and I'm interested in finding out if that's true. And I don't know, I just don't get how so much of this stuff, even if you only take fucking 0 .1 % of the things that you're exposed to and you're a little bit discerning about what's good and what's not good. You are, this is what I said before about the difference between a parents and grandparents and a great -grandparents generation and ours. You are orders of magnitude better constructed, better informed.

1:05:01I listen. I think podcasting is a miracle. I think it's world -class education on demand anytime you want about any subject you want. Like you want to learn about history, you want to learn about philosophy, you want to learn about business. You'll find somewhere in the podcast directory, some not crazy educator that has gone down the rabbit hole to degree that most people find unreasonable, and you can download that into your brain on demand. Here's the problem that I notice. People don't understand what learning is. Learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. Correct.

1:05:29That's how it is definition to. Yeah, perfect. There's a lot of, like, you could tell Hermosi, like, I don't know if he reads a bunch of biographies, but he sounds like he does, because a lot of the stuff he says is like, oh, like, that sounds a lot like Buffett. There's a lot of stuff. You should hang with them. I'd love to see you two talk. Yeah, I'd love to. So what I am shocked by, because again, like the way I spend my life, like, if I'm not with my family, I'm hanging out with other founders. And all the founders listen to the show because that's my entire network, right? And I'm, and you know, I become like the founder whisperer and I know a lot about what's going on in their business and everything.

1:06:05And I'm like, you said you listened to episode 299 As like that idea, it's like, hey, never ever forget the dynamic range of human beings. Like you're saying, hey, this guy is super talented, but he wants five times the amount of salary as this other guy who's like one tenth is good. Obviously pay the most talented person. Like, there's so many times where they know the lessons and they're not actually changing their behavior. And so I am delusually optimistic on the impact that podcasts have because I say podcast Yes, or a miracle. And so I do hope you'll live in it. Yeah, but I'm worried that I'm overestimating.

1:06:41I think we both, how many people, like I change my behavior. I'm obviously not a perfect person, but like I literally say every single person I've read about and I have no ego attached to this, they are smarter and more productive than me. That's a fact. That's not like, that's not hyperbolic. That's a fact. So what is the point of me spending all my time studying and learning from them if I don't change my behavior? That means my entire life was a waste. and I refused to waste my life. So I changed my behavior. And so I'm just worried that a lot of people don't. So I would love it to be 70%, 60%.

1:07:14My also thing is people are like, oh, do you have to grow up poor to like have outsized? And no, my answer is of course not. It's just most people grow up poor. Like if you were, I'm sure we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside a bubble. Even if you look at like the top 1 % in the world, you know, across eight billion people was it. Like $40 ,000 a year or something like that. Let's say just in America, I think it's like $70 ,000 a year. It's like we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside of a bubble. I'm very, and I think also human nature is constant. So I'm a little worried that we can shift the variance by that much.

1:07:49Yeah. Behavioral genetics is like the physics of the way that people show up, and there's no changing that. You don't get to go in and think. We talked about like the impact that your relationship with your father could have on increasing your drive. Well, was Francis for Coppola siblings that way? I just did this episode in this getting James J Hill, right? And again, the same way I found him, mongers like, hey, there's this great, James J Hill is a great operator like Rockefeller and Carnegie. I'm like, what? Like, I know who Carnegie and Rockefeller are. Who's this guy? He's the greatest railroad entrepreneur in American history.

1:08:22He created this, the only, at the time, railroad industry, right? in the 18, the 18 owners, whereas it was the, by far, the most important industry in America by far. It's like what the internet or AI would be now. In 1885, the rowdans, she took and twice the amount of revenue as a federal government. It was holy fuck. Yeah. Yeah. It was the large, the nation's largest employer. The rail rotors, which were the, the, the railroad entrepreneurs, that's why they were called rail rotors, owned over 10 % of the landmass in the United States. Like, it's wild that you've got such shit railways. Yes, I know I know I know and but James J.

1:08:58Hill was the only person right the only person only railroad entrepreneur to ever Six to run an A railroad rail line that did not go bankrupt. So this is guy is the best in the most important industry of his time Okay, he's the Elon of the train. He he grows up with a poor father So poor that he's laying at his house And he could see the moon through the roof because there's holes in the roof yet he dips out of Canada. He's like, I, he believed in the dynamic, you know, the power of one individual and everything else. So he goes and seeks his fortune in America, right? What does this two siblings do?

1:09:32They talk about in his biography. They're like, this is what our life is. We're just poor farmers. They stayed. Yeah, fascinating. What is that? Fascinating. You've got this split test. You've got the same father. You've got the same environment, but a totally different outcome. This is why so much, a woman called Nancy Atkopf, And she's probably the leading twins research on the planet. And between her and Robert Ploman, you realize just how squarely life can become, even when you share the same environment, when you grow up in the same environment. Jeans matter a lot, man. So I did a, I was going to tell you about this a little bit later on.

1:10:12I did a genetic test. So I had a full genome sequence done. And as a part of that, the organization, they're able to compare you to the population of mass. And they can say this is a one copy of this SNEP or two copies of this SNEP is 20 % of the population have got that, 6 % of the population have got it when it's both. And they do it for everything. And this is related to this, this is related to dopamine, this is related to drive, this is related to obsession, this is a risk for alcohol, this is a risk for Alzheimer's or whatever, whatever, whatever. And I need to go back and go through it properly before I start talking about it fully on the show.

1:10:52But I want to introduce you to the same company because I want you to get it done because it taught me so much about myself. So many of the things that I thought were cultivated virtues. what it's very much being is like unbelievably fertile ground. I've thrown a bit of water on. And it's just like, oh, you were going to be this way. Now, you could have been this way for drugs, or alcohol, or, you know, any other kind of obsession, but you were going to be obsessed. There was no way, there was no way that I was going to grow up and not be obsessed about something. Did they identify why your forearms are so huge.

1:11:36That actually isn't available. I love the Q &A, they're like, it's just the fun. Bro, you know what, the other thing is when I do these fucking live shows, the Q &A's live are just the same. I like shake someone's hand, I do the meet and greet and they're like, dude, they really are big and real like, they don't even refer to the forearm, they're like, they really are. As if it's like, bro, you need merch just to picture your forearms. All right, actions express priority. We are only what we do, not what we say we are. No, I mean, I, and this is, I think just part of getting older, having more experience, but I don't care at all what people are like, what they say is important to them.

1:12:14I just look, how do you spend your time? Like you came in here early and I gave you a hug. I was like, how the hell are you even bigger? And I saw you last time, right? Just saw you in Austin like two months ago. And you're like, I left heavy weight. So yeah, I could tell. Like, like what is important to Chris is obvious. Obviously you take care of your health. health, you're a madman about, you have probably, not probably, you have the best, most cinematic video podcasts on the planet. Like you are expressing to the world and you make yourself easy to interface with as a bipartisan of this, this is like, what is important to you?

1:12:45As opposed, if I saw you and you had like this big gut and you're like, yeah, you know, I love working out and you know, I eat health and like, yeah, are you sure about that? Or like, I take my podcast, so many people that come, you just part happens to you too. They like, hey, you know, talk to me about podcasts And I remember this happened one time where this guy's like, all right, I started a podcast and like, he's a family friend. And so he asked my brother in law. He's like, can you think David would meet me about his podcast? And so I was like, yeah, if it's a favor for you, it's fine. I talked to him and five minutes since I said, so like, wait a minute.

1:13:15How many episodes have you done? He's like, six. I was like, six. I was like, there's nothing to talk about. Like, come back when you've done like 200, and then we can talk. But like, this doesn't make, this is not good. Use your time. And so the entrepreneurial, like, the reason that's, that's so powerful in the history of entrepreneurship is because the greatest entrepreneurs, like, most of them work well beyond, well beyond the need for money. So money is not their greatest resource. Money is a way, an asset that they use, to bring what they want, forth into the world, what they want, right?

1:13:44They all know that time is your most valuable resource. It's the only unreniable resource that they have. And so if you're watching, like, if you're curious about like, what was important to Steve jobs, for example, he really gave blue my mind about this and this is something me and you've talked about in private. I need to get better at marketing the podcast, right? And because his whole point was like, hey, I think the Apple devices I'm making are good for the world. I want every single human on the planet to own an Apple device. And first of all, Steve, not at the price point that you're at.

1:14:15But that's fine. And he goes, but and to do that, we have to become a great marketing company. He goes, we know how to build great products. We are not a great marketing company. So what do you do? So his actions express priority. So he said, every Wednesday, we are going to have a three hour meeting. I will be there every Wednesday. I will be involved. All the people involved in the marketing advertising for Apple are going to be present and we're going to review our work every Wednesday. And he got to the point where like, you know, some people call them micro managers. I just say they're into the details.

1:14:44You know, James J. Hill, all the great entrepreneurs are into the details. When you came in here and started, I saw you directing, I was like, oh, this guy, this is another Steve Jobs guy. It didn't matter if it was an ad that was gonna run as a full page in the lawsuit journal or a billboard in the NoWare, Missouri. It did not go out without his approval. His actions were expressing his priority. And what you do is like, that's not just in business, it's in everything. If you want to be a good dad and you don't spend any time with your kid, your actions are expressing what you actually want to do.

1:15:14So, yes, and I love this. But the issue is that it can become difficult to work out where the boundaries of that stop. How much should you care about the things that you do? I'm not sure, but the answer probably isn't as much as possible all the time about everything. You can't be a perfect example of this and the solution is deliberate de -optimization, So it's choosing in advance what you're going to suck at. These are insights from Oliver Birkman, who's fantastic. One of my friends told me about deliberate de -optimization of strategy. He was using, I asked him for an example. He said, well, I fly a lot.

1:15:58And if I had the right number of different credit cards, and I had all my points tied in, and I made sure that I used them the best way, and I had a wallet this big, I would be able to maximize my points. But it's not as efficiently high priority. I have other things that are higher up, so I'm just, I'm going to let that one slide. That's just going to be an L for me. Could I be more optimized? Yeah, I could. But look, it works. Now, are you going to do that in your highest calling? Am I going to do that when I'm trying to book a guest on the show or we're trying to set up the lighting or we're fighting for a great location or whatever?

1:16:31No, no. That's an area that I need to do it. The problem that the insecure over Achiever has that the type A person with a type B problem has is not knowing where the boundaries of their obsession should stop because it can't be everything. I agree with that. It can't be everything. And if it is everything, the things that it really should be for will suffer and you will feel it and you will feel miserable. No, I definitely so you mentioned Tim Kirk earlier. Steve I think was the best, like he was ruthless. Ruthless, he had the ability to like ruthlessly prioritize things. And so he picked like product, right?

1:17:08And he would, again, just like every add, every pixel on your screen, every button on that device, he would have to improve before it goes out. But could you do that for everything? No, he sucked its supply chain. So that's why he actually hired and had Tim Cook. That was with Tim Cook's job was primarily before Steve died of cancer. So yeah, completely great. The way I put it is something that also reappears in the books is they limit the great entrepreneurs, limit the amount of details to perfect, and then they make every detail perfect. Where a lot of entrepreneurs' mistake is like they are optimizing something that should never exist.

1:17:43This is something Elon talks about over and over again. He's like, before you optimize something, make sure it's actually essential to like what you're actually trying to bring into the world. And so for me and you, or I guess for me, it's really simple. It's like, How should I be spending the time? I should either be reading or I should be making podcasts in my work. That's all I have to do. And the one reason, like I don't have an assistant or I don't have anything else so they're like, well you need an assistant, you're hard to get in touch with. I was like, well then I'm managing encounter.

1:18:09I shouldn't have a counter because all I have to do is wake up every day. As long as I wake up every day and I read for a few hours a day, right? And I sit down once a week and I summarize what I learn that week from my reading, I will get everything I want in life. Everything else from that is a distraction. Dude, we broke the entire show, this whole thing, all of the different machinery and the bits and pieces behind it, how the growth happens and what I feel fulfilled by and what makes the world a better place, and what grows the revenue and all the rest of the things. We broke all of that down and it's one, two, three, four.

1:18:43It's four things, but because of your next lesson, I'm not going to say them. But there's four things. Yeah, it's four things. That's it. Should we, oh, I've heard that TikToks prioritizing videos that are over 90 seconds long, so maybe we should be, is it one of those four things? No, it's not. Well, what if we repurp because we can do a cross -promo? It's not one of the four things. Yeah. It's only four things that make an impact on everything. You see this at Elon. So all of a sudden, that happened with the election. I saw all the tweets and everything. I think the most important tweet was that this perfect encapsulation of why it makes Elon great.

1:19:18And like he literally figures like what is the most important lever for what I'm trying to accomplish today. And then he just he relentlessly jumps up and down on it. So he identifies like all the entire election hinges on Pennsylvania. So like I will build a ground game there. I will go like he's like if we win Pennsylvania, we do everything else. And so he sets up shop and he just puts all of his resources behind it, you know, in the early days, SpaceX. The only thing that matters is if we don't get a rocket into orbit, we have nothing else. So what's the most of the thing? Getting a rocket to orbit.

1:19:46And then once we do that, we obviously have to sell it and everything else. And one of, Elon doesn't have a lot of mentors, but I've heard him reference Larry Ellison as one of his mentors, which I thought was fascinating. And I've read three biographies on Ellison. I wish there were more. And he, there's, and one of the biographies, Larry Ellison is arguing, right? There's one of the richest people on the planet. He was like 40 % of Oracle, God's sake. He's arguing with his assistant because his assistant's like, hey, we have a hundred important things. There's a thousand things we need to get to.

1:20:13He's like, no, no, no, no, there's not a hundred. There's not a thousand. There's three. He goes, I'm going to focus on those three and I'm going to ignore everything else. Ruthless prioritization. Like that is such a key part of achieving things in life. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify powers 10 % of all e -commerce in the United States, including huge brands like Jim Shark and Allbirds and Utonic. They are the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Look, you do not want to learn to code to start your business. You don't want to learn how to build a website or how to do inventory management or web hosting or to design stuff.

1:20:52You want to get all of that out of the way so you can get on with what you're here to do, which is to build and sell cool stuff. That's what Shopify helps you do and that's why we use them for Utonic. They're literally your no excuses business partner. You can sell without learning to code or design. You just bring your best ideas and Shopify will help you to sell immediately. Plus Shopify's award -winning help is there to support your success every step of the way. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to shopify .com slash modern wisdom or lowercase.

1:21:25That's shopify .com slash modern wisdom to grow your business now no matter what stage you're in. Bad boys move in silence. When you find an edge shut up about it, talking invites competition, competition destroys profits. So I grew up listening to hip -hop and the interesting thing about my obsession with like Maxim's and memorable things like I think a lot of that came from. It's not like a red poetry when I was younger, I'd listen to hip -hop and like they're very poetic and they have lines and there that you just remember. That's from Biggie Smalls, Bad Boys Move in Silence. And it's funny because I'm reading the obscure biography of Rockefeller.

1:22:02And it really clicked because everybody's read there's one canonical biography Rockefeller called Titan. It's like 800 pages. It's great. That's fine if I read it like two times. Rockefeller is a man, right? But I went through the biography or the bibliography and I discovered books from editor books. And so I found this obscure biography published in like 1970. And now you try to get the book, it's like $4 ,000 because all these books are out of print. And it's in there and it's 250 pages, right? There's a longer thing here where I think it's lawful not to compress your thoughts. That's like, to say stuff like that.

1:22:39But I think about, sorry, I wrote you such a long letter. If I only had more time, I could have written you a shorter one. I think it's disrespectful to people to not. Like think about if you want to high value audience and you're saying, hey, I can tell story an hour and a half. Or I can tell story in 45 minutes, but I took an hour and a half. I just stole 45 minutes of your life. You're not getting back. Times that by however many people, like I spent an entire day, I mean, you've talked about this privately. One of the big breakthroughs I had is like spending an entire day before I sit down and record just literally going through all my notes and highlights and just cutting.

1:23:09I never, I never add. It's like, nope, ruthlessly cut. Try to respect the people's time. But anyways, I think authors should do that. I like Titan. Do I need to know what the furniture is like in his grandfather's house? No, I do not. I want to know how he built maybe the greatest business has ever existed. And so this book is 250 pages of how he built standard oil. It's called John D the founding fathers of the Rockefellers. I know friends that have literally bought the book because they heard the episode and they spent $2 ,000 because it's like this is the guy like there's an idea worth billions and a $2 ,000 history book.

1:23:39And so in that book, it's all secrecy covered everything in his, when I think of bad boys moving silence, I think of Rockefeller. It's in all kinds of other entrepreneurs, but essentially he's saying, hey, you don't understand how lucrative this is and I'm not gonna educate my competition because if you go and say, hey, look how much money I'm making, what are humans gonna do? They're all mimetic. They're gonna be like, oh, I'm gonna try to do exactly what Chris does. And so I'm gonna do, and you invite competition and there goes your profits. And so not only he would like do deals and he's like, hey, I'm gonna buy your refinery.

1:24:13You can't tell your wife how much I bought it and who bought it. He would have this thing called, there would be secret ownership. So people hated Rockefeller because he was dominating this area in Cleveland. And so, this thing called Cleveland Masker where he essentially in like a day or a few days rounds up like 22 of his top 25 competitors. Like, and then from there on at 25 years old or 28 years old, he's really young. He's a dominant player. And so then he goes, he also has a secret alliance where they put him at the head of the national, I was at the Kerosene refineries association, something like that.

1:24:45Essentially, just like a trade group and he goes around. He meets with all the other people in his business and they're trying to collude to keep prices like at a profitable level. And so he gets to see their books and as a result of this secret alliance, he knows, oh, just how we know each other. It's like I knew Chris was a legit player. I need to spend more time with them because he's another me, right? And then he goes, oh, that's a good competitor. Maybe I need to buy him. This guy, I don't know where about this guy. This guy's not serious. I see his books. And so what he would do is some of those people say, Rockefeller, you're too powerful.

1:25:15I'm not selling to you. And so they go and they sell to a company, not knowing that Rockefeller secretly owns that company. So if you really want to internalize bad boys moving silence, it's Rockefeller's the prototype. But there's another great thing. In Steve Jobs' last years, he dumps 50 million of his own money. And at the time, he only had $70 million. So he dumps almost all, you know, well, we've joined him as well into Pixar. And literally they can't make payroll. They don't have a product. He's just writing checks to cover the payroll. And they pivot from trying to sell hardware, which is how Pixar started to what the team really wanted to do with their passion.

1:25:50I was like, we want to make the world's first computer animated movies. And so Steve's like, okay, we need to study like his animation profitable. And he has a great line in that book. He's like, it's not like you can go to the library and check out a book that says the business model for animation. Because there's only one company that's ever done it successfully that's Disney and they don't want anybody to know how lucrative it was. So he wants a building relationships, relationships are on the world, see how all these things hide together. With people in Disney, he finds out holy shit. They can literally, like they take Snow White, what he discovers, the Snow White came out like 60 years before, and then you have the new invention of VHS, and you have a new invention of DVDs, so you know the 90s, and they take something they haven't put a dollar into in 60 years that our kids are still gonna watch, they put it on the new technology that they VHS, DVD, quarter trillion, or excuse me, not quarter trillion, 250 million drops to their bottom line, all profit.

1:26:43That's one movie. And so that's when you realize, oh, the reason they shut up about it, because they don't want people know how lucrative it is. And you see, so we're never gonna, a friend of mine is doing, he's doing, let me see if I can put this sensitively, he is buying a bunch of other companies, so he's rolling up a bunch of other companies, okay? And he's doing it so successful, He runs a publicly traded company that he caught the attention of somebody else that has been doing a similar strategy in a different domain for the last like three decades and He goes they share a board member and so he meets with them and this older wiser guy tells my friend.

1:27:13He goes hey What you're doing is working he goes now shut up about it. Stopting interviews stop talking about strategy He goes because I you know the amount of competitors I created for myself because I didn't hide what I was doing successfully. And so people saw how this guy, we came, the guy that's giving him advice, we came in multi -billionaire. Anyways, like, this guy's worth $3 billion, whatever numbers, how do you do that? Oh, this is what he does. Let me copy him. He's like, now I just created all these clones of me. And now I have made it more difficult to do what I wanted to do anyways.

1:27:45So bad boys moving silence. It's something up here's over and over and over again. Belief comes before ability. The external world has this backwards. The belief that you can do something is a prerequisite for trying. This drives me insane. So you mentioned earlier, you don't know how normal, normal people are. And I'm gonna remember that line. Because people are like over and over again, when you have somebody, you have somebody like the founder of Four Seasons, and we talked about, you know, hey, Chris, we're friends, like, I'm gonna tell you my dream. And my dream is to build the collection, not just one, a collection of the world's greatest hotels.

1:28:21And you're like, is he? You've never, you have no money. You've never built a hotel. Like, what are you talking about? Like, why would you even think this is possible? What you need to do is prove it first and then we'll believe in you. He's like, no, that's ass backwards. Belief always comes before ability. There's a story where Elon's on, he tries to buy a rocket. At first, he thought he was just going to shoot like this, this, this, like, garden for lack of a better word to Mars on somebody else's rocket. And because he was trying to like draw attention to the fact that, hey, NASA is not innovating.

1:28:50where like not we're stuck in like lower Earth orbit. Like why aren't we trying to get to Mars? Why aren't we trying to, you know, colonize the galaxy? And he's, goes to Russia, they treat him like shit and he's on the way back and he just realizes, hey, we're gonna build our own rocket. And people laugh at him. They're like, oh, this is internet kid. Cause he's 29, 28. He's like, wait, internet kid, you can't do that. His belief came before his building. He believed that he could do that and then he went out and proved it. Now, when I say belief comes before ability, It doesn't mean you just sit there and be like, I'm great.

1:29:21And you know, you do the work necessary to achieve what you want. But if you're waiting for the external world to like push, encourage you or an edge on like it's impossible. So I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure what direction you were going in with that because one reading of that sounds fantastic. And I wholeheartedly disagree. But the one from the outside world, I think is absolutely bang on. So the reason that I disagree, if you were to say belief comes before ability is in self -belief. I wrote an essay this week about it, so I'm going to read it to you. Okay. An ode to people who don't believe in themselves.

1:29:58What comes first? Belief or action? Do you need to believe that you can do a thing before you do it? Fake it until you make it is one option, but incredibly hard if you're introspective, I have low self -belief and high standards. So what about make it until you fake it? Here are some lessons I've learned. And you can believe you're not worthy of a thing and still attain it. You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed. You can grip and grasp and fear and it ruin the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted. And things still go well. You can have no self -belief and show up anyway and still win.

1:30:34You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like. You can doubt the process, question your talent, be uncertain that you're making progress, disparage your accomplishments permanently feel like you're not working hard enough, no matter how hard you work, never give yourself a break, fail to fully feel gratitude, be terrified of never reaching your goals and still end up in a place that your 20 -year -old self could not imagine you'd ever get to. Self -belief is overrated, generate evidence. Yeah, I would, like, you could say self, when I say belief comes before about it, I mean self -belief.

1:31:06Yeah. But I don't, that line I would disagree with, it's like self -belief is overrated. I think it's the the the highest order bit. There's actually one area where I disagree with Steve Jobs and he talks about like The highest order bit. It's a it's from like computer science where it's like the most important part of the system Right, and this is like a complete like oversimplification of it But and his whole thing was like the highest order bit is that like you love what you do and for all the reasons that we discussed earlier You'll keep doing it for a long time. You'll persevere and everything else and I love what I do I know you love what you do and I agree.

1:31:43It's super important. I think it makes life easier. You used a phrase like you're swimming downstream earlier. I think it's a great way to put that. I was thinking about that because the Steve Jobs archive, which is run by Steve's widow, just released this free book you can read online called Make Something Wonderful. Steve Jobs into Zone Words. It's remarkable. I've read it a bunch of times and he talks about this in there. That's where I discovered the highest order bit part. Then I was thinking about it more and more and I was like, well, no, that's not. What comes first? It's like the belief that you can actually do something that's valuable to the world that provide that like is an active service and Makes the world a better place and I think me and you might be good examples It's like how many years were you doing the podcast before anybody gave it damn three and a half my mind was five and a half Why were you still doing it because those swimming done stream?

1:32:31Because you believed that you could like you believed that you could do it The belief that you had that you could actually make something worth people's time and listening Yes, that lag was a couple years before the world's like, yes, Chris, we agree with you. Yeah, that's an interesting way to think about self -belief. Because I believe that the thing that I'm doing right now is of value to the world. And the world just as yet hasn't recognized that. It's like an interesting pivot on self -belief. the belief, I know that I can make it. I have never had. I've never had. Ever. Ever. I am the best avatar for somebody that is permanently looking at his feet, going, how the fuck am I studying here?

1:33:22Like, how did this happen? Very much, don't believe that you're worthy of a thing. still attained it, disparage your accomplishment, but still get them. A grip, grasp, fear, ruin the enjoyment, all of that, all of that. Like the entire, for me, journey up until probably only the last two years, basically moving to America was sort of driven with self -doubt and uncertainty. And am I even doing this right? Like, but I enjoyed the thing that I was doing and I knew that I was good at that thing but I didn't know that there was going to be some outcome. So I think it's what is the sort of self -belief directed at in a way directed at the outcome of I know that I can do this thing well and I enjoy it all day directed at this is going to reach something that some portion of people will accuse of being success never really wants.

1:34:20So I've heard you say that perspective on your show before I would say like interacting with you in person you come across unbelievably You've only known me for the last two years. Yeah, I'd much better get a much bigger mountain of evidence. Yeah Good point after a while if imposter syndrome continues to persist Even though you keep disproving it. Do you have imposter syndrome today? No, okay? No, no more I'm about to step out on stage from front of three and a half thousand people in London I just came back from Oz five thousand people. Yeah, oh this side of the planet. Yeah, and um No, not anymore.

1:34:52But that, like, I need to really write this out, because I haven't yet. I'm just such a fucking poster boy for somebody that would have a biding in pasta syndrome. Like, very uncertain, very unsure of himself, of his place in the world, a need for validation, a desire to be seen as competent. Like, all of the thing, all the, you know, just like, the fucking ingredients to make a really beautiful imposter syndrome casserole. And it's dropped away and it's gone. And it's not gone through any weird combination of mindset changes and sort of conscious reframing. It's gone because it's been crushed under a fucking neutron star worth weight of evidence.

1:35:45Yeah, I'm like, I just can't, I can't keep Holding on to a belief that things are going to go badly or that I'm not good enough or that I don't have the talent or That even though I feel like I'm working hard. I know that I should be working infinitely harder Because I'm just like how many times you want to roll the dice and it come up six six six like over and over and over and over again Mm -hmm. And um Yeah, I just I really want to write it out because I think that there's a lot of people who have a level of self doubt so great that they struggle to even connect with like an inspirational story because it feels like it's a different.

1:36:25I agree completely. I think a lot of people accuse entrepreneurs of being arrogant and of course they are. Like you'd have to be arrogant to think like oh I don't have to go, I don't have to work for somebody else. I can literally take something that doesn't exist and like bring it to the world. But my issue with that is like we don't have an epidemic of arrogance. We have an epidemic of people who don't believe in themselves. And so the weird thing about the early days of the podcast, you know, these people that I'm reading about and telling stories about, they're crazy people. Like they are all crazy people.

1:36:55And yet I kept hearing the same review, the same email, the same DM. I find your podcast so comforting. I'm like, what kind of, I was like, oh, there's a million of us out there that are like, this is me too. And that's the biggest key where like the reason the biographies are important and life stories in general is not because like we're talking about Francis Four Copa's life or Steve Jobs life or any of the life we've talked about. It's like, no, no, you see yourself in them. Correct. That's the key. Dude, I've realized this over the last couple of years. We don't fall in love with other people who are perfect.

1:37:29We fall in love with other people who we see ourselves in their flaws. And there's been a few times on the show or going out for dinner and meeting people or whatever, like, huh, I, this person's, you know, really smart, really interesting or really insightful and I just don't care. And I have nothing to talk to them about. And I realized it's that I can't find hooks in their shortcomings that I can latch onto that either I'm not, I'm unable to see them for some reason. They're being hidden. They're incentivized to hide them. They don't align with the way that I see the world perhaps, cultural differences, stuff like that.

1:38:15But what we really, really resonate with is somebody else who has a shortcoming that we see ourselves in. You see a little version of yourself in Chris Bumstead when he cries on stage, or when he's uncertain about whether or not he's going to win. You see a little bit of yourself in Kobe Kobe when he snaps his Achilles and he's unsure about where he's going but then he pulls himself back around. You know, like whoever it is, like you see you're and that I think is reassuring to a lot of people. It's certainly reassuring to me when I realized that the most interesting person in the room, in fact, this was this was born out of our trip to Miami for George's birthday.

1:38:54The most interesting person in the room isn't the most interesting person in the room. It's the person who makes everybody else feel like they're the most interesting person in the room. So you don't need to worry about not being charismatic. You just need to make other people feel charismatic. Like, I called it inverse charisma. That you know that story. Was it Winston Churchill's wife who went to go and see the two different American presidents? You said, I sat down with one of them. And after a dinner being next to him, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in the world. And I sat down a couple of months later with his opponent.

1:39:27And after that dinner, I left feeling like like I was the smartest person in the world. Like who do you wanna be? I wanna be the sort of person that makes other people feel like the smartest person in the world. And the beautiful thing about this idea is that so many people want to be liked and charismatic but feel like they don't have any charisma or likeability. You don't need to. It's not about you. It's about what you do to other people. And that is so much easier. If you're just, you don't need to be interesting. You just need to be fucking interested in somebody else. I love that you said that because I say the most interesting people are the most interested.

1:40:00And like the people that I'm drawn to, right? Because to your point, like you meet so many people, and in some cases, like you admire them from afar, and I think one of the biggest benefits is like, and this way, I'm again, evangelist for reading biographies and autobiographies is because like, we're incentivizing our day to day to like, may things seem better. Like you were just talking about the health problems that, you know, you're like, hey, I'm not ready to talk about this, but you know, when I am, I'll talk about it. But like from the outside, people like Chris has, has it everything, You know, he's handsome, he's in great shape, he's world famous, like he's got one of the best podcasts in the world.

1:40:31And you're like, yeah, but you haven't seen the shit that I've been going through for the last 12 months. And in the biography, he's like, you see that because people don't write, sit down to write a biography when they're like 30, 35, 40, when they're still in it. They, there's some weird genetic thing where it's like, I know I'm gonna die soon, I wanna pass down everything I know in this book. It's a act of service of next generation of bunch of nerds, I think is really important. And that's the, when I just did the Elon episode on the SpaceX book, one of the things I said is it's like the reason that you guys should read this book is because like you have, it's not only just Elon or genius, but all the early SpaceX employers or genius.

1:41:05And the whole book is, these geniuses can't figure shit out. And like they're running into prom, after prom, after prom, after prom, and then you know six years later they figured out. That is so good for you. It's like, oh, if that guy, you know, if that guy couldn't do that, then up thing, and makes sense, like, I feel better about myself. Again, it's technically the story about, you know, on SpaceX, but you make it about yourself. I just think that's human nature. By endurance, we conquer. Time carries most of the weight. It is hard to beat someone who never stops. Oh, this is, I feel hormosy would say something like that too.

1:41:37So my phone is now changed. You know, this one I call you. It's Michael Jordan being really intense, but for like a year and a half, it was, or for like maybe two years, it was by and turns we conquer is the family motto of Ernest Shackleton, who's probably the greatest, you know, one of the greatest polar explorers. And I believe I'm a huge believer in consistency over intensity. And I think what a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs make mistake is like, there's, first of all, there's never up until the first few years ago, there's no such thing as like an entrepreneurship, like industry. Now there's like an industry and people are incentivized to try to spread it and try to put money into these companies.

1:42:12And so what happens, like, people were in a rush, right? And they try to take like an idea and like, instead of building it slowly and making it durable, right? They're like, let's just throw a lot of money and people at it and like try to do it fast. And then you see them like it may grow for a little bit and pop. And I think there's an issue. And so what I realized is like the greatest entrepreneurs is like, no one writes a book about somebody's like, oh, they ran a company and five years in it was really successful. 10 years, it was gone, right? They write about businesses that last. And so I had one of the greatest experiences of my life this year.

1:42:46And I was at this company off site, and it was just a 70 year old female billionaire owning a private company, right? And just her company building philosophy, like I told her I was like, I'm in love with you. And my wife was with me and I was like, I have literally loved you. Like I love everywhere you build your company. And her whole thing is just very common sense. She's just like, handful of principles, I'm always just gonna do what's best for the customer and the customer experience and that's where I'm gonna put my money And I'm in this forever and so she told me this hilarious story where You know she felt because she she wasn't trained in business and she was a woman like I need consultants I need McKinsey and I need Bain and I she's hiring putting millions of dollars on this and first of all they're like You know you should buy up all your competitors and so they start looking into this and it's like well how much would that be?

1:43:37And you know, whatever, let's say that company's gonna cost 200 million to buy and she's like, but Why don't I just put that 200 million dollars into like making my customers experience better? And so she told me the slayer story. She's like year five, you know, I had 15 competitors year 15 I have 10 year 25 I had three Year four she's running company for 40 year 40 I have one He goes, I took the money, said a buying out their companies, I made my customer experience better, my product better, my marketing better, controlled more things, and they went out of business slowly but surely. And so time carries most of the way.

1:44:16That's a maximum that I came up with where, as listening to Charlie Munger, Charlie Munger has this good, his whole point is like, hey, if you just master the big ideas and handful of disciplines and you really master them and implement them, that the big ideas in like physics, biology, psychology, economics. There's only a handful of ideas you actually need to memorize in all these main subjects, and that carries most of the freight. And I was like, oh, that's a good turn of phrase, like that makes sense. And then I'm reading more and more about these stories, and it's like, oh, you're not winning because you're a genius, you're not winning because you're winning because you just outlast everybody.

1:44:49By endurance, we conquer. She conquered the endurance, because she made sure, she made her company durable. This is what Peter Tio wrote. If you're only going to read one book on business, obviously, in my opinion, especially today's day and age, you read zero to one, right? And everybody that's building a tech company has read that book. And yet they miss his most important lesson, which is like, hey, don't optimize for growth at the expense of durability. And the reason you're likely to optimize for growth at the expense of durability is growth is measurable and durability is not. And the reason durability is so important, he says, is because in technology companies and almost all companies, all the vast majority of the profits are 10, 15, 20, 20, 20, 20, the amount of money that company that woman I just described is making today is 95 % 99 % more than what she was making year 10.

1:45:36All the money was in the future. What's that thing about Buffett made some obscene percentage of his entire net worth after 65? Yes, like 90, you see that graph, it goes viral on Twitter all the time. And that's obviously the magic of compounding too. And it's like, that's why I say buy endurance week conquer. Like I'm not trying to have the hot podcast or great episode So this week, I'm trying to do this until I die. I want them to pry the microphone from my cold dead hands. And so therefore, I need to make sure that I'm, how do I do that? I have to maintain, first of all, there's valuable for the audience.

1:46:09I have to trust with the people that give me their time. And so like, you just say, hey, I'm not making a decision based on what I'm doing today. I'm, this decision gonna serve that goal. So people will still think that I'm trustworthy and that what I'm doing in the world's valuable for 10, 15, 20 years from now. If you know your business from A to Z, there is no problem you can't solve. The best entrepreneurs stay in the details of the business. I love that you say Z. Every time I hear it on your podcast, I just... So this is literally a line that was... this guy named Sam Zomerie. Okay, so I go out.

1:46:45This is our friend George Mack, who we both love. He's the one that really has put into my brain the importance of being high agents. You know, he's really, you got just break and everything. I'm gonna talk to you self. Keep going. It's all your big muscles. That's true. So, so George Mack is the one that put the importance of being high to see in my, like I think his writing on it, his memes, the stuff he makes is just perfect. And I would say every single person I read a biography about is high agency. The most high agency person that ever come across is that guy named Sam Summary. So what's funny is there's another line in zero to one that I think people mistake too, where they say all technology is, is a better way to do something.

1:47:26So people think technology's got to be like software, it's got to be computers. Like no, at one point, a steamboat, the invention the steamboat engine was a technology of that day because it made it possible a better way to do something. And what did that do? So one of the first, this will surprise a lot of people. One of the first multinational corporations in human history were the banana, you grew it in Jamaica, you grew in Honduras, that banana, you have to eat it in like four days. So without the, our five days, our week, whatever it is, without the invention of the steam boat, you have a local market.

1:47:59So you match fruit, which humans have, you know, are going to eat forever with the steam boat and you create one of the first multinational corporations. So Sam's a Murray, right, is this guy. He is a poor Russian immigrant, right, comes to America, shows up in like Alabama and builds this gigantic fruit empire. And the book, the reason the book is called The Fish to Eat the Whale is because the biggest fruit company the time is called United Fruit. And Sam's and Mary could be his head to head with them and then eventually he takes over the little fish eats the whale. He takes over that company.

1:48:30So the reason that he says that is because his competition when the founders die, the people young running the United Fruit, their business is in Central America. That's where all the fruit is grown. And then it shipped into like the Gulf Coast and Florida and then put on trains and put whatever else, they thought they were gonna run their business remotely in Boston. And this guy's out here. He's literally hacking machetes. He's helping lay the railroad track. He's taking inventory. He's building the boats. He's doing every single thing. And the reason he did that, they're like, why are you doing this?

1:49:02His whole point is like, because if I know my business from A to Z, there's no problem I can't solve. Because I know every component. You just said you broke down your business to four components. You probably know those four components in and out. Now if you know, hey, we have a problem, a component three. No problem. I understand what we need to fix. It's such an important thing where a lot of people like this goes back to normal people or You know unobsessed people they call this Micro -managing or all you shouldn't do all this. It's like no, they're in the details He is in the details one of the funniest stories of this is the the the fruit association or something There's some kind of trade group.

1:49:34He's in a van, right? This is probably like 1910 or something like this and he's they want to give him an award So like they call it his name. Here's this award for the you know fruit guy of the year whatever they call it And like it's not in the audience they track him down. He's on the port. He's going over the inventory He's like I don't have I don't care about awards. I care about the business like I'm in the details of my business And so I would say way this isn't like a none of these like you know Like what Chris Bumson said like you know You can some of these work for you some of these are not gonna work for you I would say most of the people I read about are you would consider like micro managers Larry Ellison and I mentioned earlier, not a micromanager, not a grinder.

1:50:14He says in his book, he's a sprinter. He's like, I take care of the top level stuff, strategy, products, stuff like that, putting the right people in, but then I hire other people to be in the details. Elon, I think maybe he changed now, but in his early days, like in SpaceX, he knew the rocket forward and backwards. So it could also, these could also apply, you can't actually apply them to your situation. To be getting your company, you might want to do that. Maybe your, your, your, Inter shift or maybe you find something is better at that detail than you are. You just figure out how to apply yourself, but this is something I really curse over and over again.

1:50:44The public praises people for what they practice in private. There is no such thing as an overnight success. Every great act is built on Joseph practice, no one sees. So this goes back to my love of hip -hop that public praises people for what they practice in private, is this line from this rapper named Russ. And I think Russ is actually interesting. He'd actually be a good guest for you. He's done some great interviews. But Russ was the first person in history to write, record, produce, mix, and master an entire album. So one person, only one person, and it got over a billion streams. And so, I think it's like a very fascinating person.

1:51:21I think it's about things. But he's also a gifted lyricist and he says stuff that like kind of sears in my brain. And so this is like the point we were talking about earlier where like, you know, you can go out and say Jeff Bezos has too much money. He shouldn't have the world's largest yacht. He shouldn't have all these things and the giant house everywhere. And so I'm gonna put a guillotine. I'm gonna take things away from him. But you didn't see like all the stuff that he was doing before that. You didn't see the fact that he was making door desks. You didn't see that he was literally, there's a line in his biography where he is buying knee pads because he's the one putting the packages together, putting them in as like jeep and then taking them to UPS.

1:52:00And so one of my favorite stories about this, And it's actually like an idea I think that's related to this that the public crazy people for what they practice in private is this idea of going slow So you can go faster later on and I think Sam Walton's a perfect example of this And I bring up Sam Walton because he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs because there's like a very business It's so easy to understand in a way that I think Amazon is not you know what's Walmart's business? I buy cheaply and I sell cheaply and I just do that and a bigger and better in a way else and that's what generates the wealth and And so the crazy thing about the outcome that Sam had is nobody saw that for the first five years of his life, he had a single store.

1:52:39One store. He was like trying to figure out like, what is this retail thing? What am I good at? What's the merchandise that you should do? How do I do this? How's the marketing? And there's a great line in his biography where it talks about the fact that his first store they owned for five years was so successful that he made a mistake, a rookie mistake. His land he had at least and the lease could be terminated at any time There was no option he didn't have the option to renew the landlord say it would have to say yeah I want you back in here the landlord realized that oh my god this store that you know was making $20 ,000 a year Is now making 300 ,000 in a tiny little tiny little town?

1:53:15I'm just gonna say Sam nice to know you I'm taking over your store and so he's forced to then go look for another store That's where he discovers Bentonville Arkansas and so also he buys a store there. But there's like a multiple month timeframe where he has to run two stores for the first time in his life. And this is really important because one, he realized, oh, I don't have to have just one store. I can run two stores at a time, but he's also driving back and forth over between these like mountainous roads. So even though the stores are, let's say they're 300 miles away from each other, it's like an eight hour drive or something there, each way.

1:53:48And so he's like, man, there's got to be a more efficient way to do this. And one day he's driving and he hears a plane overhead. And he's like, oh, it's a Cessna. So he goes to the air, air field. He says, hey, how much would it cost to hire a Cessna to fly me from Bentonville to, I think, Newport is where the other store was. And it was, you know, whatever, $50, $100 in back of the day. And then he realizes, hey, I don't want to keep having this expense of, like having a charter or plane every time, like have somebody else drive. I'll just teach myself how to fly. And why is that important? This goes back to the public praises people for what they practice in private.

1:54:21They say, look, Sam you built a $200 billion fucking fortune look at all stuff you did they don't see all the stuff that happened What he realizes like hey now I can fly my own plane so I this this this this what it was a problem Was problems are just opportunities and workloads I thought me losing my first store was a problem I wonder being the best opportunity in life. It taught me one that I can run more than one store at a time And then two I accidentally discovered oh I can now fly I learn how to fly and so the advantage he had over his competitors where I can fly over, they're in jets. My competitors in K -Mart, they're in jets, right?

1:54:52They're above the clouds. I'm in a little tiny sesta. I can see traffic patterns. I can see, and he was scouting out. I think he scouted out personally the first 300 stores that he was doing. And so the idea where it's like, yeah, we can see that he's one of the richest people in the world when he was older. We can see that he has 300 stores and he's got all this other stuff. But it's like, you didn't see all the practice that went in there. There's another story that illustrates It's the public praises people for what they practice in private. He had no relationships with suppliers. So at the time there was a hula hoop was like a huge craze.

1:55:26All the kids wanted hula hoops, all of America. The suppliers didn't know him so they went by, they went sell hula hoops to him. So he just looked, he's like, what's a hula hoop? Well that's a problem, right? What's a hula hoop? He's like, it's just a little pipe. It's connected and it's colored. And he just wiggled your hips and that's like what the toy is. It's like, okay, he bought the material and at the end of the night, after he worked all day, he's like, I'm gonna make my own hula hoops. He winds up doing thousands of these. And then because he didn't have any money, he's like, now he had multiple stores.

1:55:55How do I get the hula hoop to other stores? He had a John Boat, which is like a little tiny boat because he's like a redneck fisherman. And he just put all the hula hoops in behind the John Boat and he towed behind his car. And that's with his delivery system. So in every single story, you're gonna see like, it seems like there's no possible way these giant companies can start with these little basic improvisations, like just feeling your way through, and then you're slowly practicing. You're like, oh, that idea worked. Let me do more of that. Oh, that idea didn't work. Let me avoid doing that in the future.

1:56:25And you just over and over and over again. And it's just compound. So the public praises people for what they practice in private. I love it. I mean, it's cliche to say it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. Go listen to, I remember when George Mack, I went back and listened to George was like one of your first guests and then went back and listened to the very first time. Until model show. Yeah, yeah. And then you go and look at your skills as a podcaster. It's just, you see this literally everything. Yeah. Self pity has no utility. If you live long enough bad things will happen to you.

1:56:59Your goal is to use the bad in life in a constructive fashion. So self pity has no utilities, another maximum from Charlie Munger and Charlie, you know, a lot of people don't like that. They don't tell me how to feel.

1:57:15He can speak to this because he experienced the worst thing somebody could go through. I think he was like 29 years old. He went to Gooding Divorce. He's got a nine year old son named Teddy if I remember correctly. And Teddy gets diagnosed with fatal leukemia. At this time, now he could have been safe. But at that time in history, they didn't know how to heal him. So he just went through divorce. He's not doing well financially because Charlie Munger doesn't become a full time investor So he's 20, at least 20s in the story. And he is struggling to work, failed marriage, and he is going to the hospital every day and slowly watching his son fade away.

1:57:51So anybody that's lost somebody from cancer, like my mom died of breast cancer in 2017. The last two years of her life were the worst way to die because there's all three of her bones too. And so like you literally see her, like get smaller and like not be able to get a bed and be addicted to pain medication and like can't do anything without it. And so it's one thing that happened to your mom is obviously we're devastating. The love you have for your mom is orders of magnitude less than you have for your child. When people talk about, oh, the way I would describe why this is such an important thing and why this anchor that self -pity has you know utility in this story that Charlie Munger mentions it in is because people that don't have kids are like, they think they know what love is.

1:58:33right? And the way I would describe this, the best description of why they don't know what love is yet is actually a story that I heard Ryan Reynolds to actor to say. And he's like, you know, his wife Blake Lively, he's like, I've never loved somebody as much of the love Blake. I think it was impossible that I'd ever love somebody more. He goes into that and still the day that Blake gave birth to our baby daughter. And then the moment I saw the daughter, I knew that if we were ever under attack, I would use Blake as a human shield to protect that baby. And having two kids, I was like, that's exactly right.

1:59:08That is the best description. And so when I, I don't just read these stories, I try to put myself in their shoes. And like, when I like cry, thinking about that happening to my son. And even then he's like, listen, you're gonna mourn. It's going to change. I mean, certain bad things are gonna happen in your life, right? Many of these are out of your control. That's the point, that's why. It's like, self -utility's not the solution. Yeah, you're gonna grieve, you're gonna mourn, you're gonna be changed forever. If you lose, you're God for you, you lose your child. Your life, your rest of your life's going to be fundamentally different.

1:59:38You're using a parent, your life is fundamentally different. And his whole point, I think he quotes Epititas if I'm not mistaken, where he's just like, the response to denevitable tragedies, the trials and tribulations you're having in your life is like learning from them I'm trying to use them as constructive fashion. It's not to wallow, oh, well, was me. Like bad things happening is a part of the human experience. So self -pity has no utility. Utilize, spend your time doing something else. The good ones, no more. The top talent in every industry has gathered more information than most people would find reasonable.

2:00:13Oh, this is my favorite. This is literally what I'm doing for a living because it's also in the books. So my idea was it's like, I don't think, like, you don't have to be smarter than everybody else, right? And some of this out of study control, it doesn't matter what I do for the rest of my life, I will never be as smart as Charlie Munger. But I can gather more information than another person would want to, right? And so like the example I have of this is like, I've just told you my thing, where like I read a biography about somebody going to the bibliography and I find up skier books. I found the subskier book on Thomas Edison, right?

2:00:49in the bibliography of a book, it was mostly like 1950 or something like that. And it talks about when he was 12 years old, he was so voracious and has such an inter -drive to make something of himself and to become an inventor and to really have controllers on Destiny. He was working as like a boy, so like, you know, very common for a 12 year old boy to have a full time job at that point. He was working on a railroad on an actual train and the train would have like a switch over. So there'd be a few hours every day where he would go and he'd find himself in Detroit. And so what he's doing, he goes, oh, there's a library here.

2:01:20He reads every single book in the library over a course of a few years. His name, Edwin Land, who I won't shut up about, I talk about all the time because he had his Steve Jobs, he four Steve Jobs. Edwin Land's the founder of Polaroid. He's also one of the most prolific individual inventors in American history. When he died, he had the third most patents to his name behind Edison and somebody else. And so Steve Jobs, the reason I found Edwin Land is because Steve Jobs, when he was in his 20s, talks about meeting Edwin Land when he was in his 70s. And he said that meeting was like visiting a shrine.

2:01:49So Steve's talking about Evan Land in 2020. Steve's dying of cancer in his late 50s, right? Still giving interviews, I'd, Walter Isaacson, phrase biography, still talking about this guy, Evan Land, right? So I was like, oh, that obviously I need to, to read about this guy. You start reading about Evan Land. He does the exact same thing. He, his idea, he had two, two goals in life. I wanna be the world's greatest scientist and I wanna be the world's greatest novelist. So obviously he outsides, Lova. I outsides Lova's love and ambition. He decides, he picks a scientific field where he feels he can be the best, that's the field of light and how it affects our vision.

2:02:23And so he starts sleeping with the canonical textbook on the science of light and vision is underneath his pillow when he's like 14. Okay, gets accepted to Harvard. Realizes there's nobody at Harvard that can teach him what he wants to learn. So he goes to the Harvard library, reads every single book in the Harvard library on light, then immediately drops out, moves to New York, goes to New York City Public Library, the beautiful one with the lines out front, reads every single book on light, and then starts to do his experiments. Doesn't have any money, doesn't have resources. He breaks into, I think NYU might be Columbia, let's say it's Columbia.

2:02:59Breaks into Columbia, right? There's a lot of misfits that do breaking an airy. They're like trying to steal your TV or something. This guy was breaking in so he could use scientific equipment so he could run his experiments. But it's like they just go to unbelievable levels of, like just way beyond you would find reasonable. So another example of this, the good note ones, no more is this line from David Ogriby. Again, I didn't know who David Ogriby was, reading all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. And he keeps talking about this, he calls it, he calls it, he calls it, this genius David Ogriby.

2:03:30I was like, genius, who is this guy? Read about him. He talks about, he built one of the most valuable advertising agencies that ever existed. And he talks about, he's like, oh, you want to get promoted? You want to get my spot? Like, how do you think I got to my spot? And he would encourage the people coming up, the young men in his organization. Because I'm going to sign you to one of their biggest clients with Shell Oil, right? You're going to read every single piece of paperwork on the company history. You're going to read textbooks on geology. You're gonna be textbooks on all exploration.

2:04:00You're gonna know all the executives at Shell. On Saturdays, you're gonna go down to the Shell gas station and you're going to interview the customers that are patronizing their business. Within a year, you'll be ready to take over your boss's position. And he's like, the good ones no more. He worked for a friend chef. He's like, they just knew every single thing about they collected more information about their craft and things related to their craft than anybody else. It is interesting, you know, so much of the stuff that we're talking about today is going beyond the reasonable. Yeah. There is a bar that lots of people get to.

2:04:37Tolerance for pain, endurance, kind of time persisting doing a thing. That's a great insight. A amount of talent that somebody has prepared. And it's just a case of going orders of magnitude past that. There's a guy named Les Schwab who he could have talked about him when we talked about the the trying to not wind up like your dad, because his dad was a drunk and a loser, and Les was very poor, and his dad, I think Les is like 12 years old and nine years old, and his dad, they find him dead in a ditch in front of a bar, and Les goes on to build a multi -billion dollar tire company. And like, you know, half a century ago, 40 years ago, and he says something in his autobiography, he's like, everything you do, it's volume, it's like gusto, and he goes, the combination of gusto, So like, you know, really throwing yourself into it and volume.

2:05:25And he's like, he says it's a case of repeat, repeat, repeat. And again, I think the, if you really want to edge in what you're doing, again, I'm not trying to copy, I'm not trying to make a tire company. I'm not trying to invent the instant photography like Edwin Land did. I'm not trying to be an inventor like Thomas Edison. I'm not trying to build an advertising agency like David Ogamy, but I just take that idea as like, good ones no more. So it's like, not only am I going to spend, I read for a few hours every day, Right? That's usually in the morning because that's the time my brain works best.

2:05:57Then I usually have lunch. And then in the afternoon, what I do is then I reread past highlights and relic into old episodes and I just see myself in that. So anytime you see like some kind of social media post from me, all that is is something I reread that day that I read for the first time four years ago. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. I posted this, this quote about Rockefeller and the importance of concentration because I went back through and I reread the highlights from the book and that's what I was spending, you know, 30 minutes doing. And it's just like, all I'm, I can't guarantee that I'm gonna be successful.

2:06:28I can't guarantee that I'm gonna make a podcast that people find they think it's worth their time. But what I can do is I can't control that, but I can, because it's more like a, especially with podcasts, it's like more like a, it's a subjective kind of thing, right? And, but I can objectively do more work to hopefully influence until the subjective, like nature of podcasting in my favor. And I just all I do is read books like, oh, that's good idea. I'll take that. Thank you very much. This isn't fucking rocket science. Money comes naturally as a result of service. A business is just an idea that makes someone else's life better.

2:07:05This drives me insane because again, all I do is hang out with founders. And now the filters got a lot tighter than it has for the last few years. But what I don't like is when people are like, I always ask them like, who are you entrepreneurial heroes. Who's the smartest person you know? What's the best business you can think of? What's your favorite biography? Who do you want to emulate? I think picking the right heroes is one of the most important things you can do in your life because you're going to naturally all of us are going to copy and absorb things from people around us whether they're in together in person or I'm reading a book about or watching a movie about it.

2:07:38And what drives me insane is they're like, well, they put a number on it. It's not like I want to start a company that does X or I want to help somebody do Y. I want to build a hundred billion dollar company. And it's like, do you understand that people have built a $100 billion dollar company? You think Jeff Bezos was sitting back there and was like, I'm gonna build a $3 trillion company. You think Steve Jobs, you think Steve Jobs thought that Apple was gonna get to $2 trillion or whatever it's at today. One of my favorite piece of trivia about Apple is the first ever Apple sale was made barefoot.

2:08:06He didn't have shoes on when he sold his first set of computers. They weren't even computers. Like his first Apple product, his first sale was made barefoot. There's no way that guy was like, I'm gonna start this because there's a number attached to it. So money comes naturally as a result of service is from Henry Ford, okay? Henry Ford's autobiography, I think, is like a mandatory, like I think an entrepreneur should read it over and over again, you know, every two or three years. And he, Henry Ford, and 1919, he owned a hundred percent of Ford Motor Company because he bought out all his investors.

2:08:37And he was arguably the richest person in America at the time. So it's like me and you owning like a $20 billion company who knew outside of shareholders today. It's insane, right? And yet you go and you analyze the life of Henry Ford, and he's the one that said that, is like, he had one single idea. He's like, it's kind of messed up that cars are only for the rich people at the time, they're like hand making them. Most of the cars on a road are either electric or steam. He obviously populates internal combustion engine. It's a funny, let me take a tangent. It's a funny story. I'm rereading Rockefeller's autobiography.

2:09:09They wrote when he's like in his 80s, like a few months ago. And there's a line in there where he's like, Young Henry Ford came to visit to me day. I love that guy. I'm like, yeah, he made the demand for the product. You have a monopoly on orders of magnitude. Yeah. Yeah. I bet you probably get him a hug and a kiss when you see him. Of course you love him. But when I love Henry Ford and I love this about everything, it's like you only need one idea. You only have to be right one time. Henry Ford had a single idea. And it's a tire career, one idea. Everybody should be able to afford a car. We can't do that right now because at the time, let's say cars were like $6 ,000 and the average person made, you know, two bucks a day, a dollar a day.

2:09:47This is not going to happen. And so it took him, when you read Vogue, he's about him and he studies career, it took him like a decade and a half, two decades to finally figure out mass production. So you can drop the price of the car, right? And so how did he become the wealthiest person in America at the time that he was alive? Money comes naturally as a lot of service. The service he provided was he made the car affordable so everybody. And I literally Think about like there's a lot of great products. There's not many products you can make that change the geography Like that's how influential this guy was and so what I think where people make mistakes They're always like I want to make X amount of money in my pocket or I want to make you know my market cap in my company Being this is like well the way to get wealthy is to solve a problem for somebody and then Increase the amount of people that you're able to solve that problem for assuming that is a widespread problem turns out how many people would want a car that they could afford?

2:10:41Well, they're either on foot, or they're being driven by horses, probably a lot if you can solve that problem. And so the second line of that after Henry Ford says, money comes out to us as a service, the best definition of a business I've ever heard is that second line from, and that came from Richard Branson. And the weird thing you're gonna see, and he says that all businesses is an idea that makes somebody else look like better. The weird thing that happens, this is, there's another maxima repeat over and over again on the podcast, that history doesn't repeat, human nature does. because every generation thinks that there's no more opportunity.

2:11:10Like, oh, we missed it. There's always, there will be limitless opportunity as long as humans are alive because all of business is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. A podcast can make somebody else's life better. The people that made the camera, that makes sure somebody else is life better. Whoever made the microphone, the iPad, your drink that I down, the orange sunrise, when I'm doing my podcast, that makes somebody else's life better. There's an infinite way to make other people's lives better. Mmm. If you love what you do, the only exit strategy is death. Retirement can be fatal.

2:11:44This is something that's fascinating because my dad is like a, he's a blue collar guy. He's got like an eighth grade education. And I realized you said how normal, normal people can be. And I told him like, it was like a big deal to me because it's like the first super famous and wealthy person that I got some time with was Sam's L. And at the time, Sam's L probably had $10 billion or something. It was insane. He's 81 years old. He's working seven days a week.

2:12:16And I talked to him. He's like, I'm going to be doing deals to die. He was obsessed with this. And he was working on deals six months later. He's dead. Still working every day. Or very a lot, maybe not every day. But he was still on all the time. And my dad for the life of him could not understand that this guy had billions of dollars And he still chose to work and it realized like oh for vast majority of people Work they equate work with something I have to do. It's a drudgery There's a great line called how to do great. There's a great essay called how to do great work It's by this guy program.

2:12:49Yeah, and He's so his guess is like how many people out of eight billion people on the planet really wind up finding work that they love to do and they're able to support themselves with it. A lot of people find things they like to do that they love, but can they make your abocation, your vocation, I think it's a line from Steve Jobs. And Paul's guess, Paul Grims' guess is like, probably a few hundred thousand. I think he might be right about that. Like it is unbelievably rare, where I don't look at, like I wake up every day like I get to do this, not I have to do this. Sam Zell looks at it like I get to do this, not I have to do this.

2:13:27and what's remarkable is the overlap between people that got to the top of their profession and the people that had no exit, their exit strategy was death. Not only would they not sell their company, they would never retire. I did this at this at one of the episodes I'm most proud of and one of the guys I really like and I uh, uh, uh, it's the founder of Red Bull and his name's like Deatrice Matchich, Deatrice Machicist or something like that. There's no even biography of him in English. So I had to I had to use Chatship T to translate a German biography to read in English, which is the transition not perfect to do that episode.

2:14:00And he came to my attention because he had just passed away. And he remarked, well, story didn't start. He was like a executive, like a counting executive for like you in love or something like that. And then started his first company. He was red bull. He was like 41 years old. He owned 49 % of it. So he had, there was a 49 % partner, 49 % partner, another guy that owned 2%. Towards the end of his life, he turned, he was paying himself between like 200 million a year and 500, 700 million a year every year. So that's the face. That's the face check, right? Uh, was turning down like, right now you could sell Red Bull for $40 billion?

2:14:37Probably more. So multiple times he turned down $10 billion in his pocket. His share would be $10, $20 billion. In his whole point, he's like, I love what I do. Why would I sell it? Then I don't have anything to do. And he was like, you would love him because like he like to, he took care of his health. Um, you know, he was, he had his own fleet of airplanes So he flies on planes, he rides motorcycle, he just live life to the fullest. And there's so many people like that where like they achieve outside success because time carries most of the way. It's all the stuff we've been talking about today.

2:15:04And to them, taking that away from them would be like losing a child. What about retirement can be fatal? What did that line come from? That's a line from David Orgoby. And same thing where he noticed, the problem is it's like, I think you've mentioned this on your show and I think you got something like shit for it before or two about like the different values that historically men and women and like how contrasts. But for men like for us, I think it's really important for us to like wake up every day and like put solve a problem, put something out into the world, feel like we're being useful to our tribe.

2:15:42You are not a selfish person. Like you are a driven person but you are doing you are doing things every day for other people. And I think when you remove that and they've showed would tell you something like this. Like then they don't have, it's not just work. It's, this is my life's work, this is my purpose. Like I wake up every day with a burning desire to achieve mission success. Like, well, there's a, you know, thinking about it through an evolutionary lens, you're useful. Yes. What are the signals that the world's giving you? You're moving toward a goal, you're useful. People need you. Yeah.

2:16:15Contribute. And yeah, the evidence is there. Yeah, in... You're, your friend Jordan Peterson said something one time. I saw this clip on YouTube and I didn't see the whole conversation, but the clip was, I was like, oh, this sounds exactly, this sounds like this guy's read hundreds of biographies. Because he said successful men are insane. And he's just like, they wake up every day, he goes, you could put them in a forest and they would just run around all day, chopping trees down with an axe. Like they have to do something. And to take away their ability to be productive, to be useful using your term is torture It is, it takes away their purpose.

2:16:51It takes, in many cases, like you'll find like, oh, they stopped working. And then all of a sudden this young, or not young, this, you know, virile, healthy, overall healthy older person is dead. How did that happen? And so I think when the point is like, this is the way I would describe this, I think is really important. And this is the maximum that I took away from the two hour conversation I was sans out is go for freedom. And essentially what he told me, He's like, listen, I know all the rich guys. He's like, they're all miserable. He's like, they make the mistake of like, buying, spending more time doing shit that you don't like to buy slightly more nicer versions of the same shit.

2:17:28That's his word, himself. That's what he said, right? He also did something with Salaris. He's like, I have a place in Chicago and I have a compound in Malibu. That's the word he used, right? And he goes, every year I take my family, he, like his kids, his extended family, and we spend the holidays in the South of France. He goes, I could buy the village. He goes, I don't buy it, I rent it because the things that you own start to own you. And then he's the funny thing is he wanted to show me pictures of his Malibu house. And so I thought it would be like pictures on his phone. He hands me his phone and it's Google Images.

2:17:59It says Sam Zell Malibu House. And so it's like, imagine having a house that's so well known, a compound where it's like it's on Google Images. But his whole point was like, David, you do not trade money for freedom, okay? He goes, go for freedom. and this is the rough synopsis what he said. He goes, if you go for freedom, if you have freedom, you can control what you work on. If you can control what you work on, you can work on what you love. If you work on what you love, you'll do it for a long time. If you do it for a long time, you'll get really good at it. If you get really good at it, money will come as a result.

2:18:30And so his whole point, he's like, I had unlimited money. I never made the mistake of trading money in exchange for my freedom. And that, it's really powerful. And that gives you the ability, when you find, when you really, your goal in life is to find your life's work and a thing that like the purpose why you feel you're here, and then to do it until you die. I can give you a list of people, Enzo Ferrari, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett's doing this, Charlie Munger, Coco Chanel, Estee Lauder, the list goes on and on and on and on. They, these people were decades past the need for working for money.

2:19:02And in many cases like Enzo Ferrari, he was working like 11 hour days, seven days a week for the rest of his life. He didn't need the money. Dude, I love what you do. I said it at the start, I said it on the Q &A. I think founders is a podcast that everybody should go and listen to. It's not a cadence that's going to actually eat into your modern wisdom time because you can only get one hour a week, you've got to read all of the books. Bro, you're great. You're great. I really appreciate you as a friend. I appreciate everything that you do. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff that you get them.

2:19:29The founders podcast and your podcast player, you founders podcasts on all the networks. Dude, Chris, I admire you. I'm so glad we came friends. I love the opportunity and I appreciate you. You invited me. Until next time man. You're the man. Appreciate you.