How to make a few Billion Dollars | Brad Jacobs

23:45So my goal was to make$100 ,000 and I figured I could take the$100 ,000 and with the interest I'd make on that, I'd make over$1 ,000 a month. And I figured I could live comfortably on that. My two big, you asked what I was doing. The two big things I was doing were music and meditation. And I didn't feel either of those required a lot of money. I was not into money. My goal was never to make money. It turned out that I was good at making money. And I, instead of making a hundred thousand dollars over some period of time, I happened to be in the right place at the right time. And I had some great people around me and with me and, and we were making a hundred thousand dollars a month and more than that, actually.

24:21So I just, I didn't plan it. It just kind of started happening and it's happening. And then I got more and more and more. And one thing led to another. Did you talk to your music friends about this? Like, how did you even get into like oil trading? I didn't even know oil trading existed until, you know, I was much older. So what did you even know that got you started? I will tell you the moment that I decided to get into the oil business, because I remember very vividly, I was watching the evening news. I think it was CBS with Dan Rather, but I could be wrong. I think it was CBS, Dan Rather. And Exxon, before they bought mobile, they were just called Exxon back then, was the first company to ever make a billion dollars profit in a quarter.

25:03And on the television, it said obscene profits. And I said, huh, I'd like to make$100 ,000. That's obscene profits. I think I'll get an oil business. So I went to the library, no internet back then. So I went to the library and I just read every book I could get on the oil business. I read a book called The Seven Sisters. And I read just every, the history of the oil business and everything I could get my hands-on that was there. And from that, I started talking to people. I found some other guys who were doing different things in the oil business. And what does that mean you found like in the bars where your band was playing?

25:38Well, I just asked around just people I knew, people I ran into, people I knew socially, and some people were doing it already. And I learned from that. And I started making some calls together with some friends. It wasn't just me alone. I don't deserve all the credit. And as a team, we started calling major oil companies like Exxon, Shell, BP, Texaco, etc. I mean, some of those have been sold, but those were the big ones back then. And we talked to independent refiners like Marathon and Ashland and City Service and so forth. And by Dumlok, the Iran regime changed and the Ayatollah Committee came back from Paris, the Shah left, and they took the 400 American hostages, this is 1979.

26:18And oil prices went through the moon. And those who were old enough remember, you had to get Your license plate either had an odd or even license plate number, and that determined whether you could get gasoline that day. And people were fighting for gasoline. It was a shortage. And the prices were going way up like they had never gone up before. It was a very volatile spot market. So in that atmosphere, guys at Exxon or Mobil or Texaco would take a 20-something-year-old kid's call and say, hey, are you interested in selling any oil or do you need any oil? and they would say, well, you know, we've got some Arab heavy and we'd like to get rid of it.

26:54We've got too much. If you've got someone who's got some Arab heavy, give me a call. And I'd say, you got anything you want to buy? So you actually, yeah, yeah, we'd like some Dubai. We'd like to buy some crude oil. I'm just using these examples. So now we've got two orders. We've got a buy order, we've got a sell order. We'd call the next guy. We'd call Gulf Oil and say, we repeat what we have the buy and sell order for. And maybe Gulf would want to do one of those. And so then we'd call back Exxon and we'd say, okay, we got a, we have a counter party for you. Let's put them together. They say, is it reputable or is it someone we can't trust?

27:28Well, it's another one of, it was the seven sisters back then. It's another one of your six sisters. And it's okay. That's fine. Put the deal together and we charge them a nickel or dime a barrel. And that was our commission. And we were so all over the marketplace. We were talking to everybody at once that we had market knowledge. We had price discovery. We knew who was selling and who was buying. And therefore, we could match them together and earn an honest brokerage commission. I mean, that's great. But there's a few things there that are really incredible. And again, I'm trying to make the bridge between my own mindset at the age of 23 and yours.

28:04First off, when I think of the oil business, even right now, and I think of going into the oil business, as you put it, I think, how am I, like Exxon is already in the oil business. What am I going to do, drill for oil? That's the first thing I would think. And the answer is, of course, no, because that requires billions of dollars. And then the idea of calling Exxon up and saying, hey, do you want to buy this kind of oil? Like, why wouldn't Exxon just call their six other sisters and do it themselves? I would think to myself, I don't really add any value here. I would give up before I discovered the ways to add value.

28:41Okay. So back then, the seven sisters didn't talk to each other. There were antitrust reasons. There were ego reasons. There were all kinds of reasons. They didn't need to really. Everyone had integrated oil companies where they were drilling for oil in the Middle East and Africa and Asia. They had their own ships. They had their own refineries that they were shipping it to in Rotterdam or Amsterdam or in Houston. And they had their own gasoline stations that they would then go and distribute it to. So they were really integrated and everything was going hunky-dory and everyone had their own little world and they didn't really need to talk to anybody else.

29:17When this Iranian situation broke out in 1979, that all changed because people's systems got all messed up. And going back to what we were saying before, when there's anomalies, when there's disruptions, when there's volatility, you can make money on that if you're nimble, if you're agile, if you're flexible, if you're willing to take a little risk. Yeah, so you just felt confident you would call them up. And then were you ever worried, like, let's say, okay, I got Exxon to buy this from mobile and I took my piece in the middle. We ever worry that now, instead of being in the middle, Exxon could just call mobile every time they needed the same thing you sold Exxon.

29:53That happened. Yeah, that happens sometimes. And we got cut out of it. And that happens. But more often than not, these guys didn't like talking to each other. They were very competitive. And they had a lot of legal reasons why they weren't supposed to talk to each other for antitrust reasons. The Justice Department was all over the oil companies back then. So they weren't our only customers. We had the independent refiners. And then we had the traders. We had a big trading community, the Phillip brothers and Tampa maxes and many, and they had the Japanese Sogo Shoshas, the big Japanese trading houses.

30:24So we had a lot of people to talk to. And we had, and it was, we had maybe like a couple hundred customers and we were talking to all of them and none of them was talking. None of those companies were talking to the other 199 of them. Everyone had a few they were talking to, but not all of them. So the fact that we were all over the market was our secret. Now, where did I get that idea? I remember exactly where I got that idea. I got that idea from reading a Businessweek article about a man who ended up doing business with his company, meeting him, and he became my business mentor called Ludwig Jesselson.

30:56And the name of his company was Philip Brothers. And I read an article in Businessweek about him, and it had a photograph of them. They were traders. I was a broker. So a trader takes title, buys, and sells. A broker matches together a buyer and a seller and takes commission. Now, the trader has risk. Sometimes they lose money. A broker, the most they can lose is they don't get paid their commission, but they don't have a lose principle. And there was a photograph in that Businessweek article of the trading floor, and it had clocks with the times of different cities around the world. And the article explained that the way Philip Brothers made money was to have a worldwide global organization that was plugged in to all the people who needed commodities and all the people who wanted to sell commodities.

31:46And therefore, they had an edge and they had a legitimate value they could add in the oil business. And I said, I totally get that business. The problem is I had$5 ,000 left over for my bar mitzvah money and that was it. So I could not spend billions of dollars buying and selling crude oil or refined products because I didn't have billions of dollars and no bank was going to lend me that. But brokerage doesn't require any money. Brokerage just required a phone, and that was pretty much it. And the phone, you didn't have to pay for two, three months after you got the phone bill. So helpful working capital.

32:18So it was an easy business. It was a business we could afford. And it was a business that was relatively low risk, almost no risk. And I guess in order for a business like this to work, you have to be able to talk to actual decision makers on both sides. Like you can't talk to the people four levels underneath. So if the decision maker was the CEO, you're probably in trouble. But the decision maker probably for an oil company on whether to buy a particular type of oil probably was more middle management is my guess. I don't know. No, you're completely right. It was not the CEO. It was, I mean, we would see the CEOs at, the annual events in London or in Houston or New York, there were parties, there were trade shows, but they really weren't in the trading game.

32:59They were running the whole business. There was usually a head of trading at each one of the oil companies. And there was managers of crude oil, managers of two oil, managers of fuel oil, of residual oil, different types of oil. And there were managers of shipping, of the chartering ships and moving it around. And that's who we spoke with. My guess is through your reading and your conversations, you realize probably, A, you realize that there's going to be these anomalies and this volatility in the oil business, but you also probably got a sense that the decision makers weren't impossible for you to reach.

33:30And I think that's what would have stopped me is that I probably wouldn't have understood that I could have reached the decision makers. I've never been shy about calling anybody. And I find that 90 % of people I call will take my call, even if I've never talked to them before. And I think people like to talk to other people. People like to connect. People like to help other people. I think most people are generous by nature. And by the way, I don't think, I think you're right. I think opportunities like this, they probably don't exist in the same industries, but they probably always exist. Like it reminds me of reading Bernard Baruch's autobiography called My Story, where he basically gets telegraphed the gold price in London, finds out what the gold price is in New York, and he has the simple arbitrage.

34:14Gosh, you know, it's so funny. You mentioned that book. My father had that book. He kept it in his bedroom. You should see it all the time. He used to always tell me to read it. I never read it. Oh, it's really good. I should read it. Now you, now you mentioned it again, I'm going to read it. It's a different era of investing where, you know, insider trading was, had, there was a different viewpoint on it legally. And it's not, I'm not saying he was an insider trader, but some of his stuff seemed to border on that, but he also used very simple arbitrage principles and found where those very simple arbitrages were.

34:47Like in that time, it was gold internationally. Like I imagine now, let's say someone creates, hypothetically, the SEC approves the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF. I imagine it's possible to call a sovereign wealth fund in the Middle East and say, listen, you need to leg in. A lot of people are putting money into Bitcoin ETFs. You're going to need to leg into it slowly, but faster than your competitors. and I can help you do that by dealing with directly with BlackRock. I'm just making this up right now based on what you just said. So I imagine there's some opportunities like that that could exist in the future.

35:20There's always opportunities. The world is so big and commerce is so large and there's so much going on and there's so much flowing goods. There's just so much going on that if you're sharp and if you have an open mind and you have the right attitude and you have great people, there's places you can make money always. There's never no places to make money. There's always places to make money. And this relates to your focus in the book on mindset and how important mindset is. And I've been seeing this constantly lately that how many times mindset is mentioned just in the course of my life. And you mentioned how it's very easy.

36:01It's almost like an evolutionary thing to have negative thoughts because the people who survived were more worried about lions than the people who are optimistic that lions would never show up. And so the question is, though, but to succeed in business, you have to have enough optimism or enough positive thinking to know that a 23-year-old can call the decision makers and do billion-dollar oil deals. So how do you straddle that bridge? And you mentioned your earlier interest in meditation. You said you were interested in music and meditation. Had you traveled to India? Or what was your interest in meditation at that time?

36:33because in the 70s, it was like everybody went to India to meditate. They couldn't do it here. And I went to India too. Into the 70s and the 80s and the early 90s. I haven't been to India in a long time. And wow, I have many, many Indian friends. But India has changed a lot. I mean, when I went to India, even in Delhi, the phones didn't work. You had to call someone 20 times to get through. When I went to India to get from the airport to the hotel, you were mobbed with people with leprosy and poor people. and some of that still exists but not as much as it did back then when i was in india the taxi cabs in the floor had holes and you could see the road you and love rocks were coming in so it's really changed and there was no there was no billionaire class there was really no big middle class it was it was a poor poor country now they've they've changed a lot they've really matured as a as a country and the economy has gone a lot and there's a lot of wealth there's still great poverty which terrible.

37:28But wow, it's come a long, long, long way. Now, but you mentioned a minute ago, I want to comment on that, that you have to have a lot of positivity in order to succeed in business. I would say yes, but I would say I agree with you. You absolutely need a positive mindset and thinking big and you have to have good, upbeat energy and you want a team of winners and people thinking they're going to conquer the world and all full of piss and vinegar, as I said. However, I think you can't only be like that because there is a value to being also pessimistic, also doubting, also being rational, testing your beliefs, really challenging your hypotheses.

38:08Are they right? And in all the businesses I've had, I've created a culture where there's dialectical thinking, meaning looking at situations from multiple perspectives, not only two perspectives, but multiple perspectives. And I think the reason, one of the main reasons why we've been successful is we, we debate things all day long in a nice way, in a nice way. And, uh, and, you know, I have, I have a niece who, when she was young, when she was, when she was in high school, now she's in her thirties, when she was in high school, she, uh, scored very, very high nationally in these, um, debating clubs.

38:45I think they call it forensics. And I really respected the way they did it. She would have to argue one side of the proposition, and then they'd switch, and she'd have to argue the against, and the person who was arguing against had to argue the fork. And she regretted on how well you argued both sides of the argument, not just one side. I think this is really important in business. I think it's important in life. I think in business, you have to always be thinking big thoughts, dreaming big objectives, but then also challenging those, challenging those assumptions to make sure they're real. And then you have to be modifying the business plan all along based on further evidence that's coming up, more information that's coming, better perceptions and analysis of the situation, being opportunistic, pivoting when it's necessary to pivot.

39:39So I think you need both. I don't think you should just be everything is roses and ice cream and wonderful. I think that helps. A part of the culture should be like that. But I think it's really healthy and useful and important to have also a doubting part of the culture as well. Yeah. But still, I guess there's this optimism that you yourself personally can survive the problems that you encounter in this steel manning of both sides. Like you have confidence that even though, uh, okay, you made a$500 billion mistake, you know, depending on the U S government, 500 million, not 500 billion, it's still a lot of money.

40:20It's still a lot of money. I won't scribble over it. It was a big mistake. Yeah. You still have confidence in yourself that you wouldn't start spiraling into, Oh, I'm a loser. I shouldn't be CEO. Here's my resignation. Like you have confidence that you personally can move forward through these things. Absolutely. I mean, you're going to make mistakes. So in the acknowledgement section of the book, instead of thanking the normal people you thank, I called out who my mentors were. My friends were people I learned from people. I really got something from as a result of interacting with in my life.

40:52And one of them was a psychologist called Albert Ellis, who died about 15 years ago. but I had the fortune of seeing him in New York when he was live in his later years. And I read all his books and I just really fascinated with his mind. He was one of the two inventors of cognitive therapy, along with Aaron Beck. He called it rational emotive therapy, but basically it was the same thing as cognitive therapy, which is where you're analyzing your thoughts and being aware of your thoughts and then disputing them and reframing them in more constructive ways. And one of the things that he was famous for and what I put in the book that I learned from him is lose perfectionism.

41:28Don't try to think that you're perfect because you're not. Don't think other people are going to be perfect because they're not. Don't think that life is going to be perfect. It is not. And if you can really master that non-perfectionism where you don't expect perfection in yourself, in others, and in life in general, number one, you're a lot happier. You get disappointed. You don't disappoint yourself. Other people don't disappoint you. The world doesn't disappoint you because you're expecting things to go wrong because that's life. That's the way it works. And secondly, you can be more effective in your thinking because you're not wasting time.

42:06You mentioned a minute ago in your question about, I didn't think, oh, I'm a loser. Oh, by the way, that's a thought that does come up sometimes. I'm a loser. But then I realized, okay, that's a silly thought. That's not a rational thought. I'm exaggerating something. Let's throw that thought away. But that's normal. People do have that thought, particularly successful people. I'm shocked at when I get, and I know a lot of successful people, when I know them well and we confide in each other, most successful people wear a mask. They wear a mask of confidence, of strength, of I got this whole thing together.

42:40And in their private moments, when they're talking to their husband or their wife or to another person that they confide that's a good friend, they say, wow, I don't know if I can do this. Gee, this might be a first year in a long time. I'm going to really mess up or wow. Look what I did. People have, it's okay. That's normal to have negative thoughts, but you have to reframe those. You can't let them grip you. You can't let them dominate you and just hold you down, but you shouldn't feel bad about feeling bad. You should, that's something I learned from Albert Ellis. You shouldn't feel you're a loser just because you're thinking in a bad way.

43:15You're a human being who's programmed to think not exactly rationally all the time. That's what we are.

43:36you describe a meditation that you do you mentioned you meditate 15 minutes in the morning 15 minutes in the evening usually and early on you described two kinds of meditation i was curious you don't say you do this but you said that if you stare at your hands for a few minutes, you'll start to get like into a trance-like feeling. I never heard that before. I know quite a bit about meditation or is enough about it. I never heard this before. So I didn't invent that. Ernie Rossi, he died about two years ago out in Los Osos, California. One of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. And he was a hypnotherapist and he studied under the best hypnotherapist of all time called Milton H.

44:18Erickson, who died in the 80s. And what he came up with, Ernie Rossi, was, you ever heard of the homunculus man? Homunculus man is a visualization of what a person would look like if the size of their organs was proportionate to the amount of communication, electrical and chemical, between the brain and that organ. So they have very big hands. They have very big lips. They have very small other parts of the body that there's not no reason, like the elbow is very small because the brain doesn't really need to be talking to the elbow much. But due to our ancestral past, the hands are really important because we were pulling onto trees and we had that wrong and we're communicating.

45:01One mistake, you're dead. And he came up with this thing of, you look at your hands and you stare at your hands as if it's the very first time you've ever seen your hands. And by the way, sometimes it is the very first time you've really stared at your hands. Some people never looked at their hands before. And you look at your hands and it's amazing. You do this, and I've done this with Ernie with 200 people in an audience. And it's very quiet. People do go into a trance, that's to use your word. And you look at your hands and you start seeing things you never noticed before. And you start getting very, very introspective.

45:38And he takes that to another level and another level another level that maybe should be the subject of an entire another podcast, but not now. What I did is I took, I'm never ashamed of taking other people's ideas and then improvising on them and making them more relatable to me and stuff I can use. I do it all the time. I'm always looking for information that's really cool that I can then maybe apply and adjust a little bit different way and I can use it for my own personal benefit or the business benefit. So what I took was rather than standing there looking at my hands, which after a while, you know, I put my hands down.

46:12I said, okay, let me close my eyes because most of my meditation do with my eyes closed. And I said, why don't I feel the brain? Why don't I just close my eyes and like allow my awareness to just float in the brain? Sometimes on the right hemisphere, some on the left hemisphere, some on the top, some on the bottom, some on the prefrontal cortex, whatever, just be in the brain and see what happens. And that's been the main meditation. I do lots of different meditation techniques, but that's the main meditation technique that I invented, my humble contribution to the field of meditation that I do myself.

46:44And I do it several times a day. I don't just do it in the morning and the evening for 15 minutes. But if I'm, if it's two, three o 'clock in the afternoon and I'm feeling that afternoon kind of dullness and I got big meetings going on, I need to be sharp. I'll just close my eyes for a few minutes and I'll just feel my brain. I'll just direct my awareness into my brain. And I find it's extremely relaxing and energizing at the same time. I find it unleashes this huge amount of creativity and sensory activity. And it's a really cool thing. So that's what I do. That's my main meditation technique is feeling the brain.

47:19I do other stuff too. That's the one I really enjoy the most. I think in the appendix, maybe you mentioned some of the other things like these thought experiments in the appendix are very interesting. Like the first, I think four or five of them were space related. Like imagine for instance, you're a star that's about to explode. Like why did you pick these specific, maybe you could describe one of them, but why did you pick those specific thought experiments? I've never seen thought experiments like those before. You really read the book, James. Thank you for doing this. Of course. I wouldn't have you on the podcast if I didn't read the book.

47:51Oh, no, you did your homework. So thought experiments to me are an integral part of how my businesses have succeeded so much. Because one of my basic beliefs is if you're going to do extraordinary stuff, you need people who are extraordinary and they need to think in different ways. They need to rearrange their brain. because if I hire just ordinary folks and we think in ordinary ways, it's foolish to think we're going to achieve extraordinary profits for shareholders like we have. So that's a basic, basic tenet of all my businesses is hire extraordinary people, pay them real well, and let's think in ways that are very different than most management teams think.

48:35And I got this idea about thinking differently in part from studying Albert Einstein. where he had these Gedanken experiments. My German is terrible, so I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that word, where he imagined different things like riding a beam of light and he came up with E equals MC squared. And so he literally closed his eyes through picture stuff. And that's how he came up with his theorems. And so I find that if we want to think differently, if we want to rearrange our brain, there's a lot of different ways we could go about doing that. But the examples I gave in the book are ones that are visualizing time, visualizing space in very different ways, either very, very big elements of space, thinking about the whole cosmos or thinking about an infinite number of picturing, actually picturing an infinite number of universes all at the same time.

49:24That's a very, very expanding, expansive way of thinking. Or shrinking down to tiny, tiny elements of space, thinking of what would it be like to be in the nucleus of an atom or be an elementary particle inside an atom. and then just getting in touch with that. And then maybe alternating between tiny, tiny, tiny and huge, huge, huge. And that's one way to get out of your normal way of thinking, which is the goal, in my opinion, of meditation is to get into a new state of consciousness, not the ordinary way of perceiving the world. But then that's only one, as you rightfully pointed out. There's also ways to use meditation to change the way you have perceptions, use your senses, ways to smell differently, to taste differently, to hear different sounds.

50:10There's ways to feel, feel friendliness and love and kindness and compassion and kindheartedness and gratitude and all these emotions that if you cultivate them, you actually put attention on deliberately, intentionally getting in touch with these fantastic, uplifting feelings. You feel great. You feel wonderful. And you'll be more effective in business. That's not going to happen by itself. You got to put attention on that. So I have many, many different little techniques I've fooled around with over the years. And I've mixed and matched from other meditation teachers that I've respected a lot.

50:47And I've turned it into my own little toolkit of tools of meditation techniques. It's almost like there's like a bunch of different muscles in the brain that you're trying to exercise. So for instance, if you're not used to feeling compassionate towards people, how about let's do 20 minutes a day of exercising that muscle. But another muscle might be that what we talked about earlier, like, oh, I'm always thinking I'm a loser and that spirals out of control. So another muscle might be noticing when you're thinking, going down an irrational path of thoughts, noticing it as quickly as possible, practicing that and being able to pull yourself back before it spirals.

51:25100 % and you're on something big there. There is an intersection between meditation and cognitive therapy where you can try to take a new perspective on your thoughts and challenge those thoughts and reframe those thoughts. And there's a fantastic book that Aaron Beck wrote about 20 years ago called The Prisoners of Hate. And it's about the mind of a terrorist. It's why does a terrorist do all these horrible, horrible things. And the thesis is, it's because there's, like all of us, terrorists have core beliefs that are reflections of their schema, of the lens, the prism by which they interpret the world.

52:08And those core beliefs are as follows. I believe in X, Y, Z religious thought. Two, you and everybody else must also agree that these are true for all time. And this is absolutely 100 % true. And everyone must agree with me on that. And number three, a core belief that says, and if you and other people don't agree with me on these core religious beliefs, that's a horrible, terrible, unacceptable thing that I cannot let stand. And in fact, I have to kill you. I have to eliminate you because that is a unacceptable situation. And then there's a final thought that says, and if I do kill you for disagreeing with me, I'm going to go to heaven.

52:56I'm going to have great rewards in the afterlife and so forth. And those core beliefs, when you have them all, end up in terrorism. So in a way, it's false logic. Some of those beliefs are wrong. But nevertheless, there's a reason why people have performed terrorist acts. It's because of their belief structure. And his hypothesis was, in the Prisoners of Hate book, is cognitive therapy could be an antidote for terrorism in the world. Yeah, I wonder how he made the connection. I guess the connection is that if you're aware that some of these core concepts are irrational, then you're able to kind of pull yourself out of them whenever you drift into that.

53:40And you can do that through cognitive behavioral therapy, then you won't be a terrorist. Yeah, and that's the theory. I don't know that how many terrorists have gone to therapy. I think that's the problem is that you also have to have this initial belief that I believe all these things, but there might be another way to think. Yeah. And that's the problem. I mean, think about this, James. Supposing back with Al Qaeda, instead of when they brought them to, when the U.S. government brought them to Guantanamo Bay, instead of quasi-torturing them or in some cases actually torturing them, what if they had given them cognitive therapy?

54:12That would have been a real interesting experiment to have done. Yeah, because then, presumably, if they stopped having the terrorist mindset, they might be more open with giving answers to questions and so on. Absolutely. And you think about those core beliefs that go into a terrorist mind. If you were able to succeed at challenging and disputing and reversing any of those, you wouldn't have terrorism. So in other words, if you just got rid of, maybe they keep the first one, like, I believe in X, Y, Z, and there's nothing to debate about it. You're never going to change my mind. I'm sure it's God telling me that and there's nothing to change about it.

54:47Okay, maybe they keep that one. But maybe that you can get rid of the second one that says, and you and you and you and you must also believe that. Or maybe they keep those two, but you get rid of the one that says, and if they don't agree with me, that's an unacceptable situation. Or you get rid of the one of, I've got to kill you if you disagree with me. So if you get rid of, or the last one is a motivator to do the killing part, I'll end up in heaven with great rewards. If you can get rid of any of those, if you make progress at disputing any of those core beliefs, the person would be not prone to terrorism.

55:20So it's interesting because, you know, you've been in the oil business. You presumably know high up people in these countries. I don't know any terrorists. Let's get that out there. No, but that's the point is that even if you talk to like people in the royal families of the Middle East, they're not, they're on the whole, I would say, or maybe none of them are terrorists. Like they are concerned about their country surviving, their family surviving, their family surviving in power. They're concerned a lot about money. In many cases, I think they don't like the terrorists because the terrorists get in the way of all those stability factors that they need to keep their regimes going.

55:59So and at the same time, they're religious people. So you wonder what what takes someone turns them into a terrorist as opposed to just a simply religious, you know, Muslim. Yeah, it's not just Islam, but that extreme religious belief with the things that were in that book, Prisoners of Hate, I think that causes terrorism. It makes sense to me. So, you know, along the lines of like mindsets that might be incorrect, I was looking at you, you know, you also have a section with interview questions that you would use when you're interviewing somebody. And one of them, you know, an example is, you know, Brad, tell me your professional strengths.

56:42Why should I believe someone who tells me their professional strengths? Well, even if they're telling you what you don't consider their professional strengths, you think they're fibbing a little bit and interviews people fib a little bit. That's normal. They're selling themselves. Sure. What they pick, what they choose, what they select to say tells you a lot about a person. For instance, one of the questions is, name a bunch of adjectives and phrases that sum you up, that get your essence. Is the word honest in there somewhere? Is integrity in there somewhere? And if they've listed seven or eight different adjectives and they forgot to say anything about honesty or ethics, you need to follow up with questions on that.

57:25Like, that's interesting. How come you didn't mention that? So you learn by what they say, how they answer each one of those questions. and you also learn from what they don't say in those questions. And those 45 questions, I put them in an appendix in the book. I've now, so I was at a conference with other CEOs three weeks ago. Several different CEOs came up to me. They endorsed the book. They wanted to read the book first. They read the book and they said, I'm using those 45 questions now. I'm using those questionnaires. I got those questions. I developed those questions over decades, mainly from hearing other interviewers ask questions.

58:02I said, damn, that's a really good question. And I wrote that one down. I boiled it. I find that if I ask those 45 questions to somebody and I hear their answers and I listen really carefully to their answers, I know that person. I know the essence of that person. I know what makes them tick. I know what motivates them. I know their strengths. I know their weaknesses. I know what they say or they think other people think about them. I know a lot about that person who's applying for a job. And going back to - That's interesting. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Again, it's like a second level way of thinking.

58:37So it's not so much their answers that's important. It's kind of like everything else that's surrounding the answer. Yeah. You also want to hear and see how logical they are in thinking and what their thought process is and how articulate and how eloquent they are answering those questions. It's funny because I remember it brought me back to my very first job interview ever. And someone asked me something similar. And I said, well, I suppose the correct answer is, and I listed off some attributes that I assumed he wanted to hear. And he got very offended that there were, he said, there's no correct answer.

59:11And I just didn't want to BS. I felt like he was looking for certain answers. And I felt it was like sort of unnatural, almost answering that question. But I didn't get that job. but you know it seems like another important thing about making a few billion dollars is having a lot of energy like i presume from your chronology you're about 12 years older than me so that puts you in your you know mid to upper 60s and you have a lot of energy you're going around at conferences of ceos conferences industry conferences uh writing a book doing podcasts so what keeps you so energetic? Like you really do seem to have like a lot of energy.

59:49Yes. I'm lucky. I am born with a lot of energy and I'm happy. I am. So I've got a lot of stuff going on. So I need a lot. I need all that energy. And I surround myself with people who have a lot of energy. That's one thing I look for when I hire someone, how hungry are they? How dynamic are they? How much, how much energy they have? Is this someone who's kind of sleepy and like, no, I need people who are in it. I need people who are all in, people who really want to accomplish big stuff and are hungry. And, you know, when you give those psychological tests and they, I want people to score high on need to win.

1:00:22I want people who really need to win. I want people who are competitive by nature, who really want to come in first, who want to be best in class, but also want to do that fairly, want to do that honestly. Don't want to cheat. Don't want to cut corners. Want to do that ethically. I want to obey all the rules. But win. Within the four corners of the rules, win, win, win, win, win. And for that, you need energy. You need very dynamic people. And I give examples of people in the book who I've been fortunate enough to work with who have even more energy than I do, and I have a lot of energy. I mean, like you're even planning your next business or your next industry that you're going to roll up.

1:00:58What do you think you would morph to in the next phase of your life? Well, the next phase of my life, the next decade or so, I'm going to start another the company. I'm going to build it up to something tens of billions of dollars in size. And I'm going to do everything I possibly can to make huge amounts of money for my shareholders. That's my goal. That's my vision. That's my motivation. That's my inspiration. And that's what I've done. And I'm lucky I do that well. And I'm going to try to do it even better this time. So that's definitely what I'm doing in the next phase of my life. What I do after that, I'm not sure.

1:01:27I'm so consumed with what I'm doing now. I don't plan 10 years from now what I'm going to do starting 11 years from now, but I'm sure I'll do something fun. I'll do something exciting, like I always have. Everything I've done in business has been fun. It's been a long, long time since I needed the money I'm making from business. It's for the fun. It's for the joy of creating stuff. It's a creative process. It's like if my roots are in music, where you're just dreaming and getting in the flow, and then suddenly you got music, and you got people around you getting harmony with, and wow, suddenly you got this cool thing you've invented this music, this collaborative effort.

1:02:02It's the same thing. I like doing that. I like being with people that I'm harmonious with, people I'm, we're beating the same drummer, to use a cliche. Do you still do music? Do you play any instruments? You know, yes and no, I do. But I don't consider myself a practicing musician because I don't practice every day. So to call yourself a musician, you really should practice eight hours a day, at least five or six days a week. And then you can jam and you can play in a band and do whatever you want around that. But you need to be practicing. You need to be practice, practicing, practicing your chops.

1:02:37And I don't do anything remotely close to that. But if I get around a piano or electronic keyboard or get in a room with one of my daughters is a musician. And if I see her in an electronic studio, yeah, I'll get down and geek out on it. But you don't feel that urge like, okay, now finally I'm going to get back to like eight hours a day of practicing the piano? I do actually, but I'm resisting that urge because you can only do so much at a time. Instead, I replace that urge to be physically creating music that you hear to just enjoying life as music and listening to sounds and being mindful about my heart beating and the sound of my breath and just sounds I hear and sounds of the day.

1:03:20And it's a mindfulness technique to just really tune in to the sounds that I'm hearing. Pay very close attention to that. And for me, that's very enjoyable. So I walk and I'm walking in nice places because I'm living here in Connecticut and I hear so many sounds. And some of them, most people would say are really ordinary. And I find them awe-inspiring. I'm listening to them. I'm thinking, this is music. This is symphony. It's great stuff. I do look at life as music. I look at life very intentionally on the hearing. My sense is my hearing is probably my most dominant sense. well brad jacobs author of how to make a few billion dollars great book it would definitely went in directions i did not expect uh but it was a great book it was so many different like interesting directions and perspectives and i really admire the way you've built your career and all the things that surround it such a fun conversation i hope you come back on the podcast at some point and clearly you felt the need to do something other than business because you did leave, you know, you did create a good part of your knowledge that you're leaving for next generations.

1:04:26And when you wrote this book and, uh, I appreciate it. And thank you so much again for coming on the podcast. Thank you, James. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate it. Me too. Thanks.

1:04:50Thank you.