The best interview I've ever done about Founders

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/894349d3635ddd2e

So this is not a typical founders episode, but it is the best interview that I have ever done.
on founders. This episode of Invest Like the Best came out a year ago. It is a great summary of what I've learned from the first six years of Making Founders podcasts. Patrick and I recorded a part two, which covers some of the lessons that I've learned in the last year that should be out in a week or two, so make sure that you're following Invest Like the Best in your favorite podcast player so you don't miss that.
But I also wanted to post this episode for you so I can tell you about the live show that Patrick and I are doing in New York City.
On October 19th, Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders on his podcast. I've obviously read three hundred plus biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for mine. So we're gonna be talking about what we've learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and then doing a live QA. If you live in New York, I think it's a no brainer.
And if you don't, I think it's a great excuse to fly in and visit New York City. The link to get tickets is down below and available at founderspodcast.com, and I hope to see you.
In New York.

David, I think you have one of the most interesting hobbies turn professions of anyone I know.
I first stumbled upon your show.
I think because like five friends at once told me to listen to the episodes on Edwin Land and Estee Lauder.
Those were my
Gateway drugs.
into your way of looking at history.
I'd love to begin to introduce you the audience.
By just outlining
What you do. It's quite unusual.
You've done a lot of it.
Maybe you could just
Begin all the way back.
to when you first remember falling in love with reading.
Let's start there.
I've been in love with reading.
Longer than I even have a memory.
A few years ago.
Unfortunately, my mother died of breast cancer at a young age.
And as she was dying.
Because my parents had like a tumultuous relationship at the beginning of my life.
She's really the only one that has any kind of recollection of how it was as a child. So unfortunately
When she died.
All those memories.
Died with her.
She said the way you are now, you were from the time that you could talk.
She's like you would read
Anything you can get your hands on.
Even if we didn't have books in the house.
You read the back of seal boxes.

We didn't have a lot of money.
But what I would do.
Is take you
to the bookstore.
And God bless bookstores where
Even to this day.
You can go in there.
And even if you don't buy anything.
You just sit on the floor.
And you can read.
And that's like
One of my only memories.
From childhood.
Her taking me to the bookstore.
And just letting me read. And even before I could read.
One of my favorite books when I was a real young kid was Where's Waldo?
That's not even reading.
Let's just say they're trying to find the guy with the striped hat.
So it's just the only hobby that I've had my entire life.
There's a ton of hobbies that I picked up, ton of interest, ton of sports.
All the kind of things where I'll get really intense, do it for a long time.
And then drop it.
I have two modes, zero or a hundred.
Reading's not like that.
And I just re read
Because the founder of Visa D Hawk just passed away.
And what I loved about his book
Is he was the exact same way.
He grew up in
A tiny house on the edge of the Rocky Mountains.
Had no plumbing.
No electricity.
No money.
They barely had food.
But he had books.
His neighbors just said, There's something wrong with that Dehawk boy. He'll read anything.
See, when I read a biography, it's like I'm not reading biographies casually. I'm not like oh okay
I put myself in the story.
To me, great biography is like a movie for your mind.
Except instead of being over for two and a half hours, it's gonna last like fifteen
twenty hours.
We were just talking before recording that.
I read a thousand page biography on Enzo Ferrari.
One of history's greatest obsessives.
You put yourself in that store. You're like
What is it like being a young Enzo Ferrari? His father passes away unexpectedly. You're 18 years old, your father that you love more than anything passes away.
Your brother serving in World War Two gets killed.
Your father's business collapses because of your father's death. Now you're left as an eighteen year old man trying to support your mother.
With no skills, no education, no anything.
That's where the ideas and then when you study something like Ferrari it's like oh
That is why the guy worked.
Sixteen hours a day, seven days a week for sixty years, and did it until he died.
Because of that pressure.
One of the greatest stories in that book.
You didn't even think it was gonna start some car company, it was just amazing.
the big car company of the day in Italy was Fiat.
He goes to try to get a job.
And at the time there's a huge glut. This is after World War One.
And all these veterans are looking for jobs.
So they get precedents over him.
So he feels deflated. He had traveled from a small tiny town
thinking he's gonna get a job'cause he's obsessed with car racing,'cause his dad used to take him to the racings at nine years old.
There's just so many things where you can't understand why they make the decisions they do in business unless you understand who they were and what happened to them early on in life.
What happened was he goes and gets a job, he gets rejected, he goes to a park bench in the middle of the snow and is crying.
It's a very vivid scene in the biography.
And what is insane
Is forty years later, after Fiat buys half a Ferrari.
He goes back to that bench.
That author ties it together. He's like
There was
A
Missing piece of my life, a problem that I hadn't solved that ate away from me, that caused me to have this excessive drive and dedication and obsession to my business.
And now that circle is complete and he goes and sits on that exact same bench.
The idea of understanding what happened to someone before they were eighteen.
was the topic of a conversation I just had with one of the partners at Sequoia.
Tell me a story about Mike Morris.
Sir Mike Moritz, very famous investor.
Who asks that question of just about everyone.
thinking that someone's motivation tends to be
Rooted in their life.
Of childhood, maybe up until fourteen, not even eighteen.
Before I start getting into your obsession with biographies.
You mentioned your mom already.
What is that for you?
If we were to zoom in on your time pre fourteen.
What's rooted
in your own history that's made you this complete obsessive about studying
History's great entrepreneurs and founders.
I think there's a lot of examples in these books.
Sometimes you learn what to do by seeing it done incorrectly.
If I had to guess.
And I don't even like thinking about this stuff.
both sides of my family. They did the best they could, but like
My parents didn't even graduate high school.
Much less college.
I'm the first person in my family who graduate high school.
First person graduate college.
first male in my family not to go to prison in three generations.
Wow.
Both sides of my family.
Unfortunately.
are filled with examples of what not to do.
Usually it has to do with
Abusing children.
sexual abuse, physical abuse, abandoning their kids.
I had never met an intelligent person.
In like extended I mean.
My immediate family did as best they could.
My dad's still alive, I still have a relationship with him.
It is what it is.
As you get older and then I have my own kids.
You start thinking like
All the stuff that like you're mad at them about.
Imagine if you had their parents.
One person in the family
I'm thinking of like my grandmother and my dad's side.
It's just like an evil person.
And then my grandfather on my mom's side.
They destroy everything in their wake.
My own guess is
Wife is obsessed with books and stuff like that.
I was looking for the right answers'cause
Oh, I saw it was the wrong answer.
Oh, I don't want to be that person.
One of my favorite things Warren Buffett said.
I've read his shareholders letters, I've read a bunch of biographies on him.
Then went and studied all the people he talks about in his sharehold letter. So I have like fifteen episodes.
He says, Hey, go study this person, they're really smart.
And I'll go and track them down and then find out who they admire.
But one of the best things he ever said, he's like one of the best things ever happened to me is like
Pick the right heroes.
I think that is extremely important. So that is the role that books play for me. It's just like
I don't have access to these people, I didn't have mentors, I don't have anybody.
When you think of what biography is
You're getting to know somebody.
And they become mentors in historical context.
This is why Charlie Munger has such great advice and why he's right hunters of biographies like
I make friends with the eminent debt.
Because if you learn the ideas they have and the personality behind that idea, it's actually gonna stick as opposed to like just a list of hey, here's 10 good business ideas.
But if you actually understand like why they did the way they did, why did they think about that? Why were they obsessed like that? Why did they want to avoid other things?
I've had publishers for books.
Reach out to me. Some of them had been subscribers to the podcast. They're like, You should write a book.
And I was just like I can't simplify
Over four years.
I'm up to like two hundred seventy books, over a hundred thousand pages.
over ten thousand hours.
If you look at what founders is right now, it's like around four hundred hours of audio.
That's about as short as I can get it.
There's no book that I know of that's four hundred hours long.
I've been buried.
I've been with my wife for like fifteen years.
And even
Recently. She's like
I've never heard that story before.
How is that possible? I've talked to you every day for almost two decades.
I don't know, I just try to focus on the future.
As much as possible.
Everybody has weird unresolved things in their past.
And what I really like
The best feedback I've got on founders, the podcast.
is people find it comforting.
The vast majority of people are not born in great circumstances. This is not new at all. It's not unique. It's the vast majority of human history.
Have had to
be born into and survive and thrive in imperfect situations.
So when you hear that over and over and over again.
And they worked their way through it, found a way out.
It's like hugely inspiring.
Do you remember the first time
You sort of connected
with someone that you were reading about.
Those lines of
A positive role model.
Was there one that stands out in memory as the first?
In the category of biography.
I have a series of heroes, and almost all the heroes have come through the podcast and the research I've done.
Usually they're heroes and what they did. They got to the top of their profession. They had a lot of good ideas.
They're very admirable. They're wicked smart. They don't give up.
They have extremely high pain tolerance, but they're all imperfect human beings.
And that is kind of like the cautionary tale with their overall theme of founders where I get a lot of feedback too. Like I'm glad you're not idolizing these people.
They're people. Everybody's an imperfect human being.
So
I'll take bits and pieces from people.
The only person
Out of every single person that I've studied.
On the podcast.
that I consider like my blueprint for like I want that
I want their life in totalities at Dorp.
Because
you know, history's grades entrepreneurs, how'd they get there?
They're gonna over optimize.
Their work
to the detriment of everything.
Their health.
In many cases, they die earlier than they have to.
They are terrible fathers.
They're terrible husbands.
I don't want to do that.
They have no friends.
They're uh crazy people like
I keep bringing up Enzo Ferrari.
Somebody I greatly admire from a work perspective.
Work seven days a week.
twelve to sixteen hours a day, sixty years till he died.
He was a terrible husband.
He was a good father.
His son Dino actually dies early from I think muscular dystrophy when he was like twenty.
But he had no friends.
Never traveled.
Wouldn't leave his town, wouldn't get on an airplane, wouldn't even get on an elevator.
So I look at it like how can I be obsessive about the work I do?
Wanna make sure it's the highest quality it could possibly be, but not be terrible in all these other domains.
If there was an entrepreneur that can only read one of the books that I've read so far founders.
It would be
This book called Against the Odds Autobiography of James Dice.
James Dyson now is seventy five. He just recently
wrote another autobiography.
That biography is good.
It's not comparable to
Him coming off of
Fourteen years of intense struggle.
He's writing the book. Once he gets over that hump.
At the time, Dyson has one product.
It's just the cyclone vacuum.
It's in one.
Market. It's just in England.
It's the fastest growing banking company in history.
It's doing like a couple hundred million a year. He owns a hundred percent of it.
But what makes that book so great is
It's all the client.
It's my dad dies young.
Which is really sad story there.
I had to learn how to raise myself from
Being eleven years old.
He starts a bunch of businesses.
Get screwed over by different partners.
But from the time he rips apart that Hoover vacuum and it's like
Why does the vacuum cleaner have a bag that breaks all the time? This doesn't make sense.
to the point that he has a working prototype from his own design that he owns a hundred percent of.
is fourteen years of intense struggle.
Five thousand one hundred and twenty seven prototypes.
So what I do is I
I'm gonna reread that book.
For every one hundred episodes.
So I did it on episode two hundred. I think I did it on episode twenty five.
So three hundred will be that book again.
Four hundred, read that book again.
Because it's just the reminder.
That's where most people are interested.
When you read a biography
Everybody wants to know the beginning.
There's always a part of the biography after they're super rich and famous and they're donating a bunch of money and I'm glad they're doing all that. That's fundamentally not interesting.
How many people can relate to that, but everybody can relate to, hey, I have a dream. This is what I want my life to be.
Life is gonna throw up all these barriers.
So how do I navigate that maze to actually get to where I'm going?
Everybody.
can relate to that.
So you've read
nearly three hundred of these things, some of you've reread.
Multiple times.
I wish people could see on video like the crazy notes and highlights you take.
In all these things.
It's hard to imagine there's a person alive that is reading and studying biographies and trying to piece together the lessons.
As intricately as you are.
Especially within a subcategory, which is founders.
Not just business founders, but people that start things.
And I understand that you can't compress down
what you've done, the body of work to much smaller than it is.
But I thought we could take today's conversation as an opportunity
To just touch on a couple of the ideas.
That you and I have talked about.
as we've just discussed the body of your work.
One of them is this
I guess the word is obsession.
There seems to be
as a through line through so many of these people.
Some initial whether it's a vacuum cleaner or makeup or
cameras or whatever the thing is.
Some obsession takes root.
in the people that you've studied.
And creates this motivation.
this dogged motivation to just keep going through thick and thin.
Maybe you can just talk a little bit about that word obsession.
How often you see that characteristic.
Whether or not you think it's the key characteristic.
In the people that you've studied.
In terms of why they did what they did.
Every single book.
It's also the very high bar,'cause think about that.
To make it onto Founders Podcast, you gotta live life so remarkable that somebody wrote a book about it.
the tiniest of tiny subset of people.
And they're all extreme people'cause I find freaks and crazy people and misfits and rebels
Facet.
Which is frustrating to me because there's like four passions in my life.
entrepreneurship.
Reading history and podcasts.
So founder sits in the middle of that.
And for the life of me.
I don't understand.
Why so many business lectures, business books, business writing is boring.
You have the most fascinating subject on the planet.
And then you have the most fascinating personality types. Think about how crazy you have to be and be like, hey, this thing doesn't exist.
I want it to exist.
And I'm going to will it into existence.
And I'm willing to do everything possible to make sure this thing succeeds.
That is a crazy person. That is a tiny percentage of any of the people alive and the people that have lived forever.
But like I could scroll through and I was doing that earlier.
One thing I do is I don't only just make the podcast.
I don't just read the book once.
I take excessive amounts of highlights and then I store all my highlights in this app called ReadWise and I reread my highlights every day.
'Cause I don't want to forget the lessons.
There's a limited amount of stuff that you're actually gonna remember.
So I also go through
My episode list.
And I do that
Frequently.
And I can't think of anybody that's not completely obsessed.
With what they're doing.
A perfect example of this is
Not only is it one of the craziest stories in entrepreneurship history, but it's also one of the most fun books to read. It's called The Fish That Ate the Whale. It's this guy named Sam Zamury.
A ton of entrepreneurs and investors I know.
All know this book.
So I just recently reread it and it's just like okay.
Why is Sam Zamurie?
This guy is super rich.
At the time he's got the second largest
banana company in the world.
And he's working in the fields in Honduras and he's with his machete and he's whacking away.
And he's crossing Honduras on a mule.
the entire length of Honduras looking for an advantage for his company while his competitors are sitting in a office building in Boston.
And we know how the story ends. He kicks their ass because of course he is.
But it's like why is that guy so obsessed?
From the time he was eighteen, till he discovers what he called ripes, which is like a banana that other banana companies would just throw away because you only have like three or four days, maybe five days before it rots and it's useless.
So there's a line in the books that's great.
He made a calculation based off arrogance that he could be fast where others were slow.
Why is an eighteen year old penniless
Russiant in Alabama.
Think that he can be faster and he sees an opportunity.
That a giant company called United Fruit, which is one of the first
truly international American companies.
Why on earth does he think they're super rich?
They have all the assets in the world. They have the largest private navy in the world.
And this guy's like, Oh, I see an opportunity. You don't see.
And it's because it's obsession.
And she starts there, masters that then he starts moving up.
Then he goes, Okay, I'll buy
Regular bananas.
Okay, once I mastered that, now I will start buying my own ships.
Then I'll go to Central America.
United Fruits in Guatemala, I'll go next door. I'll go to Honduras and I'll start doing that.
And that's the entire story. So
I don't think there's anybody that's gonna write a biography of that is not obsessed.
I do think to answer your question.
That is a fundamental trait, and in my personal opinion.
It makes life
Worth living if you have that obsession. I could not live.
without an obsession. People were like, Oh
Founders of the podcast, founders of business, yeah.
But it's an obsession first.
It's an obsession disguise as a podcast in a business.
Is the thing underneath obsession
Mostly curiosity because
The topic of obsession for these people is all different.
The Dyson one's a perfect example.
It's hard to imagine getting excited about vacuum cleaner.
But he did.
There's some reason behind the obsession each time.
What is usually behind that? Is it just a basic system setting of curiosity in the person and
How do you think people listening
should apply this obsessive
Lesson
To their own lives.
Do you think it's
too general to say that everyone should
keep working until they've become obsessed with something?
I do think it's too general. I don't think most people will ever find it.
The reason I'm so obsessed with just studying people that got to the top of their profession.
Is because one third of your life
is going to be spent working.
Half of your conscious life, half of the time you're not asleep is gonna be spent working.
for certain personality type to not excel at that.
Not to be really good at that.
means that life is not gonna be an enjoyable experience for me.
If I had to guess, which comes up a lot.
I think there's some kind of
Deep rooted.
Fight against a sense of inferiority.
That is underneath it.
It's interesting. This comes up a lot.
There's a line in the Francis Ford Coppola biography that I read'cause I really love reading biographies of filmmakers.
That's the closest analogy.
to like what I'm trying to do with podcasting.
I read their words and like that's how I think about podcasting. That's fascinating.
And there's a line in a Francis Four Coppola biography where embedded in the story of the sun.
Is the story of the father.
And his dad was this guy he wanted to be
Magician.
Never made it.
Was super bitter.
So he raised Francis for Copa, and they would just talk shit.
His dad would just talk shit about anybody that was successful.
And Francis is like well
I don't wanna be the person criticizing the successful person. I wanna be the successful person.
And Copel at the beginning of his career, like look at the track record he'd in the seventies.
The decade of a twenties is like one genius move after another.
movies that people so watch to this day. And he had this fanatical obsession with learning everything about filmmaking.
working every single hour, he'd fall asleep while editing films.
And I think a lot of that came from like
how we start the conversation. Like some people have say, Hey, I wanna be like that guy.
Other people have.
I don't want to be like that guy.
And those are equally powerful motivators.
I think of like Sam Walton.
I just reread his fantastic autobiography. Everybody knows about that.
But rereading it over and over again, you see different things and then rereading
In between the first time I read it and the second time I read it, I read like two hundred other biographies of entrepreneur. So the words hadn't changed, but I changed. So the meaning changes.
There's a time.
In that
Way before he started Walmart, he's obsessed with retail, right?
His little five and dime store.
Is really successful.
The guy that owns the building that he's renting from.
Sees that.
And screws over Sam and he's like
Oh, I'm not gonna renew.
Your lease.
And they're in a tiny town.
population of five thousand people. So it's not like you can go across the street and open another one.
So what he did is just took Sam's business from him, copied it, changed the name.
And put in the same location.
There is a
Seen in that book I've never forgotten.
where Sam is in his attorney's office trying to see if there's anything to do for it.
And his turn is going through lease is like no.
you made a mistake, you didn't know any better, you're a young entrepreneur, but you didn't get the protections that should have been in the lease agreement.
And Sam is standing there.
And he's
Clenching.
And unclenching his fist.
And he's clenching and he's unclenching his fist and he's clenching, he's unclenching his fist.
He's like, I'm not whipped.
I found this town, I found this store, I made the store success, I'll do it again.
And he just picks up, he's like, I'm not gonna look back at this, I won't make that mistake again, goes to the next town.
Does it again.
then does it again, again, and then two or three iterations after that, he stumbles on Walmart.
So there's like that.
thing where it's just like I have this drive
And then he talks about the book.
Unhappy life.
His
Parents had a crappy relationship.
Whatever it is that a kid experiences
I don't know if Sam could actually
Articulate it.
'Cause he's writing the book as he knows he's dying from cancer.
But that drove him to just be obsessive. And he's like, I didn't like spending any time in the house.
So I went out.
I went to school.
I worked as much as I could and I was in every single club and accumulated every single skill set I have. He had this weird drive.
You either have it or you don't.
My life is really interesting.
And it's because of the podcast.
Worth like half my day.
Is spent reading
having one side conversations with history's greatest entrepreneurs.
which is what reading a biography and autobiography is.
I get all these interesting ideas, see how they did life.
And then the other half is
I get to talk to a bunch of founders that listen to founders.
And then that becomes huge friend group. And I get to talk to all these really smart issue people. And I can't think of one person that needs somebody else to motivate them.
There's something inside of them.
That's why they're doing what they're doing.
To be an investor, to be an entrepreneur.
It doesn't work if you can't trust your own judgment.
So what kind of person who's willing to take that risk?
I know a ton of entrepreneurs that could even make more money.
If they went to go work for like Google or something like that.
They'd rather make less money in their own business.
Then work for somebody else.
But there is something bizarre.
that I don't think you can explain.
All you can do is notice in other people.
And then seek those people out and be like, Oh, I'm not weird.
There's a ton of people just like me.
It brings to mind one of the things I was most excited to talk to you about.
Which is this classic nature nurture debate.
In people.
But it's the idea versus execution debate or the inspiration perspiration debate. Famously Edison said.
one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration, and maybe that's true in time.
But what I found more recently is
Good ideas matter a lot.
If you don't have a good idea, all the perspiration in the world
Probably doesn't matter.
I saw an interesting idea somewhere recently, which was like
A lot of people can run a McDonald's franchise.
Not a lot of people can create a new McDonald's.
And I'm curious what your reading of all these great entrepreneurs and founders.
Where it's led you in this debate of inspiration versus perspiration.
And sort of how you would assign
What matters more or most?
Obviously they both matter.
But I would love to just hear you riff on
These two twin concepts.
So there's two guys I discovered through the podcast. One's Claude Shannon through Jimmy Sony's fantastic book, A Mine at Play.
Another guy called Alfred Lee Loomis.
There was a biography of him called Texedo Park.
And what Shannon and Loomis had in common is they wouldn't argue their ideas.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs in general
They spend time on Twitter arguing about
Should we be
remote, or should we be this, or should we raise money, or should we do that? It's like
Who gives a fuck?
You have an idea and don't let anybody get in your way until it's done.
And if that's inspiration or perspiration, whatever the case is.
The idea obviously matters because I think the largest predictor of business success is the market that you're operating in.
This is all over Warren Buffett shareholder letters.
It's in this book that I have right here about Henry Clay Frick.
Andrew Carnegie's partner and one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever lived.
He benefited from the fact that he was
Monopolizing the Coke industry, Coke not being Coca Cola or Cocaine.
But Coke is a
ingredient needed to make steel and iron.
And he was at the right place in the right market.
was in Western Pennsylvania at the exact time he needed to be.
And guess what?
You take that dude.
That's smart, that's disciplined.
And you put'em in a market that's decreasing, you let'em run
Berkshire Hatway, the original textile.
In the sixties.
It's gonna go right into the ground just like
You could be as smart and it's hard working, it doesn't matter.
I think more of the set of the idea.
I think more of like the market.
It's way more important.
One of the things I'm so excited about.
Why I'm obsessed.
And me and you share the subsession. It's just like
Podcasting is like a miracle to me.
We were talking about the importance of understanding
Why is this guy so freaking obsessed? Why is he working seven days a week on this?
This is psychopathic behavior.
It's because of the way I look at
Podcasting. I don't look at it as a means to an end.
Podcasting is
The printing press for the spoken word.
the revolution that Gutenberg unleashed when he invented the printing press.
may have taken forty, fifty years, sixty years, a hundred years to gain steam.
Even goes faster now.
But that is exactly what podcasting is.
Everybody's like, Oh, we have too many podcasts.
That's like saying you have too many movies.
We have too many books. Like that's ridiculous. We have too many bad of anything.
But there's always room.
when it comes to media or anything that people consume.
For good things to
grow and prosper. And to me
When I look at where do I want to spend all my time.
Is there something I'm obsessed with?
that I'll think about even when I'm not working.
And then also is it a growing market?
You're telling me today.
We've reached a peak of how many people are gonna listen to podcasts.
That's absurd.
That's absurd. And not only will more people find your podcast than my podcast now, there's people that haven't even been born.
That are going to be listening to episodes.
I don't want to dismiss is it idea or execution. It's like you need both.
I'm sure there are some markets where they're gonna pull the product out of you no matter what.
And if you're the only one in that market, then
That market's gonna be satisfied.
But I can't think of anybody that I've read a biography about that's just like I stumbled into a good idea and I didn't have to execute
relentlessly and over and over and over again for a long period of time. That's another thing too, where
I'm only interested in people that do things for a long period of time.
There is a subset of people that can start a great business or
Be a great investor for two years.
Five years, ten years.
I'm interested in people that you started the conversation saying about Edwin Lann and S T Law.
Okay.
Two obsesses.
They both had good ideas and relentless execution.

had to wait twenty years. She got completely obsessed with the idea of beauty, didn't have the opportunity to start her company because she was a stay at home mom until she was forty.
The reason I say listen, man, you guys should be reading
S Lauder's autobiography.
Is because
It is my belief.
That if you were able to bring her back from the dead.
And
let her start a company today, she'd be kicking most entrepreneurs' ass up and down the court.
Edwin Land II
Edwin Lam started working on Polaroid when he's like nineteen.
And worked on it till he's seventy.
He had like the third most patents in American history.
behind Edison and I forgot the other person.
Who the hell works on something from nineteen to seventy?
That's incredible.
But what about the people underneath
These leaders.
I probably listened to fifty episodes or something.
of founders.
If I just summarise one of the interesting lessons it's
The dramatic importance
Of the individual.
Which I think runs a little counter to maybe how a lot of people wish
The world was
Where it was more communal and
Steve Jobs was gonna emerge if Steve Jobs particularly wasn't him or
I think the great individual theory or thesis
A lot of people don't like.
But
is I listen to a lot of
your episodes and these stories.
It strikes me that
The person matters a lot.
And I'm curious what
You've learned about the layer of leadership.
Underneath.
the founders and if there's any common
Stories, themes, traits.
that you've sussed out there.
I wanna start with a quote.
'Cause you just nailed it.
And
I'm a Edwin Land fanboy.
I am on a mission.
'Cause I mean a ton of smart people don't even know who he is.
So maybe people listening to this don't know that he was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs met him when he was in his twenties, Edwin was like seven years old.
And Steve came over from the meeting saying
Meeting Edwin Lane was like visiting a shrine.
These ideas that you've undoubtedly heard from Steve Jobs did not originate with him. He literally took them from Edwin Lans.
The idea of building a technology company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
That's not C
That was on every single presentation that he made on Apple, he got that idea from Edwin Land.
He literally
talked about him over and he said, This is my hero.
And Steve also had this deep historical knowledge, which all these founders definitely have.
All of them. I have not come across a founder that
was not curious about what the great people before them did.
I actually made a 30 minute in-between episode. It's called Steve Jobs and His Heroes, and I break down thirty nine podcasts on either Steve Jobs or the people that he talked about influencing him.
Even when he was young, he was like his twenties.
And he could tell you how he felt the invention of the Macintosh was similar to like Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone.
It's like how the hell do you know that at that age?
That's remarkable.
But Edwin said that
There's no such thing as group originality or group creativity.
He goes.
I do believe wholeheartedly in the individual capacity for greatness.
And he says originality are attributes of a single mind.
Not a group.
What happens is even if you have a bunch of co founders,
There's usually one.
A lot of these people had co founders.
You could say one A, one B, whatever the case is, but
It's always singular. It's never like a joint thing.
And what's good is they find people that can play the role of
The second or third.
It's not like hey, I want to be the smartest person in a company.
They all obsessed.
This is in Warren Buffett, David Ogrevey, Enzo Ferrari, Steve Jobs.
They only surround themselves with A players.
There's a great book called In the Company of Giants. It's on the floor next to me right now.
What's fascinating about that is it's two Stanford MBA students.
In nineteen eighty seven.
go and interview all these technology founders.
If you think about the growth of technology industry from ninety seven till now.
They were clear like ahead of time.
And what's fascinating is
Steve Jobs.
Young Cobs.
He just came back to Apple.
It's for the interview.
They start the interview like hey
You know, startup founder doesn't have that much time.
To recruit.
And I forgot the exact terminology, but he cuts him off. He's like, I disagree completely.
Recruiting talent.
І з портінча.
As a founder.
Think about the first ten people in your company.
Every individual is ten percent of the company.
You don't transition from a startup
A nascent idea to a super successful company.
That creates a great product.
If you fuck up that part.
That was his point that he was making there.
And he knows that because
This is the crazy thing. So you mentioned Mike Morris earlier.
Mike Moritz wrote this fantastic book.
The Little Kingdom.
I read the updated version called The Return to the Little Kingdom. And what's fascinating about that is that's way before Mike was an investor.
It's like the first I think six years.
Of the history of Apple.
And
When the book ends.
Apple two's doing really well.
Steve Jobs is still at the company.
But we don't know how the story's gonna end.
So then
I would read that book and then what you need to jump into right after that, there's another book called Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing.
I think it was written by Randall Strauss.
That book is about the thirteen years between he left Apple and then he returned.
I call it bizarro Steve Jobs.
Cause it's a gifted, intelligent entrepreneur.
making every wrong decision in the book.
That book ends in ninety seven.
He gives us interview.
Think about this, how crazy is this?
He starts next.
One of his first ten hires and next.
Is an interior designer for the office.
What the hell is happening here?
You're reading that book and you're like, I know Steve Jobs is smart.
I know he's talented. How the hell did he do this?
We talked a little bit about ego before we start recording. Where it's like
It's very prone to let your ego get the best of you.
People admire you because the work
What happens is like you're usually isolate yourself, you'll work really hard, you'll do a lot of work.
That work draws the attention of other people because it adds value to their life.
And then suddenly over time
You confused like
Oh, they don't like the work. They like me. And then I could just show up without having to do the work.
And everything will be fine.
And that next he just showed up. He's like, I'm Steve Jobs.
Ego is such an interesting one.
That lesson is fascinating. Confusing
people liking the work for liking you. I've never heard it phrased that way, and that is so damn interesting.
Where else do you see ego?
Rear its head good or bad.
It strikes me that
Ego's like a negative connotation.
Don't want to have an ego.
But you do want to be confident.
You do want
To be charismatic. You do want to be a good salesperson. Some of the things that
how ego people might be good at.
What other things have you learned about ego?
That phrasing is so helpful.
I actually don't think that
You build a great company with a giant ego.
I don't think that exists.
Sam Walton has a good idea about that. He's like, listen.
Your ego should use to drive you, but you should not be on public display.
And he's like, I hire people at Walmart with big eels.
They know how to hide it.
Because there is some weird thing where it like drives you.
Which problem is
When you make it.
A parent.
Did you think that you're better than everybody else?
In almost every story.
You have a young entrepreneur that needs some help.
They're usually helped by people that are older.
have a lot more access to resources. So think about like how people are funding private companies now.
You have
Super smart and determined founders.
Lot of potential.
Who knows what a person like that is gonna be.
In ten or twenty years.
But they need assistance, whether it's they need resources, they need personnel, they need money.
What I realize
This morning is
There's this guy named Thomas Mellon.
And Thomas Mellon.
is one of the most important people in American business history because he's the patriarch of the Mellon family dynasty.
What he did is he made a lot of money.
before and after the American Civil War.
He's like
maybe fifty years old, super rich, owns a bunch of banks and stuff like that.
He comes across a twenty one year old Henry Clayfrick.
Henry Clayfrick shows a lot of potential at this time.
Well, Melon can't possibly know yet.
Forty years in the future, Frick is going to be considered one of the best entrepreneurs to ever do it.
So much so that Andrew Carnegie sees him as like, I need this guy on my team.
And then they have a following up. There's a fantastic book called Meet You in Hell.
I recommend everybody read if you want to learn about Andrew Carnegie and Frick.
It's about
What Frick told him.
They had a falling out.
Later when Andrew's about to die, he sends a letter to Frick
It's like hey, let's reconcile. We're living in the same city. We live a few blocks away. Let's get together.
And he writes back, he's like, I'll meet you in hell.
What was fascinating is Mellon C's frick.
Break is at the very beginning of building this Coke Empire that's eventually gonna be acquired by Carnegie's company.
And Mellon sees him, he's like, Oh, this is another me.
This is me when I was younger.
He approves the lawn.
Then Frick takes that money, immediately deploys it, starts scaling up because it's like, Hey, I got an opportunity. I need to do it as fast as possible.
Goes back to Melon.
I think you borrow like a thousand dollars. I mean this is eighteen hundred, so it's a lot more money a thousand dollars today.

Goes back almost immediately says, Give me ten thousand.
Melon's like, yo, what the hell are you doing, kit?
So he sends one of his parties go check out this frick guy.
He seems he has potential to me, but I need to make sure this guy's not full of crap.
So Malin's partner.
Goes in shadows Frick.
And he writes back to Mellon.
And he's like
The guy works in the Coke plants all day long.
Studies his books at night.
knows his business down to the ground.
Make the law.
And that is a first
Hand up that he gets.
That causes him to build a monopoly in his industry.
There was no
One B to Fricks Coke Empire.
Is clearly h
Well, what's fascinating is like I didn't put this together the first time I read that book because
I probably read a hundred fifty books, hundred fifty biography since I read it the first time.
But I had just recently
been rereading books on John D Rockefeller.
And
This guy named Jay Gold.
pops up in Rockefeller's biography, every single one, which is really weird.
Everybody's read Titan.
The most famous biography of Johnny Rockefeller. What I did is I went in the bibliography of Titan.
found a book that the author, Ron Tronnell, used as research and ordered it.
It's a very old book. It's like forty something years old.
It's very hard to find.
I read that book and I'm like
Wait, this is the biography of Rockefeller and there's an entire chapter based on Jay Gold. What the hell is happening here?
And then you see when
people would ask, Rockfellow is probably the most famous entrepreneur in history.
And they asked him, like, who's the best businessman you know? And he said, without hesitation, J go.
Without hesitation.
Then you have Cornelius Vanderbilt.
This is another thing we should talk about is how all these people wind up knowing each other.
There is something to be like talking to other A players. And then you have Cornelia's Vanderbilt, who's the richest person in America at the time.
Forty or fifty years older than Jake Old.
And he's like, Jay Goal's the smartest person in America.
So it's like okay, what the hell happened?
So
The author actually sent me the book.
A biography of J Gold.
came out like fifteen years ago. Things called like Dark Genius of Wall Street or something like that.
These are formidable people saying this is the one.
You gotta pay attention to that.
Why is that happening?
So I'm reading J. Gould's biography.
Same situation. He's like twenty years old, twenty one, needs a leg up.
meets this older, more successful businessman.
But where Mellon did is like I'm successful, but he didn't let his ego get in the way.
He's like
I wanna be this guy's partner.
His success does not threaten me.
At all.
The difference in J Gold type is
Jay Gold point's up taking on older partners, guy named Zadak Pratt, I think is his name. I'm going off memory here, so I might get his name wrong.
But that guy was super rich, owned a ton of land in the northeast at the time.
Owned thirty different factories that would produce leather goods.
And all the different factories would have different partners.
So
He winds up.
Doing
A partnership.
Okay.
Points of doing some surveying work for him on some of his land.
And Zadic's like, Oh, this guy's smart, I'll partner with him.
I'll put up to Mani, I'll give you the expertise, and then you run with it.
Well she goes.
is a straight up genius, way smarter than Oliver B.
And he runs with it.
He'll hit you up for advice and money, but eventually he's like, Oh, I got this. I can figure it out.
He's coming up with ideas.
The crazy thing about J is
This guy's been in the leather business for forty years. I'm coming up with ideas that he doesn't see.
That threatens that's ego.
How do I know it's at a Seco?
Because the guy was so rich.
He started his own bank.
Printed his own currency.
Guess whose face he put on his currency?
His face.
You know Mount Rushmore?
In this town there's like a big like granite wall or a big rock formation.
So, you know, Mount Rushmore, you got all the presidents on there.
He hired somebody to carve his own face.
Think about how egotistical we have to be.
I want people to come to my town and see my giant head.
Hovering above everybody.
They started partnering.
He didn't like that Jay stopped asking him for advice.
He thought his success in Jay was managing his leather factory, they call them tanneries.
better than his other partners, he didn't like that. He felt threatened.
So he tried it.
Maneuver and
You said, Hey, we're gonna end the partnership.
You have to either buy me out for sixty thousand dollars, which is the money I put in.
Or I buy you out for ten.
Which is with the money you put in.
He did that because he's like
This guy doesn't have sixty grand.
Didn't know that Jay has the brain.
He knew this was coming and he had secretly set up financing.
And he was waiting for that to happen.
Rockefeller's exact same story.
For his first partners in the oil industry.
Get older partners to try to screw them.
And he says a great line. He's like, Well, they were talking so loud, my mind was running.
What happens like okay.
Um hitting this provision in our contract.
You have to come up with sixty grand She's like here it is.
And he takes off running.
You had the opportunity to partner.
With one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever do it.
And you fumbled it.
Because the ego
How often do these people, men and women
Break the law.
Or enter.
The gray area of the law.
Building what they built.
In Jay Gold's case all the time because
The SE C
was founded forty years later.
To combat things.
That J did.
This is eighteen hundred, there's no securities law.
They did insane things.
There's no
Antitrust act yet.
You could say okay.
Is there a a person like Steve Jobs in history? I just said there is.
Is there a person like Elon Musk?
There probably is.
Try to sell and like
Over promise in some domain.
There's like Henry Kaiser.
Who was as famous in his day as Elon is today.
There is not
In the history of entrepreneurship
An equivalent to Cornelius Vanderbilt.
I read two books on him.
If you said, Okay, David, who alive today?
Remind you most according to this Vanderbilt, I would say Vladimir Putin.
Vanderbilt have nation level wealth.
If you could have turned his entire fortune liquid at the day he died.
He would have controlled one out of every twenty dollars in circulation.
The reason I say he's not like anybody else and yeah, he breaks the law
is there's a fantastic book I did a podcast on it's called Tycoon's War.
There was this other guy.
I think his name's William Wallace.
This is like three years ago, so I'm going off memory.
William Wallace was interesting because by the time he was eighteen
He had graduated law school, medical school.
taught himself a bunch of different languages, really smart dude.
Winds up taking over different parts of Mexico.
Which was very common at the time.
He was a military adventurer.
he winds up taking over, I think, Nicaragua.
And this is a time where
Cornelius is doing the transition from just having steamboats and he's getting into railroads.
But this is gold rush.
So people are paying.
to
be transported from the east coast of the United States to get to California for the gold rush.
Vanderbilt makes a ton of money.
Because he's one of the rare people that has steam ships, railroads.
And then boats to cut through South America, and then he'll pitch on like a mule.
And then he'll pick you up on the other side.
Yeah, basically from A to Z.
He cut down travel time by like six months, so substantial value.
So само в гіпс.
Were
Station in Nicaragua.
And Williams said, Hey, I overthrew the government. I am now the president of Nicaragua.
So these are my ships.
Vanderbilt try to have him killed.
That's not hyperbolic. That is legitimate. He hired mercenaries to go get him.
He petitioned the Secretary of State of both the United States and Britain.
He's like
I'm not gonna sue you.
I'm going to kill you.
The way they thought.
You could argue that some in history's greatest entrepreneurs
They might have been more ambitious.
I'm not saying go out and overthrow governments, but they did.
Sam Zamur, fishing that ate the whale. He did that.
That's legitimate.
He funded a coup because you tried to take away his banana property.
I'm not saying these are good people.
I'm just saying that
They just looked at it like a problem. How we would be like, Oh, I can't do anything. I guess my stuff is gone. Oh, he has my ships. What can I do?
I'll try to go to diplomatic channels.
Cornelis, like I'll just send guys with guns.
Go try to steal something from Putin. What do you think's gonna happen to you?
It's funny to think about some of these examples in contrast to like
Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great or some of the great conquerors through history.
Where probably there's some similar
Threads to pull on.
in both eras, but in the modern era where especially now, like Elon, everything he says, you hear about four seconds later.
The feedback loop is so much tighter.
So there's probably less room for shenanigans.
Maybe, maybe not.
As you think about
the role of constant learning.
in the story of these entrepreneurs. There was a Michael Jordan quote you sent me.
Which was something like successful people listen.
And those that don't listen don't survive.
Or something like that.
No, that's Michael Jordan. You know, I mean I think maybe the greatest athlete of all time.
Talk about the role of
Constant learning.
This relates back to ego too.
I think ego would
Maybe cause you to stop learning.
Because you know it all or something.
You've mentioned several times.
People study the history of their industry.
People are listening, they're learning.
Say a bit more about the common trait of listening and curiosity and perennial learning.
Not only is Michael Jordan probably the greatest basketball player ever lived, you can make the argument that he was better at his job than anybody else has been as good at their job in history.
Reading his biography changed my life.
And I was a Michael Jordan family when I was a kid.
I don't have time to watch fastball now. I'm busy, but like
I'm actually standing on it right now.
I record all my podcast standing up'cause I try to bring energy every day.
But like my foot is on Michael Life. It's like a six hundred ninety four page biography of Michael Jordan.
What blew my mind about that is every single person
Way before he even made his college team.
Till the time he was a professional basketball.
They also the same thing. This dude was like a sponge.
There's a great quote.
The next David said.
And he said that average players want to be left alone, good players want to be coach, and great players want to be told the truth.
Michael had a giant ego at giant drive.
but he would run up to the coach and tell me what I need to get better at.
So the reason I say that book changed my life.
is this idea of practice.
How many people want to get to an MBA?
I can't.
Millions. How many get?
Four hundred maybe.
How many people get to the dream team in Barcelona in ninety two, which might be the greatest basketball team of all time?
Fifteen people?
A subset of a subset of a subset.
So Michael's tired. He'd been playing nonstop, back to back.
He's like, Man, I really want to take some time off. I don't want to spend my summer at Pan Olympics, but I'm gonna go.
He goes, I want to see their practice habits.
We're all the best of the best.
What am I doing that's different than what they're doing?
So what happened was he goes
He watched the way they practiced compared to the way he practiced.
And the main theme of Jordan's book is I believe in practice.
I would rather miss a game.
Than mispractice. That's insane.
He said something that gives me chills for this day.
He goes, I watch their practice habits and he goes, they're deceiving themselves about what the game requires.
Best of the best.
Ton of people in there.
But
When he was done, no one had more championships than he did.
So I was like, damn, that's crazy. This guy's at the top of the top winning championships, MVP, scoring awards.
Also game.
And he's still working harder than anybody else.
That line, successful people listen, those who don't listen don't survive long.
Is from
that biography. And he's like, listen, I don't have that big of an ego.
that I can't learn from other people.
All officials create entrepreneurs like that.
I just talked about Edward Lant.
Think about how crazy it is.
That dude to get started, he made his money in cameras and lighting.
So to understand cameras, you have to understand lighting. How did he understand lighting?
He went to the New York Public Library and read
Every single book
On lighting the hat.
He invented
Instant photography.
Before
Edwin Lan, you took a picture, you sent it to Kodak, and you got it back like two weeks later.
After Edwin Land, you press a button and you have it then.
That's insane, dude.
And what did he do? He did say, look at what I've done.
He goes and he hires Ansel Adams.
Who he thought was a fantastic
Photographer.
And he says he's like my aim is to produce the most picture perfect making process.
And you have shit in your brain.
That can help me achieve that.
They're learning machines. They're like, okay.
Whether it's a book, whether it's a podcast, whether it's grabbing person.
So hey that person has information I need.
I want to see if I can talk to them.
You mentioned Edward Land, there's this great quote that I think ties in here, which is something like anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.
Again what I like when you send me stuff is
when it's at odds with common wisdom, you know, everything in moderation or something like that.
Talk about that.
Excessiveness.
And what I'm really interested in is hard work.
It seems as though one of the modern things is to have a more balance, more freedom, more flexibility.
I think if you look at all these biographies and everything I've listened to from you.
That's definitely not the case.
For these people.
And again, like you've said, we're not suggesting these people are the ones to emulate, just that they're ones that have created
extraordinary outcomes.
But talk about this everything worth doing is worth doing to access.
How you think about hard work? You know, you working your ass off to create
Founders.
What do you think about excessiveness and hard work?
The fall line is
What Evan Land says is like there's something they don't teach you at Harvard Business School.
If anything's worth doing, it's worth doing to access.
I put together maximums because you're gonna remember that.
Successful people listen, those who don't listen don't survive long.
No sick in your brain.
And don't understand the idea behind that.
And this is as old as humans. They've been talking in maxims and common sense and homilies forever.
Think about why song lyrics are so sticky,'cause it's like an idea condensed down.
One of my favorite ones and it's the main theme of the history of entrepreneurship. It's the why if you look at my phone.
On my phone, my lock screen is a picture of Ernest Shackleton.
The famous polar explorer.
Who looks like hell.
Get a huge beard.
Covered in ice. Looks like he's about to die.
And his family motto was By endurance we conquer.
Which is why I told you earlier I'm only interested in people to do things for a long time because
At every single step.
These people are presented with opportunities to quit and they don't.
So he's like I don't have to be the smartest, I don't have to be the best.
I don't have to be talented and this is where I believe in myself.
I don't have to be the best. I don't be the smartest.
I'm gonna be the most talented.
I just had that last year.
And I'm not giving up.
I've had a bunch of people
Offer like partner up.
buy the podcast or whatever, and they're like, Hey
You're going at an extreme pace.
Which I really don't feel like I am because I just read
There's no trick here.
I pick up a book and stare at it and I do that for a few hours every day.
Seven days a week, three hundred sixty five days a year.
My daughter's like, Why are you reading?
It's your birthday. Why are you reading? It's Christmas, because I'd like to read.
And if you do something for three or four or five hours every day that most people don't do, you're going to develop
of value for other people in the world and that's all a business is.
The best description of a business I ever heard.
Came from Richard Branson.
He's like all businesses.
It's an idea or service.
That makes somebody else's life better.
If you make other people's life better.
You'll capture that value in return. So
I don't find many of these people are moderate.
I'm gonna read his quote that I have saved on my phone, it's hilarious.
It's by Bill Gurley. It's called Running Down a Dream.
How to survive.
And thrive in a job you love, but in that hі profiles.
Five people.
That do exactly what Michael Jordan does, that did exactly what Edwin Land does. He profiles Bob Dylan, the musician, Bobby Knight, the coach, Danny Meyer, the restaurateur.
Sam Hinke and Katrina Lake.
What Bill Gurley did in an hour.
He breaks down.
What are all the traits or what are their approaches to work?
That is similar.
What does an entrepreneur have to do with a musician?
A lot.
What does a restaurateur have to do?
With a basketball coach. A lot.
It's the same ideas.
apply to different domains.
None of the people described.
Are moderate.
That's why in an hour
Bill just break this down perfectly.
It's insane.
I just finished reading Bob Dylan's autobiography, which is the book that Bill Gurley read.
That dude literally
Discover smoke music.
Find out who does folk music the best.
Lens every hour of his day that he's not playing.
Bill's term for this is professional research, which I think is exactly what founders is.
How do you get better at your job when you're not working?
It's all the learning, the constant practice. That's professional research under one umbrella.
So Bob Dylan engages in professional research, listening to every single
Record he can get his hand on.
making friends with people that have hard to find records.
And then he discovers Woody Guthrie and he's like
I gotta go find him. Where is he?
I'm in Minneapolis. I have no money.
My clothes are tattered, but I have a guitar in a dream.
I'll go out to the side of the road and stick my thumb out.
And I will hitchhike.
To New York City.
With ten dollars and a guitar case to find him. And that's exactly what he did.
So to answer your question, there's a quote I have on my phone.
I've had this quote.
Since two thousand seventeen.
I'm not a fan of moderation.
I'm attracted to extremes.
What do you want your life experience to be?
Do you want to be exceptional?
Do you want to push the boundaries of your capabilities?
Do you want to walk around in a fog?
butting up against your potential, but never actually realizing it.
Then knock yourself out.
Be moderate.
I'm not interested in that.
So I can't
do the podcast less than I do.
All I can do is say, Hey.
This thing, this obsession of mine.
Will overtake my life because I've seen
Enough stories where it can ruin my life.
So I have boundaries.
I have a balance every day.
The only thing I figured out is
'Cause I'm obsessive person, obviously you are
A ton of people are that are listening to this as well.
So what I realized is like okay.
Instead of working like a ton of hours five days a week, I'll just spread everything out and have a balance seven days a week.
This is Ed Thor.
I literally just read his book, took his blueprint, like, oh, I'll just do that.
Ed Thorpe says every hour you spend in fitness is one less day in the hospital.
First thing I do is wake up in the morning and I do an hour of some kind of physical activity, whatever you like to do.
Then I work.
I spend time with my kids. I spend time with my wife.
And I talk to friends.
maybe have an hour or two to something that's fun. But really work is my hobby and that's the advantage I have.
Over other people.
Somebody listening might say, Hey, I'm gonna do a podcast.
On the history of entrepreneurship.
Go ahead.
You should.
It sound like a zero sum game.
But I'm only gonna do this.
I'm not gonna start a fund.
I'm not gonna start another business.
I'm only going to do this. And a lot of this is where it's comforting to me.
Where
I can give you a list of people that I've studied.
Daniel Ludwig.
What a crazy book I read.
It's called the Invisible Billionaire. Book is very hard to find.
This guy was the richest person in the world and no one knew who he was.
And he competed with like Aristotle Onassis. Everybody knew who Onassis was. He's married to Jacqueline Kennedy and shit like that.
This guy.
His work was his hobby.
Edwin Land, work versus hobby.
Henry Ford, Enzo Ferrari, Estee Lauder, Henry Kaiser, David Ogee, Warren Buffett, Sam Zamur, Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer, Coco Chanel, Sam Prompton. I'm good on the list.
You just have an advantage because you love it.
There's a guy.
Name Larry Miller. He was the richest entrepreneur in Utah.
He owned the Utah Jazz. He owned like ninety different fucking businesses.
On like a thirty thousand square foot house on the hill?
And he's writing his autobiography as he is dying.
And he's saying, My life is a cautionary tale.
Every hour, every minute.
I was awake.
And this comes from the
Childhood trauma. His mom called the cops on him, sent him to juvenile hall, kicked him out.
He had this weird incessive drive.
There's probably like some weird sense of inferiority, right? That he's overcoming.
I worked every hour of the day.
I don't know my wife.
I didn't know my kids. Now I'm dying. I'm kinda getting to know my grandkids.
But he was excessively obese.
And the entire book is not like hey, look how successful I am.
Might be a billionaire, whatever it is. It's like
Don't do this.
I screwed up.
Think about this guy has
Unlimited resources.
And he gets to the end of his life. He's like, If I could do it all over again, I would have worked less.
I would have took care of my health.
I would have spent time with my family and I would have had fun.
I never had fun in life.
That is terrifying to me.
That should scare the hell out of everybody.
Anybody that's obsessive that again work was his hobby too.
If you don't have guardrails dangerous and what's crazy is he dies. So he's working with a co writer and he dies before the book is done.
The last chapter.
Is his wife talking to the co author?
And she goes, I miss Larry.
But it's not like he was here when he was alive.
If you think about the
Role of a soul of a business.
I think
He sent me this interesting quote from Ciddy Harmon.
Where
Found serve as guardians.
Of the soul of a business.
Anything about the soul of your business?
The business is you.
In many ways.
But if it were to have an independent soul.
I want to talk about this concept more generally too, but I want to start with you.
Describe the soul.
Of
Founders.
What does it stand for?
I'm not a good example of that because
It's an obsession.
That
just happens to be a podcast and podcasts just happen to be businesses.
I feel like I'm like
The Jiro dreams of sushi of the podcast world.
Where it's just like
You have a massive audience.
You have
people around you, you have a movement.
The way I think about it's like
I read this great book called Masters of Doom, which is obviously about the video game Doom.
There's John Romero and John Carmack.
And John Carmack said something in what caused the rift of their partnership. He's like
Romero wants an empire.
I just want to make great games.
Somebody hit on this.
Founders is like a handmade product.
And I was like, Thank you.
because that's what I think about. It's a handmade product at scale.
Because of the miracle of podcasting.
I can do everything myself. I don't have anybody helping me. I edit it.
And I also don't have script.
I just read books and then I just have a conversation just like I would if we were at dinner.
Just like Giro dreams of sushi.
Every other podcaster I talk to, they're all super smart.
They're like, dude, you're crazy.
You've told me, like, why the hell are you editing your own thing?
Why are you doing this?
And it's because like
I have to.
I don't even have a choice.
So I'm actually talking to a founder later on today.
Who's really sharp and I met him through the podcast and like I don't want to say who he is, but although he's really well known.
He's got a theory about this.
Again, I like talking to smart people that think I'm doing it wrong.
Which I love.
I don't take offense to it at all.
But he's like, You're crazy.
The soul is just me.
It's like a person that it's a business. So the reason I think that's the best description of a
Founder that I've ever heard.
It's not the same thing as like
managing a company that's been around for fifty years that somebody else started, maybe the founder's been dead for a long time.
I really do think that's the role of the founder.
City Harman.
Worked on his company for what, fifty years. You might know his name because
Anytime you get in like a luxury car, Harman Carden.
That's the guy.
Who started that company?
So he goes the role of the founder is the guardian of the company's soul.
And all these books.
There is a decision you can make to compromise on the quality of your product.
Or take a shortcut.
Or do something.
You would never
Yeah.
Do it.
I just read the biography of the guy that started in and out.
Compared to his contemporaries to McDonald's and Carls Jr. and all this explosion of fast food that was happening at that time in American history.
Not financially successful, no.
Not nearly.
He only had seventeen stores when he died.
But he was obsessed with quality. Everybody else is saying, Hey, I'm gonna use frozen beef. He's like, I'm gonna buy my own cows.
I'm gonna add
salads and all this other stuff to my menu. He goes, I'm not changing my menu at all.
It's that intense love.
There's a cult.
Anybody knows this.
go fly to LA and try to go to In and Out.
Good luck.
I was just in LA two months ago.
try to go to In Out twice because I read the book.
I'm not waiting on a line.
There's a cult around in and out because
The expression of the founder's soul
is manifest in the product.
People that have in and out tattoos. How many people have McDonald's tattoos?
So this also people like, hey, what's your goal? Like you want to make the biggest podcast in the world. No, I want to make the best podcast in the history of entrepreneurship in the world.
That doesn't mean it will have more downloads anywhere else.
I'm fine with that.
That's not my goal.
Just like if you study now, obviously Apple being dominant, they have a huge market share in device and everything, but it wasn't like that.
It's like what?
Two percent of the market, five percent of the market.
Microsoft was killing everything. IBM destroyed everything.
The important thing.
What do you want to build?
Some people I talk to founders and they're say, Hey, I want to make an Enzo Ferrari level of craftsmanship on their product.
Ferraris being handmade.
And some people take the forward route.
Ford and Ferrari existed at the same time. Ford tried to buy Ferrari.
There's a great line in the movie Ford vs Ferrari.
The guy that's playing Lei Coco is like, Hey, we should be thinking like Ferrari. He's a Ford executive at the time.
And there's hugely egotistical, dismissive guys like we spend more on toilet paper than they spend on their whole production.
And he's like, Yeah, but when you think of victory, you don't think of Ford, you think of Ferrari.
So you have to decide.
There's nothing wrong with it.
I talked to a ton of founders like hey
Usually when they want to go big, it's like
I want to make a billion dollars or it's like a number attached to the business.
I become like the founder whisperer.
I have these conversations with people just like, hey, I just want to talk to the shit I'm going through with you. And if there's anything that's in your brain that you've seen in these books.
Let me know.
And a lot of these conversations will start
My goal was to be X.
I wanna make a ten billion dollar company. It's like okay.
I was starting the same question.
Who are your entrepreneurial heroes?
Everybody copy somebody, dude. You're a human.
I always have a maximum I say on the podcast that the mind
Is a powerful place.
What you feed it affects you in a powerful way.
I'm very careful when I let into my mind.
So I'll have these conversations and they'll start listing off.
All these people that influence the way you think about entrepreneurship.
And I was like, Go read a book on him.
Did Steve Jobs ever say, Hey, I want to make a hundred million dollar company?
That was never in discussion.
He said I want to make insanely great products and then I want to get really good at marketing because I want everybody in the world to have an Apple device.
And the way to do that is to get really good at marketing.
It's very easy to confuse yourself.
And that's why
If you're confused as a founder.
And you're the guardian of the company's soul.
The reason I admire Steve Jobs so much
I've never come across another person that thought clearer than he did.
If you could copy one thing about Steve Charles, would you want right now? I want his clarity of thought.
It's insane. Like how much
Mental computation for decade after decade did that guy have to go through to clarify his thinking like that.
You know exactly what is important to him.
There's a great book by Ken Cosienda called Creative Selection.
He demoed uh Steve Jobs, said the same thing. He goes, Listen.
Steve was at the center of all circles in Apple.
He was like the oracle of Delphi.
But the difference between Steve and the Oracle of Delphi was when you asked the Oracle of Delphi a question.
You get back some kind of riddle. You have no idea what the hell's going on.
When you get feedback from Steve.
There is no ambiguity.
You know exactly what Steve wants to do, and that's it. He's like, there's no like, oh I'm confused.
The quote that comes to mind when I think of the founders of Guardian's company Sol.
is actually quote about Steve Jobs. It's in one of the books I read about him.
And he says he made and remade Apple in his own image.
Apple is Steve Jobs.
With ten thousand lives.
That gives me goosebumps.
'Cause that's exactly what a founder should be doing.
It's impossible to build a company to spend all your life energy on it.
And not have it imbibed.
With your personality, with your ethics.
Everything that you think about
Your business and your life is going to seep into it.
The good and the bad parts.
It reminds me of uh conversation I had with Tony Shu, who started DoorDash.
Tony's a very mild mannered, very humble.
Almost quiet.
person.
Which is why this quote
from him stands out in my memory so strongly, which is I asked him something about culture, like
How do you think about
constructing the culture of a company.
His answer was basically like
I think a culture of a company should be like eighty or ninety percent just the personality of the founder.
And that's it.
It should be the extreme characteristics.
of the personality of the founder.
Because
If you try to make it generic.
Nothing stands out and there's no progress, inertia dominates.
I think that's basically what you're saying.
These stories are fundamentally the stories of individuals replicating themselves in some interesting way, like you mentioned, with jobs.
And the marketing thing is such an interesting angle that I don't think you and I have ever really talked about because
So much of the time we think about the products. And that's mostly what we've talked about.
The phone the Polaroid.
They're playing the whatever.
And we don't think about as much the story and the marketing.
What have you learned about
all of these people as it relates to marketing, did they all tend to be good at it?
Was it just a means to an end for them?
What have you learned about
How these people
Distributed.
Or got the word out about their products.
Over time.
I'm a collector of maxims and aphorisms.
And I think my favorite one might be actions expressed priority.
I don't look at what you say, I just look at what you do.
They're marketing geniuses.
All of them.
What do you call a person that's gifted?
That
Customer acquisition or distribution.
A founder.
There's a ton of people that have great products and no one knows about
So you failed at that aspect of it.
I read a book called Insanely Simple.
which is written by one of the guys that worked at the ad agency that Apple used and he compares and contrasts in the book.
Dell's approach to marketing when he worked for them.
And apples. And he's like
Steve told you with his
actions that marking was important.
And how do you do that?
Every Wednesday.
We had a three hour meeting.
And this is like
Maybe post iPod and before iPhone, somewhere in there.
But after they were already having a lot more success when he came back.
And he goes, We had a three hour meeting.
And Steve would review every single
Marketing.
Add
Every single thing.
There would not a fucking billboard.
That was gonna go up until Steve said that was okay.
And the reason it's important is because there's a lot of people that preach in their companies.
Marketing's important.
And it just works.
Steve showed with his actions. And then you have
Enzo Ferrari is just on top of mine because I read three biographies of him.
I just read all of my highlights again yesterday.
But he was a marketing genius too because he's winning Le Mans.
That's how he jump started his company.
And because of Ferrari's sense for victory, you have all these rich Americans flying to Italy and they'd want to meet. And so Ferrari is very mysterious. He wouldn't let you see his eyes. He'd wear
Sunglasses in every meeting.
He did that on purpose. He thought they were like the windows of the soul and he didn't want you to read his soul.
And what do you do is
His employees would catch him giving a tour of this rich guy.
And the guy's like, oh my God, Enzo, these cars are fantastic. I must have one.
And he goes, I appreciate that.
I'll see what I can do. I might be able to get you one, you know, maybe six months, maybe twelve months from now.
And then the guy would leave and the employer would go up and be like, Enzo.
We have a parking lot full of unsold Ferraris.
He's like a furry has to be desired.
He knew it.
It's very similar to that fantastic podcast you just did with Rolex.
with Ben Climber.
You see that same idea where they purposely limit production or don't even tell you how much they're making.
There is a secrecy.
Element to it.
Edwin Land, same thing.
When you we think of like how much
Steve Jobs to practice.
For his presentations.
He got that from Edwin Land. Edwin Land would do all kinds of crazy stuff way before he invented a camera.
He invented polarization.
So one of his main inventions was
When you were driving at night.
you would be blinded by the oncoming headlights of the other car. So he has that film they put over it?
He was trying to sell it to a bunch of other car companies. And there's a story in one of his biographies where he rents a hotel room.
He figures out where the sun is gonna be at what specific time, which hotel room
that he needs to get that has a window that faces it.
He puts like a fishbowl there.
And then he invites the people he's trying to sell in and then at the perfect time
It shows the light emanating through the window to the fishbowl.
With and without the polarization.
And that's how he sold him.
So it's like that thought process.
Walt Disney.
Fantastic, fantastic book.
And so Ferrari and Walt Disney have one thing in common. Both their first companies bankrupt.
A lot of people don't know.
Walt Disney, everybody's like, Oh, one of the best founders ever, how could he not be, right?
Everybody thinks he was a cartoonist, yes, he invented animation, first successful full-length animation movie. But if you ask Walt Disney, what is he most proud of? He's most proud of two things.
One starting his company and keeping control of it,'cause he lost control of his first company.
And two, doesn't it?
Did not mention animation.
When he was dying, he's in the hospital dying, his brother's his partner, Roy.

Looking on the ceiling of his hostile room.
And they're going over the plans for Epcot.
He never got to see it'cause he was dying.
This is a very common cocoa chanel's the thing. They work to the day they die. Enzofer, day they die.
There's no retirement.
It's not gonna be retirement from James Dyson. Wasn't retired from Steve Jobs.
What Walt Disney was getting at is also the amusement park. It's like hey.
Why are you making an amusement park? What people don't understand that back then is amusement parks were seen as low life stuff. They were like dirty, full of scam artists only like a circus kind of thing.
So while Disney said something was genius.
They're like, Why are you building an amusement park? They're dirty low class places. He goes, Exactly.
Mine won't be.
And the way I frame that in my mind is
Their mediocrity is my opportunity.
There is not a great
Amusement Park.
I will be the first.
He's like, Okay, I need to raise money.
To fun Disneyland.
He barred against his house, barred against his life insurance. He was crazy. He didn't give a shit about money.
He should have been way more wealthy than he was.
P package the financing and the marketing together.
So he's like A B C.
I'll do this weekly show.
I'll be the one hosting it.
Founders guardian the company soul.
They would show some things from his animation.
But then they would also show, hey, this is what we're doing in the park.
Essentially like a weekly ad that people were watching.
Willingly.
As a result
He gets money from that. He gets perfect marketing and advertising for that. Maybe the best ever.
And ABC puts up a large percentage of the money to make the park.
And what happens?
As a result of people watching this
It was one of the highest rated shows on television for a year.
The day he opens the park.
It's the biggest traffic jam in Orange County history.
So it's not just I'm gonna make the very best product.
He considered amusement park like a cast.
It's just a physical movie.
I'm building a physical movie. So I'm going to make the very best music park ever and it's going to have the very best marketing.
It sounds like a common theme in all these stories is
Process as art.
by revealing the process behind the product because they're so obsessed with that.
That is a common marketing story.
Is that right? Do you see that over and over?
I read Warren Buffett shareholder letters and
to me is like how many people have studied more founders and more businesses than Warren?
He says in there.
David Ogre's a genius.
I'm like, Who's David Ulrich?
This is years ago.
And I find David Olgerbeen, he's now one of my personal heroes. I read five books on
And what did he do?
He did exactly what every single other entrepreneurs did. Figured out what was the best shit that happened before I was live.
Hey, those are good ideas.
Human nature doesn't change.
Let's use them. So David Ogreby winds up in the very last chapter of Ogby and Advertising.
He talks about the six people, the six advertising giants that came before him that he studied.
If they were alive, he'd befriend it.
That's another thing Bill Gurley's talk that's important, is like going out and actually meeting these people if you can.
And then he would just take all these ideas and build on it.
His point was
There's no such thing as a business that is boring.
It's only boring advertising and C says, listen.
It's boring to you because you do it every day. But if you explain to the customer the process
They'll find it interesting. So he did this for like explaining the brewery process for one of the beer accounts he had.
The person that owned the beer company
It's like I don't wanna do this.
Every other brewery does it this way too. He goes, Yeah, but we're the only one telling the story.
So he spends
Three weeks or three months, can't remember.
Researching the hell out of Rolls Royce.
Talking to the engineers, reading all the material.
He winds up reading a fifty page document.
There's one line in it.
It says the loudest thing in the car.
At fifty miles an hour was the clock inside.
And he used that as a tagline and then put a couple thousand words of
Copy
What is it too?
maybe the best, if you want to call it a media company. Like I can't think of another company that has the assets that Disney has.
And
It started with a huge fight with
Roy Disney, who is the brother
The business aspect of that and Walt Disney.
They were having this fight in one of their books where it's just like
How much is this gonna cost?
And Walt says
We're innovating. I'll tell you when I'm done.
To go into the process behind it.
That book, Disneyland, goes into it and
Your point, it's like almost like opening the kimono.
He shared with the entire country all the work and effort and detail that went into it.
I shopped at Trader Joe's for a long time.
It's a weird place. Interesting.
I liked it. Okay.
Reading the biography.
Of the guy that started it?
You have to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
I would use is
When I talk about sometimes on the podcast,'cause people are like
It sounds like you have really good recall or like you can remember this stuff.
you must have a really good memory.
Absolutely not.
The way I make the podcast.
I read the book.
Make the highlight.
That's the first time I read the highlight.
The book is done.
The night before I record, usually record in the morning, the night before.
I'll reread all the highlights. That's the second time I've read the highlights now.
I record the podcast. That is the third time.
I read the highlights.
I edit the podcast. That is the fourth time.
I've heard the highlights.
And then the fifth time is I have to take pictures with the ReadWise app.
and literally input them physically one by one. Usually takes hours to do this.
That's the fifth time.
People knowing that.
When they feel comfortable pressing play.
When they listen to founders,'cause like, first of all, this dude
every single episode, he's got to read an entire book to prepare.
That's kinda crazy.
And then second of all
He's not just reading it casually, doing it once. He's read these words five times. And then I'll reference them.
In future episodes, and the only reason I'm able to reference them in future episodes is because I did that five times.
So if there's any part of your product that seems banal or ordinary to you, I promise you, no one is thinking.
About your business as much as you.
The favorite business of mine in the world.
You think about it less than probably
Five minutes a week.
Nobody is thinking about it like you, so you have shit in your brain.
That is interesting to customers, and then you could package that up.
and use that as marketing to get more customers.
One of the lines that stands out from
listening to all your stuff, I think is the Kinko's founder.
Who said his exits and then you've adopted it that his exit strategy is death. And like if I think about uh summing up what we've talked about so far.
It would sort of be
Find your obsession.
Uh
And then
make your exit strategy death, right? Like your exit strategy is not make a billion dollars or ten billion dollars or whatever.
Uh
It's this just lifelong pursuit.
of your life's work, right?
I'd love to apply that now to you and podcast. So
My suspicion is like you've
suggest other entrepreneurs that have done. You've studied the history of of this industry.
Who are your idols?
In entrepreneurship.
Whether I'm I'm curio specifically curious about podcasting as a business, given that's what you're doing.
But what have you learned about
Podcasting and
Why it's so exciting as a business.
Uh
You you've mentioned a little bit about the Gutenberg press for
You know, for audio.
Or for the spoken word.
But
If you apply Bill Gurley's kind of Bob Dylan, you know, trained a trained in your concept of podcasting to yourself.
What comes up?
I have a unique advantage that Bob didn't have.
There's barriers to entry.
Almost all the people that are examples like that.
There's Barry's entry.
Somebody that has to sign you
There's somebody that has to hire you if you're like Bobby Knight.
What I like about podcasting is it's completely permissionless.
If I think about like what is the skill set that I have is
I can lock myself in a room with a book, a ton of espresso, and a microphone.
And I'm gonna come out every five to seven days.
with an audio recording that is gonna help you at your job.
The thing I like about it is
It's all work and no work about work.
I just talked about this in
I think it was a D Hawk podcast, but it pops up over and over again.
that so many of them get disillusioned with the business of business.
And a lot of them
wish they could go back to when it was just a small team.
They weren't public yet.
They knew everybody's name.
They were actually doing some of the work themselves.
Humans are terrible predictors of what they actually want.
So you can say okay, I'm doing the work now.
But I can't wait till I can hire a team to do it.
Then scale that up and then I find myself fifteen years later running this giant multinational public corporation. It's like, Oh, I don't like this anymore.
Think about this, I just read Amazon Unbound.
Jeff Bezos is one of my heroes.
One of the best obviously to ever do it. That's not really saying anything.
I like the everything store more than I like Amazon onbound.
But
Amazon Unbound, you get to the end and one of the notes I wrote in the margin is think about it.
Being the CEO of Amazon is not fun.
'Cause if it was fun, he would do it.
What you really root for is
Obviously you can't stay at the very beginning, the guys got knee pads on.
He's taking the books to UPS himself.
You don't wanna stay in that case, but
One thing is I was obsessed with podcasts way before I even had one.
So as a byproduct of that, me and you were talking about this the other day where
People can give you bad advice on podcasts.
And there was a piece of advice that I heard and I was like oh
That person that said that doesn't like podcasts.
'Cause if that person loved podcasts, there's no fucking way that would come out of their mouth.
No way.
So that is why my podcast is designed the way it is, which is like listen.
I'm doing as much as I can. I just want a way to be me at scale.
I don't want to read from a script.
I don't want to have to put on an act because if I want to do this for forty years.
Or till I die, whatever it is.
Can't fake who you are.
When people talk to you.
Or people talk to me, what do they say?
Oh man.
I listen to you so much, I feel I know you.
You do.
You cannot listen to me for four hundred hours to listen to my podcast and like I have some weird other personality.
It's so funny'cause I meet a lot of people from the show.
And I'll have dinner with them.
The all say variations of
Oh, just like getting a private podcast.
This is literally how I want it to be. I'm just meeting up with a friend every week and saying, I read some cool shit this week.
Here's some stuff you might want to know.
You might find it helpful.
As far as heroes.
In the podcasting domain.
I feel the best podcaster to ever live is Dan Carlin of Parkour history. The reason I have a single person show
Is because of damn.
I've not only bought his back catalogue over and over again.
But I just listened to his podcast over and over again. For a long time. Now I'm reading lately spend a lot of audio books, but
Almost every night I'd fall asleep to his voice.
The fact is.
He inspired me to go the extra effort.
One thing I didn't want to do. I didn't want to do two podcasts.
a month or yearly he does. Like I get sad if I don't record it every week. I legitimately get sad.
What I like about Dan is
She'll read like 30 books.
And then he'll do an episode.
So I was like, all right, well, if he's reading thirty books for every episode, he does two a year.
It's sixteen bucks.
I'll just read them every five to seven days and then just release them as they come.
I have a personal preference for podcasts where
Dan in his early days?

Now they're multiple series in like five hours.
I get lost.
I don't enjoy it as much. I still love'em.
But I'm like
I don't like five hour long podcasts.
Let me update it again.
I don't like really long chapters and books. It's the same thing. Like give me a break, dude.
If you just want to pure entertainment.
Somebody affected me was
Bill Burr's Monday morning podcast.
Which is as low tech as you could possibly get.
Most people are at least people like you and I are using Podcast to Learn, but
What I liked about his is like he's been doing it every year for over a decade.
He shows up every week.
Don't listen as religiously as I used to, but
I don't think he's skipping any weeks.
And he just sits up and he talks directly to you for an hour.
And he might be talking about his life and all this other stuff.
But it's perfect.
Because if you really think about it.
What I don't like and why I think you see podcasts that have bigger audiences than like cable news.
'Cause it's all fake.
Humans desire authenticity.
The words that are coming out of my mouth are not coming from words that somebody else wrote on a teleprompter. This is some fake shit. If a friend talked to you like that, you'd get up from the dinner table and walk away like what's wrong with this guy?
You're sweating, you got caked on makeup. Like why are you wearing makeup?
I think humans crave authenticity. And the reason I'm so bullish on podcasting as a business is because the village storyteller is as old as language.
Except now
The village.
Isn't just
Ten people run a campfire.
Campfire is seven billion people.
The reason why I'm so bullish on founders is
I think it'll take me to really interesting prices, assuming I don't quit, which I don't plan on.
You're like you're wasting your time. You'll never achieve scale.
Go start like a enterprise software business.
you'll make a lot more money.
So I just spent my life chasing money.
Doing something I hate.
Great advice. Thank you very much.
And it's just like
Why won't I reach scale?
They're like oh because you know.
What's the biggest podcast?
Maybe the biggest podcast has like ten or fifteen million people.
I was like, Yeah, but now they do.
How many people are interested in business?
How many people enter entrepreneurship?
And the way that I think about it.
How many people are connected to the internet?
speak English and are interested in entrepreneurship.
There's like a hundred and fifty million business owners around the world, something like that.
Somebody out there has better numbers than I do.
The last time I looked at the first time.
It was like that.
I don't think this is like some small niche, dude.
I got a freaking email yesterday.
And I love this shit.
This is why I'm so obsessed with it. It's'cause you never know.
what they're gonna do with the work you put out there.
This dude listened to my podcast. I did like three or four podcasts on Jeff Bezos.
He's like, dude, listen to your podcast. Help me get a job as an engineer in Amazon.
And then
He emails me, he's like, I love your podcast. I wrote this software.
And now he's analyzing all the books and writing out a software program to map out the connections for us.
And he's gonna like make it available for everybody.
What do you think are the
If any
major aspects of the people that you've studied.
That we haven't
talked about yet. I feel like we've talked about
People's obsession
their endurance
the dark sides maybe of some of these lives.
The role of marketing.
The role of the team.
We talked about a lot the role of the market.
Are there any other major things that you find yourself constantly like pointing out a segment in a book and saying, There it is again?
We may have not talked about the most important.
And that's
The best maximum in the history of entrepreneurship was said by the founder of Four Seasons that excellence is the capacity to take pain.
Anybody trying to do something difficult. How many people want to do like
A great achievement with their lives.
Every single living person that has ever lived.
No one's like, Oh, I don't want to do anything.
I'm here and I'll just die.
No, they have ideas they may never pursue, they may not have the courage, they may attempt, they may fail.
Think of it like
The difficulty he had to do of trying to make not only just a hotel chain.
But at time the best hotel chain in the world.
And all the struggle they had to get to
In his autobiography, his wife would wake up in the middle of the night, see him like staring at the middle of the ceiling, just racked with guilt.
Anybody that's ever done anything difficult, whether it's a company, anything, knows the euphoria and terror. It's the entrepreneurial emotional roller coaster.
And the reason that
I think it's so important to talk about is because
It is supposed to be hard.
There's not a book they're gonna pick up.
Where the guy's like
Our woman.
Hey, I have this idea. I started it. Everything went great.
And
The end of the book
It doesn't happen and so
What's fascinating to me is
I never know what books are gonna resonate with me either.
What I really try to tell people is like there were so many times I'm like no one gives a shit about founders.
This isn't gonna work.
I'm trying to grow a podcast that doesn't have interviews.
I don't have social media and I'm introverted as hell.
And then you have to make a commitment like a podcast, it's like choosing a friend.
I'm asking you to spend an hour, hour and a half with me.
It's not like a thirty second TikTok, dude.
This is a high bar here.
It's me to like me in.
I'll just give up.
And a lot of what pushes me
Is these stories like oh okay, this is normal.
When James Dyson says in his autobiography that there's many nights in these fourteen years
That he came in.
He had two mortgages in his house. He spent the whole day to build a prototype. It blew up in his face. Didn't work.
At the end of that book, the reason it's so important, it's against the odds, an autobiography of James Dyson. It's hard to find, but if you can get a copy, order it.
And he says listen
It's easy for me to celebrate my doggedness now.
I made three hundred million dollars last year.
But I'd be lying to you if there wasn't times where I went inside my house.
had my wife look at me in the face like I'm a failure and I'd cry myself to sleep.
And I got up and did it again anyways.
Because excellence is the capacity to take pain.
I apply this to like
I don't really feel like working out right now.
I don't feel like doing cardio.
I don't give a shit, David, how you feel.
How you feel is irrelevant.
That's an idea I got from Henry Ford. You read his autobiography.
Because I feel sorry for these
I think he calls them soft and flabby men.
They can only do great work when they feel like it.
That was one of the first episodes the founders ever did.
There's like two hundred people listening at that point.
I read the quote.
And I go, So essentially
Henry Ford is saying
Fuck your feelings.
That line for some reason resonated because
I didn't even know people were listening to this.
And with Henry Ford's point was listen, a business.
Exists
To serve other people.
So how you feel.
There's gonna be days where you get out of bed and you cannot wait to get to work.
And that's great.
And there's gonna be days where you don't wanna go to work and that is irrelevant.
Cause the business is not about you.
The business does not exist for your pleasure.
The business exists to serve other people.
What's surprising to me is
In ReadWise app.
I can segment books by
Author When's the last time I read it?
What's fascinating I segmented by
What book have I highlighted the most?
shocked what it was.
It was the autobiography of Ed Catmall.
Creativity Inc., which is the founder of Pixar.
one thing that is in that book that I think is
The perfect
illustration of this idea that excellence is the capacity to take pain.
And that it is supposed to be hard.
I just heard Stanley Drunken Miller.
He talked about this exact same phenomenon.
I think he said he was working for George Soros. I don't know. I might have this wrong.
Which is kinda crazy.
And he's like lost a bunch of money. He just went away for a while. He's like, I can't do this anymore. I'm not good at it.
I'm an idiot.
completely depressed. He's like, I just gotta go away.
the difference between Stanley and a million other investors and entrepreneurs is like
A million other people did that. They went away and they never came back.
But he overcame he's like, I'm in pain.
I'm gonna keep going forward. So there is a filmmaker that works for Pixar.
That put this beautifully.
And he used the metaphor.
of doing anything difficult, but for your and I purposes of building a company.
And he says if you're sailing across the ocean.
And your goal is to avoid weather.
And waves.
Then why the hell are you saying?
You have to embrace the sailing.
means that you can't control the elements and there's gonna be good days and there's gonna be bad days.
And whatever comes
You deal with it.
Because your goal
is to eventually get to the other side.
you will not be able to control exactly how you get across.
That is the game you decided to be in.
Which is exactly what Henry Four was telling us.
Then don't run a company, dude.
That is the game you've decided to be in.
If your goal is to make it easier and simple
Don't
Get in.
The fucking
Both.
Maybe we'll call this episode passion and pain. Like those seem to be
The two themes.
of people's obsessiveness, willingness to devote themselves to something, but also then
To endure.
A ton of hardship and pain.
I think it's a good place to leave it.
I think you also know my traditional closing question for people.
What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
The kindest thing anybody's ever done for me happened a few decades before I was born.
My grandfather on my dad's side was living in Cuba. He was just thirty eight years old. He had a wife and a newborn baby.
when the Cuban Revolution happened and Castro took power.
He didn't understand the language, had no money and no education, and yet took the gigantic risk.
And the complete correct
choice at that time in his life.
To flee Cuba.
To go to America to give
His family
A better chance and a better opportunity.
That one decision.
change the entire trajectory of my life.
None of my interests that I happen to be naturally born into.
The passions that chose me that I did not choose.
Would make a lick of difference if I grew up in Castros, Cuba.
As opposed to America.
And as somebody that studies
Get people for a living.
It really resonates how
Our decisions not only affect our loved ones now.
And our family now and our friends now.
But they reverberate through the generations.
And if you think about it not as
the context of what's gonna happen in your life this year or next year.
But what the decisions you're making.
Will affect people that aren't even born yet.
You'll make your decisions differently.
It's a wonderful closing thought.
I guess I'll close by just saying what I've said elsewhere, which is
I find your show to be almost like a meditation app.
For entrepreneurs.
Where
The open meditation app to sort of get recentered.
And I find something similar and that word comforting, which you mentioned earlier, is definitely there for me too, of like, Oh wow, there's lots of people.
who are nuts about whatever it is that they're doing.
And it's comforting, certainly for me, but also I think for tons of people that listen to your show.
To just be constantly reminded of
The agony, the ecstasy, the journey of building something or creating something.
And
It's like nothing else that I've encountered.
for this specific function. And so
I'm just such a huge fan. I've so enjoyed talking to you over the last several months.
Getting to know you.
And listening.
And I've so enjoyed this conversation today. Thanks for your time.
I appreciate the support. You've been amazing, dude, and I really do appreciate it. And I thank you very much.
I put a lot of my life energy into it and to have somebody
You especially say that you get value out of it. I don't take that for granted by any means.
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