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Uh Andrew Ross Sorcin. Um he's got this new book called 1929. I'm in the I'm in the middle in the middle of reading it. I I think you read science science fiction, right?
>> Yeah. Just surely >> I like science fiction. I like uh some of the more popular ones, but I'm a big history guy. And this book uh 1929, it's about the um Great Depression and how it came to be. And basically, credit had just become a thing. So credit GM uh invented it so you could get a car on a loan and then eventually other appliances on a loan. And then Sears was like, "Oh, we'll do a layaway thing. We'll give you credit so you can buy clothing." And then City Bank, which back then was called National Bank. They said, "Let's do it for stocks and bonds, so you can borrow money and we will let you buy stocks." And they did it at a 10:1 ratio, meaning for uh every $10 of stocks that you have with City Bank, we're going to loan you $100. And so the great depression happened because uh when the market went under which happens occasionally happened during co >> it was just like a domino effect because everyone was incredibly overleveraged and he tells this amazing story about it and there's like probably 20 characters in the book and they're like the Jaime diamonds of the time >> and they give you the day-to-day life of these characters and it's really fascinating and my biggest takeaway from this book so far well there's been a bunch of takeaways but one takeaway is that the executives of these banks, they didn't work that hard and they were like they were in the Jamie Diamonds of the time and their income was the equivalent of $100 million a year. And like one guy had a routine where he's like I'm up at 6:00, I exercise, I'm at the office at 10:00, I'm home by 5. Another guy had a similar routine as that, but then he would take off, he took summer off to go to Europe with his family. And going to Europe meant taking a 3-week boat.
>> And same with Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie was popular in the late 1800s. He died probably in 1920 or so. He did the same thing where he would barely work. And I read about some of these like I think Brian Halligan who's the founder of HubSpot just tweeted he's like you don't move mountains working 9 to5 and all these people yourself included and myself included talk about hard work but I like see all these other examples and I'm like isn't it crazy how much you can get done by actually not working hard and lately I've been like interested by some of those examples. Have you ever read about that?
I haven't read about it, but I've definitely observed it with some people that, you know, are further ahead than than I am. I think what's what's always difficult is like, do I model the the the top of the mountain or do I model the climb? Like, am I trying to extrapolate how someone currently lives for what they did to get there? Um, and that one's always a really dangerous one that I try and catch myself on, which is like, you know, we're in different seasons, and so I have to make sure that I'm comparing this person's spring, uh, you know, to my spring, not not my winter to their spring. Well, like all these like I'm just I can list so many people where I read these books and I'm like you don't work hard at all. What the hell? It's like what am I doing? Like Ted Turner was another guy. He he Ted Turner when he built CNN which made him a multi-billionaire. He was also a professional sailboat racer where he was gone for three months at a time racing sailboats. Uh and so anyway, I could I could give you so many examples of that. It's just crazy.
when we let's let's take that for a second because I think that like let's say let's say like within your business let's say that you could find the perfect Sam just as a a thought routine right the perfect Sam that you could hire and whatever you could pay the perfect Sam to do and he could do everything you can do just as well as you can it's like so whatever your current profit is minus Sam's compensation if you could do that then you would have almost the same amount of money you have now and maybe in two years Perfect Sam would grow the pie so that you're making the same or more than you're making right now but you're still not working at all. And so if that's the case, then it's like we're always like in the hypothetical world, we're one hirer away from somebody who could do 100% of what we're currently doing and the business would be able to continue to grow. I think um to that point about patience, it's like but most entrepreneurs are like, well, I'll I'll find that person. I'll give it to that person and then I'll start the next job. Whereas some other people just say like, I'm just not going to start that next job and then just be willing to let the company continue to grow with the team that I've assembled. And I think both like fundamentally if you work or you don't work, as long as the business performs these functions, it will grow.
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