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

Did you hear me say when I was asked who is the podcaster's podcaster? The underground one that all of us listen to is you. Yes, I almost clipped it and then posted it. I appreciate it. I watch all your Q&As. I love them. Thank you!

Yeah, dude, I would love a weekly Q&A from you.

Oh God, I don’t know whether the internet's ready for that. There’ll be a new one coming up soon anyway.

Today, I want to go through a bunch of lessons. You spend your entire time studying history's greatest founders, greatest leaders, thinkers, and I wanted to go through some broad buckets of lessons that you've taken away from them. So, we're going to do 15 today.

Okay, first one: Excellence is the capacity to take pain. Persevering through pain is mandatory.

Why? That is probably my all-time favorite maxim from studying all these history greats. It actually comes from the founder of Four Seasons, this guy named Izzy Sharp. Sometimes, like you're reading a book or you're listening to a podcast, or sometimes it is even like a music lyric, that just one sentence can stay in your brain forever.

I haven't read that book in probably five years, and he's describing how difficult it was. He had no experience in the hotel industry when he founded Four Seasons, and yet his goal was like, "I'm going to make a collection of the greatest hotels in the world." He didn't disregard the fact that he had never made a hotel before, didn't have any money, resources, or contacts.

So, the whole book, the autobiography—which I think he wrote when he was close to 80 years old—is him recounting this for the reader. There are just so many times where he hits a problem that he can't figure out how to solve. You know, problems with partners, contractors, financing, all kinds of unresolved issues.

He's laying up late at night, and there are interviews with his wife, which are fantastic because they were married through this whole thing. They're still married to this day, and she recounts where she would wake up at like 2 in the morning, and he's just sitting there wide awake, hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling, just can't sleep, depressed, agonizing over this relentless pursuit of a goal.

He’s the one that coined the term, you know, "Excellence is the capacity to take pain." I was like, "That!" By that point, I had read like 180 biographies and autobiographies of history, and that's exactly what I see in every single book.

There's never a book, there's not a life story or a book that starts with, "Hey, this guy had an idea, he did the idea, everything went well, end of story." It is always like, "Hey, I have this idea, I want to do something," and it's just one problem, one obstacle, one emotional and mental, and in some cases, physical pain to persevere and push through until they get to the other side and actually achieve what they're trying to achieve.

Why is that the case? Is it just that achieving anything that is excellent requires you to negotiate with a world that's going to push up against you? That means you're going to end up feeling discomfort; therefore, the capacity to deal with pain is important?

Yeah, there's no such thing as an important goal, an audacious goal that comes easily. I think Jeff Bezos has his own way of saying this. There’s this great book called "Invent and Wander," and it's the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. They take his shareholder letters and they take transcripts of his speeches, and you really get to understand how he was thinking as he was building Amazon and all the stuff that he's learned.

His whole thing was, "I have unrelenting, uncompromising standards for excellence and the talent of the people around me." If you're coming to work at Amazon, I'm not going to bend; you're going to rise to my expectations, my standards. It is not easy to work here, I'm going to tell you that up front, because we're trying to do something that we can tell our grandkids about, that we can be proud to say, "This is what Granddad did. This is how I spent my life."

He says, "Things that you could tell your grandkids about are not meant to be easy." There’s a quote from Tim Cook at Apple where he says, "People say if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." I found that to be a total crock. At Apple, you will work harder than you ever have before, but the tools will feel light in your hands.

I'm surprised Tim said that because if you go back, Steve Jobs is obviously what I consider probably the greatest entrepreneur of all time just for his unique story. There's really no other founder that, if you think about the story of Steve Jobs, he founded Apple twice. The second time, he was alone.

Then he winds up coming back, you know, after 12 to 13 years in the wilderness, and he comes back and then goes on the greatest run that we've ever seen. He creates the most successful consumer product of all time and sets the foundation for the multi-trillion dollar market cap that Apple has today.

Steve's take on this was the reason you have to love what you do is because it's so hard and so painful that if you don't, you'll quit. He goes, "Why do people quit? Because it's sane. It is. That's the sane thing to do."

It's the misfits, the rebels, you know, the people that actually are obsessed with what they're doing that are able to persevere. He also has this other quote that he feels what separates the successful half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is just pure perseverance.

All these ideas are all related: excellence, capacity to take pain, you should love what you do because if you love what you do, you'll keep doing it through the pain.

Did you ever hear me tell Rogan about the region beta paradox? That thing is just an idea about why you get stuck in comfortably numb. In the middle, things aren't too bad, they're not that good, but because they're not that bad, you don't have the motivation to go make them better. It's like a well-known psychological state.

I came up with a theory of it, which is the reverse region beta paradox: being in an aggressively terrible working cadence or environment but having such a tolerance for discomfort that you can endure it for a lifetime. Lower resilience, less stubborn people would snap and have to find a way to change, but not you. You're the David Goggins of working hard, who's going to carry the workload forever.

That thing is a blessing and a curse because it allows people to maybe continue moving when they actually should pivot to something else. But if you know that the idea is right, I guess that's a competitive advantage.

I would say one of the great, if you're talking about one of the near-perfect entrepreneur autobiographies, is Phil Knight's "Shoe Dog," where he's telling the story of Nike. The reason I think it's great is because every chapter is a year, and it goes in sequential order from the time he has the idea till the IPO of Nike.

Everybody identifies with the struggle of wanting to have a dream and wanting to achieve it. I wish more biographies were like that because they spend too much time after the person is super rich and donating things to education. That's way less relatable.

This is an egalitarian, a temporally egalitarian book. This is like 90% struggle, and then he finally breaks through and then gets the IPO. We know what happens after that; we got that. But he ends that. I love what you said because in the last chapter, he's like, for the charlatans, he calls them charlatans, he's like, "For the charlatans to tell entrepreneurs to never quit, that's [ __ ]!" He doesn't use that word, but he goes, "You don't ever stop, but sometimes quitting is the best thing," meaning like you're on the wrong path, so quit that path, but don't stop trying to actually do what you want to do in life and what you want to set out to accomplish.

What about Elon? Because he strikes me as somebody that's just got a pretty high pain tolerance.

So now I'm completely back. The very first episode of Founders, in September 20, 2016, was Ashley Vance's book on Elon. In fact, there's this guy named Kevin Rose, who's the founder of Digg, right? He's like one of the first internet OG creators. He has one of the first podcasts, but they weren't called podcasts back then. He had this video podcast, what we call a video podcast today, called "Foundation," and it was excellent, high quality. You would love it because it's shot in crazy cameras, great sets.

So you go back, and he actually interviews Elon. I watched this in 2012, okay? The interview is on Tesla's factory floor, so you kind of hear the stuff in the background. Elon looks way better than he does now. You know, he's been going through hell for the last 15 years.

But at the time, they were just starting to produce the Model S. What was fascinating about this is the reason that was the first book that I covered, right? Because I wanted to do a podcast on biographies and autobiographies, is because Kevin Rose asks Elon a question that changed my life.

He’s like, "Hey, you know Elon has a crazy experience. Everybody knows Tesla, SpaceX, but if you go back and him immigrating from South Africa to Canada, and then Canada to the Bay Area, you know, I don't think a lot of people know that he had his first successful company exit when he was like 25, something like that. He sold this company called Zip2, winds up netting something like $20-30 million at that age, and then immediately rolls it back into PayPal. Then he rolls PayPal into Tesla and SpaceX and does exactly what he always does now.

But the fascinating thing, Kevin was like, "Dude, you didn't know anybody. You didn't have resources. You didn't have a network. How did you learn? Did you have a mentor? Did you read business books?" And Elon said something that's fascinating. He’s like, "I didn't read a lot of business books. I like biographies and autobiographies. I think they're helpful."

He goes, "I was looking for mentors in historical context." So he talks about, you know, reading the biography of Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, and I was like, "That's genius!" Because for the vast majority of humanity, right, we don't have world-class mentors in person, but you can access their entire life learnings by picking up the biography.

So a few years later, I started getting obsessed with podcasts. I was like, "I remember that." Because as soon as he said that, I started reading a ton of biographies, and then I got addicted to reading biographies. I thought, "Oh, I should just make a podcast about the biographies I'm reading."

It's funny you bring him up because I just read for the second time. I reread a lot of books. I think that's actually important. We can talk about that later if you want to, but I just read this book called "Liftoff: Elon Musk in the Desperate Early Days of SpaceX." Elon is in a class of himself. There are not many cases like a lot of the modern-day founders. There is a historical event; there is even a Steve Jobs before a Steve Jobs.

I've given up on finding there's no Elon Musk before another Elon. The reason I love this book "Liftoff" so much is because it's the first six years of SpaceX. That's it. Just like I said, I loved how Phil Knight just covered getting to the IPO; it's fine. This is even better because then you go back, and what I do is when I'm reading books, I'll look up how old they were when this was happening in their life.

That book is about Elon Musk when he's 30 to 37. Now, me and you think of Elon now, like the world's richest man, like unbelievable, powerful, tipping elections, going and doing all this crazy [ __ ] right? It's like, "No, no, no, he was 30 to 37."

It's insane, and 90% of the book is him failing. They can't get the rocket into orbit. He's running out of money. He's going through a divorce. His infant son dies. His girlfriend talks about in the book him literally waking up in the middle of the night screaming—not like, "Oh, how you doing, honey? I can't sleep." No, no, screaming in pain and agony.

When he was the largest shareholder in PayPal, okay, this is what I also admire about him: his skin in the game. When you already have multiple successful exits, you don't have to put your money on the line anymore. You can raise money from whoever you want. He's like, "No, no, I want to be the largest shareholder." He made more money on PayPal than anybody else, right?

Because he put in all his own money, gets $180 million after taxes when they sold to eBay, puts $100 million into doing a rocket company with no experience, puts $70 million into Tesla, where there hadn't been a successful American car company for like 80 years, and then puts $10 million in SolarCity, has to borrow money for rent.

This is talking about, he's like, "You know, that book is the next few years. He just sees all that money just essentially being lit on fire." How does he keep going? He has [ __ ] malaria at the same time.

This is what I love. So originally, he's like, "Hey, I have enough money for three rocket launches," and that's what he thought. He's also like super, super optimistic, so he's a little nutty in that case. He just thought he could do this.

So the third rocket fails, and he's like, "You know what? We're going to scrape up enough money, and we have 30 days. We don't have six months. I think it might be six weeks. We have to launch this rocket."

His whole thing, he ends that speech after the failure of the third rocket. He's like, "Come hell or high water, we're going to make this work."

I just think another thing that history's great entrepreneurs have in common—and I think me and you probably agree with this too, I definitely do—is the power of will and the power of one dynamic individual to change the course of history.

I feel that belief comes before ability is another repeated lesson. It's obvious if you read biographies of people that do great things. For Elon, it's just like I think he believes that he has strength and power, well, and that he can literally bend and change the world. Problems are just opportunities in work clothes.

The closest, now the closest historical equivalent to Elon—and this is still a bit of a stretch, so you have to bear with me—this is a guy named Henry Kaiser. Okay, Henry Kaiser founded over a hundred different companies. He built the Hoover Dam in his day around World War II. He was almost as famous in his day as Elon is today.

I think now Elon is on a different level. You know, multiple billion-dollar companies. He built ships, and he just helped the Allies win World War II. But that's his line where he was just like Elon, just default optimistic. Every day, like, "I know I wake up every day, there's going to be problems. That's fine. That's what I want because problems—that's his line—problems are just opportunities in work clothes."

So when his employees would complain about, "Oh my God, this thing failed or this order fell through or we can't find a guy for this," he’d be like, "Good! Problems just to work close."

The default state, I think, for humans is to complain. Oh, woe is me. Here's another problem. Entrepreneurs, what they realize is, "Oh, the problem? Actually, if I can solve that problem, any problem you solve for a person could be a business."

That second line is something I came up with where it's like, "Oh, well, if businesses are problems, that means the most successful companies are just effective problem-solving machines."

Their perpetuation of their existence is the fact that they're solving problems for other people, and they're doing so effectively. If you want to build wealth, if you want to be a successful company, it's like find a problem and then solve it better than anybody else.

It's the reason that people at the top get paid more because they have more levels of input coming in. Anybody that's in the suite, the C-suite, that's good in the C-suite is basically just a very complex, high-level problem-solving algorithm.

They can just see the number of inputs that they're able to see and the way that they can triage top-down and prioritize what the most important is and weigh their weighting appropriately because of experience and maybe taste or talent or whatever insight.

But yeah, I think you're right. I think that the best companies just solve problems. I was thinking about this yesterday because, you know, we talk all the time, and one thing that you notice is like I'm kind of oblivious to what's going on online. I'm just reading books and enviously, you know, talking to podcasters and entrepreneurs.

It's like, "Oh, that's what my entire life outside of spending time with my family is." I was struck and kind of shocked because I saw a headline where there were a bunch of protesters that set up a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos's Washington, D.C. house. This was like a year or two ago or something like that—an actual guillotine—and you know, "Kill the rich" or "Eat the rich."

I looked at that, and I was dumbfounded because I'm like, "Jeff Bezos made a magic button that I could press, and if I want something to appear in my house in a day or two, I just press the button." Jeff hides all that operational complexity.

Do you understand how difficult that was to do? This talentless hack shows up at his house with a guillotine like, "Give me your money!" What did you do? Did you make a magic button? Jeff deserves that money.

And that doesn't even talk about all the other businesses—the fact that he owns the largest cloud computing business, the fact that the hardware businesses he has, the mention of the Kindle, his advertising business. They probably have more multi-10 billion-plus businesses, uncorrelated 10 billion-plus businesses inside of Amazon than any other business on the planet.

You think you could have done that? That's insane! He deserves that money.

The other thing I was thinking about too, in response to this, because I've done probably like, I don't know, like eight podcasts on Jeff. I think he's incredible. So I read everything about him, and I'm like, "This is kind of hypocritical."

You're protesting now because, you know, he's got a trillion or two trillion dollar market cap, right? But there was no protest in front of his house after the dot-com bust when the stock goes from $180 to $6. You could have bought a share of Amazon stock at that price that time for $5.90. You weren't out in front of his house then.

When he had a mass exodus of employees, you weren't saying anything about that. You wait until it's not. There's a line that, again, we talk about the fact that it's just a single line. I read all the time, you know, you're not going to read everything. You're not going to remember everything in an entire book. Maybe a 500-page book, I'll remember a story, a line, right?

There's a line that I heard Charlie Munger say one time, which he was actually quoting Warren Buffett, and he says, "It's not that greed runs the world; envy runs the world." His whole point is, "Cure yourself of envy."

I was like, "Dude, you're not outside of Jeff Bezos's house because you're trying to fix the broken world. You're envious." You hear that line, and then now you start to look at all the interactions you have and the actions of other people, and you're like, "Oh, they're right. Greed doesn't run the world; envy does."

It's a shame because one of the things that this can incentivize people to do is to track the low points and track the journey in the beginning sufficiently so that you always have this sort of stake that you've planted in the ground to say, "See?" You know that famous photo of Jeff, and he's in front of the handwritten Amazon sign, and it's like CRT monitors and old-school style keyboards and stuff? Everything's beige.

Why is that photo important? Because most of Amazon's inception is bereft of the 4K behind-the-scenes footage that you would like to have now.

You look at somebody like Chris Bumstead, best bodybuilder in the world. I guess he just retired a few weeks ago. He has been tracking his journey for over 10 years on YouTube. So when it comes to him, people can look at this person, and the envy, I think you're able to dampen that down. You're able to ameliorate it because you can show people the difficult times.

If you were able to see Jeff Bezos at his worst, Elon Musk at his worst, Dyson at his worst, whoever, Trader Joe at his worst, if you could see those guys when they were really in the [ __ ] I think far fewer people would think that they did not deserve the success that they get on the other side.

The issue people have is that it looks like it came easy; therefore, they don't deserve it. "I didn't have something come easy, therefore I should take it from them."

Yeah, you're the one that introduced me to Chris. I didn't know about Bumstead before I watched your episode with him. I love the question you had for him. You were like, "Do you think you're a strange dude to be the best in the world?"

He's a real soulful dude, correct? He's very soulful. I thought that was fascinating. I loved his perception because, again, one of the complaints that some very few complaints I get—most of the people who listen to the podcast are nerds, right? And I'm talking about history, and it just self-selects for like you have to be kind of a driven, obsessive person to even be into this kind of stuff.

I think you, obviously, me, and you are both like this as well, but they're like, "I can tell when sometimes a podcast is not for other people." You see, like, "Oh, you're not telling me what to do."

I was just like, "Because there's no formula." Chris made the point. He's just like, "Listen, this is how I got there, but there's six other ways, there's 15 other ways. There's no right way; it's the right way for you."

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I was listening to Michael Dell's autobiography, which is really excellent. He wrote two, but they're both good. The second one is the one I was listening to, and for the longest time, I kept talking about the importance of building a life and business as a byproduct of that that's authentic to you.

Then I'm listening to Michael Dell, who's a phenomenal entrepreneur. Even when he was young, like right away, when he was like 19, he was making millions and millions of dollars. So he's running this crazy company in Austin, and it's just exploding, and he's still in college. He winds up recruiting an older, more experienced C-suite executive to help him, and the guy helps him for a few years, and he burns out real fast.

He's not sleeping; he's gaining weight, and he's like, "Michael, I love you, but I have to take a break. I can't do this. I have to leave the company." Michael felt the opposite. He's working all hours of the day; he's going to the full limit.

What he realized—and he put it better than I did—he's like, "Oh, the difference was I built a business that was natural to me. This is how I naturally want to spend my time. This is what I'm naturally interested in. This is what I'm naturally obsessed with. This is what I naturally want my life to be."

I'm like, "Natural" is a better word than "authentic," and I think what I took away from your conversation with Chris was like he built a life that was natural to him. He's swimming downstream.

Yeah, it makes life so much easier. He's swimming downstream. The partner that he picked compensates for his shortcomings and accounts for them and helps him to be a better person. So does mine. So does my wife.

I keep hopping on about this Michelangelo effect thing: two people, they make each other better to be better for each other and for themselves, and together they are positive sums more than they could have been apart, etc.

I actually have an interesting tangent I think you might enjoy. I read a book, so I was obsessed with Arnold. I love Arnold, and you know his autobiography that he wrote when he was 70 called "Total Recall" is excellent, right? But what's even better is he wrote an autobiography when he was 30 that people don't think of as an autobiography. It's called "The Education of a Bodybuilder."

The first 110 pages of that book is Arnold telling his life story at 30 and then calling a shot, saying, "Hey, the same principles I just did to be the best bodybuilder, I'm going to get into movies. I'm going to build a business empire." He just literally calls a shot.

I read everything I get my hands on. I watch everything with Arnold, and so I thought I read every book about Arnold. Then I'm watching that Netflix documentary on him that came out, and they kept interviewing his girlfriend that Arnold lived with before he was famous from 21 to 26.

She goes, and it's like the author of "Arnold and Me." I'm like, "What?" I was like, "I ordered the book immediately." Then I read the book, and it's 300 pages of this woman, bless her heart, right? I could have helped her in a minute.

Her saying, "I don't understand why this outlier of an outlier of an outlier won't just be a normal guy."

Oh man! The main takeaway from that book was, especially for entrepreneurs, especially for driven people, and you know people like Chris as well, and I can give you multiple examples in the books as well, like the founder of Four Seasons.

It's also like for entrepreneurs, you either need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all because there is no separation from our work and our lives, and it's not going to work if you're completely obsessed.

The reason me and you get along, the reason I love hanging out with you—we've spent nine hours talking about podcasting in Miami—is because you're a fellow obsessive. I was like, "That's why I flew here. There's no way I'm recording remotely. I'm coming to give you a hug and to sit down with you."

But you can't, like, imagine your wife, you know, your future wife saying, "Chris, don't work so hard on the podcast." Like, "Oh, it doesn't matter. That doesn't have to be shot with a camera that's going to break Spotify's video player. Calm down. You don't need to redo the barn. It's just Matthew McConaughey. Why does this stuff matter?"

It's not going to work. You either need a no spouse or a supportive spouse.

I've seen this is where I see so many entrepreneurs fight against this, where their spouse makes them feel guilty. They're attracted to them because they're so driven and obsessed, right? Which is abnormal for the human population.

You deal with a lot of young men. A lot of young men need to get offline and increase their level of ambition and service to the world, right? Stop thinking about themselves; start thinking about other people.

You're attracted to this person because they're so driven, then you marry them, and it's just like, "Hey, I love what you are now. Be something you're not. Please stop that thing that made me so attracted to you."

It's actually kind of getting in the way of the comfort that I want to get.

Yeah, so true, man. I mean, H. Mo's got something where he says, "The cheerleader should not be telling the quarterback to get off the field when it's in the final play of the game."

You know, that can switch. I'm sure there are times when you need to step up and be the cheerleader for your wife—not in the podcasting world, but in all sorts of other stuff. You're like, "Hey, there you go, Stadium flow. Crack on. I'm here to support you."

I think what Hormozi did too, that's smart, that I've seen a few times, because you are going to—you know, these people are obsessed. They're not going to write biographies about normal people. It's not like, "Hey, this guy had a 9 to 5, and you know, he just played pickleball on the weekends, and he barbecued."

No one's going to read that book. So by default, you're self-selecting into these very extreme people. My entire life outside of spending time with my family is talking to entrepreneurs and hanging out with founders.

I don't have any friends that aren't founders. One thing that you see is this conflict between how do I balance work and family? I think what Hormozi did is he combined work with a—I actually got that idea from two people: from Estée Lauder and Sam Walton.

Estée Lauder is one of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live that no one ever thinks about. They know that the company is named after her. It's probably a $20 billion market cap, whatever it is today.

But there's a very hard-to-find autobiography about Estée Lauder when she was still alive, published I think in the 80s. It's one of my favorite books I ever read. If you can get a copy, you can read it in a weekend.

There was a huge conflict between her. She's a monster. She is one of the most driven entrepreneurs ever, and she's like, "But I want to also spend time with my sons and my husband." So what do I do?

She brings them into the business with her. Her husband shuts down his business because her business has a lot more potential. He works in there, and then they involve the kids since they were like six.

Greg McKeown, an author of "Essentialism," was on the speaking circuit's 10th anniversary of "Essentialism" next month, and he's done speaking forever. He didn't want to miss his kids, but he also wanted to build a life that his kids would benefit from.

So he's sort of caught between a rock and a hard place because being away from his kids is the very thing that facilitates the life he wants to give them. So he just put in a request. Part of his rider was a second ticket, business class, and a second hotel room, and he took one of his kids with him every time that he did a talk.

I love that.

Can I tell you a funny rider? I do a lot of—well, now I do less of them, but for the right people, I'll do a lot of speaking gigs for private companies, usually private companies or investment firms.

I was at one; there were two speakers: me and Tucker Carlson. The CEO of the company that will not be named, I was asking him because I was like, "There's no way I probably charged way too less for like not enough money for this."

So I asked him, "How much did you pay Tucker?" Because, you know, he’s a fan of the podcast. I knew I could talk to him like, you know, friend. He goes, "Well, his rider is a little different than yours."

I was like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "He insists that we fly him in and out on our private jet." I was like, "I didn't even know I could do that!"

Number three: There are ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. History's greatest entrepreneurs all learned from history's greatest entrepreneurs.

That is a direct quote from "Poor Charlie's Almanack," and it is literally true. In that case, there's this guy named Henry Singleton that I didn't know.

I guess I should back up and talk about part of my process, which I think is helpful outside of just making a podcast. I really believe like anybody you admire, whatever field it could be—a director, an entrepreneur, an athlete—read, find a book about them, and read about their life.

I am an evangelist for reading biographies. I think it's one of the highest value activities that you could have outside of spending time on your health with your friends and family. I really think people should make it a habit.

What I do is I think Charlie Munger is the wisest person I've ever come across. He's like a hero of mine. I got a chance to meet him. I got to go to his house. This was incredible.

But what I'll do is I'll read every single book I can find about somebody I admire, and then I usually find other books about them by going through the bibliography. Books are made out of books, so anybody usually has one reference of people referring to other people.

Not only is that how you find hard-to-find books or books that other people are reading, but inevitably in that book, they all studied history's greatest entrepreneurs. All studied history's greatest entrepreneurs, so they will talk about the people that influenced them.

I'm doing this, going through the same process I just described to you for Munger and Buffett, and they keep bringing up this guy named Henry Singleton. I was like, "Who the hell is Henry Singleton? I've never heard of Henry Singleton."

They say wild stuff like, "Henry Singleton's the smartest. Charlie Munger says Henry Singleton is the single smartest person I've ever met." Singleton is smarter than Buffett. Buffett says that it's a crime that business schools don't study him, that if you took the top 100 business school students and compared their record to Singleton, he'd blow them out of the water.

I'm like, "I have to read about this guy." So then you start—there's this book called "The Outsiders," and I pick it up. I start reading about it, and I'm like, "Oh my God, the ideas that I thought were Buffett's were Singleton's." They just applied it to building Berkshire.

Then you go, and so then what I do, I go and read everything about Singleton, and then Singleton says, "Hey, there's this book that changed the trajectory of Tenneco." He built this conglomerate called Tenneco, and he goes, "There's a book that changed the trajectory of Tenneco. I was reading Alfred Sloan, the CEO of GM's book, and he says, 'As you're building a business, you need access to a financial institution.' So I went out and bought either a bank or an insurance company."

I forgot which one he did. He's like, "And that solved—like that made that helped Tenneco." Not only did he use the money to invest and keep buying more companies to increase his conglomerate, but literally, they made billions of dollars from an idea that was in a $30 history book.

You see this over and over again. When I say all of history's entrepreneurs study history's entrepreneurs, it's really important. What they're doing is they're not trying to copy the what; they're trying to copy the how. They're not trying to build another Tenneco; they're building their version of their business, what they were interested in.

The greatest example of this is you go back, and all the great entrepreneurs can place their work in historical context. So when Steve Jobs is developing the Macintosh, he goes and studies, "What did Alexander Graham Bell do? How did he market the telephone?"

Because he feels, "I just made the telephone of my generation." There are ideas around marketing this other invention 100 years before my invention that still work to this day.

That's what I mean. There are ideas worth billions in $30 history books.

What about that line between SpaceX and NASA?

Oh, so this is nuts. This was in that book "Liftoff," which is really, again, I highly recommend that book because you can, again, read it in a weekend. Some of these books, you know, I don't read people like, "Oh, you must read fast." No, I read pretty damn slow because I'm taking notes. I'm like doing arts and crafts over here.

I got scissors, a ruler, a pen, I got Post-it notes. It takes a long time, but you can read that book in a weekend.

What they realized is like, "Hey, NASA has, because it's a government-run agency, they documented all of their experiments, all their hypotheses, all their everything in papers, and you could just download them and read them."

Nobody read them. So they wind up, I think they said they cribbed NASA's notes, and they got a couple billion dollars of value from ideas in their era of SpaceX.

Then you could also do that. There's another line in the book that Elon talks about where this reporter goes. He's flying on Elon's jet after a failed, I think it's like the second failed rocket, and Elon's brother's on the jet, and he's like watching TV or playing video games, and Elon's in the corner reading biographies of all the rocket engineers.

Because again, he's like, "I want to know what they know so I can take the good ideas and avoid the bad ones." This just happens over and over and over again.

Relationships run the world. Trusted personal networks may be the most valuable asset in the world.

Okay, so this might be the most important idea that I've actually internalized and seen play out in the last year of my life. I had the ability to meet Charlie Munger. I just met him and went to his house.

Had dinner with him. The night started out in his library, which was really cool for me because, you know, I love reading, and I got to see not only what was in his library, but I also got to see like I could read biographies for the rest of my life, and like I'll never have what he has.

What I mean by that is he's sitting in front of his bookshelf, right? I get there, and first of all, he's like my hero. When I mean that, so I first of all, I'm sitting there, and you know, I'm there with two other of my entrepreneur friends, and you just start having conversation. They had met him before, and I'm in shock.

I'm just staring at him because I'm like, "That's Charlie Munger! I watch all the AGM videos. That's him!" He's just sitting there, and you know, he's looking at you because his eyes were really degenerated.

He has like the bifocals, but it's not just like he looks at you like this. He'll look, and he'll go like this because he's got to look through the bottom, and he's making eye contact with me. I'm looking, and for 10 minutes, I'm just like frozen.

Then my friend Andrew is like, "Hey, get in here. Start asking him. You're going to waste this." So what I do, I was like, "I don't know what to say." I had all these notes. I had made all these things on my Apple notes on my phone. Never looked at my phone once in three hours.

So immediately, I just start looking at his shelf behind him, and I start noticing all the books because, again, I find people I admire, and then if they say, "Hey, I like this book," I go and read it.

So I start asking him questions about all these books, and what I mean that I'll never have what he has, I have to like reread stuff. I have to like study. I have to like practice.

Immediately, I ask him about a book he hasn't read in 25 years. He can tell you what the company does, what their revenue was, who their partners were, who sold it. He was a legit genius. Like absolutely, I don't have whatever brain he has.

Anyone in 99 is going to have some level of decline, right? You have to some level imagine him at 35. He would destroy me. He would just like 55. Any of that, he would destroy me.

So the relationships around the world is one of the lessons that he taught us because, you know, he knew he was not going to live forever. He knew he didn't have that much longer, and so he prioritized meeting with other young, ambitious, like entrepreneurial kind of people.

His whole thing was, we talked a lot about Ben Franklin because he's got a bust. He commissions busts of people he admires. So he's leaning on Ben Franklin, and he's got every biography I've ever seen on Ben Franklin.

His whole thing is like one of the things I learned from Ben Franklin is that no matter your age, go out and seek talented people. If they're your peer group, that's fine, but if they're younger, build a relationship with them.

He talked about how Ben Franklin did that with a young George Washington. Ben Franklin's like 48 years old when he cold DMs of the day, slides in George Washington, who's 21, right? They build a relationship, and they have a relationship for their whole life.

He was describing that as like, "That sounds like what you did." He's like, "That's exactly what I did." He’s like, "I met Buffett. I was 35; Buffett was 28, and we built a seamless web of deserved trust."

He goes, "Everybody knows about us, but there were all these other guys around us that were similar age and similar interest, and we just did deals forever, and most of them had passed on, you know, but by the time I got to meet Munger."

But relationships run the world. What you realize is every—like we think of an organization, like let's say we need—there's certain organizations that are important in podcasting, Spotify being the most important one.

So we think of Spotify as an organization, but is it an organization? Well, inside an organization, there are people, and there are people that me and you have relationships with, like Daniel Ek or people on the board or the head of podcasting.

So if you need something done, right, because of their personal relationship they have with you, it's a call. It's relationships run the world.

There's another guy that I got to meet who was one of my heroes, this guy named Sam Zell. He also, he was 81 years old when I met him. He passed away, unfortunately, about six months after I got to have lunch with him.

In his autobiography, he mentions Sam's a legend, you know, one of the best entrepreneurs, investors. He sold his—the largest real estate company in history for like $38 billion. The guy just could he felt as backwards into deals and money. He was just phenomenal.

But I got to have a two-hour lunch with him, and he's sitting, you know, closer than you are to me, and I got to ask him whatever I wanted. So I brought up the fact that I read he knew I read his autobiography because the way I met him is he got into podcasts, and he heard the podcast I did on his autobiography, and he starts listening to a bunch.

He goes, "Hey, can I meet this guy?" So I get a message like, "Sam Zell wants to meet you." I thought it was like fake. I was like, "Yeah, he doesn't want to meet. This is ridiculous."

So I go, "Sam, I bought the book that you talked about that changed—go back to there's ideas worth 30." I forgot about this. There are ideas worth billions in a $30 history book.

When Sam Zell was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school, he was an entrepreneur for 61 years, one of the best to ever do it. He picked up a book that changed his life when he was in law school.

It's this autobiography of this guy named William Zindorf. William Zindorf is one of the greatest real estate developers to ever live. In that book, he has this idea he calls the Hawaiian technique, right?

It worked in real estate, and it worked in real estate when Sam Zell used it. But Sam also realized it works in business, buying private businesses, where he says like there are components of a building that you know the land underneath you can piece it apart.

The land is valuable; it would be highly valuable to a certain party. You could sell it to the highest bidder there, and then maybe the leases that somebody else prioritizes that.

So break up the components of the business and sell to the highest bidder, and the sum of the parts—that's how you make more money, right?

Sam used that idea and made billions of dollars. He also used it in private business. But I tell Sam, I go, "Sam, I bought Zindorf's book." He's like, "Did you read it?" I go, "Not yet."

Sam had this—he was famous for this gravelly voice. He goes, "Read it!" I was like, "Okay, Sam Zell tells me to read the book." I immediately read the book.

In that book is where it crystallized for me that relationships run the world. Zindorf, you know, very wealthy, winds up losing all his money, but at the time, very wealthy and wasn't born wealthy.

So like very similar to me and you with our background, right? We don't understand any of this stuff. So what he realizes as he climbs through society, and he's in New York, and he gets more successful, and he meets more people, and he gets richer, what he goes, "Hey, you're a normal dude. You know how we grew up? You're at the base of the mountain. You can might be able to see that peak, right?

But what you don't see because you're not climbing in the mountain is when you get to the other— as you get closer to the peak, other peaks start to appear.

All these are very influential, rich, very powerful people. What you realize is all these mountain peaks are actually connected by little pathways, and you don't have access to these pathways unless you've climbed the mountain.

He goes, "If I need something from a Howard Hughes or a J. Pritzer family, which is, you know, a multi-billion dollar Chicago family, or you know, the mayor of New York City because I'm a developer, well guess what? I'm on a peak too."

This path right here—relationships run the world.

The advice that they both gave me is like you need to develop seamless webs that deserve trust.

There's an additional element in there which suggests you need to also be able to display value in some way. You need to be able to have—yes, you can build a relationship with somebody, but the analogy of the peak suggests to me that you stand alone at the top of a mountain of your own.

Yeah, you have done a thing which enables you. It unlocks that.

I love that you said that. There's another maxim. I try to break everything down to maxims to distill everything I'm learning, right?

Because I've done, let's see, you probably read 380 biographies, over 100,000 pages in eight years, two months. But like you can't remember all that stuff, so you have to—like I love what Naval Ravikant said. He's like, "I break things down to the maximum level."

So then they're easy to remember, and then you contextually apply it to your situation.

Zipped file. If people—this is a—because of the way that I learn as well, which is the same essentializing, right? Taking long concepts into memorable mantras, maxims, aphorisms, whatever it is.

It can feel like quote-porn, right? Which is fine, and I don't actually mind all that much, but that's the sticky thing that stays in the back of your mind.

If you're not going to be able to remember the entirety of a book, but you can remember, "Do less but better." That's the concept of essentialism, right?

Do less but better. It's like from a German saying. You go, "Right, well, you can't use it if you can't remember it."

Correct. David has this line where he's like, "Why do you have to write interesting ads?" You do this phenomenally. I just saw the ad you did yesterday.

Thank you!

His response is, "You can't save souls in an empty church."

So then you'll remember, "Oh, I can't save souls in an empty church." If no one reads this or no one—if I want to educate, so I have a—my life's goal is very simple. I have one simple organizational principle: I want to help people learn from history's entrepreneurs, and I want to do that better than anybody else in the world.

That's it. So then I can remember that. That's my principle, and I look at how I'm spending my time.

Single ordinating, single direction.

Yeah, I want to go back to what you said, though. So my maxim on this is you need to make yourself easy to interface with.

Okay, and I go back to how we were able to build a relationship. We're in an industry full of second-rate products and second-rate talent, and most people that go to podcasts are podcasters who don't want to work.

They do—it’s not the only thing they do. It's like one of ten. What me and you saw in each other immediately is like, "Oh, this is another me."

We may talk about different things; we have different formats, but it's another me. It's so much easier for me to—like I knew I listened to your podcast, so I know exactly who you are, and then we can build a relationship real fast.

So easy to interface with. The person that did this the best, and he did it in three words: Steve Jobs—insanely great products.

He said, "You want to come make insanely great products? Then you come to Apple. If you are passionate about doing this, then come work with me. If you're not interested in it, then remove yourself from my life."

The key thing is where people make mistakes when you go back to relationships around the world, okay? It's very important that you build a seamless web of deserved trust.

I really do believe these high-end personal networks are the greatest assets in the world. I'm not—that's not hyperbolic. I literally believe that.

You have to make yourself easy to interface with, right? What people make the mistake of is all these people, right, on these peaks that are connected to these paths all day long.

I call it gimme-gimme all day long. They wake up, and somebody wants something from them. You know, "Give me money. Be my customer. Let me pick your brain." Like all this stuff.

It's like, "No, no. The way you build relationships is doing acts of service."

I make myself—the way I'm able to build relationships with these kinds of people is really simple. I make myself easy to interface with. Why? Because I can point to a body of work.

I don't ask for anything, never. I never ask for a favor. I don't want to pick your brain. I don't want any money from you. I don't want anything. I just want to give, give, give.

My act of service is the podcast. It's like, "Hey, I spent eight years and two months doing this, you know, hundreds of thousands of hours or whatever the time frame is, and I condensed it down into, you know, 400 hours."

You can learn and hopefully be educated and entertained while you're doing other things—while you're on your plane, while you're walking your dog, while you're washing dishes, whatever it is.

I make myself easy to interface with. It's like, "Oh, is this a serious person? Well, you've read [ __ ] 400 biographies of entrepreneurs. That seems a little odd. That seems like somebody worth my time."

The higher up you go, right? Learning from history is a form of leverage. That's another maxim from Charlie Munger.

Why is Charlie Munger a multi-billionaire? He could learn from anybody. Why is he still reading biographies? He could literally pay anybody in the tutor. He says, "This is the best value of my time."

So anybody that builds a very valuable company sees a podcast like "Founders" just sees somebody like me like, "Oh, talking to this guy."

A good friend of mine said this the perfect way, and he runs a multi-billion dollar fund. He goes, "Talking to you is like talking to 50 of history's greatest entrepreneurs simultaneously."

I made myself easy to interface with, and I never asked for anything. I'm not like, "Oh, you know, can you do this? Can you introduce me to this person? Can you do me this favor? Can you help me raise a fund?" Nothing.

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So when I think about a lot of the people that have ended up working for me in one form or another in nightlife on the podcast, so many of them started off working for free. Dean, the guy that's still with me now, that's edited 2,000 videos that have gone out—every single one of them—creative director now, maybe the best podcast editor on the planet, arguably I would say so.

He did the first two, three years for free. Yeah, he came and did the first shoot for free. Now, we were friends or whatever, but he was a working professional photographer and videographer, but he was like, "I think there's something here. I'm just going to do it, and let's see what happens."

It's like offer, offer, offer, give, give, give.

Just to round out what you were saying before about this sort of essentializing, the fact that mantras and maxims are a useful windzip tool to then unlock this file downstream from it.

Andre Gide, a Nobel Prize winner, everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since no one was listening, everything must be said again. That line is in my favorite book on Buffett, and it's called "All I Want to Know is Where I'm Going to Die, So I'll Never Go There."

I thought it was them, so that's funny that you said it's his.

You've got like Munger and Drucker.

All right, you can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son. A desire to not end up like your father is a powerful source of extreme drive.

So again, that line comes from a Francis Ford Coppola biography. The way I would say this is like I think I have a very broad definition of entrepreneur, right? An entrepreneur is like somebody who has ideas and does them.

I think filmmakers are entrepreneurs. I think certain athletes are entrepreneurs. I think podcasters are entrepreneurs. It's literally somebody—you don't have a job; you have an idea. You have something you want to happen in the world, and you build a company around it to be able to accomplish that.

I think it's like, I know if I'm correct, it's like I was like 242, 243 books in, and I'm going through and reading all these biographies of filmmakers because I feel like creating.

I think directors and entrepreneurs, like there's just a lot of—they have a lot of similarities. That line, like you can always understand the son by the story of the father, the story of the father is embedded in the son, was literally in that book.

It's because Francis Ford Coppola, right, is talking about the relationship that he had with his dad. As somebody, I have two kids, and you know, I have a daughter and a son, and I could never imagine talking to my son the way that Francis Ford Coppola's dad did.

Francis Ford Coppola's dad was a musician, but he was a failed musician. What's going to happen if you have something you want to do in your life, and decade after decade, you're saying, "I'm a talented musician," and the world is saying, "No, you're not. We're not interested in what your offerings are"?

Most people, you know, I would consider the weaker people become bitter, right? It's not them; I'm not the problem; it's the world that's the problem. No, it's always you. You have to have extreme ownership, you know?

He would say stuff to his son like, "Francis, when they were growing up, obviously not a lot of money, there can only be one genius in the family, and that's me, so it can't be you." He would try to like basically, you know, pull his son down.

I want my son to like—I would like—I want him to do whatever he wants in his life. All of your accomplishments, yeah, I think some entrepreneurs, some driven people make the mistake of like, "Oh, you're driven, and so I'm going to make my kids driven."

I think you alienate them. Sam Walton said this the best because if you think about how crazy Sam Walton is, like if he didn't disperse his fortune through his kids, and he did this way before the actual assets appreciated, you know, he created one of the world's largest fortunes.

The family net worth today is like $220 billion. He says, he's dying of cancer when he's writing his autobiography, and he says something like, "Well, I'm a fairly—" the biggest understatement of the century. He's like, "I'm a fairly overactive fellow, and I don't expect my kids to be like me, so I don't push them that hard."

Yes, well think about it that way. It is an odd thing for you to be an outlier, for you to know that you're an outlier, for you to kind of want to bestow the benefits of outlierness on your kids.

But if you're that much of an outlier, hopefully, some smarts have come along with you, and if you're that smart, you'll know what regression to the mean is. If you are way out on the tail of this thing, where do you think your kids are going to be? They're going to move back toward the center. That's how it works.

Yes, right?

Yeah, I would like—I just want my kids to do whatever they want. Like my daughter wants to—sometimes she's like, "Oh, I want to sing. I want to dance." Whatever. I don't care what you do. You don't have to make any money. I'll take care of that. Don't worry about that.

I want my son to just be happy. I want them to have good habits. Like I wouldn't ever like, "You're not going to do drugs. You're not going to be a loser." You know, but you don't have to shoot for outside success. That's ridiculous.

So like just bringing your son down.

I need to interject. Isn't it interesting, though, that the thing that gives you such a sense of contentment and meaning in the world is your pursuit of something difficult?

It's this insatiable, unstoppable drive to go and do this thing, and what you're trying to bestow on your kids is equanimity and peace and enoughness.

If I went to you and said, "I'm a super intelligent AI, and I can go in and I can change your source code, and I can get rid of your need to do the drive. You can be as happy in a hammock as you are in a podcast studio, as you are reading a biography."

I don't think that you would take that deal.

No.

Even though my first proposal was, you know, "Don't try and expect your kids to be as much of an outlier as you are." Tails go back to the middle; they don't go further out to the tails.

But on the flip side of that too, what if your kids are made of the same stuff as you? Throwing some fuel onto that furnace would be maybe the best blessing because, "Wow, I'm made of the same stuff that Dad is, and Dad gets me, and Dad taught me how to handle and control this huge stallion that I've got."

You know what I mean?

We've got this sort of really interesting—easy for a [ __ ] Nona to say here.

No, no, no, no, no. This is a really important—like I think this may be the most important maxim I say so much.

People, so I surveyed my audience the other day because I've been trying to break down all the lessons because I think repetition is persuasive. I'm not this person who like, "Oh, you should learn something new all day."

No, no, you should—I think the people that build great companies, they identify a handful of principles, they master the fundamentals and the basics, and you do it for decade after decade.

That's what it is. It's the boring [ __ ] decade after decade where most people, especially now, they're like, "I need—you have to memorize the 2,000 new things."

No, no, it's like a handful of principles, and you'll just see them repeat over and over again. That's why I think the best description of Founders podcast was, "It's church for entrepreneurs."

I grew up in a Christian, like a fundamentalist Christian church. It's not like the preacher set up on Sunday like, "Okay, last week we went over that Jesus guy. We're done with him. Let's go on to somebody else."

No, they literally go and teach messages from the same book for centuries, forever. I think there's actually a power to that, and I think the best entrepreneurs do that.

Jeff Bezos identified a handful of principles. He has 14. I would argue he has one: obsess over customers. He said it over and over and over and over again.

So I would be fine with that, my son, because he's going to grow up. It's not the drive they have an issue with; it's the source that has to be positive.

Yeah, my source is not positive.

Yeah, mine neither. Yours is not positive. Francis Ford is not positive. We're trying to right a wrong. We're trying to right, in many cases, a multi-generational wrong.

I'm not sitting on a [ __ ] hammock. I don't like to relax. I'm incapable of relaxing. People are like, "How many hours do you work?"

All of them. Literally all of them because I just got to get this out. Sorry.

Because like, so I'm willing—and again, I love my job. I think it's the best job in the world. I love my life, but yeah, I have a hole in my heart that will never be filled.

It's because it's personally important to me, and a mission to me is like to—there's this term I have, and you can call it the founder of a family is the generational inflection point, right?

Essentially, you go and look at this family tree, and you just see like one shitty branch after one shitty branch after one shitty branch, and then eventually, it's all going downhill.

Then there'll be literally a g—there's like one dude. Sometimes it's a woman; most of the time, it's a dude.

Then straight up, right?

And so a circuit breaker. Exactly. That is what the role I'm trying to play.

That is—I—my friend Sam Hy has this great line. He says, "I find it intoxicating to be there for my tribe."

I want that. I want that pressure. I want that responsibility.

So if now I know for a fact, like, you know, I got the [ __ ] beat out of me when I was a kid, like stomped on, like all kinds of crazy stuff happened. I've never touched my kids.

My kids grow up unbelievable. They're great kids too, and they're way sweeter and nicer. My boy is way sweeter than I was at his age, and that's fine.

So if he grows up in this positive environment, he knows he's loved. He knows me and my wife have a good relationship. He sees that his dad gets out of bed and tries to help other people all day.

We can talk about this. One of my favorite maxims from history of entrepreneurship is that money comes naturally as a result of service.

People are like, "Oh, I'm going to be wealthy." Fine. Find a problem, solve the problem, and then all you have to do is scale up the amount of people you serve.

That's where wealth comes from. So I wake up every day trying to do things for other people. I'd be reading these books anyways, no matter what, but the fact that I sit down and record my thoughts and condense a 40-year career and 40 hours of reading into 45 minutes, that's an act of service.

So he sees what I do all day. He sees I take this very seriously, and if he says, "Hey, I want to do that," and he does that for a good, then good. That's what I want.

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I wonder, you know, I've spoken to 850 people, whatever, on the show, maybe with doubles, like 750, something like that. I would say that on average, high performers are driven.

90% of them, 95% of them are driven by a sense of insufficiency, not a perfectly balanced desire to enact their logos forward and be the best version of them that they can be simply for the flourishing that comes along with it.

Most people don't have that. Most people are trying to fill a void. They're looking for validation. They want the world to see them as useful because they've never felt like they were loved.

They want someone to tell them like they're enough, so they're going to make themselves so much more than enough that they have this undeniable stack of mountain of evidence that they were the thing, not the thing that they feared that they were.

I just get the sense that it is a balance between happiness and success, but given that most people try to become happy by being successful, unhappy people try to use success to achieve happiness.

If you can just shortcut it and go straight to happiness, which it sounds like you're trying to teach your kids to do, and much of this is genetic in any case, it's like, "Hey, here's a roll of the dice. There's 50% of your psychological disposition. Good luck. Hope you're ready."

But yeah, if you can do what you can from a rearing perspective, you're safe, you're validated, I love you if you win, and I love you if you lose as long as you try.

Here's some principles that you should do that are scalable, that are blah, blah, blah. I think the success thing, especially the people that listen to this podcast, the people that listen to yours are the kinds of people that have buried themselves being that breakwater, being that circuit breaker of intergenerational trauma of one kind or another.

If that's you, if you've prostrated yourself on the like domino lineage of your ancestors and you've just like, "No, you've Samsoned this entire thing together," that's what it's like, right? Holding these pillars up—that's you and your intergenerational problems.

If you've done that, first off, bravo. Secondly, you have got the skills, you have got the gifts, you have got the insights, you've got the lessons, you've probably got the resources that your parents and your grandparents and your great-grandparents couldn't have even imagined existed.

Not only because we're in a world that offers you that opportunity and education and so on and so forth, but because you were the outlier.

And that's why you listen to shows like yours and shows like this, because you are an outlier among outliers, right? You can't overestimate how normal the normies are.

Go out in the street. Like, I served the normal people at my nightlife business. They're [ __ ] fantastic. They're not riven with this sense that you have that for the most part is probably pathological.

And you would be significantly better off if you didn't have it. But what does it allow you to do? It allows you to push yourself into places that other people won't go.

So can you take on that pain? Can you take on, like we said in the very beginning, can you take on that burden, shoulder that burden, pass on what's good, try to hold on to the stuff that you wish didn't go, and then use the fruits of that labor—the lessons, the resources, the insights—give that and be like, "I have it. It was me that did the thing. I accumulated the stuff. I passed it on to my kids, and they got most of the benefits structurally of what I did with as few of the pathologies emotionally of what caused that to happen?"

Yeah, I think that would be the definition of success. The definition of my success is that like my kids grow up happy. That's—I'm like, there is something I think you correctly identified, like this—the source of this internal drive.

One thing that I think would surprise most people is there's one—I think people would be surprised that a large source—and I think we'll go back to Francis Ford Coppola because this certainly was the case with him—is like revenge.

And it's revenge for being born in an environment like that with a father like his.

How does it manifest? Oh, revenge is so interesting. It manifests right where his dad's like, "Oh no, no, I'm the genius of the family. You're—you can't be him."

His fierce work ethic. It's obvious in the very beginning of Francis Ford. He's trying to break into movies, and he's one of the first—and at the time in Hollywood, there was no such thing as young directors.

He's the one who broke down the door for like a young Steven Spielberg or George Lucas and all these other people, right? The idea you have a 28-year-old feature film director was unheard of back then.

So he meets a young George Lucas. He meets Steven Spielberg. "Hey, that guy did it. I can do it." But you see the 10 years of work that he put in before that in the book when he's literally—he starts out as an editor, and he's literally editing 24 hours.

He falls asleep. He doesn't get up from his desk. He just times it to go, "I'm editing. Time to go to sleep. I'm going to just put my head down."

He has this fierce work ethic, and then the revenge is, "Dad, I'm doing this movie. It's probably going to be a success because it's the sequel to Godfather," right?

He goes, he has one of the greatest directing runs ever in one decade. He does Godfather I, Godfather II, and Apocalypse Now. Maybe you've never seen another 10-year run like that ever, except she at such a young age.

He's like, "Dad, I'm going to let you do the score for Godfather II." And then his dad wins an Oscar for the only achievement he ever does for in music came because his son hired him.

Wow! Revenge!

This idea you just nailed it. I think it's 90-95% of sons usually trying to say, "I don't want to be like my dad. I'm going to succeed where he failed."

Then there's maybe a 5-10% where it's like, "My dad is my hero. I want to be more like him."

And I'm going to try to like—I wonder whether this could totally just be availability bias because the people that I look up to and that I surround myself with, but I get—I’m really hopeful for the next generation that maybe they have more of those.

Maybe that 90-95% actually gets closer to sort of, you know, 70 or 80 because the proliferation of people trying to make themselves better.

Like if Founders is church for entrepreneurs, then Modern Wisdom is church for people who want to make their lives better.

Like I'm curious. I have the sense that I'm built for more, and I'm interested in finding out if that's true.

Yes, and I don't know. I just—I don't get how so much of this stuff, even if you only take [ __ ] 0.1% of the things that you're exposed to, and you're a little bit discerning about what's good and what's not good, you are—this is what I said before about the difference between a parents and grandparents and a great-grandparents generation and ours.

You are orders of magnitude better constructed, better informed. I listen—I think podcasting is a miracle. I think it's world-class education on demand, anytime you want, about any subject you want.

Like you want to learn about history? You want to learn about philosophy? You want to learn business? You'll find somewhere in the podcast directory some nut crazy educator that has gone down the rabbit hole to a degree that most people find unreasonable, and you can download that into your brain on demand.

Here's the problem that I noticed: people don't understand what learning is. Learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior.

Correct.

Okay, that's Alex's definition too.

Yeah, perfect.

There's a lot of like—you could

Like, oh, that sounds a lot like Buffett. There's a lot of stuff you should hang with him. I'd love to see you two talk.

Yeah, I'd love to.

Um, so what I am shocked by, because again, like the way I spend my life, like if I'm not with my family, I'm hanging out with other founders. All the founders listen to the show because that's like my entire network, right? And I'm so... and you know, I become like the founder Whisperer. I know a lot about what's going on in their business and everything.

And like you said, you listened to episode 299 or like that idea. It's like, hey, never ever forget the dynamic range of human beings. Like you saying, hey, this guy's super talented, but he wants five times the amount of salary as this other guy who's like one-tenth as good. Obviously, pay the most talented person.

There are so many where they know the lessons and they're not actually changing their behavior. And so I am delusionally optimistic on the impact that podcasts have because I say podcasts are a miracle. And so I do hope you're living in it.

Yeah, but I'm worried. I'm worried that I'm overestimating. I think you... I think we both are. How many people, like I change my behavior. I'm obviously not a perfect person, but like I literally say every single person I've read about, and I have no ego attached to this, they are smarter and more productive than me. That's a fact. That's not hyperbolic; that's a fact.

So what is the point of me spending all my time studying and learning from them if I don't change my behavior? That means my entire life was a waste, and I refuse to waste my life. So I changed my behavior. And so I'm just worried that a lot of people don't.

So I would love it to be 70%, 60%. My also thing is people are like, oh, do you have to grow up poor to like have outsized... and no, the answer is of course not. It's just most people grow up poor.

Like if we... I'm sure we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside of a bubble. Even if you look at like the top 1% in the world, you know, across eight billion people, what is this? Like $40,000 a year or something like that? Let's say just in America, I think it's like $70,000 a year. It's like we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside of a bubble.

Um, and so I... I'm very... and I think also human nature is constant. So I'm a little worried that we can shift the variants by that much.

Yeah, yeah. Behavioral genetics is like the physics of the way people show up, and there's no changing that. You don't get to go in... We were talking about like the impact that your relationship with your father could have on increasing your drive.

Well, was Francis Ford a sibling that way? I just did this episode with this guy named James J. Hill, right? And again, same way I found him. MERS was like, hey, there's this great... James J. Hill is a great operator like Rockefeller and Carnegie. I'm like, what? Like I know who Carnegie and Rockefeller are. Who's this guy?

He's the greatest railroad entrepreneur in American history. He created the only... at the time, railroad industry, right? In the late 1800s, it was by far the most important industry in America. By far. It's like what the internet or AI would be now.

In 1885, the railroad industry took in twice the amount of revenue as the federal government. It was... holy [ __ ]!

Yeah, yeah. It was the nation's largest employer. The railroaders, which were the railroad entrepreneurs, that's what they were called, railroaders owned over 10% of the land mass in the United States. Like, wild that you've got such [ __ ] railways.

I know, I know, I know. But James J. Hill was the only person, right? The only person, only railroad entrepreneur to ever run a rail line that did not go bankrupt. So this guy is the best in the most important industry of his time.

Okay, he's the Elon of the train. He grows up with a poor father, so poor that he's laying at his house and he can see the moon through the roof because there are holes in the roof. Yet he dips out of Canada. He's like, I'm... he believes in the dynamic, you know, the power of one individual and everything else.

So he goes and seeks his fortune in America, right? What do his two siblings do? They talk about inphy. They're like, this is what our life is; we're just poor farmers. They stayed.

Yeah, fascinating. What is that? Fascinating.

Yeah, you've got this split test. You've got the same father, you've got the same environment, but a totally different outcome. This is why so much... woman called Nancy Atov, and she's probably the leading twins researcher on the planet. And, um, between her and Robert Plomin, you realize just how squirrely life can become even when you share the same environment.

Genes matter a lot, man. So I did... I was going to tell you about this a little bit later on. I did a genetic test, so I had a full genome sequence done. And as a part of that, the organization, they're able to compare you to the population at mass. They can say, this is one copy of this SNP or two copies of this SNP. 20% of the population have got that; 6% of the population have got it when it's both. And they do it for everything.

Yeah, and this is related to this; this is related to dopamine. This is related to drive. This is related to obsession. This is a risk for alcohol. This is a risk for Alzheimer's or whatever, whatever, whatever.

And, um, I need to go back and go through it properly before I start talking about it fully on the show. But, um, I want to introduce you to the Sim company because I want you to get it done because it taught me so much about myself. So many of the things that I thought were cultivated virtues, um, what it very much being is like unbelievably fertile ground. I've thrown a bit of water on, and it's just like, oh, you were going to be this way.

Now, you could have been this way for drugs or alcohol or, you know, any other kind of obsession, but you were going to be obsessed. There was no way... there was no way that I was going to grow up and not be obsessed about something.

Did they identify why your forearms are so huge?

That actually isn't available.

I love the Q&A. They're like, it's just the F, bro.

Do you know what the other thing is? When I do these [ __ ] live shows, the Q&As live are just the same. I like shake someone's hand doing a meet and greet, and they're like, dude, they really are big in real life. They don't even refer to the forearm. They're like, they really are! As if it's like, bro, you need merch. Just a picture of your forearms.

All right, actions express priority. We are only what we do, not what we say we are.

No, I mean, I... and this is, I think, just part of getting older, having more experience, but I don't care at all what people are like, what they say is important to them. I just look at how do you spend your time?

Like, you came in here early, and I gave you a hug. I was like, how the hell are you even bigger than I saw you last time? I just saw you in Austin like two months ago, and you're like, I lift heavy weights.

Yeah, I could tell. Like, what is important to Chris is obvious. Obviously, you take care of your health. You're a madman about... you have probably... no, not probably. You have the best, most cinematic video podcast on the planet. Like, you are expressing to the world, and you make yourself easy to interface with.

As a byproduct of this, it's like what is important to you, as opposed to if I saw you and you had like this big gut and you're like, yeah, you know, I love working out, and you know, I eat healthy. I'm like, yeah, are you sure about that?

Or like, I take my podcast... so many people come... this part happens to you too. They're like, hey, you know, talk to me about podcasts. And I remember this happened one time where this guy's like, all right, I started a podcast. And like, he's a family friend. And so he asked my brother-in-law, he's like, can... do you think David would meet with me about his podcast?

And so I was like, yeah, if it's a favor for you, that's fine. I'll talk to him. And five minutes into it, I like, wait a minute, how many episodes have you done? He's like, six. I was like, six? I was like, there's nothing to talk about. Like, come back when you've done like 200, and then we can talk. But like, this doesn't make... this is not a good use of your time.

And so the entrepreneurial... like the reason that's so powerful in the history of entrepreneurship is because the greatest entrepreneurs, like most of them work well beyond the need for money. So money is not their greatest resource. Money is a way and an asset that they use to bring what they want forth into the world, what they want.

Right? They all know that time is your most valuable resource. It's the only renewable resource that they have. And so if you're watching, like if you're curious about like what was important to Steve Jobs, for example, he really blew my mind about this. And this is something me and you have talked about in private.

Like, I need to get better at marketing the podcast, right? And because his whole point was like, hey, I think the Apple devices I'm making are good for the world. I want every single human on the planet to own an Apple device. And first of all, Steve, not at the price point that you're at, but that's fine.

And he goes, but... and to do that, we have to become a great marketing company. He goes, we know how to build great products. We are not a great marketing company. So what did he do? His actions expressed priority.

So he said, every Wednesday, we are going to have a three-hour meeting. I will be there every Wednesday. I will be involved. All the people involved in the marketing and advertising for Apple are going to be present, and we're going to review our work every Wednesday.

And he got to the point where like, you know, some people call them micromanagers. I just say they're into the details. You know, James J. Hill, all the great entrepreneurs are into the details. When you came in here and started, I saw you directing. I was like, oh, this guy, this is another Steve Jobs guy.

Um, it didn't matter if it was an ad that was going to run as a full page in the Wall Street Journal or a billboard in nowhere Missouri. It did not go out without his approval. His actions were expressing his priority.

And what you do is like, that's not just in business; it's in everything. If you want to be a good dad and you don't spend any time with your kid, your actions are expressing what you actually want to do.

So, uh, yes, and I love this. Um, but the issue is that it can become difficult to work out where the boundaries of that stop. How much should you care about the things that you do? I'm not sure, but the answer probably isn't as much as possible all the time about everything.

Yes, you can't be perfect. Example of this, and the solution is deliberate deoptimization, right? So it's choosing in advance what you're going to suck at. These are insights from Oliver Burkeman, who's fantastic.

Um, one of my friends told me about deliberate deoptimization strategy that he was using. I asked him for an example. He said, well, I fly a lot, and if I had the right number of different credit cards and I had all my points tied in and I made sure that I used them the best way and I had, you know, a wallet this big, I would be able to maximize my points.

But I just... it's not a sufficiently high priority. I have other things that are higher up, so I just... I'm going to let that one slide. That's just going to be an L for me. Could I be more optimized? Yeah, I could. But look, it works.

Now, are you going to do that in your highest calling? Am I going to do that when I'm trying to book a guest on the show or we're trying to set up the lighting or we're fighting for a great location or whatever? No, no, that's an area that I need to do it.

And the problem that the insecure overachiever has, that the type A person with a type B problem has, is not knowing where the boundaries of their obsession should stop because it can't be everything.

I agree with that. It can't be everything. And if it is everything, the things that it really should be for will suffer, and you will feel it, and you will feel miserable.

No, I definitely agree. So you mentioned Tim Cook earlier. Steve, I think, was the best. Like, he was ruthless. He had the ability to like ruthlessly prioritize things. And so he picked like product, right?

And he would, again, just like every ad, every pixel on your screen, every button on that device, he would have to approve before it goes out. But could he do that for everything? No, he sucked at supply chain. So that's why he actually hired and had Tim Cook. That was Tim Cook's job primarily before, you know, Steve died of cancer.

Um, so yeah, I completely agree. The way I put it is something that also reappears in the books is they limit... the great entrepreneurs limit the amount of details to perfect, and then they make every detail perfect.

Where a lot of entrepreneurs mistake is like they are optimizing something that should never exist. This is something Elon talks about over and over again. He's like, before you optimize something, make sure it's actually essential to like what you're actually trying to bring into the world.

Um, and so for like me and you, or I guess for me, it's really simple. It's like, how should I be spending my time? I should either be reading or I should be making podcasts in my work. That's all I have to do.

And the one reason, like I don't have an assistant or I don't have anything else, like, well, you need an assistant. You're hard to get in touch with. I was like, well, then I'm managing a calendar. I shouldn't have a calendar because all I have to do is wake up every day. As long as I wake up every day and I read for a few hours a day, right?

And I sit down once a week and I summarize what I learned that week from my reading, I will get everything I want in life. Everything else from that is a distraction.

Dude, we broke the entire show, this whole thing, all of the different machinery and the bits and pieces behind it, how the growth happens, and what I feel fulfilled by, and what makes the world a better place, and what grows the revenue, and all the rest of the things. We broke all of that down, and it's one, two, three, four. It's four things.

But because of your next lesson, I'm not going to say them, but there's four things.

Yeah, there are four things.

Should we... oh, I've heard that TikTok's prioritizing videos that are over seconds long, so maybe we should be... is it one of those four things?

No, it's not.

Well, what if we repurpose? Because we can do a cross-promo.

It's not one of the four things.

Yeah, there's only four things that make an impact on everything. You see this at Elon. So all the stuff that happened with the election, I saw all the tweets and everything. I think the most important tweet was that this perfect encapsulation of why makes Elon great.

And like he literally figures, like what is the most important lever for what I'm trying to accomplish today? And then he relentlessly jumps up and down on it. So he identifies like, oh, the entire election hinges on Pennsylvania. So like, I will build a ground game there. I will go... like he's like, if we win Pennsylvania, we do everything else.

And so he sets up shop, and he just puts all of his resources behind it. You know, the early days of SpaceX, the only thing that matters is if we don't get a rocket to orbit, we have nothing else. So what's the most thing? Getting a rocket to orbit.

And then once we do that, we obviously have to sell and everything else. He... and one of Elon doesn't have a lot of mentors, but I've heard him reference Larry Ellison as one of his mentors, which I thought was fascinating.

And I've read three biographies on Ellison. I wish there were more. And there's... in one of the biographies, Larry Ellison is arguing, right? He's one of the richest people on the planet. He was like 40% of Oracle, for God's sake.

Um, he's arguing with his assistant because his assistant is like, hey, we have a hundred important things. There's a thousand things we need to get to. He's like, no, no, no, there's not a hundred. There's not a thousand. There's three.

He goes, I'm going to focus on those three, and I'm going to ignore everything else. Ruthless prioritization like that is such a key part of achieving things in life.

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Bad boys move in silence.

Yes, when you find an edge, shut up about it. Talking invites competition; competition destroys profits.

So I grew up listening to hip-hop, and the interesting thing about my obsession with like maxims and memorable things, like you, I think a lot of that came from... it's not like I read poetry when I was younger. I listened to hip-hop, and like they're very poetic, and they have lines in there that you just remember.

That's from Biggie Smalls: "Bad boys move in silence." And it's funny because I'm reading this obscure biography of Rockefeller, and it really clicked because everybody's read... there's one canonical biography of Rockefeller called Titan. It's like 800 pages. It's great; that's fine. I've read it like two times. Rockefeller is the man, right?

But I went through the biography or the bibliography, and I discovered books are made out of books. And so I found this obscure biography published in like 1970, and now you try to get the book, it's like $4,000 because all these books are out of print. And it's in there, and it's 250 pages, right?

Um, there's a longer thing here where I think it's slothful not to compress your thoughts. That's like church. Say stuff like that. What was that thing about, uh, sorry I wrote you such a long letter. If I'd only had more time, I could have written you a shorter one.

I think it's disrespectful to people to not like think about... if you want a high-value audience and you're saying, hey, I can tell a story in an hour and a half or I can tell a story in 45 minutes, but I took an hour and a half, I just stole 45 minutes of your life that you're not getting back.

Times that by however many people. Like, I spent an entire day... me and you've talked about this privately. One of the big breakthroughs I had is like spending an entire day before I sit down and record just literally going through all my notes and highlights and just cutting.

I never add. It's like, nope, ruthlessly cut. Try to respect the people's time. But anyways, I think authors should do that. I like Titan. Do I need to know what the furniture is like in his grandfather's house? No, I do not. I want to know how he built maybe the greatest business that has ever existed.

And so this book is 250 pages of how he built Standard Oil. It's called John D. The Founding Fathers of the Rockefellers. I know friends that have literally bought the book because they heard the episode, and they spent $2,000 because it's like this is the guy.

Like, there's an idea worth billions in a $2,000 history book. And so in that book, it's all secrecy covered. Everything in his... when I think of "Bad boys move in silence," I think of Rockefeller. It's in all kinds of other entrepreneurs, but essentially saying, hey, you don't understand how lucrative this is, and I'm not going to educate my competition.

Because if you go and say, hey, look how much money I'm making, what are humans going to do? They're all a medic. They're like, oh, I'm going to try to do exactly what Chris does. And so I'm going to do... and you invite competition, and there goes your profits.

And so not only he would like do deals, and he'd say, hey, I'm going to buy your refinery. You can't tell your wife how much I bought it and who bought it. He would have this thing called... there would be secret ownership.

So people hated Rockefeller because he was dominating this area in Cleveland. And so there's this thing called the Cleveland Massacre where he essentially in like a day or a few days rounds up like 22 of his top 25 competitors. Like, and then from there on, at 25 years old or 28 years old, he's real young. He's the dominant player.

And so then he goes... he also has a secret alliance where they put him at the head of the national... is the kerosene refineries association, something like that. Essentially just like a trade group. And he goes around, he meets with all the other people in his business, and they're trying to collude to keep prices like at a profitable level.

And so he gets to see their books, and now as a result of this secret alliance, he knows, oh, just how we know each other. It's like I knew Chris was a legit player. I need to spend more time with him because he's another me, right?

And then he goes, oh, that's a good competitor. Maybe I need to buy him. This guy, I don't have to worry about this guy. This guy's not serious. I see his books.

And so what he would do, some of those people say Rockefeller are too powerful. I'm not selling to you. And so they go and they sell to a company not knowing that Rockefeller secretly owns that company.

So if you really want to internalize "Bad boys move in silence," it... Rockefeller is the prototype. But there's another great thing in Steve Jobs' lost years. He dumps $50 million of his own money, and at the time he only had $70 million.

So he dumps almost all, you know, the majority of his wealth into Pixar, and literally they can't make payroll. They don't have a product. He's just writing checks to cover the payroll. And they pivot from trying to sell hardware, which is how Pixar started, to what the team really wanted to do, when they were passionate about, was like we want to make the world's first computer-animated movies.

And so Steve's like, okay, we need to study like is animation profitable? And he has a great line in that book. He's like, it's not like you can go to the library and check out a book that says the business model for animation because there's only one company that's ever done it successfully, that's Disney, and they don't want anybody to know how lucrative it was.

So he winds up building relationships around the world, see how all these things tie together with people in Disney. He finds out, holy [ __ ], they can literally like... they take Snow White, what he discovers, Snow White came out like 60 years before, and then you have the invention of VHS and you have a new invention of DVDs.

So you, in the '90s, and they take something they haven't put a dollar into in 60 years that our kids are still going to watch. They put it on the new technology of the day, VHS, DVD, quarter trillion, or excuse me, not quarter trillion, $250 million drops to their bottom line, all profit. That's one movie.

And so that's when you realize, oh, the reason they shut up about it is because they don't want people to know how lucrative it is. And you see this over and over again.

A friend of mine is doing... he's doing... let me see if I can put this sensitively. He is buying a bunch of other companies, so he's rolling up a bunch of other companies, okay? And he's doing it so successfully. He runs a publicly traded company that he caught the attention of somebody else that has been doing a similar strategy in a different domain for the last like three decades.

And he goes, they share a board member, and so he meets with them, and this older, wiser guy tells my friend, he goes, hey, what you're doing is working. He goes, now shut up about it. Stop doing interviews. Stop talking about your strategy.

He goes, because I... you know, the amount of competitors I created for myself because I didn't hide what I was doing successfully. And so people saw how this guy became the guy that's giving him the advice, became a multibillionaire.

How anybody's like, this guy's worth $3 billion, whatever the number is. How did he do that? Oh, this is what he does. Let me copy him. He's like, now I just created all these clones of me, and now I have made it more difficult to do what I wanted to do.

Anyways, so "Bad boys move in silence" is something that appears over and over and over again.

Belief comes before ability. The external world has this backwards. The belief that you can do something is a prerequisite for trying. This drives me insane.

So you mentioned earlier, like you don't know how normal people are, and I'm going to remember that line because people are like over and over again. When you have somebody, you have somebody like the founder of Four Seasons, we talked about, you know, hey, Chris, we're friends. Like, I'm going to tell you my dream, and my dream is to build the collection, not just one, a collection of the world's greatest hotels.

And you're like, Izzy, you've never... you have no money. You've never built a hotel. Like, what are you talking... like, why would you even think this is possible? What you need to do is prove it first, and then we'll believe in you.

It's like, no, that's ass backwards. Belief always comes before ability. There's a story where Elon's on... you know, he tries to buy a rocket. At first, he thought he was just going to shoot like this, this, um, this like garden, for lack of a better word, to Mars on somebody else's rocket.

And because he was trying to like draw attention to the fact that, hey, NASA is not innovating. We're like not... we're stuck in like lower Earth orbit. Like, why aren't we trying to get to Mars? Why are you trying to, you know, um, colonize the galaxy?

And he goes to Russia. They like treat him like [ __ ]. And he's on the way back, and he just realizes, hey, we're going to build our own rocket. And people laugh at him. They're like, oh, this internet kid. CU, he's 29, 28. He's like, who are you, internet kid? You can't do that.

His belief came before his ability. He believed that he could do that, and then he went out and proved it.

Now, when I say belief comes before ability, it doesn't mean you just sit there and be like, I'm great, and you don't do it. No, you do the work necessary to achieve what you want. But if you're waiting for the external world to like push, encourage you, or ed you on, like it's impossible.

So I wasn't sure... I wasn't sure what direction you were going in with that because one reading of that sounds fantastic, and I wholeheartedly disagree.

But the one from the outside world, I think, is absolutely bang on. So the reason that I disagree, if you were to say belief comes before ability, as in self-belief, I wrote an essay this week about it, so I'm going to read it to you.

Okay, an ode to people who don't believe in themselves. What comes first, belief or action? Do you need to believe that you can do a thing before you do it? Fake it until you make it is one option, but incredibly hard if you're introspective or have low self-belief and high standards.

So what about make it until you fake it? Here are some lessons I've learned. You can believe you're not worthy of a thing and still attain it. You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed. You can grip and grasp and fear and it ruin the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted, and things still go well.

You can have no self-belief and show up anyway and still win. You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like. You can doubt the process, question your talent, be uncertain that you're making progress, disparage your accomplishments, permanently feel like you're not working hard enough no matter how hard you work, never give yourself a break, fail to fully feel gratitude, be terrified of never reaching your goals, and still end up in a place that your 20-year-old self could not imagine you'd ever get to.

Self-belief is overrated. Generate evidence.

Yeah, I would like... you could say self... when I say belief comes before ability, I mean self-belief.

Yeah, but I don't... that line I would disagree with, where it's like self-belief is overrated. I think it's the highest order bit.

There's actually one area where I disagree with Steve Jobs, and he talks about like the highest order bit. It's from like computer science, where it's like the most important part of the system, right?

And this is like a complete oversimplification of it. But, um, and his whole thing was like the highest order bit is that like you love what you do. And for all the reasons that we discussed earlier, you'll keep doing it for a long time. You'll persevere and everything else.

And I love what I do. I know you love what you do. And I agree, like it's super important. I think it makes life easier. You had the phrase like you're swimming downstream earlier. I think is a great way to put that.

And so I was thinking about that because, um, the Steve Jobs archive, which is run by Steve's widow, just released this free book you can read online called Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words. And it's remarkable.

And so like I've read it a bunch of times, and you know, he talks about this in there. Um, that's where I discovered the highest order bit part. And then I was thinking about it more and more, and I was just like, well, no, that's not like what comes first. It's like the belief that you can actually do something that's valuable to the world, that provides, that like is an act of service and makes the world a better place.

And I think me and you might be good examples. It's like how many years were you doing the podcast before anybody gave a damn? Three and a half? Mine was five and a half. Why were you still doing it? Because I was swimming downstream.

Because you believed that you could. Like you believed that you could do it. The belief that you had that you could actually make something worth people's time and listening, right? That lag was a couple of years before the world's like, yes, Chris, we agree with you.

Yeah, that's an interesting way to think about self-belief.

Um, because I believe that the thing that I'm doing right now is of value to the world, and the world just hasn't yet recognized that. It's like an interesting pivot on self-belief.

Um, the belief... I know that I can make it. I have never had... I've never had... yeah, ever, ever. I am the best avatar for somebody that is permanently looking at his feet going, how the [ __ ] am I stood here? Like, how did this happen?

Uh, very much don't believe that you're worthy of a thing, still attained it, disparage your accomplishments but still get them, grip, grasp, fear, ruin the enjoyment, all of that. All of that, like the entire for me journey up until probably only the last two years, basically moving to America, was sort of riven with self-doubt and uncertainty.

And am I even... am I even doing this right? Like, but I enjoyed the thing that I was doing, and I knew that I was good at that thing.

Mhm, but I didn't know that there was going to be some outcome. So I think it's what is the sort of self-belief directed at?

Yeah, in a way directed at the outcome of I know that I can do this thing well, and I enjoy it all day, directed at this is going to reach something that some portion of people will accuse of being success. Never really once.

So I've heard you say that perspective on your show before. I would say interacting with you in person, you come across unbelievably... you've only known me for the last two years.

Yeah, much bigger, much bigger mountain of evidence.

Yeah, good point. After a while, if imposter syndrome continues to persist, even though you keep disproving it, do you have imposter syndrome today?

No.

Okay, no, no more. I'm about to step out on stage in front of three and a half thousand people in London. I just came back from Oz, 5,000 people, other side of the planet.

Yeah, and um, no, not anymore. But that, like, I need to really write this out because I haven't yet. I'm just such a [ __ ] poster boy for somebody that would have abiding imposter syndrome.

Like, very uncertain, very unsure of himself, of his place in the world, a need for validation, a desire to be seen as competent, like all of the things, all of the [ __ ] ingredients to make a really beautiful imposter syndrome casserole.

And um, it's dropped away, and it's gone. And it's not gone through any weird combination of mindset changes and sort of conscious reframing. It's gone because it's been crushed under a [ __ ] neutron star worth of weight of evidence.

Yeah, that I'm like, I just can't... I can't keep holding on to a belief that things are going to go badly or that I'm not good enough or that I don't have the talent or that even though I feel like I'm working hard, I know that I should be working infinitely harder because I'm just like, how many times do you want to roll the dice and it come up six, six, six, like over and over and over and over again?

And um, yeah, I just... I really want to write it out because I think that there's a lot of people who have a level of self-doubt so great that they struggle to even connect with like an inspirational story because it feels like it's a different...

I agree completely. I think a lot of people accuse entrepreneurs of being arrogant, and of course they are. Like, you'd have to be arrogant to think like, oh, I don't have to go... I can... I don't have to work for somebody else. Like, I can literally take something that doesn't exist and like bring it to the world.

But my issue with that is like we don't have an epidemic of arrogance; we have an epidemic of people who don't believe in themselves.

And so the weird thing about the early days of the podcast, you know, these people that I'm reading about and telling stories about, they're crazy people. Like, they are all crazy people. And yet I kept hearing the same review, the same email, the same DM: I find your podcast so comforting.

I'm like, what kind of... I was like, oh, there's a million, you know, of us out there that are like, this is me too. And that's the biggest key. We're like the reason the biographies are important and life stories in general is not because like we're talking about Francis Ford Coppola's life or Steve Jobs' life or any of the lives we've talked about.

It's like, no, no, you see yourself in them. Correct? That's the key.

Dude, I've realized this over the last couple of years. We don't fall in love with other people who are perfect. We fall in love with other people who we see ourselves in their flaws.

And there's been a few times on the show or going out for dinner and meeting people or whatever, like, ha, this person's, you know, really smart or really interesting or really insightful, and I just don't care, and I have nothing to talk to them about.

And I realized it's that I can't find hooks in their shortcomings that I can latch on to, that either I'm not... I'm unable to see them for some reason, they're being hidden, they're incentivized to hide them, they don't align with the way that I see the world, perhaps, you know, cultural differences, stuff like that.

Um, but yeah, we really, really resonate with somebody else who has a shortcoming that we see ourselves in. You see a little version of yourself in Chris Bumstead when he cries on stage or when he's uncertain about whether or not he's going to win. You see a little bit of yourself in Kobe when he snaps his Achilles and he's unsure about where he's going, but then he pulls himself back around.

You know, like whoever it is, like you see your... and that I think is reassuring to a lot of people. It's certainly reassuring to me when I realized that the most interesting person in the room... in fact, this was born out of our trip to Miami for George's birthday.

Uh, the most interesting person in the room isn't the most interesting person in the room. It's the person who makes everybody else feel like they're the most interesting person in the room.

So you don't need to worry about not being charismatic. You just need to make other people feel charismatic.

Like, I called it inverse charisma.

Mhm. That, you know that story? Was it Winston Churchill's wife who went to go and see the two different American presidents? And she said, I sat down with one of them, and after a dinner being next to him, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in the world.

I sat down a couple of months later with his opponent, and after that dinner, I left feeling like I was the smartest person in the world.

Like, who do you want to be? I want to be the sort of person that makes other people feel like the smartest person in the world.

And the beautiful thing about this idea is that so many people want to be liked and charismatic but feel like they don't have any charisma or likability.

Mhm. You don't need to. It's not about you.

Yeah, it's about what you do to other people, and that is so much easier if you're just... you don't need to be interesting; you just need to be [ __ ] interested in somebody else.

I love that you said that because I say the most interesting people are the most interested. And like the people that I'm drawn to, right?

Because to your point, like you meet so many people, and in some cases, like you admire them from afar. And I think one of the biggest benefits is like... and this is why I'm again an evangelist for reading biographies and autobiographies is because like we're incentivized in our day-to-day to like make things seem better.

Like you were just talking about the health problems that, you know, you're like, hey, I'm not ready to talk about this, but you know when I am, I'll talk about it. But like from the side, people are like, Chris has everything. You know, he's handsome, he's in great shape, he's world famous, like he's got one of the best podcasts in the world.

And you're like, yeah, but you haven't seen the [ __ ] that I've been going through for the last like 12 months.

And the biography is like you see that because they're not... people don't write... sit down to write a biography when they're like 30, 35, 40 when they're still in it.

There's some weird genetic thing where it's like I know I'm going to die soon. I want to pass down everything I know in this book. It's an act of service to the next generation of entrepreneurs. I think is really important.

And that's the... I... when I just did the Elon episode on the SpaceX book, one of the things I said is just like the reason that you guys should read this book is because like you have not only just Elon, a genius, but all the early SpaceX employees are geniuses, and the whole book is these geniuses can't figure [ __ ] out.

And like they're running into problem after problem after problem, and then, you know, six years later, they figure it out. That is so good for you. It's like, oh, if that guy, you know, if that guy couldn't do that, then it makes sense.

Like I feel better about myself. Again, it's technically a story about Elon's SpaceX, but you make it about yourself.

I just think that's human nature.

By endurance, we conquer. Time carries most of the weight. It is hard to beat someone who never stops.

Oh, this is... I feel Hormoz would say something like that too.

So, uh, my phone is now changed. You know this one I call you. It's... it's Michael Jordan being really intense. But for like a year and a half, it was... or for like maybe two years, it was, uh, by endurance we conquer is the family motto of Ernest Shackleton, who's probably the greatest, you know, polar... one of the greatest polar explorers.

And I believe I'm a huge believer in consistency over intensity. And I think what a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake is like there's... there, first of all, there's never... up until the first few years ago, there's no such thing as like an entrepreneurship industry.

Now there's like an industry, and people are incentivized to try to spread it and try to put money to these companies. And so what happens? Like people are in a rush, right? And they try to take like an idea and like instead of building it slowly and making it durable, right, they're like, let's just throw a lot of money at it and like try to do it fast.

And then you see them like it may grow for a little bit and pop. And I think there's an issue. And so what I realized is like the greatest entrepreneurs is like no one writes a book about somebody's like, oh, they ran a company, and five years in, it was really successful. Ten years, it was gone.

Right? They write about businesses that last. And so, um, I had one of the greatest experiences of my life this year, and I was at this company offsite, and it was a 70-year-old female billionaire owning a private company, right?

And like just her company building philosophy, like I told her, I was like, I'm in love with you. And my wife was with me, and I was like, like, I literally love you. Like, I love every way you build your company.

And her whole thing is just very common sense. She's just like a handful of principles. I'm always just going to do what's best for the customer and the customer experience, and that's where I'm going to put my money, and I'm in this forever.

And so she told me this hilarious story where, um, you know, she felt because she... she wasn't trained in business, and she was a woman, like I need consultants. I need McKinsey, and I need Bain, and I'm hiring, spending millions of dollars on this.

And first of all, they're like, uh, you know, you should buy up all your competitors. And so they start looking into this, and it's like, well, how much would that be? And you know, whatever, let's say that company's going to cost $200 million to buy.

And she's like, but why don't I just put that $200 million into like making my customer experience better? And so she told me the hilarious story. She's like, year five, you know, I had 15 competitors. Year 15, I have 10. Year 25, I had three. Year 40, she's running the company for 40 years. Year 40, I have one.

She goes, I took the money instead of buying out their companies. I made my customer experience better, my product better, my marketing better, controlled more things, and they went out of business slowly but surely.

And so time carries most of the weight. That's a maxim that I came up with where I was listening to Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger has this good... his whole point is like, hey, there's... if you just master the big ideas in a handful of disciplines, and you really master them and implement them, that it... like the big ideas in like, you know, physics, biology, psychology, economics, there's only a handful of ideas you actually need to memorize in all these main subjects, and that carries most of the freight.

It's like, oh, that's a good turn of phrase. Like, that makes sense. And then I'm reading more and more about these stories, and it's like, oh, like you're not winning because you're a genius. You're not winning because... like you're winning because you just outlast everybody.

By endurance, we conquer. She conquered through endurance because she made... she was... she made her company durable. This is what Peter Thiel wrote. If you're only going to read one book on business, obviously, in my opinion, especially today's day and age, you read Zero to One, right?

And everybody that's building a tech company has read that book, and yet they miss his most important lesson, which is like, hey, don't optimize for growth at the expense of durability.

And the reason you're likely to optimize for growth at the expense of durability is growth is measurable, and durability is not. And the reason durability is so important, he says, is because in technology companies, and almost all companies, all the vast majority of the profits are 10, 15, 20 years out.

The amount of money that that company, that woman I just described, is making today is 95%, 99% more than what she was making year 10. All the money was in the future.

What's that thing about, uh, Buffett made some obscene percentage of his entire net worth after six years? Like 90%? You see that graph? It goes viral on Twitter all the time.

And that's obviously the magic of compounding too. And it's like, that's why I say, by endurance, we conquer. Like, I'm not trying to have the hot podcast or a great episode this week. I'm trying to do this until I die. I want them to pry the microphone from my cold, dead hands.

And so therefore, I need to make sure that I'm... how do I do that? I have to maintain... first of all, it's valuable for the audience. I have to have trust with the people that give me their time.

And so like you just say, hey, I'm not making a decision based on what I'm doing today. I'm... is this decision going to serve that goal so people will still think that I'm trustworthy and that what I'm doing in the world's valuable over 10, 15, 20 years from now?

If you know your business from A to Z, there is no problem you can't solve. The best entrepreneurs stay in the details of their business.

I love that you say Zed. Every time I hear it on your podcast, I just...

So this is literally a line that was... this guy named Sam Z. Murray, okay? So I go out... this is our friend George Mack, right? Who we both love. He's the one that really has put into my brain the import of being high agency.

You know, he's really good at just breaking everything. The [ __ ] yourself, keep going. It's all your big muscles. That's true.

Um, so George Mack is the one that put the importance of being high agency in my... like I think his writing on it, his memes, the stuff he makes is just perfect.

And I would say every single person I read a biography about is high agency. The most high agency person I've ever come across is that guy named Sam Z. Murray.

So what's funny is there's another line in Zero to One that I think people mistake too where they say, um, all technology is a better way to do something. So people think technology has got to be like software. It's got to be computers.

It's like, no, at one point, the invention of the steamboat engine was a technology of that day because it made it possible, a better way to do something. And what did that do?

So one of the first... this will surprise a lot of people. One of the first multinational corporations in human history were the fruit companies. Because you... before you had a banana, you grew it in Jamaica or you grew it in Honduras. That banana you have to eat in like four days.

So without the... or five days or a week, whatever it is, without the invention of the steamboat, you have a local market. So you match fruit, which humans have... you are going to eat forever, with the steamboat, and you create one of the first multinational corporations.

So Sam Z. Murray, right, is this guy. He is a poor Russian immigrant, right? Comes to America, shows up in like Alabama, and builds this gigantic fruit empire.

And the book... the reason the book is called The Fish That Ate the Whale is because the biggest fruit company of the time is called United Fruit. And Sam Z. Murray competes head-to-head with them, and then eventually he takes over. The little fish eats the whale; he takes over that company.

So the reason that he says that is because his competition, when the founders die, the people running United Fruit, their business is in Central America. That's where all the fruit is grown.

And then it's shipped into like the Gulf Coast and Florida, and then put on trains and put everywhere else. They thought they were going to run their business remotely in Boston.

And this guy's out here. He's literally hacking machetes. He's helping the railroad track. He's taking inventory. He's building the boats. He's doing every single thing.

And the reason he did that, they're like, why are you doing this? His whole point, he's like, because if I know my business from A to Z, there's no problem I can't solve.

Because I know every component. You just said you broke down your business to four components. You probably know those four components in and out now. If you know, hey, we have a problem with component three, no problem. I understand what we need to fix.

It's such an important thing where a lot of people... like this goes back to normal people or, you know, un-obsessed people. They call this micromanaging or, oh, you shouldn't do all this. It's like, no, they're in the details.

He is in the details. One of the funniest stories of this is the fruit association or something. There's some kind of trade group. He's in Havana, right? This is probably like 1900, 1910 or something like this.

And he's... they want to give him an award. So like they call out his name. Here's this award for the, you know, fruit guy of the year, whatever they call it. And like he's not in the audience.

They track him down. He's on the port. He's going over the inventory. He's like, I don't have... I don't care about a WS. I care about the business. Like I'm in the details of my business.

And so I would say, way... this isn't like a... none of these are like, you know, like what Chris Bumstead said. Like, you know, you can... some of these work for you; some of these are not going to work for you.

I would say most of the people I read about, you would consider like micromanagers. Larry Ellison, I mentioned earlier, not a micromanager, not a grinder. He says in his book he's a sprinter.

He's like, I take care of the top-level stuff, strategy, product stuff like that, putting the right people in, but then I hire other people to be in the details.

Elon, in... I think maybe it changed now, but in his early days, like in SpaceX, he knew the rocket forward and backwards.

So it could also... these could also apply again, context apply them to your situation. The beginning of a company, you might want to do that. Maybe your interest shifts, or maybe you find somebody's better at that detail than you are. You just figure out how to apply yourself.

But this is something that recurs over and over again. The public praises people for what they practice in private. There is no such thing as an overnight success. Every great act is built on years of practice.

No, no one sees... so this goes back to my love of hip-hop. That public praises people for what they practice in private is this line from this rapper named Russ.

And I think Russ is actually interesting. He'd actually be a good guest for you. He's done some great interviews. But Russ was the first person in history to write, record, produce, mix, and master an entire album.

So one person, only one person, and it got over a billion streams. And so I think he's like a very fascinating person, how he thinks about things. But he's also a gifted lyricist, and he says stuff that like kind of sears in my brain.

And so this is like the point we were talking about earlier. We like, you know, you can go out and say Jeff Bezos has too much money. He shouldn't have the world's largest yacht, and he shouldn't have all these things and the giant house everywhere.

And so I'm going to put a guillotine, and I'm going to take things away from him. But you didn't see like all the stuff that he was doing before that. You didn't see the fact that he was making door desks.

You didn't see that he was literally... there's a line in his biography where he is buying knee pads because he's the one putting the back packages together, putting them in his like Jeep and then taking them to UPS.

Um, and so one of my favorite stories about this, and there's actually like an idea I think that's related to this, that the public praises people for what they practice in private, is this idea of going slow so you can go faster later on.

And I think Sam Walton's a perfect example of this. Um, and I bring up Sam all the time because he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs because he's like a very... a business is so easy to understand in a way that I think Amazon is not.

You know, what's Walmart's business? I buy cheaply, and I sell cheaply, and I just do that, and I'm bigger and better than anybody else, and that's what generates the wealth.

And so the crazy thing about like the outcome that Sam had is nobody saw that for the first five years of his life. He had a single store, one store. He was like trying to figure out like what is this retail thing? What am I good at? What should... what's the merchandise I should do? What... like how do I do this? How's the marketing?

And there's a great line in his biography where it talks about the fact that his first store they owned for five years was so successful that he made a mistake, a rookie mistake. His land... he had a lease, and the lease could be terminated any time. There was no option. He didn't have the option to renew.

The landlord said, would have to say, yeah, I want you back in here. The landlord realized that, oh my God, this store that, you know, was making $20,000 a year is now making $300,000 in a tiny little town. I'm just going to say, Sam, nice to know you. I'm taking over your store.

And so he's forced to then go look for another store. That's... he discovers Bonville, Arkansas. So he buys a store there, but there's like a multiple month time frame where he has to run two stores for the first time in his life.

And this was really important because one, he realized, oh, I can... I don't have to have just one store. I can run two stores at a time. But he's also driving back and forth over between these like mountainous roads.

So even though the stores are, let's say, they're 300 miles away from each other, it's like an eight-hour drive or something there, each way. And so he's like, man, there's got to be a more efficient way to do this.

And one day, he's driving, and he hears a plane overhead. And he's like, oh, this is a Cessna. So he goes to the airfield. He says, hey, how much would it cost to hire a Cessna to fly me from Bville to... I think Newport is where the other store was.

And it was, you know, whatever, 50 bucks, $100 back in the day. And then he realizes, hey, I don't want to keep having this expense of like having to charter a plane every time. Like, have somebody else drive. I'll just teach myself how to fly.

And why is that important? This goes back to the public praises people for what they practice in private. They say, look, Sam, you built a $200 billion [ __ ] fortune. Look at all the stuff you did. They don't see all the stuff that happened.

What he realized is like, hey, now I can fly my own plane. So this... this... what was a problem was problems or just opportunities. And he thought me losing my first store was a problem. One being the best opportunity in life.

It taught me one that I can run more than one store at a time, and then two, I accidentally discovered, oh, I can now fly. I learned how to fly.

And so the advantage he had over his competitors was I can fly over... you're... they're in jets. My competitors in Kmart, they're in jets, right? They're above the clouds. I'm in a little tiny Cessna. I can see traffic patterns. I could see... and he was scouting out, I think he scouted out personally the first like 300 stores that he was doing.

Um, and so the idea where it's like, yeah, we can see that, you know, he's one of the richest people in the world when he was older. We could see that he has 300 stores and he's got all this other stuff. But it's like you didn't see all the practice that went in there.

There's another story that illustrates the public praises people for what they practice in private. He had no relationships with suppliers. So at the time, there was a... there's a... the hula hoop was like a huge craze. All the kids wanted hula hoops all over America.

The suppliers didn't know him, so they wouldn't buy... um, they wouldn't sell hula hoops to him. So he just looked. He's like, what's a hula hoop? Well, that's a problem, right? What's a hula hoop?

He's like, it's just a little pipe that's connected, and it's colored, and you just wiggle your hips, and that's like what the toy is. He's like, okay. He bought the material, and at the end of the night, after he worked all day, he's like, I'm going to make my own hula hoops.

He winds up doing thousands of these. And then because he didn't have any money, he's like, how now he had multiple stores? How do I get the hula hoop to other stores? He had a John boat, which is like a little tiny boat because he's like a redneck fisherman.

And he just put all the hula hoops in behind the John boat, and he towed it behind his car, and that was his delivery system.

So in every single story, you're going to see like it seems like there's no possible way these giant companies can start with these little basic improvisations, like just feeling your way through.

And then you're slowly practicing. You're like, oh, that idea worked. Let me do more of that. Oh, that idea didn't work. Let me avoid doing that in the future. And just over and over and over again, and it just compounds.

So the public praises people for what they practice in private.

I love it. I mean, it's cliché to say it takes 10 years to become an overnight success, but go listen to... I remember when George Mack... I went back and listened to... because George was like one of your first guests, and I went back and listened to the very first time the show, and then you go and look at your skills as a podcaster.

It's... you see this literally everything.

Yeah, self-pity has no utility. If you live long enough, bad things will happen to you. Your goal is to use the bad in life in a constructive fashion.

So self-pity has no utility. It's another maxim from Charlie Munger. And, um, Charlie, you know, a lot of people don't like that. They don't like, oh, don't tell me how to feel.

Like, you know, like he can speak to this because he had... he went... he experienced the worst thing somebody could go through. I think he was like 29 years old. He went... getting divorced. He's got a 9-year-old son named Teddy, if I remember correctly.

And Teddy gets diagnosed with fatal leukemia. And at that time, now he could have been safe, but at that time in history, there was nothing. They didn't know how to heal him.

So he is just... went through a divorce. He's not doing well financially because Charlie Munger doesn't become a full-time investor till he's 40. So he's 20... late 20s in the story, and he is struggling at work, failed marriage, and he is going to the hospital every day and slowly watching his son fade away.

So anybody lost somebody from cancer, like my mom died from breast cancer in 2017. The last two years of her life were the worst way to die because it was all through her bones too. And so like you literally see her like get smaller and like not be able to get a bed and be addicted to pain medication and like can't do anything without it.

Um, and so it's one thing for that to happen to your mom is obviously going to be devastating. It's the love you have for your mom is orders of magnitude less than you have for your child.

When people talk about... oh, like the way I would describe why this is such an important thing and why this to anchor that self-pity has no utility in this story that Charlie Munger mentions it in is because, you know, people that don't have kids are like they think they know what love is, right?

And the way I would describe this, the best description of why they don't know what love is yet is actually a story that I heard Ryan Reynolds, the actor, say. And he's like, you know, his wife Blake Lively, he's like, I've never loved somebody as much as I love Blake.

I think it's... it was impossible that I'd ever love somebody more. He goes, and that is until the day that Blake gave birth to our baby daughter. And then the moment I saw the daughter, I knew that if we were ever under attack, I would use Blake as a human shield to protect that baby.

And having two kids, I was like, that's exactly right. That is the best description.

And so when I... I don't just read these stories; I try to put myself in their shoes. And like I want to like cry thinking about that happening to my son.

And even then, he's like, listen, you're going to mourn. It's going to change. Certain bad things are going to happen in your life, right? And many of these, they're out of your control. That's the point.

That's why it's like self-utility is not the solution. Yeah, you're going to grieve. You're going to mourn. You're going to be changed forever if you lose your... God forbid you lose your child. Your life, the rest of your life is going to be fundamentally different.

Using a parent, your life is fundamentally different. And his whole point, I think he quotes Epictetus, if I'm not mistaken, where he's just like the response to the inevitable tragedies, the trials and tribulations you have in your life is like learning from them and trying to use them as constructive in a constructive fashion.

It's not to wallow, oh, woe is me. Like bad things happening is a part of the human experience. So self-pity has no utility. Utilize... spend your time doing something else.

The good ones know more. The top talent in every industry has gathered more information than most people would find reasonable.

Oh, this is my favorite. This is literally what I'm doing for a living because it's also in the books. So my idea was just like, I don't think like you don't have to be smarter than everybody else, right?

And some of that's outside your control. It doesn't matter what I do for the rest of my life, I will never be as smart as Charlie Munger, but I can gather more information than another person wants would want to, right?

And so like the example I have of this is like, uh, I read... I just told you my thing where like I read a biography about somebody, I go into the bibliography, and I find obscure books.

I found this obscure book on Thomas Edison, right, in the bibliography of a book. It was published in like 1950 or something like that. And it talks about when he was 12 years old, he was so voracious and had such an innate inner drive to make something of himself and to become an inventor and like to really have control of his own destiny.

He was working as like a boy, so like, you know, very common for a 12-year-old boy to have a full-time job at that point. He was working on a railroad, on an actual train. And the train would have like a switch over, so it'd be a few hours every day where he would go and he'd find himself in Detroit.

And so what does he do? He goes, oh, there's a library here. He reads every single book in the library over the course of a few years.

Um, there's a guy named Edwin Land who I won't shut up about. I talk about all the time because he was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs. Edwin Land is the founder of Polaroid. He's also one of the most prolific individual inventors in American history.

When he died, he had the third most patents to his name behind Edison and somebody else. Um, and so Steve Jobs, the reason I found Edwin Land is because Steve Jobs, when he was in his 20s, talks about meeting Edwin Land when he was in his 70s, and he said that meeting was like visiting a shrine.

So Steve's talking about Edwin Land when he's 20. Steve's dying of cancer in his late 50s, right? Still giving interviews, Walter Isaacson for his biography, still talking about this guy Edwin Land, right?

So I like, oh, obviously I need to read about this guy. You start reading about Edwin Land. He does the exact same thing. His idea, he had two goals in life: I want to be the world's greatest scientist, and I want to be the world's greatest novelist.

So obviously, outside levels of ambition, he decides he's like, he picks a scientific field where he feels he can be the best. That's the field of light and how it like how it affects our vision.

And so he starts sleeping with the canonical textbook on the science of light and vision. It's underneath his pillow when he's like 14.

Okay, gets accepted to Harvard, realizes there's... there's nobody at Harvard that can teach him what he wants to learn. So he goes to the Harvard Library, reads every single book in the Harvard Library on light, then immediately drops out, moves to New York, goes to New York City Public Library, the beautiful one with the lions up front, reads every single book on light, and then starts to do his experiments.

Doesn't have any money, doesn't have resources. He breaks into, I think NYU, might be Columbia. Let's say it's Columbia. Breaks into Columbia, right?

There's a lot of, you know, misfits that break... do breaking and entering. They're like trying to steal your TV or something. This guy was breaking in so he could use scientific equipment so he can run his experiments.

But it's like they just go to unbelievable levels of like just way beyond that you would find reasonable.

So another example of this, the good ones know more is this line from David Ogilvy. Again, I didn't know who David Ogilvy was reading all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters, right?

And he keeps talking about this genius, David Ogilvy. I'm like, who is this guy? Read about him. He talks about he built one of the most valuable advertising agencies that ever existed.

And he talks about... he's like, oh, you want to get promoted? You want to get my spot? Like, how do you think I got to my spot? And he would encourage his... the people coming up, the young men in his organization, goes, I'm going to sign you to one of their biggest clients with Shell Oil, right?

You're going to read every... you're going to read every single piece of paperwork on the company history. You're going to read textbooks on geology. You're going to read textbooks on oil exploration.

You're going to know all the executives at Shell. You're on Saturdays, you're going to go down to the Shell gas station, and you're going to interview the customers that are patronizing their business.

Within a year, you'll be ready to take over your boss's position. But that... and he's like, the good ones know more. It's like that he worked for a friend, Chef. He's like, they just knew every single thing about... they collected more information about their craft and things related to their craft than anybody else.

It is interesting, you know, so much of the stuff that we're talking about today is going beyond the reasonable. There is a bar that lots of people get to: tolerance for pain, endurance, amount of time persisting, doing a thing.

That's a great insight. Amount of talent that somebody has prepared, and it's just a case of going orders of magnitude past that.

There's a guy named Les Schwab, um, who he... we could have talked about him when we talked about the trying to not wind up like your dad because his dad was a drunk and a loser.

And Les was very poor, and his dad, I think Les is like 12 years old or 9 years old, and his dad... they find him dead in a ditch in front of a bar. And Les goes on to build a multi-billion dollar tire company.

And like, you know, half a century ago, 40 years ago. Um, and he says something in his autobiography. He's like, everything you do, it's volume. It's like gusto. And it's... he goes, the combination of gusto, so like, you know, really throwing yourself into it, and volume.

And he's like, he says it's a case of repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And again, I think the... if you really want an edge in what you're doing, again, I'm not trying to copy. I'm not trying to make a tire company. I'm not trying to invent the instant photography like Edwin Land did.

I'm not trying to be an inventor like Thomas Edison. I'm not trying to build an advertising agency like David Ogilvy. But I just take that idea. It's like the good ones know more.

So it's like not only am I going to spend... I read for a few hours every day, right? That's usually in the morning because that's the time my brain works best. Then I usually have lunch, and then in the afternoon, what I do is then I reread past highlights and relisten to old episodes, and I just seep myself in that.

So anytime you see like some kind of social media post from me, all that is is something I reread that day that I read for the first time four years ago, and I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting.

I posted this quote about Rockefeller and the importance of concentration because I went back through and I reread the highlights from the book Titan, and that's what I was spending, you know, 30 minutes doing.

And it's just like all I'm... I can't guarantee that I'm going to be successful. I can't guarantee that I'm going to make a podcast that people find they think it's worth their time.

But what I can do is like I can't control that, but I can because it's more like a... especially with podcasts, it's like more like a... it's a subjective kind of thing, right?

And but I can objectively do more work to hopefully influence and tilt the subjective nature of podcasting in my favor. And I just... all I did is all I do is read books. I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. I'll take that. Thank you very much.

This isn't [ __ ] rocket science.

Money comes naturally as a result of service. A business is just an idea that makes someone else's life better.

This drives me insane because, again, all I do is hang out with founders. And you know, now the filter's got a lot tighter than it has for the last few years.

But what I don't like is when people are like, you know, I always ask them like, you know, who are your entrepreneurial heroes? Like, who's the smartest person you know? What's the best business you can think of? Like, what's your favorite biography? Like, who do you want to emulate?

I think picking the right heroes is like one of the most important things you can do in your life because you're going to naturally... like all of us are going to copy and absorb things from people around us, whether we're in together in person or I'm reading a book about or watching a movie about it.

And what drives me insane is they're like, well, I want... they put a number on it. It's not like I want to start a company that does X or I want to help somebody do Y. It's I want to build a hundred billion dollar company.

And it's like, do you understand the people that

Repeat: Human nature does every generation think that there's no more opportunity? Like, "Oh, we missed it."

There's always going to be limitless opportunity as long as humans are alive. Because all a business is, is an idea that makes somebody else's life better.

A can make somebody else's life better. The people that made the camera make somebody else's life better. Whoever made the microphone, the iPad, your drink, that I down the orange Sunrise when I'm doing my podcast, that makes somebody else's life better.

There's an infinite way to make other people's lives better. If you love what you do, the only exit strategy is death. Retirement can be fatal.

Again, this is something that's fascinating because my dad is a blue-collar guy. He's got like an eighth-grade education. I realized how normal people can be. I told him it was a big deal to me because the first super famous and wealthy person that I got to spend time with was Sam Zell.

At the time, Sam Zell probably had like $1 billion or something. It was insane. He's 81 years old, working seven days a week. I talked to him, and he said, "I'm going to be doing deals till I die." He was obsessed with this.

He was right; he was working on deals six months later, and he was still working every day—or, you know, very often. My dad, for the life of him, could not understand that this guy had billions of dollars and still chose to work.

I realized that for a vast majority of people, they equate work with something they have to do. It's drudgery. There's a great essay called "How to Do Great Work" by Paul Graham.

His guess is: how many people out of eight billion on the planet really wind up finding work that they love to do and are able to support themselves with it? There are a lot of people who find things they like to do that they love, but can they make your avocation your vocation?

I think that's a line from Steve Jobs. Paul's guess is probably a few hundred thousand. I think he might be right about that. It is unbelievably rare.

I wake up every day like I get to do this, not I have to do this. Sam Zell looks at it like he gets to do this, not he has to do this.

What's remarkable is the overlap between people that got to the top of their profession and the people that had no exit. Their exit strategy was death. Not only would they not sell their company, but they would never retire.

I did this one of the episodes I'm most proud of, and one of the guys I really like is the founder of Red Bull. His name is Dietrich Mateschitz. There's not even a biography of him in English, so I had to use ChatGPT to translate a German biography to read in English, which, you know, the translation is not perfect.

He came to my attention because he had just passed away. He had a remarkable story. He was like an account executive for Unilever or something like that and didn't start his first company until he was 41 years old.

He owned 49% of Red Bull, so there was a 49% partner and another guy that owned 2%. Towards the end of his life, he was paying himself between $200 million and $700 million a year.

That's his paycheck. He was turning down like, right now, you could sell Red Bull for $40 billion—probably more. Multiple times, he turned down $10 billion in his pocket. His share would be $10 to $20 billion.

His whole point was, "I love what I do. Why would I sell it? Then I don't have anything to do." He took care of his health. He had his own fleet of airplanes, so he'd fly his own planes. He'd ride his motorcycle. He just lived life to the fullest.

There are so many people like that who achieve outside success because time carries most of the weight. Taking that away from them would be like losing a child.

What about retirement? Can it be fatal? Why did that line come from? That's a line from David Orban. He noticed the same thing.

I think you've mentioned this on your show, and I think you got some flak for it before too, about the different values that historically men and women have and how they contrast.

For men, I think it's really important for us to wake up every day and solve a problem, put something out into the world, and feel like we're being useful to our tribe. You are not a selfish person; you are a driven person, but you are doing things every day for other people.

When you move that, they've shown studies that it's not just work; this is my life's work. This is my purpose. I wake up every day with a burning desire to achieve mission success.

Thinking about it through an evolutionary lens, you're useful. What are the signals that the world is giving you? You're moving toward a goal. You're useful. People need you. You contribute.

The evidence is there. Your friend Jordan Peterson said something one time in a clip I saw on YouTube. I didn't see the whole conversation, but the clip was, "Successful men are insane."

He said they wake up every day, and you could put them in a forest, and they would just run around all day chopping trees down with an axe. They have to do something.

To take away their ability to be productive, to be useful, is torture. It takes away their purpose. In many cases, you'll find that an overall healthy older person stops working, and then all of a sudden, they're dead. How did that happen?

The point is, this is the way I would describe this, and I think it's really important. The maximum that I took away from the two-hour conversation I had with Sam Zell is: go for freedom.

Essentially, what he told me was, "Listen, I know all the rich guys. They're all miserable. They make the mistake of buying and spending more time doing things they don't like to buy slightly nicer versions of the same things."

He also did something hilarious. He said, "I have a place in Chicago and a compound in Malibu." That's the word he used. Every year, he takes his family—his kids, his extended family—and they spend the holidays in the south of France.

He said, "I could buy the village, but I don't buy it. I rent it because the things that you own start to own you."

The funny thing is, he wanted to show me pictures of his Malibu house. I thought it would be pictures on his phone, but he handed me his phone, and it was Google Images. It said, "Sam Zell Malibu house."

Imagine having a house that's so well known, a compound that's on Google Images.

His whole point was, "David, you do not trade money for freedom." He said, "Go for freedom."

This is the rough synopsis of what he said: If you go for freedom, if you have freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can work on what you love. If you work on what you love, you'll do it for a long time.

If you do it for a long time, you'll get really good at it. If you get really good at it, money will come as a result.

His whole point was, "I had unlimited money. I never made the mistake of trading money in exchange for my freedom." That is really powerful.

That gives you the ability to find your life's work and the purpose why you feel you're here, and then to do it until you die.

I can give you a list of people: Enzo Ferrari, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Coco Chanel, Estée Lauder. The list goes on and on.

These people were decades past the need for working for money. In many cases, like Enzo Ferrari, he was working 11-hour days, seven days a week for the rest of his life. He didn't need the money.

Dude, I love what you do. I said it at the start, and I said it in the Q&A. I think "Founders" is a podcast that everybody should go and listen to.

It's not a cadence that's going to actually eat into your wisdom time because you can only get one out a week. You've got to read all of the books.

Bro, you're great. I really appreciate you as a friend. I appreciate everything that you do. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the stuff that you've got done?

"Founders" podcasts on your podcast player. You can find "Founders" podcasts on all the networks.

Dude, Chris, I admire you. I'm so glad we became friends. I love the opportunity, and I appreciate you inviting me. Until next time, man, you're the man.

Appreciate you. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, there is something else you will absolutely love right here. Go on, give it a tap.