#59 Howard Hughes: The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire

What I learned from reading Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters; The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire. ---- He was a film director, a producer, a test pilot, inventor, investor, and entrepreneur [0:01] the start of Hughes Tool Company [13:00] during a gold rush sell pickaxe's / great idea about leasing drill bits [19:00] Howard Hughes Jr is on his own at 18 years old [26:00] starting out in the movie business [32:00] his first plane crash/divorce [38:00] Howard Hughes goes broke [48:00] Howard Hughes breaks the world record for the fastest flight around the world / Hitler was always an asshole [56:00] Henry Kaiser and the birth of The Hercules [1:05:00] his 4th plane crash and descent into madness [1:14:00] Howard Hughe's M. O. on corruption and bribes [1:26:00] I am not really interested in people. I am interested in science. –Howard Hughes [1:29:00] ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  He was a film director, a producer, a test pilot, inventor, investor, and entrepreneur. And for most of his life, he was considered to be the richest man in America. At a time when being a millionaire was rare, Hughes had several billion dollars. That alone would have made him intriguing. But Hughes' allure was about far more than money. To unravel his story required the help of hundreds of journalists, lawyers, doctors, investigators, archivists, librarians, acquaintances, and lovers. Each contributing pieces of the grand puzzle of Hughes. In addition to interviews, court transcripts, and depositions, Hughes' own original papers were examined.

• 0:43David Senra?

  While he never kept a private diary as such, he wrote over 8,000 pages of memos, notes, letters, and instructions that chronicled his loves, hates, fears, and frustrations. Recently declassified FBI and CIA files were also analyzed. 2,500 pages of detailed surveillance reports. Likewise, over 100,000 pages of sealed legal briefs, corporate records, and inventories were uncovered and read in an effort to gain entrance into the mind and life of this ultimate outsider. The result of years of research, this book tears away the facade that Hughes worked his

• 1:23David Senra?

  entire life to create and reveals a man so complex that during his life he remained an illusion even to the few who knew him best. It is a story that only he could tell, of a life so extraordinary that it can be found recounted nowhere else. Okay, so that is from the introduction of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos, and Letters: The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire. And before I jump into the book, I just want to recount... So I was doing some extra research, and I came across this...

• 2:05David Senra?

  This article that was published in the Washington Post in 1977, a few years after Hughes died. And let me just read an excerpt to you. So it says, "The Amazing Howard Hughes", which can be seen in two episodes on Channel 9 tonight and Thursday night from 9 to 11, is both satisfying and unsatisfying. Based on the book Howard, The Amazing Hughes by his longtime associate Noah Dietrich, Noah Dietrich's a very important person in this story, so please remember his name. In collaboration with all these other people that are important, so I'm skipping over that. The television adaptation of the book satisfies in that the subject is Howard Hughes. But, and this is the part that really stuck out to me when I was reading this article.

• 2:51David Senra?

  But the dissatisfaction arises since most of us have read or heard too much about Howard Hughes. Yet with all that we have read or heard, we have the vague feeling that we don't really know all there is to know about this man. So the reason I wanted to start here in particular is that that last paragraph talking about the dissatisfaction about hearing a lot and being exposed to a lot of stories about him, but then at the end of all these stories, feeling that you don't really know him? That's exactly how I feel going into this podcast. So sometime, I think last year, maybe the year before, I attempted to do a Founders episode on this book I read, which is called Howard Hughes: His Life in Madness. And I found it so frustrating that I read the entire book and it's massive.

• 3:36David Senra?

  It's, I think, like a 20-hour read, 700 pages, 655 pages, something like that. Actually have in front of me. That I just refused to do a podcast on it because I was so frustrated by this guy. So I decided to give it another shot because

• 3:53David Senra?

  if you really think about what we're doing here, well, first of all, if this is your first time listening to Founders, welcome. My name is David. The concept of this podcast is extremely straightforward. Every week I read a biography or an autobiography or a book about somebody that's built a company and just try to understand the person behind it, pull out ideas that we can use in our own lives. So I don't really think I could document the history of entrepreneurship without talking about Howard Hughes. So I gave it another crack. I read this book. This one was a little bit more palatable because it spent less time talking about what seems to be very clear that Howard Hughes suffered, especially later in his life, from severe mental illness.

• 4:35David Senra?

  So he was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, but he basically had, he wouldn't open himself up to being diagnosed further. And he had his own private set of doctors, as we've seen happen with other extremely rich people. And you know, when they're paying, when you're being paid tons and tons of money by the world's richest person, you kind of unfortunately look the other way and you don't put the care of your patient first. And that's exactly what happened to Howard Hughes. So the first book, you know, probably that I read, probably 60% of it is all about his descent into madness, which is really hard to read, actually. And that cultivates with, you know, him having a lot of yes men around that only, were not

• 5:18David Senra?

  looking out for him, that were only basically doing whatever he told them to do. And so when he winds up dying in the 1970s, I think he was 70 years old. He was six foot three, but he weighed like 80 pounds. He had been a drug addict on codeine and all other kind of opiates for over a quarter century. And he was basically just skin and bones, hadn't been in the sun for like 30 years. And they found a bunch of, you know, broken off needles. I think when his autopsy, there's like five or seven different needles placed anywhere from his groin to, all over his body because he would be taking so much drugs that the veins would give out.

• 6:01David Senra?

  So that's, that's really hard to read about. It's not pleasant, it's not, and I'm not going to talk much about that on the podcast. I'm going to focus on.

• 6:10David Senra?

  You know, his early life, because I think that's important. Because up until about, time he's from 19, when he takes over his father's company to about 40, he's certainly eccentric, but something happens. And I think it's the multiple plane crashes he was in. And obviously, I think after reading this, like, he probably had mental illness his whole life. But then he just, the last 30, 30 years of his life is just a descendant of madness. So today, we're going to focus mainly on the beginning. And, and up until about 40 years old. So I will say that like, a lot of times on this podcast, like, we're learning a lot of good ideas from people based on their experiences. You know, you go back and listen to all the founders' episodes and, you know, we benefit greatly from somebody else documenting their entire, the lives of these company builders,

• 6:54David Senra?

  because we understand their personalities, their philosophy on business. They readily share the ideas that they gain through experience. And, and the reason I'm doing this podcast is because I think those ideas are invaluable to anybody that wants to get better at what they're doing. Whether you're running a company, want to run a company, whether you're a freelancer, whether you work in a large company, like, you can use these ideas yourself. And you don't have to go through 70 years of experience before you have these realizations. Today is going to be different. Today, we're going to learn a lot more about what not to do. The kind of person not to be. I don't think, based on the other research I've done, is, I don't think I've come across another entrepreneur that the gap of the actual person they were and the mythology is wider. He was widely beloved, mainly, in some cases, deservedly so.

• 7:39David Senra?

  Where, where he, you know, he's the first person to, to fly around the world. He has all these, these interesting aviation world records at the time. And that's what made him world, world famous. Based on what I was reading, he's one of the most famous people in the 1930s that, all across the world. But I can't say, and I, I, based on how he treated other people, he wasn't a good person. And a lot of the stuff he did in business is not, you know,

• 8:12David Senra?

  We're learning on this podcast, like, the power of putting a customer first, of thinking from first principles, of building a product that is so great that people want to give you money for, that can benefit their lives. And a lot of what Howard Hughes did was not that. And a lot of the running of his companies isn't even, basically, I mean, Noah Dietrich, for all intents and purposes, was the person running, he was actually who Howard Hughes was. So, I just want to have that, I just want to set that out at the beginning, so, you understand my perspective on this, because there's going to be a lot in this book that is just not behavior that I think we should replicate, but at the same time, we should understand that it's out there. It's tons of humans.

• 8:55David Senra?

  Howard Hughes wasn't the first person to act like this, he's not going to be the last. So I do think it gives us an understanding of like, the reality that we operate in. So, with that, what, all I could think about is, and I looked for books, there's tons of books written about Howard Hughes, tons of information about Howard Hughes, Howard Hughes Jr., that is. But I couldn't help but think that, the book that I really wanted to read, the person that I think is overlooked, who is extremely important, because he built one of the most successful companies ever, is his father. Howard Hughes, Senior, I guess that would be, so that's where I'm going to start the book. We're going to learn a little bit about Howard's dad.

• 9:39David Senra?

  And so, I'm going to, they're going to, Howard they're referencing in the book right now, is Howard Hughes Senior. So it says, "Howard was not a student. Howard was mechanical. While he had no patience to sit at a desk and learn," this sounds fairly familiar to people that have listened to a bunch of his podcasts, "he could spend hours at a workbench tinkering with clocks and motors." When Felix attempted, this Felix is Howard Hughes Senior's dad, and Howard Hughes Junior's grandfather, obviously. "When Howard Hughes attempted to put his oldest son to work at his law office, Hughes rebelled after only a few months, and set out on what he would later call his adventure in the frontier of opportunity."

• 10:21David Senra?

  The year was 1895 and for a rugged, tall, 26-year-old American, or 26-year-old, America was a land of discovery. So as we're going to see here, I really feel like there's a, there's like a typical personality type of people that become entrepreneurs. I do think that now, given the advances of technology, that that is actually going to widen. But there is just certain people that are just not content making a good salary, sitting at a desk and that they're willing to take on an insane amount of risk just for the ability to do their own thing and to kind of call their own shots. And Howard Hughes Sr. was definitely like that. And a lot of, having that appetite for risk does not always guarantee success. For most of his life,

• 11:06David Senra?

  he was not very successful. He had failure after failure after failure, which I think is important for us to understand. Because, you know, he winds up creating an invention, which is a drill bit, getting a patent on that invention and that, that singular invention came from a life of failure. And a lot of people are like, you know, you see this mythology. It's like, oh, if you want to start a company, you have to do it really young. Well, we know, people that listen to this podcast know that's not true. Ray Kroc was not young when he started his company. Sam Walton was not young when he started his company. In this case, Howard Hughes Sr. was over 40 years old by the time he found his first actual successes at business. So before we get there, let's just hear a little bit about his life. He says, "For the next eight years, Hughes traveled across the Midwest,

• 11:50David Senra?

  roaming through Colorado and Oklahoma, looking for his fortune in zinc and silver mines and on gambling boats full of, full of women and desperate men. It was an erratic existence that found Hughes riding the ebbs and tides of riches and poverty." So he's going through all, basically gambling, trying to, trying to, it's basically a lot of speculation is what it is. And so being a speculator, he hears about all these people making money. In Texas and Louisiana around in the early 1900s from oil. So he's like, okay, I need to get down there. He said, I heard the roar in Joplin and made the seat for the disturbance.

• 12:35David Senra?

  So he says, okay, I heard things were going on here. I need to get down there and see if I can make some money. So he gets down there and he starts, he goes, Hughes blindly speculated on oil leases and tried drilling for oil for himself with rented equipment. While his schemes failed to generate continuing income, they did bring him in contact with another wildcatter, wildcatter with the names of the oil speculators at the time, named Walter Bedford Sharp and a partnership that would lead both to riches. And then on the next page, it just says a sentence that kind of gives you an idea of what he's, what's going on at this time. He said Hughes moved from boomtown to boomtown, mean oil boomtown, learning about drilling from hands-on experience.

• 13:19David Senra?

  That's going to be important because this is the start of Howard Senior's business. I said, by the start of, he wasn't having much success at this time, but he was learning and that's equally as important. He says, by the time, by the start of 1908, Howard Hughes Senior felt like a failure. He had lost the attention of his wife and rarely saw his son. Striking it rich was no longer the fanciful dream of a young vagabond. It was now a necessity for the 38-year-old braggart. Ironically, the key to his fortune was to be found in his failure. This is an important lesson for all of us. Throughout his years as a wildcatter, Hughes had repeatedly, was repeatedly frustrated by his lack of success in striking oil.

• 14:02David Senra?

  The problem, he claimed, was not the location of his wells, but rather his inability to drill deep enough to tap the oil reserves he was certain remained undiscovered beneath bedrock. And there's no really way at this time for him to, to him to know that other than just a belief. He was going off instinct here. He said, faced with the reality that no, that no known drill bit could dig through the impenetrable rock, he became obsessed with the challenge to design such a bit and worked for months in a futile effort to achieve positive results.

• 14:31David Senra?

  It took a chance meeting in a Shreveport, this is in Louisiana, bar called The Oyster Pub, to motivate Hughes toward his future. It was there he happened upon a millwright named Granny Humison, who was attempting to interest the riggers in a drill bit that he had conceived that resembled two engaging pine cones. His concept called for the cones to rotate in opposite direction, meshing like a coffee grinder. So everybody else is laughing at this guy that's trying to sell like a new drill bit. They're like, they're basically, they laughed at his design. Thought, you know, you can't improve, it's already working, people are making money at oil, we don't need your stupid design. But Hughes looked at it differently.

• 15:15David Senra?

  He said, "Hughes took it seriously enough to pay $150 for the two sewing thread spools that Humison had carved to illustrate his invention." He then takes this and he says, "Howard engaged a machine shop to fabricate a prototype of the drill for experimental use. Still uncertain that his concept would actually work, Hughes took the finished prototype, mounted it on a rod in a press, and attempted to drill through a six-inch-thick piece of granite. Legend has it that the drill bit drilled through the granite, drilled through the workbench, and was chewing through the concrete floor of the workshop before the machinery could be stopped." So that little invention, he's gonna wind up patenting it.

• 16:00David Senra?

  Let me see if that, that hasn't happened yet. Nope, yeah, so right after this, he's granted a patent in August of 1909. And this invention is the basis of one of the most, I would argue, one of the most profitable companies of all time. And without this invention, we would never know the name of Howard Hughes Jr. Because by the time, so Howard Hughes, his wife, or his wife, his, um, the son, that is, his dad dies of a heart attack at 54 years old. And his, two years earlier, his mom had died when she was in like her late 30s, going into, for surgery, and she never woke up from anesthesia. So by the time he's 19 years old, both of his parents are dead,

• 16:43David Senra?

  and he's given 50% ownership of Hughes Tool Company, which is the basis, uh, which at that time was already hugely successful. And he actually does some smart things where he buys out the other 50% was owned by family members. And one, his grandparents sold them their 25% interest in the tool company for $10. And the other person, I think it was uncle, sold them the other 25% for like 200 grand. But this is a company that, I have a note here that, just so you understand the size and the scope of how important this company was, or how profitable it was, rather. Hughes Tool Company was founded in 1908.

• 17:24David Senra?

  I think they started like making real money, no, actually, yes, founded, founded in 1909, sorry. And then Hughes started it with this guy named Walter Sharp, but Sharp died in, in 1912, three years later. So, by the time the company matures, in the 1940s, it was making about $40 million a year in profits in the 40s. And so if you use these calculators online, they'll tell you about like what, what the equivalent, the equivalent of that would be in $2018, $2019. That's equivalent about $500 million a year today. And Howard Hughes Jr. owned 100% of the company. He had complete control.

• 18:07David Senra?

  So, he had this cash cow that he didn't have to invent, never had to work in, that was basically throwing off the equivalent of $500 million a year today. And it all started from this little invention. And something we can learn that can be applied to a million different things is, hold on. Okay. So, we've, we've heard this, this, I don't know if I've covered this before, but I've certainly read about it a lot, that, so in a gold rush, the, the, the smarter strategy is to sell pickaxes, right? Instead of going out and trying to rush for gold, you sell the equipment that the people that are trying to go out and rush for gold are, are, that need to do that, right?

• 18:49David Senra?

  Well, in the oil boom, which is happening around this time, in, this time in American history, it, the equivalent of that is sell drills. And that's exactly what Hughes does. But he also has a just a straight genius insight that I would never even thought of, I don't think. And I would say the modern day equivalent of this, based on the profitability that you see is like AWS. Like everybody is, almost every business is slowly turning into a, you know, internet-enabled digital business. And so you see with AWS where they make billions and billions of a year, they have much higher profits than the overall Amazon profit margin is. You know, they're kind of, they're doing the exact same thing.

• 19:29David Senra?

  But they're doing the modern day equivalent of that, equivalent of what Hughes Tool Company was doing in the oil boom, is what I'm trying to say. Okay, so it says with the oil, this is the genius idea that Howard Hughes Senior had. "With the oil business in a boom phase, there seemed to be an unlimited thirst within the industry for the essential Hughes bit." So everybody's going out, they want to make money, they need his bit to access hidden oil fields that other bits can't get down to. And again, he's got a monopoly on the market because he's got the patent. So it says, but this is the genius thing he did. "Hughes refused to sell his bit outright. Instead, he leased the bit on a monthly basis, providing free sharpening and maintenance as the device required.

• 20:13David Senra?

  In this manner, each bit paid for itself within a few months, and with each successive month was generating nearly all profit." I've read that sentence, first of all, it's a great idea. Secondly, I kind of feel like that's the difference of software as a service. Back in the day, if you're old enough, you remember you'd go to like a store and you'd buy a box of software. And it'd be a one-time charge, you'd just go home and you have it. Now they're like, well, we're not going to sell you the software outright. We're going to sell it to you and we're going to maintain everything for you. We're going to make sure it's updated, we're going to keep improving the product, but we're going to charge you monthly. And this is kind of what Hughes was doing, but for drill bits, which is extremely important at the time.

• 20:50David Senra?

  Okay, so now we're going to start talking about Howard Hughes Junior. And in this case, he finds, this is the example of him finding his life's passion, which is aviation. And then starting his first tiny, tiny business when he's a kid. Because he's very, he definitely was a smart person, he definitely was a tinkerer. He was interested in like mechanical machines, he was just interested in science, he was interested in experiments. But he just didn't care about the oil business at all. And so that was kind of, you know, bequeathed to him by his, by his father, which, which led to what he was able to do.

• 21:27David Senra?

  So, um, his, his, uh, he does something his dad wants him to do, so he says, uh, let me just jump into the story. He said, "He put out his hand and requested a $5 bill." "Five dollars? That's it?" his father questioned. Shaking his head in excitement, Sonny," so that's what they called when his parents were alive, he wasn't called Howard, he was called Sonny, and then he changes his name, so, um, from Sonny to Howard, and then, uh, at least asking people to call him Howard, and then eventually he just tells people to call him Hughes. So he says, "Um, shaking his head in excitement, Sonny took the $5 as he pointed to the seaplane anchored in the harbor and the sign overhead: 'Five dollars a ride.' The plane was part of a local sightseeing and tourist attraction. Although Big Howard had never himself been in an airplane and had little faith in their

• 22:11David Senra?

  safety, he joined his son in the seaplane. The 10-minute flight was agreeably short for the elder Hughes, who felt sick from the ride. As for his son, he was exhilarated and inspired by the sensation of flying, and he knew he had found his calling in life." Uh, so now this is a little description of, of what his childhood was like, you know, he was really bad in school, didn't care about it, but he, he would make things, he'd do, like, make his own, uh, radios, like, I guess like the precursor to CB radios, I don't know exactly what they're called, and he would tinker with engines and, uh, internal combustion engines and all this other stuff, so he actually makes something. He said, "He spent most of his days alone in his bedroom, in his bedroom or in his garage workshop, where he fashioned a motor and starter onto his bike, turning it into a

• 22:55David Senra?

  primitive motorcycle. Words spread quickly, quickly, that there was a new addition to the neighborhood, turning Sonny into an entrepreneur, when he began charging five cents a ride." So, you know, I love seeing this kind of thing, where you see like a flash of entrepreneur at a young, young age. So, "All right, I got something people want, and they're willing to pay for it." Um, he starts to do a lot of reading, um, after that flight, and he just becomes completely obsessed with the idea of aviation. So he said, "He had begun to read about a pair of British fliers, who had won a challenge from, uh, in London, as the first pilots to fly across the Atlantic. To Sonny, it was more than an adventurous exploit, it was fascination, exploration,

• 23:37David Senra?

  and fantasy, in an arena, in an arena, that had yet to be tapped. It became his arena, it became his dream."

• 23:48David Senra?

  School was relatively unimportant considering he had made up his mind about flying. Algebra and spelling did not fit into that picture. As a result, Sonny had poor grades and erratic classroom attendance. So, we're gonna jump right into an example of like, an idea I just don't think is really smart, which is really spoiling your child. So, right before he turns 18, he's in high school and he's not really going that much. But, uh, this gives you an idea to the degree which Howard Hughes Jr. was spoiled. His allowance was $5,000 a month. At a time when $5,000 represented the median annual income for the average family of four.

• 24:34David Senra?

  So what would that be equivalent today? I think the average annual income in America for a family of four is something in the range of like $50,000, maybe a little higher. So that'd be an equivalent of paying your 16-year-old $50,000 a month, or whatever that actual number is. So, this is how, um, his wife, or, excuse me, his mom is already, uh, has already passed away at this time, a year or two later. His dad does too. His dad's in his office, talking about all these exciting plans for the future. He's in a meeting and then all of a sudden he clutches his chest and collapses and falls dead on the floor. And this is the transition now for Howard Hughes Jr. With the death of his father, Sonny Hughes made the transition from boy to man with the instinct of a survivor and the sorrow of an orphan.

• 25:18David Senra?

  His world went from a life where days slid beyond themselves into weeks without distinction, to minutes that lasted for hours with an ache that saw no joy. The man who was his hero, the man he only wanted to please, died without warning or an opportunity to say goodbye.

• 25:41David Senra?

  So at the time Howard is 18 or 18 and 19 years old. And he wasn't considered an adult by Texas state law. You weren't considered an adult until 21. So even though he inherited 50% of Hughes Tool Company. And this is like an ugly aspect of human nature. So there was like extended relatives, like his uncle, that didn't really like his dad, but now was put as like Howard's guardian and basically only didn't care about Howard either. He just wanted access to the money and control the company. So Howard sees that he actually does something really smart here. He plots, no one knew, but he was plotting an escape and a way out.

• 26:25David Senra?

  So he said, Howard began a detailed and organized effort to take control of both his life and his money. With a heretofore unrecognized brilliance, he began his blitz by announcing his intention to pay his relatives for their share of the Hughes Tool Company. They accepted Howard's offer of cash in exchange for a company they had no chance of running in any case. In 1924, Hughes Tool Company became Howard's in its totality. They were unaware that, they were unaware that away from the course, meaning he was playing a lot of golf at the time, Howard was studying the inheritance laws of Texas. In particular, he was fascinated by a statute that allowed a 19-year-old resident of the state to be declared by the court an adult in the eyes of the law.

• 27:10David Senra?

  So he files this petition and he gets what they call the disabilities of youth removed. So now it's saying, hey, he doesn't need a guardian. He's in control of everything, of his own destiny. And after this, as a result, Howard returned to the house his father built with a confidence that few teenagers can muster. He was tall, handsome, rich and inspired. He moved through the stately mansion, master of his domain. Looking up, he saw his destiny. There on the edge of space, it was written in the sky. So now he's in control, he's like, okay.

• 27:45David Senra?

  We see this tendency in a lot of entrepreneurs, but I think it's this desire for control is especially exacerbated with Hughes, because I think he suffered from severe obsessive compulsive disorder. And I'll give you some examples of that later. But he's very much, does not want to be told what to do by other people, and he wants things exactly, like he almost creates, what I would say is like he creates his own reality within, like a smaller world within a larger world, where he has absolute complete control. And so first, before he does this, he's got to figure out what he wants his life to be. And so now we get to the part of the book where he's thinking about things. It says, "The initial reflections that came to mind were of those things he did not want to do. Run his father's business, for instance.

• 28:29David Senra?

  He had little desire to sit in an office in Houston and sell drill bits. On the back of a receipt, he wrote the words Hughes Tool, and then promptly crossed it out. Thinking again, he topped a small piece of paper with Things I Want to Be. He wrote, number one, the best golfer in the world. Number two, the best pilot. And number three, the most famous producer of moving pictures."

• 28:59David Senra?

  And this is going to give you,

• 29:05David Senra?

  so, a little insight into his bizarre personality. And despite a history of joyful holiday celebrations spent with his family, the new Hughes, this is what he was asking to be called at the time, the adult Hughes, celebrated none ever again.

• 29:23David Senra?

  He starts doing that really early. So who knows, we can't really psychoanalyze this guy, but that sounds like some kind of childhood trauma, or who knows what it was, actually. Okay, so at this time, he realizes that, he was really good at understanding the necessary, like the necessity of appearances, even though he was very manipulative. So he convinced this 19-year-old woman, Ella Rice, to marry him, even though she didn't really want to. But at the time, in Houston, it was common for like arranged marriages, based on like your family's like financial, like situation, or socioeconomic status, I guess. And so her mom made her marry Howard, and then Howard just basically...

• 30:10David Senra?

  He moves to California because I forget this, I'm out of Texas. And then he lets his wife, they live together for a little bit, but then he just sends her back to Houston and ignores her. So this is what I mean about like, we're gonna see a lot of personality traits or just, I'm sharing them with you so you understand who the person was. But it's not like, this is like, he just didn't seem to care and we'll see in a minute, even talks or later on in the podcast. So he just talks about, he says, "I'm not interested in people whatsoever." Like they just didn't fact, like they were, they seemed to me like, like, I don't know if tools is the right word. It's just like, they just, they were like actors in this play where he was at center stage and he would just dismiss them at his, at his pleasures. So this example, "When Hughes neither arrived in Houston nor telephoned, Ella sent telegrams, several dozen of them.

• 30:55David Senra?

  Each one more desperate than the last, attempting to understand how their honeymoon had dissolved into first separate bedrooms and then separate states. When he refused to accept her telephone calls, she wired, "I cannot understand why I've not heard from you." So eventually they get divorced, he just, basically just ignores her, ignores her, stops talking to her completely. And then he's cheating on her constantly when he's in California too. So he does not seem to like, to accept the like, the emotions or like the opinions of other humans. They just don't seem to really exist to him. And may, you know, maybe if you have, I think what exacerbated that, not only do I think it's some kind of mental illness, which, you know,

• 31:38David Senra?

  people don't choose to have that, you know, so I can't really, I'm not saying blame, but some of his decisions just seem to be like a selfish spoiled kid. You know, so I don't know how much of that was under his control or how much was not, but to the extent that it is under your control, like this is not behavior that, you know, you want to emulate in any sense, in any fashion. Okay, so this is him starting out in the movie business and he's, he, he has like a vindictive.

• 32:08David Senra?

  Like he, he basically quit. So he starts on the movie business. He fails at the beginning and then he quits, but he only goes again just to prove that his uncle like wrong. And you'll see this in a minute. So it says, um, he, he meets this guy on this actor on the golf course in LA. And he says, as each man moved to seize the opportunity before him, it took but a handshake to open a new chapter in show business history. When Graves, this is the actor, told Hughes that he needed $40,000 for the film budget, the gullible Texan never flinched as he took out his checkbook and gave the actor the entire amount. As Graves began the picture, Hughes haunted the set. This is actually something that's smart. He very much learned by observing and talking to people. And he says, take it, he took copious notes and he asked the actors and cameramen's questioning

• 32:52David Senra?

  everything that, the, he was questioning everything they were doing. So he would add, almost like to the point of pestering, like, why are you doing it? Why do you do it that way? And then he'd write down, you know, their answers. It's basically as a way to provide his own education into the business. So it says, by that point, actor, by that point Ralph Graves had spent the $40,000 and would ask for another $40,000 more before he had finished Hughes' first film. It was titled Swell Hogan. When Hughes screened the finished picture, he discovered that however wonderful an actor Graves may have been, he had little talent as a director. Swell Hogan was said to have been such an embarrassment that Hughes ordered the projector, projectionist to burn the only prints and to never

• 33:34David Senra?

  mention its contents to anyone. Hughes was $80,000 poorer, but a whole lot wiser. He would not make the same mistake on film number two. Um, so after the success, he said Hughes was no longer as interested in the money, in the money hungry movie business. He had learned his lesson and might not have ever made another film if it had not been for a call from his drunken uncle Rupert. He, his uncle was lashing out at his nephew. It took only his uncle's arrogant advice to quit the business to persuade Hughes that he had to prove him wrong. So he jumps back into the business just out of, you know, kind of ego or just saying, hey, you know, I can do, like, I can actually be

• 34:15David Senra?

  successful at this. Even, it didn't sound like he was actually motivated internally to do so, though.

• 34:22David Senra?

  So he actually, his next film is widely successful. The film was budgeted a hundred and fifty thousand and it made Hughes over seventy-five thousand dollars in profit. And again, that's seventy-five thousand dollars in nineteen twenty-seven dollars. The next, the next film was even more successful. The film made six hundred and fourteen grand in profit. It subsequently won a Best Director at the first Oscars. And more than just smiling, Hughes was crowing. Particularly when he thought of his smug Uncle Rupert, who had neither an Oscar to his credit nor the six hundred grand in his pocket. Okay, so that's his start in the movie business and then we're gonna see how does he become an aviator, which is where he's most widely known as.

• 35:05David Senra?

  And said, "On May twenty-first, nineteen twenty-seven, Charles Lindbergh successfully piloted the first non-stop solo transatlantic flight in his single-engine plane. It was a flight that captivated and envious Hughes, who eagerly sought details of the journey and forced him to squarely face his last goal. He was eager to return to the sky and hired a pilot to teach him fly. It was then, in mid-nineteen twenty-seven, that Howard Hughes, at twenty-one years old, knew he was living his dream." Okay, so this one, this, uh, two sentences actually gives you a good idea of look into it, not only his personality, but his, his management style. "The world of Howard Hughes was one of his own creation. Every person, every costume, every scrape of scene decoration,

• 35:50David Senra?

  all became his personal domain. And with an eye to detail that frustrated as it impressed, he began to take control." So, uh, what they're talking about is a lot of, he'd hire, you know, he'd just be financing these films and hire a director. And then inevitably, he'd show up and tell the director how to do his job. And they'd quit constantly, one after another, one after another. And so, um, this is an example of that. "Hughes suggested. Hughes needled. Hughes overruled to the point that on September thirtieth, Reed, which was the director on this movie, threw up his hands and shouted the immortal words. 'If you know so much about it, why don't you direct the damn thing yourself?'" That was all Howard Hughes needed to hear. He accepted the challenge.

• 36:34David Senra?

  Okay, so now I want to jump to...

• 36:38David Senra?

  He's got a series of plane crashes.

• 36:43David Senra?

  I think total four. And this is the first one. So it says against the... He's shooting the film that's going to be Hell's Angels. And it actually winds up being a hugely successful film, one of the most successful productions ever made. But it's about like dogfights between the Germans and British in World War I. And he hires a bunch of stunt pilots and says, "Hey, I'm gonna, you know, I can do that too." So it says, "Against the advice of his crew, he leaped into a small scout plane and took off to join his stunt pilots in the air. As the cameras rolled, Hughes' plane went into a sudden tailspin and shot towards the ground. Hughes was only beginning to bring the plane up from its free fall when it slammed into the ground.

• 37:24David Senra?

  Trapped inside the cockpit, he was pulled to safety by his crew and rushed to a hospital, where he was in a coma with a crushed cheekbone and numerous lacerations."

• 37:36David Senra?

  So this is, he's still married to Ella at the time. And so she's in Houston, but she hears about the plane crashes, she rushes to LA, and this is more of his personality. "She immediately returned to Los Angeles, only to be berated by her husband for overreacting to the situation. She pleaded with him to cut his work schedule and hire another director for Hell's Angels. It was a suggestion that impacted their marriage in the most fundamental way. Hughes considered Hell's Angels to be his baby. To suggest abandoning the project was a huge misjudgment on Ella's part. The couple moved to opposite corners of the ring of their marriage and prepared for a fight." So that leads to a divorce.

• 38:19David Senra?

  And that's also like, I would say, a fundamental personality trait of his. Anytime somebody tried to tell him what to do, he would just basically eliminate them from his life, including employees, where he'd get a letter from like a director saying, "Hey, I don't want you interfering." Then the director would hear back a few hours later, he's fired. People running huge, successful companies like this company that he found, Hughes Aircraft, which at its peak was doing like $11 billion a year in revenue. And, you know, Hughes would take, he would take personnel from the aircraft company, who at the time was building planes and equipment for the US military during World War II.

• 39:02David Senra?

  And he would take them without telling anybody and have them work on like a movie he was doing. And so the guy running the company was like, "Hey, you know, you can't do this." And Hughes fired him. Like, there was no like discussion with him, which again is just really not smart.

• 39:17David Senra?

  So two personality traits, both simplified in two different sentences. Hughes had learned from his father that every man has his price. So one of Hughes' most famous quotes is that, "Every man has his price. If that wasn't true, men like me wouldn't be able to exist." And this is another example of, okay, like, you know, this is a fundamental, anytime you have centralized power, that centralized power has the ability to be bribed or to be influenced, right? Well, what Hughes is saying here, the reason I'm not going to talk too much about the aircraft company in this podcast is because a lot of it is crony capitalism. And I think that it needs to be called out, because I think the freedom to start your

• 40:00David Senra?

  own company, to do your own thing, is very important to protect. And I think then that's fundamental to like a capitalist, free society, right? But when you see these examples of crony capitalism that a lot of people will point to as capitalism, it gives the rest of us a bad name and could in the future impede our freedom to create the products we want. So this is not some behavior. And what I mean by that is like, his entire life, Howard Hughes was bribing politicians, Democrat and Republican alike. He would bribe, for example, he was awarded tons of contracts based on bribing FDR's son. He'd give him tons of money, he'd send three women to his hotel room every night, basically

• 40:45David Senra?

  sending them prostitutes. He would give loans to like Richard Nixon's brother to start a company. When he has a fight with Senator Owen Brewster over like basically where hey, we gave you forty million dollars. You haven't given us a plane. What the hell happened to the money? And you know Owen Brewster wasn't a good guy in his own right. He was getting paid off by Juan Tripp, who was the CEO of Pan Am at the time. But he winds up getting not only did he defeat Owen Brewster, which I'll talk about in a little bit, but he then makes sure that he doesn't get reelected by just dumping tons and tons of money into his opponent. So his entire life, like you know, that building Hughes Aircraft where you're just basically bribing politicians

• 41:30David Senra?

  and they're accepting money and they do this constantly. Like it happens where Hughes tries to shield a bunch of money from for tax purposes. So he starts this Hughes Medical Institute, but it's like it's a sham company. And the IRS finds out this sham. He's like, hey, you're just doing this. You're putting assets from Hughes to a company, which is throwing off all these profits. You're putting it into this quote unquote foundation that's not actually doing anything. Or like the amount they actually dedicate to medical research is like a tiny percent, like maybe like less than one percent kind of thing. And the IRS is now going after him for, for, um, for, you know, basically evading taxes. And what does he do? He pays off the vice president at the time, which I can't remember who it was.

• 42:12David Senra?

  And suddenly the IRS reverses his decision. So that's the kind of stuff like I'm not naive. I understand that that's happened. It happens today. It'll happen in the future. It'll happen. It's happened in human history. I'm just saying that that kind of stuff for like, for people that entrepreneurship, the freedom to do like what you want to do and to build the products that, like that needs to be called out because if not like that, this constant crony capitalism is, you know, could impede our ability to do what we want to for normal entrepreneurs, people that are, you know, that are actually building products that people want, not the ones that are bribing government officials or this person's sister, like, you know, that that kind of stuff. So it's just,

• 42:54David Senra?

  and he was open about it. I mean, it's in his own handwriting, in his notes. You're constantly talking about, let's buy this guy off. Let's buy this guy off when he's living later on in Las Vegas. And, you know, he's super paranoid about germs. The US government starts, um, starts doing nuclear testing, uh, like, uh, in Nevada, but not in Vegas. And so Hughes is convinced that those particles, his nuclear particles are gonna kill him, even though he's, at the time, he's, he's hauled off in a, in a penthouse that he doesn't leave for several years and never opens the blinds for like years.

• 43:27David Senra?

  And he says in, in, in his own written documentation that he'll, he'll spend every single bit of his money so he can control the White House so they can, then the American government can stop doing testing near him. So he was very much in his DNA, just like, okay, whatever, I'll get what I want by bribing people. And I think like the point of this podcast is like, no, let's focus on the, like, build a product that people want and then you, you get success through that. I don't like seeing this, this other, this other bullshit.

• 43:54David Senra?

  Even though, again, like, unfortunately, it's, it is a part of, of humanity. And then the, the next page, um, and I'll get more into that too, you'll see a little bit more details, but it was just, you know, it's not. It's not, I don't think it's right. So, um. The next page, it talks about, you know, his modus operandi, it says, "It was typical Hughes when it came to intrigue, a complex plan where simplicity would have better served the purpose." And that's, he, like, you know how we've been talking about, um, like, the clarity of mind of Steve Jobs? Hughes is the exact opposite, like, he made things way harder and way more difficult.

• 44:35David Senra?

  And again, like, I have no idea if this is who he was or who, what's responsible, whether it's mental illness or not, but it was, it's very, like, I would, I would consider his behavior like schizophrenic. It just didn't make any sense. It was just, it was decisions based on like a mind, I think, seeped in paranoia. Okay, so before we get there, his first huge success, um, this is the, uh, at, at the premiere of.

• 45:04David Senra?

  So this is the evening in the film where a triumph for Hughes and he would later remember it as the best night of his life. At 24, he had completed the most expensive film ever made in Hollywood without any help from a studio. He had orchestrated a premiere event that would never again be equaled in its complexity or effect and he had captured the love of a woman who was a major star in Hollywood and it had done it all on his own terms. So this is like the kind of thing which I would have wished to see more of Hughes. Like, he was able to make pictures that were, you know, people loved, the audience adored, they made money. That's completely different than paying off the governments. You get contracts

• 45:42David Senra?

  to build planes at inflated prices. But, he just kinda got, he soured on Hollywood later in his life and, uh, eventually he was, became the first individual to ever own a, uh, a Hollywood studio outright, but he just, kinda just, uh, he just started, I guess got distracted. He starts buying up land and hotels and all these other businesses which are not as unique nor profitable as running, you know, if you have the ability to make films. And he certainly did. He made a ton of money in, in the, in the theater business. Um, okay, so, he, this is an example of a success of compulsive disorder and I think caused a lot of, uh,

• 46:25David Senra?

  health problems. They talked about, like, if you look at pictures from Howard Hughes, and again, some of this is because, uh, he got addicted to painkillers from all these plane, plane, plane crashes, but he exacerbated the problem by working non-stop, not resting, not understanding the need for sleep. He'd work for like 48 hours a time, not eat, not sleep, very erratic behavior. And, uh, this is, so anyways, my point being is like, you can see him at, let's say, 30 years old, see a picture of him, and then see a picture again at 40 years old and it looks like, like he's like, uh, um, the only thing I would say is like, uh, there's a show that was really popular, like, you know, probably five or 10 years ago, Breaking Bad, and it was about like meth, right? And so I started seeing a lot of these like, public service announcements or advertisements and it would

• 47:10David Senra?

  show you like what you're, what you looked like before meth and what you looked like after. And you know, you, a person would basically age twenty or thirty years in a matter of a few, uh, like, you know, in a very short time span. That's what I would say, like, he, maybe not, it wasn't that dramatic with Howard Hughes, but he did not, those ten years of his life, what was occurring during that, like, had him, he just looked a lot older. He didn't look, at thirty, he looked young and vibrant. At forty, he looked decaying and old. Um, and it's shocking to me that he was able to survive another thirty years after that. But anyways, we're gonna hear about, uh, how he worked. Hughes was working at a pace unmatched by even the major studios. At one point in nineteen, in early nineteen thirty-one, he had formed four films in various stages of production,

• 47:54David Senra?

  and insisted on producing each one himself. Driven by his need to become the most famous producer of moving pictures, he was unwilling to delegate responsibility, thus ensuring that the shotgun of glory not miss its mark. So what he's talking about is, um, he claimed not to like attention, but he loved adulation from other people, and to the point where like another business person, there could be a, like, he would, he would be induced into a state of rage. Let's say somebody else was written about in the newspapers in a fawning manner that he was used to, to having. He would, like, lash out, start throwing things, start getting really mad at the people around him, and trying to find ways to, like, sabotage another person, which is just insane behavior.

• 48:37David Senra?

  Now, this was something I, I came across that was not in the first book I read on Howard Hughes, and I didn't know that he basically went broke. Um, so it says Hughes ended nineteen thirty-two, so remember, in nineteen thirty-one, he's spending all this money, and all that money's coming from the Hughes Tool Company profits. And he's doing all this, all these, um, pictures at once, he's doing all the work for himself. So it says Hughes ended, in the following next year, says Hughes ended nineteen thirty-two facing an even bigger devastation. He was out of money, totally broke, moreover, he was deeply in debt.

• 49:11David Senra?

  So there was a bust in the oil industry and Hughes Tool Company started, it wasn't profitable anymore, which is very, it comes back out of this and we're going to see that here in a minute. But let me just tell you like how he does the opposite of what, what I would recommend, not even me, but most of the entrepreneurs that we cover on this podcast about like the importance of frugality, of watching your expenses, of making sure that you're spending money in ways that make sense. And over the long term, we understand that most companies are incapable of doing so, which is why most of them go out of business eventually. Whether usually after the founder leaves or whatever the case happens. So Hughes is not paying attention. And even though Hughes Tool Company was making less money and eventually not becoming unprofitable,

• 49:53David Senra?

  he was spending $250,000 a week at this time. And this is going on at the beginning of Great Depression where you have people that can't even feed their families. And he's buying like, you know, he buys a house for this woman, for a girl he wants to, to, to date. He spent $50,000 on carpets. He spent $135,000 on furniture. He buys two new Rolls Royces.

• 50:20David Senra?

  He turned down $10,000 to help fund the Los Angeles Public Library, but spent $20,000 on a jewelry for this, some woman that he wanted to date.

• 50:31David Senra?

  He's just very, he's the opposite of frugal. So I don't, I don't, I don't remember ever reading that. So I was, I was fascinated. And then this is the result of what happened. I didn't know he actually went and got a job. So this is by 1932, thanks to the Great Depression, the US economy had hit rock bottom and banks were folding up like, banks were folding up. Hughes Tool Company had failed to generate a profit for the first time in its history and had been forced to lay off employees. Having never paid any attention to business, Howard Hughes knew nothing of the declining oil market or bankruptcies in Texas. It did get his attention however, when Noah Dietrich arrived at the, at his house, sat him down in the kitchen and told him the money cupboard was bare. So Noah Dietrich's in charge of running all of the most profitable.

• 51:16David Senra?

  Parts of the Hughes Empire. It says, "Since Hughes never carried cash and charged everything he bought to Hughes Tools, at first he did not realize the impact this news would have on his life. While the rest of America was having trouble placing food on the table, Hughes felt the effect only when he decided to buy a new plane and was told that he needed to pay for his purchase with cash. It was a foreign concept, one that took some getting used to." And so, this is, you're gonna see, you're gonna see the standard, you know, MO for Hughes. It says, "When Dietrich delivered the news that Hughes was attempting to spend money he no longer had, he reacted in typical fashion. Rather than acknowledge the situation and make an effort to economize, Hughes sent Dietrich

• 51:59David Senra?

  to live in Houston, to find out why those fellows," and this is a quote from Hughes, "find out why those fellows are running my company into the goddamn ground. He took the opportunity to back away from the declining film business, close his company offices, sever his contract with stars and directors, and refuse to comment to the press. For a man whose entire persona was linked to his unbelievable wealth, it was a humiliating circumstance." So this is the shocking part. This is his employment with American Airlines, which is his sole time in Hughes' life where he earned a salaried income. "He had shocked pilots and passengers alike when it was discovered he was working as a copilot with American Airlines at the wage of $250 per month.

• 52:41David Senra?

  Had the airline not mishandled the processing of his paperwork, he claimed he would have kept the job." That's probably a lie, but this is so weird, like, I wish the company, I couldn't find anything else about this, but I wish the book went into more detail, because like, when did he start? Like, how, I wanna know like, how this happened? How is this guy who was really, really famous for being wealthy, he also signed up under like, a false identity, which he does a lot throughout his life? I don't know, I just, it's, this is just one paragraph in the book, and then the author moves on, I'm like, wait a minute, this could be an entire, like, chapter here, I want more details. Unfortunately, I don't have them for you. Okay, so, Dietrich goes down to Houston, starts to reinvest in the company, the oil

• 53:25David Senra?

  business at the same time, starts...

• 53:29David Senra?

  Overall, like the industry starts to rebound. But there was a bizarre twist that actually got Hughes Tools back to profitability. And we see this a lot around the prohibition era. There's a lot of companies that benefited from the repeal of prohibition and, you know, built entire empires, basically, off of selling alcohol at extremely high, at high margins. And Hughes Tool Company was one of them. And I didn't know that either. I found this fascinating. So it says, "Dietrich managed to turn around the Houston plant, but through slightly unconventional means. With the end of prohibition in 1933," they're naming this guy that was running Hughes Tool in Houston.

• 54:12David Senra?

  His name's Colonel Kudel. Colonel Kudel had opened the Gulf Brewing Company inside part of the Tool Company in an effort to offset the business falloff from the Depression. So they're waiting for the oil industry to rebound, so they're selling booze. "With Dietrich's arrival in Texas, the struggling brewery took on new life. His taste buds leading the way to a celebrated beer called Grand Prize, although it had not won any. With the success of his beer and a turnaround underway in the oil business, Hughes Tool returned to profitability." And so again, this had nothing really to do with Howard Hughes. He didn't have any part in it.

• 54:54David Senra?

  He occupies himself flying, playing golf, thinking about different things to do. And now this is his second plane crash. He's trying to, he wants to capture the world record for the fastest flight speed. So this is, "On his final pass, he had just banked west when his engine stopped, the mighty motor unforgiving without fuel. Plummeting to earth at slightly over 180 miles per hour, Hughes skimmed a fence and slid to a rather bumpy stop in a beet field. Hughes hoisted himself out of the cockpit and leaned against his damaged plane, waiting for his rescuers. Only then did he learn that he had beaten the old record with an average speed of 352 miles per hour. His only comment: It'll go faster."

• 55:44David Senra?

  So he wants to beat, I think it's Lindbergh who has the, uh, this is a while later, who has the record for the fastest transatlantic flight, or flight, I'm sorry, the fastest flight across the world. This is where it makes him like super, super famous. But I found something interesting in the, so you know, you take off from New York and you're going, you're heading east and you have to stop to refuel a bunch of times. And this, well, let me just read it to you. "The next leg of the journey took Hughes and his crew over Germany, where Adolf Hitler had made it clear that the plane was not welcome. The Nazi government was concerned about the

• 56:25David Senra?

  potential for spying and was arming itself for war. A compromise was reached when Hughes agreed to fly at 12,000 feet, well above the range that any spying could effectively be carried out. Nevertheless, the Lockheed, the Lockheed, which is the plane he was flying, was tracked as across the country by Luftwaffe, Luftwaffe escorts, which is the German army at the time, military. I just pulled that part out because it just shows that Adolf Hitler was an asshole."

• 56:57David Senra?

  Okay, so he's, I'm gonna skip over most of the details of the flight because we know the outcome. This one sentence is a good summary. "He was no longer Howard Hughes. He was in Amer-, he was America's hero. It was his zenith. It would become his bane. And this is when he becomes one of the most famous people on the planet." So this is another example we see around this time. There's a lot of fortunes built around war, especially World War II in America. And this is the impact the war has on Hughes Tool Company. "With the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Hughes' business fortunes improved enormously. There was a drastic need for oil to, for oil to fuel tanks and planes, and with it, an expansion in production at Hughes Tool in Houston, which still controlled

• 57:41David Senra?

  a virtual monopoly on drilling bits. Profits from the business had grown dramatically from the shock of the Depression." Hughes Tool had over 200 versions, uh, 200 versions and sizes of the bit in its catalog. So that's the time where I was telling you that in the 1940s, they were making about 40 million.

• 58:04David Senra?

  They made like 400, 385 million or something like that in eight years. Which is an insane amount of money when you, when you factor in like what actually, the value of it in today's terms. Okay, so this is a glimpse into his life at 36 years old. It's also, to give you some context, Hugh, he founded Hughes Aircraft Company. Again, he doesn't really run it. It's hugely successful, but to the degree that I would say that he's responsible for the success in the sense is the degree to which he bribed officials to get preferential treatment. But that doesn't take away from the engineers that worked there and they actually built amazing technology. This is what I was talking about at the beginning where there's hardly a gap between the mythology of Howard Hughes and based on the books and the writings that I've read

• 58:49David Senra?

  and the actual reality of Howard Hughes. Yes, he took extreme risks as an aviator, but, and he had a lot of ideas about product development, but the actual work and the experimentation was done by, you know, a lot of other people. And so he's, um, he's trying to develop this thing at this, this, this new plane called the D2.

• 59:11David Senra?

  But during this time, well, let me just read it to you. "In the aftermath of his bout with venereal disease, Hughes dedicated himself to proving the D2 was the plane of the future." So what they're talking about is he caught syphilis from several actresses that he, that he was lovers with. So, "He worked tirelessly refining lines and its aerodynamics before taking the plane for several test flights over a dry lake bed in Palm Springs, only to rework the engine's thrust and flaps. Each night, he returned back home merely long enough to have his evening meal with Faith," this is some young star that he was living with, "before sending her home to her parents and then heading to the studio to attempt to edit The Outlaw.

• 59:54David Senra?

  It was a schedule that left little time for socializing, and for most of 1941, Hughes stepped outside the spotlight of eccentricity while tumbling further into its depths. At times caught up in the editing process, he worked 48 hours straight without sleeping or eating, leaving the darkened basement of the office," this is where he was doing editing, "his eyes squinting at the harsh reality that was Hollywood. With the news that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and America was at war, his workday lengthened, if that was possible for somebody who was already working 24 hours a day."

• 1:00:31David Senra?

  And there's some advancements, they actually came up with some good ideas. Says he redirected his energy to creating a flexible ammunition line for fighter planes whose guns came equipped with inadequately small boxes to hold bullets. He formed an armament division of Hughes Tool and he hired 500 employees to manufacture more than a million feet of the flexible shoot, the bases of which are still in use today. This is what I mean when I was talking about at the beginning of the podcast where it's like, you can study this guy and you don't know who he is, you know? Where, listen, he had a company that he didn't have to run. He could have easily just collected millions and millions of dollars all day, did nothing else. He could have been, you know, dating actresses and playing golf all day.

• 1:01:14David Senra?

  He did reinvest those profits into real technology and like, there is like a real credit that he did that, he didn't have to do it. But at the same time, like, I don't know how much of he did it because he, like, it seemed like he wanted to develop the technology, but he also did it to also personally profit. And he personally profited, um, you know, in a way that gave him an unfair advantage. And that was just because he had more money than the other company, so he could bribe more people. Um, okay, so that's why he's just, he's just really confusing figure to me. Like, now I've read, let's see, over, between this book and the last book, over a thousand pages and I'm just like scratching my head, like, who is this, this guy? Okay, so this is interesting. Um, we always talk about the idea that, uh, books are the original hyperlinks.

• 1:01:59David Senra?

  So I just ordered another book on this guy, cause he's insane. I've never heard of him before, but he's a, he's a huge character. There's this guy named Henry Caesar. And the, uh, the birth of the idea for Hercules. So Hercules is this plane that, uh, Howard Hughes collects a lot of money from the government to make and it's basically saying, hey, how can we make the largest plane in the world? Because all of our boats, like our, uh, are getting, like, uh, the aircraft carriers and stuff, where they're sending heavy machinery with boat over to fight the war in Europe. But they're getting, they're losing a ton of equipment and a ton of money because they're getting shot, uh, they're getting torpedoed. So they're like, hey, why don't we, um, Henry and Howard wind up doing a partnership and they're like, why don't we build the world's biggest plane and we just fly over the Atlantic?

• 1:02:44David Senra?

  So, and that would basically, uh, solve our problem. So let me tell you about, more about this Henry Kaiser guy. As World War II deepened, the American fighting force became casualties to the German, became casualties to German and Japanese. There was an ever-increasing demand for military ships and planes to reinforce the dwindling US supply. Henry J. Kaiser, a one-time builder of roads and dams, revolutionized the shipbuilding industry with an assembly line that was capable of building an entire military vessel in four and a half days. Upon learning that his ships were sitting targets for enemy submarines, he concocted a concept of a flying cargo ship that would be able to transport men and supplies across the Atlantic in the sky where no submarines could shoot them down.

• 1:03:27David Senra?

  Had someone else suggested such a concept, it is doubtful that anyone would have listened. Coming from the mouth of Kaiser, however, made it sound totally feasible. So, little background of, I love this, this is one of my, I want to, like, I collected a lot of quotes, like I've told you before, and so I put this also where, store the rest of my quotes in my phone, but it says, Kaiser, a man who coined the quotation, "Trouble is only an opportunity in work clothes." I love that perspective, when you think about building anything. Trouble is only an opportunity in work clothes. Put his organization into seeking the most concentrated source of aeronautical engineering manpower.

• 1:04:09David Senra?

  While companies like Lockheed, Boeing, and Douglas had the experience, they were operating at peak capacity for the war effort. Hughes Aircraft, on the other hand, had excess engineers, all devoted to developing the D-2, that plane that Howard Hughes says is the future. While Kaiser had never met Hughes personally, he was well aware of his aviation accomplishments and placed a call to his Aircraft Division, and now you're going to see some bizarre intricacies into the Hughes organization. He placed a call to his Aircraft Division, his Tool Company, and his Main Street Headquarters in an effort to speak with him directly. When days evaporated into weeks, Hughes failed to return his calls. Kaiser became outraged with both Dietrich, Noah Dietrich, and Henley, Henley is Howard's personal secretary.

• 1:04:54David Senra?

  Stressing it was, stressing it was their patriotic duty to locate a man they claimed checked in with his office infrequently at best. While Kaiser was putting the pressure on the Hughes organization to produce its boss, the man himself, meaning Hughes, was cloistered in San Francisco battling pneumonia.

• 1:05:12David Senra?

  He had gone to the Bay Area to finish working on the final edit of the film The Outlaw. After eighteen months of work, he had only reduced the film down to four hours and sixteen minutes, still double its presentation length. The long hours and infrequent eating schedule had left his body depleted and ripe for the infection that finally put him in a San Francisco hospital. They actually thought he was gonna die several times because of what I talked about earlier. He didn't take care of himself, he wouldn't sleep, wouldn't eat. He'd catch these, there were several times where he was on quote-unquote "his deathbed." Um, before I continue, because this is gonna be hilarious when Kaiser actually finds him, um, I just wanna tell you a little bit about Kaiser, cuz this guy seems insane. In a good way. Henry Kaiser organized construction companies to build a Hoover, uh, the Hoover, Grand Coulee, and Bonneville dams, as well as the San Francisco-Oakland, uh, bridge.

• 1:05:56David Senra?

  During World War II, he ran seven shipyards that used assembly line production to build fourteen-hundred ships for the US. By his death in nineteen sixty-seven, he had founded over a hundred companies, including Kaiser Aluminum, Kaiser Gypsum, Kaiser Fraser Automobiles, Kaiser Hospitals, and the Hawaiian Village Resort, which he sold in nineteen sixty-one to the Hilton Corporation for twenty-one million dollars. Alright. So now Kaiser finds Hughes. He says Kaiser located him and made an appointment to meet the aviation legend. "When the sixty-year-old Kaiser strolled briskly into Hughes' suite at the Fairmont, the millionaire was only dressed, was dressed in his only suit and was lying on the living room sofa, groaning.

• 1:06:37David Senra?

  Seeing the ailing Hughes did not deflate his spirit, as Kaiser lifted both hands and boomed, 'Get up, man, we got a war to win.'" For once, Hughes was not so easy to convince, telling Kaiser, who had promised the government delivery of the first flying boat in ten months, that he was crazy. So he's saying, "We can't do this in ten months." Or at the very least overly optimistic. After all, Hughes had spent three years developing the D-2 and was still not in production with the plane. Now you can see why, later on, a few years later, the government comes after Hughes for, for wasting their money. Either Kaiser's enthusiasm was contagious, or Hughes was too sick to resist. Whatever the reason, the headlines of newspapers across the country in 1942 screamed the news

• 1:07:18David Senra?

  that Kaiser and Hughes had formed an alliance to build 500 of the giant airplanes in what he labeled "the most ambitious aviation program the world has ever known." Alright, so skipping ahead, he had a live-in girlfriend called Faith. And she has a description in her diary about Howard Hughes that I want to read to you. "There is a strange quirk in Howard, stranger than all of his other peculiarities. Once he has become involved with a project or a person, he cannot let them get away from his control. Once owning something, he has to own it for always. And this is so strong in him, I believe it is unconscious. It is so much part of his presence that it is like his brown-black eyes, his high-pitched

• 1:08:03David Senra?

  voice. It is him. And it is the most self-destroying element of his character."

• 1:08:15David Senra?

  Okay, so this is a pretty crazy...this is his third plane crash, and this is how it changed him. This is...now he's gonna start his...beginning of his descent into darkness.

• 1:08:26David Senra?

  "There was nothing extraordinary about the flight. After circling Hoover Dam three times, Von Rosenberg..." He's on a plane with a bunch of regulators from the Civil Aeronautics Administration. And Von Rosenberg's one of them. "Von Rosenberg instructed Hughes to land the plane in a section of the massive man-made lake known as Vegas Wash. It was a simple landing on a placid lake. As the Sirovsky..." Which is...or Sirkowski. Circo...I don't know how to pronounce it, it's the name of the plane. Let's just say it's a plane. "As the plane hit the water, Hughes skimmed its surface before the plane suddenly bucked in pitch right, its wings slamming into water. The right-engine's propeller cracked in two on impact and sliced its way through the cockpit, hacking a hole in the fuselage which began to flood.

• 1:09:12David Senra?

  Hughes was stunned in his seat as the frigid mountain water hit his legs and chest. Von Rosenberg felt this flash of pain and then a numbing sensation cleansed his body as he screamed to Hughes to open the escape hatch. 'Klein, Klein!' Von Rosenberg shouted as he slid down the slide of the plane into the water." He's talking about Kiko Klein, which is another person on board. Blandfield, as another gunner aboard, was gripping at the edge of the plane with his left hand, his right arm supporting Felt, Felt's mechanic. Part of the mechanic's head had been severed off by the propeller blade. Blood pulsed from the gaping wound and began to flow unabated into the lake.

• 1:09:57David Senra?

  Kiko Klein had disappeared with his seat and an entire section of the fuselage into the depths of the lake. In the hospital later that afternoon, the four remaining crew members were separated. Von Rosenberg had suffered a broken back and spent the next three months in a full-body cast. Blandford and Hughes had only suffered cuts and scrapes and were released later that same afternoon. Felt died within two hours of massive brain damage and blood loss, and Klein's body was never recovered. When Hughes returned to Bel Air following the deadly accident, he was a changed man. Reminded again of his own mortality, he was a reptile shedding its skin, stripping away memories of the past or at least material possessions attached to them.

• 1:10:38David Senra?

  So he starts burning all of his possessions. And Faith, his girlfriend at the time, attempted to convince Hughes to save at least one letter from his father and mother, but to no avail. Those letters in particular, he made certain, were completely burned. And she writes in her diary, "There was nothing left from his past, not even memories." So after this, Noah Dietrich talks about the fundamental changes he observed in Howard. He says, "Noah would later testify that Hughes was showing the first signs of enormous strain. He began to haunt the empty hangars at Hughes Aircraft long after his employees had punched out for the evening. Night watchmen clocked his activities as he roamed the various research divisions, using

• 1:11:23David Senra?

  a flashlight to eliminate blueprints for plane designs and developments. He would often spend hours simply staring at the D-2, a plane that had been overshadowed by the rush to construct the Hercules," which are these big seaplanes that him and Kaiser do together. "Hughes would talk to himself as he rubbed his fingers over the skin of the high-speed bomber."

• 1:11:44David Senra?

  And he has a complete breakdown here. Says the meticulous perfectionist began to repeat himself, giving an instruction three, four, five times in the course of the same minute. His employees were reluctant to criticize their boss and allowed his unusual behavior to continue. Only Noah Dietrich felt confident enough to challenge Hughes. More than challenged, he urged him to seek immediate medical help. "I think you ought to see a doctor," Dietrich recommended. "I made a tally on a pad. You repeated the same sentence thirty-three times. You've been repeating yourself a great deal lately." When Dr. Vern Mason took Hughes' call, he instantly recognized the symptoms of a nervous breakdown. His advice took the form of an edict.

• 1:12:25David Senra?

  "Stop work and take a vacation, or your body will do it without you." Howard Hughes was petrified when he returned the telephone receiver to its cradle. His hands trembled. He slipped them between his knees and allowed his head to drop. Still, his hands trembled, joined now by a flood of tears. His mind raced with details. Plane specifications, soundtrack scores, movie deals, the perfume of Ava Gardner, the misty green eyes of Faith D'Amengrue, his unfinished will, thirty-eight hundred employees, faces, names, figures, details, details, details. When Hughes opened his eyes, he discovered that he'd fallen asleep. Hours had passed, his shirt was damp with nervous perspiration.

• 1:13:09David Senra?

  He was cold, yet he felt he had a fever. He wanted to hide, but nowhere to run. He only knew he had to try. Telephoning Noah Dietrich, he confirmed his assistant's suspicions and informed him that he was taking some time off. "I don't want you trying to find me either," Hughes warned. And with that, Howard Hughes disappeared into the night. For the next eleven months, Hughes never contacted his office and had no interaction with any of his companies.

• 1:13:35David Senra?

  So when he does come back, this is when they're developing like a fast spy plane and he wants to test it. This is his fourth plane crash and the worst one. And from here on in, he becomes a codeine addict. The XF-11 was traveling at 155 miles per hour when it smashed into the home of dentist Jules Zimmerman in Beverly Hills, shearing off the top half onto the lawn. Seconds later, the plane's right wing sliced through the upstairs bedrooms of actress Rosemary DeCamp, who was in the room with her husband, John. The plane continued its rampage through the DeCamp garage, plowed into a row of trees, lining their neighbor's yard, before finally exploding and bursting into flames. The impact of the explosion was so great that it sent one of the plane's two engines

• 1:14:17David Senra?

  flying 60 feet into the air. Flames shot 100 feet in the air. Marine Sergeant William Lloyd Durkin, who was visiting his son, James, in the neighborhood, raced to the edge of the burning XF-11, Justice Hughes pushed his way out of the cockpit, stumbled onto the wing and fell to the ground. Duncan rolled Hughes away from the intense heats and flames and dragged the pilot out of danger. He's taken to the hospital, he says, "A lung punctured in six places, eight broken ribs, a broken left shoulder, third-degree burns on the left hand, a severe gash on the left side of his head, and a broken nose." And the after-effect, he says, "Morphine injections were administered at the first sign of discomfort."

• 1:15:00David Senra?

  And this is where he has now, kind of very similar to, I think, what like Michael Jackson, I think maybe even Prince had as well, they have like these private doctors that'll just dole out copious amounts of drugs to them. So from here on in, he has an entire, basically, private drug dealer in the form of doctors. So something else that happens after this is, this is when Senator Owen Brewster... They're looking into it like, "Hey, we've spent, you know, tons and tons of millions of money. Forty million on this, seven million over here, tons of government money. Like, where is the stuff? The war is over at this point. Like, you never delivered the planes where you needed it for the war. What happened?" And so, they start to, um, they try to subpoena him, so he has to come in and testify.

• 1:15:43David Senra?

  And he does this huge cat and mouse thing for a long time, but the author makes this, um, sentence that I thought was important. "The news of the attempted service," meaning serving him with subpoena, "sent him into hiding, moving from house to house in a cat and mouse game to escape a frightening tight, uh, to escape a tightening dragnet, rather. The experience, while exciting on the surface, would leave a deep psychological impact that would affect his behavior for the remainder of his life."

• 1:16:08David Senra?

  Um, and so, he's, he's moving around with actress Jean Peters, who he winds up marrying, but she's there and she's describing what's happening. So, uh, they can't find Howard Hughes, but they can subpoena other people in his organization, so they start these, uh, these, um, hearings in Congress, and, and Hughes is listening on, uh, the radio, and this is just bizarre behavior, and I kinda laughed, honestly. It says, "Jean Peters described Hughes' reaction to Ferguson's announcement as something," basically, he's saying, "Hey, we're gonna find him, and we're gonna, and we're gonna make him come in here." And he says, "Jean Peters described Hughes' reaction to Ferguson's announcement as something close to a Highland jig, as the aviator began to dance around the room chanting, 'You gotta catch me first, shit-ass.'" "Shit-ass" being his newly acquired curse phrase. "You've gotta catch me first."

• 1:16:54David Senra?

  So, just, I just, I just, uh, in my, in my mind, I just picture this, this guy who's, you know, on drugs at the time, recuperating from an, uh, from a, uh, a disastrous plane crash, in like his pajamas, doing this Highland jig, and just calling people shit-ass. So, I don't know why I found that funny. It just was to me.

• 1:17:16David Senra?

  Okay, so, this is something, this is an interesting, you know, because you remember, Howard Hughes is a great celebrity at this time. And this is kind of an insight into human nature where, from what I'm reading, like, he did waste a lot of money, of the government's money. But, he was so beloved, that he was able to use like, his celebrity, and like, I think there is a stream of, for most, compared to most countries, like, a stream of rugged individualism, you know, that is, at least in our mythology and our culture, whatever you want to call it. Where, he was widely cheered for, basically, taking on the government.

• 1:17:57David Senra?

  As like, a David and Goliath kind of clash, even though, David in this sense has billions and billions of dollars, but, well, I'll just tell you how this went. Ferguson's purpose was presumably to discover what the government had bought with its forty-two million dollars in cash. By the time he got it to answer, the question had been left twisting in the wind so long that it no longer resembled an investigation of Hughes, but rather, an investigation of the Senate itself. And so, before this, Hughes had met, this is what I'm talking about, the government corruption that was rampant, Hughes had met with Brewster, the guy that started this whole, this whole, like, look into his, like, what he did with the money, because Brewster received a hell of a lot of money from Pan Am.

• 1:18:42David Senra?

  Pan Am had, basically, a government monopoly on transatlantic rights. At this time, Hughes had a controlling interest in this, this other airline called TWA, and he started to compete, want to compete with Juan Trip, which is the CEO of Pan Am at the time. And Hughes met with him, and Brewster said, "Hey, if you just agree to merge TWA with Pan Am, I'll just drop this other thing." So, Hughes is like, you know, "You're squeezing me here, you're doing this because of corruption." Now, that part seems to be true, but it's also true that he wasted a lot of money. So, no one's like, an angel in this situation, right? But he goes, "This is Hughes." Now, he flies to Washington and agrees to take part in this, these hearings.

• 1:19:24David Senra?

  Senator Brewster told me in so many words that if I would agree to merge TWA with Pan Am and go along with his scheme for a community American airline, there would be no further hearings in this matter. In his 47 minutes in front of the committee, he had the crowd inflamed into applause, laughter, and contempt as Ferguson vainly moved to restore order, ashtray in hand, so he was like beating like this ashtray to try to get people to calm down that were watching this. Brewster, taking the stand in his own defense, attempted to diffuse the situation, his voice cracking, his answers uncertain, he had spent an hour and 37 minutes digging a hole for himself, a hole that Hughes had mapped and outlined. After hearing Brewster's version of his meeting with Hughes, Ferguson made the mistake of asking Hughes if he had any questions for the senator.

• 1:20:08David Senra?

  "Yes," Hughes answered, "about 200 to 500." The audience applauded. Ferguson banged his ashtray. Hughes stretched his long legs out under the tables if he were lounging by a neighbor's pool with no place to go. As the days toiled on, Hughes maintained the pressure on the Senate committee that was constantly outflanked, second-guessed, and understaffed. Hughes' publicity campaign included sending out press releases, photographs, and specification sheets to the media. This is actually, shows he actually knows something about manipulation, or how to influence people. So he's saying, okay, while he's doing this, he's sending out press releases, photographs, and specification sheets to the media, so giving them, like, he's giving them data so that they can amplify his message.

• 1:20:52David Senra?

  Then he did something else, he provided recordings of the meeting with Brewster, oh, boy, and transcripts of the recordings. In addition to the millions of listeners that heard the proceedings over live radio broadcasts, it was also the first Senate committee investigation to be seen live over a new invention called television. What Americans heard, they cheered, they liked the outspoken spunk of a man who, when asked by Ferguson to once again produce Meyer for questioning, answered, "I don't think I will." So Meyer is Hughes, one of Hughes' right-hand guys, he was the one responsible for bribing all of these officials, and like, he bribed not only like FDR's son, all these other politicians and their relatives, but he also bribed generals. They would give them like interest-free loans, they would, uh, one general was like obsessed with eating filet mignon and lobster tail, so they would have deliveries constantly

• 1:21:37David Senra?

  sent to his home, and they'd stuff his fridge full of like the finest foods ever, but straight, outright, 100% corruption is what they were engaged in. Um, let's see. A manufacturer who was so impassioned by the Hercules that he said, this is Dirkko from Hughes, "I have put the sweat of my life into this thing. My reputation is wrapped up in it. I have stated that if it fails, I will leave the country and I mean it." He says, "Nobody kicks around in this country without acquiring a reputation, good or bad. I'm supposed to be capricious, a playboy, eccentric, but I don't believe that I have the reputation for a liar. For 23 years, nobody has questioned my word. I think my reputation in that respect meets what most Texans consider important."

• 1:22:19David Senra?

  Cheers were heard from the Chesapeake to the San Francisco Bay. So, he winds up winning this battle and they drop, uh, nothing ever comes of this. This is a great quote on his personality, "Unlike others who were forced into accepting the world where they were delivered, Hughes stubbornly determined to live one of his own creation." And so, this is what, I'm not gonna spend too much time here because it's very unpleasant, but, um, just giving an example of like, what, who he starts to become. And the Aviator, the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Howard Hughes is a, gives you a good insight into Hughes, like this kind of behavior. So, he has all these memos, a very explicit way to do certain things and he's obsessed

• 1:23:01David Senra?

  with using Kleenexes to, to avoid germs. So, he says, this is a memo he wrote in 1950 to his staff. "Is extremely important to me that nobody ever goes into any room, closet, cabinet, bathroom, or any other arena used to store any of the things which are for me, either food, equipment, magazines, paper supplies, Kleenex, no matter what. It is equally important to me that nobody ever opens any door or opening to any room, cabinet, or closet, or anything used to store any of my things, even for one thousandth of an inch or for one thousandth of a second." And that's like, a very short one. He's got some of the last pages, so I'm not gonna read it, it's just freaking bizarre.

• 1:23:42David Senra?

  But, this is, this is the weird dichotomy here where, the further he slips into madness, the better his companies perform. So, he basically sets this up where he's got all these people, like, uh, so he says, uh, he's got, um, this guy named Frank William Gay is kind of like his, uh... Like his conduit to the outside world. So it's with Gay on phones, meaning answering all his calls, Nadine on keyboard, that's the secretary, Dietrich on Tools, the tool company, and George on aircraft, the guy running his aircraft company. Hughes found himself with nothing to do for the first time in 23 years, except count his money, which was then reproducing itself at the rate

• 1:24:22David Senra?

  of 42,000 a day at a time when the average salary in the US was $8,000 a year. So what is that, five, over five times what people make in a year, he's making in a day?

• 1:24:42David Senra?

  Oh, and so here's an example of, of his MO with corruptions. "From Hughes' simplified perspective, all things problematic could be settled with money. Every man has its price, Hughes said. If they didn't, people like me couldn't exist. In this case, the price was $100,000. Dietrich placed a call to the head of the Democratic National Committee, promising a donation of $100,000 to candidates of the DNC's choice, courtesy of Howard Hughes. And while the donation came without covenants, Dietrich let it be known that Hughes would be very pleased to have his company removed from the litigation." This is just one example. "Several telephone calls later and 20 individual $5,000 checks, Hughes' tools were dropped from the formal charges, and two employees pleaded no contest to a lesser offense. Hughes ended up paying their $20,000 fine and then had them fired." So what he's talking about is

• 1:25:27David Senra?

  they, they use their government contracts to, to, to purchase discounted planes at $17,000 and then resold them for $100,000 each.

• 1:25:42David Senra?

  And then he's, he's gone full, full crazy in this sense.

• 1:25:49David Senra?

  He, at this time, he's living in a darkened suite at Beverly Hills Hotel, doesn't let sunlight in, and he says, "As far as Hughes was concerned, it was the triumph of leveraged coercion, and delighted, and he delighted in the power. When he heard from Dietrich that his effort has been successful, he was lying naked on his bed in a room lit only by the ear-to-ear grin on his face." So it's another thing. He would spend a lot of his life naked after this period because- He'd watch movies like, he watched one movie, I think like 120 times in a row. He'd sit in a chair, wouldn't move, drinking only like milk and eating chicken. And would have, be completely naked, except like a Kleenex covering his genitals. So like, that's like, that's way outside the scope of the point of this podcast. Like, so I'm not gonna spend much time here.

• 1:26:34David Senra?

  But, um, it is important to, uh, to understand that his, his, his doctor, Mason, this guy that I mentioned earlier, says explicitly, um, well, here, I'll just read this, that we need to declare this guy incompetent. Um, soon after Dietrich had handled the details of the loan, this is a loan that goes to Nixon's, gives money, he gives money to Nixon's mother, to his brother, to all these people. These people are just 100% corrupt again. Soon after Dietrich had handled the details of the loan, he received a rather mysterious call from Dr. Vern Mason, who wanted to schedule an imperative and extremely private meeting. Given the urgency in Mason's voice, Dietrich offered to leave, to have Mason come to his home. It was an offer that Mason accepted.

• 1:27:18David Senra?

  When Mason arrived at the Dietrich home, he declined a drink, although according to Dietrich, he was nervous enough to need one. The reason for the secrecy and the spate of nerves became clear as he spoke. And the reason he wanted to be in person, because they're, uh, the FBI in this area, I tapped Howard Hughes' phones and had like, uh, what, 2,500 pages, something like that, of, uh, notes on his life, and they kept putting him under constant surveillance. And, uh, so the doctor says, Noah, I think it's time has come for you to have Howard declared incompetent. And unfortunately, they don't do so. Um, and I, you know, it might be because it's against their economic interests. Unfortunately, that is a part of human nature that we, we should understand, so we have an accurate representation of reality that, um, you know, the last 20 years of his life,

• 1:28:02David Senra?

  he's surrounded by people that don't, they don't care about his well-being, and they're just gonna indulge his every, um, his every like, uh, request, because they make tons of money. In some cases, they have guy, like, he starts paying this, this one guy in Vegas to, to be his like man on the street, he's paying him like, uh, $10,000 a week in 1960s, with an unlimited expense account. He buys the guy yachts and houses and, you know, he just, at that point in his life, he doesn't even know what's going on. His doctor, 15 years earlier, his doctor's saying he should be declared incompetent. His mind just completely, um...

• 1:28:38David Senra?

  You know, just turned to mush. So I don't want, I'm not going to go into any more detail here. I do want to read this one quote that comes from the 1940s where I think Hughes is for a rare glimpse into who he is in a person personally. And he's, he's doing an interview with this writer. He says, "My father never suggested that I do something," Hughes told writer Dwight Whitney in the 1940s. "He just told me. He shoved things down my throat and I had to like it. He had," meaning his dad, "a quality that I never had. He was a terrifically loved man. I am not. I don't have the ability to win people, to win people the way he did.

• 1:29:20David Senra?

  I suppose I'm not like other men. Most of them like to study people. I'm not nearly as interested in people as I should be, I guess. What I am tremendously interested in," Hughes said, pausing then to think, "what I am tremendously interested in is science." And with that, he closed his eyes and dreamed.

• 1:29:45David Senra?

  So I'll leave the, that, the story of Howard Hughes there. If anybody finds a book on Howard Hughes Senior, I've searched, I can't find anything. Please let me know because I would love to read it because I do kind of want to learn. I, other than I think like his genius idea of leasing those out. I do want to learn more about the, you know, this book only talked about 40 years of, of Hughes Senior's life in, you know, maybe five pages. But it's very interesting to me like how, to learn more about how he built up his business, what he was doing in detail before he started the company, which I think is something we could all learn from. So if you learn from my work, if you enjoy what I'm doing and you want to see more of this,

• 1:30:29David Senra?

  please support the podcast. As you just saw, I presented the entire podcast without ads. The only way I'm able to do that is if the people that are actually learning from this and get value out of it, agree to actually sign up and support the podcast with their actual dot. And I do this because I think it's the best user experience for you, the listener, as a podcast fan myself. I just want to present the information. I want to give you, I want to have the right incentives. And if I'm supported by the audience and the people that give value, like I make sure that I do everything I can to. To make sure that I'm always optimizing for you and not, say, advertisers. So I was reading this, something this week that kind of crystallizes why I feel this way. It says, "Perhaps most importantly, I believe that more and more consumers are coming to grips with the reality of online media.

• 1:31:13David Senra?

  When everything is free, you too often end up getting exactly what you paid for. If you consider the time wasted reading clickbait a few bucks a month for content you trust, isn't such a bad idea." And that's what I'm asking for, why I'm asking for direct support from you. So how I do that, not only do I make every single podcast available for free with no ads, I have something that I've been working on that's extremely important to me. And I take a copious amount of notes, just like I do when I read books, which is just the podcast you heard. I do when podcast, when entrepreneurs appear on podcasts, or they give talks or lectures. I, I think the, the beauty of podcasts is it allows us to have access to brilliant people every day.

• 1:31:54David Senra?

  And I think for most of us, we don't get to interact with truly fascinating and brilliant people, but you can access them through podcasts. So when I listen to people talk, like entrepreneurs talk about their business, like why they started the company, how they think about the market they're in, how they get customers, what books influenced them, what tools they use. I take notes and I write that down and I do a weekly email. And that, I call that weekly email Founder's Notes. And the tagline is Founder's Notes helps you, helps you know what other founders are thinking. I go out and I collect key ideas from entrepreneur, entrepreneurs and I deliver them to your inbox so you can get better at whatever it is you're working on. Just like we want to spend time reading and listening, reading books about entrepreneurs,

• 1:32:38David Senra?

  about their lives, and then listening to this podcast. I assume the reason you're listening to this is so you can learn something and to get better. I think we could do, somebody needs to do the same for, for podcasts that focus on people starting companies, which is no one else is doing it. So that's the focus I'm on, that I want to focus on. And I've been doing this for a long time. I've been taking notes on podcasts since I started listening to podcasts. I just thought everybody did. So, so far I've done, I think I'm up to 145 different founders. And again, the way I present the email for those of you who haven't signed up yet. It's in a bullet form, so every Sunday you'll get if you sign up and you agree to support. It costs $10 a month right now or $100 a year, so it's up to you. All you have to do is choose whether you want to support monthly or annually.

• 1:33:23David Senra?

  It takes less than two, a minute or two to sign up. And then you just sit back, you have access to my full archive, but I also just deliver an email to your inbox every Sunday morning. That every Sunday, that'll have notes from seven different founders. Talking about all the things I just discussed, like how they think about their business, different ideas. So the goal here is for us to all, it's self-improvement, but not self-help. You know, there's an important distinction there. So their experiences that people have where they spend years of their life building something and then go and talk freely about what they learned. That is extremely valuable and that's the main thesis behind why I started this into a product is that somebody needs to go out and collect these ideas because we can all benefit from them.

• 1:34:06David Senra?

  It's like a cheat code at life, a cheat code to getting better at work, if you will. You don't have to live through 145 lifetimes to understand how they think about things. So I find the information extremely valuable. The feedback I've been getting so far is most people that are reading it do as well. So please, I cannot like the podcast you just listened to. I was actually listening to a podcast with this guy. He's, he's started, he's building one of the first America, started one of the first mechanical watch companies in America. So a lot of the, the production has been sent out to Europe or Mexico or other places. And he's like, no, you know, I'm going to make these by hand.

• 1:34:45David Senra?

  And I'm going to do it here because I think like, I want to bring back jobs, high-paying jobs and, and people will buy or willing to buy if you let them know. Like this is important for him, all of the, all his supplies, all his equipment comes from America. He He makes them here, he's reinvesting the money that they, that people give through the purchase of watches back into America, but he has such a great, he's like, listen, each of these watches is 80 hours of handmade love. And I realized it's like, I don't know if people understand how long these podcasts take for me to make, because I'm a one man show, and I think that's also important, why I'm asking you to support directly, because you're not giving your money, your hard earned money, to a faceless corporation, you're giving it to an individual that you want to

• 1:35:29David Senra?

  support, you want to see more of this work out in the world, to spread, to be able to spread these ideas. And so this, the only way I'm able to spend so much time, let me back up real quick before I get there, I just saw something on Twitter where this, somebody hosts podcasts, he's like, "Look at all this, this prep I have to do for the podcast I'm doing," it was like, you know, four pages of notes. That's, I'm glad you're taking, you know, the time to do that, but try reading 500 pages, or 400 pages, that's what I have to do before I even sit down to record. I have to read an entire book, I highlight, I take notes, then I do extra research to get more depth into understanding of like, what, what does this actually mean? Then I record myself, then I edit, and then I publish.

• 1:36:11David Senra?

  So each of these podcasts take 20, 30, sometimes 40 hours of handmade love. And the only way I can afford to do that, to dedicate so much time, is by people stepping up and willing to support the work, so I can keep doing this. And I'm not some, some, you know, listen, podcasts gotta decide how they want to do this, some people just say, "Hey, my podcast is so valuable, just donate to me." But what, what we're doing on this podcast is we're studying human nature, we all understand that there needs to be added incentives. Yes, some people will do that, absolutely, but a lot more people will do that if you also give them something. So not only am I gonna make podcasts free and available to download for everybody, no matter where they are in the world, whether they can support me or not, but I also do

• 1:36:54David Senra?

  all this extra work where, you know, you're getting very valuable ideas in, in the form of Founder's Notes, which is going to like, it's just going to grow, it's, this knowledge that's trapped in audio is important. And so, like, in, in most cases, what Founder's Notes is doing is taking 10 to 15 hours of audio a week and turning it into key ideas that you can read in 10 minutes. That's extremely valuable, and, and I think the, when I look at like, how can I design... The most value to the people that listen to my podcast, like I want to, I want to not only give away my podcasts for free, but I want to say, hey, if you'll support the podcast by signing up, signing up for Founder's Notes, I'm also doing this thing that is valuable, even if

• 1:37:37David Senra?

  there were, if you, even if you don't listen to the podcast. And somehow people have signed up, I'm getting emails from people that subscribe to Founder's Notes, that don't even listen to the podcast, which is interesting to me. So I don't know if people, subscribers are telling them about it. I should actually start to ask, but um, my point being is like, it's valuable, it's valuable enough, it's worth way more than $10 a month, or $100 a year, just in the ideas, because you can apply these ideas in whatever it is that you're doing, and reap those benefits, whether it's efficiency benefits, whether you just get smarter, you get a better, you better job, you design better products, whatever the case is. And we know, the entire point of doing this podcast, it's really hard for people that, to like, to learn these things in, others than from people that have done it. There is no school of entrepreneurship.

• 1:38:19David Senra?

  That's why I spend so much time reading these books, because they just have counterintuitive ideas that you only know by tinkering, by trial and error, by experience. So that's, that's my pitch, that's my plea. I hope that I'm doing enough work for you that you find this valuable, and that you're willing to sign up. You go to founderspodcast.com, and you can see the link there. If not, it's in, it's on your podcast player, it's in every single episode. All you have to do is tap that button, and like I said, it takes less than a minute to sign up. So I really appreciate that. If you do give value for my work, please do so. The second thing is, so, I have a private podcast feed, and I, it's a free podcast feed. And, what are we learning here? Like, when you study all these people that have

• 1:39:01David Senra?

  built companies, we, we understand that we have got, the only advantage we have in life is to think differently, right? Is to collect information that's useful, and apply those lessons, and think differently. So, if you've listened to a lot of podcasts, which I assume you do, you know almost every single person, podcaster says the same thing. And they say, hey, please leave a review, please leave a rating, this is very helpful. And it is, there's a reason why everybody repeats that. Now, what I understand from the lessons that I've learned from reading these books, is that's not good enough for me. I have to, I'm not, I'm an independent podcaster, I don't have a large social following, I don't, I'm not part of a podcast network, right? So I have got to do things in a different manner than anybody else, because you see, there's, you know, there's a lot of big money

• 1:39:44David Senra?

  flowing into podcasting, a lot of corporations, a lot of celebrities are doing it. And- I don't have the resources to compete with that, so I have got to find a smarter way, which is the lessons that we learn a lot in these books. And so for me, I was like, listen, I want to make, I want to incentivize people to leave a rating or review because it's important, but I want to do something in addition to not only giving you a free podcast. So I created an entire separate podcast feed. I call it a reviewer only podcast. I, what happens is if you leave a rating or review, right? So in places like Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, you can, you know, leave a five star rating and you can write what you like about the podcast. I also read all them. Thank you very much. Take a screenshot, you email it to me. Have [email protected]. Founders, just like the name of the podcast, reviews with an S, [email protected].

• 1:40:29David Senra?

  I reply back with, uh, with the private podcast feed link. I reply back to every single one. As of this recording, um, I've replied back to every single person that's emailed me. So if you've emailed me, you haven't received a response, make sure you email me again. Or you can always get in touch with me on Twitter too. My Twitter account is on every, if you go to Founders Podcasts, it's on every single page there. But anyways, the reason I'm doing this is because if you do that, you unlock four, I've already done four, um, four private podcasts, right? But not only that, when I give you access to the feed, as I do them in the future, they automatically pop up in your podcast player, just like any other podcast does. So for a minute or two minute or three minutes of your time, I'm giving you hours, tens,

• 1:41:10David Senra?

  it would have been hundreds of hours of work for me in the future, because I want to incentivize you to help me out. I need your help by leaving these ratings and reviews and I have to do that. I have to perform better than people are there that are just asking you. So now there's some podcasts like Overcast, Breaker, these other podcasts where they have like heart features or star features. That what they do that, when you press that button, you're recommending the other people in the network that, hey, I like this episode. So that applies, you don't have, you can't leave a review there, but if you just pick your favorite episode, it's interesting to me because I also get to see what episodes you guys really like, which is kind of cool. Leave a heart, leave a star, take a screenshot of that, email it to me, I'll send you the private podcast link with instruction on how to add it to your podcast player. It's really, really simple.

• 1:41:55David Senra?

  And so I feel very comfortable with that. Like I said before, like I'm going to make that the best return on investment that you've ever had for two or three minutes of your time. So I have four up there, one on, two on Steve Jobs? Yeah, two on Steve Jobs, who I think like we're not even close to being done to learn from. One on Max Levchin, which is a co-founder of PayPal.

• 1:42:18David Senra?

  Oh, and one on Samuel Bronfman. I had to think about it. He was the guy that started Seagram's. He built a family business that lasted like 140 years. It's fascinating guy.

• 1:42:27David Senra?

  So I did that. And then I'm reading this other book that I talked about last week, which has to do with, I think a lot about the future of work. Having a child, I think you have to, but not only for my child, but for myself. And it's just, I feel like when you see what our kids are being taught in school and you see what the jobs are available in the world, like there's a huge disconnect there. So it's something I spent a lot of time thinking about. And this book is called Unscaled: How AI and a New Generational Upstarts Are Creating the Economy of the Future. I, by the time I release that episode next week, I will probably have already recorded this podcast too. Because it's a rather short book, it's like 200 pages and I'm fascinated, personally fascinated by the subject.

• 1:43:08David Senra?

  And I just think that we have the opportunity, like it really, I wouldn't say it depresses me because that's not the right word, but I'm, I think entrepreneurship is one of the most important concepts in the world. In the world. And it's a vehicle for economic freedom for people that just are outside of the main, you know, like if you grew up in a rich family and you got to go to private school and you shepherd into all these high, you know, Ivy League schools and then come out and get a high paying job, like that's a tiny, tiny track for a tiny, tiny percentage of all the humans on earth. But the internet has demolished that playing field where now all of us have the opportunity to outpour and actually receive the economic benefit that we are able to give to other people, right?

• 1:43:48David Senra?

  And what, what is disconcerting to me is like in my own country, I know a lot of people listen to this all over the world, but like

• 1:43:56David Senra?

  Entrepreneurship's at a 40 year low and in my opinion it should be the reverse. It should be the opposite trend. It's easier. Now, it's easier to start a business doesn't mean it's easier to succeed at it, which is why I spend so much time sharing these ideas with you because I want you to do well. I want you, like entrepreneurship changed my life. I was the first person in my family to graduate high school. The first person to graduate college. Understand, like without the internet, without me being able to access books and podcasts and YouTube and unlearning whatever I want to learn, like I would have been destroyed. So that's why, like I'm so passionate about people learning these ideas. Like it is life changing. We need more of this, not less of this. And I love seeing things like just the weird things that people come up with in a way to make the living and do things that they love

• 1:44:40David Senra?

  and that other people benefit from. So it just, I'm very interested to make this recording of this next book because, and it's also, I'm going to read some other books about this too, because I do think that the thesis of the book is that economies of scale, it's a history of entrepreneurship, you know, let's say 200, 300 years, whatever timeframe you want to put on it, was big was always better. And now his whole thesis, which I'm, you know, predisposed to like is like, it's the internet is dismantling our entire economy and rebuilding it. And that thesis on economies of scale has turned on its head. And that most people I don't think understand that because most people always say, oh, I've always been told bigger is better, bigger is better, bigger is better. So most people go out and try to do this.

• 1:45:22David Senra?

  Meanwhile, you're seeing weird little companies. Like I saw a company that handles distribution for,

• 1:45:28David Senra?

  for independent music artists and they have 100,000 paying customers and there's three people in the entire company. That's an example of unscaling and they're not outsourcing the jobs to India or the Philippines. They're outsourcing them to bots. They're using technology to gain this leverage.

• 1:45:48David Senra?

  So I'm, I, I want to see more opportunities like that for people because I think there's a lot of people that could be entrepreneurs that don't think they can, but they have all kinds of ideas. And that's all it is. Entrepreneurship is just an idea. It's, hey, I think I have some, this, this thing I have is valuable. And if I tell people about it and they agree it's valuable, well, human nature is they're going to pay you money for that. We buy things that are valuable, whether I go down stairs and buy a smoothie because I'm hungry. Or I buy a car because I need to get, get somewhere or whatever the case is, like humans will clearly exchange

• 1:46:24David Senra?

  money for value. And what I'm saying is like, now we have what, what deems, what people can deem valuable is much, much broader. Then people, than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And I think that trend going forward is only going to continue. Um, so I want to use, like, we're studying people that built usually big businesses, but I don't have a desire to build a big, big business. Now I want to have an impactful business. I want to have a business that, that helps people and I want to spread that as much as I can. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be more people, right? I'm rather introverted. I don't like really managing people. Anytime I've been in that situation in the past, I found myself unhappy. So what, what these technologies is going to allow us to do is like, we're going to be able to unleash

• 1:47:09David Senra?

  an entire generation of people all over the world that never would even consider the idea of being entrepreneurs, but can be. Because they have some unique skill or talent or just a different way to look at things. And you don't need, you know, a massive office with massive, raise massive amounts of money from a venture capitalist or, or a, or, or a bank. And there's nothing wrong if that's the route you want to go. You have to be who you are. You know what I'm saying? But I'm just saying like, when you, when you can access what, what the book calls renting this technology is the way they, they, um, is the way the author, and his name's, I gotta give him credit. His name's, I think, Hermont Teneja. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but he, that's the term he uses renting it. Um, it just completely, it flips.

• 1:47:54David Senra?

  It inverses what is actually valuable. And if you focus on your core competency, what you'll realize, and people that are already subscribed to Founders Notes know this because I've taken notes on several entrepreneurs that have said this, like, every single business process has now, you can either be accessed to an API, or it can be accessed to another entire company that's just devoted for that. And so what that means is you have this modularity where you can focus on what you're absolutely good at, and then find people that are absolutely good. So maybe like, I just found out about this one company that does, think about if you're selling physical products, it's called Happy Returns. When, you know, people buy stuff, they're gonna return stuff all the time. That process, they call the reverse logistics process, is a pain in the ass. Well, now, you can just hire this company and they do it, do everything for you. And then you could focus on your core competency, whatever that is.

• 1:48:37David Senra?

  So anyways, there's tons and tons of examples all over. And again, I just think that that is more of the future. And that's when I think about like, my own daughter, like, you know, like, I don't, if she wants to go out and get a job, by all means, like, it's her life, do it. But I just want her to understand that the barriers to entry of starting your own business is a lot smaller. And that applies not only for the kids that are young now, but people today, people are there in jobs, that are trapped in jobs that they fucking hate. There, I know so many people that are miserable, that would be so much happier just to be able to call their own shots, to do their own thing, even if it's a tiny one-person business. They would be better off.

• 1:49:19David Senra?

  And you have one goal at this life, why are we gonna spend it being miserable? So if I can do anything, if I can go out and I can be the conduit to go out and read these books, get these ideas to you in a form, in an easier to understand fashion, then I wanna do that. And if I can listen to these podcasts and take these notes, and email them to you, so you can use these ideas in your own lives, I want to do that because I think that gives you the tool, like, it bursts open a dam of entrepreneurship. And I want to burst that open. I do not wanna see trends where it's, you know, that's more centralization, less people, more people going to work for companies they don't wanna work for, and less people being able to do their own things. Because what did Edwin Land teach us? If you remember that.

• 1:50:03David Senra?

  That book insisting on the impossible, his dream of a thousand small corporations. Like instead of this one corporation, so one giant centralized organization. He's like, my dream is for a thousand corporations, each reinvesting and investing $25 million into research and development and developing more technology and more products that we can all use, more diversification. Well, we don't have to stop at a thousand. What about 100 million different businesses? Like there's 7 billion people on the planet. Each one could be, it doesn't have to be a single individual, like in unscaled, there's some, you know, there's some companies that are using this technology and there's hundreds of people, but they have impacts that used to require thousands or tens of thousands of people. That's what I want to

• 1:50:45David Senra?

  empower people and I want to try to play some kind of small role because it's, I think it's fundamentally life-changing. So, I wasn't expecting to say that, all that, I hope you understand, like I don't sit down with things written. I just go off of, like I have notes in a book or like highlights, but I just, I just try to speak from the heart because there's no way I can keep this podcast. I can't keep doing, I couldn't, I want to do this podcast for a very long time. There's no way I can do that if I have to like script everything out. I just have to talk how I am as a person and hopefully people will respond well to that. So that was an example of that. Thank you very much for your support. If you like what I'm doing, please support financially. I rely on it. I need you to do that and please tell your friends about it. Thank you very much. I'll be back next week.