#152 Katherine Graham (Washington Post)

What I learned from reading Personal History by Katherine Graham. ---- [1:02] A few minutes later there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. It was so profoundly shocking and traumatizing —he was so obviously dead. [3:56] Katherine Graham was the first-ever female CEO of a fortune 500 company. [5:30] This book is the inner monologue of someone not at all comfortable with herself and where she fits in with others. [8:55] Katherine's mom on having a second wind: The fatigue of the climb was great but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one’s second wind. I think that is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one’s mental efforts. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existence of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as second wind. Whether mentally or physically occupied most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion. Thus they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort. [13:42] When an idea is right, nothing can stop it. [17:47] Advice from her Father that she still remembers 60 years later: What parents may sometimes do in a helpful way is to point out certain principles of action. I do not think I would be helpful in advising you too strongly. I do not even feel the need of doing that because I have so much confidence in your having really good judgment. I believe that what I can do for you once in a while is to point out certain principles that have developed in my mind as sound and practical, leaving it for you yourself to apply them if your own mind grasps and approves the principles. [26:14] Have a problem? Look at it from a different perspective: I had deplored the fact we had the bad luck to live in a world with Hitler, to which Phil responded, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a privilege to have to fight the biggest son of a bitch in history.” [29:20] Reading biographies can give you the strength to not quit: Phil was finishing a book on the lives and careers of newspaper magnates. “You know, they put the company together when they were in their thirties. Now they’re in their sixties and I’m in my thirties. I think we can make it [successful] another way.” [33:28] There is no doubt in my mind that the struggle to survive was good for us. In business, you have to know what it is to be poor and stretched and fighting for your life against great odds. [37:26] Knowledge of that new generation—my children—was what led me, however hesitatingly, to the decision I made then: to try to hold on to the company by going to work. [38:04] Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life. [41:28] I made mistakes and suffered great distress from them, partly because I believed that if you just worked diligently enough you wouldn’t make mistakes. I truly believed that other people in my position didn’t make mistakes; I couldn’t see that everybody makes them, even people with great experience. [46:19] Good luck was again on my side, coming just when I needed it. It was my great fortune that Warren Buffett bought into the company, beginning a whole new phase of my life. [47:53] Writing a check separates conviction from conversation. —Warren Buffett [52:05] My business education began in earnest—he literally took me to business school, which was just what I needed. How lucky I was to be educated by Warren Buffett, and how many people would have given anything for the same experience. [55:56] Warren has done so many things for me, but among the most important are the inroads he has made on my insecurities. Warren is humanly wise. He once told me that someone in a Dale Carnegie course had said to him, “Just remember: We are not going to teach you how to keep your knees from knocking. All we’re going to do is teach you to talk while your knees knock." [57:13] Warren later told me he subscribed to Charlie Munger’s “orangutan theory”—which essentially contended that, “if a smart person goes into a room with an orangutan and explains whatever his or her idea is, the orangutan just sits there eating his banana, and at the end of the conversation, the person explaining comes out smarter.” Warren claimed to be my orangutan. I heard myself talk when I was with him and I always got a better idea of what I was saying. ---- 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?

  Phil very much wanted to go to the farm for a break from the hospital, and had started to work on the doctors to obtain their permission. There was a sharp difference of opinion among the doctors about whether this was a good idea, but no one ever asked me if there was liquor or sleeping pills at the farm, nor did I think to mention the guns we had there. I, who certainly knew the farm was stocked with guns that Phil used for sport, was completely deluded by his seeming progress, lack of visible depression, and his determination to get well. In fact, I was optimistic about his ability to do so. And I must say I was glad. He wanted so much to go to the farm, and I got caught up in thinking how good it would be for him.

• 0:44David Senra?

  On Saturday, August 3rd, Phil's driver picked him up, and then they came to get me. We had lunch on the back porch while chatting and listening to some classical records. After lunch, we went upstairs to our bedroom for a nap. After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom that he sometimes used. A few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. It was so profoundly shocking and traumatizing. He was so obviously dead, and the wounds were so ghastly to look at,

• 1:27David Senra?

  that I just ran into the next room and buried my head in my hands, trying to absorb that this had really happened. This dreadful thing that had hung over us for the last six years, which he had discussed with me and with his doctors, but which he had not been talking about in recent weeks, when he was obviously most seriously thinking about it. The sight had been so appalling that I knew I couldn't go back in. What I was agonizing about was that I had let him leave the bedroom alone. I can only say that he seemed so much better that I stupidly was not worried enough. It never occurred to me

• 2:10David Senra?

  that he must have planned the whole day at the farm to get to his guns as a way of freeing himself forever from the watchful eyes of the doctors and the world. He left no note of any kind. And that was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Personal History: The Autobiography of Katherine Graham. Before I jump into the book, I want to tell you how I came to discover. I actually was listening to Jeff Bezos' talk, and he actually, before he bought The Washington Post, which is the business that Katherine's now going to run after the suicide of her husband, he read this book, said it was a fantastic book, and went to go on the Pulitzer, I think, in 1998.

• 2:52David Senra?

  It's one of the highest-reviewed books that have ever come across, and I could see why. It was absolutely fantastic read. So I heard Jeff Bezos say that later on, when I was reading the biography of Warren Buffett, Snowball. I think I covered that on Founder's Number 100. Katherine Graham is a, I wouldn't say a main character, but she's definitely, she's in the book a lot. She's a supporting character in the biography of Warren Buffett, because he makes an investment in the 1970s in The Post, and he becomes a very close friend, some say they had an affair, actually, of Katherine Graham. And so, he talks in the biography, I guess he's not the one writing it, but the author talks a lot about the relationship that Katherine Graham had.

• 3:37David Senra?

  And it was in that book, Snowball, that I discovered the story of Katherine Graham, where she's in her 40s, she has four kids, she's married to Phil Graham. Her father had bought The Washington Post a couple decades earlier. At the time, it was very uncommon for women to be running large companies. In fact, Katherine Graham is the first-ever CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But her father, when he's ready to retire, he actually passes the business, instead of giving it to her, he gives it to her husband. And so, her husband is running that up until the point that he commits suicide. So the reason I was interested in reading the book, besides Bezos obviously saying, "Hey, you should read this book," which is usually a good enough reason on its own, right, is I just...

• 4:23David Senra?

  I cannot imagine what that experience must have been like. She did not see this coming. I'll talk more about that as we get into the book. But this idea where you could be in your 40s, you know, not really have, at the time, it was, she was involved in her family civic activities, but did not have any business experience. Your husband kills himself, you discover it, you see the aftermath. And then now, not only you have to take over the family company because no one else is there to run it, while taking care of your kids and yourself. I just cannot imagine what that experience would be like. And so, reading that, this book is my way of finding out what that experience is like.

• 5:06David Senra?

  And I think the title, Personal History, is really interesting because this book is a large book. I have the paperback version. It's 625 pages. And what this feels like you're reading is her personal diary, where she goes into great detail of her life, mostly in chronological order. And it feels like you're, the first note I left, as I, you know, maybe it's 100 pages into the book, I was like, you know what, this book really does, it tells the inner monologue of someone that is not at all comfortable with herself and where she fits in with others. And that, this refreshing honesty that I think most people hide, might be the main reason to read the book.

• 5:49David Senra?

  So, let me go ahead and jump into the book right now. Okay, so this is a description of her early life. She says, "As the fourth of five children, I was oddly shielded from the rigors of living with parents who demanded perfection and from some of the eccentricities of our curious upbringing. Luck helped me be a survivor and gave me strength. My difficulties were much more tied to a lack of guiding personal relationships, for I had more or less to bring myself up emotionally and figure out how to deal with whatever situations confronted me." So, I'm going to talk about that in a minute because her mom... Is she, her mom's almost like, I would compare the way she presents her mom in this

• 6:29David Senra?

  book to almost like the way like a Disney evil stepmother would be portrayed. Extremely selfish, egotistical, demeaning to the kids even though they're her biological kids, just not a, not a good mother figure at all. At the same time, I was surrounded by extreme luxury. I led a life structured and in many ways Spartan, circumcised by schools and lessons, travel and study. So it talks about, there's a lot going on in these two paragraphs. One is talking about demanding perfection. Her father was a very, very formidable person. He was investor, an entrepreneur. By the time she is born, she was born in 1917, her father had already accumulated a fortune somewhere around 40 to 60 million dollars.

• 7:13David Senra?

  So the equivalent of today, you know, that could be hundreds of millions, if not more. He was extremely wealthy, once being president of the World Bank. He has this, actually, I would, I'm going to look for a biography on him because I found him such an interesting and intelligent person. But as many fathers during this time period, rather absent. He does develop a very close relationship with her, but he also just assumes that, you know, she's not going to be able to run a business, which is, you know, the way unfortunately women were looked at during this time period. And that's, that's why he gravitated towards her husband instead of her. I would say that even though the father's busy, he's absent a lot, as you could imagine, he did, I think he was the better of the two parents.

• 7:55David Senra?

  And so I want to talk a little bit about her mom, who, you know, I didn't, based on the descriptions that Catherine has in the book, just not a good person. So a lot of this book has, it's just amazing how many letters between the family that they saved. There's a lot of written material in here. And in this one case, she's writing, I think to a friend, her mother's writing to a friend, talking about, I don't even know if she ever wanted to be a mom. She's talking, listen to this sentence. She's talking about the difference of having, between having two or three kids. She was distressed at the difficulties of three, meaning children, as opposed to two children, comparing them to a basket of eels.

• 8:40David Senra?

  Now, I don't think her mother was a bad person. I think she led an interesting life, but she was just focused on her own life. And I think part of being a good family member, just like being a good friend, is you have to have some level of selflessness, right? You can't just be selfish. That doesn't mean that she wasn't intelligent, that she couldn't pass along a lot of wisdom to her children. This is, in my opinion, this is going to come from the diary of her mother when she's mountain climbing in the Canadian Rockies in 1926. And this is a lesson, what in my opinion, the best lesson that her mother could teach her, which is, don't quit. You can do more than you think you can. And I think that's really important to tell Catherine that because Catherine was extremely, she had a very low self-esteem. Interesting enough, Warren Buffett is going to play a major role, and I'm going to talk

• 9:25David Senra?

  a lot about him today, and she credits him with actually being the one to make her believe in herself, which is very interesting how he did it. And this is not the Warren Buffett we think of today. The Warren that we're going to talk about today is mainly in 1970, so this is like 50-year-old Warren. But he's got a lot of good advice, just like, of course, 90-year-old Warren does as well. But this is, first, before I get to this, is the excerpt from her mother's diary. "The fatigue of the climb was great, but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one second wind. I think that this is an important lesson for everyone to learn, for it should also be applied to one's mental efforts.

• 10:10David Senra?

  I couldn't agree more. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existence of that field of endeavor which we describe as a second wind. Whether mentally or physically occupied, most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion." So I talked about this last week. I feel we talk about this over and over again. One of the benefits of reading biographies and autobiographies is you realize that they have troubles, just like you and I do. The difference is, they don't quit, whereas most of our peers, most of our colleagues, most of the people that we interact with, don't have that. Most humans in history don't have that. We give up way too easily, and that's what her mother's saying. "Whether mentally or physically occupied, most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion."

• 10:52David Senra?

  "Thus, they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort." That is a fantastic lesson. That our parents could instill in us. And that's what she's doing right there. And using the analogy of climbing a mountain and how physically difficult that was. And how you can apply what you learn from exhausting yourself physically to obviously mental and your professional life and everything else. Okay, so this next section is her right at the end of high school. There's a ton of paragraphs spread throughout the entire years. I don't think she felt completely comfortable with who she was till she was probably 50, maybe 60 years old. So it says, "Apparently, my classmates didn't see me the way I saw myself.

• 11:36David Senra?

  My class prophecy read, K's a big shot in the newspaper racket. But I envisioned no such future for myself, or in fact, any specific future at all. Rather than creating my own way, what I was trying to do all the time was figure out how to adjust to whatever life I found." And a few pages later, we see another paragraph where it continues to expand on the main theme of this book, which is she has a serious lack of self-esteem, which I think people would find surprising, given how much she had later accomplished in her life. "I was, I thought, realistic about my own assets." I hate that word, "realistic" that is. "I thought realistic about my own assets and abilities as I grew older. I was not very pretty.

• 12:19David Senra?

  I seemed ungainly to myself. I didn't think I could excel. And I was sure I'd never attract a man whom I would like and who would not be viewed with condensation by my parents and siblings." So that echoes back to what she was saying. Her parents had, and her entire family, had extremely high standards or high expectations of everybody else. But this is just very distressing, this idea that, and she talks about it, you know, she says it might have been on a subconscious level, but she was taught that her role in life is to find a man. Get him to marry you and then raise the children and be happy and content in your life doing that, but to not have any desire to excel professionally.

• 13:04David Senra?

  And I think, obviously, now we live in a world that's much different than that, albeit not perfect, but this idea where 50% of human beings alive were taught not to try to fulfill their potential, I think, is devastating. So also spread throughout the book is just some advice that her father, and this is as they start to grow, as she got older, they start to grow closer. And this is just a great quote from her father. When others, he had already purchased The Washington Post at this point. It's really a passion project for him. It's something he wanted to keep in his family to pass on to generations. And that's exactly what wound up happening. But this is just a quote, "When others are predicting that he's going to fail," trying

• 13:48David Senra?

  to resurrect The Washington Post, and he didn't have that belief at all. And he says, "When an idea is right, nothing can stop it." That's one of my favorite sentences in the entire book. Now, something that's interesting to me and why I wanted to start the podcast with Phil's suicide, that's Phil Graham, her husband's suicide, is because I feel that was the line of demarcation in her life. The beginning, the first, she's in her 40s at the time. She lives to 84, so it's roughly the halfway mark of her life as well. And I feel the first 40 years of her life were more unhappy. I don't think she knew who she was as a person. I don't think she was living the life that she actually wanted to. And something I found really interesting is, we see excerpts from her diary when she's much younger. She worked at newspapers before she got married.

• 14:33David Senra?

  She had a deep love of the newspaper industry and The Post. And that's what I'm going to read to you here real quick. Let me read the paragraph first, and I'll leave the note I left myself, because I wasn't sure what was taking place at this point in the book. So it says, "Much later, the depth of my caring was pointed out to me by Phil's psychiatrist, who told me that Phil and I both had a problem. We cared too much about The Washington Post. I told him, in one of the great understatements of my life, that I feared there was little he could do about that." So she, this becomes a... And The Washington Post asked when she starts to run it and she runs it up and you know, she's heavily involved up until she dies, even though her son winds up taking over after her. But that was the deep love of her life. She never gets remarried. She

• 15:18David Senra?

  becomes married to her career. And I think that's secretly what she wanted her entire life, but she was told that you shouldn't want that. Do you see what I mean here? Where it's very, it's almost like she's, she's not, she's, she's willing to let others dictate how her life should go. And again, one of my favorite ideas, it might be my favorite idea that I learned in that book, The Snowball, which is where I was introduced to Catherine Graham, is this idea of that, how Warren Buffett describes it, it's the difference between an inner and an outer scorecard. So he talks about he admired his father because he had an inner scorecard, meaning that he chose what his life was going to be. And if people didn't agree, or they didn't think he'd succeed, that's fine. If, as long as he, he was comfortable with the results of his own thinking. And if he wanted to pursue something, even if others made fun of him or thought it would fail, it didn't matter.

• 16:02David Senra?

  His mom, who Warren Buffett was, I would say, almost terrified of, was the opposite, the outer scorecard. She was worried about what others would think of her. Others would think of her family if Warren got in trouble, or whatever the happen, whatever the case was. And he, and Warren, I think correctly arrives at the conclusion that if you want to have a happy life, you have to be dictated by your inner scorecard. And if you want to be miserable, you have to, you should go after an outer scorecard, right? Be so concerned with other people think that, that it kind of dulls who you are as a person. I would say the first half of her life, she definitely had, Katherine Graham definitely has an outer scorecard. I don't know if she ever completely switched over to an inner scorecard, up until right before she dies. She, you know, she talks about you don't,

• 16:45David Senra?

  there's a lot of negatives of aging, but one of the benefits is, you know, you don't have worry. You're just, you're finally free to do what you really want to do. Unfortunately, at that point, where she realizes that she only has about four or five more years left. But going back to this part about caring deeply, which is so bizarre to me, why she just accepted her father's decision to not

• 17:06David Senra?

  Just to give it to Phil, not even think about her. So the note I left myself is, when does this deep love for the post begin? And the reason I wrote that is because now, looking back, I highly suspect she always had that deep love, but she buried it because it wasn't even, it was such a remote possibility in her mind. It's just, of course, I don't have the skills. I can't run a business. I can't do anything. This is what men do. And I think, again, that's just a devastating way to live your life. Okay, so, right after college, she's working in the newspaper industry, and she gets advice from her fathers, or from her fathers, from her father. And it's something that she's writing about 60 years after it happened. And I thought it was really good advice, so I want to read it to you as well.

• 17:48David Senra?

  "My father wrote me back at once, thanking me for my letter and concluding with what is one of the simplest and best precepts for parents to live by that I have ever read. It meant a lot to me then, as it does even today. What parents may sometimes do," this is now her father writing to her, "what parents may sometimes do in a helpful way is to point out certain principles of action. I do not think I would be helpful in advising you too strongly. I do not even feel the need of doing that because I have so much confidence in your having really good judgment." The way her father talks to her is completely different than the way her mother does. Her mother would diminish her accomplishments, make Catherine seem that she wasn't as smart as her mom was, wasn't as driven, and so on and so forth. So I really appreciate what her father's saying here.

• 18:33David Senra?

  Let me go back to what he was saying. "I have so much confidence in you for having really good judgment. I believe that what I can do for you once in a while is to point out certain principles that have developed in my mind as sound and practical, leaving it for you yourself to apply them if your own mind grasps and approves those principles." That's fantastic advice. It's really interesting, now that I reread that section, knowing what happens later on in the book. Essentially, she is taught...

• 19:06David Senra?

  Warren Buffett essentially gives her a one-on-one course in how to run a business. Can you imagine having been mentored on a one-on-one basis from Warren Buffett? Who his entire life has been about, I don't know if there's anybody alive today that has studied and read and learned more about all the different businesses, which is extremely helpful. But what happened is, and something that her father is saying here that Warren also echoes later, is she started to become too reliant on it. Like she'd call him two, three, four times a day with just basic questions. And at one point, they're thinking of, you know, the Washington Post company is very different from just running the Washington Post. They own radio stations and TV networks and other newspapers and all kinds of other stuff. It's a gigantic business, right?

• 19:49David Senra?

  And they're about to buy, she wants to buy another, later on in the book, they talk about she wants to buy another newspaper. And she insisted that Warren be, like, be involved in the negotiations. And he refused at that point. He's like, "You are competent enough. You can do it. I'm not going to do it for you." And that wound up, that message to her was like, oh, that was extremely, it built her up. It gave her more confidence and she wound up buying something at a good rate and wound up being a good deal and they made money on it later on in life, too. But I thought that was very, I think that's just very good advice from Warren and very good advice from her father. It's like, "Listen, I can teach you the lessons and the principles and the things I discovered

• 20:29David Senra?

  over my long career, but unless you, like, unless they make sense in the context of your life, unless you actually want to, unless you understand them and then want to apply them, like, that's something no one can do for you. You have to apply them. You have to do that for your life." And I think that's just fantastic parenting. Okay, so now I want to tell you about, this is, I'm going to read a couple excerpts from, this is a letter that she wrote in college. And this is what I was referencing earlier. She knows what she wants, but is full of doubt. And as I read this to you, this reminded me when I, when I read this letter that she wrote. I saw a talk Kobe Bryant gave in China, in China.

• 21:10David Senra?

  And he was talking about what the biggest fear that we usually have in life is not things that are external. It's like, it's internal. It's that we know deep in our heart that we want to do something. But, you know, we're afraid to, to, to attempt it. What happened, what does it say about us if we go all in and we fail? You know, and he says the biggest, the scariest thing, I think the quote from him was, you know, the scariest thing is admitting to yourself, I want that. And then going for it. And his whole point, the reason he's telling this to the audience, a lot of young kids in the audience, is you have to overcome that fear. If you've identified this is what you want your, to do in life, this is what you want your life to be, you have to go forward no matter what. And we see her kind of, she, she's admitting that she, she loves the newspaper industry.

• 21:54David Senra?

  But again, she's just been brainwashed that it's just not in the cards for her because she was born female. I think I want to go into the newspaper business. The fact remains that what I am most interested in doing is, is reporting. Possibly working up to political reporting later. As you can see, this is no help to dad. He wants and needs someone who is willing to go through the whole mill. So they're talking about, uh, the, the reason he winds up passing down the paper to, to Phil Graham is because, you know, they can take care of circulation and management problems and run the actual business and deal with the editorials and the politicians and everything else. And she's saying, well, I just have a love of reporting. I, and then this, this is what she says here.

• 22:35David Senra?

  Again, if you have a feeling like this, she's, the way she feels in this next sentence, if Phil Graham never killed himself, she would have never had the career that she had. Right? Which is the most tragic, single most tragic thing that ever happened to her. But, but in a weird way, and I hate to say like, this might be the best thing that ever happened. Phil has some serious problems. Manic depression. He was extremely troubled, but he also was not. I don't know if she would agree with this statement, but reading this book, he was not a good husband. He would belittle her, he cheated on her. Six months before he kills himself, he leaves her for his employee. And then he admits to her in one of his like, it's almost like what we see. He just, he has these like rants, which is like, oh yeah, it's not just Robin, which is his mistress.

• 23:19David Senra?

  It's like, you know, it's this person, this person. She didn't know any of this and he was just carrying on all these relationships. He was good friends with JFK. He had a lot of JFK in him, actually, is the way I would put it. Cause JFK was doing the same things to Jackie Kennedy. But this is the sentence. "I doubt my ability to carry a load like the Washington Post. From Dad's point of view, I think it would mean something. I may be flattering myself, but I think it would mean several things, such as companionship, a living connection with the next generation, and the knowledge that, that all that he was slaving to build was not going to stop. And she's talking about, it would mean a lot to Dad if I had the ability to do this. She's not married yet. So she doesn't know that, that, you know, her husband's going to be the one fulfilling this position

• 24:03David Senra?

  where she's saying, the one that she's talking about that secretly she probably really wants, but she doesn't feel she's good enough for. And that's what he was, he wanted the Washington Post to be a family business. Eventually they go public, but they were, it was run. Warren Buffett writes her a letter when he invests, before they have a relationship, he buys like 10% of the company. He's like, listen, I'm fine that it's Graham run and Graham, Graham owned, meaning Graham family and Graham managed. I'm fine with that. So he says, "And the knowledge that he was not slaving to build something that was not going to stop with him. From my point of view, it would be giving up a position that is fair to say thousands would fight for, that is an influential position and an influential paper in the capital of the world's most important country." If I find for some reason that I'm not fitted to the newspaper work,

• 24:47David Senra?

  and this may happen, among other things, I function a little on the slow side. Again, she's so demeaning to herself. She called herself ugly, didn't think she was motivated enough. Now she's saying she's not smart enough. "I function a little on the slow side, which is not good. I shall get out and consider it no disgrace." And so I would just stop and think about what she just said there. Like, she would consider it no disgrace. So this is something that she wants to do, something that she doesn't think she can do, something that would be good for her family, yet saying that if it didn't happen, it'd be no disgrace. I don't know if I agree with that. If we only have one shot at life, isn't it a disgrace to not actually do what you truly want to do? And I just have one sentence for you.

• 25:30David Senra?

  This is the way she summarized working at a newspaper in San Francisco before going back to Washington. This is right after she graduated from college, if I'm not mistaken. And this gives you an insight. She really did love this industry, which is so... Which, again, I just want to keep hounding on. While she was meant to do what she... This is what she loved to do. And yet, her lack of self-confidence prevented her from doing that. "I loved those months I spent in San Francisco as I have loved very few times in my life." Keep in mind, she's 79 years old when she's writing those words. This is, you know, she might be 22 at the time.

• 26:10David Senra?

  "I loved those months I spent in San Francisco as I loved few times in my life." So I love this one paragraph, because it's Phil Graham. Really, what he's saying here is, if you have a problem, maybe you benefit from looking at it from a different perspective. And this is right before America starts jumping into World War II. So this is, "In one exchange between us, I had deplored the fact that we had the bad luck to live in a world with Hitler, to which Phil responded, 'I don't know. Maybe it's a privilege to have to fight the biggest son of a bitch in history.'" So after the war, her father starts broaching the subject of, "Hey, you know, I want to keep the post in the family."

• 26:54David Senra?

  And I think Phil's the best route to do that. They're married at this time. And I'm going to read to you... This section, but really, listen to her response. Which is, again, I think sometimes we can be blinded. We just accept something is true that's, in this case, we find out it's definitely not true. But she didn't even question it, which I think is very, like, it's a lesson that we can take. Like, what are the things that we think are true in our lives that if we dig a little deeper, we find are false? As a way to put that. Shortly after this, my father seems to have brought up with both of us the possibility of Phil's working at The Paper after the war. Certainly, he saw the whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. In those days, of course, the only possible heir would have been male.

• 27:38David Senra?

  And since my brother was in medicine and had shown little or no interest in the business, my father naturally thought of Phil. Now, this is her reaction. Far from troubling me personally that my father thought of my husband and not me, it pleased me. In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at The Paper. So at the time Phil takes over The Paper, it's losing money. Her father is still, to the tune of usually like a couple hundred thousand dollars every year, is still paying up the losses out of his pocket. And so they realize, hey, we need to get better on our reporting, better on editorial. And at the same time, we've really got to focus on increasing our ad revenue.

• 28:23David Senra?

  And so something that Phil does, because The Post, you know, Washington Post now is very widely known. At this time, it was like the fourth, it was in fourth place out of the five main Washington DC newspapers. So Phil does something that's a really good idea. He's, he actually starts cold calling heads of major companies and executives and asking them for their business. So it says, Phil became one of The Post's best ad salesmen. This is, again, he's running the entire company. So it talks about how important this aspect of the business was. Often writing letters to company executives around the country, giving forceful evidence for why The Post was a logical, cost-effective choice for their advertising dollars.

• 29:04David Senra?

  And that winds up being a good idea, winds up recruiting people and companies that started to spend money with The Washington Post that either didn't even realize that there was an opportunity, or didn't come up with that idea on their own. So I thought it was a really good idea. Phil also does something that's really smart, which is what you and I are doing right now, which is learning from and then drawing inspiration from biography. So at this time, their larger, more profitable competitor was just purchased by another formidable, successful newspaper publishers. And so this is the guys, the guys that wind up buying the competitor are the guys he's reading a biography about. And what's interesting is their biography actually gives him the strength to carry on because he realizes, I'm now in the position they were when they started their career. And if they did it, I can do it.

• 29:48David Senra?

  That's a very, very valuable lesson to learn. One night, a week or so after the takeover, I woke up at 2:00 in the morning to find Phil smoking and finishing a book on the lives and careers of the newspaper magnates Colonel McCormick and Captain Joe Patterson. These are the people that just bought their main competitor. Phil said, you know, they put their company together when they were in their 30s. Now they're in their 60s, and I'm in my 30s. I think we can make it another way. With that simple conclusion, Phil got over the terrible blow of being defeated in a deal on which we thought our life depended. So what happened is they were both, I covered this in the William Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer podcasts, but it was very common to increase your overall circulation by buying a competitor

• 30:32David Senra?

  that was either going out of business or was up for sale for some reason. In this case, if they would have successfully bought, I think it was the Washington, the Times Herald, maybe, they would have doubled their circulation overnight. And they needed that because they were still losing money this time. Now, eight years later, or maybe five or eight years later, they wind up buying the paper from these two guys that he's reading the story on. So he was actually right. But his point that he says, okay, you know what? I can do what they did, and I think we can make it another way. With that simple conclusion, Phil got over the terrible blow of being defeated in a deal on which we thought our life depended. And that's his whole point. He's like, okay, well, we missed it on this one deal. Does that mean we're going to go out of business? No, like, we just, that sucks. Let's have a pity party for a few minutes, and then let's overcome and find another route. And they wind up doing that.

• 31:17David Senra?

  So something she talks about a great deal is the fact that Phil drank a lot. When he drank, he'd get, I don't know if he ever hit her, but he would get, he would yow, break stuff, you know, he was just not pleasant to be around. In fact, right before he's committed to the mental hospital, this is like six, maybe six, nine months before he went to committing suicide, he goes on one of his rants, he's giving a speech, and again, he was friends with, wrote speeches for Lyndon Johnson, wants to be a friend and advisor of JFK, and he just, at this speech, he just starts talking about, oh yeah, JFK's sleeping with, you know, I think it was a CIA director's ex-wife or something like that. I looked into it.

• 31:56David Senra?

  She winds up getting killed, shot a few months later, and to this day, it's still an unsolved case. And this, a few months after that, JFK gets killed. There's just a lot of craziness that's going on in Washington at this time. And so throughout this entire book, there's definitely stories that set up what Phil winds up doing, right? He's clearly unhinged in a lot of ways. But what was very interesting to me, and I just put wow, it's the only note I left here, is this sentence, "I never suspected that Phil was either ill or depressed." Now, in hindsight, they would diagnose somebody like Phil Graham as a manic depressive, right? She did not, but he hid that.

• 32:40David Senra?

  He did, they just thought it was erratic behavior, maybe caused by alcohol or something like that. But he wouldn't talk about his depression. And like she said, when he, the day he committed suicide, she thought, she was optimistic. She's like, oh, we've turned the corner, we're going to get back to being a loving family, not realizing that, you know, he had other, other ideas. But this idea, "I'd never suspected that Phil was either ill or depressed," so it just makes what happened even more shocking. Now, a large part of this book is the struggles to make The Washington Post a viable company. It goes, you know, maybe a decade of struggle, if not more. And so she puts out, this paragraph, I think, talks about that. Like, there's a lot of people today that are working in the Washington Post that think

• 33:23David Senra?

  we just, you know, we were bestowed with this great franchise, now realizing that we had to work really hard to get on a solid footing. So it says, "There's no doubt in my mind that the struggle to survive was good for us. In business, you have to know what it is to be poor and stretched and fighting for your life against great odds." That's the description of the ideas of the Washington Post. "Many of the young people in the paper today tend to think that the franchise was bestowed on the Post, and they take it for granted. We all had a deep fear that, like the Star, Washington Star family, there's one of their main competitors that wound up going out of business after like 128 years, we would someday become self-satisfied. That fear permeates our family." And now here's another paragraph that I mentioned earlier, that the book is just full of paragraphs just like this, separated by years, multiple decades of her being insecure.

• 34:07David Senra?

  Later on, she feels she has imposter syndrome, that she doesn't belong. "Despite my pleasure in the life I was leading during these years, I can now see that I was having problems I didn't acknowledge. I was growing shyer and less confident as I got older. I still didn't know how to look my best or to handle myself in social situations. I was afraid of being boring, and went on believing that people related to us entirely because of Phil." So what she's really saying there is, you know, we, this time, they may be coming friends with politicians, presidents, congressmen, senators, all kinds of ambassadors and everything else, but they don't really care about me. They're only talking to me because, they're only talking to me because I'm married to Phil. And that's, again, just a devastating way to go through life. So something that exacerbated Phil's mental illness is the fact that he burned the candle

• 34:52David Senra?

  at both ends, did not take care of his health at all. The note of myself in this page, "Just take care of your health, or nothing else matters." And, you know, he had, he had to be hospitalized a couple of times. Sometimes he would just have to take two or three weeks where he couldn't talk to anybody but Catherine. He was just so distraught and so, just...

• 35:10David Senra?

  Tightly wound and under a great deal of stress. So this is one of his, uh, this is one of, this is a family friend of Phil's family who grew up, uh, I think in South Dakota. His family's from South Dakota and Florida. So it's talking about, you know, you gotta take care of your health because look what happened to your dad. His dad is slaved away trying to build like this dairy business in like the Everglades or something like that. So it says, uh, "You no doubt have been congratulated and toasted by many great and important people on your last adventure. None more sincerely than by one who has been privileged to sit on the sidelines and watch the developments since long ago in Terry." That's Terry, South Dakota. That's where Phil's family is from. "When I look back now over the many years of tremendous effort your father expended in building his land empire, which is, which has now wrecked a fine, physical specimen

• 35:54David Senra?

  of a man, I cannot but be skeptical of such attainment." So he's saying, "Your father built this great business, but he did so at the consequence of not taking care of his health. I hope you have learned over the years to cast aside such responsibilities that accompany such business as yours and not follow the footsteps of your father and work at it 24 hours each and every day. There is no greater wealth than health." And that is a, um, that's advice that Phil never, um, heeded. In fact, as he got, the sicker he got, the busier he got. And I think, I think that, uh, contributed to his, his eventual suicide. Now, we're already on the, uh, at the point in the story where on the other side of that line of demarcation, and now she has to make this decision. You know, cause Phil dies, everybody assumes, okay, well, they're, they're gonna sell the

• 36:39David Senra?

  paper, you know, no one's there to run it. And then this is where she's making the decision. "I have to be the one that runs the company. I have to be the leader of the family here on in." She says, "I recall walking into a room where the all male board was gathered, was gathered. To a man, they almost looked as stricken as I was. They also seemed to be looking at me hard to decipher what was there. Oz Elliott, one of the board members, later recalled what I said better than I could. You said you appreciated very much how everybody had handled this very difficult situation with professionalism, and you just wanted to say that you knew rumors were around and would be around, that the company would be for sale or that some part of it would be. And you said that you wanted to make it clear that it was not for sale. No part of it was for sale.

• 37:21David Senra?

  This was a family enterprise and there was a new generation coming along." Okay, so now we start to see the very first inkling of her, where she's building up her own strength. And this is as the years continue, you know, this is not an overnight process. I think 10 years after, 10 years into running the company, she's still having serious self doubts. But she says, "Knowledge of that new generation, which were my children, was what led me, however hesitantly, to the decision I made then to try and hold on to the company by going to work." And her children at this time, if I'm not mistaken, by the time Phil commits suicide, I think they have four kids ranging from ages of 11 to 19, I think. So very, very young. This is just a great sentence.

• 38:05David Senra?

  "Sometimes you don't really decide, you just move forward. And that is what I did, moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life." And again, I just want to remind you, I really feel this second, the second part of her life was much more enjoyable and much more authentic to who she really was than the first part. Obviously, unfortunately, she had to go through such a severe tragedy to get to that second part. So now in this section, she's going to talk about, you know, "I don't know anything about running a business." But really, what I, the left hand of myself is, she has passion and commitment. She can learn everything else. She can hire other people to teach her these things. But she has the two most important things. "I'm not giving up. This is a family business and I'm extremely passionate about it.

• 38:49David Senra?

  I cared so much about the paper and about keeping in the family that despite my lack of knowledge and feelings of insecurity, I felt I had to make it work. Throughout the first weeks, I felt I was wandering around in a fog, trying to grasp the rudiments. Who did what, when, why, where, and how? It's hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was. I knew neither the substance of the business, neither the substance of the business, and journalistic worlds in which I was moving, nor the processes through which these worlds operated. Despite my father's expertise and experience, I knew next to nothing about business and absolutely nothing about accounting." Her father knew everything, but now he's passed away. So this is the role, I mean, not a father figure role, but a mentor role that Warren's actually going to fulfill. "I couldn't read or understand a balance sheet.

• 39:33David Senra?

  I remember my complete befuddlement and my inability in the beginning to follow technical financial discussions. The mere mention of terms like liquidity made my eyes glaze over. I was also uneducated in the basics of the working world. How to relate to people professionally, how to tell people things that they might not want to hear, how to give praise as well as criticism, how to use time to the best effect." Things that people learned automatically in their workplace or in graduate schools, I didn't know. And this next part has nothing to do with the story, other than it's just an odd occurrence. Imagine, this is another of myself, imagine getting yelled at by the President of the United States while he undresses. So this is Lyndon Johnson. Phil, again, was very close to Lyndon, wrote, way before Lyndon was Vice President or anything

• 40:17David Senra?

  else, wrote speeches for him, everything else. It's just kind of, you know, Lyndon has been known to be a bit of a dick, is the way I would put it. That's being light. He was, you know, a lot of people describe him in very terrible ways. So he's yelling at her, he's at the White House yelling at her because he doesn't like the coverage. You know, every single politician in this book complains about the coverage, Nixon, Lyndon. I don't know if JFK did. JFK comes off really likeable, actually, in the book. But, "As he was yelling at me, he started to undress, flinging his clothes off onto a chair on the floor, his coat, his tie, his shirt." When I was reading this, I was like, "Oh, my God, where's this going?" I thought it was going to become like sexual in nature. "Finally, he was down to his pants. I was frozen with dismay and baffled about what to do.

• 41:01David Senra?

  I remember thinking to myself, 'This can't, this can't be me being balled out by the President of the United States while he's undressing.'" Suddenly, he bellowed, "Turn around." I did so obediently and gratefully. And he went right on with his angry monologue, until I turned back at his command to find him in his pajamas. He bid the two of us a curt goodnight, and I turned around on my heels and vanished." During this time, I thought this was very interesting. I think a lot of people are under the same delusion. She thought she was the only one making mistakes, that if people were in jobs, they were obviously qualified for that job, they didn't, they weren't doubting themselves, not realizing that most people do. "I made mistakes and suffered great distress from them, partly because I believed that if you worked diligently enough, you wouldn't make mistakes." That's ridiculous.

• 41:45David Senra?

  "I truly believed that other people in my position didn't make mistakes." Also ridiculous. "I couldn't see that everybody makes them, even people with great experience. What I did that I'm certain my male counterparts did not, and which was particularly tormenting, was to lie awake at night, reliving events of the day, going over and over certain scenes, wondering how I could have managed whatever it was differently." She's saying that male counterparts do that. That's not true. I've done that before. I think you might have as well. Everybody does this. Now, I want to fast forward 10 years. 10 years she's been running The Post. Okay, now we're in the midst 1970s. This is where Warren's gonna get involved. But listen, listen to this. "Given this is how she felt, it's amazing that she succeeded. My expectations far exceeded my accomplishments. In fact, the years from the mid 1960s, when she took over the paper, to the mid 1970s,

• 42:29David Senra?

  rich and full as they were, were depressing. I seem to be carrying inadequacy as baggage." We are now on page 416. This is 400 pages of her talking about how inadequate she was. This is amazing. "I still felt like a pretender to the throne." There's imposter syndrome, right? Still takes place to this day. "Very much on trial. I felt I was always taking an exam and I would fail if I missed a single answer. What most got in the way of my doing the kind of job I wanted to do was my insecurity. I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children."

• 43:13David Senra?

  She believes that even though at the time, she's already had a decade of running a very complex and gigantic business. And doing so while she believes she can't do so. Okay, so even though this is a family business, she's eventually talked into by other people, this is pre-Buffett, to go public. And so she goes public, and this is the first time in the book that Warren Buffett is mentioned. And then from here on in, he is a, I would say, you know, not a main character, because this is her, obviously, main story. He's the next most important supporting character for the rest of the book. I think he's mentioned 25 times in the last 150 pages, including one, like, seven-page

• 43:57David Senra?

  section where it just talks about her relationship with him, how important he was to her. He's extremely, extremely important in this story. So it says, "Warren Buffett, whose company Berkshire Hathaway bought about 10% of the company's B shares in 1973, later told me that he didn't think we really had to go public, but was glad that we had." He was essentially... Saying, telling her the advice that you were getting from these other people were incorrect. In fact, a lot of other board members considered Warren an adversary that told her over and over again not to trust him and he, you know, he's dangerous. And she keeps building a relationship with him, you know, talking more and more to him. She's like, I don't think your assessment of him is accurate. In fact, I feel he's very, very wise.

• 44:38David Senra?

  In fact, I was glad we had to, I was glad we had to, meaning going public, although I still dislike some of the responsibilities being public entails. The advent of Warren was only one of the positive things that resulted from our going public. It also gave us proper discipline about profit margins. So remember, the context of all this, what I'm reading to you right now, she's 10 years in and she's still not confident. So she's going to talk more about that. And then I'm going to read from this letter that she kept that Warren wrote to her about why he made such a large investment in the company. Now, keep in mind, this book, like, you might have known Katherine Graham before this podcast because Watergate, Pentagon Papers. There was a movie I watched with Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. Meryl Streep plays the character of Katherine Graham.

• 45:21David Senra?

  I think it's called The Post, and it's about Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. So that's a large part of the book I'm obviously omitting. I'm going to focus from here on in about the advice, the business advice and, and things that Catherine learned. But that's also in the book as well, which was really fascinating because again, it's like, it's like reading her diary, her journal, and it's a ton. She's in Washington DC for, she's running the company for almost 40 years. She lived there, you know, 20 something years before that. So 60 something years of history, of political history in the United States that's contained in this book. That's also very, very interesting to read. Because I still had vast problems with self-confidence in public situations, I feared dealing with

• 46:02David Senra?

  industry and with Wall Street, especially the excruciating ordeal of speaking to financial analysts. Because we were a public company, if I had hashed things up now, meaning the mistakes were all going to be visible. In truth, I didn't even know how much I didn't know are the complexity of what lay before me. Good luck was again on my side, coming just when I needed it. It was my good fortune that Warren Buffett bought into the company, beginning a whole new phase of my life. And again, she says over and over again, how important Warren was to the success. Later on, he compares, he's like, you know, I put $10 million to your company. Let's compare how you, like, the performance of the company under your leadership compared

• 46:45David Senra?

  to other, you know, alternative investments I could have made at the time. Other newspapers, media properties, etc. And he's like, you know, your return has been 3,000%. The other ones have averaged like 1,000%. And she's like, yeah, but you're discounting the role that you played in that as well. And again, they seem to have a very genuine friendship. The letter helped explain why he bought the stock. This is now her telling her, him writing to her, why he bought 230,000 shares. This purchase represents a sizable commitment to us and an explicitly quantified compliment to The Post as a business enterprise and you as its chief executive. Writing a check, it's so important for how other people believe in you. Like, how valuable this wound up being to Katherine Graham. Writing a check separates, oh, this is such a great sentence.

• 47:30David Senra?

  He is, again, if you haven't listened to my podcast, I did when I read every single one of his shareholder letters, I'm looking at the freaking book right now. It's like a textbook. It was the hardest thing I ever did. And if I could do that again, I recorded it in one sitting. Imagine sitting by yourself, talking for three hours straight. I would have, if I could do it again, I would have recorded it multiple times and edited together because it was so difficult, but I didn't know any better. But in any case, he's just a great writer. And listen to this sentence. Writing a check separates conviction from conversation. I recognize that The Post is Graham-controlled and Graham-managed, and that suits me fine. So anyways, I didn't finish that thought. I think it's number 88, 81, something, it's in the 80s. If you haven't listened to that, it's the longest founders episode I ever did.

• 48:13David Senra?

  I don't think I'll ever do an episode again that long, but you should listen to it. It's really interesting. Some years back, a partnership which I managed. Made a significant investment in the stock of Walt Disney. The stock was ridiculously cheap based upon earnings. I think he paid like 55 cents a share. I can't remember. He talks about it on his shareholder orders. It was insane. And then he went up selling it. Asset values and capability of management. That alone was enough to make my pulse quicken and my pocketbook open. But there was also an important extra dimension to the investment. In its field, this is why, reason I'm reading this to you because it's fantastic and I love Walt Disney. He's one of my favorite founders ever. In its field, Disney simply was the finest, hands down.

• 48:53David Senra?

  Anything that didn't reflect his best efforts, anything that might leave the customer feeling short-changed, just wasn't acceptable to Walt Disney. He melded energetic creativity with a discipline regarding profitability and achieved something unique in entertainment. Then why am I reading those to you? Because this very next sentence, think about how beneficial this would have been to Catherine Graham. At this time, she's running a company for 10 years, still very deeply insecure. And he says, "I feel the same way about The Washington Post." Okay, the letter continues. I'm going to move on to another section. This is her talking about Warren becoming important to her business. They're at a dinner at the time. They're starting to, with other people.

• 49:36David Senra?

  They're starting very early in their days of trying to build a relationship. So this guy named Howard makes, he has a question that makes Catherine feel like an imposter. And so this is where Warren jumps in. Howard looked at me and said, "Now Catherine, how does the emerization of goodwill work?" The conversation stopped for a second. Warren recalled, "I could see the look on your face like he asked you to explain Einstein's theory of relativity. Here was my chance to be a hero, so I jumped in and explained in a fairly succinct, in a succinct way how it worked. I think this was the real beginning of my knowing how much Warren would mean to me. After lunch, he and I spent an hour together, during which he offered to stop buying our stock because he perceived it was worrying me.

• 50:21David Senra?

  He described his bite, that's in quotation marks, of the company as baby teeth, also in quotation marks, but added, 'If they look like wolf's fangs, I will take them out.'" Warren wrote me a few days after lunch saying, "When you can obtain total participation by talented and intellectually diverse people without diluting authority and at the same time enjoy yourself immensely, you are achieving something." So he's talking about what she's doing. She's learning, she's getting investors like him on her side. She's hiring good executives. She's running the company herself. Again, when you obtain, I'm going to read that sentence again because it's really interesting. "When you obtain total participation by talented and intellectually diverse people without diluting authority," meaning you're still in charge, "and at the same time enjoy yourself," because she has a passion about what she's working on,

• 51:05David Senra?

  "immensely, you are achieving something." That's fantastic advice from a youngish Warren Buffett. This theme continues. This is more on Warren as a mentor and a teacher. Remember, that's how he views himself. Yes, he's an investor, but he considers his shareholders, his ability to teach everything he knows about business. This is what, again, I know the book is the size of a textbook. You don't have to read in one sitting. I think I read it in a week. That was very unwise. I would not do that again. But I do think buying the book, and you can get the Kindle version. I have both. I have the Kindle version that goes up until 2018, and I have the physical version that goes from 2014. The Kindle version is like $2.99. Are you serious? "Warren was sending me a constant flow of helpful memos with advice and occasionally alerting me to problems of which I was unaware.

• 51:47David Senra?

  And in the beginning, I didn't realize how fortunate I was to have this mentor. But I grew very dependent on him for advice, and I liked it. In effect, he was beginning to teach me the fundamentals of thinking about business for which I had so longed. I started to call him two or three times a day." Imagine having one-on-one tutelage from Warren Buffett. That's insane. More on this, you know, kind of own business school of sorts, this personal curriculum that she's developing with Warren. Again, this is, I'm not reading from the same pages. This is spread out by maybe 40, 50 pages. This goes on and on. "My business education began in earnest. He literally took me to business school, which was just what I needed. How lucky I was to be educated by Warren Buffett,

• 52:30David Senra?

  and how many people would have given anything for the same experience? How much, if you could even pay for something like that? I mean, you can't because essentially it's priceless. But, you know, people would pay a ton of money for that. He brought with him to our meetings as many annual reports as he could carry and took me through them, describing different kinds of businesses." This is what I really love because, you know, they go back in time, him and Charlie. And they read about, you know, they're biography nuts, both of them, but they read about businesses well before they were born. I just, I know I mentioned them earlier, but I just saw Coach K, which is one of the most famous basketball coaches of all time, talking about when he was, something that was unique about Kobe Bryant was the fact

• 53:11David Senra?

  that all players would study tape of current players. But Kobe would say, hey, go back and find tape on Oscar Robinson. Go study Jerry West. Find what made these guys great. Again, Kobe, what Kobe was doing for basketball, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett and others were doing for business and their, and their, their craft, their, their professional lives, which I think is really good. But I interrupted myself here, so let me go back to that. He brought a bunch of annual reports describing different kinds of businesses illustrating his main points with real world companies, noting why one was a good business and another bad, teaching me specifics in the process of imparting a great deal of his highly developed philosophy. He told me, whereas Otis Chandler, I don't know who that is, collected antique

• 53:53David Senra?

  cars, he himself collected antique financial statements. What the hell? That is really interesting. I've never even heard somebody say that. He himself collected antique financial statements because, just as with geography or humans, it's interesting to take a snapshot of a business, this is a quote from Warren now, "It's interesting to take a snapshot of a business at widely different points in time and reflect on what factors produce change, as well as what differentiates this specific pattern of development from others also observed." This is a hell of a sentence. Warren's effect on my life is central to everything that followed, while mine on his is largely peripheral. So again, the first part of that sentence, of course, if you're going to get one-on-one lessons from Warren

• 54:38David Senra?

  Buffett, of course it's going to have an effect on your business and your profession. Guess what? You can do that too. You just got to read his biographies and read his shareholder letters. But the second part, again, is she's still not, you know, downplaying. My effect on his life is largely peripheral. Well, you remain, I mean, she doesn't know this because Snowball was published after she died, but you know, you're a rather large character in his life as well. So again, don't, don't downplay yourself. Let your, your light shine bright here.

• 55:03David Senra?

  Just a few more highlights. This is her describing Warren and then Charlie Munger's orangutan theory, which I don't think I've ever heard. And I've read a lot about Munger and I really love. So this is her description of Warren, why he does what he does. Warren is only happy when he's unconstrained, totally in control of his own life, not forced to go to meetings or dinners that he doesn't want to, or see people who don't interest him, or do things he doesn't enjoy. That's Warren Buffett, right? I feel the same way. You probably do as well. This idea that Munger talks about, talking about why he left, he didn't want to be an attorney anymore and wanted to be an investor. He's like, "I desperately wanted to be rich." And he's like, "I didn't want Ferraris. I wanted freedom. I wanted independence."

• 55:46David Senra?

  And I think that's what Katherine Graham is describing here in terms of Warren Buffett. Oh, I skipped over one more sentence before I get to Charlie Munger's orangutan theory. Warren has done so many things for me, but among the most important are the inroads he made on my insecurities. Warren is humanly wise. He was humanly wise, too. So naturally, I began to share with him things in my private life. His comments always helped me. So this is great. This is before. Let me finish this and then I'll get to Munger's orangutan theory. I can't believe I almost skipped over this. This is really important. Just talk about, you know, I'm sharing him things in my private life. He helped me not be so insecure anymore. What's the value of that? It's priceless.

• 56:31David Senra?

  Again, he once told me that something, and this is fantastic advice. He once told me that someone in a Dale Carnegie course had said to him, "Just remember, we're not going to teach you how to keep your knees from knocking. All we're going to do is teach you how to talk while your knees knock." That's when he then turned around and passed on to me. He helped me learn how to talk while my knees knocked. Now, this is Charlie Munger's orangutan theory, which is freaking fantastic. Warren summed up our learning relationship by suggesting that I seemed to go around as though I was seeing myself through the distorting mirrors of a carnival funhouse. He saw it as his task to get me a better mirror that could eliminate the distortions.

• 57:13David Senra?

  He later told me that he subscribed to Charlie Munger's orangutan theory, which essentially contended that if a smart person goes into a room with an orangutan and explains whatever his or her idea is, the orangutan just sits there eating his banana. And at the end of the conversation, the person explaining comes out smarter. Warren claimed to be my orangutan, in an way he was. I heard myself talk when I was with him, and I always got a better idea of what I was saying. Okay, so now I've reached towards the end, and again, I've said this before, I really can't encourage you enough, and I don't even think you need my encouragement, to read

• 57:55David Senra?

  as many biographies, and I always prefer autobiographies. So if there's an autobiography, I'll always read that first. I'll obviously read biographies in addition to that. But reading this book, and like any other autobiography, it's having a one-sided conversation. Like, I had a 20-hour, one-sided conversation with someone that's been dead for 20 years. If she was alive today, she'd be 103, 104, something like that. And I think autobiographies especially, especially of people that have passed on already, it's the greatest illustration of that quote I always talk about, or I always think about, the Carl Sagan quote, "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.

• 58:38David Senra?

  But one glance at it, and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years, across the millennia, an author speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackle of time, a book's proof that humans are capable of working magic." And again, I just think, the more we study interesting historical figures, almost every one of them does the same thing that we can do, that's available to us. They can read biographies and autobiographies of great people and learn every time. It's such... I got to this book, and it's that same feeling. It's a bittersweet, melancholic...

• 59:20David Senra?

  Happiness feeling, where it's like, alright, I'm better off having this conversation with Catherine Graham than I was if I didn't have that conversation. And so maybe her life interests you. If not, there's 150 something other books to pick from. The ones I've covered, obviously you can grab any ones that interest you. It's no surprise to me why some of the smartest, most productive people in the world do exactly this activity, because it's one of the highest value activities you can do in the world. It's fantastic. Why dare write a book? What makes us think that someone else would be interested in stories from our own past? For me, there was a mixture of motives. I've been thinking about my parents, who with their drive, discipline, eccentricity, and wealth, might be of interest even to non-family people. But I also felt that Phil's story had not been told.

• 1:00:04David Senra?

  His brains, ability, and charm were legendary among his friends, but no one had written fully about him and his accomplishments, as well about his devastation by his largely untreated manic depression. Partly, I wanted to look at my own life, because my personal history contains elements that were both unexpected and unrepeatable. I recognize the inherent danger of being self-serving and having tried to retain as much detachment as possible, but I wanted to tell people what happened, just as I saw it. And in that process, I hope to arrive at some understanding of how people are formed by the way they grow up and further molded by the way they spend their days. That's a great sentence. I'm going to read it again.

• 1:00:47David Senra?

  At the end of the sentence, "I hope to arrive at some understanding of how people are formed by the way they grow up and further modeled, excuse me, further molded by the ways they spend their days." This is where she talks about aging and what's really important. "It is my family and the engrossing pleasures that I've mentioned that help me face the unavoidable problems of age and the inevitable loss of friends. I will be publishing this book when I'm 79. I've been fortunate, but old age is no barrel of laughs. Even if you were generally healthy, there are things, your heart, your hips, the general slowing down mentally and physically, that make denying of aging an impossibility. At the same time, there are positive aspects to being old.

• 1:01:30David Senra?

  Worry, if not gone altogether, no longer haunts you in the middle of the night, and you are free, or freer, to turn down the things that bore you and spend time on matters and with people you enjoy." I am grateful to be able to go on working and to like my new life so well that I don't miss the old one. It's dangerous when you're older to start living in the past. Now that it's out of my system, I intend to live in the present, looking forward to the future. I think that's fantastic advice to close on. We can learn from the past, but we're not going to spend any time there. Let's focus on the present and the future. I love that. That is where I'm going to leave the story for the full book. For the full book, for the full story, read the book.

• 1:02:15David Senra?

  It's fantastic. You can go to amazon.com/forshop, forshopfounderspodcast. And you can buy this book or any of the books. You'd be helping out the podcast at the same time because I get a small percentage of the sale. I also leave that link in the show notes that you can just tap on your podcast player. And you can go to founderspodcast.com and get the link there. So however you want to do that. One other favor to ask you, please sometime this week, find a friend or two or 10 that you have not already told about the podcast and please help spread the word. That would help very much. And that is 140, 152 books down.

• 1:02:58David Senra?

  Somebody pointed out to me that it's actually more than 152 books because I haven't been counting the bonus episodes, so it's technically 157. But I'm going to keep up with just looking at the number of the episode and going with that. But you know, there's other books out there as well. 152 books down, 1,000 to go, and I will talk to you again soon.