My Conversation with Brad Jacobs

I’ve started a new show where I have conversations with the greatest living Founders. The show is called David Senra. It will be on a separate podcast feed from Founders. So it is very important that you follow David Senra on ⁠Spotify⁠, ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠, ⁠YouTube⁠, or ⁠wherever you're listening to this so you don't miss future episodes⁠. Nothing is changing with Founders. I will never stop making Founders.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've started a new show where I have conversations with the greatest living founders. That show is called David Senra and it will be on a separate podcast feed from Founders. So it's very important that you follow David Senra on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you're listening to this, so you don't miss future episodes. The first two episodes were with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, and Michael Dell. This episode is with Brad Jacobs. I find Brad Jacobs very fascinating, not only because he started eight separate billion-dollar companies, but also because of his infectious energy and enthusiasm for business building and money-making. He was kind enough to invite me to his house and that is where we recorded this conversation. I'm going to post our entire conversation on this feed, so you know what the new show is like. I hope you enjoy the conversation and please don't forget to follow the new show, David

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Senra, now, so you don't miss future episodes. And by the way, nothing is changing with Founders. I'm still doing episodes every week and will work on Founders until I die.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I'm ready when you are, man. I'm in the zone. I'm in the zone, man.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  We're going to pick up right... I hope we start with this. I love your energy. This is what I always tell people when, you know, I did the episode in your book, right? And since then, thousands, and this is not an exaggeration, thousands of people have sent me messages. But what I try to explain to people, they're like, well, what's so different about Brad? I was like, well, first of all, how long do you have? Second of all, he's got the best energy and the most energy of any person I've ever been around. So like, I really appreciate you taking the time and agreeing to do this. One of my favorite things is your affinity and relationship that you had. You had a bunch of mentors, but one of your most important ones, and you mentioned, I think, four times in the book, is Ludwig Jesselson. You have a list of maxims in the very beginning of the book that you learned from other people. The maxim that you listed for him was get the major trend right.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  So if you could just talk about your relationship with him and what he meant to you, I think that's a perfect place to start.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  He meant a lot. So Mr. Jesselson, I never called him Ludwig. Mr. Jesselson, he was significantly older than me and much more accomplished than me. So I showed him respect by calling him Mr. Jesselson. Mr. Jesselson was a special guy. This was someone who... Was deep, very profound and had lived life fully and by principles. And he was a religious guy. I wouldn't say he was like ultra-religious. He was more taking the morality of Judaism. The do's and don'ts and ethical behavior and honesty and so forth. And that became the core of his life. That became the core of his personal life and his business life. Relationships, deep relationships, long-term relationships, honest relationships, relationships you can keep coming back to.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  And sometimes one person has the leverage, sometimes the other person has the leverage. Doesn't matter, you don't take advantage of that. It's long-term relationships. And he had, he had about a few dozen deep principles. And, and one of them is one you just mentioned, which is because he was a trader. Ran the largest commodity trading firm in the world, Philip Brothers. It was, you gotta get the long-term trend right. You can get a lot of other stuff right.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  But if you don't get the long-term trend right, you're kinda in trouble. So you gotta, you gotta figure that one out. You gotta see what, what's going on here. You need context. You need to see what's happening, what did happen, what is happening and what will likely happen in the future. And what are the different future states that could happen? And what's the probabilities for each one of those? And then you have your risk management. So yeah, the converse of that is if you get the major trend wrong, you can do a thousand things right, you're still gonna lose. You're not gonna create alpha, you're not gonna create value there. So yeah, that, that was a big lesson from him.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  The other thing that I love is you were 23 years old. You're having lunch with him on a very frequent basis. Like you just said, he's much older, he's one of the most successful people in the world. He's taking an interest in you. And yet you were still comfortable to like unload your, like your stresses and your problems. And he would sit there patiently listening. And then I love his response where he's just like, yeah, business is problems. Like one of the, I think, most important lessons is like problems, there's a line from Henry Kaiser, who was, you know, in his day was as famous as like, say, like an Elon is today or you're becoming. And, you know, he started a hundred different companies. He built the Hoover Dam. Uh, he built Liberty ships for the Allies in World War II. And I've read a bunch of biographies on him because he was Charlie, one of Charlie Munger's favorite founders. And he said a line in the biography that's in multiple life stories about him that problems are just opportunities in work clothes.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  And so I read the, your recounting in your book of your, uh, some of your lunches with Mr. Josterson. It's like, oh, he had the exact, he essentially gave you the same advice.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in the book, I talked about a specific episode when I was having lunch with him and I was kind of down and glum and he said, what's going on? And I was talking about this problem and this thing. I was just kind of down, you know? And he said, well, don't stay in the business world if you're going to get down on this stuff. These are the things you should get up from.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  When you have problems, when you have challenges, you have obstacles. By addressing those, that's how you make money. You make money. So the more problems you have, as long as you can solve them, as long as you figure out how to address them and remove the problem, that's how you're creating value. That's a wonderful way to go through life. Number one, it's a great way to make money because you're not always down. Because you always have incoming missiles when you're in the business world. You have problems with employees, with competitors, with regulators. I mean, just all day long, you have incoming missiles. You have great stuff, too, but in between that is punches to the face. And if you're going to get beaten up by that, you're not going to be successful. And secondly, you're not going to be happy. So you're going to go through life like glum. You see, sometimes you see these like multi-billionaire guys and they always look like this.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Well, what's the point of all the money? Seriously. So I would not want to be one of these zillionaire guys who's like frowning all the time and like and upset and angry and depressed. That's much more important to me, to be in the right frame of mind and to go through the short time we have in life. Happy, reasonably happy. I don't have a perfectionist standard. I don't have to be like in ecstasy and bliss 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but generally happy.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Did you ever meet Sam Zell when he was alive?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  I did, yeah, many times.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Okay, so-

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Great guy.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  He had the same thing. I was lucky enough to have a two-hour, very intense lunch with him. He said the same, very similar thing to you. He's just like, I know all the rich guys. He's like, you wouldn't believe how many are miserable. He's like, don't do that. He's like, I wake up every single day. You guys have a lot of similarity where like, I'll spend time with you. You know, the very first time I met you, when I went to your book launch party, right? I just remember like, oh, this guy's got crazy energy. And I'd already read your book by then. But something that you talk about over and over in your book is like, problems are just opportunities. It reminded me of, there's this line from Jeff Bezos's, there's several books on him, but one of his main biographies is this book called Everything Store. And they said that Jeff, you would tell him problems about his business and he would get excited. Yeah. Because he's like, oh, and he talks about in the shareholder letters, like, oh, this is like,

• 6:52Speaker 00

  these are problems. If I solve these problems, this is going to increase the enterprise value of the company that I'm building. These are actually good things to identify and embrace instead of avoid. One of the most important things that I learned from Brad Jacobs is the importance of working with the smartest and most talented people you can. Brad says the most important thing that a CEO does is recruit superlative people. Brad recruits the smartest people he can find and says there's no substitute for smarts. Steve Jobs believed that this was important, too. Steve said, "I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people." The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most two to one.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. You need to build a team that pursues the A-plus players. That is the end of the Steve Jobs quote, and that is exactly what Ramp has done. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top-tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24/7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations. And they do this on a single platform.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  That means the longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, "You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient." Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. From a customer's perspective, what does a team of A-plus players sound like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said, "Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled." Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money today. That is ramp.com. I do have a question on your long-term reputation. Okay, so there's this line, do you remember when Buffett got

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I remember it.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  in all that trouble with with Solomon Brothers?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  And he's like, listen, you can lose money, that's fine, but you lose a shred of reputation.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I'll be ruthless.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  I'll be absolutely ruthless. I, it was a very jarring experience for me at your book launch party. Because first of all, I was the only one that didn't show up in a suit. So I rectified that today, right? And then everybody else was just like, you know, I've known Brad for three decades. Like, basically, everybody there was like, how do you know Brad? It's like, you know, he, I was investor of his, you know, he made all this money for the pension fund that we were on and everything else. And like, the stories that I've heard at the party, and then since I released the episode, is just like, you have a fantastic long-term reputation. Do you have any advice on how you were able to maintain that? And how important it was for other people to do the same thing?

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Reputation is really important. Your personal brand is extremely important because based on that, people are going to want to do business with you, or they're going to want to not do business with you. So every day, you're in the office and doing stuff, you're either raising your brand or you're lowering your brand. And that's the main thing you got to work on. You got to make sure that your brand reflects integrity and honesty and dependability and stability. And people can count on you. This goes back to Mr. Jeselson. So Philip Brothers, this is before email. This is before, actually, it was even before faxes. It was more Twixes and Telexes. So, which took a few days to go through, when they went through, it's going to go through. So you could do a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars on a handshake or a phone call. There's no written confirmation of that for like days.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  In the meantime, maybe the price of whatever you were trading, oil or copper, had gone up a lot. You still had to have a deal. Otherwise, you know, the whole system doesn't work. So dependability is so, so, trust is so, so important to do.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  How old were you when you, when he gave you that advice? Did you immediately start applying it? So you, you were optimizing for the long-term even when you were that young?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think as you get older, you optimize long-term more. I think, I think when you're young, you're just so ambitious and you want to get stuff done, you're in the now. When, as you get older, as you mature, you have more context. I think life in general is about getting more context, seeing things in proportion to other things.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Can you say more about that?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Well, you know, because we've talked about it a lot outside of your podcast, I'm into meditation. So a lot of the meditation I do is changing, looking at space from different perspectives, not the normal perspective that we have right this minute. So I expand my mind from the earth to the sun, to the solar system, to the galaxy, to the clusters of galaxies, to the universe, to the multiverse, just go way, way, way, way, way high. And then bring it all the way back in and then go into the molecule and the atom and the proton and the nucleus and right in the middle of all that and then go to strings. And I find that accordion, making my mind like an accordion getting really, really big and then really, really small. And they're doing the same thing with time, looking at time, go back towards my life

• 11:51Speaker 01

  over the last few decades and then go back centuries and millennia and just keep going way, way, way back, all the way back 13.8 billion years, go back all the way to the Big Bang and then go all the way forward and like picture the world going forward, forward, forward, forward, forward, forward. That time and space juxtaposition, for me at least, different things work for different people, gives me context. It gives me humility, gives me humbleness. It shows that I'm, I'm just one thing right here in a major, major thing going on. I'm just one little, little tiny jet. At the same time, I'm part of that. So I'm very uplifted, I'm very inspired, I'm very motivated, like, wow, I'm part of like a real big deal here. It's great, we all are, we're all part of this huge, huge, huge, huge, huge thing. So I think context is really important.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  It gives you meaning, it gives you purpose, it gives you understanding, it gives you wisdom.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  I know you hate when I say this because we've talked about this previously. It's like you obviously know I study uncommon people for a living, right?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  They do a great job of it.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  I appreciate it.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Maybe unique.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I appreciate it, but like, think about how crazy it is. Like the people that I study on Founders is they were so good at their job, somebody wrote a book about their life. Like you're talking about very small, but most of their inner monologues, you're different. You have a much more positive energy and like, there's almost like a, let me, let me give you some context here. We were together a few months ago at a mutual friend's birthday party in Miami, our friend Rick. And at the, there's a bunch of interesting people at the party. One of them was Apollo Ono, okay? Apollo Ono is the most decorated winter, American winter Olympian of all time. He's become a friend, I met him through the podcast. And he walks up to me and this is one of the funniest things and, you know, because he has People think you're an Olympian, like he was training since he was a kid.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  His dad would make him get up at like five in the morning and run drills in the in the school parking lot. But he still comes from like a very positive, he has a great relationship with his dad. Normally, it's like, you know, not good when they're put under the circumstances. So he was asking me, he's just like, I see this pattern in, you know, when you're reading all these hundreds of biographies about these great entrepreneurs. That like, there is something inside of them driving them, and it's actually negative. It could be insecurity, it could be, you know, they grew up in poverty, it could be a bad relationship with their family. And he's like, are they all like that? And I, you're like 20 feet away, you see that guy over there? You go, you know who that is? And he goes, no, I go, that's Brad fucking Jacobs. I was like, I guarantee you, he's not driven by that. This is what I mean, you're uncommon amongst uncommon people.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Because at least from the outside in the conversation I had, it's like, I think part of this impenetrable nature that you have in like, oh, yeah, business is problems. It's gonna come. What do you think we're doing here? Like, you don't seem to be rattled by them. So like, what is your inner monologue? Like, when, like, you're doing huge fucking deals right now, you're doing all kinds of crazy stuff. You built eight separate billion dollar companies. You don't do that by accident. So how do you make, like, I'll stop talking there. What is your inner monologue like?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So it goes back to what Mr. Justin used to say is, problems are your friend. You want to, you don't want to just tolerate problems. You want to embrace problems. You want to hug problems. Problems are the way you succeed. You want to run to the fire, you don't want to run away from the fire. Be brave, be courageous, go into it. I think you can start with anything that's anything. And in this case, in Apollo's case, he starts with, and other people he's studied, start with negativity, trauma, stress, insecurity, fear, anxiety. And then that's their motivator. They, they zero in on that, and then that makes them run faster.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Was that ever your case, though?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  No, that's not my thing.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  You're like a unicorn.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I don't know that I'm a unicorn. I don't embrace negativity. I, I'm okay with it, but I don't make a big deal about negativity. I'd much rather enjoy the positivity. I'm a sunny side up guy.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  But your inner monologue, are you nice to yourself? Your ongoing inner monologue.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  I'm reasonably nice, like, yeah, I am.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  I am vicious. I sound like, you know, David Goggins is, is like.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I was just, someone was talking, the Oz, the mentalist was talking about.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  My inner monologue sounds like David Goggins. Where it's just like, you're not doing enough, this wasn't good enough. Like, I see the problems, so like, I attack them. Like, it's like, oh, like, I'll listen to like, a past podcast, or something, anything I've done, it's like, and all I see are the flaws. I don't see any of the good part.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  So, let me comment on that. I think there's two different ways you can approach that. So, yes, as cognitive behavior therapy has taught everyone, we're born with a schema, a prism through which we see life. And that can be clouded by core, core beliefs of, I'm inadequate, I'm weak, I'm defective, I'm unattractive, I'm unlovable, all kinds of negative stuff. Now, there's two ways you can approach on that. You can either dispute those things, first validate, then dispute, so say, well, of course, I'm hearing this. I have executives who report to me over the years that have the exact same schema as you just described,

• 16:40Speaker 01

  where they're always saying, oh, I'm no good at this, oh, I'm, I'm, when people realize how bad I am, I'm just faking it, I'm wearing this mask, and I'm doing a bad job, I'm gonna get fired, people are hiding stuff against me because they don't, they don't respect me. All this like, negative self-talk. It's a complete waste of time. But nevertheless, that's their reality. Their reality is they have this steady drone of automatic negative thoughts. There's two ways to deal with that. Either you can dispute them, but first validate it, don't start with the disputing. First validate and say, okay, yeah, of course, I'm having all these negative thoughts because I got a tough job, for example. I have a big job, there's a lot of pressure, and I'm not perfect, so I'm not getting everything right.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  And so, I do mess stuff up, and I do get things wrong, and all that negative talk, and then you catastrophize on those negative things and make them into huge, huge issues when they really should be minimized if you put them in proper context. So, you first validate it, but then dispute it, and then say, well, what does the evidence say here? Is this really a rational thought, or is this my schema kicking in?

• 17:42Speaker 00

  To me, when you say that, it's like, I think you have this gift to step outside of yourself, which now you're saying, but when I say you step outside of yourself, you're like, no, I'm in myself.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  I, I, I much prefer to be in myself, not myself. I like to come to center.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I like to find the center. The first time that concept of centering came about was. When I was, I went to enrichment camp at, at, at school in the summertime. And there was a book they gave out called On Centering. I don't remember who wrote it. And it had a picture of someone making a pottery. And, and they were explaining in the book that it's all about finding the center of, of the, of the pot you're making. So centering, finding that inner calmness, finding that zone where you're in the groove. And everybody has it. Everybody has that. You just gotta find it. And that's, that's one of life's missions is to find that center, find that inner calmness zone. And then when I went to college and I studied music under Bill Dixon, same concept came out. So I'm familiar with it. It said, come back to the center.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  So we're playing improvisation, what he called black music. Some people might call it jazz. He didn't like the word jazz. Playing, playing, playing with some friends and then you have to find the center. Come back to center, back to the center, back to the center. So there'd be a center point in the music. You could go anywhere you wanted in the music. You can improvise all over the place, but come back to center. And then everybody come back to their common center. So, so I've, I've incorporated this concept of centering, of finding a center into my meditation practices, into my business practices, into my philosophy of life. So I like to find centers. But going back to what we're saying before, so you have this negative self-talk coming. You can either take one of two paths. You can take the path of validating and disputing it and seeing it in a proper rational way.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Or you can take the approach of just witnessing it, just enjoying it and just, just, it is what it is. It's mindful acceptance of it, so acceptance of that. And I, I, I vacillate between those two. Sometimes I do the, you ask how I do it?

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  My internal monologue, if negativity creeps in, of course it creeps in. I'm, I'm, I'm dancing with the ghosts of my ancestors, just the way you and everybody else are dancing with the ghosts of the ancestors. Evolution worked very slowly over generations, over long periods of time. So we always have this set of genes that were good for survival and procreation of our ancestors, but not necessarily now. We still have in the gene pool, all these like irrational thoughts. So another way to look at it is just, just observe it, kind of more of a Buddhist way. Just observe it. Like so, one of the ways, the, the most simplest Buddhist meditation is just observe your breath. To deserve your breath. I mean, how easy can that be? All you gotta do is-

• 20:19Speaker 00

  We just did this before we started recording. You're like, let's go through a miniature like meditation before we begin. Like, I don't ever do that. And I probably start, should start doing it. I just kinda wake up and go and just try to attack things that I feel like- And don't get me wrong, like, I absolutely am obsessed with what I do. I love, love my work. I work on a seven days a week. But I want it to be the best in the world at it. And that's where it's like, oh, you just see these deficiencies.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  So that sounds to me like perfectionism. So I suffered a lot from perfectionism when I was younger. I wanted to be perfect.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Not only did I want to be perfect, I wanted everybody else to be perfect. Not only did I want myself and others to be perfect, I wanted the universe to be perfect. I wanted everything to just go swimmingly well at my beck and call and command. Well, it turns out, that's not reality.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  It's the nature of things.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  None of those three constituents are perfect.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  There's something that you said in your book. Uh, it's actually in this section that I was writing down. You're like, I'm not surprised when things don't go perfectly. That's the nature of the universe. The big problems can be where the best opportunities lie. And so obviously, you know, like, anytime I read something, it's not that I'm reading it. I think about how it relates to every single thing else I've experienced and all the other books I read. And, um, I remember I got to have dinner with Charlie Munger. I spent three hours with him, uh, you know, uh, six months, eight months before he died. There's like a trend here, unfortunately, where it's like-

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Uh-oh.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  You're kinda dangerous. Remember, you're like, I don't know. I don't know if I'm gonna have dinner with you. Um, but one of the things I loved, it was a top note I left myself. Cause as soon as I left there, I just wrote down like what I learned. And it said that Charlie has an almost complete indifference to problems. Troubles from time to time should be expected. This is inescapable, so why let it bother you? And it's like, one of the things I most admired about him. He's like, yeah, it's part of life. What's wrong with you? Like, you know, he had nine, 10 decades of, of life experience. He was way further down the line and obviously way wiser than I was, so.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  I have two comments on that. One is- When you go back to the Big Bang, the current construct model of how the universe was created, it was actually created out of imperfection. There was like a slight imbalance between matter and antimatter. Just a slight imbalance. A lot of debate of what caused that. As a result of that, everything came out of that. Had there been perfection at the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang would not have happened. So we are imperfection. We are the children of imperfection. Imperfection is good. Imperfection is not bad. Expecting perfection is, will cause you stress and strain. It won't really work.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  When you were in your twenties, though, you said, hey, I wanted to be perfect. Now later, I want to be perfect. I want everybody around me to be perfect. I wanted the universe to be perfect. Like, how long did it take for you to learn what you just explained?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  So when I stepped down from United Rentals, I still stayed as chairman. When I stepped down as CEO of United Rentals, had done it for about 10 years. And I wanted to do my next big thing. I wanted to do another startup from the beginning. I was running a big company. I wanted to start it from scratch. And there was a period of a couple of years where I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. And I didn't find it. And then the great financial crisis came. And I was kind of lost. I was kind of, it was probably the only time in my life that I was depressed. I'm just not depressed. But that period of time, I was actually clinically depressed. I took the Beck Depression Inventory and I came up, yep, depressed. So I found an amazing cognitive therapist. And I went to the guy twice a week, hour and a half a shot, for two years.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  It was fantastic. One of the best things I've ever done in my life. Because what we did was, in an environment that was very safe and confidential and trusting with someone who was a professional at psychology, I was able to, first of all, identify and then notice more fully my automatic thoughts, the negative thoughts and irrational thoughts, unconstructive thoughts. And then... First validate them, then dispute them. First join and then lead to a more constructive way of looking at things. So that cognitive therapy approach of identifying the thoughts and then, and then dealing with them, really was the turning point in my life on this perfection thing. Because after a few sessions, he said, you know, I kind of know what's going on here now.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  I've gotten your, your measure. You want to hear it? I said, yeah, I want to hear it. And he said, you're suffering from perfectionism. You want everything to be perfect, and it ain't. So we need to get over that. We need to reduce these demands, these musts, these shoulds, these commands that either I or you or the rest of the world is perfect to, you know, preferences. Where I would like me to be better, I would like you to be better, I'd like things to go better, but they don't have to. I can still be happy. And frankly, they're not going to all the time, so I need to accept that. Need to radically accept that. I need to, I need to be in reality, not put these, you know, you mentioned Bezos. Bezos has a lot of cool stuff.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  One of the things he says often is, don't fight with reality because reality always wins.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  So the reality of this is, nothing's perfect. Like literally, nothing is perfect that I've found yet.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  He has another line, I think, that's related. It's similar to the idea in your book where he's just like, if you don't want to be criticized and you don't want stress, then you don't do anything.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  It's just like, then just sit in a room and watch Netflix and order a DoorDash or something, but like, you're not going to do anything that you can be proud of.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  So that's another irrational thought you see people have. And I, I used to have this a lot, but I don't have it now because I went through that, that therapy thing and it turned a switch on in my brain, is a demand that, that everybody likes me and everybody respects me and everybody says great stuff about me and I get good press and I get good reviews and the stock just goes up every single day. Well, that's not going to happen. That's called perfectionism. That's, that's not reality. So you just kind of modify that to... Well, sure, like everybody else, I'd like to, people to say good stuff about me rather than bad stuff about me, but I don't really care. If people say bad stuff about me, then, okay, maybe there's some truth in it, maybe it's some good thing I can learn from that. Or maybe they're just off and they don't know me and they're just kinda, they're imposing

• 26:11Speaker 01

  their distortions on me, but does that really change who I am? It really doesn't. If somebody's saying something bad about me, or is that, does that really matter? It doesn't matter really at the core. And again, it goes back to context. In the larger context of things, most problems really don't matter. They just don't matter. Maybe at the time, they seem like one, and maybe we're kicking in, magnifying those problems and catastroph, making them into big catastrophes and dramas, but most problems really aren't a bad problem, aren't a bad thing.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  I always say opportunity is a strange beast. It usually, it frequently appears after a loss.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  There's always a play. There's always, no matter what happens, it goes back to the Jesselson conversation. No matter what gets thrown in your face, at the moment, it may seem ugly and bad, there's a play. There's a way to utilize that. There's a way to use that. There's a way to embrace that and turn that into success. Anything can be turned into positivity and success, even if it starts in a bad place.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Something came to mind when you were talking, that's also unusual, because most of the people that, like I read biographies about, they, they're, they go through several different companies, so they find that like their life's work, but normally, they're working on something for like a very long time. Why, why do you keep starting so many companies? Like, what is going on?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  That's my thing. Everybody's got their thing. So everybody, so you're a great podcaster. You have a talent. Your superpower is you can consume a large amount of information and then distill it down to like, boom, here are the most important takeaways from that. It's a, it's really brilliant. That's your thing. That's why you're doing it, right? Because that's what you're good at. You're not playing professional baseball, or you know, acting, or singing, whatever. You're doing what you're good at. This is what I'm good at. I'm good at figuring out what's the right industry to consolidate. Secondly, I have a toolkit and it's the same old toolkit. It's not.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  You told me this last time. Can you explain this? I love the way you described this toolkit of how you approach building your businesses.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  So first, I find the right industry. I find something that's large. I find something that's growing. I find something where it's fragmented. I find something where we can buy things at reasonable prices. I find things where technology is, would, could be used. It's not a very tech forward industry. I find stuff that AI and automation are not going to disrupt at any time in the near future. So I, I find industries that have certain characteristics to it. Whether it was garbage, whether it was construction, whether it was transportation or logistics and now distribution. That's, they all have the same characteristics, same traits. So that's point number one. Point number two is I then put together an amazing team.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  I put together a team of people who are generally smarter than me and who are more talented than me in what they do. So I have a great CHRO who knows everything there is to know about HR and compensation and talent recruitment and so forth. I have great M and A team who really know how to do deals and get deals done rather than turn them into dramas. I have great finance accounting people who understand everything there is to know, A to Z, about running a, a fast growing company and keeping the books clean. So et cetera. And I get the team together. Then I get the compensation sorted out. So I make everybody my partner on the senior team and I give people tons of equity, but there's a catch. It could vest, but you can't sell it for five years. And most of it vests in the last two years.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  So everyone is committed, going back to long-term relationships. Sure, people come and go for whatever personal reasons or people burn out or whatever. But generally speaking, most of the team stays for a while and you, you work together as a team. And then I have, I have certain rules of how we're going to interact with each other in a very respectful way. But in a way that encourages looking at things from different angles. So we disagree and we argue, argue is too strong of a word. We present different ways of looking at a situation that partly overlap and partly conflict. And then we, in a very scientific way, figure out, well, let's, let's risk adjusting things, figure out what's right.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  It's, it's a scientific experiment, an ongoing science experiment, like all day long of trial and error and experimentation and A B experimenting. And so that culture that we create is, gives us a power, gives us a power to. Attack the industry in a way without all the, the, the, the noise that management team has. A very coherent team, like a super organism, like a brain, like a very organized group. And then I have, between all those people, we have experience at our main job, which is to buy companies at reasonable prices, where there's a difference between what we can raise capital at and what we can deploy it at. And then we have a skill set to be able to improve the companies that we buy.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  These are the two main things we're good at, is buying companies in a disciplined way. Price is too high, we don't do it. Price is reasonable, doesn't have to be cheap, we're not trying to steal companies, if the price is reasonable, we go for it with gusto. And secondly, the other talent that the team collectively has is, we know how to improve the businesses. We know how to improve the pricing, improve the procurement, the HR element, the compensation systems, the technology, the whole tech stack, just everything from A to Z. We're just good at transformation. We're, we're good at taking a company that is making a billion dollars of EBITDA of, of profit, and within three to five years doubling the, doubling the profit, doubling the EBITDA. That's the main criteria I look at when I look at a, at a company is purchase price.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And secondly, can we double the profit in three to five years? And, and most of my main acquisitions have done that. So Conway, Robert Dantosangla, all these different ones, they were great companies and everyone says, oh, they're working really well. Okay, well, three years later, we doubled the profit.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Because we apply the toolkit, we apply the playbook. And it's the same playbook, industry after industry, the playbook gets refined a little bit here and there, but it's the same playbook.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  So when you say, this is just what I do, like, to me, you now have figured out who you are as a person, right? I have this weird theory that I can't, um, I can't prove, but I believe. And, you know, there's like this myth of like the genius young entrepreneur. And I was like, well, I don't know, if you study, like, you study the history of entrepreneurship pretty intensely. You realize that like people do most of the time their best work many decades into their career. And so there's all, all kinds of reasons, they're like, oh, they've had more experience, they're wiser, they have more resources, they have more practice. And I don't dispute that, that is all true. But I have this weird theory that They also know themselves way better. And I think the key to being a great entrepreneur is building a business that's. I used to say, building a business that's authentic to you.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  And then I read Michael Dell's excellent autobiography. And he has a better line. He said, he built a business that's natural to him. And there's a great story. I want your opinion on this in one second, but there's a great story where, you know, Michael starts in his company, he was 19. He's in his twenties and it's doing fabulously well, but he realized like, hey, I need some like grown up, like some, I need some help here. And so he gets this guy, I think his name was Lee Walker, if I remember correctly. And he's about 20 years older than than Michael, already started a bunch of companies. Rich, you know, didn't have to work anymore, but he saw an unusual, once in a, you know, generation talent and Michael decides to help him. He lasts like four years. And so I read the book and then I was about to make the podcast on it. I go and see, I was like, I wonder what ever happened to this guy. And I found an interview that he did and he's in his eighties and he's talking about that time.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  And he gave me some of the best context to really understand this story. And Michael's story is really a story of you and everybody and all the people really are, you know, very similar people that we're studying. And he's just like, you know, Michael starts his company with a thousand dollars, says, I'm going to take on IBM for my dorm room. IBM is the most valuable company in the world at the time, which I didn't know. It was the first company to hit a hundred billion market cap, which is nuts. And he's, you know, just the audacity to have that. And he's like, in the first few years, like, we're going against this behemoth. And I lasted four years. I started losing my hair. My back hurts. I can't sleep. I'm unhealthy. And he goes, but he goes, but Michael was energized by it. He built a business that was natural to him.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Because like, this is what I want to do. I'm not, I'm not losing my hair. I'm not, you know, depressed. My back's not hurting. I can't sleep. I'm like waking up every day, just getting after it. So is that the way you feel about just like what you're doing? It's like, this is, it may seem weird because it is in a not a pejorative way. It's not weird in a, in a negative way. It's, I don't know, another person that started eight separate billion dollar companies. So it's like, you almost like you can't help yourself.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  That's what I do.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And that's, I know how to do that.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  So it's just natural to you. This is just like.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, this is, I've done it many times before and I've made every mistake in the book over the decades. And I've learned from those mistakes and I've refined it and refined it, but I have a winning formula. I know how to execute on this and the team I have knows how to execute on it. I don't want to underestimate the team. So one of the things about being the CEO and the founders, you get all the credit. But like, there's a lot of people on the team who are doing these things, accomplishing these things.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have a great line in your book, which I see over and over again. You said the CEO's most important job is recruiting superlative people.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  It's like your people. So my question to you though, is like, what would it take to get you to stop?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know, because I'm not, and I don't see that in my near future. I just started the company in the last few months.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  This is what I, no, but in general, like, so this is what I loved about, you know, most of the people I admire. It's like, I can still remember this, you know, I put it into the maximus. It's like, if you love what you do, your extra strategy is death. Right? Like, you're just working on something. So like, you know, Sam Zell told me, he's like, I'm going to be doing deals. So I died. Well, he was doing deals, so he died. Mungar, same thing, like, I met him right after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. It was like, he was like a kid in a candy shop. He just thought this was like the, he didn't want people to be hurt, obviously. But he's just like, you know how many financial panics that I've seen in my lifetime? Like, of course, this is like, nothing new. So I was, I remember I was actually having dinner. I remember I was, I was at Harry's Pizzeria in Miami in the design district.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  And, you know, I was supposed to be paying attention to my wife and on our date. And I was thinking about the podcast and all the shit I'm reading. And I go and like, take a bite into a piece of pizza. And I was like, people say if you love what you do, you do it for free. And I go, no, there's a different level. If you love what you do, they couldn't pay you to stop.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  And I was like, how much money could you have gone to Steve Jobs and like, hey, how much would it take for you to not work at Apple? That's not why he's doing it. It's that, that's not why they're doing it. In Enzo Ferrari, Estee Lauder, Edwin Land, Coco Chanel, all these other people. Like, they just can't, Michael Ferrero, I just, the Michelin brothers. Like, this just story over and over again, and I get the same sense to you. It's just like, if I said, hey, What price I'm going to pay you and you can't do any work. You have to stay home. You can't. It's just like, there's no price.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Everyone you just named, all those successful people, they were all in. They were 100% in. They weren't like partly in and partly aren't. They're in. They're 100% in and completely focused and single-mindedly concentrated on executing the plan. And that's important. And you want to have people on your team who share that passion, that commitment.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations, unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more, and that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com. That leads me to another great one of your. I don't even think you think it's a maxim, but it's how you differentiate between A, B, and C players. Where you're like, I'm just going to summarize this and jump in whenever you want.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  But you envision, you do another thought experiment of, okay, do you want to see if you have the absolute best people on your team? Just visualize it. They're coming into your office and they're saying, Brad, I quit.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  So then what happens next in this scenario?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  So I'm always interacting with my CHRO and going over talent and making sure everybody's happy and motivated.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  How much percentage of your, like?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  A lot. I spend most of my time on people and talent issues.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  So most of your time?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, not the most, but the most, if I did a pie chart of like how I divide up my time, the largest percent is on people issues.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  There's a funny story about this. And then I don't want to interrupt, but I do. This is inside of me and it just has to come out, all these stories, because I find them fascinating. So there's two MBA students in Stanford in the 90s, in late 90s. And in 97, they interview 16 technology company founders, since they're in Silicon Valley at the time. You know, and they published this book called In the Company of Giants. And everybody's in there, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and everybody else. And they're telling Steve, they're like, well, you know, you're the founder. Of course, you don't have time to, you know, recruit people. And Steve's like, what? Like, no, it's the most, it sounds exactly what you said in your book. It's the most important. He goes, and he does a great, great way to demonstrate the point. He goes, let's say you're starting a company, right? You're in Silicon Valley, like what you're doing over here. You pick your co-founder.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  You should think long and hard about that. Your co-founder is 50% of the company at that point.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  And then he goes, and then he goes, but it still goes out. Now you have to pick the 10th person. That person's 10% of your company and you're saying you don't have time? Like, what else are you doing?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  It's all about the people. It's all about the people. You know, systems and tech and budgets and customers and sales, all these things are really, really important. But you can't achieve excellence in those things without fantastic people, without fantastic leaders. And I spend a lot of time, especially on the top few dozen people. I want to make sure everybody's in it to win it. Everybody is fully, fully engaged. And I do a mental exercise where I picture the person coming into my office and saying, Brad, I quit. Like, this is not a conversation about you making me a counter offer. I'm done. I've already moved and it's over with. This is about a conversation about how do we make an orderly transition? Because I respect you and I don't want to leave you high and dry.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  And then I try to feel and visualize what would be my reaction if that person came into me and quit? If my reaction to that is, yes, I don't want to smile. I don't want to act like I'm happy about this, but you know, I didn't have, you know, nobody likes firing people. And I, I just didn't, you know, I, I just kept postponing firing that person. I shouldn't have, but I did. And this is great. I don't have to pay severance. And, and you know, I, that solves that problem. No problem at all. We'll replace him. That's a C player. That's someone really you should get the courage up to take, to get off the manage, get off the team right away. And then on the second category, if my reaction to it is, you know, it kind of sucks.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  You know, it's what I would have preferred that person stayed, but it's not the end of the world. We'll hire a headhunter. We'll get someone as good, maybe something even better. And, you know, things will work out. That's a B player. But if when I visualize that person quitting, my reaction to that is pure terror.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  And absolute panic. And like, somebody took a baseball bat and just whacked me in the stomach and then punched me in the face. I'm like, oh my god. Like, I'm never gonna find someone as good as her. No way. Or I'm never gonna have someone as talented as that person. I'm never gonna have someone who brings to the table their particular superpower. I am, and I, I don't even, I can't even hear what they're saying anymore. Cause I'm just like, having this internal panic dialogue going on. That's what you call an A player. So I want all A players around me. I want people whose relationship with me, I value so much that if it was terminated, I would be lost. And I want them to feel the same way. I wanna have mutual relationships.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  I want people who love being in a relationship with the team, with the company, and that we all are in it together to go conquer the world. I, I think, I named it, it's been two years since I wrote the book, but I think I had a chapter that said, how to kill the competition instead of killing each other. And, and that's, you know, it's kinda funny, but it's a serious, it's a serious title. Is, you don't wanna have a dysfunctional management team. One of the most important things that has allowed us to create tens and tens of billions of dollars of value is the management team's coherent. We have the right people on the management team, and we have the rules of the road of how we're gonna deal with each other in a respectful way that still encourages differences of opinion.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  First of all, I love the way you described, because everybody says, oh yeah, hire A players. And like, people, it's really hard to differentiate. Like, what does that actually mean? And I think this thought experiment is perfect. It's like, we are fucked. If this person leaves, that's an A player, that's a way to think about this. But this also goes down to your gift and why I think, um, I've learned so much from you. One, partially, it's like, your ability to like, have very clear thinking, and then put it in a memorable way. So you were just talking about like, the relationships that you have with the people you work for. You have a line in the book where you're like, he says, an organization is like a party. You only wanna invite people who bring the vibe up. My team and I spend a lot of time together, so it's a big deal that we like one another.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Who said that? That was a good one.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Bezos has a line in, I think, his shareholder letter, it's just like, "Life is too short to work with people you don't admire." Like, it's the same situation. It's like, you're in charge, you get to choose. Again, this goes back to one of the gifts of being the CEO, of being entrepreneurs. Like, it's very rare that you get to literally choose who has access to, who's around you. And I love this idea. It's like, hey, the organization is just like a party. You want people to, you only want people to-

• 43:36Speaker 01

  David, it's all about the people. It's all about the people, because the people then create all the different processes and work streams and transformations and everything.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  This is very fascinating, because like, it's obviously, you know, business is people, right? You're not only just like the people that are building a product, but like, all of businesses, the best definition of business I've ever heard actually came from Richard Branson. He says, "All businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better," right? And like, there's infinite, that's why there's always more opportunity, because there's always infinite ways. We think technology's gonna like, it changes things, but then it just usually opens up other ways to make other people's lives better. So just focus on like, if you're looking for an opportunity, how can I just serve other people? Another line that's very related to this is Henry Ford, where he says, "Money comes naturally as a result of service." Like, I think those two ideas go together. The reason, I was thinking about this, though, the best way I just, I've heard described what you were just saying, it's all about people.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Work with the best people you possibly can, the A players. We're gonna talk about, you have this great line about, "There's no substitute for brains." But before that, it's like, the way that I've heard this described best, in my opinion, is from Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, right? He would go around and give all these talks, and he was actually like shocked that he would ask the audience, like, "What's more important?" "People or ideas?" He says, "Every single time, people got it wrong. They said it was the ideas." And he's like, "No, it's the people." And so he has this great line where he's like, "Listen, if you give a mediocre idea, right, to a brilliant team, they're either going to- Fix it, or they'll throw it out and come up with something better, something new. But if you give a great idea to a mediocre team, they're gonna screw it up. So it's obviously, because ideas come from people, so it's the people.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I'm trying to say, what he said.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  He says it in like, just, wait, wait, but you have a very explicit piece of advice in your book that I think is interesting, where you're like, screening for, there's no substitute for brains. Screening for superior intelligence eliminates 90% of all candidates. So it's the first thing I look at. There's no substitute for smarts. The CEO trade most closely correlated with organizational success is a high IQ. Double down on hiring the brightest.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you want smart people. And I particularly want people who are smarter than me. I want people who uplift me, who teach me. I don't want to be...

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Do you want them specialized? Because you mentioned earlier, you said you want them smarter than you, but also better at their particular...

• 45:54Speaker 01

  The vast majority of them are specialized.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  They're a finance person, they're an investor person, they're a strategic person, they're a... They have something that they, tech person, they bring to the table that they're really, an inch wide, a mile deep in. But you also want them to have certain human qualities that transcend what their specialty is. And those are as or more important than the technical skills.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Explain.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Well, you want, you mentioned smart. You want people to be honest, you want people to be hardworking, you want people to be collegial. You want people who are really in it, like on the work-life balance thing, boom, it's work. And their life is a lot of their work. And they enjoy that. And I don't have to hold them like a schoolteacher, a stick over their head, getting them to work late or come in early, work on weekends. Like, they want to do that. Like, they enjoy doing that. Their job, their career, their success, the collective success of the company is an important part of Vygotskotl. It's really an important part of their being and their purpose.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Was there ever a time, I don't mean to cut you off, but this is fascinating, and it's almost selfish to have this conversation, because I get to ask you questions and learn from you. Was there ever a time where...

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Work wasn't where you were more balanced? When was the last time you were balanced? So you started your first company at 23.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  I did, and I've been completely in balance since then. I've been working seven days a week.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, because you

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Very few vacations.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  You guys scaled like four years to, I don't know, like a couple billion dollars. It was an insane story in the book.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  But for me, it's not work. For me, it's like, I'm really enjoying it. To me, it's a craft. It's a skill that I have.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Were you always

• 47:18Speaker 01

  That I enjoy doing it.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Were you always honest with yourself? That it was the top priority?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  I had a conversation with a friend of mine on the drive over here. And I think I'm lying to myself. So let me give you an example. So, you know, in many cases, like you read these biographies of these people, and it winds up being a cautionary tale. You know, because they kind of like will sacrifice everything for professional success, their health, their relationships, everything else.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Well, that I'm not in favor of.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  No, no, no. You're still married. You're a good father, like everything else. Yeah, for sure. But your main, it's not like you have an abundance of hobbies outside of work, from what I understand.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Meditation and music, that's pretty much it.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  There you go. So I, for a long time, every single person I read about, I was like, okay. Well, I even titled the episode, My Personal Blueprint, which was Ed Thorp, right? Ed Thorp, I'll give a short rundown where Craig, he first, first person to invent a quantitative hedge fund. He invented, you know, the ability to count cards for blackjack, writes this book in the 1960s called Be a Dealer. You know, made more money than he'll ever spend. But if you read his book, you get to the end, it's like he was much more balanced, right? He also came from academia, and maybe this had played a role into that. But essentially, like, lived a life of adventure because he truly loved what he did. Once he made more money than he could spend, he stopped trading more time for money.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  He had a good marriage till his wife passed away from cancer, took care of his health. But like, much more of like, let's say there's five important things, and he kind of like divvied up. Maybe like, work was 50%, but the other four are other 50%. And I was like, oh, that's, that's kind of my personal blueprint. And I sat on the driver, I go, No, I'm lying. It's like 90% of what I think about and how I spend my time is just work.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  That's a beautiful thing. So all the people you've mentioned so far, all these very, very successful people, I guarantee you probably every single one of them, with few exceptions, if any, were all in. And what they were doing was their passion and they were just so excited about it. They were in the flow. They were in the flow of being so absorbed on something that you'd like lose track of time and the whole rest of the universe is gone. You're just in it. You're just really into something that you do well and with people that you really like. And you're likely to be successful because you're doing what you do.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  When I was thinking about the amount of research that you do, that you explain before you get into an industry, before you start a company, it's like, the way I'd describe your book is buy it, read it all the way through. And then what I really think it is, you put it close to your desk because it's a reference manual. Because you can just pick this up now and read one chapter that takes 10 minutes and get good ideas out of it.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Do you want me to write a sequel?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  The last time you told me, it's like, I only had one book in me. I have nothing else.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  So I wrote the book and I got so much feedback of what people thought about it. And people asked, well, you should really talk more about this, this, this. At first I said, I'm never writing another book.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Yes, I remember.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Takes a lot of time to write a book and I don't have a lot of time.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  But I had so many people ask me similar questions. Okay, I'm going to write a sequel that addresses those particular questions. You know what the title's going to be? That was How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. This is going to be called How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Is that great or what? Yes. Let me get an early copy, please. You were very nice to send me an early copy of this one. But I think what ties all this together, when I think about your research process, the way you go after life, all the people we've been talking about, from Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, it's like mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  I think that is what animates me. It's just like, you see this, you're talking about like even when you buy great companies, good companies, they're like, what else could you do? It's like, there's always more. Because you could always infuse passion into what you're doing, obsession, work with the best people. Of course, you can keep getting better and better results.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I agree with that. I think, so what you just said, you buy a company, it's doing very well. And then three, four years later, you've doubled the profit. What did you do? You went in with a toolkit and you went into the, attacked the pricing using algorithms and elasticity analysis. You've attacked the compensation, so you've got the salespeople made partners rather than pupils to the parent authoritarian figure at corporate. You've put in technology that frees up time, that allows people to spend time doing selling and doing their job rather than trying to find information. You're sharing information in very good ways. So you apply a certain toolkit, boom, you double profit.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  So wait a minute, this brings up something interesting that I've been talking about lately, the different archetypes there is in founders and CEOs, right? Everybody thinks like, oh, there's kind of one archetype and especially the ones that are popularized now, it's like essentially like the Steve Jobs dictator make, you know, almost all the decisions.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  I don't like that.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so exactly, I just heard the pupil part.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Who am I to criticize Steve Jobs?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no. It's not a criticism, it's just like, that's the beauty of entrepreneurship is like you get to do it.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  I wouldn't be able to do that.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  So what is your archetype? What is, like, let me back up before I ask you a question, because I've been having long conversations with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, who's become a good friend. And that's his whole thing, where he, like, we're actually, might be writing something together about, like, he's concerned that there's going to be young entrepreneurs out there that are like, I'm not like Elon, or I'm not like Steve, or I'm not like all these people, so therefore I can't be an entrepreneur. He's like, there's multiple archetypes. He's like, I'm not like that. He says, he thinks he's a better coach than he is a player. And essentially, he has discovered, it's almost like this, he recruits some of the best talent in the world to the point where he's like, I used to be the best at product. That guy's better at product, he should do it. I'm, that guy's a better designer, that guy, that person's a better HR, that person's everything. So he's like, the way I look at it is like, much more of a coach than a player.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  What is your, like, archetype?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  So, you want to get the right people in place, you want to get the compensation aligned, and then you want to be communicating with each other in a very constructive way and a very prolific way. So Friday, we had our second MOR, monthly operating review for this company we'd bought, Beacon. And How did we come up with the agenda? It was 10-hour meeting, two breaks. One was 10 minutes, one was five minutes. Nobody was distracted. Nobody was on phones or devices. It was all shut off. We're very concentrating on the one person that had the proverbial microphone at a time and listening very carefully and intently what that person was saying and then debating each point and each action point. How did we come up with the agenda? Here's how.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Did I, the CEO, come from above and say, here's the agenda that I think is the important thing? I'm smarter than all of you and here's what we should be doing? No. How pompous and arrogant and kind of ineffective, really, to do that. What I do is just the opposite. I send around a question pro, an app, and we say, here's all the materials, pre-read for the meeting. We don't do PowerPoints and go through all that nonsense where everyone tells each other how great they're doing. It's just the silliness that you see a lot in corporate America. We send all those decks out ahead of time. We have everybody read them. And then we have everybody fill out the app, say, based on everything I read, here are my main takeaways, and here are the main questions that I think are so important in

• 54:17Speaker 01

  terms of creating value that we should, the whole team, all 25 of us who were in that meeting, spend time debating and discussing around the table in the limited time we've got. Because $10 goes by like that. And then I send back out the takeaways and I send back out the questions. People rank them on a scale of 1 to 10. Again, we have an app for this. And then I send people the takeaways. Here's how they were rated. Here's what people thought were the most important takeaways. It's very valuable. Now, you've got the benefit of everybody's perspectives on the same data. So people have seen the same charts, the same data, the same metrics, same KPIs. But they've seen it from a little different angle. It's very enlightening. And then I've got the questions. I tell everybody, rate the question 1 to 10. And then all the questions that are rated 8, 9, and 10, and between 8 and 10, that's the agenda, David.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  That's what we talked about. So we just went, then we put them in categories. Everything about tech that was rated 8 or above, here they are. Everything that was on comp or people, everything that was on strategic, everything that was on M and A, all the different categories, only the ones that the group voted on, at least an 8. Now, what is the consequence of that? Number one, we have an amazing meeting. Like, it's a good agenda, much better than I could come up with. Because now it's got everybody's angle on it, it's group sourced. Secondly, everybody's Involved in it because the boss didn't come down and like here's the agenda. It's like we collectively made the agenda. So people realize the truth of the matter is we really respect each other's opinions.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  There's no one person who's the authoritarian figure who's like teaching everybody else. It's a group. I've created a group. I've created a super organism. I've created like a beehive or an ant colony or a brain or a human body, super organisms. Things that are a collection of people that the sum is greater than the collection of the parts and the whole is greater than each individual. We have a holistic, powerful approach to that. That's how I run the business.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  How many people would be in a meeting like that?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  So I've experimented with this over the years. I used to have larger meetings with 40 or 50 people and it just didn't work. And so those meetings, those monthly operating reviews, which are the most important meeting of the month. Then the most senior people in the company come together and do the exercise I just mentioned for 10 hours with almost no breaks, almost no breaks at all. That I have 25 people and I limit it to 25. I don't want more than 25. I don't know what's so magic about 25, but 20 to 25 is the ideal group. You have enough people that you get diversity of opinion and you have dialectical discussions, meaning looking at issues from multiple perspectives, then analyzing those and synthesizing them and finding the truth. But you don't have so many people that you're, you know, people are peacocking and trying to impress each other and don't want to be vulnerable. You want people to be vulnerable.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  You want people to be, to trust the other people in the room so much that you've created a safe zone to say, you know what? I've been thinking this and thinking this, but the more I'm listening to you, the more I'm hearing about this, I may be wrong. Maybe I got this thing completely upside down. I'm starting to come around to look at it like this with one little twist. Now I think what we should do is X, Y, Z. And then what do y'all think of that? That's a fantastic conversation. When you have leaders of the company feeling it's safe to show that, hey, I was wrong. I was thinking things wrong and I model that. I role model that myself all the time. Be flexible in thinking. Don't be rigid in thinking. Don't be black and white dichotomous thinking, but be open minded, be receptive, to be willing to learn and to be challenged. And that's okay to be proven wrong. It's actually a good thing.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  We're learning together.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Two questions on that. How, what percent of the meeting are you speaking in a situation like that?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  So I open up usually and I ramble on for like an hour, maybe even more than an hour of the state of the union from my perspective. And I try not to just mention things that I form conclusions on. But I try to frame things of, these are the most important successes of the company. But these are the things where we need to improve. And here are the issues that, in my view, after reading everybody's votes and everything, I think are the things we should attention direct. We should spend most amount of time solving, because I think those will create the most amount of value. And I try to keep it balanced, the good stuff and the bad stuff. Yes, I do add a boys and add a girls and rah rahs. That's a good thing to do for leadership. But I, in equal measure, do, look, we gotta keep it real. We gotta keep it honest. Here's things that we said by this deadline, we're gonna do it. We're a couple of weeks behind on this.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Let's get going here. What's going on? Here's we thought this outcome was gonna happen, and we're only 92% there. How can we get to 100%? So I try to start off with a balance, but then I try to shut up. And then I try to let the mechanical going through the questions, where I just go down the questions by categories, and then go around the room and hear everyone's opinion. And that's, you don't want the leader talking a huge amount of time.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you basically start with an hour, then next, in this case, nine hour, the nine hours for this meeting.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Everyone else.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Everyone else.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  I'm not talked to, but not inordinately. I've already used up my hour, for God's sake.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is one of the things that I felt, and I've seen this with a lot, with like, really remarkable people, is how many people, like, when we had this intense breakfast at your house a few months ago, you had a notepad, and you were, I'm talking, and you're taking notes, like, what the hell is going?

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Well, you were saying cool stuff.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  No, it's the reverse. In fact, I have a story about this, and then I want another question for you, was Mitch Rails, obviously one of the founders of Dan and Here.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Great company.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Oh, incredible. And.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  The Dan and Her way.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  He's, yeah, he's actually a mentor of two close friends of mine. So I get like insights from them about him, and just what, one of the most remarkable things that he did. But he was at this vertical market software conference, it was only like 40 people there recently. And a friend of mine, I was going for a walk in New York City about this, and he says, I don't understand. The guy sat in the front row, he's the most successful person there by far, and he was just taking notes the whole time. I was like, that is why he's successful. It's not the reverse. It's not that you go and you build a $200 billion company, whatever it is, and then take notes. He was like that his whole time, just relentless, like, you have valuable information, great. I just did this episode on Jimmy Avine, who's a very fascinating person, and he has this great line, he said, great can come from anywhere.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  And then you have this other thing, I'll get back to that question.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Great can come from anywhere.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  He's in the music business, his point was that he was trying to help, he was partners and a mentor of Dr. Dre, who's one of the greatest hip hop producers of all time, Dre didn't have an artist to work with. They wind up getting this demo tape from Eminem. And at the time, he's this poor kid in Michigan, living in a trailer park, right? No, like, no resources at all. And yet, they're like, we weren't looking for, you know, somebody to be controversial. We were looking for great. And guess what? It can come from anywhere. It came from this kid that was obsessed, sitting in a frickin' trailer park, saying, I want to do this thing, and I'm going to do this to the best of my ability. I want to talk about, I'm going to go back to this question I have, but you have, I love this idea of grabbing information, which is really fascinating. There's multiple examples in your book, and I find these in other books, where it's just like, it's so nuts that,

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  especially when companies get big and older, they don't, they stop asking information

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  That's bad.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  from people from the frontline. So you're like, often, when we buy a company, we discover that the frontline employees, middle managers, and even some senior executives have never been asked, what would you do to improve the company? You would think owners would want to know that. And then you have this great thing that I think is actually good for business, but also personal relationships. You ask, what is the stupidest thing we're doing? And what is the smartest thing you're doing?

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  This ability to like, you just almost described it in these meetings. It's like, hey, we're going to disperse and ask these questions, and see what comes back, and then we'll rank the information.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  So at the end of those operating reviews, once we've gone through all the lists, now we do human interactions. That's where the fun starts. So we work really hard, solving all these problems and debating all these issues. Now we put that aside, and I ask a series of questions. I modify them a little bit every month, but I have a list of a few dozen questions. I pick which ones I want to ask each time. Usually, one of the first ones is, what is something somebody said today that you have a different opinion on? What is something that somebody said you disagree with, and you didn't get a chance to talk about it? And I just go around one by one to each person. That's a wonderful thing. Many management teams can't do that, because everyone will get upset.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Here, it's like, great, this is, and then we have a nice, I ask everyone, what's your single biggest takeaway from today? What is something that 10 hours ago, you didn't understand about how we're going to make money, and how we're going to serve customers better, and how we're going to improve employee engagement, and how we're going to kill the competition? What is something you didn't know? What is something you learned? And just go around, one by one, by one, by one. And then I ask them, When I think about people not in this room, but people in the organization out there in the field, who's an MVP? Who's the most valuable player? Who's somebody who's going above and beyond that you really respect, you really admire, you really think is amazing, wish we had thousands more like that person, and why? Why are they? And I send an email to them afterwards saying, hey, I was in a meeting with the leaders of

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  the company, and you were nominated as an MVP because X, Y, Z. People love it. Sometimes they start crying. There's a lot of times, it's really, really emotional things, really, really nice thing. Validating the field. And then I bring it inwards, and I say, who around this table today, in your mind, did their star go up? Their star already might have been high, because everyone loves each other, but even higher, you know, and why? What is something that somebody said today in the meeting that impressed you, that made you go aha, made you say, damn, that's a good insight, that's a good perception, I really like that? Who was it, and what did they say? We go around everything like that. And I have a few other questions like that. And then I bring it down to the person themselves, and I say, finish the sentence. I resolved to improve the company by...

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Just go one by one, and each person stands up and says, I resolved to improve the company by... And then they say what they want to say. It's a great thing. What I didn't get a chance to do Friday, because we ran out of time, what I often do is, then we go into another room, we get out of the boardroom, get out of the conference room, and then we stand in a circle, and just silently look at each other with, for the first couple of minutes. A couple of minutes is a long time to be like, looking around everybody else. It's, you know, it's a lot of people, that's uncomfortable. It's not uncomfortable if you all like each other. And, and look at each person and say, I admire this person because, like, what are the strengths? What are the qualities? What are the traits? What are the skills? What are the things that they do that you really are impressed with, you really like that person a lot?

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  And just go one by one, look at each person, and just identify that. And then, after a minute or two's gone by, I say, okay, now let's do the same thing, look at each person and say, I really, so we've already said why I'm grateful they're on the team. So now I want to say, so it was gratitude. Gratitude's a wonderful leadership technique. And then the second thing is... I really wish that person great success in the company. And I can picture this company five years from now accomplishing X, Y, Z. And I'm, I'm, I send nice vibes, I send love vibes to that person. It's going around one by one, all silently, nothing out loud. It's one by one, by one by one. You start seeing people smile, like always, I've done it so many times.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  You start seeing people smile, so you're looking at people, you see, looking at people in a very positive, uplifting way and appreciative way. And then I say, okay, now we've concluded the day and I declare the day a success and congratulations. Then we just clap. And we clap, sometimes this clapping goes on for like five minutes. And that's like really, really awesome, but it's a very, then people levitate home. Go to the airport and go home.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  How much of is of your, the way you run your company is like guided by intuition? Like you seem like a very intuitive person to me.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Maybe not as much as you think.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  No?

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Not, yes, there's always instinct, there's always intuition, you're always going by your gut.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Well, like, how would you even know, like, this is, this is an unusual, like, what you just described, like, how did you learn that?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  So I've experimented over time.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  I've experimented with different things. I've read a lot, I've studied positive psychology, I've studied cognitive therapy, I've studied a lot of stuff. I read a lot of stuff, I meditate a lot, I do things that worked for me. So I think of things that have worked for me on my path, my evolution of feeling gratitude and all the happiness that comes with feeling gratitude, by feeling appreciation, by problem solving, all the different things. And I try to imbibe that to other people. So, and then if it works, so feedback loops. One of the key tenants of all my companies is we have intense, voluminous feedback loops. Feedback loops between the senior team, feedback loops between the senior team and mid-level management,

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  senior, feedback loops between senior, medium, and frontline management, feedback loops with customers, feedback loops with vendors, feedback loops with investors, all the, all the constituents of the constellation that make a corporation, that make a company. We have, we have to be communicating, we have to be communicating very intensely with each other in an honest way, and then sharing that information. I share information much more widely in my organisms, in my, in my organizations than most companies. Most companies, they, they, they're afraid to share it. They're afraid to share, they're afraid to share the good information, they think a competitor is going to hear about it. Okay, well, they will, but let them try to copy us, they don't have all the ingredients to do that. Or they say,

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  We don't want to share the bad stuff because then the market's going to hear our weaknesses. Okay, well, that's kind of true, too. That's so much overshadowed by the benefit of we're learning where we have to improve. We're learning how to become better.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high-quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night. And as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high-quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is Eight Sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of Eight Sleep, Mateo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using Eight Sleep, I randomly ran into Mateo at a restaurant, and I was with some friends. So I go over and say, hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, who was I talking to? And I said, that's Mateo, the founder of Eight Sleep. And my friend replied, he looks like he gets good sleep.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  Mateo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my Eight Sleep ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe Eight Sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use Eight Sleep. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress, and it is next-level sleep tech.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to eightsleep.com/cenra and use the code CENRA to get $350 off. You can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my Eight Sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at eightsleep.com/cenra.

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  So this is what you were describing earlier, this like almost a constant iterative trial and error process. Absolutely. And just keeping the information flowing through the company. There's an idea that I think, when I thought of your ideas, like, hey, we're gonna buy the company, we're gonna ask, like, what would you do if you were running the company? What's the stupidest thing we're doing? What's the smartest thing we're doing? I, as you know, like, I'm not interested, I'm interested in timeless principles, not timely, right? And when I read that in your book, what I thought of was not you building your company, I thought of Jim Casey building UPS 100 years ago. And what he learned, because a lot of these things, these ideas have survived for a long period of time, they're not dependent on the company, it really depended on human nature. Because like, history doesn't repeat, human nature does, right? Human nature is kind of constant, doesn't really change. And so what Jim realizes, the more successful he became, the more successful his company

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  became, his executives, their incentives were to like hide the bad news and just tell them good things. Because then it's like, everything is great in the company, Jim, and so like, and I was the one that made that great, and so pay me more, and like, make sure I keep this great job I have. And Jim realizes, like, oh, I need to have constant unfiltered access from the people that are delivering the service to my customers. So he would, he would do is like, he would, he would instruct his driver, every time we see a brown UPS truck, you are to pull over. And he would get out, no matter how successful he was, and he would talk to the driver. I love it. Unfiltered information. Same thing. People would go and they'd try to meet Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas, right? They'd show up, they even have appointment on the books, and they'd walk into the office,

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  and they're like, hey, I'm here to meet Sam for our, you know, 7:00 AM meeting, and his secretary's like, he hopped on, because he used to fly his own plane, he left at 5:00 AM this morning, and he went to, you know, this Walmart over here, and he's hanging out and like, greeting customers and talking to the people, stocking the shelves and everything else, but this constant, I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you said in your book, basically is what I'm saying, it's like, you see this over and over again, they, they want unfiltered access from the front lines. They don't want the information to be, you know, massaged or presented in a manner that that seems good. So Todd Combs is one of Warren Buffett's managers, and we were talking on Saturday about...

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  I don't know, ten years ago, eight, nine, ten years ago. When he was first, he was getting on the JP Morgan board and he was kind of moving up in the world, stuff like that. I lost touch with him, but really great guy, very smart guy. And he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm reading employee surveys. I'm reading all the employee surveys from the whole company of, we ask them two questions. What's your single best idea to improve the company and rate your job satisfaction scale of one to 10? And sometimes we add a third one of what it will take to make it a 10. And I just go through all these one by one because I feel like I'm talking to every employee and learning on that. He said, that's amazing. So what's so amazing about that? So I was just talking to Bezos and Bezos was reading customer surveys. Customer surveys. So I'm talking, so it's this, so he's talking to customers, I'm talking to employees. But it's the same concept. You need feedback loops.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  You don't know how you're doing unless you have radar, like sending beep beep out there and seeing how it comes back. You have to have this very intense feedback loop.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  This is why I'm so obsessed with what I'm doing because like nothing we're doing is new. Like you had all these people that ran all these kind of experiments for centuries and they built great companies. And just because, you know, they passed on and maybe the company's not around anymore. It's like there's so, there's a treasure trove of data in there. So like Bezos idea I love where he would publicize, he used to publicize the very early days of Amazon. Jeff at amazon.com, email me. And he read, part of the, one of the reasons that he figured out, he's like, oh, I can, we can't just sell books. Like I could sell anything. People, he'd be like, he would send emails so that I think like the top thousand customers, like what else would you buy? And one guy, he had this epiphany because they, you know, they'd be like, hey, I want toilet paper. I want, you know, groceries, whatever. One guy's like, I want windshield wipers. And he's like, windshield wipers? If this guy wants windshield wipers, I'm going to be able to sell everything. Like it is a true everything store.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  But I was, I was thinking about this recently because I just read this book translated from French about the Michelin family dynasty, which starts out in 1891, selling tires in France. You're selling tires, there's like 350 cars on the road for God's sake. But there's a line in the book that is related to all this where they start, the, the, the two brothers have to take over this failing factory. And they don't know what to make because most of the products that they're manufacturing are unprofitable, they're in bankruptcy. They're one profitable.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Product, which so they eliminate everything else and they focus on the one profitable product, which is a rubber brake pad for horse drawn carriages.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Say that again.

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  A rubber brake pad for horse drawn carriages.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  Eighteen hundred, it's eighteen eighty-eight. And so it takes them like a year or two to figure out like, hey, we should manufacture rubber. And there's two twin phenomenons. You're talking about get, remember what Justin said, get the major trend, right?

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  They're like, well, horse drawn carriages have been around for a while. You know what's growing way faster? Bicycles and then cars, even from a small number. Like, we need to go to where the technology is going. But the point being is like, so we need to make more products, we need to make rubber tires. And the guy took over a factory, he's like, I don't know how to do that. So his answer was, he would go and it sounds just like, what'd you do? He only had like fifty employees that were making the rubber brake pads. And he would just ask questions. He's like, I came to them and I admitted my ignorance. I go, know nothing about rubber manufacturing. Why'd you do that? Can you explain to me? Can we, what if we did? And not in like, what you just said, you said something about not like coming down from on high? It's like a peer almost like, teach me.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  And he's like, it was wildly effective. He's got a great line in that book. He's like, it turns out the guy that handles the material for eight hours a day, while the COs in the office has something to teach you. Like, he's going to understand something about that process because you have like a bird level view. He has a very particular job and he found it very instructive. And he's like, it was a wonderful way to learn the business. And then that led him to like, oh, now I know how to make things. And then from there to grow and grow and grow. And I just absolutely love this idea. It's like, you should have this unfiltered access, unfiltered information over and over and over again.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Completely. All the different constituents in an organization need to be talking to each other. Need to have feedback loops to know how they're doing. If you're not asking your customers how you're doing, you may think you're doing a lot better than you're, than you really are, or.

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  How do you figure out how you're doing in your position?

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  I ask all day long. And, and we have different modalities of anonymous surveys and three sixty reviews and, and we're, I'm interacting with the teams non-stop all day long. I'm walking out of people's offices, what's going on? What do you think of this? What do you think of that?

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  You like the, um, you have this great line in your book where it says, uh. I love working with outrageously talented people to deliver outside returns for shareholders in public stock markets.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  This constant feedback from the public market.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  It's fantastic.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  You love it.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't always agree with it, but some of it, there's always some truth in it. You get free advice from like the smartest people in the world, the global allocators. People have raised billions of dollars from pensions and endowments and sovereign wealth funds, and now they're analyzing what you're doing and they're giving you advice. They're telling you, this is what I like, this is what I don't like. Okay, you don't have to, you actually mathematically can't agree with it all, because a lot of times you get conflicting advice. People saying, you're going right, you should be going left. Another guy saying, you should go left even more. So it's good to hear all this stuff. It's good to hear what people are saying, but then you have to go within yourself and you have to, you've got to make the decision. You have to be an adult.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  You have to, you take in tons and tons of information and opinions and beliefs and data, as much as possible. Then you've got to kind of ignore all that, just go inside and say, this is what I want to do. You've got to make the call. That's what a CEO does, that's what the leader does, is you make the call. But you have to get all that input, otherwise you're in a, you're just a bubble chamber, echo chamber, you're just hearing your own thoughts instead of others. You want people challenging your thoughts all the time.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  I think for a long time, like one big goal was like starting a company and then taking it public, and now I talk to a lot of founders, and even the ones that raised a lot of money, and they don't want to ever go public. Do you have any?

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  I love being public.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  What advice would you give to somebody that's say 30 years younger than you? They're trying to build a great company, they've raised a bunch of money, but they don't want to go public.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Well, they have to be at a level of maturity of the company to go public. They have to be preferably profitable.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  There's a bunch of them like now.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Who never want to go public.

• 1:17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that are, that reach that criteria and are choosing not to.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  You know, it'd be interesting to ask them, why? What's the reason why you don't want?

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  I think people think, yeah, I can't speak for them, but I think they're like, maybe they're scared of the public scrutiny, the hassle, the...

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  But that goes back to what we were talking about an hour ago, is, so they might have a core belief saying, I need everybody to always be like saying great stuff about me, which is never going to happen. And they may think that, gee, if I go public, when you're public, at any moment in time, you have people in favor of you and people who are naysayers. You have people who are selling and buying. The people who are selling think you're overvalued, the people who are buying... Get the joke and they understand you have a real, real business plan here that's going to create much more value. So you always have those two different things going. Maybe those people don't want to hear the naysayers. Maybe those people don't understand that naysayers sometimes can help you correct your own path, can tell you, gee, you know, maybe I'm cutting costs too much. People come in and say, you're cutting costs too much. I visited one of your locations. I didn't think the service was so great. Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Thank you for telling me that. So now I have to invest more rather than cut costs. You have other people who say, you know, I'm looking at your numbers here. Your margins are growing, which is great. That's only half the, half the situation here. The other situation is, what are you doing with your top line? What are you doing with your price and volume? What are you doing with your organic growth? In my business, in all my businesses, the only two things I had to do in the end in order to get great valuations and create shareholder value were grow the top line faster than the competition, faster than the market, be taking share, and growing the margins, increasing the margin, increasing the profit margins. If I did those two things, everything else flowed. Everything else flowed from that. But those are the two main things. In order to do those, accomplish those two things, you want as much input as possible.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  You want as many, many chefs, many chefs in the kitchen as you possibly can. The public gets you hundreds and thousands of voices. So it's amazing data. It also being public allows you to build a brand much faster and much more voluminous.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  Explain that part?

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  So you want to be a magnet for talent, for drivers, for people in the branches, for people in mid-level management. You want to, you want to be, going back to what you said before, you always want great talent coming in. Well, if nobody knows who you are, they're a little skeptical about joining your company. If you have research written about you by bunches of firms and you have press releases and a public website and you're very well-known what you're doing, it's very clear what you're doing, people say, okay, I get it. You're a known quantity and I like this. I buy into it. I like what you're doing. I want to join the company. So in order, and then you can pay them. You compensate them with stuff they can look on their iPhone every day and see the value of the compensation. If you're private, you give people these phantom shares or whatever the compensation plan is, they don't really know the value of it until they sell it someday and it may

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  be very different than what they thought it was all along. So from a compensation point of view, which is a big element of success in these high growth business plans, being public is fantastic.

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  Was there ever a time in your career where you're like, maybe I should do, should do a private company instead? Or you were pretty much all in on it?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  I've been doing public since 1992 and I'm non-stop. And I'm, I like it, I don't, I enjoy it. It's, I find it very helpful, very constructive. I like the pressure. I like, I like the ability to hear what the street says and then agree with what I agree with. But to disagree with what I think is wrong, what I feel passionately and have evidence to support they're wrong. So sometimes the street, particularly like the hedge funds, they're very focused on like this quarter, like the next 90 days. That's a terrible thing long-term. You don't want to be focusing on just what's good for the quarter. You end up, you see these public companies that go out and they cut costs in the field that hurts customer service or hurts employee morale and they're understaffed, which is even worse than being overstaffed, which is, which is bad. And, and here it's a, it's a

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  completely different story. So yeah, I, I, I like being public.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  You said something interesting. I like the pressure.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  I do. Thrive on it.

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  So many people give you the money, whether it's a retail individual, whether it's a high net worth family, whether it's, it's a sovereign wealth fund, whether it's a pension plan, whether it's an endowment, all these people are invested, long only funds, mutual funds, all these people are giving, they're wiring money to buy your shares. This is a intense pressure. This is a, this is probably the biggest pressure I have in life, is to make sure that I do everything I possibly can to make sure I give them back more money than they gave me. Make sure that they invest in the company. And like, if you look at my neighbors and my friends, I don't know the exact number, but I would guess over 90% of them are invested in the company. And that, that's what it's been over time. Well, that's pressure, man. That's like, wow, I don't want to disappoint them. These

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  are my relatives, these are my friends, these are people I really love. These are people, people come and say, look, I believe in you so much. I put two thirds of my, my retirement plan in, in your stock. Just single, no, no to forget, just reverse vacation. Boom, I'm going all in on Brad and his team. Well, that's a lot of pressure. I like that pressure. I enjoy that pressure. That motivates me. That inspires me. That makes me feel, I have something to do here that's important.

• 1:22:35Speaker 00

  I think that's so important to like, put that out. Cause we were talking about the negative self-talk and like, you know, just living a pretty crazy life where it's like, you want to work 7 days a week or you're just completely all in. And the way, some, again, this goes back to, you can hear a sentence and just like, oh, I feel that way too. And it kind of changes the way you approach things. And I remember reading about Herb. Keller her, which is the founder of Southwest Airlines. You know, it's such a, it's such a crazy story that like in an industry where bankruptcy is the most common. You know, outcome, the guy had, his, his company was profitable for 40 straight years. This is nuts. And he's like a nut job. He's drinking a fifth of bourbon every day. He's chain smoking cigarettes.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  That's not me.

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  No, no, no, nobody's like.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  I don't advocate that.

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  No, he, he wouldn't sleep. He's like, it was, he's just hilarious stories in his life. And I thought he was like, he just lived on the edge and completely like all in. It was a great story about this where they tried to get, you know, he chain smoke and then drink a fifth of bourbon every day. And they're like, um, but then he had like prostate cancer or something like that. Now you should stop smoking. He's like, I don't smoke with my prostate.

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  But that's not the thing that I remember. The thing that I loved in an interview one time, they're like, you have like, you deal with a ton of stress. Like, how do you handle it? He goes, I don't handle it. I like it.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  He wanted the stress. He's like, I want to be in the game.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  This is, he was an attorney. He just started a company. It was his first company. He was an attorney. He was 35 years old. And then he decides, hey, I'm going to try to do an interstate or intrastate airline. And like, then he had, it was like four years of legal fights before he could even take his first flight. He's just like, I love this shit. This is what I want. I want the pressure.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Passion.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  What I love about this is it's in your book, you, you constantly talk about the, the other people, the other entrepreneurs, other investors, other CEOs that you learn from. Then, then acknowledgements, all these maxims from all these other brilliant people. You talk about, uh, obviously Ludwig Justin. Uh, I do want to talk about, I read something on LinkedIn about other, I want to talk about the other people that you've learned from. The other founders, CEOs, executives that you admire. Uh, I want to start with Fred Smith, since he, he passed away. I read his biography, uh, probably like four or five years ago. And I, tell me if I'm wrong, you know more about this industry than I do. It seems like FedEx had to be one of the most difficult operational companies to ever invent.

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  Like an unbelievable, you're talking about somebody who wanted pressure. Yeah, the complexity. You wrote on LinkedIn, you, you never miss an opportunity to spend time with them and you admire them. Could you just tell like why?

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  So Fred endorsed my book.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I saw.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  And I was very touched he did that.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  He was a competitor.

• 1:25:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Literally the lost three competitors who endorsed my book. So Fred was an amazing guy. I mean, this is a very special, you, you meet people in life that are just special, that are certain integrity and. So I met Fred for the first time in 2013. And I was doing a bunch, I came out of nowhere from this industry. I got in in 2011, but I really started doing a bunch of acquisitions out of nowhere. It sounded like I was on the front pages of the trade journals. And I was in Atlanta at the National Association of Manufacturers, NAM conference. And Fred was the keynote. So I was in the audience watching him. And somebody said, what do you think of Brad Jacobs? I go, oh, my God. My heart starts to beat. Oh, my God. Fred Smith's about to like destroy me.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  My brand is going to be completely crushed. You know, the icon of the industry is going to say, oh, yeah, I don't believe in that. And he said, I really like watching that guy work. He said, he is coming into this industry with courage and buying things left and right and has big goals and big ambitions and I'm going to keep an eye on that guy. And I cried. I said, wow, Fred Smith's like saying crazy stuff. So I went up to him afterwards, after the speech was over. And I said, Mr. Smith, I'm Brad Jacobs. I really appreciate what you said. And he said, well, first of all, I'm Fred. And that was the beginning of a great, great friendship. And we got together many, many times. Of course, he was on the business council. He was the longest serving member of the business council, over a quarter of a century. Oh, wow.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  And I go to every business council meeting I possibly can to meet other CEOs and to hear what other people are thinking. He was just a generous guy. This was a guy who had vision, he had passion. Talk about grit. I mean, he was flying around all the time, everywhere. Vietnam, he was decorating, he was flying helicopters with people shooting bullets at him to go get Marines who had been, he was a Marine. Marines who had been killed, but you don't leave any Marine behind. He'd go in there, he's risking his life with bullets like shot, he's shooting at him to go get the remains of a dead Marine. Putting his own life on the line. He got a Purple Heart, he got Silver, he got, I mean, he's serious, serious, courageous, high integrity guy and everybody, everybody loved.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Everybody loved Fred. Everybody loved Fred.

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  The opening paragraph of that, of his biography is the craziest opening paragraph I've ever heard. I'm just gonna like paraphrase it, essentially like, you know, he's in debt. He ran through like his, the, his Greyhound, his dad's Greyhound bust millions. I think he burned through like 15 or 20 million. His planes are about to be confiscated. They just got fired by his board. The FBI is investigating him.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  He goes to Vegas.

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  Yes. And then they're like, he thought, he, he thought, and he was like 30 years old at the time, so still young, but he refused to let his federal express train die. And the line was just like, he thought of suicide. And then the next paragraph is like, but the idea of Fred, of Fred jumping out a window is ludicrous. He's more likely to throw somebody out of a window. He was just like a guy that you, like, he was like the Terminator. You couldn't stop, like, he just wouldn't stop coming. There's a few lines.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  No, I all recognize that in him. So, so throwing someone out the window.

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  At 30, I think he might have been a little different.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  Well, maybe, yeah. But I was a direct competitor of him in transportation and logistics and in, not in package, because we didn't do package, but pretty much all the other lines of business, we competed against him. He was generous. He was charitable. He would always take a meeting with me. He used to come to my house. We'd spend hours and hours and hours talking about everything.

• 1:28:34Speaker 00

  This is what is so special. I know it's part of humanity in general, but entrepreneurship in, in particular is just like, you see this over and over again, just how generous these people are with it. Because they know how fucking hard it is. They just went through all this. And now we might be 15, 20, 30 years different in age, but it's like, just like Ludwig Jostelson did when you were 23. And in many cases, like what you did with the book, like, the idea, like, think about Sam Walton, right? He wrote his autobiography. His cancer was all over his body. He was in pain. He knows his time is towards the end. And what does he do? He spends a, a, a big chunk of the last time he had left, saying, this is what I learned in my six decade long career. That is a gift to future generations. And then in the book, they're like, somebody, I love this part because they're, in the book, they're like,

• 1:29:18Speaker 00

  people ask me all the time, could another Walmart story happen? He's like, yeah, it's probably happening right now. And it was Jeff Bezos going around with his copy of the book, writing it, annotating it, giving it to the executives, the early executives, Amazon. It's such a beautiful thing that Fred would do that. It's a beautiful thing you did for your book.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  Fred and Amazon didn't get along.

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  No, no, no. I'm saying, but like, in general, yeah, obviously. Well, yeah, I can see why. But my point being is the, the transfer of. Even for competitors. He was, Fred was your competitor, but he's transferring knowledge to you.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:29:47Speaker 00

  I don't think people understand how much that go, I'm glad you just said that. Cause yeah, you could see in the books. You hear stories like that.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  He endorsed my book.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. You hear stories like that all the time in private. And for you to say that, I think is really important. There's a few things I pulled out from his biography that just remind me of you. And I'm curious if like you, if you agree with some of these things. One, uh, the amount of-

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  If it's about Fred Smith, if it, if I don't have that trait, I should work on getting it.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, perfect. The amount of information, so like, think about it, like he started FedEx in sixties, I think, something like that. No, after Vietnam, so maybe early seventies. But in the eighties, he says that he estimated in, during nineteen eighties, he spent four hours a day reading. He says, uh, he found he relied quite heavily on his own vision backed by assimilating information, which you've mentioned multiple times so far, from many different disciplines at once. You've talked about in meetings, you've talked about in trade journals, you've talked about all the research you do, right? This is his quote though, that I want to read to you. "The common trait of people who supposedly have vision is they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information and then synthesize it until they come up with an idea." That sounds like you to me.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  I like that. Yeah. Going back to what I was saying before, you don't want to be rigid in your thinking. You want to be open minded, you want to be flexible. You want to be scientific about it, that if new evidence comes along that disproves your, your theory, then modify your theory. Go by the evidence, go by the facts. You want to get, you want to interact with people who you respect and you want to be picking their brain all the time.

• 1:31:11Speaker 00

  Which are also like a lot, the way to describe it is like you're, you're also alive and paying attention. Like the story in your book where you're like reading a magazine in bed on a Sunday morning and you read about like, uh, these waste management companies making like five hundred million dollars in profit. You're like, whoa, what? Like they're picking up trash from one spot and bringing it to another. I need to learn about this industry. But that's my point, like you're, you're, people like Fred, people like you, I think, you know, there's a ton of people to have the same thing. Whereas like they're, the, the whole world is like a classroom. If you're actually paying attention, like you can pick up ideas all over the place.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  So the waste management business, I contrasted to the oil business. The oil business is a lot more complex. We were negotiating complicated long-term contracts and chartering vessels and negotiating processing agreements with big major oil companies and hedging. And I mean, it's a very complicated, complex business. When I read that about the garbage business, it said, "That is so much easier picking up garbage." "That's a simple business. They move some garbage and send out an invoice." "So I definitely think I can do that." "And it seems like they make a lot of money." "And the trend seemed in the right direction." "So, yeah."

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  Oh, and the application of technology, which is...

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  I love how at the end of your book, you have essentially one or all the... Some key technology developed by humans, starting, you know, back 300,000 years ago, and you move forward. I thought that was a beautiful way to like, just put that in the...

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  So I got that from Kurzweil, by the way, Ray Kurzweil. So Ray Kurzweil, huge mentor of mine. Only met him once, but met him for about six hours.

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  But I've read every book he's written. I've read every article about him. I see every YouTube he's... And I'm a Ray Kurzweil fan. I really... And what I read in The Singularity is Near in 2005, 2006, when that book came out, was amazing, where it was a chronology of the universe going... You know my meditation, I go back in space and time. I said, "Kinder spirit here." There's somebody who thinks in large scale of time. And what are the key things that have happened over the last 13 billion years? And reducing that down to a couple hundred points. I thought that was real helpful. So I modified it a bit and made it more specific to business, things that would be applicable to business. But the main trend, going back to Mr. Justin about you gotta get the main trend right,

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  the main trend for the last 2 million years had been humans creating tools, AKA technology, to do things, to outsource to those things, that do better than us, that free up our time. So whether it was fire, whether it was a wheel, whether it was the printing press, and more recently, all the digital electronic stuff we've done, and all the internet, and now artificial intelligence, and robotics, and nanotechnology. This is the trend. The main trend in life, and therefore in business, is technology. Outsourcing our senses, outsourcing our memory, outsourcing now our intellect, our speech, to computers, to the cloud. This is big. This is really, really, really big.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  So when I looked at 55 different industries before I picked building products... I ruled out a bunch of them, so this is looks like an interesting industry, but I think AI and automation are going to cry bashing, and I didn't do it. And I mentioned in the book, there was one particular online education company, it was called Chegg. And I said, I don't know, it seemed like you got a good business, but I think these AI is going to come in and basically do that for free. Well, you know, and I said, I think the stock might come down. Well, the stock came down a lot, it came down from 50 to single digits. So fortunately, I made a good prediction there. As Yogi Bear said, predictions are difficult, particularly when they're about the future. But that turned out to be a good prediction. Why was that

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  a good prediction? Because to me, I'm looking at it saying, the main trend, the long-term trend, is to use technology to do things that we've been doing ourselves. And so I'm always trying to look at these different work streams and say, is that something that can be automated? Is that something that's going to be AI or robotics going forward? And then capitalizing on that.

• 1:35:03Speaker 00

  And the opportunity to always do something slightly better, which is an event tools to do so, technology. It even starts out when you were talking about collecting-

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  Sometimes a lot better, not slightly better.

• 1:35:15Speaker 00

  But the good thing is, like, this is not exclusive to the time we live in. It's a constant throughout our experience. You can go and look at the, like, when you guys were collecting all, this is, you said before, fax, before email, you were collecting all the information for Amrex.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:35:28Speaker 00

  You know, 40 years ago.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:30Speaker 00

  And then the waste management, when you're like, hey, how, like, I should get into this. And then you realize, wait, they're not even using technology to figure out the most efficient route. And you, this constant application of technology is one of the things I'm glad, it was on my notes, but I'm glad you brought, like, directed the conversation there. Because the way I thought about this is really crystallized my mind when I read Andrew Carnegie's autobiography, right? Which is probably written 130 years ago. And for whatever reason, if you talk to somebody today, they don't think of, like, the production of steel as technology, which is like a crazy thing. At the time, it was like, they literally invented a new and a better way, and then everything in the world was going to be made out of this. And so what I do is, like, when I'm finished reading a book, again, we go

• 1:36:12Speaker 00

  back to this idea that you and I share, we have to, like, distill it. You're not going to remember 250 pages, but you'll remember a paragraph or a sentence if you can. And Andrew's a young person getting into an existing industry. It's a new industry, but it's still an existing industry. Most of his competitors were much older, and they were very resistant, to your point, resistant to change. You cannot be resistant to change. You have to embrace the major trend, which is what your mentor told you. And so- I was hearing the criticism that his competitors, almost like when you were in that business and the guy took you out to lunch, it's like, "Slow down. I used to be the first, now I'm the second." That's a terrible way to do business. Like, take your competitor out to lunch, you'll be like, "Stop being better than me."

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Motivation.

• 1:36:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not gonna work. But the way I would summarize the main theme from Andrew Carnegie's book that then reappears over and over again in all these stories is invest in technology, the savings compound, it can give you an advantage over slower-moving competitors, and can be the difference between a profit and a loss. And you see that over and over and over again. It doesn't matter if it's steel, waste management, software, over and over again. It's like the best entrepreneurs, the best CEOs, the best executives, they're not scared of technology. If you're scared of it, you're going to get destroyed by it. They embrace it, and they invest heavily in it. And again, the benefit I have is like, I'm reading about a chocolate company that was started 80 years ago, and they have some of the most advanced robots, making chocolate. I'm reading about a tire company from 150

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  years ago. They watch their costs, and they're very efficient in how they spend their time and their money, but they invest heavily in technology. No one thinks of Walmart as a technology company, but if you go back in 1979, right, Sam's in his 60s, and they're like, "Hey, we're doing everything by hand. Our business is getting way too complex. We have all these distribution centers. Think about the logistics. You would know all this. Moving all this material where it needs to be at the right time. We need to invest in computers." And Sam, at first, he heard computer, he heard overhead, he heard expense. "I can't do that." And then he was slowly allowing himself to be convinced by the pounds of people on his team, and he wound up, when he decided to invest, he didn't dabble. He

• 1:38:26Speaker 00

  invested $500 million in $1979, who knows what that would be today, in the most advanced computer system to handle his logistics and distribution. And that was an edge that no, not another retailer on the planet had, or at least in America had, that he had the technological edge over the rest of his competitors.

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  In business, you always want to be finding waste, because there always is some. And eliminate it. You always want to find inefficiencies and there always are, want to reduce them. Technology helps you with that. Walmart's a big tech company. So my chief supply chain officer came out of Walmart, very, very sophisticated guy. It's all about technology, all about using tech in order to get the data and then being very data driven.

• 1:39:05Speaker 00

  I would argue that if anybody, I don't think you could be the leader in any industry and not also, we don't think of them as tech companies because we think tech has to be like Google or Facebook. It's like, no, they're all tech companies. I just did, um, I wanted to do more than just like American entrepreneurs is where, because you know, the

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  We have an outsized share of entrepreneurs.

• 1:39:24Speaker 00

  Everybody's like, you should do more X, Y, Z. It's like, why are they all American? And that, I understand that. And my point being is like, if you think about entrepreneurship in like the market economy, it's only a couple hundred years old. It's like, well, America's kind of dominated. So it makes sense if 75 or 80% of my episodes are about that. But I, I did one on one of the, the most successful entrepreneurs in Europe named Amancio Ortega. And I didn't know anything about him. All I know is that

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  His H and M?

• 1:39:49Speaker 00

  Uh, Zara.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  Oh, Zara. Zara Intex.

• 1:39:51Speaker 00

  Intex, yeah, yeah. And then you're reading about this, you're like, it's not a fashion company. It is a technology company. What does that mean? He built the logistics and the system to say, me and you can walk out on the street right now and we could see, oh, there's, there's a trend here where all these ladies are wearing dresses with whatever, you know, red flowers on them. And he can take that idea and put it through a system and he can have manufacture dresses with red flowers in eight, you know, 25 different countries in seven days. That is technology. He says, it's like, we're a technology company with a chain of stores attached to it.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  So Zara Intex is a big customer of GXO Logistics, one of the companies we spun off from XPO. And GXO runs a lot of their warehouses in Europe. And it's, it's exactly what you're saying. It's, it's e-commerce. It's trying to do things very efficiently and very quickly and very accurately. And you need technology to do that. You need robots and you need AI. Every business, every single business is going to see more automation and more AI. People have to get on the program on that or they're going to be dinosaurs.

• 1:40:49Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. I'm going to go back to Fred Smith. He says something that sounds

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Fred was in tech.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  Oh, of course.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  In a big way.

• 1:40:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  He was always talking about this new invention he just did and the removing packages and robots. And we were trying to figure out some way you could use automation in LTL. Cause he was a big LTL. FedEx is the biggest action LTL. And XPO is a big LTL. The automation is not there yet to get, because all the closed spaces and all the people still involved in that, but it's going to be. Package, you have automation now. Package automation is much further ahead.

• 1:41:18Speaker 00

  Yes, so there's something we haven't touched on. I have a question for you. And this is a quote from Fred in his biography. Says, "You have to be absolutely brutal in the management of your time."

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 1:41:29Speaker 00

  Do you have any insights?

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  If you want someone to disagree with that, you're going to have to talk to somebody else.

• 1:41:34Speaker 00

  I'm curious how you do this, though.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  So time, so when you're a CEO, when you're an executive, you only got two things. You got time and you got capital. And how you deploy that time and how you deploy that capital equals results. So it's your, it's your time and it's the time of the people, the organization. So when I was running XPO, we had about 150,000, a little more employees worldwide. See, each one of those work, the senior management worked long hours, but the average worker worked eight hours a day. So you had eight times, about 1.2 million hours a day of work getting done. If you've got people very focused and very motivated and very well-trained and feel good about the company and feel good about their job, that productivity of that 1.2 million

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  hours a day is going to be a lot more than if they're, if the conditions I just mentioned are not, are not present. So managing people's time, putting them in the right priorities and, and telling, ranking what people should be spending their time on is very, very, very, very important to success. Now, how do I spend my time? I spend my time deliberately and consciously and intentionally on the things that I think make most amount of value for the, for the company.

• 1:42:47Speaker 00

  How many things at any given time are you having to focus on?

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Now, a fair amount. So if you're a CEO, you're, you're managing, you know, 15, 20 different things always. You're managing people, you manage technology, you're managing budgets, you're managing investors, you're managing. Infrastructure, you're managing transportation, you're managing logistics, you're managing pricing, you're managing procurement with the vendors, you're managing customer relations, you're managing sales, you manage sales force excellence. There's just, there's about 20 things that are your life. Like, that's what a good CEO does. The problem with a lot of CEOs is they've come up through just sales or operations, and they're good at that, but they kind of just delegate the other 15 things. That's really part of the CEO job. You look at the great CEOs, CEOs have created a lot of alpha, a lot of shareholder value.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  They've been in each one of those 20 or so things. You talk to a Dave Cody, you talk to an Ed Breen, you talk to Larry Culp. You can talk about any of those 20 things, and they have things to say, and you can learn from them. You talk to CEOs who haven't created a lot of value, who are not really good at this game. They'll know four, five, or six, even half of those 20 things, but they don't do the other. They don't do the other part. You've got to be in all of them. But you're not in all those things in equal measure. Some things you don't have to spend as much time on. The people things and compensation things, I actually spend a lot of time on. So that's core, that's critical to get right. That's something that if you get wrong, you're wasted. Budgeting, I spent a lot of time going on the budget. Customer satisfaction, I spent a lot of time on that.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  The employee engagements, going out to the field, doing the town halls, doing the Zooms. I'm all in on that.

• 1:44:23Speaker 00

  But when you say that the CEOs that you think might not be doing the best they could, are they delegating too much?

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're not, they're afraid to do the, I'm making generalizations, there's always exceptions. But generally speaking, what I find is they gravitate to the stuff they like and that they're good at, and they kind of just don't do the stuff that they don't like, or they aren't very good at. And you can't. You've got to be, if you want to be a good CEO and have a high performing company, and be in the top decile of stock performance, like United Rentals and XPO were both top 10 stock performers last Test Gate. That's not random that both those companies were, because it was the same principles, the same structures. You've got to have CEOs, and they did, that are in the whole thing. Understand from A to Z what running a business is,

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  and how you create shareholder value, and see the whole picture of the levers. So I always tell friends who are, and I have a lot of friends who are portfolio managers or analysts on the buy side, I say, when you bring a management team in, You need to ask them, what's your stock price going to be five years from now? And what are the levers that I have to believe is going to get you there? And if that CEO tells you, I'll get, that's a great question, I'll get back to you. Short that stock, or at least don't buy that stock. Because that's the first thing the CEO has to know. First thing a CEO and the senior management team has to know with great specificity. Here's where we are right now, the stock price. We want to get massive outperformance and get to here. That's great, that's just the beginning.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  Here are the levers of how I get there. Here are the levers of the things that we must do as an organization. That will improve our profitability, improve our multiple, generate free cash flow. Just how are we going to get to there? And in my case, it's not that hard because when you do the graph, the first two bars, when you do the levers, comprise the vast majority of what you have to do to create the value. And those are buying companies right, meaning being very disciplined in what you pay. And looking at lots of acquisition candidates at the same time. So you don't fall in love with any one of them. And so you have alternatives and you don't.

• 1:46:35Speaker 00

  What's the distribution there? So you've done over 500 acquisitions throughout your.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  My teams and I have, I like to give credit to my team.

• 1:46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, you and your team, for sure. So you and your team have done over 500 acquisitions, you've looked at how many?

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  Thousands and thousands, I mean, many thousands.

• 1:46:49Speaker 00

  Like 100,000, you think it'd be that?

• 1:46:51Speaker 01

  I've lost count.

• 1:46:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's 100,000, when I say look, looked at in depth.

• 1:46:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  But in the thousands, many thousands.

• 1:46:58Speaker 00

  Okay, going back to the time management, though. I think, especially in like the age that people are growing up in, like where like there's a shortened attention span, a lack of focus, in my opinion, and like, really easy to give into distraction. Like how, you sound like you're almost not impervious to distraction. That's not the right way to put it because I know how you're going to be humble when you describe yourself. But how do you avoid being pulled into things that are not prioritized?

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  So many, many people know Warren Buffett. I barely know Warren Buffett. I've met him a few times, but he's not a close personal friend. I wish he was, but he's not. But I know a lot of people who are close to me who are close to him. And they, most of them have the same story, so he must tell us to everybody. He tells people, I'm the richest person, I'm the wealthiest person in the world. And I said, well, Mr. Buffett, you worked for one period of time, but I think you're number four.

• 1:47:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  He says, no, I can prove that I'm the wealthiest person in the world. I say, why is that? And he reaches in, he brings out his day timer, his, you know, his calendar.

• 1:47:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  And he says, Monday, I have one appointment. Tuesday, I have no appointments.

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Wednesday, I have no appointments. Cause he controls his time.

• 1:48:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  He controls his time and he has no problem saying no and refusing people time. So he's very disciplined.

• 1:48:07Speaker 00

  I have a problem saying no, though. Like, this is why I'm asking you.

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  Well, you need to solve that problem. That's a problem you've identified. That's great. That's half of the solution to the problem.

• 1:48:14Speaker 00

  He, he, he has that great line where he's like, the difference between successful people and really successful people is really successful people say no to almost everything. So like, you have 20, you know, whatever the number is. Yeah, so whatever the number is, like, you have 20 things that, that, you know, you're, you're focused on at the CEO level at this, this moment. You're, you know, you know, where you want to spend your time, what you're best at. We talked about incentives and, and then recruiting talent. But like, you also are one of the most, and you're not gonna like this, but like, one of the most famous and wealthiest people in the world. You have an unbelievable amount of people that want your time. How do you stay disciplined? Like, you're, you seem to be disciplined from the outside of saying no to a lot of things. Like, how, is that something you learned in the last, like, five years, 10 years? Do you like that when you were younger?

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  So first of all, I'm not that famous. I'm well-known in the.

• 1:49:02Speaker 00

  In the business community, yeah.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  The business community.

• 1:49:03Speaker 00

  That's the only community I care about now.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  But like, like, you know.

• 1:49:07Speaker 00

  No, the average, yeah, for sure.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  And, and I'm not one of the richest people in the world. There's many people who are vastly richer than I am. But in my own modest way, I've, I've created some level of recognition and some of, some of wealth and more importantly, wealth to others.

• 1:49:21Speaker 00

  You should see my inbox when it comes to you, but that's fine. That's fine.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate that, but.

• 1:49:25Speaker 00

  I just know.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  But in context.

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  It's funny, cause people.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  It's not, the way you said it is a little grandiose. I don't think I, I don't think I am that.

• 1:49:30Speaker 00

  This is why every time I say these things to you, you say, say things.

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  Well, cause I wanna correct the record. Cause I don't wanna get grandiose in the wrong.

• 1:49:36Speaker 00

  No, it's, it's a smart move, but the, the funny thing is when I did the I had breakfast with Brad Jacobs episode. Now people were like, Flood, like, can you introduce us? Like, no, like, you had to figure out to get to him yourself. Like, you can't do that.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  When I was researching after. After XPO.

• 1:49:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  I was looking for my next thing. No, no, excuse me, after United Rentals.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  Looking for my next thing. And I was looking at asset management. And I went, and I went to Chicago and I wanted to get in a point with Ken Griffin.

• 1:50:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  Who now I've met, now I know, and he's a neighbor down in Florida. I don't know him well, know him well enough. And I, you know, I think he'd return my call if I called him. Uh, but he would turn down the meeting. He wouldn't take the meeting. Said, wow, that's kind of humbling. And then, and, but you can't even like spend an hour. He says, no, Ken is a very, and I think you, you interviewed him, right?

• 1:50:21Speaker 00

  No, not yet.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  Oh, you should, you definitely should.

• 1:50:23Speaker 00

  I want to meet him. I want to meet him. So if you can introduce me, please.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  He could be President of the United States someday.

• 1:50:27Speaker 00

  He's incre- the cra- so this is the good thing about when I do, remember, most of the people I study are dead. When I do episodes on people that are living, this is why I was asking you some of the questions. Because like, I'll do this episode, it reaches a very valuable community and they're really helpful. And then I get all these crazy stories about this guy's even more remarkable than your episode. It's like, and I got it about you and I got it about Ken. And then I was like, oh, I got it. Like, I definitely want to meet Ken.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  Ken's in a different league than I am.

• 1:50:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  Ken is like way, way up there.

• 1:50:53Speaker 00

  He's a very fascinating person.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  Oh, just, you should def- you should definitely do something on him. You asked how I manage my time. So I have a chief of staff. He used to work in the Oval Office and manage the most important person in the world's calendar. So I mean, he's, he's always very, very good. And more importantly, he understands what I'm doing. He understands my, my priorities and he understands what I was talking to you before. Like the two most important things that I gotta do are have organic revenue growth, better than competition, and a margin expansion and everything else. He understands that. He understands that in order to do that, I have to focus on people, I have to focus on technology. He understands the different levers to do that. He under-

• 1:51:30Speaker 00

  So you run every decision between those two?

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my framework. In business, my framework is, because I've learned, if I do those two things, and it takes a hundred different things to do those two things well. But if I do those two things well, I will create dramatic shareholder value. If I buy companies at significant lower multiples of profit than I trade at.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  Monday morning at seven o'clock after we announced the acquisition, I've already created alpha for my shareholders. That's a nice way to start the week. Number two, if I then double the profit over the next three to five years, then I'll get a nice multiple. And if I generate, those are the two main things I need to focus on. He understands that. Now, what he also understands is all the components because, you know, in the monthly operating reviews and all the correspondence, we're very, we're very good at communicating with each other, what's important and what's not important. So he knows my priorities and therefore is a great gatekeeper.

• 1:52:24Speaker 00

  Is there anybody that could tell you when you're getting off track from what you profess to say is important to you?

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  Everybody around me. So if I'm spending too much time on, like, I'm going to catch heck for being on this podcast.

• 1:52:35Speaker 00

  Dude, you're the man for doing this, by the way.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  I mean, they're going to, no, I love doing it.

• 1:52:39Speaker 00

  And it will also get to like, I do think, you know, one of the things that you obviously accomplished with the book and like I try to help amplify with my work is like, just millions of people are going to benefit from your lived experience. You have forty, fifty, almost fifty years, let's say forty years of experience as an entrepreneur. It's like, how many people that have ever lived life that have done that? Most people, you know, unfortunately they quit or they fail or whatever the case is. Like you have so much to teach the world.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  Can I comment on something about the time?

• 1:53:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  There's a phrase I used to use, and you brought it out to me. So I'm going to start using it again. I've been using it recently is what-wom.

• 1:53:11Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  W O T W O M.

• 1:53:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  Waste of time, waste of money. So when people are brainstorming, kind of, let's do this, let's do that. Someone can say, what-wom. And what he does, that's a waste of time, waste of money. Like, how does that, how does what you're suggesting we do, influence directly or even indirectly, growing organic revenue growth or increasing the margin? And if it doesn't, what-wom, that's a waste of time, waste of money. You only, you have limited time and you have limited capital. You've got to be directing that time and deploying that capital that things have the greatest returns. Otherwise, it's what-wom.

• 1:53:47Speaker 00

  And I'm so glad, first of all, it's hilarious. I'm glad that you said that you actually have other people around you doing this too. Because I am kind of skeptical that no human can, can hit their goals and what they want to do, you know, a hundred percent of the time. I can't imagine, you know, the complexity of running. FedEx. And this guy's just like, no, you have to be brutal. There's a word like that. He picks it. Absolutely brutal is the word. Absolutely brutal in your time management. Yeah, I think there's a lot of thing. There's another thing that Fred Smith said. That again, like when I'm reading about Fred, when I was going through and rereading all my highlights from his biography, I wasn't really thinking about Fred. I was thinking about you, you know, like this to me feels like a lot of what I've learned from you. And this is a direct quote from Fred. He says, I believe that a man who expects to win out in business without self denial

• 1:54:32Speaker 00

  and self improvement stands about as much a chance as a prizefighter would stand if he started a ring battle without having gone through intensive training. Natural ability, even when accompanied by the spirit to win, is never sufficient. If I look at the way you were building businesses when you were 23 compared to, you know, you can pick first million dollar company, then you look at the second or the third or the fourth or the fifth or the seventh, it's like you're not even, like you'd go back and kick that dude's ass because of all the stuff you have learned since then.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Well, you do get better as you keep with experience like in anybody in anything. But the principles are pretty the same. If you look at all my companies, the essential concepts are the same, that you want to have fantastic people, that you want to have rules of engagement with those people where you get along and go kill the competition instead of killing each other, that you want to have fair compensation so that everybody's in on the action here, so that.

• 1:55:27Speaker 00

  When did you kept repeating that? When did you understand the power of incentives? Because you talk about compensation incentives a lot.

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  Very, very early, very early in the oil brokerage days. Because I used to have, we had tables, like 10 brokers at a table. And every month, we paid people monthly, I'd meet with everyone and say, look, we made so much this month in the bonus pool, what percent do you think you contributed to it? And then I would add it up and it would always come to like 300%. Never added up to 100%. So I had to have these difficult conversations with people that said, look, you know, I think you're inflated with how much of these other day. But I, what I realized very early on is people are coming to work, not because they love me. They might love me, I might love them, but that's not their main motivation. The main motivation why they're coming to work is to make money. And make money for themselves and more often to make money for others, to make money for their families, for their spouses, their kids, or whoever.

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  And that's important to understand the motivation of the other person is really, really important. It's called theory of mind. Where you understand, and a child gets that after a few years, they don't have it at first. And there've been a lot of psychological studies done on that. It's important to to look at things from what's motivating the other person, what's driving the other person, what's important to that other person. That's good in deal making, that's good in compensation, that's good in building teams, that's good in customer relations, that good with vendor relations. You need to understand their point of view. You can't just be in your mind. You can't just say, here's what I want, here's what's important to me, and I'm a bully, I'm gonna go get it. Because then people is gonna stick their tongue out, you're gonna turn away and do something else. You have to be a, have a partnership. You have to be, you have to be trading with people all the time.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  You've got to be figuring out what will help them, what's good for them, and how can we make money together? Not me at your expense, you at my expense, but how can we go conquer the world together?

• 1:57:09Speaker 00

  I think you're a faster learner than me because like, I, I don't think I ever thought about incentives. Uh, I think episode like 97, so this is probably like six years ago. I'd read, that means I read 96 biographies before this. I get to Poor Charlie's Almanac. And he's really the one that got, Charlie was the one that really put into the, my mind about how important this was. Because I thought he was one of, I still think he's the wisest person I ever met and probably one of the most brilliant people. And he said something fascinating in that book where he's like, I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort my entire life of understanding the power of incentives and how it drives human behavior. And there's not a year that goes by, and he's probably in his 60s when he said this, there's not a year that goes by where I don't underestimate the power of incentives.

• 1:57:52Speaker 00

  And you repeat over and over again, you show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Remember I told you a few minutes ago that I give everyone on the top level of the company a bunch of equity?

• 1:58:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  But it's locked up for five years. So I meet with my CHRO, who's fabulous, regularly, usually twice a month. And she shows me a spreadsheet of how much the equity is going to be worth at $50 a share, $75 a share, $100 a share. And I look at that, I look at the numbers. And I say, okay, this person has something to work for. This person's on the team. This person, that's something that I see them working really hard to get those numbers. Or I see, gee, you know, somehow or another, we messed up the comp and maybe we're going to top the person up. Or, wow, I can't take anything back, but maybe I gave too much equity. Whatever, but at least I know where everyone's head is at. Because I know what's in it for them. You know, there's always that joke, I listen to radio station WIFM, what's in it for me? And people are generally, they don't care about you and me, David. They care about them, which is normal.

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  That's capitalism, that's free markets, that's a good thing.

• 1:58:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't feel it's a negative thing at all. It's like we're all self-obsessed. But I do think you have a great line in the book where you're like, money, he's like, I built businesses all over the world. When you have 150,000 employees, they're spread throughout, you know, people they go, it's all different cultures. It's like, oh, guess what? Money animates people everywhere. For the whole point, you have a great line in the book, like, they're not coming to work to make Brad Jacobs more money.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 1:59:09Speaker 00

  They're doing it for their families. I love this idea of, I think it's really important to have a, I think it's tied to your obsession with like the public markets too. And what you said in your book about being very proud of building wealth, not just for yourself, but for schoolteachers, pension plans, nurses, firemen, and everything else. Like, the importance of having a mission bigger than yourself. I think like, if you just live a completely selfish life, first of all, you would have stopped way a long time ago. Like, you didn't need to, in general, people, you wouldn't have to do this. And I've seen this in a couple of different places where like Jeff Bezos, we talked about him a few times today, where his idea was when he started Amazon, he's like, I want to build the world's most customer-centric company.

• 1:59:50Speaker 00

  So I want to be an example, not just to our employees and our customers, but to other companies to see, look how you can, over the long term, you can align the interests of the customer and the shareholder perfectly aligned, they just have to be done so over the extremely long term. But this idea of like, Going, it drives me. It's like, I want to build wealth, you know, so my kids are proud of me. And like, and I show them like what it's like to like chase after something and be deeply committed to it and be passionate about and love it.

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:00:18Speaker 00

  And also make something that's better for other people. And if you do that automatically, you know, the family will prosper and everything else. So I think that's like, I think I love, that was one of my favorite parts of, of your book.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  Do you know, I, I think Amazon modified that, that mission statement now, something with employee engagement too.

• 2:00:34Speaker 00

  Do you remember what it was?

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Something about workplace, great workplace environment, something like that. The best workplace environment in the world.

• 2:00:40Speaker 00

  Um, it, it is funny when you think about it because um, it's one, I, I have this conversation. Actually, last night I went to dinner with our mutual friend, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He texted me this morning, he's like, make sure you say, tell Brad hi.

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  Best like the best.

• 2:00:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And we had, he was with us, we had breakfast here a few months ago.

• 2:00:57Speaker 00

  And we were having this discussion at dinner with his family. I was like, what is the most impressive company built in our lifetime? And so me and him were born in the eighties because what about Microsoft? Microsoft is in seventies, like before us. And I would say it's like, for me, the answer is like, Amazon, like started in 97. Like, I can't think of another company started in the nineties, like in terms of like, as impressive as, as what-

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  They're a big success story.

• 2:01:18Speaker 00

  As what Jeff has built. By reading your book, listening to your interviews, talking to you now, you kind of, for, for me personally, like you kind of remove any self-imposed limit that I have. Where I'm like, oh, like there's no, I don't think Brad has a limit to what he thinks he can achieve. He thinks on a big scale automatically. Like you just, you operate in a very big and ambitious way. Where I think a lot of people have like self, there's like self-imposed ceilings that are most likely invisible in many cases. Right? If you want to build more wealth, you want to grow great companies, just find more customers to serve. Like, it's a pretty straightforward process. But I do think one of the things that I absolutely love is, and it's the way I ended the episode, it's the way you ended the book.

• 2:01:58Speaker 00

  And I would summarize what I'm about to say here as go all in, you only get one shot at life. And I think this is the perfect spot to like wrap our discussion. And so I'm just going to read from your book to you. And you said, "The summer after eighth grade, I attended the Rhode Island Governor's School for the Gifted in Art and Music, a summer enrichment program for kids who've been nominated by their schools. I wasn't sure what to expect. On the first night, I was captivated by a speech given by one of the leaders. I remember goosebumps rising on my arms as he spoke. This program is a special opportunity, but it's up to you to take advantage of it. You have a choice. You can waste the next couple of months and not accomplish that much, or you can go all in." This is an opportunity to go deep on a project and do the best work you've ever done, but you have to decide if you want it.

• 2:02:43Speaker 00

  I learned what it meant to go all in. The magical connection between intensity of focus and the end result. This is, to me, the punchline. I love this. If I put my whole heart and soul into a project, I had it in me to create really cool stuff. You talk about the passion and going all in and the advice that you'd have for other people listening to this.

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  I'm reliving the goosebumps, literally, but physically, I'm feeling the tingle in my sensation because that was a critical moment in my life where I understood that it's up to you. You can diddle-daddle through life and just kind of sleepwalk and then die, or you can live life, you can embrace life, you can have big dreams and go all in and find your passion, which for most people is not going to be business or making money, but whatever it is, that's what it is, and really achieve something fantastic. And for me, that's a big motivator.

• 2:03:37Speaker 00

  This is a perfect place to end. Thank you very much for writing the book. Thanks for taking the time. Brad, I really admire you. I've learned a lot from you and now I'm very humbled and privileged to call you a friend.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Thank you, sir.

• 2:03:48Speaker 00

  I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  All the best.

• 2:03:51Speaker 00

  I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.