The Exchanges

Q And I think to your point, everyone gets there and every philosopher in history got there. The question is just like, how late in life do you get there? I think you got there a lot earlier than it took me. Some people never get there.

A It took me 32 years to find my path and another five and a half of fucking struggling until it actually like could sustain me. And then now it's like, I wake up every day. It's like, I have no doubts about what I'm doing. I was like, I'm going to build, again, I'm mining these old books of somebody who did something amazing for Ideas and insights that we can push down to the next generation of entrepreneurs and having conversations like this, where we talked before, I was like, I was like, oh, you know, you, you, you asked this perfect question for your audience. It's like, I'm having these conversations selfishly, because I just know there's, there's ten million Davids listening to this, that have the same interests, that want to know what is in, you said you're 50, you've been working at, you sold your first startup, then you work, you have such a singular life experience. This is what me and Daniel were talking about earlier. Like, who the hell sells their startup, works at a big company for 18 years, then becomes CEO.

AI assessment note: “It took me 32 years to find my path and another five and a half”

Q Going back to the, the kind of like founders archive in your head, like how many of the great founders were making things, manufacturing, building, moving physical stuff around?

A I mean, if you think about, like, the most famous, like, just go through, like, the robber barons, where their names are known, it's just, like, there's only one, there was essentially one robber baron that did finance, and that's, like, Jay Gould. But, like, J.P. Morgan. I have a different take on that, where, like, if you read, I've read every single book I can find on J.P. Morgan, he has an interesting character. I found his dad to be much more of a formidable individual than, than he was, and there's a funny thing when, um, J.P. Morgan dies, they, his size of his estate is revealed. I forgot the number, it was like, fifty million, which is still a ton back then, but Andrew Carnegie goes, oh, to think he wasn't even a rich man. But like Carnegie and steel, Rockefeller and oil, Vanderbilt and transportation. There's not, you know, they were building things. They were creating, I mean, they were creating essentially entire industries. If you really think about it, they were building the best company inside the industry, but they were really creating the industries.

AI assessment note: “Carnegie and steel, Rockefeller and oil, Vanderbilt and transportation. There's not, you know, they were building things.”

Q work is now changing other people's lives in that same way that you changed your own first, but you were the first beneficiary of it. And so what is your principle or why? I don't know. Maybe it's that you can, you don't have to just keep going the same direction that you were given. You can break off and, and found something new. Um, I think that's pretty amazing.

A I think there's a lot of times, I, I really resonate with what you said when you were, you found that book and you're like, you know, this, this paragraph, this sentence just like hits you with like a hammer to the face. This is also like, you know, I use podcasts for this reading mainly. It's like, I think people are rushing through things too, too fast. You know, I'm famous for only listening to podcasts on one X. Everybody's like, oh, you read a lot. You must read fast. I'm like, yeah, 25 pages an hour fast. Like I'm not speed reading here. I think I want understanding and like I want understanding of how things actually are, not how humans say they are. And humans, not only are we lying to ourselves constantly, which if you're lying to yourself, like, of course you're lying to other people about, like, why you're doing what you're doing, or what you're doing, uh, what it is that you're doing. And this is why I like autobiographies and biographies so much, because in many cases, the person's, like, long past dead, or they're older, and they're just like, I'm writing this book when I'm 80, like, I have no, I'm not incentivized to, to lie, and, like, here's the stuff I went through, and the trouble with whatever. Being, what kind of dad you are, trouble with women, trouble with business, which you realize, like, there's nothing that you're experiencing that somebody else hasn'…

AI assessment note: “what I want is, like, true understanding of, like, humanity as it is”

Q So, so, so, uh, don't rely too much on that, right?

A This is why I think, uh, entrepreneurs have to, like, study past entrepreneurs, too, and it's, like, obviously very valuable. Like, it's, it's no surprise that, like, you were reading about these people, like, what I would say is, like, the greats all studied the greats. This is, like, very, like, they were doing it today, they were doing it 40 years ago, they were doing it 200 years ago. If you took, like, an average person in normal society, And the way they think about experts, ok? And the way it's discussed in all these biographies, it's like, they're very dismissive of experts, right? I just mentioned I was reading James Dyson's, uh, autobiography. You know, the whole thing is just like, he believes in the Edisonian principle of design, just constant iteration, you learn as you go, you can't predict, like you're, you just, you know, change one thing and then test it and see how it goes. And he mentions setting Henry Ford a lot in that book. And then James Lyson wrote an autobiography, 30 years after that, that he also mentions Henry Ford a lot. And the reason I thought of that is because as you were speaking about, you know, you go and ask an expert from 10 years ago, what's going to happen? Like, they're not going to tell you that ChatGPT is absolutely, you know, that my 13 year old, I use ChatGPT all the time, but I'm a nerd. I like to research stuff. I like to read abou…

AI assessment note: “they're very dismissive of experts, right?”

Q How do I allocate my time across the existing problem?

A So, you know, so like, like Elon's famous for like, what is the, the bottleneck here? And like, I'll find out in my entire empire where the bottleneck is. I'm going physically there, and I'm going to sit there and like dedicate all our resources. In that essay I told you, I read about the history of SpaceX. They, they just, there's a NASA guy, a guy from NASA visiting SpaceX, and they're like, like when there's a problem, there's like a flash mob appears. So Elon has a very specific way. And I heard you on another podcast saying, like, you're attracted to problems. I'm just curious, like, I'm not talking about problems you could solve, like, in future product development. I'm saying literally, like, there's, you're running a giant company. There's all tons of stuff that's not going well.

AI assessment note: “Elon's famous for like, what is the, the bottleneck here?”

Q 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, wah, wah, it'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 Watt Watt.

A And I'm so glad, first of all, it's hilarious. I'm glad that you, you said that you actually have other people around you doing this too, because I, 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 things. There's another thing that Fred Smith said, um, that again, like when I'm reading about Fred, um, 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 and self-improvement stands as about as much a chance as a prize fighter 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 billion dollar company, then you look at the second, or the third, o…

AI assessment note: “There's another thing that Fred Smith said, um, that again, like when I'm reading”