This episode of the My First Million podcast features hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discussing various business strategies, including the impact of Apple’s new AlarmKit, the importance of “founder’s fun” in marketing, and the surprising success of unconventional business models. They also share personal anecdotes about networking, the value of learning from others’ mistakes, and the unique stories behind successful companies like Ramp.
Topics: Apple AlarmKit, business strategy, marketing, networking, Ramp, entrepreneurship, corporate culture, lessons from successful companies.
Apple’s AlarmKit and Developer Opportunities [00:00]
Sam Parr: All right, Sam, why are we dressed so festive?
Shaan Puri: It’s Casual Friday, baby. It’s Casual Friday.
Sam Parr: And the best stuff is always in the group chat. And these are the things that I sent in the group chat that I wouldn’t post publicly, but decided, you know what, it’s Casual Friday. Let’s air them out.
Shaan Puri: All right. Can we do the first one?
Sam Parr: The first one. Here it is.
Shaan Puri: Okay, this is a tweet from Dylan. Dylan says, “At long last, any app can be your alarm app.” Apple has finally introduced AlarmKit. This is at the the Apple announce what happened this week. That lets any app have the same privileges as the clock app. This is long overdue. Dylan, you are absolutely right.
Sam Parr: Dude, I did not understand this. Is this a joke?
Shaan Puri: No, this is real. So basically, you know, like Apple gives you certain permissions, right? If you’re an app, you can send push notifications, you can use the camera, you can use the GPS. But for a long time, no app could become your alarm app. It couldn’t access the same features of an alarm app, which is like, now any app, you don’t just have to use the Apple alarm app. Anybody can build an app for alarm.
Sam Parr: Sounds small.
Shaan Puri: I don’t understand. Yeah, this does sound small. So change my mind. Why is this important?
Sam Parr: So, think about it this way. There’s like 2 billion people with iPhones, and you know, not every app can address all 2 billion people, but an alarm clock can basically address like a billion or two people who actually have the need for an alarm clock. So, what happened was two weeks ago, or you know, a week ago, as an app developer, you that was not a category you could be in. And now it’s a category you could be in where there’s a billion active users that might want your app. And there’s been no creativity and no innovation. So like the App Store’s been out been out for, you know, 15 years now. So a lot of stuff is solved, right? Camera apps are pretty good, map apps are pretty good with Google Maps and Waze, and you know, ride-sharing apps. There’s all kinds of apps, and there’s been tons of innovation. But this has been basically artificially blocked.
Shaan Puri: Wait, really quick. Do you remember the the joke of Peter Thiel where he said, “You wanted flying cars, but you got 140 characters like for Twitter.” This is an even worse version of that. You wanted flying cars, now you can make alarm apps.
Sam Parr: By the way, I met the guy who wrote that line for, or I didn’t meet him, but I I I I found out who wrote that line for Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel has like a guy. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You met him? Okay, you mistakenly said you met him versus you heard about him. I met a guy who was like, “That’s the guy who wrote that.” That’s Peter’s guy. He he comes up with those, and that was his job was basically follow Peter around, listen to what he’s saying, and then try to like transform his sentiment into something really punchy. And that guy came up with that line, which became the basis for like Founders Fund and like a rally cry.
Shaan Puri: That’s cool. Well, tell him good job.
David Goggins and the Alarm App Idea [02:54]
Sam Parr: All right, so check this out. Easy idea. David Goggins, would you like a million dollars? Because David Goggins today should pay some kid to make the alarm app that’s basically the David Goggins skinned alarm app. Like I want to wake up with David Goggins just saying, “Wake up, bitch. There’s miles to run.” And I just want to hear that when I wake up and not like, you know, the default alarm sound for for my phone.
Shaan Puri: Are there uh when is this going live? When when’s this alarm kit thing?
Sam Parr: So they did the developer preview. That’s what WWDC is, right? They tell you what’s possible and you can start building with it, but it’s not like available yet to customers, but it usually, I think it’s just like a couple months. It’s like not not very long.
Shaan Puri: This is low-hanging fruit, my friend. It’s a good idea. It’s a good idea. Yeah. This is fruit that might just be on the ground actually. This might be rotting fruit. I’m not not entirely sure.
The “Ramp” Story and Corporate Culture [03:44]
Sam Parr: By the way, we’re totally stealing this gimmick from our boys at TBPn. Shout out to John and Jordy. Part of the brotherhood.
Shaan Puri: But I gave them a shout out later on. One of my one of my uh photos or tweets is from them, which is pretty funny.
Sam Parr: Yeah, they basically had the the true innovation of the podcast industry of printing out the tweets. And we decided that we too shall now print out tweets. Um, but I’ve been doing five tweet Tuesdays for a lot longer than those guys, so I I think I’m okay. All right, uh this one comes from Chris Baki. He says, this is a Chris Baki banger. He says, “In 2022, McKinsey paid $55 million, was paid $55 million to advise Warner Brothers uh when they merged with Discovery. They charged them 37 million by advising them to change HBO to HBO Max, then to Max, then back to HBO Max.” And in 2025, they build them an additional 63 million again to determine that Warner Brothers and Discovery should be separate brands again.
Shaan Puri: Did you see that McKinsey last week laid off uh 15% of their staff?
Sam Parr: Because of AI? Because now like AI can do half the job or what? Is that why?
Shaan Puri: For sure. Yeah, for sure. This is this is absolutely insane. What did you say? You’re allergic to lack of common sense? This is ridiculous.
Sam Parr: This is exactly the sort of lack of common sense I was talking about. This tweet has 70,000 likes, by the way. Um, I don’t know if he totally made up these numbers or if these are true, but directionally correct. There were some good reactions to this. Greg Greg tweeted, “Don’t be the problem. Be the solution that creates the problem.” That is my takeaway.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous. Have you ever had friends that have worked at McKinsey?
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. Uh my buddy Ramin, who I do a bunch of business stuff with, he was a former McKinsey guy.
Shaan Puri: They’re easy to make fun of because you’re like, “What does a a 23-year-old know about business?” But like, I have a friend that worked there and she had some pretty amazing like, basically a PE firm uh in her case, identified like uh a bunch of dairy farms that they wanted to like roll up. And so they bought a bunch of them, the PE firm did, and then they hired McKinsey folks to come and figure out how to make it more efficient. And so she literally would go to Iowa every single week for about six months and devise interesting things. Like for example, “We’re going to change the bucket size that we like use, that the workers use.” Like like really just imagining.
Sam Parr: It’s like, have you seen Landman?
Shaan Puri: Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Sam Parr: When like the lawyer shows up on the like on the oil field and she’s like got her high heels like stuck in the mud basically. That’s what I’m imagining. The McKinsey consultant showing up at the uh the cattle farm.
Shaan Puri: It and it was kind of great. Until like I learned about this whole this whole experience she had and there is value that is created from these consultants, even though we like to make fun of them. Have you did Ramin actually work on anything interesting?
Sam Parr: Well, they deserve to be made fun of because they’re incredibly smart. They get paid very well. So, you know, that means you’re a punching bag, right? So that’s basically the criteria for like, “Oh, it’s free game.” It’s like what a nerd was in middle school. It’s like the opposite traits, right? Like the person you could give a swirly to in in in sort of junior high would be like somebody who’s sort of weak and powerless. But when you grow up, you can’t make fun of the weak and powerless. You only make fun of the powerful. And um so yeah, Ramin was like this. Basically, he would tell me things that they would do and I’m like, “Oh, that’s really smart.” I was I was kind of hoping you guys were a bunch of idiots, but actually, that sounds pretty good. But what I did come away with was they have huge brains but small balls is generally like the person who stays in consulting.
Shaan Puri: Which by the way, that’s the definition of anxiety. Is when you’re uh the definition of anxiety is when your uh brain is a lot bigger than your balls. So that’s probably why there’s a bunch of anxious consultants running around.
Sam Parr: I like how you just I like how you’re just saying something is the definition of which is absolutely not the definition of and that’s hilarious. I’m going to start doing that. Well, well, you know the root word of that and then you just make it up. It’s not even the root word. All right, we got a couple more reactions. Our boy Ty Lopez comes in, comes in hot off the top ropes. A good gig. You know it’s you know it’s a good scam when Ty Lopez is giving you giving you respect.
Shaan Puri: Oh, these are all replies to that original one. Okay, I didn’t even I wasn’t even following that. Yeah, that’s we’re learning. That that’s insane. And what about this one?
Sam Parr: Uh this is the consulting uh meme. Uh consulting. If you’re not a part of the solution, there’s really good money to be made in prolonging the problem. There’s this thing that happens in sports that I’ve always wanted to be a part of business. So you know in the UFC how they have press conferences where they really talk shit about each other? And I always felt like it’s the best part and you know, I wish business people would do the same. Like I wish right now I’ve gone to them by the way. They’re awesome. You’ve been to the press conferences? I’ve been. One time, I tried to sneak in when I ran the hustle. Like I tried to like get I couldn’t get I was like, “Let me see if I can get credentialed to this.” And they didn’t give it to me. And so I showed up anyway and they kicked me out. So I I went like they made me walk to the back and like sit with the crowd and I and I watched it. Yeah, it was great.
Shaan Puri: They didn’t respect the hustle as a newsletter as a media brand?
Sam Parr: Dude, the the hustle is the worst name ever when you’re trying to hustle someone. Like I was Dude, I mean, it was just like some random security guard and she was like, “My name is John Scam.” Hoping for you to tell me your Coinbase password. It was the worst. Like the lady like giggled at me and it was like a it was a pathetic laugh. It was like it’s so no, I got kicked out. It did not work. But if anyone’s listening who works at the UFC, if you and I could get credentialed to go to a UFC event and ask a question, I would do that in a heartbeat and I would take it incredibly seriously.
Shaan Puri: Arguably too seriously. Might ruin the whole event.
Reading Habits and Book Recommendations [09:23]
Sam Parr: All right, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I want to see what mistakes uh did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just want to avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in 2025, and I did that. And so I listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life and I explained what the differences that they had on me or what actions I took because of the book. And then also I listed out my very particular ways of reading because I’m pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It’s seven books that had a huge impact on my life and you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it. Or there’s a link. You guys know what to do. There’s a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it and you’ll see the guide that I made. So it’s the seven books that had a massive change in my life this year so far. And then also how I’m able to read so much. So check it out below.
Frank Slootman and “Amp It Up” [10:17]
Shaan Puri: All right, what’s what do you have next? Do the Frank Slootman one.
Sam Parr: This is actually related to what I was just talking about. So Frank Slootman, who is the uh the man’s man CEO. He’s the David Goggins of the corporate world. Would you agree?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I mean, he’s pretty baller. Uh he’s he kind of says it like it is. For people who don’t know, he took over, he’s been a CEO of a bunch of companies, but he took over at Snowflake and he has all these famous memos that he wrote on LinkedIn and it was basically like, “Don’t be a bitch, work hard.” Like that’s like how he summarizes everything.
Sam Parr: Yeah, but it’s a little bit different. So he’s got this book called Amp It Up. But if you really, you could just read his blog post called Amp It Up and get 80% of the the idea. It’s not even just about working hard. It’s like, pick up the pace. Pick up the there’s his basic point is that in every organization, there’s an incredible amount of slack that’s just built up. It’s a expectation of timelines, of rigor, of of effort, of everything. And then another one of those is common sense. And like his approach is just to cut through all the bullshit. And so he has this quote where he’s like talking about the man in the, you know, that famous like man in the arena quote.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s it kind of I I kind of think that uh that quote is super lame now. It’s been hijacked by people I don’t like.
Sam Parr: I know. Too much. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah. Yeah. Was people a singular word?
Shaan Puri: All right, here we go. So here’s what Frank Slootman says. He says, “There’s lots of people in this world who are not really in the arena. They’re they’re either observers, consultants, or agents, or VCs that just provide capital. But there’s some people who are in the arena, they’re very special people.” And then he says, he talks about he was asked to speak at a business school where they always ask for his advice. He says, “You all have elite educations. You’ll have many job offers paying you big bucks. Your parents and siblings will be incredibly proud of you. But they’re all consulting jobs for Bain, McKinsey, and companies like that. You’re going to have an easy path to pretty quick earnings, but you’ll never know whether you have what it takes to actually build something new.” In Roosevelt’s words, “You will be those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” I had actually never read that part of the of the quote, and I thought that part’s way colder than the than the the rest of it, you know what I mean?
Shaan Puri: Imagine saying this to uh a room full of Stanford kids. It’s like, that’s I wonder what that What do you think the reaction would have been like?
Sam Parr: I think the reaction would have been like, “God, he’s so right. After I finish up this first four-year tenure at McKinsey, then I’m totally going to do that.” I think that’s the real the true reaction. It’s like, “He’s so right. I’m not actually going to rescind the I’m not actually going to withdraw the job offer. I’m I’ll I’ll finish up. I’m going to make sure I get the first few years and then I’m going to go do that thing someday.”
Shaan Puri: I’ve hung out with like uh my friends’ children or, you know, people who are like in the uh applying to college age right now. It’s way different than when we were younger. Like when we were younger, not going to college for a a huge majority of people, for anyone that’s like a middle class on up, it was like that wasn’t even a question. Now, it definitely seems like the smart people are saying, “I’m not sure, you know, I I’m weighing my options. I’m trying to look at all that’s available.” Have you noticed that?
Sam Parr: No, is that like and when you say that, they’re thinking about like trade school or dropping out or everything’s on the table?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so for people who Are their parents entrepreneurs or are they No, the people the people the people who I know, it’s just like um it’s like let’s say cousins and nephews and things like that. And um like they’re mostly like well-to-do or at least like have a household income of $200,000. And it’s basically like this and these are smart kids. So typically, when we were younger, Sean, the smart kids like always went to college. Now, the smart kids are like, “I’m not sure, you know, I I’ve been in contact with this company about just going getting an intern internship right away, right at 19 years old.” Um other people who are less of the academic, like they’re they’re not like the geniuses, they are considering trade school and it’s not nearly looked like a when I was younger, if you said you’re going to trade school, it was like it was like uh is that like punishment for getting in trouble? Do you know what I mean?
Sam Parr: Oh, you’re dumb.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Now, I think there is a there is 100% a change in sentiment. And I wonder I wonder if like this whole MBAs are dumb, that’s a new feeling-ish. That’s like Peter Thiel was the one who popularized that where he said, for you he goes, “The valuation of your company, take a million dollars off for every MBA uh employee you have.” And so now that’s popular. And I wonder the NBA people who are they’re now and who would hear something like this, how they feel, if they acknowledge it or if they don’t.
Sam Parr: Right. That Peter Thiel quote is like how that’s like my parenting style. I’m like, “One more word. One more word and we’re not going to the pool for two days.” Oh, oh, three days. And I just keep going. I’m just like, if if you say one more thing and you lose a little bit more.
Shaan Puri: Do you stick with it?
Sam Parr: There’s all kinds of retrades, dude. I’m I’m Trump I’m Trump in the China deal right now with my kids. Wait, you let your kids trade punishment? I I raise the tariffs and then there’s a temporary pause for extenuating circumstances while we negotiate. And then we have some really good interactions and then we start thinking and then they come back again and they do something, you know, they just throw their spaghetti on the floor and then we’re back at 125% tariff. What age does punishment work? Because right now when they do something, I say no, it just like they laugh at me.
Sam Parr: They can start to understand like cause and effect or consequences somewhere between two and three years old. I think you start to get it at a very basic level, but you also have to time it. So like if the kid is emotionally upset or is feeling something, they’re not going to learn the lesson in the moment when they’re having the fit. Whereas like I think as adults, we’re like, “Well, this is why.” And we’re trying to like explain the thing while they’re like, you know, having their meltdown. It’s like you have to have let the meltdown happen and then if you want to have a teaching moment, it’s like got to come after, which is probably true for adults too, but it’s like very obvious with kids because they’re literally melting down.
Shaan Puri: I got to figure this out because I I yeah, I’ve been trying to like punish her, not punish her, but be like, “No, you can’t do this.” Right. And I just get laughed at. Um all right, read the next one. So uh All right, this is one of yours. So it’s a David Senra uh tweet and he says, “Charlie Munger told me flex. Charlie Munger told me to read less Schwab’s autobiography. I’m glad I did because less says things like this. Quote, ‘Success in life is being a good husband, a good father, and when and you end up being a second father to hundreds of other men and women. Last night, I attended a wedding of a young man from our office and the young man told me that two men had influenced his life, his father and me. That’s worth more than money.’”
Shaan Puri: So this guy, Les Schwab, is amazing. I haven’t completed his book, but I’m in the middle of reading it. But let me tell you about this guy. So go to the Wait, dumb dumb question. Is Les, so there’s Charles Schwab. No relation. He’s Les Schwab. Okay. He’s he’s he he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization. And I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that.
Sam Parr: All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.”
Shaan Puri: How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on that, but hearing you and Sam talk about like kind of how fun it is to have kids and build your business and they’re not like either ors, like kind of nudge me towards deciding like, you know, we should keep this, we should do this.” And I remember being like, “Whoa, that’s like a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on the words that I didn’t really sort of think about.” Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. I I think it’s hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this, we’re just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen, so it’s hard to like feel a presence. But I think that um I view this podcast as well as my company, I view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that I want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world. I also think that like I thought about like we are not even remotely like this, so it I don’t even love saying it, but like when LeBron James or some famous athlete does something bad and they’re like, “I didn’t sign up to be a role model.” I think about that all the time where I’m like, “Well, I used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and I’m like, well, I don’t care if this influences me. This is just me. This is this is just my opinion.” And then now I’m like, “Uh, you know, it holds a little bit of weight. I want to make sure that I I’m right about it and not hateful.” Right, right. And you know, the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like I’m just talking to you and we’re just goofing off here and there’s only two of us. But like, you know, let’s say this episode on average, these episodes get like, you know, 300,000 people listening to them. I mean, that’s bigger than the biggest college football stadiums. You know what I mean? Like if we if we were sitting in the in the 50 yard line and there were three stadiums stacked on top of that, it’d be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other. Do you know how differently we would do this? Like it would suck. I would I would be so nervous and thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way. And so I think one of the real blessings is that that’s not the case. You don’t you don’t know it, you’re blind to it. We rarely record in real life and one time that we did, there was a a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and I noticed that one time one of us or maybe I forget who said something that made her laugh and I was like, “Ooh, that felt nice. I want to I want to make you laugh again.” And then and then she didn’t laugh and I was like, “That didn’t feel good.” And I started like performing really poorly. I’m like, I can’t stand the the presence of one person, let alone uh 300,000 in real life. That’s crazy. All right, next uh next story I want to show show you. Did you see this? Did you see this tweet? No. Here’s what it says. So this is from @restructuring, which is a good it’s a good account by the way. Do you follow this account? No. Is this all about companies that have gone out of business? No, it’s kind of like PE, it’s like a PE uh type of account. Uh they they private equity type of stuff. Anyways, um Oh, we talked about this a while ago, I believed, didn’t we? So I I think we mentioned it, but I didn’t I didn’t know the story. So the the headline here is, “Man steals $122 million from Facebook and Google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay.” Why is that a crime? Why is that a crime? Exactly. This the tweet here is, “This remains my favorite path to wealth. Exploiting exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be legal.” Uh I agree. It’s all’s fair in love and war. If you if I send you an invoice and you pay it, am I at fault or you? Hold on. What’s going on here? But there is a little more to the story. So, have you read about how this actually worked? No. Well, uh wasn’t he like legitimately a vendor for them? No. He’s a vendor. Okay. He’s he’s he he was a hillbilly in Oregon. Basically, uh he was like orphaned at the age of like 13 or 14, uh was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of 31 or 32. Didn’t know anything about tires, but started a tire shop. Eventually, over the course of 50 years, it grew into a multi-billion dollar operation and he’s famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he’s famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger look to stories for uh from him on how to properly lead and incentivize. And then go to the next slide. Look at what he looks like. So he was a hillbilly. Uh he was uh he was a he was like a from the streets type of guy. I’ve been thinking about how I can describe these types of people because I love them. And I think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swagger. Something like that. Like these guys that you and I love, who are these like blue collar So small town grit with big city swagger? No, with like big number swagger. So it’s like these guys So let’s call it big city swagger, right? But what I mean is is that they’re like these kind of hillbillies who build these massive companies. And so they can they make like for example, one of our friends, Kevin Van Trump is one of them, where you see this guy and he comes off and he’s like, um, “Hey, what’s going on brother? I got to write my newsletter.” And he like he like talks like this, but like turns out he makes like $20 million a year. And like the people who read his newsletter, um he’ll, you know, Kevin’s this uh big guy from um Kansas City, comes off like like a hillbilly because he talks funny, but he his work is read by like, you know, the world leaders and he makes $20 million a year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a Picasso. So like I love guys like this and this guy is one of them. So Les Schwab started a tire company. He died in his 90s but ran the company up until then, grew into a multi-billion dollar organization and I want to go go to the next one. I want to read He wrote the his own forward to the book and I highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward. Read that. All right. So it starts he says, “This book was mainly written for the 2,000 families that make their living selling Les Schwab uh tires and for the thousands of families to follow in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” All right. So he says, this is what you highlighted. “I wrote this in November and December of 1985. I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. Uh I do thank Jan Nolan, my right-hand gal, Lorraine O’Hara, our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation. I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words.” And then it says, basically, “In this, I’m going to pass on my theories of business to our people.” And he says, “Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.” And then it ends with he basically says, “If you’re not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.” How great is that? How much of a simpleton am I that it’s just here’s you want to win me? Here you go. Push me away. It’s all it takes. Oh, oh, you think I won’t like this book? Watch me read every word. It’s called Already buying a second copy. Treat them mean, keep them keen. That’s that’s how you got to do it. Why am I so easy to manipulate? How how beautiful is this guy? Uh I So you read this book? Is it like I’m in the middle of reading it. Yeah, because So far Seven out of 10, find and forgettable. Eight out of 10, I’ll remember the big idea, but that’s kind of it. I didn’t need 300 pages. Nine out of 10, really enjoyed it. Good book. 10 out of 10, I’m giving this book out as a gift. Where is it at? Uh uh I’m only a quarter of the way through and it’s between an eight and a nine. Yeah, an eight and a nine. Yeah, quite good. And what’s the big idea so far? He just treats people well and if you treat people well, you get rewarded in return. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a very simple thing, which is you said, there’s a lack of common sense. He’s a very common sense, rational person, but often rational means cold and he is it he is rational warm. Oh, warm rational. Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good insight. Cuz the start of your answer was kind of boring, but the end of your answer was fire there. That was good. So it’s sort of like his original quote, which was uh I went to I I became a father to all these people and I go to their weddings and that makes me feel great. That is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus, you know, what a McKinsey consultants would say, which is it’s all just about these numbers on a spreadsheet. That is also rational, but it is rational cold. Yes. So do you, honest question, do you think that you’re you kind of are doing that? Do you think that you have that kind of like, I’m a a a fatherly influencer, a man influence on other men uh in a is that something you think is true or take pride in? Are you like, yes, I need to double down on that from this podcast? Cuz like, remember when we were at this dinner or you were there, but I was at a dinner and I told you about it like this guy came up and you know, at the end of the dinner, he’s like, “Hey, sorry, I wanted to say hi. I saw you guys over here. I didn’t want to bother you.” But he’s like, cuz I always ask people, I say, what, you know, what do you really like about the pod? Like what is it, you know, what’s stood out to you or what’s helped you? And he was like, he had basically mentioned, he’s like, “Me and my girlfriend got pregnant. We didn’t plan on