#216 - The Dark Side of Going All In on Your Business | Dr. Thomas J. Powell

1
00:00:00,076 --> 00:00:02,567
All right, so we were just talking about
going to Chile.

2
00:00:02,567 --> 00:00:04,247
And I think if you wouldn't have said
that,

3
00:00:04,247 --> 00:00:08,058
Mr. Dr. Thomas Jane Powell, if you
wouldn't have just said Chile,

4
00:00:08,058 --> 00:00:12,990
I would have my country self who grew up
poor would have tried to enunciate Chile

5
00:00:12,990 --> 00:00:16,821
or something crazy like that. So you were
you you were talking about you're going

6
00:00:16,821 --> 00:00:19,511
skiing, but I want to talk about skiing
more,

7
00:00:19,511 --> 00:00:22,712
but this is something that comes into my
head as an entrepreneur.

8
00:00:22,712 --> 00:00:26,153
You said they're having a great snow snow
season.

9
00:00:26,153 --> 00:00:29,274
And where I instantly go is

10
00:00:29,998 --> 00:00:36,610
Kudos for you for building the life that
when another continent

11
00:00:37,071 --> 00:00:39,675
is having a good snow season, you've built
your life,

12
00:00:39,675 --> 00:00:41,088
that you get to go.

13
00:00:41,656 --> 00:00:45,658
Yeah, I have. And thank you very much for
that.

14
00:00:45,658 --> 00:00:46,788
And thanks for mentioning it. Yes,

15
00:00:46,788 --> 00:00:50,800
not only there, every season I ski in
Europe with some of the best professionals

16
00:00:50,800 --> 00:00:52,590
in the history of world skiing,

17
00:00:52,590 --> 00:00:54,791
guys named Franz Klomer, Franz Weber,

18
00:00:54,791 --> 00:00:57,322
a number of other Olympians and World Cup
skiers,

19
00:00:57,322 --> 00:00:59,974
and we do this and we also bring them here
to the United States.

20
00:00:59,974 --> 00:01:04,700
I I live a life of where I ski between
eighty to one hundred and twenty days

21
00:01:04,700 --> 00:01:06,736
a year of skiing. It's my passion,

22
00:01:06,736 --> 00:01:09,137
it's what I love. And as and it goes
through the different,

23
00:01:09,137 --> 00:01:10,558
you know, hemispheres as well as

24
00:01:11,010 --> 00:01:12,010
The continents.

25
00:01:12,386 --> 00:01:15,289
Where'd that come from? So you sitting
here with all this professional life

26
00:01:15,289 --> 00:01:18,453
experience that we're gonna go to the
depths today and we're gonna talk

27
00:01:18,453 --> 00:01:21,266
a lot about you. Guys like you always try
to redirect and make

28
00:01:21,266 --> 00:01:23,439
it about other people. You've built lives
that way,

29
00:01:23,439 --> 00:01:28,595
right? However, it seems like this skiing
thing must be really foundational

30
00:01:28,595 --> 00:01:29,696
and fundamental to like tier one.

31
00:01:29,674 --> 00:01:30,674
It

32
00:01:29,844 --> 00:01:31,575
is it is foundational. As a matter of
fact,

33
00:01:31,575 --> 00:01:36,656
I was just I just had done a speech about
maybe a month ago on it about resilience.

34
00:01:36,656 --> 00:01:39,327
And I tied it all back because I think,

35
00:01:39,327 --> 00:01:42,318
you know, tenacity and resilience are
probably two of the key factors that make

36
00:01:42,318 --> 00:01:45,879
founders ~ successful because the
resilience side,

37
00:01:45,879 --> 00:01:47,479
the tenacity is to keep going,

38
00:01:47,479 --> 00:01:52,721
and the resilience is to keep going after
your brain has said you must stop now,

39
00:01:52,721 --> 00:01:54,621
or your family's telling you you must stop
now,

40
00:01:54,621 --> 00:01:56,472
or good sense is telling you you must stop
now.

41
00:01:56,958 --> 00:01:58,749
And that resilience is you get back up,

42
00:01:58,749 --> 00:02:00,480
you get back up after you've been knocked
down.

43
00:02:00,480 --> 00:02:03,522
And it's who stands up one more time.

44
00:02:03,522 --> 00:02:05,923
And you re just read it over and over and
over again.

45
00:02:05,923 --> 00:02:10,366
And skiing taught me that at a young age
because skiing and snowboarding

46
00:02:10,366 --> 00:02:12,887
any snow sport is about falling down and
getting back up.

47
00:02:12,887 --> 00:02:17,960
and the good skiers are about getting a
coach and about learning

48
00:02:17,960 --> 00:02:20,042
and about applying all these various
things.

49
00:02:20,042 --> 00:02:22,553
Cause most people get to be at best an
average skier,

50
00:02:22,553 --> 00:02:23,904
and that's great. It's fun.

51
00:02:24,258 --> 00:02:28,632
Right. But to become really truly a
professional and an expert and and live

52
00:02:28,632 --> 00:02:34,118
in that space, that takes a tremendous
amount of purposeful effort with coaching,

53
00:02:34,118 --> 00:02:36,470
with feedback, and a lot of falling down.

54
00:02:37,208 --> 00:02:39,322
Yeah. Do a lot of these people I don't
know,

55
00:02:39,322 --> 00:02:40,641
you probably started skiing young,

56
00:02:40,641 --> 00:02:41,641
I'm assuming.

57
00:02:41,902 --> 00:02:42,902
Pretty young, yeah.

58
00:02:43,352 --> 00:02:47,887
So the the superstars, if we're looking at
a downhill slalom or alpine,

59
00:02:47,887 --> 00:02:51,260
it in their twenties, it's like they're
peaking like mid to late twenties,

60
00:02:51,260 --> 00:02:53,152
what it seems like in skiing. Maybe it's
thirties,

61
00:02:53,152 --> 00:02:56,997
I don't know, but so they started young.

62
00:02:56,997 --> 00:02:58,198
Absolutely.

63
00:02:59,310 --> 00:03:02,141
Yeah, Yeah. Michaela's a great example.

64
00:03:02,141 --> 00:03:03,381
So you take Michaela Schiffer,

65
00:03:03,381 --> 00:03:06,893
who's who's arguably the best skier right
now,

66
00:03:06,893 --> 00:03:08,733
~ competitive skier in the world.

67
00:03:08,733 --> 00:03:10,554
She's won the most World Cups ever.

68
00:03:10,554 --> 00:03:13,395
~ and and you get Lindsay Vaughn,

69
00:03:13,395 --> 00:03:15,766
who really is probably one of the
strongest skiers,

70
00:03:15,766 --> 00:03:17,297
especially female skiers ever.

71
00:03:17,297 --> 00:03:20,468
She's phenomenal. And both of those
started very young.

72
00:03:20,468 --> 00:03:21,468
~

73
00:03:21,504 --> 00:03:23,995
You know, Lindsay started on a very small
ski hill,

74
00:03:23,995 --> 00:03:27,437
like the nonprofit ski hill that I run is
also a very small ski hill.

75
00:03:27,437 --> 00:03:29,286
And we've got kids out there skiing at,

76
00:03:29,286 --> 00:03:30,478
you know, two and three years old.

77
00:03:30,478 --> 00:03:35,221
And some of those ha get the just absolute
passion about it,

78
00:03:35,221 --> 00:03:38,142
or their parents do, but in most cases
it's the the kid.

79
00:03:38,142 --> 00:03:41,023
And you just can't get out of the snow.

80
00:03:41,023 --> 00:03:44,385
And that they they just live it because
you do live it.

81
00:03:44,385 --> 00:03:46,306
You are skiing seven days a week.

82
00:03:46,530 --> 00:03:48,252
You're traveling to different hemispheres.

83
00:03:48,252 --> 00:03:51,806
It's an expensive sport. You're pulling
your family into it and you know,

84
00:03:51,806 --> 00:03:53,979
it's just a it's a it's a great
experience.

85
00:03:53,979 --> 00:03:56,562
But becoming Olympian in almost all
categories is

86
00:03:57,707 --> 00:04:00,352
My brain went to the story that Michael
Phelps talks about.

87
00:04:00,352 --> 00:04:03,267
About I think he went I d I don't know the
number,

88
00:04:03,267 --> 00:04:05,972
it was something like twelve or eighteen
or twenty years where he didn't miss

89
00:04:05,972 --> 00:04:08,216
one day in the pool. Nope. You don't.

90
00:04:08,216 --> 00:04:10,208
Right? And and so it's not just a

91
00:04:10,158 --> 00:04:11,158
Cool.

92
00:04:10,718 --> 00:04:14,659
He had to do recovery. And that's a big
part of what I also talk about is,

93
00:04:14,659 --> 00:04:16,800
you know, today now at my age,

94
00:04:16,800 --> 00:04:22,941
I spend roughly twenty one ~ hours a week
on recovery,

95
00:04:22,941 --> 00:04:25,742
on taking care of my body, the yoga,

96
00:04:25,742 --> 00:04:29,033
on the acupuncture, on the massages,

97
00:04:29,033 --> 00:04:32,554
the PT, all of that stuff because I've
been a c you know competitive athlete

98
00:04:32,554 --> 00:04:34,685
all this time, as well as everything else
I do,

99
00:04:34,685 --> 00:04:36,105
and longevity is a big part of it.

100
00:04:36,105 --> 00:04:38,486
So that is part of that training,

101
00:04:38,486 --> 00:04:39,636
not just being on the ski hill.

102
00:05:01,048 --> 00:05:03,089
So, what do we do with that when you get
all these clients?

103
00:05:03,089 --> 00:05:05,029
We're going to talk about the founder's
office today,

104
00:05:05,029 --> 00:05:08,180
about the advocate. We're going to talk
about SEC cases.

105
00:05:08,180 --> 00:05:14,782
~ when people come to you and they want to
talk about being successful,

106
00:05:14,782 --> 00:05:19,604
or they want they have this big question
on how do I do something?

107
00:05:19,604 --> 00:05:24,795
What to do? Does your brain wanna go ahead
and skip to the finish line

108
00:05:24,795 --> 00:05:26,286
to just tell them all the things?

109
00:05:27,214 --> 00:05:29,095
No, I think the journey's too much fun.

110
00:05:30,016 --> 00:05:31,016
Even for you.

111
00:05:30,977 --> 00:05:36,630
Even for me. Yeah. I I just I we do help
them see around the corner.

112
00:05:36,630 --> 00:05:37,861
So we talk about that as, you know,

113
00:05:37,861 --> 00:05:41,784
the founders office is a relative new
offshoot of one of our companies.

114
00:05:41,784 --> 00:05:44,354
~ and it's because we've had, you know,

115
00:05:44,354 --> 00:05:48,388
over five hundred founders that we've
helped throughout their ~ their journeys.

116
00:05:48,388 --> 00:05:50,870
We've done over three billion dollars of
deployment of capital.

117
00:05:51,454 --> 00:05:53,625
And so in that, we've seen a lot of
stories.

118
00:05:53,625 --> 00:05:55,055
We've experienced a lot of stories.

119
00:05:55,055 --> 00:05:56,765
We've got a lot of scars. I mean,

120
00:05:56,765 --> 00:06:00,057
literally a lot of scars. And so in that,

121
00:06:00,057 --> 00:06:03,828
n all of that stuff is not about teaching
them specifically,

122
00:06:03,828 --> 00:06:07,979
because it's about, it's about helping
them recognize that they've already

123
00:06:07,979 --> 00:06:09,719
got the knowledge somewhere around them.

124
00:06:09,719 --> 00:06:13,811
And how do they do that? But it's also
recognizing that their advisors,

125
00:06:13,811 --> 00:06:17,602
~ we talk about this a lot with the as a
doctor,

126
00:06:17,602 --> 00:06:18,722
you have to name stuff.

127
00:06:19,008 --> 00:06:20,939
It's just, it's required. When you get the
degree,

128
00:06:20,939 --> 00:06:22,880
they actually say, okay, now you're gonna
have to go out there and name stuff.

129
00:06:22,880 --> 00:06:26,382
So I named this affliction called the
founder's isolation paradox.

130
00:06:26,382 --> 00:06:30,264
And what it is is that all the people that
are surrounded around the founder,

131
00:06:30,264 --> 00:06:34,447
even if they do talk, they're still
centered around the nucleus of the
founder.

132
00:06:34,447 --> 00:06:36,508
So you've got your attorneys, you've got
your accountants,

133
00:06:36,508 --> 00:06:40,130
and everything that goes in, they may
actually even talk to each other about it,

134
00:06:40,130 --> 00:06:44,292
but they're not fundamentally looking at
the LLC of how it impacts

135
00:06:44,692 --> 00:06:47,394
the tax accounting five years down the
road.

136
00:06:47,734 --> 00:06:51,189
And so we help them, ~ founders to
actually look at those questions that

137
00:06:51,189 --> 00:06:54,222
are just today, but also what's going to
be thirty years from now.

138
00:06:54,222 --> 00:06:56,686
How does that set up? How does it do with
your family?

139
00:06:56,686 --> 00:06:59,209
How are you getting your kids to not hate
you,

140
00:06:59,209 --> 00:07:00,721
you know, ideally in the future,

141
00:07:00,721 --> 00:07:02,343
and or your spouse not to hate you,

142
00:07:02,343 --> 00:07:03,655
or your ex spouse not to hate you?

143
00:07:03,655 --> 00:07:05,928
I mean, all of that stuff is really
critical within there.

144
00:07:07,426 --> 00:07:09,067
What's going on with so I have a note.

145
00:07:09,067 --> 00:07:10,647
Every once in a while on podcast,

146
00:07:10,647 --> 00:07:13,038
I'll come up with something. I'll put it
into perplexity or into chat

147
00:07:13,038 --> 00:07:15,429
or something like that. So I just I just
decided,

148
00:07:15,429 --> 00:07:18,671
since I'm talking to the council of
millionaires and billionaires here.

149
00:07:18,671 --> 00:07:22,692
I just real quick, I put something in and
it just occurred to me.

150
00:07:22,692 --> 00:07:25,023
I said, We're gonna talk about building
wealth,

151
00:07:25,023 --> 00:07:28,335
entrepreneurs, ~ coaching on a business
level today.

152
00:07:28,335 --> 00:07:29,475
We're gonna talk about all this stuff.

153
00:07:29,475 --> 00:07:31,356
And I'm gonna give an intro right after
this.

154
00:07:31,356 --> 00:07:33,977
I'm gonna give you a second to think about
this and I'm gonna give you an intro.

155
00:07:33,977 --> 00:07:36,608
Okay. But I put into both of them.

156
00:07:36,802 --> 00:07:40,944
I said, how many millionaires and then
billionaires are there in the world right

157
00:07:40,944 --> 00:07:45,986
now in 2026? And what it kicked out was
there's

158
00:07:45,986 --> 00:07:49,588
60 million adult millionaires globally.

159
00:07:49,588 --> 00:07:51,959
And I took it further and I said,

160
00:07:51,959 --> 00:07:53,489
How many of them are self-made?

161
00:07:53,489 --> 00:07:57,351
I don't mean self-made, but they're first
generation millionaires if not.

162
00:07:57,351 --> 00:08:02,183
42 to 48 million of the millionaires,

163
00:08:02,183 --> 00:08:03,754
70 to 80 percent are self-made.

164
00:08:04,606 --> 00:08:07,848
79% did not receive any inheritance.

165
00:08:07,848 --> 00:08:14,834
Then down to billionaires. There's 3,300
billionaires globally right now.

166
00:08:14,834 --> 00:08:18,407
And then 2,300 to 2,500,

167
00:08:18,407 --> 00:08:19,928
depending on which stat you look at,

168
00:08:19,928 --> 00:08:24,461
70 to 75% are self made. That's insane
that one lifetime,

169
00:08:24,461 --> 00:08:28,765
one generation. 74% of them self made,

170
00:08:28,765 --> 00:08:32,467
and the vast majority of them come from
entrepreneurial endeavors.

171
00:08:32,467 --> 00:08:34,239
So think about that.

172
00:08:34,510 --> 00:08:36,270
I'm going to give us an awesome intro
here.

173
00:08:36,270 --> 00:08:39,462
~ today's guest is Dr. Thomas J.

174
00:08:39,462 --> 00:08:42,133
Powell. If you get to know him well enough
and he likes skiing with you,

175
00:08:42,133 --> 00:08:46,615
I think it's Tom. He's he's founder of the
founder's office.

176
00:08:46,615 --> 00:08:49,627
Tom spent nearly four decades helping
founders navigate

177
00:08:49,627 --> 00:08:53,178
the opportunities and challenges that come
with building something meaningful.

178
00:08:53,178 --> 00:08:55,434
Today we're gonna talk about resiliency.

179
00:08:55,434 --> 00:08:59,291
We've already talked about some founder
dependency and what it really takes

180
00:08:59,291 --> 00:09:01,662
to build a business that can stand the
test of time.

181
00:09:02,712 --> 00:09:05,075
Tom, welcome to the necessary entrepreneur
officially.

182
00:09:05,710 --> 00:09:06,834
Mark, that's awesome. Thank you.

183
00:09:06,834 --> 00:09:07,834
Great introduction.

184
00:09:08,152 --> 00:09:09,985
Thank you. we try to get better every day.

185
00:09:09,985 --> 00:09:12,208
Small micro improvements. Yeah.

186
00:09:12,208 --> 00:09:15,824
So what's your brain do with the stats we
talked about about millionaires

187
00:09:15,824 --> 00:09:18,228
and billionaires and first generation and
self made and

188
00:09:20,502 --> 00:09:22,253
It was a lot fewer when I was a kid.

189
00:09:22,253 --> 00:09:25,225
~ it's been this exponential growth,

190
00:09:25,225 --> 00:09:29,447
right? So the Four Forbes Fortune Fortune
four hundred,

191
00:09:29,447 --> 00:09:31,489
right, didn't have a billionaire on it.

192
00:09:31,489 --> 00:09:35,291
~ and I've known ~ you know,

193
00:09:35,291 --> 00:09:38,537
Larry Ellison, I was telling my kids this
the other day 'cause we go stayed down

194
00:09:38,537 --> 00:09:42,125
at at the former chairman's of Oracle's
house quite often for a number

195
00:09:42,125 --> 00:09:43,996
of different reasons, who's also a
billionaire.

196
00:09:43,996 --> 00:09:45,217
~ and

197
00:09:46,912 --> 00:09:49,423
Larry Ellison, for almost all of my adult
life,

198
00:09:49,423 --> 00:09:51,703
has been the richest man on the planet
until recently.

199
00:09:51,703 --> 00:09:54,464
And so that so that also is that piece.

200
00:09:54,464 --> 00:09:56,595
And wasn't a billionaire really until
recently,

201
00:09:56,595 --> 00:10:01,456
in in most cases. so that is a an
interesting piece.

202
00:10:01,456 --> 00:10:03,387
I also doing work in Singapore,

203
00:10:03,387 --> 00:10:06,547
one of the things that struck me there at
the time in the forties,

204
00:10:06,547 --> 00:10:09,408
Singapore was one of the poorest per
capita countries,

205
00:10:09,408 --> 00:10:11,349
and now it's one of the richest per capita
countries.

206
00:10:11,349 --> 00:10:13,949
And at the time, this was probably
fifteen,

207
00:10:13,949 --> 00:10:15,950
twenty years ago, in the airport.

208
00:10:16,436 --> 00:10:18,988
It said one in six people in Singapore are
a millionaire.

209
00:10:18,988 --> 00:10:22,180
One in six, right? Type scenario.

210
00:10:22,180 --> 00:10:23,180
So you start looking at that and say,

211
00:10:23,166 --> 00:10:25,211
okay, so what's going on in the world?

212
00:10:25,211 --> 00:10:29,864
And it goes to the something I was just
talking about before we got on

213
00:10:29,864 --> 00:10:32,676
the show is free enterprise saves the
world.

214
00:10:32,676 --> 00:10:35,738
Period. It doesn't matter where you are,

215
00:10:35,738 --> 00:10:38,319
it can be a capitalist or a communist
economy.

216
00:10:38,319 --> 00:10:42,202
There are still people that are trying to
exchange their ideas.

217
00:10:42,422 --> 00:10:45,803
for income. They're trying to solve a
problem and get paid for doing that.

218
00:10:45,803 --> 00:10:48,205
And some economies make it easier than
others,

219
00:10:48,205 --> 00:10:51,916
but it's still that entrepreneur and that
founder that makes the difference.

220
00:10:51,916 --> 00:10:53,754
It drives the categories. You know,

221
00:10:53,754 --> 00:10:58,109
over 50% of the people in the United
States approximately are employed.

222
00:10:58,109 --> 00:11:00,510
It drives the employment of 50%.

223
00:11:00,510 --> 00:11:03,812
One in, you know, one in two people that
have jobs work for small business.

224
00:11:03,812 --> 00:11:07,003
And of the economy, the GDP,

225
00:11:07,003 --> 00:11:08,914
it's almost 50% of the small business.

226
00:11:09,464 --> 00:11:10,484
We're talking the most powerful,

227
00:11:10,484 --> 00:11:12,576
most largest economic driver in the world.

228
00:11:12,576 --> 00:11:15,319
So I'm not surprised. First of all,

229
00:11:15,319 --> 00:11:17,500
founders should be compensated.

230
00:11:17,500 --> 00:11:20,743
I loved your other other piece of the 74%
of the billionaires.

231
00:11:20,743 --> 00:11:26,778
Because I don't necessarily agree with
someone who's

232
00:11:26,778 --> 00:11:31,822
a professional CEO, and Jamie Diamond
might not like my comments on there,

233
00:11:31,822 --> 00:11:34,635
but he didn't start anything. He didn't
build anything.

234
00:11:34,635 --> 00:11:37,557
It was being built, and he's a great
professional manager,

235
00:11:37,557 --> 00:11:38,848
but he never took.

236
00:11:39,310 --> 00:11:42,752
Personal risk. And so for that person to
become specific,

237
00:11:42,752 --> 00:11:43,903
it's not to pick on Jamie Diamond,

238
00:11:43,903 --> 00:11:47,375
it's but it to to have that type of a
person who took no personal risk

239
00:11:48,055 --> 00:11:50,026
in ownership become a billionaire,

240
00:11:50,026 --> 00:11:52,698
~ I don't think that that's necessarily
correct.

241
00:11:52,698 --> 00:11:54,899
I don't know how to change it
specifically.

242
00:11:54,899 --> 00:11:56,850
But the person who started something,

243
00:11:56,850 --> 00:11:59,121
put it on their credit card, borrowed
against their house,

244
00:11:59,121 --> 00:12:01,903
took their savings out that was going to
be their kids going to college,

245
00:12:01,903 --> 00:12:06,085
and bet everything on that and continually
bet and bet and bet.

246
00:12:06,085 --> 00:12:07,085
Great.

247
00:12:07,170 --> 00:12:09,015
And they're paid not because of the work
they do,

248
00:12:09,015 --> 00:12:11,843
they're paid because of the work that they
provide and the benefit they provide.

249
00:12:11,843 --> 00:12:14,080
So that's a great reason to be a
billionaire or a millionaire.

250
00:12:15,595 --> 00:12:17,827
Do you think it takes for the vast I mean,

251
00:12:17,827 --> 00:12:20,538
there's all I didn't pull the stat of how
many businesses fail every year,

252
00:12:20,538 --> 00:12:22,219
but way more fail than succeed.

253
00:12:22,219 --> 00:12:24,281
There's something about this five year
number,

254
00:12:24,281 --> 00:12:27,143
but so many of those people just pick
themselves back up and do it again.

255
00:12:27,143 --> 00:12:30,355
I don't know why we continuously just like
have a bloodletting of ourselves,

256
00:12:30,355 --> 00:12:37,110
but we do. But do you think that in this
current environment and current world,

257
00:12:37,110 --> 00:12:39,591
the ones that roll the dice and have the
vision,

258
00:12:39,591 --> 00:12:40,862
have the dream, they're builders,

259
00:12:40,862 --> 00:12:43,414
they're visionaries, but they have to
execute as well.

260
00:12:44,192 --> 00:12:47,184
What's inside of those folks that makes
them,

261
00:12:47,184 --> 00:12:49,185
I forget who ~ wrote the book,

262
00:12:49,185 --> 00:12:50,833
whether it's burn the boats or whatever,

263
00:12:50,833 --> 00:12:53,627
but it's an idea of all in. Because you
hear so much,

264
00:12:53,627 --> 00:12:55,068
you you mentioned Steve Jobs earlier.

265
00:12:55,068 --> 00:12:56,929
I'd love to know what you loved about him.

266
00:12:56,929 --> 00:13:00,951
And but it's do or die.

267
00:13:00,951 --> 00:13:05,233
And I that seems like a big statement for
people that aren't involved in it.

268
00:13:05,233 --> 00:13:06,954
But the folks that I'm around.

269
00:13:09,656 --> 00:13:10,996
That are winning, not just fine,

270
00:13:10,996 --> 00:13:12,827
that are winning. You see the DNA.

271
00:13:12,827 --> 00:13:17,669
There's no option for them to quit.

272
00:13:17,669 --> 00:13:22,791
There's no op there's no option for this
to go away and them not to give every
ounce

273
00:13:22,791 --> 00:13:25,272
of blood they have. Does it take that?

274
00:13:25,272 --> 00:13:29,473
Or am I being too drastic about the
necessary characteristic or all in

275
00:13:29,473 --> 00:13:31,274
to really win in this world of
entrepreneurship?

276
00:13:34,334 --> 00:13:38,155
use a, you know, good as an economist and
as as a legal professional,

277
00:13:38,155 --> 00:13:40,096
I get to use both this word multiple
times.

278
00:13:40,096 --> 00:13:44,117
It depends, right? So I know successful
entrepreneurs that didn't necessarily

279
00:13:44,117 --> 00:13:48,198
go all in and still hit it out of the park
because generally they were

280
00:13:48,198 --> 00:13:51,879
on their third or fourth try. They'd
already gone all in.

281
00:13:51,879 --> 00:13:55,700
They realize that it's not the going all
in that actually makes that deal

282
00:13:55,700 --> 00:13:58,821
successful. It's oftentimes another one of
these catchphrases,

283
00:13:58,821 --> 00:14:02,722
which is, you know, from Dan Sullivan is
the the who not how.

284
00:14:03,170 --> 00:14:06,932
So they started realizing they don't need
to be the only one doing it.

285
00:14:06,932 --> 00:14:10,573
They realize they need to really find the
right team members.

286
00:14:10,573 --> 00:14:13,574
And there's always someone who's
passionate about the things that you're

287
00:14:13,574 --> 00:14:15,565
not very good at. And they love it.

288
00:14:15,565 --> 00:14:18,436
Like there's a people that are passionate
about doing the accounting

289
00:14:18,436 --> 00:14:20,167
and the books and getting it right and
straight.

290
00:14:20,167 --> 00:14:21,677
And many of the founders suck at that,

291
00:14:21,677 --> 00:14:26,489
right? Or being a truly good manager and
they find those people and a good

292
00:14:26,489 --> 00:14:29,601
COO is usually one of the main people,

293
00:14:29,601 --> 00:14:32,622
a third or fourth time founder.

294
00:14:32,994 --> 00:14:38,756
discovers they have to have, they have to
have a great COO because they suck

295
00:14:38,756 --> 00:14:40,977
at that job. And so they find that.

296
00:14:40,977 --> 00:14:44,498
And then even within that, they find the
right COO who can take them

297
00:14:44,638 --> 00:14:48,179
to the ten million. And it's usually a
different COO to take them a hundred
million.

298
00:14:48,179 --> 00:14:50,460
And it's a different COO to take them to a
billion.

299
00:14:50,460 --> 00:14:53,131
And then it's a different one that takes
them public and it's a different

300
00:14:53,131 --> 00:14:55,212
one that gives them the exit. All of these
various things.

301
00:14:56,194 --> 00:14:59,785
That sounds like a lonely journey because
right,

302
00:14:59,785 --> 00:15:03,327
but and the reason why the context I have
is when you go from that person that

303
00:15:03,327 --> 00:15:07,459
helped you get you to ten and you gotta
let them go and you gotta move on

304
00:15:07,459 --> 00:15:09,039
to get to another place to go to the
hundred,

305
00:15:09,039 --> 00:15:13,841
to maintain those relationships on someone
that was everything to you,

306
00:15:13,841 --> 00:15:15,372
that's really hard.

307
00:15:17,238 --> 00:15:20,310
It's incredibly hard. And you do have some
team members that are able

308
00:15:20,310 --> 00:15:22,561
to stay with that company as it grows,

309
00:15:22,561 --> 00:15:27,464
obviously, but they're generally got a
skill set that does not change
tremendously.

310
00:15:27,464 --> 00:15:32,346
The other side of it is there are the
anomalies of these people that just never

311
00:15:32,346 --> 00:15:38,430
ending growth mindset. But generally that
mindset is the founder,

312
00:15:38,430 --> 00:15:41,201
right? They're always trying, they're
always looking at the next thing,

313
00:15:41,201 --> 00:15:42,392
the next opportunity, whatever.

314
00:15:42,392 --> 00:15:45,934
And the COO a lot of times is the the
steady Eddie or steady

315
00:15:46,484 --> 00:15:50,287
Edith that's just making sure that that
stuff gets done and they are

316
00:15:50,287 --> 00:15:52,878
so good with people and they're able to be
consistent,

317
00:15:52,878 --> 00:15:54,800
you know, Sunday through Monday,

318
00:15:54,800 --> 00:15:55,860
all the way through, you know,

319
00:15:55,860 --> 00:15:59,733
eight, seven days a week. And that that
does ~ you know,

320
00:15:59,733 --> 00:16:02,865
the the COO of ~ one eight hundred get
junk,

321
00:16:02,865 --> 00:16:05,367
Cameron was a friend is a friend of mine
and he talks about that.

322
00:16:05,367 --> 00:16:07,648
He goes, He was a great COO, up to a
hundred million.

323
00:16:07,648 --> 00:16:09,449
He knew he could not take it past that,

324
00:16:09,449 --> 00:16:10,570
and the company knew.

325
00:16:11,052 --> 00:16:13,646
Now, maybe the company could have exited
him a little bit better,

326
00:16:13,646 --> 00:16:16,460
a little differently, but you know that
that's the part of it is how do

327
00:16:16,460 --> 00:16:19,205
you do that humanely and say it's you know
it's kind of time.

328
00:16:19,205 --> 00:16:22,479
It's kind of time. Let's figure out what
the next next deal is.

329
00:16:22,479 --> 00:16:24,002
Don't chop him off at the knees.

330
00:16:24,610 --> 00:16:27,925
Yeah. I guess it's we're talking about
interpersonal relationships,

331
00:16:27,925 --> 00:16:29,437
you're talking about all your character,

332
00:16:29,437 --> 00:16:32,411
all the stuff, because I don't know what
book that you know to apply

333
00:16:32,411 --> 00:16:34,685
to the exact circumstance and the exact
company,

334
00:16:34,685 --> 00:16:36,347
the exact timing. It that's really hard,

335
00:16:36,347 --> 00:16:40,903
isn't it? It's like there's no directory
to flip to to apply this to this moment.

336
00:16:41,974 --> 00:16:46,527
No, that's why most leaders are readers
and you know you've got and

337
00:16:46,527 --> 00:16:49,099
and running it through AI is not reading.

338
00:16:49,099 --> 00:16:51,021
Getting the synapses of you know,

339
00:16:51,021 --> 00:16:55,564
just the quick of the book because reading
the book is so critically important

340
00:16:55,664 --> 00:16:59,327
or listening to it on Audible or Kindle or
however you do it and having

341
00:16:59,327 --> 00:17:02,889
all your bent pages of all the different
things and having a variety

342
00:17:02,889 --> 00:17:06,291
of things because you can t there's so
many times I'll quote a movie

343
00:17:06,372 --> 00:17:09,483
or a fiction book that's relevant.

344
00:17:09,848 --> 00:17:12,648
To a story right now. The Odyssey's out in
in movies,

345
00:17:12,648 --> 00:17:16,411
theaters right now. And I quote the
Odyssey a ton in there.

346
00:17:16,411 --> 00:17:18,702
Or, you know, I'll use The Merchant of
Venice as another one that

347
00:17:18,702 --> 00:17:20,083
I oftentimes will be talking about.

348
00:17:20,083 --> 00:17:24,085
And so you know, you look at that and
you're able to equate and put that into
real

349
00:17:24,085 --> 00:17:26,435
life. And so, but there are, you know,

350
00:17:26,435 --> 00:17:29,217
there's a handful of books. We were
talking about Harvey McKay not too long
ago.

351
00:17:29,217 --> 00:17:32,448
I said, gosh, your your people will do a
great job of getting backgrounds.

352
00:17:32,448 --> 00:17:34,910
And Harvey McKay had this, you know,

353
00:17:34,910 --> 00:17:35,910
50.

354
00:17:35,980 --> 00:17:38,784
And he wanted to know these fifty things
about the people they're doing business

355
00:17:38,784 --> 00:17:41,527
with. And it's not you go with a checklist
and go down the checklist.

356
00:17:41,527 --> 00:17:42,819
And now you can use, as you said,

357
00:17:42,819 --> 00:17:44,281
perplexity to get a lot of this stuff.

358
00:17:44,281 --> 00:17:45,703
But no, it's getting to know them.

359
00:17:45,703 --> 00:17:49,498
And now you know them as humans because we
hopefully exchange ideas

360
00:17:49,498 --> 00:17:51,911
and and opportunities because we're
humans,

361
00:17:51,911 --> 00:17:54,284
not just a exchange of monetary things.

362
00:17:54,764 --> 00:17:56,639
Yeah. What do you love about his book,

363
00:17:56,639 --> 00:17:58,114
about the swimming with sharks book?

364
00:17:58,114 --> 00:17:59,114
What do you love about it?

365
00:18:00,150 --> 00:18:03,172
You know, it was pro my primary takeaway
at that time.

366
00:18:03,172 --> 00:18:07,156
So you gotta look at this was in the 80s
and early nineties type scenario of that.

367
00:18:07,156 --> 00:18:13,941
It was transforming what was kind of the
Xerox sales method,

368
00:18:13,941 --> 00:18:17,644
which was really a methodology of this is
what you do,

369
00:18:17,644 --> 00:18:19,396
this is how you call, this is how you get
past the gatekeeper,

370
00:18:19,396 --> 00:18:20,968
da da da. And Harvey's like, no,

371
00:18:20,968 --> 00:18:23,349
no, no. That's all important and it's all
good.

372
00:18:23,349 --> 00:18:26,672
But what you really need to know is you
need to get to know the people.

373
00:18:26,672 --> 00:18:28,733
And that's even the gatekeepers.

374
00:18:28,733 --> 00:18:29,733
So

375
00:18:29,676 --> 00:18:33,349
I was at an interesting conversation not
that long ago where they're like,

376
00:18:33,349 --> 00:18:35,010
you know, it's about family offices.

377
00:18:35,010 --> 00:18:37,602
And they said, you know, if you piss off a
gatekeeper,

378
00:18:37,602 --> 00:18:39,433
you're never going to get to the decision
maker.

379
00:18:39,433 --> 00:18:42,295
And I said, Yeah, that's kind of the
truth.

380
00:18:42,295 --> 00:18:45,357
But if you piss off anybody in a family's
office,

381
00:18:45,357 --> 00:18:48,470
you're not getting the deal because that's
the that's the way it is.

382
00:18:48,470 --> 00:18:51,201
So people will come in, they'll treat me
always super nice,

383
00:18:51,201 --> 00:18:54,174
and then they'll treat my staff horribly.

384
00:18:54,174 --> 00:18:57,306
And it's like, you just killed any chance
of doing any business.

385
00:18:57,570 --> 00:18:58,932
And by the way, if we go to dinner,

386
00:18:58,932 --> 00:19:01,997
which we will take you to dinner because
we want to know you with your family,

387
00:19:01,997 --> 00:19:07,846
and if you're yelling at your kids and if
you are unkind to the food server,

388
00:19:07,846 --> 00:19:09,148
you're also not getting a deal.

389
00:19:09,148 --> 00:19:12,453
It's the people. That's what I loved about
that book.

390
00:19:12,453 --> 00:19:13,453
It's the people.

391
00:19:13,750 --> 00:19:16,594
Yeah. Do you think back to you brought up
Xerox?

392
00:19:16,594 --> 00:19:18,417
I'm I'm referencing something.

393
00:19:18,417 --> 00:19:21,222
Did Larry's did Larry Ellison start at
Xerox?

394
00:19:22,282 --> 00:19:24,604
He may have. I don't remember that,

395
00:19:24,604 --> 00:19:26,575
but you know, I do it was

396
00:19:25,730 --> 00:19:26,730
Valley though before.

397
00:19:26,575 --> 00:19:29,244
Silicon Valley, yeah. So I was in San
Carlos.

398
00:19:29,244 --> 00:19:34,771
I'm sorry, I was in San Carlos as Oracle
was growing and and

399
00:19:35,032 --> 00:19:38,554
it still was the SeaWorld there in Redwood
City.

400
00:19:38,554 --> 00:19:41,527
So and then they came right across the
street right through there.

401
00:19:41,527 --> 00:19:44,859
So I was there when the first building of
Oracle goes in at that time in

402
00:19:44,859 --> 00:19:47,861
the in the eighties, which was fantastic
time to be down in Silicon Valley.

403
00:19:47,861 --> 00:19:48,861
~

404
00:19:49,331 --> 00:19:51,305
And we if we'd only known what it was
actually gonna be,

405
00:19:51,305 --> 00:19:54,222
it was it was crazy, crazy times in the
nineties as well.

406
00:19:54,222 --> 00:19:57,080
So I sorry, you were gonna say about just

407
00:19:57,558 --> 00:20:02,402
Just, you know, we these icons of Steve
Jobs and Ellison and Elon Musk,

408
00:20:02,402 --> 00:20:04,863
Mark Zuckerberg, they end up being tech
people,

409
00:20:04,863 --> 00:20:10,628
Bill Gates. But everyone's always trying
to catch on to what is it?

410
00:20:10,628 --> 00:20:12,869
What was it, right? And you know,

411
00:20:12,869 --> 00:20:15,051
Isaacson wrote two of the biographies,

412
00:20:15,051 --> 00:20:17,473
right? He wrote Steve's and Elon's.

413
00:20:17,473 --> 00:20:23,197
Wrote both. And do you think there's is
there something different about them just

414
00:20:23,197 --> 00:20:24,258
as the individual?

415
00:20:25,048 --> 00:20:26,859
There's only just a few unique people like
that?

416
00:20:26,859 --> 00:20:31,130
Or is there a combination of things that
you just couldn't recapture again that
like

417
00:20:31,130 --> 00:20:34,452
the net cut all? Timing, product market
fit,

418
00:20:34,452 --> 00:20:36,482
that person, their experience,

419
00:20:36,482 --> 00:20:38,483
~ the team they have around them.

420
00:20:38,483 --> 00:20:43,745
Or are these outliers, even in acting like
a Denzel Washington and Oprah Winfrey,

421
00:20:43,745 --> 00:20:45,656
is it just the individual?

422
00:20:46,872 --> 00:20:49,897
Well I so I got to serve on a board for
many years with Denzel,

423
00:20:49,897 --> 00:20:51,666
by the way. So ~

424
00:20:51,616 --> 00:20:52,616
Is

425
00:20:51,727 --> 00:20:54,505
he as special as I just put him the level
I put him at?

426
00:20:54,860 --> 00:20:56,741
No, yeah, I just I think he's phenomenal.

427
00:20:56,741 --> 00:20:58,341
And by the way, as a board member,

428
00:20:58,341 --> 00:20:59,921
and it was the Boys and Girls Club of
America,

429
00:20:59,921 --> 00:21:03,152
so I sat on the national board and to sit
there with him,

430
00:21:03,152 --> 00:21:06,453
he was one of the hardest working board
members.

431
00:21:06,453 --> 00:21:10,655
And that's how I understand he I never got
to see him on stage or I well actually

432
00:21:10,655 --> 00:21:11,655
I did get to see him on stage,

433
00:21:11,495 --> 00:21:14,426
but I never saw him in his really acting
role other than the movies.

434
00:21:14,426 --> 00:21:15,736
I didn't see how professional he was,

435
00:21:15,736 --> 00:21:19,057
but I could imagine how he was because
when he showed up to the boys

436
00:21:19,057 --> 00:21:21,338
and girls club meetings, he read his
stuff.

437
00:21:21,338 --> 00:21:22,638
He wasn't a pretty face.

438
00:21:23,010 --> 00:21:24,411
He was there, he's asking questions,

439
00:21:24,411 --> 00:21:26,062
and it's with all the Fortune 50 CEOs,

440
00:21:26,062 --> 00:21:27,883
right? So I mean he knew his stuff.

441
00:21:27,883 --> 00:21:29,444
And he sat in there, General Powell was on
there,

442
00:21:29,444 --> 00:21:30,495
kind of Lisa Rice was on there.

443
00:21:30,495 --> 00:21:33,217
So you had all these amazing people that
are sitting on this board,

444
00:21:33,217 --> 00:21:37,720
and then for some reason, me, some punk
kid that was out of ~ out of Nevada.

445
00:21:37,720 --> 00:21:40,762
But so is there something different about
them?

446
00:21:40,762 --> 00:21:46,926
For many of them, and and you take st ~
jobs and Elon as an example,

447
00:21:46,926 --> 00:21:50,589
they probably are high on the,

448
00:21:50,589 --> 00:21:52,390
you know, whether it's the Asperger's

449
00:21:53,006 --> 00:21:55,608
scale whatever. Yeah, they're somewhere on
the spectrum.

450
00:21:55,608 --> 00:21:58,047
But would you say Mark Cuban is,

451
00:21:58,047 --> 00:22:02,052
I, you know, he seems like he's a pretty
likable guy at many cases and he's

452
00:22:02,052 --> 00:22:06,015
on the on the court, but he is as
tenacious and one-minded focus.

453
00:22:06,015 --> 00:22:09,717
And that is so again, I say say I ski with
these Olympians.

454
00:22:09,717 --> 00:22:14,161
And when they're in the gate, they're like
sh they're like the sharks.

455
00:22:14,161 --> 00:22:17,143
Their eyes go back in the sharp of their
head and they are just like they're

456
00:22:17,223 --> 00:22:20,965
instantly so focused. So people that you
think have ADHD

457
00:22:23,126 --> 00:22:27,109
all of a sudden become so focused that
nothing else is in their way.

458
00:22:27,109 --> 00:22:29,650
And that's what Steve would do.

459
00:22:29,650 --> 00:22:33,643
And that's what, you know, Elon does at a
at a pace that none of

460
00:22:33,643 --> 00:22:37,276
us can even imagine. And they also seem to
be absent,

461
00:22:37,276 --> 00:22:40,698
a a s a potential skill or whatever you
call it,

462
00:22:40,698 --> 00:22:43,260
that they just don't give a damn of what
people think of them.

463
00:22:43,260 --> 00:22:45,872
They're not trying to win friends and
influence people.

464
00:22:45,872 --> 00:22:47,274
It's not a Dale Carnegie, Andrew,

465
00:22:47,274 --> 00:22:48,924
you know, Dale Carnegie kind of thing.

466
00:22:48,924 --> 00:22:50,805
They're like, no, my people get to do
that.

467
00:22:50,805 --> 00:22:51,805
I am

468
00:22:54,187 --> 00:22:57,558
When someone asks you about your career
and your perspective,

469
00:22:57,558 --> 00:22:59,568
it goes in line with these unique
individuals.

470
00:22:59,568 --> 00:23:03,269
It's a it's a level of carp
compartmentalization that almost

471
00:23:03,269 --> 00:23:06,830
you can't even comprehend because they're
still existing in this world,

472
00:23:06,830 --> 00:23:10,071
but it's almost as if it n like none of it
affects them.

473
00:23:10,071 --> 00:23:13,232
But I find this hard to answer for me.

474
00:23:13,232 --> 00:23:14,753
So I want to when people say, Well,

475
00:23:14,753 --> 00:23:17,093
Mark, what did you find hard about?

476
00:23:17,093 --> 00:23:19,134
Whatever.

477
00:23:20,204 --> 00:23:22,325
What did so becoming an attorney,

478
00:23:22,325 --> 00:23:26,377
becoming a doctor, sitting on the board
for the Boys and Girls Club,

479
00:23:26,377 --> 00:23:28,537
being all these b having the world yanked
out from under

480
00:23:28,537 --> 00:23:29,538
you 'cause every entrepreneur,

481
00:23:29,538 --> 00:23:33,299
what did you find hard? Where does your
brain go when someone asks you that?

482
00:23:33,299 --> 00:23:39,192
What did you find hard about learning to
ski or being a a a a top performing skier?

483
00:23:39,192 --> 00:23:40,192
Anything.

484
00:23:40,846 --> 00:23:45,538
Well, so I think that I'm an incredibly s
~ so I've been in strategic coach

485
00:23:45,538 --> 00:23:47,488
for twenty six years, right? So Dan
Sullivan,

486
00:23:47,488 --> 00:23:48,829
so if you're familiar with strategic
coach,

487
00:23:48,829 --> 00:23:54,130
and Dan jokes about this. He says his
favorite clients are people with deep
pockets

488
00:23:54,130 --> 00:23:57,551
and are slow learners. So I'm a slow
learner,

489
00:23:57,551 --> 00:24:01,413
I take but I'm an aggressive forever
learner,

490
00:24:01,413 --> 00:24:05,464
right? And so that you know that so
learning is hard

491
00:24:05,656 --> 00:24:08,997
For me in certain ways, and especially
learning the lesson sometimes,

492
00:24:08,997 --> 00:24:12,148
I have to get beat with a two by four 14
times before I figure out that that's

493
00:24:12,148 --> 00:24:16,409
not going to work. But I have continually
increased in that scenario.

494
00:24:16,409 --> 00:24:21,781
The other really hard one is when I look
back and see the bodies that

495
00:24:21,781 --> 00:24:26,192
are in the gutter that have happened
because of things that I did

496
00:24:26,192 --> 00:24:30,013
of poor judgment or things that I did
where I wasn't kind or things that

497
00:24:30,013 --> 00:24:31,673
I thought I was so focused here,

498
00:24:31,673 --> 00:24:33,426
I didn't pay attention to.

499
00:24:33,826 --> 00:24:38,259
you know, not showing up to a baseball
game or to a cheerleading thing or to
some,

500
00:24:38,259 --> 00:24:41,911
you know, whatever's going on and seeing
how that accumulates,

501
00:24:41,911 --> 00:24:44,612
cause it all accumulates. Right.

502
00:24:44,612 --> 00:24:45,612
So

503
00:24:45,367 --> 00:24:46,367
Come.

504
00:24:45,873 --> 00:24:48,555
everything everything does. And so where
are you going to be?

505
00:24:48,555 --> 00:24:50,205
Would I necessarily change it?

506
00:24:50,205 --> 00:24:53,057
I don't know. You know, it there's a
fantastic,

507
00:24:53,057 --> 00:24:56,159
fantastic fiction book I recommend to
every founder.

508
00:24:56,159 --> 00:24:59,081
Well to just about anybody, but especially
if they're going through any challenges,

509
00:24:59,081 --> 00:25:00,832
it's called The Midnight Library.

510
00:25:02,112 --> 00:25:05,684
And the reason it's so fantastic is this
gal decides to take her life,

511
00:25:05,684 --> 00:25:07,065
and I'm not gonna give too much of the
book away,

512
00:25:07,065 --> 00:25:10,617
but she goes and she gets stuck in if you
if you're Catholic,

513
00:25:10,617 --> 00:25:12,588
it's purgatory, right? So she gets stuck
in purgatory,

514
00:25:12,588 --> 00:25:14,189
and so she's stuck in purgatory,

515
00:25:14,189 --> 00:25:19,462
and every book she takes off the shelf is
another life that she could have lived.

516
00:25:19,462 --> 00:25:21,573
And it's her life, but it's going on.

517
00:25:21,573 --> 00:25:23,494
And she's got tens of thousands of books.

518
00:25:23,494 --> 00:25:26,286
So she gets to stay in this library and
live all the thing where she's

519
00:25:26,286 --> 00:25:27,859
a rock star and where she's, you know,

520
00:25:27,859 --> 00:25:30,578
an astronaut and ~ all these various
things in there.

521
00:25:30,912 --> 00:25:35,565
And it's a fascinating story to go through
because that's what we live

522
00:25:35,565 --> 00:25:38,975
in a regrets if we're always doing that
and saying I could have,

523
00:25:38,975 --> 00:25:40,989
I could have, I could have, instead of
saying I can,

524
00:25:40,989 --> 00:25:43,871
I can, I can. But do know it, there's
costs.

525
00:25:43,871 --> 00:25:47,784
And so what we do again at the founder's
office is we take this founder's isolation

526
00:25:47,784 --> 00:25:52,036
paradox and we try and help the founders
understand what the costs are,

527
00:25:52,036 --> 00:25:55,959
and that maybe that risk, all in risk,

528
00:25:55,959 --> 00:25:59,942
is not what they need to do. Because the
all-in risk of putting the house

529
00:26:00,450 --> 00:26:03,571
Guaranteeing the business is the separate
scenario.

530
00:26:03,571 --> 00:26:06,462
No employee does that, right? Nobody,

531
00:26:06,462 --> 00:26:09,193
the banker doesn't do that. They don't put
their stuff at at risk.

532
00:26:09,193 --> 00:26:12,203
And so why are you? We need to be able to
get your capital.

533
00:26:12,203 --> 00:26:13,974
We use the what's called the capital
alignment method.

534
00:26:13,974 --> 00:26:16,755
We get the capital aligned with what
you're doing.

535
00:26:16,755 --> 00:26:21,206
And so that's what is in. You're in
because your spirit and your mind

536
00:26:21,206 --> 00:26:22,756
and your you're focused on it,

537
00:26:22,756 --> 00:26:25,137
but it doesn't have to be every single
thing you own.

538
00:26:25,137 --> 00:26:27,938
You don't need to put your spouse at risk
with the finances.

539
00:26:28,248 --> 00:26:30,241
They shouldn't be signing on personal
guarantees.

540
00:26:30,241 --> 00:26:33,838
You know, you y the the credit card is a
personal guarantee when you

541
00:26:33,838 --> 00:26:37,725
use that every time. Yep. So that's that's
kind of it.

542
00:26:37,725 --> 00:26:39,428
So that's the regret. Sorry, I went way
off on that,

543
00:26:39,428 --> 00:26:40,428
but

544
00:26:39,830 --> 00:26:43,466
No, I think but y what you're helping
people do is reverse engineer their life

545
00:26:43,466 --> 00:26:44,466
and their total outcome.

546
00:26:45,204 --> 00:26:49,767
Always. I love backcasting. So in almost
everything we do,

547
00:26:49,767 --> 00:26:52,278
we backcast, which is project yourself.

548
00:26:52,278 --> 00:26:54,149
Don't build it linearly. You know,

549
00:26:54,149 --> 00:26:57,211
don't do a linear path because you're
never it's never gonna be exciting.

550
00:26:57,211 --> 00:26:58,211
It's ooh, five percent growth,

551
00:26:58,191 --> 00:26:59,462
five percent growth, five percent growth.

552
00:26:59,462 --> 00:27:01,683
There

553
00:26:59,486 --> 00:27:00,620
Start where the end is, right?

554
00:27:00,620 --> 00:27:01,620
Start at the goal.

555
00:27:01,944 --> 00:27:07,206
and go, how can we do this? How can I make
this little teeny ski mountain

556
00:27:07,507 --> 00:27:11,229
an Olympic training center? What would
have to happen if I go five years

557
00:27:11,229 --> 00:27:13,270
in advance and I look backwards.

558
00:27:13,516 --> 00:27:17,672
What impossible things today had to have
happened for me to actually do that?

559
00:27:17,672 --> 00:27:19,510
And so that's how you start looking at it
and saying,

560
00:27:19,510 --> 00:27:22,138
Well, let me make the calls and let me get
some introductions and let me

561
00:27:22,138 --> 00:27:23,860
do this and let me do that. And all you
what?

562
00:27:23,860 --> 00:27:24,992
All of a sudden you get lucky.

563
00:27:26,562 --> 00:27:28,033
What I've found about that strategy,

564
00:27:28,033 --> 00:27:33,007
whatever we call it, is that it's the only
strategy I've found

565
00:27:33,007 --> 00:27:35,990
for folks that haven't accomplished the
goals that they have yet,

566
00:27:35,990 --> 00:27:40,153
that they can remove stress and anxiety
and depression from the process.

567
00:27:40,153 --> 00:27:42,635
Because there's nothing that you have to
think about.

568
00:27:42,635 --> 00:27:45,537
Then you if you've reverse engineered it,

569
00:27:45,537 --> 00:27:49,831
future casted it, then you have the step
by step method of everything that

570
00:27:49,831 --> 00:27:51,782
you need to do. There'll be some
deviation,

571
00:27:51,782 --> 00:27:56,056
something won't go well, but you've ident
identified the tactical things in advance.

572
00:27:56,406 --> 00:27:58,378
That you're gonna need to check off and
you're gonna need to do.

573
00:27:58,958 --> 00:28:03,173
Mike, thirty years ago in the Fortune th
the the Forbes four hundred list,

574
00:28:03,173 --> 00:28:04,504
right? I think it was Forbes, not Fortune,

575
00:28:04,504 --> 00:28:07,968
but Forbes four hundred list, if not one
of those people were billionaires,

576
00:28:07,968 --> 00:28:11,291
and today if you are in the four hundred,

577
00:28:11,291 --> 00:28:14,234
you're not a billionaire, you're a deca
billionaire,

578
00:28:14,234 --> 00:28:16,697
what had to have changed? I mean,

579
00:28:16,697 --> 00:28:21,182
it is a it's a explosion scenario of that.

580
00:28:21,934 --> 00:28:23,541
How do you decide what books to read?

581
00:28:26,030 --> 00:28:27,619
Like any given moment, what hap what
happens?

582
00:28:27,619 --> 00:28:29,630
Yeah, what happens when you choose a book?

583
00:28:29,630 --> 00:28:30,630
How's that happen?

584
00:28:31,074 --> 00:28:34,976
Well, ~ I always have a stack of books
that like I'm getting ready to go to
Chile,

585
00:28:34,976 --> 00:28:37,908
so it was it was loading up the Kindle to
go with me.

586
00:28:37,908 --> 00:28:41,140
I was I thought I was actually gonna bring
some actual paper books with

587
00:28:41,140 --> 00:28:43,918
me and and my ~ sister looks and she goes,

588
00:28:43,918 --> 00:28:47,444
They're too heavy. We can't bring all
these books scenario.

589
00:28:47,444 --> 00:28:53,067
So it's ~ it's partly my wife tries to get
me to read fiction ~ at times

590
00:28:53,267 --> 00:28:57,970
and it's usually what I grab. I'm a huge ~
constitutional buff.

591
00:28:58,450 --> 00:29:01,471
~ I actually hate my doctorate is in
constitutional law.

592
00:29:01,471 --> 00:29:04,072
I teach federalism at the doctoral level.

593
00:29:04,072 --> 00:29:07,453
I have three doctoral students going to
get their doctorate now where you know,

594
00:29:07,453 --> 00:29:11,344
so if you talk start talking about
federalism and I get really excited about
that

595
00:29:11,344 --> 00:29:13,474
and how does it apply and how does it go
internationally?

596
00:29:13,474 --> 00:29:15,945
So I've always got one or two
constitutional law,

597
00:29:15,945 --> 00:29:20,396
some history type book there. ~ and then
generally it's something from

598
00:29:20,396 --> 00:29:25,688
~ probably Greece, Rome times of what we
were doing at that point.

599
00:29:26,154 --> 00:29:28,545
And then there's always new business
ideas.

600
00:29:28,545 --> 00:29:32,698
AI is of course exciting. Everybody talks
about AI.

601
00:29:32,698 --> 00:29:35,159
I'm talking about AI as a governance.

602
00:29:35,159 --> 00:29:37,270
So if we've got this piece here,

603
00:29:37,270 --> 00:29:42,393
we've got to have the governance of that
because there is a civil society piece
that

604
00:29:42,393 --> 00:29:44,184
needs to be put within this. How do we do
that?

605
00:29:44,184 --> 00:29:45,245
How do we operate through there?

606
00:29:45,245 --> 00:29:47,706
And it's not gonna be, you know,

607
00:29:47,706 --> 00:29:54,090
just a piece that you just think how we
operated trains is how we're gonna operate

608
00:29:54,210 --> 00:29:55,210
AI.

609
00:29:55,070 --> 00:29:57,253
Or how the internet worked or what that's
gonna be.

610
00:29:57,253 --> 00:30:00,088
So, you know, th these are all the kind of
interesting things that make

611
00:30:00,088 --> 00:30:03,203
me I'm I have a book always on skiing.

612
00:30:03,203 --> 00:30:06,588
Believe it or not, I'm still a very
voracious learner on skiing.

613
00:30:06,588 --> 00:30:07,660
So

614
00:30:07,698 --> 00:30:12,747
The ~ all right, so federalism in the
constitution constitutional law.

615
00:30:12,747 --> 00:30:17,816
Give all of us folks who would fail that
exam

616
00:30:20,792 --> 00:30:26,168
Give us a basic since you have your
doctorate and you teach doctorate level
classes

617
00:30:26,168 --> 00:30:27,309
to people who are gonna become,

618
00:30:27,309 --> 00:30:32,956
~ give us a minute or two on federalism,

619
00:30:32,956 --> 00:30:37,291
our constitution, and how it interacts in
two thousand and twenty

620
00:30:37,291 --> 00:30:38,472
six for an American citizen.

621
00:30:40,382 --> 00:30:46,227
One, I think the founders were all flawed
human beings as all of us are.

622
00:30:46,227 --> 00:30:49,881
And so when you look at that, they were
doing a lot of research about

623
00:30:49,881 --> 00:30:53,133
how do you build a government that people
join by choice.

624
00:30:53,133 --> 00:30:58,358
Because what most people don't realize is
you join your government by choice.

625
00:30:58,358 --> 00:31:01,751
You don't have to have that, but you do if
you're not gonna if you're gonna live

626
00:31:01,751 --> 00:31:04,284
in a society of three people or three
hundred million people,

627
00:31:04,284 --> 00:31:07,006
you're gonna have some form of government
level in there.

628
00:31:07,628 --> 00:31:10,289
And so ours was the first constitution to
be written down.

629
00:31:10,289 --> 00:31:13,921
It's the oldest living constitution ~
that's written down.

630
00:31:13,921 --> 00:31:17,023
And so that document, and here's one of
the most interesting,

631
00:31:17,023 --> 00:31:20,985
Mark. We just celebrated our 250th
birthday.

632
00:31:20,985 --> 00:31:26,948
We didn't put the constitution in place
for thirteen more years.

633
00:31:26,948 --> 00:31:30,590
We were a confederacy of states.

634
00:31:32,044 --> 00:31:35,345
Because every state wanted to be
autonomous and have its own thing.

635
00:31:35,345 --> 00:31:40,047
So essentially we almost went the way of
of Europe of having these independent

636
00:31:40,047 --> 00:31:44,639
fiefdoms. And so they had to bring these
thirteen states together,

637
00:31:44,639 --> 00:31:49,401
~ after they were colonies together and
get them to agree to play nice

638
00:31:49,441 --> 00:31:53,002
in the sands and set up a boundary of
rules that Virginia would work

639
00:31:53,143 --> 00:31:55,824
and New Hampshire would work. And how do
you do that?

640
00:31:55,824 --> 00:31:58,405
And so it was it was brilliant.

641
00:31:58,405 --> 00:32:00,586
And Madison, who led a lot of that,

642
00:32:00,586 --> 00:32:01,586
~

643
00:32:01,656 --> 00:32:05,369
You know, was looking back at how the
empires had fallen and

644
00:32:05,369 --> 00:32:07,550
how republics had fallen, because they
said,

645
00:32:07,550 --> 00:32:10,672
democracy doesn't work. That's mob rule at
the end of the day.

646
00:32:10,672 --> 00:32:12,163
Whatever whoever the masses are,

647
00:32:12,163 --> 00:32:13,534
they're gonna rule at that scenario.

648
00:32:13,534 --> 00:32:16,146
So you set up a republic, you set up a,

649
00:32:16,146 --> 00:32:18,868
you know, a government where you can go
and have a place where they

650
00:32:18,868 --> 00:32:20,919
can debate these things that are the
important things.

651
00:32:20,919 --> 00:32:25,582
And by the way, the federal government in
the US should take care of very little,

652
00:32:25,582 --> 00:32:28,724
and the state governments should take care
of very much.

653
00:32:28,724 --> 00:32:30,706
And just like your house.

654
00:32:31,084 --> 00:32:34,095
You wanna have most of the rules at your
house and the least amount

655
00:32:34,095 --> 00:32:35,248
set by somebody in D C.

656
00:32:36,842 --> 00:32:39,759
Is this similar to Rome and the Senate?

657
00:32:39,759 --> 00:32:40,759
Is it similar?

658
00:32:41,268 --> 00:32:43,679
It it starts from there as an idea,

659
00:32:43,679 --> 00:32:48,080
but what ended up happening because one
judicial's not separated and

660
00:32:48,080 --> 00:32:51,021
you could have the Rome and then you had
to have the common people,

661
00:32:51,021 --> 00:32:52,661
House of Commons type scenario,

662
00:32:52,661 --> 00:32:56,522
in there because if you don't have all of
them in there,

663
00:32:56,522 --> 00:33:01,424
you you end up having something that gets
these factions.

664
00:33:01,424 --> 00:33:03,714
And right now we have a lot of little
factions,

665
00:33:03,714 --> 00:33:08,105
which is not unusual. And a faction could
be a far left or a far right party,

666
00:33:08,105 --> 00:33:09,618
whatever it is, and

667
00:33:10,208 --> 00:33:14,683
It's so brilliantly made that it's very
hard for a faction to get total control.

668
00:33:14,683 --> 00:33:18,747
And what happened in Rome is that a
faction would get control and then they
either

669
00:33:18,747 --> 00:33:22,191
move to the Senate having control or once
again a Caesar would come

670
00:33:22,191 --> 00:33:24,964
in and take over. And that's what they
were looking at,

671
00:33:24,964 --> 00:33:26,916
how not to have it happen. But not just
Rome.

672
00:33:26,916 --> 00:33:28,448
I mean y you have others as well.

673
00:33:28,962 --> 00:33:31,628
Yeah. What was the d if we were the first
constitution that

674
00:33:31,628 --> 00:33:32,971
was documented and written down,

675
00:33:32,971 --> 00:33:36,820
what was the document that came before us
in England that supposedly

676
00:33:36,820 --> 00:33:37,820
was modeled after?

677
00:33:38,168 --> 00:33:42,000
Well, so the Magna Carta was really the
first written document.

678
00:33:41,944 --> 00:33:42,944
Fourteen something.

679
00:33:43,120 --> 00:33:46,821
Yeah, yep. And then and the Magna Carta
came out and said,

680
00:33:46,821 --> 00:33:49,743
Hey King, you're good looking.

681
00:33:49,743 --> 00:33:52,944
You only have that job 'cause we let you
have that job.

682
00:33:52,944 --> 00:33:57,886
If we don't do a good job, we will remove
your head from your body

683
00:33:58,166 --> 00:34:00,407
and your your riches from your family.

684
00:34:00,407 --> 00:34:04,479
So you get to be king as long as you're a
good king and you do these things that

685
00:34:04,479 --> 00:34:07,540
we say. And during a couple of those times
they actually did remove the king.

686
00:34:08,108 --> 00:34:11,500
Right. So you had that right almost right
before we had our revolution.

687
00:34:11,500 --> 00:34:14,621
So you had the this scenario where kings
removed because it's like,

688
00:34:14,621 --> 00:34:18,023
nope, you're not doing it. And so it was
really somewhat the rich

689
00:34:18,023 --> 00:34:22,386
and powerful saying, Nope, you get that
because we do have our own kingdoms.

690
00:34:22,386 --> 00:34:26,027
And then that's also where I think one of
the brilliant things

691
00:34:26,027 --> 00:34:28,129
of Madison specifically, he said,

692
00:34:28,129 --> 00:34:31,841
humans, some humans, back to your very
first comment,

693
00:34:31,841 --> 00:34:34,132
some humans have more ambition than other
humans.

694
00:34:34,132 --> 00:34:37,643
And so if we pit the ambitions against
each other.

695
00:34:38,219 --> 00:34:40,210
We are more likely to stay safe.

696
00:34:40,210 --> 00:34:43,391
So you have the House of Representatives.

697
00:34:43,391 --> 00:34:47,601
Those people somewhere in there is going
to have their ambition and they're going

698
00:34:47,601 --> 00:34:49,053
to want to be the speaker of the House.

699
00:34:49,053 --> 00:34:52,123
And then you have the Senate and somewhere
in there it's going to want

700
00:34:52,123 --> 00:34:53,774
to be the senior center and the junior
center,

701
00:34:53,774 --> 00:34:56,715
you know, the head of Senate. And then you
have the Senate and the House that

702
00:34:56,715 --> 00:34:59,856
get together and say, No, they're not any
more powerful at the executive than

703
00:34:59,856 --> 00:35:01,686
the combined of us. And then you have,

704
00:35:01,686 --> 00:35:06,438
of course, the executive, but they're
stopped because of the power of

705
00:35:06,438 --> 00:35:07,438
the House and the Senate.

706
00:35:07,712 --> 00:35:10,923
And then both of those are stopped because
you have the judicial.

707
00:35:10,923 --> 00:35:14,585
And so that was the battle. But there's
one other part that people lose.

708
00:35:14,585 --> 00:35:20,878
We have 50 kingdoms that have governors
that have all

709
00:35:20,878 --> 00:35:22,518
of those same legislative things,

710
00:35:22,518 --> 00:35:24,479
oftentimes exactly like the United States.

711
00:35:24,479 --> 00:35:26,742
Some of them are different. Louis
Louisiana is different.

712
00:35:26,742 --> 00:35:28,251
You know, you've got some different things
in there.

713
00:35:28,251 --> 00:35:31,612
But you have these different, and those
are the states that have the power.

714
00:35:31,612 --> 00:35:35,434
And it's the ambition of that governor
that's supposed to keep that state.

715
00:35:35,586 --> 00:35:38,258
free you know, so you've got all these
wonderful things that go on

716
00:35:38,258 --> 00:35:39,946
to put ambition against ambition.

717
00:35:41,122 --> 00:35:44,105
So why has the federal government become
so powerful?

718
00:35:45,358 --> 00:35:50,040
~ there's not unusual that I get asked
that question,

719
00:35:50,040 --> 00:35:53,021
and I have my theory on it. Others have
different theories on it.

720
00:35:53,021 --> 00:35:58,834
But people will trade their safety or
trade their their freedom for their
safety.

721
00:35:58,834 --> 00:36:02,755
~ my God, we got to do this. And it starts
in the local area.

722
00:36:02,755 --> 00:36:04,356
Let's have the police, let's have the
knights,

723
00:36:04,356 --> 00:36:06,207
instead of doing the neighborhood watch,

724
00:36:06,207 --> 00:36:07,507
you know, that with then they,

725
00:36:07,507 --> 00:36:11,309
you know, they sit in HOAs and they start
giving away their power each time.

726
00:36:11,309 --> 00:36:13,750
We do that because we want to be safe at
night,

727
00:36:13,750 --> 00:36:14,750
right?

728
00:36:14,350 --> 00:36:15,991
Scenario. That's that's how it starts.

729
00:36:15,991 --> 00:36:21,433
What the US government did during Andrew
Jackson's time was brilliant if

730
00:36:21,433 --> 00:36:23,614
you want to be a big federal government.

731
00:36:23,614 --> 00:36:29,046
So Andrew Jackson is the first time we had
a balanced budget and excess reserves

732
00:36:29,046 --> 00:36:31,277
in the bank account. And he's like,

733
00:36:31,277 --> 00:36:33,778
Well, let's start building national roads.

734
00:36:33,778 --> 00:36:36,999
And the states go, like, you can't tell us
what to do.

735
00:36:36,999 --> 00:36:40,871
You can't build a road here. You this is
that is not constitutional.

736
00:36:40,871 --> 00:36:43,432
You cannot build a road. And so he's like,

737
00:36:43,432 --> 00:36:44,432
huh.

738
00:36:44,108 --> 00:36:45,539
His team gets together and they're like,

739
00:36:45,539 --> 00:36:49,121
okay, let's bribe We'll give you the
money,

740
00:36:49,121 --> 00:36:51,103
but you gotta build the road this way.

741
00:36:51,103 --> 00:36:54,285
We'll give you the money, but you gotta do
the schools this way.

742
00:36:54,285 --> 00:36:58,408
We'll give you the money, but now
everybody has to have a real ID before
they

743
00:36:58,408 --> 00:37:03,001
get on an airplane. And that's what they
do now is they suck up the money

744
00:37:03,001 --> 00:37:05,833
to the federal government and then they
give it back through everything from

745
00:37:05,833 --> 00:37:07,954
Medicare to to health, you know,

746
00:37:07,954 --> 00:37:09,956
education type things. Yeah, whatever it
is.

747
00:37:09,956 --> 00:37:12,547
Yeah. When they really should be looking
at the borders and,

748
00:37:12,547 --> 00:37:13,547
you know, and

749
00:37:13,656 --> 00:37:15,367
There's lots of people that want the
federal government to

750
00:37:15,367 --> 00:37:20,329
be incredibly powerful and have us be
fifty unified homogenous states,

751
00:37:20,329 --> 00:37:23,050
but that's not realistic. Right?

752
00:37:23,050 --> 00:37:26,781
So it's like we don't y you really need to
be able to look and say,

753
00:37:26,781 --> 00:37:28,052
okay, if you live in California,

754
00:37:28,052 --> 00:37:31,193
these are the California concerns and they
should be managed from California.

755
00:37:31,193 --> 00:37:33,414
And if you live in Massachusetts,

756
00:37:33,414 --> 00:37:35,915
it may be similar, but it's you kinda
gotta manage those through there.

757
00:37:35,915 --> 00:37:37,896
And they really don't want California
telling them.

758
00:37:37,896 --> 00:37:40,477
~ you know, and we've seen that that
doesn't work so well.

759
00:37:40,477 --> 00:37:42,538
It didn't work well in Rome because the
further it got out,

760
00:37:42,892 --> 00:37:44,691
Rome telling them what to do doesn't work.

761
00:37:46,078 --> 00:37:47,923
If you had to design, what do they say?

762
00:37:47,923 --> 00:37:51,581
Democracy's the worst form of government
except for its what,

763
00:37:51,581 --> 00:37:54,338
the best of all the worst. What are I
would I don't know.

764
00:37:55,074 --> 00:37:57,866
Yeah, no, that's it's yeah, it's it our
form of government,

765
00:37:57,866 --> 00:38:00,647
which is a is a democratic republic.

766
00:38:00,647 --> 00:38:06,640
Okay. And just a republic itself doesn't
work because everybody wants

767
00:38:06,640 --> 00:38:08,001
to feel like they have a voice.

768
00:38:08,001 --> 00:38:10,762
Now only approximately 50% of our people
vote,

769
00:38:10,762 --> 00:38:15,325
and they only generally vote in the
national elections,

770
00:38:15,325 --> 00:38:18,497
which is really crazy because the things
that you impact,

771
00:38:18,497 --> 00:38:21,218
the things that really impact your life
are the school the school board,

772
00:38:21,218 --> 00:38:24,450
the the library board, the city mayor.

773
00:38:24,664 --> 00:38:26,626
That you won't get anybody to go out and
vote for,

774
00:38:26,626 --> 00:38:30,039
right? Type scenario. ~ so yes,

775
00:38:30,039 --> 00:38:32,861
our form of government. Now, arguably,

776
00:38:32,861 --> 00:38:35,403
I went to school with the Prime Minister
of Jamaica.

777
00:38:35,403 --> 00:38:37,745
And so he's part of the, you know,

778
00:38:37,745 --> 00:38:42,509
of Great Britain. So and we're sitting in
~ London and we're having

779
00:38:42,509 --> 00:38:47,433
a debate because it's post-COVID and we're
talking about how fast they could move

780
00:38:47,754 --> 00:38:50,396
versus how slow we had to move in certain
ways.

781
00:38:50,396 --> 00:38:52,518
And he's like, well, because we've got

782
00:38:52,738 --> 00:38:56,241
You know, this this scenario where you've
got Congress is working better with

783
00:38:56,241 --> 00:38:58,984
the with the prime minister and you get
these signs and we're like,

784
00:38:58,984 --> 00:39:01,666
you know, Congress actually here is
supposed to be broken.

785
00:39:01,666 --> 00:39:03,708
We're not supposed to pass that many laws.

786
00:39:03,708 --> 00:39:07,552
It's supposed to be debated and debated
and debated and debated because someone

787
00:39:07,552 --> 00:39:11,315
in Arkansas has a voice just like somebody
in Seattle,

788
00:39:11,315 --> 00:39:13,757
Washington. And they may not like it,

789
00:39:13,757 --> 00:39:18,121
but democracy means you gotta let the
person you don't like's idea actually

790
00:39:18,121 --> 00:39:19,121
get voiced.

791
00:39:21,474 --> 00:39:22,795
Would you design it different now?

792
00:39:25,997 --> 00:39:26,997
You know.

793
00:39:26,390 --> 00:39:29,121
Yeah, the country of co the country of
Doctor Tom.

794
00:39:29,814 --> 00:39:35,335
Yeah, yeah, I I've I often ha have this
conversation with my wife ~ and

795
00:39:35,335 --> 00:39:39,897
~ say I don't ever wish to be sovereign
because I think anytime

796
00:39:39,897 --> 00:39:42,367
you get ultimate authority, no matter how
good you are,

797
00:39:42,367 --> 00:39:45,148
you're gonna still make decisions that
just you know aren't gonna be

798
00:39:45,148 --> 00:39:50,860
you can't do it. So I think we have a
brilliantly designed,

799
00:39:50,860 --> 00:39:56,161
flawed system that gets to continually
improve and grow.

800
00:39:56,161 --> 00:39:59,032
And it doesn't move fast on purpose.

801
00:39:59,404 --> 00:40:03,515
Because people make bad decisions in the
immediacy.

802
00:40:03,515 --> 00:40:06,436
They make and it's a even go back to the
founder's office,

803
00:40:06,436 --> 00:40:10,307
where we help a lot of founders see is
planting the tree today that seems like
it's

804
00:40:10,307 --> 00:40:12,918
hard, but 30 years from now you're gonna
love the shade.

805
00:40:12,918 --> 00:40:17,709
And you gotta do that. So when you get
into the accounts of slavery,

806
00:40:17,709 --> 00:40:21,500
the way that they actually maneuvered
through that,

807
00:40:21,500 --> 00:40:24,181
yes, some of it was kicking it down the
the the road,

808
00:40:24,181 --> 00:40:28,512
but it was still a conversation that they
were debating.

809
00:40:29,090 --> 00:40:30,090
And we've had the conversation.

810
00:40:30,080 --> 00:40:31,631
I had this debate too. It's like,

811
00:40:31,631 --> 00:40:33,431
well, so if they hadn't gotten there,

812
00:40:33,431 --> 00:40:34,832
what would have likely happened?

813
00:40:34,832 --> 00:40:37,473
Well, we likely would have had two
countries to start with at best,

814
00:40:37,473 --> 00:40:40,754
and probably three or four or the thirteen
would have just all been separate.

815
00:40:40,754 --> 00:40:43,975
And France and and Britain would have
turned their eyes on us and

816
00:40:43,975 --> 00:40:46,255
we would have become one of them or part
of them.

817
00:40:46,255 --> 00:40:49,447
And that would have gone. War of eighteen
twelve is a perfect example of that.

818
00:40:49,447 --> 00:40:52,297
We were too weak and and all of a sudden
we start getting attacked again.

819
00:40:52,297 --> 00:40:53,718
Right? So

820
00:40:54,774 --> 00:40:57,896
It's hard. It's the it's the it's the
library again,

821
00:40:57,896 --> 00:40:59,157
the midnight library. What if,

822
00:40:59,157 --> 00:41:01,819
what if, what if, you know. So I think
it's pretty good.

823
00:41:01,819 --> 00:41:03,240
I don't think it's great for everybody.

824
00:41:03,240 --> 00:41:05,201
There's lots of disenfranchised people.

825
00:41:05,201 --> 00:41:10,014
Most of the disenfranchised people is
because in many ways they don't feel safe

826
00:41:10,014 --> 00:41:12,736
to get off the porch. So, you know,

827
00:41:12,736 --> 00:41:15,948
you talked about that what founders do is
they get off the porch.

828
00:41:15,948 --> 00:41:19,720
They get in the game, and you can't win
unless you get in the game.

829
00:41:21,644 --> 00:41:23,880
What's necessary for people to feel safe?

830
00:41:23,880 --> 00:41:27,350
Because it feels like the individuals we
were talking about before,

831
00:41:27,350 --> 00:41:30,018
they get off the porch even when they
don't feel safe.

832
00:41:30,818 --> 00:41:35,432
Would you trade your would you trade what
level of freedom will are

833
00:41:35,432 --> 00:41:37,367
you willing to trade for safety for you?

834
00:41:39,416 --> 00:41:43,209
For me, not very much. ~ I will take the
pain.

835
00:41:43,209 --> 00:41:47,032
The worst thing you can do is take away my
freedom of choice.

836
00:41:47,032 --> 00:41:51,115
And so for me, that is a core value.

837
00:41:51,115 --> 00:41:53,297
And but what I also have to realize,

838
00:41:53,297 --> 00:41:55,459
there's an awful lot of people that that's
not their core value.

839
00:41:55,459 --> 00:42:01,083
So for me, the safety is in

840
00:42:01,224 --> 00:42:03,165
my ability to have resilience,

841
00:42:03,165 --> 00:42:05,797
the ability to get back up, the ability to
live.

842
00:42:05,797 --> 00:42:06,808
And most people don't even know this.

843
00:42:06,808 --> 00:42:09,120
Our founders, it was not freedom of
religion.

844
00:42:09,942 --> 00:42:13,474
It was freedom of enterprise that all of
our constitution is written about freedom

845
00:42:13,474 --> 00:42:16,946
of enterprise. And the religion is
actually carved out to say you don't bring
that

846
00:42:16,946 --> 00:42:19,047
in here as a set government religion.

847
00:42:19,047 --> 00:42:22,129
You can have your religion. It's just not
going to be the guiding path of what

848
00:42:22,129 --> 00:42:25,081
we do specifically, right? It'll be your
guiding path,

849
00:42:25,081 --> 00:42:28,192
but not globally, because we can't figure
out one religion to say.

850
00:42:28,192 --> 00:42:31,594
So in that, but we can figure out
economics.

851
00:42:31,594 --> 00:42:34,256
So what are the economics and what do you
need to do?

852
00:42:34,256 --> 00:42:36,097
Well, one of them you need to be able to
do is fail.

853
00:42:36,097 --> 00:42:38,318
And the second thing you need to be able
to do.

854
00:42:38,632 --> 00:42:41,965
Is get back up again. And so in article
one,

855
00:42:41,965 --> 00:42:46,159
the very first article, they write about
the ability for people not to have

856
00:42:46,159 --> 00:42:47,851
to go to debtor's prison, essentially.

857
00:42:47,851 --> 00:42:51,875
Because debtor's prison in the old days
took the entrepreneurs

858
00:42:52,215 --> 00:42:55,679
who borrowed the money and were had
employees.

859
00:42:55,679 --> 00:42:59,022
And then when they failed because the
economy changed or whatever happened,

860
00:42:59,022 --> 00:43:00,924
then they took them totally out of the
game.

861
00:43:00,924 --> 00:43:03,136
And our founders are like, that's a bad
idea.

862
00:43:03,822 --> 00:43:06,034
Risk is way too high then, hardly anybody
would take it.

863
00:43:06,242 --> 00:43:07,603
Yeah. Yeah.

864
00:43:08,568 --> 00:43:09,568
So what's

865
00:43:10,658 --> 00:43:12,006
What's the f let's go by the way?

866
00:43:12,006 --> 00:43:14,038
This is this is a really inter it's just a
great

867
00:43:14,778 --> 00:43:19,802
Here we go. What's what's the what's the
con what's the constitution,

868
00:43:19,802 --> 00:43:22,463
the first not even a minute, what's the
first principle of the constitution

869
00:43:22,463 --> 00:43:24,905
of the founder's office and all these
things you're building?

870
00:43:24,905 --> 00:43:27,997
What are you what are you weeding with
every day that really matters?

871
00:43:27,997 --> 00:43:30,138
And it doesn't have to be just one word or
one principle.

872
00:43:30,138 --> 00:43:35,212
What's the idea that you're now marching
out here in the world and what's your what

873
00:43:35,212 --> 00:43:37,253
what you're passionate about and the
things you're trying to move?

874
00:43:37,253 --> 00:43:38,944
What is it? What's the underlying thing?

875
00:43:39,470 --> 00:43:43,051
So like I said, free enterprise saves the
world.

876
00:43:43,051 --> 00:43:45,652
Without founders, there's no free
enterprise.

877
00:43:45,652 --> 00:43:50,633
Okay. And so, but no one's looking out for
the founder's best interest.

878
00:43:50,633 --> 00:43:52,774
And because they do have resilience,

879
00:43:52,774 --> 00:43:57,085
everybody thinks they're so tough that
even their advisors are not looking

880
00:43:57,085 --> 00:44:00,456
out for them. And I'll give you a very
simple one that we try and show.

881
00:44:00,456 --> 00:44:03,397
Company grows, they get into something,

882
00:44:03,397 --> 00:44:05,167
they need a lawyer, they hire a lawyer,

883
00:44:05,167 --> 00:44:06,838
and the founder invariably always says,

884
00:44:06,838 --> 00:44:08,108
My lawyer, my lawyer, my lawyer.

885
00:44:08,802 --> 00:44:10,543
They get into some trouble with something,

886
00:44:10,543 --> 00:44:13,565
and the lawyer is like, No, I'm the
company's lawyer.

887
00:44:13,565 --> 00:44:15,746
And the founder goes, But it's my company.

888
00:44:15,746 --> 00:44:17,137
It's like, no, it's not your company.

889
00:44:17,137 --> 00:44:18,418
You are separate from your company.

890
00:44:18,418 --> 00:44:21,030
It's its own entity. I'm the lawyer.

891
00:44:21,030 --> 00:44:22,531
You have to get your own counsel.

892
00:44:22,531 --> 00:44:27,053
Now that sounds really crazy, but it
actually is exactly like that.

893
00:44:27,053 --> 00:44:29,075
And so the accountants are doing the same
thing.

894
00:44:29,075 --> 00:44:33,998
The C-suite, they don't mind the founder
is going to

895
00:44:34,794 --> 00:44:37,355
sign on the hundred million dollar
personal guarantee,

896
00:44:37,355 --> 00:44:40,005
which by the way, I've had a hundred
million dollar personal guarantee in

897
00:44:40,005 --> 00:44:43,416
my in my life. And ~ it you know that fee

898
00:44:42,744 --> 00:44:43,744
How do you?

899
00:44:45,477 --> 00:44:48,838
at the time it was fine. It was when it
hit a billion dollars and this

900
00:44:48,838 --> 00:44:50,146
was this was a true conversation.

901
00:44:50,146 --> 00:44:53,699
It hit a billion dollars in personal
guarantees and me and my other

902
00:44:53,699 --> 00:44:56,280
two founders looked at each other and we
were all pretty well off.

903
00:44:56,280 --> 00:44:58,620
But we looked at it, we said, Do you have
a billion dollars?

904
00:44:58,620 --> 00:44:59,620
I don't have a billion dollars.

905
00:44:59,477 --> 00:45:00,594
Do you have a billion dollars?

906
00:45:00,594 --> 00:45:04,502
And so we're like okay we need to start
whittling this

907
00:45:04,940 --> 00:45:07,961
Down. And I will tell you the last two
million of it was actually

908
00:45:07,961 --> 00:45:10,582
the hardest because by that time you've
gone through all your best assets

909
00:45:10,582 --> 00:45:12,032
and everything else. So anyway,

910
00:45:12,032 --> 00:45:15,903
your management team will let you sign the
personal guarantee for

911
00:45:15,903 --> 00:45:19,994
a hundred million because they're going to
get raises if you hit it out of the park.

912
00:45:19,994 --> 00:45:21,765
They're going to get equity and all the
other shares.

913
00:45:21,765 --> 00:45:22,835
And it's not that they're just,

914
00:45:22,835 --> 00:45:29,077
you know, selling you out, but we use the
this analogy of most everybody

915
00:45:29,077 --> 00:45:31,758
is the chicken in the ham and egg
breakfast.

916
00:45:31,758 --> 00:45:33,228
The founder is the pig.

917
00:45:33,634 --> 00:45:36,340
So they're all involved. The founder's
committed.

918
00:45:36,340 --> 00:45:38,695
Right. And so when things go down,

919
00:45:38,695 --> 00:45:41,952
it's, you know, really literally your ass
on that on that plate.

920
00:45:41,952 --> 00:45:42,952
Hm.

921
00:45:43,694 --> 00:45:49,029
~ we talked earlier about Congress and
when we were talking about

922
00:45:49,029 --> 00:45:52,702
the Constitution Federalism that Congress
was meant to move slow.

923
00:45:52,702 --> 00:45:54,644
It wasn't meant to pass a lot of law.

924
00:45:54,644 --> 00:45:59,408
If we try to make this correlation on
running companies and

925
00:45:59,627 --> 00:46:01,370
and entrepreneurism and stuff,

926
00:46:01,370 --> 00:46:08,036
we now have a government that's meant to
operate slow with

927
00:46:08,036 --> 00:46:10,568
everything else around us operating at
such speed.

928
00:46:14,254 --> 00:46:18,926
What what do we do with that? 'Cause it
feels like this AI conversation.

929
00:46:18,926 --> 00:46:23,496
I'm assuming the politicians really don't
know.

930
00:46:26,274 --> 00:46:31,757
Yeah, no, I would agree. I ~ so we spent a
lot of time in in AI and

931
00:46:31,757 --> 00:46:35,438
how to implement AI. And I think any
company that's not implementing some level

932
00:46:35,438 --> 00:46:37,239
of AI, and most everybody is now.

933
00:46:37,239 --> 00:46:40,311
I mean, it was not even a year ago that
would you'd say you use Chat

934
00:46:40,311 --> 00:46:41,802
GPT and people kind of like, hmm?

935
00:46:41,802 --> 00:46:43,723
Now what you're getting is people saying,

936
00:46:43,723 --> 00:46:46,634
No, I don't want to use it and they don't
even realize that it's just

937
00:46:46,634 --> 00:46:49,996
in the background. So it's the inner
internet of things,

938
00:46:49,996 --> 00:46:50,996
right? IoT.

939
00:46:51,318 --> 00:46:53,329
They didn't realize that everything now is
the internet.

940
00:46:53,329 --> 00:46:54,570
They didn't realize that their car,

941
00:46:54,570 --> 00:46:56,852
their toaster oven, everything is run on
the internet,

942
00:46:56,852 --> 00:46:58,793
right? That's where AI is moving.

943
00:46:58,793 --> 00:47:00,754
It's just not even gonna be called AI
anymore.

944
00:47:00,754 --> 00:47:04,427
It'll just be what is Yeah, it'll just be
yeah,

945
00:47:04,427 --> 00:47:08,039
exactly. ~ and so government is kind of,

946
00:47:08,039 --> 00:47:10,671
I think, in that quagmire of like,

947
00:47:10,671 --> 00:47:12,532
how do we get our hands around this?

948
00:47:12,532 --> 00:47:15,584
And, you know, Ronald Reagan used to say
regulate it,

949
00:47:15,584 --> 00:47:16,715
you know, until it doesn't move.

950
00:47:16,715 --> 00:47:19,017
And there's people that definitely want to
do that.

951
00:47:19,017 --> 00:47:20,788
The you know the

952
00:47:20,920 --> 00:47:23,552
the big, you know, server farm type
things.

953
00:47:23,552 --> 00:47:25,453
It's like, and they're using the energy
and the water.

954
00:47:25,453 --> 00:47:27,895
It's like, is that really what people are
afraid of?

955
00:47:27,895 --> 00:47:30,617
Or is it they're afraid they're gonna lose
their jobs or their autonomy?

956
00:47:30,617 --> 00:47:34,219
And so as understanding that I think
that's it.

957
00:47:34,219 --> 00:47:36,200
That is it. That is it, actually.

958
00:47:36,200 --> 00:47:39,603
at the end of the day. And losing
autonomy,

959
00:47:39,603 --> 00:47:41,334
if you think about it, you know,

960
00:47:41,334 --> 00:47:45,087
do you become the Matrix or ready player
one type lifestyle?

961
00:47:45,087 --> 00:47:46,547
Or if you grew up and you saw,

962
00:47:46,547 --> 00:47:50,060
you know, ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Terminator.

963
00:47:50,338 --> 00:47:51,979
You know, or is this where we're headed
to?

964
00:47:51,979 --> 00:47:55,341
I don't think so. I have a lot of faith
that human beings are pretty smart

965
00:47:55,962 --> 00:47:58,764
and that it's our creativity that makes us
different.

966
00:47:58,764 --> 00:48:03,597
And that that creativity is not about
asking chat to do something and give

967
00:48:03,597 --> 00:48:06,329
me a good story. Well, they use a formula.

968
00:48:06,329 --> 00:48:09,451
The great thing about humans is we don't
use a formula necessarily.

969
00:48:09,451 --> 00:48:11,302
We c you know, we come up with crazy ass
stuff.

970
00:48:11,302 --> 00:48:12,633
Like, how did they make this work?

971
00:48:12,633 --> 00:48:19,618
~ you know, so government is supposed to
move slow unless it needs to move fast.

972
00:48:20,020 --> 00:48:23,662
And in most cases, it shouldn't regulate a
lot of things,

973
00:48:23,662 --> 00:48:25,602
but it does need to regulate certain
things.

974
00:48:25,602 --> 00:48:27,473
Like I went up against the SEC.

975
00:48:27,473 --> 00:48:29,954
The SEC was breaking the Constitution.

976
00:48:29,954 --> 00:48:33,176
I'm like, you can't do that. And so I go
up against the SEC.

977
00:48:33,176 --> 00:48:35,437
I wasn't saying get rid of the SEC.

978
00:48:35,437 --> 00:48:39,518
I'm saying no, the SEC has to be mindful
of the rules that we all agree to play by,

979
00:48:39,518 --> 00:48:41,179
which is the Constitution, right?

980
00:48:41,179 --> 00:48:42,950
And someone's got to hold them
accountable.

981
00:48:42,950 --> 00:48:45,831
Might as well be me, I guess. I would have
wished somebody else did it,

982
00:48:45,831 --> 00:48:47,902
but that that was me. So the same way with

983
00:48:48,044 --> 00:48:51,378
with ~ you know, AI and whatever the next
AI will be,

984
00:48:51,378 --> 00:48:54,092
this isn't gonna be the last thing that we
come up with that's all that great.

985
00:48:54,092 --> 00:48:57,246
You know, quantum computing's gonna come
up and change everything once again.

986
00:48:57,246 --> 00:49:00,000
So, you know, who knows? Who knows what
that'll be.

987
00:49:00,878 --> 00:49:04,148
I'm always wondering what's the thing that
we're not focused on that's happening.

988
00:49:05,516 --> 00:49:11,290
You know, ~ it's scary, but one of the
things we're not thinking about is,

989
00:49:11,290 --> 00:49:14,946
and we saw it a little bit with you know,

990
00:49:14,946 --> 00:49:19,397
nine eleven. It's the non nationals.

991
00:49:19,397 --> 00:49:21,348
It doesn't have to be a nation.

992
00:49:21,348 --> 00:49:23,610
It's not Iran who we're at war with,

993
00:49:23,610 --> 00:49:25,191
it's an ideal that's within that.

994
00:49:25,191 --> 00:49:28,544
That's actually also a faction within
because most of the Iranian people

995
00:49:28,544 --> 00:49:31,146
are amazing people in this amazing
country.

996
00:49:31,488 --> 00:49:34,130
And same with Israel or Palestine or
wherever you go in the world,

997
00:49:34,130 --> 00:49:37,612
they're all amazing people. And there's a
faction that's taken over somewhere

998
00:49:37,612 --> 00:49:40,063
in there, right? And the problem is,

999
00:49:40,063 --> 00:49:41,724
at least when they're governments,

1000
00:49:41,724 --> 00:49:45,516
at least when somebody's taking Nazism and
putting it and marching in a street,

1001
00:49:45,516 --> 00:49:49,559
we see It's when they're not. It's when
they're in a basement or they're

1002
00:49:49,559 --> 00:49:54,011
in a back room and they're designing the
next nuclear type fusion bomb

1003
00:49:54,372 --> 00:49:57,854
or something else. And now with technology
they can do that and diseases

1004
00:49:57,854 --> 00:49:58,854
and other things.

1005
00:49:58,732 --> 00:50:00,120
So it's not the big science labs,

1006
00:50:00,120 --> 00:50:01,377
it's the little ones that scare me.

1007
00:50:02,060 --> 00:50:04,288
Yeah. And now we have access to all the
information now.

1008
00:50:06,484 --> 00:50:13,156
~ you mentioned autonomy. One of my
favorite conversations that people

1009
00:50:13,156 --> 00:50:14,796
feel when they have these jobs,

1010
00:50:14,796 --> 00:50:16,527
they've been an employee. Listen,

1011
00:50:16,527 --> 00:50:17,767
I'm not hammered on being an employee.

1012
00:50:17,767 --> 00:50:19,998
It's where I came from. My whole family
was employees.

1013
00:50:19,998 --> 00:50:22,368
If you if you put the golden handcuffs on,

1014
00:50:22,368 --> 00:50:23,889
you're a public employee, a teacher,

1015
00:50:23,889 --> 00:50:25,979
a firefighter, and you have pensions and
all that,

1016
00:50:25,979 --> 00:50:30,121
you see a guaranteed outcome. But so many
people that are employees,

1017
00:50:30,121 --> 00:50:35,382
they feel that it's too risky to start the
venture.

1018
00:50:36,066 --> 00:50:41,579
To take a so-called risk. But yet if
they'll just go online and look

1019
00:50:41,579 --> 00:50:44,150
in their networking group of people that
they care about,

1020
00:50:44,150 --> 00:50:47,872
there's stories every day that the people
had this false sense of autonomy,

1021
00:50:47,872 --> 00:50:50,764
that they had the rug pulled right out
from underneath them and they

1022
00:50:50,764 --> 00:50:53,335
did not have autonomy. They were not safe.

1023
00:50:53,335 --> 00:50:57,037
I just this facade that everybody operates
in.

1024
00:50:57,037 --> 00:50:58,998
I'm okay if we choose to be in it,

1025
00:50:58,998 --> 00:51:03,621
but everyone that feels safe because they
think they've had their job

1026
00:51:03,621 --> 00:51:05,302
for five and six and seven years.

1027
00:51:05,516 --> 00:51:08,611
And they like their boss and they like the
person that owns the company.

1028
00:51:08,611 --> 00:51:10,614
There's so much change happening.

1029
00:51:10,614 --> 00:51:15,092
I don't think anybody that's an employee
should feel safe anymore.

1030
00:51:16,556 --> 00:51:18,377
They ever necessarily should have,

1031
00:51:18,377 --> 00:51:19,907
even with unions and other things,

1032
00:51:19,907 --> 00:51:22,388
because you saw plants get closed down,

1033
00:51:22,388 --> 00:51:24,649
right? You saw the rust belt happen.

1034
00:51:24,649 --> 00:51:28,991
And so, and you I you know, I remember
somebody sharing this story,

1035
00:51:28,991 --> 00:51:30,472
so I'm stealing somebody else's story.

1036
00:51:30,472 --> 00:51:33,713
But it was they ~ you know,

1037
00:51:33,713 --> 00:51:34,914
they they close down the plant,

1038
00:51:34,914 --> 00:51:38,015
the city starts dying because there's no
major jobs there.

1039
00:51:38,015 --> 00:51:40,976
But there's still like four families that
stay there,

1040
00:51:40,976 --> 00:51:44,388
and they are just poor as poor could be
possible.

1041
00:51:44,388 --> 00:51:45,388
And they come in and they're like,

1042
00:51:45,378 --> 00:51:46,589
Well, the plant's closed down.

1043
00:51:46,589 --> 00:51:49,001
We just don't have any nobody's got a job
around here.

1044
00:51:49,001 --> 00:51:52,244
It's like, well, maybe while you were
working at the plant,

1045
00:51:52,244 --> 00:51:54,346
if you had gotten some education,

1046
00:51:54,346 --> 00:51:55,767
I'm not talking formal education.

1047
00:51:55,767 --> 00:52:00,070
I have a doctorate, right? But I also
barely graduated high school.

1048
00:52:00,070 --> 00:52:02,943
So it took me a while to come to
education.

1049
00:52:02,943 --> 00:52:04,314
And that's not why I made money.

1050
00:52:04,314 --> 00:52:07,046
I made I got education because I was
curious.

1051
00:52:07,046 --> 00:52:11,200
Okay. So I I made money because I was an
entrepreneur and a founder

1052
00:52:11,200 --> 00:52:12,961
and aggressive about that type of stuff.

1053
00:52:12,961 --> 00:52:13,961
So

1054
00:52:14,114 --> 00:52:18,146
But anybody could have learned any skill
that they could have then been portable

1055
00:52:18,146 --> 00:52:20,336
to another job somewhere along the line.

1056
00:52:20,336 --> 00:52:23,758
So if you're in that job and you're
working your forty hours a week

1057
00:52:23,938 --> 00:52:26,579
and then you're not doing something to
improve or become scalable,

1058
00:52:26,579 --> 00:52:29,220
you got a long lifetime. There's no
guarantees of these jobs.

1059
00:52:29,220 --> 00:52:32,341
And so, yes, by being an entrepreneur,

1060
00:52:32,341 --> 00:52:35,703
you may work a lot of late hours and not
have any income,

1061
00:52:35,703 --> 00:52:39,984
but that at any time you do have that
sense of freedom that you're free

1062
00:52:39,984 --> 00:52:43,586
to go do anything else. There's been times
I've been a waiter.

1063
00:52:44,044 --> 00:52:46,659
while starting a new company because I
needed to make the mortgage,

1064
00:52:46,659 --> 00:52:49,249
right? I needed to have cash flow and I
had assets,

1065
00:52:49,249 --> 00:52:51,640
but I had no cash flow. So how do you do
that?

1066
00:52:51,640 --> 00:52:53,294
Well, you do what it it what it takes.

1067
00:52:55,362 --> 00:52:57,212
So this ~

1068
00:52:59,488 --> 00:53:02,431
As predictable as I like to think things
are.

1069
00:53:04,706 --> 00:53:06,527
~ because that's how we make plans,

1070
00:53:06,527 --> 00:53:08,597
six month plans. It's how you build
departments,

1071
00:53:08,597 --> 00:53:11,651
it's how you build companies. Most of my
business plans,

1072
00:53:11,651 --> 00:53:13,412
maybe I'm the slower learner than you.

1073
00:53:13,412 --> 00:53:16,074
I think I'm the tortoise. I eventually
beat the hair a lot of times,

1074
00:53:16,074 --> 00:53:17,735
but man, it feels like the race is long.

1075
00:53:17,735 --> 00:53:20,287
A lot of my plans, the way I designed it,

1076
00:53:20,287 --> 00:53:23,759
it just didn't go that way. It's the
adjustments throughout.

1077
00:53:23,759 --> 00:53:25,210
But I heard something this week.

1078
00:53:25,210 --> 00:53:26,941
They left the Federal Reserve,

1079
00:53:26,941 --> 00:53:30,164
they they left or the board, they left
interest rates the same again.

1080
00:53:30,164 --> 00:53:32,575
I think it's like five meetings in a row,

1081
00:53:32,575 --> 00:53:33,575
they've left them the same.

1082
00:53:34,674 --> 00:53:39,135
And there was a one of the institutional
hedge fund investors from years ago,

1083
00:53:39,135 --> 00:53:43,696
I forget which one it was, but he said
none of us can predict interest rates.

1084
00:53:43,696 --> 00:53:45,737
And so

1085
00:53:46,146 --> 00:53:47,146
Not one person.

1086
00:53:47,177 --> 00:53:49,988
Right, and but we're basing our lives in
thinking like,

1087
00:53:49,988 --> 00:53:51,679
Man, if that interest rate comes down,

1088
00:53:51,679 --> 00:53:56,140
man, I'm gonna make this plan because I
think it's re we run our lives this way.

1089
00:53:56,140 --> 00:53:58,551
So what do you do in the founder's office?

1090
00:53:58,551 --> 00:54:00,771
Is there anything that you do that yes,

1091
00:54:00,771 --> 00:54:02,102
we can have prediction models,

1092
00:54:02,102 --> 00:54:03,732
but what should we be doing?

1093
00:54:05,742 --> 00:54:10,784
Well we're t we're talking about this
often in my office is always just

1094
00:54:10,784 --> 00:54:13,155
for me as well. So I'm a very hard person
to take care of.

1095
00:54:13,155 --> 00:54:15,814
I have a team that takes care of me to
make sure everything where I'm going,

1096
00:54:15,814 --> 00:54:18,265
you know, advanced teams, things that go
on is you know,

1097
00:54:18,265 --> 00:54:19,628
just a weird ass life that I live.

1098
00:54:19,628 --> 00:54:25,291
And it's always you gotta think of
contingencies because nothing works out.

1099
00:54:25,291 --> 00:54:27,042
And it's not it's not this, you know,

1100
00:54:27,042 --> 00:54:29,693
gosh, it's you know, that's it it just.

1101
00:54:29,718 --> 00:54:30,886
It's not working against us.

1102
00:54:32,492 --> 00:54:34,023
It's just whatever it is, right?

1103
00:54:34,023 --> 00:54:35,444
So you don't control these things.

1104
00:54:35,444 --> 00:54:36,494
So it's outside of your control.

1105
00:54:36,494 --> 00:54:38,096
And we actually don't control anything.

1106
00:54:38,096 --> 00:54:39,287
We don't control our own bodies.

1107
00:54:39,287 --> 00:54:41,529
We don't control our minds or emotions or
anything else.

1108
00:54:41,529 --> 00:54:43,871
So you kind of go with it. You have your
good days,

1109
00:54:43,871 --> 00:54:48,634
your bad days, but it it is that looking
of how do we pivot?

1110
00:54:48,634 --> 00:54:50,696
And that's maybe an overused word now,

1111
00:54:50,696 --> 00:54:54,599
but how do we pivot and how do we look for
the opportunities within there?

1112
00:54:54,599 --> 00:54:56,951
So it was very interesting with with,

1113
00:54:56,951 --> 00:54:58,412
you know, this is our our chairs.

1114
00:54:58,742 --> 00:55:02,864
first now vote and they we had a split
vote on should we raise rates

1115
00:55:03,265 --> 00:55:06,836
or should we hold them at. And then what
you got with the economy's growing

1116
00:55:06,836 --> 00:55:09,588
at that came out today. So they did that
yesterday and then they

1117
00:55:09,588 --> 00:55:11,389
the numbers come out today and what did
the numbers say?

1118
00:55:11,389 --> 00:55:13,571
They said the the economy's slowing.

1119
00:55:13,571 --> 00:55:17,503
So did they get that right? 'Cause you
certainly don't want to raise rates when

1120
00:55:17,503 --> 00:55:19,574
the economy's slowing, you know,

1121
00:55:19,574 --> 00:55:23,186
so it feels like inflation and for the
general population you're like it's

1122
00:55:23,186 --> 00:55:25,337
six dollar gas. It certainly is the
inflation.

1123
00:55:25,337 --> 00:55:26,337
Yes.

1124
00:55:26,872 --> 00:55:28,153
But that's a war that's going on.

1125
00:55:28,153 --> 00:55:30,665
That's not inflation. That's not supply
and demand causing that.

1126
00:55:30,665 --> 00:55:37,469
So for founders, the number one thing is
never think that what you've

1127
00:55:37,469 --> 00:55:40,371
got going and is working now goes forever.

1128
00:55:40,371 --> 00:55:45,115
Nothing does. It changes. If you've got a
cash cow business,

1129
00:55:45,115 --> 00:55:48,477
something can change immediately in the
regulations and no longer you do.

1130
00:55:48,477 --> 00:55:50,579
So don't build your lifestyle around that.

1131
00:55:50,579 --> 00:55:52,630
Build other, you know, in other income
streams.

1132
00:55:52,630 --> 00:55:55,242
Look at it. You know, be focused about.

1133
00:55:55,552 --> 00:56:00,276
And also mostly be resilient. And you can
build resiliency.

1134
00:56:00,276 --> 00:56:03,289
So we do things like my crazy wife,

1135
00:56:03,289 --> 00:56:04,740
she's a retired lieutenant colonel,

1136
00:56:04,740 --> 00:56:08,323
and you know, Iron Man triathlete,

1137
00:56:08,323 --> 00:56:09,594
and I was an endurance athlete.

1138
00:56:09,594 --> 00:56:14,758
And she makes us do three or four things a
year that are absolute endurance.

1139
00:56:14,758 --> 00:56:17,201
And I always look at them going into them,

1140
00:56:17,201 --> 00:56:19,052
yes, I can think that they're fitness or
whatever,

1141
00:56:19,052 --> 00:56:22,645
but it's usually me to practice telling my
mind to shut up.

1142
00:56:22,645 --> 00:56:23,645
No.

1143
00:56:23,692 --> 00:56:25,633
My body can do this. I know it sucks.

1144
00:56:25,633 --> 00:56:27,664
It's uncomfortable. It's what we're gonna
go through,

1145
00:56:27,664 --> 00:56:31,446
but let's get through there. And then I'm
able to equate it back to what it's like

1146
00:56:31,665 --> 00:56:35,438
when a regulator shows up on the door or
the banker says no.

1147
00:56:35,438 --> 00:56:36,489
And now all of a sudden, you know,

1148
00:56:36,489 --> 00:56:37,805
how am I gonna make payroll? And,

1149
00:56:37,805 --> 00:56:39,370
you know, all the various things that go
in there.

1150
00:56:40,430 --> 00:56:43,751
So you talked earlier, and ~ I could talk
to you for hours,

1151
00:56:43,751 --> 00:56:46,563
man. I think I could talk to any subject
you're gonna have insight on,

1152
00:56:46,563 --> 00:56:50,134
which is incredible. It's probably the
reason why you can build something like
this

1153
00:56:50,134 --> 00:56:53,626
founder's office that you can be the
advisor and help other people grow their

1154
00:56:53,626 --> 00:56:59,308
business. But you said early on something
that I ask all my leaders to do,

1155
00:56:59,308 --> 00:57:01,339
and I'm working on training everyone this.

1156
00:57:01,339 --> 00:57:03,260
You mentioned seeing around corners.

1157
00:57:03,260 --> 00:57:06,241
That's kind of what you just talked about
now,

1158
00:57:06,241 --> 00:57:07,482
about right? And so

1159
00:57:08,312 --> 00:57:11,835
Can you speak to what you meant about
seeing around corners?

1160
00:57:11,835 --> 00:57:13,926
Because I think when you said it,

1161
00:57:13,926 --> 00:57:16,048
you said it and I didn't spend time on it.

1162
00:57:16,048 --> 00:57:22,803
But for me personally, if you can hone the
ability to do what you're gonna

1163
00:57:22,803 --> 00:57:27,027
talk about here, there's probably not a
problem that shows up that

1164
00:57:27,027 --> 00:57:28,638
you can't solve pretty quick.

1165
00:57:30,552 --> 00:57:34,555
Some that comes from just experience that
there is really hardly ever,

1166
00:57:34,555 --> 00:57:37,648
again, I give a lot of faith into that
when you use the who not how,

1167
00:57:37,648 --> 00:57:38,735
you may not be able to solve it,

1168
00:57:38,735 --> 00:57:40,110
but there's somebody who can solve it.

1169
00:57:40,110 --> 00:57:43,573
And finding out who that is, so building
your network and saying who

1170
00:57:43,573 --> 00:57:46,095
and being not afraid to be the dumbass in
the room.

1171
00:57:46,095 --> 00:57:48,076
I'm gonna back up for just a second.

1172
00:57:48,076 --> 00:57:51,399
I'm gonna pound on University of Michigan
for those people that are listening there.

1173
00:57:51,399 --> 00:57:54,802
So ~ my wife went to Michigan State.

1174
00:57:54,802 --> 00:57:57,444
They think they're the rival of University
of Michigan.

1175
00:57:57,444 --> 00:58:00,106
University of Michigan does not think
Michigan State is their rival.

1176
00:58:00,534 --> 00:58:02,416
So not dishing on either school,

1177
00:58:02,416 --> 00:58:03,737
I didn't go to either one of right?

1178
00:58:03,737 --> 00:58:06,539
But I'm at it's a New Year's football
game.

1179
00:58:06,539 --> 00:58:12,034
I'm wearing my Harvard sweatshirt and the
gentleman who had been a very loud,

1180
00:58:12,034 --> 00:58:16,877
boisterous young man all day and very
drunk in a freight elevator,

1181
00:58:16,877 --> 00:58:18,570
'cause the regular elevator broke,

1182
00:58:18,570 --> 00:58:21,452
and he stumbles and he looks over at me
and he goes,

1183
00:58:21,452 --> 00:58:25,176
Ugh He's got his University of Michigan ~
sweatshirt on,

1184
00:58:25,176 --> 00:58:27,418
looks over at me and he goes, Harvard,

1185
00:58:27,418 --> 00:58:28,418
huh?

1186
00:58:28,834 --> 00:58:31,516
Did you go there or did you just go there
to get the sweatshirt?

1187
00:58:31,516 --> 00:58:33,377
And he kind of giggles a little bit.

1188
00:58:33,377 --> 00:58:37,920
And I go, Yeah, I went there. ~ and I
taught there for five years.

1189
00:58:37,920 --> 00:58:43,264
And he goes, ~ I'm usually the smartest
one in the room.

1190
00:58:43,264 --> 00:58:45,035
And it we're in a freight elevator,

1191
00:58:45,035 --> 00:58:47,047
right? And the door opens up and I'm like,

1192
00:58:47,047 --> 00:58:49,608
Wow. I said, Maybe you should get in
bigger rooms.

1193
00:58:49,608 --> 00:58:51,990
And I step out of the elevator.

1194
00:58:52,502 --> 00:58:55,224
Because the last thing I want to do is be
the smartest person in the room.

1195
00:58:55,224 --> 00:58:58,007
I want to surround myself with incredibly
brilliant people.

1196
00:58:58,007 --> 00:59:00,389
And it could be somebody that you deem not
that smart.

1197
00:59:00,389 --> 00:59:02,650
They're maybe doing a manual labor job,

1198
00:59:02,650 --> 00:59:04,092
but I don't know how to do that.

1199
00:59:04,092 --> 00:59:05,903
I won't, you know, I need to learn from
them.

1200
00:59:05,903 --> 00:59:07,955
How do we how do you do that? That's super
cool.

1201
00:59:07,955 --> 00:59:12,179
You know, so that that's the way you see
around corners is I think

1202
00:59:12,179 --> 00:59:15,481
by being curious and then being able to
synthesize information.

1203
00:59:15,481 --> 00:59:19,164
But my my youngest daughter has a a
doctorate in

1204
00:59:19,225 --> 00:59:21,046
in industrial organizational psychology.

1205
00:59:21,686 --> 00:59:24,268
And she ~ is back in the family office
now.

1206
00:59:24,268 --> 00:59:25,608
They have to go out, earn their own,

1207
00:59:25,608 --> 00:59:27,209
and then they get to come into the family
office.

1208
00:59:27,209 --> 00:59:29,851
So she was working with unicorns,

1209
00:59:29,851 --> 00:59:33,673
so companies that get billion dollar v
valuations relatively early on.

1210
00:59:33,673 --> 00:59:35,480
And so she's working with those.

1211
00:59:35,480 --> 00:59:38,796
She has an MBA and and a fair amount of
entrepreneurial experience.

1212
00:59:38,796 --> 00:59:43,779
And so, you know, that was great when she
got her education.

1213
00:59:43,779 --> 00:59:46,381
And I said, But honey, you are brilliant,

1214
00:59:46,381 --> 00:59:48,472
way smarter than me. I said

1215
00:59:48,714 --> 00:59:50,095
And you've got all this education.

1216
00:59:50,095 --> 00:59:51,977
What you don't have is experience.

1217
00:59:51,977 --> 00:59:54,780
I said, so what you when you get
experience,

1218
00:59:54,780 --> 00:59:58,965
you are gonna be unstoppable. But the only
way you're gonna get experience

1219
00:59:58,965 --> 01:00:00,026
is to get out there and get bloodied.

1220
01:00:00,026 --> 01:00:02,368
And you're gonna learn it. And so that's
what,

1221
01:00:02,368 --> 01:00:04,821
you know, consultants that go to work for
McKinsey that graduated

1222
01:00:04,821 --> 01:00:06,652
the best schools and have the MBAs,

1223
01:00:06,652 --> 01:00:08,024
~

1224
01:00:08,898 --> 01:00:11,180
They haven't gotten bloody. So they're
reading off the playbook

1225
01:00:11,180 --> 01:00:15,084
of McKinsey type scenario. But they become
better because and they

1226
01:00:15,084 --> 01:00:16,385
do become incredibly valuable.

1227
01:00:16,385 --> 01:00:18,968
I've got a lot of friends from McKinsey
that are incredibly valuable,

1228
01:00:18,968 --> 01:00:20,960
but it's not that first year. It's the

1229
01:00:21,086 --> 01:00:22,644
They're in their but they're in but
they're in their forties,

1230
01:00:22,644 --> 01:00:23,644
fifties and sixties now.

1231
01:00:23,830 --> 01:00:26,092
Yeah. Cause it took experience.

1232
01:00:26,092 --> 01:00:28,124
Yeah. You know what we don't have when
we're in our forties,

1233
01:00:28,124 --> 01:00:32,224
fifties, and sixties? The ability to take
pain anymore like we did when

1234
01:00:32,224 --> 01:00:36,281
we were twenty. So it's inverse scenario.

1235
01:00:36,281 --> 01:00:37,281
But they are saying, you know,

1236
01:00:37,196 --> 01:00:41,176
we're have more companies being founded by
fifty and sixty year olds than we've ever

1237
01:00:41,176 --> 01:00:44,008
had, which is phenomenal because it's
like,

1238
01:00:44,008 --> 01:00:45,570
okay, what's the economy? I'm not ready
retire.

1239
01:00:48,268 --> 01:00:49,974
~ yeah. What what do you think?

1240
01:00:49,974 --> 01:00:51,463
And I'm I probably need to wrap up here.

1241
01:00:51,463 --> 01:00:54,248
We probably need to. What does your you
reference your family office

1242
01:00:54,248 --> 01:00:55,372
a couple of times. What do you guys do?

1243
01:00:57,022 --> 01:01:01,035
~ well, we're a we're a single member
family office.

1244
01:01:01,035 --> 01:01:03,597
So first of all, we we were early to the
family office thing.

1245
01:01:03,597 --> 01:01:04,878
Now everybody's a family office.

1246
01:01:04,878 --> 01:01:07,080
Whatever you get ten million dollars and
you call yourself family office.

1247
01:01:07,080 --> 01:01:09,031
I I don't know what it what it is anymore.

1248
01:01:09,031 --> 01:01:13,494
And most of the family offices are about
taking the wealth,

1249
01:01:13,494 --> 01:01:16,016
getting it to some f wealth advisor,

1250
01:01:16,016 --> 01:01:18,638
and then kind of figuring it out along
that line.

1251
01:01:18,638 --> 01:01:20,319
And you got wealth advisors that are out
there.

1252
01:01:20,319 --> 01:01:23,832
We're actually much less about the wealth
than we are about the family.

1253
01:01:24,032 --> 01:01:28,004
And so it was about the longevity of of
what our ideals and our members

1254
01:01:28,004 --> 01:01:30,226
are of those families, how do we take care
of them?

1255
01:01:30,226 --> 01:01:34,488
Not in a manner that says none of you are
gonna have to work.

1256
01:01:34,488 --> 01:01:37,430
If you're not gonna work, you better be in
a nonprofit type scenario.

1257
01:01:37,430 --> 01:01:40,000
And, you know, so if if somebody's ill,

1258
01:01:40,000 --> 01:01:41,352
how do we take care of that scenario?

1259
01:01:41,352 --> 01:01:43,773
So it came out of about a thought process
of being wealthy,

1260
01:01:43,773 --> 01:01:48,056
not financially wealthy. And so over the
years it has adapted.

1261
01:01:48,056 --> 01:01:50,107
I tell this kind of story about,

1262
01:01:50,107 --> 01:01:51,928
you know, ~ my oldest daughter.

1263
01:01:53,484 --> 01:01:57,748
was we're riding a car and ~ she's got her
little friends there and she's like,

1264
01:01:57,748 --> 01:02:00,009
Dad, what kind of car am I gonna get when
you're when I'm sixteen?

1265
01:02:00,009 --> 01:02:01,281
And it was when the light went on,

1266
01:02:01,281 --> 01:02:04,063
light bulb went on. I Well whatever kind
of car you could you can buy.

1267
01:02:04,063 --> 01:02:07,356
And she goes, What?

1268
01:02:07,356 --> 01:02:11,099
And all the friends were getting beamers
and Mercedes and whatever and I said,

1269
01:02:11,099 --> 01:02:12,380
Well yeah and she goes, But Dad,

1270
01:02:12,380 --> 01:02:14,282
we're rich. And I'm like, No, no,

1271
01:02:14,282 --> 01:02:16,253
no, no, sweetie, I'm rich. You're poor.

1272
01:02:17,642 --> 01:02:19,803
And she hates when I tell that story still
to this day.

1273
01:02:19,803 --> 01:02:21,254
She's like, No, Dad, that's not exactly
right.

1274
01:02:21,254 --> 01:02:22,905
I'm Yeah, it's pretty exact exactly right.

1275
01:02:22,905 --> 01:02:25,266
But what it led to is, you know,

1276
01:02:25,266 --> 01:02:30,109
this is a kid who today still has a
business with her mom where they

1277
01:02:30,109 --> 01:02:34,652
go to the thrift shops, they buy the
dollar buckets of stuff,

1278
01:02:34,652 --> 01:02:38,134
they find the things that are there and
they resell them on Poshmark

1279
01:02:38,134 --> 01:02:41,216
or whatever it is because it's a business
and she just finds it's a joy

1280
01:02:41,276 --> 01:02:43,377
and it's one more avenue of income for
her.

1281
01:02:43,377 --> 01:02:44,948
She'll

1282
01:02:45,272 --> 01:02:46,763
Plenty wealthy on it, but she loves this,

1283
01:02:46,763 --> 01:02:48,925
you know, she loves doing that kind of
stuff.

1284
01:02:48,925 --> 01:02:51,887
So, you know, 15 different business ideas
on there.

1285
01:02:51,887 --> 01:02:56,841
And I would never worry in our family
office about any of my family,

1286
01:02:56,841 --> 01:03:00,935
my kids, that they're going to need
income.

1287
01:03:00,935 --> 01:03:03,417
But it's sharing the wealth of the family.

1288
01:03:03,417 --> 01:03:05,469
My grandfather discovered one of the
largest mines.

1289
01:03:05,469 --> 01:03:08,902
He didn't know, he didn't he didn't know
he was even going to be married until

1290
01:03:08,902 --> 01:03:12,104
he was in his fifties. So he didn't do any
estate planning.

1291
01:03:12,104 --> 01:03:14,446
When he died, the mine went to his
partners.

1292
01:03:15,062 --> 01:03:17,865
All of a sudden my mom is poor from being
rich.

1293
01:03:17,865 --> 01:03:20,869
I'm like, that was an interesting story
for me to hear and learn.

1294
01:03:20,869 --> 01:03:23,617
~ I didn't have parents. I was abandoned
when I was,

1295
01:03:23,617 --> 01:03:26,375
you know, a pretty young kid. And so my
older sister raised me.

1296
01:03:26,375 --> 01:03:28,908
And by twelve, I started a company,

1297
01:03:28,908 --> 01:03:31,440
and by sixteen, I was making more than
teachers.

1298
01:03:31,440 --> 01:03:34,585
So, you know, those are the skills that I
want to be able to teach

1299
01:03:34,585 --> 01:03:35,585
in the family office.

1300
01:03:35,970 --> 01:03:39,513
Hmm. If you took one thing away from your
wife,

1301
01:03:39,513 --> 01:03:41,474
could have been a degree from Harvard,

1302
01:03:41,474 --> 01:03:43,096
could have been your jurisdoctorate.

1303
01:03:43,096 --> 01:03:46,879
If you took it could have been an
experience working underneath with
someone,

1304
01:03:46,879 --> 01:03:47,940
it could have been a marriage.

1305
01:03:47,940 --> 01:03:53,364
If you took one thing away, what would the
thing have been that would have most

1306
01:03:53,384 --> 01:03:55,596
negatively impacted what you've achieved
thus far?

1307
01:04:01,816 --> 01:04:04,987
Meaning if I could change something and
not experience that,

1308
01:04:04,987 --> 01:04:06,221
either negative or positive

1309
01:04:06,358 --> 01:04:07,358
I

1310
01:04:06,488 --> 01:04:08,439
asked it differently. Usually people say,

1311
01:04:08,439 --> 01:04:10,362
What's the thing that's been most
impactful?

1312
01:04:10,362 --> 01:04:14,796
Right. I changed that to say, What's the
thing if I took it away from you?

1313
01:04:15,052 --> 01:04:19,225
Would change my life dramatically in a
negative way.

1314
01:04:17,066 --> 01:04:18,068
In a negative way.

1315
01:04:19,225 --> 01:04:20,535
For

1316
01:04:20,535 --> 01:04:26,449
me, I think growing up poor, but around
extremely wealthy people,

1317
01:04:26,449 --> 01:04:30,692
that the best somebody asked me this
yesterday.

1318
01:04:30,692 --> 01:04:33,374
I was getting interviewed for ~ a thing
called Nifty,

1319
01:04:33,374 --> 01:04:35,565
which is where they teach kids and and
juniors,

1320
01:04:35,565 --> 01:04:38,837
high juniors in high school and and in in
early college how to be entrepreneurs.

1321
01:04:38,837 --> 01:04:40,418
And I said, you know.

1322
01:04:40,982 --> 01:04:42,623
It wasn't just that I grew up poor.

1323
01:04:42,623 --> 01:04:44,024
That's the because lots of people grow up
poor,

1324
01:04:44,024 --> 01:04:48,006
right? So that's not it. But I was around
a lot of founders and it

1325
01:04:48,006 --> 01:04:53,479
was through the the kindness of strangers
and that benevolence that that thing that

1326
01:04:53,479 --> 01:04:54,930
they took and they grabbed me and they
said,

1327
01:04:54,930 --> 01:04:58,692
You've got more skill. You've they would
see more for me than I saw for myself

1328
01:04:58,692 --> 01:05:02,183
as a person. And these are people that
have names on buildings,

1329
01:05:02,183 --> 01:05:05,145
I mean big buildings like like Hera's
casino and type things,

1330
01:05:05,145 --> 01:05:08,827
right? So I'm growing up in this area
where it's and their kids turned

1331
01:05:08,827 --> 01:05:10,218
out John Hera.

1332
01:05:10,840 --> 01:05:14,041
died couple years ago and you know went
through three hundred

1333
01:05:14,041 --> 01:05:17,752
and fifty million dollars or whatever in
you know and had everything

1334
01:05:17,752 --> 01:05:21,673
you could possibly think of. But I knew
his dad and then the people that were
around

1335
01:05:21,673 --> 01:05:23,454
him and all the other founders that were
around there.

1336
01:05:23,454 --> 01:05:29,176
That I would not have traded being cold in
a breezeway,

1337
01:05:29,176 --> 01:05:33,437
not having enough money, not having that
opportunity for the world.

1338
01:05:33,437 --> 01:05:35,798
I mean that that would have changed who I
am.

1339
01:05:38,360 --> 01:05:42,135
So then how do you reproduce? How have you
tried to reproduce that environment

1340
01:05:42,996 --> 01:05:44,448
for your kids as you raised them up?

1341
01:05:45,272 --> 01:05:48,825
So my kids from a very early age,

1342
01:05:48,825 --> 01:05:50,904
no, you know, you don't get an allowance,

1343
01:05:50,904 --> 01:05:52,328
you don't get paid for grades.

1344
01:05:52,328 --> 01:05:55,831
You can earn money working in the company,

1345
01:05:55,831 --> 01:05:59,464
but you got to do a better job than the
person we'd hire,

1346
01:05:59,464 --> 01:06:02,176
and you get paid for whatever that person
would be able to do.

1347
01:06:02,176 --> 01:06:06,530
So, you know, my my little twelve year old
daughter's answering the phones

1348
01:06:06,530 --> 01:06:08,292
and she's got a switchboard and different
things at the time.

1349
01:06:08,292 --> 01:06:10,353
We had a large company that she was
working at because we had lots

1350
01:06:10,353 --> 01:06:13,506
of different companies they could work at
and little ones shredding papers.

1351
01:06:14,220 --> 01:06:16,772
And then when I'd hire people around the
house and we had,

1352
01:06:16,772 --> 01:06:19,174
you know, a team of people doing ~ you
know,

1353
01:06:19,174 --> 01:06:20,315
all the estate and every stuff,

1354
01:06:20,315 --> 01:06:23,158
and it's like you can do any one of those
jobs and you get paid that.

1355
01:06:23,158 --> 01:06:25,580
And then the kids will joke about this.

1356
01:06:25,580 --> 01:06:27,282
They say, Well, Dad, you'd come out and
you'd say,

1357
01:06:27,282 --> 01:06:28,923
Hey, I got an opportunity for you.

1358
01:06:28,923 --> 01:06:32,937
Would you like to? And they always said
the answer to that is,

1359
01:06:32,937 --> 01:06:34,669
and they told their little brother who
came on,

1360
01:06:34,669 --> 01:06:37,731
you know, when he talked about his second
marriage and and he's now eighteen.

1361
01:06:37,731 --> 01:06:39,042
But when he came on, they said,

1362
01:06:39,042 --> 01:06:40,864
And my nickname with him is Skier Tom.

1363
01:06:41,302 --> 01:06:44,305
So ~ so that that's my nickname with him.

1364
01:06:44,305 --> 01:06:48,345
And they said, if Skier Tom ever asks you
if you would like an opportunity,

1365
01:06:48,345 --> 01:06:51,902
the answer is yes, because you're gonna
get paid if you do the opportunity that

1366
01:06:51,902 --> 01:06:53,913
he gave you. But if you say no,

1367
01:06:53,913 --> 01:06:56,835
you're going to do it, you're just not
gonna get paid.

1368
01:06:56,835 --> 01:07:00,969
So that's somewhat what it was.

1369
01:07:00,969 --> 01:07:04,952
It was letting them struggle and
understand what the struggle was.

1370
01:07:04,952 --> 01:07:08,806
And then also, ~ one of the things and
they didn't like it,

1371
01:07:08,806 --> 01:07:09,806
you know.

1372
01:07:09,496 --> 01:07:11,077
probably psychologists would say it's
horrible,

1373
01:07:11,077 --> 01:07:15,309
but I managed by ~ by other people's
experiences.

1374
01:07:15,309 --> 01:07:17,891
So we talked OPE all the time.

1375
01:07:17,891 --> 01:07:23,574
So one kid screwed up, all four were sat
down and we talked about it.

1376
01:07:23,574 --> 01:07:27,606
And, you know, it's like, you don't do
that in in in management theory.

1377
01:07:27,606 --> 01:07:28,907
Well, you're right, because these are
employees,

1378
01:07:28,907 --> 01:07:32,152
but these are my kids. And so I don't want
the six year old doing what

1379
01:07:32,152 --> 01:07:34,099
the twelve year old dumbass just did.

1380
01:07:34,099 --> 01:07:37,611
You know, I want them to understand that
that was an activity that you don't want

1381
01:07:37,611 --> 01:07:38,612
to do and here's why.

1382
01:07:39,564 --> 01:07:42,949
And so that those were things that I think
did and they all are you know,

1383
01:07:42,949 --> 01:07:44,401
I'm very thrilled with my kids,

1384
01:07:44,401 --> 01:07:46,904
their their spouses that they have,

1385
01:07:46,904 --> 01:07:50,029
the grandkids. It's it's probably the
biggest joy.

1386
01:07:50,029 --> 01:07:54,595
And from a kid who had just an absolute no
idea what that was like,

1387
01:07:54,595 --> 01:07:56,628
~ it's it's fantastic.

1388
01:07:57,550 --> 01:07:59,211
Awesome. All right. So to wrap this up,

1389
01:07:59,211 --> 01:08:02,794
~ all the success you've had,

1390
01:08:02,794 --> 01:08:05,506
you're getting ready to go have some fun
and ski in the mountains and

1391
01:08:05,506 --> 01:08:08,518
the hills of Chile. And you go to the
Alps,

1392
01:08:08,518 --> 01:08:11,740
you have, you're building a you already
have a nonprofit now,

1393
01:08:11,740 --> 01:08:13,521
I believe, or a young training center.

1394
01:08:13,521 --> 01:08:14,732
Yep. So so local.

1395
01:08:14,904 --> 01:08:16,283
So whole mountain. We I have a mountain.

1396
01:08:16,283 --> 01:08:17,493
I have a ski mountain.

1397
01:08:17,698 --> 01:08:20,466
Yeah. Mount Mountain Tom. ~

1398
01:08:20,590 --> 01:08:22,504
Skier Tom, Skier Tom is the is the name.

1399
01:08:22,504 --> 01:08:23,532
Yeah, there you go. I like it.

1400
01:08:23,532 --> 01:08:24,532
All right.

1401
01:08:23,787 --> 01:08:27,071
Good. Yeah. ~ of all of that

1402
01:08:29,729 --> 01:08:30,729
When you get up in the morning,

1403
01:08:30,522 --> 01:08:31,522
what's still getting you going?

1404
01:08:31,270 --> 01:08:32,327
'Cause you don't have to do this anymore.

1405
01:08:34,316 --> 01:08:35,456
My wife would sure like to know.

1406
01:08:35,456 --> 01:08:38,216
She's like, why are you up at four thirty
in the morning?

1407
01:08:38,216 --> 01:08:41,287
Can you just sleep in? And you know,

1408
01:08:41,287 --> 01:08:43,868
there is something about innate drive.

1409
01:08:43,868 --> 01:08:46,879
I'm curious. I am curious about
everything.

1410
01:08:46,879 --> 01:08:49,649
~ and it doesn't matter. If I don't know
how to do something,

1411
01:08:49,649 --> 01:08:51,319
I want to learn how boy, that's really
cool.

1412
01:08:51,319 --> 01:08:55,881
Let's go do do that. And so we have I had
coffee with a friend the other

1413
01:08:55,881 --> 01:08:59,051
day and he's talking about he just started
a constitutional center

1414
01:08:59,252 --> 01:09:01,792
at the university, and he's talking about
starting a law school.

1415
01:09:01,792 --> 01:09:03,122
And I'm like, Yeah, that'd be really
interesting.

1416
01:09:03,122 --> 01:09:04,122
Okay, so I could

1417
01:09:04,024 --> 01:09:06,326
Do that. And my wife is like, when are you
going to do that?

1418
01:09:06,326 --> 01:09:08,537
Where does this fit in this scenario?

1419
01:09:08,537 --> 01:09:13,182
So I don't, you know, I feel so incredibly
blessed about the life I do have,

1420
01:09:13,182 --> 01:09:15,984
~ that I probably pack too many things in,

1421
01:09:15,984 --> 01:09:22,140
but I'm also like, I'd rather I want to
die withered up and worn out than like

1422
01:09:22,140 --> 01:09:24,011
I'm preserved and I looked great.

1423
01:09:24,011 --> 01:09:25,554
That's not that's not what I'm here for.

1424
01:09:25,554 --> 01:09:27,816
I want a lot of experiences. Yeah.

1425
01:09:27,816 --> 01:09:30,158
And I want to I want to help a tremendous

1426
01:09:30,700 --> 01:09:34,090
tremendous amount of people because I've
been gifted so much by so many.

1427
01:09:35,341 --> 01:09:38,214
Are you in place now where you can still
drive significant revenue

1428
01:09:38,214 --> 01:09:40,536
for the things you've built while helping
others build too?

1429
01:09:41,934 --> 01:09:48,068
~ I still drive significant like generally
our clients pay anywhere from twenty five

1430
01:09:48,068 --> 01:09:50,819
thousand to to two million a month to work
with us.

1431
01:09:50,819 --> 01:09:57,274
So ~ and so yes, so that and so that
drives still a significant amount of
level.

1432
01:09:57,274 --> 01:09:58,865
Now I'm generally the trim tab in there,

1433
01:09:58,865 --> 01:10:01,307
so I'm not doing an awful lot in that
scenario.

1434
01:10:01,307 --> 01:10:05,890
but that is, you know, it it gets in there
and my daughter calls me

1435
01:10:05,890 --> 01:10:09,312
the New York fixer, you know, fixer
attorney consigliere.

1436
01:10:09,312 --> 01:10:11,574
I walk in, I'm like, that's gotta get
done.

1437
01:10:12,120 --> 01:10:15,232
So yeah, I still drive a fair amount of
revenue at different times.

1438
01:10:15,232 --> 01:10:17,534
And a lot of it is investment income,

1439
01:10:17,534 --> 01:10:18,805
you know, different things that we have,

1440
01:10:18,805 --> 01:10:21,486
and then driving those businesses to have
bigger,

1441
01:10:21,486 --> 01:10:24,578
better exits. Most founders today,

1442
01:10:24,578 --> 01:10:31,433
especially in this IP world, they miss all
of the things that they create as ideas.

1443
01:10:31,433 --> 01:10:33,464
You've got the light bulb and the brain
behind your head.

1444
01:10:33,464 --> 01:10:39,418
And so that's one of our biggest spaces is
how do you transfer your ideas

1445
01:10:39,418 --> 01:10:41,350
to something that is valuable?

1446
01:10:41,350 --> 01:10:42,350
Because

1447
01:10:41,952 --> 01:10:44,183
Wall Street is intangible value,

1448
01:10:44,183 --> 01:10:47,155
right? Almost all of it. It's not the
bricks and mortar.

1449
01:10:47,155 --> 01:10:50,707
It's not the revenue streams. It's the
intangible value that those companies have

1450
01:10:50,907 --> 01:10:54,429
and the licensing of revenue. So most
every founder is one of the things

1451
01:10:54,429 --> 01:10:57,421
we work with them on in their estate
planning is how to separate

1452
01:10:57,421 --> 01:11:03,294
out their ideas from their company and
then license those ideas throughout their

1453
01:11:03,294 --> 01:11:07,957
company. And then that becomes a value
model for them that is an actual basis
that

1454
01:11:07,957 --> 01:11:10,388
they can grow upon. And it it separates it
out.

1455
01:11:11,128 --> 01:11:14,590
Hmm. That sounds like 2026 aligned with
AI.

1456
01:11:14,590 --> 01:11:17,351
That seems good enough. Doesn't

1457
01:11:16,928 --> 01:11:17,928
Good.

1458
01:11:17,351 --> 01:11:18,952
seem like you're gonna be outpaced with
that idea.

1459
01:11:18,952 --> 01:11:22,143
That's awesome. ~ hey, so as we wrap up
here,

1460
01:11:22,143 --> 01:11:23,964
well, what's the one place if somebody
said,

1461
01:11:23,964 --> 01:11:26,146
I don't I I I'm probably bad at this.

1462
01:11:26,146 --> 01:11:27,666
I don't even carry business cards anymore.

1463
01:11:27,666 --> 01:11:29,807
I don't, I probably should, I don't.

1464
01:11:29,807 --> 01:11:33,889
~ but if someone, if you meet and have
coffee and you have a good five

1465
01:11:33,889 --> 01:11:35,030
or ten minute conversation

1466
01:11:35,372 --> 01:11:37,184
What do you want to weave that person
with?

1467
01:11:37,184 --> 01:11:39,656
You're at a Starbucks or your favorite
coffee and you're like,

1468
01:11:39,656 --> 01:11:42,028
that was intriguing. That was a curious
conversation.

1469
01:11:42,028 --> 01:11:44,370
You hadn't known them before. What do you
want to weave them with?

1470
01:11:48,110 --> 01:11:54,443
I think the win for me would be let's
let's continue this

1471
01:11:54,443 --> 01:11:56,203
conversation. This was incredible.

1472
01:11:56,203 --> 01:11:59,765
I mean, it's incredibly valuable how many
people you meet every day,

1473
01:11:59,765 --> 01:12:01,353
or at least, you know, I seem to anyway.

1474
01:12:01,353 --> 01:12:02,927
And it's like, and it doesn't matter where
you are.

1475
01:12:02,927 --> 01:12:06,158
It's like if you're interested in what
they're doing,

1476
01:12:06,158 --> 01:12:08,920
there's more to that story. Right.

1477
01:12:08,920 --> 01:12:10,400
And and if they're sixty years old,

1478
01:12:10,400 --> 01:12:14,022
there's a lot to that story. There's a lot
of lifetimes in sixty years.

1479
01:12:14,614 --> 01:12:16,575
Right. So I you just look back at that and
you're like,

1480
01:12:16,575 --> 01:12:17,777
tell me about that. How the that?

1481
01:12:17,777 --> 01:12:21,390
Because then you can put that into your
database to help the next person that's

1482
01:12:21,390 --> 01:12:25,794
going through that struggle. And so I th I
I think that that's what what probably

1483
01:12:25,794 --> 01:12:29,327
is like, you know, let's ride a chairlift
together and let's talk about that.

1484
01:12:29,327 --> 01:12:31,839
Or what are you what are you working on?

1485
01:12:31,839 --> 01:12:33,511
One of the primary things, Mark,

1486
01:12:33,511 --> 01:12:35,712
I talk about what in raising capital.

1487
01:12:35,712 --> 01:12:41,027
Most founders talk about what problem or
most most people in the United States talk

1488
01:12:41,027 --> 01:12:42,027
about what they do.

1489
01:12:42,688 --> 01:12:45,819
And every founder should talk about what
problem they solve.

1490
01:12:45,819 --> 01:12:48,170
Right. And the problem that they solve,

1491
01:12:48,170 --> 01:12:53,991
generally people can't articulate that
because they're so focused on they know
it,

1492
01:12:53,991 --> 01:12:56,732
it's what drives them, but they didn't
they can't articulate.

1493
01:12:56,732 --> 01:12:59,673
They're talking about how they do what
solves that problem instead

1494
01:12:59,673 --> 01:13:00,863
of what the problem actually is.

1495
01:13:00,863 --> 01:13:06,345
And so the loneliness, the isolation of
that founder is what we solve with

1496
01:13:06,345 --> 01:13:09,926
our founder's office. And it's integrated
and it changes throughout

1497
01:13:09,926 --> 01:13:11,596
the life cycle of the founder.

1498
01:13:12,066 --> 01:13:15,577
The founder that exits it three hundred
million dollars has

1499
01:13:15,577 --> 01:13:17,368
a different isolation paradox,

1500
01:13:17,368 --> 01:13:21,169
but they still have it if they have not
planned on how not to have that,

1501
01:13:21,169 --> 01:13:26,531
then the one who's got massive amounts of
debt and their f relationship

1502
01:13:26,531 --> 01:13:29,392
is falling apart right now, their primary
relationship,

1503
01:13:29,392 --> 01:13:31,833
their bankers calling them, the kids don't
like I mean,

1504
01:13:31,833 --> 01:13:34,234
but both are in that isolation paradox.

1505
01:13:35,512 --> 01:13:37,825
So everybody listening today, if they're
intrigued,

1506
01:13:37,825 --> 01:13:40,859
how do they continue the conversation with
Dr.

1507
01:13:40,859 --> 01:13:41,859
Tom?

1508
01:13:42,200 --> 01:13:43,621
So you can always find me at LinkedIn,

1509
01:13:43,621 --> 01:13:47,074
Thomas J. Powell. ~ you know, I was early
early guide to most of these things.

1510
01:13:47,074 --> 01:13:48,985
So Thomas J. Powell works in most places,

1511
01:13:48,985 --> 01:13:50,683
including when I went up against the SEC.

1512
01:13:50,683 --> 01:13:52,858
So you can check that out, find that place
out there.

1513
01:13:52,858 --> 01:13:55,480
~ there's lots of Thomas J. Powell's,

1514
01:13:55,480 --> 01:13:59,402
by the way. So, you know, so it but that
that is generally my moniker.

1515
01:13:59,402 --> 01:14:01,904
You'll see it out there. ~ the other way
is the founder's office.

1516
01:14:01,904 --> 01:14:04,946
so go to foundersoffice.com and you'll see
that in there.

1517
01:14:04,946 --> 01:14:06,598
We've got a number of different things.

1518
01:14:06,598 --> 01:14:09,650
So if you're in the capital raising or you
think you don't have a capital alignment,

1519
01:14:09,974 --> 01:14:11,505
You've got tools that you can use.

1520
01:14:11,505 --> 01:14:15,027
They're free. You put your your pitch in
there for what you're raising capital,

1521
01:14:15,027 --> 01:14:18,018
give you feedback back based off our
twenty seven points that we do.

1522
01:14:18,018 --> 01:14:19,439
We don't have anything we're selling you.

1523
01:14:19,439 --> 01:14:21,840
If people want to have us and hire us for
coaching,

1524
01:14:21,840 --> 01:14:25,422
we don't put that out there. They they
actually have to be referred to us.

1525
01:14:25,422 --> 01:14:26,973
So that's a you know something in there.

1526
01:14:26,973 --> 01:14:29,244
And we don't coach. We advise and it's you
know,

1527
01:14:29,244 --> 01:14:32,726
we come in there and it's it's a it's a
much more bespoke scenario.

1528
01:14:34,498 --> 01:14:36,765
I was gonna wrap up, but I heard something
that was important.

1529
01:14:36,765 --> 01:14:39,524
~ why do you only work by referral?

1530
01:14:39,524 --> 01:14:40,618
What is it about a referral?

1531
01:14:42,872 --> 01:14:46,914
Well, it used to be that when we were
truly just venture capitalists

1532
01:14:46,914 --> 01:14:50,746
and pri private equity, it was part of our
underwriting scenario so that

1533
01:14:50,746 --> 01:14:53,588
we didn't have websites out there that you
could find.

1534
01:14:53,588 --> 01:14:59,291
And so in the underwriting, the the who of
the founder was oftentimes

1535
01:14:59,291 --> 01:15:03,824
who they were surrounded by. And so that
was one of our underwriting it's like,

1536
01:15:03,824 --> 01:15:07,106
~ Joe, Joe referred man, they wouldn't
refer him to us if they didn't think they

1537
01:15:07,106 --> 01:15:10,317
were a good person. So we'd go ask them
and we'd and that's so we just found that

1538
01:15:10,317 --> 01:15:11,338
that's a great way to do it.

1539
01:15:11,916 --> 01:15:13,296
And so we were off the radar. I mean,

1540
01:15:13,296 --> 01:15:16,027
as for most parts, I you wouldn't have
found me doing these things except to

1541
01:15:16,027 --> 01:15:19,088
be as a professor. ~ those would be the
conversations I'd have.

1542
01:15:19,088 --> 01:15:22,359
~ so it's just that way.

1543
01:15:22,359 --> 01:15:24,210
Now I found that I'm a horrible,

1544
01:15:24,210 --> 01:15:26,190
horrible, horrible pitch person.

1545
01:15:26,190 --> 01:15:29,571
So my staff will be like, there was 15
different sales things in there.

1546
01:15:29,571 --> 01:15:30,762
It's like, I used to teach sales,

1547
01:15:30,762 --> 01:15:32,672
you know, 35 years ago, but man,

1548
01:15:32,672 --> 01:15:36,013
I suck at this. So it's just not something
I do well,

1549
01:15:36,013 --> 01:15:37,744
and it's just something that just isn't so
it's like,

1550
01:15:37,744 --> 01:15:38,744
okay.

1551
01:15:38,264 --> 01:15:39,304
People come to us, they've got,

1552
01:15:39,304 --> 01:15:42,446
I've got a problem to solve. They're
usually referred by their accountants

1553
01:15:42,446 --> 01:15:44,857
or their attorneys or another founder.

1554
01:15:44,857 --> 01:15:49,339
and a lot of times it's at almost always
at an event.

1555
01:15:49,339 --> 01:15:53,660
So they've got something they got a letter
from a regulator.

1556
01:15:53,660 --> 01:15:56,191
They got a they're going through a
divorce,

1557
01:15:56,191 --> 01:15:57,662
they need to figure out how to do that.

1558
01:15:57,662 --> 01:16:00,628
Or they've got a you know, a recent one
was a guy,

1559
01:16:00,628 --> 01:16:03,645
a friend actually, got an offer for ten
million dollars.

1560
01:16:03,645 --> 01:16:07,066
He's in his late sixties, more money than
he ever th thought he'd get.

1561
01:16:07,466 --> 01:16:09,347
on his business. He's like, I didn't think
it was worth anything.

1562
01:16:09,347 --> 01:16:13,050
I sat down with him, I go through and I
sorry to t take a second on this,

1563
01:16:13,050 --> 01:16:14,591
but go through the numbers with him.

1564
01:16:14,591 --> 01:16:18,073
And I'm like, this is going to be a bad
offer for you for all sorts of reasons.

1565
01:16:18,073 --> 01:16:21,415
I said, for one, you take two million
dollars a year off your company.

1566
01:16:21,415 --> 01:16:23,031
I said, you won't last very long.

1567
01:16:23,031 --> 01:16:24,988
And he's like, no, I take four hundred
thousand.

1568
01:16:24,988 --> 01:16:26,159
That's my salary. I did this and,

1569
01:16:26,159 --> 01:16:27,159
you know, I said, No, you don't.

1570
01:16:27,139 --> 01:16:29,091
I said, look at all the your trips here
and everything else.

1571
01:16:29,091 --> 01:16:30,421
That's all your two million dollars.

1572
01:16:30,421 --> 01:16:31,421
He's like,

1573
01:16:32,022 --> 01:16:33,353
And I said, so the other thing is,

1574
01:16:33,353 --> 01:16:35,455
I said, you have nothing to do after
you're done,

1575
01:16:35,455 --> 01:16:38,027
because you haven't built anything else
with your life really to go do.

1576
01:16:38,027 --> 01:16:41,300
I said, another part is the way that
you've capitalized your company,

1577
01:16:41,300 --> 01:16:43,732
you're going to pay massive taxes on that
10 million.

1578
01:16:43,732 --> 01:16:46,334
I said, let's work on a handful of things,

1579
01:16:46,334 --> 01:16:51,538
which we did. And he got a 45 million
dollar offer he closed about a year almost

1580
01:16:51,538 --> 01:16:58,103
a year ago now. And ~ he had to pay almost
no taxes on that ~ relative to that.

1581
01:16:58,103 --> 01:17:01,056
And in that

1582
01:17:01,260 --> 01:17:04,642
He'd had up a whole setup of new
entrepreneurial ventures that are in

1583
01:17:04,642 --> 01:17:06,313
the non profit sector with that.

1584
01:17:06,313 --> 01:17:10,145
And he kept his building that now a credit
tenant tenant of it.

1585
01:17:10,145 --> 01:17:12,077
Yeah. They lease back. And they're a
credit tenant.

1586
01:17:12,077 --> 01:17:16,649
So the building actually jumped up in
value by another million dollars because

1587
01:17:16,649 --> 01:17:19,041
a better tenant than himself was in there.

1588
01:17:19,041 --> 01:17:20,822
So that's the kind of stuff that we love
to do.

1589
01:17:21,474 --> 01:17:27,059
Yeah. ~ so since you helped him get an
increase of thirty five million,

1590
01:17:27,059 --> 01:17:30,231
but also other what type of fee did mister
Mr.

1591
01:17:30,231 --> 01:17:31,231
Dr. Tom get?

1592
01:17:33,626 --> 01:17:35,973
Well, generally we take a part of the
upside.

1593
01:17:35,973 --> 01:17:38,322
Yeah. So we still play the upside side.

1594
01:17:38,188 --> 01:17:39,188
He's

1595
01:17:38,479 --> 01:17:42,007
so nice. I knew it. I just asked the
questions like you gotta answer the damn
thing.

1596
01:17:42,007 --> 01:17:44,874
Sorry for the polygraph, but it is what it
is.

1597
01:17:43,746 --> 01:17:44,746
Yeah.

1598
01:17:44,874 --> 01:17:46,758
Part of the upside. Hey, thanks for
joining us.

1599
01:17:46,758 --> 01:17:48,322
~ great conversation.

1600
01:17:48,610 --> 01:17:50,005
Yeah, Mark, thank you. Thanks for having
me.

1601
01:17:50,571 --> 01:17:51,923
Enjoy the skiing.

1602
01:17:52,620 --> 01:17:53,792
You got it. Thank you. All right.

1603
01:17:53,997 --> 01:17:54,997
All right, man.