8つのビリオンダラー企業を築いた——ブラッド・ジェイコブズ

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

He meant a lot. So Mr. Jess, I never called him litig. Mr. Jess, he was, you know, significantly older than me and much more accomplished than me, so I showed him respect, but call him Mr. Jess.

ran the largest commodity trading firm in the world for brothers. It was you got to get the long-term trend right. You can get a lot of stuff right.

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

Yeah. So in the book I talked about a specific episode when I was having lunch with him and I was kind of down and glum and he said what's going on and I was talking about this problem and this thing I was just kind of down you know and he said well

with employees, with competitors, with regular. I mean, just all day long you have incoming missiles. You have great stuff, too, but in between that is punches to the face. And if you're gonna get beaten up by that, you're not gonna you're not gonna be successful. And secondly, you're not gonna be happy. So you're gonna go through life like glum. You see, sometimes you see these like multi-billionaire guys and they always look like this. What's the point of all the money? [laughter] Seriously. So I I I would not be want to be one of these zillion guys who's like frowning all the time like and upset and angry and depressed. That's much more important to me to be in the right frame of mind and to go through the short time we have in life.

Did you ever meet Samzel when he was alive?

Okay. So, he great guy.

Cuz he's like, "Oh," and he talks about the shareholders. He's like, "Oh, this is like these are problems. If I solve these problems, this is going to increase the enterprise value of the company that I'm building. These are actually good things to identify and embrace instead of avoid." One of the most important things that I learned from Brad Jacobs is the importance of working with the smartest and most talented people you can. Brad says, "The most important thing that a CEO does is recruit superlative people." Brad recruits the smartest people he can find and says there's no substitute for smarts. Steve Jobs believed that this was important too. Steve said, "I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most 2:1. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. You need to build a team that pursues the A+ players. That is the end of the Steve Jobs quote. And that is exactly what RAMP has done. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at RAMP is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 23% of the people that applied. That means when you use RAMP, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24/7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations. And they do this on a single platform. That means the longer they use RAM, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. From a customer's perspective, what does a team of A+ players sound like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said, "Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled." go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money today. That is ramp.com. I do have a question on your long-term reputation. Okay, so there's this line. Do you remember when Buffett got uh in all that trouble with uh with Solomon Brothers? And he's like, "Listen, you can lose money. That's fine. But you lose a shred of reputation.

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

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

Can you say more about that?

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

I appreciate unique.

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

No, that's not my case.

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

Your ongoing inner monologue.

I am vicious. I sound like uh you know David Gogggins is this like

Yeah. My inner monologue talking about my inner monologue sounds like David Gogggins versus like you're not doing enough. This wasn't good enough. Like I see the problems. So like I attack them like it's like oh like I'll listen to like a past podcast or some anything I've done. I was like, and all I see are the flaws. I don't see any of the good part.

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

I like to find the center. The first time that concept of centering came about was when I was uh I went to enrichment camp at uh at school in the summertime and there was a book they gave out called on centering. I don't remember who wrote it and had a picture of someone making pottery and and they were explaining in the book that it's all about finding the center of of the of the pot you're making. So centering, finding that inner calmness, finding that zone where you're in the groove. And everybody has it. Everybody has that. You just got to find it. And that's that's one of life's missions is to find that center, find that inner calmness zone. And then when I went to college and I studied music under Bill Dixon, same concept came out. So I'm familiar. They said, "Come back to the center." So we're playing improvisation, what he called black music. Some people might call it jazz. He didn't like the word jazz. playing playing playing playing with some friends and then you have to find the center, come back to center, back to the center, back to the center. So there'd be a center point in the music. You could go anywhere you wanted in the music. You can improvise all over the place, but come back to center and then everybody come back to their common center. So So I've I've incorporated this concept of centering of finding a center into my meditation practices into my business practices into my philosophy of life. So I like to find centers. But going back to what we were saying before, so you have this negative selft talk coming. You can either take one of two paths. You can take the path of validating and disputing it and seeing it in a proper rational way or you can take the approach of just witnessing it, just enjoying it and just just it is what it is. It's mindful acceptance of it. So acceptance of that and I I I vacascillate between those two. Sometimes I do the you ask how I do it. my internal monologue. If negativity creeps in, of course it creeps in. I'm I'm I'm dancing with the ghosts of my ancestors just the way you and everybody else are dancing with the ghosts of the ancestors. Evolution worked very slowly over generations, over long periods of time. So, we always have the set of genes that were good for survival and procreation of our ancestors, but not necessarily now. We still have in the gene pool all these like irrational thoughts. So, another way to look at it is just just observe it. kind of more of a Buddhist way. Just observe it. Like so one of the ways, the most simplest Buddhist meditation is just observe your breath. Just observe your breath. I mean, how easy can that be? All you got to do is we just did this before we started recording. Like, let's go through a miniature like meditation before we begin. Like, I don't ever do that. And I probably start should start doing it. I just kind of wake up and go and just try to attack things that I feel like, and don't get me wrong, like I absolutely I'm obsessed with what I do. I love love my work. work on it seven days a week, but I wanted to be the best in the world at it. And that's where it's like, oh, you just see these deficiencies.

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

I have two comments on that. One is when you go back go back to the big bang

Had there not had there been perfection at the beginning of the universe, the big bang would not have happened. So we are imperfection. We are the children of imperfection. Imperfection is good. Imperfection is not bad. Expecting perfection is will cause you stress and strain. It won't won't really work.

When I stepped down from United Rents, a c I still stay as chairman. When I stepped down as CEO of United Rentals had done it for about 10 years and I wanted to do my next big thing. I wanted to do another startup from from beginning. I was running a big company. I wanted to start it from scratch and there was a period of a couple years where I was trying to figure out what I was going to do and and I didn't find it and a great financial crisis came and was kind of lost. I was kind of it's kind of it was probably the only time in my life that I was depressed. I'm just not depressed. But that period of time I was actually clinically depressed. I took the Beck Depression Inventory and I came up Yep. depressed.

So So I found a amazing cognitive therapist and I went to the guy twice a week, hour and a half a shot for two years. It was fantastic. one of the best things I've ever done in my life because what we did was in a in a in an environment that was very safe and confidential and trusting with someone who was a professional at at at psychology. I was able to first of all identify and then notice more fully my automatic thoughts, the negative

the rest of the world is perfect to, you know, preferences where I would like me to be better. I would like you to be better. I'd like things to go better, but they don't have to. I can still be happy. And frankly, they're not going to all the time. So, I need to accept that. Need to radically accept that. I need to I need to be in reality, not put these, you know, Je mentioned Bezos. Bezos says a lot of cool stuff, but one of the things he says often is uh don't fight with reality because reality always wins.

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

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

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

That's my thing. Everybody's got their thing. So everybody So you're a great podcaster. You you have a talent. Your superpower is you can consume a large amount of information and then distill it down to like boom. Here are the most important takeaways from that. It's a It's really brilliant. That's your thing. That's why you're doing it, right? That's what you're good at. You're not playing

figuring out what's the right industry to consolidate.

And secondly, I have a toolkit and it's the same old toolkit. It's not

So, first I find the right industry. I find something that's large. I find something that's growing. I find something where it's fragmented. I find something where we can buy things at reasonable prices. I find things where technology is would would could be used. It's not very tech forward industry. I find stuff that AI and automation are not going to disrupt in any time in in the near future. So I I find industries that have certain characteristics to it. Whether it was garbage, whether it was construction, whether it was transportation or logistics and now distribution, it's that's they all have the same characteristics, same traits. So that's point number one. Point number two is I then put together an amazing team. I put together a team of people who are generally smarter than me and who are more talented than me in what they do. So I have a great CHRO who knows everything there is to know about HR and compensation and talent recruitment and so forth. I have great M&A team who really know how to do deals and get deals done rather than turn them into dramas. I have great finance accounting people who understand everything there is to know agency about running a a fast growing company and keeping the books clean. So, etc. And I get the team together. Then I get the compensation sorted out. So I make everybody my partner on a senior team and I give people tons of equity. But there's a catch. It could vest but you can't sell it for five years and most of it vests in the last two years. So everyone is committed going back to long-term relationships.

and within three to five years doubling the doubling the profit, doubling the Ebida. That's the main criteria I look at when I look at a at a company is purchase price and secondly can we double the profit in three to five years and and most of my main acquisitions I've done that. Conway, Robert Dangla, knew all these different ones. They were great companies and everyone says, "Oh, they're working really well." Okay. Well, three years later, we doubled the profit. Yeah. Because we apply the toolkit. We apply the play playbook. And it's the same playbook industry after industry. The playbook gets refined a little bit here and there, but it's the same playbook. So, when you say this is just what I do, like to me, you now have figured out who you are as a person, right? I have this weird theory that I can't um I can't prove, but I believe. And you know there's like this myth of like the genius young entrepreneur and I was like well I don't know if you study like you study the history of entrepreneurship pretty intensely. You realize that like people do most of the time their best work many decades into their career. And so there's all kinds of reasons they're like oh they've had more experience they're wiser. They have more resources. They have more practice. I don't dispute that. That is all true. But I have this weird theory that they also know themselves way better. And I think the key to being a great entrepreneur is building a business that's I used to say building a business that's authentic to you. And then I read Michael Dell's excellent autobiography. And he has a better line. He said he built a business that's natural to him. And there's a great story. I want your opinion on this in one second, but there's a great story where, you know, Michael starts in his company was 19. He's in his 20s and it's doing fabulously well, but he realized like, hey, I need some like grown like some I need some help here. And so he he gets this guy. I think his name was Lee Walker if I remember correctly. and he's about 20 years older than than Michael already started a bunch of companies. Rich, you know, didn't have to work anymore, but he he saw an unusual once in a, you know, generation talent and and Michael decides to help him. He lasts like four years. And so I read the book and then I was about to make the podcast on it. I go and see it. I wonder what ever happened to this guy. And I found an interview that he did and he's in his 80s and he's talking about that time and he gave me some of the best context to really understand this story and Michael's story is really story of you and everybody and all the people really are you know very similar people that were studying and he's just like you know Michael starts his company with $1,000 says I'm going to take on IBM for my dorm room. IBM is the most valuable company in the world at the time which I didn't know it was the first company to hit a 100red billion market cap which is nuts and he's you know just the audacity to have that and he's like and the first few years like we're going against this behemoth and I lasted four years I start losing my hair my back hurts I can't sleep I'm unhealthy and he goes but he goes but Michael was energized by it he built a business that was natural to him because he's like this is what I want to do I'm not I'm not losing my hair I'm not you know depressed depressed. My back's not hurting. I can't sleep. I'm like waking up every day just getting after it. So, is that the way you feel about the just like what you're doing? It's like this is it may seem weird because it is in not a pjorative way. It's not weird in a in a negative way. It's I don't know another person that started eight separate billion dollar companies. So, it's like almost like you can't help yourself.

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

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

to get you to stop?

This is what I No, but in general like so this is what I loved about you know most of the people I admire. It's like I I can still remember this you know I I put it into the maximum like if you love what you do your exit strategy is death right [laughter] like like you should be worthy on something. So, like, you know, Sam told me he's like, "I'm going to be doing deals till I died." Well,

There you go.

Everyone you just named all the successful people, they were all in.

Of okay, do you want to see if you have the absolute best people on your team? Just visualize that they're coming into your office and they're saying, Brad, I quit.

So then what happens next in in this scenario? So I'm always interacting with my CHRO

How much percent of your like

So most of your time there's

It's all about the people. It's all about the people. you know systems and tech and budgets and customers and sales all these things are really really important but you can't achieve excellence in those things without fantastic people without fantastic leaders and I spend a lot of time especially on the top few dozen people I want to make sure everybody's in it to win it everybody is fully fully engaged and I do a mental exercise where I picture the person coming into my office and saying Brad I quit like this is not a conversation about you making me a counter offer I'm done I've already moved moved and it's over with. This is about a conversation about how do we make an orderly transition because I respect you and I don't want to leave you high and dry. And then I try to feel and visualize what would be my reaction if that person came into me and quit. If my reaction to that is yes, I [laughter] don't want to smile. I don't want to act like I'm happy about this, but you know, I didn't have you know, nobody likes firing people and [laughter] I I just didn't, you know, I I just kept postponing firing that person. I shouldn't have, but I did. And this is great. I don't have to pay severance and [laughter] and you know I that solves that problem. No problem at all. We'll replace them. That's a C player. That's someone really you should get the courage up to take to get off the manage get off the team right away. And then on the second category, if my reaction to it is, you know, it kind of sucks. You know, it's what I would have preferred that person stayed, but it's not the end of the world. We'll hire head hunter. We'll get someone as good, maybe something even better. and you know things will work out. That's a B player. But if when I visualize that person quitting, my reaction to that is pure terror [laughter] and absolute panic and like somebody took a baseball bat and just whacked me in the stomach and then punched me in the face. I'm going, "Oh my god." Like I'm never going to find someone as good as her. No way. Or I'm never going to have someone as talented as that person. I'm never going to have someone who brings to the table their particular superpower.

And and that's, you know, it's kind of funny, but it it's a serious it's a serious title is you don't want to have a dysfunctional management team. One of the most important things that has allowed us to create tens and tens of billions of dollars of value is the management team's coherent. We have the right people on the management team and we have the rules of the road of how we're going to deal with each other in a respectful way that still encourages differences of opinion. First of all, I love the way you describe because everybody says, "Oh yeah, hire a players and like people it's really hard to differentiate like what does that actually mean?" And I think this thought experiment is perfect. It's like we are … If this person leaves, that's an A player. That's a way to think about this. But this also goes down to your gift and why I think um I've learned so much from you. One partially it's like your ability to like have very clear thinking and then put it in a memorable way. So you were just talking about like the relationships that you have with the people you work for. You have a line in the book where like he says an or an organization is like a party. You only want to invite people who bring the vibe up. My team and I spend a lot of time together. So it's a big deal that we like one another.

[laughter]

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

This is very fascinating because like it's obviously, you know, business is people, right? You're not like the people that are building the product, but like all a business is the best definition of business ever heard actually came from Richard Branson. He says all businesses is is an idea that makes somebody else's life better, right? And like there's infinite that's why there's always more opportunity because there's infinite ways we think technology is going to like it changes things but then it just usually opens up other ways to make other people's lives better. So just focus on like if you're looking for an opportunity how can I just serve other people. Another uh line that's very related to this is Henry Ford where he says money comes naturally as a result of service. Like I think those two ideas go together. The reason uh I I was thinking about this though the best way I just I've heard describe what you were just saying it's all about people work with the best people you possibly can. the A players we're gonna talk about uh you have this great line about there's no substitute for brains but before that it's like the way that I've heard this described best in my opinion is from Ed Catmill the founder of Pixar right he would go around and give all these talks and he was actually like shocked that he would ask the audience like what's more important people or ideas he says every single time people got it wrong he said it was the ideas and he's like no it's the people and so he has this great line where he's like listen if you give a mediocre idea right to a brilliant team, they're either going to fix it or they'll throw it out and come up with something better or something new. But if you give a great idea to a mediocre team, they're going to screw it up. So, it's obviously because ideas come from people. So, it's the people. Um, so

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

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

Well, you want you mentioned smart. You want people are honest. You want people hardworking. You want people collegial. You want people are really in it like a like on the work life balance thing and boom, it's work. and their life is a lot their work and and you know that's that they enjoy that and I don't have to

I did and I've been completely imbalanced since. I've been working seven days a week. Yeah. Very few vacations. You guys scaled like four years to I don't know a couple billion dollars. It was like an insane story.

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

Well, that I'm not in favor of.

meditation and music was pretty much it.

So I I for a long time every single person I read about I was like okay well I I even titled the episode my personal blueprint which was Ed Thorp, right? Um Ed Thorp I'll give a short run. First uh in first person to invent a quantitative hedge fund. Um he invented you know the the ability to count cards for blackjack. writes this book in the 1960s called Be a Dealer, you know, made more money than he'll ever spend. But if you read his book, you get to the end, it's like he was much more balanced, right? He also came from academia and maybe this had played a role into that, but essentially like lived a life of venture because he truly loved what he did. Uh once he made more money than he could spend, he stopped trading more time for money. Uh he his uh had a good marriage till his wife passed away from cancer. uh took care of his health, but like much more of like a let's say there's five important things and he kind of like divvied up maybe like work was 50% but the other four are other 50%. And I was like oh that's that's kind of my personal blueprint. And I said on the drive I go no I'm lying. It's like 90% of what I think about and how I spend my time is just work.

I guarantee you probably every single one of them, with few exceptions, if any, were all in and what what they were doing was their passion and they were just so excited about it. They were in the flow. They were in the flow of being so absorbed on something that you'd like lose track of time and the whole rest of the universe is gone. You're just you're just in it. you're just really into something that you do well and you're with people that you really like and you're likely to be successful because you're you're doing what you do. When I was thinking about the amount of research that you do that you explain when you before you get into an industry, before you start a company, it's like the way I describe your book is buy it, read it all the way through and then what I really think it is, you put it close to your desk because it's a reference manual because you can just pick this up now and read one chapter that takes 10 minutes and get good ideas out of it. Do you know I'm writing a sequel?

I had so many people ask me similar questions. Okay, I'm going to write a sequel that addresses those particular questions. You know what the title's going to be?

Is that great award?

Love it.

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

I don't like that.

Who am I to criticize Steve Ch. I wouldn't be able to do that. So you want to get the right people in place. You want to get the compensation aligned. And then you want to be communicating with each other in a very constructive way and a very prolific way. So, Friday, we had our our second mo monthly operating review for this company we had bought, Beacon. And how did we come up with the agenda? It was 10-hour meeting, two breaks. One was 10 minutes, one was 5 minutes. Nobody was distracted. Nobody's on phones or devices. So, it was all shut off. We're very concentrating on the one person that had the the the the mic the proverbial microphone at a time and listening very carefully and intently what that person was saying and then debating each point and each action point. How did we come up with the agenda? Here's how. Did I, the CEO, come from above and say, "Here's the agenda that I think is the important thing. I'm smarter than all of you, and here's what we should be doing." No. How pompous and arrogant and kind of ineffective really to do that. What I do is just the opposite. How many people would be in a meeting like that? Two questions on that. How what percent of the meeting are you speaking in a a situation like that? So I open up usually and I ramble on for like an hour or maybe even more than an hour of the state of the union from from my perspective and I try not to just mention things that I form conclusions on but I try to frame things of these are the most important successes of the company but these are the things where we need to improve and here are the issues that in my view after reading everybody's rep votes and everything I think are the things we should attention direct we should spend most amount of time solving because I think those will create the most amount ount of value and and I I try to keep it balanced the good stuff and the bad stuff. Yes, I do add of boys and of girls and rahrhas. That's that's good thing to do for leadership. But I in equal measure do look, we got to keep it real. We got to keep it honest. Here's things that we said by this deadline we're going to do it. We're we're a couple weeks behind on this. Let's get going here. What's going on? Here's we thought this outcome was going to happen and we're only 92% there. How can we get to 100%. So I try to shut start off with a balance but then I try to shut up and then I try to let the mechan the mechanical going through the questions where I just go down the questions by categories and then go around the room and hear everyone's opinion and that's that's you don't want the leader talking a huge amount of time. everyone else everyone else Yeah. This is one of the things I felt and I've seen this with a lot with like really remarkable people is how many people like when we had this intense breakfast at your house a few months ago, great company. standing her way. Yes. that especially when companies get big and older, they don't they stop asking information from from people from the front lines. So here you're like often when we buy a company we discover that the frontline employees, middle managers and even some senior executives have never been asked what would you what would you do to improve the company? You would think owners would want to know that and then you have this great thing that I think is actually good for business but also personal relationships. You ask what is the the stupidest thing we're doing and what is the smartest thing you were doing. So, at the end of those operating reviews, once we've gone through all the lists, now we now we do human interactions. That's where the fun starts. So, we work really hard going solving all these problems and debating all these issues. Now, we put that aside and I ask a series of questions. I modify them a little bit every month, but I have a list of few dozen questions. I pick which ones I want to ask each time. Usually one of the first ones is what is something somebody said today that you have a different opinion on? What is something that somebody said you disagree with and you get a chance to talk about it? I just go around one by one to each person. That's a wonderful thing. Many management teams can't do that because everyone will get upset. Yeah. validating the field and then I bring it inwards and I say who around this table today in your mind did their star go up the already might have been high because everyone loves each other but even higher you and why what is something that somebody said today in the meeting that impressed you that made you go aha made you say damn that's a good insight that's a good perception I really like that what who was it and what did they say we go around everything like that and I have a few other questions like that and then I bring it down to the person themselves and I say finish the sentence I resolve to improve the company by just go one by one and each person stands up and says, "I resolved to improve the company by" and then they say what they what what what's what what they want to say. It's a great thing. What I didn't get a chance to do Friday because we ran out of time. What I often do is then we go into the another room. We get out of the boardroom, get out of the conference room, and then we stand in a circle and just silently look at each other with for the first couple minutes. A couple minutes is a long time to be like looking around everybody else. It's, you know, it's a lot of people that's uncomfortable. It's not uncomfortable if you all like each other. How much of is of your the way you run your company is like guided by intuition? Like you seem like a very intuitive person to me. not well. Yes, there's always instinct. There's always intuition. You you're always going by your gut, So I've experimented over time. Okay. And just keeping the information flowing through the company. There's a idea that I think when when I thought of um your ideas like hey we're going to buy the company we're going to ask like what would you do if you were running the company? What's the stupidest thing we're doing? What's the smartest thing we're doing? I as you know like very I'm not interested I'm interested in timeless principles not timely. Right. And when I read that in your book what I thought of was not you building your company. I thought of Jim Casey building UPS 100 years ago. And what he learned because a lot of these things that these ideas that survived for a long period of time, they're not dependent on the company really depend on human nature cuz like history doesn't repeat human nature does, right? Human nature is kind of constant. Doesn't really change. And so what Jim realizes the more successful he became, the more successful his company became. His executives their incentives were to like hide the bad news and just tell them good things because then it's like everything is great in the company, Jim. And so like and I was the one that made that great and so pay me more and like make sure I keep this great job I have. And Jim realizes like, "Oh, I need to have constant unfiltered access from the people that are delivering the the service to my customers." So he would he would do is like he would he would instruct his driver every time we see a brown UPS truck, you were to pull over and he would get out, no matter how successful it was, and he would talk to the driver. Unfiltered information. Same thing. People would go and they try to meet Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas, right? So Todd Combmes is one of Warren Buffett's managers. I don't know 10 years ago, 8 nine 10 years ago This is why I'm so obsessed with what I'm doing because what like nothing we're doing is new. Like you had all these people that ran all these kind of experiments for centuries and they built great companies and just because you know they passed on and maybe the company's not around anymore. It's like there's so there's a treasure trove of data in there. So like uh the Bezos idea I love where he would publicize he used to publicize the very early days of Amazon. jeff amazon.com email me and he read part of the one of the reasons that he figured out he's like oh I I can we can't just sell books like I can sell anything people he'd be like he would send emails to I think like the top thousand customers like what else would you buy and one guy he had this epiphany cuz you yeah you know they like hey I want toilet paper I want you know groceries whatever one guy's like I want windshield wipers I'm going to be able to sell everything like it is a true everything store but I was uh I was thinking about this recently because I just read this book translated from French about the Michelin family dynasty which starts out in 1891 selling tires in France. You're selling tires. There's like 350 cars on the road for God's sake. But there's a line in the book that is related to all this where they start the the the two brothers have to take over this failing uh factory and they don't know what to to make because most of the products that they're manufacturing are unprofitable. They're under bankruptcy. They're one profitable um product which so they eliminate everything else and they focus on the one profitable product which is a rubber brake pad for horserawn carriages. Say that again though. And so it takes them like a year or two to figure out like hey we should manufacture rubber and there's two twin phenomenon. You're talking about get remember what Justin said get the major trend right. Yeah. Yes. completely. All the different constituents in an organization need to be talking to each other, need to have feedback loops to know how they're doing. If you're not asking your customers how you're doing, you may think you're doing a lot better than you than you than you really are or Do you like the um you have this great line in your book where it says uh I love working with outrageously talented people to deliver outside returns for shareholders in public stock markets. You this constant feedback from the public market. You love it. you're in a you're just in a bubble chamber, echo chamber. You're just hearing your own thoughts instead of others. You want people challenging your thoughts all the time. I love being public. Well, they have to be at a level of maturity of the company to go public. They have to be preferably profitable. Yeah. Yeah. That are that reach that criteria and are choosing not to. I think people think Yeah. I I can't speak for them, but I think they're like maybe the scared of the public scrutiny, the hassle, the but that goes back to what we were talking about an hour ago is so they might have a core belief saying I need everybody to always be like saying great stuff about me which is never going to happen and they may think that gee if I go public when you're public at any moment in time you have people in favor of you and people who are naysayers. You have people who are selling and buying. The people are selling think you're overvalued. people are buying get the joke and they understand you have a real real business plan here that's going to create more much more value. So you always have those two different things going. Maybe those people don't want to hear the naysayers. Maybe those people don't understand that naysayers sometimes can help you correct your own path. Can tell you, gee, you know, maybe I'm cutting cost too much. People come in and say, you're cutting cost too much. I visited one of your locations. I didn't think the service was so great. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Thank you for telling me that. So now I have to invest more rather than cut costs. You have other people who say, you know, I'm looking at your numbers here. Your margins are growing, which is great. That's only half the half the situation here. The other situation is what are you doing with your top line? What are you doing with your price and volume? What are you doing with your organic growth? In my business, in all my businesses, the only two things I had to do in the end in order to get great valuations and create shareholder value were grow the top line faster than the competition, faster than the market, Explain that part. Was there ever a time in your career you're like, maybe I should do should do a a private company instead or you were pretty much all in on it? You said something interesting. I like the pressure. What do you mean by that? I think that's so important to like put that out. Um cuz we were talking about the negative selft talk and like you know just living a a pretty crazy life where it's like you want to work seven days a week or you're just completely allin and the way some again this goes back to you can hear a sentence and just be like oh I feel that way too and it kind of changes the way you approach things. And I remember reading about Herb Keller, which is the founder of Southwest Airlines. You know, it's such a it's such a crazy story that like in an industry where bankruptcy is the most common, you know, outcome. The guy had his his company was profitable for 40 straight years, which is nuts. And he's like a nut job. He's drinking a fifth of bourbon every day. He's chain smoking cigarettes. No, no, no. He's like, I don't advocate that. Yeah, This is He was an attorney. He didn't start his company. It was his first company. He was an attorney until he was 35 years old. And he's like, "Hey, I'm going to try to do an interstate or intrastate airline." And like then he he had it was like four years of legal fights before he could even take his first flight. He's just like, "I love this … This is what I want. I want the pressure Um, I read his biography uh probably like four or five years ago and tell me if I'm wrong, you know more about this industry than I do. It seems like FedEx had to be one of the most difficult operational companies to ever invent like an unbelievable talking about somebody wanted pressure. So Fred endorsed my book. And I was very touched he did that. He he was a competitor literally Wall Street competitor to endorse my book. I mean this is a very special you meet people in life that are just special that are certain integrity that I and I was in Atlanta at the National Association of Manufacturers, the NAM conference, and Fred was the keynote. So I I was in the audience watching him and somebody um said, "What do you think of Brad Jacobs?" I go, "Oh my god." My heart starts beating. [laughter] Oh my god, Fred Smith's about to like destroy me. My brand is going to be completely crushed. you know the icon of the industry is going to say oh yeah I don't believe he's really he said I really like watching that guy work he said he is coming into this industry with courage and buying things left and right and has big goals and big ambitions and I'm I'm going to keep an eye on that guy and I I would I cried I said wow Fred Smith like saying great stuff so I went up to him afterwards after the the speech was over and I said Mr. Smith, uh, Brad Jacobs. I really appreciate what you said. I said, "Well, first of all, I'm Fred [laughter] Robert Smith." And that was the beginning of a great great friendship. And we got together many, many times. Of course, he was on the business council. He was the longest serving member of the business council over a quarter of a century. And I go to every business council meeting I possibly can to meet other CEOs and to hear what other people are thinking. It was just a generous guy. This was a guy who had vision. He had passion. Talk about grit. I mean, he woring around all the time everywhere. Vietnam. He was decorate. He was He was flying helicopters with people shooting bullets at him to go get Marines who had been He was a Marine. Yeah. The opening paragraph of that of his biography is the craziest opening paragraph I ever heard. I'm just going to like paraphrase it. Essentially like, you know, he's in debt. Um, he ran through like his the his Greyhound his dad's Greyhound bus millions. I think he burned through like 15 or 20 million. Uh, his planes are about to be confiscated. They just got fired by his board. Uh the FBI is in uh investigating him. Yes. And then they're like he thought uh he he thought he was like 30 years old at the time, so still young, but he refused to let his Federal Express dream die. And the line was just like he thought of suicide. And then the next paragraph is like but the idea of thread of Fred jumping out a window is ludicrous. He's more likely to throw somebody out of a window. [laughter] He's just like a guy that you like he was like the Terminator. You couldn't stop uh like he just wouldn't stop coming. There's a few lines. I mean, I was Well, maybe. Yeah. But I was a direct competitor of him in transportation and logistics and pretty not in package. We didn't do package, but pretty much all the other lines of business, we compete against him. This is what is so special. I know it's part of humanity in general, but entrepreneurship and in in particular is just it's like you see this over and over again just how generous these people are with cuz they know how … hard it is. They just went through all this and now we might be 15 20 30 years different in age. But it's like just like Lew did when you were 23. And in many cases like what you did with the book like the idea like think about Sam Walton, right? He wrote his autobiography. His cancer was all over his body. He was in pain. He knows his time is towards the end and what does he do? He spends a a a big chunk of the last time he had left saying this is what I learned in my six decade long career. That is a gift to future generations. And then in the book they're like somebody I love this part cuz they're in the book they're like uh people ask me all the time could another Walmart story happen. He's like yeah it's probably happening right now. And it was Jeff Bezos going around with his copy of the book writing it annotating it giving it to the executives the early executives of Amazon. It's such a beautiful thing that Fred would do that. It's what a beautiful thing what you did uh for your book. No, no, no. I'm saying but like in general. Yeah, obviously. Well, yeah, I see why. But my point being is the the transfer of even for competitors. He was Fred was your competitor, but he's transferring knowledge to you. That is Exactly. You hear stories like that all the time in private and for you to say that I think it's really important. There's a few things I pulled out from his biography that just remind me of you and I'm curious if like you if you agree with some of these things. One, uh, the amount Okay. Well, perfect. The amount of information. So, like think about it. Like he started in Fredex in 60s, I think, something like that. No, after Vietnam, so maybe early 70s, but in the 80s, he says that he estimated in during the 1980s, he spent four hours a day reading. He says uh he found he relied quite heavily on his own vision backed by assimilating information which you've mentioned multiple times so far from many different disciplines at once. You've talked about in meetings, you talked about in trade journals, you talked about all the research you do, right? This is his quote though that I want to read to you. The common trait of people who supposedly have vision is they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information and then synthesize it until they come up with an idea. That sounds like you to me. But you're also like alive. The way to describe is like you're you're also alive and paying attention. Like the story in your book where you're like reading a magazine in bed on a Sunday morning and you read about like uh these waste management companies making like $500 million in profit. They're like, "Whoa, what?" Like, they're picking up trash from one spot and bring it to another. I need to learn about this industry. But that's my point is like you're you're people like Fred, people like you. I think you know there's a ton of people that have the same thing where it's like there the whole world is like a classroom if you're actually paying attention like you can pick up we ideas all over the place. So the waste management business I contrasted to the oil business. The oil business is a lot more complex. We're negotiating complicated long-term contracts and chartering vessels and negotiating processing agreements with big major oil companies and hedging and I it's very very complicated complex business. When I read that about the garbage business, I said that that is so much easier picking up [laughter] that's a simple business and move some garbage and send out an invoice. I definitely think I can do that and it seems like they make a lot of money and the trend seemed seemed in the right direction. So yeah, you So I got that from Kurtzwell by the way. Ray Kerszswwell. So Ray Ray so Ray Kurszswwell huge mentor of mine. Only met him once, met him for about six hours. But was amazing where it was a chronology of the universe going you know my meditation I go back to space and time said and the the opportunity to always do something slightly better which is and invent tools that to do so technology it even starts out when you were talking about collecting but the the good thing is like this is not exclusive to the time we live in it's a constant throughout our experience like you can you can go and look at the like when you guys were um collecting all this is you said before fax before email you were collecting all the information for amorex the way I thought about this is really um crystallized my mind when I read Andrew Carneg's autobiography right which is probably written 130 years ago and for whatever reason if you talk to somebody today they don't think of like the production of steel as techn technology, which is like a crazy thing. At the time, it was like they literally invented a new and a better way and then everything in the world was going to be made out of this. And so what I do is like when I'm finished reading a book, again, we go back to to this idea that you and I share. We have to like distill it. You're not going to remember 250 pages, but you'll remember a paragraph or a sentence if you can. And Andrew is a young person getting into an existing industry. It's a new industry, but still existing industry. most of his competitors were much older and they were very resistant to your point resistant to change. You have to embrace the major trend which is what your your mentor told you. And so I was hearing the the the criticism that his competitors almost like uh when you were in that business and um they the the guy took you out to lunch. It's like slow down. I used to be the first now I'm the second. That's that's a terrible way to to do business. It's like take your competitor out to lunch and be like stop being better than me. Yeah, it's not going to work. But the the way I would summarize the main theme from Andrew Carnegie's book that then reappears over and over again in these stories is invest in technology. The savings compound. It can give you an advantage over slower moving competitors and can be the difference between a profit and a loss. And you see that over and over and over again. It doesn't matter if it's steel, waste management, software over and over again. It's like the the best entrepreneurs, the best CEOs, the best executives, they're you they're not scared of technology. If you're scared of it, you're going to get destroyed by it. They embrace it and they invest heavily in it. And again, uh the benefit I have is like I'm reading about a chocolate company that was started 80 years ago and they have some of the most advanced robots making chocolate. I'm reading about a tire company from 150 years ago. They watch their costs and they're very efficient on in how they spend their uh their time and their money, but they invest heavily in technology. No one thinks of Walmart as a technology company, but if you go back in 1979, right? He's Sam's in his 60s and they're like, "Hey, we're doing everything by hand. Our business is way getting way too complex. We have all these distribution centers. Think about the logistics. You would know all this. Moving all this material where it needs to be at the right time. we need to invest in computers. And Sam at first saw he heard computer, he heard overhead, he heard expense. I can't do that. And then he was slowly allowed himself to be convinced by the talents of people on his team. And he wind up in when he when he decided to invest, he didn't like dabble. He invested $500 million in 1979, who knows what that would be today, in the most advanced computer system to handle his logistics and distribution. And that was an edge that no not not another retailer on the planet had or at least in America had that but he had the technological edge over the rest of his competitors. I would argue that if anybody there I don't think you could be the leader in any industry and not also we don't think of them as tech companies because we think tech has to be like Google or Facebook. It's like no they're all tech companies. I just did um I wanted to do more than just uh like American entrepreneurs is where because you know the when you have an outside share of entrepreneurs is H&M Oh Zara Index So Zar Index is a big customer of GXO Logistics, one of the companies we spun off from XPO and GXO runs a lot of their warehouses in Europe and it's it's exactly what you're saying. It's it's e-commerce. It's trying to do things very efficiently and very quickly and very accurately. And you need technology to do that. You need robots and you need AI. Every business every single business is going to see more automation and more AI. People have to get on the program on that or they're going to be dinosaurs. Fred was an attack. Yeah, of course. In a big way. Yes. So there's something we haven't touched on. I have a question for you and this is a quote from Fred in his biography. He says you have to be absolutely brutal in the management of your time. Do you have any insight? So time. So when you're a CEO, when you're an executive, you only got two things. You got time and you got capital. and how you deploy that time and how you deploy that capital equals results. So it's your it's your time and it's the time of the people of the organization. So when I was running XPO, we had about 150,000 a little more employees worldwide. See each one of those worker the senior manager worked long long hours but the average worker worked eight hours a day. So you had eight times about 1.2 million hours a day of of work getting done. If you've got people very focused and very motivated and very well trained and feel good about the company and feel good about their job, that productivity of that 1.2 million hours a day is going to be a lot more than if they're if the conditions I just mentioned are not are not present. So managing people's time f putting them in the right priorities and and telling ranking what people should be spending their time on is very very very important to success. Now how do I spend my time? I spend my time deliberately and consciously and intentionally on the things that I think make most amount of value for the for the company. No, a fair amount. So, if you're CEO, you're you're managing, you know, 15 20 different things always. You're managing people, you manage technology, you're managing budgets, you're managing investors, you're managing uh infrastructure, you're managing transportation, you're managing logistics, you're managing pricing, you're managing procurement with the vendors, you're managing customer relations, you're managing sales. There's you manage salesforce excellence. I mean, it's just there's about 20 things that are your life. Like that's what a C that's what a good CEO does. The problem with a lot of CEOs is they've come up through just sales or operations and they're good at that, but they kind of just delegate the other 15 things. That's really part of the CEO job. You look at the great CEOs, the the CEOs have created a lot of alpha, a lot of shareholder value. They've been in each one of those 20 or so things. You talk to a Dave Cody, you talk to an Ed Breen, you talk to Larry Culp, you can talk about any of those 20 things and they have they have things to say and you can learn from them. You talk to CEOs who haven't created a lot of value, who not really good at this game, they'll know four or five or six or even half of those 20 things, but they don't do the other. They don't do the other part. You got to be in all of them. But but you're not in all those things in equal measure. Some things you don't have to spend as much time on. The people things and compensation things I actually spend a lot of time on. So that's that's core. That's critical to get right. That's that's something that if you get wrong, you you waste budgeting. I spend a lot of time going on the budget. customer satisfaction. I spent a lot of time on that. The employee ser the employee engagements, going out to the field, doing the town halls, doing the Zooms, I'm I'm all in on that. Yeah. They're they're they're not they're they're afraid to do the inet are making generalizations. There's always exceptions, but generally speaking, what I find is they gravitate to the stuff they like and that they're good at and they kind of just don't do the stuff that they don't like or they don't aren't very good at. And you can't you've got to you've got to be if you want to be a good CEO and have a high performing performing company and be the top and be in the top desile of of stock performance like like United Rentals and XPO were both top 10 stock performers last decade. That's not random that the both those companies were because it was the same same principles, same same structures. You've got to have CEOs and they they did where that are in the whole thing and understand from A to Z what running a business is and how you create shareholder value and see the whole picture of the levers. So I always tell friends who are port and I have a lot of friends who are portfolio managers or analysts at on the buy side. I said, 'When you bring a management team in, you need to ask them, "What's your stock price going to be five years from now? And what are the levers that I have to believe that's going to get you there?" And if that CEO tells you, "I'll get that's a great question. I'll get back to you." Short that stock or at least don't buy that stock because that's the first thing the CEO has to know. First thing a C a CEO and the senior management team has to know with great specificity. Here's where we are right now. on the stock price. We want to get massive outperformance and get to here. That's great. That's just the beginning. Here are the levers of how I get there. Here are the levers of the things that we must do as an organization that will improve our profitability, improve our multiple, generate free cash flow. Just how are we going to get to there? And in my case, it's not that hard because when you do the the the graph, how what's the distribution there? So you've done over 500 acquisitions throughout your Yeah. You and your team for sure. Thousands and thousands. I mean many thousands. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Going back to the time management though, I think especially in like the age that people are growing up in like where I like there's a shorten shortened attention span, a lack of focus in my opinion and like really easy to give into distraction. Like how you sound like you're almost not impervious to distraction. That's not the right way to put it because I know how you're you're going to be humble when you describe yourself, but how do you avoid being pulled into things that are not prioritized? And he says, "Mday I have one appointment. Tuesday, I have no appointments." Wednesday, I have no appointments. Because he controls his time. He controls his time. And he he has no problem saying no and refusing people time. It's a very Well, you can solve that problem. That's a problem you've identified. That's great. That's half of the solution of the problem. Now you need to work on. He has that great line where he's like the difference between successful people and really successful people is really successful people say no to almost everything. So like you have 20 you know whatever the number Yeah. So whatever the number is like you have 20 things that that you know you're you're focused on at the co level at this moment. You're you know you know where you want to spend your time, what you're best at. We talked about incentives and and then recruiting talent, but like you also are one of the most and you're not going to like this, but like one of the most famous and wealthiest people in the world. You have an unbelievable amount of people that want your time. How do you stay discip Like you you seem to be disciplined from the outside of saying no to a lot of things. Like how is that something you learned in the last like five years, 10 years? Were you like that when you were younger? in the business community. No, the average Yeah, for sure. You should see my inbox when it comes to you. But that's fine. That's fine. It's funny because people This is why every time I say these things to you, you say say No, it's it's it's a smart move. But the the funny thing is when I did the I had breakfast with Brad Jacobs episode now people were like flooded like can you introduce like no like you had to figure out how to get to him yourself like this you can't. I was looking for my next thing. and I was looking at asset management Yeah. and uh I you know I think he'd return my call if I called him. no not yet I did you should you definitely should I want to meet him I want to meet him so if you can introduce me please he's inc the so this is the good thing about when I do remember most of the people I study are dead when I do episodes on people that are living this is why I was asking some of the questions because like I'll do this episode it reaches a very valuable community and they're really helpful and then I get all these crazy stories about this guy's even more remarkable than your episode. It's like and I got it about you and I got it about Ken and then I was like oh I got it like I definitely want to meet Ken. He's a very fascinating person. and more importantly he understands what I'm doing. He understands my my priorities and he understands what I was talking to you before like the two most important things that I got to do are have organic revenue growth better than the competition and a margin expansion and everything falls. He understands that. He understands that in order to do that I have to focus on people. I have to focus on technology. He understands the different levers to do that. He Yeah. That's my framework in business. My framework is because I've learned if I do those two things and it takes a hundred different things to do those two things well. But if I do those two things well, I will create dramatic shareholder value. If I buy companies at significant lower multiples of profit than I trade at Monday morning at 7 o'clock after we announce the acquisition, I've already created alpha for my shareholders. That's a nice way to start the week. Number two, if I then double the the profit over the next three to five years, then I'll get a nice multiple and if I generate th those are the two main things I need to focus on. He understands that. Now, what he also understands is all the components because, you know, in the monthly operating reviews and all the correspondents, we're very we're very good at communicating with each other what's important and what's not important. So, he knows my my priorities and therefore he's a great gatekeeper. Is there anybody that could tell you when you're getting off track from what you professed to say? Dude, you're the man for doing this by the way. And it will also get to like I I do think, you know, one of the things that you obviously accomplished with the book and like I try to help amplify with my work. It's like there's millions of people are going to benefit from your lived experience. you you have 40 50 almost 50 years let's say 40 years of experience as an entrepreneur it's like how many people that have ever lived life that have done that most people you know they unfortunately they quit or they fail whatever the case is like you have so much to teach the world can I comment on something about the time there's a phrase I used to use and I you brought it out of me so I'm going to start using again I haven't used it recently is watwam okay and I'm so glad first of It's hilarious. I'm glad that you you said that you actually have other people around you doing this, too, cuz I I am kind of skeptical that no human can can hit their goals and what they want to do, you know, 100% of the time. I can't imagine, you know, the complexity of running FedEx and this guy is just like, "No, you have to be brutal. There's a word like that." He picks it absolutely brutal is the word. Absolutely brutal in your time management. Yeah. I think there's a lot of things. There's another thing that Fred Smith said um that again like when I'm reading about Fred when I was going through and rereading all my highlights from his biography, I wasn't really thinking about Fred. I was thinking about you. You know, like this to me feels like a lot of what I've learned from you. And this is a direct quote from Fred. He says, "I believe that a man who expects to win out in business without self-denial and self-improvement stands as about as much a chance as a price fighter would stand if he started a ring battle without having gone through intensive training. natural ability even when accompanied by the spirit to win is never sufficient. If I look at the way you were building businesses when you were 23 compared to you know you can pick first million dollar company then you look at the second or the third or the fourth or the fifth or the seventh it's like you're not even like you'd go back and kick that dude's ass because of all the stuff you have learned since then. When did you kept repeating that? When did you understand the power of incentives? Because you talk about compensation incentives a lot. Remember I told you a few minutes ago that I give everyone on the top level of the company bunch of equity. Yeah. But it's locked up for five years. they don't care about you and me, David. they care about them, which is normal. That's that's that's capitalism. That's free markets. That's a good thing. their families. I love this idea of I think it's really important to have a I think it's tied to your obsession with like the public markets too and what you said in your book about being very proud of building wealth not just for yourself but for school teachers, pension plans, nurses, firemen and everything else is like the the importance of having a um a mission bigger than yourself. I think like if you just live a completely selfish life, first of all, you would have stopped way a long time ago. Like you didn't need to and in general people you wouldn't have to do this. Um, and I've seen this in a couple different places where like um, Jeff Bezos, we talked about him a few times today where his idea was when he started Amazon, he's like, I want to be build the world's most customer- ccentric company. So, I want to be an example not just to our employees and our customers, but to other companies to see look how you can over the long term you can align the interests of the customer and the shareholder perfectly aligned. They just have to be done so over the extremely long term. But this idea of like going it drives me. is like I want to build wealth, you know, so my kids are proud of me and like and and I show them like what it's like to like chase after something and be deeply committed to it and be passionate about and love it and also make something that's better for other people. And if you do that automatically, you know, the family will prosper and everything else. So I think that's like I think I love that was one of my favorite parts of um of your book. Do something about something about workplace great workplace environment or something like that the best workplace environment in the world or um and we were having this discussion at dinner uh with his family I was like what is the most impressive company built in our lifetime. And so me and him were born in the 80s cuz he's like, "What about Microsoft? Microsoft is in the 70s like before us." And I would say it's like for me the answer is like Amazon like started in 97. I can't think of another company started in the '90s like in terms of like as impressive as as a big success story by reading your book, listening to your interviews, talking to you now, you kind of for for me personally like you kind of remove any self-imposed limit that I have where I'm like, oh, like there's no I don't think Brad has a limit to what he thinks he can achieve. He thinks on a big scale automatically like you just you operate in a very big and ambitious way where I think a lot of people have like self there's like self-imposed ceilings that are most likely invisible in many cases right if you want to build more wealth you want to grow great companies just find more customers to serve like it's pretty straightforward process but I do think one of the things that I absolutely love is and it's the way I ended the episode it's the way you ended the book and I would summarize what I'm about to say here uh as go allin you only get one shot at life and I think this is a perfect uh spot to like wrap our discussion. And so I'm just going to read from your book to you. And you said, "The summer after 8th grade, I attended the Rhode Island Governor's School for the Gifted in Art and Music, a summer enrichment program for kids who've been nominated by their schools. I wasn't sure what to expect. On the first night, I was captivated by a speech given by one of the leaders. I remember goosebumps rising on my arms as he spoke. This program is a special opportunity, but it's up to you to take advantage of it. You have a choice. You can waste the next couple of months and not accomplish that much. Or you can go allin. This is an opportunity to go deep on a project and do the best work you've ever done, but you have to decide if you want it. I learned what it meant to go allin. The magical connection between intensity of focus and the end result. This is the to me the punch line. I love this. If I put my whole heart and soul into a project, I had it in me to create really cool stuff. you talk about the passion and going allin and the advice that you'd have for other people listening to this. This is a perfect place to end. Thank you very much for writing the book. Thanks for taking the time, Brad. I really admire you. I've learned a lot from you. And now I'm I'm very uh humbled and privileged to call you a friend. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.