Founders Podcast

MY NOTES

Andre Agassi

• There are many many ways to get strong and sometimes talking is the best way
  ~ Gil Reyes, friend of Andre Agassi
• winning changes nothing
  ~ Andre Agassi
• When you make perfection the ultimate goal, you are chasing something that doesn’t exist
  ~ Brad Gilbert, Andre Agassi's Coach
• So what if you hate tennis. Who cares? All those people out there, all the millions who hate what they do for a living, they do it anyway. So you hate tennis, hate it all you want. You still need to respect it and yourself.
• Andre says the word “change” to himself several times a day. Change, change, change. He isn’t warning, soothing, depressing, or shaming himself. Instead it centers him on changing everything about him from top to bottom. It’s change now or change never.
• Decisions, bad or good, create momentum, and momentum can be a bitch to stop.
• We must all care for one another. That is our task in life. But we must also care for ourselves, which means we must be careful in our decisions, careful in our relationships, careful in our statements. We must manage our lives carefully in order to avoid becoming victims.
  ~ Nelson Mandela
• The same court on which you suffer your bloodiest defeat can become the scene of your sweetest triumph.
  ~ Andre Agassi

The Cook & The Chef

• Both the cook & the chef are very similar to each other, they both run on autopilot 90% of the time, but there will come a day, something new that will call upon them to do something new, the difference is the chef creates and the cook copies.
• Everything was once created for the first time
• How a cook starts a business(reasoning by analogy, don't think this way):
  • If something has been done before, it’s possible
  • If something has not been done, it’s impossible
  • If something is both a good idea and possible, it’s already been done
• To be a chef you need to be yourself. Thinking outside the box requires independence, not intelligence or ingenuity
• It didn’t take genius to come up with the iphone. Steve Jobs didn’t ask which keyboard did people want. He just asked, what should an iphone be
• Question everything. Question the things we think must be done a certain way because it’s always done that way. Question it with first principles thinking. New information might allow you to requestion things
• Don’t be trapped in your own history:
  • America was able found itself off of first principles because they had a fresh lead to work with, but Europe struggled to implement first principles because they were “trapped in their own history”
  • SpaceX and Tesla are like the the late 1800s America with fresh new labs ready for experiments, while the other gigantic aerospace companies are like Europe, unable to drive their companies from a clean slate mentality, stuck behind legislation, bureaucracy
• Scientists are great and all, but without engineers, none of their discoveries amount to anything. In other words, both A and B are good, but without no A there is no B, and without no B there is no A
• To advance physics, you need data, which is why Elon Musk decided to switch from physics to become an engineer
• Galileo engineered the telescope which allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor in Galileo’s discoveries was engineering. If you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor, therefore you must address the engineering
• People’s reality boxes are distorted because they think what is possible is what already exists
• Formal education is a painfully slow way to download information
• Your entire life runs on the software in your head. Why wouldn’t you obsess over optimizing it. Yet not only do most of us not obsess over our own software, most of us don’t even understand our own software or why it works that way.
  • Elon Musk’s secret sauce is that he is a brain software pro in a world where people don’t realize brain software is a thing
• To a chef in the lab, negative feedback is a free boost forward in progress, courtesy of someone else, pure upside
• Dogma is you not knowing how to code your own software, so you install someone else's
  • Never say, “because I said so”, especially not to children because it enforces dogma and not reasoning by first principles. If what you say is right, you’d be able to explain it to them. It doesn’t matter if it takes a long time to explain, if the child or person is curious enough, they will want to learn and understand your reasons
• Epiphany #1 You Don't Know Shit:
  • The greatest enemy of knowledge isn’t ignorance, it’s the illusion of knowledge.
    ~ Stephen Hawking
  • Every sentence I utter must be understood as a question, not an affirmation
    ~ Niels Bohr
  • You should take the approach that you are wrong, your goal should be to be less wrong
    ~ Elon Musk
  • The reason why all these smart people are so humble is because they understand unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding, and the death of effective reasoning
• Epiphany #2 No One Else Knows Shit Either:
  • The emperor’s new clothes demonstrates a trademark of human insanity: This doesn’t seem right to me, but everyone else says it’s right, so it must be right, and I’ll pretend I also think it’s right, so no one else thinks I’m stupid
  • Lose your respect for the world, it sounds counterintuitive to stop respecting society, but it makes perfect sense when you think about what your eyes and ears tell you
    • Being a game changer is just having little to no respect for the game to realize that there is no good reason not to change the rules
    • Being a trailblazer is just not respecting the beaten path and so deciding to pave yourself a new one
    • Being a ground breaker is just knowing that the ground wasn’t laid by anyone that impressive and feeling no need to keep it intact
  • Conventional wisdom worships the status quo and always assumes that everything is the way it is for good reason
    • There are clues all around us showing us that conventional wisdom doesn’t know shit
    • History is just one long record of status quo dogma being proven wrong again and again, everytime some chef comes around and changes things
  • When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use
    ~ Steve Jobs
• Do not try to be the perfect chef or expect perfection whatsoever. Because no one is a perfect chef, and no one’s a pure cook either. We are all on the spectrum of being a chef to a cook, but to improve ourselves and shift closer to the chef side of the spectrum, we need to remember to remember
  • Remember that we have software, not just hardware, that reasoning is just a skill and like any other skill, you get better at it if you work on it, and we have to remember the cook chef distinction
  • We have to remember 3 Key Objectives
    • To be humbler about what we know
    • More confident about what’s possible
    • And less afraid of things that don’t matter

Shoe Dog

• The Oregon Trail is our birth rate, our character, our fate, our dna. The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. And that leaves us, some rare strain of pioneer spirit, some outside sense for possibility combined with some diminished sense for pessimism
• Life is a game. Like it or not. And those who refuse to play simply get left on the sidelines
  ~ Phil Knight
• The world is made of crazy ideas
• Belief is irresistible
  ~ Phil Knight
• People who urge entrepreneurs to never give up are charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop
• The best of the best will always have a target on their backs because this is a law of nature. Entrepreneurs have always been out gunned, out numbered, they’ve always fought up hill and the hills have never been steeper
• Back in 1980, when Phil Knight IPO’d and was worth $178 Million, the only thought he had in his mind was that he wished he could do it all over again
• Human nature repeats itself, suppliers will cut you off, but it's your job to get to a point where you don't need them
• When Johnson was allowed to lease the first store, he set up a sanctuary for runners where none had existed until then
• Jeff Johnson logs a database for each customer(personal info, shoe size, shoe preferences) and it enabled him to keep in touch with them at all times, he sent them christmas cards, birthday cards, notes of congratulation after they completed a big race or marathon
• Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results. If you end up having to micromanage them, then fire them
• Phil Knight tells Jeff Johnson that Blue Ribbon(Nike) is sinking like the titanic in debt and Johnson responds by begging for a ticket in first class(asks for a job offer). Jeff Johnson becomes employee #1 of Nike
• Phil Knight studied and learned from shoguns, Churchill, Kennedy, and Tolstoy

Estee Lauder

• temp note

Dietrich Mateschitz

• temp note

Quentin Tarantino

• temp note

Enzo Ferrari

• temp note

Jensen Huang

• temp note

How to Sell Like Steve Jobs

• temp note

How Elon Works

• temp note

Arnold Schwarzenegger

• temp note

Tiger Woods

• Tiger's opponents were never people, it was history

James Dyson

• temp note

Jeff Bezos

• temp note

Bill Gates

• Anything Gates did, he did to the max
• Every year Bill Gates travels the world for 2 weeks just to read and learn
  • Jeff Bezos started doing this too
• Bill Gate’s parents and high school administration were worried about Gate’s addiction to computers, so they barred his access to them for 9 months. During those 9 months, he obsessively read the biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs- Franklin Roosevelt, Napoleon to understand how the great figures of history thought
  • My goal is to at least read the same 9 months equivalent as well
• Paul Allen’s mother called Bill Gates an edge walker(someone who courts risk and chases adrenaline) where Paul Allen was weary of danger, Bill Gates seemed to enjoy it
• First company Bill Gates ever creates is Trafodata where they make the traffic counter system data look better and then sell it to municipalities as easy readable traffic flowcharts faster and cheaper than their competitors and made $20k in high school before he went to college
• There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures
  ~ Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar
  • What Paul Allen told Bill Gates to drop out and catch the internet wave
• Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw a future where computer use would be widespread and they need software to run, Gates would build the software for these computers to run

Michael Jordan & Kobe Bryant

• temp note

Tony Bourdain

• temp note

Early Days of SpaceX

• temp note

Michael Ovitz

• temp note

Rick Rubin

• Love your career or find another
  ~ Estee Lauder
• Success is selfish
  ~ Michael Jordan
  • but the outcome of the work isn’t selfish, it’s actually a gift to the rest of humanity
• The world isn’t waiting for much of the same
  • Difference for the sake of it
    ~ James Dyson
  • The goal isn’t to fit in, but to amplify your differences
  • If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what the Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me
  • John Wooden would make his very talented players start with learning how to tie their shoes effectively. Creating effective habits down to the smallest detail is what makes the difference between winning and losing games. Compound these small habits and your performance will be affected exponentially
  • Mozart’s competitors couldn’t play pieces up to Mozart’s skill level because they lacked hand strength, and they lacked hand strength because they didn’t practice as much as Mozart. Thus, because Mozart practiced, he was able to get magic out of an instrument that his competitors could not
• The panicked music industry was focused on selling, but Rubin kept his focus on making great music first
  • Follow your intuition instead of those around you
  • Intuition is an even higher form of knowledge than the rational/storytelling part of your mind
  • You can doubt your way to excellence because doubting your work can improve your work, but never doubt yourself
  • Distraction is not procrastination. Distraction is a strategy in service of the work
• Just start. Action produces the information that will reveal what you need to do next
  • faith is trusting the direction without needing to understand it
  • The work reveals itself as you go
    ~ Rick Rubin
  • Jeff Bezos’ motto: Step by step ferociously
  • The reward for great work is just more work
    ~ Rick Rubin
  • You don’t have to be brilliant. You just have to be consistently not stupid
    ~ Charlie Munger
• When making art, the audience comes last
  ~ Rick Rubin
  • Imagine you’re designing a home that no one will ever visit. Still you invest the time and effort to shape the space in which you’ll spend your days. This is the essence of great art, performing for an audience of one
  • Everything that we will ever do is just a collaboration with the art that has come before us and a collaboration with the art that will come after us
  • There are no shortcuts. The artist experiences life slowly and then re-experiences the same thing anew
  • Steve Job’s definition of success: Did I make something that I am proud of
• When flowing, keep going
  ~ Rick Rubin
  • When an idea or song appears, even at the dinner table, Rubin will just get up and leave to capture it
  • Summon your strength and commit yourself on behalf of this offering, even when it arises at an inopportune time (the serious artist’s obligation)
  • All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything
    ~ Napoleon
• Search for great people, but aren’t in a great place right now
  • Rick helped Johnny Cash create the grammy award winning “Hurt” music video
  • Rick’s thought process was if Cash’s great hits in the past had a guitars/pianos and they sounded good 50 years ago, then chances are they’ll sound good 50 years into the future, so he got rid of all the random new crap and just focused on guitars and pianos
• People keep going back to Rubin because he is so easy to be around
  • You bond with people first(go to the beach or on a drive) and then orchestrate a way to derive the talent out of the people
  • Rick Rubin was a professional listener
    • Formulating an opinion, preparing a response, defending your position, or attacking another's opinion is not listening
    • To listen impatiently is to hear nothing at all
    • In order to listen, suspend your belief, openly receive, pay attention with no preconceived ideas, remain totally present and allow it to be what it is
    • The only goal is to fully and clearly understand what’s being transmitted
    • Thus, listening is not just awareness, it is freedom from accepted limitations
  • How Rick Rubin works
    • Only works with A players
      • Your job is not to motivate them, A players motivate themselves
    • Try to get your thinking as clear as possible
    • Production by reduction
    • Understand culture & music
    • Surround yourself with people interested in music for the right reasons
    • Be true to the things that you love
    • Look for what you notice but no one else sees
    • There is no wrong way, only your way
• We don’t know 1/1000% of anything
  ~ Thomas Edison
  • We are the unreliable narrators of our own experience
  • It is helpful to remember there are forces at work beyond our comprehension
  • Our continual quest for efficiency discourages us from looking too deeply
• How to think creatively and find solutions
  • If you ever reach an impasse, it can be helpful to step away to create space and allow a solution to appear
  • In order to pick up on a signal, the answer is to not look for it. We need to create an open space that allows solutions to appear, a space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that it functions as a vacuum
  • David Oglivy and Rick Rubin are workaholics, but they still took time away to retrieve ideas from their subconscious mind(go on long walks, go for a swim, sit in his garden reading fiction)
  • Elon Musk and Jim Simmons' version of this would be to find a quiet dark place and lay on their back flat, not seeing or hearing anything and stay for usually an hour or more to just hear your mind
  • The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might be otherwise invisible