Turner advertising company was already one of the largest billboard companies in the South when my father put together a deal that would make it the biggest my father had developed a close relationship with a successful billboard operator in Minnesota named Bob Nagel and together they hatched a deal they would go in purchase General outdoor and
then split it into two pieces Nagel's company would take the properties in the north while my father would own the markets in the South this merger would quadruple our revenues overnight to afford the deal my father had to finance nearly all of the purchase price when the dust settled on the general outdoor acquisition my father moved into our new
headquarters as CEO of the biggest Outdoor advertising company in the South dad was elated this was the most energized I had ever seen him unbeknownst to all of us this upbeat Behavior came just as he was approaching the brink of a collapse almost overnight his behavior became significantly more erratic and unpredictable one day he'd be high as a kite and the next he'd be
in a state of abject depression he had always been a fairly large man but now he was putting on more weight and growing a big pot belly after years of smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day he had developed a bad case of empyema that combined with his drinking and his weight gain took a heavy toll on him physically it's clear to me now that
reaching New Heights in business and material wealth actually undermined his mental state he told me a memorable story on this subject he was preparing to enter Duke University just as the Great Depression hit his parents lost nearly everything and they struggled to tell him that they could no longer afford his tuition at that young age he consoled his mother saying don't worry
Mom when I grow up I'm going to work really hard and I'm going to be a success I'm going to be a millionaire and I'm going to own a plantation and a yacht he had achieved all three of these things he said that now having checked off each of these goals he was having a really tough time re-evaluating things and coming up with a plan for the rest
of his life he then told me something that I've never forgotten he said Son you be sure to set your goals so high that you can't possibly accomplish them in one lifetime that way you'll always have something ahead of you I made the mistake of setting my goals too low and now I'm having a hard time coming up with new ones in addition to achieving
all that he'd ever hoped to this new acquisition seemed to trigger other insecurities in dad seeing his parents lose everything in the depression created a deep-seated concern about going too far into debt his post-acquisition interest payments were big and the company needed large Capital Investments to continue its growth the billboard business was doing well and he
shouldn't have had trouble meeting his obligations this was an irrational fear of losing everything and it began to consume him he tried to get his addictions under control by checking into rehab they managed to curb his drinking and his smoking but then he was also prescribed a variety of medications my dad basically swapped alcohol and tobacco for prescription drugs after
years of grooming me to succeed him all of the sudden he seemed in a panic about the company's future it was the middle of the week and I was in Atlanta working my phone rang and it was my father calling he said that he was calling to tell me that he was selling a large chunk of the company I couldn't believe it I was stunned I tried to talk him out
of it I told him that the company was doing well and there was no doubt in my mind that we could make our debt payments when it was clear I wasn't getting anywhere my shock gave way to anger and I said dad all my life you taught me to work hard and not to be a quitter and now you're the one who's quitting what happened to you how could
you do this Dad remained surprisingly calm and unmoved I hung up the phone dazed and disappointed Ed just a few days later I got another call but this time it was my stepmother dad was dead after having a relaxing breakfast my father walked up to his bathroom climbed into the tub and shot himself I never thought it would come to this I had lost my best
friend that is an insane excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to about today which is Ted Turner's autobiography it is called call me Ted I want to start a few years before his father's suicide Ted is around this is this is an insane story there's so much that's going on uh that happens in this book so Ted is around 24 25 years old when his dad kills himself uh he
inherits his dad's Company the company is worth in like today's dollars at that time something around $15 million for the next 50 years Ted Turner is going to work on this company he's going to sell the company to Time Warner for $8 billion and then a few years later Time Warner is going to merge with AOL Ted Turner stock goes up to a value of $10 billion
and then he winds up losing over the next 30 months 8 billion he has this funny line in the book uh where he says my network dropped by about 67 million per week or nearly 10 million per day every day for two and a half years losing that much money so quickly might have been a record but it obviously wasn't the kind that I was hoping to set
so his merger or his sale to Time Warner actually happens about 37 years in the future from where we are his dad is still alive he just he's around College age he'd been working for his dad's billboard company every summer and every year since he was 12 years old so he's like okay I have a very complicated uh relationship with my father but I need
to stop delaying the inevitable and I'm actually going to work full-time at the Turner advertising company which at this point in history is just an outdoor advertising company their sole focus is they have a bunch of billboards and so Ted describes the education that his dad is giving him once he comes to to work with his dad full-time there were many
days when he'd drive me to and from work and the entire ride he'd only talk to me about the business it was almost as though he gave me the business degree that he didn't get in college he'd punctuate his lessons with funny stories or memorable Expressions once to drive home a point about the difficulties of attracting good loyal employees he told
me heck Jesus only had to pick 12 disciples and even one of those didn't turn out well one of his favorite mottos was one that I've used for myself ever since early to bed early to rise work like hell and advertise that's a great line it's funny actually that Arnold Scher actually adopted that as his motto as well he would repeat in his biography
early to bed early to rise work like hell and advertise and so one thing that sticks out about Ted Turner is in his early life his dad sent him to a bunch of like Christian militarys and he was really trying to teach his son like uh self-discipline and a fierce work ethic Ted is clearly being groomed to take over his dad's company he's going into
the company and he doesn't want people to think that he's getting hand handouts and this is the first time we see a hint that Ted is definitely a workaholic many times he never leaves his office he sets up a bed he sleeps there he wakes up gets to work he works all the time and he does that later on life but he's also doing this since a 21-year-old I was
trying to do my best to do everything right I would work the hardest follow every Rule and seek excellence in everything I did as the boss's son I made a point to impress the other employees by being the first one to arrive every morning and the last one to leave at night and so there there's probably about 50 pages that just deal with the relationship that Ted had with
his father there's a bunch of stuff in here um it's interesting that we're still we haven't got to the point where his dad shoots himself and then Ted's response is that he lost his best friend because frankly there was a lot of times was like man I wouldn't want my son to describe me this way they had a very complicated contemptuous relationship
his dad is definitely a control freak his dad is definitely a dictator Ted's own kids would describe Ted that way as well but at this point when you're 21 he's like I'm My Own man too and so he's actually having a conversation with his dad because it's just reaching a boiling point where his dad's just trying to to control every single decision personal
or professional that Ted is going to make and this is what he says to his dad dad it gets tough when you're involved in every aspect of my life you tell me where I should live who I should date I'd like you to consider letting me be myself a little bit in my business life I'll do anything you say but please try not to bug me so much about my personal
life when I want advice I'll ask for it but if not please let me try to work this out for myself and the fact that Ted stood up for himself told his dad exactly how he felt and what he wanted happened was really important because this was what happens next he actually gets um a letter from his dad well first he's driving him to the airport and his
and his dad tells him son you're starting out where most men finish meaning here I was 21 years old running a business a few days after I got a letter from him telling me what a great job I was doing and how proud he was of me my father was very sparing with his praise and nothing he ever did before or after that day ever made me feel as good
within 3 years of that letter his father would be dead and so as I go over all the notes of this complicated deal he put together the fact that he was abusing drugs and alcohol the fact that he was out of rehab there's a line uh that I heard from Charlie Munger one day that I've never forgotten and it's something that he's realized with human history with a lot of like really
successful entrepreneurs and and Executives and he says that the problem isn't getting Rich the problem is staying sane the problem isn't getting rich the problem is staying sane Ted's father got rich but he was incapable of staying sane so imagine you're Ted Turner at this point in The Story You're 24 years old uh your father who was your
best friend didn't say anything didn't leave a note went into the bathroom and shot himself in the head so not only did you lose your best friend but now you have to try to save uh his company and what he's realizing is he had signed this deal to sell off these assets back to Bob Nagel the day before he killed himself and he actually wrote it it was
a handwritten note and so from Ted's perspective it's like okay well my dad andh Bob Neo were friends my dad was obviously not of a sound mind when he entered into this agreement considering that he signed it one day and then popped his top the next I'm going to get out of this deal but now he's a 24-year-old inexperienced entrepreneur going to a 60-year-old man that has
built an incredible company saying hey how how can we get out of this deal and Bob's like listen I admire your father I'm very sad that he died but I'm not I have no intention of letting you get out of this deal this deal will continue and go forward and so this is the first time in the book we see some traits that Ted's going to have his whole life he
likes to fight he just does he doesn't back down the giant conglomerates that this guy takes on uh in the early days of like the the cable industry and the satellite uh TV industry is incredible he's involved in multiple lawsuits and so he's like okay well this guy thinks I'm just some you snot-nosed 24-year-old rich kid he thought oh like I'm going to
threaten his son his dad's not here to save him he's going to back down Ted doesn't do that at all and so Ted's like okay let me go and actually read all of like this this very informal agreement and what he realizes is that Bob nle made a giant mistake that he did not actually call for a non-complete cause clause for the employees of Ted's dad's
company and so Ted's idea is like how can I severely diminish the value of this asset so Bob's not going to actually want it anymore and so he says I'm going to jump his leases so I didn't know anything about this he says in the billboard business a company's leases are its most valuable assets and if you really wanted to to mess up a competitor
jumping the leases was a great way to do it so what does that mean most of these leases so what the billboard companies did right they'd go around to people that own a bunch of land next to highways or high traffic areas they go knock on the door and say hey we'd like to put up a billboard here in return we'll pay you you know this is 1950 so
it's like we'll pay you $25 a month or $50 a month uh you can enter into these agreements with us but guess what if you change your mind you can always cancel a lease within 60 to 90 days and so Ted's like okay so I'm going to jump all these leases I'm going to use the exact same people so the exact same group of people that signed up the leases are now going
to contact these people again but with from a different company and say hey I know you can cancel in 6990 days you're getting paid uh $50 a month or $25 a month guess what we're going to pay you $75 a month if you'll switch that lease to our company so for the next few weeks all Ted Turner and his team do is they go and work the phones and they're
feverously just renegotiating and jumping all of these leases and over in a matter of a few weeks he did significant damage to these assets that Nagle wanted to acquire and so finally nle figures out what he's doing and so there he comes up with a deal he's like okay if you pay me $200,000 then we can cancel the deal and Ted's like okay great I agree right away
here's the problem Ted doesn't have $200,000 this is another main theme from his career he's constantly agreeing to Deals then he realizes oh I don't have that money so he's got to constantly get really creative on how to raise uh the funds this gets really complicated later on this is like a more simple idea so he had this idea where he's like okay uh we
have this agreement I'm going to pay him uh 200 Grand I'm going to keep all the assets that my dad was trying to get rid of the the day before or uh he committed suicide but I need to find a creative way out and so this is what Ted says in the book let me read this part to you I learned a lesson that would stick with me throughout my career when the chips
are down and the pressure is on it's amazing to see how creative people can be and with a 90-day clock ticking so Bob gave him 90 days to come up with the money we had to get really creative very fast so now this was very interesting he realized well Bob's a very rich guy he makes a lot of income at this point in American history the the top he was a he
was at the the highest bracket income tax bracket and so at this point he's like well if I pay you 200 grand in cash that's taxed at a 90% rate so you wind up with what $20,000 and the the government the US governments get gets 180,000 obviously you don't want to do that because this is being treated as a short-term capital game and therefore it's taxes ordinary income right and so
he goes well what if I actually give you stock in Turner advertising which is the company that he inherited from his dad and then that way you can hold the equity as long as you need to to Shield yourself from any heavy tax that you would get on a short-term game gain and Bob's like Okay I accept that offer so I want to jump to another example where
Ted always has to get really creative when he's financing these deals and something to know about him he's acquisitive by Nature uh if he has you know Billboards in Georgia he wants to expand into Tennessee if he has Billboards he wants to get into radio if he has Billboards in radio he wants to get into Billboards radio and TV uh if
he starts buying the Atlanta Braves then he wants to also the Atlanta Hawks this is something he does his entire life he's very very acquisitive at this point he says I'm I'm eager to expand I found a very profitable Bill billboard company in Chattanooga Tennessee but the price was a million dollars great I'll buy it here's the problem I didn't have that
kind of cash so he convinces the seller right this is how he makes the acquisition of no money down he's like will you finance 75% of the purchase price over 7even years at a very high interest rate he says yes then he goes to a bank that's actually looking to expand investments in the South and they lent Ted the rest of the money in return
for equity in the Chattanooga company so this is another important thing that he learned from his dad his main company right is Turner advertising if you're going to go and acquire another company don't just fold that into Turner advertising you want to keep that as a separate entity he says my father always maintained many of the different billboard businesses as separate legal
entities and so in this deal this is important why for two reasons he could offer the Bank the equity in the Chattanooga company without duding his ownership of the main entity which is Turner advertising okay it also allows for periodic reorganization to offset potential capital gains liabilities and especially at the time this is still
important to this day but it's really important when yourp when your top marginal tax rate is 90% so he continues to expand by acquisition but he's not content being the biggest billboard company around he wants to get into new and exciting Industries so so the first thing he does he's like okay I want to go and buy a bunch of radio stations now
this is very important because he repeats multiple times throughout the book that when you own an asset your job is to maximize its value and what Ted is really great at this may be the most important idea other than he failed to to he's a dictator and if you're a dictator you want to listen to James Dyson when he said one of the most important things is retention of Total
Control uh Ted is a dictator but then sells his company and then loses control and is very frustrated when he watches other people take10 billion do of his assets and drive it into the ground and so that was another big mistake but other than that I think the most important idea in this uh book for me is that he's really great at combining his
assets in a way that his competitors can't so you can think about this is like you find an advantage by doing only what you can do and so there's a bunch of people that own radio stations that's great uh not many people own a bunch of radio stations and also own a billboard company and so this this idea what he's about to do here he also does when he
gets into TV which we're going jump into a minute so he starts buying up these radio stations he's like well I'm just not going to like if I'm going to buy my first radio station like what is the advantage that I have that other people don't I should buy a radio station in the same Market where I already have Billboards so there's two things that
happen here one he he benefits from an efficiency in sales and promotion because he's selling ads it's the same thing like if I'm selling ads on a on a billboard right my sales team can sell ads on billboards my sales team the same very Sal the very same sales team can also sell ads in a radio station so that was fascinating but even better is what he does so let's say I own a radio
station right and I want to compete what do you want you want more listeners than the other people this it's this isn't podcasts right this is not like oh anybody all over the world can listen to it you're listening to it in a specific geogra you're constrained by a specific geographic location so therefore it is a much more Zero Sum game so I want to
take listenership right away from the people because were fighting over let's say all the residents of Atlanta and I want to beat the other radio stations and so what happens is like okay well you have a radio station I have a radio station we're competing against each other but guess what I have the the biggest billboard outdoor billboard and
Outdoor advertising company in this area 15% of my ad sales on or my ad inventory on my billboard company every month goes unsold guess what I'm gonna do I'm gonna put ads for my radio station I'm going to use that unsold inventory because has no cost to me right I'm going to put the ads for my radio station on these Billboards that's going to increase
listenership I'm going to have more listeners than you I'm going to make more money and AD Revenue eventually I can acquire all these other radio stations he does this exact same idea in local TV stations before he gets into satellite and cable TV as well and again it comes from this main idea he does this in a variety of ways he's combining
the assets that he has in a way that his competitors can not and he's also good at taking ideas that worked in one industry and transferring to another he doesn't even like like if you really think how crazy this is right 90% uh maybe not 80% of a book is his career in TV he says I never developed a p this is why I never developed a passion for radio the way I later would for telion
for television this is why he's going to start getting into the TV business he thought the TV business was way more exciting and he says you should always bet on the medium that look like it would grow the fastest and obviously TV is going to grow a lot faster than radio is from this point in history and so he's like well listen if it comes down
to buying a lousy radio station or lousy TV station then the the the choice is easy because I want a bet on the medium that look like it would grow and so when he buys this local TV station you're only watching if you're in and around the Atlanta area this is before remember there's there were decades before the internet for God's sake but there's is
before cable and satellite TV that does not exist this is all like an antenna so he does exact same thing here he's like okay well I still have this you know 15% of the billboard inventory it's going to go unsold so I'm just going to put ads for my TV station on these Billboards just like I did when I only had radio stations and when he says that these are
lousy right these are lousy TV stations he means it listen to this this is the first channel that he buys the first station he buys the more I learned about TV stations the more I realized that ours was a disaster of the 35 people who were on the payroll when we took over only two were still there a year later the custodian and the
receptionist one of the the the most important things about Ted Turner and understanding his career is that he believed in the power of TV specifically if you could have a 24 aration or if you could reach people all over the world if you were not constrained by you know just this small being in one small city right he believed in the power of
Television uh more than almost anybody else remember he built a media company all of his money is going to come from ads and so this is the first hint that he gets that TV can be an incredible distribution Channel and so one of the people that are paying him to do a show on their TV is these T evangelists that are going to wind up becoming Infamous
uh many decades into the future it's Jim and Tammy Fay Baker Jim is known for becomes one of the largest tele evangelists in the world and then gets caught I think with a bunch of hookers and he like cries on TV and stuff this is like a very well-known uh event that happened but this is multiple decades before that happened and listen to this
the only show that aired live from our Studios was a was a religious program hosted by a young couple named Jim and Tammy Fay Baker well before they went on to National Fame they got started with this local show and before long they were bringing in more money in a week than the entire station made in a month okay so at this point in Ted's career he is he owns one there's only two
independent TV stations in the Atlanta area uh he owns one of them the other one is going to go out of business remember he said they're lousy businesses especially when there's almost no financing so when you get in a a jam it's really hard to get financing but what happens here is is a blessing because he's like okay well it helps if
I can be the only one bidding because you're buying content and at this time it is restricted by your geographical location that means that you can't bid on syndicated programming from say MGM right MGM Studios for Atlanta unless you own a show unless you own a station in Atlanta so there's only two previous biders now the other bidder is gone and
so he's the only buyer in this entire market and so what Ted's also really good at is he happens to understand he spends a lot of time thinking about thinking about and understanding the financial incentives of the person that he is buying from again he understands the financial incentives of the person he is buying from and so he's like well
uh if the other station's gone no one else is in Atlanta is buying old movies and why is that important because there's thousands of old movies and thousands of TV shows that no one else is competing to air them on in the market that right now he finds himself with the temporary Monopoly on right and these old films were long since fully amortized by the studios and they don't
have to pay any of the talent so that means that any Revenue that is generated by selling these old movies to Ted drops straight to their bottom line and so as a result of this he's able to get great pricing he buys about every single movie that he can get his hands on and he strikes long-term deals whenever possible because he this this isn't
going to this series of events like disadvantage is going to change as soon as there's another bidder in the market so that the long-term part of that is actually really important and he's doing business with MGM Warner Brothers Paramount MCA all of them and then he also has Sports what he realizes that now that we're in the 1970s that local
sports is huge and so he winds up being the one he bids on and he winds up broadcasting all the Atlanta Braves baseball games and so this is an idea that you and I talked about over over again the fact that relationships Run the World this is how he winds up buying the Atlanta Braves and why remember his channel is the one that carries the Braves games and so he's like listen the
ratings for The Local Atlanta Braves games I think is the highest thing highest rated show uh that he has on his TV network or his TV station rather right but the problem is like that fluctuates whether the team is winning or losing team wins more games obviously more people tune in right and so he goes to the president of the club his name is
Dan he's like Dan I consider us to be partners we need to add some more excitement next year what are you going to do to get the team on track and Dan tells him well I'm not going to do anything because I'm going to sell the team and Ted's freaking out he's like what are you talking about who are you going to sell it to and Dan says I'm going to sell it to you and the reason I
say relationships run the world is because one it's in these book over you see this in these biographies over and over again but it's also something that his dad told him a long time ago he says my dad taught me early on that long-term relationships with your customers and partners are very important you never know how the guy who your friendly with
today might be able to help you tomorrow and so what's happening he's like they're offering me a firstlook chance to buy the franchise and this is another example where Ted does not have the money and this is what he says it's like I it doesn't matter I don't have any money I have to do this the Braves were a key asset and I had to go for them by
owning the team I could control its long-term TV rights they were too important to his TV station and so they're like okay we want uh $10 million for the team could you imagine buying a professional sports team for $10 million by the way and so he this is where he has to get creative he's like okay I can give you a million dollars down and then
you give me nine years to pay the rest at a high interest rate and they say yes another smart thing Ted does so he understood this is very fascinating we're going to get into literally the invention of the cable TV industry the best book I've read on this is actually cable Cowboy uh it's actually episode 2 68 if you haven't gone back and listened
to it it tells the story of John Malone oh that's another thing the remarkable thing about this book is all the different people that at the time they're still coming up but these people are like world famous a lot of these people now are in their 80s most of them are multi-billionaires I I love reading stories about people like they these
intersection of these like a players uh that all either know each other sometimes they collaborate like let me give you an example Ted Turner goes to a meeting there's four people in the meeting Ted Turner John Malone Warren Buffett and Bob Iger and this is before Bob Iger was the CEO of Disney uh John Malone's in this book all the time because he saves Ted's ass
a couple times but also um the the book is structured in a way where like Ted will be telling a story and then they'll be other people throughout his life that commentate on what was also taking place at that time and some of them you know were like I have a little different view on that and so John Malone what I think I'm going to do is actually uh you could
buy the Kindle version of the book and just search John Malone and just read all of like Malone's excerpts and I think it's actually a it's that's even worth the price of the book alone there's just a million like really interesting people that are spread throughout the book that was one of my favorite parts of reading the book but let me get back to this though what what
was fascinating is right now Ted is considered a broadcaster he owns a TV station you can only get access to that TV station when if you have like an antenna and yet this is the the brand new cable TV industry is going to be seen as a threat by broadcasters Ted is a broadcaster and he realizes this is not a threat this is an opportunity so
he says I also saw that people were signing up for a new service to get local stations they were unable to tune in with their antenna which is the basis of his TV business at this point this technology was often referred to as catv which stood for Community attenna television or more simply cable TV Ted thinks this is a massive opportunity so
anytime he thinks there's a massive opportunity Ted does the same thing he goes and tries to build relationships with the good with the main players in that industry so he goes and becomes friendly with the capable TV operators and this is hilarious because this is what they tell them they told me that I was their first friendly broadcaster that they had ever met back then
broadcasters saw cable operators as the enemy for many years local TV stations had a monopoly and they viewed cable op operators with fear and suspicion why because broadcasters say hey how dare you import distant stations I have a local Monopoly and you're coming over the top and Ted thought that was a stupid position to have because he's like no you're not coming over the top
you're greatly expanding my audience now instead of 20,000 people watching the show or 100,000 people watching the show there there's going to be millions of people watching my shows so at this point he starts the the first they call it superstation so uh he's Ed with creating this like the super station concept he was the first person this is
actually going to be TBS what we know is TBS and he's always on the Forefront he's so usually so far ahead of other people that uh whether it's financial institution like Banks don't understand how to loan a money because they don't understand what he's doing or in many cases advertisers they're not comfortable and so this was fascinating
because he couldn't convince traditional advertisers to buy ads he finds small companies with products to sell and then gives them distribution so the thing that saves his ass until he can bridge this Gap is the fact that he does direct response so think about you you've undoubtedly seen these let's say you are a manufacturer of steak knives and
you're a small company you go on TV and you you know sell your sell your steak knives in like a two-minute commercial like Billy May style right these are the small companies that he chooses to partner with and here's the thing this is again he's always proving his concept he knows that TV can be an incredible distribution Channel because back when
nobody was watching his station he saw Jim and Tammy Fay Baker make all this money and it's the same thing that's happening now when he expands to this region he's like of course the bigger the market of course you're going to increase your sales so he says we managed to sell a lot of merchandise direct response Revenue would prove to be vital for us while we work to
convince traditional advertisers that we were well worth considering and remember I said he was inquisitive he sees this article and it mentions that there's this brand new company called home box office HBO that is going to be a new pay for Movie Channel that's going to distribute their signal not by antenna not by cable but by satellite this is
going to be both one a massive opportunity and a big headache because he's buying content from other people those people they're selling the content usually like to sell it by again they're geographically constrained he's like no no no not only am I don't want to just put in like one little city or one little state I'm going to broadcast this
all over the world and people flip out so I'll get there in one second now this is is also interesting and it is John Malone's take on Ted Turner at this point in Ted's career that he was impervious to roadblocks that would stop people from even starting so he says this is John Malone remember John Malone describing Ted Turner he always had this kind of basic almost childless Lo
childish logic about him that refuses to accept artificial impediments I think one of his biggest secrets of success over the years is that the things that most of us would sit there and Ponder all these Regulatory and legal reasons why it might not be something you could do and Ted would just say oh hell you can overcome those kind of things and he
just go and do it and so he's making enemies everywhere he's fighting with he's like we managed to alienate the Hollywood Studios the sports leagues the broadcast networks and the local stations all over the country and so he has to fight this actually in Washington there's going to be a bunch of lawsuits a bunch of regulations this is what I
mean this he's going to describe what he what this is one of the most difficult periods of his life but this also speaks to this obsessive workaholic nature that he has there's a bunch of stuff in the book about his childhood which was crazy about the way he went through multiple divorces talks about you know wasn't really around when his kids were there
if you're interested in that I'm going to skip over that uh from I want to focus on really how he built his business but there is a lot of that in the book and it's well worth reading but this is uh he's describing the hardest part of period of his life these issues were all unchartered territory all of us the regul ators the broadcasters the
program suppliers and the leagues the sports leagues were sorting things out on the Fly I was working as hard as I could I'd go all out during the day working on sales distribution regulatory issues whatever the battle happened to be and i' work right up until it was time to fall asleep I had a pull down Murphy bed in my office and I would literally work until the point of total
exhaustion then I'd put my head on the pillow at night worried about problems then I'd wake up and spend the entire next day trying to solve them and so in many cases the solutions he comes up with to these problems is very creative and so one of the problems he has at this point is there's this company called neelen so neelen is the
one that measures viewership for regular TV stations at this point remember he's one of the first I think he is the first superstation on a satellite and they're like hey we're not going to measure your audience we can't document your audience outside of Atlanta you know you're spread out all over the place it's too expensive for us to do it and if they
don't do it then can't sell ads against it because he can't prove how big his audience is right they they literally turn over the neelon data to the advertisers and that way they sell their ads against now here's the problem he's like yeah but this is [ __ ] this is not why you're saying that your real motivation is because your customer base is actually the broadcast networks and
the local stations and I'm competing them and out competing them with the satellite and So eventually he's going to threaten to sue them they're going to wind up uh acquiescing to his demands but before then he's like this is a problem I need to prove like essentially his problem is like okay how can I prove that people all over the country are
watching my superstation if I don't have any analytics and this is where he had that blessing in disguise where he couldn't earlier in the story he couldn't sell Regional nobody would buy Regional advertising right so he's like oh I got to go to direct response and he realizes oh okay well since we we're running so much and we're relying on
Direct response so much we know where our customers are because they send in personal checks and the postmark tells us where the check comes from check this out direct response advertising could be a solution to our problem since many of our orders for direct response products came in the form of personal checks mailed directly to our Atlanta offices
we could tell they where they were coming from based on the postmarks on the envelopes so he has his team he says okay you need I want you to put all the checks from the from our customers into one of two piles you have the Atlanta pile which is the market that neelen wants to verify and the non Atlanta pile and very quickly he realized oh my God
the non Atlanta stack grew to such a size that it dwarfed the size of the local one obviously I have a l lot larger audience outside of Atlanta than I do inside of it and so he's doing anything he can to get an advantage and to keep his company alive but keep in mind there's a usually a very slow lag and he describes this part of human nature it's like no one wants to be the
first person that does something but once other people do it a lot of people flood in it was nearly uh two full years before we got any meaningful National buys what we were doing was so new and so unique that everyone was slow to adapt but once a few of the biggest players validated our concept the rest began to follow and then he's constantly
looking for these ways to differentiate himself from competitors I remember so when I was a kid there was this thing called TV Guide TV Guide was literally a physical book that would tell you what's on TV eventually it got digitized and essentially they copied what was in the book on the TV but what I couldn't understand is like when IID want to
watch like TNT or TBS which uh Ted Turner owned they would start their programs at a different hour and I didn't know why and so Ted's going to explain why and it worked because this worked on me so he says the listings in the TV Guide for every other channel started and ended at the top and the bottom of the hour so it was very common for TV everything starts at 700
everything ends the next show starts at 8 everybody does it the exact same way and he's like okay well if we can extend a program through the end of the hour and then we'd start we he pushed his the the start time back five minutes I think this was TBS was five minutes I thought when I was younger one of them was five and 15 minutes but maybe it was all five
so he's describing why he did this we're going to extend a program through the end of the hour and start the following one at 7:05 I Envision that people watching our comp competition would start flipping around at the end of their shows and while the other channels would all be running commercials we'd be showing programming the other benefit of
this strategy was that we got our own little slot in every program guide a group of channels would be listed together at the top and bottom of the app hour but we were by ourselves on the 05 and 35 minute Mark we tried this and immediately our ratings improved and so again this constant trial and error another thing that he does that he gets uh he gets
criticized for later on that I thought was actually really smart is he did Heavy Investments remember he's like buying all these old movies right he syndicating all these old movies he's using them in a bunch of different formats a bunch of different the TV stations that he owns and there's a new technology comes along that would recolor them this is like decades ago
and it was very expensive he'd have to pay like 200 Grand per every every single film you're like oh you want to take this black and white film and you want to turn to color great Ted that's going to be 200 Grand and no it was like you're out of your mind it's way too expensive people considered it was like like almost like graffiti because why
are you doing this it was meant to be black and white Ted didn't care about any of that stuff and what happens he is like okay I could run the black and white version of that movie and then I could invest 200,000 then now now I have the color version and I'd run that exact same movie one is in black and white one is in color the color one would get six
times the amount of viewers so in other words it would pay for itself very quickly because you got six times the audience Ted is always paying attention Ted is always adaptable and that leads him I think if most people ask like what is Ted Turner known for I think it would be the invention of the first the world's first 24-hour news station uh
CNN and what was fascinating he's like well that idea was rather obvious and why was it obvious to him and other people because he's paying attention to this industry he's obsessed with this industry and he's like well what came before CNN well you had HBO which is a 24-hour Movie Network people love that then you had ESPN which is a 24-hour
Sports service and people love that why wouldn't there there should be a 24-hour News Channel and he thought about this idea for 5 years before he winds up doing it because he's like obviously the big three networks ABC CBS NBC they have tons of reporters they have news bureaus all over the world they have all these assets that I don't have that I have to
build to do obviously they see that we should just take those assets produce more content so instead of doing uh they they did news four hours a day at this time let's add an extra 20 hours we're going to do it 24 hours a day and of course we're going to grow a giant audience and so for five years Ted Turner has this IDE is just waiting waiting waiting and they don't do it and
that leads us to one of the most important ideas in the book The Power of belief clearly the companies for whom the economics of 24-hour news would have made the most sense were the big three broadcasters they already had most of what was needed Studios bureaus reporters anchors they had everything but a belief in cable and this is such an important
point because over and over again in the early days of his career they they would call he's like Ted Turner's nuts this guy's crazy he's not nuts nut he's not crazy he's early he sees something that you don't see listen to this he's 38 years old and this is how much he has a belief in Cable in cable TV he's on a plane and he's like I'm going to be a
billionaire he's saying this in October of 1976 he's 38 so it says uh the guy's telling the story that sit next to him we managed to get seats together on the plane he pulls out a copy of the Delta Airlines magazine and he turns to the map of the United States and starts explaining to me how he's going to be a billionaire make sure you buy my stock
I'm going to be a billionaire and here's why I'm going to put this station up on a satellite and I'm going to get a news thing going Sports movies and news 24 hours a day all over the world he said that in 1976 that is incredible I haven't even mentioned yet the fact that this guy is a voracious reader and you already know before I say this to you what do you
think he's reading what do you think he's reading you know what he's reading he's reading history he's reading biographies he's constantly I don't know if I'm going to there's some highlights on this but he's constantly comparing stuff he read in books like from history to what's taking place in his in his life and I love this part he's like I'm
often asked if we ever did any formal research on the viability of a 24-hour news or 24hour cable news station and my answer is no I had spent over 5 years thinking about it Henry Ford didn't need focus groups to tell him that people would prefer inexpensive Dependable automobiles over horses Alexander grah Bell never stopped to worry about whether people would prefer speaking to
each other on a phone if viewers liked watching news on television why wouldn't they want the option to do it any hour of the day and so when I say that I think the highest order bit is his belief in cable and I can prove to you that he believed it because you have all these people saying that that Turner was like literally jumping up on desks and
people were like literally like screaming that people didn't understand what he saw but he his actions show this and he's like you know what I don't have enough money or experience uh I believe in this idea of CNN so much I'm going to sell off all my other assets to fund this unproven idea and so this is where it gets really crazy what he's willing to
do uh to make this dream happen he says listen we're breaking one of the golden rules of startups we're launching a business and we know we know we do not have sufficient Capital it's not going to be profitable enough on the money we have so he's like okay I got figure out what the hell I'm doing and again I like I said before he's always so far ahead
there's no lenders or investors they don't understand what he's doing so like he's like okay my only option is like I got to sell assets and I'm going to put all these profitable assets that would make me a very rich man if I just did that and I'm going to sell them all take that money and maybe light it all on fire if CNN fails this is pretty wild so
he has to go to these like very difficult almost like lone sharks it they're highly collateralized they're very high interest rate uh late rates he wants up taking money from a factoring company so they actually come in and actually check his books every week before giving him more cash but the main idea I want to tell you about what's
going on here is really asking your question uh asking yourself the question like what is the most valuable but least strategic asset that I have that I can sell so I can actually make it to the next fuel station that's going to make more sense because he's going to do another uh historical analogy and so he's looking around all the stuff he's
owning he's like okay I'm selling the billboard selling radio station so he's like well I own the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks but I can't and they're very very valuable but they're too important strategically to the actual like all like his his TV stations right he's like I can't sell them and so he's looking around for the most valuable and least strategic asset he
has this local TV station in Charlotte that eight years before he had bought for a million dollars remember he's always early and now that business is valued at 20 million so he sells that for $20 million takes a $19 million profit and this is why this is excellent I've always been a student of military history I thought the CNN launch strategy was similar to rl's Desert
campaign during World War II so raml was a German general he's fighting the British in World War II he knew he didn't have enough fuel to conduct an entire offensive he's he's a tanker he's they have Panzer tanks at this point what he intended to do was strike when they weren't expecting it meaning the British overrun their lines and then
capture their fuel dumps at that point he could refuel his Panzer tanks and continue the offensive this is this is Ted's strategy my vision for financing CNN was similar if we had enough cash to get on the air and could somehow get through our first year of operation people would see that this was viable and then once the concept was proven we
would have easier access to Capital so he kind of has like a burn the boats no plan B mentality there is something that happens over and over again where it's like how the hell is this guy this little startup going against some of the biggest companies in the world some of those profitable companies in the world he talks about like uh going to meetings
with some of the people he's competing with they're at like this like Shack in Atlanta he goes up to their their company headquarters in New York and it's like they're eating on like China from Versailles uh they have a million-dollar artwork like what the hell is going on and he winds up winning and he talks about this and he says I'm always convinced that one of the reasons
that I've been successful is that I've almost always competed against people who were bigger and stronger but who had less commitment and desire than I did and so in this case he's fighting RCA RCA was a huge company but for Turner Broadcasting this dispute meant everything we had to win and so I just went through and looked at all my notes
that are that's happening during this time trying to figure out like what is the main theme here and there's just a couple things that he has that his opponents don't even though they have more assets than he shouldn't have won he's fully committed right where they have this is just like one dispute and they there's a huge conglomerate they're
not fully focused he has a stronger desire as a result of that he has more belief by far by far he's got more belief about cable and satellite TV than anyone else more belief about the fact that this makes no sense that no one else has made a 24-hour Cable News Network yet and he's got the highest level of enthusiasm this guy is one of
the greatest one-on-one salespeople even when he recruits Talent they just say over and over again listen he's very charismatic and his enthusiasm is very infectious and you will it's almost like how people describe Steve Jobs like that real reality Distortion field that when you're in his presence like there's an aura you cannot understand it and you
know that because when you leave it you're almost like you snap out of it you stop being hypnotized and you're like what the hell just happened this guy completely hypnot Ted Turner is capable of completely hypnotizing people with his enthusiasm and his sheer belief in what he is doing and so there's a bunch of times where he's there's a
bunch of anti-competitive behavior he threatens all these like Anti-Trust and monopolistic lawsuits in this case he launches CNN and then ABC and Westinghouse are going to do a joint venture they're essentially going to copy CNN but instead of charging the cable networks for it they're gon like oh you can have our channels for free Ted Turners like you know this is
predatory anti-competitive behavior willing to sue you winds up not backing down they wind up saying okay they never launched their version I think it was called like snc or something like that and they're like okay we'll we'll back out of this you have to pay a $25 million Ted's like I don't have that money right now but I have to again how
many times has he said this I don't have the money but I have to do this deal and so it says uh one of my top Financial uh advisers reason with me that fighting it out with them with with Westinghouse and ABC was costing me right now $4 million a month so for the cost of about 6 months or more of fighting well we could buy them out all together we decided to
settle for the 25 million now this is that's interesting that's fine this is the crazy mind-blowing thing that I I can't understand the next sentence blows my mind CNN obviously gets a large viewership it's obviously working even though he's going to bleed a couple million dollars for a few years before it becomes wildly profitable we know
that his that 24-hour like super station because his his TBS superstation is printing money right I think they were making around this time uh 100 I want to say 160 let me see if I can find it real quick sorry 177 million in revenue and 66 million and profit so clearly why wouldn't that work with news as well right it's a 24-hour satellite station
and so this is the crazy thing the crazy sentence after he he settles with ABC and Westinghouse and they never launched their 24-hour News Network he says it would be 13 years before we faced another 24-hour News Channel imagine having an unbelievably lucrative brand new opportunity and you don't even have a competitor for 13 years and again Ted uses a historical analogy Turner
Broadcasting defeating ABC and Westinghouse in the early 1980s was like Luxenberg going to war with both the United States and Soviet Union and winning and so there's several examples in the book where it's like okay why aren't they these broadcast networks why aren't they doing a 24-hour news station right if you're a broadcast network and
so what I mean by broadcast network I need be clear about this this is like the big three this is ABC CBS and NBC right and everything he's doing is like these are cable networks and he's like why aren't like a broadcast network and a cable network under the same ownership actually makes a lot of sense why is nobody doing this I think it's another
example of the fact that he just understood the industry more so than other people and you you have an inkling that you might be able to do that because there's something that's obvious to you like an opportunity hiding in plain sight that's obvious to you that no one else sees so he says to my continued amazement the network stayed on the sidelines and watched the launch
of other cable channels so not only did you have his TBS the superstation you have ESPN you have HBO you have all this other other experiments you're seeing things like MTV Nickelodeon the Discovery Channel and his hypothesis Ted's hypothesis about why this was happening is saying it's almost like the innovator's Dilemma they were worrying
more about the previous nights ratings and the money that comes from that than the long-term future of their business and so he keeps trying to merge Turner Broadcasting with this is this is again um just how how the whole thing ends ends up when he tries to merge later on with uh ge and he's having this convers ation with Jack Welch uh the note I left
myself there's not even a highlight there but I'm just like reading about this page after page after page there's probably like a 100 Pages where this is like he's always trying to be a bigger part of a bigger company and to me it's like that's not your personality and so I just wrote to myself why does he keep trying to sell his company and then have
a position at the larger company he's not going to be in charge and I didn't know when I wrote that note to myself what was going to happen when he gets the Time Warner and effectively gets fired but we're not there yet so at this point he's still again trying to merge Turner Broadcasting with another one of the big three networks and his whole point and this is just about the news
part of it which I thought was really smart he's like well you guys have in this case it's CBS you guys at CBS you have four hours of news a day right okay uh I have CNN and I have headline news so we have 48 hours that means if we combine we have 52 hours 48 plus 4 right 52 hours against which to amortise our costs ABC is and NBC has the same thing
you do they have four hours a day combined with me we have 52 now and then we can advertise the cost across those 52 and we'll leave the compet our competitors in the dust and there's another benefit because the antitrust rules at this time prohibited the broadcast networks from vertically integrating so means that that means they cannot produce their own uh
programming at this time they would license most of their shows from Malik Hollywood Studios and so his whole point was like okay well CBS you're going and you're going to a studio and you're leasing a show like Mash mash was like the biggest TV show at this point in history so you get the first run of mash but then the actual owner of the show
which in this case is 20th Century Fox then goes around and sells its reruns to a local station or cable channel and CBS doesn't make a dime off this off Network syndication but you would make a dime if you owned a cable network so he's like if CBS and the superstation which is TBS were part of the same company we could NE negotiate a comprehensive corporate
deal with Fox CBS can build the show into a hit right they get the first run and then TBS would have the option to Syndicate the hit episodes in other words you'd make more money you'd make money on both of the transactions right now you're only making money on one of the transactions and you could argue that because it's a hit on CBS is what
gives the value for the the secondary transaction is is Ted's Point here which is like really smart this guy is just very keen is the way I guess would think about like he has a keen understanding of how to combine assets to create an advantage that no one else has and I think the mistake he makes which what we're going to get to here now is he
just lets his deals get too complex and so CBS turns him down and so he's like okay well I need content like what can I do and he goes and does a deal with MGM and remember how his dad killed himself because he thought he overleveraged himself and he was risking everything else Ted Turner actually does that and he over leverages himself in this deal
Kirk Koran uh who I did a long time ago I'm going to reread that book so many people ask me to do another episode on it I think it's like episode 65 so probably you know five or six years ago this book called The Gambler a lot of people know it it's an excellent book it's the biography of Kirk Koran so Ted Turner is actually buying MGM from Kirk
Coran and he winds up screwing himself and he actually has to um call on John Malone and John Malone saves him and as a result then he has like some veto power so this is like the first step where Ted Turner actually kind of has a boss B not a complete boss but hey over a certain amount he can't just go and like buy and do deals anymore without like approval from his board this is
really important actually because I think genius has the fewest moving parts and I think the biggest weakness that I see in this book and one I want to avoid for myself is like never get into deals that are too complicated Ted's deals are way too complicated they have way too much debt and they rely on the future company performance that is possible to
predict and so he finds himself in a bad deal and very a few months away from losing everything and good thing he he is good friends with and and calls John Malone who's really good at situations like this by the end of 1986 it was clear that if I didn't do something soon I'd be having to transfer my stock to Koran within a couple of months John
Malone understood my situation and he and I set to work immediately knowing that if we didn't successfully change the company's ownership structure within five quarters I would lose control of Turner Broadcasting exactly what his father feared Ted did this is insane calling on John Malone turned out to be the best thing I could have done and so John Malone also describes what's going
on I'm just going to pull out one sentence here I think you'll get you understand this he took his leverage too high and the structure of the leverage was a problem and so it goes into all these deals he's trying to do with these giant companies I mentioned GE and Jack Welch before uh he tries he almost does a deal where he sells to Bill Gates and
Microsoft and that's when I was like hey why is he keep trying to sell the company and then have a position at the larger company that he's not going to be in charge of and part of this is because he's already lost complete autonomy he does not uh adhere to James Dyson's principal of retention of total control and the importance of retention of total
control and Bill Gates talks about this he's like listen Ted had these weird control Provisions relative to the other cable guys who own pieces of his company this is the the rescue package that John Malone put together to save him from Kirk aoran uh it drove Ted kind of crazy he never really knew how to deal with having sort of a boss so it's not really
a boss but it's kind of a boss you know uh you get up uh one morning with a wild idea and then you have to think am I going to get vetoed Ted did not like this and I again I I really think the most important most prominent Instinct Natural Instinct in founder in entrepreneur types is the control and Conquer Instinct I think what we we think we want money or Prestige or
status us but I really think what we actually want is control and so I think there's a lot of wisdom in in James Dyson's Maxim that you know retention of Total Control never relinquish total control and I think the loss of total control being exhausted and flat out running for three decades and then also somebody offering you8 billion leads to
why he sold to Time Warner the final reason I agreed to do the deal was a simple one I was tired it was now more than 30 years since my father's death and had been running the company on my own ever since 30 years of long weeks and 18-hour days would get to anyone and by this time I was flat out exhausted I made the official announcement in
September of 1995 the little billboard company that I struggled to hold together had grown into a diversified entity that was being acquired at a value of more than $8 billion I would now be the largest shareholder of the biggest Communication company in the world I wish my father could have seen what we'd accomplished with the business that he left I'm sure he would have been
proud and that is where I'll leave it highly recommend reading the book if you're interested in building a media company I think there's a lot of ideas actually here that are transferable outside of media including this just really smart way to combine Assets in a way uh that your competitors can't it is unbelievably dense it is easy to read
but there's so much going on in every page what I would do is one take your time with with it and two I would go and highlight and do a lot of notes and then what I would do is I would re there was so much going on even like a single page or maybe two or three pages I have to rewrite out what actually is happening to understand so I would definitely take
your time with it if you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time there'll be a link down below that is 337 books down 1,000 ago and I'll talk to you again soon okay so what you're about to hear is this question I was asked a few months ago I actually recorded this a few months ago they asked how did History's Greatest
entrepreneurs think about hiring all the answers people think I have a better memory than I than I actually do you know if people say David you have a great memory my wife would laugh at that I forget things all the time it's not I have a good memory it's I reread things over and over and over again every single answer every single reference
you're about to hear in this 20 minute mini episode came from me searching all of my notes and highlights that option is now available to you if you like what you hear if you think it's valuable if you're already running a successful company and you want an easy way to reference the ideas of History's Greatest entrepreneurs in a searchable
database that you can go through at your convenience anytime you want then you go to Founders notes.com and sign up I want to start out first with why this is so important there's actually this book that came out in like 1997 it's a called in the company Giants I think it's episode 208 of Founders it's two Stanford MBA students if I remember correctly and they're interviewing a
bunch of technology company Founders and in there Steve Jobs one of them this is you know right I think even before he came back to Apple and they were talking about well yeah we know it's important to hire but in a typical startup a manager or a Founder may not always have time to spend recruiting other people and I I first read this Steve's answer
to this you know I don't know two years ago and I never forgot it I think it's excellent I think it sets up why uh this question is so important and you should really be spending especially in the early days like basically all your time doing this uh in a startup manager may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people then Steve jumps
in I disagree totally I think it's the most important job assume you're by yourself in a startup and you want a partner you take a lot of time finding a partner right he would be half of your company I'm going to pause there this idea of looking at each new hire as a percentage of the company is genius why should you take any less time finding a
third or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company when you're in a startup the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not each is 10% of the company so why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all a players if three three out of the 10 uh were not so great why would you start a company where 30% of your people are not so great a small
company depends on great people much more than a big company does okay so to answer this question the advantage that um that I have making Founders and that you have as as a byproduct of listening to Founders is not only that I've read you know 300 something biographies of entrepreneurs now but I have all of my notes and highlights stored in my
readwise app and that means I can search for any topic I can look at the past highlights of books or I can search for keyword so what I did is first of all like what I've started to do with these AMA um questions is I read them decide which ones I'm going to do next and then think about it for a few days I don't put any just literally that that I know
that's the next question just let my brain work on it in the background for a few days and then I'll go through and start searching all my notes and so that's what I did here and so there's a bunch of you know I don't have I may have like 10 or 15 different Founders talking about hiring the first idea is the most obvious but I think probably
works best when you're already established so Steve Jobs is talking about hey you know great way to to hire is just find great work and find the people that did that and then try to hire them when you're Steve Jobs that's a lot easier right than if you're just somebody doesn't have reputation maybe don't have resources maybe your company's rather new or not as well
known David ogy I just did confessions of an advertising man a couple episodes ago I think 306 or something like that 307 and he did the same thing but he's David olgy at that point so he would find he'd go through magazines find great advertising great copywriting and he'd write the personal letter and then set up a phone call and he says he
wouldn't he was so well known and you know he's one of the best in his field that he wouldn't even have to offer a job just the conversation then the person would the he' want to hire the person never mention it and the person would apply to him um and so again I think if you can do that then of course that's straight forward who find for somebody who does great work usually you
can do this I actually have a friend I can't say who it is he's doing this right now actually um I have a friend that's really good at doing this he's finding people that do great stuff on the internet and then just cold cold dming them and then getting convincing them to work on things and that usually works especially with people like
younger people earlier in their career there's a bunch of different ways to think about this in a bunch of different ways to prioritize so the first thing that that that came to mind that I found surprising is you read any biography on Rockefeller and he had a couple ideas where he felt the optimization you know table Stakes that you're intelligent and
you're driven and you're hardworking right we don't even have like if you're listening to this you already know that but he prioritized hiring people with social skills and so this is what he said the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I pay for I pay more for that ability than any other Under the Sun
there's the two the second part to this though and this is also works well if you have access to more resources you Rockefeller would hire people as he found as he found talented people not as he needed them it's not like okay standard oil has six open spots let's go find six can candidates right he'd come across what he considered a talented
person he didn't even matter if he didn't know what they were going to do he's like I'm just going to stack his team and if you really think about the his partners of sard orial he essentially built a company an executive team of founders of because he was buying up all their companies so it's very rare but um there's a line from Titan I want to read to you taking for
granted the growth of his Empire he hired talented people as found not as needed and then I found another idea in hiring like the actual interview process so there's this guy named Van ebsh I did two episodes on him I think it's 270 and 271 he is the most important American ever uh in history uh in terms of connecting the scientific field private
Enterprise and the government the most important person to keep alive for the American war effort was FDR the second one was Van bush vaniver bush is like the Forest Gump of this historical period he is involved in everything from the Manhattan Project to discovering like a young Claud Shan into building a mechanical computer like this guy
literally has done he just he pops up in these books over and over again if you were reading about American Business history during World War II and post World War II you are going to come across the name vanever Bush over and over again uh I read his fantastic autobiography called pieces of the action and I came across this weird highlight and so this is his brilliant
and unusual job inter rview process and so he's talking about this organization he's running called amrad at amrad I hired a young physicist from Texas named CG Smith the way I hired him is interesting an interview of that sort is always likely to be on on an artificial basis in somewhat embarrassing so I discussed with him a technical point on
which I was then genuinely puzzled the next day he came in with a with a neat solution and I hired him at once here's another idea this is from Nolan Bushnell Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari founder of chuckecheese and Steve Jobs Mentor he hired Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs was like 19 at Atari he would ask people their reading habits in interviews this is why uh one of the
best ways his whole thing was he wanted to build a all of his companies laid on a foundation of creative people so that's what he's looking for he's like I need creative people one of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question what books do you like I've never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm
to a question about reading habits actually which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read it all I've known many talented Engineers who hated science fiction but loved books on bird watching a blatant but often accurate generalization people who are curious and passionate read people who are apathetic and IND different don't I
remember that's such a great line and I obviously agree with it I remember one I'm going to read it again a blatant but often accurate generalization people who are curious and passionate read people who are apathetic and indifferent don't I remember one particular woman who during an interview told me that she had read every book that I had read so I
started mentioning books I hadn't read and she had read those too too I didn't know how someone in her late 20s found that time this much time to read so much but I was impressed I was so impressed that I hired her right there and assigned her to International marketing which was having problems this is why this is why I'm reading this whole
section to you a job with a lot of moving Parts benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving Parts it wouldn't be possible to have read that many books without such a brain so do you see what I mean like we start with Steve Jobs saying this is the most important thing that you your rle as the leader the company the founder to do right and you are and
it's so important to study and this is why I'm glad this this question exists and why I'm glad that I've I took the time and I had like the foresight to was like Hey I should really organize my thoughts and notes because there's no way I would have remembered all this without being being able to search my readwise right but you have Rockefeller
saying this is what's important to me you have Bush saying this is how I hire now you have Nolan Bush now saying well here's another weird thing that I learned um let me go through what Warren Buffett says about this so this is about the quality one thing that is consistent whether it's jobs Buffett Bezos uh Peter teal this just pops up over and over
again they talk about the importance of trying to find people that that are better than you the the hiring bar constantly has to increase now obviously the larger the company gets that's impossible uh Steve Jobs has this great quote where he's like you know Pixar was the first time I see I saw an entire team entire company of a players but
they had 400 player they had 400 team members he's like at the time Apple three 3,000 it's like it's impossible to have 3,000 a players so there is some number that your company May grow to where it's just you're just not you're not going to have thousands of a players in my argument I don't even know if you get have 400 I guess you I mean I'll
take Steve's word for it on there and Pixar definitely produce great products but it's probably a lot lower than that as well so Warren Buffett would tell you to use David olgy's hiring philosophy and so Warren said Charlie and I know that the right players will make almost any team manager look good again that is why it's the most important function of
the founder maybe directly next to the product or right above the product actually because those are people building your product we subscribe to the philosophy of ogy and Ma's founding genius David ogy this is what ogy said if each of us hires people who are small smaller than we are we should become a company of dwarfs but if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are
we shall become a company of giants David or Jeff Bezos rather used A variation of AG's idea too Jeff used to say in Amazon every time we hire someone he or she should raise the bar for the next hire so that the overall talent pool is always improving they talk about this idea in Amazon where the the the future hires that we do should be so
good that if you had applied for the job you already have an Amazon you wouldn't get in that's a very interesting idea take your time with recruiting take your time with hiring there's this great book on the history of PayPal it's written actually I've recently become friends with the author his name is Jimmy Sony um and this is in his book The the most
fascinating thing that I found was that PayPal prioritized speed so from the time they they're found it to the time they sell to eBay it's like four years Jimmy spent more time researching the book than than he spent six years researching book I always tease them because like you took longer on a book than they took to start and sell their company it just speaks to like the
quality he's trying to do but that as a byproduct of that like obviously they move fast but they prioritize speed over everything else except in one area recuit in Max ludin kept the bar for talent exceedingly High even if that came at the expense of Speedy St Staffing Max kept repeating A's higher A's B's hire C's so the first B you hire
takes the whole company down let's read that again a players hire a players b players hire C players so the first B player you hire takes the whole company down uh additionally the team the company leaders mandated that all prospects here's another idea for you all prospects must meet every single member of the team now the next one is the most bizarre it makes sense if you
study I did this three-part on Larry Ellison three-part series on Larry Ellison I should read those books again because the podcast is like 50 times bigger than than when I uh publish those episodes and he's just crazy so he would hire based on the confidence the self-confidence level of of the canidate listen to this I have tears in my eyes I
don't know why I'm laughing okay this just so cuz this is you read about Larry Ellison and he's one of these people that's like really easy to interface with because you just you just know exactly who he is and what's important to him that's why I think it's so funny Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest new college graduates when they were
recruiting from universities they'd ask people are you the smartest person you know and if they said yes they would hire them if they said no they would say who is and they would go hire that guy instead I don't know if you got the smartest people that way but you definitely got the most arrogant Ellison and this is why the personality of the
founder is largely the culture of the company Apple is Steve Jobs Apple's just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives right I was just texting a a Founder friend of mine uh he listens to the podcast I actually met him through the podcast and he's going through this like uh process of self-discovery like he's already started a bunch of companies are really
successful but he's like I think I'm more of this type of founder than the other type of founder and that's good that he's doing that because he's he's hopefully his next mission is like his life's mission you know and you can't get to your life's mission unless you you figured out who you are Ellison knew who he was Ellison's swaggering
combative style became a part of the company's identity this arrogant culture had a lot to do with oracle's success here's another odd idea for you Izzy sharp the founder of Four Seasons actually could figure it out that in his business which was hotels right that hiring could hiring the right person could actually be a form of distribution for his hotel he gave me the idea
because of what what do we know what do you and I know know in our bones that History's Greatest Founders All read biographies they all read biographies of people that came before them and took ideas from them Izzy sharp is trying to build Four Seasons what do you think he did he picked up a biography of Cesar Ritz the guy that Ritz Carlton is named
after the great arguably the greatest Hotel of all time and when he realized oh [ __ ] Ritz he he says uh remembering that Caesar Ritz made his hotel's World Famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs we decided to do something similar so what is he talking about Cesar Ritz went out and partnered with August escaf what Caesar Ritz was to hotel to
building hotels August esaf was to French cooking and so what happened is you partner with world famous chefs people come into your restaurant that's in the hotel because the world famous chef and now they know about your hotel that leads to more G that leads to more activity in your restaurant that you own but also leads to more brand recognition
of your hotel and then by as a byproduct that more people staying at the hotel so hiring as a form of distribution this is fascinating that is a fascinating idea okay here's the problem you can identify great people right maybe they even want to come work like you've identified them you've sold them hey this is what this is our mission this is what we're we're
doing and yet humans have complicated lives they have spouses they have kids they have a reason maybe they can't move across the country to work for you even though they want to so there's a problem solving element that you see in these books on you have to solve like you've already identified the person you've recruited them they can't go for some other reason okay well the great
Founders are not going to take no for an answer I read in um in this book called liftoff which is about the first six years of SpaceX this is what Elon mus did they had an anticipated his friend's issue having convinced mus they needed to bring This brilliant young engineer from Turkey on board it became a matter of solving the problem his wife had a
job in San Francisco she would need one in Los Angeles right cuz that's where SpaceX is at the time there these were solvable problems and elon's better at solving problems than almost anyone else mus therefore came into his job interview prepared about halfway through mus told the guy that he wants to hire so I heard you don't want to move to LA
and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google well I just talked to Larry and they're going to transfer your wife down to La so what are you going to do now to solve this problem musk had called his friend Larry pagee the co-founder of Google the engineer sat and stunned silence for a moment but then he replied given all that he would
come to work at SpaceX that's really smart there is another idea when you're promoting are you going to promote from within or from without you know that's dependent on you depending on what's going on I do think this is interesting though there's this guy named Les Schwab who built this this really uh valuable chain of uh like tire companies in the
Pacific Northwest I actually found out about him because Charlie Monger is like hey you should read this biography he said it in um he didn't say it to me personally he said it to uh in like one of the birkshire meetings that to study leab had one of the most uh one of the smartest uh Financial incentive structures of any company that that Charlie Monger had come across so this
is what Les Schwab did he did not want to hire from he didn't want to hire other people from other companies because they might come with bad habits he liked to train his own Executives and so he says in our 34 years of business we have never hired a manager from the outside every single one of our more than 250 managers and assistant managers
started at the bottom changing tires they have all earned their management job by working up and then another thing if you're going to hire the best of the best in a players they're a players don't like to be micromanaged um and so this came in Larry Miller's autobiography called driven he owns like he owned like 93 companies all throughout Utah car dealerships movie
theaters all kinds of crazy stuff but he also owned the the the NBA team Utah Jazz and what was fascinating is he's trying to recruit Jerry Sloan as the coach at the at the point and Jerry Sloan would only take the job on one condition and I really like it I really like this idea if you hire me let me run the team in business right that's what
you're hiring before one of the best things we had ever done was hire Jerry Sloan's coach at the time he said I'm only going to ask you for one thing if I get fired let me get fired for my own decisions if you hire me let me run the team SL business here's another idea from Thomas ell Edison that I think is fascinating really I the way I think
about a Founder is like you're developing skills that you can't hire for you you're going to hire for everything else but you shouldn't be hirable and Edison wasn't Edison expressing his views on the preeminent role of Applied scientists which that's what he considered himself coined the expression I can hire mathematicians but they can't hire me and so when I read
that paragraph for the first time the note I left myself was develop skills that you can't hire for capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable uh Este Lauder would give you advice that you need to hire people align with your thinking and values hire the best people this is vital hire people who think as you do and treat
them well in our business they are top top priorities this idea is like that seems kind of weird like hire people who think like you there's obviously not one right way to build a business I think the your business should be an expression of your personality and who you are who are as a person at the core and so I think there is an art to the building of your business and the reason
to use the word art I don't mean in like a hoyy toyy you know pretentious manner that's not me at all I don't even care about I don't art at all really I mean that you're making decisions not just based on economics like there are non-economic important decisions based on how you're building your business like you could probably make more money
doing a decision a but decision a is goes against who you are as a person or you just don't like it or it's just not as elegant or beautiful and so therefore you don't do it so that's what I mean about you know higher people who think as you you do and what for whatever reason when I read saay Lauder say that I was like okay that there's like this
art to what she's doing one thing that's going to be helpful in recruiting uh this comes from Peter teal I think this is the book 0 to one understand that most companies don't even differentiate their pitches to potential recruits and hiring so therefore like they're just going to by as a byproduct of that you're going to wind up with a lower
overall Talent base and so he says what's wrong with valuable stocks smart people are pressing problems nothing but every company makes this these claims so they won't help you stand out General and undifferentiated pitches to join your company don't say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of money instead of many others
so that idea of like your pitch your actual he would tell you you're you shouldn't be building undifferentiated commodity business but even above and beyond that like you're the the the mission that you're trying to engage everybody to join you in that pitch that s sale you're trying to make to potential recruit should be differentiated should not if that
person's applying to five other jobs there should not be like it's like they may not like your mission they may not like your pitch but they shouldn't be able to compare to anything else uh another quote from Nolan Bush now hire for passion and intensity that's what he would do or that's what he did when he found Steve Jobs if there was a single
characteristic that separates Steve Jobs from the mass of employees it was his passionate enthusiasm Steve had one full one speed full blast this was the primary reason we hired him and one thing all these Founders have in common is that they know how important hiring is and when something's important you do it yourself this is again Elon Musk on
hiring he interviewed the first 3,000 employees at SpaceX that's how important it was one of musk's most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would fit his mold his people had to be brilliant they had to be hardworking and there could be No Nonsense there are a ton of phonies out there and not many who are the real deal
must said of his approach to interviewing Engineers I can usually tell within 15 minutes and I can sure I can for sure tell within a few days of working with them musk made hiring a priority he personally met with every single person the company hired through the first 3,000 employees it required late nights and weekends but he felt it was important to get the right people
for his company and then the close on this we started with Steve Jobs telling us why it was so important and why should be a large part of how you spend your time and now we'll close with what you do after what do you do after you hire the person this what he says it's not just recruiting after recruiting it's building an environment that makes
people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are the feeling that their work will have a tremendous influence and is part of a strong Clear Vision so that is the end to that 20-minute mini episode I just relisten to the whole thing and it it really does I think it's a perfect explanation and illustration of why I think Founders
notes is so valuable cuz that some of those books I haven't read in five six years and just the ability to have a searchable database of all this these ideas like this collected knowledge of some of History's Greatest entrepreneurs to reference and then contextually apply to our own businesses it's nothing short of like it's magic that's really the way
I think about it I think it's a massive superpower gives me a massive superpower I couldn't make the podcast with without it I also think if you have access to it it will make your business better and so if you're already running a successful business I highly recommend that you invest in a subscription and you can do that by going to Founders notes.com