Warren Buffett said Tom Murphy and Dan Burke were probably the greatest two-person combination in management that the world has ever seen or maybe ever will see when he speaks to business school classes Warren Buffett often compares the Rivalry between Tom Murphy's company Capital Cities broadcasting and CBS to a transatlantic race between a rowboat and the
Q2 QE2 is the Queen Elizabeth 2 it is this giant transatlantic liner much much larger than the Titanic so he Compares it to a transatlantic race between a roboat and the QE2 to illustrate the tremendous effect management can have on long-term returns when Murphy became the CEO of capital cities in 1966 CBS was the dominant media business
in the country with TV and radio stations in the country's largest markets the top rated broadcast network and valuable publishing and music properties in contrast at that time Capital Cities had five TV stations and four radio stations all in small markets cbs's market capitalization was 16 times the size of Capital Cities but by the
time Murphy sold his company to Disney 30 years later Capital Cities was three times as valuable as CBS in other words the rowboat had won decisively that is an from the book I'm going to talk to you about today which is The Outsiders eight unconventional CEOs and their radically rational blueprint for Success it was written by
William Thorndike and specifically I'm going to focus on chapter one which is about Tom Murphy and Capitol City's broadcasting and the name of the chapter is a Perpetual perpetual motion machine for returns and before I do that I'm going to actually put this book down for one second I'm going to pick up last week's book which was Ted Turner's
autobiography and read this section because he he appears Tom Murphy and his uh partner uh Dan Burk appear in Ted Turner's autobiography as well because they also built they essentially built Capital Cities from a small Broadcasting Company into a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate and so this is what Ted Turner said about them I like the
Capital City's people a lot Dan Burke and Tom Murphy really understood the business they had built their company up by buying TV and radio stations as well as new newspapers and magazines and operating them efficiently that is not the first time I read Tom Murphy name in one of the books that I've covered for
the podcast all the way back on episode 2 286 I did an episode on Warren Buffett and Charlie merer Warren Buffett and Charlie merer talk about Tom Murphy over and over again they mention him in the shareholder letters they mention him when they're answering the q&as at their annual meeting but this is what they said in the book all I want to know is
where I'm going to die so I'll never go there that I covered back on episode 286 this is Warren Buffett he says 40 years ago Tom Murphy gave me one of the best pieces of advice I've ever received he said Warren you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow you haven't missed that opportunity just forget about it for a day if you feel the same
way tomorrow then tell them that then but don't spout off in a moment of anger and just one more excerpt before we jump into the book and this actually comes from the book called a few lessons from Warren Buffett I covered it all the way back on episode 202 this is advice that Tom Murphy gave Warren Buffett on cost
control cost control is something you and I are going to talk about a lot today it's Central to understanding Tom Murphy's incredible performance this is where War buff it says 30 years ago Tom Murphy drove this point home to me with a hypothetical tale about an employee who asked his boss for permission to hire an assistant the employee assumed
that adding $20,000 to the annual payroll would be inconsequential but his boss told him that the proposal should be evaluated as a $3 million decision given that an additional person would probably cost at least that amount over their lifetime factoring in raises benefits and other expens down to the amount the fact that the
company would have to buy more toilet paper this is how insane this guy paid attention to cost and efficiency and unless the company fell on very hard times the employee added would be unlikely to be dismissed however marginal his contribution to the business so as we go through this overview of Tom Murphy's life and his business philosophy just remember that
he watched headcount like a hawk so let's go back to the book The chapter on Tom Murphy in The Outsiders and it's going to pick up where we just left St where Capital Cities winds up vastly outperforming over the uh three decades CBS and like okay well how does this happen how did this seemingly insurmountable gap between these two
companies get closed so it says the answer lies in fundamentally different management approaches CBS spent much of the 1960s and 1970s taking the enormous cash flows generated by its Network and broadcast operations and funding an aggressive acquisition program that led it into entirely new Fields so instead of focusing on other media properties
media business that they knew well they bought things like a toy business and they even bought the New York Yankees uh they also would issue stock to fund some of these Acquisitions they're going to compare and contrast obviously the way CBS is being led uh under this guy named Bill py who's actually the founder of
CBS I was reading about Bill py last week in the Ted Turner biography or autobiography and he mentioned uh bill so actually went out and bought and it's actually sitting on my desk right now it's uh Bill's autobiography which was published all the way back in 1979 So eventually I'm going to read it and if
it's good I'll make a podcast on it but let's go back to this so uh they're getting into new fields that they don't know uh enough about they're issuing shares they're building a fancy headquarters in Midtown Manhattan at an enormous expense and then they developed now this is this is going to be maybe the largest contrast uh between CVS and
Capital Cities they develop a corporate structure listen to this with 42 presidents and vice presidents and generally displayed what Charlie marger calls a Prosperity blinded indifference to unnecessary cost when I got to this section of the book it made me think of one of my favorite things that uh that Monger says uh they go and uh I think he
was touring the Buffalo Evening News after they bought it and he was really against Monger was really against spending money on luxurious offices and so he has this great quip he's like why does a newspaper need a palace to publish in and so that's what I think of when when they're describing what's going on here the strategy at CBS was
consistent with the conventional wisdom of the conglomerate era which espoused The elusive benefits of quote diversification to justify the acquisition of unrelated businesses at its core cbs's strategy in implemented by Bill paly was focused on making CBS larger so now they start contrasting that with Murphy strategy for Capital
Cities in contrast Murphy's goal was to make his company more valuable not justar ler but more valuable as he said to me and so Thor DIY is talking to him for this book right as he said to me the goal is to not have the longest train but to arrive at the station first using the least fuel I love Murphy's got a bunch of good lines uh when he's being
when he's talking to Thorndike that's one of my favorite the goal is to not have the longest train but to arrive at the station first using the least Fuel and so as he continues to describe the difference in Murphy and burk's strategy compared to CBS I just jotted down a few notes on what was happening to on this page for my own self I just put find
your Edge don't diversify and then repeat what works Murphy and Burke rejected diversification and instead created an unusually streamlined conglomerate that focused laser likee on the media business that it knew well Murphy acquired more radio and TV stations as opposed to buying the Yankees or toy company right so he
acquires more radio and TV stations operated them superbly well and regularly repurchased his shares the formula that allowed Murphy to overtake py was deceptively simple number one focus on Industries with attractive economic characteristics number two selectively use leverage to buy occasional large properties number three
improve operations number four pay down debt and number five repeat this Loop more contrasting by Thorndike what's interesting is that his peers at other media comp companies did not follow this path they followed fashion and diversified into unrelated businesses I'm going to pause in the middle of that sentence actually because when I got to
that section made me think of something I read in Burk in um Warren's birkshire shareholder letters where he says the behavior of peer companies will be mindlessly imitated it's exactly what's happening in the book right they're just following fashion uh what's really popular to do at the time what every other people what other company other
conglomerates doing they're going to diversify into unlimated businesses they're going to build large Corp staffs and they're going to overpay for Marquee media properties obviously he's setting that up for you and I to tell us that Murphy did the opposite he did none of those things Capital Cities under Murphy was an extremely successful example of
what we would Now call a rollup in a typical rollup a company acquires a series of businesses attempts to improve operations and then keeps acquiring benefiting overtime from scale advantages and best management practices now just because it sounds simp Le does not mean it's easy there's a lot of people especially in the '90s and8 the
'90s and the 2000s that try to do this and a lot of these companies that try to do a bunch of rollups wind up going out of business and he talks a little bit about why this happened uh why this happened to them and why it did not happen to Tom Murphy a lot of these companies collapsed under the burden of too much debt these companies typically
failed because they acquired too rapidly and underestimated the difficulty of integrating Acquisitions and improving operations Murphy's approach to the rollup was different he moved slowly he developed real operational expertise which I think is one of the benefits of not diversifying right by the time he
does his biggest acquisition is going to come three decades into his career he's going to buy ABC with Warren Buffett's help he can have real conviction do do I actually have operational expertise in operating all these media properties well let me look at the past 30 years did I do this correctly or not uh and then he focused on a small number of
large Acquisitions that he knew to be high probability bets Capital Cities combined excellence in both operations and capital allocation to an an unusual degree and that's that goes back to uh the start of the chapter where Buffett's saying like you know Murphy and Burke are probably the greatest twers combination ever and it's this division
of labor the fact that Burke was the incredible operator the one that rooted out all the the inefficiencies and then Murphy was the one that was Capital allocator focused on strategy and Acquisitions which we'll get to and and again here's another great uh Murphy ISM if you will uh so he says Capital Cities combined excellence in both operations
Capital allocation to an unusual degree as Murphy told me this is great this is excellent the business of business is a lot of little decisions every day mixed up with a very few big decisions okay so let's go back in the timeline and figure out how did Tom Murphy even get associated with capital cities to begin with and really the
reason I'm highlighting this is because it speaks to the fact that one of the things you have to admire about Tom Murphy is that once he had conviction he had no hesitancy about being bold and you see that with the decision to take job in the first place so he graduates from Harvard Business School and he gets a job just a normal job he's working for
Lever Brothers which is this massive consumer package goods company at the time he goes to this event at his parents house and he meets this guy named Frank Smith and Smith begins to tell him about Smith's latest Venture which is he bought a struggling TV station this is before cable just like if you listen to last week this is the
early days of cable this is very similar to the early days of Ted Turner's career career that's why I think it's so interesting to do this podcast right after the last one so Smith buys this he buys a struggling TV station and he purchas it out of bankruptcy and before the evening was over Murphy had agreed to leave his job in New York City and
relocate to alany to run the TV station now here's the crazy thing he had no broadcast experience nor did he have any kind of management experience of any kind at this point Tom Murphy is 29 years old Tom is going to turn around this station is going to take him 3 years so the station has a bunch of operating losses obviously cuz it was
bought out of bankruptcy right so he wents up turning it into a consistent cash generator generator by improving programming and then aggressively managing costs that's going to come up over and over and over again aggressively managing cost as you can imagine when he's giving advice to Warren Buffett by the way Warren Buffett
says that Tom Murphy was one of his Heroes that Tom Murphy made him a better person and that uh actually that that is the ultimate give gift you can give to somebody by helping them become a better person so you could imagine if he's giving Warren Buffett advice saying that don't don't think about hiring another person just as like a $20,000 thing like
thinking about all like how much you're going to pay more over a decade all the other stuff that comes with employee down to the amount of toilet paper that person is going to use in the office I think that the that's an understatement aggressively managing costs right so it says this is a Formula that the company
would apply repeatedly in the years ahead in 1957 so this is now three years later Smith and Murphy buy a second TV station then shortly thereafter they buy a third TV station and then they change the name of the company to Capital Cities now the third TV station is important because this is when Murphy hires a young 30-year-old with also no
broadcast experience as his replacement to run the Albany station that is Dan Burke Dan Burke and Tom Murphy are going to be this Dynamic deal with his partners for the next 30 Years so Murphy spends time training Burke and he says says he quickly indoctrinated Burke into the company's lean decentralized operating philosophy then Murphy moves
back to New York to work with Smith to build the company through acquisition so that is how Capital Cities is going to grow it grows by selectively acquiring additional radio and television stations now here's what happens Smith unexpectedly dies in 1966 by this time Smith and Murphy had been working together for 11 years so
that means at 40 years old after Smith's death Murphy becomes CEO and that's the position he's going to hold until he sells it uh to Disney so at the time he takes over the company they have revenue of just $28 million Murphy's first move as CEO he's like okay I'm going to elevate bur to the role of President and Chief Operating Officer and this was an
excellent selection of a partner because they have suchen opposite skill sets and they have a very clear division of labor and so this is a description of their excellent partnership and who did what Burke was responsible for daily management of operations and Murphy for Acquisitions and capital allocation as
Burke told me our relationship was built on a foundation of mutual respect I had an appetite for and a willingness to do things that Murphy was not interested in doing Burke believed his job was to create the free cash flow and Murphy's job was to spend it so by this time capital city owns five different TV stations that was the maximum allowed by
the FCC so there there's a regulation on the books of the time you cannot own more than five so so it's like okay well we're not going to stop growing what are we going to do says they next turned their attention to newspaper publishing which as an advertising driven business with attractive margins and strong competitive barriers had close
similarities to the broadcasting business so that's another example of him deviating from what other people building conglomerates are doing this time he's like well I just want to stick to these businesses that are very similar to each other that I know very well and so after buying a bunch of newspapers he's like well what other
businesses are very similar to the ones that already own eventually this this regulation is going to be lifted uh but before that happens he's like well there's this new invention which we talked about last week which is cable television okay well that looks very similar to the broadcast TV stations I own and then some of these newspapers
that I own they're advertising driven businesses with attractive margins let me go ahead and buy a cable television business and this was one of the most fascinating things about the Ted Turner autobiography is the fact that Ted Turner was one of the first people in the broadcast uh TV industry to actually embrace cable there's a maxim here that
this is not a threat it's an opportunity everybody every other broadcaster besides Ted Turner and uh now we see uh Tom Murphy as well thought about cable as oh my God this is a threat to my broadcast business they both both Turner and Murphy thought it's like no it's not a threat it's an acttion opportunity and
they also understood it as a better product offering like the genie out of the bottle like there's nothing you're going to do like you might as well go with the technology that enables you to just reach a a much larger market than somebody watching like a local or Regional TV station and then it goes into another strategy that he used that
was quite different uh during the extended bare Market of the mid1 1970s to early 1980s Murphy became an aggressive purchaser of his own shares he eventually bought close bought back close to 50% of his outstanding shares most of it at single digit price to earnings multiples in 1984 the FCC relaxed its station ownership rules and
Murphy his master stroke bought the ABC Network so the note I left myself here is this is something that comes up over and over again in these books stay in the game long enough to get lucky this is the most important thing that he does in his entire business career and it happens 30 years into his career so he buys ABC Network for nearly
$3.5 billion with financing from his friend Warren Buffett the ABC deal was the largest non oil and gas transaction in business history to that point and an enormous bet this is what I meant about him being able to be bold when he has real conviction and an enormous bet the company transaction for Murphy representing over 100% of capital
equity's Enterprise Value at the time so the The Wall Street Journal uh reported on this transaction with the headline The Minnow swallows the whale and then Murphy's partner Burke said at the time that this is the acquisition that I've been training for my entire life so why would Murphy the entire company on one transaction says Murphy's conviction was
that he can improve the margins of ABC's TV stations from the low3s up to Capital City's industry leading levels of margins of 50 plus per. oh my God check this out under burk's oversight the staff that oversaw ABC's TV station group dropped from 60 to eight people the margin Gap was closed in just two years so in two years they they they
brought ABC's margins from 30% to over 50 a story from this time demonstrates the culture clash between the network Executives and the leaner more entrepreneurial acquires ABC was a limousine culture Executives had the habit of taking a limo for even a few blocks to go to lunch Murphy however was a cabman before long this practice of
Murphy's practice of taking cabs everywhere instead of limo or God for God's sake she should walk a few blocks come on stop being lazy uh before long this practice of taking cabs rippled through the ABC executive ranks when asked whether this was a case of leading by example Murphy responded is there any other way Capital Cities never made
another large scale acquisition after the ABC deal focusing instead on integration smaller Acquisitions and continued stock repurchasing in 1995 so 10 years after he bought ABC Buffett suggested to Murphy that he sit down with Michael Eisner who was the CEO of Disney at the time they wind up meeting at the an uh the Allen and Company
gathering in Sun Valley Idaho and iser expressed an interest in buying the company they wind up having a negotiation and Murphy negotiated a buyout price of $19 billion he left Murphy then uh retired from active management he left behind an estatic group of shareholders why are they estatic well if you had invested a
dollar with Tom Murphy as he became coo in 1966 that dollar would have been worth $24 by the time he sold the company to Disney okay and so then the book goes into a little bit more about how they ran the business before the acquisition by Disney it says one of the major themes in this book is resource allocation The Outsider CEO so not just
Tom Murphy but the eight other CEOs or the eight total CEOs uh covered in this book including Henry Singleton uh John Malone Warren Buffett says the outsider CEOs shared an unconventional approach one that emphasized flat organizations and dehydrated corporate staffs there's a lot of very very memorable language in
the book that is one of them dehydrated corporate staffs they also talked about headquarters staffs being anorexic both of those descriptions being important because that's how they want to build the company's culture so the company's culture at Capital Cities went meant extraordinary autonomy for operating managers and this principle was stated
in a single paragraph on the inside cover of every Capital Cities annual report and it says decentralization is the Cornerstone of our philosophy our goal is to hire the best people we can and give them the responsibility and Authority they need to perform their jobs we expect our managers to be forever cost conscious that phrase is
repeated a few times forever cost conscious and to recognize and exploit sales potential headquarter staff was anorexic no vice presidents in functional areas like marketing strategic planning or human resources no corporate Council and no public relations department either in the Capital City's culture the Publishers and station managers had the power and
the prestige internally and they almost never heard from New York if they were hitting their numbers the company's guiding human resource philosophy was repeated over and over again by Murphy and it was hire the best people you can and leave them alone extreme decentralized approach keeps both cost and ranker down and I love how they make
the point that Capital Cities ate their own cooking the guinea pig in the development of of this philosophy was Dan Burke himself in 1961 after he took over as general manager at wte which was the station in Albany that uh first Murphy was managing right so after he takes over for Murphy Burke this is hilarious I love this part Burke began
sending weekly MOS to Murphy as he had been trained to do when he worked at General Foods after several months of receiving no response he stopped sending them realizing his time was better spent on local operations than on reporting to headquarters as Burke said Murphy delegates to the point of Anarchy again
great memorable language in here Murphy delegates to the point of Anarchy frugality was also Central to the ethos this is going to sound a lot I mean again the two main I think ideas you see over and over again in the history of Entrepreneurship is one the importance of focus and two gentleman Watcher cost that is a quote from Andrew Carnegie
they're all all of the people we study on the podcast with very few exceptions were maniacal about watching their cost and Murphy and Burke describe why they were also fanatical about this and is exactly like the the frame of mind that Andrew Carnegie and his partner Henry Klay frck had 150 years before this this is exactly what they said so it says
Murphy and Burke realized early on that while you couldn't control your revenues you can control your costs they believe that the best defense against the revenue lumpiness inherent in advertising supportive business businesses was a constant vence on costs which became deeply embedded in the company culture that is Andrew Carnegie
and Henry K Frick that is Rockefeller that is Ford that is Sam Walton in fact was hilarious oh I got I'll bring up I'll bring a Walton in a minute because the next story that illustrates how obsessed they were about cost control reminded me of something that I read in Sam Walton's autobiography one of the earliest and most often told corporate
Legends Murphy even scrutinized the company's expenditures on paint they wanted to repaint one of their TV stations and Murphy says paint the two sides that face the road and leave the other sides untouched he is forever cost conscious there is a great story anecdote told in Sam Walton's autobiography he's flying the plane that
little CES that he would go around picking out like the new Walmart stores and they're they're trying to come up with a name for what what the concept behind Walmart and there's a series of names uh Walmart is one of the ones suggested and one of the reasons first Sam was inspired by Soul price who I've covered over and over again about
fedmart and so he liked the idea of Walmart but one of the reasons he picked it is because it had less letters than the other options and therefore less lighting that you knew you had to light up your stores right and so the less letters less lighting less costs on a grand scale as he expands might be only you know seven letters instead of 11 or
whatever the other options were but that extra that additional four letters you don't have to make them you don't have to light them you don't have to clean them all the additional expenses that would compound over time so again that again they all think this this way they are forever cost conscious they're just
insane about getting this competitive advantage that comes when you just watch your cost like a hawk this is where he goes into headcount over and over again so Phil Meek is one of the guys he runs their publishing division he works for both Burke and Murphy right Phil Meek took this message to heart and ran the entire publishing operation so at this
time they had six daily newspapers several magazines and a bunch of weekly like Shoppers these things you see in um in like grocery stores and he ran his headquarters with only three people they would have very few meetings one of the meetings is the people would come to New York and they'd go over all of their again they're they're obsessed with
economic efficiency and how it relates to every single other idea that they have in their philosophy and so what they do is they sit down and they go through line by line everything that you're spending and so it says particular attention was paid to Capital expenditures and expenses managers were expected to outperform their peers and
great attention was paid to margins the profit margin that your company operated at was viewed as a form of report card to HQ outside of these meetings managers were left alone the company did not simply cut its way to high margins Murphy and Burke realized that the key drivers of profitability in most of
their businesses were Revenue growth and advertising market share and they were prepared to invest in their properties to ensure leadership in local markets why why did did they invest in expanding their market share because they realized this through trial and error they realized early on that the TV station was the the TV station that was the
number one in local news ended up with a disproportionate share of that Market's advertising revenue and a great way to think about this is another description by an early employee at cap cities the company was careful not cheap the company was careful not cheap the company's hiring practices were equally unconventional Murphy and Burke shared a
clear preference for intell Ence ability and drive over direct industry experience because neither one of them Murphy when he was hired and Burke when he was hired they had intelligence ability and drive they did not have direct industry experience uh and so they specifically targeted what they called talented younger foxes with fresh
perspectives Murphy and Burke were also comfortable giving responsibility to promising young managers as Murphy described it to me we' been fortunate enough to have it ourselves and we knew it could work and so one of the people they hired young was Bob Iger they hired Bob Iger 3 at 37 and before that he had spent his entire career in broadcast
sports and they hired him to assume responsibility for ABC entertainment another important trait that fueled their success is they had exceptionally low turnover part of this culture right and they talked about there's a rival broadcaster once REM mark this is another great line we have we see lots of resumés but we never see any from
Capital Cities why cuz the system in place corrupts you with so much Aton ionomy and Authority that you can't imagine leaving again really great memorable language the system these are people that are inside the company the system in place corrupts you with so much autonomy and Authority that you can't imagine leaving so that was a
description of more of operations which fell under Burke let's go to Murphy and his Capital allocation in the area of capital allocation Murphy's approach was highly differentiated from his peers he issued diversification paid minor dividends rarely issued stock and made active use of leverage he would regularly repurchase shares and between
long periods of inactivity made the occa occasional very large acquisition the two primary sources of capital for Capital Cities were internal operating cash flow and debt the company produced consistently high industry-leading levels of operating cash flow this high amount of cash flow provided Murphy with
a reliable source of capital to allocate Murphy also frequently used debt to fund Acquisitions once he summarized approach is this we take the assets and once we've paid them off we leverage them again to buy other assets Acquisitions was where Murphy spent the majority of his time he did not delegate acquisition decisions and never used investment
bankers to Murphy as a capital allocator the company's extreme decentralization had important benefits it allowed the company to operate more profitably than its peers which in turn gave the company an advantage in acquisitions by allowing Murphy to buy properties and know know that under Burke remember burk's this extreme efficient operator they would
quickly be made more profitable lowering the effective price paid when he had conviction Murphy was prepared to act aggressively and Murphy was not impatient Murphy was willing to wait a long time for attractive Acquisitions he once said I get paid not just to make deals but to make good deals when he saw something he liked Murphy was prepared
to make a very large bet much of the value created during his nearly 30 or 10e CEO was the result of a handful of large acquisition decisions just a handful these Acquisitions each represented 25% or more of the company's market cap at the time they were made Murphy was a master at prospecting for deals he knew what he wanted to buy and
he would spend years developing relationships with the owners of these desirable properties he had a very unusual negotiating style he would often ask the seller what they thought their property was worth and if if he thought their offer was fair he would take it and if he thought their proposal was high he would counter with his best
price and if the seller rejected his offer Murphy would walk away so it says like he would never do well at auctions he usually bid you know 60 or 70% lower than the winning bid but that was very interesting it's like you told me what the price is I think it's worth that I won't even negotiate with you I'll just
say okay I'll take it for that amount and if that doesn't work out here's the best price I can do there's no back and forth can we just agree on this if not let's just keep it moving outside of Acquisitions the second largest amount he spent was actually share repurchasing he bought back over 1.8 Bill he spent over 1.8 billion on share BuyBacks that
investment alone generated a excellent return for shareholders 22.4% over 19 years as Murphy says today I only wish I had bought more and then the chapter closes with this interesting anecdote about this very unique culture uh he told me a story about a bartender at one of the management Retreats who made a handsome return by buying Capital
City stock in the early 1970s when the bartender was later asked why he made the investment he replied I've worked a lot of corporate events over the years but Capital Cities was the only company where you couldn't tell who the bosses were and then there's a postcript on the chapter that if you're interested in studying they call Trans this company
transim a contemporary Doppel ganger to Capital Cities it says a contemporary analog for Capital Cities can be found in trans diim a little known publicly traded Aerospace components manufacturer like Capital Cities the company focuses on very specific types of business with exceptional economic characteristics and trans diim evolved a
highly decentralized corporate structure and operating system for optimizing the profitability of these specialized businesses and there's actually an excellent podcast series I listen to that's actually produced it's uh called 50x if you search in your podcast player William Thorndike so the author of this book actually did a four-part series on
trans dime so if you're interested in in companies that are like Capital Cities and you want to listen to that podcast or you want to learn more I'd highlight recommend listing to that four-part series I thought it was really good I wish there was more books on I can't find any biographies on Thomas Murphy I
can't find a company history on Capital Cities which seems like I'm making some there I have to be making some kind of massive mistake so if you find either a biography on Thomas Murphy or uh company history please let me know I'd gladly read it and then make a a longer like more in-depth podcast episode on this I'm always fascinated about learning
more about and from the people that are admired by people I admire the fact that Warren Buffett calls Thomas Murphy his hero that Ted Turner says that these guys know what they're doing that they were building an excellent multimedia or multi-billion dollar media conglomerate uh really pequ my interest so I will leave a link down below I assume you
already have this book it was number one on Warren Buffett's recommended reading list for a long time it's referenced over and over again I think they sell it at the birkshire um annual meeting every year as well I actually did a podcast on a chapter in the book previously it was episode 94 on Henry Singleton uh if you
want to go back and listen to that but just in case you haven't uh bought the book already I will leave a link down below and if you buy the book using that link you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time that is 328 books down 1,000 ago and I will talk to you again soon one more thing before you go if you have not already subscribed to Founders
notes you can go to Founders notes. and sign up for what I think is the world's most valuable notebook for Founders I'm just going to give you a brief history this is I I've never been more enthusiastic or can give a more enthusiastic endorsement of any product ever because I literally created this product so let me tell you what I mean
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ideas or the the principles at hand anytime that you want and so I was like is there a way for us to build a product together where it's very simple you go to Founders notes.com you sign up and then what do you get you get access to exactly what I see you are seeing every single thing that I see you see all the book all my
books you see all the notes you see all the highlights and then therefore you can actually search find ideas and principles and then contextually apply them to your business so there's a line in Port Charlie domc that says there's no better teacher than history in determining the future and that their answer is worth billions of dollars in a
$30 history book this Founders notes is like that on steroids because it's not a single history book it's hundreds of them and then all my notes and the way I think about and my interpretations of what's Happening and why that's so important that I wanted to save that uh idea and actually put it into a database
that I can search so I said in the right hands I think it's the world's most valuable notebook so the reason what I made this for is I made this for Founders that are already running successful companies right the reason that is because those already running successful companies what Founders notes does for those kind of people and
hopefully you're one of them is it gives you the best way to reference the thoughts and ideas of History's Greatest Founders and then it's up to you how to know how to apply apply what you're learning to your own company the best Founders want useful information they don't want to be told what to do and in many cases the only person that can
actually make the right decision for your company is you because you have all of the context and the history and an understanding of what it is that you actually want to build and what you're doing the second thing the second way I just think about who uh Founders notes is perfect for it's it's for the already
committed uh there is no monthly option there's only annual subscriptions if you have to think twice about the price it's not for you again this goes back to the there's 300 and something episodes of Founders that anybody can listen to for free it's people running already successful companies like I spend I spend money all the time if I think that
something is going to make my company better then I don't hesitate I view that as an investment not an expense and Founders notes's priced in a way where if you're already running a successful company it's a no-brainer to subscribe and to at least try it out so if this is you I encourage you to test it out for a year you'll have access to the world's
most valuable notebook for Founders and I do really do mean that and I do believe that and I do think the value that you'll get out of it will be incredible one after you subscribe keep it in your browser the tab is always open on my computer I never exit out if I do it's by some kind of drastic mistake I reference it constantly every
day there's so much knowledge and wisdom contained in it over 20,000 highlights and that doesn't even tell you that what I have coming I already have three upcoming features it's going to make it even more valuable that'll be included at no additional cost to you so I'm I'm not going to even sneak on those yet I'm going to release them I think one at a
time uh with the help of rewise because rewise the team of rewise are the ones helping me build this uh together so they've been absolutely fantastic but to get access to what I believe sincerely believe is the world's most valuable notebook for Founders all you have to do is go to Founders notes.com that is Founders notes.com