Jay Z's Autobiography

I made this episode about two years ago and I wanted to repost it in case you miss it the first time because it's one of my favorite episodes that I've ever made. And because I'm currently working on another new episode, that's going to be about Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. And there's actually a great Michael Jordan story in this episode about when Jay Z had dinner with Michael. There's also a reference to my daily practice, something else I learned from both Jay Z and Michael Jordan. But there's a reference in this episode about my daily practice of reading and rereading my notes and highlights.

And what I call this gigantic searchable database, you'll hear it about like 11, 12 minutes into this episode. But I referenced this gigantic searchable database of all my notes and highlights, the fact that they're in this app called Readwise. And I actually didn't know it at the time I made this episode. But two years later, I would partner with Readwise to build a version where you can actually see exactly what I see. So you can get access to all my notes and highlights this gigantic searchable database on the history of entrepreneurship by signing up for Founders Notes. That's Founders with an S.

Founders Notes dot com. You can sign up going by going to Founders Notes dot com. And now for a limited time only you can sign up and pay once and get access to every highlight and note I have ever done. And every highlight and note I will ever do no ongoing subscription. Pay once you're in forever. This becomes a tool that you can then use your entire career to tap into the collective knowledge of history. It's great. As entrepreneurs do not daily time is limited and this offer could end up

at Founders Notes dot com. That is Founders with an S Founders Notes dot com. And I hope you enjoy this episode on Jay Z. I'm going to start with a gravity pulling me into that swirl of kids. No bullshit like a planet being pulled into orbit by a star. His name was slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood. An older kid who had barely made an impression on me in that circle though he was transformed like the church ladies touched by the spirit and everyone was mesmerized.

He was a big diamond throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance for a crazy long time 30 minutes straight off the top of his head never losing the beat. Writing the hand claps. He rhymed about nothing the sidewalk the benches are he going on the kids who are standing around listening to him.

And then he'd go in on how clean he was how nice he was with the ball how all the girls loved him. Then he'd start rhyming about the rhymes himself how good they were how much better they were than yours. He was the best that ever did it. All he had were his eyes, taking in everything and the words inside him. I was dazzled. That's some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then I could do that. That night I started writing rhymes in my notebook.

From the beginning it was easy, a constant flow. For days I filled page after page. Then I'd bang out a beat on the table, my bedroom window, whatever had a flat surface, and practice from the time I woke in the morning until I went to sleep. I saw it as an opening, a way to recreate myself and reimagine my world. After I recorded a rhyme, it gave me an unbelievable rush to play it back, to hear that voice. Everywhere I went, I'd write.

If I was crossing the street with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I'd break out my binder, write it on a mailbox or a lamppost, and write the rhyme before I cross the street. Even back then I thought I was the best. I'd spend my free time reading the dictionary, building my vocabulary. I could be ruthless, calm as fuck on the outside, but flooded with adrenaline. I wasn't even in high school yet, and I'd discovered my voice.

That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to about today, which is Jay-Z's memoir, and it's called Decoded. Okay, so this podcast is going to be similar to when I read, all the back-and-founders number 219. I read the biography of Anthony Bourdain. And the reason this is similar is because before I read the biography of Anthony Bourdain, I had read his books. I watched almost every single episode of his shows. I was a massive, massive fan. He had a huge influence on my life.

And it's the same way with Jay-Z. I've been listening to his music repeatedly for over two decades. I'd watch interviews with him. I'd take notes on what he says. I have a folder on Instagram that is labeled Motivation. So when I come across something that just hives me up or there's just a good idea, I put it in there, and then I just go to that folder whenever I have a few minutes and just watch videos.

And a lot of them also have, it's also Jay-Z just dropping pieces of advice or lessons that he learned through his life. And I cannot believe it's taken me this long. I have no excuse that it cannot believe it's taken me this long to read this book. I remember going to a friend's house back in 2010-2011 and it was on its coffee table. And I remember picking it up and leaving through it and like, wow, this is amazing. I should read this.

And so it's taken me more than a decade to circle back around, but I'm very, very glad. Once I got read it, I could just could not believe how good it was. So I want to go back to the part of the introduction. It's in the very first chapter. And I just want to pull out a couple of thoughts I had as I went through some of these highlights that I just read to you. When he's seeing this kid in a cipher, which is just an early days of hip hop, which is one person sitting in the middle, rapping.

Sometimes it's one person, sometimes it's a few in their battling, whatever the case is, and just people surrounded by them. This is the first time Jay-Z is seeing that happen. He's watching it for a while. But it was interesting what came to his mind. He's like, that's really cool and I could do that. And that's an illustration of a major point that pops up over and over again in these biographies of history's case, such as painters, is that belief comes before ability.

He had never wrapped a day in his life, but he already said, okay, oh, no, I believe I can do this. If that person figured out how to do it, I can too. And if I had to distill everything that I've learned about the history of entrepreneurship from reading almost 250 biographies to as little words as possible, I would say the entrepreneurs, the great founders of history, they would combine Kanye West's levels of self belief with the work ethic of Kobe Bryant.

And so that leads me to the second thing that he says on this page that is really, really interesting. And it's about the importance of practice. And when I read that 600 page biography of Michael Jordan all the way back on founders number 212, it blew my mind. How much Michael in that book talked over and over and over again about his belief in practice, his dedication to practice that he'd rather miss a game than mispractice. And Jay-Z said the exact same thing.

He says, I would practice from the time I woke up in the morning until I went to sleep. He is not even in high school. He is a teenager. This is 12 years before he creates his first album. He's 26 years old when he releases his first album, Reasonable Doubt. This is another example of that maximum that I've said on a few podcasts that the public praises people for what they practice in private. The public praises people for what they practice in private. We didn't see.

We saw for some, when he dropped it and when he was 26, we didn't see the 12 years before that. Him practicing his craft before it was in public view. Recently, Netflix has this documentary. It's a fantastic documentary on Kanye West. It's called Genius. I've what you can, it's a three parts series. You can skip the third part. The first two is all about the struggle, the founder mentality that Kanye had to possess to break into the music industry and to actually achieve his lifelong dream.

Just like we didn't see Jay-Z practicing for 12, 13, 14 years before he's actually in the music industry, Kanye says the same thing in that documentary. When Kanye leaves Chicago to chase his dream in New York, it's year 2001, Kanye is 24 years old and he's selling beats, although people at the time don't realize that he's only making and selling beats so he can wrap on them, right? But that was his end. He found his end to the industry. But he had been producing beats since the seventh grade.

So same thing. He was 12 years old when he started making beats. We don't see him. He doesn't start becoming famous or well known for another 12 years. It's an incredible, incredible documentary. I've watched the first episode four times. I'll probably watch it 50, 100 times in my life. Second episode is really good as well and I've watched it multiple times. And Kanye on his debut album talks about what he had to do out of view of the public, right?

The public praises people for what they practice in private. And so on Kanye's album, I'm just going to read you some his lyrics real quick from his album's spaceship. And he says, you all know my struggle. You can't match my hustle. You can't catch my hustle. You can't fathom my love, dude. And this is a punchline right here. This is his punchline here. Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers. It's a different world like three summers. I deserve to do these numbers.

And the reason this is important, the reason I'm bringing this to your attention is because this is all over the history of entrepreneurship. All the experiences, the practice you put in, the things that you're learning, you don't even have an idea how you're going to be able to utilize them in the future. And we just saw this recently when I reread Sam Walton's Fantastic Autobiography made in America on founders number 234.

I'm going to read, this is so fantastic because he puts words, he puts words to this idea that I'm trying to explain to. He says, somehow over the years, folks have gotten the impression that Walmart was something that I dreamed up out of the blue as a middle-aged man. And that it was just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. It's true that was 44 when we opened our first Walmart. But the store was totally an outgrowth of everything that we've been doing since Newport.

So he's talking about the 12 or 14 years of his retail career, all the little tiny stores that he had opened before he had learned that there was a massive opportunity. That he winds up calling Walmart. So it's true that it was 44 when we opened our first Walmart. But the store was totally an outgrowth of everything that we've been doing since Newport. I'm going to pause there, go back to what Jay-Z says. Yeah, I would practice from the time I woke up in the morning until I went to sleep.

Everywhere I went, I would write. If I was crossing the street with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I'd break out my binder and I'd spread it on a mailbox or a lamppost and I'd write the rhyme before I crossed the street. It is the exact same idea applied to two different domains. One wall to apply this idea to retail, Jay-Z applied it to being a rapper, to being a considered as an artist, a musician going back to Sam.

But that store was totally an outgrowth of everything that we've been doing since Newport. Another case of me being unable to leave well enough alone, another experiment. And like most other overnight successes, it was 20 years in the making. So let's go back to Jay-Z's motivations of what I just read to you. I saw it as an opening, a way to recreate myself and reimagine my world. That is the exact same feeling. The feeling he's having is a 13 or 14 year old saying, hey, maybe hip hop was a way.

I live in, you know, I'm not very happy with my surroundings. I live in the projects. My dad left. I'm being raised by a single mother. We don't have a lot of money. A few weeks ago or a few months ago, I read Steven Spielberg's Fantastic Biography. This is back on Founders 209 in case you haven't listened to that podcast. I would highly, highly recommend. Filmmakers, I'm working on another podcast for you on a biography of filmmaker.

Filmmakers are some of my favorite people to read about because I think the way they approach their craft, they're just so many parallels and ideas that we can steal as founders for our own work. But there's a line, talks about why Steven Spielberg was, he was obsessed by the time he's like 12 years old. He's like, yep, I'm going to be a director. He starts practicing Steven Spielberg at 12 years old, started practicing.

He said he would envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thinking the Academy. He was 12 when he said that. Interesting enough in that Kanye documentary I was just talking about. He Kanye says something. He says before I had a car, I would be walking to the train, practicing my Grammy speech. He was completely broke. Couldn't even afford a car. I'm walking to the subway to go for my apartment in New Jersey.

Two men had to try to sell some beats and I'm already practicing my Grammy speech. It's the same idea. But what I wanted to compare for you, what Jay-Z just said, he's like, I thought it was a way for an opening for me to recreate myself and reimagine my world. It's very similar to what Steven Spielberg said. They said about him in his biography when he's a young person. He was disappointed in the world. So he built his own. Jay-Z used hip-hop and rapping to build his own world.

Steven Spielberg used making movies, directing movies to make his own world. And then just one other thing before I move forward in the book, again, the importance of practice. That is the main lesson from, and Michael Jordan's, you know, it says in the book that maybe no one has ever been as good as their job as Michael Jordan was at his toward, like later in his career. So there's a lot. Obviously, we're all trying to get to the top of our professions.

We're trying to be the best we possibly can be. That's why we're listening to this. That's why we're reading these books. That's why we're doing all this stuff we're doing. And so Jordan just has a lot of things to teach us, but the importance of practice. And so ever since I read, I'll tell you how I interpret that from homework. And so ever since I read that, Jordan taught me that.

I spend hours, hours every day when I'm not reading books or when I'm not making podcasts, I'm rereading the highlights. I told you I have over 20,000 highlights in this app called Readwise. So every single highlight I make goes into this app called Readwise. It becomes this gigantic search, like database of all my notes and highlights from the history of entrepreneurship. And I just read them over and over again. And so what do we see here? Jay-Z, what is he saying? He's a young kid.

And he's like, all I have are my eyes and my words, right? So he says, I spend my free time reading the dictionary, building my vocabulary. It's the same idea. Remember that too, because there's a fantastic story where Jay-Z gets to have dinner with Michael Jordan later in the book. So I'll bring that up to you, because it's just fantastic. It's two of my favorite people having dinner together. So then he's talking about this time. This is the late 70s, early 80s.

And if you ever study Mark and Jason. So back on Founders in number 50, I read Mark and Jason's. And I think it's like 200 page archive of his blog. They used to be on. You can go back there and in Founders in number 50, you'll see the link to download the PDF for his blog. It's fantastic. It's absolutely free. There's no reason not to read it. It's really amazing. But Mark's advice for young people.

He's like, listen, you should only be working in the industries where the founders of the industry are still in charge of their companies. I thought there was a really interesting idea. I never thought about that before. And so what Jay-Z is picking up here, he's like, well, I'm in a brand new business. A brand new industry. They don't even really know what they don't even know. Some people are making a tiny bit of money. In the case of these, I have a gigantic opportunity.

So not only can I practice my craft and get better over time, but I'm in an expanding market. So it will lift me along with that. And he says, I'm not going to say that I thought I could get rich from rap. But I could clearly see that it was going to get bigger before it went away. Way bigger. And then we're going to get into something that also blew my mind. And it's silly that I should blow my mind at this point, right? Given everything you and I have talked about.

But how much of this book is Jay-Z talking about studying the great people that came before him, breaking down their approach to their craft? So the book has chapters, but in between each chapter is Jay-Z's. He's like, handpicked some songs. And so he'll go through line by line. And he'll give you his interpretations. He's like, people listen to my songs. They don't even understand what they're about.

And so the way he did that for his own music, he's been doing that forever for the music of other people. It's very similar to how you and I are approaching these books where it's not just a line. We look at it, we underline it. We try to tie to other things. We really think deeply about what the hell it means. And so in this case, this is the first example he's talking about. Hey, I really looked up to people like Run DMC, the Sugar Hill game, Cool Modee.

And so he's going to talk about what he liked about Run DMC's songs. And he says that he says their rhymes were crisp and aggressive. And he's talking about Run DMC. And he says Run wrapped about having a big long catty, not like a Seville. And so he's quoting him. And then this is the important part. He says that line seems like a throwaway. But to me, it felt meaningful. And to know that myself on that page is like, I feel the same way. Like I'll be reading an entire paragraph of page.

And there's just something that jumps out at you. And you can't even really describe why it's so important. But they're not random lines. They have me. If you sit down and pause and don't just skip to the next paragraph and think about what's happening. It's like a prompt for your thinking. And then here, Jay-Z describes his early life when he's starting to do this and the crazy thing is.

So he says, I was just a kid from public housing whose whole hood would rubber neck when an expensive car drove down the block. And what I wrote, and I wrote this several times throughout the book, when he says stuff like this, it's like a lock and happen in one lifetime. You go from a kid living in public housing who is lusting after an expensive car to living in a hundred million dollar house in Beller. That happened. It actually happened. That is possible.

And the great thing about reading autobiographies is the fact that the stuff is not sugarcoded. They talk in a way that they may not talk in like public interviews or if they're marketing new project or whatever the case is. So in this case, he's describing the environment that he grew up in. And this is the environment he had to survive. And he talks about the fact that he was a kid when the crack epidemic in the 1980s just exploded.

And he says, but when crack landed in your hood, it was a total takeover. Over. Sudden and complete. Most of these crack fiends were my parents age are a little younger. They were skeletal and she and they were as jittery as a rookie beat as rookie beat cops and their eyes were always spinning with schemes to get money for their next hit. Kids my age were serving them, meaning they were the ones the kids were actually the ones selling the drugs to the older crackheads.

Guys my age and why were they doing that? Because guys my age fed up with watching their mom struggle on a single income were paying utility bills with money from hustling. So that hustling is obviously talking about selling drugs. He says the court yards of my projects of Marcy projects and projects across the country contain teenagers who wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers. We had grandmothers who were afraid to leave their house. And he doesn't sugarcoat things for us.

He's selling drugs at a very young age and this is what the person he used to buy. What happened to the person he was buying drugs from? So like his supplier like his wholesalers can think of like that. His name was D.D. When D.D. was murdered he was something out of a mob movie. They cut off his balls and stuffed them in his mouth and shot them in the back of the head execution style.

And so that is a crazy, crazy environment that he's got to develop the skills to not only survive but escape and then thrive throughout life. So the main theme of the book because he spends a lot of time talking about let's say his teenage years, there's like early 20s. He's selling drugs. He doesn't want to sell drugs but he's not sure.

He's like, if rap was actually career and he talks about the fact that people that were from similar projects like him, Biggie Smalls and Torres Strait Group in a project in Brooklyn, Nas Group in a project in Queens. And he says once he saw them blow up with their initial, with their, their album. So Nas did Elmatic when he was like 17 years old, which is crazy. Like it's just insane how somebody that young could build something could make a classic album as such a young age.

And then Biggie's ready to die, both came out before Jay Z and that really helped him realize, hey, this is actually possible. And so that that struggle of like straddling two worlds like, you know, he had their stories in the book where he's been selling drugs in Virginia for three days and he's got to go and meet a record executive, try to get a label.

So he's got to drive back from Virginia overnight, shows up all dirty, you know, smelling terrible, terribly, trying to convince this guy to sign them. And I guess I kind of just, I just turned the page and kind of just ran over my own point that I was trying to make and he says, I better than I could. I was still rhyming, but now it took a backseat to hustling. It was all moving so fast. It was hard to make sense of it or see the big picture. Kids like me think about that kids. He's a kid.

Kids like me and you don't feel that way. I remember being 16 or 17. You damn sure don't feel like a kid, but you definitely are. You just don't know it. Kids like me were going through something strange and twisted and we had a crazy story to tell. So through a friend of a friend, he winds up meeting one of his idols, which is this rapper called Big Daddy Kane. And at this point, remember when I'm about to read you, Jay-Z has no intention.

He's like, I'm not, he's, I guess I'll just be a husser, you know, that's what I'm going to do for my life. So he winds up meeting Kane. He's still rhyming so Kane puts him on an album, on one of his songs. And that song is actually played on the radio and he's like, this is crazy to me. And he says, people were talking about the second kid on the tape. That's him. The MC before Kane. I was getting great feedback. I couldn't believe people even noticed my verse.

And he says he couldn't believe they could notice his verse because Big Daddy Kane was so he had a, he had a, like an audience, he had people to like them. And people thought he was really, really good. And so Jay-Z gets on the track. He's like, wait a minute, I can hold my own with one of the best. And so then he goes back. And again, this just blows my mind. Jay-Z is studying the greats that came before him, which is exactly what you and I do every week on this podcast.

There was no one like Rick Kim. This flow was complex and his voice was ill. He was approaching rap like literature like art, which is exactly what Jay-Z considers it. He's like, I write, but I don't write things down. So I don't know if you know this, but Jay-Z is famous because he starts writing things in his notebook when he's younger. But as he gets older and you can actually see this in, there's a documentary. It's called Fade to Black. It came out like 15 years ago.

I had to rewatch it for prep for this podcast. And it's when Jay-Z thought he was going to retire and it shows him building the album. And so he goes to California and he's working with this famous producer named Rick Rubin. He's one of the co-founders of Def Jam. And he's produced albums for everybody. Not just hip-hop artists, but country people, rock. Everybody goes all over. They think Rick is just an amazing person. Actually, I have a note for you real quick.

I wasn't planning on talking about it right now, but while I'm, in case I forget to talk about Rick Rubin later on, he's a Rick Rubin, like hangs out with people like Jack Dorsey, like seeks his counsel and stuff like that. But in the documentary, it's funny. He says, this is what Jay-Z likes about Rick Rubin. Rick ain't normal. I don't give a fuck. He is strange by strange standards.

And he goes, once the last time you see him a bison in some dude studio and he's making music with in a room with Rick Rubin and Rick Rubin is got this huge stuff bison. And so this is what Jay-Z loves about him. He goes, listen, Rick is over 20 years into his career and now almost 40 years. Over 20, and he's still doing it. That's amazing. Over 20 years into his career and the dude ain't changed. He's got his own vibe. You've got to love him for that.

And so our interpretation of that is he didn't build his product in some degree as himself. And he knows what Peter Tiltottis is like, you don't build an undifferentiated, commoditized product. You have to differentiate. You have to build something, and it's even better than like James Dyson taught us on his autobiography. Build something that looks strange. At least it gets people talking about it. Don't just go out and copy what everybody else is doing. Make it look weird.

Rick Rubin, your experience in dealing and letting him produce your music, it's going to be an odd experience, an experience that you can't get nowhere else. And so in that documentary, Rick is telling something else. He's like, Jay-Z is very unique because he does everything in his head. He doesn't write it down. He waits to hear the track. And then he's got an idea and you'll see him like, he calls it his rainman. He's like mumbling.

Like, you can't really tell what he's saying, but his lips are moving. And so the reason I bring that up is because Jay-Z talks about it. He's like, I think of, I'm like a poet. That's the way I look at what I'm doing. And that's why I have to explain it to you because a lot of people are listening to me musically. They don't even understand when I'm trying to say. And so this idea, he's like, wait a minute.

Like, where Kim is the first person actually saw a approach rap, like literature, like art. That's what I want to do. And then he says, and his song, Still Banged at Parties. Then he starts talking about what he learned from I.C. T. K.R.S. One, Dr. Jaree. All these other people over and over again. And so the way I think about what's happening right in the book is like, Jay-Z News is doing exactly what Steve Jobs did, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, War Buffett, Charlie Munger. They all did this.

They're analyzing the people that came before them, seeing how they approached their work, seeing what ideas that took them many, many decades to learn, and then taking the ideas, and adding, he's taking their ideas and adding his own unique twist on and using them for his work. And I think the reason I like, I'm talking fast and like getting kind of excited is because like, this is just a reaffirmation for me and for you. Like, we are on the right path.

We are doing exactly what we should be doing, just keep doing it. And so it's another theme of the book that Jay-Z talks about. He's like, I just love language. And so this is him talking about his love of metaphors. I love metaphors. And for me, hustling is the ultimate metaphor for the basic human struggle. The struggle to survive and resist. The struggle to win and the struggle to make sense of it all.

And something that may surprise you, but I kind of like, listen to his music and hear him talking interviews. You kind of get this. He's rather introverted and he says the promotion, he's talking about what happens after you create the album. He says the promotion was already starting, which isn't my favorite part of the process. I'm still a guarded person when I'm not in the booth or on stage or with my oldest friends. And I'm particularly wary of the media. And so he talks away.

So listen, man, if I don't know you, I'm going to be real quiet. But once I get to know you, I won't shut the hell up. Like I'm the exact same way. And that's another thing I appreciate that Jay-Z talks about not only is music, but in the book a lot. It's like humans are multifaceted, man. We do things that we can't really explain. There's going to be actions that we're really proud of, actions that we don't like about ourselves. And you have to take the person as a whole.

But there's just simply no such thing as a perfect human. Okay. So now we get to the first example of when he's breaking down his own lyrics. This is from the song, American Dreaming. And it's really a story about entrepreneurship. I've mentioned GZ a bunch of times on previous podcasts because I think I especially like his album, 4444, a lot of them. It's like entrepreneurial anthems. And so I'm going to go through this and try to make sense. I have connections I make here. So our soaps are.

Okay. So at first I'm going to give you his, the line he says and then his interpretation of this. So it says, this is the shit you dream about with the homies steaming out, back, back in them beamers out. So his interpretation of that line, this is Jay-Z talking. This is really where it begins in a room with your dudes. Too young to shave, dreaming about big body benzes you're going to push.

Obviously for me, this is happening in Marcy, but this could be anywhere, a basement in the Midwest, a backyard in California, an oldsmobile somewhere down south. The danger is that it's all just talk. And then this is I double on and on in this section. I believe you can speak things into existence. So another thing that surprised me and it shouldn't surprise me by now, Jay-Z talks over and over.

He says at least three or four times in the book on the power and he talks about in the documentary, the power of visualization of seeing things in your mind before you see them in person. This is something that we learned as they lauderdid, Bob Nois the founder of Intel did, Edwin Land the founder of Polaroid did, Steve Jobs did, Arnold Schwarzenegger. They all did this. Now Jay-Z, I believe you can speak things into existence.

And he says it starts from a dream you're sitting there day dreaming with your friends about future success. And so then he says, seems as our plan to get a grant, then go off to college, didn't pan or even out. He's like, no one goes to college from the hood from where I'm at in the hood. So he's like, all right, so that's not going to work. What are we going to do? We need it now. We need a town. We need a place to pitch. We need a mount.

And so that's the first time he's going to mention you need a product to sell and you need a market to target. That's the, that's exactly what he's telling us here. This is what I mean. They're just entrepreneurial anthems disguised as hip as rap songs. I said, mama forget, I'm not going through every single, I'm not going to read the, the interest of the highlights I had, like the things I underlined it in the song lyrics. And then so he says, mama, forgive me.

I should be thinking about Harvard, but that's too far away. We're starving. And so even though everybody didn't grow up in the projects like Jay-Z, there's a lot of people that understand exactly what he's saying there. He's like, I should be thinking about Harvard, but that's too far away. We're starving. I remember when I was about to graduate high school, I was like, hey, where are you going to go to college? What do you mean?

Whichever one I can drive to, whichever one I can work full time while I'm doing this, my parents didn't even graduate high school. So this idea where I should be aiming at Harvard, that's ridiculous. And then he goes on to the next thing. A nut, this is going to remind me about, okay, so he says, let me tell it to you first. A nothing wrong with the aim, just got to change the target. So to me, he's saying you have to pick, picking the right market is essential.

This is something more buffet warrants over and over again in the shareholder letters. This is something Mark Andreessen talks about over and over again in his blog archive. The picking the right market is essential. In fact, if you would ask Mark Andreessen, he's like, what is more, what is a more predictor for business successes at the market, the team, or the product? And he gets any marks a great writer too. And he gives the answers that you're most likely to expect. It's the team.

It's the product. And he's like, well, actually, I'll take the market. And so what's crazy is all that stuff, Jay Z just described all the ideas behind these lines. And extremely, I'm a piece of him is like his efficiency with communication. Like he can just use up, he can tell entire stories. And a lot of great musicians do this as well in just a few lines. So we're not even, what is that? Three, four lines. We're not even, we haven't even touched the surface of the song.

So he says, ain't nothing wrong with the aim, just got to change the target. I just got to figure out where I'm going to direct my talents. And so then he says, and it's not like when they're just young kids, they have to figure it out as they go. And it's not like we're professionals moving the decimals. No, do you know where to cop? No, got to connect. No. So what he's saying there is that's obviously for drugs, but for our, our, our, our, for our purposes, it's do you have something to sell?

Do you have a way to get something to sell? You can sell it to somebody else's product or you're going to make your own. So he's like, do you know where to cop? Do you know where to buy drugs? No. Do you got to connect the person selling drugs? No. And then he summarizes it like the very beginning of an entrepreneurial journey. Who in the F knows how to be successful? They say it's celestial. It's all in the stars. And then he says, and at all cost, you better avoid these bars.

So in his game, it's like, listen, you better not, like, you need to avoid going to jail. Like you're just where you go bust. Sorry, you can't, you can't be successful if you don't first survive. So that's their example of that. You know what I wrote down when I, when I got to the line, he says, and all costs you avoid these bars. It's something I love. The founder of Sequoia, Capitol Don Valentine, because, uh, and I didn't, I don't think I even knew about him when he was alive.

Maybe I did, but he passed away recently. And if you go back and like watch videos of his on YouTube, they're just absolutely fantastic because this guy's got no fluff. What I wrote down when, when I got to this party says that all, and at all costs, you better avoid these bars. Uh, Don Valentine says, all companies go out of business. The, all companies that go out of business do for the, do so for the same reason. They run out of money.

And so Don would advise his entrepreneurs, or you need to focus on cash flow. Another thing I love, Don, he just cuts through all the bullshit. Don says two things in business matter. And you can learn this in two minutes. High gross margins and cash flow. The other financial metrics you can forget. So back to JZ says that all costs, you better avoid these bars. This is a crash course, this saying high school. So it's obviously very dangerous in his case. You could die or go to jail.

In our case, we could be bank, go bankrupt. We're not like we can run out of money. We can cause a lot of pain and only to ourselves. Everybody else around us. This is a crash course, this saying high school. If we make mistakes, we have very, very real consequences. And then this is one of my favorite parts of the song that I've repeated over and over again in my own life. You're now in a game where only time can tell. Survive the droughts. I wish you well. Survive the droughts.

I wish you well. How sick am I? I wish you health. I wish you wheels. I wish you wealth. I wish you insight so you can see for yourself. I double online that step last part. I wish you insight so you can see for yourself. And that is him telling us you have to do the work necessary to trust your own judgment. Companies live and die by the founder. No one is coming to save you. I wish you health. I wish you wheels. I wish you wealth. I wish you insight so you can see for yourself.

Now let's go back to when Jay-Z was 19 and his informal mentorship with Big Daddy Kane. And so he says it was 1988. I was still in the streets and I basically accepted that I'd be a hustler who happened to rap in his spare time. I thought the rap game was crooked and a little fake. Big Daddy Kane was playing a role. Hip hop's first playboy. He had silk robes and pretty girls and all those videos and all that. But his flow was sick. So his point was like, yeah, people see the flash, right?

They see the girls, they see the robes, they see the jewelry. But I'm actually looking at what he's actually saying and how he does it. And I'll tell you what this made me think of in a minute. He was condensing stacking rhymes on top of one another. Trying to keep up with him was an exercise in breath control, in wordplay, in speed and imagination. He was relentless on the mic. So think about that. How many people watching Big Daddy Kane's music videos?

How many people listening to his music are thinking about stacking rhymes on one top of another? How many of them are thinking about the importance of your breath control, the importance of your wordplay, the speed of which you're saying the words and how you space them out. And so he says, I went on the road with Kane for a while and I double underlined this section. I got an invaluable education watching him perform. This is the exact same.

The way Jay Z is talking about Big Daddy Kane is exactly, exactly the way Kobe Bryant used to speak about Michael Jordan. And so Kobe said, when I grew up watching Michael play my gender listen, this is, I have goosebumps right now. This is freaking crazy. When I grew up watching Michael, excuse me, when I grew up watching Michael play, my generation saw the highlights and the fancy stuff. But what I saw with his footwork, I saw the spacing, I saw the timing, I saw the fundamentals of the game.

Is that not exactly what Jay Z was just telling us? I got an invaluable education from watching him perform. I was watching his breath control, his wordplay, the way he stacked rhymes on one another. While you're watching the girls and the jewelry and the robes, just like Kobe's generation was watching the highlights and the fancy stuff, Kobe's focused on the footwork, the spacing, the timing, the fundamentals of the game. Back to Jay Z, Kane had just an incredible amount of showmanship.

In today, I use some of the ideas I picked up back then in my own shows. Let's go back to what Kobe just said. I haven't said it yet, but what Kobe said, everything that I do, I learned from the guys who came before him. Go back to Jay Z before we go back to Kobe. I use some of the ideas I picked up back then on my own show and he was generous too, generous, remember that word. He'd stop the show and bring me out when no one knew who the hell I was.

If you watched the fantastic documentary The Last Dance Episode 5, right before Kobe passed away, unfortunately, he was interviewed. And this is what Kobe said. When I came into the league, Michael provided a lot of guidance for me. I don't know why I'm getting so emotional. I had a question about shooting his turnaround shot. He gave me great detailed answers and on top of that, he said if you ever need anything, he gave me a call.

Just what Bob Nois have intel and Bill Hewlett and David Packard of HP were generation older than Steve Jobs and they did the same thing. It's the right thing to do. And then Kobe says, I truly hate having discussions. What is going on? My voice is cracking, alright. Okay. I get excited about this stuff, man. I truly hate having discussions about who would win one-on-one or fans saying that you'd beat Michael. I feel like yo and he puts his hand up to Kobe puts his hand up to say stop to chill.

And he says, so I hate having these discussions about who would win one-on-one or fans saying that you'd be Michael. I feel like yo, what you get from me is from him. I don't get five championships without him because he guided me so much and gave me so much great advice. That is so powerful. It made me think of when I reread Steve Jobs' biography by Isaacson, I just did rerecorded another podcast on it. It's episode 214. If you haven't gone back and listen to it.

But there's something that Steve says as he's dying because he's working with Isaacson as he's dying. There's two things, but I want to read this to you. And he talks about like, you know, what did Kobe could say? Yeah, yeah, you know, I'd give it to him one-on-one and all this other stuff. He's just like, I wouldn't have had five championships without them. Everybody builds on the work from the great people that came before them.

And so Steve is telling us like he's parting words of advice to us. He's like, listen, I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs. When what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do what it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in the business. That is how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before.

You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did. And Hula Packard and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. And that is what I want Apple to be. And then the other example happens when jobs is in a massive lawsuit with Google. And so he says jobs had another visit that month from someone who wanted to repair fences.

It was Google's co-founder Larry Page who lived less than three blocks away and had just announced his plans to retake the reins of his company. He asked if he could come by and get tips on how to be a good CEO. This is really important because they're in a massive lawsuit against each other. And look at what jobs does. He does the right thing. So it says jobs were still furious at Google. My first thought was fuck you, Steve said.

But then I thought about it and I realized that everyone helped me when I was young. What is happening in the book where we're at? Big daddy Kane is a star. No one knows who the hell Jay-Z is. He does not have to give him the time of day. Not only does he put him on songs. Not only does he let him go on tour with him, he brings him out and tries to introduce him to other people when no one knew who he was. But then I thought about it and realized that everybody helped me when I was young.

From Bill Hewlett of founder of HP to the guy down the block. So I called him back and said sure. Larry came over, sat in jobs living room, and listened to his ideas on building great products and durable companies. So then he talks about mentoring Memphis Bleak, which is like this young kid that lived in his projects as well. They do a song together and I just want to pull out one line here. Because just one line made me think of so many other examples. And so Jay-Z is playing the song.

He's playing the role of like the older mentor to the younger person. And he says hold up. Now listen to me. You let them other dudes get the name. Skip the faint. 10,000 or 100, so 10,000 or 100 G's, so 10,000 or 100,000 dollars. Keep your shit the same. And so that's the line. And then this is Jay-Z now writing many years after the fact what it means. And he says this is a classic piece of OG advice.

So original gangster like the interpretation of that would be like somebody older and whic than you. Okay, so they're slaying his OG. This is a classic piece of OG advice. It's amazing how few people actually stick to it. So the advice from Jay-Z is stay on your grind. That's the way he says it. If you go back to founders number 56 when I did the biography, the book on Herb Keller, the founder of Southwest Airlines, the only airline that was profitable for 40 something straight years is amazing.

Herb has got a fantastic personality. One of the best personalities of anybody that's come across. But he says, and he's essentially saying the same thing that the same advice that Jay-Z is given to Memphis Bleak here and giving to us. Herb gives us as well. He says success has to be earned over and over again or it disappears. And so Jay-Z saying, doesn't matter. If you have a little bit of money or a lot of money, you still act the same. You still do the same thing.

He'll Jay-Z quotes later on and he puts it on one of his songs at the very beginning in one of his songs. Biggie Smalls talking about advice that he got from who signed him, which is Diddy. The advice that Diddy gave him when they were coming in, they were both young, you know, early 20s. And so Biggie says, he says, just try to stay above water, stay busy, stay working puff, who's called puff at the time. We know him as Diddy today.

Diddy told me that the key to this joint, the key to staying on top of things is to treat everything like it's your first project. You know what I'm saying? Like it's your first day back when you were an intern. That's how you try to treat things. You have to stay hungry. And so they're picking up on this natural tendency of human nature that you're really hungry. And when you're coming up, you're dedicated, you stick to it, but it's really hard.

Like you've got rich, maybe you don't have the same motivations that pushed you when you were younger or when you were hungry, you lose that hunger and that what happens as soon as you stay off your grind, as he says, 10,000 or 100 G's keep your shit the same. Once you get off of it, you fall off. As Herb said, you can't do that. Your success has to be earned over and over again or it's going to disappear.

Skipping ahead, he's analyzing the song called, it's De-Evils, Devils with an apostrophe, but there's just one line from here. And he says, 9 to 5 is how you survive. I ain't trying to survive. I'm trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. That's why I feel they're really entrepreneurial anthems. 9 to 5 is how you survive. I ain't trying to survive. I'm trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. Entrepreneurs are chasing what Mark and Jason says.

Like you only experience two, as an entrepreneur, you only experience two feelings, euphoria and terror. You're not seeking equilibrium. If we wanted to seek equilibrium, we'd go get a job. We're not interested. Going back to the J.C.'s parallel, his thoughts on lyrics and rhymes is very similar to my thought, my thinking on books. He says, great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don't necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it.

Instead, it plants dissonance in your head. It leaves shit rattling around your head and that won't make sense till the fifth or six times through. It challenges you. The problem isn't in rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music. And here's an example of that because this is just one line and I'll tell you it's very similar to what you and I just discovered on that book about the early history of PayPal back on episode 233.

Every hustler knows the value of a faint, meaning a head fake, like a movement that is not actually, that's not going to reveal your intention. Every hustler knows the value of a faint. It keeps you one step ahead of whoever's listening it. So in that fantastic book, founders, the Jimmy Sony wrote about the early history of PayPal.

There is something that Reed Hoffman, which working at PayPal at the time goes on to find for Found LinkedIn and now he's a venture capitalist and all this other stuff. At the time, he gives the rope a do. He does a faint to the eBay. So PayPal is getting ready. They had been in acquisition talks with eBay over and over again. They always fell through. And so PayPal is going ahead with the IPO.

And they're worried that during the quiet period where they can't say anything that eBay could torpedo their IPO by saying, oh yeah. Most of their businesses on our platform and we're getting ready to kick them off our platform and just use our own payment system. So essentially when they're going to attack somebody that they don't like because eBay and PayPal did not like each other and they're going to attack the weakness of their enemy at a time when the enemy cannot fight back.

So they come up with and that's why you have to read the book over and over again because these guys were geniuses on how they just as unique way they saw problems. So Reed Hoffman says, hey, you know what? Let's sit down and let's have like more acquisition talks. I think we can work this out.

And so he's only doing that because if you're in the middle of your company trying to buy my company and I can convince you I'm fainting, I'm faking that I'm really interested and I want to sell you my company. Let's just get this locked up now. You're not going to say things that will that will that will decrease the value of the company. You're not going to destroy my IPO and the entire time. My Whitman who's the CEO of eBay time thought that they were serious. They were never serious.

They did not want to sell the company. They just wanted you not to destroy the IPO. So let's go back again. That's a long story. It goes over a couple of pages in a book. Jay Z says it every hustler knows the value of a faint. It keeps you one step ahead of whoever's listening in. So let me go back to studying the greats before he could meet the greats. He had to study them through their music, right?

At this point in his career, and this is not the book is not in chronological order, just you know. At this point in his career he's already super famous so he gets to sit down and meet with Quincy Jones and Bono from YouTube. I met Bono years ago in the cigar room of a bar in London with Quincy Jones. This book is filled with stories like this which again I've been a lifelong Jay Z fan. I didn't even know that stuff.

I spent most of the night quizzing Quincy about Thriller which I think is the greatest album that has ever been made. Bono was beaming and laughing the whole time. I liked him right away. I was completely unprepared for what a genuine, humble and open person Bono was. We became friends after that night. So then they see they run into each other later on in New York. He told me he read an interview I had done somewhere.

The writer had asked me about the YouTube record that was about to be released and I said something about the kind of pressure a group like that must be under just to meet their own standard. Bono told me that my quote had really gotten him. In fact he said it made him a little anxious. He decided to go back to the studio even though the album was already done and he kept reworking it until he thought it was as good as it could possibly be.

This is the important part and the reason I bring this here attention. Because again, from the outside Bono super famous, he's YouTube, like he's settled. He's not nervous. He's not worried. Yes, he is. Everybody is. I really wasn't trying to make him nervous with that quote and it was surprised to find out that at that point in his career he's still got anxious about his work. It is only right that I met him and Quincy Jones on the same night. They're both already in the pantheon.

We ended up trading stories about the pressure we felt even at this point in our lives. So Jay says, I've heard him say in interviews over and over again, hey listen, I respect the grades. I learned from the grades but I'm competing with them too. I want to be the best that I ever did it. There was something beautiful about Tupac being my closest competition on the charts of that week. He talked about, they both really stowems.

This is many years after Tupac died and Tupac wants to come in second. He comes in first. There's something beautiful about Tupac being my closest competition on the charts of that week. Aside from the heartbreak of losing two great MCs and one great friend, I've always felt robbed of my chance to compete with Tupac and Biggie. Competition pushes you to become your best self. Jordan said the same thing about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

That desire to compete and to win was the engine of everything we did. So then he flashbacks in his life. He's still thinking okay, like I can sell drugs and like can I make this hip hop thing work? And I'm going to read my notes you first before I read this section because I think it informs what happened here. And I wrote founder mentality. You know exactly what Jay means here.

I wanted money and excitement and love the idea of cutting myself loose from the rules and low ceilings of the straight world. So he's like I'm not going to get a job. The kid on the street is getting a shot at a dream. He sees the guy who gets rich and thinks yep, that'll be me. He ignores the other stories going around. So for his purposes, he's talking about death and jail, our purposes were thinking yep, that person built a successful company. So can I?

We also know that there's a ton of people who fail and there's devastating consequences to that. So he goes back to this. These kids are the season guy who gets rich and thinks yep, that'll be me. He ignores the other stories going around. They're working because they think they're due for a miracle. The kid in McDonald's gets a check and that's it. I never even consider that as a possibility. And you've got a nation of hustlers working for a small handful of slots.

For small handful of slots, you learn something that you never learn at McDonald's. If you got the heart and the brains, you can move up quickly. There's no way to quantify all of this on a spreadsheet, but it's the dream of being the exception. And he also clarifies, he's like listen, I'm not dissing you if you go to work at McDonald's because he says it's like it was very, there's like a level of courage to walk through the hood.

He rejects in your uniform and everybody else is saying, hey, go play basketball. Go sell drugs, do all this other stuff. He's like, no, I'm taking a predictable path to success where I can actually pay my bills legitimately and not worried about getting killed or going to jail or whatever the case is. But Jay-Z saying, I never thought about that. I never, he says in his rap, he's like, I never had a job. Like he never had a job in his entire life other than one that he made for himself.

So one of the people that he gets to know when he's still before he's in the music industry, it's this rapper named Jazz. And he learned something because Jazz gets signed. He's one of the first people he knows to get signed to a major record deal. And that's where he's like, wait a minute, this isn't what we see. Like they're not actually adding a lot of value. They want to, he says it's like the most crooked, the least contract in history. So he says, I would link with Jazz.

We'd go back and forth to each other's houses and write rhymes for hours. We'd lock ourselves in a room with a pen and a pad. So again, he's telling us practice, practice, practice over and over again. Jazz got a record deal. He at EMI advanced him a ridiculous amount of money nearly half a million dollars. That was huge back then. The label rented Jazz a flat in London to work with Chuck, which is this new, I guess successful producer.

So go to London, we'll rent you an apartment and work with Chuck and record your debut. Jazz invited me along for the ride. Inside I was doing back flips and shit. So Jay Z's talking about his life. And I barely, I'd been out of my projects. I'd been to maybe Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, but I'd never been abroad. Like this is insane. I says, and even though I didn't go around talking about it, even to my closest friends, I believed I could make it as a rapper too.

So he talks about the time in London. I was like a sponge. When I'd sit in on Jazz's recording sessions and meetings, I never gave my opinion about how his business was being run. I was new and I didn't necessarily know how things worked in the music business. I did notice that even though we were in London more for more than a month, when the guys from EMI finished Jazz's album, it didn't sound that different than his demo. So okay, wait a minute, we spent all this time and money over here.

His album is the same. And besides, you gave him one new track. He says the only new track they gave him was Hawaiian Sophie. But in this point, he's like, well, this doesn't seem right. So I'm noticing, I'm trusting my intuition saying, hey, something's off here. But the problem is, they have the experience. They are the record label. They had just made a successful album, Will Smith. Maybe they knew something we don't.

But we were looking at the plaques on their walls and thinking about the radio play that they got Will Smith and we let them convince us that Hawaiian Sophie was going to make Jazz below. Unfortunately, it didn't read that way once the video came out. That single was nearly career suicide for Jazz. He went from being courted to the highest level to not having EMI return his phone calls.

The wildest shit about the whole thing was at the executives at EMI who would withdraw on support for Jazz's project were coming to me behind his back to holler at me on some solo shit. I thought to myself, this business sucks. There's no honor, no integrity. It was disgusting. And he talks about devastating it is from the individual's perspective. Jazz's debut album, something that he'd been dreaming about his whole life, did come out.

But in the end, it was nothing more than a tax write off for a giant corporation. After the way EMI handled Jazz, I buried my little rap dreams and I took it out on the block. I said, all right, I'm not going to be a rapper. I'll go back to selling drugs and then here's the problem a little while after. He's like, this can't be my life. This isn't how my life should be is a very powerful motivator.

He says, in that bitter cold, folded into the crevices of a project wall, hundreds of miles from home, I sold crack to addicts who were killing themselves. Collecting the wrinkled bills they got from God knows where. I stood there thinking, what the fuck am I doing? So eventually he's going to be like, I got to give it a go and he realizes, forget trying to get signed by a record label, right?

Even though no one was signed on, which is hilarious because he sold 125 million records up until this point. No one wanted to sign them so he had to make his own record label, which reminds of being the best idea he ever had in his life or one of the best ideas he ever had in his life. But he goes back to studying the grates. And this is going to be, I mentioned Rick Rubin, one of the co-founders of Jeff Jam. This is the guy Russell Simmons, who essentially is the first rap mogul.

So it says, when I was moving off the street and tried to envision what winning look like, it was Russell Simmons. Going back to see what I mean, how blows your mind or blew my mind. How much of this book is Jay-Z just studying the great people that came before him? Russell was a star, the one who created the whole model for the hip-hop mogul that many people like Andre, Harold, Puff Daddy and even Shug Knight went on to follow.

People in the record business had always made a lot of money, not the artist who'd kept dying broke, but the execs. Still, regular fans had no idea who they were. Russell changed that. His brand is an executive matter not just within the industry, but among people in the street. And with Jeff Jam, he created one of the most powerful brands in the history of American entertainment. Russell also made being a CEO seem like a better deal than being an artist.

He was living life crazy, fucking with models, writing embentlies with his sneakers sticking out the window, with his sneakers sticking out the window and never once wrapped a single bar. His gift was curating a whole lifestyle, music, fashion, comedy, film, and then selling it. He didn't just create the hip-hop business model, he changed the business style of a whole generation of Americans.

The whole vibe of startup companies in Silicon Valley with 25-year-old CEOs wearing sheltos is Russell's deaf jam style filtered through different industries. The business idea, so he's still talking about all the lessons he learned before he met Russell. The business idea for a whole generation went from growing up and wearing a suit every day to never growing up and wearing sneakers to the boardroom. I understood what Russell was onto.

He discovered a way to work in the legit world, but to live the dream of the hustler, independence, wealth, and success outside of the mainstream rules. It's more of a founder mentality, independence, wealth, and success outside of the mainstream's rules. This was a better story than just being a rapper, especially based on what I now knew about how rappers got jerked. And so we moved on to a different page. He's about to meet Russell and I just wrote so many jams on this page.

So he says, I first met Russell when Dave biggs and I, so Dave-biggs, Burke, I think is the last name and Jay-Z were the three co-founders of Rockefeller records before Jay-Z is going to wind up breaking off by on his own later on. I first met Russell with Dave-biggs and I, we're negotiating for a label deal with Rockefeller after reasonable doubt dropped. So it's first out at this point in story, he's already in the, he's already said, hey, I'm not going to sell drugs anymore.

I'm going to dedicate all my time and effort into making it at this, he says, making it at this rap shit is the way he puts it. So his first album comes out, it doesn't sell a lot, but it's like critically, it's like, wow, this guy's really good. So it says, I remember sitting across the table from him in Lear Cohen.

This is a really, I remember Lear Cohen from later on in the story too, because Lear is really important to the story because he's one of, he's one of Jay-Z's mentors and it's also, again, Jay-Z, he's demonstrated like, I'm going to find the smartest people that know more than I do and I'm learning everything I can from them, right? And so he does that with Lear becomes, like, Lear becomes his mentor and this causes a rift between Jane and his co-founders.

So it says, I remember sitting across the table from him in Lear Cohen and disability belief that we were negotiating a seven figure deal with the greatest lab, greatest label in rap history. But I was feeling a dilemma. I was looking at Russell and thinking, I want to be this dude, not his artist. Russell would become a valuable, informal mentor for me. He knew that the key to success was believing in the quality of your own product enough to make people do business with you on your terms.

He knew that great product was the ultimate advantage in competition, not how big your office building is or how deep your pockets are or who you know. In the end, it came down to having a great product and the hustle to move it. He knew the culture's power and was never shy about leveraging it and making sure that it was the people who were creating the culture who got rich off of it. So let's stop here, let's flash back just like Jay Z said at the very beginning. I knew hip hop was new.

I just knew one thing and I knew it in my bones. I knew it was going to be bigger than it was. It's going to be bigger in the future than it is today before it dies. Well, the analogy here is Russell knew how valuable. Russell was one of the first people that knew that the birth of the hip hop industry was going to make billionaires. He knew it. He knew that the first people to profit off of it. And the whole part is like we are the ones in control.

We're the ones making it to what Steve Jobs said that most important people in the company are the people that are making your product. The people that can create wonderful products, both in Apple and Pixar, those are the people that are valuable and the way to build a strong company is to make sure that those people are the most important people in the company. And what Steve Jobs learned from getting kicked out of Apple was like, oh, we used to be the most important people in the company.

Then when we build a product that turns a company into a rocket ship, then they bring in like adults, they start prioritizing sales and marketing. And then eventually you've already peaked. You don't even know it. You're like a walking dead. And 10 years later, you don't everybody that's capable of creating great product has left. So in the end, it came down to having a great product and the hustle to move it. So build and sell and you will become unstoppable.

That is Naval RavaCon from the Omnaka, Naval, I can't remember what a podcast number that is, but you can find in the archive. He knew build, if you can build and sell, you will be unstoppable. He knew the culture's power was never shot about leveraging it to make sure that it was the people who created the culture who got rich off it. That was the idea. Now, this is again, I'm still on the same page. So many gems on this page. And I'm reading you almost the whole page. It's amazing.

The idea was at the heart of Rockaway. So this is a company that they're going to start. They wind up selling. So Jay Z sold multiple companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. Rockaway, he sold for 200 million. I forgot how much he sold his liquor company for. He's got a few liquor companies. He just sold title to Jack Dorsey, and Square for like 400 million. So he just does this over and over again. The idea was at the heart of Rockaway.

I mean, that's how you wind up being able to live in a hundred million dollar house, right? The idea was at the heart of Rockaway. The clothing company we founded. In the late 90s, I was wearing a lot of clothes from this company called Iceberg. After a while, I'd look out into the audience and my concert and see hundreds of people rocking Iceberg. The executives at Iceberg looked at us like we were speaking of foreign language.

They wanted to do a partnership deal, they wanted to get paid for their influence of sales, right? They go meet executives like, nah, get out of here. They looked at us like we were speaking foreign language. They offered us free clothes, but we wanted millions. We walked out of their office realizing that we had to do it ourselves. And so what he realized is like, forget endorsing other people's products. I'm not doing that. I'm making my own.

If you'll buy a clothes t-shirt that you see me in, the t-shirt should be owned by me. If you go to the club and order a drink, like, Kristal or whatever else, because I wrap about it, then I should just wrap about, like, I should own everything. It's like almost like a form of like, a form of an integration. And so he talks about this. Like, forget Timberlin, forget Krovasse, forget Versace and all that other stuff. Like, we're going to make our own stuff. And he just got a great line.

Like, what story are you telling about your product? And he says, we gave those brands a narrative, which is one of the reasons anyone buys anything to all not just a product, but to become part of a story. That line could have came directly at a Coco Chanel's mouth. She said the exact sentiment behind that line is exactly how she built her massive, massive empire around. It's why anybody buys anything, not to just own a product, but to become part of the story.

And although, so he picks up on something about change in his outlook on things in life that he becomes older and wiser and just learns more. One thing like, like, was interesting is like, you know, you have all these like rap beefs and rap battles and they make songs about each other and all this other stuff. And it's still, you know, people still fight over this stuff today. When I was younger, I really liked it. Like the, like the, like the, like the our form is very interesting.

And as a good old, I'm like, this is kind of dumb. Like, if I'm making music and somebody else is making music and somebody's that other person is making music says something bad about my music, like the best thing for me to do is to ignore and outperform, right? Instead of me giving them attention, now some of this is like all fake and they do it's like, you know, wrestling thing where it's like, we, if we have this fake beef, we'll sell more records of stuff.

But I think in general, it's like, I don't care what other people are. I'm just focused on me and my product and getting the word out. Like, I just think that's smarter. And so that's what he's realizing here is like, I'm not going to freaking argue with every single person that comes at me. Like, this is just, I don't have that much time. So he says, I don't scrap with every up and come or these days. I got so many people coming at me. I'd never do anything else.

I'm not competing with rappers anymore. I look at things a little differently than I used to. The competition isn't always zero sound like it was when we were on the streets. I discovered that there really is such a thing as a win-win situation. So it's all a point. It's like, this is all zero. This is not a zero sum game. You can like my music, you can like that person's music, you can like that woman's music and like, it goes on forever.

So it says, I discovered there really is such a thing as a win-win situation. I'm only competing with myself to be a better artist and businessman, to be a better person with a broader vision. This is genius. This is exactly what we should be doing. I'm competing with myself to be a better artist and businessman, to be a better person with a broader vision. I'm still that dude on the corner and it talks about the mindset he has.

I'm still that dude on the corner, seven nights straight, trying to get back the money I lost. I'm still the kid who'd fight to be able to walk through a park. I'm still the MC who'd battle anyone in a project courtyard. So he's not saying this literally, saying, I still have that mindset. This is what the streets have done for us. They have done for me. They've given us a drive. They've made us stronger.

Through hip hop, we found a way to redeem these lessons and to use them to change the world. So this is just fantastic too. The North of myself on this page is this is just great. It's a million dollars with a game for $9.99. That is a line he said in his album, $444, what he means is like you're buying an album for $10. You're going to get a million dollars with an idea for it. Very similar to what they said in Port Charlie's Almanac.

Founders number 90, if you haven't listened to that where I said there's 30, the reason that all hit, like when you study the best founders and the best investors, like they all have deep historical knowledge. And the reason is, there's a line in Port Charlie's Almanac. They said there's an idea, there's ideas worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book. And so this is just fantastic.

So he's going to analyze the career and life of John Michelle Boschiat, who if you listen to Jason Musick, you know who he is because he won't shut up about him. And he's just talking about, he's analyzing his work, taking the good ideas, right? And then avoiding the bad. It's exactly what we're doing. Boschiat was from Brooklyn, like me. He started living off living in the streets as a graffiti artist.

He was hanging around with Madonna before she was famous and he collaborated with Andy Warhol. He came onto the scene with the crew of graffiti writers, but he didn't want to be boxed in with that movement. So when the graffiti site scene died, he didn't die with it. He moved in a white art world, but flooded his art with black images, attitudes and icons. He wanted to be the most famous artist in the world.

So I double on that section because Jay-Z may not want to be the most famous, but he wants to be the best. He wants to be the best artist in the world. He was hip hop when hip hop was still in its cradle. So he's seeing things in Boschats art. And he's realizing that same theme that's running through his art is exactly the foundations of this industry that I just jumped into. On the night he died, he was 27. Boschiat had been planning to see a run DMC show.

When people asked him what his art was about, he'd hit them with the same three words over and over again. Royalty, heroism and the streets. When he died in 1988, I'm not sure I knew who he was, even though he was a Brooklyn kid like me and he wasn't that much older. And so then he's saying, Boschiat, we're on getting his wish, but he got in death. You don't want to get your wish in death. You want in life. He's probably among the most famous artists in the world, two decades after his death.

I own a few of his paintings. His technique feels like hip hop, another sentence I underlined. Twice. His technique feels like hip hop. This is where he's again, don't think of things literally. The one thing you learn if you study the life of Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory, is like he looked at everything like a giant abstraction, which is what you and I try and do at these books. His technique feels like hip hop.

In the way he combined different traditions and techniques to create something new. Okay. He brought together elements of street art and European old masters. He combined painting and writing. He combined icons from Christianity and Santoria and Voodoo. And on top of all that mixing and matching, he added his own genius. Bingo exactly, which transformed the work into something completely fresh and original. So you go study the career of the life and career of Steve Jobs.

And you see elements that he learned from Edwin Land, which he called his hero. He called Edwin Land a national treasure. You see Edwin Land's ideas in the back of Steve Jobs, like the influence, the veins of influence runs through Steve Jobs' approach to his work. It's not Edwin Land's ideas. It's Edwin Land's ideas mixed in with Steve's own genius, which then transforms Steve's work into something completely fresh and original. And if you want to put a price tag on it, what is it?

Multiple trillion dollar market happens. Insane. Baskets work often deals with famous success. The story of what happens when you actually get the things you'd die that you would die for. One Boschiat painting I own is called Charles I. It's about Charlie Parker, the jazz pioneer who died young of a heroin overdose, just like Boschiat. In the corner of the paintings are the words most kings get their head cut off. So why is he telling us this? So why is he bringing up?

He's just bragging about that he's got really expensive art on his walls? No. This is the important part. In the reason I collect Maxim's and Song lyrics and short form videos, I read, so he's talking about it, looking at that, walking in the corner in the house and seeing that painting on the wall. These kings get their heads cut off. The reason why I have Ernest Shackleton on my lock screen on my phone. Why? Because I see Ernest cover. I see Shackleton covered in snow, looking like death.

And I immediately reminded of his motto, buy endurance week conquer. So when I look at my phone, I see, oh, you're going to give up, David? You're really going to do that. No, you're not going to conquer anything. Buy endurance. Get used to taking paint. And then when you open my phone, it's a line, a screenshot from the last dance, the biography of Michael Jordan, a guy that was totally focused on one thing and one thing only.

So we see this is very common for people to have these little reminders set around their house. Same reason I leave the book, the towel of Charlie Munger out, the bed of Hercestes, autobiography of a restless mind. These are just like little books I leave in place in my house. I just pick up their books of Maxim's and Afros.

It's not to sit there and read for 15 minutes, pick one up for two minutes, read an aphorism, a maximum, turn to a random page, and it's going to prompt your thinking, right? It's going to remind you of things just like JC sitting in his big, beautiful house looking at this boss gap painting. And he's saying, most kings get their heads cut off. This is what JC says. I read it as a statement about what happens when you achieve a certain position.

People want to take your head, your crown, your title. They want to amasculate you. When you resist it until one day, your albums are moving and the shows aren't filling up and it seems like the game might have moved on without you. And this is the problem. You do exactly what you should. Then you start to change and you do whatever you need to get back into that spotlight. And that is when you're the walking dead. So in that margin of that paragraph, I wrote Steve Jobs, avoided that.

Look at the weird crazy arc of Steve Jobs's life. There were many times like, no, Steve, why you, they said something about, he was, he was trying to build really nice expensive Apple computers when everybody was just buying the market. It's shifted and everybody was buying everybody was buying cheap PCs.

And there's a line in that book in Steve Jobs by Isaacson says Apple's problem is that they still believe the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers. I'm not here to serve you cheese and crackers, Steve Jobs said. I'm building insanely great products because that's what I feel I should do. And if I start to change and just build an undifferentiated commodity PC like everyone else is doing, then Apple never returns.

He looked at Apple's, this is this period that line comes from when, this is at late 90s when Steve Jobs come back to Apple and he looks at the product line. I'll be like, this line sucks. There's too much stuff. All of it sucks. Okay, rid of it all and we're going to build four products and there's going to be four bad ass insanely great products. And we're going to stake our claim and we're going to rebuild our company on the quality of our fucking products.

And that, that line of thinking becomes the foundation for the greatest corporate turn around the world has ever seen. Not sticking your finger up in the air and be like, what's the, what, what is the wind blowing? Oh, you don't like what I'm doing? Let me change. Let me do whatever I need to do. Get it back in the spotlight. No, the spot, I'm going to build the best products and that's going to direct the spotlight. I'm not going to just copy you and go down this crappy path.

That reminds me of this fantastic, fantastic anecdote that's in Joni, our junk. I said it again. I did a whole podcast on it. Johnny, his name is Johnny. Johnny Ives, uh, biography. It's Johnny Ives, the genius man Apple's greatest products. And so at the time, the market, the market demand saying, uh, everybody, all the, the undifferentiated PC makers were building these things called netbooks and they go from being like nothing to the laptop market to like 20% of the laptop market.

And when, when they were talking, I was like, should we build a net book? Steve Jobs just nailed it. And you only know this by being authentic to yourself. And he says, even though they were 20% of the market, Apple never seriously considered making one. And Steve said, netbooks aren't better than anything. Steve Jobs said at the time, they're just cheap laptops. And so he's like, no, I'm not building it because they're not better. They don't do anything better than any other product.

They're just, they're just popular because people are mass producing them and buying them. And so instead of dedicating time to build a net book, you know what, what, uh, what, uh, Steve directed Apple's resources a building instead? The iPad. That is why that what, what Steve are assuming what Jay Z is describing to us is so important. So back to this paragraph, nearly every rapper who made it big has had to deal with getting one of his heads chopped off.

The stories you hear can really make it seem like success can be a curse. And so what Jay Z is describing us is this is what Jay had had to successfully navigate his way through the stories you hear can really make it seem like success can be a curse. Rappers who have been dangled over balconies for their publishing money. That's a true story, by the way, held by their ankles.

Signed this contract and we're going to drop it at the balcony, driven out of their home towns, fucked up by drugs, sued by their own families, betrayed by their best friends, sold up by their crews. There are rappers who blow up and blow through whole fortunes. They squander every opportunity and before you know it, end up back on the block. And so this is why this book is really hitting hard for me, hitting home for me is because there's a bunch of other people that I like their music.

The same time I discovered Jay Z's music 20 years ago. And let's say there was 20 of them. How many of them are still surviving to this day? How many of them did not successfully navigate through that labyrinth of what Jay Z described to us? It's a handful. A handful. Let's put that number. There's thousands of people that have made a hit rap hit hit hit song. How many of them are still doing it decade after decade after decade? That's what I'm interested in.

I'm not interested in being good at podcasting for a year or two. But a decade after decade after decade because that is what my hero's did. Steve Jobs is a hero. He worked on his career for 40 years. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett are still at it. Enzo Ferrari died. Enzo Ferrari's ex-estrategy was death. Edwin Land ran his company longer than almost any other American business founder or any other founder in American business history. Steven Spielberg is still at it.

All these other people I look up to and admire for different reasons. Like, the one thing that they all have in common is longevity. Jay Z, same thing. Long-jeivity. So you take maybe thousands of people that had a hit song like Jay Z did and maybe five or are still doing it for his love. Maybe three or four. Whatever the number is, are still doing it as long as he is. That long-term success is the ultimate goal. And so I turn the page and he's back at it and this is what I wrote.

He just gets it. Jay just has the ability to connect the dots. I'm lucky. I'm also lucky. Never to have needed the approval of the gatekeepers in the industry because from the start we came in the game as entrepreneurs. That gave me the freedom to just be myself. Which is the secret to any long-term success, but exactly what we just talked about as tea jobs, right?

That is a secret to any long-term success, but that's hard to see when you're young and desperate just to be put on, just to get put on. I don't accept and ran over my own point. I just said a minute ago, this is the goal here. I don't accept that failing is inevitable. I think there's a way to avoid it, a way to win, to get success and its spoils and to get away with it without losing your soul or your life or both. It's exactly what Jay-Z's able to accomplish.

I'm trying to rewrite the old script, but Boschiat's painting sits on my wall like a warning. Few pages later, just one line here. Reminder that this is something I learned from Bill Gurley. Be the best informed person in your field. If you've never seen that fantastic talk, go to YouTube, type in running down a dream. How to survive and thrive in a career love, I think it is. That's be the best person, be the best informed person in your field. It's a direct quote from that talk.

He says, I'm a music head. I listen to everything. People around me are passionate about music. We study music. We seek it out. Then he talks about it. You shouldn't be an artist. You should be a businessman. You should approach your art as a business. Again, really, he's just listing the pitfalls of the game that he was able to avoid. This idea, it's funny because everybody's like. They describe the emergence of what they call quote unquote the creator economy. That is not a no idea.

Back in 2005, and I think Jay-Z put it better than the term creator economy, he says, I'm not a businessman. I'm a business man. The other part of commercialization is the idea that artists should be only be thinking about their art and not about the business side of what we do. When I committed to a career in rap, I wasn't taking a vow of poverty. I saw there's another hustle. Exactly. Dead on. It's just another product to move.

I saw there's another, it just happens to love and be obsessed with it. Which in obviously the intent or the reading through the lines there is that that increases his ability to hit the likelihood of his success. I wasn't taking a vow of poverty. I saw it as another hustle, one that happened to coincide with my natural talents. I mind my business and I don't apologize for it. There's this sick fascination with the dead artist, the broke artist, the drugged out artist.

Another thing that's surprising is how much Jay-Z talks about. Don't drink all the time. Don't smoke. We don't do coke. Have a clear head. There's a fantastic story about him and Biggie. With regard to that, I'll get to it in a minute. There's a sick fascination with the dead artist, the broke artist, the drugged out artist, the artist who blows all of his money on drugs and big chains and ends up on a VH1 special. And he's just saying, he's like, I'm not doing that.

You're not going to catch me slipping like that. So then we get to the point where he's analyzing one of his freestyle. I'm going to skip the line. I want to say just a few sentences, two sentences, I think about what he's talking about. Again, Bob Noise, Estee Lauder, Edwin Lance, Steve Jobs, Arnold, Jay-Z. They all do this in the song. I keep talking about seeing it all before and it's true. Not that I was prophetic, but I have always used visualization the way athletes do to conjure reality.

The mind is a powerful place in which you feed it can affect you in powerful ways. And so I think for a lot of people that say, oh, this is weird. That's like a really fufu stuff. Well, I see it all the time. I don't know what to tell you. I remember I was having coffee with a listener of the podcast, Seth. He's a founder and investor. He's around at the same age and we both arrived at the same conclusion and we were having this conversation.

And we talked about, you know, like, when you're younger, you're kind of like, I think we both had like a more analytical bent and real as the more life experience you have. And you also see in this book, when you're in the more you like weigh intuition, just because we don't understand it doesn't mean it's not powerful. And there's some kind of evolutionary benefit to listening to your gut.

Whatever you want to call it, intuition, gut, your mind, doesn't matter, monologue, whatever word you have been to put on it. But before I completely discounted anything, it was like, like, human scoring the abstract. Well, I was one of those people that scored in the abstract before I understand how valuable that is. There's something about having this positive mental attitude, having a belief in yourself.

Like even if you're walking out into the unknown, you think that you have a good product, you think you have some attraction on your business, but you have to believe that you are going to succeed. You have to see it in your mind and brainwash yourself. And I'm kind of doing the same thing when I'm reading this book. It's impossible. It is absolutely impossible to read biography after biography of people believing in themselves.

They had no reason to believe in themselves and using that as fuel to fuel their dreams and not have a profound sense of belief in your own ability and what you're doing. That's not something you've been in a spreadsheet, but it's very real and has very valuable. Listen to yourself, like your heart, your soul, your intuition, your gut, whatever it is. It's the same thing that Jay-Z is saying there. I always use visualization the way athletes do to conjure reality.

Okay, so now we get, like I said, there's tons of fantastic stories in the book. This is on having dinner with Michael Jordan. She says, I also believe there's a lot to be learned from elite athletes. Sports are one of the great metaphors for life. I know I'm not alone when I say this, but I absolutely love Michael Jordan. His career was a perfectly composed story about will. I went to his restaurant at his invitation to have dinner with him. And so he's like, this was just fantastic.

I got to be a freaking, just an absolute fan and I got to a pepperon with any question I wanted to. So he says, I found out how much Jordan loves the Kima Lajuan. He pointed out that a Lajuan was a leader in steals, which is rare in his center, because he played center, which is rare in the center position. I asked him to name his five favorite centers, the best games he ever played, which championships meant the most to him. I got to be an unabashed fan.

It was an absolute dream conversation for me. The things that distinguished Jordan wasn't just his talent, but this is the most important part. And it speaks to exactly like his dedication, the dedication that Jay-Z had in his craft, the one that Kanye, we mentioned earlier, I'm locking myself, I'm doing, I'm locking yourself in a room and do five beats a day for three summers. I deserve to do these numbers.

The thing that distinguished Jordan wasn't just his talent, but his discipline, his laser light commitment to excellence. That's something I always respect, especially in people who have great natural talents already. And so he's like Jordan, that same approach to Jordan uses, I've seen it in other people. It's through line through excellence.

My earliest mentors and rap taught me that making music is work, whether it was jazz locking himself in a room, working on different flows, or a big daddy cane taking the time to meticulously put together a stage show. There's unquestionably magic involved in great music, songwriting and performances, like those nights when a star athlete is totally in the zone and can't miss. But there's also work. Without the work, the magic won't come.

There are a hundred hailed minors for every one Michael Jordan. So it means there's plenty of people with talent. That's not enough. You got to combine discipline and laser light commitment to excellence with your talent. And that becomes your end of what I guess I end like the startup world you hear is like they're looking for, they describe this phenomenon. It's like Jordan-esque phenomenon as end of one founders. So that's the way I think about it.

When you hear that, you think, oh, they're looking for the next Michael Jordan. And so Jay-Z talks about this because he also not just rap, but he signs other rappers. When it comes to signing up new talent, that is what I'm looking for. Not just someone who has skill, but someone who's built for this life.

Someone who has the work ethic, the drive, the gift that Jordan had wasn't just that he was willing to do the work, but he loved doing it because he could feel himself getting stronger and ready for anything. That is the kind of consistency that you can get only by adding dead, serious discipline to whatever talent you have. And so one of these people that Jay-Z saw that and he wants up signing this rapper who's one of my favorite rappers like of the new school rappers named J-Koll.

And there was an interview Jay-Z was doing to promote his album. I think this is back in 2013, 2014. He was releasing Magna Carta Holy Grail, that album. And he talked about the fact that him and J-Koll have albums coming out at the same time. And he talks about the mentality that you should have. And he says, I know for a fact, J-Koll thinks his album is better than mine. And the next line is this punchline. And he's supposed to. He is supposed to feel that way.

That doesn't mean he's like, he's respectful to me. He learns a lot from me just like I learned from him and he says in the interview. He's like, you know, studying with Kim, big, dead, he came, but I'm also competing with him. He's like, you respect the people he came for, you but you're competing with him. You're supposed to. I know for a fact, J-Koll thinks his album is better than mine. He's supposed to. You're supposed to feel that way.

That is not something that people that don't have found their mentality have a, they can't wrap their mind around them. So later on, he says something that's just a fantastic line, a fantastic point. He talks about later on, he becomes like a business partner in this restaurant like Bono and Bill Clinton. And he's like, I didn't really like the laws Bill Clinton passed. He was detrimental to people like that look like me and everything else.

But he's, but he talks about like meeting him and like becoming friends with them. And he says, but I'm not exact, and this is his great point. But I'm not exactly the same person I was in 1992 either. Everyone needs a chance to evolve. Two great ideas on this page a little later on. When you step outside of school and you have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see to my rhymes.

My mind is always jumping around. Restless. Making connections. Mixing and matching ideas rather than marching in a straight line. Purely linear, linearly thinking, or rarely get you from the projects to being a billionaire. So this is obviously a good idea. My mind is always jumping around. This making connections mixing and matching ideas rather than marching in a straight line. It's exactly what I'm trying to do with founders and trying to connect disparate thoughts.

I've always believed in motion and action following connections wherever they take me and not getting too entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose. More about unpredictable leaps and links than simply steady movement or worse stagnation. It has allowed me to stay open. Isn't she saying the value of flexibility? What are you talking about here? It's allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next.

And on this page, I just listed a bunch of people that optimize her flexibility too. Singleton, herbkeller, buffet, monger, nymphs, Persia. So the mountaineer, we just covered a few, a few, a few podcasts ago. Chuck Fini, the billionaire who wasn't, the guy that made eight billion dollars and gave it all away when he was still alive. Walter Chrysler, Henry Ford, Ed Cappell, all, they all say things just like what Jay-Z is saying here.

I need to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next. So he goes back to his childhood and this is just insane. These are lessons from his dad and just imagine like it's one thing they're both terrible obviously, but it's one thing it's like you're never part of your kids life and you ran away. I still think it's cowardly to speak of what behavior, but what his dad did to him is even worse.

Imagine walking out on your nine year old son. So he was raised his son for the first nine years of his life and then disappears and doesn't see him until right before he dies a few weeks before he died. They went and meeting again. So this is my, I just cannot, I have a nine year old daughter. She's about to turn 10. Like the idea that it would, like that is just you have to be so something wrong.

I remember one of my oldest friends, his friend and I don't know how close he is to this, his friend. They went to college together, but he said that his friend did this where it's just like he got a girlfriend and then just dipped out and never like didn't support the kid and did it like just completely like abandoned his responsibilities as a father. And I was like you and I told my friend I was like never talk to that dude again. Like that's the scumbag. Like he doesn't care for some kids.

He doesn't care about you. And he thought like I was being harsh. And he's like, well, what if and we'd been friends at that point probably like 15 years when I was having this conversation with him. And he's like, well, what if I did that? I was like, I'd never talk to you again. Like this is despicable, despicable behavior. Like your destroyed like kids don't deserve that. Like you're the adult. You're the one that like had the responsibility. You're the one that had the sex.

You're the one that did the like you're the one that made help make that baby. Like you take it. It doesn't mean you have to be with the like the mom obviously and everything else, but like you have to support your kid. And so Jay-Z talks a lot about that. Not only his layer of spin in the book about his generation really did their best to flip because he's like, it was extremely common that our mothers were graces. The dads were never around.

And so we try to take that curse, that generational curse and fix it. And be like, yo, if you do this, you're a sucker. And so he puts it, my father was crazy for detail. I get that from him. Even though he didn't, we didn't live together after I was nine. There's something he instilled to me early that I never lost. There was nothing he missed about a person. He was really good about taking it all in, taking it all to non-verbal clues.

People give you to their character how to listen to the matrix of a conversation to what a person doesn't say. For my pops, it was just as important to take places as people. He wanted me to know my own neighborhood inside and out. When I was walking with him, he'd always walk real fast. He said it if someone's following you. He did that because if someone's following you, they'll lose you.

And he expected not only to keep up with him, not only for you to keep up with him, but to remember the details of the things I was passing. He was teaching me to be confident and aware of my surroundings. There's no better survival skill that you could teach a boy in the ghetto. And he did it by showing. And so then he talks about the fact that his dad left and that hip hop took this as like, hey, we got to change this.

The hip hop generation never gets credit for this, but those songs changed things in the hood. They were political commentary, but they weren't based on theory or books. They were based on reality on close observation of the world we grew up in. The songs weren't more realistic, but they created a stigma around certain kinds of behavior. Just by describing them truthfully and with clarity, one of the things we corrected was the absent father, karma, our father's generation created.

We made it, and Jay-Z put it very eloquently, more eloquently than I could put it. And he says, we made it some real bitch shit to bounce on your kids. We as a generation made it shameful to not be there for your kid. So then he goes back to the burden of growing up poor and how you never, and I've seen this, what he's about to sculptor, I've seen this in a lot of the books that we read as well. The burden of poverty isn't just that you don't always have the things you need.

It's the feeling of being a bearist every day of your life, and that you do anything to lift that burden. I remember coming back home from doing work, so selling drugs out of state, with my boys and a caravan of Lexices that we parked right in the middle of Marcy. I ran up to my mom's apartment to get something and looked out at the window and saw those three new Lexices gleaming in the sun, and I thought, man, we're doing it. In retrospect, yeah, that was kind of ignorant.

But at the time, I could just feel that dink and shame of being broke, lifting off of me, and it felt beautiful. The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get. And so all the way back, I think it's like founders 115 maybe, or it's 116 actually, and it's Samuel Bronman, who grew up extremely poor in Canada. I once up building the gigantic Seagrames business that like produced generational wealth.

He's one of the first examples of this thing, this topic you and I've talked about a few times, which is the generational inflection point where you have an entire family, a history of a family, steeped in poverty, and you have the one like Neo, like the matrix, like you have the one, the one person is going to change the generational inflection point that changes the trajectory of the future generations forever.

Sam Bronman is that one in his family, and it's certainly the role I'm trying to play in my family. And it says Sam recorded his, recorded little, which childhood, except to reiterate how painfully he experienced the poverty in which his family lived. He worried that his parents might fail to make their payments on the family home. Sam later recalled the shame of appearing before his classmates in torn clothes.

A humiliation, he recrowned to his own children, the rest of his life, his daughter in the book talks about, they're living in a giant mansion, and he'd bring up the fact that he would have to go to school. Be around his peers in torn, torn clothes, and he would shiver literally many decades that are shiver at that thought. And what did Jay-Z just say? The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get. It's the exact same idea.

So Jay-Z talks about the value of mentorship. Really think about this, the mentorship you either get in books are in person is just a way to speed up time, right? It accelerates, it accelerates the learning curve because you can learn from their experiences you don't have to put in the 15 years that they put in. So Lee or Cohen, who I consider my mentor once told me something that he was told by a rabbi about the eight degrees of giving and Judaism.

So I didn't know where this came from but I've heard Jay-Z rap about this for. The seventh degree is giving anonymously. So you don't know who you're giving to and the person on the receiving end doesn't know who gave. The value of that is that the person receiving doesn't have to feel some kind of obligation to the giver and the person giving isn't doing it with an ulterior motive. The highest level of giving, the eighth, is giving in a way that makes the receiver self-sufficient.

So now we get to the point where he describes this as literally crossing over from one life to another, from going from I'm a full-time drug dealer to I'm a full-time rapper. All of these threads came together at a purple moment in me, the moment when I fully crossed over from one life to another.

I was sitting across the table from Ruben Rodriguez who was a music business vet wearing the uniform, a dress that silks suit, pinky ring, tie, the room, the table, the view outside the window of a skyscraper, the whole scene was surreal to me. I'd been living like a vampire. The only people I'd seen in weeks were the people my crew down south and of course the customers. The endless nighttime tide of fiends. My hands were raw from handling drugs and handling money.

My nerves were shot from the pressure. Now is in this office, sitting next to me was Dame Dash. This is going to be one of his co-founders. He says Clark Kent, the producer, so Clark Kent was a well-known New York producer and DJ. And he introduced, he's another important person in and and and Jay's his life. He made beats for him, put him in a music business. He says, and he introduced to a bunch of people. Clark Kent was a person who introduced me to Dame.

Clark was pivotal at the stage of my life. In the mirror, all I saw was a hustler. Clark would find me and say, let's do this music. I appreciated him. Him, Clark Kent, tie, tie, be high, all these other people. They would encourage me, but I was also skeptical about the business that I would get, I was so skeptical about the business that I would get annoyed at them. Be high, which is this cousin, used to really come down hard on me.

He was real honest and direct and told me straight up, he thought I was throwing my life away. Clark thought I had something, this is why, again, if we can encourage, especially younger people, like people, like it's just so important. Clark thought I had something new to offer to this world that he loved. So he's saying, I love your music, you have something new, something valuable. I want to help people discover it.

It's like stop dealing drugs, Jay. Take the rap shit seriously, you're good at it. Clark knew Dame was hungry, Dame Dash was hungry for talent to represent, so he could break into the music industry and thought we'd make a good match. Dame walked into the room and room talking and didn't stop. He was a Harlem dude through and through. Flashee, loud and animated. He projected bullet proof confident. That is important. He projected bullet proof confidence.

This is advice I talked to a founder the other day. This topic came up where it's just like, he knows the stuff, he's got a good product that's valuable, but he's just like, I don't have the confidence. It's like, it doesn't matter, act like you do. Act like you do until you actually do. That's not even me. That's not advice for me. That's advice Nolan Bushnell gave to a 13 year old Steve Jobs. That Steve Jobs ran with.

Nolan said only the arrogant are self-confident enough to press their creative ideas on others. Steve believed he was always right and was willing to push harder and longer than other people who might have had equally good ideas but who caved under pressure. Dame Dash projected bullet proof confidence. If you're not like this, act like you are. Who cares? You just act like you are.

So he goes more into the early days of them trying to hustle and just trying to, it's actually bootstrap what they're doing. They're trying to bootstrap a record label. And again, this, I know nothing myself on many times in this book, a lot can change in a lifetime from five dudes in an SUV and sharing hotel rooms to a billionaire. Every time Dame left these meetings, he'd get so heated, he couldn't believe that they didn't get me. But I wasn't surprised. I expected nothing from the industry.

I just tried to shrug it off and I'd get back to my real life. Dame was getting frustrated trying to keep up with me. So he put together a makeshift tour to keep me focused on music. Sometimes Dame and his group and I would just pile into a pathfinder, a Toyota Pathfinder, or Nissan Pathfinder, sorry, and do shows up and down the East Coast. I was being a team player. I piled in the truck, stayed in the, the double rooms with the rest of them. In some ways, these were like my college days.

Taking road trips. I'm, Jay, Jay, Jay didn't even graduate high school from, I was taking. In some ways, these were like my college days taking road trips, bunked up with friends learning my profession, except that I still had a full-time job selling jerogs. And so he's talking about not trying to hide who he was, essentially I'm being human. This is one of the great things that make rap at its best. It's so human.

It doesn't force you to pretend to be the, to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one soldier, shoulder, excuse me, and an angel on the others the most commenting in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside. You, uh, that you don't have contradictions inside you.

That you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes, changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places. And so now he's fast forward into his career a little bit and the note of myself that I've left on a lot of these books is how bad do you want it? There's all these examples in the book. I'll just, I'll just give you one in the post of my mind because I just talked about it.

Sam Bronpin, the generational inflection point, the one that made generational wealth and ended his family's curse of poverty. The time he's growing up in Canada, it's extremely cold. Uh, they're, they're learning, hey, we're going to sell liquor. You have to, at the time they had like all these weird prohibition laws and things like that. And so one way to get around that is you buy an existing hotel that's like grandfathered in that's exempt from this law that allows you to sell liquor.

He hears about a hotel that is for sale. There's another guy in the same town that lives, that he lives in that also wants to bid on this hotel. He's out the owner of the hotel is in the middle of nowhere like the, like the middle of like icy tundra somewhere out in Canada hunting. And so you have Sam who wants the hotel to make an offer in the hotel. You have Sam's competitor that wants to make an offer in the hotel. They find out the guy's not going to be back for a few weeks.

The other guy's like, okay, I'll just wait. Sam's like, all right, where's the guy at? He is in this remote, uh, you know, Yukon territory where it is. How do I get there? Oh, I have to rent a dog sled. I have to sled in the ice and freezing cold for six days. And I can't bring food. So we have to hunt and kill our food on the way just to get to this guy's remote location. Yeah, I'll do that. Does that for six days? An unbearable pain and struggle gets to the guy's camp.

You already know the end of story, don't you? Who's going to get to, who is going to get the deal? Not the guy sitting on his ass back by the fire waiting for this guy. The guy that went through it. So Sam Bromping winds up getting meeting the guy negotiating the deal in the camp spot and getting the hotel before that other guy's sitting with his feet up, even knew what hit him. And so the way to summarize is that how bad do you want it?

Because there's an extreme, there's extreme levels of drive and pain tolerance in history of entrepreneurship. Okay, so this is necessarily painful, but Jayce is not also one to take no for an answer. He's going to describe how he gets the clearance for what becomes his biggest hit. So he did this song called Hard Knock Life. This is on his second album, excuse me, his third album if I'm not mistaken.

It is before that, before Hard Knock Life, Jayce is critically acclaimed, not selling many records. After, he sells five million records and he completely changes the trajectory of his entire career. And so they have to get clearance from that movie, like Little Annie. I forgot the little redhead of girl. I forgot her or Fernandez, whatever name is to use the song from Annie. We had to get clearance from the copier holder.

I was, I wasn't surprised when the company that owned the right center, lawyers, the letter turning us down. Lord knows what they thought I was going to wrap over that track, but I felt like the course of that song perfectly captured what little kids in the ghetto felt every day. Instead of kisses, we get kicked. So that's the hook, right? So I decided to write the company a letter myself after being rejected.

I made up the story about how when I was a seventh grader in the ghetto, our teacher held an essay contest and the three best papers won the writers a trip to the city to see Annie on Broadway. That was a lie. I wrote that I wrote that as kids in Brooklyn, we hardly ever came into the city. That was true. I wrote that from that moment on or from the moment the curtain came up, I felt like I understood her story.

Of course, I had never been to see Annie on Broadway, but I had seen the movie on TV. They bought it. They cleared it and I had one of my biggest hit. How bad do you want it? And so the note of myself a few pages later could also have applied to what Jay-Z just disobeyed just told us when somebody puts up a wall in front of what do you do? You put up a wall in front of Jay-Z, Sam Bronfman, all these other people. They're knocking the wall down. They're tunneling under the wall.

They're jumping over the wall, but that wall is not going to stop them. After every label and then she turned us down and I do mean every label in town, Dame Bigs and Eyes decided, fuck it. Why be workers anyway? Being a recording artist on a major label is the most contractually exploitive, exploitative relationship you can have in America and it's legal.

All three of us had red hitman, which is this book, which is the industry Bible and we knew what kind of gangsters had established record companies. So in 1994, Dame Bigs and Eyes pulled our resources to form Rockefeller records. Obviously, an homage to some degree of John D Rockefeller. The name was aspirational and confrontational. The first record we made was called I can't get with that. We made in Clark Kent's basement studio and we shot the video for $5,000.

We pressed up our own vinyl and we made champagne baskets and sent them to DJ's. So he's just saying, he's like doing things that don't scale into the program, advice to start a founders. He's starting a business and he just knows how to hustle. He's like, we don't have endless amount of money, so we got to be resourceful here. So we're just doing things on the low. We'll do things ourselves as much as we can and we're going to push this and get the momentum of our label going.

So he says, we didn't know the business yet, but we knew how to hustle. We did more than talk about it. We wrote it down. The key thing is we wrote it down. This is exactly what Arnold Schwarzenegger says. He's like, you got to have a goal. You got to write it down and you got to think about it. That's the only thing you think about. So Jay Z says the key thing is we wrote it down, which is as important as visualization and realizing success.

How many times is he going to talk about visualization, singing your mind before he's singing in person over and over again? Back then we'd go to record stores who stole still sold singles on consignment. This is wild. We would drop the single off and come back every couple of days to collect half the proceeds of what have been sold. We'd show up and we'd collect $150. I was right there in the stores, politicking with the retailers and personally building relationships with DJs.

It was due or die. So they own all the records. The only thing they don't have is distribution. So they have to then distribution to usually takes like a 20% fee. In some of the videos I saved on my phone from Jay Z, he's like 26 years old talking to me. Yeah. Oh, and everything. I have actually wrote down what he says. Hold on. He says, I want full control over my, this is him and he's like 26 at the time. This is wild. Full control over my music. This sounds like George Lucas.

Try to own as much of yourself as possible because it's going to pay off in the long run. He's like, we own everything except a 20% distribution fee and we're working on young, young dude. And he knew back then. It's just amazing. We negotiated a deal with payday that guaranteed wider distribution and the one we'd be able, the distribution we'd be able, we'd be able to get on around. Once we secured that deal, we rented an office in the financial district. Check this out.

We started a fan club before we even had any fans. So the note of myself here is something I already told you from the Kanye documentary. Before I had a car, I'd walk to the train practicing my Grammy speech. So they find a way to get their single on a getting radio play. It's getting popular. He's like, oh, I don't have the album done. I got to hurry this up. Since we had a small window of opportunity from the time, this is, he calls him flex.

That's Funkmaster Flex. Very famous DJ on hot 97, which is a very big radio station in New York. Remember, this is way before streaming and you know, stuff. We had a small window of opportunity from the time Flex started playing it in the beginning of 1996. I figured I had until the summer to complete an entire album. That's about three to four months from studio to a package product with a marketing plan. I don't think I slept for weeks at a time back then. I was living off of pure adrenaline.

One of his singles that's going to be on the album, he actually gets through his relationship with Clark Kent. When Biggie Smalls came through, one of my sessions to see Clark played him the beat for Brooklyn's finest. He told Clark he had to get on it. I met Big and we clicked right away. More than anything, I love sharp people. Men or women, nothing makes me like someone more than intelligent.

And then he talks about what is like being on the forefront, on the front frontier of a brand new industry and why brand new industries usually attract a certain personality type. Rap started off so lawless, not giving a fuck about any rules or limits. It was like a new frontier. We knew we were opening up new territory, even if we left behind a whole country or sometimes our own family. We struck oil. And so then this is when he gets into a fantastic big story and really just a powerful lesson.

So he says, I hadn't been on vacation since I got serious about music. So I was happy to go to Miami to shoot the video for the song he's got with this other rapper named Foxy Brown. Big was touring, but he took the time out to fly down and make a cameo in the video. I loved to smoke, so smoke weed, but I could count the number of times I had smoked trees. Champagne and the occasional Malibu run were my thing back then, but mostly I like to stay sober. The better to stay focused on making money.

I come from the class of hustlers who looked down on smoking as counterproductive. We used to judge dudes who smoked as slackers. When I did smoke, it was on vacation in the islands. But when big asked me to smoke with him, I told myself, relax. You're not on the streets anymore. I was happening and I had to admit it. I was out of that life. So I smoked with big and he smoked blunts. The last time I had smoked whenever that was, I'm pretty sure I was hitting a joint.

A couple hits later and I was high as shit sitting there, feeling outside of time, slightly stuck and laughing uncontrollably. Big leans in so only I can hear him. I gotcha. That fuck me up. Big was a friend, but also a competitor. He gave me an important lesson at that moment. They call it the game, but it's not. You can want success all you want, but to get it, you can't falter. You can't slip. You can't sleep. One I open for real and forever.

Big's joke was such a small thing, but I was like, fuck that. The director was setting up shots, shots and all that and I went to my room and I sobered up before I came downstairs. When I came down, big was laughing. His laughter was a beautiful thing. Even when the joke was on me, this time, I leaned in close to him. Never again might do. That might be surprising because maybe he mentions it as music, smoking or drinking and he says alcohol forgot to say it. It's really interesting.

Action's express priority, which might be my all time favorite maxim. What you do is what is actually important to you, not what you think in your mind or what you say. It's interesting. He might rap about smoking a blunt or drinking or whatever, but he's telling us. He's like, no, I actually don't like smoking that much and I don't like drinking that much. I try to state clear mind. He talks about that too. I was like, especially in hip hop in the 90s, they glorified like going to the club.

That was really big. They would hang out. He tells during the book where he would show up to do a performance. He'd get on stage at the club, do a couple songs, and then people would think, oh, Jay-Z's here. In many cases, he'd even be paid by the club to show up because it's like, oh, Jay-Z's here. So those more people come, more call this album, etc., etc. He's like, what I would do is like, I'd get on stage. I'd rip it for 10 minutes and then I'd leave. I'd get in my car and go home.

I'd go back to work or whatever. He's like, I'm not hanging out in the club. I'm not wasting time like that. So here we go. Jay-Z talking again about studying and learning from the grades they came before him. Slick Rick was the widest shit out back then. He can make the Ross Rhymes sound like Masterpiece Stater and he had the kind of style that hustlers aspire to. His songs were energetic and hilarious. Like all great comics, he knew how to hide deeper emotion between his punchlines.

He kept it clean and honest and respected his listeners enough not to manipulate them. Slick Rick taught me that not only can rap be emotionally expressive, it can express those feelings that you can't really name, which is important for me and a lot of kids like me who couldn't always find the language to make sense of our feelings. Then he talks about another guy that he was studying, which is Scarface.

And so he said, Scarface is one of my favorite rappers and maybe the first truly great lyricist to come out of the South. He's known as a rapper's rapper and it's true. He gets respect across the board and his influence is enormous. His music is an extended autobiography. Scarface always feels like he's rapping right in your ear. Like the guy next to, like the guy on the next bar stool unburting himself of a story that keeps him up at nights or a nightmare that comes back to him all day.

The power of his stories come in part from his willingness to pull the covers off of taboos to get into the shit that people pretend isn't really happening. And so that's why I try to bring up these crazy stories in the books because I feel there's stories in the books that people are willing to share in an autobiography or memoir form that they just won't talk about in an interview or in otherwise. They'll talk about stuff in private. They're not talking about publicly.

They'll put it in their books towards the end of their life. And so that line really hit me. He's willingness to pull the covers off taboos to get into shit that people pretend isn't really happening. So Scarface is also, I'm going to really try to convince you to watch that Kanye documentary. If you haven't seen it, but Scarface makes an appearance in that documentary.

At this time, Kanye had produced a song or two from Scarface and he asked Scarface to come to the studio to listen to his music. And so Scarface says two things that are really interesting. One, he pulls up, he's like, at the prime, Kanye's having this video crew follow him around. And he's like, Scarface is like, why are the cameras here? He's like, oh, they're doing a documentary on me. And he's like, who? He's like, you? And Kanye's barely known.

You might know him as like a supplier in an industry, right? Just because he's making beats for people. And so Scarface says something about Kanye that really demonstrates the relentless resourcefulness that a young Kanye West had. Forget everything you know about him now. That's a relive study, the first two episodes of the documentary. And tell me that's not found in mentality. Tell me that is not found in mentality. That's like, it's just amazing what he did.

Like, not only like put in 12 years of practice of his craft, but then to make people believe. But Scarface says when he learns that the documentary crew is for him, he goes, that Goddamn Kanye be pulling rabbits out the hat man. That is the perfect way to describe relentless resourcefulness. Pulling Goddamn rabbits out the hat man is the exact quote. But anyways, the real reason that's important because he goes in and he's like, listen, I know you're like my beats.

I want to play you music from that I have wrapped on. And so he, and you see this in the video, that's why it's crazy. Or in the documentary, he plays it. And this again, Scarface at this point is a legend. One of the best to ever do it in what? So think about it. It's like Kanye is aspiring to be just be taking seriously as a rapper. Now he's Scarface seriously taking seriously as a rapper. He's widely acknowledged one of the best to ever do it.

And so he plays that song for him and we get this on on the documentary. It's on tape. And he says, this is incredible. And then the narrator of the documentary says getting validation from one of the best rappers alive was more encouragement for Kanye to keep moving forward. It is so important to encourage the next generation as much as you possibly can. This is a tale's oldest time. Go back to Henry Ford.

He's like, this is weird, man, all the cars at the time to either steam or their electric cars. I'm really thinking that the internal combustion engine is like, like it's self-contained. We can fuel it. Go farther. It's more reliable, et cetera, et cetera. He winds up meeting his hero, right? He didn't know him. It's time to be really good friends, but at this time he weren't. He meets Thomas Edison. And he gets to explain his idea to Thomas Edison. And seven words changes. Seven words.

Seven words from Thomas Edison. It's a trajectory of Henry Ford's life. You have the thing. Keep at it. And it says with encouragement from the man who formed, who forward regarded as the greatest inventive genius in the world, ringing in his ears, Ford returned home with the conviction that he should persevere. Go back to the Kanye documentary after Scarface leaves. Kanye is in the parking lot. Beaming. Beaming. Full of energy and enthusiasm. And he said, he said it was incredible.

Making validation for one of the best rappers alive was more encouragement for Kanye to keep it forward. So it goes back to studying them. Rick and Scarface, slick risk, Rick and Scarface share the ability to get under your skin by dredging up all kinds of emotions that young men don't normally talk about with each other. Regret, longing, fear, and even self-approach. So then he talks about this nice, fast forwarding in the story because he's talking about it's crazy.

Like I admire Scarface and I'm doing a song with him. And so he says, on the verse I did with Scarface, I went into some dark personal storytelling about a time in my life when I felt truly confused and lost every entrepreneur in the world has felt this before. I went into some dark personal storytelling about a time in my life when I felt truly confused and lost. I was between worlds to voice in my head screaming at me to leave the street shit alone.

While outside I watched big and naws blow up. It was a verse about fear of failure, which is something which is something everyone goes through. But no one particularly where I'm from wants to really talk about. But it's a song that a lot of people can connect to. The thought that this cannot be life is one that all of us have felt at some point or another when a bad decision and bad luck and bad situations feel like too much to bear. Those times when we think this, this cannot be my story.

But facing up to that kind of feeling can be a powerful motivation to change. Amen. It was for me. And then he talks about, yeah, I struggled when I was younger. I survived a crazy environment. I did things that could have wound up getting me killed or in jail and I survived. But the feeling from that earlier struggle never goes away.

Inside, there's still part of me that expects to wake up tomorrow in my bedroom in apartment 5c and Marcy to slide on my gear to run down the piss-filled stairway and hit the block with one eye over my shoulder. So then he talks about one of his songs that he feels is like hidden gem in his catalog. It's Beach Chair, a feature in Chris Martin. It's on his Kingdom Come album, which is the album that Jay-Z thinks is as worse.

But there's just two things from his interpretation of the song, from his explanation of the song. And so there's two things I want to pull out for you. First, there's a line in the song where it talks about, I hear my angel singing to me and then you hear Beyonce's voice, are you happy, Hove? Hove obviously being Jay-Z's nickname and occasional listeners. Music says, I hear my angel singing to me, are you happy, Hove? So this is why you put that in the song.

When you get things you think you'd always wanted, it doesn't stop the voice in your head's interrogation. If anything, it gets more insistent. When you get the things you think you've always wanted, it doesn't stop the voice in your head's interrogation. If anything, it gets more insistent. And then in the song he talks about, I'm not spending all my day tied into what other people are thinking or saying. Like I give myself space so I can come up with something unique.

He says, I'm not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of not trying. Every day hit every wave like I'm Hawaiian. I don't surf the net. No, I've never been on my space. I'm too busy letting my own voice vibrate, carving out my space. And so what does that mean? Give your brain space to think. Just like Henry Singleton did this. He sat alone in his corner office with his Apple II computer and that offers produced a cornucopia of ideas.

Jay Z says, it's always been most important for me to figure out my space rather than to check out what everyone else is up to minute by minute. And this hit me so hard. Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself. And that's essential being connected to yourself that is for any artist, I think.

And I've heard this song over and over again and now that I read his interpretation of it, it's just like when I say like if you, I guess I started reading the biography of entrepreneurs and you realize how much of their life went into what they do. Like you appreciate an Apple product more if you know Steve Jobs' story. Like you appreciate Trader Joe's more if you know Joe Colombo's story. Like it's the same thing.

And this song I've heard a thousand times still didn't understand it as much as I should have. And really what he's, it's just, and the fact that he doesn't write this down is just insane talent. So he is speaking, this is still the same song. He's speaking to his unborn child and this is before he was a parent. And so he says this song is like a hallmark card until you reach here. So he's speaking to his unborn child, okay? His unborn daughter.

This song is like a hallmark card until you reach here. So till she's here and she's declared the air, I will prepare a blueprint for you to print, a map for you to get back, a guide for your eyes. And so you won't lose scent. I'll make a stink for you to think I ink these verses full of prose so you won't leaked their audience within them. And I'll have heard all that from myself. anybody's favorite81stall's fancier's colours, writing or feel scrappayers?

And I've heard him pot年前 listen to your music and he didn't listen that olyăqon. He going to tell you something I didn't like who he really liked and with a spiritual context. I ink these verses full of prose so you won't get conned out of two-cent.

My last will and testament I leave my heir, my share of Rockefeller records and a shiny new beach chair, so his interpretation of that, is I'm still trying to give this unborn child something more than just money, a blueprint for life, a map, a guide, a scent to follow, and I really do believe that that is why how many autobiographies of 80 and 90-year-old entrepreneurs have you and I set in this podcast?

They know, like I got a couple more years, maybe I got a couple more months, and they just sit there and they write all their best nuggets of wind wisdom, and they're trying to give us something to follow, a blueprint, a guide, a scent to follow.

And then I'll close with what Jay-Z says about the power of language and storytelling, what he's about to describe here is the same, I feel the same way with these books, and I think that's why biographies hit so hard when you read them, whether it's in a movie or a television show or whatever, the best characters get inside of us. We care about them, we love them, and we start to see ourselves in, and in a crazy way, we become them. And that is where I'll leave it.

I absolutely loved reading this book. If you are a Jay-Z fan, no brainer, don't make the same mistake I did and not read it. Even if you're not a fan of his music or you don't know much about it, there's still just a ton of lessons, I think, from hearing his story that can be applied to your life. So if you want to get the full story, read the book, I'll leave a link in the show notes. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

That is 238 books down 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you in soon. Okay, before you go, I want to go back to this idea that for a limited time only you can sign up and pay once and get access to every highlight and note that I have done, which isn't saying because I've been doing this since 2018, adding all the highlights and notes

for everything I've read for the podcast into this app, that now you can get access for a limited time, sign up, pay once, and you get access to every highlight note that I've ever done, and you'll get access to every highlight and note that I will ever do. This is this tool is embedded in my workflow. So the only way I would stop adding notes and highlights to it is if I stop making the podcast, and I think it's obvious by now that I plan on doing this for the rest of my life.

The only way I'd stop is I don't have a voice. And even then, there's so many hours, there's hundreds and hundreds of hours of my voice trained where I could essentially have an AI version of my voice. So even if they take my voice, I will type my way to the podcast. That gives you an indication that I mean, obviously, if you've listened to this many episodes, you've gotten this far, you know, I take this excessively serious. So serious that I would take the thing about this.

For me to, I don't know if I ever told you this, I think I've told you this before, but I read physical books, right? And so to get my notes and highlights into the Readwise app, which is now the version that you get to have access of if you sign up for founders notes, you see exactly what I see in Readwise. So the, the, the, the, the process is I take notes and highlights in a book, right?

Physical book, I sit down with, with a pen or ruler, posts a note, scissors, it's like I'm doing arts and crafts over here. And so once I'm done reading before I record the next episode, it's like, go through and I figure out, okay, what do I want to put in this searchable database? So I remember I have to take pictures of all this, you know, it reads it, but you have to update it.

So I'm sorry short, takes several hours for every single book for me to add on my notes and highlights because I have to do this physical book. And people like David, why don't you do like, why don't you read Kindle versions? It's like, one, I read a lot of old books, there are no Kindle versions too. When I was a kid, I fell in love with Kindle versions of books, even though I have, you know, probably 300 digital books on my Kindle.

So not like, totally against it, but I have a physical love for, or not a physical love. I have a love for physical books. And so that is my favorite way to read. And I'm not trying to do it in the most efficient manner. Yeah, if I read just digital versions or Kindle versions, I would do the job faster. I'm not trying to do the job faster. I'm trying to enjoy my work so I spend more time doing it.

So anyways, long story short, since 2018, I've probably spent, let's say, you know, three to five to six hours for every book. There's hundreds, almost 300 books in there. You're talking about, you know, essentially like a full time, a year full time work, just adding in these notes and highlights and I go in there every day and it's like a garden that I tend. Sometimes I think books have too many highlights, so I delete some. Sometimes they don't have enough, so I add some.

So anyways, the point I'm making is over time this tool has evolved into, you know, this gigantic searchable database on the history of entrepreneurship. And so I'm just going to take a few minutes to tell you how I use founders notes right now and then a bunch of other features that are already in production, most of which I'm testing, but you won't have access to yet. They'll be released, you know, in a few weeks. So first thing is you sign up for founders notes.

It's in my browser all the time. I never exit out. Once you sign up, it'll drop you onto this page. You have a bunch of features like how do you want to look at the highlights, which route do you want to take care? So I, the first one is at the very top. I use the search highlights feature the most. Any topic that I'm thinking about goes into the search bar. This is fairly self-explanatory, hiring, patient, succession, monopoly, moat, incentives, for gallery.

Those are just some of the recent examples of ideas I've been trying to find more information on. I just read through all the highlights related to that keyword. And don't worry, you won't have to remember everything I'm saying because you'll get a welcome email after you sign up that tells you exactly how I use this. And so you can, you can read all this. The next feature that I use the most is the highlight feed. This is like a smart Twitter feed.

Instead of random ramblings of crazy strangers online, this is this feed is just a constant stream of ideas and thoughts from history's greatest founders. So I use this feature to remind myself of past lessons and to prompt new thoughts. The next feature is the books features. The books features is just what it sounds like. It's a list of all the books that I have in there. And if you want to read all the highlights and notes that I have on a specific book, then this is the feature you use.

It's remarkable how much you can actually learn just by reading, you know, the notes and highlights of one specific book in five or ten minutes. And there's another feature called favorites. So when I'm rereading my own highlights, like I just described in the Shazie episode, when I read, read my own highlights and I come across something thought for voting or something I don't want to forget, I favored it. And so now you can see which ones I favorite. That's like peering into my soul.

The last feature that's available right now is called latest highlights. I don't use this feature, but other people seem to like it. It's exactly what it sounds like if I, the latest highlight I've added in, if you want to see by in order of being added to the database, that is latest highlights.

Now the long term vision and the good news is, is if you sign up for founders notes right now, as I add features, all of these features are free to you, but will cost more if somebody said, as I add more features, more notes and more highlights, obviously, you know, a year from now, a couple of months from now, the price will constantly go up. If you sign up now, you get all this for free.

And so right now you get access to all my notes and highlights and you can search by keyword, by subject, by person, right? That is how I've searched all my highlights for years, right? Just by keyword. I'm going to make the podcast without it, but I'm not stopping there. So what I've been testing, I'm calling it the founders GPT chat interface. Okay. I got to come up with a different image. It's just like chat GPT, which, you know, or any of these AI search platforms.

What I really think about this is this is like search on steroids. So instead of just searching by keyword, I can ask it questions. And it has been making connections that I've even missed. And so this version, this search will be based on all my notes and highlights and on all the transcripts of every episode. And so that is coming soon. The ability to search, if you want to search keyword, if you want to search transcripts, every single transcript for every episode will also be in there.

Again, all of this is included. There will also be bullet point summaries of the key ideas of each episode. So what I'm telling you is like founders notes, maybe have four or five different ways right now that you can search through. It's going to wind up having 10, 15. I'm going to keep thinking of ways to condense and clarify. So this has really been like my north star.

And the way I've been describing this in private conversations was like, listen, my goal, my long-term vision for founders notes is to turn it into an ever-increasing, giant, valuable curriculum that condenses and clarifies the collective knowledge of history-strategist founders. And so any new feature, any way I'm thinking about this. First of all, I'm building the tool for myself first because it's only going to make me, as I keep reading of it, you know, 339 episodes now, right?

Eventually it gets to 500 episodes and 600 and 800 episodes. And as I keep adding more and more data to this, I need better tools to be able to go back and synthesize and tie all that data together. And the only way that's possible is if I'm able to continue to condense and clarify, just so happens that the ability to condense and clarify the collective knowledge of history-strategist founders is very valuable to your career.

Because then as we've seen over and over again, you can take ideas that they learn in their career and then apply it to your own. So as I keep updating it, as I keep building new things, I will keep you updated on the long-term visions for founders' notes. But something that is unique and new right now is the fact that so many people have sent me messages saying, hey, is there a way instead of doing a subscription, can I just pay once?

And anytime I've had a bunch of people ask me that don't know each other, ask me the same thing. Usually that's like a tip of an iceberg. The entire existence of founders' notes came because so many people over the years like, hey, how do I get access to your notes and highlights? I'd really like to be able to search them and be able to read them. And I was like, well, this is kind of weird people keep asking for it.

And it turns out if you just make what people ask for, it attracts them and droves. So I highly suspect the same thing is going to happen here. This is a test. Founder's notes isn't going anywhere ever. But the ability to pay once and be in forever, meaning that you get access to not only every other highlight note I've ever done, but every note I've ever will do. It is a test. It is for a limited time only and it could offer this offer could end at any time.

But I am wanting to test this because it makes it, first of all, interesting to me because you pay once and you're in forever. That means that this becomes a tool that you can use for your entire career to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs. And because I use this in my own life, I know how valuable that is. So don't delete Ali. Time is limited. This offer can end at any time. Sign up right now at foundersnotes.com. And I'll talk to you again soon.