Steven Spielberg

I just re-listen to this entire episode and it's remarkable not only like the the filmmaking genius that Spielberg is but the way that he built a business and the way he thought about building the business around his life's work. And the reason I went back and re-listen to this and the reason I originally did this episode almost three years ago the reason I'm republishing it now in case you miss it the first time or even if you listen to the first time and highly encourage you to re-listen to it you'd be surprised how much you're gonna forget but because I was working on a Tarantino episode last week and he kept talking about multiple

times in Tarantino's book he's talking about the fact that he thought that Spielberg's natural born filmmaker genius that he's made some of the greatest movies said in film history Tarantino would talk about Spielberg's gift of taking idea they had his mind and then making it real. And the other reason that I wanted to go back and study Spielberg is because in this episode I talk about one of my favorite biographies of all time which I covered you know seven years ago on episode 35 and it was George Lucas a life by Brian Jane jode I have spent the whole week I'm still in the

processes of rereading and really diving deep into George Lucas's life and work again and so while I'm working on that I think Spielberg is the perfect bridge from Tarantino to Lucas because if you study Spielberg Lucas is gonna play a role in his life and you study Lucas Spielberg plays a role in his life and what his

fascinates when you study all three they have an idea that they have in common right and it's the fact that it talks about in this this episode is talked about Tarantino episode we talked about in the Lucas episode Spielberg in particular he would watch and rewatch movies he loved and then decades later entire scenes from those movies would appear in Spielberg's own movies that's just exact same thing as Edwin lands ideas showing up in Steve Jobs companies and products it's the same thing as Sam Walton's ideas showing up in Jeff Bezos's companies and products and a main thing they're

reappears for anybody gets to the top of their profession anybody becomes great at what they do is they are seeped in the industry the history of their industry they talk about over and over again they don't just read a book one time they don't just watch a movie one time they don't

just have one conversation they do it over and over and over again that is why if you have not done so already I'm going to highly recommend that you subscribe to Founders Notes that's Founders Notes dot com you go to Founders Notes dot com that's Founders with an S for six years I have been cataloging all my notes my

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interesting part is if you press on expand it actually tells you what it searched to come up with the answer and it obviously it's going to search you know the episode you did on Steven Spielberg but then it it's searched when I mentioned Spielberg in a Steve Jobs episode when I mentioned Spielberg and a question for Nolan and James Cameron episode when I mentioned Spielberg in an episode on the creation of Pixar and so I really believe a

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One of his boyhood friends for calls Spielberg saying he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy he was twelve.

I've been really serious about filmmaking as a career since I was twelve years old Spielberg said I don't excuse those early years as a hobby do you know what I'm saying I really did start then that was an excerpt from the book that we talked about today which is Steven Spielberg a biography and is written by Joseph McBride and that is one of the reasons I wanted to read a biography of Spielberg because I think it's so there's a few

reasons but one of them is the fact that from twelve from the age of twelve to seventy four which is how old he is today he's had the same goal. He has been making movies for sixty two years.

It's very rare for somebody to do something for that long for sixty two years so I think that's somebody that we should obviously be studying and learning from another reason that that he came to my tensions because he appears in one of my favorite books that I've ever read for the podcast that's back on founders number thirty five and that's the biography of George Lucas it's called George Lucas a life and George and Steven met when they were in early twenties and they became best friends and

collaborators throughout their entire career and I actually just re-listen to that episode and then I reread I want to make sure I'm re-reading my highlights from that book from that George Lucas book every year because I think what he did his approach to filmmaking that made him a multi billionaire.

There's a lot of ideas that he used he just in his work that we can use in ours where he just approach the industries like well why is he just kept asking why like why we made this way why are they finance this way why are they own this way why they distribute this way and he constantly

questioned every aspect and realize hey I could come up with a better way to do things in my favorite sentence and the entire book and that's another gigantic book it's like five hundred pages it's George Lucas on apology unapologetically invested in what he believed in most himself.

And we'll see today that Steven Spielberg did the exact same thing so for today's podcast it took a really really long time this is a gigantic book it's almost five hundred pages the author interviewed three hundred twenty over three hundred twenty five people the new Steven Spielberg it goes into amazing detail of all the movies he made up until the end of the book.

The book ends he had just finished shinlers list and Jurassic Park he's just over fifty years old and in addition to reading the book I also watched and took notes on this documentary that's on HBO Max right now which is a bio serves as another biography of Steven Spielberg as well it's two and a half hours long. So between the book and watching the documentary taking notes it took me about thirty hours of prep work before I'm sitting down to talk to you about it.

So I'm going to be working off my notes from the book and the notes from the documentary as well before jumping to the book I wanted to tie something that's remarkable that maybe you knew this it blew my mind when I found found this out because I tell you how Steven Spielberg reminds me of Coco Chanel so a few weeks ago three months ago I read the second biography of Coco Chanel they read.

And she became she started off as an orphan and I wind up before she died she was the richest woman in the world and part of the way she she got that way was because she signed one of the most lucrative deals in history. She previously made a mistake when she started her perfume company she went up giving away ninety percent of it didn't realize that Chanel number five was going to be one of the most successfully commercial commercial products ever made.

And so like twenty fifteen twenty years later she runs a redoing the deal and she gets two percent of all sales globally for Chanel number five that made her the in today's dollars so that means she made three hundred million dollars a year and she had a clause in that deal where the company had to pay for every single one of her living expenses.

So Spielberg has a very similar deal I just found out because I'm going to be reading a biography of Michael Jordan soon as well that he has a deal like this he gets Michael Jordan gets five percent of all sales from from his Jordan shoe brand and he he's estimated to make about a hundred and fifty million dollars a year in present day because they're doing around three billion dollars a year in sales so Spielberg winds up and this deal is done after the book ends but he wants up signing a deal where he gets two percent.

Of all the ticket revenue at universal studios the theme parks and so that's rumored to pay him out again this is just from this one deal to pay him about about fifty to seventy five million dollars a year. They keep trying universal keeps trying to buy him out there say hey we'll give you a couple billion just to buy you this contract and he keeps saying no and one of the reasons I think that he keeps saying knows because in that contract it's not only the universal theme park that's in our

Orlando but it's any future theme park that they build and I think they're making a new one in China and somewhere else came over the other destination or the other place rather but he's going to get two percent of all tickets else on that and the last time I looked it was something like ten ten to twelve million people a year by tickets to just their universal team park in our

Orlando and for some reason when I was reading about that an idea or quote from the founder Shopify Toby Luke a popped into my mind and he says you have to remember that the world is non linear Spielberg you know had this passion for movies to start when he was twelve years old he had no idea what opportunities him pursuing that passion over multiple decades could unlock in the future certainly couldn't predict that hey I can get two percent of all two percent of all tickets at universal

universal universal studios you know multiple decades in the future so let's go to write when he's sixteen years old he just made this movie it's called fire light he winds up remaking this movie when he becomes a professional filmmaker that's the movie it's a remake of this movie is close encounters at the third kind but we see his personality sixteen years old and a lot of this sticks with him for his whole life Steve Steve and he was go he went by Steve Spielberg at this point in his career

Steve Spielberg had been shooting film obsessively for more than seven years with a mono maniacal dedication that made him virtually oblivious to schoolwork dating sports and other normal adolescent pursuits so this idea of mono maniacal dedication is something that's going to appear over and over again in the book it appears over and over again in the

documentary as well he repeats it over and over again he's like I had one focus I was obsessed with movies I knew right away that this is what I was going to do for the rest of my life as he says I know they're quoting him when he was a he's reflecting back at this time I was being a young young man a young filmmaker I was more or less a boy

with a passion for a hobby that grew out of control and somewhat and that grew out of control and somewhat consume me I discovered something I could do and people would be interested in it and me I knew that after my third or fourth little film that this is going to be a career not just a hobby and that's another thing that just makes Spielberg extremely interesting like how many people realize from such a young age to people

going to mind that that were similar to Spielberg was like okay I knew by time I was a teenager was going to do for my life in var camprod which is the founder of IKEA I covered him back on I think I'm going to be a part of this number one or two he started here like 14 years old worked on until he died when he was in his 80s and then Kobe Bryant knew from time he was teenagers like okay I want to be the what my goals to be the greatest basketball player of all time

so I think it's rare for anybody to find what they really want to do in life but even more rare that you know from such a young age it's just remarkable so it's a little bit about the family life and the fact that his he was really uncontrollable he was a born director and we're going to see this so his mom is talking she said our house was run like a studio we really worked hard for him your life was not worth a dime if you didn't because he

nagged you like crazy Steven had this way of directing everything remember he's 16 years old this time not just his movies his life he directed our household he was a terrible student in school but I never thought what was going to become of him

his mom was so tolerant of her son's lack of interest in school that she often let him stay home feigning illness so we get edit his movies so there's a lot about like the uncertainty of his family family life that pops up in his movies talked about at length and documentary it's covered over and over again in the book as well his mom he didn't really consider mom his mom she was more like a friend she basically had no rules she wasn't interested in growing up his parents

parents when getting divorced and again into the bizarre story just crazy story what his mom does but then you have so on one end you have his his mom was kind of like a friend right and his dad is this really gifted engineer that is highly recruited by the major technology companies of his day so they move around you know from the east coast to Phoenix to then he wants a pencellicon valley and his dad was a workaholic so Steve Steven winds up emulating his dad but in

in stevens movies a lot of them has to do with like an absentee dad so they went up reconciling later on in life but Stephen had a really hard time with that and stevens dad also took a bad approach in my opinion about approach we kind of try to direct what his son was going to do with his life force him into hey study mass then study engineering being an engineer like me

and Stephen didn't even just wasn't interested in that he wasn't interested in school he knew okay I'm going to be a director not only not just I'm going to work in the film industry I'm going to be a director so he starts talking to his dad about wanting to be a director and his dad tries to uh what's the way to put this he he tries to make him think smaller so this you'll see what I mean right here she says um he said I want to be a

director and I said well if you want to be a director you got to start at the bottom you got to be a go for and work your way up and he said no dad the first picture I do I'm going to be a director and he was that blew my mind that takes good and here's another quote from a young stevens billburg making movies grows on you you can't shake it I like directing movies above all all I know for sure is I've

gone too far to back out now and so this idea there's no turning back this obviously conflicts with a lot of conventional life advice but I that it appears over in these biographies people are just like I have no plan B that I'm all in on this idea this is something he talks about in the book uh quote from the documentary says that there too and now you know the book ends this book ends he's just over 50 years old the documentary takes place he's in his early 70s

and he says I realize there was no going back this was going to be what I was going to do or I was going to die trying this was going to be the rest of my life.

So a few pages later this two sentences each on separate pages that I think are very interesting very quick lessons here and one is that it's obviously Spielberg was one capable of independent thought and part of that came out of the fact that he just felt like a misfit he felt different than everybody else he felt he wasn't understood he was not interested in the other things that were expected of a kid a young person his age

and he says I never felt comfortable with myself because I was never part of the majority I felt like an alien then he talks about his approach to filmmaking which is very common for I think how you make a good product the fact that you put your place in you put yourself in the place of the customer like you make what you want to see and so he says Spielberg wants to find his

approach to filmmaking by declaring I am the audience recently is the 10 year anniversary of Steve Jobs death and I was rereading some notes from this book about how they created the iPod and Steve Jobs and his team at Apple said they knew that the iPod was going to be a success because they loved using it and Spielberg has a similar approach he's like I make movies that I want to see a trade that we see in his

other life that he keeps up for his entire the rest of his career the book ends with Jurassic Park with them discovering oh my God like they he wants to try to hire he didn't know that CGI had advanced so much right that they could actually have the the velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus Rex look like they did in that movie and so originally they were trying to physically make like these costumes they were going to have

whether they were machines are they had people dressed up as I'm trying to run and trying to emulate what wind up being reproduced by the computer in the movie but from the very beginning he was obsessed with with finding the latest cutting edge technology he could apply to his craft is something that's very important and really the way to think about technology is not just computers technology just a better way to do something right and you should invest in it because the savings compound

the money he saved instead of having 30 or 50 different people running around I think about all the people that have to make the actual the steel the plastic the materials that the dinosaurs had to be made out of could all be replaced by software

and Jurassic Park ones being one of the most profitable movies I think he made like 250 million dollars he's probably made more since then you know the 20 years since then just off that movie it's just remarkable and part of that was investing in technology

savings compound Stevens fascination with all kinds of cutting edge technology and his mastery of the tools of filmmaking have been evident from the earliest days of his professional career and there's actually a scene where I'm getting ahead of myself but there's a scene in that documentary where Steven goes up to industrial light magic which is Luke George Lucas's special effects company

and they created the CGI for the for I think it was the transverse Rex running if I remember the scene correctly and they just could not believe what they were seeing on the computer screen they compared that moment right that was taking place at industrial light magic to win sound was first introduced to movies that the fact that they said it opened up a whole new way if you could imagine it you could do it you weren't limited to plastic or steel

another thing from his early childhood and then I want to get into how he breaks into the industry because there's a lot of interesting lessons in there one of my favorite quotes that I've read in all the books that I've covered this podcast comes from Iván Chinard and his book let my people go surfing

and he says one of his favorite things about entrepreneurship is if you want to understand the entrepreneur study the juvenile delinquent the delinquent is saying with his actions this sucks I'm going to do my own thing in a vans like that's how I approached my work Stephen was very much the same way but he was like a bad little devil since he was a little kid and this is his aunt talking about dice like we have a word for him in Yiddish we call him a

music it said lovingly you know but it means a mischievous little devil and he was that okay so this is a little bit at the very beginning how do you come as the youngest director ever signed very much like a prodigy like a wonder kid so main theme and Spielberg's work singular focus which I'll repeat over and over again today and enthusiasm attracts mentors and it is extremely important especially when he was a 21 20 year old kid 21 year old kid 22 year old kid

even in his early 30s he's constantly when he's already successful constantly seeking out older wiser people that can help and one thing that they're attracted in return to him is because he gives a damn he clearly has sold the game his enthusiasm we are you and I talk about this in the practice of an organ passion is infectious we just respond to it

and so you see the mentors found his passion and his do's asm for film and like wow okay I want to help this kid as much as I can so say he cares about one thing making films Spielberg was a general you know what before I read this up to you another note myself on the page you can change and existing industry Lucas and Spielberg did and so this is a description when they come in you know the gold age of Hollywood's over and now in large part to Lucas Spielberg

Francis for Coppola Martin square sacy Brian to Palmer all of which are friends which is one of the most amazing things about this book and about the documentary as well because you have all these young filmmakers come they came in the existing industry and already successful

motor industry and sort of questioning everything you know the time about to reach us like young people were just actors you were not put in position to make movies to be in charge at all and through their talent there enthusiasm hard work to like no no we're going to do it differently you don't have a monopoly on the medium of filmmaking dry find personally very very inspiring

fibres a genuine novelty when you're right in Hollywood the movie industry at the time was still middle-aged man's profession the young people on the universal lot were actors one of the first contacts he made in Hollywood was Charles Chuck silvers this guy is extremely important older generation he's the universal pictures film librarian

and he became the earliest mentor steves early is mentor in the film industry and so his relationship with silvers because he starts as an intern there develops a relationship with him he silvers helps him get signed to this other the other the other most important or I guess not he has more another important mentor this guy named shinberg I'll get there in a minute but before I get there the the one I'm going to reach you is also important it's like it's yeah you're

passionate yeah you're enthusiastic but you also have to have a piece of work that you can point to you need a calling card you can't just say how excited about making films okay we'll have you made a film and that's also advice Steve I was watching him on YouTube advice he gives a young filmmakers that want to make films like you can do this with your phone now like you have to make films you need a piece of work that you can point to as a

call in card and so Spielberg goes out and he makes a short film it's called Amblin which is also the name of his company but it's a Spielberg did manage to direct an independent short film called Amblin in the summer of 1968 several months after his 21st birthday Amblin was what brought Spielberg to the attention of Sid she sheenberg then vice president of production for Universal TV who offered Spielberg a directing contract so these two mentors

lay the foundation for his career his relationship with Universal think about how crazy it is he's going to start out as an intern and eventually get two percent of all their ticket revenue later on many decades later so that's Chuck Silver's and Sid sheenberg of the important characters Spielberg 21 is believed to be the youngest filmmaker ever ever contracted by a major studio so to go back to what his parents say about him as a young person to because this is important because one of the main

takeaways I took from from his life stories the fact that if you don't like your life you don't like your own the world that you're living in like you can create your own and he definitely had a very unhappy like time growing up not only with the dissolution of his parents marriage and fighting all the time but also like they lived they kept moving around they they went from like in

you know Jewish community to living to being the only Jewish people around so there's a lot of antisemitism you know to deal with but it says when he was growing up I didn't know he was a genius his own mother later admitted frankly I didn't know what the hell he was you see Stephen wasn't exactly cuddly he was scary when Stephen woke up from a nap I shook my mother you start say the world is

going to hear of this boy she continues no one ever said no to him he always gets what he wants asked how she influenced her son's development she replied I gave him freedom Stephen acquired what he called his father's workaholic personality he was like this even in in high school and he definitely like that for I mean it's funny because later in the book it's like I had his first son's born I think he's around 40

years old so he's like you know I'm going to just not work weekends I'm going to be home he does that for a very short amount of time but he's definitely an obsessive Stephen acquired what he called his father's workaholic personality along with such shade as his love of storytelling and his fascination with high technology that his father introduced him to Stephen's tendency to withdraw into his own world is also a legacy from his father

like Stephen his father was an introverted person then talks about more about his mom's influence on Stephen just realizing hey I don't really want to be an adult I want to create these I want to live like this fantasy world the rule of home was just don't be an adult who needs to be anything but 10 we never grew up at home because she never grew up Stephen commented and so one of his favorite stories when he was younger is Peter Pan

and so something he took away from that story says he was mightily impressed by Peter's defiant declaration I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things no one is going to catch me lady I always wanted to be a little boy and have fun Spielberg admitted I've always felt like Peter Pan I steal I still feel like Peter Pan it has been very hard for me to grow up and that game continues to continue continues throughout the book there's a quote here that's describing citizen Kane the movie

citizen that comes from the main character of citizens Kane which is Charles Foster Kane which is which is actually built upon the real life of William Randolph and I think this quote from William Randolph her it also applies to Steven Spielberg which he says the same thing later on and the quote about William Randolph her is he was disappointed in the world so he built one of his own that's a way to think about

Stephen's approach to his work in his career and so Stephen said I never felt life was good enough so I had to embellish it that was also something that commies semi by surprise how much Stephen lies constantly just making up stories he would lie about his age over and ever again constantly wanted to make it seem like he was younger

then he actually was so it's more impressive if you know he starts directing TV when he's 20 or 21 when he's actually maybe 22 or 23 there's just a ton of stories about that a ton of stories he made up about like his origination story about how he broke into universal studios, comedy or an office and then went to just went to work and nobody noticed for two years that went up being not true

but just this whole theme of like I'm just going to you know I don't like my life I'm going to create it even if I have to lie and bend the truth this is definitely something that that appears in the life story of Stephen Spielberg this is about also something like I was surprised at how many of things that happened to his childhood in his childhood that he would reference in movies many many decades into the future over and over again

and so this is one of them I think this is actually the scene that is in his movie catch me if you can which he made I think in 2002 and this is something that happened to him back in his 60s and this is the fact that this is very traumatic for him but Steve's mom marries his dad's best friend that the family considered like an uncle they didn't tell their kids his

his his his his his his his mom fell in love with his best friend and Mary and left him and married him Stephens dad told his kids that he was responsible for the divorce and so for 20 30 years he was largely alienated from his father based on another lie this is bizarre they talk about in the book we're trying to reach you now and then his sisters are interviewing the documentary that is like this was bananas like this was our Uncle Bernie and our mom runs off and

Mary's our Uncle Bernie so says Bernie Adler was an engineer who followed Arnold out from New Jersey and worked as his assistant at GE at the general electric Bernie was almost like a member of the Spielberg family the kids called him Uncle Bernie he was always there he did everything with them

Spielberg's mom would enter into an enduring enduring marriage with Bernie Adler she said she found Bernie so funny so bright so moral that I fell madly in love with and so this is rather embarrassing for the kids because even then there's quotes from the neighbors and Phoenix they're like we weren't

actually sure who who the father was so this is a scene we're Leonardo Caprio in catching me if you can sitting down with his dad saying hey you know let's call your mom let's call mom whatever the case is and the dad says no

he she ran off and married my best friend that actually happened in Spielberg's life and then in another plot twist Bernie was up dying many years later and now Steven and his mom are Steven's dad and his mom were like in their 80s or 90s they're extremely they got to be their 90s are back together

okay so let's go I want to move ahead a little bit because Steve Steven has this like encyclopedic knowledge of the history of films and he's constantly going back doing the same thing you and I are doing now we go back through the history of entrepreneurship fine ideas that are useful and applying to our work he did that in film over and over and it's like oh I like that idea in fact I will take that exact same shot

and so this was very similar to David Geffen when I read his his biography for the podcast that Steven that's Steven's obviously future partner he would he was obsessed with show business he would just hang out hang out at the movies all day are in Steven's cases the movies I think in David Geffen's case it's Broadway shows so you pay like a quarter and you can stay hang out

there all day so says Steven's movie fanaticism was nurtured at the key of a theater on Main Street in Scottsdale Arizona parents would drop off their kids on Saturdays and leave them all day with 50 cents admission to a program that include westerns and Tarzan movies sci-fi and monster movies

it was a great set it was it was Saturdays or great Spielberg called I was in the movies all day long every Saturday I've seen absolute duplicates in Spielberg movies of seeing things that we used to see back in the 1950s at the key of a theater

you can example of this when Harrison Ford and Raiders of Lost Ark rides his horse down the hill and jumps onto the truck carrying the arc Spielberg got that shot from the 1937 serial Zorro rides again even the camera angle one of Spielberg's heroes and he has a bunch of filmmakers that he would look look up to and idolize and in many cases emulate would be Alfred Hitchcock

so said Arnold his dad Arnold Spielberg took Steven to see Alfred Hitchcock's movie psycho now what's crazy is this idea does it even say in the book no I think I okay let me read this to you and then he talks about this in the documentary

Steven later told a neighbor how impressed he had been with Hitchcock's employment of the power of suggestion Steve talked about the shower scene in psycho how Hitchcock never showed any real violence he showed you the knife and this and that but most of it was in the viewer's mind

so he uses that idea the shower scene from psycho Steve uses that the the power of suggestion with jaws in the movie jaws the shark ones are breaking down right they didn't didn't expect it to break down so now you have the star of the movie can't even use and he comes up with this idea if you see the movie of the barrels though yellow barrels that are tied to the shark and he uses the power of suggestions showing the movement of the barrels never at barrels rather never actually showing the shark

and that's an idea that he learned when he was a young person watching Alfred Hitchcock this is another example how important studying the film makes it came before him war for his career so the movies that impressed even the most when he was a boy were two epics directed by David lean the bridge on the river quiet and the Lawrence of Arabia

Spielberg later called lean the greatest influence I ever had he emulated lean sense of visual storytelling throughout his career he says the scope and audacity of those films filled my dreams with unlimited possibilities you know what's crazy in the documentary says he watches great films over and over and over again right just like we should be reading books or any kind of experiences that we have like books is the most obvious example here is you know you

you might read a book once and you read it five years later and just like all the book changed is like no the books the same you change right he still sees Lawrence of Arabia every year he talks about that in the documentary the movie came out in 1962 okay so now he's college aged this is where he meets the goal we're going to go we're going to go into more detail by where he meets the mentor Chuck Silver's

he gets a meeting in a tour with the universe's head librarian and this was Silver's impression of Spielberg at that age okay he explained how he wrote photographed and directed his own pictures casting them with neighborhood and school friends devising the special effects and even making the costumes

Steven was such a delight he said that energy not only that impressed me but with Steven nothing was impossible that attitude came through it was so clear he was so excited by everything when we walked onto a dubbing stage how impressed he was at some

point time it dawned on me that I was talking to somebody who had a burning ambition and not only that he was going to accomplish his mission he was very young for his age in all other respects but when it came to motion pictures God damn I knew he was going to do something I didn't know what the hell he was going to do but he was going to do

something you can't walk away from a kid like that just out of curiosity you want to sit and watch and so this is a quote from he's a senior in high school from the school newspaper this is right after he met sovers as we said Steve Spielberg worked with Hollywood directors of summer universal pictures he spent Spielberg spent the whole vacation working in his as an unpaid clerical assistant in the universal editorial department

the job enables Spielberg to roam the lot watching films and television shows being shot and to hang out with film editors and other post production people learning the craft of professional filmmaking he would continue hanging out on the lot all through his college years until with

sovers help he was hired as a director this is more on the beginning this this beginning opportunity universal and no of myself is this is amazing he starts out as an intern a universal now gets 2% of all universal tickets reminded me of remember that book the gambler on Kirk

or I think it was like founders number 67 somewhere back there but Kirk or he starts out as a day labor on the lot of MGM studios I think he's like moving around heavy rocks for production right he's getting $2.60 a day 30 years later he owns MGM and his return on investment makes him $260,000 a day from $2.60 as a day labor a day to owning MGM and making

$260,000 a day a lot can happen in one lifetime but the reason I'm bringing this up to you is because something Spielberg does something here that you and I talked about over and over again the importance of developing your own curriculum because personal curriculum I think a better term from it term for it comes from Bill Gurley that talk it's called how to run down a dream

on YouTube and he talks about what he learned by studying Danny Meyer not film night Bobby night and Bob Dylan I think is the musician but the fact that they would all the work that they're doing that's not work so all the stuff that they're trying to learn that they apply to work he called it professional research

and he goes into detail in that talk how they all did that and how it enhanced our work is fascinating talk but anyways since his Spielberg game began his apprenticeship at Hollywood at Universal in the summer of 1964 his mentor Chuck Silver's recalls that the ambitious teenager gradually worked out his own curriculum

they say it's specifically here he's working out his own curriculum on the lot visiting sets talking with editors and sound mixers he was kind of a guest a self-appointed observer who made his own arrangements with the people who responded to him many chapters later it picks up this theme about this theme about the importance of developing your own personal curriculum your own professional research

so since Spielberg remained essentially an auto didax Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career universal studios in effect with Spielberg's film school he couldn't get into film school they read every single film school rejected him

giving him an education that was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucial to his development

and so it's this point where he finds other like minds and this is just again I repeat myself but this just blew my mind like the day jaws comes out Spielberg's driving around with Martin Scorsese like before Martin Scorsese was Martin Scorsese the idea that you have George Lucas Brian Dupalma Spiel Spielberg Martin Scorsese for instance for Coppola you have a group of crazy people who were all obsessed with movies

all struggling to make it at this point right now you fast forward 50 years and they're all huge and successful but not this point and the whole group wants to become successful and dominates the movie business all the time though they're giving each other feedback

trying their friendly but they trying to compete with each other they go back and forth between producing like the most financial successful movies at a time first it's Godfather then I think Spielberg passes them and then I think Lucas passes Spielberg it's just absolutely remarkable

and I've already read biographies on Lucas and Spielberg I'm looking for biographies on the rest of these people as well but let me just tell you a little bit more about this time of history because I found this fascinating and I find it fascinating because again they're doing this to an already mature industry there's always room for more opportunity it just starts with questioning why things are done the way they are right so they're called the movie brass this whole crew

and sometimes referred to as a USC mafia and there's a bunch of us not just these five people there's screenwriters there's entertainment attorneys they're all helping each other it's very fascinating at the time they came to Hollywood generations of neptism had made the studios terminally imbred and unwelcoming to newcomers the studio system long under siege from television following box office receipts and skyrocketing costs was in a state of impending collapse

so how fascinating is that from the outside it's like why are you wasting your time making movies what is wrong with the television is the future this look at this they're making less money you can't get in you have to go people are going to film school and the professors are saying don't go to film school because you're never get hired it's just very fascinating that's when they're like okay at the very bottom of the market so to speak

they're like okay well this is where the opportunity can't go anywhere up from can't go anywhere else from here but up right the future seemed daunting for the term for the determined young movie fanatics who came of age in the 60s and for whom film historians coin the phrase the movie brand

Spielberg vividly remembers how he and such other self starters that's how he's describing himself Lucas and Scorsese had to chisel and dynamite their way into a profession that never really looked to young people except as actors

there were no willing producers at that time I was trying to break into the business my first first thrust were met with a great deal of animosity but all these people the movie brats USC mafia this is a description of them were unwilling to settle for such limited dreams they ate breath and slept movies with a passion earlier generations had brought to writing or painting and so what they needed is they needed somebody like Francis Ford Coppola who was the first young director to break through

and then once they saw wait a minute that guy can do it and he's great talented they're not they weren't saying it wasn't talented but it's like okay he's not he's like a couple years older me I can do it too it's extremely important it took Coppola to start breaking down the doors of Hollywood for other films to go graduates in the late 60s he became as Spielberg put it all of our Godfathers and so now we fast forward to when Spielberg and Lucas start becoming friends

he wanted being pals and spiders collaborators but they're pushing each other because of how talented they were so Spielberg you know it's like I'm young hot shot I'm good too oh wait there's another meat right there's always another you like you gotta know that and so what what Spielberg realizes like he watches Lucas's film he's like oh my god I'm sick to my stomach and how good this guy is so he says when he saw the short film Spielberg was jealous to the very marrow of my bones

I was 20 years old and I directed 15 short films by that time and this little movie was better than all of my little movies combined so he says now I you know before he out at all these people like Frank Capra Walt Disney out for Hitchcock David Lee and all these people but he's like now I can have a role model and a collaborator and somebody inspires me this my own agents doing the same stuff I'm trying to do so says now instead of having those

remodels rather with someone near to my own age someone I could actually get to know compete with and draw inspiration from and that was remarkable how you know they're obviously very driven big egos but they didn't have big egos with each other right they're like listen

we're competing but I'm also being inspired from you and they they were able to maintain like a friendship right and not they had the maturity to realize hey it's we're gonna get a lot farther if we can help each other then if we just like oh I hate that guy because he's doing the same thing I'm doing well this is not a zero some game like people can like your movies George and they can like they can like they can like my movies as well

it doesn't have to be just one filmmaker the fact that they were able to do that at such a young age is very very admirable so here's another fantastic little story from the book and how yes for Chuck Silver silvers is what I wrote

here on my note in this page because if we ever have the opportunity to stick out for young talented person like we should do it and this is an example of that because Stevens dad who is now divorced and living in or Stevens living with his dad but basically gone all the time

because he obsessed with with movies Stevens dad realizes hey he's spending a lot of time universal spending a lot of time with this this guy named Chuck I'm gonna call this guy Chuck and tell him hey my son needs to be focused on college Stephen didn't want to go to college he winds up

playing his his I think mainly his dad goes like Long Beach college Long Beach University something like that but he doesn't give a shit about that like he's spending all his time universal winds of dropping out and the reason I say hell yes for Chuck Silver is just

because look at the conversation that he had and it's just like your dad doesn't understand the opportunity and how gifted you are and this is not an opportunity that waits around right for you to finish school shortly before Stephen started college Arnold made a phone call to Chuck

Silver's Stevens mentor universal who described their conversation the only substantial one he and Arnold ever had as spirited he's going to Long Beach State I'd appreciate if you would do what you can to make sure that he goes to school Silver said he couldn't do that

look there's something you got to understand about the motion picture business he told Stevens father for Stephen to realize his ambitions he's gonna need a hell of a big break somebody's going to have to put a lot of faith and a lot of money up so the rest of us can see

if Stephen is who he appears to be I'm his friend if it comes to a choice of Stephen having the opportunity to direct something that he could use as a showcase I will advise Stephen to do it school be damned lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place in this

industry so you'd better be ready for it they don't care whether you've got a degree or not what they are interested in is what he can put up on the screen and so his dad's like well fine I still want to go to school his reach so ver's reaction is with talent like

Steven Spielberg you don't get you don't set that kind of goal what the hell good as a degree that wasn't Stephen and this is such an important part of this whole thing about this I'm not trying to direct and what to do I'm trying to be there for him so

silver says my guy my idea of encouragement was to be there basically that's the only function I really served somehow I always became a listening board every time he got a degree every time he shot some film asked why he went so far out of his way to help Stephen silver's reply simply I liked him I admired this lump of raw material just think about his pause and think about what is happening in the story how important there is an alternate future where Stephen does not have the help of Chuck

Silver's somebody that is a film historian somebody that's been with Universal somebody can help guide him somebody is a few decades older than him and there we don't know the name of Steven Spielberg because that wasn't that opportunity didn't present itself he didn't actually stand up for this person he's like hey this guy is talented the work he's putting on to the world is important I'm going to be there to encourage that that is just so so important we're going to be

an opportunity to do that for people and Stephen wants to and playing that that same role in the future for young filmmakers and young writers and young producers it's so so important it's another idea that he got from Chuck which I'll talk to you about later but I just want to pause this thing what his what his father's telling him to do right he's going to school he's going to drop out but this is just a reflection of how disjointed school can be from real life and

this is something that Phil Knight founder of Nike and Fred Smith founder of FedEx dealt with two they both wrote papers about exactly what they were going to do the idea for Nike the idea for FedEx and I think they both got a C same thing happens to Spielberg this is so silly nothing sums up the frustrations of Spielberg's academic experience along Beach State better than his record in the TV productions course he received a C moving on reminder shoot your shot shoot

your shot goes up this is a young kid and he just goes up and again he's not like American kid goes up with asking for help and saying why he wants help he often would walk up to stars and directors and producers on the studio streets and invited them to lunch carry grant and rock Hudson were among those who accepted this is the same thing that a young Steve Jobs did he called up Bill he would if I remember correctly I think it was Bill and not David either one

the partners calls him up asked for parts says I'm a 14 12 year old kid once we're getting a summer job well later on when he's like 18 19 he pulls he calls up all the people Bob noise founder of Intel the the guy that did micro systems camera his name the guy that the AMD camera his name at the

moment sorry all these people is just like listen I didn't know how to build a company I greatly admired the people that that knew so I called them up I asked if I could talk to I can have lunch coffee with them yeah some people are going to ignore you some people are going to not be able to do it whatever he says but some people will say yes just shoot your shot few pages later look at this this is repeated over and over again it's so important professional

research personal curriculum we've got to develop that Spielberg asked a million questions to the editors it was a process of absolute technical application he worked out his own curriculum I am not making up these words this is the author using the sentence this statement that you and I talked

about over and over again multiple times in this in this biography he worked out his own curriculum it was the real world there's no school you can really go to learn to be a filmmaker that's not what they teach and then later on we have silver's talking about this is like this and I helped them but like my impact I try to open as many doors I could give them advice from an older wiser perspective but you can't teach like who's going to teach DaVinci right

for a interesting just quick paragraph for you I don't want to cast myself in any way as his teacher I wish to hell I had been how the hell do you teach Maria callus how to sing who taught DaVinci you can expose people to things but they have to have it in themselves as far as I'm concerned he's the most gifted person in motion pictures and so with the fact that Spielberg obviously was extremely so he calls himself a self starter he had a piece of work which I

have to repeat is very important you have to have something you could point to scientists like come you know I'm just somebody you don't even know you know come help me like they see that this kids out here hustling is out here working is actually doing this he's really interested in this industry that I'm in right and he's got something point to so because he had like a calling card he was able to get signed and then he's just so grateful because he feels Chuck

Silver's is the one that like opened all the doors for her universal is he's like be my manager and listen to Chuck is so wise here and he just has one request he's like listen I'm just doing this because I want to help you but you have to pay this forward after your success his one request to Chuck's one request to Steven Spielberg is the same thing it's why Ingvar Compris said over and over again founder of a Kia why my right in this book people told me I didn't want to

autobiography I resisted the idea he says explicitly the the the argument that convinced me from his co-writer was that you know stuff that a help future entrepreneurs and you love entrepreneurs and so that's why he wrote the Kia story because I'm going to announce passed on it's good thing he did because we wouldn't have had access to his ideas Sam Walton same thing I'm writing this book because I wanted to help you fill night the the there's some kind of instinct

you know these people are older they I think they in that case in those three examples I just gave you I think they were on their 70s by the time they they wrote it and in Sam Walton's case he knows he's dying he's super super sick he talks about in the book he's got cancer everywhere right but it was very important for them Bob noise same thing in Intel like but they're like what to help Bob you're wealthy doing anything in the world why you spend a time

having you know at 19 year old 20 year old Steve Jobs at your house why are you going to give these talks why are you doing all these investments he's like I need to restock the stream I fished from it's that natural human instinct to be like okay I benefit greatly from this knowledge from this industry from this mentorship I'm going to go and turn it around and do it for the next generation to it's amazing so it's a Spielberg then asked me if I'd be as a manager

silver said I said Stephen you need someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the business than I do I'm not the right person he asked me what I wanted for I said well Stephen by the time you really make it big I'll probably be too God damn old for you to do many good in effect what I told him was when you can pass it on when you make it big you could be nice to young people I learn from people I had no way of thinking I learned from people I had no way of thinking you

can pass that on Steve made me a promise and he kept it you look at the list of first time directors and new writers and first time producers he has made an opportunity for he puts his money and he puts his business personality on the line okay so he's already signed as a director again I've

repeated a certain I'm going to repeat it one more time because it's not left myself on this page there's two notes myself number one have a piece of work that you can point to right he set up a screaming of Amblin it was an incredible piece of work this is how he gets signed but it's guy named Sid

Berg so think of this as as mentor number two in Stephen's life and there's still friends of this day which again like this is something I always look for like if like when you meet new people it's like it's very important that they have they've been able to develop relationships for a long time

because like you can fool like you can fake being a good person for you know a couple months maybe a year maybe even a few years but you know if somebody's known you for 20 years like you can't fake me in a scumbag for that long right and Stephen something that he talks about I actually I wasn't going to talk about this now but I might as well because it possibly minds like something that I think is an idea that we can take from Spielberg he talks about

the reason he's able to work so quickly now is because he's worked with the same people for decades right his editors his visual effects people the people like when he's on a new project he wants to hiring a lot of the same people over over again because he says like we just have a way like all the knowledge we have working with each other it compounds and that compounding makes it easier for us to communicate and work faster he's like if I had to hire

brand new people every few years to do a project he's like I couldn't do this this is very similar if you I did a three-part series on Larry Ellison he said the same thing he's like the reason he's like the core programming team at Oracle for the first I forgot it was like 10 years whatever the time period was like they didn't change it looked the same 30 people whatever the number was right I can't these numbers might be wrong but the main point I'm telling you is

definitely I remember correctly but the idea is like you don't want all this turnover you see these people jumping from project project working with constantly new people you might want to do that may want to get some fresh idea new blood in there but the idea is like well just like money compounds

time compounds knowledge compounds to and now you've been working together you have a way of a fundamental understanding that has taken years to develop and that if you keep switching like you're interrupting the compounding and so Stephen applies that to not only the people he works with but his professional relationships up and down like not only the people he hires but the people that hired him very fascinating so he has a piece of work Sid winds up hiring him gives

him contract he makes him do TV first Stephen does not want to do TV right so the second thing is you may not like your first opportunity but you got to do

your level best it's just a script was terrible. Spielberg said later I really didn't want to do the show I told Sid Jesus can I do something else he said I take this opportunity if I were you and of course I took it I would have done anything and so he talks about the very beginning something also that might surprise you to this day from the from the first time he makes a movie till now he's constantly throwing up nervous every time I start a new seam I'm nervous talks about vomiting

over and over again he's a 65 year old man when he's talking about this right and the same thing he was that was happening to when he was younger like we just don't and I'm glad he shares this because now says I go to sky obviously knows everything he's got I don't even know what four of the I don't know what the number is now but I think when this book ends he has four of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time like just outsides remarkable success this guy clearly knows

what he's doing and yet you don't see before he can't return on he's in the corner throwing I was so frightened that even the whole period is a bit of a blank I was walking on a ex I didn't know if you if I'd ever I don't know if you've never been a bit bad for four days in a row it's like taking drugs I don't take drugs I never have or I would have used every drug under and over the counter at the time the show put me through dire straits it was a good discipline but a very bad

experience so you have he goes from the euphoria right of being signed the youngest director ever to the terror of not liking the work and being very bad at it he has a down he winds up having to take a really the high from being getting signed and then the fall of being to spawn and yes take a break not only had he failed to interest universal letting him bring to life all the stories I had my head but no one was even offering him TV episodes to direct I was in a despondent comatose state

and I told Sid I wanted to leave a absence and I got it and there's one more sentence about this point in life because I think it's extremely important to success is not a straight line he didn't just go from night gallery the show he didn't like to jaws his career stalled at a number of occasions

okay so there's an idea that popped up in the book and in my notes multiple times for the documentary and it's this idea that he thinks visually and really the way I think about this is like you got to find the perfect medium or the perfect format for your skill set and there's another way to put it somebody else later on the documentary says that that Spielberg speaks cinema as his native language and Spielberg in the documentary also gets advice he's like you have

this idea of what you want to do and it's only in your head and he says no one can help you holding the entire idea in your head that that is your job that's something that you have to figure out how to do and I think that's his approach to to movie making so let's go back to the book he thinks visually he's in the perfect format for his skill set and it says he seemed to be able to see more than other people saw he didn't seem to waste any time he didn't seem to

get caught up in what directors often do eating up camera time eating up miles and miles of film this is back before the digital film there's literally with a physical film there was they produce my literally that's true miles of film on the screen he seemed to cut on the floor we knew that this boy knew about the camera and then he combined this this the way he thought visually which is perfect for obviously being a filmmaker with the fact that it's just try not to

be a dick just try to be you're going to get farther if you can avoid that and a lot of people would interact with Stephen like okay like he's not he's got he says he has a nice manner this gets you a long way when a director has to do I don't know everything about this but would you like to try something which is how Stephen interacts with the people his co-workers you're willing to knock yourself out for that director and so I think at this point in his career where he's

really struggling was very helpful to have all these other filmmakers around them these young filmmakers because he's suffering internally but this is the note of myself positive forward motion regardless of internal suffering which is they're all not really getting what they think they they're their talent and their drive is certainly is currently not being like there's no evidence of actual accomplishments like they're not getting as far as they think they they could

based on the talent they already have in the drive they have so says we're all ambitious in wanting to work and none of us were getting the kind of work that we wanted to do Stephen knew what Stephen knew he wanted to do features meaning movies when Stephen was very discouraged trying to sell a script and break in he always had a positive forward motion whatever he may have been suffering inside so positive forward motion regardless of external circumstances so

eventually he does get the opportunity to direct a movie it's called Sugarland if flops and it's very dangerous as much as like the the film industry talks about oh yeah it's an art and everything else it's like yeah you have a couple flops and you're out of the industry real quick right and so he was in a very precarious position because he was being pushed into do a shark movie and he's like what the hell I don't want to do this shark movie and the real little lesson

here is that his biggest win draws his by far the most important thing to ever happen to the career of Spielberg and he says it right his biggest win is going to come right after what he thought at the time it was his biggest failure when he received the bad news about Sugarland in April 1974 Spielberg did not have much time to sit around engaging and second guessing or nursing his wounds he was on the Massachusetts Island of Martha's Vineyard immersed in preparations

to make another film it was a modestly budgeted thriller called called jaws so we're going to get into the jaws I want to take a slight tangent first I do have to tell you I'll just take it front jaws is was his paper calls jaws his free pass pass into his future then that's completely due to his its financial success at the time it it was released it was the most profitable movie ever made and he's like once I had that I got final cut on every single project I

ever did moving forward in my career I got to choose his projects I did I got to choose what they look like it bought me my freedom and again finances by you freedom I want to at before jaws their shop in this this idea of a of a

science fiction film that is going to eventually become a closing counters of a third kind which is also successful but I want to pull something out here because the thing it's important something we talked about on this the autobiography of Sid Meyer Sid Meyer is the computer programmer the game

designer that made civilization the main idea that book was so important is the fact that like you you discover that if you question that questioning conventional wisdom can be very profitable Sid wanted to make a strategy game I always said no strategy games can make any money doing that he does it anyways releases civilization it sells fifty one million copies right and so we see the exact same thing here Lucas and Spielberg are trying to shop this this

this project it says in two decades in Star Wars and the closing counters were released science fiction films have accounted for half of the top 20 box office hits but before George Lucas and Spielberg revived the genre there was no real appetite at the studios for science fiction the conventional wisdom was science fiction films never make money so questioning conventional wisdom can be profitable let's get to the making of jaws because it was a just constantly in

flux they're rewriting the script the night before not sure if they'll have it done before the next day if they can actually shoot anything it went over budget and over schedule I think like three times like it was supposed to take like fifty seven days I think it took like a hundred and fifty days something like that but it says and then they wind up the shark winds up like the main character winds up disappearing so it's just amazing like how resourceful he had to be

so he says I hired a man named Carl Gottlieb who was an old friend of mine and he came with me to Martha's Vineyard essentially a Polish script as the actor sat with me every night often only 24 hours before the shot and improvise to facilitate the work on the script Gottlieb and Spielberg shared a house on location with and Gottlieb would continue to work on the revisions after Spielberg went to sleep each morning Gottlieb would give new pages to the company typist and by

8.30 in the morning they would be approved and ready for filming it was incredibly 10th and so halfway through Spielberg wants to quit and this is just a reminder your mind will play tricks on you Lucas thought Star Wars was going to flop if you remember that Spielberg says the same things like this I'm going to be out of the movie business this movie is not going to do well I had two failures in a row and I'm done Sid had words with Spielberg over draws

one of the few disagreements that Stephen and I had I literally forced him to do it I think he was upset for a while and he turned to me and said why you making me do this B movie he was scared he felt overwhelmed he wasn't sure he

was right guy for it the picture was important to him finally important there was such huge professional stakes nothing was ready it was at that stage completely out of control as and it was as it was during most of the shooting jaws ran into so many production problems that exasperated crew members

began referring to the movie as flaws Spielberg later admitted I thought it would be a turkey this is more about the terror part of you for your terror imagine having to shoot a shark movie without the shark he thought he was doomed and this one's being his greatest achievement it's just wild for weeks after shooting starting started Bruce simply refused to work that's the name of the shark that night Richard Dreyfus declared if any of us had any sense we

all bail out now Spielberg anxiously shot around the star of the movie out of desperation he began shooting barrels instead of the shark in the movie the barrels are fixed to a shark by the harpoon and they cruise the ocean surface

as a standard for the submerged creature we were very scared I didn't know when he whether any of us could do it we thought we're making a picture called jaws and we don't have the fucking shark today with computers you could just put the shark in in those days it was a strictly mechanical thing the

pressure on the 27 year old director was enormous I thought my career as a filmmaker was over I heard rumors from back in Hollywood that I would never work again because no one would ever take a no one had ever taken a film a hundred days over schedule let alone a director whose first picture had failed as a box office there are moments of solitude sitting on the boat thinking this can't be done it was stupid to begin with we'll never finish it no one is

ever going to see this picture and I'm never going to work in this town again think about the mind games that he had to deal with when making the movie the movie is finished the movie is released this is what happens jaw surpassed

Francis Ford Coppola's the godfather to become the most successful film and motion picture history to that date jaws held that distinction until November 77 when it was just thrown by George Lucas's Star Wars Spielberg took out an ad and Hollywood trade papers showing a little robot

from Star Wars are are 2d2 catching Bruce the shark and his jaws of the fishing hook congratulating Lucas for capturing the box box office title Spielberg wrote where well your pal Stephen again just remarkable that all these guys for friends so after jaws he has a jaws is a hit

close encounters a third kind is a hit he's like I can do anything real high on his own supply so he tries to do this comedy called nineteen forty one and this is really the point of the reason bring Mr. Tensions because sometimes you learn more from failure and nineteen forty one winds up being a

failure he has a reputation that you know yeah jaws is successful close to counters of their time successful but he's always over budget he's always like he's not disciplined and so he learns from George Lucas that you have to watch your costs you have to be disciplined about this and so again to

our Lucas plays a huge influence in life but first it says Spielberg used to say that he was born again after nineteen forty one that's the big gigantic failure the mistake working as a hired hand for Lucas a conservative and highly disciplined producer Spielberg used Raiders of the Lost Ark as a form of professional rehab so after nineteen forty one Lucas is like hey I have this idea I'm going to be a producer for this is you know Raiders of Lost Ark that

one of the most successful film franchises in film history they don't know at that time obviously he's like we direct this for me and so Spielberg Lucas and Spielberg are now on set it's Spielberg the director Lucas lets him be as a director but he's the one you know putting up the money making sure

everything runs on time so that's where he's just learning from here on in he becomes you know he had a bad reputation Lucas goes around selling trying to sell the movie and they're like well who's going to direct like Spielberg like now we're out like how could you be out he just did jaws and closer cutters of third time and like talked about you know the guy that lying about the budget but saying yeah you can do it for twenty million it comes in at sixty million

that that's going to piss these people off right so says the Lucas Spielberg proposal was presented to the studios to proposal day out there to assault oh I'm bringing I'm bringing this to your attention because there's a quote from George Lucas's biography that's fantastic and he says some of the

ravest and most reckless acts that we did were not aesthetic but financial again highly recommended all founders I think should read George Lucas's biography how many people do you know that founded multiple billion dollar businesses and did it like he just has this like a not aggression but just like this damn it I'll do it myself attitude that you just can't you just love yeah absolutely love so says they're going around shopping this and now they're saying okay

this is after star wars this is after jaws this is we're playing a different game here so says the proposal dare to assault the standard Hollywood financial practices on several especially sensitive points chief among them was that while the distributor would be expected to put the movies budgeted twenty million dollars it would receive no distribution fee and take no overhead charge that's like these Hollywood accounting this is a term for like the shenanigans this

finished shenanigans I was known and initially at the time those items usually counter for more than 50% of the gross film rentals besides demanding large sums of money up front Lucas and Spielberg also wanted enormous shares of the gross a demand that was especially unusual for director in that era

and while the distributor would be allowed to recover their entire cost of raiders from gross film rentals before Lucas and Spielberg started to receive their shares of the gross Lucas would eventually all have full ownership of the movie studios were taken aback by such who's book

and so with Lucas's help he becomes this this disciplined watch your cost director so says we knew we had to now they're talking about shooting the movie we knew how to compromise there were some moments where it would go to take two or three and take and take four and something wasn't working so

you know multiple takes Stephen would say that's it let's move on we'll figure out another way to do it he was very very good in our respect raiders was the first picture he bought in on budget I heard Stephen say that his friends were doing smaller pictures than him less expensive pictures than him coming in on budget and they were able to see money on the back end Stephen rarely had that opportunity so he was bound and determined to bring a picture in on budget so

he could see the back end so really what Lucas taught him is like you got to watch that's nice is your your you make a lot of money the box office but you'll make a lot of more money personally if you watch your costs and so he takes what you learn from Lucas and on the the raider the the the Indiana Jones movies right and he applies it to ET and check this out this is now we're in the euphoria part of his career ET prints money so he winds up he's like I'm doing

this movie for $10 million ET was so tough because Stephen had made a bet with universal that he could do this thing for $10 million completing ET within that budget enabled him to satisfy his obligation for the final remaining film from his 1975 contract with universal in the first weeks and he winds up coming in on budget and on time right in the first weeks check this out this is gonna blow your mind in the first weeks after the films release on June 11th

1982 we're talking 1982 dollars which is even crazier what I'm about to tell you Spielberg personally was earning as much as half a million dollars per day as his share of the profits and so as his movies become more financial successful he's able to demand better and better deals he also is learning from his third mentor Stephen Ross so it says Steve and then of myself is you don't make three or four billion dollars by accident referring to Spielberg Spielberg is good

as a businessman as he is a director Spielberg is renowned and sometimes deployed in Hollywood for driving hard bargains with everyone from technicians to actors to studio chiefs in recent years his standard deal has been a remarkable 50%

of the distributors gross on his pictures and they said you compare that with five or 15% of group five or 15% of gross that even major stars command so he's making a lot more money right the studios also fully finance Spielberg's films even though that he that he owns it that he owned that

that that the movies owned or shared by Amlin his his company steven gets the studios to carry the risk and he takes in the money and so he wants to be becoming real good friends with the head of time the head of is this Warner Brothers or Time Warner at the time I'm not sure time Warner so he says his connection came through his close friendship with Steve Ross the chairman of the board of Time Warner Ross was the most colorful and controversial of the film

industry mentors to whom Spielberg had attached himself assuming the roles of Spielberg's best friend and idealized father figure as well as business mentor Ross began educating Spielberg in the finer aspects of life as a Hollywood mogul in the documentary Tom Hanks talks about working with Spielberg is remarkable because how resourceful he is you could plan something out as best you can circumstances dictated it's not going to work out and he comes up with

just he just makes the most of whatever is there and we see an example of this when he's on location filming his first his first movie in China since about while preparing for the first day of shooting in Shanghai assistant director David Tomlin plotted out all the crowd movements and everything and

I plan to keep the road clear so there could be traffic so there could be traffic movement I drew it all out and told everyone to do what to do then 5,000 people suddenly flooded the road it went I went crazy I said to Steven oh Jesus it's all gone wrong he said looks great roll the cameras action he was happy with how it looked and I wasn't going to argue with the 5,000 people he's very good like that he's not pedantic whatever is there he makes it

work that's the most important sentence of that entire paragraph whatever is there he makes it work that's the assistant director talking about something they made in the 80s Tom Hanks of the exact same thing when they were making save a private Ryan another thing that Steven talks about in this book talk about the documentary over and over again is how important family is to him the fact that he's got like a seven kids something like that you got divorced for the first

time he felt like a failure then got remarried they've been married for a long time so it's extremely important because of the traumatic childhood he had and he's got this scene and hook that he took to heart and I think it's fantastic and so they're going back and forth it's the character Peter and his wife and it says your children love you they want to play with you how long do you think that lasts we have a few special years with our children when they're the

one where they're the ones who want us around so fast Peter it's a few years that it's over you're not being careful and you're and you're missing it that is the lesson Peter learns and hook and it is one spewburg took to heart in his own life and I would say that is the major life regret that I've seen in a lot of these biographies and autobiographies and when they're writing in these books it's too late it's the fact that they over optimized for their work life at

expense of their children they'll tell you not to do it they did some regret they can't do anything about the best term I've ever heard about this came from Ingvar Campera's autobiography because he did that his three boys from non-mistake and he's like I I missed her childhood because I was building IKEA and I I messed up I should have done that and it says childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered there's also a line in the hook movie with

Peter Pan that I think Spielberg took this idea and ran with it as well and that's the idea that to make life the adventure it's supposed to be so Granny Wendy tells Peter your adventures are over oh no he replies to live to live will be an awfully big adventure so in the book ends he just finished Schindler's list and Jurassic Park finally finally gets his Academy Award that he's been dreaming of since he was 12 that he would have been snubbed for multiple decades before then as two of the most

successful successful and well known movies and it says as he approached his 50th birthday Spielberg showed no signs of being crushed on an enormous weight of his success many a lesser career has collapsed from the burden of escalating expectations and Spielberg who still bites his fingernails

and throws up before coming to a set in the morning cannot help feeling the horrendous pressure of having to top himself of simply having to be Steven Spielberg but throughout his 28 years as a professional filmmaker he has maintained a

sense of inner balance that so far has enabled him to avoid losing his nerve he seems comfortable even if others are not with his own complexities and contradictions when his high school friend Chuck Case visited him at the Long Beach Airport during the filming of 1941 Spielberg surveyed his army of

uniformed actors and World War II airplanes and said with a childlike smile you know they pay me to do this and that is where I'll leave it for the full story read the book and I highly recommend watching the documentary as well as fantastic if you want to buy the book using if you buy the book using the link to some show notes should be supporting podcast at the same time that it's 209 books down 1000 ago and I'll talk to you again soon.

Okay so what you're about to hear is this question I was asked a few months ago actually recorded this few months ago they asked how did history is great such when you think about hiring all the answers people think I have a better memory than I then actually do you know if people say David you have

a great memory my wife would laugh at that I forget things all the time it's not to have a good memory it's I reread things over and over and over again every single answer every single reference you're about to hear in this 20-minute mini episode came from me searching all of my notes and highlights that option is now available to you if you like what you hear if you think it's valuable if you're already running its successful company and you want an easy way to

reference the ideas of history's greatest entrepreneurs in a searchable database that you can go through at your convenience anytime you want then you go to founders notes dot com and sign up I want to start out first with why this is

so important there's actually this book that came out in like 1997 it's called in the company giants I think it's episode 208 of founders it's two Stanford MBA students if I remember correctly and they're interviewing a bunch of technology company founders and in their Steve Jobs is one of them this

is you know right I think even before he came back to Apple and they were talking about well yeah we know it's important to hire but in a typical start up a manager or founder may not always have time to spend recruiting other

people and I first read this is Steve's answer to this you know I don't know two years ago and I never forgot it I think it's excellent I think it sets up why this question is so important and you should really be spending existing the early days like basically all your time doing this in a typical

start-up manager may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people then Steve comes in I disagree totally I think it's the most important job assume you're by yourself in a start-up and you want a partner you take a lot of time finding a partner right he would be half of your company I'm going to pause there this idea of looking at each new hire as a percentage of the company is genius why should you take any less time finding a third or a fourth of your

company or a fifth of your company when you're in a start-up the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not each is ten percent of the company so why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all a players if three three other ten we're not so great why would you start a company where thirty percent of your people are not so great a small company depends on great people much more than a big company does okay so to answer this

question the advantage that that I have making founders and that you have as a bi-part of listening to founders is not only that I've read you know three hundred hundred something biographies much winners now but I have all of my notes and highlights stored in my read wise app and that means I can search for any topic I can look at the past highlights of books or I can search for keywords so what I did is first of all like what I've started to do with these

AMA questions is I read them decide which ones I'm going to do next and then think about it for a few days I don't put it I just literally that I know that's the next question just let my brain work on it in the background for a few days and then I'll go through and start searching all my notes and so that's what I did here and so there's a bunch of you know I don't have I may have like ten or fifteen different founders talking about hiring the first idea

is the most obvious but I think probably works best when you're already established so Steve Jobs is talking about hey you know great way to to hire is just find great work and find the people that did that and then try to hire them when you're Steve Jobs that's a lot easier right then if you're

just somebody that's in a reputation maybe you don't have resources maybe your companies rather new or not as well known David Ogoby I just did confessions of an advertising man couple episodes ago I think 306 or something like that through seven and he did the same thing but he's David Ogoby at that point so he would find he'd go through magazines find great advertising great copywriting and he'd write the personal letter and then set up a phone call and he says he

wouldn't he was so well known and you know it's one of the best in his field that he wouldn't even have to offer a job just the conversation then the person would the he would want to hire the person never mention it and the person would apply to him and so again I think if you can do that then of course it's straightforward find for somebody that is great work usually you can do this I actually have a friend that I can't say who it is he's doing this right now

actually I have a friend that's really good at doing this he's finding people that do great stuff on the internet and then just cold cold DMing them and then getting convincing them to work on things and that usually works especially with people like younger people early on the career there's a bunch of different ways to think about this and a bunch of different ways to prioritize so the first thing that that come that came to mind that I found surprising is you

read any biography on Rockefeller and he had a couple ideas where he felt the optimization you know table stakes that you're intelligent in your driven in your hardworking right we don't even have like if you're listening to this you already know that but he prioritized hiring people with social

skills and so this is what he said the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I pay for I pay more for that ability than any other under the sun there's the two the second part to this though and this is also works well if you have access to more resources he he Rockefeller would hire people as he found as he found talented people not as he needed them it's not like okay standard oil has six open spots let's

go find six candidates right he'd come across what he considered a talented person he didn't even matter if he didn't know what they were going to do he's like I'm just going to stack his team and if you really think about the his

partners of standard oil he essentially built a company an executive team of founders of cuz he was buying up all their company so it's very rare but there's a line from tight now I want to read to you taking for granted the growth of his empire he hired talented people as found not as needed

and then I found another idea in the hiring like the actual interview process so there's this kind of vanny for bush I did two episodes on them I think it's 270 and 271 he is the most important American ever in history in terms of connecting the scientific field private enterprise and the government the most important person to keep alive for the American war effort was FDR the second one was vanny for Bush vanny for Bush is like the force gump of this

historical period he is involved in everything from the Manhattan project to discovering like a young called Shannon to building a mechanical computer like this guy literally has done he just he pops up in these books over and over again

if you are reading about American business history during World War II and post World War II you are going to come across the name vanny for Bush over and over again I read his fantastic autobiography called Pieces of the Action and I came across this weird highlight and so this is his brilliant

and unusual job interview process and so he's talking about his organization he's running called Amrad at Amrad I hired a young physicist from Texas named CG Smith the way I hired him is interesting an interview of that sort is always likely to be on on an artificial basis and somewhat embarrassing so I discussed with him a technical point on which I was then genuinely puzzled the next day he came in with a with a neat solution and I hired him at once here's

another idea this is from Nolan Bushnell Nolan Bushnell's the founder of Atari founder of Chuckie cheese and Steve Jobs mentor he hired Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs was like 19 at Atari he would ask people their reading habits in interviews this is why one of the best ways his whole thing was he wanted to build all of his companies laid on a foundation of creative people so that's what he's looking for he's like I need creative people one of the best ways

to find creative people is to ask a simple question what books do you like I have never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits actually which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read at all I've known many talented engineers who hated science fiction but loved say books on bird watching a blatant but often accurate generalization people who are curious and passionate

read people who are apathetic in a different don't I remember one that that's such a great line and I obviously agree with that I remember one I'm going to read it again a blatant but often accurate generalization people who are curious and passionate read people who are apathetic in a different

don't I remember one particular woman who during an interview told me that she had read every book that I had read so I started mentioning books I hadn't read and she had read those two I didn't know how someone in her late 20s found that's this much time to read so much but I was impressed I was so

impressed that I hired her right there and assigned her to international marketing which is having problems this is why this is why I'm reading this whole section to you a job with a lot of moving parts benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving parts it wouldn't be possible to have read that many books without such a brain so you see what I mean like we start with Steve job saying this is the most important thing that you your roles the leader of

the company the founders to right and you are and it's so important to study and this is why I'm glad this this question exists and why I'm glad that I took the time and I had like the foresight to like hey I should really organize my

thoughts and notes because there's no way I would have remembered all this without being being able to search my read wise right but you have rock of fellow saying this is what's important to me you have bush saying this is how I hire now you have Nolan Bushnell saying well here's another weird

thing that I learned let me go through what Warren Buffett says about this so this is about the quality one thing that is consistent whether it's jobs Buffett Bayzos Peter Teal this just pops up over and over again they talk about the importance of trying to find people that that are better than you the the hiring bar constantly has to increase now obviously the larger the company gets that's impossible Steve jobs has this great quote where he's like you

know Pixar was the first time I see I saw an entire team a tire company of a players but they had 400 players they had 400 team members he's like at the time apple 3000 seconds impossible to have 3000 a player so there is some number that your company may grow to where it's just you're just not you're not going to have thousands of a players in my argument I don't even know if you get a 400 I guess you I mean I'll take Steve's word for it on there and

Pixar definitely produce great products but it's probably a lot lower than that as well so Warren Buffett would tell you to use David Ogleby's hiring philosophy and so Warren said Charlie and I know that the right players will make almost any team manager look good again that is why it's the most important function of the founder maybe directly next to the product right above the product actually because those people building your product we subscribe to the

philosophy of Ogleby and others founding genius David Ogleby this is what Ogleby said if each of us hires people who are small smaller than we are we should become a company of drawers but if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are we should become a company of giants David or Jeff Bezos rather use a variation of Ogleby's idea to Jeff used to say in Amazon every time we hire someone he or she should raise the bar for the next hire so that the overall talent pool is

always improving they talk about this idea in Amazon where the future hires that we do should be so good that if you had applied for the job you already have an Amazon you wouldn't get in that's a very interesting idea take your time with recruiting take your time with hiring this is great book on the history of PayPal it's written actually I recently become friends with the authors name is Jimmy Sony and this is in his book the most fascinating thing that I found

was that PayPal prioritized speed so from the time they found it to the time they sell to eBay it's like four years Jimmy spent more time researching the book than for he spent six years researching book I was teasing like you took a long-run a book than they took to start and sell their company it just speaks to like the quality he's trying to do but that as a byproduct of that like obviously they move fast but they prioritize speed over everything else except

in one area recruiting max Lubchin kept the bar for talent exceeding the high even if that came at the expense of speedy sat staffing max kept repeating a's higher a's b's higher c's so the first b you hire takes the whole company down let's read that again a players hire a players b players hire

c players so the first b player you hire takes the whole company down additionally the team the company leaders mandated that all prospects is another idea for you all prospects must meet every single member of the team now the

next one is the most bizarre it makes sense if you study I did this three part on Larry Ellison three parts here is Larry Ellison I should read those books again because the podcast is like 50 times bigger then then when I published this episode and he's just he's just crazy so he would hire

based on the confidence the self confidence level of the candidate listen to this I've tears of my eyes I don't know why I'm laughing okay because this is you read about Larry Ellison and he's one of these people it's like really easy to interface with because you just you just

know exactly who he is and what's important to him that's why I think it's funny Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest new college graduates when they were recruiting from universities they'd ask people are you the smartest person you know and if they said yes they would hire them if they said no they would say who is and they would go hire that guy and said I don't know if you got the smartest people that way but you

definitely got the most arrogant Ellison's and this is what the personality of the founder is largely the culture of the company Apple is Steve jobs Apple is just Steve jobs in 10,000 lives right I was just texting a founder friend of mine he was a pot guess actually better through the podcast and he's going through this like process of self discovery like he's already started a bunch of companies are really successful but he's like I think I'm more of this

type of founder than the other type of founder and that's good that he's doing that because he's he's hopefully his next mission is like his life mission you know and you can't get your life's mission unless you do you figure out who you are Ellison knew who he was Ellison swaggering combative style

became a part of the company's identity this arrogant culture had a lot to do with Oracle's success here's another odd idea for you easy sharp the founder of four seasons actually could figure it out that in his business which was hotels right that hiring could hiring the right person could actually be a form of distribution for his hotel he gave me the idea because of what what do we know what do you and I know in our bones that history's greatest founders

all red biographies they all read biographies of people that came before them and took ideas from them easy sharp is trying to build four seasons what do you think he did he picked up a biography of Caesar Ritz the guy that it risk Carlton's named after the great arguably the greatest hotel the air of all time and when he realized oh shit Ritz he says a remembering that Caesar Ritz made his hotels world famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs we

decided to do something similar so what is he talking about Caesar Ritz went out and partnered with August a scoffier what Caesar Ritz was hope to hotel to building hotels August a scoffier was to French cooking and so what happened is you partner with world famous chefs people come into your restaurant that's in the hotel because the world famous chef and now they know about your hotel that leads to more get that leads to more activity in your restaurant

that you own but also leads to more brand recognition of your hotel and then by the way that more people staying a hotel so hiring as a form of distribution this is fascinating as a fascinating idea okay here's a problem you can identify great people right maybe they even want to come work like if

I identified them you've sold them hey this is what this is our mission this is what we're doing and yet humans have complicated lives they have spouses they have kids they have a reason maybe they can't move across the country to work for you even though they want to so there's a problem solving element that you see in these books on you have to solve like you've already identified the person you've recruited them they can go for some other reason okay well

the great founders are not going to take no for an answer I read in in this book called liftoff which is about the first six years of space X this is what Elon musted they had anticipated his friends issue having convinced must they needed to bring this brilliant young engineer from turkey on board it became a matter of solving the problem his wife had a job in San Francisco she would need one in loss angeles right because that's for space X's at the time there these were

solvable problems and Elon's better solving problems than almost anyone else must therefore came into his job interview prepared about halfway through must told the guy that he wants to hire so I heard you don't want to move to LA and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google well I just talked Larry and they're going to transfer your wife down to LA so what are you going to do now to solve this problem must could call his friend Larry page the co founder

of Google the engineer sat and stunned silence for a moment but then he replied given all that he would come to work at space X that's really smart there is another idea when you're promoting are you going to promote one within or from without you know that's dependent on you depending on what's going on I do think this is interesting though this is a guy named lushwob who built this really valuable chain of like tire companies in the Pacific Northwest

actually found out about him because Charlie mongers like hey you should read this biography he said it in he didn't say to me personally he said it to in like one of the birch are meetings that to study lushwob had one of the most one of the smartest financial incentive structures and he company

that that Charlie monger had come across so this is what lushwob did he did not want to hire from he didn't want to hire other people from other companies because they might come with bad habits he liked to train his own executives

and so he says in our 34 years of business we have never hired a manager from the outside every single one of our more than 250 managers and assistant managers started at the bottom changing tires they have all earned their management job by working up and then another thing if you're going to hire

the best of the best in a players there a players don't like to be my commandage and so this came in Larry Miller's autobiography called driven he owns like he owned like 93 companies all throughout Utah card dealerships movie theaters all kinds of crazy stuff but he also owned the the NBA team

Utah jazz and what was fascinating is he's trying to recruit Jerry Sloan as the coach at the point and Jerry Sloan would only take the job on one condition and I really like it I really like this idea if you hire me let me run the team in business right that's what you're hiring me for one of the best things we had ever done was hired Jerry Sloan as coach at the time he said I'm only going to ask you for one thing if I get fired let me get fired

for my own decisions if you hire me let me run the team slash business here's another idea from Thomas Ellett Edison that I think is fascinating really the way I think about a founder is like you're developing skills that you can't hire for you you're going to hire for everything else but you shouldn't be hireable and Edison wasn't Edison expressing his views on the preeminent role of applied scientists which that's what he considered himself coin the expression

I can hire mathematicians but they can't hire me and so when I read that paragraph for the first time to note I left myself was develop skills that you can't hire for capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable

as they louder would give you advice that you need to hire people aligned with your thinking and values hire the best people this is vital hire people who think as you do and treat them well in our business they are top top priority so this idea is like that seems kind of weird like hire people

who think like you there's obviously not one right way to build a business I think that your business should be an expression your personality who are as a person at a core and so I think there is an art to the building of your business and the reason to use the word art I don't

mean in like a hoidi toy the you know pretentious manner that's not me at all I don't even care about it all art at all really I mean that you're making decisions not just based on economics like there are non economic important decisions based on how you're building your

business like you could probably make more money doing a decision a but decision a goes against who you are as a person or you just don't like it or it's just not as elegant or beautiful and so therefore you don't do it so that's what I mean

about you know hire people who think as you do you do and what for whatever reason when I read essay law to say that I was like okay that there's like this art to what she's doing one thing that's going to be help when recruiting this comes for Peter Teal I think this is the book zero to one

understand that most companies don't even differentiate their pitches to potential recruits into hiring so therefore like they're just going to buy as a byproduct of that you're going to wind up with a lower overall talent base and so he says what's wrong with valuable stock smart people are pressing problems nothing but every company makes this these claims so they won't help you stand out general and undifferentiated pitches to join your company

don't see anything about why a recruits should join your company instead of money of instead of many others so that idea of like your pitch your actual he would tell you you're you shouldn't be building a undifferentiated commodity business but even above and beyond that like you're the mission that you're trying to engage everybody to join you in that pitch that sale sale you're trying to make to potential recruits should be differentiated should not if that person

has a job or other jobs there should not be like it's like they may not like your mission they may not like your pitch but they shouldn't be able to compare to anything else I had another quote from Nolan Bushnell hire for passion and intensity that's what he would do or that's what he did when he found Steve jobs if there was a single characteristic to separate Steve jobs from the massive employees it was his passionate enthusiasm Steve had one full one speed full blast

this was the primary reason we hired him and one thing all these thunderstorm and is that he know how important hiring is and when something's important you do it yourself this is again Elon Musk on hiring he interviewed the first three thousand employees at SpaceX that's how important it was one of musk's most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would fit his mold his people had to be brilliant they had to be hard working and there could

be no nonsense there are a ton of phonies out there and not many who are the real deal must said of his approach to interviewing engineers I can usually tell within 15 minutes and I can sure I can for sure tell within a few days of working with them Musk made hiring a priority he personally met with every single person the company hired through the first three thousand employees it required late nights and weekends but he felt it was important to get the right people for

his company and then the close on this we started with Steve jobs telling us why it was so important and why should be a large part of how he's found your time and now we'll close with what you do after what you do after you hire the person this what he says it's not just recruiting after recruiting it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are the feeling that their work will

have a tremendous influence and as part of a strong clear vision so that is the end to that 20 minute mini episode I just really listen to the whole thing and it really does I think it's a perfect explanation and illustration of why I think founders notes is so valuable because that some of those books I haven't read in five six years and just the ability to have a searchable database of all this these ideas like this collected knowledge of some of the history's

greatest entrepreneurs to reference and then contextually apply to our own businesses it's nothing short of like it's magic that's the really the way I think about it I think it's a massive superpower gives me a massive superpower I couldn't make the podcast without it I also think if you have access to it and make your business better and so if you're already running a successful business I highly recommend you invest in the description and you can do it by going to founders notes dot com