Oil! by Upton Sinclair w/Tom Libby & Jesan Sorrells

well. During a time in America where socialism wasn't a boogeyman, because in the West we did not know— we are— not only did we not know, we did not have accurate reporting on exactly what was going on inside of Stalin's Russia. We also had the Great Depression on during the time of much of Sinclair's writing. And World War II. Now, what is modern progressivism back in the day would have just been called social reform. They didn't use the term social

justice, they used the term social reform. And Sinclair was a social reformer, and he used his talents, he used his ability to write and turn a phrase, um, to critique and reform the society around him. He, he had a vision for a better world, and he used his talents to, to try to bring that world into into reality. He wanted to convert his readers and his fans from a constrained vision of tragic trade-offs in a world that just was. If you just worked at a meatpacking plant, well,

it just is. Or if you're a journalist, it just is. Or in the case of oil, if you're an oil man or a landman, you're part of a system that just is. You just operate in the system and there's no way for you to reform it. Sinclair didn't believe that, and he didn't write from that position. Um, he, he believed in an unconstrained vision and utilizing— well, you creating entertainment out of the

paradoxes of human nature. So one of the things you see in Oil is that J. Arnold Ross, well, he is an oil man and a land man, and he is, for lack of a better term, portrayed as being greedy and venal. His son is portrayed as being a social reformer, basically rejecting all of that venality and greed and being able to see through his father's hypocrisy, such as it were, in order to create a new world. Now, those things are very interesting about St. Clair, and that frames sort of the book.

I opened up with differing perspective because unlike Paul Thomas Anderson, well, no, let me frame it this. Let me use a different framing. I think that being a movie director inside of the Hollywood system is about as close as you can come to being an entrepreneur inside of a system in any modern system that we have. Because think about what a director has to do, right? They've got to obviously arrange for things to be on set.

They have to make sure the writing is clear. They have to make sure the storyboards are correct. They have to make sure the actors hit their lines. They have to have good relationships with the actors, all of the members of the crew, everyone from the grip to the caterers. They also have to have good relationships with the financiers and the money men who

will come by and have an opinion because they're giving money. Case in point, a meeting that we had this morning, Tom and I, on another project that we're involved in, right? Money men are going to have an opinion. And the director sits even more so than the cinematographer who just points the camera— well, not just, but points the camera and makes sure the shot is good. Or the writer who writes the words that the actors say.

Heck, even more so than the actors themselves, who quite frankly are puppets on a string if we're really going to be direct about this. Um, some puppets are just better than others. Um, the director is the guy who has to have the vision and keep all of those people on the straight line towards the vision. And if he deviates even just a little bit, if he's allowed to be distracted by the money men or by the actors, or by, um, the

situations that will surround him on the set. If he deviates even just a little bit from that, you don't get a masterpiece, you don't get quality, you don't get excellence. Um, heck, you don't even get a mediocre product. I think of the movie that came out this week, Maggie— Maggie Gyllenhaal directed Bride, and it was a $100 million movie And I think it grossed $9 million.

Brutal. It didn't look exciting to me either. I, I, I, you know, we talk about— we're both pretty good movie— we're movie people, and I, I watched the trailer and I went, what are we doing? Like, I'm sorry, I just didn't get it. And now, by the way, by the way, the original Bride of Frankenstein, great movie. That was a great movie, by the way. It's not, you know, it was just this ver— I didn't, I didn't get it.

But back to your analogy here though. So, and, and pulling— yes, back to the analogy, pulling this back to entrepreneur, uh, entrepreneurship.

If you think of that, so the director in your analogy is the startup founder, and keeping that North Star to their mission and what their plan is and what they're trying to build can get very easily get distracted by the developers that are producing the software. Let's just say on the left-hand side, you've got a whole slew of operational things, whether they're developers, your first hire, hiring the right team, etc., etc.

On the right-hand side, you got all the money people, right? So, the VCs and the angels that once they give you their money, they want to have an opinion. So, to your analogy there, it's interesting to me that you chose the movies and the director is basically the startup founder. The director is that person that's supposed to have the North Star, that's supposed to have the steering compass to steer the startup in the

movies that is the director. So that, like, to your point, it's the closest to entrepreneurship in the movie industry is that director. I agree with that. I didn't really put those two and two together, but it's a good analogy. So I look at directors like, you know, we're not going to talk all about directors this episode, but we're going to talk more about entrepreneurs. We're going to sort

of lean into that. And I want to talk about the work too. I want to tie it into what I said there in the opening because I think there's something something valuable. Not something— there is something valuable there, 100%. Um, but I think of directors like, um, directors I, I particularly care for, and directors who are— who have been acknowledged as creatives who produce something of quality, right? They all had the ability— and I'm going to name 5 of

them, right? Actually, I'm going to name 3 more because I already named Paul Thomas Anderson. And I named, uh, Christopher Nolan. I'm going to name 3 other ones, okay? All 5 of these men, quite frankly— oh no, I'll throw a woman in there actually, um, had strength of vision, to your point, and they had strength of singular vision. So the man at the top of that mountain was Orson Welles. I mean, he created Citizen Kane at what, like the age of like 26? Yeah, that's nuts.

By the way, Michelangelo also created the David at like, you know, 20-some-odd years old. So like, you know, genius in youth is not just limited to like— you're telling me that Mark Zuckerberg wasn't the first, wasn't the first child genius? It's been done before, Mark. And by individuals who— anyway, doesn't matter. I won't go down that road. Don't you tempt me. So you got Orson Welles, Um, then you have, of course, the great British master. I have two

Britishers on this list. Alfred Hitchcock. Oh yeah, I mean, please. From the silent films, um, that he directed, um, in the, um, in the '20s and '30s— or not, sorry, not '20s and '30s, in the '40s and '50s. Um, and then the remakes that he did, um, in the, uh, in the '60s and later on into the '70s. The man was just— the man was just ridiculous. So you've got Orson Welles, You've got Alfred Hitchcock. And I said I was gonna throw a woman on there because, you know, I'm not gender-specific here.

Kathryn Bigelow, you know, The Hurt Locker, Point Break. I mean, those are singularly visionary, visionary films. And then of course, Christopher Nolan, like I said, Paul Thomas Anderson. Those are 5 directors I can name just off the top of my brain. And I know that our listeners can name more where they had that vision. And they drove the vision. Sometimes I think of Stanley Kubrick, actually, a man, by the way, whose vision I could not understand on most of his movies. I just could not.

Um, but I cannot deny that he had a vision. He absolutely did. It's just one I didn't understand. You know, the interesting thing too here is, if again, pulling it, pulling it back to entrepreneurship, film— the film directors and entrepreneurs are very similar in this respect as well. If you've done it once and you've made a lot of money at it, you are less likely to get those left-right side influences trying to change your vision if you've

already been there, done that. So, yes. So, second, you know, second-time

entrepreneurs, third-time entrepreneurs, when you hear people talk about having 2 or 3 successful exits and they want to start another company, I mean, funders will just throw money at them because they think that if they've been successful 3 times already, it's like The same thing with the film, right? Like, so Christopher Nolan— now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say I'm in love with every movie he's ever done, but the fact

of the matter is most of them produce a lot of money. Like, let's just be realistic, with his name on it alone, even the bad movies that he has made have made a lot of money because his name's on it. So it's like that. But the entrepreneurship journey is very similar in that respect as well. Like, a first, a first-time founder is very hard to get money. I hate to tell you guys this, but it is what, statistically speaking, it is now in the current landscape, less than 1% of,

of companies that start actually get significant funding. I'm not talking about your uncle or your grandparents that give you a couple hundred thousand dollars. I'm talking about significant influen— influential money, uh, anything over 7 figures. It's less than 1%. But if you've kind of, if you've done this and you've exited once or twice, let's say twice, now you're starting a new company when you got this new idea, you are not 1% chance of getting money. That

exponentially grows. Like, you're talking probably a 50-50 shot on whether you get money. Which is unheard of in the startup world. But those producers, those filmmakers are the same way. My, my only part to this tangent is— No, you're right. Yeah, this jog we're doing around the block. Yeah, there's a direct correlation, I guess, is my— There is. There is. Well, and it's not just on, on the money and on the exits, which is a good

point. It's also on the work. Yeah. So I had a meeting today with somebody where I said to them, and this person probably in their late 20s, and after I said it, he was like, I've never actually heard that before. I said to him, advice is easy. Getting money, or no, getting money is easy. Getting good advice and acting on it is hard. And he didn't understand that. He's like, that's, oh, okay, that's an interesting position. I think there are a lot of people who would disagree with you on that.

And I said, that's fine. They could disagree with me on it, but it's true. Getting money is easy. Getting good advice, notice I said good, not bad, good advice and acting on it is hard. And the reason why it's hard is because we forget about the part that unites the advice to the money. And that's the work. Yeah. Work is hard. And so I already sort of went on my tangent about that. What is the important part of work? This is my question in red, which you would have seen it if I sent you the

notes today. What is the important part of work in getting an idea from napkin to reality that we don't talk about as leaders? Good Lord, there's probably 100 different, like, cliché comments that people make here, right? That are— I know all of them are true. And at the same time, like, we don't understand how to put them into practice, right? Like, for example, and we— the one of the conversations that we, um, that we had, uh, this

morning, we— you and I had a brief conversation. I won't bring up the— but it was a brief conversation about it. But so about this particular comment, which is you know, don't let perfection get in the way of good enough, right? Like, right. So, like, but, but what, like, so you can say that to a startup founder and that's good advice, by the way, but acting on that good advice is not that easy because it's, it still leaves too much up to the

interpretation, right? Like, so what, what is good enough to you and good enough to me may be very different. So it goes back to your point about the the whole, the founder's vision and reaching for that vision. It's like, well, it's very difficult. So again, my kind of like, there's a lot of cliché things in here. What I will say is this, the biggest problem in my opinion about people starting businesses today is this, and I'm going to use the word ridiculous people and

I'll explain in a minute what I mean by this. The ridiculous notion of work-life balance. You will never start your own company to work less. That just doesn't happen. And if you think you're going to, then you're insane to start with, right? Like, so when you're talking about like what is the work that needs to be done, the idea— listen, I know you've started companies in the past, Hazar. I've started companies in the past. I remember the very first company I ever started.

I, I didn't take a solid day off. Not a solid day, meaning, meaning I didn't look at an email, I didn't look at social media, I didn't look to— I didn't look at anything. I didn't think about the company. I didn't think about it for a whole day. One day. Not once in the first probably 2 years of the company. Now, did that mean that I worked 24/7? No. What it meant— what it means is on a Saturday when I was supposed to be with my family an email would come in and I would tell

them, I'm really sorry, but I have to address this. Give me 5 minutes. So maybe it was only 5 minutes of work on that day. But I'm telling you, every single day for 2 years, there wasn't a single day that I took off to get that company off the ground. Now, I successfully exited that company about 5 or 6, 6 years ago now and started another company. Started from square one, just started doing it all over again. But, uh, but the

point, the point I think that, I, I think that people misunderstand, I think that that statement of work-life balance, I want to find work-life balance, I, I want work-life balance, I think people misunderstand what that term means. Or let me rephrase, my definition of that is very different than most people's, I'll put it that way. To me, work-life balance is not a 50/50 amount of day and time that you work versus not work, or— no, to me, work-life balance just means one of two things

that you accomplish. Sometimes it's both, but one of two things: what you do for work aligns with the person that you are so well that they just kind of blend in, and you're not worried about how many hours of the day you're working. It's just kind of like, it is what it is, right? Like, Like I just said, like, and even now at this point, if I have to interrupt my wife's— I'm at a christening with my wife. If I tell her I have to excuse myself, she knows it's really

important. That's balance. If it's a run-of-the-mill email, I don't care. But if it's something that really, like, is unbelievable, earth-shattering, like emergency, I will still take the time out of my day to answer it on a Saturday or a Sunday or in the evening or whatever. It doesn't matter. Because to me, that balance is if I lose that client, then my work sucks. Like, and I'm not willing to lose that balance of work.

So, it's that allowing that what you do to marry and match who you are as a person, that's balance. Or the other side of it is that when you are at work, you are focused on work and your personal life does not interrupt you as much as when you are in your personal life, you don't allow your work to interrupt you. That's balance. Now, whether you work 8 hours a day or 12 hours a day

is irrelevant. That, that is not— that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being in the moment and working through whatever's in front of you and not allowing interruptions so that you can actually focus on it. That's balance. And when you allow that balance— when what, what creates the balance is when you allow it to happen on both sides of the coin. So again, that scenario, like when you are with your family, you are with your

family. You do not allow your work to interrupt that. When you're at work, you're at work. Now again, in both cases, emergencies are emergencies. You can't— there's nothing you could do about that. There are going to be times where you interrupt one of those things because it's just absolute necessity. That does not mean you don't have balance. That just means that you have an order of importance in your life.. And I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, that's where I think they start

to fail in today's world. That order of importance and misunderstanding what work-life balance is, is the surefire way to failure, in my opinion. So

I also think, so I think two things. One, the idea of work-life balance is the way you're talking about it, the way

it's conceptualized, not what you have defined. The way the popular culture conceptualizes work-life balance, is a direct outgrowth of the work of Upton Sinclair and the other social reformers of the '20s and '30s who looked at work through the lens of a society that was transitioning from being primarily farming to being primarily manufacturing, where the manufacturing conditions and the industry conditions were demonstrably worse than what would have been

on the farm. And then the social reformers failed. The progressive social reformers failed to update their software when the transition was made post-World War II from a manufacturing society to a mostly white-collar working society. Where work shifts from being a physical thing to being a mental and emotional

thing. And the only update the social reformers had was the popular conception of work-life balance, because work looks different when it is emotional or intellectual versus when it is physical. That's right. So, um, case in point, right? The Jungle. The Jungle was written about meatpacking plants. Um, I lived in Chicago for about 5 seconds when I was in my early teenage years, long enough to remember it and long enough to talk about it and long enough to forget it, except when it comes up

in examples like this. And when you would drive through, uh, and they still had slaughterhouses in Chicago back in the early '90s, like that, that whole culture hadn't yet sort of all completely transitioned over. And you could, if you were stuck in traffic on certain parts of the expressway, whichever one it was, I can't remember, you would smell the slaughterhouses and the meatpacking plants. You could smell them driving by

the highway. When I went to high school in northern Louisiana, at that time in northern Louisiana, there were paper mills all over the place and you could smell paper mills. Oh God, it's horrible. I'd rather drive through a— I'd rather drive through a fertilizer, like cow manure, than a paper mill. Closing the loop on a previous conversation that we've had. Okay, now we're talking about manure again. This is

great. But these are the kinds of jobs, whether it's a fertilizer plant, a papermaking mill, or a meatpacking plant, where The, the work that is being done is physical and messy and smelly and, and for many people,

disgusting. They associate that with work. No one, no one associates, for black, for good or ill, no one until recently, and by recently I mean within the last 30 years in our culture, associates the white-collar effort of Being mentally and emotionally focused on making a decision, either in a startup environment or a white-collar corporate environment or a white-collar medium-sized business environment. Nobody associates that with

work. Most people throughout the history of the 20th century associated that with ease because that was the bourgeois class. That was the capitalist class. Those were the folks that Sinclair was writing against. Those were the owners. They were And that's— and this is how he frames J. Arnold Ross. He frames him as an owner, but he frames him as an owner who is willing to get down in the dirt, but he's working really hard to make sure his

son doesn't have to get down in the dirt. And Sinclair critiques this in Oil, using the son to critique the assumptions of the father and to call out the father and say, to your point about work, How dare you not have work-life balance? How dare you not this? And how dare you not that? Which is, of course, is the lament of every child whose father works 24/7, 365, and doesn't see them. I was talking with my wife,

totally different context, but it applies here. I was talking with my wife about liquor stores the other day. You would think that owning a liquor store would be an easy kind of retail. Thing to do. Uh-huh. I would— I'm going to go on record right now. I would never— and never is a long time— never want to own a liquor store. I don't want to be a part of a liquor store. Don't come to me with any ideas about liquor stores.

No. Distilleries, distribution, that's a different thing. But the actual retail store itself— the reason liquor store— owning a liquor store is hard is because everyone's trying to rip you off. From the people who are, from the people who are doing the customer service to your customers, to your distributors, to the landlord. You have to be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to make sure no permit, the government. Oh, and I haven't even talked about the government

and taxes yet. I haven't gotten into that yet. Right. Um, just

the people on the ground trying to rip you off. Forget the other people, like 3 levels up trying to rip you off. And guess what? If you— oh, and by the way, the government, if you do anything wrong with like the stamps on the liquor, oh, forget it, your life is over, right? And you know how I know this? Because Gary Vaynerchuk, who is the son of, I believe, a Russian Jewish immigrant, talked about how when his parents came over, he never saw his father until he was in

his 20s. Because his father owned a liquor store and coming over from what was terrible conditions in Eastern Europe or in Russia, wherever the Vaynerchuk came out of, coming here, work in a liquor store looked like paradise in comparison to what they came from and emigrated from. Work. This is the thing. We have to change

our conceptions around work. So I'm supporting your point around work-life balance, but I also think we have— and not but— and I think we have to take into consideration that we have to reconceptualize what work actually is, which is part of our struggle that we're having right now. No, and I agree. And we both have children in their 20s, and that's another fight. Oh, yeah. I mean, the whole idea— so without giving away too much and without talking too deeply about whatever,

so We have a very large house, right? And so my house is about 5,000 square feet. This disillusion— they're delusional in thinking— my kids, I'm not saying everybody's kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My kids are delusional in thinking that they should be afforded the ability to go work 40 hours a week and live the way they want to live or the way that they were accustomed to living living in my house. So, you know, 3 acres of land, 5,000 square feet, 2, you know, 3,

4 cars in the driveway. They, you know, when they turn 16, they could just take the car whenever they want, like, whatever, right? They want to work 40 hours a week and live the way they want to live. And I keep trying to explain to them, you can't start like that. Like, you want to run like Usain Bolt when you're— you haven't even learned how to crawl yet. Like, when I, when I came into the workforce, I had to work two jobs.

And they always have this, like, they always get this— they always try to get very analytical on me and talk about how inflation is, like, isn't there— their salaries are not keeping up with inflation, etc., etc., right? Whatever. And that might be true. I don't really care, to be honest with you. I don't, I don't care because I, I don't care that my first apartment that I ever rented was only $450 a month. I made $3.25 an

hour. And I understand that, you know, that, that, that math may not math for, for my kids, but I remember when I lived on my own, very first time I lived on my own, I, I had to work 2 jobs. So you're right, the idea of work-life balance to me at that time was just simply I didn't have to live at my parents' house anymore. I was happy. The balance to me was living on my own, working 75 hours a week. Didn't matter. I lived on my own. Didn't matter.

That's the balance was there was always like a give and take, right? Balance is about give and take. They don't understand that today. So, when I tell my kids like, well, if you want to earn more money, just go get a second job. I shouldn't have to do that. I should be allowed to work. Well, why? Because I can work 40 hours a week and afford my— well, I've got 30 years of experience behind me. I've

done the— I've scrubbed the toilets. I, I've wiped the floors and picked up kids' puke off the bathroom floor. Like, what are you talking about? Like, you— to your point about the whole difference between white collar and like— so let me get this straight. You want to walk in the door at— you have a psychology degree. You want to walk in the door as the director of HR with never having HR experience? Yes, yes, that's exactly that. Yes, that's exactly— that's exactly it. Yes. And make

$150,000 $140,000, $150,000 a year. No, it doesn't work that way. You have to earn that. You have to go work your ass off to earn that. You have to go scrub toilets, if that— whatever, whatever the equivalent. And I apologize for HR professionals here, that's not my— my intent is not to crap on HR. It was just the one that popped into my head because of the psychology

degree that she has. Anyway, but like, whatever the equivalent to that is, you have to take that $50,000, $60,000 a year job, maybe it's $40,000, I don't know. You need experience before you can demand those salaries. But because we put so much emphasis on higher education and the fact that when we were coming out of higher education, the jobs were better for people who had that

degree, no doubt, no doubt. When I graduated high school, at the time I graduated high school, the workforce was probably closer to 70-30 of college degrees, like about 30%. And it was going up. It was definitely on the upward swing. By the time I was about in my early 30s, it was probably closer to about 40-45% of jobs that were— that required degrees. Now it's much higher than that. So guess what happens to you, the value of your college degree, now

that 90% of the jobs out there require college degrees? The value of that college degree goes down, not up, right? Which means that now they can offer that $40,000 a year job to the college graduate instead of the person who never went to college. Well, and this is— and this is— they don't get that. They don't get that. They want $100,000 out the gate. Well, because we just told them that a $200,000 education is going to be worth it for them. Well,

and this— and, and the thing— well, the thing we also don't consider is, um, human nature in this, right? So one of the things that, that Sinclair does really, really well in his book, right, um, is he describes and defines human nature,

right? So whether it's Bunny's nature, um, whether it's the nature, which is the son, um, if it's the nature of, um, the, um, the, the dad, right, J. Arnold Ross, or if it's the nature of— and I'm going to talk a little bit about this because this gets directly to what you're talking about here— the society, right, that

is consumed with this new product, right? This new thing called oil, which we forget— in the early 20th century, oil drilling in and of itself was as dangerous— and no, more dangerous and harder than mining, because people have been mining for millennia, thousands of years by, by that, by the point the 20th century showed up. By that point. But oil, oil was a totally new thing. Totally new product, pulling it up out of the

ground, refining it, which no one ever talks about refining. You know, we have this, we talked about the show Landman. We have this idea that it's just, oh, you go, you, you find a spot in the ground, you drill it, boom, like there's oil that pops up. Now, that's no longer the case. We now have fracking and a whole bunch of other processes that exist. And by the way, the reason I know about all this, ladies and gentlemen, is because I live in Texas. And I'm going to talk

about my dealings with landmen in a minute. I've dealt with landmen. I've dealt with guys like J. Arnold Ross. I've dealt with these

guys. And so we forget that in the early 20th century, wildcatting, you know, making bets on wells, making bets on this new commodity, all of the speculation, all of that that existed that Sinclair critiques All of that existed because there were people who were, to your point about education, who were what we would consider to be poorly educated people who were looking for, um, a way to get rich. How? Not slow, but get rich

quick. And they wanted their kids, to Tom's point about his children, They wanted their kids to get rich quick so their kids could be in a better spot. No, I want them to work their ass off. Right, exactly. I want— 100 years later, we're like, no, you got to go to work. You got to go get a job. Well, so like with my children, um, I will say this. My children have been raised with the principle of work, right?

So small case of this. My wife and I have gone off and on on like allowances, right, with kids, right? And when we're off, we're really off. And when we're on, it's in a spurt, kind of like an oil well, and then we're back off again because we can't. And it's not that we disagree on it, it's just that our minds shift and change based on whatever happens to be going on.

And so we were having a conversation, gosh, probably about a month ago about this with our youngest kid, and he's 9, and he's gotten to the point where you can start doing work, right? And I don't mean work like chores. So for us in our family, chores are— particularly for younger children, I always used to tell my kids, chores are preparation for you going out working in the real world. Yeah. Your pay is that you get to live here. That's the pay.

Your, your, your compensation is that, um, you get to feel good about having a clean room or clean kitchen or clean whatever, right? A clean bowl and plate. That's your compensation, right? And let me tell you, when I was a kid, it was framed in a lot harder terms for me. My father was old school blue collar, so it wasn't, you know, do this and I'll pay you, or do this chore and you can complain. It was, no, shut up and wash the dishes. Or, you know, are you going

to get something and you're not going to like it? Oh, you're right, sir. Yes, sir. All right. May I go over there and dry that dish? Yes. Thank you. And my mother was the same way. So let's not be— let's be clear. It wasn't just my father. Okay. And so the principle of work, but not tied to compensation, right? Not tied to material compensation is something that I've tried to pass on to my children. Because at the end of the day, our children are going to— like your

20-year-old daughter. I've got a 20-year-old daughter. You know, I've got, I got another daughter who's in her— she's getting ready to be 16 here in about a spit of a minute. And my 9-year-old boy, and then my oldest, my oldest son is, he's in his late 20s. He's already in the work world, thank God, and doing the work. My 20-year-old is transitioning into the work world and is putting in the effort

of doing the work. Because what I think the next thing is, particularly with our LLMs and all of that, is that the ways to get money have become so easy that people think the work should be easy too. And I take the position that Dana White takes of the UFC. He's been quoted, I see this quote all over Instagram and he's right. Somebody talked to him in an interview and he said, he tells his kids kind of the same way I tell my kids, all you have to do is just be a little bit

better than the next person because everybody's just so, he uses the term weak. I don't use that term. Everybody's so flat. They want everything so easy. All you have to do is just work a little bit harder, just a little bit, and you will just be a monster.

So I'm raising monsters. I'm raising them not to be a little bit harder, but to work a lot harder because the compensation level between the people who have chosen to not do the work or who just want it handed to them, the gap between them and the people who are just willing to put in this massive amount of work. That compensation gap is going to be huge. It's just going to be huge. Yeah, I

agree. And it's just going to get bigger and bigger as our digital tools continue to delude us into this idea that work is something that just doesn't matter. Well, they're— the digital tools are commoditizing it. Right. Yeah. Essentially, we're commoditizing entry-level work. Right. That's what we're doing. So to your point, So, the work harder, et cetera. But it's not just about, to your point a few minutes ago, it's not just about the physical work harder. You have to mentally

work harder. You just have to be— when you tell your kids you have to be better than everybody else, you're not talking about— I used Usain Bolt a few minutes ago as the reference. So, again, you're not telling them that you have to go beat Usain Bolt in a race. No, but, you know, my kid being the wise guy that he is, he'll be like, I'll beat Usain Bolt in a race any day and twice on Sunday. He can run all he wants. I'm getting in my car. You know what I'm saying? Like, so to

your point, it doesn't always have to be the physicality of it. You just have to be better. You have to be better than the next guy or girl. Yeah. Whichever. Yeah. And, and, and that, and that's where I find, that's where I think The creativity of being better is going to really accelerate people because, again, to your point, can it be physically better? Absolutely. Of course, you can be physically better. I spent the first 10 years of my career in a restaurant and my

knife skills were better than most people's. I could fly by people with knife skills. Not today, by the way, just so you know, not today, but I haven't done it in a long time. But it's so there are physical skills like that, sure.. But if there are also mental skills, there are not just mental, but there's, there's creative skills. There's like the ability to problem solve, problem solving skills. If you are better at any one of those than the next person, you'll

accelerate. You'll accelerate your, your— and by the way, getting back to the entrepreneurial conversation, that's half of entrepreneurship right there is figuring out the better mousetrap or the new mousetrap or the faster mousetrap, whatever, bigger, better, faster, stronger, smarter, whatever that is. That's the entrepreneurial journey. You just have to decide whether you're doing it for someone else or for yourself. So let me ask you

this question. What is the scariest thing about entrepreneurship that very few people consider before they

jump in? I think I— to me, I think this is going to sound counterintuitive here. I think everybody thinks the fear of failure is the biggest problem, and I don't agree with that. I think the fear of failure is actually a

halfway decent motivator. I think people underestimate— to your point, if you— throughout this whole conversation so far, I think people underestimate the sheer volume and level of work they're going to have to do when successful, not if, because all the work you do to get to do, if you're trying to be successful, if you're not quite there yet, is expected. You're expected to continue pounding your head against the wall. You're expected to continue running uphill. You're expected—

no, you're— that's— that work is expected of you. When you hit the pinnacle, when you hit the top and you say, now my startup is successful, I think people underestimate how much work there is from that point forward. There's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done after that fact. And I think that, I think the fear of success is actually very real. People, once people can start seeing the skyline and they go, oh crap, if I get to this point that's in front of

me, oh boy. Maybe I'm not sure I want that. And that's what— maybe they exit out their company before they hit it, which is fine too, by the way. So maybe you don't exit at $200 million or $300 million. Maybe you exit at $2 million and you're perfectly fine with that because you don't want to do the work. Like, that's just to let you know, people, $2 million, if you're in your 20s, is not going to last you the rest of your life. It's not going to last you the rest of your life. It'll barely

last you. Well, it won't even last you through retirement these days. So that— I, I think there's a big piece of that that people don't think about. I remember when I first made my first $100,000, um, and that was a big milestone for me. Sure. Um, and I remember watching the invoice come in where it clicked over right in my, um, in my bank account, and I sat there and looked at it for about I don't know, maybe a minute. And I thought, hmm, that's interesting. And then I went right back.

I went right back to doing the things that I needed to do in order to make the next $100,000 and the next $100,000 and the next $100,000. And I'm a weird entrepreneur because I'm not driven by, or my entrepreneurial mindset is not driven by, um, the normal benchmarks of success, uh, or failure, quite frankly, you know. So I've had the nights where like I've laid awake and like it's Wednesday and I've got to make payroll on Friday and I have no idea how

I'm going to cover. I've had that happen, right, more times than I can count. I have had the creditors chasing me around the block and I'm pushing invoices and moving things around. Rob and Peter to pay Paul. Rob and Peter to pay Paul. You know, yeah. I've had the— Tom's previous point, I've had to prioritize what are the things that I'm going to

do this week or today. And trying to figure out without knowing what the answer is, what are the things that are going to produce the most money, or they're going to— that are going to knock down the most dominoes. So by the end of the week, the thing that has to be knocked down gets knocked down. I've done all that. I've done all of that. None of those things, um, none of those things scared me, but all of

those things drive me. Weirdly enough, I found— not weirdly enough, interestingly enough— talking to entrepreneurs, talking to people who are entrepreneurial adjacent, those are the things that scare people. Those are the things that I remember talking to an employee years and years and years ago, and I was telling him, listen, I haven't taken a check from this company to feed my family in like 3 months. And he was stunned. He's like,

I'm getting a check every week. Like, yeah, I know. Because it's important that you

get a check every week so you can show up and do the thing. Now you may ask, well, how are you feeding your family? We don't need to get into all that. I figured out ways to do that. My point is that thing that I had committed to, that thing— and not Peter Thiel, another entrepreneur has said it this way, I can't remember who, but I was able to stare that thing in the face and not flinch. And I think that's the scariest thing for people. To

your point, it's not even success, I wouldn't even say, or failure. It's can you stare into the abyss of uncertainty day in, day out for multiple weeks and then months and then sometimes years? Can you stare into the abyss of uncertainty and never lose your optimism? And by the way, optimism doesn't mean like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, everything's going to be

sunshiny tomorrow. Optimism just means— I used to think this, actually, I still think this, not as sharply as I used to because things have changed, but I still get up every morning and I think, okay, nobody alive has lived today. Nobody. Like the next minute that I'm going to be talking, no one's lived in that next minute yet. So there's still all kinds of things that can open up, just like we're recording this in, in, in early March, uh, 2026, right? No

one's lived in April of 2026 yet. Not any human being, you know, not one. And actually I got that idea from a boss of mine who I absolutely despised and had a problem with. But that was one good lesson that he taught me. And when he said it and then he walked it out, I thought, huh, I do not respect any other thing about you, but that is correct. You are correct on that. And so as an entrepreneur, I've been able to channel that into getting up

every day and staring into the abyss of uncertainty. Company and doing it for years and being okay. I think somebody with a mindset who is more, shall we say, socially, social, more of a social reformer or more of an employee, which I think, not I think, the statistics are 99% of people will never start a business. They just never will. They'll never start because they can't. They had that expression on

their face. I'll never forget it from that employee. Like he looked like he would, he couldn't, It was like I was talking to him in a foreign language. I was like, I was talking to him in Chinese at that moment. Like somehow we'd switched from English to Chinese in the conversation. He didn't understand what I was saying. And I think the people who have a mindset of

I have to get paid because my bills have to get paid. If my bills don't get paid, then somehow the world collapses into this ignominy of like lack of status and I'll be homeless and I don't know, searching for gum underneath, like, you know, benches on the side of the street, like, whatever. Like, whatever the thing is that people think is

a horrible thing, they go right to that. And then they— the fear of going right to that is what drives them to, to working for people like me, because the fear of being kicked to the curb and, like, living in a cardboard box doesn't— I mean, that's not optimal. I wouldn't want that. But it's not scary. That's not the scariest outcome. There's other scary outcomes that are scarier to me

than that. And I don't think— I think that's just the distinction with the difference between an entrepreneur mindset and an employee mindset. Yeah, no, that's true. Like, and I don't disagree with any of that because I also think like if you If you take Stephen Covey's theory of beginning with the end in mind, right? Like, if you look at Stephen Covey's 7 Habits book and you think of like at the end of your life and you're all— everyone's standing around and

talking about your eulogy. What do you want them to say? Do you want them to say like he was a good provider for his family? Right. If that's your end goal, then you're right. Stay an employee, get a decent job, and just keep providing for your family. At whatever that level is that you feel. Now, at what level do you provide for them? Sure. That, you know, like we talked about a few minutes ago, you know, you started the bar, by the time you retire,

you're making six-figure, whatever. That's fine again. And if that's your goal. But if you're at the end of the eulogy, you want people to be saying things like, my God, he was such a risk-taker. He always did like he threw caution to the wind. He wanted like, you're probably going to be an entrepreneur. Like, you're going to probably you're going to be. But to your point, and that's why I did— that's why I don't equate the uncertainty thing. I don't think I view

it that same way because to me, the uncertainty doesn't make or break me, right? Like, like whatever is uncertain, to your point, I'll just go figure it out. Like, I'm— I've never worried about— and by the way, the same— to me, the same rule applies about just about anything in my life. Anything. So my daughter made an observation of me when she was about 16 or 17 years old. She had asked me a question about a particular sport we

were watching, and I was showing her. I was like, no, but if you do this and you look at the way they're doing that, and she goes, oh, have you played this sport before? I went, no. She's like, how do you— how the hell do you know, like, about— and I go, well, because if I don't know, I go learn it. Like, I Education to me does not happen in four walls in some high school or college, university. No, education happens when you seek out knowledge. Seeking out that knowledge is the

most important thing. So, to me, I've never viewed uncertainty as a problem or a fear because if I don't know it, I'll go figure it out. I'll go find out. I'll go learn it, right? So, there's not a lot of problems you can throw at me that will

scare me. What I think, like I said, in my little spiel on this topic, I would be more fearful of how I would react— one of the projects that you and I are involved in, if somebody came to us tomorrow and said, I'll give you guys $500 million for that right now, that would scare me more than uncertainty. So I would laugh. No, no, no, I know. No, no, I would, I would, I would lie, I would laugh. It wouldn't be— I would laugh and then I'd be like, uh, where's the other shoe?

All right, again, again, I know that. But yes, I know you're— I know your point. Yeah, I know that project is not worth that right now. I just thought a very large number to just— no, no, just to throw it out. Yeah, but my, my thing would be, okay, so does that mean that we're out? Like, we're bought? We're selling it to them? Are, are we staying in? Like The fear of that success, that successful conversation, that has more to do

with my hesitation than anything else. Because I wouldn't— interesting— I would not— I'd be nervous to what the rest of the people involved in that, in that project with us. Yeah, I'd be more concerned about what they would do. Well, because, because I can't dictate what they do. No, you can't. There's no— I have no control over That's— so your uncertainty, mine is the lack of control. It's control. Once you get to the success point where you no longer control

the outcomes, that's a problem for me. And I'm not a control freak either, by the way. I'm not one of those people that have to control every little detail and every little aspect of every little thing in life. I'm not a control freak. I'm just saying that that's what would— Well, and I would be like, So first, after I got past the whole, like, is this like, am I on Candid Camera? Like, is there a camera around somewhere? Like, do I need to be—

I need to worry about Green. Is Draymond Green to pop out? Sorry, if he is, I got, I got some words for you too. But, um, after I got past that, my initial thought would be I don't care about the money. Now, I'm not— this is not from a moral high horse perspective. I want to be very clear, this

is not from a moral high horse perspective. If somehow I were able to, to, to, to make off of this, this thing that we're involved in, if somehow I were able to make, I don't know, $50 to $75 million after taxes, that's for someone like myself in my position, in my life, what I've got going on, that would indeed be at the stage of life I'm at life-changing money for at least a couple

of generations. Nothing to sneeze at. I got to be very honest about that. So it's not from a, I'm on a moral high horse perspective, right? That's not what I'm talking about at all. The reason I would go to, I don't care about the money is because what's way more interesting to me in thinking about the people that are on this project, what's way more interesting to me is the shenanigans that are going to jump off because of that offer. And so for me, the curiosity on that is, wait a minute, wait

a minute. So we're not being candid camera'd. Draymond Green isn't going to show up. Okay, that's cool. That's fine. Drew Carey's not going to somehow run around screaming Cleveland rocks or something. Okay. All right. So this is legitimate. Okay. We vetted it. It's a legitimate deal. Now let me watch everybody's around the table, like in those old Westerns where like, it's all like, as my wife would say, it's all just eyes and looking. Everybody's just looking.

All of a sudden I start looking around and everybody's seeing who's going to do what, who's going to jump on what. Because for me as an entrepreneur, I go, well, yeah, that's life-changing money. And even if it's not $50 to $75, let's say it's $25 to $30 million. That's still a pretty good chunk of change. I could think of things to do with that that will last me my entire life. Because I have very small appetites. I live

very conservatively. Same. My point is the ways in which people react for me are that abyss. That's what's in the abyss of uncertainty. You know, my master's degree is in conflict resolution and reconciliation and negotiation and all that kind of stuff. And what drew me to all of that was I am a control freak. I do like to be in charge, particularly when it's stressful. I get more of that, like more

of that pops out. And so I've had to really, and I'm not a master of it, ask my wife and kids, but I've had to teach myself to let go of control and be okay with uncertainty in that abyss. And an offer like that creates massive uncertainty. It just does.

It creates massive uncertainty. And so the easiest thing is to just, for me anyway, the easiest thing is because to your point about, well, we haven't really talked about money here, but to your point about entrepreneurs, people associate entrepreneurs with a lot of money because of these big exits and things like that. And the reality is most entrepreneurs wind up broke. They

don't wind up with a huge amount of life-changing money. That is the reason you read about those things in Fortune magazine or you see them on LinkedIn or you see them on posts on Facebook or on Instagram or wherever it is you go and look at, um, is because they are rare. Most entrepreneurs wind up either broke or they, or they barely break even for what they put in on a 10-year project. And by the way, kids, all of you listening, it is 10 years. It is 10 years before you see a dime in profit as

an entrepreneur. 10 years to be an overnight success. Yeah, I was just gonna say, and every time you hear the term overnight success, it's It's a bunch— it's crap. There's no such thing. No such— every, every single, every single time you see the words overnight success, it's— yeah, it's because you didn't know their name yesterday, you

now know it today, so that's overnight. I get that. So overnight success to you, but that doesn't negate the 5, 8, 10 years that they've just put into their blood, sweat, and tears to build to the point where yesterday happened. Like, right, well, and that's— and that's part of what Sinclair sort skips over because

the social reformer doesn't put any value on that. Like the first part of Oil, if you read the first few chapters, one of the points that he definitely is trying to build as he's building this character of J. Arnold Ross, he's building him into a character where he invites corruption. He's looking for a shortcut. He's resentful that the government is taking

his money and not spending it correctly on the roads. He wants to drive as fast as he could possibly drive, and he wants to run over everybody to get to where he's going. He understands the value to us, to our point earlier about education. He understands the value of education because he wants his son to be educated, but he himself does not need to be educated because he knows everything he needs to know about pulling oil up out of the ground. He is framed as a person who will bribe

an official, a local official— not framed. He is a person who will bribe a local official to get a shortcut to make things move. And the local official is the one that is the victim of this bribery, not Mr. Ross, of the system that has been created around him that encourages the need for bribery. And so Sinclair definitely takes a position that is in opposition

to the entrepreneur. And by the way, I think this is what attracted Paul Thomas Anderson initially to There Will Be Blood, because we've always had a problem in this country with people who build things and have that ruthless vision. We've always had a problem with that. Um, and I think the reason why is it genuinely scares people who, quite frankly, to my point earlier, have to get up and go to work for somebody else. It's, it's to your point about your

point early that you made about You know, who do you want at your eulogizing you when you're dead, right? He was a great provider. I think most people are fine with that. I think 99% of the 99% of people who have employee mindset are absolutely fine with the great provider at the end

of their lives sort of eulogy. I think the people with that mindset are absolutely stone scared of the person who was ruthlessly focused like this General Ross character, or, um, I'm gonna say a few names, or, uh, the Mark Zuckerberg type, or the Elon Musk type, or the, um, the Henry Ford type, right? Um, or any of the folks who did build the big oil businesses, the Andrew Carnegie types. I think those people Like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, these guys started working when they were 8, 9,

10 years old. They didn't care about school. They were ruthlessly focused on business and making money. And they did not lose the North Star of that because they didn't care about the provider thing at the end of their lives. They cared about— and there's another great scene in There Will Be Blood. I'm going back to the movie here for just a second. There's a great scene where Daniel Day-Lewis is sitting with a man who claims to be his brother. And he's actually a grifter trying to

hustle him. But before he finds out that he's a grifter, they're sitting by a fire outside on an oil field. You know, he's pulling oil out of the ground or something like that. Or maybe it was a home. I can't remember the specifics of the scene. But Daniel Day-Lewis has this line and it is the line of the entrepreneur. He says, actually, I should look it up. I should look it up because I don't want to miss it. It's

actually a really good line. And it defines what entrepreneurship is for the entrepreneur, but it defines it in such a way that it, it, it sets it up as being scary and horrific to someone of an employee mindset, right? He says, yep, there it is. There Will Be Blood. Yes. Beautiful. Just typed it in. It came right up. Look at you, IMDb. Goose credits, storyline, taglines, quotes. Here we go. And I'm not getting into, by the way, the religious elements of the book. I'm not getting into the

parts about higher education. Those are some of those are explored in the movie as well. I'm just focusing on the entrepreneurship. This is the variation of it. But it's at the end of his speech, he says basically, There are times when I see people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money where I can get away from everyone. I have this thing inside of me that doesn't want other people, and now I'm paraphrasing, but doesn't want other people, doesn't want other men to

succeed. Daniel Day-Lewis says this, and I think that that's the way the employee, a person with an employee mindset, looks at a person with an entrepreneurship mindset. What they fail to understand is that, and this is the Hollywoodization a little bit of this idea, what they fail to understand is that many entrepreneurs, yes, don't want other folks to succeed, but just as many do want others to succeed, and that's why they're leaders. They want to bring people along.

And the challenge they have is other people I'm going to paraphrase from Michael Jordan in The Last Dance. Other people don't want to be led. Michael Jordan said most infamously in The Last Dance, he said, was I a horrible— the interviewer asked him, people call you a tyrant, right? And Michael Jordan goes, maybe I was a tyrant. Maybe I was. Maybe I led people where they didn't want to go. Maybe I did get up into them, right? Maybe I did force them to do

things that they didn't want to do. But you know what? That's the way I played the game. You don't want to play the game that way? Fine. Don't play it that way. But like, you're just saying these things because you've never won anything. And to Michael Jordan's point, we are a results-oriented society. I've been saying this since college. We can talk all we want about process, and we love to

talk about process. The result is what we actually like. This is why Tom Brady— no one's ever going to step over Tom Brady. No one's ever— God bless you, LeBron. No one's ever going to step over Michael Jordan. It's not going to happen. It's just not. Not in my lifetime anyway. Because the result is the thing that we value. Good, bad, ugly, or indifferent. We'll talk a lot all day about process, but the result is the thing that we value, and it's the thing we

put money on. And entrepreneurs produce results. But along the way, They want to hire A-players to help produce those results. And when all they see are players from their perspective that aren't A-players, they really do struggle with how do I raise these people up? That's what Steve Jobs struggled with. How do I raise these people up? That's what Michael Jordan struggled with. How do I raise these other players

up? Right? So there's a number of different threads that come together here. But at the end of it, I think there is a horror that a person has who comes from that employee mindset. When they look at that entrepreneurship mindset, when it's actually laid bare for them. Yeah, there's also— I think there's, there's, there's, there— I think there's a lot more.

I think there's a lot to it as well from a different vantage point. Like, I also think that there's, like, there's this weird, like, misnomer that comes with entrepreneurship. Like, people think, oh, you own your own company, you must be wealthy. Like, they, like, they immediately think that you're in a different financial status just because you own your own company or you have a— And I'm like, listen, people, to your point a little while ago, it's not the case.

Like a very good majority of these people are never going to make it. They're not wealthy to begin with and they're not going to be wealthy afterwards. It's not about wealth. It's about building something that you can be proud of. But to your point about entrepreneurs, not hoping for success for other entrepreneurs. I think you're— I think in today's landscape, that's actually more likely than not. I think entrepreneurs want to see other

entrepreneurs win. I think that's a very thing. Now, but, but I think there's a caveat to it. I think they want them to be in different industries than they're in. Okay. So what you're talking about is, is the I call

it the— it's the thing that happened in the NBA post-Kobe. So there's the Michael Jordan era, there's the Kobe era, and now we live in the LeBron era. And in the LeBron era, everybody's friends, everybody sub-tweets each other, everybody's friends on Instagram, nobody's trying to dunk on each other. We're all going to be collaborative together. We're all going to high-five and jump, and maybe I might beat you by 1 point or whatever.

The thing that, and tell me if I'm wrong, I think it's also happening in entrepreneurship and I think it's because of the internet and social media has allowed for globalization of this. But when you are a person who has that Jordan or Kobe level in entrepreneurship or the J. Arnold Ross level, Daniel Plainview level of killer instinct. I don't think there's a place for you anymore. I think you get run out of town. I

think you get called all kinds of names. I think people accuse you of, to Upton Sinclair's point, bribery, grifting, manipulating the system, whatever. Like, I think, so Mark Zuckerberg's a good example. I look at him and yeah, he's a weaselly guy for sure. And yes, he's a, he's a whatever in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It's fine. I'm a thing in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Mark can come find me anytime. We can work it out on the mats. Tell Mark where I live. It's fine. Actually, he could find it out anyway.

I got a Facebook account. He can find me. I'm not worried about it because here's the thing. I think Mark has that thing inside of him that Daniel Plainview has. I don't think he likes other people. I don't think he wants to roll and subtweet like LeBron wants to roll and subtweet with everybody and maybe kind of make a $100 million business on the side and maybe be a celebrity too. And he wants to do all these other things

and be— No. Killer instinct. He doesn't have it, and I know he doesn't have it, and he knows he doesn't have it. Jordan had the killer instinct. Jordan would roll around with John Starks in the offseason, and that was fine. They would go gamble in Vegas or whatever, but when it got on the court, he was going to touch his kid. He was going to cut your heart out, and then he was going to go to work on you. And that's what I see happening in entrepreneurship. Or maybe I'm

wrong. No, no, I think you're— like I said, I think you're right to a degree. But again, I think it's like— and we've seen it, right? Like, so you and I have been judges on pitch competitions and stuff like that, right? So, and you're right. It's almost like this, like they're in the room together and they're like, oh my God, you did so

well. It's good for you. And I'm like, I remember, I'm telling you my first company, I didn't give a rat's, you know what, about any other— like, no, I wanted to go and succeed and I didn't care if I stepped over somebody. Right. So, to your point, I do think it takes a certain type of person to be that person for sure. Like, but I also think that you're right with the whole globalization of things because the Olympics was a good example of this. Too. Think about this for

a second. The US hockey team just won gold. US men's hockey team hasn't won gold since 1980. 46 years, they finally won gold again. They come back to the US, now they're back in the NHL. The first time around, players on opposite benches were pulling each other onto the ice to wave to the crowd. Now it's a week later and they're basically checking each other through the boards, right? Like, it's like they don't care that they were on the same

team a week 2 weeks ago. That's all done. Like, that's all done. We high-fived each other, we hugged it out, we're good. Now guess what? You have a different color jersey on than I do. I'm gonna knock your teeth out

because that's how, that's how hockey is. That's just— but, but, and I think entrepreneurs— I, but again, I think to your point, like, that, that is a good representation of what you're talking about in the entrepreneur landscape right now, where if there's, if there's 5 people in a pitch comp— oh, better yet, And I'm not gonna single out the— I can't even say that word because you'll know exactly who I'm talking about. We recently watched a group of entrepreneurs pitch to us

that are very kumbaya. Oh yeah. Okay, they're very kumbaya. And I know for damn certain that there's one or two of those people that should be killers. And if they were killers, they would be successful the day they stepped out of college. Yep. Like, or the day they stepped out of the environment that they were in or whatever, wherever they are right

this minute, they're going to be successful. They've got to stop the kumbaya BS because if they turn on that killer instinct, there's at least 2 of them that I think would be wildly successful right out the gate. But they have got to stop looking at their peers as peers and start looking at them as people they can step over to get where they want to go. So I will tell you that the level of smothering that occurs of that instinct from other people is a dynamic that I've experienced myself. So

I'll tell a small story here. 20-some-odd years ago, I was in art school. I was not a great artist. It doesn't matter. I went to art school because I loved art. I'd done a few art projects, blah, blah, blah. It's something I've been doing ever since I was like 10, 11, 12 years old. Decided I was going to go to college for it. By the way, I paid for my own school out of my own pocket. Didn't take on

any loans, whatever. Okay. In art school, I got into so much trouble when I would say to people, and I was a little bit older than all these folks, who were like 18, 19 years old, but I would say to them, we're in competition against each other. We're in competition for an A. We're in competition for the professor's attention and good critique. We're in competition for who can put up the best, the best display of our art. And quite frankly, in some cases, we're in competition for

who can sell the most art. And do you know what the feedback was that I would get from people? They would say, oh, hey, son, you don't understand. We're just all here hanging out. I remember one— We're building a community. We're building a community. We're not in competition with each other. We're not in competition with each other. We can't be in competition with each other. I remember one person who I considered a very dear friend at the time, he said, we can't be

in competition, man. We're like, we're like just— And he was sort of like a little bit like the dude in The Big Lebowski. He was a little bit like that guy. He was like, dude, we're just, Like hanging out, man, just vibing, man. And I learned from that interaction that the people around you smother the instinct. And so you could hold it, hold it like a— I learned for me, I have to hold it like a, like a weapon, right? And I have to figure out where I can deploy it. Either to cut

those people off, right, or to, in some cases, like in art school, try to ruthlessly crush them, or to combine it with a talent and skill that they may not possess because they're all kumbaya over here, but I'm going by a different metric. And the close of that story is, when I was in art school, I put on my Bachelor of Fine Arts printmaking show. I sold almost every single one of my prints that was in

that show. Almost every single one of the other folks who was in a, in that printmaking program struggled to sell a print. And these are all people that said it wasn't a competition and they were just hanging out. And I went, I understand business and you don't, but you just told me it wasn't a competition. You have a good day.

I win and I clear the deck. Right? And that's where— and like, I've never lost that thing, but I learned, and even through entrepreneurship, I learned like, okay, this is where I have to navigate it because the smothering from others, once you reveal that, is so intense sometimes that it can almost smother the fire out. It can almost smother the

killer instinct out if you don't have it well developed enough. Well, or, or you redirect it into— so there's something to be said on the flip side of this that you go from, from competing to mentoring, right? Like, that's a, that's a good use of that creative energy. So you get to a certain point where you're successful enough that you don't need to compete with anybody anymore, but now you're gonna redirect your— that same competitiveness

goes into your mentorship. Which, by the way, so in one of those conversations with that group of people that we were— that I was just talking to, first thing I said to this gentleman was, I'm not your parent. I'm not, I'm not your— I'm not your uncle, your brother, your mother. I'm not your family member. I'm not a college professor. My job is not here to go rah-rah, you're the

best. I'm gonna tell you like it is. I'm going to tell you what's wrong with your stuff, and if you don't like it, you don't like I would have appreciated that when I was his age. He did too, by the way, at that point. I think at that point I saw something change in his eye. I saw him go— and I asked him, I said, "So what do you do next? What you do next is the most important decision you're ever going to

make. If you decide that what you're building right now is never going to be a company, then what are you doing? Then this conversation is irrelevant unless you really want to make this into something. So you have to decide, is this real or is it not? Are you playing around with this or are you not? And if you're going to make it real, then you're going to listen to some good advice and you're going to start treating this

like it's real. Do we have to start So I do believe that that instinct, and then we'll move on, we'll sort of close here. I do believe that that instinct exists inside of leaders, inside of entrepreneurs. I almost repeat myself there, athletes, but I also believe it exists inside of creatives, journalists, almost every sort of area of life, modern life even, or postmodern life. Where anyone can either make a buck or gain status or increase their class, there's going

to be competition. Now, I think that instinct comes out in a few different places. I think the social smothering is huge, but I think it comes out in different places in different ways because that's the human spirit that you can't snuff out. How do we— this is a core question, and this is why I'm a big fan of entrepreneurship in schools, entrepreneurship programs in schools, because I don't— we got rid of gym. Ambassador schools don't have gym anymore. It's, it's nuts.

Sports is a whole other kind of thing. I mean, the NFL even is leaning into flag football. I mean, come on, people. Right? Sports is a whole other kind of thing. I mean, I coach my, my, my kids' soccer team, right? Oh, assistant coach my kids' soccer team right now. And one of the principles of the organization that the team is under is that everybody

plays and everybody has a good time, but we don't keep score. And I literally told the director of the program a couple of weeks ago, not literally, I told the director of the program a couple of weeks ago, the kids all keep score. They all know. Who are we fooling? Yeah. You're not fooling me. I'm keeping score. You're not fooling them. They're

keeping score. Okay, anyway, we, we have a globalized society that flattens, uh, the competitive spirit a little bit into like this weird democratic globalized mash of meaninglessness, right? Where the nail that sticks up Sometimes by the algorithm gets pounded down, but then weirdly enough, all the nails are trying to stick up and try to be noticed because, you know, everybody wants to be

noticed, right? Um, and then of course we have the, the, the areas where competition has always existed, which is in, uh, reproduction, sexual competition, um, competition between women over men, between men over women that has not gone away. And then

that will never go away in our lifetimes. So my question here is, how do we, other than entrepreneurship programs in schools, huh, or bringing back shop and gym, how do we provide opportunities for people at a younger and younger age to access that killer instinct and really, for lack of a better idea, start to separate themselves from other folks? Because right now athletics is really the only place where that can actually occur. And athletics is even gradually being winnowed down and

flattened out. I don't know. I think, I think there's something to be said about like, like even like, so if you think about like, if you think of the, or the stories of like Mark Cuban and guys like that who like, listen, I was an entrepreneur at 12 years or 10 years old. Like I went out and got a paper route and when I figured out I could get like deliver more papers by talking my buddy into doing one street for me and I'll give him back, you know what I

mean? Like, so like, but to your point, there's no way to encourage that, right? Like there's no way, like, and I, by the way, I still firmly, firmly, firmly believe in a very old statement that necessity is the mother of invention, right? Like, so if you find, Again, I think to your point about the globalization and the socializing, we socialize our problems now too, right? So

poor people are universally poor. So we're now like we're— and by the way, I know this from experience because I grew up very poor. So like, but like, but when I was a kid, nobody paid attention to the poor neighborhoods. Nobody. Except the police departments for all the wrong reasons, but that's— we won't get into that. But like, but nobody, nobody cared. Like nobody, nobody took, nobody

took interest in ideas coming from those poor neighborhoods or any. But now even the poor neighborhoods have social media, so you could turn yourself into an influencer in your, in your bedroom of a studio apartment that you're, that you're, you know, 6 people are living in. Like, you know what I mean? Like So, we're globalizing and socializing even that part of

our lives. So, it's very— I think it's very difficult to find those needles in the haystack because to your point about not every entrepreneur is going to be successful, not every idea is going to be the next Facebook, not every— like you have to nurture those types of ideas. So, do we start looking at them through different lenses like meaning like So, we're not going to look at that kid in school that just had a science fair project that could actually be a product on the market if somebody

actually paid attention to it. No, we're going to wait until he becomes an influencer and then see him creating some garbage online that we go, oh, wait a minute, that kid's got a nice— like, I don't— yeah, I agree with you that some of this is broken. I certainly don't know the answer to it because if I did, I'd be the next Facebook. I would have already turned on the spigot. Like, I would have already

turned on the spigot if I knew how to answer that question. But I do agree with you that there are some new— there's new ways that we're trying to globalize this that makes it very tough for people to get that competitiveness. And to your point about— I tried really hard with my kids to get that competitiveness because Just so you know, I was not that guy. Like, I was not that dad to like, okay, shoot the basketball, honey. Oh my God, look at— oh, you

won. No, no, no. If you're going to beat me, you're going to beat me and it's going to be legit. Which is why, by the way, so when I taught my daughter how to play chess, like, she— out of all I have, out of my 5 kids, my daughter was the only one that enjoyed playing chess. She has a competitiveness to her. That is— and I hate this, I know that you and I are both competitive. I'm telling you, you would take both of our competitiveness and just crush them. She would

crush them. She's way more competitive than any human being I've ever seen in my entire life. She would sit and play hours, chess game after chess game after chess game, because I would beat her and I wouldn't, I wouldn't let her win ever. Yeah, I would beat her every time because I felt

like it was going to improve her chess game. So she So the handful of times that she beats me, it's like the world is like opening up her— it's like the world is her oyster and she can— it's like she accelerates that joy. Not accelerates, sorry, exacerbates that joy. Like it's like she just hit the lottery. But I can't do that with a kid down the street that I don't know that, like, that you're trying to encourage entrepreneurship to. Yeah, like, you

just can't do that, right? Like, you— now, I will say though, I remember when I was a kid, strangers weren't dangerous. I could walk— if there was a guy— and by the way, the way I learned how to play chess, being in the neighborhood that I was in, being a very poor neighborhood, we used to go down the street into a little bit wealthier neighborhood, and there was always a guy there. They had these— they had these like park, uh, park benches, park like tables, like that

had chessboards on them already. They were built in to the— oh, that's awesome. Yeah. And this guy would sit there and play chess with anybody who wanted to play chess with. So I would go and I would tell him I don't know how to play chess, and he would— he taught— he taught me how to play chess. Now, by the way, same thing, his rule— he was a— I found out much later in life that guy was like a grandmaster, like

chess, like he won chess competitions around the world. Like, this guy was really He could beat somebody in chess with 5 moves. 5. No doubt. Like, he would sit there and he'd go, he'd ask, are you a chess player novelty, or do you like, do you know? And if you said, no, no, I'm a chess player, I enter chess competitions, he'd go, okay, on. He would beat that person in 5 to 6, like, no doubt. I was like, I would watch this and go, what

just happened? What just happened? Like, so anyway, but if you sat down with him and said, listen, I'm a beginner, I don't know chess very well, different story. His competitive— like I talked about a few minutes ago, his competitiveness went away because his mentor, his mentor side came out. Came out. Yeah, he wanted to be a mentor. Now, he again would not just quote unquote let you win, but he would play as if he was a novice so that you could play on equal playing ground so that you could

learn. He would ratchet it down. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And I think, I think that that's part of the key to all of this. Right? So if you're a leader and you have that competitiveness and you've built this business and you, you started from nothing. And, and by the way, to Tom's point earlier, most entrepreneurs start from nothing. It is the very rare entrepreneur that gets gifted you know, $100 million by their daddy. That is not a normal

story. Most people start from, like I did, $500 and I'm into my last $500 and I guess I got to do something. So like, let's go. You know, most people start like that and then build something over the course of time. But I think if you're a leader, it's— you have to, you have to understand innately how to ratchet that down and how to ratchet that up. You know, and I think that's, I think that's

at the core of what you're saying. I also think that, um, I mean, the closest analogy I can have is to a martial arts master, right? Like a person who's, and I'm not going to use the term black belt, a person who is an advanced practitioner in any kind of martial art, whether it's boxing all the way to jiu-jitsu, uh, karate, all the way to tai chi. I don't care what

they're doing, right? A person comes in who's a beginner, they're not going to— if they know anything about how to handle their killer instinct, they're not going to manhandle that person. They're just not. Can I, can I tell you a very, very quick story about that? Yeah, go ahead. So I, I— one of my favorite things, I— so I, I don't know, I would not consider myself an expert because of my definition of expert, but I I can, I can spin chucks really, really well. Okay. And

the first— yourself in the face. First time somebody ever came to me and was like, oh, I could do that. I was like, here you go. And then just watched them beat the ever-loving crap out of themselves. And I said nothing. Nothing. And I was like, that is not a very good mentor. Or is it? Like, you know, to your point, like because there are, there are some lessons that I feel like you need to learn on your own.

And one of the lessons you need to learn on your own is that just because you— to your point— just because you see somebody swing those things and do it really, really well— so I think watching it and doing it are two different things. And so I have to start at step one. You can't just swing them. You have to learn how to, like, how they move, what they do, how they— you have to learn how they hurt before you can learn how

to— well, really well. Okay, so this goes back to what you were saying earlier in our conversation as we wrap up here about your kids, right? They want to start with the master's degree and go directly to the $100,000 job. They don't want to do the things like with the nunchucks. They don't want to get hit in the face because getting hit in the face sucks, you know, right? Except getting hit in the face, you know, maybe not physically. As the

comedian Marc Maron would say, it's all going to be thinky pain now. It's not going to be pain in your body, right? Like you're— or pain in your mind. Like you're done with the physical pain part. Now you're going to go into thinky pain. Psychological pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain. Nobody wants to go

through that, right? They'd rather skip all the pain parts. And what a good mentor does is— a good leader who's a good mentor, they give good analysis at the beginning and they see the difference between someone who can, who maybe can come in and experience that thinky pain and maybe in some cases physical pain, like the nunchucks. They see the difference between that person who's willing to go on that path and the person who, to your point, is just arrogantly coming in thinking they

can do something. Like, we've seen this with entrepreneurship. We've seen this with businesses. You wanna know a really good experiment to figure this out? Take one of the most complicated subject matters you can think of, theoretical physics, space travel. I don't care. Whatever you think is difficult to understand, put it in ChatGPT and then prompt it to say, tell me this like I'm a 5-year-old, and watch what ChatGPT spits back to you. Because to your point,

that's where you're starting, people. If you're trying, if you're trying to be a mentor to somebody, you have to assume they know nothing. They— you just, you have to give them the basics and the foundation before you can start, you know, throwing master classes at them. Well, and you also have to sort of, you

have to sort of Sometimes you have to, and I will go specifically into jiu-jitsu, sometimes you have to humble the arrogant. Of course, yes. Sometimes you do. We have people, it happens in our tiny little school in my tiny little town that I live in, in Texas, right? We will have people who walk into that school and they'll go, they will say sometimes with their mouths, but most often with their body language, oh, well, that crap doesn't work

on me. Or I love this one, I'll just see red, bro, and go in a fight. And I'm thinking of a few months ago, someone came in for a trial class. And I've been doing this for a minute. And my instructor was like, you go ahead, you go with the new, the new guy, right? And I always ask new people, like, what's your background? Like, do you have any experience doing this before I get into anything with them? Right? Just to test and see, to your point about the nunchucks, who am I

dealing with? Am I dealing with someone who wants to just hit themselves in the face all the time? Because I'll accommodate you. That's fine. Or am I dealing with somebody who genuinely wants to learn? And this person was not genuinely interested in learning. And so when it came time to— so we did our drills of our moves or whatever, it was fine. Move of the night, and then we were going to actually put it into practice. We're going to roll, we're going to wrestle, right?

"Poleada," which is Portuguese for fighting with intent, right? So, fighting with intent is different than fighting without intent, right? Fighting without intent is what you see on 99% of the videos that you see on Twitter of people getting jacked or getting surprised or getting ambushed. It's what Tom has experienced in his life, I've experienced in my life when you get into a brawl, It's all of that, right? That's without intent. The people with the haymakers

flying and all that kind of good stuff, right? When you roll with intent though, none of that factors in, right? Now, if you don't have intent but I do have intent, um, I'm going to beat you every single time. This is not pride or arrogance. You have no intent. You're just out there doing stuff. I know enough and I'm not, I'm not even close to mastery. Not even close. I'm on a 10, talk about 10 years of being an overnight success. It takes 10 years to get a jiu-jitsu black belt

at minimum. Most of the time in America, it takes people between 12 and 15 years at my age. Gonna be going a long time. I'm all the way at the beginning of the journey. This is not a pride thing. This is just a fact. If you are engaging with me without intent, I'm going to maul you. I'm just going to maul you and I'm not even going to really sweat that hard. And so like the person came in and he does, he starts, I was like, okay, I put a bully grip on him.

Like, like when you were a kid and they were like, give me my money. Like they grabbed your collar or whatever. And I put a bully grip on him and I watched his eyes shift and I went, oh, okay. He has no intent now because he's panicking. And he did. He started like lashing out and going around and I just moved around him and moved around him and moved around him and did my thing. And all I was doing was playing defense. And I looked over at my instructor and he was laughing.

Sit with me a while, um, or be with him a while. And he started laughing and I was like, can I just go? And I did. I looked at him, can I just go? I raised my eyebrow, can I just go? And he goes, yeah, go ahead. And so like, I just, I wrapped him up, wrapped the guy up. Guy's flailing around. I wrapped him up. I didn't even submit him. I didn't even put like a choke on him. I didn't knock him out or anything. I just put him on the ground. I was like, you gotta

calm down. Like you're flapping all over the place. You have to stop. You have to stop. That's with intent. And by the way, this is not a small dude either. This can be applied to leadership. Are you leading with intent? Are you doing it in an intentional kind of way? Are you doing your entrepreneurship with intent? And when we talk about getting that killer instinct, are you using that killer instinct with intent? Or is it just like a weapon you're just waving around

like your nunchucks? You got to get hit yourself Hit yourself in the face and then a bunch of people are going to laugh at you. It's been a good conversation. I didn't know what we were going to pull out of Sinclair. I will say to everybody who's listening, this is a 575-page book. I have covered maybe the first 100, 120 pages of it. So we will be back with Sinclair. I will have a follow-up to this episode. We'll talk a little bit more about it after I do a

little bit more of a deep dive into it. Go watch the movie There Will Be Blood. It's a great example of entrepreneurship from the beginning to the end. By the way, it's based on probably about the first 100 pages too, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very small chunk of it because there's so many other dynamics. A very small chunk of the book that is a 2.5-hour movie. It's a 2.5-hour movie. That should tell you something about Sinclair's

writing. Again, a guy who was also playing for keeps, by the way, on the work. Tom, final thoughts. How can we integrate all these lessons together for leaders? What's our final thoughts

here? Well, I think you pretty much summed it up just a couple of seconds ago. I think the difference between a leader, a true leader, and somebody who just wants to, as you put it in your jiu-jitsu example, of just going, a true leader wants to bring people with them, right? A true, a true leader wants to elevate everybody else around them. And the only way you do that is, is to meet them where they are and help them get better, not push them down and just suppress them. The

killer instinct is different in those cases, right? So you need the killer instinct to get yourself there. But once you're there, you need to kind of suppress it a little bit. And use the killer instinct to elevate everybody else around you. Instill that killer instinct around the people that

you're around, in the people that are around you. So I think that's the other— there's a phrase in the medical field, and I'm not in the medical field, so I'm not going to get it 100% right, but I know it's something to the effect of like, you know, learn about it, watch it,

do it, teach it, right? Like, so you, you— what— taking what you're learning in a book, seeing it in practice, and then trying it in practice, and then teaching it in practice— that's how you, that's how you elevate everybody around you. And being humble enough to start at the beginning multiple times, I think that's also important, because nobody knows everything, right? Nobody knows it all. So again, so you and I have talked about martial arts a lot in our in our friendship. I didn't take

Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I was a Jeet Kune Do guy. If I walked onto a Brazilian jiu-jitsu mat right now, regardless of how much I knew about Jeet Kune Do, I would feel humbled by the art form. I would want to be taught. So, even knowing what I know with Jeet Kune Do, I would not be that guy that you experienced on the mat. Right. There's no way I would be. My intent would be to learn. I'm new here. I'm the new guy. I don't give a shit what I came to the— I don't care what I

come to the mat with. I don't know your art form. I'm gonna— I want to learn it from a perspective of teaching me, not what that guy experienced, which was basically humility. Like, you had to teach him humility. That you're, you're not going to teach me humility. I think that's the difference between somebody who is I'll put it this way. I feel like, I feel like if I wanted, if I chose to go learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu right now, I would eventually be a leader in that dojo. Yeah, because

I would— I know, I know myself. I know I would start at the bottom. I know I would want to learn from the best. I know that, and I know I would elevate myself eventually to being good at what that, what that

art form was. But ultimately My goal would be to then teach people how to be that good and to exactly what you would have did with that guy, teach them the humility of it because I hate to say it, but no matter how good the Western world and Western philosophies are, well, I guess Brazilian jiu-jitsu is kind of Western, but the martial arts art forms come from the East. All of them, the foundations are all in the East. It doesn't matter which one you're in. And you're practicing

right now. But they— it's, it's all, it's all foundational, right? And it's no matter how many times you go back, you start at the bottom and you work your way up. Like, and I, I think people lose that. Like, I think people— like, I, I can't even count how many times in my career somebody has said to me— and by the way, I've been sales manager, I've been

a VP of sales, etc., etc., right? So I was a sales manager at the time, and I went to interview for another sales manager job, and they basically said to me, you don't know this industry well enough to be a sales manager. We're going to start you back as a sales rep, and then if you work out, then we'll put you as a sales manager. I did that like 3 times until finally I was like, I'm not

doing that anymore. Like, I'm going to go do my own thing because I'm not going to start at the bottom and work my way up. In the same, the examples are different. The martial arts example is exactly, that's a perfect example of it's completely different, right? The art forms are completely different. To me, sales is sales. Sales is sales. Yeah. Yeah. I'm selling, I'm selling a phone or I'm selling this mouse, like my computer mouse or my phone to be, it doesn't, I don't care what this

product is. Sales are sales and people are people. So I was, I was done doing that. But But what I did learn throughout that process is exactly what I'm talking about, taking that step back and then taking that role. I learned that the people I wanted working for me had to be people that were willing to learn. They had to be

people willing. I would hire guys that have been in sales, like not management, but I've been a sales rep for 20 years. I just want to be a sales rep. I never want to be anything more than a sales rep, but I'm going to go from product to product to to better myself in finances or whatever, right? And I would interview a guy that's been in sales for 20 years, and the only thing I cared about was, was he teachable? Was he stuck in his own ways or her own ways? Were

they stuck? Were they stuck in a philosophy of sales that I couldn't break? And if the answer was yes, I didn't hire them. I don't care if you've been in sales for 5 years or 50 years. It didn't matter. What mattered to me was are you open-minded enough to listen and learn and be— and then, by the way, if you do and I put a new sales rep with you, can you teach them? Like, can I pair a new sales rep with you so you can teach them? Those are the two things I cared about. Can you learn and can

you teach? That's it. And I think that's a good— I think that's a good overall kind of turn to what we're talking about. Today, even from entrepreneurs. You have to have the killer instinct, yes, but you have to be willing to be taught and you have to be willing to teach. If you're not willing to be taught and willing to teach, then you're probably not going to be successful

at it. That's a good spot to stop. So I'd like to thank Tom Levy for coming on the show today once again in our Wild West ranging conversation around Oil by Upton Sinclair. Go ahead and pick up that book. And with that, well, We're out.