2023-08-07. Shameless

Hi Paul.

Hey, Richard. Summer. How you

How's your portfolio?

Oh, hey. Good to see you too. Uh, my portfolio is fine. I, I had a close family friend, brilliant person, um, and, uh, he passed away, older guy, and, uh, he'd been a day trader for years, obsessed, and there wasn't that much money.

Hmm.

and like, a brilliant person, if he had socked that in an index fund, he would have had like 10x

he was enjoying the sport. He was gambling, essentially.

He, he was superior, you know, he'd bring in the information and he would read research reports and, and, uh, and he would make a decision because he was going to outsmart those, those dummies.

And, and it's, it comes down to information, right? Like, I mean, having information that you think others don't have is the perceived advantage, right? Like I did more research than you. I know everything about quantum physics and things are coming and I'm invested and you don't know anything, right?

you, you gave me good advice when we were, um, or you sort of told the story and again, not investment advice, but you were like, look, the agency is doing well, you know, you got to do something with that money. And I was like, what's, how do you break things down? And he went, look, all of our risk is in the business that we are running.

good. Don't,

everything else should be pretty boring,

That's the truth. It's

Uh, we have a startup. And the startup is incredibly risky just by its nature, right? Like, it doesn't have customers yet. So, so it's not like a, it's not like a carpet supply firm that, you know, that's been around for 20 years that we're buying and looking for certain results or real estate. It's very risky. So everything else... Should probably be pretty boring and then, you know, eventually you might be like, I'm really interested in nuclear fusion or, or, um, wristwatches with holograms.

It doesn't have customers yet. Yeah. 20 the like overarching theme of this podcast. There are no shortcuts.

no, no, the American economy...

and again, we learn that there are no shortcuts, right? Um, and it, the way through is always hard. Like, I see success on the other side of this startup, but man, if I thought it was a straight line, I'd lose my mind. I know it's not going to be a straight

to counter that. We say this a lot. There are no shortcuts. And I think that that is the right attitude if you are building something. Don't assume a shortcut. However, I'm going to say two things. One is, There kind of are, and you should always be looking for them. And I'm going to give you some examples. After many, many years of really hard work, um, a medication showed up that helped me rapidly lose weight, which was something I had a lot of struggle with.

Oh, it took 20

But it was an immense shortcut for me. I've lost the weight before. Um, when we are building software, we're trying to build shortcuts for other people,

Yes, yes,

so, so your actual job, yes, there are no shortcuts, but you should be looking for and creating shortcuts for others whenever you can.

Look, the, the investment advisory world, the investment, um, uh, research world, what is that? That is essentially people telling other people, if you give me a little bit of money, I can whisper in your ear and show you a shortcut.

this is the entirety of American Finance is built on people searching for shortcuts and saying if you get to them in the next five and a half minutes, I can make you a lot of money. After that, everybody knows,

Absolutely, exactly. I mean, there are laws, by the way. If you have... Actual insider information. Like if a pharmaceutical company has a breakthrough, um, and you go and, you hear about it, because you work for the pharma, pharma, pharmaceutical company, and then you go out, and you log on to your e trade account, and buy a bunch of stock, you'll go to jail. That's insider trading. Uh, effectively, you're cheating,

Well, it's a shortcut. The market can't be fair.

the market, yeah,

You know, and we have, we have to have something that at least approaches a fair market in order, or otherwise, someone just grabs all the money

That's right. And and so what you have is this industry that effectively tries to gather circumstantial evidence and it calls it research. It's like we see a trend in Idaho. Moms and dads seem to be buying more expensive strollers and the trend is upward. So we recommend, we think they don't even recommend, they say, we see this becoming a 3 2029. Get in there.

up comes the chart.

Up comes the chart. And you know, you, their, their, their organizations, that's all they do. Like Forrester and Gartner. They always talking about trends,

love a quadrant.

industry trends, and one, and there are every single sector has its research groups around energy, around medic medicine, et

So, let's get to the advice portion of this because I think this is,

Let's talk to the normal person. Let me, I mean, that person's doing well. They, they have a good, they're professional. They live in Philly. Uh, they, they, they have a good 401k.

I have a principle,

not going to buy those research reports. What should that person

I have a principle to share because I spent a lot of my career kind of looking at stuff like that and going, I wonder what's in there. Should I have a Bloomberg terminal? Oh my goodness.

Oh, you become a cartoon character when you think about, uh, investment.

That's what I often do. Okay. So. This is a principle that has held me really well as I have actually interacted with really powerful institutions and had access to more and more of that data and worked as a journalist and all that stuff. There's no secret information. You actually don't know much less. Then Jeff Bezos does

That's right.

like you could, you could extrapolate about 80 or 90% of what Jeff Bezos knows just by like going to the Amazon web page. Now that last 20% is real time and it's about networks and it's about who's going to do what

about no shortcuts. I mean, that is a, that is a. A leader who would be like, oh, oh, there's the fire. I guess we'll have to walk through it to see what, see if we can get through.

And he has 20, 000 people who fan out directly from him, who he can basically tell any five of them, go do something. And the other, you know, many thousands will line up and do it. So it, it's power plus knowledge that matters. And there is some secret knowledge, but not a lot.

Not a lot. I think, look, uh, I think what you have with certain people, I mean, I think this is consistent with most very, very like moonshot successful people is they're absolutely brutal in the room. When you come to them and say, I have a product idea for Amazon. It is just the hardest 40 minutes of your life because they own, you are working out of a state of failure, right? And, and jobs was Steve jobs was known for this. Bezos was known for this. It is just a rough, rough room. Why?

Oh,

They, I don't think that it ever

there's a lot of, yeah, no, the Amazon phone. Look, I will say like one,

at one point.

know, the secret superpower to anyone I've seen this, it's, it's, and I, I really struggle with this. You struggle with it less. The most successful people seem to have, not, not necessarily the super genius zillionaires, but the ones who sort of function in the world and get everything. They seem to have no ability to metabolize shame. Like, like, it'll be like, hey, hey Rich, that's the dumbest idea ever, I ever heard.

yeah, yeah, yeah, they just keep going,

They're just, whereas things that would absolutely send me under my desk trembling in shame, even at my advanced age, they'll be like,

That's a great framing, that's another characteristic. Some are just, they're real smart and they're thinking on their feet, and the diligence is real time. It's literally like you're going through what would be three months of due diligence in like 40 minutes, and it's a brutal, brutal experience.

you want to know my value? And you have very, you have much less sense of shame than I do. You more, you hustle harder. That's real, but here is my superpower and why our relationship works. I have a very powerful sense of shame. I need the product to be right. The essay has to be perfect. There can be no errors. I'm compulsive about it. And it's people see me as kind of casual, but I'm very obsessive. But once I no longer feel shame and actually feel excited and motivated about it by the

Once you believe in the thing.

I am one of the more glorious storytellers in a room.

Absolutely.

And that's just like,

But it takes time to get you there.

and notice I'm good. I just told you, I, I just complimented myself at a level that is absolutely untoward because I really do believe it. I know that about

real. Your process is different than mine. Mine is like, I will put a summer dress on a dog and tell you this is one of the most beautiful, rare species of dog you've ever seen. And the dog will be wearing a hat.

no, that's right. That is

I will do that.

I, I, but once I believe, so what's funny with

You take more time.

I gotta believe.

You gotta

I gotta believe. And then once I believe, I'm all in. And you know what, that's an artifact. I'm a very, very loyal person. I'm very trusting. And it has burned the living crap out of me over the course of my life. And so I'm very aware of this aspect of myself. And so I'm careful about where I go in.

I, yes. Exactly. And I think, I do think it's why we work well together. I also think...

a lot of trust. I trust you. And you know that if I, if I, if I won't budge, you, you stop pushing.

I do. I do. I can see it. I can, I can

You're, you're not,

your observation about shame... As a key ingredient to success is profound.

you have less shame, you will succeed unbelievably. And you can be an incredibly ethical person. You, in fact, you sometimes they are.

you know who's one of the most shameless Business people and extremely successful elon musk. He's he has absolutely

God, he is absolutely, Donald Trump had no shame.

Yes. I think, look, I think what you're saying when you say no shame, you're also saying like they have an almost fantastical belief in the thing. They don't even know how they're going to get there, but they believe in it down to their soul, People who do well, put differently, it's not that they have no shame, because when you say they have no shame, what you mean is they really care about how others perceive them and, and, and they don't want to look bad in front of others.

And because the other 99. 95% of the world perceives shame pretty fundamentally, they look at Musk and they go, how can you survive another minute being who you are? And he's like, you mean being the greatest guy in the world?

Yeah, exactly. Who wants to fail at... In front of their family, in front of their partner, in front of their community, in front of their colleagues. Nobody does. That's why people are very hesitant and very careful, right?

fear of getting caught.

I, that's right. And the ones that really skyrocket are the ones that actually, when the doubters show up. And the people who, like, whether grounded in envy or just resentment or hatred or whatever it is, it fuels them. They're very motivated. When people see, there are certain, there's a certain strain of person, of personality, that is, that it feeds them when other people seem to want them to

You know who else had no shame and who did this very subtly? Obama. Obama was not, he was like, I'm the smartest guy in the room. Smartest guy.

Oh yeah, he, he, yeah, I mean. It was true. It

but still like he was just like, yeah, that's really interesting. Okay. Thank you. Good feedback. See you later.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, success is measured a lot of different ways. It through one particular lens. Trump was incredibly successful. He became president. He passed a bunch of laws.

He's a billionaire.

a billionaire. He put Supreme Court justices in the white house. So he got to where he wanted. Now you could say, well, that guy's shameless. I mean, he's shameless. It's true. He

Well, the thing with him is he also just shows signs of living in a delusional nightmare world.

He's not

Yeah, whereas, like, someone like Obama is pretty shameless, but also, like, capable of human relationships, love, and interacting with the world as if other people do exist.

it is. It is a hard thing to be. It is a hard thing to be. You're, you're going to do better in business if you have less shame. You will, you will fire the problem employee more quickly if you have less shame. You will make decisions more decisively, right? That's a ridiculous

but, but, but I'm going to tell you, like, here we are, we're about to, you know, we're not far from launching our startup in the world and people are already as they're coming in, they're having opinions, we're getting emails and people are going to tell us we suck or it's irrelevant or all that stuff, right?

a relationship. Yeah, you're taking the leap.

and I'm going to have no shame about saying I think we've built something really good and special that other people should use.

let's close it with some advice. Not everything works out. Having no, being a little brash, believing in the thing you're doing. Going forward and then it not work sometimes things don't work out. I've had things I've had success I've also had failures. I've pissed away a lot of money on ideas early in my career We had no business doing it. Like I didn't have a house yet and I had no business

and when you do this, people on the other side will say, Well, you didn't dot your I's and cross your T's. And I think these are the problems you've caused. And you know what? I just don't like you anyway.

Oh, the advice shows up real fast on the other side of failure

Like people are gonna, I know what happens when I go out in the world and start talking about how much I love this thing. People are gonna go, you sell out, asshole.

all of it all of it all sorts of flavors, right if it doesn't work and it may not work And we may fail and you may fail and others others fail all the time like 70% of restaurants close in New York City within like nine months or some ridiculous

90% should close. But go ahead,

The healthiest thing you can do is tell one more story on the other side of that and then just keep going. That's it.

That's it. Well protect yourself. Don't, don't, don't mortgage your house, you

Protect yourself. I've had. Friends and colleagues who really took it hard when something didn't come through. Took it too hard. Just too

No, but I am taking my best swing here. And if it doesn't connect, that's life.

And you'll tell a story then. And you'll tell a story then about what you learned. And what maybe you could have done better. Anyone, like the haters are gonna

I'll tell you what to man. Nobody ever punishes you for believing too hard in your thing.

No.

Everybody, people get it. So that's, that's, I'm telling you Rich, this went in a slightly different direction, but, you know, this is real. You want to succeed? Turn the shame off, get going. Um, and when you're out there being shameless about your thing, then shut the F up and listen for a minute too. Like, don't just, that's where you, that's where the shameless ruin themselves.

Yeah. Listen. Listen. I mean, it's good to, to buy into the religion, but you have to listen.

Well, people want to see you believe.

Yeah. They do. That's

And then they want to tell you what they need.

By the way, what startup are you talking

Oh, I'm so glad you asked. It's called a board. It's a board. com. And it is under rapid development and about to get out into the world. It is getting to a very stable, safe place. I'm going to tell you two things. I'm going to tell you what we say it's for, and then I'm going to tell you how I think of it. It is a place to collect, organize, and, uh, and information and collaborate on that information. It's, it's, it's great that way.

very cool. Okay.

quite like it. For me, it is a way to express ideas in software more rapidly than coding it is. And I don't want to say it's low cut. I'm just

software.

if I have an idea about how I want to see the world. Using software. I can get there in a board in like five seconds, and it feels really good. Sometimes it's about editorial. Sometimes it's about organizing a process. Sometimes it's more like an application, and we're just kind of it's the most powerful platform I've ever been involved in.

I hope you're going to be sharing examples in the future.

We're going to share so many examples. We're going to be making videos. I am getting, we are getting the screen, the good screen recording software, unless you have an eye, it turns the cursor into a little dancing ice cream cone. It's so great, man.

Dripping ice

I am going to be, look, if you're going to live something, you got to believe it and love it. And I'm going to make good content and I'm going to tell a lot of good stories.

That sounds amazing.

wait to get out there, my

Put your shame aside.

that's what I'm doing.

Uh, it's at aboard. com. Sign up and we're going to be waving everybody in real soon. Uh,

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