Founders - #381 I Had Dinner With Michael Ovitz

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

What I learned from having an intense and fun 3 hour dinner with Michel Ovitz. 1: Mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.2: There's no ceiling on where you can push your profession.3: Don't be unequally yoked. Pick partners that have the same ambition as you.4: Read biographies. Know everything about the history of your industry.5. Have a profound sense of belief. The world is very malleable. 6: There’s opportunity hiding in plain sight.7: By endurance we conquer. 8: Work 10% less. Optimize for the long term. 9. Surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth.10: Retirement is lame.----Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more. ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Something that michael over time, people like steve jobs and jeff is the belief that you must find and work with extraordinary people even when over to the young man starts company has no money. He makes a list of people that he eventually work with any was the best of the best and even though at the time it felt like a pipe dream he actually makes that list into a reality. into a reality and the importance of working with the very best people. There's actually a great observation about this from Steve Jobs. And he says that the key observation was that I noticed that that that dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 to one or a hundred to one. So given that you're well-advised to build a team that pursues the A plus players. That's exactly what Steve Jobs did.

That's exactly what Michael Overtz did. And it is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. So that means when your business is using Ramp, you now have access to top tier technical talent

and some of the best AI engineers on the planet working on your behalf 24 seven to automate and improve all of your businesses financial operations. Ramp invest heavily in creating new innovative products. In fact, I just sat down with the founder and a friend of mine who's the one of the co-founders and the CEO of Ramp named Eric. And he told me that 54% of their payroll is now dedicated to R&D.

So the longer they use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. That's very important because as Sam Walton astutely pointed out in his autobiography, he wrote, you can make a lot of different mistakes to still recover if you run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ovitz knows that Ramp built a team of A-plus players because Ovitz invested in Ramp. So from a customer's perspective, what does a team of A-plus players sounds like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said, Ramp is like having a teammate

who you never need to check in on because they have it handled. So take the time, set up a demo of the product, and you'll see why many of the world's top founders are running their company on ramp. You can do that by going to ramp.com, go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. Okay. So last week I flew to New York to have dinner with Mike Oveitz.

We wound up having a very intense and entertaining three hour conversation. And I've made a list of things I learned from the dinner. So I'm just going to run through some of these ideas. I guess I should back up and tell you how I actually got connected, uh, to, to Ovitz, uh, we wind up, I didn't even know this, but we wind up having a very close mutual friend, I'm having breakfast with my friend Rick and his phone is on the table and it rings and it says Michael Ovitz. It's like, Oh wow.

And so he picks it up and he's like, Hey, I'm actually here with my friend David Senra. He does this podcast you might've heard of it's called founders. And there's a, there's a short break. And then Ovis says, I listened to four of them yesterday. And so we wound up getting connected and I, we were planning on having a meeting and having dinner anyways. And I was like, yeah, as you might know, I do these, like I had dinner episodes. I've done one with Charlie Munger and Sam Zell and Brad Jacobs and John Mackie. I think it'd be really interesting.

Would you be up to doing it? And he said, yes. So I flew up to see him. Conversation was really intense. It flew by, like I said, it was three hours. I was shocked when I got up from the table and I thought, you know, maybe we talked for an hour. Um, so right after dinner, I don't record any of this and I don't take notes while we're

having a conversation. So I just write down some of the things that really stood out to me and then I try to expound on them. So I have a, just a list of about 10 ideas I want to go over with you from this dinner and the number, the first one that's very obvious, if you read his autobiography, which I'm also doing an episode on, and I think I'll just release it at the same time. And if you spend any time with them or hear him speak in any capacity, there's this great line that I kind of use as like a guide to make sure that I'm on the right path. And it says, mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.

And this is very obvious if you look at his career, but he's still like this to this day. And what I would say is like, Obitz does nothing in a casual manner. And I don't either, I don't think any of the founders at UNI study or read biographies about do either. And like one of my favorite examples of this, and he was like this when he was like a young kid,

he starts working in the mail room at William Morris. And the extra length, I think there was like, I think in the mailroom at William Morris. And the extra length I think there was like, I think in the book says there was something like 20 other trainees, you know, he was one of 20. And out of those 20 people, there's only one that did what he did. And he noticed that, hey, there's this filing cabinet room, he says the length of a basketball court, and it's lined with steel cabinets. And he calls it the hard drives of the era. You know, there's no computers back then, no internet, no anything like that.

And what he realizes is like this, this, this, these filing cabinets that are the length of a basketball court, they actually hold 70 years of history on Hollywood. And he says, I viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment while other trainees wanted to be told what to do and read and learn each morning at 7 and every evening after work for 10 weeks I made my way through every single file from A to Z. How many other trainees did that? Zero. He does this over and over again. There's a bunch of different examples, but one of my favorite stories from the book too was he's trying to sign this very important director

and who the director at the time was being re wrapped by this aging and really apathetic agent. And so what Ovid's does, keep in mind, mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. Maybe the director thought, hey, I've been with this agent for a while, seems to be going well, seems to be fine. And then you have somebody with passion that's showing up and exposing how mediocre your alternative is. And he winds up working on this director for two hours a day, for two years

before the director signs with them. And one of the smartest things that Obitz did, he's like, I made sure to get him every single script, the best scripts, before his own agent got the scripts to him. So essentially working on his behalf and showing him how important it was, and showing him that I can actually, the difference between you know your your apathetic agent and me is vast. So mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.

The second thing that popped to my mind is don't put any ceiling on where you can push your profession. So Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan actually shared the same uh the same trainer, this guy named Tim Grover and he wrote two books about what it was like working very closely with them, you know, basically spending every day with them. And there's two lines that popped in my mind when, uh, after I was thinking about the conversation, how it over, it's, and Tim Grover writes the greats, figure out what works for them, regardless of what everyone else does. And number two, everyone wanted to be like Mike, Mike did not want to be like anyone else. And so if you actually analyze how there were talent agents

before, you know, Michael Ovitz was born, there's talent agents to this day. And yet one of the things that is most fascinating about his story is like, he just, he figured out what worked for him. He didn't really care what other agents were doing. In fact, he maybe looked at what other agents were doing as what not to do or what to like,

basically attack areas that they weren't doing. So one of the innovations he had was the decision that, hey, we're all gonna service every single agent inside of CA is going to service the clients together. It's essentially like a giant swarm of agents where in the past, you were assigned to one person, you only worked with one person and that caused all kinds of internal conflict and you weren't, it was just a lot better. Five people servicing you than one person, you know, wind up working out a

lot better for, for the talent that CAA assigned. And then he didn't just stay there. He's like, Oh, okay. What are we supposed to do? There's, there's a great story where it's like most talent agents, what would they do? They would field offers. They're like, okay, there's 10 offers. We have to choose between them.

Maybe we negotiated a little higher salary. The case is like, no, we're going to, we're not going to field opportunities. We're going to create them. And then that led to the next thing where, Hey, we're going to create entire packages for the studios, which also helped him control prices and make more revenue for the agency. And then from there, he's like, what else can I do? I'm going to get into corporate M&A.

No other talent agency, none of his other competitors were even thinking like this. And the size and scope of his ambition, again, don't put any ceiling where you can push your profession. You know, just pursue the opportunities and chase after them. He winds up brokering like multiple billion dollar deals. I think one, I think one of them was like six and a half billion dollars. No, again, no other, none of his other competitors, no other agent was doing this, he doesn't stop there. He says, Hey, we're going to start being marketing and advertising consultants

for giant companies like Coca-Cola. And one of the things that he said at dinner is like, if you're going to do things like this, when you do new things, you will be criticized. And in that case, you'll be criticized by outsiders, by people outside of your company. Now number two, don't put any ceiling on where you can push your profession is also related to number three, because for number two, you're going to be criticized by people outside your company. Number three is I grew up going to church, Christian church every week for my entire childhood.

And I remember one of the lessons that they would repeat over and over again is the importance of not being, they said don't be unequally yoked. And I think they meant just in relationships in general, but I specifically remember saying like, make sure you don't marry people outside of the faith, they have different beliefs in you.

And the advice from Obitz is like, you need to make sure that you're picking partners that have the same ambition as you. And so when I think about that, I think of don't be unequally yoked. And when you have no ceiling on where you're gonna push your profession, you're gonna be criticized by outsiders

because you're doing new things. But if you have picked partners that don't have the same ambition levels of you, and you try to do new things, like all the things that just listed, you're actually also going to be criticized by insiders, which are people inside your company, your co-founders. I mean, it's going to lead to a lot of conflict and you know, there's all kinds of stories in his autobiography,

which I'll go over in the episode I make on it. It's a huge part of the story. And he says this will manifest. He was saying at dinner, like the way this is manifest is like your partners will call it a distraction. And you know if you believe in it like it's it's not it's probably not that it's a distraction it's just they're not thinking as big as you are. And you might find yourself he didn't use this word but unequally yo just the way I think about it. When we talked about the you know the issues with co founders and how to maybe avoid all this and really like what he learned from this. What I found that was remarkable because I know now he has new partners and he's scaling other companies and I know his partner.

I asked like how are you able to trust because two of his partners that screwed him over were like two of his best friends too. And so I asked him like how do you trust partners after being fucked over? And I thought his answer was because you know, I keep people at arm's length, I have a hard time trusting other people, and then maybe a detriment. And he had a great perspective on this. He's like, you know, three people screwed me over my life. He's like, but it's three out of 1000. And he's not going to let three out of 1000 people, you know, foreclose

any future opportunity and being able to partner with people that aren't going to screw them over. I thought that was really interesting. Number four, read biographies, know everything about the history of your industry. There's a line, this is tied to a line that that Ovid said to me where he says only founders understand founders. So the first thing that popped to my mind is on page 179 of his autobiography talks about that. He modeled himself after Lou Wasserman. There's a biography on Lou I have, I think it's called like the last mogul or the last tycoon, the last thing was like the last Hollywood

mogul. And I asked Ovitz at dinner, it's like, do you still like think Lou Wasserman was the best? And he said, yes. And one of the benefits of reading biographies is obviously, like, Ovis started doing this. He starts working when he's like nine years old. By the time he's high school, he's like voraciously reading biographies of men that did great things. And he read the Carnegie and the Rockefeller and all these people.

He read all the biographies of all the people in Hollywood that came before him. And I think the important thing is what he's saying is only founders understand founders. And so as you understand these life stories, as you listen to this podcast, you read biographies yourself, like you'll just realize like, Oh, that's just like another me and we're going through the exact same thing. He actually gave me advice too.

He's like, you should really lean into more, the more unknown founders. Cause you know, he had read about the Vanderbilt's and the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's and the Ford, but he thought it was an edge to introduce people to other incredible founders that very few people have heard of before. So like Daniel Ludwig, the invisible billionaire, Chung Ju Young, which is the craziest autobiography I've ever heard in my life. Sam Zimurri, Estee Lauder, another example, like even if you know the company name, very few people probably thought, you know,

Oh, I should see if that person has built this massive company. I wonder if they have an autobiography or a biography about them. And then even less people would actually go and read it. So again, read biographies, know everything about the history of your industry. Number five, have a profound sense of belief. And as you'll understand, like the world is also malleable. So there's a reason this is number five and read biographies in number four because you learn this if you read a bunch of biographies.

And this is the things one of the things I most admire about obits. There's a lot of things like I love the fact that this guy never gives up and he's still pushing himself. He's in his late 70s and he's got tons of energy and he's working really hard but he has got a great line in his autobiography where he says nothing in Hollywood is anything until it's something and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one.

So Mark Andreessen, who actually modeled his venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, on what Ovitz did at CAA, had a very similar line, and this is the way he describes what I feel is the same exact phenomenon. And Mark wrote, the world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.

And so Obitz doesn't see things as they are now. He sees what they could be and then he proceeds to make that idea into a reality. And then number six, when you speak to him, I got the feeling that he just thought that there's unlimited opportunity in the world. And surprisingly enough, I think something he learned earlier, and I think it still applies to this day, is like, there's a lot of opportunity that's just hiding in plain sight. And I think you have some level of self-confidence when you're able to pick something up that off the ground, like people kind of like threw away or didn't do anything with and you turn into something that's insanely valuable and I think that's related to number two which is you know just don't put a ceiling on there's really no ceiling where you can push your profession so you know there's a ton of examples in the book but like he turned Shogun into this massive miniseries I think it's the second most watched miniseries of all time. And that opportunity was sitting inside of another agency and the other agency wasn't doing anything with it for years. He finds another script for this movie called Tootsie.

Again, six years it was considered dead. This is impossible. This isn't an opportunity. When's it making? It makes a couple hundred million dollars in profit. Rain Man, which is one of my favorite movies. I watched it, I don't even know how many times when I was a kid. Same thing. Other people couldn't get it done. Other people said no one's gonna watch

this movie about this autistic guy. Makes well over 400 million dollars. There's always opportunity hiding in plain sight and there's unlimited opportunity in the world and I feel like this has been coming up a lot if you look at the past few episodes. Like think about Leon Hess, right? Literally builds, the Hess family just sold the business for 53 billion dollars, right? What, how does that business start? That starts with Leon Hess, who realizes, hey, you're throwing out a bunch of this oil, and because you think it's not valuable, I'm going to start my empire with the stuff that you're throwing away, just like Sam Zimurri did the exact same thing with in his banana trade, right? You're throwing out the rights.

I would, that's you're throwing into trash. I see that. I don't see it as trash. I see this opportunity hiding in plain sight. Jerry Jones, Dallas Cowboys, he paid 140 million for they're worth 10 billion today. 75 people turned down the opportunity to buy the Cowboys before Jerry Jones did. If you're capable of thinking for yourself, if you have profound self-belief, there's always opportunity hiding in plain sight. Number seven,

by endurance, we conquer one of my favorites, probably my favorite line in the entire book. And I don't remember what the context of the discussion we were having at dinner, but we did talk about this and we both look at this the exact same way. But this line says he stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped.

I didn't stop. That's related to one of my all time favorite observations and quotes by Steve Jobs, where he says, Steve said, I'm convinced that about half of what separates the success of entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is pure perseverance. Unless you have a lot of passion about this,

you're not going to survive, you're going to give up. And I actually think it's related. He was talking about the difference between his mentality and maybe some of the younger people that work in their company today, where they don't understand, they just haven't gone through life enough. So it's really hard to understand

until you go through your life. Just how difficult and how much adversity you're gonna have to constantly push through. And like what Steve just said, listen, you're going to have to deal with all kinds of crap. And most of you are just going to wash out. I think in that trainee program that Ovid started as a young man, I think 80% of the trainees that all start in the mailroom that are trying to be talent agents from the time they start in the mailroom to the time they actually become an agent, like 80% wash out. One of the things I think that he can, to the time they actually become an agent, like 80% wash out. One of the things I think that the young people that work with him today can benefit from

is one, they see how fast he wants to move and how fast he wants to push. And there was an example where he asked for something and maybe it was on like a Thursday night and it's still not there on Sunday. And the person's like, Oh, get in a few days. And he's like, when I said when I asked you on Thursday night, I expected to have it on Friday morning. And this person was shocked at the pace that Obitz wanted to move at. In fact, one of my favorite stories is in Herb Kelleher, his biography, Herb Kelleher was the founder of Southwest Airlines, the most successful airline in history

under Herb's leadership. They went on being profitable for something like 40 straight years. And so I want to read this excerpt from Herb Kelleher's leadership, they went to being profitable for something like 40 straight years. And so I want to read this excerpt from Herb Keller, her biography, which I think is absolutely excellent. Says Herb Keller, her illustrates the speed with which Southwest moves by telling a story about Don Valentine, the former. That's a funny. That gives you an indication of where we're going here. The former VP of marketing. Valentine had just joined Southwest from Dr. Pepper when the marketing group met in January to discuss a new television campaign. Valentine was ready with his timeline for producing the spots.

Okay. You just came over, come over from Dr. Pepper. You're in out Southwest. You're going to give a presentation to the founder, the founder of Southwest. We have a great idea here. Okay. This is what we're going to do. This is the timeline. It's in January. Okay. So we're in January. I'm going to have the script ready in March. We're going to do the It's in January. Okay, so we're in January. I'm gonna have the script ready in March We're gonna do the script approval in April We're gonna cast the commercial in June and we're gonna shoot it in September when Valentine finished

Kelleher said Don I hate to tell you but we're talking about next Wednesday So again, a lot of people just don't know how fast you can move and as the leader of your company should really be pushing The pace and show them what's possible number Number eight, this is very, very interesting. And I wrote very few things down. I tried to go into these conversations, obviously I prepared because I read about them and everything else, but I don't have like a list of things I want to talk about. But this was one of the things I want to talk about. So there was this young guy who Obitz admired.

In fact, in fact, I think he started a talent agency even like a younger age than Obitz did. I think this guy was like 23 and Oviets was like 27. They wound up building a relationship. Ted, his name is Ted. And in the book, it talks about giving him advice and seeing how much Oviets is pushing. And he said, I have a piece of advice and knowing you, you're not going to take it. But here it is.

I could have worked 10% less and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success, but it would have been a lot happier. Ted was absolutely right on both accounts. It was great advice and I didn't take it. I see now that it could have worked as much as 20% less and it wouldn't have cost me. It wouldn't have cost me. If I worked even 10% less across 30 years, that's three extra whole years of life that I would have enjoyed. So this is one thing I did ask him at dinner. I was like, do you still believe that? Because, you know, he's, he pushes the pace. Ovitz is still working an unbelievable amount of hours. But what he told me was fascinating. He's like, yes, but not on the rise. You know, I think, I forgot the number he told me, but I think within

the first 10 years of CAA, 10 years after founding the company that had something like seventy five percent market share of you know his industry. And so he's like then you could work you know ten percent less and i should have worked ten percent less you might not be able to do that especially as you they were completely under. Finance is no venture capital they're literally like i had no money they were taking second loans out on their houses for god's sake they had like no money. They were taking second loans out on their houses, for God's sake. They had like no furniture. So he was under intense financial pressure right from day one. But he did, this is the advice he would give now, is work 10% less. And really I think what is stated there by Ted's advice and then Ovet's also agreeing with that advice is like really important to optimize for the long term. Most of the profits in a business

is very far out, you know, decade, two decades in the future. Think about the money that Microsoft makes today compared to what they made in 1990. Apple is the same way. Oracle, Walmart, you know, these things can compound for a long time. If all the value's out in the future,

the advice is like, make sure you're not optimizing for growth at the expense of durability. You want to be, you want your company to be around. You want to still be doing what you're doing 20 for growth at the expense of durability, you want to be or you want your company to be around, you want to still be doing what you're doing 20 years from now 30 years from now 40 years from now, some of the best entrepreneurs I told you before, I that I meet are in their 70s, and they've been running their business for 45 years. And if you see, it doesn't look like a

company looks like they have their own world. It's incredible. And all the profits are in the future. So I think what the advice here is, again, you really need to optimize for the long term. And if that means you push back, you cut back 10% but you're still there, you know, two decades in the future, then it's obviously a trade that you want to make. Number nine, this is very fascinating because he repeats this over and over again. Surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth. He said, I cannot stand yes men.

And it will happen because, you know, OVETS was in a glamorous business and then he did not like the publicity. It's mentioned over time, over and over again in the book. It causes problems with his partners. It caused problems with his clientele because his clientele, you know, they're obsessed with fame and they want to be the ones getting the attention. This happens with any kind of success, whether it's in the show business or even in just a regular commercial business, you're going to have people because it's in their best interest, they just, they're going to say, they're not going to tell you the truth.

The close friend that me and Ovid share, Rick, Ovid's told me that he's fiercely loyal to him because he says Rick tells them the truth. That he is direct and truthful. And he's not trying, he understands like he's not telling me bad things to be needlessly critical or to try to hurt my feelings or anything like that. He's telling them because we're friends and your friends tell you the truth. And Ovitz did this with me. He actually told me a few things that he thinks I'm doing wrong or I could be doing better. And he could be right about that and definitely would think about it.

But I went and actually pulled up, I talked about this at dinner, but then after dinner, I went and was, I asked Sage, like what did history's greatest entrepreneurs say about the importance of getting unfiltered and truthful information about your business from the people that work with you? And how did they ensure that they got the best

and most accurate information about the state of their business? And there's a bunch of examples of this. One of them was in the early days of Amazon, Jeff insisted that customers could email him directly at jeffatamazon.com. And then he received unfiltered customer feedback. Because again, if you're just getting your information through your executives, right, they want to tell you the good news.

This is what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett warned about over and over again. And they would tell people, it's like, the good news takes care of itself. I don't even need to hear about that. Tell me the bad news and tell me it fast because we don't let bad news fester. The founder of Kinko's, Paul Orfalia, same thing. He had a voicemail system where any employee could leave him a message directly.

He was dyslexic, so he's not reading emails. He says, just call me. Tell me what the hell is going on on the front lines. Sam Walton, he did not want to spend time in his office, right? There'd be hilarious stories in his autobiography and his biography where Sam would not adhere to a calendar. And so, you know, his secretary would set up like, you know, some appointment at like 7 a.m. in his office and Sam's not showing up and like, where is he?

And they're like, oh, he left at 5 a.m., got in his little Cessna and flew to another Walmart door. And he's like working and asking, oh, he left at 5 a.m., got in his little Cessna, and he flew to another Walmart door, and he's like working and asking questions from the workers on the front line. That is how he knows he's getting unfiltered, truthful information about the state of his business. Jim Casey, same thing, UPS founder. What would he do?

He made his driver, he instructed his driver, every time we pass these big brown trucks, pull over, and he goes and he talks, introduced himself and he talks directly, gets direct information directly from the people that are actually delivering the service to the customer. And finally, number 10 retirement is lame. That's a quote from Jeff Bezos, who gave this interview at the deal book summit a few weeks ago and I made an episode on it. He says retirement is lame. Ovitz would say the same thing.

He is still, he talks about, he's still very driven. He feels it's very important that you need to have something that you can push forward, that you can wake up every day on. He told me that he has a bunch of friends that, you know, had sold out or retired, decided they spent all their time playing golf or gardening. And then you speak to them a year later

and they just aren't as sharp. They're just not as vibrant. They're just not as alive. There's a certain kind of personality type. Uh, you know, if you're listening to this, you're probably one of them that you just, you need something no matter what, until death, you need something to push forward, something to focus on and to prove every single day. And I think OVETS has that trait in common with the other people that I've done

in this, I had dinner with Siri. So I'm thinking of Charlie Munger. He was still working until he died. Sam Zell told me to my face, I'll be doing deals till I die. He did that. Brad Jacobs talked to him. He's going to be working until he dies. John Mackey. Same thing. Retirement is lame. Retirement is fatal. You need something to push forward and focus on and improve every single day. So before I go, I just want to review one through 10. Number one, mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.

Number two, there is no ceiling on where you can push your profession. Number three, don't be unequally yoked. Pick partners that have the same ambition as you. Number four, read biographies, know everything about the history of your industry. Number five, have a profound sense of belief. The world is malleable. Number six, there's always opportunity hiding in plain sight. Number seven, by endurance we conquer.

Number eight, work 10% less. Optimize for the long term. Number nine, surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth. And number 10, retirement is lame. That's everything I got for you now. Hope you listen to the next episode. I'll be going through Michael's excellent autobiography, which I hope you obviously buy and read as well. And then as I go through that biography,

I'll also reference other things that relate to the dinner that Michael and I had and that are in the book. That is 381 down, 1000 go, and I'll talk to you again soon.